"Diamonds Are Forever": A Movie Review.

This essay is for "Snow White and Her Evil Queen."

"Probably the most forceful and driving writer of thrillers in England."

Raymond Chandler, Commenting on Ian Fleming's 1956 classic, Diamonds Are Forever.

Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Director Guy Hamilton, Sean Connery as James Bond, Jill St. John as Tiffany Case, Charles Gray as Ernst Blofeld. (United Artists)

Opening Credits -- 1956.

A casino in Monaco. It is a windy evening as a man in summer evening clothes -- white dinner jacket, black tie, highly polished black shoes, trousers pressed to perfection with a pleat so fine that you could cut your fingers on it -- arrives in a sleek Ashton Martin at the entrance to this establishment. He is six-feet tall. Cool, steel grey eyes take in the atmosphere. A glance at his Rolex indicates that it is exactly midnight.

With a casual nod at the host of this establishment, who appears in rented evening clothes with dentures gleaming and a discrete handing off of a hundred dollar note to this person, the man strolls -- like a panther gliding through the jungle -- to an empty seat at the roulette table.

Women wearing expensive evening gowns, dripping with jewelry, graying men whose visible affluence explains the presence of their youthful companions, all quickly make way for the new arrival. The man's physical presence is so powerful that, even in this setting, one senses danger and strength as well as mystery. He alters the energy in the room. Unconsciously, the women gravitate towards him.

"Martini, chilled ... shaken, not stirred." He whispers to a waiter hovering at his elbow.

"Sir?" asks the croupier.

"$20,000 in chips."

He removes a gold cigarette case from his jacket pocket. A silver lighter appears in his hand when a blond Kim Novak-double in a black, flawless gown -- something by Hubert de Givenchy -- and a perfect string of pearls, matched by diamond and pearl earrings places her hand over his, takes the lighter and offers him ... fire.

Enjoying a lingering glance at his new companion, the man intones those immortal words:

"The name is Bond, James Bond."

I.

President John F. Kennedy's favorite recreational reading, a character who is the clearest representative of male fantasy and idealized masculinity for American men of my generation -- probably older and younger men also -- is Ian Lancaster Fleming's "James Bond."

Any mention of the Bond novels and classic films will infuriate femi-Nazis and the politically correct thought police. This is an important reason to discuss both, also to delight in their many guilty pleasures. I will deal with the issue of Bond's alleged nefarious influence on males in "due course." An American cousin of Mr. Bond is William F. Buckley, Jr.'s "Blackford Oakes," known to his friends as "Blackie."

Hollywood, take note: Men want an opportunity to indulge in maleness. They are willing to shell out their hard-earned cash for this experience. Men will flock to any movie with action sequences, many guns, women who are scantilly clad or (better) unclad. This is one of the few constants in a changing world. If you can provide men with an opportunity to be "guys" -- in a guilt-free environment -- then you will certainly make billions of dollars. Ignore the cretinous review in The New York Times by A.O. Scott and see Shoot 'Em Up. (Monica Belluci is worth $12.50, whatever her latest movie happens to be.)

James Bond is the ultimate male fantasy experience. Bond is also a troublesome model of idealized masculine identity for persons of all genders in the twentieth century and beyond. Every man in some corner of his soul wishes to be James Bond -- at least once in a while. Bond always has great cars. The 1964 Ashton Martin driven by Sean Connery in Dr. No was recently sold for close to twenty million dollars or more to an aging would-be Bond, who made a fortune in the stock market but happens to be five-foot three, myopic, paunchy and married to a twenty-six year-old stewardess (sorry, "flight attendant") because it is a "spiritual thing."

In 2010, the same car is expected to fetch between $5-10 million more at auction. The man who last purchased the Ashton Martin may have passed away from excessive sexual exertions with his flight attendant spouse.

These novels and films -- at least the films that stay true to the spirit of the original books -- are documents of an era. To update them or transform Bond into an Alan Alda-like politically correct male is box office suicide.

What is unique in Bond is not the brawn or adventures, which were available from any number of other hard-boiled heros at the time, but his high degree of civilization. Philip Marlowe was one model for Mr. Fleming, another was (of course) Sherlock Holmes, who gets a nod in this movie. "Elementary, my dear Dr. Leiter." Bond says this to his American counterpart, Felix Leiter of the CIA. An African-American version of Bond is the original detective, John Shaft. (A review essay examining Shaft was posted at Critique, then plagiarized by Ms. Dargis at the Times.) Ginger Thompson? Who comes up with these names?

The best screen Bond is still Sean Connery, followed closely by Pierce Brosnan. Daniel Craig is promising in the role, but there is a danger that Craig's Bond will be turned into another muscle guy. Mistake. Bond's ready wit must always be on display, tinged with seeming cynicism to conceal all sentimentality. Sentimentality is still unacceptable in the male of the English-speaking species. Ernest Hemingway's definition of courage is at the center of American notions of masculinity -- "Grace under pressure." Grace is a quality I associate as much (or more) with feminine power and presence. Bond must have this polish and taste added to his ruthlessness. Bond must remain "half monk and half hit man."

For a man in England or America, traditionally, feelings are to be mastered. Stoicism is a requirement of public life. A Dashiell Hammett hero says: "I was shot in the head yesterday ... I shouldn't even be walking around yet." (The line is turned into a joke by Neil Simon.)

The affinity between artists and criminals is familiar from psychology 101, a course which I never bothered to take. Bond is an alter ego of the artist as sanctioned antinomian. Bond is Ian Fleming as action hero:

"There's a whole theory about it. The artist and the criminal both divorce themselves from society by their life patterns, they tend to be loners, they both tend to have brief periods of intense activity and then long periods of rest. ..."

Richard Stark, Lemons Never Lie (New York: Dorchester, 1971), p. 110. (A punctuation mark was removed from this quotation since my previous review of this work. I have restored that punctuation mark to the citation.)

Sartre on Genet for thesis writers in psychology who are slow on the uptake. Richard Stark is a pseudonym for Donald E. Westlake, a genius at the crime novel genre and a fine writer of scripts. Philosophical outlaws/antinomians include Antonio Negri, Michel Foucault, Jean Paul Sartre, Noam Chomsky, Bertrand Russell (arrested in his eighties for protesting against the Vietnam War, after serving prison time as a pacifist during World War I), and others. Jean Paul Sartre, "The Eternal Couple of the Criminal and the Saint," in Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (New York: Mentor, 1966), pp. 86-154 ("The beauty of the criminal is the perfect organization of evil, its plenitude, its perfect visibility, its purity, its power, its staggering evidence.")

Moronic psychobabblers should distinguish between Sebastian Faulks' "Engleby" and Anthony Burgess' "Enderby." (I am deliberately alternating my correct punctuation of the possessive for names ending in "s" in order to annoy the anally-retentive New Jerseyeans offering unsolicited "incorrect corrections.") If you cannot distinguish between those two literary characters, then you should go into politics.

I am now revising some of the same inserted "errors" for the fiftieth time. I will have to do so again the next time that I read this work. ("What is it like to be tortured?")

Take another look at my quote from Sartre's Genet, then consider the malice as well as sadism in censorship efforts directed at my writings because they're good: Compare Sebastian Faulks, Engleby (New York: Vintage International, 2007) with Anthony Burgess, Enderby (New York: Ballantine, 1968). Some shrinks are indeed too stupid to be able to distinguish between artist, intellectual, and criminal; others come to see all persons as criminals because criminals are all they know or deal with; still others become criminals without realizing it. ("Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.")

For an example of an absurd "understanding" of criminality and an inexplicable instance of influential American psychobabble, see Stanton E. Samenow, Ph.D., Inside the Criminal Mind (New York: Crown, 1984). Any time an author feels a need to list a degree, I get nervous. For a much better meditation on human subjectivity and society, see R.D. Laing, M.D., Self and Other (London: Penguin, 1969), p. 81 ("complementary identity"). "Laing is much better than Samenow," according to Juan Galis-Menendez, J.D. -- and don't forget Sigmund Freud, M.D., Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), pp. 68-69.

Cruelty is a theme in Fleming's novels and in my life. There is a great seductiveness in the power to torture others. This explains why Bond is always placed in horrible torture situations. Worse in the books than the movies. James Bond is charming when he wishes to be, polite, witty, well-read. Oxford or Sandhurst (Fleming attended Sandhurst, after Eton) seems to float up from my subconscious in association with Bond. He always knows the right wine. ("A Chateau Moughton-Rothschild 1953 goes perfectly with a steak dinner.") Bond knows music, theater, likes paintings, even as he is physically violent (when necessary) for Her Majesty's secret service. (This foregoing sentence was altered since my reading of it only two days ago.)

Bond's deft touch in unstrapping a brassiere -- one of life's exquisite pleasures -- is not to be missed in Fleming's likely detailed and rich description. Ladies and/or "female persons": a black brassiere -- which unsnaps from the front -- is a major erotic advantage and enticement if worn by a woman.

This paradox (a capacity for violence or fury combined with a high degree of civilization) is a culturally-mandated ideal of masculinity in the Anglo-American world, which goes a long way towards explaining many of the horrors of the twentieth century and our current troubles in Iraq. ("Raymond Chandler and the Simple Art of Murder.")

The cultivation of intelligence, courage, pleasure in violence, the urge to dominance and self-assertion -- the latter is, mysteriously, associated with eros -- is at the heart of that military-minded understanding of masculinity, which I dislike (intensely), as opposed to Bond's charm, humor, verbal adeptness and success with women, which I like much more. ("What a man's gotta do.")

Assessments of Bond (or of most things that matter) will require setting aside p.c. nostrums and the sort of bullshit which is much admired by denizens of East Village coffee shops. Evil behavior patterns are present in men and women. They are rationalized by everything from religion to feminism. There is no single evil religion or academic subject. No one gender or racial group has a monopology on virtue. No country is all-good or the opposite. It is necessary to say this obvious stuff in today's America.

