The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Juniper of Pistoia (or, sex and the art of memory)
Lately I’m obsessed with Peter of Ravenna. All the histories on the art of memory mention him as the first profit-minded memory wizard to actually write a popular manual on the subject (late in the 15th century) — a book aimed at regular people trying to get ahead in business, law, or whatever. His book, The Phoenix, was a down-to-earth, practical guide, in plain language, one that didn’t assume the reader was going to be trying to memorize the Psalms or the Virtues or whatever theological nonsense. Although based on the classical principles (places, vivid images, etc.), he knew the memory art could be a useful tool for people in whatever walk of life — not just monks and scholars.
What’s cool about Peter of Ravenna is that he was, as far as I know, the first to speak completely frankly about the use of sex in creating vivid memory images. If you’ve tried these techniques yourself, you may have discovered that sexy images work particularly well. And there’s no doubt in my mind that the Dominican monks who honed their memory skills during the Middle Ages figured this out, and kept silent about it. But here, in 1491, is Peter’s frank description:
I usually fill my memory-places with the images of beautiful women, which excite my memory … and believe me: when I used beautiful women as memory images, I find it much easier to arrange and repeat the notions which I have entrusted to those places. You now have a most useful secret of artificial memory, a secret which I have (through modesty) long remained silent about: if you wish to remember quickly, dispose the images of the most beautiful virgins into memory places; the memory is marvellously excited by images of women … This precept is useless to those who dislike women and they will find it very difficult to gather the fruits of this art. I hope chaste and religious men will pardon me: I cannot pass over in silence a rule which has earned me much praise and honour on account of my abilities in the art, because I wish, with all my heart, to leave excellent successors behind me.
I just came across the above quote in Paolo Rossi’s Logic and the Art of Memory
On images, Peter makes use of the classical principle that memory images should if possible resemble people we know. He gives the name of a lady, Juniper of Pistoia, who was dear to him when young and whose image he finds stimulates his memory!
I can totally see Dame Yates blushing at this. Apart from this one tiny mention, Peter’s old flame Juniper is lost to history, but to me this 15th century hottie from Pistoia burns as bright as Bruno, Lull, Simonides, or any of the other stars in the Ars Memoria firmament.
The Experiment
I was walking to Whole Foods to get lettuce, and just after I rounded the corner onto P Street I saw some bills on the ground: $12. My first thought was that it was a practical joke: a couple of those fake bills you put on the ground to seduce and disappoint passersby. So I didn’t bend down immediately to pick it up. I looked around: the usual mix of pedestrians and homeless people—no one looking my way.
As it became clear that the bills were real and not fake, my impulse was to walk on, and I started to—because, you know, there are all these homeless people around, and they need the money more than I do. But I stopped myself: There was no guarantee that a homeless person would find this money. More likely the next shopper or businessman coming down the street would find and pocket the money. And of course: How ridiculous to pass by real money—$12—lying on the sidewalk.
So I picked it up. Not without a self-conscious prickling all over my skin. Because money makes me feel guilty—especially when I clearly have not earned it. Even money that I have earned, I still feel deep down that I don’t deserve it.
I handled the bills gingerly. My immediate thought as I did this was that this was indeed some sort of trick, bills sneezed upon or deliberately infected with some virus by a sadistic prankster—like the way the Native Americans were exterminated with smallpox-infected blankets. The fate of Native Americans was somehow entwined with my own, as I hurried on toward Whole Foods in a slightly guilty but also giddy cold sweat. How often do you find a large bill (I consider anything over a “fiver” a “large bill”) just laying on the ground? What a windfall! The karmic compensation for such a windfall was the illness I would probably contract from the germs all over it. It did feel kind of damp.
And here—in reality about 10 seconds after first seeing the bills lying there—my mind finally hit on the final and lasting interpretation of what was going on. This was not a random prank. It was a psychological experiment. My behavior—my hesitation, my nervous look around, my calm taking of the money—was being observed, perhaps timed, by a grad student hidden nearby. I was probably like the tenth unwitting “participant” this morning to come upon $12 lying on the sidewalk, whose behavior was recorded. Suddenly everyone around me became probably confederates in the experiment: The black man coming toward me—was he going to ask me for the money he had just dropped or ask me if I had seen it, to test my honesty? The homeless person sitting against the wall holding out a cup suddenly seemed like part of the experiment too. He was probably the professor in charge of the whole thing.
So I went over to the homeless man/professor and pulled a one out of my pocket and put it in his cup. As I did so, the other one fell out onto the ground, and the homeless man joked about it, and I put that one in too. It would be stingy to suddenly reveal a second one without giving it to him. I kept the tenner for myself. The homeless man thanked me kindly as I headed toward the Whole Foods.
This action seemed the most rational. If my behavior were being observed, I would not appear purely greedy by pocketing the whole thing. Yet if my behavior were not being observed, I would not have just given up my little lucky windfall out of irrational paranoia and self-destructive neurotic guilt about money. I felt good: I had made the right choice.
My groceries came to eight dollars and change. I paid with the ten, to be rid of its deadly germs as soon as possible.
