Last month, I posted on twinship fantasies in The Prestige, in memory of Jules Glenn. The Road to Perdition, a film that came out a few years ago, also focuses on brothers.
When a film has a narrator, we are often seeing the world through the subjective eyes of that narrator. Even analysts tend to forget when they are in a theater that what they are told refers to psychic reality which contains admixtures of the “real world” and fantasy. The Road to Perdition has a narrator, Michael Sullivan Jr., and I think it fair to examine the film as coming from his psychic reality.
Michael tells us a story that covers several weeks in his childhood. It begins with a picture of a happy childhood and a stable family, except for the fact that his father, Michael Sullivan Sr., is a top gunman for the local crime boss in a small 1930’s midwestern town. Within that context, Michael appears to be part of a stable community. He lives with his father, mother and younger brother in a comfortable house. He rides his bike to school, has a snowball fight with his brother and reads a book about the Lone Ranger with a flashlight in his bed at night. His father works for John Rooney, who runs the town. Rooney treats Michael’s father like an adopted son and plays with Michael and his brother in a grandfatherly way, giving them special attention and sneaking away for a few minutes from a funeral to play dice with the boys in the bathroom.
As we watch the story develop with an analytic eye, we begin to notice certain themes that repeat in different contexts, like a warning alarm of unconscious meanings. If we were sitting with a patient, we might find that we keep hearing about brothers. Fairly soon, we see different sets of brothers in different types of relationships. There is Michael Jr. and his brother, Peter, Michael’s father and John Rooney’s real son, Connor, and Finn McGovern, who is burying his brother.
The film gives us two venues for understanding Michael Jr.’s psychic reality. He shows us the surface of his psychic life in his very ordinary relationships with his parents and brother. We see hints of playful aggression in an opening scene in which he and his brother have a snowball fight. After his brother hits him with a snow ball he falls to the snow as if shot to death, then throws a snowball from the ground hitting his brother squarely. It is normal, acceptable playful aggression between brothers. Any murderous impulses are well disguised and contained in the play.
These impulses are depicted in the adult world, the world of Michael Sullivan Sr., a world in which violent fantasies are acted out. It is not unusual for a film to present a single dynamic in two forms, side by side: as raw fantasy, suffused with open expression of drives and well beyond the experience of most people; and, a more subtle depiction of the same dynamic much closer to our ordinary experience. In this case, the raw fantasy is presented in the murderous relationship between Michael Sullivan Sr. and Connor Rooney. The subtler expression is seen in Michael Jr.’s relationship with his younger brother, Peter. By implication, the more violent characters act out in adult form the hidden fantasies of the child.
Finn McGovern’s brother has been murdered by John Rooney’s men because of claimed theft from the gang. Finn is angry. With enough alcohol in him at the funeral, he begins by praising John Rooney, his and everyone’s benefactor, but then begins to claim that his brother’s killing was unjust. Before he crosses the line, Michael’s father pulls him from Rooney’s house, where the funeral takes place. In this brotherly relationship, any aggression between brothers is displaced. Finn did not murder his brother, in fact he defends him, but the brother has been murdered.
The violent fantasy will be played out directly in the relationship between the third set of brothers, Michael Sr. and Connor Rooney. It is apparent that Connor resents his father’s relationship with Michael Sullivan. Connor is ugly, brooding and impulsive, childless and loveless. Michael has a family, the respect of the (criminal) community and the valued trust of John Rooney, who knows that Michael will know how to look out for his interests without being told. The contrast is striking when Rooney humiliates Connor at a business meeting over his uncontrolled violence, then walks off with his arm on Michael Sr.’s shoulder.
The violence begins in a displaced fashion, with the murder of Finn McGovern. Rooney sends Michael Sr. and Connor to talk to Finn, to make sure that he does not cause any trouble, but Connor kills Finn, forcing Michael to kill Finn’s two gunmen. As they come out of the warehouse in which they have killed Finn and his men, they find Michael Jr. there, a witness to the murder.
