In a number of important books and essays, Sigmund Freud and other psychoanalytic theorists have revealed the hidden psychology of anality. In essence, they tell us that the young child passes through a stage of development in which he (or she) becomes aware of the process of elimination. The child invests sexual feelings and perceives personal and interpersonal meanings in releasing and holding in urine and feces, and in waste products, the anus, and bathrooms. As part of this, he tries to use the process of elimination to express desires and defend himself from fears that arise in the course of development. The anus and defecation thus become involved with various conflicts, fantasies, displacements and psychological processes, which collectively make up the  aspect of human psychology referred to as anality. 

As we will see, the insights of these theorists concerning anality are essential to understanding Them!. Readers who are familiar with these insights, can jump down to here. Otherwise, let's examine these insights as a way of revealing the movie's vision of modern society and human life. 

Anality, these theorists tell us, includes the following elements:

Sexual Pleasure: Defecation, like sucking and eating, becomes a source of physical, sexual, pleasure for the child. It is a form of self-stimulation centered on the process of waste disposal.

Narcissistic self-love: Excrement is perceived by the child as part of his body and as such he may invest it with narcissistic love and take pride in its display, just as he loves and takes pride in other extensions of himself. He may experience it as a gift to parents, something of value he shares.

Holding on and holding in: Instead of displaying and offering excrement, the child may want to hold it in, hoard it and keep it both for himself and as a part of himself. By virtue of displacement, children, and adults, may  collect and hoard things considered to be of great value, which are disguised forms of excrement, including money, gold, possessions, and precious objects such as rare coins, jewels and stamps. These objects are purified of their anal dirt but the individual continues, outside of awareness, to experience them as forms of excrement. The child or adult may also become spendthrift, giving away all that is of value for fear of keeping it for himself.

The safety and comfort of dependence vs. the shame of dependence and lack of control, and the desire to please, to be independent and to experience self-esteem: Complex feelings will be aroused as the process of elimination is controlled by toilet training. Suddenly the child has to give up the symbiosis of going and being changed and ministered to, and is expected to take control of his body functions. He has to leave behind the comfort and safety of dependence and rely on himself and his own powers, which can engender a sense of loss. At the same time, he will want to please his parents and enjoy the independence and self-esteem generated by exercising self-control. 

In the end, the achievement of control over elimination becomes an important milestone in development, one that allows the child greater autonomy. It becomes an emotional paradigm of self-control, while failure can engender a feeling of loss of control and shame.

The regressive fear of being controlled : Paradoxically, in toilet training, the child has to obey his parents and let them control the manner of his going in order to learn how to be independent, which can engender conflicting and, at times, paradoxical feelings of defiance and resentment of passivity. In an act of defiance, the child may hold out when he is expected to go, and go when he is expected to hold on. The refusal to be toilet trained masquerades as an act of independence when it is really regressive. As such it is an example of, and perhaps a template for, false expressions of autonomy that are neurotic in nature and serve to continue the regressive parent-child bond.

Excrement as person: As Norman O. Brown describes in Life Against Death, ( p. 117) the child may replay his relationship with his parents with his own feces so his feces becomes himself and he becomes his parents. Odd as this may sound, he may seek to enjoy a feeling of symbiosis with his own excrement, symbolically interacting with it.  He may equate feces with babies, which are "made" by the body and expelled into the world. Excrement may also be personified and depicted as other kinds of living creatures, which are representations of analized versions of the self and parents.

Aggression: Excrement can be viewed by the child as a weapon, a tool of aggression. The child can desire to smear it on others or himself, which is a paradigm of efforts to defile and degrade the self and others. He may also enact aggression on it, torturing it as a surrogate self (or a surrogate for the parents or other people) by pushing, forcing, and squeezing.

