Today, my list of contents is being blocked in order to obstruct access to my own essays. This makes revising my work impossible. I expect computer attacks and insertions of "errors" after posting this short story. "Errors" are usually inserted in waves over the first several days that a new item is posted with the goal of maximizing psychological harm as I make identical repairs and corrections many times. Thereafter, "errors" are inserted at irregular intervals, again, to maximize the anxiety-effect and frustration-inducement. There are dozens of intrusions into my computer every day from New Jersey government and private computers. The goal is censorship and maximing psychological "touchless" torture of the victim for the purposes of bringing about a mental breakdown and collapse. I doubt that this effort will succeed with me.
I believe that the subject of evil is important and underexamined. Nearly every statement made by the protagonist-narrator of this text has been made to me in life and during Internet debates with ethical skeptics, nihilists, or "relativists." I have kept copies of many such exchanges taking place on-line. I would not be surprised to discover that persons advocating views not all that distant from those set forth below are officials in America's "Soprano State." Those who are interested in these disturbing literary themes are directed to:
Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song (New York: Warner Books, 1979).
John Banville, The Book of Evidence (New York: Warner Books, 1989).
Sebastian Faulks, Engleby (New York: Vintage, 2007).
Mitch Smith & Monica Davey, "Two Men From Elite Universities Charged With a Killing 'Dark and Disturbing,'" The New York Times, August 21, 2017, p. A11.
Alan Cowell, "Ian Brady, Unrepentant Killer of British Children, Dies at 79," The New York Times, "Business Section," May 17, 2017, p. B14.
Mike Ives, "Life Sentences for British Banker in Murder of 2 Persons," The New York Times, November 9, 2016, p. A11.
William Glaberson, "Trial of 2nd Man Will Revisit the Horror of a Triple Murder," The New York Times, November 11, 2010, at p. A29.
"Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?"
State v. Carlos R. Mendoza
Affidavit in Support of Motion for Reconsideration of Death Sentence and Appeal for Clemency
Filed before the Supreme Court of
________________________ .
Docket No.: 94-198856-10
Indictment No.: 1267790-10
I, Carlos R. Mendoza, being duly sworn hereby depose and say:
1. I am awaiting execution in accordance with a death sentence imposed after multiple convictions for the murders of several persons.
2. My "termination" at the hands of state officials is scheduled for not later than 24 hours from the signing of this official document. I submit this Affidavit in support of the legal brief seeking reconsideration of my sentence and appeal for clemency prepared by my attorney and his assistants which is to be filed not later than 9:00 A.M. on the day of my scheduled execution.
3. These "murders" of which I am convicted were only one part of a larger criminal conspiracy and chain of events in which I am said to have "participated." The United States Attorney's Office has described me in legally filed documents as a "Kingpin" and "career criminal." I am highly flattered by these descriptions and colorful epithets even as I must decline the honor that they bestow upon me.
4. I am, your Honors, merely your humble servant. I am a minor felon. I am a "poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage." I am as nothing in comparison with the evils done, every day, by ladies and gentlemen -- such as yourselves, perhaps? -- whose decisions and judgments result in death and suffering on such a colossal scale as to defy description in words, making any crimes attributed to me insignificant. It has been noted that "nations and states are but robber barons writ large." (Adam Smith) I am merely a robber baron writ small.
5. The United States of America does not deny responsibility for the deaths in the last decade of more than 1 to 2 million persons in the Middle East alone, including 500,000 children; millions of native Americans were killed in the conquest of a continent; millions more persons of African ancestry were enslaved and killed in developing the world's largest economy during the past several centuries; hundreds of thousands died instantly through incineration at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; more than one million succumbed in the Pacific to U.S. colonialism; thousands died and are still dying in Vietnam as a result of U.S. efforts in that country that included chemical as well as germ warfare. Many thousands continue to die in Pakistan from U.S. "robot" bombs -- as reported (or ignored) -- in America's daily newspapers. Hundreds of thousands have died and continue to die in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan from "secret" U.S. missions. My achievements are insignificant by comparison with "your" deeds, distinguished judges and justices, ladies and gentlemen. I am only an amateur in crime. All of you are the true professionals in the art of murder.
6. Dr. Johnson remarked that "nothing so concentrates the mind as the knowledge that a man will be hanged in the morning." I have little hope that this appeal for clemency will be successful. I am cooperating with my lawyer's efforts because he seems so interested in the research and arguments to be submitted to the court and officials deciding the matter that I would hate to disappoint him by ignoring or trivializing his effort to save my "worthless" skin. We have grown very fond of one another, my lawyer and I. At least, I like him. My lawyer regards me with fascinated "horror." Unlike many of you in the so-called "world of normality," my lawyer -- who is my age and even resembles me, physically, if not morally -- understands that "there but for the grace of God go I."
7. I share in the human condition, ladies and gentlemen. I am one of you. Your horror and dread at my actions (or at my existence) emanates from this suppressed knowledge. Admit it, you see yourselves in me and others like me. You are as much attracted as repelled by what you see in me. We need each other. No saint without a sinner, eh? No judges or lawyers and laws without criminals and violators of laws. I notice that my lawyer nods his head in agreement as these words are taken down by a typist or court reporter for transcription. Think of ancient drama or literature, if you like, or the sad poetry in court documents and filings, the foul residue of miserable lives exhaled (like a miasmic cloud) from places such as the establishment where I now find myself placed by cruel fortune and the vicissitudes of a deeply flawed legal system. Justice is only to be found in heaven. On earth we have a surplus of laws. Happily, I am surrounded by books. Finally, I have the leisure to read and a little time to think.
8. I am a man who is about to die. I must make my peace with my killer, society, even as I endeavor to justify my life with mere words. A final meal, a cigarette, some last words. These are poor consolations for the misfortunes of fate. My lawyer's eyes sparkle with pity. He pities me. I pity him. My life's final act is anticlimactic, scripted by Henry Fielding and (somehow) unfolding in the wrong century. I would have fared better in the eighteenth century -- or earlier still -- as a Spanish pirate sailing the high seas.
9. This is what psychologists call "lack of proper affect" or "insight," failure of moral imagination, inability to appreciate the pain of others, a poverty of feeling and empathy. I am a Republican. I believe in money -- our only true God -- also in punishment for criminals. Criminals enjoy committing their crimes, your Honors, just look at Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, or Mr. Trump. They -- no, we -- deserve all that is meeted out to us. So many criminals are lawyers and judges, elected officials and businessmen, even prosecutors and cops -- many of these social frauds were on my payroll. I have little sympathy for hypocrites concerned about the "ethics" and "souls" of their neighbors in Soprano States. After all, what is to be expected from this monkey race of killers and carnivores? Not much: 98% of our genes are shared with chimpanzees. Indeed, we are "50% identical to the banana. ... Homo sapiens, according to current evolutionary theory, exists primarily as a container for inactive bacteria which have been successful in the struggle for survival. ... Laws of Newtonian elegance can't apply to human behavior. Bananas aren't motivated by 'cause and effect.' Ask one." Engleby, pp. 109-110.
10. My lawyer is about my age, fifty years-old. He lives in a modest non-descript place a few miles from the courthouse. He is in debt up to and beyond his eyeballs to pay for the education of his only child. He has few possessions in comparison with what I have enjoyed. My lawyer is also a Republican. He does not have sex with young and very beautiful women. I have delighted in the pleasures of women of every kind and from every nation in the world, almost on a daily basis. He has never owned a very expensive watch. I have possessed exquisite jewelry of every kind. He has never travelled the world. I have been everywhere in Europe. I have also visited at least some parts of every continent, including Asia and Africa, mostly on business. I know what it is like to have money and power.
11. I drove a Mercedes Benz, the most luxurious model ever made. My dull and average-looking lawyer has only a very modest Japanese car. I have dined in the finest restaurants with famous faces surrounding me. He eats at home with his pleasant wife of thirty years. He dreams of nights that he cannot afford in great concert halls and theaters. I have been to all the great theaters of the world. We debate philosophy and cultural issues. He believes in goodness and love. I do not. My death may arrive tomorrow. His death (and yours) will arrive soon enough -- if it has not arrived already without your noticing the fact -- usually, death arrives before most of you have done much living. I pity all of you.
12. We "live" in different worlds of value, my lawyer and I. The boredom of his life would have killed me ages ago. I have very little confidence that my well-meaning attorney (or any judges) will appreciate all I have to say. My question to you, your Honors, is whether you or he -- this totally insignificant and flawed person, struggling to be good, with his silly books of ethics and love of art, my "inferior" in every sense of the word -- have truly lived or whether all of you will die without savoring this precious gift of life? Am I making this appeal "for" life? Or is my lawyer and are all of you with him begging for some of this "authenticity" or Nietzschean elan that I embody? Who is to be pitied? Me? Or you? How are we as "sacks of protein and water" different in the end from one another whether we are criminals or cops? How could we possibly matter to the universe?
13. My lawyer lives in an orderly world, in linear time, real spaces, and genuine emotions. I thrive upon chaos and quantum mystery. Like Milton's Lucifer, I "rule in hell" whereas he serves in heaven. I am rich in life-force. How many of you can say the same? Not many, I promise you.
14. Experts and courts demand an explanation for my actions and life choices. Their theories are laughably absurd. This demand misses the point of the enterprise: "Evil," one meddlesome English critic reminds us, "has, or appears to have, no practical purpose. Evil is supremely pointless. Anything as humdrum as a purpose would tarnish its lethal purity. In this, it resembles God, who if he does turn out to exist" -- I shall discover the answer to this question soon enough! -- "has absolutely no reason for doing so. He is his own reason for being. ... Farce is human action stripped of meaning and reduced to mere physical motion. This is also what the Nazis had in mind for the Jews." Terry Eagleton, On Evil (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 84-87.
15. One of my colleagues in business described persons as "meat puppets," things of no consequence to be moved about by men like us. We are the gods. They -- all of you -- are animals and nothing more. You are "collateral damage," like those millions of brown people who must be murdered to further America's national interest. No one claims that my life has been dull or average. I can truthfully assert -- with my hand on my heart as I do so -- that few persons have found my conversations or company boring. I am blessed with a strong dose of what Friedrich Nietzsche describes as "life-energy." Heidegger understood the need for affirmation of the moment. A single act of gratuitous cruelty that produces a victim writhing in agony is what nature intends for all of us. To deny the luxurious pleasures derived from the destruction of "little" lives is mendacious. Admit your addiction to hurting the "little people" who make the world turn. After all, to those who dare to act greatly or seize what must be theirs all is permitted. All is permitted.
16. We are carnivores, killers, takers, aggressors. We take pleasure in fulfilling our aggressive natures. This is what the blood-stained god of creation must have intended. Humanity is not made in the image of any loving God's compassion. The very suggestion of such an ethics of love is utterly absurd. Hitler had some excellent points even if he got a little carried away at times. Who is to say that Hitler was wrong? Morality is subjective. Goodness is relative to the individual and his or her situation: " ... the strong man is also the free man, ... while the subjected man, the slave, [like my earnest attorney,] lives dull and oppressed. -- The theory of freedom of will is an invention of the ruling classes." Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, R.J. Hollingdale, s. 9.
17. An invention of the "ruling classes" is what morality always will be. Yes, morality is a tool for the oppression of the people -- simple people and fools who deserve what they get from the likes of me. Much the same must be said of laws. They are for the masses not the masters of men. I was (the past tense is now necessary!), in life, a master of men. I was an "Overman." I will not end my life by grovelling to small men and women. All of you fine ladies and gentlemen are the cave in which I dwell. Right and wrong is all about power. You may kill me, but you cannot be like me and you want, desperately, to be like me. This explains why so many of you follow me and are fascinated by me, or others like me, who rule over nations and states everywhere in the world. I have lived and now I will die, greatly, loudly, proudly. I could not have borne a small and trivial life. This violent death at the hands of the state is much better. "Who would fardles bear? ..." Not I, your Honors, not me -- never.
18. I suppose some comment is desired from me concerning the murders of which I stand convicted. Very well. Let us savor the delicious details. I was forced by the relatively few gainful financial opportunities of my early life to operate a business in which credibility is vital. I cannot permit a rival (or employee) to absond with my goods or cash. Otherwise, you can be sure that others will attempt to do the same. My life unfolded in a world without the regular and predictable institutional responses that would have allowed me to forego self-help. In other words, I could not go to the cops for help. Hence, I was the cops.
19. Now many persons in such a position in America hire what are known as "subcontractors." There are "garbage disposal experts" who solve these problems for a small fee in what used to be called "the Underworld." I could have formulated a "coalition of the willing." I preferred -- even delighted -- in doing my own sanitary work. I admit that what I will now describe will seem "evil." However, I do not believe in "evil." The word is a relic of a religious age that is no longer needed. "The world is everything that is the case." (Ludwig Wittgenstein) Evil is not an item that is found existing, empirically, in the world. Evil is a concept deposited in human affairs by persons. Evil is a hypocritical concept. Evil is subjective. The winners in every war or conflict define what is evil. Had the Nazis or Japan won the Second World War there would have been "Virginia" and not "Nuremberg Trials." Besides, the word "evil" should not be applied to me. I am merely more honest than most people. I take what I want. I get rid of my competitors. I survive. This is what nature intends, ladies and gentlemen. I am in compliance with the strictures of evolution. How can anyone blame me for that? I am only a "survivor."
20. "What rats do when a member of a strange rat clan enters their territory or is put in there by a human experimenter is one of the most horrible and repulsive things which can be observed in animals." Konrad Lorenz writes of the immediate attacks and slow dismerberment of these rodents by others who bite, claw, tear at the stranger, usually over a long period of time, deliberately prolonging the agony: "Only rarely does one see an animal in such desperation and panic, so conscious of the inevitability of a terrible death, as a rat which is about to be slain by rats. It ceases to defend itself. One cannot help comparing this behavior with what happens when a rat faces a large predator that has driven it into a corner whence there is no more escape than from the rats of a strange clan. ..." "Rats," in On Aggression (New York & London: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1963), pp. 161-163. (American prisons duplicate the conditions of overcrowded rodent environments to perfection, probably deliberately, with predictable consequences in terms of inmates' suicides and frequent violence.)
21. American experts in psychological torture have devised techniques aimed at reproducing this breakdown in defensive and coping capacity in persons not convicted of any crimes through frustrations and anxiety. They have improved upon Nazi techniques. Persons lay down and die, if subjected to such excruciating torments over a sufficiently long period, except for a few annoying individuals who do not seem to fit the pattern of so-called "normality." I hate when people refuse to be victims. I detest persons who disobey me. I hate everyone who thinks he is smarter than me. They need a little humility. No offense: "Anglos are not smart enough to be philosophers." I am a true philosopher. I do not bother with all of the books my lawyer reads. His constant study shows a lack of originality. All my lawyer does is to quote from his readings and then to comment on them in formulating his opinions. I am my own source of quotations.
22. "It has been noted that the existence of evil is only a 'problem' in the philosophical sense if one presupposes that Nature is an essentially benevolent enterprise or that it is the creation of an essentially benevolent deity or deities. If one makes no such presupposition, then evil's existence ceases to be a philosophical problem. But it does not necessarily cease to be a mystery. Indeed, one can never fully explain the existence of evil merely by denying the alleged benevolence of the universe. One must also provide a completely adequate account of the ultimate origins of human suffering. ... " Timothy Anders, The Evolution of Evil (Illinois: Open Court, 1994), at pp. xii-xiii.
23. I am compelled to agree with Professor Anders. "Suffering" by victims is indeed a crucial component of this mystery. How pleasant it is to savor the suffering of another. The exquisite flavor of a dying person's pleas for mercy and recognition of one's demonic "power" -- power over life or death, power to bestow favors or inflict pain and frustrations, eternally, for no rational reason, control over others, establishing one's infinite superiority -- like the demon, Malbus, in world mythology. I am still amused by a woman's attempt to escape death by offering sex and the look of shock on her face as a bullet was fired into her belly. I did not know there was a child in that woman's body. This knowledge, I must say, would have added to the pleasure of the experience. The look of absolute loss and devastation in a person's face as his or her children are murdered is really funny. The realization in a man's face that everything he loves has been or will be destroyed is priceless. I try to force them to see that everything they believe is nonsense. There is no truth. You can do whatever you want. I know what Vikings felt when they sacked a city. I understand Cortez as he raped and burned native women. These men must have been very much like me. These are the men who made empires and built mountains of gold. These are successful men. My lawyer admires artists and philosophers, scientists and great jurists. Such men and women are only servants of the wealthy and powerful. Money is the meaning of life. Genius is something I can buy like a hundred-dollar haircut. Violence is the ultimate sexual experience.
24. I entered my rival's home with some of my employees. I tied him to a chair. I took everything of value, material and non-material, raped his woman, murdered his children. After enjoying their bodies and turning them over to my people as a reward or bonus for the evening's work, I allowed my would-be usurper to die, slowly, by bleeding to death from several gun shots to the lower portions of his body. As he was surrounded by his dead family members, I snapped a photo, after posing the group in a touching family composition. I think of these murders as my humble creation of a work of art. My masterpiece. I then set fire to the establishment. Some of the victims may have been alive before the flames engulfed them. I wish that I had brought marshmellows to roast in the flames. I certainly succeeded in sending a message to any others contemplating a "revolution."
25. This evening's entertainment was strictly a "rational means to achieve a desired goal." David Hume would say that I am utterly rational. Psychologists suggest a career in politics. This lovely scene has been repeated 70 to 100 million times in the twentieth century. We are well on our way to similar or, perhaps, even greater numbers of victims in the new century. Am I so unusual? Am I really a monster? Or do you see in me only the monstrosity in human nature -- a human nature in which you share? I am merely the other side of you. Do what you like to my body. I have enjoyed my fun. I have lived. Living is killing, eating, fornicating, excreting one's victims. Morality and human compassion are things for weak persons like all of you. When you speak of human nature, remember that (whatever other aspects of humanity are postulated) you will also have to deal with me. There will always be someone like me.
The foregoing statements are true to the best of my knowledge. I am aware that if any of the foregoing statements made by me are wilfully false, I am subject to punishment.
s/Carlos R. Mendoza
Carlos R. Mendoza, Inmate No. 45587, Appellant.
Signed before me this 21st day of September, 2010.
s/Carlo R. Mauro, Esq.
Carlo R. Mauro, Esq.
Decision of the State Supreme Court in State v. Carlos R. Mendoza, et als.
Docket No.: 94-198856-10
Indictment No.: 1267790-10
PER CURRIAM:
Appeals for Clemency and Motions for Reconsideration of all Death Sentences have been brought before this tribunal in the above captioned and related matters. The state legislature has enacted a statute that forbids the imposition of the death penalty in this jurisdiction prior to the filing of these appeals and requests. All pending death sentences of persons convicted of murder in this state will be and hereby are commuted to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole subject to review by appellate tribunals in the event that new evidence of factual innocence surfaces in any of these matters at any future time. Accordingly, the Appeals and Requests by these Appellants are rendered moot and are hereby dismissed. So Ordered.
Dated and Signed by All Justices this 1st Day of November, 2010.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Out of the Past.
"He looked as if he would murder me and he did."
I stared at this sentence on the page in my old and battered Underwood typewriter. I pushed a weathered fedora hat back on my head, loosened my tie. I always knew the end would come because of some dame. I just never realized how they'd get me. The two of them were in on it from the beginning. He was a lawyer, a shyster downtown, an ambulance chaser. She was a peroxide blond who wore tight dresses and too much lipstick, always carried a forty-five in her bag, had a tattoo on her back -- where the sun don't shine -- that said: "Hot Lips."
They were perfect for each other. I got in the way. They had no choice. I see it now. They had to get rid of me. I could almost forgive them for that. But they killed Madeleine. And that I'll never forgive. Today is the day of reckoning. I have a bullet for each of them.
This place isn't so bad. It's a lot like Jersey City on a rainy afternoon. I remember reading a ghost story that was kind of like that. I think it was Muriel Spark's "Portobello Road." There's a lot of guys, like me, wandering around in this black-and-white reality. If you have some unfinished business you may get stuck in a reality like this. I pack my 38 caliber police special -- Philip Marlowe had a revolver just like this baby! -- I step away from my desk, the typewriter, and the whole grimy office. I have to find those two grifters. I need some fresh air. Madeleine has to be here somewhere. I'm gonna find that dame.
I stroll through "The Mansions of Hades," which is a residential neighborhood for well-to-do existentialists and others dead before resolving the puzzle of their lives, still questioning, doubting, angry and unaccepting. Norman Mailer drinks at a bar nearby. Jacques Derrida scopes out the babes at the corner restaurant. Jean-Paul Sartre "lives" about a block away.
What does it mean to "live" as opposed to merely "existing"? How is hell different from the Marais district of Paris? Let's drop in on Sartre to discuss my predicament. I want to know how a dead man can kill the bastard who plugged him. No wonder all the great philosophers are here. Most of them are trying to kill their predecessors and teachers. Wittgenstein is hunting for all of them. Bastards.
I expect to find Sartre in his messy apartment that is filled with books. Instead, I find him sitting in a sidewalk cafe. Sartre holds a newspaper, stares at a cup of strong black coffee, his pipe sits on a dirty ash tray. I notice two books before him -- a collection of works in hermeneutics and the late writings of Jacques Derrida. I tip my hat in his direction, point to the seat before him as I glance at the Derrida texts. Sartre shrugs his shoulders, then gestures at the empty chair.
