Jud's Hovel _______________________________________
Curly, angry that the hired hand, Jud,
is going to the social with the girl he loves,
now goes into Jud's hovel
in the smokehouse to confront him.
And we see that Jud is the dark underside
of this world of innocence, bright skies
and perpetual celebration.
The space he lives in is
dark, crude, and dirty.
He keeps a jug of alcohol on the table,
while a rope that looks like a noose hangs on one side,
suggesting a connection between him and death.
He's got a gun and there's a picture
of a nude woman on the far wall.
Curly can't help but look at the picture.
He's interested but not transfixed
because his mind is focused on the real thing.
Soon Curly draws Jud into a song
about how the world would come to mourn
if Jud were to hang himself with the rope.
The story, which plays on Jud's self-pity,
is full of sly put downs and double meanings
at Jud's expense, which Jud misses,
suggesting he is oafish,
as well as being unclean and dangerous.
Jud then reveals to Curly
that he was treated like "dirt" by his last employer.
But, as Jud makes clear, he is a person
who knows how to get revenge.
Jud implies that, some five years before, as a hired hand,
he killed his employers -- a father, mother, and daughter --
after he discovered that the daughter, who he liked,
was with another man.
In other words, the young and idealistic Curly
had better give up his plans to marry Laurey,
or Jud might do the same thing again.
It is clear that the movie intends
Jud and Curly to represent two answers to life
and two sides of man.
Curly is potent and powerful; he is part of society
and turned toward wholesome things.
Jud is rejected, jealous, and on the outside looking in,
perhaps because he believes that is where he is stuck.
He is sunk in darkness and a hole of a life
that is characterized by impotence and anger.
And he relies on crutches
including fantasies of revenge, alcohol,
and pornography, which provide him with substitutes
for the women he can't have.
Jud could go after other women,
but he wants only Laurey, the young woman
in the household where he works and lives,
who seems as pure to him as he is unclean.
Jud is unambiguously a representation of neurosis.
Having retreated from life, he has regressed
to a state of anal dirtiness and spite.
The fact that he is unkempt and unclean,
with uncombed hair and an unshaven face,
and that he lives in a dark, windowless, space,
is a telltale sign of anality.
As we will see, it is because he is afraid
to be phallic, potent, and engaged with life
that he must be dirty and hateful, instead.
What Curly says to Jud in this encounter
reinforces the idea that Jud has regressed
into anality because of a fear of life:
"In this country there's just two things you can do
if you're a man. You can live outdoors is one
and you can live in a hole is the other," Curly tells him.
Curly then compares Jud to a rattlesnake that is
"scared to death somebody goin to step on him.
Got his old fangs all ready."
"How did you get to be the way you are, anyhow --
setting in here in this filthy hole?" Curly asks.
"Why don't you do something healthy once'd in a while
instead of staying shut up here a crawling and festering."
What is particularly interesting is that Laurey
has also done just what Curly is describing --
she has crawled into a hole.
Because of her ambivalence toward Curly,
she has holed herself up behind a wall of spite
and turned to the anality of Jud
by agreeing to go to the dance with him.
Having turned to someone who embodies
the dark side, she is now stuck with her choice.
So in this scene in which Curly
has entered Jud's hovel to have it out with him,
what we see is the force of potency and life
fighting the force of darkness and hate for Laurey's soul.
Jud responds to what Curly says to him
by firing a gun into the air.
Curly then demonstrates his own shooting abilities
by putting a bullet through what is described as
a winking knothole the size of a dime, in Jud's hovel,
so Jud will know what he's up against.
"Right through the knothole,
slick as a whistle," Curly says after he hits it.
Aunt Eller then runs to the scene
to make sure things are alright.
Who fired a gun, she demands to know.
Once Curly tells her he merely fired at a knothole,
Aunt Eller tells a worried Laurey that it's
"Just a pair of fools swappin noises."
The winking knothole, the size of a dime,
is a disguised image of an anus.
Along with the reference to fools swapping noises,
it once again suggests that all of this is a representation of anality.
Jud and Curly are in Jud's anal hole of a home,
trying to intimidate each other
with their loud masculine explosions.
But the impotent Jud's noise merely goes off in the
air.
while Curly's is phallic in character.
The bullet Curly shoots is aimed with precision,
and plugs Jud's winking knothole.
Never one to miss an opportunity,
the local peddler shows up
and offers Jud more pornography.
"I want me a real woman.
I'm tired a all these pictures of women," says Jud.
Here we see Jud angrily throwing down
Parisian postcards.
Like Curly, Jud has a dream
of something better for himself.
But Jud's dream is laced with obsession,
jealousy and rage.
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| Curly, who is a force of potency and life | confronts Jud, who is a force of darkness, anality and death. | Both love Laurey who, in an effort to play hard to get, has mistakenly agreed to go to the social with Jud. |