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Reader comments on
Subject: Working Class Horror Movie
Date: May 28, 2002
Session 9 is an excellent movie about how working class masculinity is a death trap, both for the father and his family. What does Simon say at the end: I am the weak and the wounded. This is also Gordon's situation: he tries to see himself as a powerful man, but is actually a working class male
example of the weak and the wounded. In the end, his work has literally become his life. He never leaves the site -- because he has killed his family, yes, but the image resonates. Lots of men, particularly working class men, cannot leave their job behind when they go home in the evening.
The other characters have methods to escape from -- or forms of compensation for being part of --
the working class -- youth, a law degree, drugs, or the promise of Florida. Only Gordon has internalized the work ethic completely. This makes him set impossible deadlines for himself and others, makes him becomes paranoid that people are plotting against him, makes him unable to communicate his deepest fears, even to other men, and, worst of all, makes him kill his wife for a regrettable mistake (spilling the hot water accidently on his legs -- which presumably might interrupt the work schedule if he goes to the hospital to have it treated properly).
Forms of hysteria are normally associated with women, but Charcot, who Freud worked with, also diagnosed many cases among working class men. Freud's paper on hysteria was written in 1885. I don't know if this helps to make sense of the dates on the coins. But, for sure, coins, unlike bank notes, are a bad thing to see in dreams. They are not worth much: they are therefore a
sign that the dreamer is experiencing anxiety.
In the movie, they are an effective way of showing the working class's life-long chase after small change.
I saw the Chair as a symbol of punishment, whether the punishment inflicted on you by others -- or worse still, the punishment we inflict on ourselves.
The real horror of Session 9 stems then from the fact that the thing we most fear is inside ourselves. The family is the ultimate site of both our most cherished dreams and therefore the form taken by our most intense anxieties. The horror that the family man Gordon is a killer who regrets but is unable to prevent this destruction
is worse than the discovery that the horror is out there in the form of a demon or a "madman".
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» Working Class Horror Movie « from Terry, May 28, 2002
GONE from CrapBall, Sep 1, 2006
Flaws from Chefboyartie, Jun 24, 2008
» Working Class Horror Movie « from Terry, May 28, 2002
GONE from CrapBall, Sep 1, 2006
Flaws from Chefboyartie, Jun 24, 2008
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