6. AMERICAN MYTH

At the same time that America has experimented with the encouragement of freedom on a vaster scale than has any civilization before us, we have continued to be brutal and vicious, oppressive and violent on repeated occasions at home and abroad. The distance between American ideals and American reality has been as much a puzzle to us as a delight to our enemies. Time and again we have been brought up short, left standing in confused and bloody consternation, as the creative solutions freedom nurtures have been repeatedly mocked and shattered by our violence in times of crisis. An understanding of filicide offers some help in analyzing the difficulty we have had in utilizing our freedom in positive ways The conclusion cannot be avoided that the yin of American freedom is balanced rather neatly by the yang of American filicide. If control is the primary form of filicidal behavior, then America must represent the fullest flowering of filicidal culture. Our skill at controlling is such that the English verb "manage" has made its way into any number of languages.

And we have managed very well indeed. The moon flights were awesome in their complex, cold perfection. Presidential elections have become a series of minor masterpieces of conscious, calculating manipulation of the entire country. But even as we achieved near-perfect control in many areas, collapse had already begun--at the hands of a nation hardly a twentieth our size. For reasons which baffled us all, but especially our trigger-happy leaders, we could not bring ourselves to unleash our strength even for the few minutes necessary to destroy the pesky, feisty enemy. We failed to be classically victorious in Vietnam because we were getting very near the point of no return in the filicidal script.

The filicidal mask of control, even as such seeming opposites as Neil Armstrong and Richard Nixon were putting the finishing touches on it, was cracking. We reached a point where we saw that to persist, to force life to exist inside that hollow, lifeless face meant that we had to be prepared to watch ourselves kill our children openly and without pretense. We tested pure, undisguised filicide at Jackson State and at Kent State. We recoiled. We walked right up to the edge of the abyss of child-murder--which is of course always self-murder, the same brink over which so many well-intentioned societies have plunged before us, we walked to the edge of unrestrained tyranny, dropped a few of our children into the abyss, and backed off. "No," we said. "Not that." We had finally found a price for classic, historical success that was higher than we were willing to pay.

What happens if Oedipus doesn't claw his eyes out, if Orestes doesn't kill his mother, if Agamemnon refuses to sacrifice lphigenia, if God doesn't throw Adam and Eve out of Eden, if Abraham refuses to sacrifice Isaac, if we and God never send Jesus to the cross, if Hamlet refuses to be his father's avenger, if Frankenstein gives his son a hug? What happens if a nation with a long history of filicidal behavior and a long tradition of judging success by the competitive standard where victory = good and defeat = bad--what happens if such a nation refuses to win a simple little war against a hopelessly out-classed small nation?

One thing that happens is that voices of doom are heard in great number, and they are right in their apocalyptic warnings--though not in the way they think. We were in Vietnam because we are not only our fathers' sons, we are also still trying to be our fathers. We got out of Vietnam because we somehow realized that if we won, we would lose. We realized that the only way to win was to lose. In the middle of a very bloody little war during which we had repeatedly made our fathers' old choice of mortal combat, we slowly changed our national mind and took the first step toward choosing mortal embrace by putting down our weapons and walking away. That it was an epochal gesture of breath-taking courage and beauty is a fact we are obviously having a hard time in recognizing. The warnings of the patriarchal prophets of doom are correct because that choice, if we continue to make it, does mean--just as they fear--the end to civilization as they know it.

The planetary bomb is still loaded, with a hair trigger. Many other steps of a similar kind have to be taken by many nations before the bomb is defused. Our own confused behavior in America since the Vietnam War shows that we are far from having irrevocably decided on the path of mortal embrace.

Since America is still a society in process, it is difficult to isolate our central myths. Given the nature of our first two centuries, we can safely settle on two myths for the purposes of discussion. One we might call the Wyatt Earp myth, the other, the Horatio Alger myth--the American versions of tragic failure, and tragic success. The Wyatt Earp myth arises from the need in a frontier society to establish law and order as quickly as possible and to maintain it with a minimum of disruption to the process of building a life in a wilderness. The Horatio Alger myth arises from a society which applies standards of cautious, violent control and hard-working vigilance as the only means of achieving security and peace in a frontier setting.