I sit and ask the philosopher: "How's it going?"
Sartre sips his coffee and says: "Everything just is."
"Yeah, I know the feeling."
"Feelings? Here?"
"Yeah, in a way. There's a constant numbness or dullness, a frozen quality in one's perceptions and an inescapable affective tone or mood to everything that makes life stale and flat. I have lately -- but wherefore I know not -- lost all my mirth in life ... or death. The world is black-and-white for a really good reason here, now. Cigarette smoke follows you everywhere. People dress in black a lot. The neighborhood is filled with existentialists and postmodernists -- like Hollywood."
Sartre seemed exited and child-like: "I met Humphrey Bogart, you know."
"I'd rather meet Lauren Bacall. The deepest circles of hell are reserved for analytical philosophers and the linguistic analysts. Nobody has been able to finish a sentence for centuries in hell because of all the parsing of meanings and debates over syntax. I hear they're planning to make George W. Bush deliver a speech for eternity in hell. Think about the poor saps who'll have to sit through it. 'No Exit' is right." Part of the meaning of hell is not knowing that you're in it.
"It makes you long for the guestapo." Sartre sipped his coffee.
"I want to ask you a question."
"Go right ahead. It won't mean anything."
"Well, I want to plug the bastard who did me in. I have no body. I can't physically kill the mug. What should I do?"
"Why not wait fifty years? That's nothing here."
"That's not good enough for me. I want to dispatch the guy, send him to his maker with all his sins upon his head."
"Are you sure you have the right man."
"Yes, but I haven't seen him in a while. He's a master of disguise who looks a lot like me."
"That is a problem. Your murderer -- like your self -- is an entity in the world. Definitely not a Cartesian 'I.' You'll have to trail him through his actions. Maybe you'll be able to draw a picture of the mug."
"A picture?"
"Yes," Sartre took a drag on his pipe. "You see, Schopenhauer (who lives about a block from here) said that, if you were to connect the dots of a person's actions or the deeds of his life, the image produced would constitute a kind of portrait of an external shape -- a ghost, if you like -- of the self. All of the inner life would be missing, of course, but everything else would be there. You would have a 'mug shot,' as it were, of the killer to put in post offices and supermarkets. Of course, we don't have either of those establishments in this neck of the woods. You might come up with the image of God or the devil ... either (or both) may look like you -- or me."
"I see."
With a wave to my favorite existentialist, I got up from the table and drifted, aimlessly, through the half deserted streets and muttering retreats. Sartre is still waiting for that waiter who is not there and may not be coming, like those two bums waiting for Godot.
I felt a breeze scattering some leaves, then I saw her. She was standing under a streetlamp wearing a beautiful suit -- maybe Christian Dior -- white gloves in one hand, a hat tipped over one eye. Perfect make up, cigarette on her lips, holding an envelope-type purse. She looked like Jane Greer as she appeared in Out of the Past, except she was a blond. She had trouble written all over her. I didn't care. I waltzed right up to her. In my best casual manner, I tried an opening line which is more direct than my usual coolness and distance from this sort of dame:
"You look a little too glamorous for this neck of the woods, sister. Can I help you find your way?"
I made sure she got the message. This was one tough dame. She didn't blink and gave it right back to me:
"What's it to you?" She blew some smoke in my face.
"Nothing. I'm just trying to be sociable. Mind if I walk with you. These streets can be dangerous."
"I'm dead. There's not too much more anybody can do to me."
There's something incomplete about this moment in history -- maybe it's only in my society, but I doubt it -- a feeling of deadness. Something remains unfinished in our culture and ourselves. The new age is still unborn. We are not yet what we must be. This state of being nothing applies to the living and dead. Maybe that's perfect since my name is Nick, Nick Orpheus. The choice is between "Being" and "Nothingness."
"Well, there's places and then there are much worse places. The local boys could drag you to New Jersey, which has to be the last circle."
"Anything but that." She chuckled. A lifted eyebrow said she didn't care if I walked with her or shot myself in the head. We could hear some music from nightclubs in the distance. I suggested walking in the direction of the music. It was all the same to her. She was looking for the no good bastard who shot her. I told her my story. I explained about Madeleine. She said that she must have known her from somewhere. She couldn't remember too much before she got to this place. Me too. Something about being murdered is cleansing. You leave something behind. Create something new. Her name was Jane Eurydice. She asked me about Madeleine.
"Well, Madeleine ... " I hesitate to speak of her. One of my rules in "life" is never to discuss one woman with another. The strange similarity between these women -- Madeleine's hair was chestnut colored, sometimes -- even if her hair color changed by the week -- and her eyes were dark. Otherwise, this stranger might have been Madeleine's twin: same height, weight. Despite the new arrival's blond hair and green eyes, red lipstick, and greater glamor, I felt like I was talking to Madeleine. It was enough to give me a sense of ... vertigo. Maybe "frenzy" is a better word.
"Madeleine was among those few women with a legitimate grievance against life. She was owed something for what was -- and is -- taken from her. I can't speak of her in the past tense. I love her laughter and curiosity, passionate interest in things and ideas. People fascinate and horrify Madeleine. They mostly horrify me -- especially the lowlifes and bastards she associated with."
"I am not a big fan of humanity." She said this with a hardness in her eyes I would not have believed possible for such a beautiful woman.
"You got something better?"
"There must be something better."
"Maybe that's what this place is about. Finding something better." The music was pretty loud now. There was neon in the middle distance. I gestured in a north-by-northwest direction, towards the light and shadows, smoke and mirrors.
"You want a drink?"
"Why not? You look like the best company I'm going to find in this town." Jane laughed as she said this. It wasn't meant as a compliment.
We found a cabaret that looked like something from "Casablanca." There were a lot of people dancing. Great jazz music was playing. Cigarette smoke filled up the joint. There was a never-ending party going on. I slipped the doorman a fin to get into the club, then looked for some little guy in a rented tux with gleaming dentures who would finagle a table for a brand new twenty dollar bill. Money works even at these levels of reality.
There were beautiful women all over this place. It was a lot like Hollywood. Jane wasn't worried a bit. Jane sat accross from me in the soft light of the place, removed her hat and gloves, pointed those big eyes at me posing an unspoken question. I ordered a bottle of champagne. She was some seriously beautiful woman. Her eyes were filled with intelligence and curiosity, also deeper levels of pain than one expected to see in a woman who looked the way she did -- not at her age, anyway. She must've been no more than twenty-five when she passed into this realm of blighted souls. Some women are even younger when they are ushered into this grim reality through horrible trauma. I do not envy those all-too brief lives.
"Should I make conversation? Or will you be witty for me?" A lifted eyebrow told me that she had little hope that I would succeed in amusing her. If you have eternity on your hands, she seemed to say, a moron is worth a few laughs. I was the moron.
"I'll just try to make the conversation light and fluffy."
"Go ahead and do that." I got a smile. Well, that's a start. I had a feeling that there was something about our being together, here, in this nowhere place, that was important to what we were both after. Maybe she sensed this as well, but would not articulate the insight. Women who look the way she always will, to me, are targets of every imbecile in the world. They develop techniques for wrestling with gorillas of all varieties.
The suspiciousness was understandable, shadows that fell across her features, the intensity and presence of pain or shock said that, somewhere along the way in her brief life -- probably when she was very young -- someone evil and perverse hurt her forever. Maybe she was here to find the guy or gal who would love her forever, balancing the scales. Maybe I could help. And just maybe, if I was right about these intuitions, by helping her I'd help myself. This could be the only way to get out of here.
Some things a guy in my line of work figures out by dealing with lives lost to squalor and crime, blasted souls and walking wounded in this bleak landscape where fine young cannibals walk the night. The band began to play "You Must Remember This." I fixed my tie, smiled, and extended a hand. After a few seconds of cold contemplation, Jane put her hand in mine.
We stepped on to the dance floor. I liked the feel of her body close to mine, the subtle but excellent perfume, the fabric of her dress. I liked the way Jane looked at me -- amused and expectant, cool and assessing, smart, tough, challenging, also curious. Never let a woman become bored with your mind. Most men are boring to women. In fact, most men are boring to themselves.
The most beautiful woman in the world becomes less interesting the moment it is clear that she's an idiot. I don't know why I feel that way. Most men feel the opposite emotions. They are attracted to women who will always be more ignorant and less intelligent than they are. Women who are physically attractive and intellectually dull seem to constitute one masculine ideal. Women who are easily impressed, I guess.
Life must be happier for idiots, male and female. Think of all the fools you know who are doing great. Have you ever seen the Republican Convention? They're all happy as kids in a candy store waving their flags and balloons. True, a lot of them get indicted for having too much candy, but you know what I mean.
Gradually, Jane relaxed and began to tell her story. She was the product of a broken home. Mother left early. Father liked to beat her. I suspect that he did worse. She liked boys. They liked her. Jane didn't care about much. There was a fatalism about her from the start. She expected a short life. She was certainly right about that abruptly-ended or -shortened life. Jane never thought of her life as anything other than an ordeal punctuated by moments of self-abandonment in pleasures -- pleasures of various kinds which is always an anticipation of death, a kind of living death or purgatory of the moment.
Any kind of mood altering or hallucinatory substance is about pain management. Eventually, the pain does the managing. Purgatory is the condition of a never-ending party, a nightclub that does not close, a celebration with strangers and without mirth, an eternity of boredom. Have you ever seen the Oscars ceremony?
There was so little love in Jane's life that she must have felt a desperate hunger for genuine affection or any true human connection, let alone real love. It was a wonder to me that people -- especially men -- had not taken advantage of this poor woman from day one. Maybe they did. Jane was carrying a neon sign around her neck that said: "Please exploit me."
Many women seem unaware of projecting emotional need and vulnerability, frailty, and spiritual loss. Predators feed on that sort of need and vulnerability.
At first, Jane didn't see her vulnerability as an invitation to every worthless bastard in the world. After a while, Jane didn't care or, maybe, she believed that things could never be different with anyone that she would meet. Despite the veneer of toughness and cynicism -- the edgy quality about her and Jane's formidable beauty -- she was a softie inside, craving affection, just made for the exploiters of this world, exploiters that she would seek out with a suicidal compulsion and apathy.
Jane was begging for destruction because, absurdly, she had accepted the one lesson that power always teaches its victims at every level of reality -- you deserve what I am doing to you. You are my slave. Never believe that nonsense.
"We need to find the people who hurt us." I said this and stared into her eyes. I held her close and felt the music surrounding us.
"Maybe," Jane whispered in my ear, "it's the only way we can be free."
That's when we turned and saw the man in the black raincoat. He was of middle height, his features appeared indistinct or nondescript because of the distance that made it impossible to identify him as someone familiar to me in life. He seemed like a man who knew too much. He was clearly observing us, maybe following me. He was with a woman -- dark haired, wearing dark glasses, even inside this nightclub. I didn't like the look of either one of them. There are all kinds of bosses and minor deities exacting tribute in these nether regions of lost souls. Jane saw what I saw.
"Let's get out of here." She grabbed my arm. I felt that this was right and good somehow, together we're unstoppable.
"Come on. There must be a back way out of here." Her nearness was reassuring. I want her never to be far away.
We pushed our way through the crowd. As we left the nightclub, it seemed that night had remained irremovably in place for years or eons. At this level of reality darkness ruled. There were parties everywhere, music, cheap perfume, cigarette smoke, the sounds of sex were often heard, but no love-making, street walkers at every corner. We wandered through twisting and darkening streets then came upon a man standing near a taxi. I could hear steps behind us, approaching. I (somehow) knew that it was the couple from the nightclub aiming to "get" us. They would shadow us, like a guilty past. I wasn't sure whether we could shake them off.
"Need a lift?" The man wore a cap on the back of his head, a cigarette behind his ear, unshaved, maybe forty. The car was a beat-up old checker cab with New York plates.
"Where you heading?" I asked and looked over my shoulder. Footsteps approached, quickly.
"That depends on you, buddy."
"Get in, Jane. Let's get out here pronto." We ducked into the comfy back seat. The cab peeled out into the night traffic faster than a bat out of hell -- or purgatory -- and we settled into a comfortable cruising speed, but were we heading in the right direction?
I tried to make out the streets in the darkness, deciding to trust my emotions and intuitions. I'd have to feel my way along. I would need to see through the blindness. Jane seemed to trust my judgment more than I did.
"That way," I said. The driver turned towards a dark and lost highway. We drove some ways, then -- I don't know how -- I felt there were familiar landmarks along the way, allowing them to point me in the right direction, they seemed to whisper to me, gesturing towards something known and true, a powerul emotion pulled me towards an ambiguous resolution to our adventure.
A glance behind us revealed a black cadillac, 1947, gleaming, menacing. The grill on that car resembled the smile of a hungry shark -- the caddie was gaining on us. I saw what appeared to be a very familiar street. I asked the cab driver to pull over quickly. I dropped a wad of cash in his lap, opened the door of the vehicle, then pulled Jane out of the car.
"This way." I suddenly knew the right direction. My office was on a street like this, maybe this very street. I looked at the numbers on the doors of the buildings. The numbers seemed blurry -- like in a dream or as if we were under water -- I concentrated and, somehow, I knew that I was only a few blocks from my old haunts. I felt like a man fighting his way out of a hypnotic spell, rescuing forbidden memories from the dungeon to which they were consigned by an evil witch.
"Come on, Jane."
"Where are we going?"
"Towards redemption."
I smiled at her with a confidence that I knew she could not resist. We made our way through darkened and dirty streets. No footsteps were heard behind us. This was further proof that we were headed the right way. I saw a building I knew, but everything seemed to be in the wrong place, shifted around in my recollection. I saw my office building. There was no one around. The entire area seemed desolate, abandoned, like a stage set. I thought that my old key might still open the door.
We made our way towards the entrance. No security guard. I didn't want to try the elevator. We climbed the thirty-nine steps to the fifth floor. My office door was closed, not locked. Jane seemed frightened. I offered silent encouragement. We both sensed that a revelation lay on the other side of that door. I opened it and was frozen to the spot where I stood. Jane's scream seemed to come from far away.
There were two corpses in that room. One looked exactly like me; the other like Jane. From the shadows, a man in a perfect tuxedo stepped forward and lit a cigarette. It was the cab driver, except now he was the epitome of elegance, with a pencil-thin mustache, a gardenia in his lapel, a neatly folded handkerchief in his pocket. His shoes gleamed. He sat on my desk before the two corpses, then smiled and tilted his head toward the empty seats before the bodies. He was the best dressed psycho I'd ever seen.
"I was wondering how long it would take you two to get here. These are the earlier versions of yourselves. They're as dead as doornails. I think you killed them."
He looked at me when he said this.
"Both of you, I mean." He chuckled merrily at this observation. "Pity, I wanted them to belong to me. I liked those two people. You took them away from me. I can't accept anybody who loves the way you two kids do. It's just not the kind of thing I can tolerate. You even offered to take the rap for this dame. What kind of a thing is that for a grown man to do? It ain't natural."
He reached for a drink that appeared in his free hand.
"In my position I have only a few rules. I try to be accomodating of every sort of person. I am a true democrat. I am tolerant of human foibles and peccadillos, even ... encouraging occasional sinfulness." He smiled. "With you two, I have ... failed to communicate."
The man in the tux walked around the room, smelled the gardenia in his lapel: "There is no space for you two and what you feel for each other in the realm where I am king. You two simply do not belong in the kingdom of shadows. You love her too much for that. It is that love that killed the darkness in you. The parts of you that I liked so much. Shame. I always get stuck with the stiffs."
Jane was unaware of speaking the next words: "But who really killed them?"
"You did. You 'transcended' them. I hate when people do that. Now all of you are bringing loving versions of this guy and gal to life by reading these words. It's all terribly complicated and annoying. Here's what I'm willing to do for you."
The man stood and opened his hands, holding them before our eyes like a carnival magician.
"Jane, doesn't really know you. She has no memory of her life at this lowest-level of reality. It's so similar to Union City in this sinister realm. If you can get her out of here, into the sunlight and the Springtime. If you can find the key to her love -- the old love that she felt and feels for you in the deepest part of herself -- then I'll punch your tickets and you can get to the other ride. You'll know you're there when you hear birds singing and everybody seems to be happy. They're usually all grinning like idiots in that place with the skyscrapers and a big park in the middle. I have to warn you the sex is awful in that town."
"What happens if she does not remember?"
"Then you stay with me in the kingdom of darkness becoming the two shadows of yourselves, corpses, that followed you from the club. Living dead, like everybody else in New Jersey. Whatta-ya say? Shake on it?"
Jane interrupted: "Listen, buster -- No one has to rescue me. I barely know this guy. I am not going to let him take the rap for me. I'll go any place you want. He can take off."
I was not going to let Jane risk eternity in that hell: "Not on your life. She's right. Jane does not know me. She can be very happy and better off in the sunshine. Maybe she'll find a banker or some very successful guy --"
" -- that would be hell." Jane said with a laugh.
Suddenly, I felt a blackness swallow all of my conscious awareness. The room began to spin around. I could not see Jane. I reached out for her with a desperation that I had never felt before. I lost consciousness. Everything faded to black. I knew that I might never again find the lady that vanishes.
I awoke after what seemed like hours. I was in a park or something. The grass smelled wet and clean. I heard children laughing, playing. I walked towards a small group of persons visible in the middle distance. I saw birds in a blue and white sky. I felt the warmth of the sun on my flesh and saw everything in beautiful technicolor. I was over the rainbow.
I felt dazed, walking, looking for someone. Then I saw her near some flowers, laughing with an assortment of children surrounding her. Her hair was light brown. She was wearing a sun dress. I approached, nervously and fearfully -- Did she know me?
"What are you doing here?" Jane smiled. Or was it Madeleine? "I thought for sure they'd never let you out."
I stared at this sentence on the page in my old and battered Underwood typewriter. I pushed a weathered fedora hat back on my head, loosened my tie. I always knew the end would come because of some dame. I just never realized how they'd get me. The two of them were in on it from the beginning. He was a lawyer, a shyster downtown, an ambulance chaser. She was a peroxide blond who wore tight dresses and too much lipstick, always carried a forty-five in her bag, had a tattoo on her back -- where the sun don't shine -- that said: "Hot Lips."
They were perfect for each other. I got in the way. They had no choice. I see it now. They had to get rid of me. I could almost forgive them for that. But they killed Madeleine. And that I'll never forgive. Today is the day of reckoning. I have a bullet for each of them.
This place isn't so bad. It's a lot like Jersey City on a rainy afternoon. I remember reading a ghost story that was kind of like that. I think it was Muriel Spark's "Portobello Road." There's a lot of guys, like me, wandering around in this black-and-white reality. If you have some unfinished business you may get stuck in a reality like this. I pack my 38 caliber police special -- Philip Marlowe had a revolver just like this baby! -- I step away from my desk, the typewriter, and the whole grimy office. I have to find those two grifters. I need some fresh air. Madeleine has to be here somewhere. I'm gonna find that dame.
I stroll through "The Mansions of Hades," which is a residential neighborhood for well-to-do existentialists and others dead before resolving the puzzle of their lives, still questioning, doubting, angry and unaccepting. Norman Mailer drinks at a bar nearby. Jacques Derrida scopes out the babes at the corner restaurant. Jean-Paul Sartre "lives" about a block away.
What does it mean to "live" as opposed to merely "existing"? How is hell different from the Marais district of Paris? Let's drop in on Sartre to discuss my predicament. I want to know how a dead man can kill the bastard who plugged him. No wonder all the great philosophers are here. Most of them are trying to kill their predecessors and teachers. Wittgenstein is hunting for all of them. Bastards.
I expect to find Sartre in his messy apartment that is filled with books. Instead, I find him sitting in a sidewalk cafe. Sartre holds a newspaper, stares at a cup of strong black coffee, his pipe sits on a dirty ash tray. I notice two books before him -- a collection of works in hermeneutics and the late writings of Jacques Derrida. I tip my hat in his direction, point to the seat before him as I glance at the Derrida texts. Sartre shrugs his shoulders, then gestures at the empty chair.
I sit and ask the philosopher: "How's it going?"
Sartre sips his coffee and says: "Everything just is."
"Yeah, I know the feeling."
"Feelings? Here?"
"Yeah, in a way. There's a constant numbness or dullness, a frozen quality in one's perceptions and an inescapable affective tone or mood to everything that makes life stale and flat. I have lately -- but wherefore I know not -- lost all my mirth in life ... or death. The world is black-and-white for a really good reason here, now. Cigarette smoke follows you everywhere. People dress in black a lot. The neighborhood is filled with existentialists and postmodernists -- like Hollywood."
Sartre seemed exited and child-like: "I met Humphrey Bogart, you know."
"I'd rather meet Lauren Bacall. The deepest circles of hell are reserved for analytical philosophers and the linguistic analysts. Nobody has been able to finish a sentence for centuries in hell because of all the parsing of meanings and debates over syntax. I hear they're planning to make George W. Bush deliver a speech for eternity in hell. Think about the poor saps who'll have to sit through it. 'No Exit' is right." Part of the meaning of hell is not knowing that you're in it.
"It makes you long for the guestapo." Sartre sipped his coffee.
"I want to ask you a question."
"Go right ahead. It won't mean anything."