Werewords
As a Wargo, descended from the Eastern European hinterlands, home of the original Indo-European culture from which all European languages (as well as Sanskrit) derived, I am naturally drawn to the wer- family of words—one of the main word families of that ancient language, with descendents still in the Slavic, Germanic, and Latin tongues. The wer- family (actually a few related word groups having in common this w followed closely or immediately by an r) is the backbone of English, and if English is viewed not just as a tongue but as a philosophy, the wer- words contain its fundamental intuitions about man and his place in the cosmos. I sort of think of the wer- words as the soul of the Old English worldview.
My favorite of this vast and important family, and a good starting point for any tour of the Anglo-Saxon (AS) tongue, is wyrd, the AS word for “fate.” It survives now in the wonderful word weird, thanks partly I suppose to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The “weird sisters” in Macbeth were prophetic witches, but they derived mythologically from the three norns, sister-goddesses in Norse mythology who together wove a man’s destiny and could thus foretell it: Urd or Wyrd (the “ur-norn” or norn of the past) spun the yarn or thread of a man’s life, Werthandi (the norn of the present) took the measure of this yarn in the present (think “worth”), and Sculd (“should,” the norn of the future) represented that which was yet to pass, the world in which we pay our debts, fulfill our obligations, and die. (Sculd cut the yarn of a man’s life after Werthandi had measured it out.)
Wyrd comes from the AS word weorthan, “to become,” which in turn came from the Indo-European root wer-, meaning to turn or spin (hence the “spinning” of the yarn of our life). Although it is usually translated as “fate” or “destiny,” those Latinate words imply a predetermination that is not present in wyrd. Rather, wyrd, as becoming and as turning, really represents “what has turned out” or “what will have turned out” as well as “what you are turning into” or “what you will have turned into.” There is definitely a sense of a man working (from AS wyrcan, “to do”) with his wyrd to weave his future—working actively with the strands of his past life to make something new of it, to become something else.
Because of its sense of turning, weorthan connotes direction. Our suffix -ward, as in toward, inward, backward, upward, and so, on comes from -weard. (In AS, andweard meant the present, and froweard, the future.) The AS root weardan is derived from a different Indo-European wer- cluster that has to do with watching, seeing, and guarding, but the sense of direction is often there—as in guarding (warding) or looking in a certain direction. From this root we get aware and wary, ward (from weard, keeper) and warden, as well as award and reward and wares (things that are guarded or watched). Rearward, interestingly, originally meant “rear-guard” (not “toward the rear”). (Guard, in itself, is an interesting story—see below.)
The sense of turning or bending in the wer- family of words also creates a cluster of interesting words to do with the pitfalls of emotion and destiny. There is writhe, to twist/turn (AS writhan), which may produce a wreath, or if it is a person, a wraith—a twisted and anguished soul, or even an undead spectre. If you twist something (like a towel or a neck), you wring it. And a ring, AS hring, is like a turning, or wreath, of metal. The state of being tortured or twisted in anger is wrath, or wroth. Worry comes from wyrgan, to strangle. There is also wrangeln, “to wrestle,” from which we get wrangle. And if you are turned aside from the straight and narrow—the riht (“right”)—then you are wrong (wrang). There are a host of other English words that have this ‘bendy, twisty’ connotation: wrinkle, wrench, wrap, warp, and worm (from AS wyrm), to name a few.
Wrecan (“to inflict, or punish”), whence wreak, is related to weorthan, and is the source of the words wretch (which meant an exile or someone punished) and wretched. Some of wrecan’s descendents have a ‘twisted’ or ‘crumpled’ connotation, as though they have been conflated with the descendents of weorthan over the centuries. Words like wreck. There is also wrought, a word that is often confused as a past tense of wreak, but is actually an alternate to worked, past tense of work, from the AS wyrcan, “to do”—which also gives us a wright, a craftsman or producer of something, like a playwright or a cartwright (a maker of carts).
Turning connotes change, so wer- words are to be found in ideas like worth, which meant what something has turned or changed into—which in the realm of commerce means what or how much a thing can be traded or exchanged for, hence our modern, monetary sense of the word—and worthy. There is also stalwart (“steadfast”), which combines –wart with stathol (“foundation”). Note that wort, as in St. John’s Wort, meant plant (whence we get root), and derives from a different Indo-European root, wyrt, but one with obvious resonances in the whole group of wer- words, with their twists and turns and bends, as well as their veerings (veer is also from wer-, but via the French -vert, equivalent of -ward—think words like vertical or introvert). To root (as in rummage or “root around in the dirt”) came from the AS verb wrotan.
There are also a number of wer- words that have somewhat separate genealogies etymologically but are related philosophically.
Importantly, there is write, which is usually considered to derive from writan, which means to cut or mark or scratch, but which could just as easily (to my mind) come from weorthan in the sense that writing is a turning, not only of lines/letters, but also of turning out. You have only to think of the elaborately wrought Lindisfarne Gospels to see writing as something that twists and turns upon itself—something wrought as well as writhed. And there is of course word, which also has slightly different roots etymologically but ‘goes with’ this whole family of things that turn, or which we turn, and which can be written.