It is also important to recognize that there are tendencies associated with masculinity and others linked to femininity in our culture that are really found in everyone, some of which should worry us more than others. I hate violence. I like eros and beauty. Western culture -- especially America -- cannot conceive of eros and beauty without violence in a heterosexual man. I suggest that these associations are dangerous and rarely explored philosophically. Psychologists, of course, play with their rats in laboratories and have no time to think about human beings. Mr. Bond could use some serious philosophical attention. How many psychobabblers read books these days? I mean good books and lots of them? Not many. They're too busy reading "studies." A t-shirt for the mathematically challenged -- like me -- says: "5 out of 4 people have trouble with math."

Notions of masculinity in America may be traced to Protestant individualism and the never-ending frontier, modernity, secularism, science and pragmatism. William James and Sigmund Freud will come in handy, so will Thomas Jefferson and Abe Lincoln. More worrisome is the presence of Al Capone and Marlon Brando, as the "Godfather," in the American masculine mind. At the point when such images surface in the psyche -- and they will for most men, quickly enough -- I opt for the feminine. Unfortunately, these ugly masculine images are not gender-specific. Plenty of women delight in cruelty and physical violence. New Jersey's Diana Lisa Riccioli is one such very twisted woman. Why the cover-up, Stuart Rabner? ("No More Cover-Ups and Lies, Chief Justice Rabner!")

Fleming displays a disturbing tendency towards sado-masochism (highly unattractive). This is veiled because of the conventions of the time. Fleming and his alter ego from the fifties are, it must be said, rightly regarded today as misogynistic, sexist, demeaning and insulting to women and homophobic. Bond thinks nothing of slapping a woman when necessary -- something which must be anathema to any decent man -- that I have certainly never done. He murders rivals without hesitation or qualms. This is one pathological result of that tendency to suppress feelings instilled in men early in life. Not the fictional Bond's actions, but rather the audience's unquestioning approval of them should frighten us.

My understanding of masculinity is more complex and indebted to feminism. More on that association later. True, culturally, I am a Latin as well as a "United States Person," as Gore Vidal says. As a result, I am assured (probably by a woman) that I am not smart enough for philosophy and an appropriate target for plagiarism.

Bond was never intended as a model English public school graduate. In fact, this "good English public school boy" type is the sort of person detested by Fleming, who served in British intelligence and saw some action, after graduating from Eton and Sandhurst -- being himself the model English public school boy that he came to despise. Doubles are a theme in the Bond stories, along with the death of identities, an ambiguous fascination with the mystery of Woman and the delights of women. Fleming's amusing names for characters are highly revealing -- "Pussy Galore" and "Tiffany Case" are unforgettable, as is "Goldfinger" and the charming "Plenty O'Toole."

To expect a 1950s (yes, I can write it that way) British action hero to adopt the mores of 2009 in America, let alone in trendy corners of Manhattan, is like objecting that Leonardo da Vinci did not paint automobiles or television sets. Such a criticism is idiotic, like A.O. Scott's review of the movie I just recommended.

Even more imbecilic is a review of a wonderful new television show "Viva, Laughlin" by one "Alessandra Stanley." The t.v. audience was not ready for a program indulging in "reality-breaking" and Operatic experimentation, which explains middle-brow reviewers like Ms. Stanley -- whose job is to reinforce and legitimate the prejudices of comfortable readers and viewers, plopping down before their t.v. sets and belching and/or farting. Presumably, that latter bodily function is not intended as a critical comment on the t.v. show being seen: "Glee"? "Gray's Anatomy"? "The L-Word"?

An "error" was inserted in this foregoing sentence since my previous review of this essay. I have now corrected that "error," until the next time I review this essay when it will be restored to the text.

I want readers to have a feel for my experience and the conditions under which these essays are produced. I can only hope that American journalists at the Times, especially, would not be idiotic or evil enough to cooperate with censorship imposed on anyone. We'll find out soon enough. ("America's Holocaust.")

No doubt Ms. Stanley approves of The Flintstones. Come to think of it, so do I! -- perhaps for different reasons.

Bond may be seen as a protest against the suffocating conventions of mid-twentieth century British society, a society which is an object of love and hostility (never hatred) for Ian Fleming. No, this has nothing to do with my feelings about America. Relax, I am against violence and "for" saving whales.

Many or most men have a harem fantasy. Fleming certainly does. Not me. I have a "one woman who is a double" fantasy -- and a lingering, fragile hope. Is there a woman who isn't a double? This question would be a fascinating essay topic for a very brave man. See Anthony Burgess, "Grunts From a Sexist Pig," in But Do Blonds Prefer Gentlemen? (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986), p. 1. (" ... I recognize that anything a man says is likely to cause feminist rage ...")

There is something about women that allows for greater flexibility, adaptability, elusiveness in their constructed identities. These qualities are useful and appropriate in the cultural funhouse in which we find ourselves these days. Every woman is at least dual: Evil Queen and Snow White all in one. This duality generates two reactions from men: 1) most men seek dominance or control, presuming to determine which of her personas is allowed to thrive (such an attitude is always hurtful to a woman's protean nature); luckily, 2) some men relish freedom of self-invention and share it with women, welcoming a woman's mystery as one source of her necessary freedom. This attitude is always conducive to a woman's spiritual flourishing and male survival.

To love a woman is to allow or help her "to be." She needs that Evil Queen to become the good, strong and independent woman that she must be for the persons she loves. The self needs her shadow. Evidently, saying such things, supporting a woman for the presidency, favoring equal rights and -- long ago -- the ERA Amendment makes me "sexist." I deny the charges and put the plaintiffs to their proofs." A new "error" was inserted by New Jersey's hackers, once again, providing me with a warm, nostalgic sense of familiarity.

"More perfectly than any other fairy tale," Theodor Adorno writes, "Snow White expresses melancholy. The pure image of this mood is the Queen looking out into the snow through her window and wishing for her daughter after the lifelessly living beauty of the flakes, the black mourning of the window frame, the stab of bleeding; and then dying in childbirth. The happy end takes away nothing of this. As the granting of her wish is death, so the saving remains illusion."

Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 1978), p. 121.

An application of Gadamer's hermeneutics to an encounter with stories in The Thousand and One Nights is a future project, especially as regards Islam's version of James Bond and Ulysses, all in one -- Sinbad the Seaman. My favorite translation is the Richard Burton text -- not Edward Fitzgerald's (or Lane's?) version -- Burton's text was recently edited and collected in an "unexpurgated translation" by Jack Zipes. See The Arabian Nights (New York: Penguin, 1991), pp. 507-568; see also, Edward Rice, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Secret Agent Who Made the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Discovered the Kama Sutra, and Brought the Arabian Nights to the West (New York: Charles Scribners, 1990), pp. 470-473. (A nineteenth century James Bond?)

There is no envy distinguished from hatred, the two go together in womens' experiences of those twin emotions -- usually felt for a rival -- especially in romantic triangles. Much of this rivalry is under the surface -- sisters? -- in the fictions of A.S. Byatt and Rebecca Goldstein. Mythology is filled with such accounts. (For instance, "The Judgment of Paris.")

While Fleming's hero is sometimes brutal, he is always moral and never -- as in classic representations of feminine malice -- duplicitous. I mean that he always abides by his code of loyalty to the crown, adhering to the orders of "M." This fits the model suggested by Raymond Chandler for Philip Marlowe:

"But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a weathered phrase, a man of honor -- by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."

The Simple Art of Murder (New York: Vintage, 1988), p. 18. ("Raymond Chandler and 'The Simple Art of Murder.'")

Bond's impossible expertise, physical power, sexual prowess or "success" with women -- women who fall into his lap upon meeting him -- are obvious compensatory fantasies for a thin, watery-eyed clerk in a government office, whose "service" during the war consisted mostly of filing and cross-indexing. The man who tells you that he has enjoyed carnal bliss (i.e., "screwed") thousands of women is, first of all, full of shit; and secondly, unaware that, if what he is saying is true, then he has not made love to any woman. If you're a slightly retarded thirteen year-old guy (of any age or gender) and haven't figured this out yet, let me explain: Nobody is really James Bond.

Bond appeals to the eternal adolescent in men who is incapable of appreciating that loving a woman is a lifetime deal. Such love is possible with one (or maybe two) women in your life, if you are fortunate. Real love is something that happens over decades or not at all. Love is no walk in the park. On the bright side, Bond is hopeful and dutiful, patriotic, respectful of tradition and standards of excellence, abiding by the code of errant knights everywhere. He will never be evil, vicious, or greedy. He will not rape a woman nor will he be cruel. Guys should simply take this character with a mountain of salt.

My favorite of the Bond movies is Diamonds Are Forever (1971). I will review that film and make use of it to discuss one of my favorite philosophical issues -- identity and doubleness in the dialectic of selfhood. The film should be approached with care because it is tongue-in-cheek, stylistically, it's also self-mocking and ironic.

Will someone please explain these techniques of surrealism to Ms. Stanley at the Times? Incidentally, I think Casino Royale with Daniel Craig comes close to the highest standard in the genre.

Like many therapists and social scientists, Ms. Stanley's mind is made literal and slow by the absence of wide literary culture and philosophical speculation. This is evident from her wooden prose. Diamonds is the first and best of the postmodern Bond texts, where a play of symbols conveys contradictory messages illustrating a central theme of the work in the perfect setting for fantasy and eros in America -- Las Vegas.

I've just corrected another "error" inserted in this essay since this morning, in addition to the spacing difficulties and many obstructions to using my computer today. Writing in a torture chamber poses unique challenges. ("Stuart Rabner and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "New Jersey's Legal System is a Whore House.")