"Well, I want to plug the bastard who did me in. I have no body. I can't physically kill the mug. What should I do?"
"Why not wait fifty years? That's nothing here."
"That's not good enough for me. I want to dispatch the guy, send him to his maker with all his sins upon his head."
"Are you sure you have the right man."
"Yes, but I haven't seen him in a while. He's a master of disguise who looks a lot like me."
"That is a problem. Your murderer -- like your self -- is an entity in the world. Definitely not a Cartesian 'I.' You'll have to trail him through his actions. Maybe you'll be able to draw a picture of the mug."
"A picture?"
"Yes," Sartre took a drag on his pipe. "You see, Schopenhauer (who lives about a block from here) said that, if you were to connect the dots of a person's actions or the deeds of his life, the image produced would constitute a kind of portrait of an external shape -- a ghost, if you like -- of the self. All of the inner life would be missing, of course, but everything else would be there. You would have a 'mug shot,' as it were, of the killer to put in post offices and supermarkets. Of course, we don't have either of those establishments in this neck of the woods. You might come up with the image of God or the devil ... either (or both) may look like you -- or me."
"I see."
With a wave to my favorite existentialist, I got up from the table and drifted, aimlessly, through the half deserted streets and muttering retreats. Sartre is still waiting for that waiter who is not there and may not be coming, like those two bums waiting for Godot.
I felt a breeze scattering some leaves, then I saw her. She was standing under a streetlamp wearing a beautiful suit -- maybe Christian Dior -- white gloves in one hand, a hat tipped over one eye. Perfect make up, cigarette on her lips, holding an envelope-type purse. She looked like Jane Greer as she appeared in Out of the Past, except she was a blond. She had trouble written all over her. I didn't care. I waltzed right up to her. In my best casual manner, I tried an opening line which is more direct than my usual coolness and distance from this sort of dame:
"You look a little too glamorous for this neck of the woods, sister. Can I help you find your way?"
I made sure she got the message. This was one tough dame. She didn't blink and gave it right back to me:
"What's it to you?" She blew some smoke in my face.
"Nothing. I'm just trying to be sociable. Mind if I walk with you. These streets can be dangerous."
"I'm dead. There's not too much more anybody can do to me."
There's something incomplete about this moment in history -- maybe it's only in my society, but I doubt it -- a feeling of deadness. Something remains unfinished in our culture and ourselves. The new age is still unborn. We are not yet what we must be. This state of being nothing applies to the living and dead. Maybe that's perfect since my name is Nick, Nick Orpheus. The choice is between "Being" and "Nothingness."
"Well, there's places and then there are much worse places. The local boys could drag you to New Jersey, which has to be the last circle."
"Anything but that." She chuckled. A lifted eyebrow said she didn't care if I walked with her or shot myself in the head. We could hear some music from nightclubs in the distance. I suggested walking in the direction of the music. It was all the same to her. She was looking for the no good bastard who shot her. I told her my story. I explained about Madeleine. She said that she must have known her from somewhere. She couldn't remember too much before she got to this place. Me too. Something about being murdered is cleansing. You leave something behind. Create something new. Her name was Jane Eurydice. She asked me about Madeleine.
"Well, Madeleine ... " I hesitate to speak of her. One of my rules in "life" is never to discuss one woman with another. The strange similarity between these women -- Madeleine's hair was chestnut colored, sometimes -- even if her hair color changed by the week -- and her eyes were dark. Otherwise, this stranger might have been Madeleine's twin: same height, weight. Despite the new arrival's blond hair and green eyes, red lipstick, and greater glamor, I felt like I was talking to Madeleine. It was enough to give me a sense of ... vertigo. Maybe "frenzy" is a better word.
"Madeleine was among those few women with a legitimate grievance against life. She was owed something for what was -- and is -- taken from her. I can't speak of her in the past tense. I love her laughter and curiosity, passionate interest in things and ideas. People fascinate and horrify Madeleine. They mostly horrify me -- especially the lowlifes and bastards she associated with."
"I am not a big fan of humanity." She said this with a hardness in her eyes I would not have believed possible for such a beautiful woman.
"You got something better?"
"There must be something better."
"Maybe that's what this place is about. Finding something better." The music was pretty loud now. There was neon in the middle distance. I gestured in a north-by-northwest direction, towards the light and shadows, smoke and mirrors.
"You want a drink?"
"Why not? You look like the best company I'm going to find in this town." Jane laughed as she said this. It wasn't meant as a compliment.
We found a cabaret that looked like something from "Casablanca." There were a lot of people dancing. Great jazz music was playing. Cigarette smoke filled up the joint. There was a never-ending party going on. I slipped the doorman a fin to get into the club, then looked for some little guy in a rented tux with gleaming dentures who would finagle a table for a brand new twenty dollar bill. Money works even at these levels of reality.
There were beautiful women all over this place. It was a lot like Hollywood. Jane wasn't worried a bit. Jane sat accross from me in the soft light of the place, removed her hat and gloves, pointed those big eyes at me posing an unspoken question. I ordered a bottle of champagne. She was some seriously beautiful woman. Her eyes were filled with intelligence and curiosity, also deeper levels of pain than one expected to see in a woman who looked the way she did -- not at her age, anyway. She must've been no more than twenty-five when she passed into this realm of blighted souls. Some women are even younger when they are ushered into this grim reality through horrible trauma. I do not envy those all-too brief lives.
"Should I make conversation? Or will you be witty for me?" A lifted eyebrow told me that she had little hope that I would succeed in amusing her. If you have eternity on your hands, she seemed to say, a moron is worth a few laughs. I was the moron.
"I'll just try to make the conversation light and fluffy."
"Go ahead and do that." I got a smile. Well, that's a start. I had a feeling that there was something about our being together, here, in this nowhere place, that was important to what we were both after. Maybe she sensed this as well, but would not articulate the insight. Women who look the way she always will, to me, are targets of every imbecile in the world. They develop techniques for wrestling with gorillas of all varieties.
The suspiciousness was understandable, shadows that fell across her features, the intensity and presence of pain or shock said that, somewhere along the way in her brief life -- probably when she was very young -- someone evil and perverse hurt her forever. Maybe she was here to find the guy or gal who would love her forever, balancing the scales. Maybe I could help. And just maybe, if I was right about these intuitions, by helping her I'd help myself. This could be the only way to get out of here.
Some things a guy in my line of work figures out by dealing with lives lost to squalor and crime, blasted souls and walking wounded in this bleak landscape where fine young cannibals walk the night. The band began to play "You Must Remember This." I fixed my tie, smiled, and extended a hand. After a few seconds of cold contemplation, Jane put her hand in mine.
We stepped on to the dance floor. I liked the feel of her body close to mine, the subtle but excellent perfume, the fabric of her dress. I liked the way Jane looked at me -- amused and expectant, cool and assessing, smart, tough, challenging, also curious. Never let a woman become bored with your mind. Most men are boring to women. In fact, most men are boring to themselves.
The most beautiful woman in the world becomes less interesting the moment it is clear that she's an idiot. I don't know why I feel that way. Most men feel the opposite emotions. They are attracted to women who will always be more ignorant and less intelligent than they are. Women who are physically attractive and intellectually dull seem to constitute one masculine ideal. Women who are easily impressed, I guess.
Life must be happier for idiots, male and female. Think of all the fools you know who are doing great. Have you ever seen the Republican Convention? They're all happy as kids in a candy store waving their flags and balloons. True, a lot of them get indicted for having too much candy, but you know what I mean.
Gradually, Jane relaxed and began to tell her story. She was the product of a broken home. Mother left early. Father liked to beat her. I suspect that he did worse. She liked boys. They liked her. Jane didn't care about much. There was a fatalism about her from the start. She expected a short life. She was certainly right about that abruptly-ended or -shortened life. Jane never thought of her life as anything other than an ordeal punctuated by moments of self-abandonment in pleasures -- pleasures of various kinds which is always an anticipation of death, a kind of living death or purgatory of the moment.
Any kind of mood altering or hallucinatory substance is about pain management. Eventually, the pain does the managing. Purgatory is the condition of a never-ending party, a nightclub that does not close, a celebration with strangers and without mirth, an eternity of boredom. Have you ever seen the Oscars ceremony?
There was so little love in Jane's life that she must have felt a desperate hunger for genuine affection or any true human connection, let alone real love. It was a wonder to me that people -- especially men -- had not taken advantage of this poor woman from day one. Maybe they did. Jane was carrying a neon sign around her neck that said: "Please exploit me."
Many women seem unaware of projecting emotional need and vulnerability, frailty, and spiritual loss. Predators feed on that sort of need and vulnerability.
At first, Jane didn't see her vulnerability as an invitation to every worthless bastard in the world. After a while, Jane didn't care or, maybe, she believed that things could never be different with anyone that she would meet. Despite the veneer of toughness and cynicism -- the edgy quality about her and Jane's formidable beauty -- she was a softie inside, craving affection, just made for the exploiters of this world, exploiters that she would seek out with a suicidal compulsion and apathy.
Jane was begging for destruction because, absurdly, she had accepted the one lesson that power always teaches its victims at every level of reality -- you deserve what I am doing to you. You are my slave. Never believe that nonsense.
"We need to find the people who hurt us." I said this and stared into her eyes. I held her close and felt the music surrounding us.
"Maybe," Jane whispered in my ear, "it's the only way we can be free."
That's when we turned and saw the man in the black raincoat. He was of middle height, his features appeared indistinct or nondescript because of the distance that made it impossible to identify him as someone familiar to me in life. He seemed like a man who knew too much. He was clearly observing us, maybe following me. He was with a woman -- dark haired, wearing dark glasses, even inside this nightclub. I didn't like the look of either one of them. There are all kinds of bosses and minor deities exacting tribute in these nether regions of lost souls. Jane saw what I saw.
"Let's get out of here." She grabbed my arm. I felt that this was right and good somehow, together we're unstoppable.
"Come on. There must be a back way out of here." Her nearness was reassuring. I want her never to be far away.
We pushed our way through the crowd. As we left the nightclub, it seemed that night had remained irremovably in place for years or eons. At this level of reality darkness ruled. There were parties everywhere, music, cheap perfume, cigarette smoke, the sounds of sex were often heard, but no love-making, street walkers at every corner. We wandered through twisting and darkening streets then came upon a man standing near a taxi. I could hear steps behind us, approaching. I (somehow) knew that it was the couple from the nightclub aiming to "get" us. They would shadow us, like a guilty past. I wasn't sure whether we could shake them off.
"Need a lift?" The man wore a cap on the back of his head, a cigarette behind his ear, unshaved, maybe forty. The car was a beat-up old checker cab with New York plates.
"Where you heading?" I asked and looked over my shoulder. Footsteps approached, quickly.
"That depends on you, buddy."
"Get in, Jane. Let's get out here pronto." We ducked into the comfy back seat. The cab peeled out into the night traffic faster than a bat out of hell -- or purgatory -- and we settled into a comfortable cruising speed, but were we heading in the right direction?
I tried to make out the streets in the darkness, deciding to trust my emotions and intuitions. I'd have to feel my way along. I would need to see through the blindness. Jane seemed to trust my judgment more than I did.
"That way," I said. The driver turned towards a dark and lost highway. We drove some ways, then -- I don't know how -- I felt there were familiar landmarks along the way, allowing them to point me in the right direction, they seemed to whisper to me, gesturing towards something known and true, a powerul emotion pulled me towards an ambiguous resolution to our adventure.
A glance behind us revealed a black cadillac, 1947, gleaming, menacing. The grill on that car resembled the smile of a hungry shark -- the caddie was gaining on us. I saw what appeared to be a very familiar street. I asked the cab driver to pull over quickly. I dropped a wad of cash in his lap, opened the door of the vehicle, then pulled Jane out of the car.
"This way." I suddenly knew the right direction. My office was on a street like this, maybe this very street. I looked at the numbers on the doors of the buildings. The numbers seemed blurry -- like in a dream or as if we were under water -- I concentrated and, somehow, I knew that I was only a few blocks from my old haunts. I felt like a man fighting his way out of a hypnotic spell, rescuing forbidden memories from the dungeon to which they were consigned by an evil witch.
"Come on, Jane."
"Where are we going?"
"Towards redemption."
I smiled at her with a confidence that I knew she could not resist. We made our way through darkened and dirty streets. No footsteps were heard behind us. This was further proof that we were headed the right way. I saw a building I knew, but everything seemed to be in the wrong place, shifted around in my recollection. I saw my office building. There was no one around. The entire area seemed desolate, abandoned, like a stage set. I thought that my old key might still open the door.
We made our way towards the entrance. No security guard. I didn't want to try the elevator. We climbed the thirty-nine steps to the fifth floor. My office door was closed, not locked. Jane seemed frightened. I offered silent encouragement. We both sensed that a revelation lay on the other side of that door. I opened it and was frozen to the spot where I stood. Jane's scream seemed to come from far away.
There were two corpses in that room. One looked exactly like me; the other like Jane. From the shadows, a man in a perfect tuxedo stepped forward and lit a cigarette. It was the cab driver, except now he was the epitome of elegance, with a pencil-thin mustache, a gardenia in his lapel, a neatly folded handkerchief in his pocket. His shoes gleamed. He sat on my desk before the two corpses, then smiled and tilted his head toward the empty seats before the bodies. He was the best dressed psycho I'd ever seen.
"I was wondering how long it would take you two to get here. These are the earlier versions of yourselves. They're as dead as doornails. I think you killed them."
He looked at me when he said this.
"Both of you, I mean." He chuckled merrily at this observation. "Pity, I wanted them to belong to me. I liked those two people. You took them away from me. I can't accept anybody who loves the way you two kids do. It's just not the kind of thing I can tolerate. You even offered to take the rap for this dame. What kind of a thing is that for a grown man to do? It ain't natural."
He reached for a drink that appeared in his free hand.
"In my position I have only a few rules. I try to be accomodating of every sort of person. I am a true democrat. I am tolerant of human foibles and peccadillos, even ... encouraging occasional sinfulness." He smiled. "With you two, I have ... failed to communicate."
The man in the tux walked around the room, smelled the gardenia in his lapel: "There is no space for you two and what you feel for each other in the realm where I am king. You two simply do not belong in the kingdom of shadows. You love her too much for that. It is that love that killed the darkness in you. The parts of you that I liked so much. Shame. I always get stuck with the stiffs."
Jane was unaware of speaking the next words: "But who really killed them?"
"You did. You 'transcended' them. I hate when people do that. Now all of you are bringing loving versions of this guy and gal to life by reading these words. It's all terribly complicated and annoying. Here's what I'm willing to do for you."
The man stood and opened his hands, holding them before our eyes like a carnival magician.
"Jane, doesn't really know you. She has no memory of her life at this lowest-level of reality. It's so similar to Union City in this sinister realm. If you can get her out of here, into the sunlight and the Springtime. If you can find the key to her love -- the old love that she felt and feels for you in the deepest part of herself -- then I'll punch your tickets and you can get to the other ride. You'll know you're there when you hear birds singing and everybody seems to be happy. They're usually all grinning like idiots in that place with the skyscrapers and a big park in the middle. I have to warn you the sex is awful in that town."
"What happens if she does not remember?"
"Then you stay with me in the kingdom of darkness becoming the two shadows of yourselves, corpses, that followed you from the club. Living dead, like everybody else in New Jersey. Whatta-ya say? Shake on it?"
Jane interrupted: "Listen, buster -- No one has to rescue me. I barely know this guy. I am not going to let him take the rap for me. I'll go any place you want. He can take off."
I was not going to let Jane risk eternity in that hell: "Not on your life. She's right. Jane does not know me. She can be very happy and better off in the sunshine. Maybe she'll find a banker or some very successful guy --"
" -- that would be hell." Jane said with a laugh.
Suddenly, I felt a blackness swallow all of my conscious awareness. The room began to spin around. I could not see Jane. I reached out for her with a desperation that I had never felt before. I lost consciousness. Everything faded to black. I knew that I might never again find the lady that vanishes.
I awoke after what seemed like hours. I was in a park or something. The grass smelled wet and clean. I heard children laughing, playing. I walked towards a small group of persons visible in the middle distance. I saw birds in a blue and white sky. I felt the warmth of the sun on my flesh and saw everything in beautiful technicolor. I was over the rainbow.
I felt dazed, walking, looking for someone. Then I saw her near some flowers, laughing with an assortment of children surrounding her. Her hair was light brown. She was wearing a sun dress. I approached, nervously and fearfully -- Did she know me?
"What are you doing here?" Jane smiled. Or was it Madeleine? "I thought for sure they'd never let you out."
Sunday, September 26, 2010
"The American": A Movie Review.
November 22, 2010 at 6:46 P.M. A previously corrected "error" was restored to the text, then corrected, again, by me. ("Genius and Lust.")
September 26, 2010 at 1:03 P.M. In the middle of an unsuccessful effort to scan my computer, the cable signal to my computer was cut off or blocked, illegally. The computer shut down. The scan could not be completed. The message conveyed by this tactic on the part of New Jersey government officials, who know that this is computer crime directed against me, is: 1) New Jersey does not care whether crimes are committed in trying to stop me from posting "inconvenient truths"; and 2) the feds can't stop them and may be looking the other way.
Is it all about cash? Which federal official has been bribed in this matter? Menendez?
The only logical conclusion drawn by observers is that the F.B.I. is unable (or unwilling) to protect persons struggling against the Trenton mafia or willing to testify against such figures.
Nobody will cooperate with the feds in the future if they continue to let this slide, publicly. Maybe the mafia has more friends in the F.B.I. than the NYPD.
I will continue to write from public computers. Mr. Holder, the whole world is watching.
A recent film starring George Clooney entitled, "The American" was a surprise. I expected a good thriller and the usual accomplished acting from Mr. Clooney. These expectations were fulfilled. I also discovered a work of Catholic meditation hidden inside an action movie.
"The American" is a much better movie than many New York reviewers realized. I say this as an audience member who is still surprised by Mr. Clooney's philosophical talent and political concerns. Bravos to all of the players.
The excellent script was attributed to a name that I did not recognize and, promptly, forgot. I apologize to this excellent writer whoever he or she may be. Clooney using a pseudonym, perhaps? (Yes, I will look up the name of the script writer and include it in this review.)
Having checked since writing the above, I believe the writer is "Rowan Joffe." Never heard of him. Is it "him"? An old joke often told in Hollywood concerns the proverbial dumb starlet who has sex with the writer under the impression that writers have some significance in tinsel land. Writers, sadly, do not matter much in the age of images. Cinema is a director's medium. Unless -- like Woody Allen -- the writer also directs, he or she is and should be at the service of the director. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
The director Anton Corbijn is identified only as "a Dutch-born photographer." This is like calling Pablo Picasso a Spanish-born artist who plays around with colors. I will concentrate on various levels of this film: 1) the psychological investigation of individuation and meaning in terms of a quest for the definition of masculinity; 2) a theological inquiry into eschatology and the problem of evil, where Augustine and Aquinas are specifically invoked in the narrative; 3) a display of symbolist imagery in terms of cinematic language ("Papillon," "Breathless," "Hustle" are all alluded to in the imagery to which we are treated), along with Operatic lore (Madame Butterfly is referenced in a reverse-gender tribute to Puccini), literary echoes (the film is based on a stark and brilliant novel by Martin Booth) are obvious amidst the beautiful Apenines where St. Francis of Assissi fulfilled his salvific mission. I am aware of the location in the alps. The Apenines are identified in a road sign visible on screen for a good reason.
Mr. Butterfly may be one more soul saved by St. Francis.
The novel was originally entitled "A Very Private Gentleman." The work has been reissued by Picador as "The American." Henry James is only one of the relevant novelists for viewers reflecting on this film. The novel opens with the metaphor of the cave (caves are metaphors for the "Self"), which is so important in the story of St. Francis. The Operatic score features (I am guessing) Renata Tebaldi singing "Un Bel Di." The explicit hommage to Sergio Leone's ("Italiano"!) spaghetti westerns clues us in to the "spaghetti Noir thriller" that we are enjoying. ("'Shoot 'Em Up': A Movie Review.")
Images of women in this movie are disturbing and provocative. The paradoxically named Violante Placido ("Violently Peaceful") is one of the most erotically powerful women that I have seen on-screen in a very long time. "Violently peaceful" is a classic description of coitus. This woman -- as the character of "Clara" -- exudes sexuality combined with innocence or the absence of guilt in an unusual mixture, managing to capture and represent the feminine archetype of Woman, as goddess of love.
Sofia Loren and Gina Lollabrigida with a little extra humor in the eyes constitute the screen persona of Ms. Placido.
Anthony Burgess speaks of the "yielding, vulnerable quality which men see as essentially feminine ..." Ms. Placido adds a sense of humor, charm and intelligence to abundant eros and that makes her very up-to-date. Clara can live without a man, but she likes her fun. A female Pinkerton. Anthony Burgess, "Marilyn," in One Man's Chorus: Uncollected Writings (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998), at p. 377.
I am reminded of more than one contemporary star when I ponder these attributes of our "goddesses."
The scene in a restaurant and the look given to Mr. Butterfly by the Italian waiter first glancing at Clara is worth the cost of the film experience in the theater. The look by that waiter is untranslatable and may be only imperfectly understood by any woman living north of Naples. C'imica.
