...and so Pinocchio is left without
the guidance of conscience, and the cricket is trying to
figure out how to get off Pleasure Island,
but he goes through the gates and he sees
what's actually going on.
And what's going on is that
the Coachman has this like slave boat
down in the bowels of the island.
And he's got all these black-suited minions
with the glowing eyes working for him
and they're rounding up what looked like donkeys,
and so they're beasts of burden, right.
And so there's an idea here that if you produce simple...
if you pursue impulsive pleasure to the detriment of
the development of your character,
you're going to end up a beast of burden,
you're going to end up a slave to a tyrant.
And that's exactly right, and so anyways.
But the cricket doesn't. You can see one of
those black-suited horrors here.
Hauling donkeys out of this crate, and one of
them has a hat on. And they look very sad.
And they're in different crates, and one
of them says "Sold to the salt mines" and one says "Sold to the circus",
and so they're shipped off to be slaves,
roughly speaking, and they look very sad.
And then, one of them gets hauled out of a crate,
and he still got... he has a hat on and a sweater
and he can still talk, he's a boy, it turns out,
that's been half-transformed into a jackass,
a braying jackass, prior to being enslaved
and so that's that's another thing
that's quite interesting about the story
you know, it also makes the case that
if you replace your voice with stupid braying
that the probability that you're going to become
enslaved by a tyrant is extraordinarily high, and
I always can't help but think about ideologues in that manner.
you know, Solzhenitsyn wrote about the
radical left ideologues that got thrown
in the Gulag Archipelago, you know so they were
party stalwarts, this happened to a lot of people,
true believers, who are vacuumed up by this telling,
this machine, and thrown into the gulag, anyways
and he said that those people
suffered in some ways more than everyone else.
Because... What did he say?
They were bit by the beloved ham that fed them, and so
the first while when they were in the camps,
Solzhenitsyn really didn't know what to do with people like that.
Because on the one hand... Well, they were in the camps and wasn't that awful.
And they've been torn away from their families.
And you know, stripped of all their identity and their status
and so that's pretty rough, but on the other hand,
they were writing letters protesting their innocence
and assuming that everyone else in the camp was guilty,
but they were innocent and they were still
strident believers in the communist process and so,
you know, it was a conundrum. Here they are being
terribly punished, but by the same token they're
also the perpetrators of their own demise.
So, how do you deal with them and
they used to play comrades he said they
used to play comrades with people like
that and invite them into an ideological
discussion about the camp situation and
the situation in the country as a whole
and let them rattle out their
ideological justifications for
everything that had happened. In trying
to make them parody themselves, roughly speaking,
it was a rough game and
Solzhenitsyn also concluded that....
There is no helping someone like that
when they were still in sconce tin, inside that braying ideology
you could predict everything they were going to say.
It's like someone had a crank he could just crank it,
and out would come the proper ideological formulas,
but then he realized that as soon as they,
let's call it "repented of that", and started to realize
their own role in it or the error of the system,
then he would start communicating with them, you know
as if they were people who you could communicate with,
yeah, so that was very interesting, as far as I'm concerned.
Anyways, this kid is still a little bit human, he starts to
cry for his mom and the Coachman basically throws him back into the crate
and says that he's not ready yet,
and the reason for that is that he could still
he still had the power of independent speech.
You remember right at the beginning of the movie,
when the mouth was painted on Pinocchio,
we saw that mask that was really glaring at the process
and I said that character recurs continually throughout
the movie, and there's a good example of that because
the Coachman is the enemy of anything that has its own voice.
So, he's the anti-Geppetto.
That's a good way of thinking about it,
he's the tyrannical aspect of the culture,
but as insofar as one of these mostly donkeys,
mostly jackasses can still talk
then they're not completely fit for slavery.
And you remember this movie was also
being made at about the same time that,
um.
the Nazi transformation of Germany was taking place,
and so, all these terrible underground things,
you know, this process whereby people were being
reduced to ideological slaves, say
and in this terrible process that was all playing out
in Europe in a very big way
and it's not like people weren't aware of that,
you know, it was in the air... So,
Anyways, the donkeys the jackasses that can still talk
or crying and complaining and repenting,
and the Coachman turns into a full tyrant.
Again and cracks a whip, if I remember correctly, it says
"You've had your fun and now you're going to pay for it."
So, the cricket gets word of all this.
He gets wind of it, he starts to understand
what's happened is that all these bad kids
were enticed out onto this island so that they could be
enslaved and he's really taken aback by that,
to say the least, but he realizes what's going on.
So he runs back to find Pinocchio, and then
the scene switches back to the 8 Ball Bar,
where, um, Lampwick is drinking beer and complaining about
what the conscience said you know.
Because he's kind of guilty and ashamed,
but he won't admit it.
Because he doesn't admit anything.
He knows everything, he's not going to admit anything
about himself that isn't perfect.
He's a real totalitarian in training, and he drinks this
beer and he's laughing about the conscience and
putting him down and then he says.
Well, what does he say exactly?
What does he think? "I am a jackass" or
something like that, maybe that's not the words exactly
and then he grows these ears,
and Pinocchio sees that, and immediately takes a look
at the beer and stops drinking it, and then Lampwick
transforms one more time, and his face
turns into the face of a donkey, and he's
laughing still and then his hands.
Oh yes, he laughs and he starts to bray
like a jackass and he's horrified by that
and then Pinocchio laughs
and the bray comes out as well.
And so now they're absolutely horrified and
Lampwick actually figures out what's going on.
He figures out that he's being tricked, and that
he's transforming and he's completely horrified by it.
He becomes conscious of what's happening to him
and there's one particularly, I would say, dramatic scene
where his hands have transformed in hooves
and he's kicking and, um, leaping around the room
in panic and he comes up to a mirror and
sees himself as a jackass and then he
turns around and breaks the mirror,
so you know, he's self-conscious for a moment
then he destroys his capacity for self-consciousness
then he transforms entirely into a jackass.
He's farther down the road than Pinocchio.
And he comes crawling to Pinocchio to save him
and asks that the conscience comes back
so that he can get out of this, but of course
it's a bit too late and so then
Pinocchio grows jackass ears, and he's
absolutely terrified by it as well.
He knows what's coming, and the cricket
comes back and guides him off Pleasure Island.
And so, then they end up on a cliff.
Because this is an island after all.
They have to jump into the unknown, right. Out of this
impulsive adolescent hedonic playground.
Into the unknown, and that's how they escape.