I recently saw Diamonds Are Forever in a Spanish translation on "Univision," which was very funny. I would love to see what it is like in French or Italian. Jill St. John is even more beautiful in Spanish. Ms. St John has left me with an indelible impression -- among other things -- of that tape in her bikini briefs. I never thought that I would actually envy a cassette tape, but I do. (Yes, the word 'but" in that last sentence is spelled with two "t's")

I have several pages of notes from my viewing of the film, including a page or more on the first outfit worn by Ms. St John during her entrance scene. I am hoping the hackers and typical bullshit will subside long enough so that I can make progress on this essay. Sadly, thus far, this hope has not been realized. I am very disappointed in New Jersey's judiciary.

II.

The film opens with what is known as "narrative exposition." We are told a lot about the diamond industry in South Africa and the problem of theft from the mines. African workers paid slave-like wages mysteriously resort to self-help. Shocking. The Bond touch for farce is seen in the depiction of malice in unsuspected places. A little old lady is in the South African smuggling business. The dual assassins, Mr. Kidd and Mr. Wint, embody the homophobic device of "Fag Villains" (common in Bond and other thrillers of the fifties, discussed at length by Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer using this controversial term).

"Mr. Trevanian has recourse to that staple of recent fiction the Fag Villain. Since kikes and [Vidal uses the n-word] can no longer be shown as bad people, only commies (pre-Nixon) and fags are certain to arouse the loathing of all decent fiction addicts. I will say for Mr. Trevanian that his Fag Villain is pretty funny -- an exquisite killer named Miles Mellough with a poodle named faggot. In fact, Mr. Trevanian in his comic mood is almost always beguiling, and this comic scenario ought to put new life into the Bond product."

Gore Vidal, "The Top Ten Best Sellers," in United States: Essays 1952-1992 (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 72.

The man who wrote this review-essay -- perhaps the funniest essay written by an American in the twentieth century -- is a brave early defender of gay rights, supporter of the civil rights movement, opponent of militarism, and creator of a literary masterpiece celebrating gender freedom. Vidal may be America's best critic in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. This will come as a shock to America's p.c. battalions. Vidal is deliberately offending p.c. sensibilities as a way of suggesting that worrying about such nonsense is not what these struggles were or should be about. Censorship, even when it is well-intentioned, is always offensive in a free society.

Get it? Now why are you trying to censor me? Do you really think this strategy will work? I don't.

Gay rights to full equality, including marriage rights; the struggle against AIDS (which has hurt and taken the lives of people I care about); gender freedom and equality -- these are the real issues, not whether men and women (or any two adults) desire each other, look at each other, use "forbidden" words, flirt, or enjoy sexual play. It is time for America to grow up on sexuality "issues."

Why this bizarre, allegedly "feminist" hostility -- even rage -- at the possibility of men and women being happy and/or sexually fulfilled together? Why do some self-styled "feminists" feel outraged by good heterosexual relationships? Envy? Not penis envy but "happiness envy," I guess, is popular with militant gal-pals. ("Trenton's Nasty Lesbian Love-Fest!")

I suggest that feminist hostility to "good loving" will antagonize potential allies and damage or destroy feminism. My policy has always been that what matters in life is not what others think of us, but what we think of them. Morons are never going to get anything or anybody complex. Censorship is just as fascistic and evil when feminists suppress the speech of critics as when anyone seeks to silence women. Hey, I just corrected another inserted "error"! Great. ("Is Senator Menendez a Suspect in a Mafia-Political Murder in New Jersey?")

Here is an example of femi-Nazism: "... former Harvard president Lawrence Summers was involved in another debate on academic freedom, this time at the University of California. ... The Board of Regents came under fire for rescinding a speaking invitation to Dr. Summers after some professors at the Davis campus protested that he symbolized 'gender and racial prejudice in academia.' At Harvard, Dr. Summers drew fire for saying 'intrinsic aptitude' could be a reason for lower numbers of women in science and engineering.' ..."

The New York Times, September 23, 2007, at p. 2 ("Week in Review").

As I write these words, the president of Iran who said: "the Holocaust never happened," "Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth," and that America is a "great Satan" -- this inspiring "intellectual"! -- has been invited to speak at Columbia University. Incidentally, this "gentleman" approves of the public beating of women who are "immodest" in their attire, allegedly, as does the Taliban, which approves of physical violence against women just for the laughs. The Taliban and Iran's leader happen to be critical of Mr. Bush. So they're O.K. with the forces of holier-than-thou anti-Bushism in America, like Ms. Pelosi.

You wanna delete another letter from one of my words again? Any more "error"-insertions, "ladies"?

My view of these matters is: 1) Columbia University should have invited any one of, say, 4 billion other people who are more interesting that Iran's president (including most Iranians) before asking this speaker to impart his wisdom to students. However, once invited, Columbia cannot be intimidated into abandoning the principle of free debate. 2) Former Harvard president Lawrence (call me "Larry"!) Summers is what is known in my neighborhood as a "numbnut." Summers is a "moron with a fancy degree." What Summers said about women and his comments to Cornel West are the sort of things that give idiocy a bad name. Nevertheless, Summers has free speech rights like anyone else. So do the students, if any, who wish to hear what he has to say. I have absolutely no interest in either of those men's opinions on any subject whatsoever.

Fleming was a graduate of Eton, an all-male institution where homosexual love was not exactly rare. During the nineteenth century male love on campus at England's elite public schools was a rite of passage for aristocratic boys. From Tom Brown's School Days to Brideshead Revisited, same-sex love in the form of male eroticism is on display. Only the British navy until the twentieth century was as "gay" as elite British public schools -- as indeed Parliament always has been and still is a "fun" place for gays and non-gays. Don't be fooled by British reserve. How else can one explain the extraordinary Mr. Blair? Or Mrs. Thatcher? There is a theory that these two are, in fact, the same character -- a character invented by Gore Vidal and placed on the global political stage. How can one account for David Cameron? I suppose the implosion by Mr. Brown explains the new Conservative government.

The screenplay by "Richard Maimum" or "Maibaum" (a pseudonym based on "playing" with the word "Mammon"?) hints of money as the motive for writing this work. Shocking? Hardly. Not "schlock," however, since the good stuff is under the surface in this movie. Writing between the lines is a lost art. Bond demonstrates his knowledge of wines and women, earning the undying devotion of Miss Moneypenny, Bond's gal-pal Friday. Bond's assurance and aggressive masculinity carried him farther then than they would today -- unless Bond is rewritten as a lesbian. Perhaps I will write such a story. "The name is Bond, Jane Bond."

A decision is made to trace the route of the smugglers, from South Africa to Amsterdam, in the form of a professional smuggler "Peter Franks" (money again), who is to meet a contact, the aptly-named "Tiffany Case." The goal is to get the rocks into America where everything is possible, especially in New Jersey with Anne Milgram as Attorney General.

Bond will intercept and substitute for his double, Peter Franks. In fact, Bond will eventually kill Franks (both Bond and Franks will be placed in coffins), identity exchange and reversal. The cop is always closest to the criminal. "Every good man has to wrestle with the devil," Niezsche said. Carl Jung added: "Every good man is the devil with whom he must wrestle."

Tiffany Case is one of my favorite Bond women. Halle Berry is not a Bond woman. Ms. Berry plays a colleague at the CIA in the updated version of the Bond world featuring Pierce Brosnan. The updating is only partly successful. (Another "error" was inserted and corrected in the essay since Monday.)

If you ask for a lobster meal with all the works and they bring you a low calorie substitute, you will not be happy. Men go to a Bond movie to see action, explosions, scantily clad women falling all over Bond, so they can head back to the office on Monday and delight in insurance appraisals. ("Oh, James ...")

A politically correct James Bond amounts to the cinematic equivalent of smoking without inhaling. Worse, it is being given a perfect "Cohiba" cigar, then not being allowed to smoke it. (Hint: the audience wants a romance between Ms. Berry and Mr. Brosnan.) Genuine "Cohibas" are now going for $50-75 each in the Wall Street area. If there were an end to the embargo then ordinary people could purchase a Cohiba cigar once in a while. ("Time to End the Emabrgo Against Cuba" and "Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me.'")

Jill St. John is highly unusual in that she is very intelligent, cool as a ... well, a "cucumber" (don't say it!), resourceful, adept at erotic flirtation and "play" with Bond, never unaware of where the main chance is found, capable of dumping Bond if a better opportunity arises (as it were).

One senses that Tiffany Case is just as sexually confident and experienced as Bond. It is debatable whether she is his conquest or the opposite. These two belong together. No other Bond woman conveys all of the same vibes. Neither of them will ever really "dump" the other -- because each is most comfortable with (or as) the other.

Jill St. John is also, by my standards, mouth-wateringly beautiful. Smart, sexy, able to live on both sides of the law, attracted to Bond and also to the diamonds. Tiffany is as independent and free as Bond. Ms. St. John, brilliantly, played the character as a female James Bond. Tiffany appears in a brunette wig, becoming a redhead, then an Auburn-haired beauty, signaling an alluring feminine variability, revealing her protean nature. Needless to say, this means that she's really a blond -- spiritually, that is -- in the cinematic language of Hollywood. A blond Bond.

Hair color is, of course, symbolic of different qualities. As Hitchcock understood in Vertigo, when considering a woman's hair color in a movie, especially if it changes, speak the language of flowers. Refer to Titian and Bouguereau -- who are among the best painters of women -- as are Sargent and Madame Vigee-Lebrun, both outstanding colorists. Notice the relationship between pigments and hair colors in their portraits of women, together with the mood of their works. Example: Sargent's "Madame X." What do you know about Sargent's "Scarlet Woman" that makes her different from, say, Raphael's "Madonna With Child"? How do you know this difference? Your essays should be double-spaced. You may refer to any sources, but essays must be written in class. And yes, "Tiffany Case" is Sargent's "Madame X." Is she also Raphael's "Madonna"? She can be. ("Out of the Past.")

