After the successful raid, Ness decides to take the battle to Capone, heading North in an airplane—at time when such flights were rare among ordinary folk, though a common achievement for the shaman—to the Canadian border where a shipment of whisky (from Joe Seagram to Joe Kennedy, perhaps) is scheduled to be exchanged for cash on a bridge.
Not just a bridge but a border; obviously we are meant to understand this is another, more intense, liminal situation.
Mountie: Thus taking them by surprise from the rear. And surprise, as you very well know, Mr. Ness, is half the battle.
Ness: Surprise is half the battle. Many things are half the battle. Losing is half the battle. Let’s think about what is all the battle.
The Mounties riding in is a film and cultural icon. Here, however, they seem to have forgotten their motto, “We always get our man” and become symbols of careful, bureaucratic procedure, like Canada itself. They are another false Männerbund, mere agents of the State. They’re not corrupt, like the Chicago cops, but they’re not helpful either. Their pudgy “captain” (as Ness mistakenly calls him, as if he were a cop) hands out safe and complacent orders (attack from the rear, for surprise), settling for a safe second best, which Ness rejects with some quiet contempt, preferring to be instructed by his guru:
Malone: Wait and watch.
Ness: Are you my tutor?
Malone: Yes sir. That I am. [YHVH?]
“Many things” indeed happen in this complex scene, and most of them, I suggest, involve either the acquisition or demonstration of shamanic powers.
This suffering was part of a birth, death and rebirth motif but without the role of the biological female, the male is reborn through the agency of men alone and hence becomes part of a new “family” structure which is of a single sex.219
The bureaucratic Mounties’ safe and secret strategy goes awry, creating chaos (from behind, au rebours indeed) in which the men are tested.
Since belonging to Odin means becoming a comrade of the Einherjar (or Odin’s Army), this means the comrade can be taken to Valhalla at any time, and he is considered already dead or literally dead among the living, regardless of whether he literally dies in battle or not.220
This condition also creates a unique psychological state for the warrior preparing him for Berserker training, if he is already undead and eternally in Odin’s service then pain and death are minor transitionary stages and nothing to be feared.221
Stone is the first and as yet only one of the Untouchables to be shot, thus pierced, but quickly jumps back up; he is either invulnerable, a trickster, or already dead and hence fearless.
The candidate is first given a basic education in ethics and the teachings of the lore. He then withdraws from the community and fasts and undertakes ascetic activities including being pierced with a spear.222
Stone, however, is down long enough to literally infuriate the meek Wallace, who acquires the spirit of the Berserker; shrieking in rage, he rushes the gangsters like Achilles avenging Patroclus, killing several and, when out of shells, resorts to what is now the signature Untouchables method, using the butt of the shotgun to dispatch the last thug.
Ness escapes being run over by diving under the car, a symbolic death, and then, trailing a gangster back to their cabin, himself kills his first man.
Finally, Malone, the Trickster, will use the dead man to fool the captured bookkeeper into agreeing to decode the account books. Only he and Ness know the man on the porch is the one Ness killed earlier; Malone goes outside, picks him up, holds him against the window, pretends to threaten him, sticks his gun in the corpse’s mouth, and blows out the back of his head. The Canadian is horrified by all this violence.
Finding the code has been their ultimate goal, not just stopping a shipment of whiskey. In other words, interpreting the runes. The corpse, pushed up against the window and pinned their by Malone’s pistol, may suggest Odin’s self-hanging to acquire the knowledge of the runes.
Malone: Translate this ledger for us!
Thug: In hell.
Malone: In hell?! You will hang high unless you cooperate.
And we can also go back to a bit of comic relief, when Wallace, after his Berserk outburst, and to solidify his Outlaw status, helps himself to some of the booze leaking from the truck. The use of socially forbidden intoxicants is a well-known Shamanic, and Tantric, technique; one also may recall Siegfried who drinks the blood of the slain dragon and acquires understanding of the language of the birds.223
SACRIFICES
As a result of Malone’s capture of Capone’s books—and trick with the corpse having convinced the bookkeeper to talk—Wallace can now prove Capone’s tax evasion. Unfortunately, Nitti manages to kill all three, leaving Ness without his sole witness. Once more, Ness is unmanned.