The sexualization of passivity and pain: Defecation can become a source of both masochistic and feminine feelings since this source of pleasure is centered around the feeling of movement in an interior space of the body and may involve discomfort and pain. These experiences can enhance the sense of identification with the mother and can contribute to an identification of masochism with femininity. Fantasies of using the anus to play the receiving role in intercourse, among men and women, can be partly derived from these experiences, and can be displaced onto other fantasies and desires.

Dirt: Ultimately, waste will come to seem to the child to be dirty, disgusting, taboo and off limits. He will control defecation in order to stay free of contamination. Partly by way of reaction formation to the dirt of elimination and excrement, the child may experience desires to be clean and well-ordered, which can evoke praise from parents (LAD, 203). By way of displacement, dirt, decaying meat and dead bodies, offensive odors, poisons and noxious gases and liquids may come to be associated with liquid and solid waste, in a way that retains their anal character.

Interior spaces and passages: As a result of anality, the child may develop a fascination with human plumbing and the plumbing of the bathroom. Caves, tunnels, hallways, mazes, and dark interiors can come to be disguised representations of both, and each can represent the other. All of this may be associated with the unconscious, which is a dark and secret region that produces, not excrement, but ideas and desires, so that anus and unconscious (as well as the tomb, underworld and another dark region, night) come to be connected in unconscious thought processes and fantasies.

Oedipality and excrement as corpse and castrated penis: Given that waste and elimination have such important meanings for the child, he will carry many of these issues with him into later stages of development. As children enter the oedipal period, they will experience incestuous feelings toward parents and feelings of rivalry with one or both for the other's love. And they will fear castration or other forms of retaliation, or feel they have already been castrated for the crime of their sexual desires, although castration fears may arise independently from perceptions of males and females, since young boys and girls can incorrectly perceive females as missing a penis. As a result, they may unconsciously reenact fears over castration and mourning for a lost penis in their adult lives.

During the oedipal phase, the pleasures, fantasies and anxieties over anality will continue, and the child may also back to anal issues in response to the new anxieties over genitality and incest. Oedipal and genital issues may now be expressed via fantasies and functions surrounding the anus. For example, the child may equate feces with a penis that has been castrated for the crime of incestuous desires. In the child's primitive fantasies, the castrated penis is something alive, attached, and loved that, in an act of retaliation or punishment for incestuous desires, becomes detached and turns into dead matter, leaving a hole in its place. The process of elimination may become a displaced and disguised representation of this, and the anus may seem to be a damaged organ where a penis was, since, during defecation, extensions of the body that are often phallic in shape are expelled through an opening. 

Making things dead may also come to be a way of symbolically castrating the self or others and turning them into feces. Sadistic fantasies and actions involving displaced forms of anal squeezing, strangling, torture and smearing may stand in for oedipal efforts to castrate or phallicly attack, as well as serve desires for revenge, power and potency related to oedipal conflicts. 

The child may also regress to anality as a defensive  identification with the mother and her own interior space, and to retain a sense of symbiosis and safety. He may seek admiration for disguised waste products that stand in for his penis.

Abstraction: As we move into adulthood, our interest in anality will have long since gone underground and will be disguised and controlled via displacements and reaction formations. But the anus, waste products, and the process of elimination continue to be invested with anxieties and desires, and with larger meanings in adulthood, and we continue to use them to try to solve psychodynamic problems.

Among these displacements, it is often the case that abstractions, intellectualizations, and ideas are experienced as waste products -- dead matter made by the mind that we can collect, show off, and manipulate. At the same time, ideas may be part of a reaction formation against anal desires, since they are purified of physicality and no longer betray their anal associations. Turning things into abstractions takes the life out of them, and lets us replace the dangerous world with our own fecal structure of deodorized and dematerialized ideas. It turns the dangerous world into our body, which we can control and enjoy.

A desire to create rigid systems of ideas or routines may similarly be a reaction formation against anal sadism, smearing and messiness, even as it also manifests anal desires to collect, control and order dead things.

