Tag: Sex

  • Marx and Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing

    Marx and Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing

    If ever the sensible Benedick bear it,
    pluck off the bull’s horns and set them in my forehead,
    and let me be vilely painted, and in such great letters
    as they write “Here is good horse to hire”
    let them signify under my sign
    “Here you may see Benedick the married man.”

    —Benedick, Act 1, Scene 1.

    One thing that Marx and Shakespeare had in common was living through periods of quantum leaps in culture and thought. The Renaissance was the cultural expression formed by increasing commerce, urbanization and loosening feudal bonds, and codified by painters like Leonardo Da Vinci, sculptors like Michelangelo and playwrights like Shakespeare.

    The Industrial Revolution, on the other hand, spurned an interest in science and rapid change reflected in the biological theories of Charles Darwin, the social theories of Karl Marx and the psychoanalytic proposals of Sigmund Freud. Closer to the present, we have seen developments in mass communications and recording technologies give space to pioneering musicians like The Beatles and Bob Dylan, while the digital age has seen the rise of the viral clip and the podcast. Marx and Shakespeare trailed the material changes of society, as all revolutions in thought and culture tend to do.

    Cultural productions are artifacts. They are crystallized objects transmitting historical information about the society that produced it—the psychology, the politics, the economy, the zeitgeist. In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare gives the subject of romance, love and marriage a light, comedic touch in contrast to his treatment of these subjects in crushing tragedies like Romeo and Juliet and Othello.

    Chivalry in the Court

    Saying nothing of emotional attraction, marriage evolved to institutionalize sexual reproduction and hereditary transmission of property. In Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, he notes that during the Middle Ages “the pairing marriage” was most often a “matter of convenience which was arranged by the parents.” Passion, on the other hand, “heads straight for adultery, and all the poets of love celebrated adultery.”1

    What Engels refers to is the culture of courtly love that developed among the feudal nobility, in particular the knights and ladies of the court. Engulfed by jousting matches and the dangers of battle, knights would dedicate their pursuits to a noble woman as part of the chivalric culture.2 Courtly love took place outside the bonds of marriage, layering erotic desire with both courtesy and surreptitiousness.

    Like many of Shakespeare’s plays, Much Ado About Nothing cannot be understood without contextualizing the feudal culture that the Renaissance emerged from. The rise of gunpowder had steadily diminished the scope of knighthood until it was little more than an honorific title. But the complicated culture of furtive romance and noble courtship residually remained, even as society was moving toward voluntary marriages based on love. Infidelity, once packaged as a chivalric passion, is seen across Shakespeare’s work as an ominous presence dragged down the aisle beneath the bridal gown.

    By the Renaissance period, it was armed soldiers waging battle, and the story picks up with news that Don Pedro and his men would be arriving in Messina after a successful battle. Benedick is among the arriving entourage and he carries an intense fear of being cuckolded—so much so, that he vows to never marry a woman: “Because I will not do them the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the right to trust none. And the fine is, for which I may go finer, I will live a bachelor.”

    The Timeless Art of Seduction

    Benedick’s intransigence toward marriage mark him for a sort of prank, whereby Don Pedro and his men lead him to believe that the governor’s niece, Beatrice, is in love with him. At the same time, Beatrice is led to believe that Benedick harbours feelings for her. It is a fabrication but it works, and Beatrice and Benedick are both privately delighted to be the object of the other’s affections. The speed by which Benedick accepts Beatrice’s feelings leads one to believe that Benedick’s aversion to marriage all along may have been a fear of rejection.

    In a parallel storyline, Claudio courts the governor’s daughter, Hero. This is thrown off course by Don Pedro’s jealous—and illegitimate—brother, Don John. Don John orchestrates a scheme whereby a member of his entourage advances on a chambermaid, with Claudio as a witness through the window. Claudio believes it is actually Hero being seduced and he denounces her at the altar the next day:

    Would you not swear,
    All that see her, that she were a maid
    By these exterior shows? But she is none.
    She knows the heat of a luxurious bed.
    Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty.

    —Claudio, Act 4, Scene 1.

    Being a comedy, the plot lines resolve through turns and ultimately conclude with the happy marriages of Benedick to Beatrice and Claudio to Hero. The scheming and side quests were, in the end, “much ado about nothing.”3 What this story does indicate is the immense anxiety and wicked humour around the prospect of female infidelity, primarily told from the point of view of the male characters. It peels back the social attitudes underpinning English coverture, which effectively rendered wives the property of their husbands.

    Romance during the age of chivalry was replaced in the modern age with something far more transactional and economical and potentially humiliating. Shakespeare’s play reflects the social anxieties of the commercial revolution as it transformed courtly love into the modern marriage.

    The historical construction of romance and marriage was largely passed down from a position of male accommodation, however. Gender relations since the advent of class society has been a disaster. This is because the economic scarcity created by property relations—through slavery, serfdom and meagre wage labour—has squeezed the bulk of humanity onto the lower rungs of the economic hierarchy, and women were largely pushed off the ladder altogether. Recent movement toward gender equality has burst into the open only since capitalism has demanded the labour-power of more and more people, men and women alike.4

    Universal Exploitation

    As the economic inequality between men and women have shrunk, so have the legal and cultural discriminations. But they cannot be done away under a system that freely discriminates against all people on the basis of economic class. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote: “Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.”5 The latter bit about “seducing each other’s wives” is clearly what fixates Benedick and Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing.