WYATT EARP

The experience of the frontier produced an American variation on classic, European filicide. Somehow, at the same time that we carted the old filicidal baggage across the ocean more or less intact, we left the fathers behind in Europe. On the vast, new continent we have been rather like children left alone in the nursery to fight it out among ourselves. Thus America has developed a filicidal civilization with a distinct fratricidal quality about it.

To be sure, we were aware of the grand European tradition of filicidal patriarchy. We have continuously toyed with overt father worship--as when, for example, we now and then elect a quasi-fascist president. On a less institutionalized basis we have toyed with mother worship. Just as the intense father religion of the Jews produced the intense son religion of the Christians, the intense father civilization of Europe produced the intense son civilization of America. Filicidal Christianity has as its central symbol the dead son on a cross. Fratricidal America has as its central symbol the shoot-out on Main Street. For America it is all the same myth that is acted out, whether the battle is between Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid, between Lee Harvey Oswald and John Kennedy, between Martin Luther King, Jr. and James Earl Ray, between Lyndon Johnson and Ho Chi Minh, between National Guardsmen and Kent State students, between state policemen and Jackson State students.

Cain and Abel. Daddy is off at work somewhere. Mommy is at home. And there's nobody here but us kids to try and figure out what to do. Orwell spoke more strongly to America than to Europe because his terminology ("Big Brother") and vision were more closely in tune with the realities of this fratricidal version of filicidal civilization.

Extreme, bloody, emasculating racism of the sort America has displayed is possible only in a filicidal fratriarchy. In a smoothly functioning filicidal patriarchy harsh judgment is spread more or less equally among all citizens (except those of the ruling class). Street gangs provide an accurate reflection of basic American reality: tribes of boys fighting it out, with the girls standing on the sidelines shouting encouragement.

Football replaces baseball as the national sport because it is a more nearly overt acting out of the shoot-out myth. The field and the action are linear, like Main Street, and the object of the game is to get the other group's territory by physically defeating them. Baseball, however attractive its phallic symbolism, is played in a circular area where the struggle is based more on a shared agreement as to the use of the area. Baseball is also almost wholly lacking in the element of violent body contact. Violent touching appears to be more satisfying than not touching at all.

HORATIO ALGER

Success is so obviously a primary American value that to discuss it at this late date is to belabor the obvious. What is less apparent is the filicidal irony that undercuts our Orestes-like success. The irony is a dual one, part of which is geographic and part of which is sexual.

In our near-fatal immersion in materialistic values, we have measured success in terms of money and power. The great American fortunes are--so the myth goes--the result of hard work, clear thinking, and good planning. American geography adds an irony to such acquisitiveness which is lacking in Europe. We came to a virgin continent whose natural resources had hardly been touched by its ancient inhabitants. For a group of people with a compulsion to strive for material success, the continent was an enormous El Dorado, an untouched treasure house of immense size. Given the richness of the continent, it would be difficult for any kind of society to exist here long and not generate hundreds, thousands of amazing success stories. We have behaved like children wandering through a field littered with gold nuggets. Any child who stumbles across a nugget becomes the center of our attention, and that child's life and words take on great importance for us. We have naively and pridefully tended to ignore the simple fact that our success here is in large part due to the incredible bounty of nature which the new homeland offered. Part of the irony of our success is at last catching up with us as we slowly come to realize the environmental price we have to pay for our violent exploitation of those riches.

Horatio Alger.

Horatio Alger was our only author able to successfully create an entire corpus of work centered around the myth of American success, though generally his models were oriented to a more urban, second-generation exploitation of wealth. Other writers have depicted the success myth in less stereotyped, more profound ways. But Alger was so accurate in his reproduction of the American ideal of success-- that glittering surface we still want so much to believe is real and accessible to anyone who will just work hard enough--that his name became synonymous with the myth itself. His stories are so familiar to us that we don't even have to read them anymore. But his name and his life conceal the other half of the irony of American success: Horatio Alger was homosexual.

The geographic irony of American success lies in the fact that we have applauded and praised and memorialized ourselves for being such skilled controllers of the continent, and now it turns out that we who thought of ourselves as such great lovers have been little more than clumsy rapists. The sexual irony of American success lies in the fact that we have applauded and praised and memorialized ourselves for being such skilled and deft Men--manly, no-nonsense, brave, macho Daddys, and it turns out that all this time the American fratriarchy has been homoerotic.