Ms. Placido knew what she was doing in this film by embodying a masculine ideal and desire, even dividing into a duality as "Anna"/"Clara." She is both "The Virgin and St. Anne" and/or the two Marias of Catholic mythology. Schelling's "Clara" also comes to mind. ("'The Da Vinci Code': A Movie Review" and "Duality in Christian Feminine Identity.")
The cinematographer (Martin Ruhe) cannot resist underlining Clara's identification with Venus/Mary Magdalen by establishing a relationship with the various Italian canvases depicting "The Birth of Venus" (Boticelli) or Titian's "Reclining Nudes" or "Venus." Clara emerges from the waters of life. Clara's erotic power is a miracle of the sophistication and allure that seems so easy for European actresses and increasingly rare among American women subjected to the infantilizing and dehumanizing forces that are rampant in Hollywood. This is to say nothing of currently popular forms of feminist puritanism or hostility to eros. (Compare "Genius and Lust" with "Not One More Victim.")
Any American young female movie star's quest to be thin, while possessing suitably impressive breasts and remaining nineteen years-old forever, makes the challenge of becoming a woman -- in the full meaning of the word -- an impossibly difficult one. The alternative to becoming a woman is death. Ms. Placido is, in the full meaning of the word, a WOMAN. ("Master and Commander.")
The one masculine or sexually ambiguous female in the movie is Clooney's "client," working for his "enemy-friend" (the gray-haired villain Mr. Butterfly might become or who embodies the protagonist's future self). She is the woman purchasing a gun (rifle) from Clooney's character. This female character is also "Mr. Butterfly's" feminine side. She does not end well. "If you live by the sword then you may expect to die by the sword."
This movie reverses Puccini's and David Belasco's story of the American sailor, Pinkerton, who arrives in a land he does not know, enjoys a sexual encounter with a woman whose disgrace at his hands results in her death, then withdraws to his American wife and the comforts of imperialism. It is not Cio-Cio San who falls in love in this version of the story, but Pinkerton-Clooney, as it were, who is undone by passion. Ironically, this movie which is about masculinity, subverts the masculine principle in favor of female knowingness. Gender transfers are subtle and successful at the conclusion of the work. Clara becomes Pinkerton. ("The Soldier and the Ballerina.")
Mr. Clooney's hit-man character "lives in hell," as he is told by a theologically-minded priest who has been reading Kierkegaard -- played beautifully by Paolo Bonacelli -- echoing the reflections of the Dutch theologican Miskotte and the poetry of Dante:
"Even though we are bound to take ourselves as our point of departure in every sphere in which revelation and faith are discussed, we cannot really take ourselves as our point of departure. We have to make a more precise distinction. We can say, for example, using the word in a good sense, that faith has its own kind of autonomy, that it is personal, that it is chosen in freedom, but also, enclosed within itself, entails freedom, creates it and sustains it. But there must be a place 'somewhere' where the criterion of the truth is not to be found with me. There must be a 'somewhere' where man can say in the absolute sense that he is not lonely, that he is not alone and neither a creator nor a judge. There must be a 'somewhere' where he has, less in ecstasy than with a sober sense of what is true, to feel permitted to understand that he is understood and known and that he has been chosen."
Edward Schillebeeckx, God is New Each Moment (New York & London: Continuum, 1983), pp. 67-68. (emphasis added)
John Lennon's words force themselves into the mind: "Come together over me!"
Redemption is to "choose" or affirm this moment that I am. To "be" is to love and be loved. "Hell," says the philosophical priest, "is a place without love." This is to describe hell as an absolute absence of the Other. Hell is fragmentation or division from others and within the self. Hell is to be unchosen, even by oneself, or not to own one's own life. Hell is an inner landscape externalized in the movie as a bleak terrain of gray hills and cold metallic colors -- like Mr. Clooney's hair and non-descript wardrobe -- also as the rifle which Mr. Butterfly fashions that is himself. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
Mr. Butterfly is in the midst of a transformation. Butterflies are symbols of the soul and freedom. A butterfly is self-becoming. Mr. Butterfly is recovering from Kierkegaard's "Sickness Unto Death." (I hope to see "Salt" and to review the film here.)
Mr. Butterfly, like St. Francis, has wandered out to T.S. Eliot's "Wasteland," without God ("middle age"?), where the air is cold and clear. Emptiness surrounds this struggling soul, as he journeys from Inferno, to Purgatorio -- the first stirrings of a conscience -- then to Paradiso, love, the fulfillment of the metanoia journey for Man, as the beloved Other is finally recognized to be more important than the self, achieving a kind of redemption (or woman's wisdom) through self-giving or sacrifice in an ambiguous ending.
We are invited to decide what happens next. I opt for Mr. Butterfly's recovery and the couple's move to Englewood, New Jersey. ("'Michael Clayton': A Movie Review.")
These are the stations of Carl Jung's life-journey -- also the migrations of the Christian soul enduring the "stations of the cross" -- that is identified in mythology by Joseph Campbell with the "hero's quest" where Anima is self-realization through self-giving passion, eros. C.S. Lewis in "The Allegory of Love" has charted much of this territory of the soul, of which the Troubadors sang, even providing inspiration for film-makers in "The Discarded Image." ("'The English Patient': A Movie Review" and "'The Reader': A Movie Review.")
Literary parallels for the mystery of identity, as a search, are common in the great masters of the espionage and thriller genre: Maugham's "Ashenden" is a clear source here, but Henry James and the "American's" encounter with Europe -- reversals of innocence (American) and guile (Europe) -- is also useful. Mr. Butterfly is Henry James' "Strether Martin" as both a criminal and spiritual seeker. (Compare Henry James' The American with his later novel, The Ambassador.)
Joseph Conrad, John Le Carre, Graham Greene, Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn, Ward Just have all been fascinated by this masculine territory of purification, passion, penance, and mortality symbolized in the character of a spy or other figure in hiding. "I cannot hide from myself," says Verdi's Otello.
"Where I have flown off to is a secret. I have to remain a private man, reborn into my new existence and comfortably settled into it. I have my memories of course. I have not forgotten how to paint insects, that the cyclic rate of a Sterling Para Pistol Mark 7A is 550 rounds per minute and the muzzle velocity 365 metres per second; nor have I forgotten that it is developed from the last shadow dweller's gun. I can recall quite vividly the basement in Marseilles, Father Benedetto's little garden, the sink-hole in Hong Kong, blood-red wine like the kisses of girls, the workshop in the arches in South London, Visconti and Milo and the others, Galeazzo and Signora Prasca and the exquisite beauty of the plagiara. I shall never forget the view from the loggia."
"You do not naturally, expect me to divulge into whom I metamorphosed. Suffice it to say Mr. Butterfly -- il Signor Farfalla -- still sups at the wild honey of life and is comparatively content. Similarly, he is quite safe."
"Yet I cannot drive Clara from my mind, no matter how I try."
Martin Booth, The American (New York & London: Picador, 2004), at p. 274.
For comparison, see the review attributed to David Denby in The New Yorker, September 27, 2010, at p. 17.
September 26, 2010 at 1:03 P.M. In the middle of an unsuccessful effort to scan my computer, the cable signal to my computer was cut off or blocked, illegally. The computer shut down. The scan could not be completed. The message conveyed by this tactic on the part of New Jersey government officials, who know that this is computer crime directed against me, is: 1) New Jersey does not care whether crimes are committed in trying to stop me from posting "inconvenient truths"; and 2) the feds can't stop them and may be looking the other way.
Is it all about cash? Which federal official has been bribed in this matter? Menendez?
The only logical conclusion drawn by observers is that the F.B.I. is unable (or unwilling) to protect persons struggling against the Trenton mafia or willing to testify against such figures.
Nobody will cooperate with the feds in the future if they continue to let this slide, publicly. Maybe the mafia has more friends in the F.B.I. than the NYPD.
I will continue to write from public computers. Mr. Holder, the whole world is watching.
A recent film starring George Clooney entitled, "The American" was a surprise. I expected a good thriller and the usual accomplished acting from Mr. Clooney. These expectations were fulfilled. I also discovered a work of Catholic meditation hidden inside an action movie.
"The American" is a much better movie than many New York reviewers realized. I say this as an audience member who is still surprised by Mr. Clooney's philosophical talent and political concerns. Bravos to all of the players.
The excellent script was attributed to a name that I did not recognize and, promptly, forgot. I apologize to this excellent writer whoever he or she may be. Clooney using a pseudonym, perhaps? (Yes, I will look up the name of the script writer and include it in this review.)
Having checked since writing the above, I believe the writer is "Rowan Joffe." Never heard of him. Is it "him"? An old joke often told in Hollywood concerns the proverbial dumb starlet who has sex with the writer under the impression that writers have some significance in tinsel land. Writers, sadly, do not matter much in the age of images. Cinema is a director's medium. Unless -- like Woody Allen -- the writer also directs, he or she is and should be at the service of the director. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
The director Anton Corbijn is identified only as "a Dutch-born photographer." This is like calling Pablo Picasso a Spanish-born artist who plays around with colors. I will concentrate on various levels of this film: 1) the psychological investigation of individuation and meaning in terms of a quest for the definition of masculinity; 2) a theological inquiry into eschatology and the problem of evil, where Augustine and Aquinas are specifically invoked in the narrative; 3) a display of symbolist imagery in terms of cinematic language ("Papillon," "Breathless," "Hustle" are all alluded to in the imagery to which we are treated), along with Operatic lore (Madame Butterfly is referenced in a reverse-gender tribute to Puccini), literary echoes (the film is based on a stark and brilliant novel by Martin Booth) are obvious amidst the beautiful Apenines where St. Francis of Assissi fulfilled his salvific mission. I am aware of the location in the alps. The Apenines are identified in a road sign visible on screen for a good reason.
Mr. Butterfly may be one more soul saved by St. Francis.
The novel was originally entitled "A Very Private Gentleman." The work has been reissued by Picador as "The American." Henry James is only one of the relevant novelists for viewers reflecting on this film. The novel opens with the metaphor of the cave (caves are metaphors for the "Self"), which is so important in the story of St. Francis. The Operatic score features (I am guessing) Renata Tebaldi singing "Un Bel Di." The explicit hommage to Sergio Leone's ("Italiano"!) spaghetti westerns clues us in to the "spaghetti Noir thriller" that we are enjoying. ("'Shoot 'Em Up': A Movie Review.")
Images of women in this movie are disturbing and provocative. The paradoxically named Violante Placido ("Violently Peaceful") is one of the most erotically powerful women that I have seen on-screen in a very long time. "Violently peaceful" is a classic description of coitus. This woman -- as the character of "Clara" -- exudes sexuality combined with innocence or the absence of guilt in an unusual mixture, managing to capture and represent the feminine archetype of Woman, as goddess of love.
Sofia Loren and Gina Lollabrigida with a little extra humor in the eyes constitute the screen persona of Ms. Placido.
Anthony Burgess speaks of the "yielding, vulnerable quality which men see as essentially feminine ..." Ms. Placido adds a sense of humor, charm and intelligence to abundant eros and that makes her very up-to-date. Clara can live without a man, but she likes her fun. A female Pinkerton. Anthony Burgess, "Marilyn," in One Man's Chorus: Uncollected Writings (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998), at p. 377.
I am reminded of more than one contemporary star when I ponder these attributes of our "goddesses."
The scene in a restaurant and the look given to Mr. Butterfly by the Italian waiter first glancing at Clara is worth the cost of the film experience in the theater. The look by that waiter is untranslatable and may be only imperfectly understood by any woman living north of Naples. C'imica.
Ms. Placido knew what she was doing in this film by embodying a masculine ideal and desire, even dividing into a duality as "Anna"/"Clara." She is both "The Virgin and St. Anne" and/or the two Marias of Catholic mythology. Schelling's "Clara" also comes to mind. ("'The Da Vinci Code': A Movie Review" and "Duality in Christian Feminine Identity.")
The cinematographer (Martin Ruhe) cannot resist underlining Clara's identification with Venus/Mary Magdalen by establishing a relationship with the various Italian canvases depicting "The Birth of Venus" (Boticelli) or Titian's "Reclining Nudes" or "Venus." Clara emerges from the waters of life. Clara's erotic power is a miracle of the sophistication and allure that seems so easy for European actresses and increasingly rare among American women subjected to the infantilizing and dehumanizing forces that are rampant in Hollywood. This is to say nothing of currently popular forms of feminist puritanism or hostility to eros. (Compare "Genius and Lust" with "Not One More Victim.")
Any American young female movie star's quest to be thin, while possessing suitably impressive breasts and remaining nineteen years-old forever, makes the challenge of becoming a woman -- in the full meaning of the word -- an impossibly difficult one. The alternative to becoming a woman is death. Ms. Placido is, in the full meaning of the word, a WOMAN. ("Master and Commander.")
The one masculine or sexually ambiguous female in the movie is Clooney's "client," working for his "enemy-friend" (the gray-haired villain Mr. Butterfly might become or who embodies the protagonist's future self). She is the woman purchasing a gun (rifle) from Clooney's character. This female character is also "Mr. Butterfly's" feminine side. She does not end well. "If you live by the sword then you may expect to die by the sword."
This movie reverses Puccini's and David Belasco's story of the American sailor, Pinkerton, who arrives in a land he does not know, enjoys a sexual encounter with a woman whose disgrace at his hands results in her death, then withdraws to his American wife and the comforts of imperialism. It is not Cio-Cio San who falls in love in this version of the story, but Pinkerton-Clooney, as it were, who is undone by passion. Ironically, this movie which is about masculinity, subverts the masculine principle in favor of female knowingness. Gender transfers are subtle and successful at the conclusion of the work. Clara becomes Pinkerton. ("The Soldier and the Ballerina.")
Mr. Clooney's hit-man character "lives in hell," as he is told by a theologically-minded priest who has been reading Kierkegaard -- played beautifully by Paolo Bonacelli -- echoing the reflections of the Dutch theologican Miskotte and the poetry of Dante:
"Even though we are bound to take ourselves as our point of departure in every sphere in which revelation and faith are discussed, we cannot really take ourselves as our point of departure. We have to make a more precise distinction. We can say, for example, using the word in a good sense, that faith has its own kind of autonomy, that it is personal, that it is chosen in freedom, but also, enclosed within itself, entails freedom, creates it and sustains it. But there must be a place 'somewhere' where the criterion of the truth is not to be found with me. There must be a 'somewhere' where man can say in the absolute sense that he is not lonely, that he is not alone and neither a creator nor a judge. There must be a 'somewhere' where he has, less in ecstasy than with a sober sense of what is true, to feel permitted to understand that he is understood and known and that he has been chosen."
Edward Schillebeeckx, God is New Each Moment (New York & London: Continuum, 1983), pp. 67-68. (emphasis added)
John Lennon's words force themselves into the mind: "Come together over me!"
Redemption is to "choose" or affirm this moment that I am. To "be" is to love and be loved. "Hell," says the philosophical priest, "is a place without love." This is to describe hell as an absolute absence of the Other. Hell is fragmentation or division from others and within the self. Hell is to be unchosen, even by oneself, or not to own one's own life. Hell is an inner landscape externalized in the movie as a bleak terrain of gray hills and cold metallic colors -- like Mr. Clooney's hair and non-descript wardrobe -- also as the rifle which Mr. Butterfly fashions that is himself. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
Mr. Butterfly is in the midst of a transformation. Butterflies are symbols of the soul and freedom. A butterfly is self-becoming. Mr. Butterfly is recovering from Kierkegaard's "Sickness Unto Death." (I hope to see "Salt" and to review the film here.)
Mr. Butterfly, like St. Francis, has wandered out to T.S. Eliot's "Wasteland," without God ("middle age"?), where the air is cold and clear. Emptiness surrounds this struggling soul, as he journeys from Inferno, to Purgatorio -- the first stirrings of a conscience -- then to Paradiso, love, the fulfillment of the metanoia journey for Man, as the beloved Other is finally recognized to be more important than the self, achieving a kind of redemption (or woman's wisdom) through self-giving or sacrifice in an ambiguous ending.
We are invited to decide what happens next. I opt for Mr. Butterfly's recovery and the couple's move to Englewood, New Jersey. ("'Michael Clayton': A Movie Review.")
These are the stations of Carl Jung's life-journey -- also the migrations of the Christian soul enduring the "stations of the cross" -- that is identified in mythology by Joseph Campbell with the "hero's quest" where Anima is self-realization through self-giving passion, eros. C.S. Lewis in "The Allegory of Love" has charted much of this territory of the soul, of which the Troubadors sang, even providing inspiration for film-makers in "The Discarded Image." ("'The English Patient': A Movie Review" and "'The Reader': A Movie Review.")
Literary parallels for the mystery of identity, as a search, are common in the great masters of the espionage and thriller genre: Maugham's "Ashenden" is a clear source here, but Henry James and the "American's" encounter with Europe -- reversals of innocence (American) and guile (Europe) -- is also useful. Mr. Butterfly is Henry James' "Strether Martin" as both a criminal and spiritual seeker. (Compare Henry James' The American with his later novel, The Ambassador.)
Joseph Conrad, John Le Carre, Graham Greene, Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn, Ward Just have all been fascinated by this masculine territory of purification, passion, penance, and mortality symbolized in the character of a spy or other figure in hiding. "I cannot hide from myself," says Verdi's Otello.
"Where I have flown off to is a secret. I have to remain a private man, reborn into my new existence and comfortably settled into it. I have my memories of course. I have not forgotten how to paint insects, that the cyclic rate of a Sterling Para Pistol Mark 7A is 550 rounds per minute and the muzzle velocity 365 metres per second; nor have I forgotten that it is developed from the last shadow dweller's gun. I can recall quite vividly the basement in Marseilles, Father Benedetto's little garden, the sink-hole in Hong Kong, blood-red wine like the kisses of girls, the workshop in the arches in South London, Visconti and Milo and the others, Galeazzo and Signora Prasca and the exquisite beauty of the plagiara. I shall never forget the view from the loggia."
"You do not naturally, expect me to divulge into whom I metamorphosed. Suffice it to say Mr. Butterfly -- il Signor Farfalla -- still sups at the wild honey of life and is comparatively content. Similarly, he is quite safe."
"Yet I cannot drive Clara from my mind, no matter how I try."
Martin Booth, The American (New York & London: Picador, 2004), at p. 274.
For comparison, see the review attributed to David Denby in The New Yorker, September 27, 2010, at p. 17.
Friday, July 23, 2010
David Denby is Not Amused.
September 15, 2010 at 10:54 A.M. "Errors" inserted and corrected. New obstructions of my computer signal prevented me from running a security scan of my system yesterday. I will try, again, today. Please inform law enforcement in your area of these matters. ("Jennifer Velez is a 'Dyke Magnet!'")
September 13, 2010 at 8:11 P.M. Attacks against my computer from New Jersey may have resulted in the insertions of "errors" in a number of these writings. I will do my best to make corrections as quickly as possible. This may mean that new indictments are expected in New Jersey.
September 11, 2010 at 5:45 P.M. I just received a call from "Time/Warner" (?) threatening to shut off my cable connection on Tuesday, despite previous assurances that satisfactory and normal payment could be made on Wednesday of this week. How curious? Censorship? The call was made from the following number identified as "Time/Warner": September 11, 2010 at 5:42 P.M. (718)-670-0200. I live in New York. Why would "Time/Warner" call from New Jersey or Brooklyn?
"G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism" was vandalized today. Threatening and anonymous calls are received regularly.
September 3, 2010 at 7:10 P.M. Several essays were vandalized. I have made the necessary corrections.
August 28, 2010 at 12:59 P.M. The latest wave of computer crimes has damaged my security system. As a result, I cannot run a full scan of my computer at this time. Noise and other harassments makes it difficult to write today, from this computer. I will write on a legal pad and transfer the essays on to this blog from public computers. I cannot write substantial essays or creative fiction under these conditions, of course, but I can continue to focus on New Jersey corruption and criminality. I hope to purchase a laptop or notebook to write the novel I have been working on for some time.
August 27, 2010 at 2:19 P.M. Due to the seven occasions on which my cable signal to my computer has been blocked over the past two days, requiring me to reboot my computer each time, I have been unable to write as much I would like. Mysteriously, someone mentioned that "death is all we're going to get." For some reason, I "get" the impression that some New Jersey persons do not wish me well. "Headshots?" I will continue to struggle to run security scans and do more work on New Jersey issues. I hope that you will enjoy the lovely weather today. In case there is any doubt about my position, I will make it clear that I am willing to die to express my opinions freely and to face the persons who have committed these crimes against me. I hope those persons are willing to make a similar commitment.
August 17, 2010 at 11:40 A.M. Numerous defacements of writings at these blogs overnight have required me to make corrections, once again. Fraudulent advertisements have been attached to this blog, once more, illegally. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")
August 7, 2010 at 1:41 P.M. An advertisement was attached to this blog, illegally and against my will, ostensibly from "Ads by Google":
"NEW YORKER OFFICIAL SITE, Subscribe to New Yorker magazine for $39.95/yr. & save 83%. http://www.newyorker.com/ "
The message conveyed by this bogus advertisement is that David Denby or David Remnick is behind this advertisement and attacks on my writings, except that the subscription price is wrong. New Jersey's OAE? "Cubanoids?" ("New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")
August 6, 2010 at 10:07 A.M. A computer attack last night has left me with no personal computer. I will write twice per week from multiple public computers. I cannot say who is behind this latest attack. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "What is it like to be censored in America?")
