Freudian Slip(pery Slope)s: Evangelical Eros

Freud seemed to think that everything -- everything -- came down to id impulses: Eros and Thanatos. (Mostly Eros...separate post on Thanatos another day.)

I consider myself a Jungian (insofar as I consider myself an anybody-ian), but I'll give Freud credit where credit is due.

Much of what we do to apparently avoid the subject of sex in society seems designed to actually bring it up -- albeit in a repressive, "No, I wasn't thinking about it, get your mind out of the gutter" kind of way.

The Victorians, for instance, supposedly put dust ruffles on all their furniture in order to avoid looking at a table or chair leg and thinking of a woman's leg. But which is more likely to remind a person of a woman's leg -- a wooden chair leg, or a skirt? Only an accident of language connects a chair leg and a lady's until you insist on putting a ruffled, pastel bit of fabric around the chair, too.

Another case in point: I have a light fixture in my bedroom that the landlady told me is antique. It has little flowers covering its border, in relief; but other than that, it looks exactly like a breast. It's impossible to think that no one else notices, but the polite, superego thing to do is ignore the likeness.

Don't mention that the light fixture looks like a breast, don't mention that the light fixture looks like a breast, the original owners must have spent minutes at a time pleading with themselves, then giggling uncontrollably -- to the consternation of guests who hadn't happened to look up (and to the chagrin of those who had).

What a social liability, hanging a breast above guests' heads and skirting your furniture as though its nakedness would be the equivalent of your daughter's...unless it was intentional. The popularity of the dust ruffle and this particular lighting fixture must have been due (at least in part) to the secret titillation of seeing what they really are, what they reference.

Which calls into question the sincerity of repressive societies and social mores, I think.

(Reconsider "The Emperor's New Clothes": Did the emperor's people really believe that the emperor was wearing clothes, or did they only say they believed it so they could secretly laugh at the emperor in triumph, knowing he was naked as a jaybird right there in public? Was the child who pointed out his nakedness popping the bubble of people's blind faith, or of the secret thrill citizens got from the transgression of public nudity, and the shaming of their leader?)

Joshua Harris, referenced before on my blog, and the author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, writes candidly about his problems with lust in Boy Meets Girl (the more infuriating of the two books, if it's possible to rank levels of blinding rage). He writes about the time he sat down in a backyard hammock with his then-fiance, now-wife. He realized, laying there with her, that he was experiencing lust -- so he got up and walked away.

Lust is the sort of monster that chases you, though.

The further Harris got from lines that reasonable people might consider "the danger zone" (since in his case, Harris did not want to -- or want to want to -- have sex with his fiance before they married), the more ground was eaten up by "danger zone."

I mean, he couldn't sit in the backyard in broad daylight without thinking about sex.

Harris's solution is to continually redraw the lines, heading in the opposite direction from lust. This appears to be relatively reasonable until you read his advice for first dates: that after seriously considering whether a marriage relationship is possible with the girl you're asking out (the MAN ALWAYS ASKS), you purchase a book of questions and interview her during the date.

Harris tries to mitigate his anti-anti-anti-sex message in Boy Meets Girl by mentioning somewhere in the middle, in one sentence, that God doesn't mean for you to marry "someone you're not excited about going to bed with." Then he goes back to telling you how not to be excited about it.

But Harris doesn't understand what he's talking about, and it's probably not for the reasons you'd expect. He's actually too experienced.

He admits in I Kissed Dating Goodbye that he has had experience -- too much, as he tells it -- with dating, and with physical contact (though perhaps not intimacy) with girls, and that he regretted it, which is why he's telling teens not to go down the same path.

But he tells them instead to go down a path he's never been on, one that probably doesn't even really exist.

His arguments are based almost entirely in personal experience, but he doesn't have any personal experience in the kind of innocence he's advocating -- innocence not only of actions that may harm self or others, but innocence of impulse...innocence of understanding. ("Ignorance" is the word.)

In Freudian terms, Joshua Harris wants us to deny the id, to focus only on the superego.

In Freudian terms, Joshua Harris is an idiot.

Put Harris's arguments in terms of Eros and they crumble.

"You can avoid Eros!" Harris says. "Eros is not inevitable! Better yet, turn Eros off until your wedding night -- then do whatever you want!"

Put his arguments in terms of the emperor's new clothes and they're even sillier.

"Don't see that the emperor's naked! Don't see it until your wedding night and then see it all you want! Don't understand what the rest of us are laughing at until then! It's not even really funny until you're married!"