    But think about the financial elites with proletarian wives and daughters “at their disposal.” Think about Jeffrey Epstein and associates feasting on the bodies of working class children. Think about Thomas Jefferson’s sexual exploitation of enslaved women. Think about Harvey Weinstein and the “quid pro quos” demanded of aspiring actresses.

    Sexual exploitation is the sharpest edge on the Luciferian tower of economic exploitation. But the solution isn’t to smooth the edges—it’s to get rid of the tower. Given the current reality of exploitation in Shakespeare’s world and our own, we cannot expect the double standards set between rich and poor, whites and non-whites, men and women to disappear outright. They won’t. 

    For all the fixations of the male characters in Much Ado, it is Don Pedro’s attendant who implores the ladies of the court to forgive the transgressions of men even though they are unwilling to do the same in kind. He sings:

    Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more.
    Men were deceivers ever,
    One foot in sea, and one on shore.
    To one thing constant never.
    Then sigh not so, but let them go,
    And be you blithe and bonny,
    Converting all your sounds of woe
    Into hey nonny, nonny.

    —Balthasar, Act 2, Scene 3.

    Thanks for reading!


    1. Friedrich Engels, “The Monogamous Family” in Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State. ↩︎

    2. It should be noted that detailed information and artifacts of this chivalric culture are disputed and sketchy. The historians that Engels leaned on drew heavily from the poetry of Provençal troubadours. ↩︎

    3. Of interest is Shakespeare’s usage of “nothing,” which carried a triple entendre: it is nothing, as we would say today, and it also denotes “no-thing” between the legs of a woman. Additionally it was homophonic to “noting” in Elizabethan English—with “noting” being a colloquial term for gossip and rumour. ↩︎

    4. David Harvey elaborates on the massive integration of the human population into the global capitalist system in Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014): 108. ↩︎

    5. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Arcturus, 2017): 79. ↩︎
  • The Psycho-Capitalist Dystopia of “Alien”

    The Psycho-Capitalist Dystopia of “Alien”

    There is something elemental to the vastness of outer space with its infinity of stars and planets and eternal unknowns that lend off-planet stories a conspicuously epic quality. After all, this is the realm of gods and titans, Zarathustra and Siddartha, heaven and angels, Star Trek and Star Wars. Even on the small screen there is Battlestar Galactica, motored by existential warfare, the fate of the entire species in the hands of one starship’s crew.

    Ridley Scott’s Alien blows in from the spindrift of ancient cosmology and the modern space opera, an oddity considering the spartan scope of the story. The premises of the original Alien trilogy require little imagination for today’s audience situated in the capitalist society. In the original, there is the blue collar crew of the Nostromo, tugging 20,000,000 tons of mineral ore to Earth. In the sequel, Aliens, the United States Colonial Marine Corps are sent to an extraterrestrial corporate outpost on a relief operation. And Alien 3 takes place on a prison planet. There is nothing glamorous or awe-inspiring around the cosmos in this franchise—it is a place for the utilitarian, for the rugged, for the criminally deranged. Nothing we can’t find on present-day Earth.

    The Masterpiece

    Alien sets an understated tone for the two that follow. There are installments outside the original trilogy that deviate from this mould—and they suffer for it. But the 1979 classic had first built the resonance with a mass audience that was required for the future sequels to be developed. The film opens with views of the Nostromo and the mountainous ore refinery it stages as cargo. The seven member crew awaken from stasis—hypersleep, to cope with the years-long interstellar voyages. The crew believe they are nearing Earth but we soon learn that their ship’s operating system has awakened them on a company order to investigate a mysterious transmission emanating from a moon they are passing by.

    Right away we see that capitalist class relations are integral to this plot; while the crew is reluctant to undertake such a dangerous assignment, they are ultimately compelled to do so under threat of “total forfeiture of shares.” At one point Dallas, the captain, bluntly states that the only “standard procedure is to do what the hell they tell you to do.”

    The imbalance of power is clear. If the crew refused to comply, the Weyland-Yutani corporation might lose an opportunity to profit but the crew would have to surrender their income, all for naught their many years spent aboard the starship. Even more lopsided, the crew is forced to risk their lives to investigate a potentially lucrative discovery while any proprietary claims would be held by Weyland-Yutani. The Marxist view on wage labour comes into focus: “The worker in capitalist society becomes dehumanized, regarded by the capitalists as simply another piece of equipment which is necessary for the production of profit. The workers become less than human…since they are forced to sell their lives in order to ‘make a living.’”1

    The film taps our collective anxiety that the unquenchable profit-motive underpinning our economy has lead us to transgress boundaries that were not meant to be crossed. Nuclear accidents, ocean acidification, weapons of mass destruction, the hole in the ozone layer, microplastics permeating our bloodstreams, viral lab leaks, artificial intelligence run amok—there is no shortage of potential disasters pending in a world of blind capitalist production. Films such as Planet of the Apes, The Terminator, The Day After Tomorrow and 28 Days Later all play on this collective fear.