July 25, 2010 at 12:49 P.M. More "errors" inserted in this comment and disfigurements of my review of "Inception." I wonder why? Envy? ("What is it like to be plagiarized?")
July 24, 2010 at 7:14 P.M. "Error" inserted since this essay was posted earlier this afternoon. I hope that this action was not taken on behalf of Mr. Denby or The New Yorker. ("The Heidegger Controversy.")
July 24, 2010 at 12:56 P.M. Attacks against this essay and all of my writings will continue with the protection of corrupt American officials for many years to come. I will make corrections of any inserted "errors" as quickly as possible. These writings are ostensibly protected by the Constitution of the United States of America and copyright laws enacted by the U.S. government. Let us see how much that protection is worth. (Mr. McGill at the OAE?)
September 11, 2010 at 5:40 P.M. Thus far, in practice, legal guarantees have meant nothing to New Jersey which continues to urinate on the Bill of Rights for which men and women in uniform are dying. This sanctioned illegality is especially disgusting and unforgivable on the anniversary of 9/11. Shame on you, Mr. Rabner. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead" then "No More Cover-Ups and Lies, Chief Justice Rabner!")
David Denby, "Dream Factory," in The New Yorker, July 26, 2010, at p. 78.
David Denby, Great Books: My Adventures With Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), entirety.
Two supplemental sources briefly alluded to in what follows:
Christopher Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (Hollywood: Vedanta Press, 1965).
Amit Goswami, Ph.D., The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Penguin, 1995).
I rarely purchase The New Yorker magazine anymore, unless I see something by Woody Allan or another writer I admire greatly. Mr. Denby is a critic I respect and admire as a writer. However, there have been serious mistakes in reviews by Mr. Denby, in my opinion, and also in the view of many persons within as well as beyond the United States of America.
I am sure that David Denby is a moral person and not someone who would ever deliberately insult the religion or ethnicity of another person. I believe that someone inserted paragraphs in Mr. Denby's review -- perhaps, unlike me, this computer criminal is a notorious reader of "graphic novels"? -- that cannot be attributed to the critic whose writings I know fairly well and whose book I would give, if I could, to every college freshman in America. ("Martha Nussbaum on the Vindication of Love" and "Is This America?")
The recent review of "Inception" is a greater disappointment than the astonishing claim by Mr. Denby that there was "no philosophy" in The Matrix: Reloaded. Those were Mr. Denby's words. Well, scholars from all over the world disagree with this contention regarding the Matrix sequel. Years after that film series appeared, scholars continue to write books commenting on the philosophical ideas in those rich "cinematic texts." Christopher Grau, ed., Philosophers Explore the Matrix (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Mr. Denby did not like or "get" The Matrix: Reloaded. I am confident that this is not because Mr. Denby is antisemitic or hostile to the Wachowski brothers of Chicago. David Denby simply did not absorb the ideas in the movie. There is a difference between not liking something that you understand and rejecting something because you don't appreciate all there is in the work. Stupidity is always forgivable, Mr. McGill, especially by highly intelligent critics like Mr. Denby. ("New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics.")
There are many young men and women -- especially, urban young people -- who like this movie, "Inception," or Dark Knight (which I think less good than "Inception"), whose only contact with philosophical and scientific ideas may be such films. I hope to be respectful of their philosophical curiosity, also to encourage their passion for cinema and ideas. I agree with those young men, especially, that what seems "deep" to them often is deep. "Inception" is a case in point. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
It may be that, when it comes to Dark Knight, I am the one who missed something in the movie.
Mr. Denby, with all due respect to you, you did not fully appreciate the themes in this movie ("Inception") or all of the references, cinematic, philosophical, theological, scientific, mythological, to say nothing of the various painters conjured by the images on-screen. You missed it, David. In a single sentence, this is Mr. Denby's opinion of "Inception":
" ... 'Inception' is a stunning-looking film that gets lost in fabulous intricacies, a movie devoted to its own workings and to little else." (p. 78.)
This conclusion is surprisingly similar to A.O. Scott's opinion. I wonder whether reviews of "Inception" in the Times and New Yorker were "coordinated" or written by the same person or persons? More likely, sentences were inserted in both texts by someone other than their respective authors. A banality repeated by many persons sharing or reflecting a mindset remains a banality. Mr. Edelstein at CBS may concur with this observation? David Brooks?
Among the "little else" the movie deals with are quantum mechanics, Buddhist and Hindu metaphysics and theology -- at least, these issues are present in the opinion of persons who teach the subjects at elite universities -- mind/body issues, the myth of Orpheus, Adriadne's labyrinth, hermeneutics, aesthetic theory, deconstruction, Jungian psychology, love and death, also madness. I wonder whether David Denby writes as "David Brooks"? Their views are so similar, perhaps for the same inserted reasons. For any writer to participate in the violation of the creative efforts of others is especially despicable and cowardly. Mr. Denby, you have been "incepted."
"If you don't pinch yourself too hard," you will believe that Mr. Denby is dismissive and insulting of the religious views of 2 billion or so Hindus and Buddhists, to say nothing of Muslims: "For long stretches, you're not sure of whether you're in a dream or reality, which isn't nearly as much fun as Nolan must have imagined it to be." (p. 78.)
We all know that everyone in America has the right to create a place of worship on private property. Hence, objections to a mosque near ground zero are politically popular, but Constitutionally absurd. Mayor Bloomberg is to be commended for his principled and correct stance on that issue. Symbolically, I cannot think of a more fitting place to indicate the true meaning of Islam as opposed to the bizarre interpretations of terrorists.
This idea that the world is a dream is central to the religious views of billions of persons on the planet, many of whom happen to be very well-educated -- for example, scientist Amit Goswami. Among these persons are Sufis whose mystical versions of Islam are beautiful interpretations of the world as dream-like.
Mr. Denby, how carefully did you think about this statement "not as much fun" as Nolan thought? Is it your statement? You could not have proof-read this text very well. Were there "insertions" (inceptions, perhaps) into your text by lesser hands? I suspect that there must have been such "additions" to this review. This amused contempt for antirealism is not a statement that I associate with the author of the book listed above who wondered in discussing Plato's parallel theories: "Was anything holding us together?" (The Great Books, at p. 66.)
As one inheritor of a religious tradition and people (a point which Mr. Edelstein should bear in mind) which has been subjected to great crimes, oppression and ridicule, Mr. Denby, do you really wish to imply that the religions of Asia are "silly and not much fun?" I doubt it. As a writer, will you remain silent in the presence of censorship or torture? I hope not.
Many of the ideas in "Inception" are paraphrases of ancient metaphysical doctrines, some of which are sacred to many persons today. Mr. Denby, astonishingly, claims that there is "no spiritual meaning or social resonance to any of this, no critique of power in the dream world struggle between C.E.O.s." (p. 79.)
I disagree. I am not alone in this view of "Inception" which is shared by many theologians and philosophers, also scientists, who are already devoting substantial attention to this film. They should study "Inception" most carefully. I have discussed my reasons for differing with Mr. Denby concerning the merits of this movie in my humble "little" review of "Inception." That review is thoroughly documented with scholarly support for all of my assertions of opinion or interpretations. I have reason to believe that the review is admired outside the U.S. and, maybe, by one or two persons inside America who are as "uneducated" as I must seem to Mr. Denby.
Sadly, my review of "Inception" -- like most of my writings -- is subjected to daily vandalism of a kind that Mr. Denby cannot imagine and which is only possible with the cooperation of a corrupt and lying state government that, allegedly, "guarantees freedom of speech to all Americans." The effort to denigrate my intelligence and to silence me is the experience of billions of humans on this planet who are also relegated to silence and irrelevance by many fortunate Americans. Perhaps their cable connections will be cut off? I believe that the justified anger of those billions of persons will not be contained for long. ("Barack Obama and 'The New Yorker.'")
Perhaps some persons are under the impression that I am a Palestinian. This would make it O.K. for some people to torture or murder me since Palestinian, Arabs (like poor minority men in America) are unworthy of serious consideration in the estimation of some affluent persons in my society who see themselves as my "superiors." We, insignificant persons, must not be heard. Whatever my ethnicity, it should be prohibited to deface and vandalize my writings over so many years, publicly, especially since these writings are protected by U.S. law. To obstruct my access to my own creative work is another form of censorship and psychological torture which can only take place in America with governmental cooperation. ("Censorship!")
I cannot believe that American officials are unable to control this situation. Anyone who writes for a living should think carefully about indulging in censorship of the writings of others or about remaining indifferent to such public cruelty even if they are Jewish graduates of Yale specializing in reviewing restaurants for The New Yorker. The first writers who will be censored and suppressed in a fascist society will be Jews and radical intellectuals of all sorts. ("The Heidegger Controversy" and "Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey.")
I may have the unique distinction of being insulted by Nazis and antisemites assuming that I am a Jew (close) and also by persons assuming that I am a Palestinian. Right-wing Cuban-Americans claim that I am Fidel Castro; Cubans may think that I am not far enough on the Left. When everyone objects to something that you are saying, it probably means that you are speaking truth to power. No more "errors" to be inserted today? Will you destroy my Internet connection, Mr. Rabner? ("No More Lies and Cover-Ups, Chief Justice Rabner!")
This scholarship in my writings is necessary because my opinions, as a non-resident of the Upper West Side who avoids summers in Long Island and holds only a J.D. degree, will be dismissed or ignored, laughed at (probably) by many of New York's "witty" media elites right before they plagiarize my work. This does not refer to Mr. Denby. I am lucky not to be hit with a "robot bomb." However, the obvious range of my reading and languages, together with the reception of this work (both the movie and my review, I believe) in many places in the world -- including some elite universities, I hope -- suggests that it is not to be insulted or ignored easily, even if I am not a member of the "club." Pick a card?
Many of us are not members of Manhattan's media "club." Maybe I have been hit with a robot bomb. The trouble with robot bombs is that everyone will start to use them. I prefer argument, discussion, humor to violence. This is probably because I am uneducated. This would be a good time to insert "errors" in this essay, again, New Jersey. ("G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism.")
"The Da Vinci Code" and several other essays have been vandalized today. I surmise that American authorities are aware of these crimes, but U.S. officials are unable or unwilling to take action to prevent these crimes. Tell your friends in other countries about this spectacle. Hypocrisy? Should China and Cuba believe American claims that we respect freedom of speech and protect the rights of dissidents? Is America's dialogue with the world a monologue in which only U.S. voices expressing the will and opinions of the powerful few will be heard? It may be that the world is slightly bigger and more complex than the comfortable media elites in the Hamptons may imagine. Care for a Perrier, Mr. Denby?
Mr. Denby's (or someone else's) fashionable and weary sigh (he has seen through it all?) -- from Amagansett, Long Island perhaps -- at the foolishness of mere mortals who have not socialized with full professors at Columbia University is a little exhausting for the reader: "Nolan is working on so many levels of representation [exactly!] at once that he has to lay in pages of dialogue just to explain what is going on." (p. 79.) (emphasis added)
The universe and/or your psyche, David, are working on many levels all the time, even when you dream. Cosmos and brain are now seen as "holograms": " ... if the holographic brain model was taken to its logical conclusions, it opened the door on the possibility that objective reality -- the world of coffee cups, mountain vistas, elm trees, and table lamps -- might not even exist, or at least not exist in the way we believe it exists."
Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), at p. 29. ("A Philosophical Investigation of Ludwig Wittgenstein.")
At the midnight showing of the film which I attended, a group of undergraduates sat next to me, with decks of cards in their hands, shuffling the cards during the best parts of the film (distraction?). Happily, this activity reminded me of the mathematics of manifolds and theories of probability, randomness, and chance. Who would not be reminded of such theories? I wonder whether Congressman Jerrold Nadler can provide any illumination in this matter?
I invite you to ponder Paul Ricoeur's reflections as he approached death in light of this movie's comment on one couple's construction of their "dream world" over 30 years and its destruction with the loss of one partner in the dialectic. Paul Ricoeur, "The Duty of Memory, The Duty of Justice," in Critique and Conviction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 116-126. (Holocaust studies?)
" ... the Unknowable is that which lives in the cracks between the known and the irrelevant; between the hard edges of the world and the ignorance of superstition. Between Hegel's absolute idea and Feuerbach's sensuousness. The unknowable lives in a pack of cards after it has been fairly shuffled but before it has been dealt, each possibility matters."
Steven Brust & Emma Bull, Freedom and Necessity (New York: Tor, 1991), at p. 60.
Reality is that deck of cards always being dealt for a new game. Spin that top, David.
September 13, 2010 at 8:11 P.M. Attacks against my computer from New Jersey may have resulted in the insertions of "errors" in a number of these writings. I will do my best to make corrections as quickly as possible. This may mean that new indictments are expected in New Jersey.
September 11, 2010 at 5:45 P.M. I just received a call from "Time/Warner" (?) threatening to shut off my cable connection on Tuesday, despite previous assurances that satisfactory and normal payment could be made on Wednesday of this week. How curious? Censorship? The call was made from the following number identified as "Time/Warner": September 11, 2010 at 5:42 P.M. (718)-670-0200. I live in New York. Why would "Time/Warner" call from New Jersey or Brooklyn?
"G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism" was vandalized today. Threatening and anonymous calls are received regularly.
September 3, 2010 at 7:10 P.M. Several essays were vandalized. I have made the necessary corrections.
August 28, 2010 at 12:59 P.M. The latest wave of computer crimes has damaged my security system. As a result, I cannot run a full scan of my computer at this time. Noise and other harassments makes it difficult to write today, from this computer. I will write on a legal pad and transfer the essays on to this blog from public computers. I cannot write substantial essays or creative fiction under these conditions, of course, but I can continue to focus on New Jersey corruption and criminality. I hope to purchase a laptop or notebook to write the novel I have been working on for some time.
August 27, 2010 at 2:19 P.M. Due to the seven occasions on which my cable signal to my computer has been blocked over the past two days, requiring me to reboot my computer each time, I have been unable to write as much I would like. Mysteriously, someone mentioned that "death is all we're going to get." For some reason, I "get" the impression that some New Jersey persons do not wish me well. "Headshots?" I will continue to struggle to run security scans and do more work on New Jersey issues. I hope that you will enjoy the lovely weather today. In case there is any doubt about my position, I will make it clear that I am willing to die to express my opinions freely and to face the persons who have committed these crimes against me. I hope those persons are willing to make a similar commitment.
August 17, 2010 at 11:40 A.M. Numerous defacements of writings at these blogs overnight have required me to make corrections, once again. Fraudulent advertisements have been attached to this blog, once more, illegally. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")
August 7, 2010 at 1:41 P.M. An advertisement was attached to this blog, illegally and against my will, ostensibly from "Ads by Google":
"NEW YORKER OFFICIAL SITE, Subscribe to New Yorker magazine for $39.95/yr. & save 83%. http://www.newyorker.com/ "
The message conveyed by this bogus advertisement is that David Denby or David Remnick is behind this advertisement and attacks on my writings, except that the subscription price is wrong. New Jersey's OAE? "Cubanoids?" ("New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")
August 6, 2010 at 10:07 A.M. A computer attack last night has left me with no personal computer. I will write twice per week from multiple public computers. I cannot say who is behind this latest attack. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "What is it like to be censored in America?")
July 25, 2010 at 12:49 P.M. More "errors" inserted in this comment and disfigurements of my review of "Inception." I wonder why? Envy? ("What is it like to be plagiarized?")
July 24, 2010 at 7:14 P.M. "Error" inserted since this essay was posted earlier this afternoon. I hope that this action was not taken on behalf of Mr. Denby or The New Yorker. ("The Heidegger Controversy.")
July 24, 2010 at 12:56 P.M. Attacks against this essay and all of my writings will continue with the protection of corrupt American officials for many years to come. I will make corrections of any inserted "errors" as quickly as possible. These writings are ostensibly protected by the Constitution of the United States of America and copyright laws enacted by the U.S. government. Let us see how much that protection is worth. (Mr. McGill at the OAE?)
September 11, 2010 at 5:40 P.M. Thus far, in practice, legal guarantees have meant nothing to New Jersey which continues to urinate on the Bill of Rights for which men and women in uniform are dying. This sanctioned illegality is especially disgusting and unforgivable on the anniversary of 9/11. Shame on you, Mr. Rabner. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead" then "No More Cover-Ups and Lies, Chief Justice Rabner!")
David Denby, "Dream Factory," in The New Yorker, July 26, 2010, at p. 78.
David Denby, Great Books: My Adventures With Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), entirety.
Two supplemental sources briefly alluded to in what follows:
Christopher Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (Hollywood: Vedanta Press, 1965).
Amit Goswami, Ph.D., The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Penguin, 1995).
I rarely purchase The New Yorker magazine anymore, unless I see something by Woody Allan or another writer I admire greatly. Mr. Denby is a critic I respect and admire as a writer. However, there have been serious mistakes in reviews by Mr. Denby, in my opinion, and also in the view of many persons within as well as beyond the United States of America.
I am sure that David Denby is a moral person and not someone who would ever deliberately insult the religion or ethnicity of another person. I believe that someone inserted paragraphs in Mr. Denby's review -- perhaps, unlike me, this computer criminal is a notorious reader of "graphic novels"? -- that cannot be attributed to the critic whose writings I know fairly well and whose book I would give, if I could, to every college freshman in America. ("Martha Nussbaum on the Vindication of Love" and "Is This America?")
The recent review of "Inception" is a greater disappointment than the astonishing claim by Mr. Denby that there was "no philosophy" in The Matrix: Reloaded. Those were Mr. Denby's words. Well, scholars from all over the world disagree with this contention regarding the Matrix sequel. Years after that film series appeared, scholars continue to write books commenting on the philosophical ideas in those rich "cinematic texts." Christopher Grau, ed., Philosophers Explore the Matrix (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Mr. Denby did not like or "get" The Matrix: Reloaded. I am confident that this is not because Mr. Denby is antisemitic or hostile to the Wachowski brothers of Chicago. David Denby simply did not absorb the ideas in the movie. There is a difference between not liking something that you understand and rejecting something because you don't appreciate all there is in the work. Stupidity is always forgivable, Mr. McGill, especially by highly intelligent critics like Mr. Denby. ("New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics.")
There are many young men and women -- especially, urban young people -- who like this movie, "Inception," or Dark Knight (which I think less good than "Inception"), whose only contact with philosophical and scientific ideas may be such films. I hope to be respectful of their philosophical curiosity, also to encourage their passion for cinema and ideas. I agree with those young men, especially, that what seems "deep" to them often is deep. "Inception" is a case in point. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
It may be that, when it comes to Dark Knight, I am the one who missed something in the movie.
Mr. Denby, with all due respect to you, you did not fully appreciate the themes in this movie ("Inception") or all of the references, cinematic, philosophical, theological, scientific, mythological, to say nothing of the various painters conjured by the images on-screen. You missed it, David. In a single sentence, this is Mr. Denby's opinion of "Inception":
" ... 'Inception' is a stunning-looking film that gets lost in fabulous intricacies, a movie devoted to its own workings and to little else." (p. 78.)
This conclusion is surprisingly similar to A.O. Scott's opinion. I wonder whether reviews of "Inception" in the Times and New Yorker were "coordinated" or written by the same person or persons? More likely, sentences were inserted in both texts by someone other than their respective authors. A banality repeated by many persons sharing or reflecting a mindset remains a banality. Mr. Edelstein at CBS may concur with this observation? David Brooks?
Among the "little else" the movie deals with are quantum mechanics, Buddhist and Hindu metaphysics and theology -- at least, these issues are present in the opinion of persons who teach the subjects at elite universities -- mind/body issues, the myth of Orpheus, Adriadne's labyrinth, hermeneutics, aesthetic theory, deconstruction, Jungian psychology, love and death, also madness. I wonder whether David Denby writes as "David Brooks"? Their views are so similar, perhaps for the same inserted reasons. For any writer to participate in the violation of the creative efforts of others is especially despicable and cowardly. Mr. Denby, you have been "incepted."
"If you don't pinch yourself too hard," you will believe that Mr. Denby is dismissive and insulting of the religious views of 2 billion or so Hindus and Buddhists, to say nothing of Muslims: "For long stretches, you're not sure of whether you're in a dream or reality, which isn't nearly as much fun as Nolan must have imagined it to be." (p. 78.)
We all know that everyone in America has the right to create a place of worship on private property. Hence, objections to a mosque near ground zero are politically popular, but Constitutionally absurd. Mayor Bloomberg is to be commended for his principled and correct stance on that issue. Symbolically, I cannot think of a more fitting place to indicate the true meaning of Islam as opposed to the bizarre interpretations of terrorists.
This idea that the world is a dream is central to the religious views of billions of persons on the planet, many of whom happen to be very well-educated -- for example, scientist Amit Goswami. Among these persons are Sufis whose mystical versions of Islam are beautiful interpretations of the world as dream-like.
Mr. Denby, how carefully did you think about this statement "not as much fun" as Nolan thought? Is it your statement? You could not have proof-read this text very well. Were there "insertions" (inceptions, perhaps) into your text by lesser hands? I suspect that there must have been such "additions" to this review. This amused contempt for antirealism is not a statement that I associate with the author of the book listed above who wondered in discussing Plato's parallel theories: "Was anything holding us together?" (The Great Books, at p. 66.)