My other favorite ‘other’ wer- word is, well, wer, which meant “man.” Wer has its echoes in the Latinate vir (man) and its derivatives virile (manly) and virtue. But the AS wer only survives in two places in modern English. One is the word werewolf (literally “man-wolf”), a verbal echo of a time when the world was full of shape-changers, or things that turned into other things. The other hiding place of the AS wer is all around us: the world. In AS, this was weorold or “age of man” (wer+old or eld, whence elder). The world in this sense was not the spatial world we think of nowadays, but the temporal, finite time during which men walk upon the eorth, before the end of days (the Norse Ragnarok, or the Christian domesdaeg, the day of doom or “judgment”).
This brings us to the gr-words. The spatial sense of the modern English world was expressed by the AS word middangeard, which J.R.R. Tolkien famously translated as “middle earth” but is more literally translated as “middle enclosure.” Geard, whence yard, once meant any enclosed or walled area, ranging from a fort—something guarded—to the whole inhabited world as a kind of vast enclosure. It is related to the AS verb gyrdan, which meant to encircle or surround, and gives us the modern words gird (as in “gird your loins”), girt, and girdle (from AS gyrdel).
Geard/yard assumed diminished, increasingly domestic meaning over the centuries, and now tends just to mean the grounds attached to a house; it is related to the French jardin, whence the modern English garden. Orchard comes from AS orceard, thought to be an alteration of ortgeard or wyrt-geard—an enclosure for cultivating plants. But the old sense of geard as a vast encircled enclosure is also related to the modern English horizon, which comes (via French) from Greek horizein, “to limit/encircle,” from horos, meaning boundary.
Surely horos must be connected with the Greek hora, meaning time (whence we get words like hour, horoscope, etc.). In the same way, geard, the enclosure of the world, must connect to the AS gear, whence year. The seasons, of course, were marked by where the sun fell on the horizon, so a connection between the ideas of the horizon and cyclical time would have been a natural one to make in the geardagum, the “olden days” or days of yore (from AS geara). What about linear time? Perhaps it is a reach, but gearn (“string”), whence yarn, is what the norns spun, measured, and cut, symbolic of a man’s finite life and wyrd.
The word great, meaning large in size, I connect with the horizon too. Because it is the horizon that gives us our sense of scale. Something great is, to me, something that stands tall against the horizon, or that might even rise up from beyond it.
And what about yearning, from AS giernan or gyrnan? To yearn is to long or desire something in a kind of extreme, painful or melancholy way, to regret the loss of something. One yearns for what has, indeed, passed far away, as beyond the horizon, out of one’s geard.
“There is no center” (The Parallax View Pt. 2)
Parallax is really not new. In its social implications at least, it’s just a restating of the postmodernist truism: “There is no center.” That was always the motto, right? But we – or at least, I – always took that to mean a lack of a privileged social viewpoint, a lack of some Archimedian position from which to describe reality. But I now see that in that, my grad-school understanding was actually “just” the modernist “Truth is relative.”
But there’s another way in which the center is lacking, a more troubling way, and this is what Zizek means. There is no overlap, no point or touchstone of shared reality, some place in which we all agree and in which we are all the same.
This “center” I am trying to describe is a much vaguer place. But it is also, I am beginning to think, something we all need to believe in in order to live together, love one another, and so on. Without examining my belief in this center, I go through life trusting that, even though you and I are different, come from different places and have different experiences and agendas, there is some part of us that we share, and that we share with everybody else. A middle point that we all agree on. A compromise between/among us all. Such a place somehow guarantees and anchors our reality with other humans.
As I said, it is a vague idea, but if you examine yourself I think you will find it as an article of your private faith…
(I am thinking here of the overlapping circles on a Mastercard.)
To say “there is no center” is to give voice to the self-deception inherent in our belief in such a place. There is no “place between.” There is just you, and I, and him, and her, and so on, and no way in which we actually overlap, no point between us that guarantees our social relations or that makes some shared understanding possible. Our experiences of sharing and communion are really “just” neural firings in separate brains, disconnected in space and time.
We can’t experience other people’s happiness. I can’t necessarily “get” why a certain thing might make you happy, or sad, or angry. I am not you. I am not in your shoes.
This nonoverlapping of people is, I think, what some Marxists call “antagonism.”
Without a “place between,” what do we do? What do we do to maintain our faith in a center that doesn’t exist?
The Parallax View
Reading Slavoj Zizek’s “magnum opus” The Parallax View
At first I was annoyed – it seemed wrong word choice. Parallax is just two different viewpoints on something, not a split in the thing itself. But I began to think of it more along the lines of W.J.T. Mitchell’s multistable images – like the duck/rabbit or the wife/mother-in-law. The point is, there is no “between” or neutral perspective on such an image (although Wittgenstein might disagree). It is either/or.
Plus, is it not the “split in oneself” (metaphorically, the fact that we see from two separate eyes, not one cyclopean eye mid-forehead) that gives rise to the “split in the world”?
