Life & Death Versus Death-In-Life

Life & Death Versus Death-In-Life_________________________________________

Despite its apparent traditionalism,
Oklahoma! offers a transformative vision
that provides an answer to the cultural impasse
we find ourselves in today.
That vision is based on a depiction
of three kinds of societies.

The first is a patriarchal society,
based on authority, rules, prohibitions, and guilt,
which is represented by the marshal and Annie's father.
But the movie depicts this society only in passing,
mocking its emphasis on power
and its tendency to interfere with the true business of life.

The second is a society
of forbidden pleasures and licentious sexuality,
which is primarily found in the realm of the dream
although it is depicted in a number of other scenes, as well.

The third and most essential is
a life-affirming society based on a benevolent matriarchy
that is potent, full of love and celebration,
willing to let others find their own path,
and not afraid to face difficult truths.

The message of the movie is that we should
try to create the third kind of society
and that we can do so by embracing
the good and bad in life, the living and dying,
instead of giving in to fears and desires
and retreating from the truth.

If we fail in this task, it says, we end up
re-creating an unnatural form of life
that has the aspect of death,
and this state of death-in-life
can then masquerade as the licentious, forbidden, sexuality
of the second kind of society.

In other words, when life and death are denied,
life is imbued with death,
which puts on the mask of transgressive sexuality.

The idea that death can invade life
is a metaphor, of course,
although it is one that offers a profound insight
into the conditions of human existence.
It is based on a perception,
which is essential to gothic fiction,
that when we are afraid of life
we lose ourselves in qualities that are against life,
including emotional deadness, isolation, constriction,
avoidance, self-thwarting, degradation and hate,
and the desire to wallow
in the symbolically dead matter of anality.

This idea finds its ultimate personification in the Devil,
the cosmic oedipal rebel
whose state of death-in-life
wears the mask of transgressive sexuality.

It is similarly expressed in the image of vampires
who, unable to live or die, must feed off life.
Those afraid to embrace this world,
the movie tells us, because of their fear
that potency will evoke castration and suffering,
end up like vampires who try to drain life.

Does the movie really say this?
The answer is no, it doesn't say it --
it shows it, often in disguised form,
allowing its creators to communicate
their often-unacknowledged perceptions to us.
It remains only for interpretation to reveal what the movie says,
and what we, often unknowingly, experience when viewing it.

The movie shows this idea by presenting us with Jud,
who responds to his fears by walling himself off from life
and regressing into a self-castrating existence
of impotence and jealousy,
imbued with the death matter of anality.
Like his cosmic template, the Devil, Jud presides over an underworld
in which sexuality is imbued with
anality, emotional deadness, and castration.

The movie also shows this idea by depicting Laurey,
who is afraid to embrace life.
She overcomes her fear of life by discovering
that the only alternative is the death-in-life of Jud,
which leads her to flee from living death into the arms of Curly.
Like a good psychoanalytic interpretation,
Aunt Eller's wise and well-timed words
then help Laurey take the final step,
giving her the insight that will shape her life
-- and should shape ours --
which is that the stoic acceptance of the conditions of life
opens us up to what life has to offer.

In presenting us with this story,
the movie offers a profound philosophy
that is a challenge to contemporary culture,
based on a vision that is humanely traditional
and transformative at the same time,
a vision that uses Biblical and Christian themes and imagery
to suggest an existential theme,
and that plays on the psychodynamic insights
inherent in the Bible and Christianity.

In many ways, what it offers is a variation
on a well-known precept,
which tells us those who are prepared to die, die only once,
while those who are afraid to die,
die a thousand deaths.

The philosophy the movie offers
profoundly rejects the culture of forbidden pleasures
that is on the ascendant in the contemporary world.
While this culture looks alluring and powerful,
the movie tells us, it is really a mask
of those who are afraid to live and love.
Behind this culture's mask of forbidden pleasures,
and the parade of anality, exhibitionism and licentiousness,
the movie would see people who deaden themselves,
and self-castrating oedipal rebels
turned toward darkness because they are fleeing from light.