The little boys in the nursery are very frightened of the little girls, but they can overpower the little girls because the boys are bigger and stronger. But the little boys are also frightened of each other. They know the terrible self-hatred and violence that resides in themselves is also found in their compatriots. Love is possible in a filicidal society between only those persons who can agree implicitly to relate in a filicidal way--which means violently. Since the little girls are--or appear to be--incapable of the level of violence of which the little boys are capable, the little boys are drawn irresistibly toward, and fascinated by, one another.

A major part of proving one's identity as a real father-son, a real Man, consists in being a successful fucker of women. The fucking of men is taboo except where it is done violently and harshly under extreme circumstances, as in prisons and armies. So the little boys compulsively copulate with the little girls and simultaneously sublimate their lethal fascination for each other by competing, by proving who has the larger and therefore better penis/body/mind.

Humans are violent to the extent that they cannot be loving. Men shoot other men because they cannot touch other men gently and lovingly. The American fratriarchy denies almost completely the possibility of genuine love between American men. Again we see that the fundamental attitude beneath our filicidal posturing--which in America has achieved a surface appearance of unprecedented attractiveness--is self-hatred.

As a young man Horatio Alger was a cleric in a small New England town. The pattern of his peaceful, pastoral life seemed set--until he was one day caught fooling around with the choirboys and immediately removed from his position. Lacking funds and with no immediate opportunity to earn funds, he went to New York and started writing stories about little boys who work hard and grow up to be successful big boys. The stories quickly found a wide, hungry audience. Horatio Alger became rich and famous. Horatio Alger's life is a Horatio Alger story.

Leslie Fiedler was the first to perceive the powerful undercurrent of homoeroticism in American literature. (The definitive analysis of homoeroticism in American culture is yet to appear.) The reader unfamiliar with Fiedler's work would do well to look into his eye-opening explication of, for example, Huckleberry Finn. Many other areas of the culture are filled with equally rich homoerotic ambiguity: the Hollywood Western (as Pat Dowell, the film critic, has noted), advertising, sports, etc.

The extent of the repression of our homoeroticism may be easily gauged by the intensity of American homophobia. From inane jokes to inane laws, American civilization seeks to deny its own reality. Filicidally, the dynamic of American homophobia may be understood in the following way. No matter how far away our fathers are--whether we left them behind culturally in Europe or whether they are just off at work most of the time--they still exist and their rejection of us is still real and painful, which means that our fear of them is also very great. The homosexual, as perceived by the so-called normal heterosexual male, seems to be mocking the normal male's greatest fear, that of his father. The homosexual male is known to love and have sex with other males. That sort of behavior is inadmissible in a filicidal, fratriarchal society because males are supposed to fight each other, not love each other. A person who mocks, or who seems to mock, our greatest fears, becomes the object of great fear himself, usually expressed in the form of anger and hate--hence the vehemence of American homophobia.

Another indication of the filicidal intensity of American civilization is the almost universal practice of circumcision. In the 1940s two large-scale studies of infant circumcision were conducted, one in Great Britain and one in the United States. The two studies came to opposite conclusions. In Great Britain it was found that infant mortality increased when circumcision was performed at, or soon after, birth. British doctors therefore ceased recommending it as a normal procedure. In the United States it was found that infant mortality decreased when circumcision was performed at, or soon after, birth. American doctors therefore began recommending it to their prenatal patients. In America it is ostensibly performed for hygienic reasons. The doctor will tell the parent who presses for information that it eliminates the necessity for cleaning the smegma from beneath the infant's foreskin. American parents have accepted the operation to such an extent that the percentage of American males who are circumcized is in the high nineties.

There are several strange aspects to the operation. For one, of course, it is a simple operation and an easy way for the physician to make a little extra money. Another puzzling aspect is the easy complicity of the mother, the readiness with which the mother accedes to the cutting of her baby. How easily we let ourselves believe (as did Laius and Jocasta) that the infant does not know what is happening to it, that the infant cannot feel pain. And notice that our scientific reason for the operation is to give our sons a greater chance to live. So, in examining our modern behavior we come full circle. We are back with Abraham and Isaac and all the other fathers saying to their sons as they raise the literal or psychological knife of filicide: I'm doing this for your own good, my child. Snip.