Capone: And if you were a man, you would’ve done it now! You don’t got a thing, you punk!
Since none of the “real” Untouchables was killed, it’s hard to see why De Palma kills off half of them. Wallace’s death is particularly unmotivated; in the language of Internet movie discussions, they all seem to have the Stupid Ball at this point—ironic, since Wallace is presumably the smart guy. It may be just cinematic: create conflict, pare down the cast to focus on Ness, etc. Or what?
The Untouchables has been a fairly “PG” film up to this point: no ears cut off, no gangsters being carved up in trunks, no exploding heads, the obsession with which Scorsese seems to be satirizing at the end of The Departed (which also involves a main character killed in an elevator by a rogue cop). Starting with Malone’s shooting the corpse in Canada, blood starts to flow; in Malone’s case, ridiculous amounts, as befitting the importance of his character.224
The only sense I can make out of them is that both deaths are sacrifices, part of some kind of ritual. Wallace, having already made his point about Capone’s tax liabilities, is expendable. Malone’s death seems to be some kind of payback or “boomerang” from the etheric realm for his corpse shooting stunt.225
Thus we don’t have to rack it up to stupidity. When Nitti fools Malone with the decoy killer (few people who quote it remember that Malone’s “Just like a wop, bringing a knife to a gunfight” line is followed by his being cut apart by a machine gun) it’s psychic payback for the corpse stunt. Malone, like the corpse, is already dead anyway (“It’s a dead man talking to me” said the corrupt cop earlier), and as Grimsson emphasizes, the whole point of being initiated into the warrior band is to be already dead, hence able to fight fearlessly.226
If Nitti is Malone’s twin, then he seems to play the role of Loki to Malone’s Wotan, in accordance with Grimsson’s suggestion that the Männerbünde were led by Wotan but had more secret rites associated with Loki. Nitti’s gender-ambiguity, sudden or subliminal appearances around crimes, and above all his fooling Malone with the decoy assassin (cleverly inverting Malone’s gun vs. knife with shotgun vs. tommy gun) suggest Loki’s shape-shifting, while his Loki-like boasting about Malone’s death will lead to his own demise, and Ness’s triumph.
Malone’s death, then, is a self-sacrifice, and just as Wotan’s sacrifice leads to knowledge of the runes, both of these deaths are related to communication in some way, an appropriate role for the dead.
Nitti has hung Wallace’s body in the elevator, suggesting one of the odd ways Loki would “assist” Wotan, and used his blood to smear the message “touchable” on the elevator wall, reminding Ness of his mortality. Malone, despite losing about 90% of his blood, is still able to gasp out the train information, but more importantly, he inspires Ness; first, when Ness discovers him and Malone asks, “What are you prepared to do?” and later, when Nitti makes the mistake of mocking his ridiculously bloody death, leading us to see just where Ness in fact is prepared to go. Like Obi-Wan, Malone is even able to inspire Ness after what we would call “death.”
The Train Station sequence, while the final bravura set piece, is really quite dispensable. De Palma added it to Mamet’s script,227 perhaps to s
how Ness is still capable of defending “family values” despite his increasingly outlaw status,228 or to reinforce our memory of the child’s death at the beginning, as well as the threats to Ness’ family; or just as an homage to Eisenstein.
THE LAW ON TRIAL: “YOUR HONOR, IS THIS JUSTICE?”
Using the knowledge provided by Wallace and Malone, Ness is able to bring Capone to trial, but perhaps not to justice; the judicial system is as corrupt as the police.