That vertical line, that slash in either/or, is the impossible discontinuity in the world that Zizek has decided once and for all to erect his philosophical edifice on. It’s a good move. I just wish he’d go back to addressing a wider audience.
To be honest, I only got about 50 pages in and haven’t picked it up again.
The Vanishing
Everyone has those thoughts, but no one ever jumps. I told myself: “Imagine you’re jumping.” Is it predestined that I won’t jump? How can it be predestined that I won’t? So, to go against what is predestined, one must jump. I jumped. The fall was a holy event. I broke my left arm and lost 2 fingers. Why did I jump? A slight abnormality in my personality, imperceptible to those around me. You can find me listed in the medical encyclopedias under “Sociopath” in the new editions.
I watched George Sluizer’s The Vanishing
In reconstructing his life around the wound of Saskia’s traumatic disappearance, Rex chooses not to go on living but to circle around this black hole. Is it to give it meaning? When pressed by a TV interviewer, Rex admits his quest has no hope. At bottom, though he describes it as quest for knowledge, to find out the truth of what happened, it is really, he admits, “an homage” to his lost Saskia.
The standard view of PTSD is that the constant return to the trauma (or the return of the trauma in dreams and reliving) is a project of slowly, painfully incorporating the event into one’s life story. In other words, a coming-to-terms. It is such a monumental, neverending project, in this view, because the trauma is such a foreign body, so undigestible.
But there is a counter to this, in a way a more parsimonious explanation. It may be that, on some level, the survivor chooses to make this thing the defining moment of his life—and thus the symptoms, the ongoing “inability to forget” is instead an active retelling of the life story with this trauma as a central defining feature. In other words, instead of returning to the trauma because we can’t live with it, we return to the trauma because we want to live with it, and in fact want to make it central to who we are. We don’t want to forget.
Why would someone want to live with a trauma, to base their lives on it?
For one thing, traumas make people into “survivors,” and there is something heroic in being a survivor. A trauma is like a backdrop a survivor may want to be seen against, because it provides an ego boost and legitimation. There are many direct and indirect psychological, social, and material benefits for being a survivor of a trauma. Ours is a society which places great stock on being a victim. Group as well as individual identities are built around victimhood and the memory of trauma. Patients in therapy are all too ready to redefine the imperfections of their upbringing as traumas or abuse.
Being a victim excuses us, shields us from blame and guilt for the imperfect lives we have led. It gives us a cart blanche. And being the survivor of something out of the ordinary is like creating a larger setting, a larger frame, a larger diorama in which to be viewed by the world and by ourselves.
We may not want the thing to have happened to us. Although what does that sentence even mean? The reality is that it did happen. In the absence of changing the past, we try to get back at least a bit of what was lost, exact a kind of repayment. Simple forgetting, simply going through a process of grieving and then “moving on,” wouldn’t allow us to do that, and would in fact “let the trauma get away with it.” The persistence of memory allows us to exact compensation. Freud called these things, the little perks we get from our self-destructive neuroses, “secondary benefits.”
Yet there is inherent bad faith in such a retelling of the life story around trauma. It emphasizes the pain—in Rex’s case, not only the pain of loss but also the pain of not knowing—and the ego hides behind this story. The story is “It’s so painful I can’t forget.” The truth hiding behind that story is, “I don’t want [the world] to forget that I endure/have endured this pain.” As such, the field of fantasy is important here, to transform the “made”—the way we have made the trauma and remake ourselves in its image—into the “found,” i.e. into ourselves as simple victims of something that happened to us, something we never wanted or asked for.
It may even be “perfectly true” that the pain is so extreme that it is impossible to forget. Yet there is always a clutching ego lurking behind it, snatching some piece of it back. It is a kind of unavoidable bad faith. What is its effect on us, this half- or demi-knowledge that we’re getting away with an extraction, that we are deriving selfish benefit from something bad that happened in the past?
Rex’s cover story, his alibi, that his is a quest for knowledge—one that he even admits is probably hopeless—is answered by the killer, who puts him to the test, indeed calls his bluff. It puts Rex in the same situation as the killer himself was in, on the balcony when he was 16. In effect, “fate” was calling his bluff. Our stance in relation to fate is one of bluff. Perhaps bluff is a better word than “bad faith.” It is a wager that, in effect, no one will ask to see our cards. It is founded on the knowledge that this bluff is something we all—at least, those of us with consciences—engage in; our trust that our bluff won’t be called rests on the shared nature of our guilt. The killer is able to call his bluff because, unlike other people, he is a sociopath. A sociopath is someone whose relationship to fate is honest. As such, a sociopath is the only truly ethical human being. A nonsociopathic ethics is one of inconsistency and deception.
A normal/nonsociopathic person preserves a layer of ambiguity between himself and his “true desires” or “true motives.” Such a person will not go into the wish-granting room at the end of Tarkovsky’s The Stalker, for instance. It is for fear of becoming like the legendary stalker “D’ikobraz,” who did go in and found himself a rich man instead of finding his son cured of a fatal illness. For the same reason, the stalker in the film will not go in, even though his daughter is a mutant. We don’t want to know ourselves truly, because we fear to find ourselves in the situation faced by Winston Smith in Room 101—that is, face to face with our falsehood. The killer in The Vanishing is like O’Brien in 1984: creating a situation that effectively calls his victim’s bluff.