How, after all, are teens supposed to judge whether they've met someone they're "excited about going to bed with" if they've maintained the level of purity Harris is talking about? Purity that extends to thoughts?

I mean, are we seriously saying here (I'm using "we" to be polite) that we want teens to think less about sexual involvement, their boundaries, their safety? Are we really relying on absolute purity/control to keep them off each other -- and then relying on the exhausting, mind-numbing experience of a wedding day to allow them to blow off all the inhibitions they've built up over a lifetime of steadfast not-lust?

(If we are relying on wedding days to break down inhibitions, we need to make them more exhausting -- to really break them down to instinct-level -- and then probably throw in a cage-match or two for good measure, to get the adrenaline going. I'd be in favor of that.)

The truth is that Eros is either dealt with, or it's repressed -- it's not absent.

The repressed type of Eros -- the kind that causes manufacturers to blithely churn out hundreds of breast-like lampshades or thousands or millions of skirt-like dust ruffles -- makes everything into a reference to sex. Joshua Harris runs from the hammock to repress, not erase.

The dealt-with type of Eros normalizes itself. Mention the dust-ruffle-skirt connection and the chair is a chair again. Say the emperor is naked and he becomes sad and pitiful.

So here's my punchline, the telos for this post: This is why Christians claim that your wedding night will be "better" (insert obnoxious winking and nudging here) if you wait until then to have sex.

They don't say it out of a misguided notion that "beginner's luck" will help you through an entirely new and essentially awkward experience. They don't say it (though some may think this is why they're saying it) because losing your virginity to your spouse is "spiritual."

It's not that they're saying it will be more enjoyable, but it's not that they're lying to you, either. I think they're knowingly pointing out the secret of noticing-the-emperor's-nakedness-but-not-telling-anyone; I think they're giggling at the breast-light.

They say it'll be better if you wait because repression really does make everything sexier.

Response to comment: Celebs cut their hair!!

I'm posting this here because I wrote a really long response in the comments, which I then lost. But I'd also like to hear what other people think about patriarchy. (I'm assuming this is okay with you, Ben, but let me know if not and I'll repost in comments.)

Here's Ben's comment:

"At the risk of being a dissenting voice, I think the notion of patriarchy making you read fashion magazines is a little...well, I mean, I barely know who those people were, so it's got to be something more specific to you.

And, to take the other side, no, I don't feel compelled to read politics magazines either. Whatever is going on with respect to women and fashion these days, I'm going to hazard that they are in some ways as responsible for it as men are for the travesty that is politics.

I was listening to two female critics talk about actresses, and whether or not they've had plastic surgery, and they said, "but we all have that moment that takes us out of the film, when we're like 'yeah, but what about her hair' or whatever. And I thought, "No, no that's just you." Because, honestly, I've just never, ever thought of it. Maybe that (some?) women have that moment is a patriarchal one, but I don't see the male gaze or what have you within that moment itself.

just not our thing, sorry"

***

Well, that's fair enough, I suppose, as an "I don't jive with that" response.

Except that the equation of you (an individual) with patriarchy (a hierarchical social system) doesn't jive. And I never accused men of knowing who female celebs are -- in fact, I'd expect them/you not to, if what I'm saying is at all accurate.

Men have the option of not knowing in a patriarchal culture; white men have the option of not knowing anything at all. (I don't believe you've taken this route, Ben, but some have.) Being a white man is being normal, invisible, individually powerful. White middle-class people (again, I'm not accusing anyone of being middle-class) are the ones who get to talk about individual responsibility, because a straight, white middle-class man is "normal," meaning his privilege is made invisible -- and talking about laziness or oversensitivity or individual responsibility of marginalized groups is a way to keep that privilege invisible.

It's not that we're racist -- it's that they're lazy! It's not that women are reacting to us or the society we've historically presided over, it's that they LIKE to dress up in pretty things and wear high heels and make up! They like paying attention to hair -- it's why they do it! People on welfare are taking advantage of us and need to be stopped! Black people are better at sports and talk funny!

It's only because we have "men's" bathrooms and "women's" bathrooms, not "transsexual" bathrooms! We're not prejudiced, it's just how the system IS.