FASCISM AND FILICIDE

Fathers have taken several hard licks in this exposition of the theory of filicide. One of the major historical developments of the twentieth century, fascism, offers an opportunity to balance the books. Frankenstein revealed the precarious interplay between the basic needs of our survival and our filicidal need to control absolutely. If we control too well and too much we wind up with nothing left to control. Much of the thoughtful caution so frequently apparent in all levels of patriarchal planning (in the family, in business, in government) comes from an unconsciousness awareness of that fact.

Our patriarchal leaders take pride in the alleged wisdom of their thoughtfulness and prudence. Given our tendency toward violent solutions of maximum extremity, there may be something of real wisdom in our leaders' foot-dragging. If nothing else, we thereby buy time for ourselves. It is of course quite possible that we will use that time to develop bigger and better means of violent control rather than using it to examine and change our behavior. The point is, the successful filicide knows the value of restraint and learns to practice it with skill.

In this century humanity was faced with the astounding sight of three societies whose leaders blew the filicidal cover of restraint. Fascism is nothing more than filicide practiced on a national scale--without dissimulation. Apart from our human outrage at the brutal atrocities committed by the fascist nations, our reaction to fascism was so intense because--as filicidal patriarchs--we were appalled to see whole nations of filicidal patriarchs doing what we do but being honest about it. In Germany, Italy, and Japan, racist, sexist, elitist policies were openly proclaimed and pursued as the Way. Any degree of violent force up to and including genocide was publicly asserted to be correct as a means of implementing those policies.

It was an intolerable situation. Every filicide longs to practice his tyranny openly, to have his omnipotence publicly recognized and revered. But the smart tyrant learns to live with the necessary frustration of dissimulation and restraint. If he does not learn that lesson, his subjects may well rebel, leaving the tyrant with nothing to tyrannize. And here--in the middle of the twentieth century--the world filicidal patriarchy was presented with an undisguised, unashamed exercise of filicidal tyranny. The only possible response was unrestrained hatred of the Germans, the Italians, and the Japanese, the more so as it seemed they were actually succeeding--they were expanding their areas of control at an alarming rate.

Something clearly had to be done, and what was done was, as always in filicidal crises, war. It turned out to be war to the very brink of annihilation (Dachau, Coventry, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki). The fascists had thrown down the patriarchal gauntlet, in effect saying: We rule and we rule absolutely because, like you, we have penises, but we rule openly and without liberal pretense, which of course means that we are bigger and better than you.

World War II is remembered with such fond nostalgia because the bad guys were so clearly delineated. In a conflict where the enemy is so satisfyingly monstrous, one is relieved of the burden of seeing the monster within oneself. The fascists were not monsters. They were only men and women who had dropped one of the filicidal masks--that of dissimulation.

Every society contains fascist elements, since every society requires some degree of centralization of power. A brief catalog of the characteristics of the typical fascist society will serve to point up the extent to which fascism is merely filicide gone public:

-- Racism. The fascist, as a good filicide, cannot exist without an enemy. It is frequently helpful and efficient to use race as the identifying characteristic. The successes of the civil rights movement over the years indicate some lessening of this tendency in America. At the same time, we have seen a rise in resistance to immigration and in the widespread use of the term "alien" to designate immigrants.

--Inequality. A fascist society proceeds on the public recognition of inequality among humans. Women in Germany became breeding machines. We resist the Equal Rights Amendment.

--Children. The indoctrination of children politically is a world-wide phenomenon. It appears to be the unavoidable price we pay for the benefits of universal education. Every society offers additional indoctrination. The Nazis had the Nuremberg rallies. We have the Superbowl and the World Series. On a somewhat subtler level of indoctrination, the Nazis had Albert Speer. We have Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. The triumphs of American advertising speak for themselves, perhaps most loudly every Saturday morning.

--Uniforms. A fascist society uses uniforms extensively to identify the members of its elite groups. Men now affect, world-wide, the standard Western patriarchal uniform, the business suit. Some classes of workers, for various reasons, do not wear the uniform. But notice that for burial all men are so outfitted. The degree of male entrapment in the masculine role is also indicated by the fact that, while women can now wear pants-based attire, men--irrationally and compulsively--continue to confine themselves in pants.