It is important from our analytic standpoint that Michael Jr., our narrator, our “patient”, is innocent of the violence he witnesses. He has been motivated by curiosity about his father. He is reading a book about the gun toting Lone Ranger, and has accidentally seen his father pulling a pistol from under his jacket as he prepares for dinner. His younger brother has asked him about their father’s work, verbalizing Michael’s own curiosity. His crime is curiosity and interest in his father. He sneaks into the box beneath the rear seat of his father’s car and becomes a witness to murder. Michael Sr. reassures Connor that his son will not talk about what he has seen, and for the moment Connor appears to accept it.
But Connor has decided to kill the boy and the father. On the surface, he is protecting himself from a witness to his crime, but you don’t have to be a psychoanalyst to sense that he is seeking fratricidal revenge against the adopted brother whom his father appears to favor. Connor botches his revenge. Michael, clearly upset at what he has witnessed, gets into a fight in school, his one act of overt violence, and is kept after school. He is just coming home as Connor is leaving his house after killing Michael’s mother and brother. It becomes apparent that he thought he’d killed Michael. Likewise, Connor had planned to arrange to have Michael Sr. killed by another man who owed him money, but Michael Sr. beats him to the gun and shoots him and his body guard.
If we line up the pairs of brothers, half of them are already murdered, the McGovern brothers and Peter Sullivan. Our “patient” narrator is overtly innocent, but his brother has been killed. Now, of course, Michael Sr. wants Connor dead for the murder of his wife and younger son. He refuses an offer by Rooney’s accountant to accept money to leave for Ireland with his remaining son, shooting the accountant as a message. He takes Michael Jr. to Chicago where he approaches Capone’s chief lieutenant, Frank Nitti, who tells him he has to protect Connor. In fact, Nitti arranges for a hired assassin to kill Sullivan at the behest of a shaken and very ambivalent Rooney.
Michael Sullivan and his older son set out on the road like the Lone Ranger and Tonto in an unlikely plot that has them robbing banks to steal Capone’s money while Nitti’s hired assassin chases them. This provides us with an overdetermined additional pair of brothers, not by birth or family, but by identity. For whatever reason, it is a common understanding in our culture to think of two men who share some common identity as metaphorical brothers. In this case I refer to the two killers facing off against one another, Michael Sullivan and the assassin, Maguire. In their first encounter, they face each other across tables in a country diner, holding a seemingly trivial conversation which somehow gives Sullivan warning. This is presented to us as pro against pro, gunslinger against gunslinger, the classic confrontation between two men with much in common.
As is common in such cinematic confrontations, they are different in their humanity. Sullivan is a family man who conveys a sense of decency and human concern that frankly seems incompatible with his profession. In fact, though I have known combat veterans who presented with this type of pattern, and I have treated men with psychopathic tendencies who could be caring as well, the Michael Sullivan we see in this film can more reasonably understood as our narrator’s idealized, wished for image of his father. Maguire, on the other hand, is more of a competent, outwardly refined version of Connor, with his schizoid, psychopathic character and complete absence of morality as we know it.
As such, he is a perfect vehicle, as is the psychopathic Connor, to express the film’s theme of sibling aggression without arousing our guilt. The motives that arouse guilt are displaced onto the ugly characters, the ones with whom we can easily dis-identify. The characters, the brothers in this case, with whom we are made to identify, are either completely innocent of sibling murder or are presented as justified in killing a vile brother.
Outwardly, Michael Jr. appears to have a loving relationship with his brother. In the opening scene, we see them in a snowball fight which is clearly in good fun and in which Michael allows himself to be killed in mock play. We do not see them together a great deal before Peter is killed, but we do see them in their room together at night, with Peter asking Michael questions about their father. Peter also startles Michael by repeating something he had heard Connor say at the funeral, “It’s all so fucking funny.” With a little stretch, we could say that he has been subtly identified with Connor in the brotherly relationship.
But Michael Jr., our narrator, does give us hints about his inner world as patients often do through a dream, or in this case a hint of a dream. After Peter and his mother have been killed, Michael has one brief man to man talk with his father while they have a little respite in their journey, staying at a farmhouse with a childless couple while Michael Sr. recovers from a gunshot wound. Here, the younger Michael wakes up from a nightmare. We never learn what it is, but if we use the surrounding material as associations, we might guess at its latent content. In the scene preceding, the farmer’s wife has been telling Michael Sr. how much his son admires him.