In the writhing body-images of MTV culture,
which are prefigured by the licentious dancers in Laurey's dream,
the movie would see a demonic imitation
of true celebration -- a dance of death.
These demonic celebrations take life
as their raw material, the movie says,
but they transpose it until it becomes a form of death-in-life.

But the movie also rejects patriarchal culture
by depicting the trial as a farce,
and the authoritarian marshal who would use it to accuse Curly
as an overblown braggart.
It is during the trial, when Curly is found not guilty,
that the movie offers us
the final overcoming of the anti-life desires
embodied in patriarchal culture and its flip side,
the culture of transgression.
With the not-guilty verdict, pronounced in unison
by the entire community, both Curly and Laurey
are symbolically absolved of oedipal guilt,
having killed the oedipal conflict in themselves
and the escape into deadness it inspires.

The trial, like all representations of trials,
is the endless trial inside each of us,
by which we are hauled before a corrupt court of justice,
and found guilty of imaginary crimes.
When the townspeople ignore the pretentious marshal
and pronounce Curly not guilty
so the lovers can get on with the loving,
they don't merely brush aside the absurdity of oedipal guilt;
they also invite us to do the same.

With these depictions, the movie invites us
to get beyond the false pleasures of transgressive culture,
and beyond the control of oppressive rules and authority,
so we can get to true pleasure and help create a society
that provokes us to find our heart's desire.
Such a society is generative, the movie says. It celebrates,
and passes on life and wisdom to a new generation.

Of course, these insights can also be looked at
as forms of psychological defense and ideology.
As both a defense and ideology,
the movie becomes an effort to get us to reconcile ourselves
to a world of change and death
and to the order of society
as it existed in an earlier age.
After all, in the end, Laurey accepts
the conditions of life she can't change
and takes her place in the cycle of reproduction
on which society depends.
She is depicted as living in a world in which
fulfilling the heart's desire
contributes to the stability of society,
and maintains marriage and monogamy.

It is a world in which loving sexuality and marriage
are the true order of things
and a more "freewheeling" sexuality
is a falling away from our true nature
toward something that is
immature, defensive and demonic.

The movie never questions these assumptions,
instead idealizing marriage and turning the alternative
into an object of ridicule.

Oklahoma! can also be viewed as embodying
a gender-based ideology or philosophy.
While the philosophy it offers is the possession
of neither gender, it is nevertheless based on a vision
that has something uniquely feminine about it.
This is a world that women,
in their role as homemakers, would create,
full of love and nurturance,
which is threatened by the predatory, impersonal,
and licentious sexuality of man
and by an unattached female.
Toward the end, not only is the evil of Jud
eliminated, but the ranch hand Curly
is transformed into someone who pledges
to become a farmer and family man;
in other words, a good husband.

But this scene really owes more to
the liberating vision of comedy
than to traditional feminine philosophy,
giving us the alchemy of love
in which the female accepts sex
and the male accepts a home life,
so the two meet on common ground.
In fact, with Laurey suddenly turning into
the sexual aggressor, seeking kisses from Curly,
and Curly suddenly talking about nesting,
it is almost as if the two have changed places.
Each is now planted in the other,
in preparation for the planting of crops and children
that will come.

By involving us in all this, the movie
can evoke an optimistic and tempered realism
that is beyond and before ideology
because it is the natural state of people
who have become reasonably whole
and had the good fortune to live in times
that allow them, to some degree, to flourish.
At the end, having taken all this in,
and in a state of delight at the happy ending,
we are better able to affirm life and look
at the good and at least some of the bad,
and say, (in our own words)
"Well, alright then to both of them."

It may be hard for us to see
how the good we yearn for can triumph
in a universe in which Jud is merely a pale imitation
of the Grim Reaper, who stands in the distance behind him
and cannot be undone either by taking on his aspect
or by planting and harvesting a new generation.
But the abundance of good
and what Aunt Eller refers to as our heartiness
can allow us to accept the bad as part of life,
and embrace the good,
so life doesn't become infected with the death-in-life
of Laurey's dream.

Even then, we will not, as the psychoanalytic mystic,
Norman O. Brown, has suggested,
see in our age-old adversary, a friend.
But we will be at peace and, after having fully lived,
we will be prepared to die.

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