Resolving Oedipus Complexes 1

As the reader has undoubtedly gathered by now,
with each section, a new element is being added
to our understanding of the movie.
So far we have seen that Oklahoma!
depicts a benevolent, matriarchal, society
in which young people are born and grow into
sexual adulthood and a life of fulfillment
by passing tests of gender competence and innocence
in which they overcome regressive temptations
while acting on their hearts' desire.

We now take the next, decisive, step
and examine the movie's depiction of growing up
as involving a victory over the most important
of immature temptations,
namely those involving incestuous or oedipal fears and desires,
as well as closely related desires to remain a child
and avoid adulthood.

The best way to demonstrate that these desires
are central to the movie is to begin by showing that Jud
is a disguised depiction of a boy
who has incestuous or oedipal desires for his mother.

To begin with, Jud looks like a young boy,
with a head that is large for his body.

Here, we see him, again,
ready to go to the social with Laurey,
looking like a small boy dressed up to go to a party.

Jud also tells Laurey
he can't forget the time he was sick
and she brought him soup and was kind to him,
which places her in a motherly relationship with him.
And he tells a story to Curly
that implies, once before, he lived on a farm,
fell in love with the daughter,
and started a fire when he caught her with another man.
When it is suggested that he look for a female,
other than Laurey, he refuses.
He is fixated on Laurey, the forbidden female
in the household in which he lives,
who is also his employer
and in a position of authority over him,
just as he was fixated on the daughter
in a previous household where he was employed.
What he cannot do is go out into the world
and find a woman who is part of another household.

Once we see that Jud is a disguised depiction of a child
with oedipal desires, the role of the oedipal conflict
in the underlying fantasy of the movie become clear.
In the underlying fantasy, which is both
expressed and disguised in the movie,
Jud's oedipal conflict is brought into existence
because Laurey, as the young mother, is afraid
of being sexual with her husband, Curly.
Instead, she turns to her son, Jud,
who has sexual desires for her,
which she exacerbates by being seductive.
But she has no intention
of letting him assume the role of a true mate.

Psychoanalytic theory says the common response to such a situation
is for the son to fear that the father will castrate and attack him
if he potently expresses his forbidden desires.
As a result, the son may regress from being genitally assertive
to being symbolically self-castrating and anally messy,
as a way of saving himself and his genitals,
and expressing his anger at the same time.
Sexuality then becomes perverse, which is to say,
it becomes imbued with self-castration, revengeful violence,
danger, transgression, regression and self-loathing.

And this is precisely the situation of Jud.
He is like a young boy
who has regressed from being phallicly assertive
to being holed up in his messy room,
anally covering himself with dirt
because he fears castration.

The movie makes clear that Jud has withdrawn into anality
precisely because of this fear that potency
will expose his penis to attack.
It does so, among other place, in the scene
in which Curly confronts Jud in his hovel
and makes a brief speech that bears repeating.

"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.
Why don't you do something healthy once'd in a while
instead of staying shut up here a crawling and festering."

The psychodynamic imagery in Curly's words is unmistakable:
the phallic snake, fearful it will be crushed,
has withdrawn into a hole of anality and hides from life.
At the same time, its fangs are ready,
which is a description of Jud's meanness and violence
inspired by the fear of being crushed.

We see another example of the way Jud
has replaced phallic potency with anality
when he fires his gun to intimidate Curly
but merely fires it into the air so it lacks phallic force
and is more like an anal explosion.

Curly responds by displaying the phallic ability
Jud can't muster, and uses his gun to plug
a dime-sized winking knothole in Jud's wall.
Given that the knothole is an image of an anus,
the obvious meaning is that Curly, as the father,
has entered his son's anally messy room
and is threatening to anally rape -- and thus castrate -- the son
because the son has tried to threaten him
in a fight over Laurey -- the mother.

Since the anally messy room
is Jud's anus, Curly's intrusion is, to some degree,
already a symbolic act of rape.

In many ways, the scene sums up the basic position
of the characters. It tells us that Jud,
an incorrigible oedipal rebel
who is in fear of his knothole-plugging father,
has regressed from phallic potency
to anal dirtiness, jealousy and fantasies of revenge,
and is hiding away in darkness.

Not long after, Laurey, as the mother,
journeys into her own dark realm -- the world of dreams --
where the truth can be found.
In other words, she journeys into the unconscious,
where she sees the truth of how her fear of sexual adulthood
and her defensive seduction of her son
has led to a state of death-in-life
involving licentious sexuality.

But the dream Laurey goes into is also a trap
set by Jud, in which he will try to seduce her
into participating in his own castration-based sexuality.
The trap is sprung for Jud by the movie's other sexual predator,
the Peddler, who gives Laurey the Elixir of Egypt
that will lead her into the dream realm
in which Jud is in control.

