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Popular Culture Review
under the word “spirit.” It is the Spirit that drives Van Alden, and the more it
drives him, the more he feels unfulfilled.
Van Alden’s need to feel the power of the Lord grows increasingly frantic
and violent throughout Boardwalk. One of the reasons for this frenetic faith is
that Van Alden’s character feels trapped in — and powerless to destroy — a city
which he deems a Sodom and Gomorrah. New Jersey is so sinful, in fact, that
Van Alden fully believes God Himself has died off within the area. This
sentiment materializes in episode eleven when Van Alden speaks with Deacon
Cuffy and adamantly asks, “You think Christ hears you in this forsaken place?”
{Boardwalk). The Holy Ghost is a lacking, lost object to Van Alden, much in the
way that Nucky’s baby boy and Angela’s lover are lost objects. As a result, he is
willing to do anything to bring God back to the area and to feel God’s presence
again. It is why he murders the Jewish Agent Sebso, and perhaps why he drinks
and has sex with Lucy — to either replace God with another “spirit” he can feel,
or to become the lost God in Atlantic City. In any case. Van Alden feels a great
lack — like Nucky’s lack, like Angela’s lack — of God, and his character has a
void that must be filled. Though Van Alden is the most religious and puritanical
character of Boardwalk Empire, God is his lost object, and it is the Holy ’’Spirit”
that haunts him. It is most important to note that once more we see a flash of the
word “spirit” — this time in terms of God, rather than liquor, the dead, or ghosts
— and the workings of the unconscious web of Boardwalk Empire. Lost objects
are connected beneath the surface of the film yet again.
Once the web of lost objects has been recognized — that is, the link
between alcohol, child, man, woman, and God is acknowledged — the question
then becomes the purpose of their being linked in the first place. The answer lies
with Lacan’s theories of repression. In The Ego in Freuds Theory and in the
Technique o f Psychoanalysis, Lacan writes about the modem social occurrence
where the disbelief in God actually causes a rise in regulation and prohibition. In
other words, the more one outwardly believes something, the more one inwardly
acts as though the opposite (repressed) is tme {The Ego 128). If one believes in
God, he acts as though God does not exist, that everything is permitted. If one
does not believe in God, then no thing is permitted. Reality is no different for the
web of Boardwalk characters’ repressed lost objects.
In terms of alcohol and repression, the connection is obvious. Alcohol is
celebrated no more than during Prohibition, when alcohol is socially repressed.
In the first episode of Boardwalk, as soon as Prohibition begins, there is a
celebratory party with endless amounts of champagne — a visual created to
encapsulate the irony of the situation. In addition, characters in the show are
willing to pay the highest prices for liquor — only once it is repressed — and
slipshod distilleries multiply like never before. The connection between Nucky
and his dead child with repression is the same. Though Nucky attempts to hide,
overcome, and repress the truth of his dead child, he nevertheless is forced to
action on behalf of it. The memory of his dead baby is the reason he has Mr.