Blalla Hallmann, Their Finest Hour.

Fascism is thus an externalization of filicidal consciousness onto large-scale secular reality, much as Christianity was (and is) an externalization of the same consciousness onto large-scale religious reality. The filicidal analysis of political theory and practice can be extended with equally fruitful results to any nation, no matter what it's stated ideology may be. In Russia, for example, the state theoretically becomes the filicidal parent, but in practice the tendency has been always toward more or less overt father worship. Marxism represents an intelligent, sophisticated attempt to magnify the filicidal nuclear family to such an extent that the entire society becomes one family.

The Frankenstein myth is alive and well not just in America but around the world. Two recent works with surprising resonances from that myth will provide an indication of just how far we have come since we sat for our portrait by Mary Shelley.

HAL 9000

Where can we turn to find a coldness greater than that of Shelley's Arctic? Space. And who or what could we find to be a more nearly perfect son than Frankenstein's monster? A thinking machine. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, is one of the most revealing tellings of filicidal myth this century has produced. Hal, the thinking and talking computer in the movie, is the ultimate son: Frankenstein's monster perfected to such an extent that we see at last that it is not necessary to be sexual at all in order to be a successful filicidal entity.

Following initial critical puzzlement when the movie was first released, there came a slow about-face. The technological virtuosity of the special effects was enough to give anyone with a taste for futuristic verisimilitude pause for thought. Beneath that clever surface that Clarke and Kubrick had created--with the insufficiently acclaimed aid of Douglas Trumbull--lay much more. But what was it? Was it merely a sort of garbled metaphysics or a profound religious statement? No one could say for sure, and with reserve worthy of zen masters, Clarke and Kubrick weren't talking. So each critic reached down into some long-neglected corner of his or her bag of esthetic tricks and pulled out his or her particular existential anchor for public display. "Unaccustomed as I am to religious exhibitionism" seemed to be the standard implicit disclaimer as each reviewer contemplated Kubrick's and Clarke's science-fiction conundrum.

With a bit of esthetic-religious backing and filling we soon got 2001 safely filed away in a cultural pigeon hole marked Religion: Sub-group Science and Technology, and let it go at that. This pigeon hole does not contain too many other artifacts, but it is not far distant from one marked Science: Subgroup Hubris and Destruction, in which we had long ago filed away Mary Shelley's novel. Such a classification really was safe, or so it seemed. After all, it was only a movie and a science-fiction movie at that, so there was no need to get upset about it. Just as: Mary Shelley wrote a classic horror story, so what else is new?

2001 is a murder story. Five, possibly six, homicides occur. The first is in the prehistoric prologue. A group of starving humanoid apes on the African veldt encounter an extraterrestrial visitor in the form of a black monolith and have their consciousness changed from that of nonconceptualizing animals to that of conceptualizing humans. Result: the first tool-weapon. One of the apes toys with the dried bones left over from a long ago meal. Something clicks and the jawbone becomes a club with which to slaughter beast--and human, or what passes for human at the time. We see the first murder, and we watch the first murderer, drunk with the ecstasy of his new-found power and control, fling his weapon to the heavens.

The bone never descends, because as it floats toward the apogee of its parabolic flight, Kubrick cuts to a Pan American rocket drifting lazily through near space. It is an outrageously presumptuous cut, as if the moviemakers were saying: we let you see the beginning as it happened millions of years ago; and since all endings are contained in that beginning, whatever may have come between beginning and ending is so predictable as not to warrant examination. What follows in the movie is an end, but also a beginning.

Haywood Floyd, head of the American grace program in 1997, is on a secret mission to the moon. An American team of scientists on the moon has discovered a large black monolith a few feet beneath the lunar surface. Dating of the moon soil in which it was buried indicates it has been there some three million years. We follow Floyd on his flight, as he first stops at the huge earth satellite where he encounters a group of curious Russian scientists whom he leaves as baffled about his mission as they were when he met them. After placing a birthday call to his young daughter on Earth, he boards another rocket and we journey moonward with him. After landing he attends a meeting at which all the scientists involved report their theories concerning the monolith. He goes to the site, arriving at lunar sunrise. As the rays of the sun strike the object it emits a massive burst of electromagnetic radiation.