Not surprisingly, the dream is full of images
not only of forbidden sexuality
but of deadness and castration,
with emotionally dead characters
and a setting that seems lifeless.

The dream world is controlled by Jud,
with his licentiousness and anality,
and includes fallen, zombie-like, women,
who kick up their legs and move in a way
that emphasizes their rear ends.

It is also inhabited by men who walk and flap their arms
like ducks and geese.
Although many viewers might not be consciously aware of it,
there is an unmistakable suggestion
that the imagery of ducks and geese
is a symbol of men who have been anally raped and castrated.

One key to this idea can be found in two scenes
in which ducks or geese are in the path of Curly's horse
but get out of the way in time to not be run over.
In one of these scenes, Curly describes
how he will drive Laurey to the social,
and sings, "Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry
when I take ya out in the surrey...."
And we see his words come to life
as a gaggle of geese move out of the way.

These creatures are clearly at the bottom
of the hierarchy when it comes to power.
But, unlike Jud, who is also at the bottom
of the power hierarchy,
they have the good sense to not get in the way
when a powerful, phallic, male comes by.

Thus, when the men in the dream flap their arms like ducks,
they are being depicted as powerless.

But the key to the idea that ducks represent castrated men
can be found displaced onto an encounter between
Annie's father and the Peddler, which takes place as the father holds
a long and threatening phallic rifle.
When the Peddler interrupts the father
to argue that Annie should be allowed to marry Will,
the father responds, "Well shut your face
or I'll fill your behind so full of buckshot
you'll be walking around like a duck the rest of your life."

Moments later, the father learns about the way the Peddler
has been romancing Annie
and makes clear he expects the Peddler to marry her.

This scene, in which a powerful father threatens
an intimidated and deferential younger man
with the prospect that he will phallicly invade and wound his rear end,
causing him to waddle like a duck,
is another, not-very disguised, depiction
of a threat of anal rape and castration
just as Curly's plugging of the knothole
is a disguised depiction of a father
anally raping his son or threatening to do so.

and flap their folded-in arms
in a way that makes their arms look like truncated appendages.

Although many viewers may not perceive
the meaning of the father's comments,
a fair number probably get the message outside of awareness
when they see these duck-like men flapping
and waddling like they have something up their rear ends.

All of this means that the dream is peopled by
castrated, anal and degraded characters,
which is a way of telling us that licentious sex
is a realm of impotence and castration-fear.
It is also a realm based on transgression
in which people go as far as they can go.
But it really fronts for the primary transgression in which,
fearing to become sexually whole,
people revel in a form of sexuality
that combines the essential transgressions
of incest, castration and revenge.

These desires masquerade as sex, the movie tells us,
but they are really forms of fear and defense,
and failures in development.

The movie reinforces this idea
that the licentious sexuality in the dream is really
a defense against love
by connecting the dream events to an earlier scene
in which free sexuality is used as just such a defense.

The earlier scene takes place during the
song and dance in the farm house,
when Laurey denies her true desire for Curly
by pretending she can , instead, take pleasure
in making herself beautiful and finding new loves.
In effect, she is saying that the decadence of self-involvement
and serial romances can substitute for true love.

The fact that she is in denial is obvious
because she is singing about not needing Curly
while she fights off her sadness
at the fact that he is with another woman.

The dream takes this material
(like all dreams, it takes material from waking life)
and makes it more demonic
to show Laurey where her desire to flee into
self-involvement and serial romance leads --
namely to a state of licentious degradation.

Three examples will make the point.
Each example shows the way the dream takes Laurey's
(and her friends') acts of denial in the farmhouse
and exaggerates and transforms that denial
so it becomes demonic:


On the left, Laurey in the farmhouse, leads a group of woman who dance sensually as they falsely claim they can lead a life of self-involvement and serial romances without one true love.	On the right, inside the dream, Jud leads a group of licentious women who reveal where the fantasy on the left leads, namely to being a fallen woman for whom sex is impersonal and degrading.

On the left, the group of women in the farmhouse flap their arms like ducks and geese, which is the movie's way of saying that the denial of the desire for love leads to castration and powerlessness.	On the right, the castrated men in the dream flap their arms like ducks and geese.

On the left, a woman in the waking scene moves her back end as if to say denial of love leads to the licentiousness of anality.	On the right, degraded dancers in the dream licentiously move their back ends.

The dream is thus a lesson
that tells Laurey where her waking attitudes will lead,
namely into the demonic death-in-life of licentiousness.
Her journey into the dream is like
the journey of the main character in A Christmas Carol.
She sees the future that will come to pass
if she refuses to open up to life and love.