And there's where I think the male gaze can be seen clearly, even for the ones doing the looking. By "male gaze," I don't mean individual men's eyes looking anymore than Freud meant individual penises when he wrote about the phallus. Women are complicit in the "male gaze," too, and certainly to the extent that we're explicitly policing each other's hairstyles in celeb magazines. But just because it's equal-opportunity-cisgendered heteronormativizing doesn't mean it isn't patriarchy.

If we were free of gender policing, of the kind of heternormative patriarchy that Marxists claimed was inevitable thanks to the capitalist system, we wouldn't make life a living hell for so many transgender people.

The only reason it's set up this way is the "normalness" and invisibility of the white middle class (in modern capitalism). Only in this kind of society could Freud propose such a bizarre system of family alliances that rely on a certain familial structure (two parents, for instance), a certain middle-class hierarchy (dad possesses the phallus, always), a certain middle-class neurosis (power over nurturing or any other covetable value), and find acceptance. When you remove any of those elements, psychoanalysis falls apart -- in fun ways, but completely.

It may be helpful to note here that anthropologists have linked the beginning of women's fashion to the beginning of capitalism: male capitalists, who had power, stopped peacocking around like they'd done during Henry VIII's time and instead showed their wealth through how their women dressed. Men adorned women, more or less, to indicate their wealth to other men -- women were actually dressed to be looked at by other men. The male gaze is absolutely present, and appropriative of women's bodies, in that moment. How could it not be present in all the moments based on that?

Are women not looking at themselves with the same evaluative gaze when they adorn themselves, now? Are women not in the process of evaluating themselves and each other through the imaginary, appropriative stare of those men? Doesn't it seem possible, even likely, that women have merely internalized the male gaze?

Perhaps we've moved beyond this history into something new. I mention consumer culture for no small reason in my original post -- I'm willing to blame capitalism rather than men. But if we have moved on, it's strange that we're doing the same things.

Women are socialized differently, to think about haircuts, to notice dirt and feel the need to clean it up, etc. It's true that women police each other in these things more than men do. But it's certainly not true when men claim "it doesn't matter to me -- it doesn't matter." A man who doesn't need to think about haircuts or the need to clean up after himself is a man with privilege. Such a man is living in a world where women think about their haircuts in relation to how beautiful they can be for their romantic partners, and who have a felt need to do the cleaning necessary for sanitary living. For some reason, these women are reduced by the same society to begging for haircut compliments and nagging about the laundry and the dishes, because that's the vocabulary and power offered to them. The only other option for these haircut-and-dirt-noticing women is to try to stop noticing -- in which case they may still be policed and punished as "not feminine enough" or told they will "never get a man."

But again, all this pales in comparison to the way the whole system comes crashing down on people who, for individual or spiritual or practical reasons choose to define themselves outside of the gender binary entirely. And that's IF we let them define themselves -- in which case, we still pathologize them and then make them (you know, for legal reasons) choose from between "male" or "female."

We've made some progress, such that not all transgender individuals are left jobless and homeless by a vitriolic prejudice, but we're certainly not beyond the "male gaze" yet. Not by a long shot.

Carte Blanche: Sue the Obscure

As a follow-up to my previous post on Jude the Obscure, here are questions still plaguing us about Sue Bridehead, Jude's second "wife" (they couldn't be legally married, since they'd each married before), who loves Jude but ends up going back to her hated first husband Phillotson as penance when all her children are killed by little "Father Time" -- Jude's first child from his first marriage -- who then offs himself as well.

"One would think that all my questions would have been answered here [in the previous post], but no. The following quotes, and I think there may be one more but I couldn't find it, niggle at my brain. She seems to be referring to something that is never fully revealed in the novel. Of course there must be secrets in novels and the story is not about Sue, but Jude, right?!?!?...

[See quotes in the comments section of the previous blog post...they're too lengthy to quote here.]

Again, Sue seems to hold deep inside her something that is very psychologically unresolved about Phillotson and especially his body.

Another description of Sue as a child, before her father took her to London, pictures her as a bold tomboy who was fearless. That description is contrasted with a post London description of Sue as quivering.

So my question is, 'What is the secret that Hardy was hiding? Was Hardy describing a person that he could not even understand himself, because the secret was too dark even for him to fully admit?'"

Well. Good question.

First, I don't think it's necessarily true that Jude is the main character, or at least not untrue that Sue is the main character. Sue is at least as interesting as Jude, and at least as psychologically complex -- I think more so.

And Sue was probably abused. Let's face it.

But you're right -- Thomas Hardy doesn't seem to face it. He prances around the question like a five-year-old around a maypole. The question of why he does this is an interesting one, though it falls dangerously close to literary theory, psychoanalyzing an author like this.