Another cut brings us to the heart of the story. We are on board an enormous spaceship bound for Jupiter. The ship carries five men--Dave Bowman and Frank Poole, together with three scientists in a state of suspended animation--plus one rather extraordinary computer, the HAL 9000, who thinks, or who at least gives every indication that he thinks. Hal is referred to as "he" because of his name and the masculine voice with which his makers equipped him. There follows another dazzling technological sequence in which we become acquainted with life on board the Discovery. Dave and Frank quickly show themselves to be your traditional cool astronaut types, while Hal is hardly distinguishable from them except for the fact that he has no body as such. In a sense, the entire ship is Hal's body. He has sensors--audio, video, and other kinds--everywhere. Hal functions as just another member of the crew. He keeps tabs on the ship, monitors transmissions from Earth, chats with Dave and Frank, plays chess with them, interviews them concerning their mental attitude, and even offers constructive criticism of Dave's sketches of life on the ship.

The voyage proceeds uneventfully until Hal informs the astronauts that a crucial part of an antenna is about to malfunction. Frank leaves the ship and retrieves the module in question. Tests, run with Hal's assistance, reveal no potential trouble. Dave and Frank are puzzled. They inform Earth and Earth says they will look into the problem. Hal is puzzled too, or so he says. Then Hal informs them that the substitute module Frank had installed is about to malfunction. Dave and Frank get very worried and hold what they think is a secret conversation in which they decide they may have to disconnect Hal since they cannot trust him to run the ship if he is going to make mistakes such as this. Unknown to them Hal is reading their lips through one of his many television eyes.

Frank leaves the ship again to replace the module. At this point the second murder occurs (the first having been the murder of the apeman). Hal takes control of Frank's space pod and rams Frank with it, cutting his oxygen line and sending him hurtling off into space. With ultimate astronaut coolness Dave rushes to the rescue in another space pod. Too late. Frank is dead. Dave retrieves the body and returns to the ship only to find that Hal will not open the door to let him in. While Dave is trying to find a way into the ship, Hal cuts off the life support systems of the hibernating scientists--murders Three, Four, and Five. Dave jettisons Frank's body and uses an emergency hatch to re-enter the ship. He makes his way through the ship toward Hal's "brain." Hal asks him what he is doing. Dave does not speak. He enters the compartment containing "Hal" and begins disconnecting Hal's higher functions one by one. If we consider Hal human, this is the sixth murder.

Hal talks as Dave unplugs his mind. He says he is afraid. Dave does not respond. At the last, his voice failing, Hal tells us who he is and the date of his birth: he is H-A-L 9000, activated at Urbana, Illinois, January 12, 1992. He tells us his makers taught him a song. As he dies he sings the beginning of "A Bicycle Built for Two."

Cut to Dave, near Jupiter now, leaving the Discovery in a space pod. Whatever his purpose--and we never learn what it is--he is diverted by another of the monoliths floating nearby in space. Dave enters another dimension, something beyond our space-time, and after a fantastic journey, emerges in a suite of elegantly furnished rooms. Time there is hugely compressed. Dave leaves the pod and stumbles through the rooms. The pod is there, and then it is not. Dave ages rapidly. We see him, dressed in pajamas and robe, eating at a formally set table. Then his shriveled figure is lying on the bed, only his eyes show some sign of life. He raises his arm and points and we see that a monolith has appeared at the foot of the bed.

Cut to an embryo, seemingly human, in whose features those of Dave are vaguely discernible, floating in its placenta through space, approaching Earth. End.

The movie presents its story enigmatically, with large gaps left for the viewer to deal with on his or her own. The omissions are not the taunting, malicious, or careless kind used by certain other artistic explorers. The film contains more than enough information for any viewer willing to use his or her creative imagination to follow this modern Odysseus from home to home. The movie is also unusual in that long stretches go by with not a word on the soundtrack. For a culture as addicted to words as this one is (pace, McLuhan), a two and a half hour movie with only forty-five minutes of dialogue was an affront to our verbal sensibilities. Adding to the confusion surrounding the movie's initial reception was the fact that its major points are blatantly accentuated by emotionally loaded musical cues.