Nitti seems to have the stupid ball now; in other words, some kind of karmic payback for his previous cleverness. First, he stupidly lets Ness spot his gun in the courtroom (even Ness mumbles an incredulous “Unbelievable”), which gives him a perfectly good excuse to have him removed and searched, which yields the list of bribed jurors. Then, Nitti hands over a matchbook that links him to Malone’s death. (What? Has he been carrying it around for weeks?) Panicking, Nitti steals a gun, shoots a cop, and makes his escape up the stairs to the roof. (Has this ever worked out in movies?)
After failing to escape from the roof by—stupidly—climbing down the ivy-covered building (another Eden connection), Ness captures Nitti by successfully executing the same trick, using his superior shamanic powers of deathlessness and shape-shifting. He rolls over the edge of the building, and when Nitti—stupidly—ambles over to check out the corpse, Ness, in corpse pose, has the drop on him.
Ness seems willing to let the system take over at this point, but in a final Act of Stupid, Nitti decides have a little Loki-like laugh about Malone’s death:
Nitti: I said that your friend died screaming like a stuck Irish pig. Now you think about that while I beat the rap. [Nitti is now doubling Stone, who called Malone “a stinking Irish pig.”]
Which causes Ness to revert to full Berserker mode, frog-marching Nitti right off the roof, and shape-shifting him into Malone:
Nitti: [Screaming as he falls to his death]
Ness: Did he sound like that?
As he falls, Nitti not only shrieks like a little girl, he flaps his arms wildly, as if trying to transform into a white bird against the bright blue sky (or blue screen), but his shamanic powers to fly or shape-shift have been misplaced along with his wisdom.
It’s conceivable that Malone’s death was an elaborate scheme to not only lead Ness to Nitti but insure he would be enraged enough to kill him outright. As Grimsson has pointed out, the member of Odin’s band, the initiate, is already dead, and so does not fear death.
From the alchemical thriller, Red Dragon:
Dr. Frederick Chilton: You caught him. What was your trick?
Will Graham: I let him kill me.
Now Ness has to finish with Capone. Knowing about the bribed jurors, Ness the Trickster bluffs the judge into thinking Ness knows his name is in Capone’s coded ledger, and the judge responds by executing the largest shape-shifting yet:
Judge: Bailiff, I want you to go next door to Judge Hawton’s court, where they’ve just begun hearing a divorce action. I want you to bring that jury in here, and take this jury to his court. Bailiff, are those instructions clear?
Bailiff: [puzzled] Yes, sir, they’re . . . clear . . .
Capone: [to his attorney] What’s he talking about? What is it?
Judge: Bailiff, I want you to switch the juries.
Bailiff: Yes sir.
Defense Attorney: Your honor, I object!
Judge: Overruled!
Remember, Capone is in a civil court, for tax evasion, not murder, but now he will face a family court jury, since in the film’s terms he is guilty of the child’s death at the beginning, whose mother asked Ness for justice.
Capone’s attorney reacts by switching his plea to guilty (unlike the jury switching, not really a possible defense motion at this point, but whatever; this is a philosophical fiction), and, as the cliché has it, the courtroom “explodes.”
Ness has achieved his shamanic purpose: he and his androphilic band has inverted reality, ripping the façade off society, and even turned back time. We are back at the beginning of the movie. The elite courtroom of false justice explodes, not the bar full of honest working people. Frank Nitti has exploded into a pile of bloody flesh in the back of a car, not the little girl who found his bomb in the bar. Capone, who we first met telling us that there was no violence in Chicago, at least “not by me,” is now swinging punches wildly, like a common juvenile delinquent.
Capone: I’m askin’, your honor, is this justice?
Better he should ask the child’s mother, or Ness’ family in hiding.
“HERE ENDETH THE LESSON.”
In the aftermath, Ness is cleaning out his office and finds Malone’s call box key, with its religious medal, St. Jude, patron saint of police and lost causes (“God, I’m with a heathen” Malone had said when having to explain it to Ness). Ness gives it to Stone: “He’d wanted a cop to have it.” Apparently, while Ness is moving on, back with his family (choosing The Path of the Ancestors), Stone will remain.