As one inheritor of a religious tradition and people (a point which Mr. Edelstein should bear in mind) which has been subjected to great crimes, oppression and ridicule, Mr. Denby, do you really wish to imply that the religions of Asia are "silly and not much fun?" I doubt it. As a writer, will you remain silent in the presence of censorship or torture? I hope not.
Many of the ideas in "Inception" are paraphrases of ancient metaphysical doctrines, some of which are sacred to many persons today. Mr. Denby, astonishingly, claims that there is "no spiritual meaning or social resonance to any of this, no critique of power in the dream world struggle between C.E.O.s." (p. 79.)
I disagree. I am not alone in this view of "Inception" which is shared by many theologians and philosophers, also scientists, who are already devoting substantial attention to this film. They should study "Inception" most carefully. I have discussed my reasons for differing with Mr. Denby concerning the merits of this movie in my humble "little" review of "Inception." That review is thoroughly documented with scholarly support for all of my assertions of opinion or interpretations. I have reason to believe that the review is admired outside the U.S. and, maybe, by one or two persons inside America who are as "uneducated" as I must seem to Mr. Denby.
Sadly, my review of "Inception" -- like most of my writings -- is subjected to daily vandalism of a kind that Mr. Denby cannot imagine and which is only possible with the cooperation of a corrupt and lying state government that, allegedly, "guarantees freedom of speech to all Americans." The effort to denigrate my intelligence and to silence me is the experience of billions of humans on this planet who are also relegated to silence and irrelevance by many fortunate Americans. Perhaps their cable connections will be cut off? I believe that the justified anger of those billions of persons will not be contained for long. ("Barack Obama and 'The New Yorker.'")
Perhaps some persons are under the impression that I am a Palestinian. This would make it O.K. for some people to torture or murder me since Palestinian, Arabs (like poor minority men in America) are unworthy of serious consideration in the estimation of some affluent persons in my society who see themselves as my "superiors." We, insignificant persons, must not be heard. Whatever my ethnicity, it should be prohibited to deface and vandalize my writings over so many years, publicly, especially since these writings are protected by U.S. law. To obstruct my access to my own creative work is another form of censorship and psychological torture which can only take place in America with governmental cooperation. ("Censorship!")
I cannot believe that American officials are unable to control this situation. Anyone who writes for a living should think carefully about indulging in censorship of the writings of others or about remaining indifferent to such public cruelty even if they are Jewish graduates of Yale specializing in reviewing restaurants for The New Yorker. The first writers who will be censored and suppressed in a fascist society will be Jews and radical intellectuals of all sorts. ("The Heidegger Controversy" and "Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey.")
I may have the unique distinction of being insulted by Nazis and antisemites assuming that I am a Jew (close) and also by persons assuming that I am a Palestinian. Right-wing Cuban-Americans claim that I am Fidel Castro; Cubans may think that I am not far enough on the Left. When everyone objects to something that you are saying, it probably means that you are speaking truth to power. No more "errors" to be inserted today? Will you destroy my Internet connection, Mr. Rabner? ("No More Lies and Cover-Ups, Chief Justice Rabner!")
This scholarship in my writings is necessary because my opinions, as a non-resident of the Upper West Side who avoids summers in Long Island and holds only a J.D. degree, will be dismissed or ignored, laughed at (probably) by many of New York's "witty" media elites right before they plagiarize my work. This does not refer to Mr. Denby. I am lucky not to be hit with a "robot bomb." However, the obvious range of my reading and languages, together with the reception of this work (both the movie and my review, I believe) in many places in the world -- including some elite universities, I hope -- suggests that it is not to be insulted or ignored easily, even if I am not a member of the "club." Pick a card?
Many of us are not members of Manhattan's media "club." Maybe I have been hit with a robot bomb. The trouble with robot bombs is that everyone will start to use them. I prefer argument, discussion, humor to violence. This is probably because I am uneducated. This would be a good time to insert "errors" in this essay, again, New Jersey. ("G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism.")
"The Da Vinci Code" and several other essays have been vandalized today. I surmise that American authorities are aware of these crimes, but U.S. officials are unable or unwilling to take action to prevent these crimes. Tell your friends in other countries about this spectacle. Hypocrisy? Should China and Cuba believe American claims that we respect freedom of speech and protect the rights of dissidents? Is America's dialogue with the world a monologue in which only U.S. voices expressing the will and opinions of the powerful few will be heard? It may be that the world is slightly bigger and more complex than the comfortable media elites in the Hamptons may imagine. Care for a Perrier, Mr. Denby?
Mr. Denby's (or someone else's) fashionable and weary sigh (he has seen through it all?) -- from Amagansett, Long Island perhaps -- at the foolishness of mere mortals who have not socialized with full professors at Columbia University is a little exhausting for the reader: "Nolan is working on so many levels of representation [exactly!] at once that he has to lay in pages of dialogue just to explain what is going on." (p. 79.) (emphasis added)
The universe and/or your psyche, David, are working on many levels all the time, even when you dream. Cosmos and brain are now seen as "holograms": " ... if the holographic brain model was taken to its logical conclusions, it opened the door on the possibility that objective reality -- the world of coffee cups, mountain vistas, elm trees, and table lamps -- might not even exist, or at least not exist in the way we believe it exists."
Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), at p. 29. ("A Philosophical Investigation of Ludwig Wittgenstein.")
At the midnight showing of the film which I attended, a group of undergraduates sat next to me, with decks of cards in their hands, shuffling the cards during the best parts of the film (distraction?). Happily, this activity reminded me of the mathematics of manifolds and theories of probability, randomness, and chance. Who would not be reminded of such theories? I wonder whether Congressman Jerrold Nadler can provide any illumination in this matter?
I invite you to ponder Paul Ricoeur's reflections as he approached death in light of this movie's comment on one couple's construction of their "dream world" over 30 years and its destruction with the loss of one partner in the dialectic. Paul Ricoeur, "The Duty of Memory, The Duty of Justice," in Critique and Conviction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 116-126. (Holocaust studies?)
" ... the Unknowable is that which lives in the cracks between the known and the irrelevant; between the hard edges of the world and the ignorance of superstition. Between Hegel's absolute idea and Feuerbach's sensuousness. The unknowable lives in a pack of cards after it has been fairly shuffled but before it has been dealt, each possibility matters."
Steven Brust & Emma Bull, Freedom and Necessity (New York: Tor, 1991), at p. 60.
Reality is that deck of cards always being dealt for a new game. Spin that top, David.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
"Inception": A Movie Review.
March 20, 2011 at 9:30 P.M. New attacks against this essay have resulted in new "errors" being inserted and corrected, especially in the spacing of titles in the bibliography. New defacements of this work are always expected.
August 20, 2010 at 10:04 P.M. An attack against my security system obstructed my updating feature. I have restarted my computer. I will try to run a scan for the third time today. A single letter was deleted from a word in my list of sources. I have corrected that "error." New arrests are expected in New Jersey soon. I hope. Mr. Codey's brother has a little problema. I will not discuss that matter unless there is more of a connection to Mr. Codey than I have seen so far.
August 19, 2010 at 10:39 A.M. "Errors" inserted and corrected as New Jersey is accused of fraud in connection with pension funds. ("New Jersey is $46 BILLION 'Short' in Pension Funds.")
August 17, 2010 at 10:50 A.M. Several essays appear to have been vandalized overnight, numerous "errors" were inserted in this essay-review with the goal of maximizing harmful frustrations. I have made all necessary corrections. Furthermore, I will do my best to make corrections of reinserted "errors" as they appear in my writings. I have reason to believe that this essay will be republished in a setting where such crimes may not be committed by persons sheltered from criminal liability. I will make use of more public computers in the future.
August 14, 2010 at 10:10 A.M. Several essays were altered yesterday, the spacing between titles was affected in this essay. I hope to have made all of the necessary corrections in this essay today, until next time. This kind of wave of attacks is usually followed by new indictments in New Jersey. Keep your fingers crossed.
August 7, 2010 at 5:33 P.M. A letter was deleted from a word in this essay. I corrected that "error" from a public computer. A word was deleted from "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script." I have also corrected that "error." I cannot say how many other essays or writings have been disfigured in the cybercrimes committed over the past two days. I have run six scans of my computer, removing security risks each time. The number of intrusions into my computer is in the hundreds every day.
July 26, 2010 at 11:45 A.M. "Errors" inserted overnight will now be corrected.
July 25, 2010 at 11:56 A.M. "Errors" were inserted in this text which had been left alone for a few days. Let us see what further attacks are directed against this work and others at these blogs. I will do my best to make corrections as they are needed. I think that the quality of this review, such as it is, has embarrassed some persons whose assessments of this movie seem far less good to many readers. Hence, the continuing efforts to destroy this text as well as many others. I am sure that many persons in the world can relate to my feelings upon discovering further vandalisms of this work today. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "What is it like to be tortured?")
July 22, 2010 at 10:20 A.M. "Errors" inserted overnight in this essay, after my most recent review and not found in previous versions of the work, will now be corrected. Sadly, we may expect more of this sort of thing during the next several days. ("How Censorship Works in America" and "More Censorship and Cybercrime" then "What is it like to be censored in America?" and "David Denby is Not Amused.")
Mr. Christie, use of these tactics reflects poorly not only on New Jersey, but also on the United States of America. ("Censorship and Cruelty in New Jersey.")
July 21, 2010 at 5:09 P.M. "Error" inserted since earlier today. I have now corrected that "error." I cannot say how many other writings have been altered or vandalized today. I will do my best to make corrections of each "error" inserted in these writings as soon as I become aware of it.
July 21, 2010 at 2:07 P.M. "Errors" inserted and corrected, alphabetical order of titles listed altered and repaired. Other harassments that I will not name are about what I usually deal with, nothing special. I am told that important arrests are taking place as I type these words in Hudson County. Perhaps even more arrests will take place soon in New Jersey.
July 18, 2010 at 11:07 A.M. "Errors" inserted overnight have been corrected.
July 17, 2010 at 10:47 P.M. "Errors" inserted, once more, as part of the continuing "frustration and harassment" campaign from New Jersey. Mostly letters and words may be removed. Tell your friends in other countries about this spectacle. ("What is it like to be tortured?")
July 17, 2010 at 4:33 P.M. "Errors" were inserted in this work posted earlier today. I cannot say how many other writings have been vandalized in violation of copyright law and the American Constitution. I can only hope that no journalists have or would participate in such criminal conduct. I am sure that Steve Adubato agrees with me on this issue of respect for freedom of speech. I wonder whether Mr. Adubato has visited my sites? Rafael Pi Roman? Rick Sanchez of CNN? Senator Lieberman? Professor Daniel Mendelsohn? ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "How Censorship Works in America.")
I have reason to believe and hope that the review which appears below will be translated into Japanese and, perhaps -- without expressing "delusions of grandeur" -- I may expect the review to appear not only in Japan, but also in many other countries. America's media silence in connection with this sad spectacle of government censorship and computer crime is very strange. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "What is it like to be censored in America?" then "More Censorship and Cybercrime.")
I am advised that my book concerning Ricoeur's hermeneutics has been selected for inclusion at "In Other Bookcases":
http://www.oscholars.com/to/appendix/library/fthr and
http://www.bookarmy.com/Juan_Galis_Menendez_writer.aspx_UnitedKingdom
My books and these blogs are referenced in: http://www.openlibrary.org/authors/0l2964813A/Juan_Galis_Menendez_mancheckov.net/wordpress/2004/07/nochnoy-dozoy. (Russian culture site.)
This essay along with my review of "The Prestige" (I believe) has been selected for inclusion in http://massdensity.com/category/uncategorized/paper/2/ (Quantum Physics and Scientific Culture.)
"Inception," Directed and written by Christopher Nolan; director of photography, Wally Pfister (Bravo!); edited by Lee Smith; costumes by Jeffrey Kurland (Oscar for Ms. Cotillard's dresses and one for Mr. Kurland); Leonardo DiCaprio (Cobb), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Arthur), Ellen Page (Adriadne, Brava!), Tom Hardy (Eames), Ken Watanabe (Saito), Dileep Rao (Yusuf), Cillian Murphy (Robert Fischer), Tom Berenger (Browning), Marion Cotillard (Mal), Pete Pothlewaite (Maurice Fisher), Michael Caine (Miles) and Lukas Haas (Nash).
Introduction: "I recognize you from my dreams." -- Pierre Charles Baudelaire, Le Fleurs du Mal (1857).
"And so, being young and dipped in folly
I fell in love with melancholy."
-- Edgar Allan Poe.
I was lucky to see Christopher Nolan's "Inception" on the first day that it was available in New York. As usual with Mr. Nolan's films there is a fascinating mixture of lyricism and philosophical seriousness in this movie. Mr. Nolan is exploring profound and disturbing questions in his work concerning the nature of reality and sanity, good and evil, ethics and fiction. Mr. Nolan studied literature at the University of London, I believe, but he is equally at home in the culture of images, or cinema, in which we all must live in the twenty-first century. These are our languages -- screen music, movement and image, sound and word -- because they shape the subjectivities of persons in our age. ("'The Prestige': A Movie Review.")
"Inception" is a classic example of Umberto Eco's "Open Work." The movie is intended to resonate for viewers in multiple directions. The closest analogy that I can provide to readers is from higher mathematics. For example, a "tesseract" is a multidimensional object placed in abstract space which is describable in various numerical languages and schemes, each featuring its own logic and corresponding aesthetics. This object (a "tesseract") does not exist, empirically, but it is real. For Mr. Nolan, movies are "tesseracts" -- works of art that are necessarily "incomplete" -- "living" stories that may be "entered" by other thriving freedoms-in-the-world and made complete only by the viewer or recipient of the work. ("John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness.")
"Inception" raises the question "What is a movie?" Is a movie only an empirical object? Or is a movie also its meaning? Movies, like reality, are amenable to any number of readings or interpretations, several meanings may always be attached to good films, altering in the flickering light of "projection" and placed before the viewer. Enigmatically, movies must be interpreted, freely, by recipients or they stop being movies. Hence, the analogy to dreams. This means that you, as the audience member, must respect the autonomy of the work of art which is encountered in the movie theater, even as you achieve a kind of "fusion of horizons" with the work. More on this later in pondering the mystery of identity. ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")
Happily, this is also Mr. Nolan's view of reality and of those mysterious beings called "women" who may or may not inhabit reality as distinct from our dreams. Women are freedoms-in-the-world who must be seen as equals through transcending subjective male notions of their identities. This fascination with women and darkness places Mr. Nolan's work in the tradition of American Noir cinema. This is also to suggest that Mr. Nolan's aesthetic sensibility is shaped by literary Romanticism, notably, the English variety of the movement -- especially, I believe, by the poetry of Byron and Tennyson. The latter's apt verse is quoted below:
"O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me
No casual mistress, but a wife,
My bosom-friend and half of life;
As I confess it needs must be?"
A final ingredient in Mr. Nolan's sensibility that is shared with Tim Burton is the influence of surrealism. Students of the Surrealist Manifestos and the paintings of Magritte as well as Salvador Dali will immediately recognize key images in this movie and gestures of gratitude to those artists in addition to the Master of the genre, Jean Cocteau, who also gets a nod. (See Cocteau's "Orpheus" and "Beauty and the Beast.")
The central myth unifying the highly sophisticated ideas illustrated in the plot and drawn from quantum mechanics, hermeneutic theory, Asian mysticism and theoretical speculation is the story of Orpheus who must rescue his wife, Eurydice, from the Underworld after her death. Sorrow lives with "Cobb" in the form of "Mal." Orpheus is allowed to bring his wife to the surface (life), only if he refrains from looking back at her lovely features (memory is a thief) until her return to the "day world" of the living. If Orpheus looks back (remembers her long lost beauty and their happiness), Eurydice will be lost forever. Love can only be kept by being given away. Gluck's Opera featuring this myth might have provided a soundtrack to accompany the dizzying images. Memory is a haunting "issue" in all of Nolan's films. ("Out of the Past.")
The parallel myth of Persephone and its linkage to the changes in the seasons is signaled for the audience by transitions from a bleak winter landscape to warm beaches. This is an externalization of what Carl Jung and later Alfred Adler called "guilt complexes" and identity-entanglements that are akin to the relations of particles in the quantum realm explored, as I have said, in other movies by this same director. The Orpheus myth was later absorbed by Christianity as Jesus (in the role of Eurydice) becomes the resident of the Underworld encountering his "wife" Mary Magdalene (the new Orpheus) "as" his resurrection. Noli me tangere. ("'Shoot 'Em Up': A Movie Review.")
The plunge into the Underworld is obviously a psychological journey taking place in the mind of the hero. It is the metanoia journey which is also the descent into madness externalized in science fiction terms and action sequences calculated to get the dollars of young men and their long-suffering girlfriends this summer. From what I saw at the midnight premier of the film, Mr. Nolan will be a much richer man very soon. I am happy for him.
Adriadne's shattering of a glass allows us to step through the mirror and into the "Wonderland" of this film by establishing a relationship between this film, which is explicitly associated with what is "surreal," and the imagery of Luis Bunuel. No accents on this keyboard, sorry. I am aware of where the accents belong in words even if I am unable to supply the accents. (Mr. Bunuel's Mexican films should be studied by Mr. Nolan, especially Cumbres Borrascosas, i.e., "Wuthering Heights.")
Real/surreal is a dialectic that recurs several times in the film. The word "deconstruction" is used by Mr. DiCaprio's character in connection with the dream reality under "inception." A philosopher -- whom I have excellent reason to believe that Mr. Nolan has read -- writes of reality imploding within multiple levels of meaning that are inextricable from memory and language as death nears: "Might something like this -- we might call it Zeno's eternity -- be a model for an enlightenment experience, or for the experience of dying? If our consciousness survived biological death for (only) one minute, but that minute subjectively felt like eternity, would that constitute a satisfactory form of immortality?" (Nozick, "Being More Real," in The Examined Life, at p. 129 and Kurosawa's "Ikiru," which is a recent discovery for me.)
The literal "fall" (Albert Camus) into the abyss ("leap of faith" in Kierkegaard's terms) is depicted in multiple images, most powerfully as the woman the hero loves falls from a ledge ("Mal"). This movie is a deeply religious work which has already received the attention of theologians. Discussions of theological implications of the movie are scheduled for July 18, 2010 at The Journey Church/Upper West Side, at 10:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M., Brandeis, HS, 145 West 84th Street, New York, NY (84th & Columbus). http://www.Journey/Metro.com
From a Christian gnostic perspective the movie is a meditation on sin, evil, loss, redemption and the unbreakable bonds of love. Jesus, according to gnostic accounts, spent one day in the Underworld before his resurrection. (I direct the reader to Rene Magritte's Le Soir qui tombe, 1934, reproduced in Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, at Plate 17 and "'The Matrix': A Movie Review.")
I hope to see and review "Salt" and "The American." Those films are concerned to explore existential and identity questions that are often placed in the context of espionage thrillers.
I.
Ms. Cotillard does not "warble," despite the ravings of Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. Ms. Cotillard is beautiful and elegant in several of the most provocative dresses that I have seen a woman wear on screen for many years. The beauty of this woman's features amplified on screen is worth $13.00. "Mal" (the word means "evil") is a personification of the femme fatal archetype, but she is also "anima." ("Manohla Dargis Strikes Again!")
Several of Jung's archetypes are visible in the film underlining the subconscious messages conveyed by the work: the "twin trains" ("A" and "B," the Nolan Brothers?) that travel in different directions hint at alternate time-journeys (past and future), then and now, masculine (past) and feminine (future). I agree that we are heading into a century that is dominated by the feminine side of the human mind. "All of the facts revealed by the train leaving Paddington Station can equally well be explained," Tom Stoppard assures us in Jumpers, "by Paddington Station leaving the train." ("Faust in Manhattan.")
Notice the contrast between Michael Caine's character as "Philemon" and the "wise child," Adriadne, played by Ellen Page, who is excellent. Again, the reference is to Greek mythology, Adriadne of Naxos. Adriana (same name) fashions a thread through the labyrinth to escape the minotaur. The thread is the thematic unity of the text which guides you in the maze of ideas in which you are inevitably involved by seeing this movie. This is a common motif in hermeneutic writings: "The narrative thread in dream logic." Ms. Page understood that she was playing a "trouser role," where gender was "in question." (See "Oscar" in "The Tales of Hoffman" or Strauss' "Der Rosenkavalier.")
Intertextuality is also important to the movie which uses the music of Edith Piaf -- Ms. Piaf was "played" by Ms. Cotillard in another movie -- to cope with guilt issues while breaking out of the boundaries of the screen canvas. Mr. DiCaprio's "image" of his character "Cobb" is real, but the man on screen is not DiCaprio. The disturbing idea forced on viewers ("incepted?") is that reality itself -- or the very notion that there are "real versions" of persons apart from how they are seen by others -- is doubted or made into a question for the audience. We have entered a hall of mirrors.