Melanie Griffith's masterpiece of a performance in Something Wild seems to gesture in the direction of predecessors like Louise Brooks, Kim Novak and Jill St. John. Ms. Griffith transforms herself into a feminine erotic diva, only to turn the character inside out, showing you her vulnerability and humanity. If you want to see what can be done on screen, without millions of dollars in special effects, please see Jonathan Demme's neo-noir masterpiece Something Wild. I've used the word "masterpiece" twice in one paragraph. That should tell you something.

The wigs and duality in Tiffany's feminine nature will balance the duality in Bond, ruthless and polished, urbane and violent, criminal and cop. Tiffany is criminal but loyal, ethical but self-protective, attracted to Bond and independent, free, yet connected to this man because he is as contradictory and paradoxical as she is -- and just as good in bed. Each of these two characters is looking in a mirror when seeing the other. Winnicott and Lacan will be mentioned later.

Next we move to Las Vegas. With arrival in Vegas the film borders on farce. Bond is about to be cremated, when the bad guys realize he has the diamonds stashed somewhere. The diamonds are the McGuffin, the thing the movie characters care about, but the audience doesn't. Another tribute to Hitchcock. At the gambling tables Bond meets "Plenty O'Toole":

"Hi, I'm Plenty!" The buxomy beauty says.

"But of course you are." Bond responds, as improvised by Sean Connery. "Named after your father, perhaps?"

Willard Whyte (Howard Hughes?) has been kidnapped. The diamonds will be used in a new laser intended to blow up Washington, D.C. This possibility sent shivers of delight up my spine as I thought of mourning the loss of G.W. and Ms. Pelosi. How will we replace such genius at this crucial moment in our history? One staggers in horror at the thought of such a loss for the nation, or even for The Nation. Democrats should bear in mind that Ms. Pelosi's "negatives" are were as bad as President Bush's numbers. Today, Pelosi's numbers are worse. Is this a C.I.A. conspiracy? Republicans would have been smart to run against Ms. Pelosi (the Democrat establishment) in the presidential campaign; Democrats, shrewdly, ran against Mr. Bush, and/or -- Dick Chenney.

Ernst Blofeld, has cloned himself (and his cat), Bond kills one of the clones. Not good enough. Blofeld escapes the trap set for him dressed as a woman. Gender options. What disguise was worn by the cat? We do not know. Bond meets the Furies guarding Mr. Whyte. He is triumphant over the females, but not "over" Tiffany Case. The fate of the world hangs on a cassette tape of "Favorite Marches." A tape placed, fetchingly, in the becoming attire of Ms. Case, whose wardrobe and assets, as it were, are the epitome of elegance.

"Oh, may I call you James now?" Tiffany purrs ...

"Considering that we are naked, you may call me anything you like." James should have answered in a whisper.

The world is saved once more by James Bond even as Bond is rescued by Tiffany Case. Q is forlorn since his wonderful gadgets never make it back in one piece. The ledger and record keeping are the province of men like Q. M will become Foreign Secretary. Felix Leiter will be indicted with the Contras. After being pardoned Leiter will head the CIA. A good time is had by all.

III.

As I begin this next phase of the discussion, when things may get a little heavy, please bear these quotes in mind:

"... the unconscious is structured like a language."

Jacques Lacan, The Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 20. (Alan Sheridan, translation)

"It should be stressed that Lacan uses the idea of a child before the mirror as a metaphor. The notion of reflection is a common one (especially in German idealist philosophy), stemming from Hegel. In this philosophy there is concern with questions such as: What is it to be conscious of oneself? How do we recognize the self? What is that 'something' that reflects consciousness back on to itself?" (emphasis added)

Madan Sarrup, "Lacan and Psychoanalysis," in Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism (Georgia: University of Georgia, 1989), p. 14 (compare Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 43-55).

For Kant, the mirror is the mind of the knowing agent. Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 35-44 ("Transcendental Aesthetic" in the "Elements of Transcendentalism"). Yes, I know about Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 129-165 ("Mirroring"), and see June Singer, Androgyny (New York: Anchor, 1977), pp. 128-144 ("The Philosopher's Stone in Alchemy: The Androgyne Imprisoned in Matter").

"Whether madness is a legal issue or a medical issue; whether it requires a scientist or an artist to make it intelligible; whether indeed the artist or the scientist (or the serial killer) in some sense need [emphasis added] to be mad to be who they are and do what they do; all this makes the concept of madness akin to the universal acid of scientific folklore." (Mythology? Metaphor? Mirror?)

Adam Phillips, "Around and About Madness," in Equals (New York: perseus, 2002), p. 81; see D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Penguin, 1974), pp. 130-138.

Madness is the dark mirror of reason. The experience of madness has attracted Romantics as the flip side of genius, as dark matter may prop-up and make possible light, gravity, and all matter in the universe we see and in which we are.

Compare Gadamer and Winnicott on "playing," with the Laingian idea of madness as a kind of "playing" designed to "communicate" the self to the world in relation to Lacan's theory of language-play. Madness becomes (for Laing) the play of light with darkness. Finally,"... How is it that the figure of Faust is still meaningful, and that the duo Faust-Mephistopheles still haunts us? Goethe set Part One of his tragedy amid the paraphenelia of alchemy ..." Henri Lefebvre, "Third Prelude: The Metamorphoses of the Devil," in Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes (London: Verso, 1995), p. 61. (See "Faust in Manhattan" and my discussion of the myth of "Snow White and the Evil Queen.")

Professor John McCumber, please think again about the idea of eternity and "now" -- whose now? and where is now? -- as distinguished from "timelessness." Take another look at Boito's Mephistopheles and Goethe's Faust, then see Reshaping Reason: Towards a New Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 17-19.

For even greater problems with McCumber's astonishing analysis, see "simultaneity" (p. 17), no definition of this concept is offered and there are several concepts of "simultaneity" jumbled together; "verification" as test of truth (pp. 2-20) -- What about Copleston's destruction of this notion? -- and aporias of "argument" post-Hume (ibid.); perspectival difficulties with McCumber's claims about propositions and timelessness, etc. I can see that Professor McCumber teaches German, not philosophy.

Another "error" inserted and corrected. More attacks on this text are expected.

There is so much postmodernist literature relevant to the drama/comedy of this film that it is necessary to limit one's focus in an Internet essay. I will concentrate on three issues: First, mirrors and mirroring relations by way of Lacan and his British cousins, Winnicott and Laing. Incidentally, Donald Winnicott and Charles Rycroft served as Laing's analysts when he was preparing to become a psychoanalyst and their influence is felt in Laing's writings. Second, "play" (term of art) in aesthetics and personal relations in connection with desire. Third, symbols, symbol-systems, and commodities against the Las Vegas surrealist setting, which creates the final so-called postmodern "hermeneutic challenge." The final section of my essay will bring together several strands of Continental thought -- Freud, Marx, Heidegger -- in a subtle and non-showy way because I like to be modest. Make your judgments, if you must. More "errors," New Jersey?

A. Mirror, Mirror on the Wall.

Blofeld is the self enclosed within itself, incapable of escape from the hall of mirrors within the psyche to the mirrors outside the psyche. Blofeld's self is, or becomes, nothing but his clone. It makes no difference which Blofeld is killed by Bond. Blofeld is a replicant, a cyborg, an "object" -- like most lawyers, accountants, clerks in government offices. Blofeld lives and can only live in a torture chamber. Blofeld cannot feel. Alex Booth, Esq.? To be forced into such a condition by torturers must be the worst evil that can be done to a person. It is life at Auschwitz, forever. This may be the living death that explains Stuart Rabner's condition.

This diminished state is the condition sought by American "mind control" specialists for their victims. These so-called "therapists" are employed by intelligence agencies -- and other such "law enforcement" agencies (like N.J.'s OAE) -- throughout the world, perhaps including Her Majesty's secret service. Much can be accomplished with frustration, denigration, insults, assaults, anxiety, stress and dehumanization, including the torture of family members. (See again: "What is it like to be tortured?") Example: inserting "errors" in this essay to frustrate me.

In a weird way, gleeful torturers destroying minds echo the agonized speculations of theologians commenting on the horrors of our alienated postmodernist condition where death, as in this film, is also unreal, boring, a pose. A torturer's "death" of affect, incapacity for compassion and human empathy, is also a kind of mental death legitimated by corpses in black robes -- preferably members of despised minority groups in the Garden State -- conditioned into abandoning their authenticity. John, does this ring a bell? Diana? Terry? It should. ("The Allegory of the Cave" and "The Wanderer and His Shadow.")

Ironically, I've just received a call from the "Independence Party" to help put their candidates on the ballet. I am "for" independence. June 8, 2008 at 8:09 P.M. The call came from 212-609-2827. Oh, there's no independence party? How curious?

The pleasant inhumanity in this movie -- people are fished out of a river, scorpions kill victims, cremation is a joke -- provokes no response from audience members munching their popcorn and chuckling at how funny it is. (One more "error" was inserted in this essay since this morning.) This is a movie that could only be made after the Holocaust and Gulags, as the killing fields of Cambodia were about to be discovered. Blofeld is Eichman. Blofeld is a bored would-be assassin of millions -- millions whose death means nothing. The idea of millions of deaths is unreal to audience members. Why? We are more concerned with Tiffany Case's ass.

Death is boring. Who cares about hunger in Africa? Abu Ghraib? What's Brittany Spears up to? What's up with O.J.? This morning on ABC's "Good Morning America" we were told, solemnly, that a "car bomb killed twenty-five people in Iraq" and the very next sentence spoken by the "host" -- with a laugh -- concerned an appearance by Jennifer Lopez to sing a new song "for all of you."

What is the condition of this "non-person" into which our friendly society seeks to transform its dissidents or all of us?