Orderliness, parsimony, obstinacy: (LAD, 203) The individual may develop a set of character traits based on anal retentiveness and a reaction formation against anality in which the elements of life that stand in for excrement are ordered and held in, and the individual is stubborn and obstinate. Here, the person may organize everything and demand that everything be in its place. He may be miserly and ungiving. One or more of these traits are what are usually referred to in popular expression when it is said that  someone is "anal".

Thus, in adulthood, we may continue trying to give our excrement as gifts, to admire it and be admired for it, to hold it in, collect it, use it to enlarge ourselves, attack others with it, use it to ruin things the way we may feel ruined, use it to prove our autonomy, withhold it to get revenge, and so on. And we may equate it with a castrated penis. But now feces is replaced by things that represent it in disguised form, while the object of our actions -- our childhood selves and parents -- is replaced by the people and situations we encounter in adulthood.

We will also continue to experience whatever we "make" as a valuable waste product deserving praise and pride. All our productions -- thoughts, theories, books, art objects, dwellings, and so on -- may not only be invested with our narcissism as a representative of our body and selves, but also receive a narcissistic investment of self-love because they are disguised representations of valuable waste products.

Just as anality pervades adult life, so it also pervades culture. A prime example is the figure of the Devil, who, as the psychoanalytic theorist Norman O. Brown discusses, is depicted as anal in character, emitting a sulfurous odor and dealing in waste products. (LAD, 202-233) It is the Devil who is seen as bringing death into the world and who is depicted as seducing humanity into acting on malevolent desires from the unconscious. Thus, ideas about death, anality, evil and the unconscious are condensed into, and personified in, the figure of the Devil, who is a projection of our own psychology.

Inspired by Freud's theory that we are a battleground between the life instinct and death instinct,  Brown takes ideas about anality to the furthest point. (LAD, 283-304). He argues that the fear of dying at birth begins a lifelong fear of death and a flight from death that characterizes human life. Afraid to die, we lose the capacity to live, and end up with a morbid death complex in which we are fixated on the death zone of the body -- the anus -- perpetually trying to build a life out of dead matter. This desire to create and master a world for ourselves out of our excrement, so as to protect ourselves from vulnerability and death, is carried over into adulthood and culture (120).

As a result, says Brown, we build the world of human culture out of purified, symbolic, and disguised, feces, which are so many dead monuments in which we invest our hope of immortality. Our economy is built on money and possessions -- substitutes for feces -- which we hoard and incorrectly identify with ourselves. We similarly try to mathematize the world with science, creating a cold -- dead -- vision that is once again a projection of our disguised anality. As Brown  puts it, "The commitment to mathematize the world, intrinsic to modern science, is a commitment to (the) sublimation" of anality. Culture, for Brown, is thus the endless process of sublimating anality and our morbid fixation on death in a misguided fight of life against death.

In a reference to Nietzsche that also reveals the Rankian core of many of these ideas, Brown writes: "Civilized man asserts his individuality, and makes history. But the individuality he asserts is not life-affirming or life-enjoying, but the life-negating (ascetic) individuality of (Faustian) discontent and guilt. Civilized individuality, in Nietzsche's image, does not want itself, but wants children, wants heirs, wants an estate. Life remains a war against death -- civilized man, no more than archaic man, is not strong enough to die -- and death is overcome by accumulating time-defying monuments (286).

In a passage that follows, which is reminiscent of Marx, Brown says: "Death is overcome on condition that the real actuality of life pass into these immortal and dead things; money is the man; the immortality of an estate or a corporation resides in the dead things which alone endure. By the law of the slow return of the repressed, the last stage of history is, as Luther said, the dominion of death in life; the last stage of the polis is, as Mumford said, Nekropolis" (286).

The Oedipus complex figures in this vision as well since Brown believes the child's (and adult's) incestuous desires are an expression of the desire to mate with one's parent and become father to oneself and thus, once again, avoid the state of vulnerability in a world of death.