That's alright. I don't mind literary theory every now and again.

So, in terms of what Hardy meant by all his hinting, I think it bears repeating, first, that the difference between Thomas Hardy and, say, George Eliot, is that Hardy's books (almost) always end with the main character in a pathetic state thanks to social pressures and/or one mistake made early in life that can never be overcome. The inflexibility of Hardy's Victorian England and, I'd say, the inflexibility of his characters, is what causes this.

Dorothea Brooks (Middlemarch, George Eliot -- one of my favorite books ever), for instance, marries a stodgy professor early enough in life, and ends up happy, though impoverished, with her second husband (ooh -- should have put in a spoiler alert. Sorry. It's still worth reading; shockingly, the appeal of Victorian social novels isn't often the "will they/won't they" suspense). Sue Bridehead marries a stodgy professor early in life and ends up with a nervous condition and the murder-suicide of all her kids.

These are obviously vastly different views of life at work here, not only within the characters and scenarios they create, but between Eliot and Hardy. It doesn't hurt to remember who's actually behind the wheel in driving Sue insane.

And in that light, I'd tend more toward believing that Hardy's reticence in telling what happened to Sue as a child, or what Phillotson may have done to her in their marriage, is more related to Hardy's sense of social rules and a damnable urge to follow them, than that Hardy can't take the darkness of his own intimations.

He had Tess raped, after all -- or did he? [Cue dramatic music here.]

Hardy does seem a tough guy to pin down when it comes to sexual abuse. Most scholars agree that Tess of the d'Urbervilles was raped and ended up paying for that with her life (after stabbing that man to death) thanks to the social stigma put on "loose" women. But it isn't crystal clear; the narrative camera pans politely away at the moment we'd expect to see violence and naked misogyny (pardon the pun), leaving Tess tangled up in a roadside bush with a stranger and ambiguity.

Hardy seems either 1. to be suggesting rape without saying it because it would be socially unacceptable to do so for a Victorian audience or 2. to want to leave the question of Tess's "virtue" a mystery, as he likely believes (as do we all) that even if the encounter was consensual, Tess doesn't deserve the shame and opprobrium that she gets; by not specifying whether it was rape or not, Hardy can get the reader to come to that conclusion without coming out and stating it.

Hardy is less ambiguous about other things (like that Tess is all natural and good), and there are other authors (Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter) who deal with these things (consensual sex not being the end of the world, except to Puritans) directly, so it's hard to know what Hardy's intention is.

It's possible that what Hardy lacked was the language of psychology. Freud wasn't around until a decade or so later, and it seems that lounging on couches was the closest anyone in Victorian times had gotten to being psychoanalyzed.

And I refer to my last-year's blog post on evangelicalism, repression and sex: I do think that there's something to be said about repression (such as in Victorian society) making everything sexier. It's possible that everyone in Victorian England knew exactly what Hardy was talking about, but we bikini-models-selling-cars twenty-first-century-ites aren't subtle enough to read between the lines correctly.

Anyway, that's all a matter of debate, what Hardy himself meant by Sue's half-confessions. It's possible he wasn't more specific because he didn't know how to be; it's possible he was purposefully ambiguous to allow the audience to form more personal attachments ("this happened to me, too" -- and fill in the blanks with common experience); it's possible Hardy himself was abused, and it ruined his life and so he doesn't want to talk about it, or that he knew someone who was. It could be that lacking the psychoanalytical tools forged a few decades later, Hardy made some gesture at explaining something he understood only intuitively. Or it's possible that Hardy assumed (probably rightly) that the Victorians would reject his work if it was too specific or "pornographic."

But I would bet, based on his disgusted reaction to society's disgusted reaction to Jude, that Hardy wrote in a way that he intended to almost fit within the social parameters of his times. I suspect Hardy of having the agenda of wanting to be accepted and to make society more open and progressive (by standing right on the edge of what they could handle), and I suspect the inability to be or do both is what frustrated him, post-Jude.

He should have known that society would kick against his goads, and been prepared to deal with being kicked every now and then. Reformers are never popular, and expecting that he should be was a bit of hubris on Hardy's part.

As for poor Sue, she was too brittle to withstand what came later: the failure of her first marriage, which had been guaranteed from the start, secured her inability to love Jude the way she might have otherwise, and the financial difficulties they met with (thanks to society not putting up with an unmarried couple living together) caused the break in Father Time that destroyed the whole family.