"While the radical identity [is] 'opened up,' risked and offered to others [in self-giving,] anomic man" -- Terry Tuchin? Jim McGreevey? Stuart Rabner? Bob Menendez? -- "is afraid to let his true self be revealed either to others or himself. Camus describes the Roman emperor Caligula in this condition, within him 'an abyss of silence, a pool of stagnant water and rotting weeds.' Kierkegaard ['who?' Psychoanalyst Terry Tuchin asked!] spoke of 'demonic shut-inness.' ..."

Charles Hampden-Turner, Radical Man (New York: Anchor, 1971), p. 82.

Now Thomas Merton:

"Nothing, Merton felt, could restore modern man, lost in technology, in depersonalizing societies, in fierce activism, except a new contemplative vision. 'We find ourselves living in a society of men who have discovered their own nonentity where they least expected to -- in the midst of power and technological achievement.' Identity could only be found in contemplation ... [and love.]"

Monica Furlong, Merton: A Biography (New York: Bantam, 1981), p. 277.

Another "error" has appeared in this quotation since yesterday. There is no danger that such methods will exhaust me. I am stimulated by the sadistic cruelty of those defacing my writings to persist in my struggle. (See "Maurice J. Gallipoli and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "Jay Romano and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")

I will do my best to give back to New Jersey's legal system and its denizens all that they have given me. See my essay, "Stuart Rabner and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "Mafia and Street Gang Alliance Broken Up in New Jersey" then "New Jersey's Politically Connected Lawyers On the Tit."

For Merton, the mirror that confirms the self is God. For existentialists and postmodernists, there is no God. There are only the mirroring gazes of others, indifference, frustration of desire -- which can never be satisfied anyway. Brittany Spears? For Freud, there is sex. For Marx, there is revolution. For Schopenhauer there is the "madness of art." Shakespeare and the Romantics remind us of love. Artists sing of the confirmation that love brings that is real fulfillment. Jung, not Freud. Love-making, more than sex. Does this bring us back to God?

Guess where these thoughts take us? They take us to the symbol of Christ, Star of David, also other great religious symbols. Christ reminds us that the God we thought was "dead" is doing just fine. "God" resides in those wounded and forlorn eyes that gaze at us in need and suffering, with yearning and hope. Giving herself to us, we discover the best self that we must "be" and give to her in response. The love expressed in gentle touching or "play" is not a path towards God, that love that saves us is God. (See "The Song of Songs" and Paul Weiss's The God We Seek.) Science worshipers are directed to: G. Rizzolatti, L. Fogassi, V. Gallese, "Mirrors in the Mind," in Scientific American, November, 2006, at p. 54.

"Khojeh 'Omar Halebi Abu 'Othman, the Turkish author of El-Kitab Sheri et el-Khabbeh fi 'Ilm el-Muhhabbeh ["The Book of the Secret Laws of Love,"] has written that sensuality, which is idealized in Islam, may be considered an end in itself. Allah and Eros are regarded as one and the same under divine and mundane law." Comparisons of Christian "Courtly Love" and Romance will earn extra credit points, see Denis de Rougemont, "Passion and Mysticism," in Love in the Western World (New York: Anchor, 1957), pp. 141-172 and "'The Fountain': A Movie Review."

We tend to forget that both Plato and Aristotle were translated by Arabic scholars during the Middle Ages before they were rediscovered or reinvented by the Church as "predecessors" of Christianity. Only one new "error" since last time is pretty good.

The President of Iran tells us that there are "no gays" in Iran. I suggest that he take another look around his capitol city. Traditionally, political leaders "concerned" about the existence of gays have been troubled by more autobiographical "issues." Notice this next point:

"The vital spirit of El-Islam [lives] in its unqualified sanctification of sexual passion. The same is true in Hinduism. [Also, in the gentle love of Buddhism.] ..."

"Unqualified" means that gender is left undefined as IRRELEVANT in a number of Sufi mystical verses. As for the alleged intolerance of Islam, the "truth" is very different in these verses from an Islamic mystic:

"All Faith is false, all Faith is true;
Truth is the shattered mirror strown [sic.]
In myriad bits, while each believes
His little bit the whole to own."

Allen Edwards & R.E. L. Masters, eds., "Philosophy," in The Cradle of Erotica (New York: Lancer Books, 1962), p. 12 and p. 19. By way of comparison, see Wang Shih-Cheng, The Golden Lotus [Chin P'ing Mei] translation by Clement Egerton (London: Routledge, 1957) and, of course, Kama Sutra. Some of the best erotic-spiritual literature is found in China. This God-as-love idea is universal and true regardless of the gender or sexual-orientation of the adults doing the touching and playing -- in one kind of love -- as indicated, again, in all of the great religious traditions.

Don't let any fundamentalists or extremists tell you otherwise: genuine religious feeling and devotion to what we call God is love expressed, freely, between any two people in sexual play and in other ways. If you are a gay or lesbian person (outside of New Jersey, I hope!), then you should know that you have as much right to your religious tradition and spiritual life as any other human being, including the Pope.

Inserting "errors" in this essay because you don't like gays (or me) won't change this truth. Gay love is just as spiritual and sanctified (or holy) as any other kind of love for truly religious people. Perhaps Mr. Rubio in Miami will agree with this assertion. In any of the world's great religions, you will find this idea expressed and developed over centuries by mystics and theologians.

Do not allow fundamentalists or adherents of one contested interpretation of any of the great religions to tell you that your interpretations are less than legitimate. If you are a gay young person who feels a spiritual component in your life within your religious tradition, I promise you that you are correct to see such spirituality and love as "blessed." As a gay person, your interpretations of religion are as valid as any other person's views of religion, or love, or politics, as demonstrated by the election of Barney Frank and Marco Rubio.

"One becomes two: each time we encounter this formula, whether expressed strategically by Mao, or understood the most 'dialectically,' we find ourselves dealing with the most classical and often considered, the oldest and most worn out thought. [Humanity's truest and deepest wisdom.] Nature does not work this way, but forms ever more ramifying taproot systems (les racines pivotantes ...), which are lateral and circular but not dichotomous. The mind lags behind nature. Even the book as a natural reality forms a taproot system, with its pivotal axis and surrounding leaves. The book as an intellectual reality, the Tree or Root as image, endlessly develops the law of the One that becomes two, ..." (See my review of The Fountain.)

Deleuze & Guattari, On the Line (New York: Semiotexte, 1983), p. 6 ("we two are one").

Dante says of lovers in paradise/inferno: "Eranos uno en due, e due en uno." Bond and Tiffany are positive mirror-images of the self as eros. Winnicott says that the first mirror is the mother. No, Freudians. Settle down. Most people will not receive that maternal confirmation again in their adult lives, never outside of a loving relation, some never at all. They live always as a "lack," an absence, loss. Love is the only answer. Economic consumption, the shopping mall of America, is a poor substitute for the cookie that mom gave you when you were good. It will not satisfy you for long. Neither will power or success in a profession at the cost of your relationships. Your hunger is spiritual. You are starving for love. Not sex. Love. What is another word for love? It is a short word. ("Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Is this atheism's moment?")

Any love-making between two adult persons who "recognize" one another, spiritually, is a form of prayer. Time to take another letter out of this essay? Each character makes the other's fulfillment possible through the completion of their joint narrative missions (getting the diamonds into America) and as a means to the satisfaction of desire leading to ultimate becoming, which is unification in the act of love. Masculine and feminine are integrated within the psyche. Only then can they become one outside the psyche.

Jung-Laing-Lacan-Butler is the trajectory described by me in this paragraph. What might surprise all of these philosophers -- and true therapists -- is that they have developed a new theology, a postmodernist theology resolving the aporias of the American Wasteland. A theology in which we meet God (as love) in confirmation -- beyond one's gender, race, or status as an alleged sub-human, like me, even in our theaters of cruelty. God becomes an embrace that always was (and is) waiting for us. (See my short story "Pieta.")

Why is "confirmation" a sacrament in Catholicism? Define "sacrament." An act of erotic love between any two persons may become sacramental. ("Is there a gay marriage right?")

The magic of this film for the viewer is not the return of the diamonds; rather, magic is what is captured in the metaphor of "saving the world" -- individuation, completion of the alchemical process for masculine and feminine principles. The base metal of the self has been transformed into the gold of a self-chosen identity that is freely shared with another. Freudians will interrupt at this point to suggest, tactfully: "Oh, you mean they screw?"

No, in addition to sexual intercourse and more importantly, each of these characters confirms after recognizing key aspects of the other's hidden persona -- hidden even from him- or herself: Bond's intelligence, gentleness, humor, erotic energy are directed at Tiffany; Tiffany's craftiness, creativity, performance ("I don't dress for the hired help" means the opposite), allure, independence ("I was just coming to get you!"), and strength exist ONLY in relation to Bond. I am the only mirror for the best you.

Identity is relational, dialogical, a gift of the self to the other who completes me. Without her, there is no me. Without me, there is no her. Desire is reaching out. Intentionality is defining of consciousness. Love is always a directedness, transcendence, a movement towards the beloved. That movement is both recognition and affirmation as well as celebration of otherness and entanglement. Take away that necessary mirror (lover) and the wounded psyche disintegrates (i.e., is disconfirmed).

"Yeah, but didn't he slap her? Wasn't she trying to get the rocks and take off on him?"

Psychology majors ask such questions. There is no destination without a journey. One reading of this cinematic text says that the purpose of the adventure changed for these characters as events unfolded. The hero's and heroine's journey is always about self-becoming. This is only possible with and through the other. Cynics grumble: "That's bullshit. Lacan wasn't into love."

Lacan feared that love is an illusion or "deception" impossible to fulfill, since desire is infinite. However, Lacan offered no better substitute. Neither did Freud, despite his reservations. This is because -- in the postmodernist spirit -- for "love," like Porsche automobiles, "there is no substitute." ("Have you had your sprinkle today?")