Human culture, in its current form is, thus, for Brown, excrement and "Excrement is the dead life of the body," which is also the castrated penis (297). History, he believes, is Faustian man's restless effort to sublimate anality into civilization, art, and life, and to re-create the regressive safety of the womb in the present and future, to prove we will not die. Ironically, fearing death, we end up with a morbid love of death and its representation, feces, which we surround ourselves with in disguised form.

Unable to die, we are unable to really live, since that means living in the present, in the body that is actively living and moving toward death at the same time. Brown explains all this in a set of arguments that culminate in a misguided vision in which not only anality but also genital sexuality is viewed as created by the fear of death. Thus he reinterprets the age-old mystic hope of resurrection with a call for humanity to recreate itself not in a genitally potent form, but in a polymorphously perverse form beyond the sexual organizations of anality, orality and genitality. He says this reborn humanity would experience the true pleasures of embodied life, which we lost the capacity to enjoy when we were young as a result of our fear of death.

The work of Erich Fromm provides a counterpoint and supplement to the ideas of both Norman O. Brown and traditional psychoanalysis. Like Norman O. Brown, Fromm was interested in Freud's theory of life and death instincts, and in Freud's belief that human destructiveness occurs when we externalize our death instinct and turn it on the world around us. Like Brown, Fromm believed it is the life instinct -- the urge not only to live but to live fully -- that is primary and at the essence of our nature, although he describes it more traditionally as the desire to be fully engaged with life through reason, love and work.

In Man For Himself, Fromm says that when the drive to live fully and fulfill our true nature is blocked, destructiveness results.

"If life's tendency to grow, to be lived, is thwarted, the energy thus blocked undergoes a process of change and is transformed into life-destructive energy," he says. "Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life" (Man For Himself p. 216).

From can thus say: "The choice between life and death is indeed the basic alternative of ethics. It is the alternative between productiveness and destructiveness, between potency and impotence, between virtue and vice" ( MFH, p. 214).

For psychoanalysis, our anxieties and desires over genitality and castration are transformed into anality, which can express our sense of impotence and fear of attack, and be a disguised way of gaining potency through control, pride, and aggression. For Fromm, our anxieties and desires over living fully are transformed into the urge to destroy.

Norman O. Brown correctly criticizes Fromm for abandoning Freud's theory of the bodily basis of neurosis and human psychology, even while Brown takes Freudian ideas about the body too far, culminating in the incorrect idea that the repression of the death instinct is what makes humanity's sexuality genital in character. But collectively, these theorists can help us see a vision in which human life is distorted by a limited set of fears, including the fear of death and the fear that incestuous desires and independence will lead to castration and death. Unable to become the full persons we  are biologically built to become, many people's lives are imbued with the death-in-life and analized deadness and destruction that pervades society.

This, to a significant degree, is what Them! is about. The movie, which came out before Life Against Death, offers a vision in which modern society is beginning to be governed by anality and by an obsessional reaction formation that is an effort to escape anality. As part of this change, this society takes life and turns it into something dead. It converts people and situations into case histories, numbers and files, which are dead abstractions that are substitutes for feces, purified of their physicality and messiness. It similarly tries to organize people by rigid procedures that create a controlled and orderly environment, which makes human interaction lifeless.

This obsessional society is under the sign of waste and death in another way because some of its procedures and abstractions are in the service of the ultimate machine of death and destructiveness -- the military and atomic weapons -- which can turn civilization into waste. As Brown again puts it, offering his own vision of modern society, it has come to a point in which "the malignant death instinct" -- namely our drive to recreate morbid forms of the natural death instinct we are in flight from -- can now bring about "the total obliteration of mankind" (LAD, 307). As Brown describes, it is a society that is in danger of reaching "the end of the road" which is "the dominion of death-in-life" (LAD, 307).