Is the person we see doing these "actions" on screen, Mr. DiCaprio? Is Mr. DiCaprio the person "seen" in interviews pertaining to this film? Which version of DiCaprio is real? The dream subject in DiCaprio's subconscious is real to him? The person "acting" in the empirical world is real to others? The person "acting" on screen seems "real" to audiences? Or is the real person known only to himself? Is there a single "Leonardo DiCaprio"? Is "Cobb" Mr. DiCaprio's "shadow equation"? Is there a single "Inception"? Have we seen the same movie when we sit next to each other at a screening of "Inception"? Arguably, all of the characters in this movie are aspects of a single psyche. Incidentally, I do not have a cell phone. Anyone who does have a cellphone should turn it off when seeing this movie because you will need to pay attention.
In a quantum universe, like it or not, we seem to discover a set of realities that are only constructed as we perceive them or through our perceptions of them -- while remaining objective and true -- even "true illusions." The movie is the tree that falls in the forest but only makes a noise when someone hears the "fall." Think again of "Mal's" leap into the darkness. ("David Stove's Critique of Idealism" and "G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism.")
"Schopenhauer regards his deduction of transcendental subject and object as being legitimate ... we are left confronting them as two mysteries: the unknowable subject and unknowable matter. (Perhaps they are rather one mystery, [God?] for our analysis has already led us to expect them to be different aspects of the same thing.) The transcendental subject, as the sustainer of the world of space and time, cannot itself be in the world of space and time; as sustainer of the realm within which the principle of sufficient reason operates, it can itself be neither object nor agent of that principle. For these reasons it could never be an object of empirical knowledge to anyone -- quite apart from the fact that, for other reasons considered separately, it cannot be an object of knowledge to itself. Yet its existence is a necessary presupposition of our having the experiences that we do have. Putting this the other way round, this whole world of experience is perfectly real, just as real as it presents itself as being, but is unconceptualizable in any terms other than such as presuppose the existence of a subject. This is, in a nutshell, what transcendental idealism means." (emphasis added)
There is no "Inception," until you see the movie. The movie is an "inception" into your subconscious. Schopenhauer's interest in Altman, the Hindu "worldsoul" is shared by Mr. Nolan. Today's physicists as well as biologists articulate the same idea in different terms and, often, without realizing that the latest description of the universe is really a few thousand years-old:
"This means that we cannot fall out of time, as the realist supposes us to do when we die. [Death is a character in this movie that is associated also with eros, "Mal."] The idea that we can [fall out of time] is likened by Schopenhauer to childish misapprehensions about space. When a European child first learns that the world is a giant ball, and that Australia is on the other side of it, he commonly imagines the Australians to be walking about upside-down, hanging from the world by their feet like flies from a ceiling, and is puzzled that they do not drop off into space. If he is imaginative he may also wonder why he himself, if he is perched on top of a giant ball, does not slide down the side of it. His puzzlement can be partly removed by gravity's being explained to him, but only partly: such a young child will almost certainly be unable to grasp the point that it has no meaning to talk of an 'up' or 'down' which is not relative to a subject, so that in a universe thought of as being without an observer there could be no up or down at all. His puzzlement about space, like an adult's bafflement about time, would spring from regarding a particular state of affairs as objectively existing when in fact it can have being and significance only for a subject. Our minds seem to be constructed in such a way that in both cases it borders on the inconceivable not just that the states of affairs in question should not be able to exist independently of us but that they do not in fact exist independently of us. ["Is it rational to believe in God?"] Yet so it is. The top of the giant ball is quite simply wherever one is, and separately from that there can be no top. [Where is "Inception" located?] Similarly, 'now' is wherever one is, and separately from that there can be no 'now.' ..." (Magee, The Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, at pp. 116-117, pp. 214-215.) ("Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art" and "Donald Davidson's 'Anomalous Monism.'")
II.
The logical conclusion of this reasoning is that for the world to "hang together," as it does, there must be a unifying consciousness underlying reality keeping our scientific knowledge in place and fixing the order in the cosmos (or as that order) in the absence of any particular individual or of all persons in the world. The question that arises next for film makers and audiences concerns the freedom of the protagonists and viewers "conditioned" by subconscious forces and desires, trapped in the logic of dreams and the mysteries of a universe that is also a "dream" seducing all of us. This coincides with the so-called "dreaming universe" theory postulated by physicists. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")
The various levels of the subconscious are similar to the levels of ascent for the soul in Dante's "Divine Comedy" -- from "Inferno" to Purgatory," then to "Paradise." Paradise is symbolized in the love and innocence of children and the idea of "homecoming." Milton's "Paradise Lost" and battle in the heavens is also analogized by a director who has done his homework. I suspect that Mr. DiCaprio's character would have found "Mal" in his "home" at the end of the movie wearing a lovely dress, as a blond perhaps, wondering whether he wanted a sandwich for lunch. ("Duality in Christian Feminine Identity" and "'The Da Vinci Code': A Movie Review.")
Mr. Nolan is beguiled and frightened by a reality expressing itself in his works that contains genuine horrors (I don't blame him) together with the beauties also found in the world. Terror and joy at beauty seem to come from women for this film director. One shudders to think of Mr. DiCaprio's views of women. The universe -- like women -- plays tricks on us in a quantum reality that we are only beginning to understand. I can spare Mr. Nolan many years of puzzlement: He will never fully understand women. As for Mr. DiCaprio, I would never presume to offer him advice on the subject of women. ("God is Texting Me!")
We learn of "levels" of the subconscious (Underworld), also in particle physics, where reality is manufactured and may be programed by observers. As with "The Prestige" and "Memento," the "I" (Cobb) is divided into a duality (Adriadne), Hamlet and Horatio. Schizophrenia is a constant presence in Mr. Nolan's films, perhaps as a way of commenting on what must be an interesting relationship with his brother. The Nolans are gentile versions of the Wachowski brothers of Chicago. My guess is that Christopher Nolan is the older brother. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
Mr. DiCaprio's "Cobb" is a corporate spy who "plunges" into the dreams of his targets or victims -- which is what Mr. Nolan is doing to all of us, plunging into our minds, with "his" movie -- ostensibly in order to steal secrets that are worth money to sinister corporations. There may be no non-sinister corporations. This is evidenced by the logo of "Time-Warner" that accompanies this movie. More difficult is "inception" or planting an idea in the mind of a subject who will act on that idea in the real world. Subconscious manipulations were charted by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World Revisited. The C.I.A. is very good at that sort of thing. This effort involves actual entry into the mind of another through hypnosis and other, sometimes horrifying interventions. Sexual analogies are intentional and obvious. ("What You Will ...")
Behaviorists at Yale University experimented with "creatures" (this was the term used for all "animals") by stitching their eyelids shut and rotating them on sticks -- sometimes very rapidly (spinning tops?) -- using electrical prods (on humans!), as well as many other indescribably cruel techniques for inducing continual stress and "defensiveness" leading to collapse or self-destruction, starvation maybe. This psychological torture method probably accounts for the constant "error" insertions in these writings and other harassments I deal with, every day. The goal of hackers is to cause permanent and severe psychological damage through constant anxieties and frustrations. Much of this research is parallel to developments in the plot-line of the movie:
" ... at higher levels the subject becomes more and more sensitive to pain; his torment becomes exquisite. However, should this cycling continue without diminishment, then one would observe at last, 'the ultimate demoralization of behavior': a nervous breakdown." (Rebecca Lemov, "Circle of Fear and Hope," in World as Laboratory: Experiments With Mice, Mazes, and Men, at pp. 92-93.) ("Behaviorism is Evil" and "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture." Has Joseph Nye visited my sites?)
Saito (Ken Watanabe) wishes to enter the mind of his victim Cillian Murphy's character, whose father, Pete Pothelwaite, is a business rival of Saito in order to have him break-up the rival empire controlling all of the energy in the world. Topical allusions to "evil empires" seeking control of the world's energy are obvious and (I think) secondary to the metaphysics of the film. Elaborate subconscious defenses or security forces (Mr. Cheney is burned in effigy) are developed to cope with such threats, as in a torture chamber. The analogy to viruses in electronic space and our adventures on-line makes the collective subconscious depicted in "Inception" like the Internet. This is is to describe persons inserting "errors" in my writings as a virus or fungus of evil.
Beyond Freud, Jung's experiments with altered consciousness and anthropological studies led him to formulate theories of individual, then collective and/or species subconscious (the realm of the archetypes) where we find ourselves in this movie. Collective mind is transcendent consciousness. This is a Buddhist concept and also, I keep insisting, a doctrine discussed in physics and mathematics today. For example, by Oxford's superstar quantum physicist and computer expert, David Deutsch, and fellow Oxford superstar, biologist Rupert Sheldrake:
"Thus we have arrived at a significant moment" -- with the development of probability theory and, soon, quantum computing -- "in the history of ideas -- the moment when the scope of our understanding begins to be fully universal. Up to now, all our understanding has been about some aspect of reality, untypical of the whole. In the future it will be about a unified conception of reality, [that spinning top,] all explanations will be understood against the backdrop of universality, and every new idea will automatically tend to illuminate not just a particular subject, but, to varying degrees, all subjects. The dividend of understanding that we shall eventually reap from this last great unification may far surpass that yielded by any previous one. For we shall see that it is not only science, but also potentially the far reaches of philosophy, logic and mathematics, ethics, politics and aesthetics; perhaps everything that we currently understand, and probably much that we do not yet understand." (Deutsch, "The Theory of Everything," in The Fabric of Reality, at p. 29.)
Mind and world are described, again, as mirrors set facing each other which is to describe the postmodern condition:
"The very existence of general explanatory theories implies that disparate objects and events are physically alike in some ways. The light reaching us from distant galaxies is, after all, only light, but it looks to us like galaxies. Thus reality contains not only evidence, but also the means (such as our minds, and our artifacts) of understanding it. There are mathematical symbols in physical reality. The fact that it is we who put them there does not make them any less physical. [Immanuel Kant] In those symbols -- in our planetariums, books, films and computer memories, and in our brains -- there are images of physical reality at large, images not just of the appearance of objects, but of the structure of reality. There are laws and explanations, reductive and emergent. There are descriptions and explanations of the Big Bang and subnuclear particles and processes; there are mathematical abstractions; fictions; art; morality; shadow photons; [DiCaprio/Cobb?] parallel universes. To the extent that these symbols, images and theories are true -- that is, they resemble in appropriate respects the concrete or abstract things they refer to -- that existence gives reality a new sort of self-similarity, self-similarity we call knowledge." (Deutsch, "Criteria for Reality," in The Fabric of Reality, at pp. 95-96. "Gravity?")
This dialectical form of transcendental realism/idealism (Roy Bashkar) amounts to much the same as scientific phenomenological-hermeneutics as outlined beautifully in this movie through the symbol of a spinning top.
"The symbol gives rise to thought," as Paul Ricoeur has taught us. The deployment of master symbols and their use in defense against governmental efforts at manipulation is an unexplored aspect of the continuing controversy over subliminal conditioning or "inception." ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")
III.
Scientists and others speak of the "many minds" or mentalistic interpretation of quantum theory. (Octavio Paz, David Deutsch) Religious persons speak of "God." However, the insight is very similar for both types of persons. Mind is required to hold intellectual order in place. You are "Inception," as you experience the movie or through your interactions with the work because you are changed by the movie and your accounts of the movie to others changes their ways of seeing "Inception." If scientists are to be believed, the same is true of what is laughingly called "Reality." We change reality, even as reality changes us. This is another way of describing the unitary message of the great religions concerning the experience of God. ("Is this atheism's moment?")
"Ontology" (the study of the ultimate nature of reality in metaphysics) is "bracketed" or set aside for viewers experiencing the movie. (Edmund Husserl, Hans-Georg Gadamer) The spinning top is the "hidden variable" in quantum mechanics to which David Bohm referred in his discussions with Albert Einstein. Orson Wells calls it "Rosebud" the hidden and then exploding symbol that keeps "Citizen Kane" unified, as a character and in terms of that classic movie. "Rosebud" is the symbol of what mattered in a life as that life ended. William Randolph Hearst on whom "Kane" was based, used this term, "Rosebud," to describe a portion of his wife's anatomy. This cannot be "verified" empirically. Deeper levels of reality explain what appears mysterious to us, except when it comes to women, of course, where one is simply faced with a "conundrum" (as it were) that is irresolvable. "Rosebud," indeed. (Gore Vidal)
Time is the liquid in which this cinematic experience floats for the viewer. Ironically, levels of reality are in tension, once again, because it may take years to complete a film that audiences will enjoy over two-and-a-half hours. Time orders weave together in "Inception." This is true within the cinematic text and outside of that text, for us, as viewers. ("A Review of the t.v. Show, 'Alice'" and "Time is the Fire in Which We Burn.")
A field is established for interaction. We are shaped, subconsciously, by the movie and the movie changes based on how we see it, with some people seeing more and others less of what is on-screen. This is a dialectic without termination. The movie is always new for somebody. The narrative, then, in which we are -- you can call it God, if you like -- is increasingly elastic today, protean, variable, yet still real and true, even necessarily true. To hold these ideas in place the image of the spinning top serves as a Sufi device for disorienting and refocusing the mind. This achievement of dislocation is the traditional role of madness as a journey in human experience aimed at integration of the fragmented self. For this reason, psychological dislocations from normality were sought by mystics, great scientists, and many artists throughout human history as their chosen "doorways" to illumination. ("'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review" and "'The Reader': A Movie Review.")
Philip K. Dick's great subject is this boundary between sanity and madness:
" ... we have entered the landscape depicted by Richard Condon in his terrific novel The Manchurian Candidate: Not only can delusions and hallucinations be induced ["incepted"] in virtually any person, but the added horror of 'posthypnotic suggestion' gets thrown in for good measure ... and, by the Pavlov Institute, all this for clearly worked-out political purposes. I don't think I'm wandering into fantasy here, because recall: Freud originally became involved in a form of psychotherapy that utilized hypnosis as its cardinal tool. In other words, all modern depth psychology -- that which postulates some region of the mind unavailable to the person's conscious self, and which, on many an occasion, can preempt the self -- grows from observation of individuals acting out of complete convictions and perceptions and motivations implanted by 'suggestion' during the hypnotic state. Suggestion? How weak a word and how little it conveys compared to the experience itself. [Forced hypnosis is a kind of violation comparable to rape.] I've undergone it and it is, beyond doubt, the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened to me.) ..." (Philip K. Dick, "Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality," in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, at pp. 169-170.)
Hypnosis in the wrong hands can cripple or kill victims by destroying their lives as well as minds as the ultimate form of "inception." Medical techniques should not be seen as "weapons" to injure people in order to serve political objectives, or as a way of keeping victims as personal experimental animals or slaves, much less for purposes of interrogation or investigation of innocent persons. Psychologists agree:
" ... the neo-Jungian or metanoia journey construed madness as an inner journey, [a kind of 'leap of faith" or "fall,"] or one occurring in 'inner space,' rather than as a social artifact occurring in the social domain. In his own words: 'This journey is experienced as going further in',' as going back through one's personal life, in and back and through and beyond into the experience of all mankind, of the primal man, of Adam and perhaps even further into the realm of animals, vegetables and minerals."
Professor Burston associates Jung's theory with the works of Foucault, Laing, then Lacan:
" ... Lacan said the goal of analysis was to deconstruct the ego, rather than to support and strengthen it, [the opposite of adjustment or normalization,] as Freud and his followers had enjoined. This therapeutic objective echoes the ancient Gnostic view that all but a handful of cogniscenti fundamentally misrecognize themselves and their condition. They imagine that they are free, that they know who they are, but their sense of identity is a chimera born of unconscious subjection." (Burston, "Normality and the Numinous," in The Crucible of Experience, at pp. 121-122.)
"Inception" like all excellent art is designed to make us free, to disturb us, to be unclassifiable and not easily absorbed. If the movie bothered you, if you found yourself arguing about what it all meant, then it "worked" as drama and belongs with several of the great films invoked during the course of the "story." I regret that the numerous defacements and vandalisms of this essay or other attempts to injure me will be interpreted in any way as discouraging people from seeing the film. The hostilities reflected in these tactics are directed at me because of my opinions and comments, not at anyone associated with "Inception." ("What is it like to be censored in America?" and "How Censorship Works in America.")
"Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, [homecoming or fusion with divinity,] the unitive knowledge of the imminent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle -- the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: 'How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?" (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, at pp. IX-X.)
Conclusion.
"A labyrinthine human being never seeks the truth, but -- whatever he may try to tell us -- always and only his Adriadne." -- Friedrich Nietzsche. (Krell, Post-Ponements, at p. 15.)
The review in the Times missed many or most of these important themes of the film. The newspaper's critic, A.O. Scott, offered some "conclusory" and dismissive remarks. She also failed to detect nearly all of the cinematic allusions and references in "Inception":
"Freud believed that dreams were compounded out of the primal matter of the unconscious and the prosaic events of daily life. If he [?] were writing now, [Freud lived into the era of cinema and placed films within his theory of art as displacement,] he [?] would have to acknowledge that they [films? or dreams?] are also for many of us, made of movies."
Hollywood has been called: "The Factory of Dreams." Hence, this film which aligns dreams and art in a view closer to Jung's analytical psychology than to Freud's psychoanalysis posits that the unconscious speaks through dreams or art (equally) because both are externalizations of the "powers of the psyche" (Joseph Campbell) that allow persons to cope with life's transitions and crises, like the death of a beloved spouse. We see Cobb and Mal as an old couple, then enter the hero's mind, possibly during his final seconds, as he comes to terms with recollections of this woman and love that are "now" lost to death's dateless night. "This was our dream world for thirty years," Cobb says. This is to describe a marriage. (Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City, at pp. 231-267.)
"Film as dream, film as music." Igmar Berman writes of themes similar to those which feature in Mr. Nolan's contemporary movies: "No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness. [A spinning top?] At the editing table, when I run the strip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood: in the darkness of the wardrobe, I slowly wind on one frame after another, see the almost imperceptible changes, wind faster -- a movement." (Bergman, The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography, at pp. 74-75.)
This narrative called "Inception" is about the loss of one person and self in shifting temporal orders together with the forlorn partner's suffering and pain. This is called "being-there" for the other in the mode of love and compassion. The final image of Mr. DiCaprio's character evokes the compassionate Buddha as love for all suffering children. Please see the film, "Taken." This grieving for a child is a theme of Tim Burton's not always sanguine view of childhood. Is the frightened and threatened child with a great sense of humor in Mr. Burton's films, himself? I certainly understand that child that was (is?) Mr. Burton. (Paul Ricoeur, Keiji Nishitani)
"Inception" is aimed at entertaining audiences and being successful commercially. It is also a movie that helps persons to live through and understand the language of the "collective subconscious" -- by sharing in a dream with these artists -- in order to meet the challenge of individuation so that we can bear the encounter with evil and death. Seeing "Inception" is the meeting with Mr. DiCaprio's "persona" that matters not encountering the man who happens to be an actor in Hollywood.
Nietzsche describes this process of self-narration as "becoming the person you are." Jung spoke of individuation towards mortality. "Inception" is as good as Blade Runner and other films that are now seen as classics. I believe that, in time, this fine film by Mr. Nolan will take its place with those few other movies that endure in our new century. Mr. DiCaprio's way of becoming himself is through the externalization of his inner journey in his art or self-narrative: compare "Shutter Island" with "Inception."
No film can "resolve" philosophical issues that have concerned humanity for thousands of years. This movie dramatizes such issues in archetypal forms to make them accessible to all kinds of people who may not otherwise think about such questions. This is a valuable service. "Inception" is a work of public theology that is non-sectarian. The Cartesian spectator in the theater of the mind is you, the audience member. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
"Inception" is a postmodernist text that is highly self-aware and self-questioning because it poses the ultimate riddle of cinema: What is movie reality? What is any reality? What is this "dream" (nightmare?) called "history" from which we cannot awake? (Karl Marx) Personal identity is a narrative which we create or enter through interacting with another "project in time." A personal journey is a project in time. A movie is also a project in time. Interactions that are interpersonal are also intertextual. Experiencing art is a kind of energy exchange, a form of love-making or love-sharing, which happens or does not happen to a different degree for each viewer of the work. There is art in shaping experience into a narrative by making a movie or a personal identity. Everyone is and must be an artist to some degree:
"Accident engages the question of the truth-status of 'fictions,' and therefore of the truth-status of what we call 'reality.' Consider, for instance, the problem of who is supposed to have written the text we have just finished reading. [Who "made" the movie "Inception"?] Is it Charlie, the novelist, or Stephen, who looks remarkably like Charlie?"
Postmodernist artists are suspicious of --
" -- how our everyday experiences are rationalized, plotted, from the moment they slide away from us. Stephen claims: 'You live in the present, which does not exist; it exists in memory.' And Accident argues that what is real is not a text [by creating a text] -- for it is essentially non-narrative, accidental. [A "Memento"?] But Mosley adds the proviso that as 'reality' becomes past it is accessible only as a 'text' ... when it is known through episodic memory, in story-telling." (Stephen Weisenberger, "Afterword," in Nicholas Mosley, Accident, at pp. 195-196.)
Story-telling means objectivity, cohesiveness, unity. Thematic unity can be spiritual, as in the "unity of the Holy Spirit." This phenomenon called "Inception" is real and not real, yes-and-no, the center that is everywhere. (Kaballah) The least significant aspect of the movie from the "point of view" of audiences is "technical." The ideas in the work -- this is and probably will be true of anything that Mr. Nolan creates -- are as ancient as the Buddhist doctrine that the world is "Maya," illusion. In Buddhist lore: Illusion is a woman. Truth is also a woman. ('The Fountain': A Movie Review" and "Metaphor is Mystery.")