Much depends on whether love is genuine. The important point to remember is that love between any two people is always an "unfinished adventure." Recognition is never-ending because what you are that must be recognized is also always unfinished. You are a project in time and space, also in relationships. Lacan's views are summarized:

"One of the main features of Lacan's work is that it is implacably anti-biological. The accepted view in the 1930s, for example, was that madness had organic causes. Lacan argues that organicist accounts cannot explain madness. Madness is a discourse" [language] -- plug in R.D. Laing, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler -- "an attempt at communication, that must be interpreted. We have to understand rather than give causal explanations. He emphazises that the personality is 'not the mind' but the whole being. We cannot separate a person's psychology from his or her personal history." ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")

My guess is that there are overlapping "explanations" and different kinds of madness. Now apply this insight to criminality as a final, desperate attempt at communication, a kind of madness. Every criminal is shouting at us that he or she is in pain and needs our attention:

"... One of his main beliefs is that the unconscious is a hidden structure which resembles that of a language. Knowledge of the world, of others and of self is determined by language. Language is the precondition for the act of becoming aware of oneself as a distinct entity. It is the I-Thou dialectic, defining the subjects by their mutual opposition, which founds subjectivity. But language is also the vehicle of the social given, a culture, prohibitions and laws. The young child is fashioned and will be indelibly marked by it without being aware of it."

"Lacan and Psychoanalysis," p. 9. (See Anthony Hopkins in "Slipstream.")

Both love and crime (or evil) may be found in or become languages. This means that -- even within madness -- the possibilities of redemption are also in language. The effort to deny me words or language is designed to destroy superego or ethical capacities in order to produce a criminal, an aberration, anomalous subject, an outlaw, a suicide. Never give them what they want in the corridors of power. ("The Long Goodbye.") In Lacan's words:

"The child, at an age when he is for a time, however short, outdone by the chimpazee in instrumental intelligence, can nevertheless already recognize as such his own image in a mirror. This recognition ... can take place ... from the age of six months" -- when she was about that age, I showed my daughter a mirror for the first time in her life, then whispered the Spanish word for "beautiful." I know that no one will convince her otherwise -- "Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support, human or artificial ... he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image. ..."

"Psychoanalytic Experience," in Ecrits, p. 2 (Alan Sheridan, translation).

I look in my glass and see ... first, one woman -- then others (mostly women) standing together, siblings, parents, children and community -- as the only "reflection" returned to me by the crystal ball, which is the "mirror of myself, language." Language is the community of the text in which we are. You are looking in a mirror right now. Is this a dark crystal into which we must gaze? I know someone who would say: "It can be."

Do you recognize the mystery in which we share and participate now, Professor McCumber? Do you feel the flames in which we burn? Contrast George Steiner's The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1979) with Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London & New York: Routledge, 1957), especially the latter's discussion of T.E. Hulme in light of Steiner's novel.

"I'm not sure that we can say that a given language is a device of power (even if, because of its systematic nature, it is a constituent of knowledge), but it is surely a model of power. [More "errors" inserted, then corrected.] We could also say that, being the semiotic apparatus par excellence or (as the Russian semioticians express it) the primary modelizing system, it is the model of those other semiotic systems that in the various cultures are established as devices of power, and of knowledge (secondary modelizing systems)."

Umberto Eco, "Language, Power, and Force," in Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1983), p. 244 (William Weaver, translation), then Umberto Eco, "On Some Functions of Literature," in On Literature (New York: Harcourt, Inc. 2004), pp. 2-15 (Martin McLaughlin, translation). See my essay "Umberto Eco and the Semiotics of Power."

"From what we can guess," Morris Berman writes, "early cultures regarded the specular image in the same way that modern infants do until about two years of age: it was an Other, the manifestation of a deeper reality. It was seen, in other words, as the soul -- hence the frequent centrality of the mirror in religious ceremonies and burial rites. One Egyptian term for the mirror was ankh, life, and it was used in an anointing ritual that helped preserve the body for future life. It was also seen as capable of receiving the ka (double, Other); the Etruscans similarly regarded it as a vehicle for the soul. All of this suggests, however, that confiscation was regarded as a possibility. Mirrors formed an important part of magical and mystical practices in antiquity and the Middle Ages" -- they were crucial instruments for witches to capture the objects of their love! -- "and one of the dangers associated with such practices, such as autohypnosis induced by prolonged self-contemplation, was that the Self could get lost." (Notice the African roots of these Western ideas.)

Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West (New York: Bantam, 1990), pp. 47-48. Lauran Paine, Sex in Witchcraft (New York: Taplinger, 1972), pp. 71-78.

In light of my experiences, consider this observation:

"This reasoning made it desirable to torture anyone accused of witchcraft. The torturer was actually doing them an inestimable service; he saved them from damnation and made it possible for them to achieve salvation." (Sex in Witchcraft, at p. 72.) Think of how we treat women as sexual outlaws today "for their own good." How do we respond to genius? How are people like, say, Oscar Wilde, Muhammad Ali, Gore Vidal, Camile Paglia, Lenny Bruce, Dr. King, Malcolm X treated by the rest of us? Why do they frighten or annoy us? Now imagine women who have a little of both qualities -- sexual freedom and genius? Melanie Griffith, Jill St. John, Marilyn Monroe, Simone Weil, Silvia Plath, Kate Winslet, Louise Brooks, Germaine Greer, Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch? See a pattern? I know someone who fits that pattern. Maybe we both do. As much as such women will be lionized, they are always in danger of being destroyed.

In the twentieth century many women were confined to mental institutions for "excessive sexual appetite." In previous centuries such women were burned as witches by many of the same men who had enjoyed their favors. I am not aware of many men punished for "excessive sexual appetite." Any American woman, like these gifted women, is always in danger of emotional overload and collapse. She will always be walking along the edge of a precipice. However, with love, the danger of a false step is (substantially) eliminated.

Suppose that a child's self is threatened. She decides to give that endangered self to the "mirror" that is her love, knowing that -- eventually -- she will step through the mirror in the act of unification, to find and be restored to that innocent self that can and will be kept safe only by him -- her would-be lover -- who is for her and always will be "goodness." She must become herself before she can shatter the mirror to be with him.

Witches were not to be looked at because their eyes had "mirror-like" enchanting power, especially against men, and might trap the souls of their objects of desire. Perhaps every great actress or movie star is a kind of witch. (Again: "Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")

This is her personal myth. His job is only to understand it and help to fulfill her objectives -- objectives selected by her subconscious when she saw not so much desire, but adoration in his youthful eyes. Snow White and the Evil Queen again: The Evil Queen fails to see that her hatred is directed at the younger self that she can never recapture or surpass in physical grace, only in wisdom, whom she foolishly fears as a rival. As she becomes an older woman, the poisoned apple she gives (to herself) is eros or life-force, leading to the demise of the younger persona in the older self's acceptance of mortality. She is finally at peace with her life's-journey because she has her love. He (love) compensates for age (death). This is usually a masculine narrative of life combined with a feminine understanding of eros. That's you, M.

This is the feminine dilemma. The life-giver must lose life in giving life. This is not a gender-specific problem. At the archetypal level, men's and women's feminine natures are invoked. This is her tragedy. Hence, it is her lover's tragedy -- regardless of gender -- "she" must die in order to live. She cannot be entirely free of that younger and more sinful self without becoming the bringer of the apple of eros (him) -- the life-force or phallus (for Lacan) -- to her more youthful "shadow" self (Jung), a self that is then transformed or evolves from an accepted and transcended earlier identity. The apple is poisoned because love is entwined with death -- that is, the death of the evil in her as it is transformed by (and into or reborn as) love for and from him. Only with this completion of the dialectic of selfhood will she be at peace by consuming the apple. ("The Soldier and the Ballerina.")

Christian imagery surfaces once more. The apple always was and must be "for" her "better self," the better angel of her nature that is mixed with his being. This is the flip-side of the masculine version of the myth in "The Soldier and the Ballerina." In other words, she needs her shadow to capture and deliver that love that frees her from the same shadow, forever, since love belongs to and can only flourish with her better self. Sexual orgasm was known as the "little death." Aufheben. He is the apple for her, as Bond is Tiffany's apple. There can be no other apple for her.

This sentence has been altered and corrected since my reading this morning. No doubt this essay will continue to be attacked, destroyed, defaced. Take another look at the quote concerning the torture of witches. Are you a guilty bystander, Stuart? Anne? ("Censorship!" and "What is it like to be censored in America?")

Garden of Eden time. In my experience, it is mostly women constructing the subconscious narratives into which others are fitted. Women are the novelists of private life; women are the makers of myths; men are their characters. To the extent that any woman does this constructing of a life-text for herself and others, she is an artist. In some rare cases, she becomes a great artist whose materials are her life and the lives of others needed for mutual realization. The woman whose inner narrative I have deciphered and described is such an artist. She is a person whose aesthetic gifts have never been given the opportunity to express themselves -- until now. See Richard Wollheim, "The Overcoming of the Past and Our Concern for the Future," in The Thread of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 226-257. (Professor Wollheim was an expert on F.H. Bradley's ethics of self-realization, a philosopher, psychologist, artist, and critic.)

B. Let's Play ...

Hans Georg Gadamer writes: "My thesis, then, is that the being of art cannot be determined as an object of an aesthetic awareness because, on the contrary, the aesthetic attitude is more than it knows of itself. It is part of the essential process of representation and is an essential part of play, as play."

Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), p. 104 (G. Barden & J. Cumming, translation).

I could not care less, by the way, whether my citations conform to any manual of style or blue book. Richard Bernstein comments on this passage:

"As Gadamer develops and enriches his analysis of play, it becomes clear that he is showing that the concept of play provides an understanding of the ontological status of works of art -- how they are related to us and we are related to them. It is not as if we are somehow detached or disinterested spectators simply looking upon 'objects' and seeking to purify our 'aesthetic differentiation.' Rather there is a to-and-fro movement, a type of participation characteristic of our involvement with works of art." (Dialectics?)