But in Them! the massive death machine produced by society's urge toward morbid death is kept hidden away. It is isolated and contained, and partly disguised by the abstractions and procedures that make it possible so as not to reveal the terrible truth about its nature.

In the movie, this anal obsessional society in the service of a machine of death is suddenly threatened by another society of anality -- the giant ants -- that is a product of human destructiveness. This second society is also based on lifelessness, with creatures that are dead mechanisms for extending their society's power, and with a social system that operates according to a kind of built-in bureaucracy full of lines of command, procedures, and rigid roles.

But, unlike the human society, the ant society retains much of its dirty and disgusting, and violent, character. Thus, the ants are large, black, long, segmented and rounded creatures that look much like feces. Their nests are connected to dirt and waste, since they are located in three places: in tunnels in the earth; inside a ship, and in the storm drainage system of the city of Los Angeles. All are disguised depictions of the interior spaces and plumbing (as we imagine it) of the bathroom and human body. In each instance, the ant nests are connected to the surface through anus-like openings.

The ants, as humanity's own anality and dark side, no longer disguised by reaction formations, are what Brown would refer to as an image of the return of the repressed, signifying modern civilizations ultimate creation of a machine of analized death. They are created by the greatest "bowel movement" in human history -- an atomic bomb that can make the world a zone of barren death -- from which the wind still howls in the desert nine years later. The ants are thus are our own urge to make things dead and turn things into waste, and our own destructiveness, which has been kept hidden away.

Modern societies thought they could contain this will to destruction. They built it into terrible weapons but controlled the use and detonation of those weapons, while keeping the test site off limits. But the atomic tests have set loose anal destructiveness on the world. Like feces, which is a breeding ground subject to putrefaction, the ants created by the blast are reproducing and bringing more of their kind into existence, drawing the world further under the sign of death. If left unchecked -- like the bomb -- they will turn the world into a wasteland.

Not surprisingly, the battle between this formic-anal society of ants and the formic-anal society of humanity relies heavily on acids and poisons, which are common symbols of urine and feces. The ants kill their victims by injecting them with formic acid, via a stinger in back. Humanity destroys the ants with cyanide and with fire, which is a common symbol of urine. It also uses phosphorus, a representation of feces that is shot from the "anuses" of bazookas, to create heat on the surface and drive the ants down into their nests. Humanity keeps these toxic death products, hidden and contained, as part of its arsenal of death.

Given this imagery, the depiction of the cleaning out of the nests is probably a disguised depiction of fantasies about using enemas to clean the bowels of fecal matter as embodiments of hateful, poisonous, desires. At the same time, it is an effort to clean the unconscious of poisonous thoughts and desires.

So these two societies are clearly expressions of disguised and not-so-disguised anality. But we can only appreciate the meaning of Them! when we see it as a disguised depiction of the fantasies and experiences of early childhood that relate to these issues. Here, the ants take their place as representations of the revenge-seeking, analized, mother and as an analized version of the family of childhood, produced by the nest as the analized reproductive system of the mother. In the same way, the landscape is a disguised depiction of various "locations" that are connected to anality and childhood, including the human body, the family and home, and the parts and functioning of the mind. 

Lets look at some of these disguised representations embodied in the landscape.

1. On the one hand, Them! is a disguised depiction of a fantasy a child and adult might have that depicts something like a semblance of normal space, with people, houses and physical objects. Here, the monsters depict the mother and other family members as anal-destructive persecutors or fecal monsters, based on the child's primitive fantasized perceptions. The maternal aspect of the monsters is obvious since the nest is a place where the queen ants give birth. At the same time, the male ants who mate with her are childlike fathers and the other ants are the children.

As part of this same domain of meaning, the younger human characters -- Agent Graham, Dr. Pat Medford, and Sgt. Peterson -- represent the child persecuted by these parental monsters. Dr. Medford depicts the good side of the father, who tries to save the child. 