So by definition, to be human is to live a fantasy. Sartre’s vision of living in absolute freedom, without bad faith, is only fully possible for a sociopath. We need that distance from ourselves, because we are not what we are and this is unbearable to a “moral” being. Let us be clear: It is not the content of Iago’s statement, “I am not what I am,” that marks him a sociopath. It is his capability of saying it, of honestly and forthrightly owning up to it, that does so. He is rather like the killer in The Vanishing, in that his attitude to himself is cold, clinical, detached, curious, and matter of fact. The moral man, in contrast, requires believing he is what he is, even in face of evidence to the contrary. He requires fantasy, in other words, and thus bad faith. Even if I am cleverly, intellectually, able to articulate the idea of my own nonidentity with myself, I am really unable to touch the core of it; I retain my distance and act “as if” I were consistent with myself and my ideals; as a “moral man” I must maintain the bluff, and thus do I fly in the face of the real.
Or, another way to put this might be this: We are all sociopaths—our substrate, the ground of our being, is one of sociopathy—pure freedom in Sartre’s terms, or I suppose what Nietzsche would call “will to power.” What distinguishes a healthy moral individual is giving himself over to a lie, to submit or subject himself, to treat himself as an object so as to keep away from direct irrevocable knowledge about this essential condition of his being. Thus one’s being becomes a lie, even an affront, and we live in fantasy to forget that we have lied and that we are a lie.
What is a trauma? It is a kind of alibi. It is something objectively true and real which nevertheless serves as a mask for our true intentions, our true motives, our true desires. A trauma is a safe and secure cover story for one’s guilt. We thank heavens for an opportunity for such a cover story. Trauma provides us with the necessary cover story to go on living.
Star Wars is a remake of Ordinary People
Some films get sort of obscured, in hindsight, not only by their own famousness or popularity, but also by standard interpretations. Rashomon is one example: The handy notion that Kurosawa’s classic is about relativism, different people having multiple points of view, has essentially controlled our viewing of that film since it was released. Yet the film can hardly be reduced to that, and if you pay attention, there’s darker, more interesting stuff going on in the succession of “witnesses” to the bandit’s trial.
The original Star Wars trilogy is in a similar boat. After Star Wars was released it quickly got linked to the myth scholar Joseph Campbell, whose The Hero With a Thousand Faces supposedly influenced George Lucas when he conceived and wrote the original trilogy. Campbell’s idea is that every culture’s mythology includes some variant of the hero journey, in which a young person of uncertain parentage (Luke Skywalker) is set off on a quest, undergoes various standard ordeals (meeting a wise helper/teacher—i.e., Obi-Wan Kenobi; receiving a boon—i.e., the light saber and knowledge of the Force; going into the belly of the beast—i.e., the Death Star; etc., etc.), and gradually learns about and fulfills his destiny. Lucas was consciously trying to create a new American myth, borrowing elements of earlier myths (as all myths do—what Levi-Strauss called “bricolage”) as well as historical motifs like the American revolution. But unfortunately, the Campbell hero business, along with the campiness of the films and then the awful prequel trilogy, gets in the way of seeing the films through new eyes. I think it’s high time that the obvious critical truisms and just-so stories be set aside, just like our targeting computer, so we can exercise a more direct critical force.
It does need to be acknowledged that Lucas was phenomenally successful in his aim of creating a new myth. The characters in the films are all, or have become, “archetypes of the collective unconscious.” And the central mythic story, like other hero myths, is a powerful family drama: i.e. the son versus the father. For people who grew up with the films, the characters are part of their personal mythology.
For example, over the years I have had a string of strange and interesting dreams about Darth Vader. They aren’t scary dreams. In all of them, Vader is a sympathetic figure (as he becomes at the very end of the original trilogy)—indeed, sort of pathetic. In one, his robe was tattered and I could see that he had skinny old-man arms. In another, he was a gentle mentor/father figure and gave me a sweater as a gift—a sweater he had personally knitted out of debris from the planets he had destroyed. In all the dreams, I sensed how misunderstood and lonely Darth Vader was: He was well-meaning, quiet, wanting harmony and peace but somehow unable to achieve it and forced to do bad things for good, pragmatic reasons that everyone else was unable to grasp.
For me, the family in late 20th century America, when I grew up, is a good lens through with to view the Star Wars films—perhaps a more revealing one than the hero-myth stuff. This is why I like to compare the original Star Wars trilogy to, of all things, Ordinary People. It’s not crazy. If you strip away what is nonessential about both stories, you’ll see that the two films center on the very same themes, and even have essentially the same plot: A weak father is unable to stand up to a powerful, evil force on behalf of his son, until the conflict between those two oppositions comes to a head and he is forced to make a choice. The screenwriting guru Robert McKee pointed out that Ordinary people is not really about the young Conrad (Timothy Hutton); it is about the failure and then redemption of his father Calvin (Donald Sutherland). Likewise, if you strip the Star Wars saga down to its really interesting parts and cut away the fluff, it is not really about Luke; it is the story of Darth Vader’s fall and ultimate redemption.