Time passed and 2001 eventually found an audience, even a very large audience, and picked up a passel of admiring critics along the way. Most of the critics nestled up quite cozily to the rather obvious scientific-intellectual-religious message which the surface of the movie presents.

The theory of filicide enables us to enter another level of the movie entirely. The portrait that Mary Shelley did of us has been proved more accurate than we might wish by the scientific and political belligerence since her day. Here, in 2001, we have another portrait of our filicidal selves. As in Shelley, it is a peculiar kind of double rendering, like a cubist painting, showing more sides of a person than our orthodox vision is accustomed to seeing at one time.

What is it that causes Hal, the perfect son, to commit murder? As Dave is unplugging Hal's mind, an automatic sequence triggers the playing of a video tape. From that tape Dave learns for the first time that the mission is not a simple voyage of exploration to Jupiter but is a result of the finding of the monolith on the moon--the radio signals the monolith had emitted were aimed at Jupiter. So Hal had known all along what the trip was really about but had been instructed to lie to Dave and Frank about it. In other words, Hal had been filicidally acculturated by his human fathers and mothers.

But the proto-scene for Hal had not yet occurred. Hal functioned beautifully as a bodyless human, manipulating and controlling with superb, emotionless precision and reliability. But the seed of deceit had been planted. As mysteriously as Cain was moved to kill Abel, Hal is moved, for reasons he can no more admit to himself than we have been able to admit the realities behind our filicidal violence to ourselves, to deceive his brothers-fathers-sons about the antenna. Which produces the proto-scene when he reads Dave's and Frank's lips as they decide to murder him. Hal, acting in the grand tradition of filicidal humanity, responds in kind.

2001 presents a portrait of humanity even more intensely filicidal than that in Frankenstein. Its focus is relentlessly patriarchal. We are put in a world without women, without children, without warmth, without nature. We move in a world where everything is literally manmade, including this grotesque ultimate Son of Man: Hal, my son the murderer. Shelley set the key scenes of her story in a world of ice. 2001 is played out in the realm of absolute zero. What are we to read in this but an externalization of the emotional freeze of the human nuclear family? Here we find the perfect realization of the metaphor for filicide as not literally murder but as a kind of freezing, a making-rigid of large areas of our organic potential.

Shelley ended with despair. 2001 ends with hope. Hal is us and we are Hal. But we are also more. We create Hal--just as we create Adam, and Cain, and Oedipus, and Orestes, and Jesus, and Hamlet, and Frankenstein's monster in our own image. They are what we think we are and they are also what we become. But we are always more, as 2001 shows us.

Dave, the last homicide, himself dies at the hand, or under the aegis, of agencies beyond his comprehension. He dies only to find that death is not what filicidal humanity has made it out to be. If death is not what it seems to our filicidal selves, then what are we to make of our lives? It seems that we have constructed our brutally controlled and controlling selves partly on the poor bargain that the filicidal family forces on us. We have also externalized the politics of that family onto the politics of nature itself--including death, the result being that we come to see all existence as a very poor bargain. ("Whoever dies with the most toys wins.") Trying to make the best of it, we strike this pose: All right, Death, you may have me at the end but until then, I am the captain of my fate etc., and I’ll run this little ship of mine any way I please, giving full vent to my little boy's / little girl's frustration at the mockery which you will make of my grandest achievements. If death turns out to be more than end, more even than judgment by the biggest father of them all, the filicidal self must at that point find itself in somewhat of a quandary.

2001 is to Frankenstein as Goethe's Faust is to Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Marlowe's hubristic philosopher ends in eternal damnation. Two hundred years later Goethe, dealing with the same material, was able to realize the possibility of mercy and forgiveness at the end of Faust's troubled life. Shelley's filicidal scientist plunges unerringly toward despair and death. One hundred and fifty years later Kubrick and Clarke, dealing with the same myth, give us a transcendental astronaut who undergoes the filicidally heretical experience of rebirth.