It's no mistake that the child who killed the others was Jude's from a first marriage. This is an obvious symbol of how their pasts haunted Sue (who spent all her time with the kids), especially, and couldn't be overcome. Father Time was dour and delightless, not childlike at all, and not a well-developed character.

Casaubon, Dorothea's first husband, was also dour and delightless, and also dies; but the difference between George Eliot's view of life (and the way she lived it; she lived with a lover much of her adult life, creating a life for herself that was outside the social parameters of her times, and yet, apparently, happy) and Thomas Hardy's is that none of Hardy's characters are ever able to just shrug their shoulders and say "huh. Oh well" when life doesn't go as planned -- and then try again.

Instead they end up dying tragic deaths. In the rain. Alone.

Perhaps more than anything else, I find Hardy's insistence that life should be good (independent of how we deal with it or our choices) and people accepted as they are, and his antagonism toward other people who are also, after all, scared and subject to the same social constraints, problematic. He seems to feel that the smarter, more ambitious types like Jude are owed something by the world, something that isn't owed to those who have work they enjoy and follow rules they understand.

He seems to feel that life should be lived idealistically, transcendentally -- beyond social constructs and rules -- and that's fine. But he might have considered actually moving to the woods and becoming a Transcendentalist if that's what he most wanted.

I'm not surprised that he stopped writing after Jude. But I am sad that he stopped bitterly and judgementally, rather than with a recognition that society was no more to blame for its incompatibility with his ideals than he was. That requirement that all things conform to his will sounds suspiciously like the authoritarian mindset he disliked.

And I'm pretty sure Sue suffered for it.

Special Features Commentary: Calendarsthenics on CU

Well, all, on the eve of failing for a second month to do all I tacitly promised to do here on CU, I decided my first month of meeting my post-number goals should end with a listing of all I haven't done, and more.

Over the last eight months or so, I've built up a set of expectations that have slowly congealed and eventually hardened into requirements for CU. You may have sensed the presence of these internal regulations already, but thanks to my not always following them, you might have figured they were more like guidelines than rules.

You were wrong. They're rules. I just keep breaking them.

So as to keep your scorecard more accurately riddled with my errors, and to cleanse my guilt over not posting a movie review for two months in a row, now, here's what you can expect from CU, both in the past and in the future.

Remember, though, the telos of Continue Unprotected: My posting a schedule of events is just as likely to cause me to aspire to offend you by continually flouting it as it is to keep me on task.

Posting frequency: I expect myself to post two items a day, ideally one long and one short.

Type of post, and frequency:

Once a week: At least one PSA and one Local Trivia; SYD reviews in season

Twice a month: Confessions

Once a month: Movie Review, In Defense of Poppery, Quantifiable Living, Accusations, Unsolicited Advice, New word, something involving Freud, something involving my personal life or family

Special features, to be posted as inspired: Phrases That Never Help, Mix CD lists, Carte Blanche answers

Anyone who wants to count up the percentage of this schedule I've stuck to and give me some kind of score is welcome to.

Just don't tell me about it.

In Defense of Poppery, XVI: Saws 1-7

Pop example: Saw film cycle, I-VII

Problematic critical reception: “The Problem of Saw: ‘Torture Porn’ and the Conservatism of Contemporary Horror” by Christopher Sharrett – excerpts:

“Most important, [in the 1960’s] the horror film began to eschew the supernatural in favor of the psychological, as the genre looked to horror as the product of middleclass life, not caused by external demons or a mad scientist's freak accident. The genre investigated the neurosis that is basic, as the heirs of Freud inform us, to the creation of notions of normality and otherness.”

“The psychological themes of the horror film, with their adjacent social criticism, became grossly transmogrified into the misogynist teen-kill "slasher" films of the Eighties, the most degraded example being the Friday the 13th cycle.”

What redeems it: Oh, how sad for us. All the “good” horror happened in the 1960’s and had socially liberal messages. And now all we have is this unreasonable, meaningless Saw cycle and its subgeneric cohort to watch.

Anyone who cannot see a reason for a horror film or, even worse, a series of horror films, is not thinking creatively enough or is too elitist to see the truth. Christopher Sharrett seems to be both: calling a horror subgenre “misogynist teen-kill ‘slasher films of the Eighties” and then citing its ‘most degraded example,” the Friday the 13^th movies, implies that those films weren’t expressing a real fear felt by people (perhaps particularly teens) at the time they were produced…and implying that there are fears that are somehow more worthy of expression.