But what’s this “weak father” business? One doesn’t generally think of Darth Vader as a “weak” character. Yet consider: Is Darth Vader really scary? I submit that he is not. Or rather, he’s not scary for the reasons people generally assume. He is big and dresses in a black suit, and wears an intimidating mask, but what is scary about him is not the things he does to others. He doesn’t really do anything in the films except for strangling a couple of incompetent subordinates with his mind—big deal—and, of course, at the climax of Empire, he cuts off his son’s hand in a duel (instead of killing him). No, he is scary for what he takes from others—obedience and subservience, even to the extent of being forced to sacrifice his own flesh and blood.
Darth Vader’s constant role in the three films is to carry out someone else’s wishes. In the first film we don’t really see his relationship to the Emperor, just to the Death Star commander Moff Tarkin, and Darth seems to be a kind of absurd lapdog, ever so slightly ridiculed by Moff for his “old religion.” In the second and third films, of course, we get to see Vader’s relationship to the Emperor more clearly, and see how his role is essentially that of the Emperor’s right hand man, doing whatever the Emperor says to do—even to the extent of delivering up his own son Luke to meet his doom. Vader is clearly conflicted about this: He wants his son to join him and, with him, to overthrow the Emperor, but when Luke refuses, he finds he cannot betray the Emperor. Between the demands of his son and those of his master, he finds it is the latter that, sadly, has more hold over him.
This obedience to a master is what makes Darth Vader scary. He is scary because he is weak, and because he represents a possibility we all see in ourselves: to do bad, indeed to defeat ourselves, harm the things most precious to us (for example our own flesh and blood), out of obedience to something whose remote strength and power we fear. This is a powerful archetype, and what makes the character of Darth Vader so compelling, I think. The asthmatic wheezing is a nice way of representing this essential weakness and dependency of Darth Vader: He’s like an old man on a respirator—not merely a father but an ailing, dying, failing father.
Ordinary People is of course about the same thing: A well-meaning but passive father watching as his family is torn apart and unable, until the end, to step in and change things, because it would mean a betrayal. As in the Star Wars trilogy, the external conflict is between his son and a force opposing his son, driving his son to impulsiveness and self-destruction. The internal conflict is his loyalty to both of these forces. The conflict comes to a head when Donald Sutherland confronts his wife Beth (Mary Tyler Moore) with why she asked him to change his shoes before their drowned son’s funeral; it climaxes in the kitchen at the end, when he tells her “I don’t think I love you anymore,” and stoically she packs her things and leaves. This scene is equivalent dramatically to Darth Vader casting the Emperor into the abyss at the end of Return of the Jedi.
The analogy appears to break down, of course, when we consider the nature of the “opposing force” in both films. In one film, it is the mother’s coldness and inability to forgive her surviving son for the accidental death of his brother, her favorite. Although self-possessed, she is also weak of heart, which her husband finally points out to her, and he cannot forgive it, nor forgive what it has done to their surviving child. The opposing force in the Star Wars films, however, is the “dark side,” embodied in the Emperor. We need to ask what this “dark side” really is.
What is so powerful about the Emperor that his deputy, Vader, will go so far as to hurt his son and even deliver him to his (probable) death? Even for the most workaholic, a man’s boss doesn’t have the power to override loyalty to his son. Such a thing just doesn’t make sense as a plot device. Something else is going on in these films. Ordinary People reveals what it is, I think. The one thing that (in the real world) could be powerful enough to cause a man to betray his son is his wife.
So consider the odd thing about the Star Wars films: the Emperor. This cold, effeminate (he has been described as a “drag queen”), demanding, outwardly fragile figure is not a commander/superior in the usual sense (i.e., Moff Tarkin, Vader’s “boss” in the first film), but a negative female archetype: a cold wife/mother.
The Emperor is actually a wife/mother figure, and Darth Vader a weak husband/father who cannot stand up to her until the end. Defiance and individuality on his father’s part is what Luke misses/lacks/longs for—a model of his own defiance, of his own “standing out” in the universe, of his own “rebellion.” Several times Darth Vader refrains, “You don’t know the power of the Dark Side.” James Earl Jones’ deep voice causes us to hear this as a kind of promise, held out to Luke to tempt him with the promise of having power and being able to rule the universe at his father’s side. But its real meaning, I think, is completely different: You don’t know the power the dark side wields over me. It is why I cannot save myself—or you. You don’t know the power of your mother. Nothing can stand up to her. I can’t stand up to her. I’m helpless.
Luke never knew his father, because his father was weak, disappeared behind a hardened mask. This weak, distant father in the shadow of a cold, repressive mother is a real “type,” esp. in the postwar world. I’m sure I’m not the only man whose dreams are full of Darth Vader figures that are really more like Donald Sutherland in Ordinary People. They are the same character, and the son in both films is essentially in the same position: trying to understand himself and be understood by a passive father, in the face of opposition by a remote and chilly mother. The climactic end of both films is the redemption of the father, finally standing up to ‘her’ on the son’s behalf.