Here we uncover a final Männerbund: the Twelve Disciples (there were eleven Untouchables in reality, the twelve minus Judas). Stone, born Giuseppe Petri, has received the key(s), and upon this rock a new, uncorrupt police force and cleansed society will be built, safe for Ness and his family to return.229
We’ve learned that the Männerbund is not an archaic, literally primitive feature of Aryan culture in a dead past, as the Christians and secular “Progressives” would have us believe (conveniently for them) but an eternal principle, which can always and anywhere be re-accessed and re-created when needed. As Krishna said, in a verse frequently quoted by Savitri Devi:
yada yada hi dharmasya
glanir bhavati bharata
abhyutthanam adharmasya
tadatmanam srjamy aham
Whenever there is decline of righteousness
and rise of unrighteousness;
To protect the virtuous, to destroy the wicked and
to re-establish Dharma,
I manifest myself, through the ages.230
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
April 11, 2012
OF COSTNER, CORPSES,
& CONCEPTION:
MOTHER’S DAY MEDITATIONS ON
THE UNTOUCHABLES & THE BIG CHILL
Okay, I missed Mother’s Day, but hey, every day’s a holiday for the unemployed! So, in the holiday spirit, I offer some Second Thoughts on a couple of films recently discussed here.
MALONE’S DEATH
Readers of my essay on The Untouchables as an initiatic work will recall that I was somewhat puzzled by the reasons for Malone’s death. I speculated that he had sacrificed himself, rather like Odin, to further Ness’s initiatory journey.
I was recently re-reading an essay by “Abraxas” (Ercole Quadrelli) collected by Baron Evola in the first volume of his Introduction to Magic, viz. “Three Ways.”
You must generate—first by imagining and then by realizing it—a superior principle confronting everything you usually are (e.g., an instinctive life, thoughts, feelings). This principle must be able to control, contemplate, and measure what you are, in a clear knowledge, moment by moment. There will be two of you: yourself standing before “the other.” Then you will know the meaning of “inner dialogues,” the inward commanding and obeying, the inward asking for and obtaining of advice, as in the case of many Christian and Muslim mystics, and similarly reflected in many Hindu texts that were compiled in dialogue form; the characters depicted in them are not real persons, but are seen by a skilled disciple as two parts of his own soul.
All in all, the work consists of a “reversal”: you have to turn the “other” into “me” and the “me” into the “other.”231
Then, in contrast to the mystical, or Christian, path, where the Other remains Other, and the Self remains in the feminine position of need and desire:
In the magical, dry, or solar way, you will create a duality in your being not in an unconscious and passive manner (as the mystic does), but consciously and willi
ngly; you will shift directly on the higher part and identify yourself with that superior and subsistent principle, whereas the mystic tends to identify with his lower part, in a relationship of need and of abandonment. Slowly but gradually, you will strengthen this “other” (which is yourself) and create for it a supremacy, until it knows how to dominate all the powers of the natural part and master them totally.232
Then, “the entire being, ready and compliant, reaffirms itself, digests and lets itself be digested, leaving nothing behind.”233
In short, as the New Agers like to say, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.
If Malone is a projection of Ness, embodying what Ness knows about being a man, but manifested as an external being able to function as a teacher and then dismissed (like Tyler Durden in Fight Club), this would not only be consistent with the shape-shifting and other shamanic attributes of Malone, but also explain most of the oddities I called attention to. How do they just happen to meet on a bridge at Ness’s point of greatest need? If, as Malone himself says, the whole police force is corrupt, why does Ness trust Malone himself?
And above all, why does Malone, an Irish cop, speak in a quasi-Scottish brogue? Because Ness, the ur-Norwegian Midwesterner, has probably never heard a real Irishman; Ness has just arrived in Chicago; talkies were only recently invented; even Cagney’s The Public Enemy won’t be released until after he leaves in 1931.
SHE’S HAVING MY BABY
The Homo and the Negro Page 13