    In Alien, it takes shape after three crew members disembark from their ship and discover an extraneous vessel crashed into the rocky surface of the moon. Upon entering, they first find a dead extra-terrestrial pilot, and next, a hull “full of leathery objects…like eggs or something.” A spider-like creature erupts from an egg and sizzles through Kane’s visor, attaching itself to his face. 

    In his Poetics, Aristotle finds that “every tragedy falls into two parts—Complication and Unravelling.”2 The complication occurs early, when the Nostromo receives the radio transmission and is forced by Weyland-Yutani to dock on a moon of a gas giant in the Zeta Reticuli star system. The unravelling occurs after the spider-like creature—a facehugger—has fallen from Kane’s head, the crew sitting down to one last meal before returning to stasis. This is a famously gruesome scene where a parasitic organism explodes from Kane’s chest in a geyser of blood. The fate of the ship is essentially sealed at this moment. Weyland-Yutani demands the return of the alien at the expense of the workers’ lives and the rapidly-growing parasitoid picks off the remaining crew one-by-one, able to turn them into eggs and begin its ghastly lifecycle anew.

    The Horror

    Deductions about many plot elements of this film can only be made at the point of unravelling when this parasite, this xenomorph, is unleashed on the crew of the Nostromo. First, it is clear that we are not watching a science fiction so much as a horror. The vacuum of outer space is a sublime backdrop for a horror film because the muteness of the void approximates the silence of death and non-existence. The producers understood this and created the artful tagline: “In space no one can hear you scream.” 

    Another visible element concerns the derelict alien ship containing the eggs. While the ship did not reach its intended destination, the deadly cargo must have had a destructive purpose all along, with the eggs intended to be dropped as bombs on an unassuming indigenous population—xenomorphs being the ultimate bioweapon. This bioweapon doesn’t merely kill its targets; it impregnates them, it is birthed by them and it destroys them in the voracious service of replicating its species. In Hinduism there is Shiva, the paradoxical god of both creation and destruction who simultaneously creates and destroys the universe in a cosmic dance.3 An element of divinity, of fetishization, is put forward which is further alluded to in the prequel film Prometheus. 

    The xenomorph was expressly designed by Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger with strong sexual overtones: a phallic head and a drooling vagina dentata for jaws. This represents the male fear of castration while the impregnating facehugger leaping from the egg evokes rape. The unity of creation and destruction—of reproduction and death—is given a modern form in Alien although it is not a new concept. Religious allegory aside, Sigmund Freud discovers this unity at the psychoanalytic level and likens the release of sexual orgasm to dying itself: “This accounts for how similar the state following complete sexual gratification is to dying, and for the fact that in lower animals death and the procreative act coincide.”4 For Freud, the death drive innate to living things appears as “aggression and destruction” when it is turned toward the external world.5

    The Mythology

    The xenomorph is the physical embodiment of the death drive, a product of “alien interspecies rape” and the death of its host.6 The aggression and destruction projected outward is total and directly avails its life instincts and reproduction. The android, Ash, in the film describes it as the “perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.” It necessarily takes up the most extremely rapacious form of both life and death, its species pullulating ceaselessly over a mountain of blood-stained corpses and shattered rib cages. 

    In feudal Europe it was believed that demonic incubi and succubi would sexually attack people as they slept with repeated interactions resulting in death. In antiquity this attribute is seen in satyrs and various demi-gods, and in the nomadic society it is seen in mystic and impetuous animals in nature. There is a primordial fear of death and sex working here and its cultural expression is determined by the economic mode of production that situates society. This exemplifies what Marx and Engels say in The German Ideology, that it is “material production” that alters the existence of people, including “their thinking and the products of their thinking.” 

    What Giger, Scott and O’Bannon created with Alien is a space-age capitalist interpretation of the demonic, sexually violent archetype. It is no coincidence that workers, grunt soldiers and prisoners bear the weight of deadly encounters with the parasites in the original trilogy and always under the orders of the soulless Weyland-Yutani corporation. Taking the metaphor further, the xenomorphs symbolize the overwhelming totality of capitalism itself: they flourish by devouring their two sources of wealth, nature and human beings.7

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1.  “Editor’s Preface” in Essential Writings of Karl Marx (Red and Black Publishers, 2010), 16. ↩︎

    2. Aristotle, “Selections from Poetics,” in Art and Interpretation: An Anthology of Readings in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Broadview Press, 1998), 34. ↩︎

    3. John M. Koller, Oriental Philosophies, Second Edition (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), 111-2. ↩︎

    4. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Broadview Editions, 2011), 113. ↩︎

    5. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (Broadview Editions, 2016), 91. ↩︎

    6. Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon described Alien as a movie about “alien interspecies rape.” www.buzzfeed.com/alisonwillmore/19-movie-monsters-that-look-like-penises-and-vaginas ↩︎

    7. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One. Paraphrasing: “Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer.” ↩︎