"From Hermeneutics to Praxis," in Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1983), p. 122.

Numerous distracting phone calls from 410-774-8252 on October 19, 2007 at 11:13 A.M. and many new inserted "errors" as of January 19, 2008 at 1:15 P.M. More "errors" on February 17, 2009 at 1:05 P.M. More computer attacks, obstructions of access to my sites, defacements of writings must be expected. I am told that MSN has "closed." My Internet signal has been blocked several times. No images can be used at these blogs. My book is still suppressed in America. Death threats and obscene phone calls have been added to my experience, possibly coming from the same source. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")

O.K., let's slow down and think about this: Every work of art is an invitation to play. Better yet, it is an invitation to a unique kind of playing. This James Bond movie is a big joke. The movie is sexy, witty, meant to charm and delight, both by its use of images and through an impossible catharsis or outlet for that guy in insurance appraisals, which also (maybe unconsciously) incorporates a number of postmodernist themes. (Another "error" was inserted in this sentence since last night.)

To approach this movie with a p.c. rule book or as if it were a position paper from a government agency is not to see it at all. Femi-Nazis should look up the word "catharsis." Let's take this premise a bit further. The interaction between maker and recipient of art, or author(s) and readers of a text, for Lacan, is "playing." Prejudices are not left behind. All of you engages with the work of art. However, the work of art only plays with you when you see or recognize the unique kind of game -- an analogy to the later Wittgenstein's notion of "language games" is available -- that is offered by the work.

To object that, say, Hamlet is not a good detective story is idiotic. The "play" is not playing that game. That's not what Hamlet is about. ("Metaphor is Mystery.") Now think again about my criticism of Alessandra Stanley's review of Shoot 'Em Up. The Times reviewer missed the point of the movie by misinterpreting the text as literal. She played the wrong game. You must have a lot in common with the art-object to appreciate or read any artistic text. There is -- here is Kant's influence on Gadamer, by way of Hegel -- a possible "fusion of horizons" or place of meeting, in playing, that uncovers the "meaning" of the work, for you. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")

This aesthetic encounter unfolds in a space between absolute objectivity and subjective relativity, yielding truth. Interpretation. However, that artistic truth uncovered in resolving the "hermeneutic challenge" (so difficult in postmodernist cultural spaces) is never impersonal. You will need to remember all of this, for example, if you wish to absorb a great modernist-postmodernist literary masterpiece, like Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge. You gotta bring something to the party. Artistic experience is the party. What you bring is everything in your life. You. All that you have learned, felt, known, good and bad. The art work also has a history because the creator of it has a biography, which is incorporated into the art-object, that gives you -- provided that you know how to receive this gift -- meaning. Meanings multiply. ("What you will ...")

Analogies to spiritual encounters, romantic relationships, etc. should be clear. Now think about the U.S. Constitution. The document brings you a history and structure. Americans bring to the Constitution a set of contemporary concerns and needs. The result is Constitutional law. This is another term for the moral project of the United States of America. This is something much bigger than any one presidential administration. Judicial reasoning is also a kind of playing. Some people are as good at judicial reasoning, as Sue Bird is good at playing basketball. Benjamin Cardozo is a great common law judge, for example, while Ronald Dworkin is a great analyst and thinker about law. Those guys have "game." Among the gals, Ruth Bader Ginsburg can dunk -- backwards.

Everybody still with me? O.K., now let's think about people. Lacan was aware of Hegel and Gadamer, Freud, Jung, Laing and Foucault. Every person you meet or know is a kind of artist (Nietzsche, Foucault) to the extent that he or she constructs a persona that goes out into the world. That surface personality, fabricated by each of us so we can function socially, is an invitation to play extended to all others. Some people are morons and won't get that. For example: New Jersey's Diana Lisa Riccioli is on the dim side.

Those aspects of this surface persona that are reinforced will be strengthened, those that are disconfirmed may be destroyed. Acting? When you meet someone, you have to ask: "What is the game this person is inviting me to play?" I hate to say it, but most men play at a much simpler level than women. A woman will present herself as "A" and then she will invite you to see that she is ironic about "A," that she is really "B," "C," and -- in one woman's case -- the entire alphabet.

The dialectic between men and women, or any two lovers, is about playing. Sometimes the game between the right players lasts forever. No one wins unless both players win. Alec Baldwin has the greatest line in a movie summarizing love-making: "Love-making is like a Chinese meal, it ain't over until you each get your fortune cookie."

Every good marriage is about a never-ending conversation or game, that is only partly verbal. The purpose of any game is to play it. Love-making (as opposed to sex) is always "play." There is no such thing as forced love-making or love-making for money.

When encountering a criminal, you will succeed in communicating with that person not by trying to beat him or her at the game of violence and treachery. Most criminals are victims. Criminals are persons who have been forced to play such horrible games since childhood. Conditioning won't work. Temporary effects of behaviorist methods will result in making the patient-victim worse in the long term.

You will ONLY succeed if you can persuade the criminal to play a different game, by demonstrating that there are different games and players in this world. Not everyone will betray you. Not everyone will hurt you. At least one person loves you, unconditionally and forever. Let's play a loving, not hating game. Take away the person who creates or offers this possibility in a criminal's (or anyone's) life and all is lost.

Without me, there is no her. Without her or those I love -- even as a hope -- there is no best me.

Violating my First Amendment rights will not make Samenow's writings any less idiotic, by the way, nor will you diminish the truth in these claims by making it necessary for me to correct this text thirty or forty times, deliberately inflicting further psychological harm on me. Identity is individual and social. In the right set of circumstances, as a condition of survival, you (whoever you are) will be as "criminal" as most people who are locked up in prisons. This applies to shrinks like Samenow or anyone else, including New Jersey Chief Justice Stuart Rabner. ("Have you no shame, Mr. Rabner?")

In the worst settings, people will be brutal and vicious. Even in such places, however, where there is love -- even a lingering capacity for love -- there is hope. To deny love, or destroy that capacity and possibility for anyone, amounts to a kind of death for the victim(s). No wonder people want to harass me and destroy these writings. These are terrible things to say. We need to love one another. If we do not, then "chaos is come again."

September 23, 2007 at 12:19 P.M. I am blocking: http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90... (Senator Bob and/or The Jersey Boys?)

October 18, 2007 -- All attempts to print items from my MSN group left me with a blank piece of paper bearing the following address:
http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90xWBCBRB00110msn/direct;wi.728;hi.90/01 (N.J.)

June 10, 2008 at 10:53 A.M. writing efforts obstructed and attempts to print, again, leave me with a blank page with this address:
http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/N3285.msn_cusa/B234920.20;sz=300x250;ord=438962351? (Cuban American National Foundation? US Department of Commerce under Secretary Gutierrez?)

Through heroic effort adverse circumstances can be overcome. Nevertheless, it is not the same challenge to avoid violence or criminality for any two human beings placed in different circumstances. For some people, mere survival amounts to a Nobel-like achievement. This is true even when survivors cannot afford a shirt with a Polo player at the pocket and do not attend the Oscars ceremony.

Diamonds is an invitation to play. You will not "get" this movie unless you are willing to play in the right way. You will not get your "lover" unless you can play together. There is an important analogy to religion and the truths found in religious texts. Play the correct game -- which is not the science game -- and you will appreciate religion much more. ("Daniel Dennett and the Theology of Science.")

Lacan shifts into high gear with these ideas:

"This is why for Lacan the true function of psychoanalysis is to encourage the subject to embrace the interminable play of its own unconscious desire rather than to try to bring it to an impossible stop. [You must love a woman's freedom and her unfinished condition as well as your own.] We must learn to live with the reality of the unconscious as a dialectic of unpredictable dispersal; we must consent to become, as it were, the privileged playthings of its language. The ultimate purpose of the analyst is, in short, to permit the analysand to break free from the illusory order of the imaginary and to enter, with carefree gaity and undeceiving abandon, into the open-ended order of the symbolic."

Richard Kearney, Modern Movements in European Philosophy (New York: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 281 (emphasis added).

Shared- rather than private-imagining is sanity. Lovers are persons whose neuroses fit together nicely. Lovers dream together through art or love-making. This is to allow the subject to escape the hall of mirrors within the psyche in order to enter the hall of mirrors outside the psyche, which is the Other. Ultimate playing is love. Aesthetic-spiritual experience is happy, celebratory, love-making -- a romantic comedy that lasts forever.

One person in the world, maybe, can take you to this magical playground where you become the person that you are in relations of love and life-affirmation. Destruction of such relationships for people is evil. ("God is Texting Me!" and "Master and Commander.")

Art can help you to see these truths. To really see a work of art is to "recognize" all that is in that artistic work, as communication, as the expression of its maker(s) love for you, the recipient of his or her spirit. Herbert Marcuse's Essay on Liberation comes to mind and see my essay, which has been subjected to many attacks, "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem."

For a woman to share in aesthetic space with a lover is to be transported to an amusement park in which she is always the focus of attention and concern. Notice Lacan's crucial development of Freudian theory:

"A poetics of witticism (jeu d'esprit) and jokery (calembour), it is argued, is the most effective means of giving voice to the hidden desires of the unconscious. Thus, Lacan endorses the 'challenge of non-sense, where humor, in the malicious grace of the mind free from care symbolizes a truth that has not said its last word' ..." ("Richard and I.") Ibid., at p. 279.

When reading Lacan or Derrida, be alert at all times to invitations to play, wit, puns. Derrida is a genius child who loves to play. This is true of most great philosophers. Laughter is the tool of restored innocence and peace. Become her laughter, her joy, her peace, then you will restore her goodness and all lost innocence, through play. He must hang on to a capacity for joy if she is to have any chance to laugh and be happy again with him. Her goodness is her laughter and they -- her laughter and goodness -- are both HIM. He has become her laughter and goodness.

