Driven by the Spirit
101
Schroeder murdered and why he takes Mrs. Schroeder under his care. His
deceased child is why he stares nostalgically at the babies in incubators, and it is
why he provides for Nan Britton — the mistress of soon to be President William
G. Harding and mother of Harding’s illegitimate child. Again and again, Nucky
is moved to help those that easily symbolize his lost son, despite his attempt to
secret that part of his life. What he represses asserts control.
In terms of the character Angela and repression, Angela attempts to repress
her lesbian sexual desires and hide them from her husband, Jimmy, by
attempting to be the average wife for him and by hiding her relationship with
Mary. Because that side of her is repressed, it asserts itself more thoroughly in
Angela, and eventually — even though Mary leaves and Angela promises
Jimmy that she will try to return to normalcy — she is forced to do the exact
opposite: embrace what is lost. Her relationship with Mary is dead, but it does
not know it. Similarly, Van Alden’s drive towards God causes atheistic leanings
to be repressed and thus to dominate him. Lacan speaks about the repression of
God directly, and what he says is particularly useful in the analysis of Van
Alden’s repression. Lacan states in his second seminar with the example of
Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov:
As you know, [the father Karamazov’s] son Ivan leads the
latter into those audacious avenues taken by the thought of the
cultivated man, and in particular, he says, if God doesn’t exist
. . . — If God doesn’t exist, the father says, then everything is
permitted. Quite evidently, a naive notion, for we analysts
know full well that if God doesn’t exist, then nothing at all is
permitted any longer. Neurotics prove that to us every day.
{The Ego 128)
According to Lacan, if God does not exist, nothing is permitted, and if God
fully exists then all is permitted. This explains the argument made by Agent Van
Alden’s character entirely. Van Alden is the most frightening and immoral
character of the entire show, and he is the Christian. Like the other characters,
he is driven towards what he represses, and what he represses is not love or
alcohol or family, but rather the complete lack of prohibition, security, and
Godliness. Thus, he murders, tortures, commits adultery, and challenges God.
The point of Boardwalk Empire's relating these multiple repressed lost
objects of desire is to illustrate the structural reason for why Prohibition failed in
the 1920s and always fails. The failure of Prohibition is not because alcohol is
the greatest commodity ever created, or because society ultimately realized the
thing it deemed evil was actually innocent. The failure is rather due to the fact
that people’s minds do not allow what dies in their hands to disappear. When a
thing like alcohol dies within the public's arms, it is the first time people feel
they ever had it, whether or not the phenomena is really true (as said before.