In essence, then, we have a depiction of two sides of the family -- the ants, which are the side of anal malevolence in which the evil aspect of the mother dominates, and the human characters, which are the side of goodness and normality in which the good father dominates. It is no coincidence that both sides contain a representation of a small father -- male ants that are small compared to the queen as the powerful, engulfing, mother, and Dr. Harold Medford, as a father figure who is small in physical stature. But Dr. Medford has the courage, wisdom and benevolence to stand up to the evil mother.

2. At the same time, the ants represent feces and the nests represent the toilet and plumbing of the bathroom in which they dwell. Here, we are looking at childhood fantasies in which feces is expelled poison and evil that comes back out of the toilets to haunt and destroy the child. The feces are personified as the mother and other family members, and the mother is given a fecal appearance.

This, when they drive the ants further down into the first nest in the desert, with phosphorus, they are driving the feces further into the system of pipes that are part of the bathroom. In the second nest in which the queen flies into an open hatch cover of a ship at sea, we can see the similarity between the metallic ship with an opening, floating on water, and a porcelain toilet with an opening into what appears to the child to be mysterious depths that carry away human waste. 

In the third nest, the dry river bed is a representation of the flushed and empty toilet bowl while the storm drain tunnel that goes off it is the plumbing pipe that leads from the toilet deeper into the system of pipes, where the ants as feces are hiding.

In each instance, the nest is in an inhuman wasteland -- a desert, an ocean and a dry river bed -- which is much like what austere bathrooms are -- uncomfortable places with hard surfaces for the disposal of waste. 

3. The nests are also the interior of the body, primarily the body of the mother, from which the monsters, as fecal creatures and babies, emerge. The nest openings and the entrance to the anti-ant headquarters are the genitals of the mother, which lead into the interior. When human characters stand outside these openings, wondering what is inside, we see children shut out, not only of the parental bedroom, but also out of the mother's body. When they travel into the nests, they are (as we will see in the next section) traveling into an analized version of the reproductive system of the mother.

4. The landscape also represents the structures of the mind. The ants are internalized images of the parents (and self) full of monstrous anal sadistic desires directed against the self. They are rising up from the underground caverns of the unconscious and attempting to terrorize and victimize the ego and conscious mind, which is the realm of human society on the surface.

In this imagery of mind, the institutions of law enforcement, the military and science are the operations of protection, insight, control and problem-solving of the ego, which operate mostly behind the scenes and make the surface world of conscious personality possible. In response to the emergence of anal sadistic persecutors from the unconscious, these control mechanisms of the mind come into play to repress and destroy the danger, and keep it from destroying the conscious rational personality. Here, Dr. Medford represents the mind's capacity for insight. He is the psychoanalyst of the mind. When the military, law enforcement and the Drs. Medford go into the underground nests to kill the ants, they are mental functions of the ego going into the unconscious to overcome and eliminate these fears of persecution and sadistic desires in a symbolic depiction of something much like psychoanalysis.

But the ego and field of consciousness that is represented by human society in the movie is itself heavily anal in character, although it is governed by a reaction formation against anality. It is barren and lifeless because it is warding off these fears of anal destructiveness directed both against the self and others. It is governed by urges to abstract, organize, control, remove passion and emotion, and accumulate dead things.

When we combine these domains of meaning, we can say that the movie represents the persecuting mother and the malevolent side of other family members as fecal monsters that emerge from the dark anal womb of the mother, which is a toilet and the unconscious, to prey on the child and family and on the child's conscious personality. The way this fantasy mixes "public" space, the space of the interior of the body and bathroom plumbing, and the "space" of the mind defies common sense but not the mad and poetic sense of the thoughts and perceptions of the repressed unconscious.

Let's now examine some of the scenes of the movie in sequence and translate them back into this disguised depiction of a child's and adult's fantasy about anality. Readers are, of course, free to find humor in some of these interpretations, given the subject matter, although audiences generally experience these meanings as part of the serious and disturbing qualities of the movie.