Equus, 1977 review
Equus was based on the 1973 play of the same name by Peter Shaffer. Shaffer had read an article in his local English newspaper about a young man who had blinded six horses, the play was Shaffer’s imagining of the events that could have led up to that. That in-itself seems to really discredit the story, none-the-less it is a well crafted and sublime work of art, whatever the story of the young man might actually have been.
The story opens with psychiatrist Dr. Dysart flustered, irritable, and reluctantly he agrees to take on Alan as a patient. Their first meeting sets down the general themes of the film. Dysart asks Alan his name, address and so on and Alan sings back advertising jingles. i.e. Dysart is a cog of unreality and Dysart knows this, feeling his work strips his patients of passion making them into good worker-bots, etc. Alan is reluctant to talk about what happened but eventually Dysart gets the whole story.
Dysart begins to interview those who knew Alan. Alan’s family is very cold on the surface, though his father makes the telling remark: “this was all about religion.” Ultimately Equus is a symbol of the unifying primordial reality behind things; it seems initially that Alan’s father is referring to his wife’s religious obsession, but there’s more to it than that. Alan’s mother makes some interesting remarks (is horseback riding slavery?), she says: “When ancients first saw men on horseback, they thought it was one creature, a god”, and a little later Mother says: “Equus, it’s the only word with two 'u’s” together in one.” To which the husband replies when she leaves the room: “My wife has some romantic ideas.” Indeed. This is the overriding of objectivist informed consent doctrine. The movie is about the infinite horror and awe of being, but there is also an issue of so-called child abuse in the film. When young Alan has his first experience with a horse, he is picked up on a beach by a dashing young man and taken on a wild full gallop charge through the waves. When Alan’s parents show up, they accuse the man of hurting their son (Alan scratched himself), Alan says in vain: “I’m not hurt”, but no one hears, the dashing man on the wild horse gallops off, Alan returns to his quiet and pathetic life.
Everyone loves horses and some interesting dialogue pricked my ears: “A horse is more naked than other animals, more than a dog or a cat.” How true; I’ve said the same before myself. And later, Alan’s co-worker/girlfriend asks him: “Do you think horses are sexy? Girls do.” Has there ever been a more sensual and physical creature than the horse? Its powerful muscles, flowy mane, etc. But hardly anyone notices the huge obscenity that is horses.
Dysart eventually discovers that Alan is a sort of feral child: although he lives in society, goes to school etc, Alan has created his own religion, he can access the primordial; Alan maintains his idiosyncratic ideas: his authentic constructions that most of us give up and overwrite with sensible adult-world trivia.
Although Alan lands a job at a stable, he never is known to ride a horse. Interesting. But he does take the horses out secretly where he rides them, himself naked, until they are in heavy sweat, this is Alan’s communion with the primordial.
In one of Dysart’s ruminations towards the end of the film he makes the sublime remark while pondering the mechanism of his life by contrast with Alan’s passion: “Equus: first account for me!” Meaning I think: ‘it is not how that is so amazing about the World – merely that.’
Ultimately the blinding of the horses is a very subtle and complex and horrific scene, it has overtone’s of Jesus’s suffering, the meaning of the “chinkle-chankle”, and a lot more.
The genealogy of Equus scene,
The clang-associating of names helps us see the arbitrariness of our own lineage and existence. It is in this scene that we are also introduced to the “chinkle-chankle” which Dysart finally uncovers as suffering, bondage, and also a kind of vocal organ or magic wand. The stable is the temple of the “chinkle-chankle” which makes sense because a stable is the symbol of second-life, the life of one-dimensional beings like Dysart and stabled horses.
The blinding scene,
From the sexual-abuse metaphor, take Alan rolling in the hay with Jill in the barn: the horses and Equus become aware of this, it is the inverted or symbolic analogue of bestiality or NAMBLA when the human community and God become aware of the abuse: as Paul said: “all sin is in the Torah”, Romans 7: 7-23: therefore we want to blind the adult world who condemns the man-boy love we had naïvely as children: when the horses know Alan has been with Jill, it is as a boy caught loving a sheep, etc. Alan has such devotion for his man-lover that rather than seeing himself and his lover as an abomination, he rejects society’s judgment: to do this he blinds the horses: stop judging me and degrading me with your gaze; the irony is that the horses probably don’t judge him for it. Alan seems to be faced with rejecting his humanity, because he does this, he must become objectively insane to the rational world of psychiatrists, etc. Dysart’s pessimism about The System is pre-hidden to be found in the iconology of Alan’s idiosyncratic worship as the “man bit” ritual: a recursion of the central “chinkle-chankle” theme: from bondage emanates the genealogy of Equus: the passion of Christ (and his innocence) is produced from His suffering and Crucifixion: bound and nailed to the cross.
Alan is an Oedipus for horse lovers: blinded for his tragic ignorance of having sex with his mother. But isn’t this the subtle message of the movie: sympathy for the suffering of the aggressor, Stockholm syndrome: Are we seriously to believe that society: who is always the other and the aggressor against our will, is the victim?! Society the victim?! That is the meaning of our artist-contrived pathos for the stable of blinded horses. Has there ever been a more victimless crime than any crime of which society is alleged to be the victim? – Society is the Oedipal triangulation of fascism brothers and sisters – I tell you: gouge-out the all-seeing-eye of social-fascism!
Alan is impotent (castrated) with Jill because her touch, etc remind him of his childhood abuser, poisoning sexuality for him. But Alan will not betray his abuser’s memory: ‘she loves him specifically because he shows her that by hitting her’: Jill says: “The harder you do it, the more he likes it”. Alan, like Peter Pan, is doomed never to enter the adult world until he accepts the System’s value that sexuality and life are abusive and obscene: symbolized as the child-pornography film Alan and Jill see: an ‘adult’ movie. Because Alan is acted by Peter Firth who is objectively human, the audience is led into a deceptive heteronormative metaphor where the thing that something stands for is switched with the thing itself: the audience are fooled into believing that Alan is a human and not a horse.
This is the sex scene,
Dysart asks Alan, “What was the first time you saw a horse?” i.e., Tell me about your first sexual experience? Alan reports, he was making sandcastles on the beach when a very handsome man approaches on a sublime horse, the man is played by actor John Wyman; the man takes Alan on a passionate ride up the beach and through the waves; Alan is fully alive: he is one. Alan’s parents are angry when they learn of this, they think the man has hurt their son; Alan replies, unheard, “I’m not hurt”. Shaffer’s artistic slight of hand is to equate Christ’s Passion: expressed as the genealogy of Equus ritual or the secret nightly “man bit” rituals, with the passion of man-boy love. Was Equus spoken from the “chinkle-chankle” of Flequus, or from the mad beach ride? Is sex really violence? Is sex death? The play obviously speaks to the issue of man-boy love as noted clearly by this theater critic of an Equus performance at Redtwist Theatre in Chicago in 2010,
“Today the play could be dangerously read as a condemnation of the psychological treatment of modern-day “passions” problematic to today’s societal norms—pedophilia, bestiality and other types of psychiatric disorders—“obsessions” whose psychiatric suppression is paramount to the end of the “individual.””
A more likely story behind the blinding of the six horses goes like this: ‘Alan’ is hired as a stable hand. Like other ancient industries, stable work maintains the feudal stratification that also existed in, for example, large kitchens before the reforms of Escoffier. Disrespected by the horse owners, the hands above him, and the stable manager, Alan is driven to indignation; he acts out, symbolically, against the horse owners and the stable manager for stinting his wages, treating him poorly, etc by blinding their horses.