That George Lucas failed to see or acknowledge the true relationship between Vader and the Emperor explains many things. The whole “prequel” trilogy is really a retroactive and failed attempt to justify deflecting the whole central issue in the films from anything genuine and troubling: to somehow make Darth Vader’s conflict be about something other than a sexual relation, somehow justifying the Emperor as something worthy of incredible loyalty on the part of Anakin/Darth. That is what the Force (or at least, the dark side) is: a dramatic contrivance to obscure the sexual relation. But it is completely contrived, and the prequels fail miserably because of it.
Kubrick, Lynch, the Bardo
David Lynch seems like someone who gets possessed by a question and won’t let up until he tires of the question (not, that is, until he answers it—the questions he asks aren’t answerable, probably). The question in his recent films, at least, seems to be: What is Woman made of? Or maybe it is some version of the old “What does woman want?” Now, Inland Empire, Lynch’s most sprawling and, in some ways, astonishing work to date, he returns again to this question. In this film, we again have a troubled actress, and also follow the intertwining stories of the character she plays, a poor housewife, and other intermediate personas who might be her doppelgangers or facets of her unconscious, or both.
Near the beginning of the film, Lynch uses a shot that confirmed for me something I had already suspected: that Lynch is obsessed with Kubrick, specifically the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The shot is this: Laura Dern’s character, having an uncomfortable conversation with a strange Polish woman, looks across the living room and sees herself sitting on the couch looking back at her. Then, it is just her across the room, and there is no other “her” there with her. (I got chills when I saw this, and had to pause the DVD.) A variant of this same transition also occurs near the end.
Lynch has used this trick before, but it was first used (to my knowledge) at the end of 2001. Dave Bowman’s final transformation—or perhaps, transmigration—takes place in a white, vaguely Rococo hotel suite that could be on an alien world, in another dimension, or in Dave Bowman’s own mind. First, moving slow, as in a dream, Dave looks into a room and sees an older version of himself, in a bathrobe, sitting at a table. The older Dave hears a sound, looks up where the astronaut Dave was standing, and sees nothing. Now we are “with” this older Dave—he has, through this magical and uncanny transition, become the Dave of the story. This Dave then turns and sees an elderly version of himself lying in a deathbed. And then, just as before, we are “with” this elderly Dave and it is as if there was never any younger one sitting at the table. Lastly the dying Dave raises his hand toward the “Star Child” that we will lastly see hovering over the earth.
Many quintessentially Lynchian scenes recall the end of 2001. Lynch loves strange rooms—they are always curtained, usually in red or blue—and they seem to be either a dream space or some place of transition between life and death, or between death and rebirth. It could be something like the “bardo” of Tibetan religion. Lynch directly borrows the “transmigration shot” from 2001 and uses it near the end of Mulholland Drive: Naomi Watts sees herself making coffee in the kitchen, and then is herself making coffee in the kitchen. (Coffee, of course, is an important symbol for Lynch. Could it mean “waking up”?)
Lynch’s obsession with what could be called the “transmigration of the soul” goes back at least to Twin Peaks—an obsession with inhabiting spirits and multiple fragmented personas. Lost Highway is obviously another exploration of this idea, in which a man escapes into a completely other, alternate life (which might be a kind of dream fantasy or unconscious alternate reality), to fall in love with a dangerous double of his wife.
To feel palpably the occult connection between Kubrick and Lynch, watch Dale Cooper’s famous dancing dwarf dream in Episode 2 of Twin Peaks. The long shots on Dale sitting expressionless, experiencing something slowly, unsure, as though paralyzed (the way one is paralyzed in sleep). Like the middle-aged Dave Bowman, Dale is aged, covered with tiny wrinkes.
Kubrick’s The Shining is perhaps a relevant parallel/source here. The film is about a “possessing spirit” and ends with the uncanny shot of a photo in the Overlook Hotel of Jack Torrance amid revelers at a 1920s ball. Like Twin Peaks’ transmigrating evil spirit Bob, the murderous evil that takes over Jack Torrance’s mind subsists through time, inhabiting different bodies. The bar and bathroom where Jack meets the satanic bartender and his murderous predecessor are also distinctly reminiscent of the “bardo” in 2001, not to mention Lynch’s curtained rooms, esp. the Red Room in Twin Peaks. Could Lynch’s Red Room (the black lodge) be something like, or be a sort of (perhaps unconscious) reference to, “Redrum”?