Really? Fears that become ‘worthy’ of horror flicks? How does that work, exactly?

Acting as though certain types of fear are somehow more civilized than others, perhaps even assuming that on viewing these movies we’ll all instantly give in to our ids and become serial killers (assuming also that we’re all, at heart, serial killers minus opportunity), is acting as if we are all basically evil and must, even in our expressions of primal fear, strive to “rise above.”

We, the horror viewers, are not children. We know that this is make believe but also that it in some way reflects our reality. If there is misogyny in our horror films, that’s probably because misogyny exists and has to be dealt with. Showing women tortured may titillate as well as horrify, but if it does so, that’s because the problem of torturing women being sexy already existed. The job of horror is not to pretend these issues don’t exist, but to draw them out and resolve them.

This is not a problem, because horror isn’t an Aesop fable. Horror films are not normalizing. We do not learn how to be by watching horror films, not directly. Everyone knows you go to a scary movie to be scared and confront yourself and fears, not to figure out how to function properly in society.

Horror is a subversive genre, and while Sharrett says “the subversive component nearly vanished, as the genre was relegated to a lowbrow vehicle for shouting "boo!" that its snobbish attackers accused it of being since its inception” way back in 1980, I say this in reference not only to the “great” horror movies of the 1960’s (some of which are definitely great: Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, for instance. Watch them), but even to the “torture porn” we’ve been seeing recently.

Horror is about showing the unshowable truths that comedy and drama reign in. Our bodies degrade. We die. Time never returns us to where we think now we probably were happiest. And when we were there/then, we weren’t as happy as now we think we must have been. The things we love flee from us, somehow or other. We don’t get beautiful monologues on our deathbeds, declaring “the rest is silence” – it just is. Saying so subverts those narrative myths and the politenesses that allow us to live narrated lives.

Horror is unruly, and that should make analysis of it that much more rich. There are narratives that “don’t work,” that don’t function as they should, because those are controlled accounts of our lives (or the lives of characters), but horror films that terrify – ones that are popular being the best guess as to which ones definitely do terrify us – do “work.” They obviously work. They’re meant to scare us, and if they do, they’re working.

So this brings me to my defense of the Saw movies, which I believe this reviewer has completely – perhaps willfully – misunderstood. The premise of the cycle of films is, more or less, that a serial killer called Jigsaw has begun setting traps for his victims that end up with most of those victims murdering themselves, mainly through failure to adhere to the extremely rigid rules set by Jigsaw, or by being physically incapable of fulfilling them. (Spoilers to follow) Each movie reveals more about the previous movie’s events as well as furthering the torture in what becomes a smorgasbord of physical torture; Russian doll style, these films nest together such that layers of information filter down through the viewer’s understanding of each previous movie to change “what you know” to “what you thought you knew.” Jigsaw’s original intent, the one he repeats throughout, seems to be to teach people to “truly live,” in a needlessly complex set of Raymond-K.-Essel scenarios. What took Fight Club thirty seconds takes the Saw franchise seven movies.

Sometimes this seems ridiculous. And young teen boys, which over and over again I see listed as the supposed audience for these films, probably do have a stake in proving their nascent manliness by being “less scared” or “less grossed-out” than their friends at the extremely torturous traps set by Jigsaw, making the torture for them an end in itself. But set those imaginary boys aside for a second, and set aside the visceral gruesomeness of the movies, and take a look at what’s going on with Jigsaw’s supposed motivations, an “inane morality” that Sharrett dismisses without even bothering to interrogate it. You’ve missed the point, fellow reviewer. This statement of motivation, and Jigsaw’s moral system, is the point of these movies. The torture is about the morality, not the other way around.

Specifically, the torture is the effect of the stringent and extremely specific morality of Jigsaw. He creates these traps assuring the audience, whatever audience he can get, that if they play by the rules, his victims will emerge victorious and more full of life than they ever were. Most don’t survive, which he sees as weakness deserving of death.

But here’s the kicker, and for my part the whole meaning of the cycle (and a major spoiler): some appear to survive the torture. Some appear to go on living after their ordeals. But none of them do.

In the end, the Russian dolls, so brilliant in their constant re-framing of the events of previous movies, reveal the truth about Jigsaw’s hard-ass morality, which is that nobody ever survives it. Ever.

