A Psychoanalytic Look at Organizm (2008)

Originally a made-for-TV movie that got new life on DVD and Netflix, Organizm is a beautifully perverse film that flew under the radar for that reason. The lot of made-for-TV movies is to fly under radars, because so much has to be flown under the radars of the producers and censors. With Organizm, writer-director Richard Jeffries gets away with a lot. This is a film in which the ‘obligatory sex scene’ is the protagonist coating a newly-widowed woman’s naked body with his own blood, and in which the climax is basically a death-by-fisting. If we’re to see all this film has to offer, however, we shall have to go through it carefully, and, I think, with the aid of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is not always the ideal tool for approaching a film, but this film in particular is structured around it and the perverse treasures it has to offer are best found using it.

The plot is deceptively simple, even hackneyed. A high school teacher warns military officials that they must not disturb the old base they’re destroying, because his mother told him so the night she killed herself. The army takes him seriously and investigates, causing a cancerous mass to explode from a body into a sea of tendrils that spread over the base and begin growing at an exponential rate. The teacher and a female soldier discover the developer of the tentacular organism is his father, a Russian scientist who defected to the USA. The shared genes gives the teacher an in-built vaccine for the organism. He realizes he must plunge his blood into the organism’s source, his father’s body, in order to kill it. He does so and it dies.

What is interesting in this plot is its gradual progression deeper into the subconscious. We begin with the pure, conscious facticity of the present: tendrils swarming military artillery and invading a bowling alley, where a soldier tries to flee and fails. This is the diseased, apocalyptic present, a present in extreme conflict. We then rewind thirty-three years to a boy being terrified by his disturbed mother. She warns him to remember “sublevel 3, vault 12” at all costs, carves it into his hands, and sashays out to kill his father. If the present is the consciousness in conflict, then the flashback we’re given is to the source of the trauma that would eventually erupt into the diseased state we see thirty-three years later. We’re given the two extremities of consciousness that matter; in between is the period of festering in the subconscious, metaphorically ‘sublevel 3, vault 12’.

We then join the high school teacher (Jonathan Schaech) on his way to the army base. We realize that he is the little boy we saw. Therefore, this film is to be his psychodrama. He has heard that the base is to be destroyed, so he comes to warn the Colonel that there is something that should not be disturbed. When he busts in, he’s captured, but by the intelligent records experts who decide his story is worth hearing, despite the Colonel’s objections. They are going to plumb the depths of sublevel 3, vault 12. It is this exploratory action that releases the disease into consciousness, that causes the eruption of the tendrils into the light of day. What they discover in the vault is a man’s pickled body with a horrendous, spreading growth on his chest. From this body the tendrils spring.

What’s interesting thus far is the teacher’s relationships to father figures. We know that when he was a child he witnessed the death of the man he thought was his father. When he arrives in the town where the army base is located, he tries to get the attention of an old man, who simply walks away without answering. The Colonel in charge of the army base is difficult to get in touch with, and, when he is reached, doesn’t want to deal with the teacher. He tries to reach out to older men instinctively, and finds it impossible to have a meaningful connection with them.

The teacher’s difficulty with father figures is important to note because of the next major plot point. As the teacher escapes with a female solder who just lost her husband to the rampaging tentacles, they speak to the old man who shunned the teacher earlier. They discover through him that the body at the source of the tendrils is a Russian scientist and that this scientist is the teacher’s real father. The source of the eruption of the diseased consciousness and the reason for the childhood trauma, then, is the teacher’s biological father. The repressed horror at the heart of his subconscious is the father.

The teacher and soldier run from the growing tendrils to a school where they watch an old film reel. The reel shows the Russian scientist discussing his work, explaining that his quest for the ultimate biological weapon ended in his own body. His own tissues were growing at a phenomenal rate, consuming any energy at all, from fire to nuclear radiation. At the same time, the teacher is infected and successfully fights off the tendrils, turning his blood into an instant tendril-cide. However, we’ve just learned that the tendrils are, literally, his father’s body, meaning that tendril-cide is a sort of patricide.

Now the teacher and soldier realize they have to go to the body at the source of the tendrils and kill it. To protect the soldier, the teacher coats her in his own blood, but the imagery is that of a newborn covered in birth-blood. They then fly a helicopter to the base, landing in a disturbing terrain of all tendrils. They are plunging into the subconscious, to the repressed monstrosity of an absent father. In a stroke of excellent set design, the tendrils swarm the closer they come to the center.

As they do this, the threat of bombing looms. The military plans to drop nuclear bombs in hopes of destroying the tendrils. Curiously, the Russian scientist described the US military as his new father, enriching the interplay between patricide and infanticide already at play in the film.

Finally the teacher confronts the body of his biological father, simultaneously alive and dead, present and absent. In the center of his father’s chest is what is unmistakably a throbbing, pulsing anus out of which all the tendrils grow. As perverse as any Greek myth, the teacher thrusts and knife into his father’s heart-anus and digs, metaphorically fucking his father. He then slices at his hands, drawing blood, and thrusts both hands into the orifice, in an act that can be best described as fisting his father to death.

Meanwhile, the soldier is sidetracked by the discovery of his husband in some sort of amniotic sack. Clawing with her hands, she digs the sack open, giving birth to her own husband in a way, but washing the protective blood off her own body in the process, leaving herself vulnerable. Fortunately, the father dies from the fisting just in time. The trauma has been overcome in facing the repressed, subconscious absent father that the disturbed mother so desperately tried to repress in sublevel 3, vault 12.

Not everything in Organizm makes sense to me. I don’t even mean the chronology, which would make the obviously late-thirties teacher in his fifties. I mean it’s not really clear how the tendrils form an amniotic sack and what the interplay of birthing imagery in this film really amounts to. I don’t think the psychoanalytic structure of the film means it’s a film filled with great depth: what good is reiterating Freud, really? This is a film made more with the subconscious than with the conscious. Its beauty is in how perverse it all is in representing diseased consciousness. From the reproductive imagery of the tendrils, through the birthing imagery, and the anal father-son fisting imagery of the conclusion and the anti-oedipal implications of such, the film is just perverse in the story its images tell, whatever the cheesy plot may be.