Do you believe that it is ever a good idea to destroy a person's capacity for laughter and goodness by taking away the one person she associates with those qualities in herself and in human life?

These qualities are her only chance for survival. He must not lose these capacities for laughter and goodness. However tortured and damaged he is or may be, he must continue to laugh -- both for himself and on her behalf. This takes us to the "play" of symbols in Lacan and Baudrillard, returning us to James Bond, Tiffany Case, and Las Vegas. A hermeneutic circle?

C. Symbols and Semiotics.

The playground of symbols in this movie is Las Vegas. Disneyworld for American adults. Happiness and success in life is modelled for people in terms of sparkling lights, glitz, glamor, celebrities. The American fondness for a "good time" is projected onto symbols and images: the cheerful cowboy with a cigarette in his lips, the "showgirl," the Vegas "strip," the commodification of sex as opposed to love, the selling of the illusion of ... well, a "James Bond-like" adventure to tourists from the mid-west is part of the phenomenon of society as spectacle or the culture carnival. Life is a movie.

See Woody Allen's Celebrity, where Melanie Griffith outperforms everybody else in the movie, including great actors like Kenneth Branagh and Leonardo Di Caprio. Notice Ms. Griffith's ability to step back from her screen performances at key moments, only to step into devastating emotional crises of a character on film with full, overpowering reality, flooding her eyes with pain. Example: In the film Tempo, there is a scene with Ms. Griffith's character sitting on a bed, as I recall, which is unforgettable. I think the character foresees her death at that instant and accepts it. There is no written text in the scene to help Ms. Griffith to communicate these complex emotions. Ms. Griffith -- who is one of the few American actors magnificent at depicting tragedy -- is best known as a comedian. Hollywood always gets things right. Please see "Another Day in Paradise."

James and Tiffany are transformed into cartoon-like images in Vegas, emptied of deeper meaning or inner lives. The car chase is surreal, for example, but the characters in the vehicle and the audience take it in stride. The world of the movie has become an amusement park ride. Sex in America is in danger of becoming only an amusement park ride. This is the opposite of the "serious play" for which Lacan and others argue. America, for Baudrillard, especially as seen in Las Vegas is the ...

"... Land of glittering surfaces, of the 'irrepressible development of inequality, of banality and of indifference,' the US has realized the 'anti-Utopia' of French poststructuralism, 'that of unreason, of deterritorialization, of the indeterminacy of the subject and of language, of the neutralization of values, of the death of culture.' Herein lies the difference between America and Europe: 'We [Europeans] only manage to dream and from time to time to cross over to action -- pragmatic America draws the logical consequences of everything that it is possible to conceive.' Europe -- or rather her intellectuals -- are still marked by 'the Revolution of 1789,' 'with the seal of History, of the State and Ideology,' acting as the unhappy consciousness of this modernity' which America has unreflectingly realized. 'In this sense, she is naive and primitive, she doesn't know the irony of the concept, she doesn't know the irony of seduction, she doesn't ironize about the future or destiny, she operates, she materializes.' ... America pragmatically lives out [Europeans'] dreams -- and nightmares."

Alex Callinicos, "The Mirror of Commodity Fetishism," in Against Postmodernism (New York: St. Martins, 1990), pp. 146-147. (American culture is both Modern and Postmodernist.)

James and Tiffany recover their capacity for irony and play in the finale, after saving the world, when they are in each other's arms. The interlude in Vegas is a descent into unreality, absurdity, a flirtation with the death of affect, or just with death. An allusion to Orpheus and Vegas as Hades is available. The loss of the ability to feel is abandonment of reality to the illusions of commodity fetishism and symbol-systems. It is the trading of what is most real for what is most false. This is a danger for millions of people who accept the bogus happiness available in things, objects, money or "diamonds" as opposed to the only authentic bliss, self-becoming with and through another in a loving relationship.

Vegas is social autism resulting from saturation of experience. It is the afterlife as spectacle. Tinsel, baubles, sex, power, fame, money -- these are illusions that will leave you empty. Love is -- well, why not? -- like Coca-Cola, "the real thing."

I live in New York. There is a Wax Museum at 42nd Street to which my relatives wished to go when they visited the city. This museum features wax effigies of celebrities. There is Woody Allen -- with whom I chatted as we sat on a bench -- and all American presidents. Hollywood "Stars" can be seen. You can take your picture with them, also with political figures -- including Fidel Castro, who is a stone's throw from his nemesis, JFK -- or Marilyn Monroe and Elvis. Even Sean Connery as James Bond.

We finally get to go to that hoped for party at which we mingle with the famous and eternally great, or notorious, being validated in our humble lives as mere mortals through the illusion of being, briefly, something more -- one of the "real people" (as a fellow tourist expressed it) -- except that the "real people" are made of wax. The danger is that many of us now are also made of wax.

We are the wax figures on display at this museum. The tourists fail to see that they, we, are the "exhibits" and the wax figures are merely plastic fixtures resembling real environments placed in museums for stuffed animals. No wonder these ideas are dangerous and must be destroyed, like me. My mind and freedom are "scary" to some people. Why? Why does thinking frighten people? Why are intelligence and originality (to the extent that they exist in me) unforgivably offensive? Any more "errors" to be inserted today?

The stuffed animals and wax figures are all of us who abandon our humanity, our capacity for love and self-giving, to become "successful," to go to the Oscars, or to get Ms. Griffith's autograph and a picture. Beyond sadness one feels a terrible sense of tragedy when contemplating such a scene. American society, as depicted on our plasma television screens, is in danger of becoming only that cocktail party for wax figures. Perhaps this explains the Presidents we elect. Wax figures? Thank God for Obama. We have had our "sprinkle" today. Change is long overdue. (See again my much-attacked essay, "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")

A new "error" was also inserted in this foregoing sentence since last night. ("'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")

The suffering caused to persons by so-called "therapists" absorbing this ludicrous idea of "success" as a glamorous, impossible Hollywood party ("adjust") and lots of money, or only professional esteem, is beyond my ability to describe. Dr. Phil? Diana? Tuchin? The resulting destruction of relationships and separation of loved-ones by victims pursuing such a chimera (make money! don't rely on others for happiness!) would be laughable if it were not tragic.

Brad Pitt's character in a new movie asks: "Do you want to be like me? Or do you want to be me?" To want to be someone else is to will your own death. Who or what do you imagine those movie actors are like in their daily lives? Do you think they are any less human than people in your family? Do you think that they hurt any less? Experience less suffering (sometimes they cope with more suffering) in their lives than any other person? Do you believe that anyone escapes the human condition?

On the ground floor of the Paramount building in New York (just accross from the "Winter Garden Theater"), there is a charming restaurant called "Mars -2112." Parents and children enter a "rocket." The rocket "takes off" and the doors open (after we are "cleared for landing"). We find ourselves in a movie set "Mars." Waiters are "Martians." Actors have to pay the bills. Some really get into their roles. They take our orders for burgers and fries. This visit to a good restaurant helps to keep things "real" for us. So do James Bond and Tiffany Case. Mad cool. I wanted to buy a ray gun when I was at this restaurant and join some kids who were shooting at the Martians -- Martians who cheated by shooting back. Not fair, duh. Isn't all acting "playing"?

These characters remind us, through their ironic depictions by Mr. Connery and Ms. St. John, of all that is make-believe in our lives and fantasies. "Nobody is really James Bond," Mr. Connery says with his characteristic smile and knowing wink. Irony. "I'll put on something more comfortable," Ms. St. John's "Tiffany Case" says to an audience that knows -- as she knows -- that she's the "eye-candy" in this movie. She's having fun with that role. Going to the movies is always lunch at "Mars-2112." Going to the movies is playing.

A person -- especially a woman -- inviting you to see her, is similarly saying (with a hand at her hip and a chip on her shoulder): "I am the opposite of this character that I appear to be."

To which a man's only answer, if he really sees her, must be: "I know. Me too."

Sadly, even this previous sentence was altered this morning by hackers. Irony, humor, and distance are the only possible responses and defenses to the bizarre and sometimes evil settings in which we find ourselves placed by forces beyond our control. Each partner in the dialectic of selfhood must allow the other to play a needed role, while remaining anchored to the authentic self deposited with and reflected back by that one indispensable other, with love. To destroy such a dialectic, again, is to kill both partners in the dialogue that is loving and being loved. ("What is it like to be tortured?")

"The primary object of psychoanalysis is, therefore, to remind us that the imago of self-identity presupposes a dialectic of self-differentiation."

For Jacques lacan:

"The self is in truth always different from itself in so far as it is beholden to the other. The conscious ego which declares 'c'est moi' is in reality split and divided" -- as it must be to survive horror and pain, like the experience of trauma, rape, torture and censorship, the dismantling of a life and all relationships -- "for it is constructed out of an unconscious relation to the other which it cleverly conceals from itself. The 'I is other', declares Lacan (echoing Rimbaud's phrase 'Je est un autre')." Kearney, p. 274.

No matter what happened to this woman, she knew that the part of herself that she gave to someone she saw as filled with love and a good human being, could never be destroyed. He would keep her innocence and goodness safe. She was right. He has kept those things safe for her.

Closing Credits

An admirer of Cary Grant happened to run into the famous actor in a Las Vegas bathroom. The "film legend" was at a urinal. Grant washed his hands as the man droned on about what a great actor Grant had always been in the movies, asking for an autograph, then a picture. Mr. Grant patiently accomodated the fan. As Grant was leaving the bathroom, the man said: "I always wanted to be like you in your movies."

Cary Grant looked at his "fan" and said with a smile: "Well, so would I."