Jigsaw doesn’t survive, obviously, because he had cancer when he started his escapades. But every single victim he puts through “a test” or “a game,” as he likes to call them, either becomes one of his cohort, putting others to constant tests and being tested themselves, committing the same atrocities he does, in fact; or they die. Once you have started down the path of an absolutist morality that “takes no prisoners” and shows no mercy, you have already sealed your doom. You are already either also evil or dead by your own hand.

The fact that his victims die by machines, or die by their own hands in some way or another, or that they’re willing to kill others once they’ve been traumatized by their own horrible experiences, supports my hypothesis that the films are about the personal standards we hold ourselves and others to...and in fact the horror of believing that (in this modern, machine-filled, medically supported world) we have the choice to be perfect, but somehow can never make that choice, can never achieve it. If we could, somehow we could have lived forever.

No killer needs to lay a hand on us for us to “die” psychologically in this way. This level of stringent morality, this perspective on life, is suicide.

Jigsaw fails. He fails every single time to produce the effect he says he seeks, which is the production of a fully alive, grateful, absolutely moral human being. His failures betray the principle he adheres to. They show that such mercilessness cannot help but destroy.

And from that perspective, I can see the point of the torture. It’s a physical manifestation of a psychological reality – a physical inducement of that psychological reality, in fact. The physicality is not the point. “Mortify the flesh”: that is the point. "Mind over matter" is the point. The point is the psychological and metaphorical link between the body and “the flesh,” the parts of us that keep requiring critique, that keep failing at perfection, and the supposed liberation of the mind from that flesh that can only/supposedly be achieved through torture.

But then we torture ourselves, and the torture always fails.

My point, here, is that this is to me a revolutionary message for a horror film to be sending, that a judgmental eye will always end up gouging itself out. And it does not, definitely does not, read as a conservative message to me, something that Sharrett accuses it of doing.

In fact, to the contrary: I'd say Saw is one of the most effectively liberal cycles of film I have seen in a long time – more effective even (perhaps) than bleeding-heart documentary because, like a good bleeding-heart documentary, it gets us mad, but unlike many of those documentaries, it also makes us fear for our lives in our guts and not just in our brains.

What could be more internal and psychologically basic than that?

Dear Dr. Freud,

You probably remember that I told you a story when I’d found out my friend died in July, about how my Mom had found me crying in my room one night and had the guidance counselor call me in the next day to try to “deal” with it, or whatever he was supposed to do – but we left, and talked, and watched the Office, and I never got to the point of that story, which was that I rarely allow(ed) myself to cry alone after that. Partly thanks to the paranoia of living with my Mom – her paranoia, really, but it ran over into everybody – and partly thanks to my own dysfunctional ways of dealing with myself, I didn’t feel safe with “privacy.”

I mean, she’d proven that I didn’t actually have any, that it was an illusion, when she came in and saw me crying and then told my guidance counselor, who didn’t know me or my situation at all. Or when she read my journal, or the letter(s) I wrote to my English teacher, or when she told other people that I didn’t have any real problems, that it was “just PMS [laugh]”.

At least in public I could see my audience.

So I only cried in front of other people, which was weird because it was also embarrassing. It’s not like that’s what I wanted; it’s just all I could manage.

It’s a weird thing for an introvert to need other people to help process in this way, I think. It makes me wonder sometimes if I’m a closet extrovert who was ruined by a strange childhood. (But I don’t worry much about it. Who really cares? I am what I am.)

I’ve never been a closet depressive, though – I mean, I’m not one of those people who hides sadness well, and I’m probably not the sort who would make a good alcoholic or addict, either. I’m not good at hiding or masking, and so I’m not good at denial. Which is why it surprised me when you pointed it out, even unwittingly, about the airport and watching Spencer go – I had to think about it. (How many times had I avoided the question? ‘How are you’ should be simple. What else might I be hiding from myself?) I would usually know these things about myself before anyone.

My eye is still red from last night, the crying and lack of sleep – the right one.

I mailed a letter to Spencer yesterday, mostly made up of Mitch Hedberg jokes. I didn’t have an envelope, so I wrote it on one side of a blank sheet of paper and folded and taped it shut and walked to the post office. (That's where I went when I left; then I went to the library to get an Advocate.)

I brought that handwriting book back to the library Monday, and the dream book along with it – so I don’t know what the book would say about my dreams last night. You were there, and we were talking for a long time. We were outside, near trees, and it was daytime. Those are good signs. I looked for the dream book when I woke up this morning, wanting to know exactly what they meant.

