Deterritorialize your childhood. We are descending into the abyssal depths of Atlantica to map the flows of power, voice, and commodity in Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989).

In this episode of We Only Make Chaos, we bypass the molar structures of "happily ever after" to examine Ursula’s cavern as a Body-without-Organs—a zone of pure production where the State’s territorialized desires are liquefied. We explore why King Triton’s trident is the ultimate phallic signifier of Sovereign Law and how Ariel’s voice is transformed into a commodity fetish within a patriarchal capitalist assemblage.

Ursula is not the villain; she is the only merchant honest enough to show us the coercive nature of the social contract. Join us as we explore the Creative Nothing and the revaluation of values beneath the waves.

Key Concepts Discussed:

• Schizoanalysis and Desiring-Production (Deleuze & Guattari)
• The Unique and Its Property (Max Stirner)
• The Grain of the Voice (Roland Barthes)
• Sovereign Power and the State of Exception (Giorgio Agamben)

#TheLittleMermaid #Schizoanalysis #DeleuzeAndGuattari #MaxStirner #Ursula #FilmTheory #PhilosophyPodcast #DisneyAnalysis #CulturalCritique #PostStructuralism #PoliticalPhilosophy #Ariel #TheLittleMermaid1989

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This is a special interruption featuring the short story Blue Violence—a chronicle of a relationship that breathes in the friction of the edges, where reality breaks and the fun finally starts.

The story follows a woman who hunts for compositions like a predator stalks a kill and the man who acts as her ballast. It is a narrative told in violent slashes of pigment, the stinging weight of shared hallucinations, and the specific kind of damage that only comes in shades of azure.

In this episode, we explore:

• The Schizz and the Ballast: How love functions not as a contract, but as a collective assemblage of desire between a nomadic subject and her anchor.
• Production over Sublimation: An analysis of the creative act as a desiring-machine—illustrated by the hunt for a specific, sparkling blue and the crisis of its absence.
• The Tactile Real: Why the slug to the shoulder and the slap in the dream are essential intensive affects that prove the reality of the body against a grey, domestic backdrop.
• The Playground Analysis: Observing the different poles of desire in children—from the paranoid-fascist ego of the screaming boy to the schizoid grace of the girl hanging upside down to decode the air.
• Molecular Requirements: The movement from the molar exhaustion of the creative struggle to the molecular need for salt, fries, and the blue bruise of a fresh encounter.
• In Blue Violence, we find that identity is a clumsy production, and truth is found only in the sting of the encounter.

This episode serves as a thematic bridge between our deep dives into cinematic structures and our upcoming explorations of nomadic thought. If you are new to the show, this story provides the aesthetic baseline for the philosophical concepts we deploy each week.

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In this episode, we deconstruct Sam Mendes’ 2002 film Road to Perdition. While it presents itself as a classic road movie, we argue that the road never actually leads anywhere. Instead, it functions as a treadmill that redraws the same Oedipal triangle—father, son, and the Great Father—across the Midwest.

We move beyond the surface-level gangster tropes to examine how the journey of Michael Sullivan and his son is not an escape from patriarchal violence, but a re-inscription of it.

Key Theoretical Maps:

• The Despotic Assemblage: How John Rooney fuses the Church, the mob, and the family into a single machine of obedience and guilt.
• Pseudo-Deterritorialization: Why the road to Perdition is a striated space of bank ledgers and logistical networks rather than a true Line of Flight.
• The Fascism of the Heart: Analyzing the child’s libidinal investment in the father’s violence—the process where the boy learns to desire the Father more deeply by attempting to flee him.
• Maguire as the Capture Apparatus: The hitman-photographer as the bridge between the gun and the camera, turning living flows into static death-images.
• The Residual Oedipus: Why the film’s ending is a total victory for the Father, as Sullivan’s violence is purified and internalized by the son as a moral core.

Is there an outside to the paternal law? Or is every highway simply a hallway in the Father’s house? Join us as we trace the circular geography of Michael Sullivan’s final drive.

References & Further Reading:

• Deleuze & Guattari – Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
• Deleuze & Guattari – A Thousand Plateaus
• Michel Foucault – The History of Sexuality, Volume 1
• Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams
• Wilhelm Reich – Character Analysis

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If you are interested in the intersection of schizoanalysis and cinema, subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications. We do not offer solutions; we only map the traps.

#RoadToPerdition #Deleuze #Guattari #Schizoanalysis #FilmPhilosophy #Oedipus #MicroFascism #CinemaStudies #TomHanks #SamMendes

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