The vision of 2001, for all its scope, remains flawed. The movie carries our filicidal behavior to the point where we create the perfect son. The humans around him seem almost pitiable so imperfect are they in comparison to him. But what has happened at the end is that--once again--an agency of external, parental redemption so characteristic of the filicidal mind has been shifted up one dimension. The monolith, whatever it represents, is only a scientific rendering of God the Father who saves or damns for reasons of his own. Monolith knows best. So once again we see ourselves seeking salvation by means of some grandiose power external to ourselves--a continuation of the endless quest to recapture that forgotten time long ago when father's yes was heaven, and his no, hell.

MYRA BRECKINRIDGE

Myra Breckinridge is Wyatt Earp in drag, the ultimate put-down and put-on of filicidal humanity. She's a two-breasted, dildoe-toting hermaphroditic Amazon whose goal is nothing less than total "power over both sexes and, yes, even over life itself." Her mission as she states it is:

the destruction of the last vestigial traces of traditional manhood in the race in order to realign the sexes, thus reducing the population while increasing human happiness and preparing for the next stage.

Myra Breckinridge is America and her failure is the failure of this country's naive belief in its ability to control everything benignly and benevolently. She is Yankee ingenuity carried to its extreme, rigorously logical conclusion: if the world is not the way you like it, change it with whatever degree of force is necessary, but do it cleverly and with style. American tyranny at home and American imperialism abroad have succeeded so well because they are the tyranny and imperialism of panache, elan, and chutzpah. The American contribution to that process known as history has consisted of making filicide palatable. What our filicidal gods needed all along, it turns out, was a good public relations man and a well-trained, smooth-talking traveling salesman.

Recapturing something of the lost vision of the ancient matriarchy, Gore Vidal at last gives America its savior--a male lesbian transsexual.

Myra Breckinridge is a nonalcoholic Willie Loman who knows the value of Dale Carnegie. She is Werner Erhard with a sense of irony. In her willful, stylish attempt to rearrange the sexual priorities of an entire civilization we see reflected in a bizarre and even obscene way the end of American innocence. In God we trusted for over three hundred years, but it turned out to be not a god who had made us in his image but one whom we had made in our own image. In Myra Breckinridge our chicken-hearted, blustering bravado comes home to roost. The novel contains a mythic acting-out of why we were in Vietnam (with harmonics produced and resonances sounded far beyond Mailer's hearing) and why we withdrew from that rape before coming--a mythic acting-out of the nightmare side of the American Dream in its most basic and bloody essentials.

Raquel Welch as Myra Breckinridge.

Myra Breckinridge yields up the last insight into the nature of fiIicidaI behavior. She is a one-person nuclear family. In her polymorphous self she embodies and acts out all the roles: mother, father, husband, wife, son, daughter, brother, sister. Myron Breckinridge fucks himself. The offspring of that incestuous and bloody union is Myra Breckinridge. Myron is thus Myra's husband and father and brother and son. And Myra is Myron's wife and mother and sister and daughter. Myron/Myra is a Victor Frankenstein who creates the monster directly out of himself. And we see at last that filicide is an on-going, internal process. Whatever agents may be involved in the original incident of filicide, however neatly we may isolate initial filicide in a proto-scene, filicide must finally be seen as an internal event.

The force and habit of tradition, along with the supportive filicidal input we get from our families and friends and the society, lend great sustaining impetus to our filicidal behavior. But each individual's continuation in the old ways is--if the concept of adult responsibility mans anything at all--finally a matter of choice. We are all Myron and Myra Breckinridge. Each of us is a walking nuclear family. So thoroughly have we learned the filicidal lessons and imperatives that we have internalized the roles completely. As an adult, I am my father and my mother, my husband and my wife, my son and my daughter, my brother and my sister. Like Myron and Myra Breckinridge, I shift quickly--though not entirely without pain--from role to role in my incessant search for absolute power over both sexes and indeed over life itself.

Myron Breckinridge knows and lives the failure of modern masculinity. Then he emasculates himself, has his breasts pumped full of silicone and his veins filled with hormone shots--and lives out the failure of modern femininity. Myra, with an almost mystical vision (her great insight is: "Nothing is what it seems and what nothing seems is false") and with a genuinely mythical fervor, sets out to become Woman Triumphant, the new Magna Mater, Kali incarnate, only to have her best-laid, rationally calculated plans reduce her to a man again--such is her tragedy--who plays out an empty life of mock masculinity in the suburban wasteland of California. Filicide, and with it, history, begins and ends at home.