A psychoanalytic interpretation of the film Burnt by the Sun Nikita Mikhalkov's (1994) reveals the admiration and the homosexual love of Dimitri for Sergei Kotov. Out of castration anxieties and fear of dependency, Dimitri transforms his love object Sergei into a fetish. This makes him feel as if he could handle his relationship with the love object. When Dimitri is confronted with the fact that he has no power over Sergei, he decides to destroy his creation (i.e., himself). There no longer exists the possibility to establish human relations, maintain them, and feel empathy with the other. The narcissistic cathexis of the object and the dissolution of object love is one of the powerful psychological presuppositions for Stalinist terror.