After telling his father that he has had a bad dream and turning down an offer to talk about it, Michael sits to talk to his father who is going over accounting books of Capone’s gang, saying, “Math, huh,” and telling his father that he hates math. His father tells him, “Me, too.” After a short exchange about what Michael does like in school—bible stories—Michael says that Peter was good in math.
Father: “Was he?”
Michael:“Did you like Peter more than me?”
Father: “No. No, Michael. I loved you both the same.”
Michael: “But you were different with me.”
Father: “Was I? … Well, maybe it was because Peter was just such a sweet boy, you know? And you were more like me and I didn’t want you to be. I didn’t mean to be different.”
Michael says, “Good night,” but stops to hug his father around the neck before returning to bed.
Michael’s bad dream will always be hidden to us, but the surrounding associations concern his admiration of his father and his fear that his father favored his younger, sweeter, smarter younger brother. It is just a suggestion of sibling rivalry, just a hint of jealousy, but the film gives it greater meaning through its juxtaposition with the more open expressions of hostility in the other brotherly relationships between Sullivan and Connor and between Sullivan and the assassin, Maguire. In fact, in a further association, after Michael goes back to bed, his father comes across Finn McGovern’s accounts, where he will find that Connor has been stealing from his father. It is in the juxtaposition of two such parallel relationships that a film often represents a realistic family dynamic and the fantasy that underlies it.
In this fantasy, the rivalry is for Father’s affection. Rooney’s wife, we are told, has died some years ago. Michael Sullivan’s wife is present in the film, but is killed early. Most of the boy’s interest is around his father, and it is he whom he asks about loving his brother more. This is a story about brothers and fathers in which the fathers are somewhat idealized action heroes in the mold of boys’ fantasies. Even John Rooney is presented sympathetically, played by a charming Paul Newman. We never see him as purely cynical or as relishing the killing of one of his “sons.” He refuses Nitti’s suggestion that the younger Sullivan be killed, although we get the impression that Nitti gives the order anyway. He is always agonizing over having to choose one son over the other, and he begs Sullivan to leave, allowing him to spare them both. When Michael Sullivan shoots down his entire gang on a rainy night and faces him with his machine gun, Rooney tells him, “I’m glad it was you.”
Similarly, Michael Sullivan is portrayed as a decent, caring father and man, belying the suggestions in the voiceover narration that he is considered a hardened criminal. This is the boy’s view of his father.
In the end, Michael Jr. is able to foreswear violence while reaping the benefits of it. Having wiped out Connor and Rooney’s entire establishment, Michael Sr. takes his son to his wife’s sister’s house in Perdition. The scene looks idyllic, with a beautiful house overlooking the waterfront and a friendly dog. However, the assassin is waiting for them there. He shoots Sullivan in the back while he watches his son play with the dog through the window. As he prepares to photograph his victim, his personal fetish, the boy comes up behind him with a pistol. Maguire approaches the boy to take the gun from him, sensing that he won’t shoot, only to be shot from behind by the father. With Michael Sr.’s closing words, he expresses his great happiness that his son could not fire the gun. The father will presumably go to perdition (everlasting damnation), but the son is spared both everlasting damnation and the ravages of guilt. Afterward, we hear the boy say that he realized his father’s wish was for him not to be a killer. He says he never carried a gun again. (It’s not clear what role he played in WWII.) But in the film’s underlying fantasy, he is the victor after all the bloodshed. Of all the film’s brothers, Michael is now the only survivor.
He takes the dog and the car back to the farmhouse where the childless couple are more than glad to take him in. With no blood on his hands, he has achieved the goal of the rivalrous sibling. He has become an only child. What is more, in his closing soliloquy he appears to wipe out his memory of his mother and brother, establishing himself in his new life as the only boy of this happy couple with only memories of having had his father to himself.
“People always thought I grew up on a farm, and I guess, in a way, I did; but I lived a lifetime before that in those six weeks on the road in the winter of 1931.”
Originally published in the PANY Bulletin, Spring, 2004