Postscript: Around the time I saw Inland Empire I also happened to re-watch Kieslowski’s Double Life of Veronique, and was struck by the parallels. Double lives, obviously—an actress playing different versions of the same person, with separate (yet connected) fates. But also there’s that strange aspect of Poland. Kieslowski’s two Veronicas are connected to his own two lives, his first life in Eastern Europe (one that, perhaps, has died because it has gotten worn out, like an overused marionette) and his new life in France. (Veronica, of course, means “true picture”—representing the filmmaker? Film itself?) In Lynch’s film, the actress and at least one of her doubles is married to a jealous, possibly violent Pole, and we keep returning to this Polish girl watching a strange television program somewhere in Poland. It is almost as if Poland is, in this film, a kind of symbol of the unconscious. Which makes sense—Eastern Europe has always played the role of the “unconscious” of the West, a place of dark dreams, seething desires, fear, and repression.
The black monolith
Well, there are many kinds of films. Most of them, nowadays, don’t demand much thinking. That makes me very, very upset. It makes me upset that they think the audiences have grown unused to thinking and that they only want things spelled out for them, in a platter. That’s bullshit, and a big one. People love to think. We are all detectives. We love to observe, we love to deduce. It is great to pay attention. We have a lot of fun this way.” –David Lynch
Dreams often, if you pay attention, contain some element that seems like a symbol of the dream itself, a little representation of the fact, “I am dreaming; this is a dream.” Movies are the same way. Every movie, good or bad, intentionally or unintentionally, contains a symbol of itself. 2001: A Space Odyssey is a perfect example. What is the black monolith but … the film 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Or reverse the formula: 2001: A Space Odyssey is the black monolith. It was made and placed before us by an intelligence that remains mysterious. It was put here for a purpose, possibly to raise us to the next level in our evolution. In pursuing it, we go on a journey. Interpreting the film is that journey.
Again, exactly like dreams.
My dreams often have demonstrations in them. Like someone giving a demonstration of a new appliance in a mall department store. The recurring tableau in 2001, interestingly, is the demonstration. The film begins with the appearance of the slab among the apes—an ambiguous but powerful demonstration—which is followed by the violent use of tools, again, in a kind of demonstration (of violence, power). Then, on the Moon, Haywood Floyd gives a bland talk on the need for secrecy, etc., and is shown the slab. Finally, we might think of the last segment as a kind of demonstration for Dave Bowman.
Those who say 2001 is boring or incomprehensible are like the one ape in the background, at the beginning of the film, who shows no interest. He’s the dolt who will never evolve. You should instead be like the alpha ape who goes up and touches the object, fearfully at first, but with increasing boldness, and then later uses the jawbone of a pig-like creature to kill another pig-like creature.
(We’re killing pig-like creatures here, ape friends. And killing our evolutionary-dead-end ape enemies.)
Eternal Sunshine
The inspiring American story is that we can put the past behind us and reinvent ourselves and our lives. It is the subtext of most American movies, and our heroes, the characters played in films by guys like Tom Cruise or George Clooney, are ones who don’t let themselves be burdened by the past. There is only the present moment, and we have only to look to the future. “There are no answers, only choices,” says Clooney in Solaris. And Cruise (in Magnolia), parodying his usual roles, laments his past weakness: “I was swimming in what was.” These are tough guys and the Now is firmly in their meaty clutches.
It is rare for a filmmaker to own up to how hard choosing one’s destiny is for real humans. The modern manuals of moviewriting (Syd Field, Robert McKee, etc.) don’t make room for protagonists stuck in the past. But there are exciting recent exceptions: P.T. Anderson in Magnolia, a film about how “we may be through with the past but the past ain’t through with us,” and especially Charlie Kaufman in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film about how obliterating the past, cleansing us of our painful histories, doesn’t work. The past (like past life in Jurassic Park) will find a way. I keep telling people I think this is the best film of the 21st Century so far. It’s sure close.
This theme is foreshadowed so subtly in an overheard phone conversation in Dr. Mierzwiak’s office: Some patient wanting the procedure for a third time in a row. Why should such a thing be necessary, we ask? Then Mary, we realize, falls in love all over again with the Doctor after her procedure. And of course, the main characters do the same thing.
Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) is a sympathetic character, likeable, human, doing the right thing (such as making room for Jim Carrey immediately when Carrey learns of Clementine’s procedure), and in a way, he is the tragic center of the film: He believes in the power of his technique to erase painful memories, but his technique doesn’t work. People keep re-falling in love with who they were supposed to fall in love with. He can’t stem the tide, or make things better for people. And it looks, at the end, like he’s going to lose his marriage as a result. He is unable to get the better of his blunders.
Kaufman’s protagonists (clearly images of himself) are a response to the stereotypical American hero firmly in command of his own destiny. Kaufman’s protagonists are shy men, and reticent, crippled by self-doubt, who fall in love too easily with strong women, women who mock their passive and uncertain stance in life, of not going for what they want. When Catherine Keener (in Being John Malkovich) says, on the couch, “there are two kinds of people, those who go after what they want, and those who don’t”; or when Kate Winslet, in the crumbling beach house in ESSM, says “just go back then” and Jim Carrey explains that he did go back “because you said it so coldly, so dismissively.”
That moment really hit the nail on the head for me. To be confronted by another person’s ability to desire and act, and to try hard to read it and form a response, but to feel so rejected by it because that freedom doesn’t, at least at that moment, exist in you.