The dream book never told me anything I couldn’t have figured out by myself, though. And the handwriting book didn’t tell me anything at all. Small “I,” it said, indicated a poor ego and insecurity – a poor sense of self. It rushed off onto other “I”s, seriffed and sans-serif, mother and father strokes, independent-thinkers and smothered, resentful child-adults, and didn’t give me any more space for explanation. I remember the first journal where I used “i,” and in that case, they were right – I was insecure and insufficient. I was 14.

But the next year, I took Algebra 2 and learned about imaginary numbers, the italic i symbol for them, and adopted it. That’s what my I stands for: the possibility of something uncountable. i intend to be invisible and undefinable. i intended to find a place to hide. I only use small-i when I’m writing to myself.

I’ve carved out places, in other words, to be myself and sufficient and to find privacy.

But I’m glad I didn’t have to rely on them yesterday.

This is all pretty pretentious, but I guess the idea of a blog is pretentious to begin with – so what else could I do?

My intention was to say thanks.

So thanks.

Etc.

A.

P.S. – Yes, it was probably a sex dream. They’re always sex dreams.

PSA: Watching the Watchman's...er...

Anyone who still hasn't seen the movie should be advised that while the graphic novel Watchmen does an excellent job of obscuring the fact that Dr. Manhatten is entirely naked through most of the action of the book, the movie does not.

You just have to get used to it.

Providentially, while fighting in Vietnam and towering over the jungles as Vietcong cowered below, Dr. Manhatten still wore some form of Speedo-type underwear -- if he hadn't, I'm betting we would have seen a marked increase in Freud's "Little Hans" type disorders in comic-book crowd men.

The religion of women...perhaps.

I read a well-selected article posted on FB by one of my FB friends who frequently selects articles well -- this one was from The Atlantic, a magazine I've decided I love after years of subscription, and so was already heavily weighted to be a good one -- about women's cinema...or I suppose what might be called women's cinema if such a thing were acknowledged to exist.

The author said this:

The Sex and the City and Twilight franchises may have less cosmic implications [than Eat, Pray, Love, which gives women permission to treat break-ups as a big deal], but they too allow women to self-mythologize and assign importance to matters of sex, dating, and intimate conflict—whether they're offering a fantasy of single life as a marvelous, celebratory adventure or a fantasy of literally undying, all-consuming love, what they're offering women is a chance to see their own most personal concerns dramatized and given focus. To see themselves, and their feelings, as important.

I've already diatribed about women being compelled to care about "lesser" things like fashion and hairstyles where men are less compelled, so that's not where I'm going with this.

What strikes me about this quote and this idea is that there is elitism in liking literary fiction over romance genre fiction. And it's justified elitism, to some extent, (I'd like to think) because romance fiction is repetitive and almost automatic, like porn. The point is not the content, but the chemical reaction it triggers in the brain.

These somewhat more sophisticated iterations of "romantic themes" of "sex, dating, and intimate conflict," though, aren't really only triggering chemical reactions, are they? The idea is that because we have to learn to read literary fiction, and properly, it rises above the baser instincts in us to become "art," where women's concerns (always earthy) don't rise above women's baser instincts to relate and emote, and so are not art.

But doesn't romantic fiction "teach" us to read it? We're not born knowing red roses are "romantic," are we?

The heroic epic can be said (Freud certainly would have agreed) to focus and dramatize men's insecurities and struggles, and eventual victories over those turmoils. Maybe Twilight is the equivalent of the classic epic.

I wonder these things not so much as a critic, but as a writer. I find my own fiction to rely very much on "tell, don't show" sensibilities; it explains every intimate detail of the characters in question, reasons out their actions before they even take them, and otherwise commits all the sins of genre fiction that "show, don't tell"-ers grieve over. It's solipsistic to the extreme. Even my plots involve mind-reading and getting lost in one's own inner workings...and some of my fiction couldn't be said to even HAVE a plot.

I mean, this is why I don't write fiction anymore.

But what if these inward-leaning ways of writing aren't inferior, just misused? Maybe there's a way to turn the world of an intimate relationship into the whole world, without going all What Dreams May Come on everyone and externalizing the drama.

I should probably read some more Virginia Woolf. But I suspect I'd probably better read some more LJ Smith, who I loved as a pre-teen, and who probably understood more about hero tropes (for girls) than most of the other authors I've read since.