The film's gestures in the direction of Akira Kurosawa's interpretations of Shakespeare and Yukio Mishima's "Temple of the Golden Pavillion" lead to the wisdom of the great Kyoto school of philosophers. People who like "Inception" should see Takashi Yamazaki's brilliant, "Returner." Kyoto is mentioned in the script. In light of the relationship between Cobb and the architect, the lore of knights and squires, Samurai and their "youthful assistants" should be kept in mind:
"On the one hand, the thing-in-itself is truly itself on this field, for in contrast with what is called objective reality, it has shaken off its ties with the subject. This does not mean, however, that it is utterly unknowable. For reason, it is indeed unknowable; but when we turn and enter into the field of emptiness, where the thing-in-itself is always and ever manifest as such, its realization is able to come about. On the other hand, on this field the being of a thing is at one with emptiness, and thus radically illusory. It is not, however, an illusory appearance in the sense that dogmatism uses the word [illusory] to denote what is not objectively real. Neither is it a phenomenon in the sense, say, that critical philosophy uses the word to distinguish it from the thing-in-itself. A thing is truly an illusory appearance at the precise point that it is truly a thing-in-itself." (Keiji Nishitani, "The Standpoint of 'Sunyata,' in Religion and Nothingness, at p. 139.)
The audience's "role" is written into "Inception." ("Master and Commander.") Your reactions are necessary at key points in the story for the movie to succeed, a movie whose mysteries also create room for unanticipated developments or reactions by (and within) your mind. If you see "Inception," then you can say that you were in a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio.
If a movie must now be thought of as a whole "gestalt experience," then every movie must be supplied with an "emergent principle of totality" ("Soft Chaos Theory") -- say, elegance, beauty, or simplicity -- in its dream logic. Curiously, it seems that "Reality" also prefers beautiful solutions by creating intelligible order with your help. Spin that top.
Sources:
Periodical Reviews and Articles:
A.O. Scott, "This Time the Dream's on Me," in The New York Times, July 16, 2010, at p. C1.
David Denby, "Dream Factory," in The New Yorker, July 26, 2010, at p. 78.
Stephen Witty, "Building on a Dream," in The Sunday Star Ledger, Sec. 4, July 11, 2010, at p. 1. (Mr. Adubato?)
Dennis Overbye, "Is Gravity Real? A Scientist Takes On Newton," in The New York Times, Science Times, July 13, 2010, at p. D1. (The "ideal" nature of gravity and its "illusory" properties are set forth, allegedly, by daring physicist and Kantian, Erik Verlinde.)
Benedict Carey, "Columbia Lab Halts Research Over Injections," in The New York Times, July 17, 2010, at p. A1. (Columbia University scientists halted research that involved secret injections of harmful substances on unknowing human experimental subjects. Inceptions? My experiences of torture, as someone who has never been diagnosed with a mental illness, are worse than the horrors described in this article.)
Richard Perez-Pena, "New Jersey is Sued Over the Forced Medication of Patients at Psychiatric Hospitals," in The New York Times, August 4, 2010, at p. A15. (Involuntary chemical lobotomies inflicted on unsuspecting victims, many of them women -- Jennifer Velez? -- who may have been sexually and otherwise abused. How many of you in New Jersey had sex with Marilyn Straus? New Jersey is accused of "suspending people's civil rights without due process." Many victims are made worse and some are destroyed by this practice. "Jennifer Velez is a 'Dyke Magnet!'" New Jersey may have surpassed Libyia in violating human rights.)
Donald G. McNeil Jr., "U.S. Infected Guatemalans With Syphilis in '40s," in The New York Times, October 2, 2010, at p. A1. (U.S. physicians experimented on unwilling victims by infecting them with syphilis, as they experiment today with techniques of psychological torture in New Jersey.)
Charlie Savage & Scott Shane, "Bush Aide Calls Some Methods Used by C.I.A. Unauthorized," in The New York Times, July 16, 2010, at p. A12. (Circuit Judge Bybee, an architect of America's torture policy, regrets being "inconvenienced" by an inquiry. "Is America's Legal Ethics a Lie?")
Nina Bernstein, "U.S. Court Orders Safety, Not Deportation, for Woman Facing Torture," in The New York Times, July 16, 2010, at p. A20. (Person facing less severe hardships than are deemed legal by Mr. Bybee, or routine treatment of the mentally ill in N.J., will be given asylum in the U.S.)
Anthony Thomasini, "Cause for Worry: A Deep Drink of Bliss, With Confusion for a Chaser," in The New York Times, Arts Section, August 3, 2010, at p. C2. (Review of Gluck's Opera "Orfeo ed Euridice.")
Helen Vendler, "Science and the Poet," in The New Republic, June 24, 2010, at p. 28. (Warum schriftlos leben.)
"The Film Issue," in Granta 86, Summer, 2004 (Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa, Sajat Ray). http://www.granta.com/
Cinema referenced in this work by Christopher Nolan:
1. "Citizen Kane."
2. "A Clockwork Orange."
3. "2001, A Space Odyssey."
4. "Pan's Labyrinth."
5. "Orpheus/Blood of a Poet/Beauty and the Beast."
6. "Apocalypse Now."
7. "The Matrix Trilogy."
8. "Out of the Past."
9. "Casino Royale."
10. "Vertigo/North by Northwest/The Lady Vanishes."
11. "Blade Runner."
12. "Wings of Desire."
13. "Ikiru/Seven Samurai/Ran/Rashomon."
14. "L'Age D'Or."
15. "Returner."
16. "Dark City."
Selected books I have relied upon in writing this essay:
Amir D. Aczel, Entanglement (New York & London: Penguin, 2003).
John Barth, Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction 1984-1994 (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1995).
Roy Bashkar, Plato, Etc.,: Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution (London & New York: Verso, 1994). ("Explanations and the Laws of Nature," esp. p. 35.)
Igmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography (New York: Viking, 1988). (Joan Tate, trans.)
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964).
John P. Briggs & F. David Peat, eds., Looking Glass Universe: The Emerging Science of Wholeness (London: Fontana, 1985).
Daniel Burston, The Crucible of Experience: R.D. Laing and the Crisis of Psychotherapy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
A.S. Byatt, Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Times (London: Vintage, 1997). (The Nolan Brothers?)
Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992). (Particularly good discussion of dissipation theories.)
Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1949), (2nd Ed., 1968).
Joseph Campbell, ed., The Portable Carl Jung (London: New York: Penguin, 1976).
Albert Camus, The Fall (New York: Vintage, 1956).
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). (Analogy to Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology of belief in writings about God.)
Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1998).
Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, Volume 7, Modern Philosophy, Part I, Fitche to Hegel (New York: Image Books, 1963).
Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, Volume 8, Modern Philosophy, Part I, Bentham to Russell (British Empiricism and the Idealist Movement in Britain) (New York: Image Books, 1966).
Edward Craig, The Mind of God and the Works of Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality (London: Penguin, 1997).
Philip K. Dick, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon, 1995).
Thomas Doherty, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Simon During, ed., The Cultural Studies Reader (New York & London: Routledge, 1993).
Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1983).
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Random House, 1966).
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973).
Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). (See the first letter from Rene Magritte to Michel Foucault in the Appendix.)
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961).
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton, 1965).
Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). (Robert Bernasconi, ed.)
Amit Goswami, Ph.D., The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Penguin, 1995). (" ... consciousness is the true foundation of all we know or perceive.")
Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (London & New York: Penguin, 2005).
George Greenstein, The Symbiotic Universe: The Life and Mind of the Cosmos (New York: William Morrow, 1988).
John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (London: mcMillan, 1966).
Ted Hondereich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (New York: Harper & Row, 1946).
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Harper & Row, 1932). (La vie marche vers les utopies. -- Nicolas Berdiaeff's opening quote.)
Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Free Press, 1993). (Focus on the Romantics is perceptive and sympathetic.)
Mark Johnson, Saving God: Religion After Idolatry (Oxford & Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
Carl G. Jung, et als., Man and His Symbols (New York: Dell-Laurel, 1964).
Michio Kaku, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Leszek Kolakowski, Religion: If There is No God ... (Indiana: St. Augustine Press, 2001).
Lawrence M. Kraus, Hiding in the Mirror: The Quest for Alternate Realities, From Plato to String Theory (By Way of Alice in Wonderland, Einstein, and the Twilight Zone (New York & London: Penguin, 2005).
David Farrell Krell, Post-Ponements: Woman, Sensuality, and Death in Nietzsche (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). ("Adriana" ... is the problem of the "mask that looks upon itself as a mask ..." pp. 15-31, and Yukio Mishima's "Confessions of a Mask.")
R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (London: Tavistock, 1961). (Schizophrenia as defense and liberation in environments of forced encounter with extreme evil, like Auschwitz, that shatter the looking glass of identity.)
George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980).
Rebecca Lemov, World as Laboratory: Experiments With Mice, Mazes, and Men (New York: Hill & Wang, 2005). (Behaviorist "Inceptions"?)
C.C. Lin & L.A. Segel, Mathematics Applied to Deterministic Problems in the Natural Sciences (Philadelphia: Society for Applied Mathematics, 1988). ("Tensor Theory," especially so-called "Cartesian" tensors analogous to "leaping" from one dream to another.)
Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
Abraham Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences (London: Penguin, 1984). (Letters have been deleted from this author's name and defacements will probably continue in the future.)
Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1991).
Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact (New York: Pantheon, 2005). ("Dreams on Film.")
Colin McGinn, Mindfucking: A Critique of Mental Manipulation (London: Acumen, 2008). ("Error" insertions, alterations of the alphabetical order or spacing of titles in this bibliography, computer crime, obstructions of my cable signal, harassments intended to injure a person forced to make corrections many times.)
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964). (" ... movies offer as product the most magical of consumer commodities, namely dreams.")
Jonathan Miller, Marshall McLuhan (New York: Viking Press, 1971).
Libuse Lukas Miller, In Search of the Self: The Individual in the Thought of Kierkegaard (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1962). ("Leap of Faith.")
Nicholas Mosley, Accident (Illinois: Dalkey Press, 1965).
Nicholas Mosley, Hopeful Monsters (New York: Random House, 1990). (One of the great novels of the last several decades in which "key" passages are echoed in the dialogue of "Inception.")
Nicholas Mosley, Inventing God (Illinois: Dalkey Archive, 2003).
Nicholas Mosley, Experience and Religion (London: Stodder & Houghton, 1965). ("Anyone can spin any theory ..." see page 39.)
Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley: University of California, 1982).
Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).
Olivier Pauvet, Noir: A Novel (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2005).
Octavio Paz, Alternating Current (New York: Arcade, 1990). ("Notes on La Realidad y El Deseo.")
Octavio Paz, On Poets and Others (New York: Arcade, 1990) ("Labyrinth of Solitude," Reflections on "Jean Paul Sartre -- Memento.")
William Poundstone, Labyrinths of Reason (New York: Anchor, 1976), ("The Maze and the Mystery" or "The Paradoxes of Completeness in the Labyrinths of Ts'ui Pen.")
Douglas Shrader, ed., The Fractal Self (New York: Oneonta Philosophy Center, 2000).
June Singer, Boundaries of the Soul: The Practice of Jung's Psychology (New York: Anchor, 1973).
Ninian Smart, The Philosophy of Religion (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). (What is reality "piercing" -- inception -- to achieve the "religious ultimate?")
Tom Stoppard, Jumpers (New York: Grove Press, 1972).
Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001). ("Closed Loops.")
Gore Vidal, Screening History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
James Waddell, Erotic Perception: Philosophical Portraits (New York: University Press of America, 1997). (How heterosexual men see women.)
Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism (London: Thames & Hudson, 1965). (See Ronald Penrose's painting "The Invisible Isle.")
Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blond: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1994).
Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses: Other Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Andrew Wiles, "Modular Elliptic Curves and Fermat's Last Theorem," in Annals of Mathematics 142 (1995), pp. 443-551. (Fusion approach unifying the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture establishing a dialectic between "elliptical equations" and "modular forms" in order to "prove" Fermat's Last Theorem. ... Every woman is an "elliptical equation.")
Andrew Wiles and Richard Taylor, "Ring Theoretic Properties of Certain Heckle Algebras," in Annals of Mathematics 142 (1995), pp. 553-572. (They had to get the kinks out of the first formulation of the proof by what Goro Shimura described as a "more elegant and beautiful" statement of the field or negative proof of Fermat -- interestingly, in terms of the movie "Inception" -- these approaches are called "phantom equations" and are almost always captured in feminine metaphors. "Mal" is the shadow equation of "Cobb." Each of the movie characters is a shadow equation for the actor playing the part.)
Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). (Williams comments on P.F. Strawson's "Individuals.")
Colin Wilson, The Essential Colin Wilson (Berkeley: Celestial Arts, 1986). ("The Ladder of Selves.")
Richard Wolin, Labyrinths: Explorations in the History of Ideas (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).
Slavoj Zizek, Looking Away: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).
Slavoj Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994). (See what I mean?)
Danah Zohar, The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics (New York: William Morrow, 1990).
August 20, 2010 at 10:04 P.M. An attack against my security system obstructed my updating feature. I have restarted my computer. I will try to run a scan for the third time today. A single letter was deleted from a word in my list of sources. I have corrected that "error." New arrests are expected in New Jersey soon. I hope. Mr. Codey's brother has a little problema. I will not discuss that matter unless there is more of a connection to Mr. Codey than I have seen so far.
August 19, 2010 at 10:39 A.M. "Errors" inserted and corrected as New Jersey is accused of fraud in connection with pension funds. ("New Jersey is $46 BILLION 'Short' in Pension Funds.")
August 17, 2010 at 10:50 A.M. Several essays appear to have been vandalized overnight, numerous "errors" were inserted in this essay-review with the goal of maximizing harmful frustrations. I have made all necessary corrections. Furthermore, I will do my best to make corrections of reinserted "errors" as they appear in my writings. I have reason to believe that this essay will be republished in a setting where such crimes may not be committed by persons sheltered from criminal liability. I will make use of more public computers in the future.
August 14, 2010 at 10:10 A.M. Several essays were altered yesterday, the spacing between titles was affected in this essay. I hope to have made all of the necessary corrections in this essay today, until next time. This kind of wave of attacks is usually followed by new indictments in New Jersey. Keep your fingers crossed.
August 7, 2010 at 5:33 P.M. A letter was deleted from a word in this essay. I corrected that "error" from a public computer. A word was deleted from "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script." I have also corrected that "error." I cannot say how many other essays or writings have been disfigured in the cybercrimes committed over the past two days. I have run six scans of my computer, removing security risks each time. The number of intrusions into my computer is in the hundreds every day.
July 26, 2010 at 11:45 A.M. "Errors" inserted overnight will now be corrected.
July 25, 2010 at 11:56 A.M. "Errors" were inserted in this text which had been left alone for a few days. Let us see what further attacks are directed against this work and others at these blogs. I will do my best to make corrections as they are needed. I think that the quality of this review, such as it is, has embarrassed some persons whose assessments of this movie seem far less good to many readers. Hence, the continuing efforts to destroy this text as well as many others. I am sure that many persons in the world can relate to my feelings upon discovering further vandalisms of this work today. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "What is it like to be tortured?")
July 22, 2010 at 10:20 A.M. "Errors" inserted overnight in this essay, after my most recent review and not found in previous versions of the work, will now be corrected. Sadly, we may expect more of this sort of thing during the next several days. ("How Censorship Works in America" and "More Censorship and Cybercrime" then "What is it like to be censored in America?" and "David Denby is Not Amused.")
Mr. Christie, use of these tactics reflects poorly not only on New Jersey, but also on the United States of America. ("Censorship and Cruelty in New Jersey.")
July 21, 2010 at 5:09 P.M. "Error" inserted since earlier today. I have now corrected that "error." I cannot say how many other writings have been altered or vandalized today. I will do my best to make corrections of each "error" inserted in these writings as soon as I become aware of it.
July 21, 2010 at 2:07 P.M. "Errors" inserted and corrected, alphabetical order of titles listed altered and repaired. Other harassments that I will not name are about what I usually deal with, nothing special. I am told that important arrests are taking place as I type these words in Hudson County. Perhaps even more arrests will take place soon in New Jersey.
July 18, 2010 at 11:07 A.M. "Errors" inserted overnight have been corrected.
July 17, 2010 at 10:47 P.M. "Errors" inserted, once more, as part of the continuing "frustration and harassment" campaign from New Jersey. Mostly letters and words may be removed. Tell your friends in other countries about this spectacle. ("What is it like to be tortured?")
July 17, 2010 at 4:33 P.M. "Errors" were inserted in this work posted earlier today. I cannot say how many other writings have been vandalized in violation of copyright law and the American Constitution. I can only hope that no journalists have or would participate in such criminal conduct. I am sure that Steve Adubato agrees with me on this issue of respect for freedom of speech. I wonder whether Mr. Adubato has visited my sites? Rafael Pi Roman? Rick Sanchez of CNN? Senator Lieberman? Professor Daniel Mendelsohn? ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "How Censorship Works in America.")
I have reason to believe and hope that the review which appears below will be translated into Japanese and, perhaps -- without expressing "delusions of grandeur" -- I may expect the review to appear not only in Japan, but also in many other countries. America's media silence in connection with this sad spectacle of government censorship and computer crime is very strange. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "What is it like to be censored in America?" then "More Censorship and Cybercrime.")
I am advised that my book concerning Ricoeur's hermeneutics has been selected for inclusion at "In Other Bookcases":
http://www.oscholars.com/to/appendix/library/fthr and
http://www.bookarmy.com/Juan_Galis_Menendez_writer.aspx_UnitedKingdom
My books and these blogs are referenced in: http://www.openlibrary.org/authors/0l2964813A/Juan_Galis_Menendez_mancheckov.net/wordpress/2004/07/nochnoy-dozoy. (Russian culture site.)
This essay along with my review of "The Prestige" (I believe) has been selected for inclusion in http://massdensity.com/category/uncategorized/paper/2/ (Quantum Physics and Scientific Culture.)
"Inception," Directed and written by Christopher Nolan; director of photography, Wally Pfister (Bravo!); edited by Lee Smith; costumes by Jeffrey Kurland (Oscar for Ms. Cotillard's dresses and one for Mr. Kurland); Leonardo DiCaprio (Cobb), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Arthur), Ellen Page (Adriadne, Brava!), Tom Hardy (Eames), Ken Watanabe (Saito), Dileep Rao (Yusuf), Cillian Murphy (Robert Fischer), Tom Berenger (Browning), Marion Cotillard (Mal), Pete Pothlewaite (Maurice Fisher), Michael Caine (Miles) and Lukas Haas (Nash).
Introduction: "I recognize you from my dreams." -- Pierre Charles Baudelaire, Le Fleurs du Mal (1857).
"And so, being young and dipped in folly
I fell in love with melancholy."
-- Edgar Allan Poe.
I was lucky to see Christopher Nolan's "Inception" on the first day that it was available in New York. As usual with Mr. Nolan's films there is a fascinating mixture of lyricism and philosophical seriousness in this movie. Mr. Nolan is exploring profound and disturbing questions in his work concerning the nature of reality and sanity, good and evil, ethics and fiction. Mr. Nolan studied literature at the University of London, I believe, but he is equally at home in the culture of images, or cinema, in which we all must live in the twenty-first century. These are our languages -- screen music, movement and image, sound and word -- because they shape the subjectivities of persons in our age. ("'The Prestige': A Movie Review.")
"Inception" is a classic example of Umberto Eco's "Open Work." The movie is intended to resonate for viewers in multiple directions. The closest analogy that I can provide to readers is from higher mathematics. For example, a "tesseract" is a multidimensional object placed in abstract space which is describable in various numerical languages and schemes, each featuring its own logic and corresponding aesthetics. This object (a "tesseract") does not exist, empirically, but it is real. For Mr. Nolan, movies are "tesseracts" -- works of art that are necessarily "incomplete" -- "living" stories that may be "entered" by other thriving freedoms-in-the-world and made complete only by the viewer or recipient of the work. ("John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness.")
"Inception" raises the question "What is a movie?" Is a movie only an empirical object? Or is a movie also its meaning? Movies, like reality, are amenable to any number of readings or interpretations, several meanings may always be attached to good films, altering in the flickering light of "projection" and placed before the viewer. Enigmatically, movies must be interpreted, freely, by recipients or they stop being movies. Hence, the analogy to dreams. This means that you, as the audience member, must respect the autonomy of the work of art which is encountered in the movie theater, even as you achieve a kind of "fusion of horizons" with the work. More on this later in pondering the mystery of identity. ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")
Happily, this is also Mr. Nolan's view of reality and of those mysterious beings called "women" who may or may not inhabit reality as distinct from our dreams. Women are freedoms-in-the-world who must be seen as equals through transcending subjective male notions of their identities. This fascination with women and darkness places Mr. Nolan's work in the tradition of American Noir cinema. This is also to suggest that Mr. Nolan's aesthetic sensibility is shaped by literary Romanticism, notably, the English variety of the movement -- especially, I believe, by the poetry of Byron and Tennyson. The latter's apt verse is quoted below:
"O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me
No casual mistress, but a wife,
My bosom-friend and half of life;
As I confess it needs must be?"
A final ingredient in Mr. Nolan's sensibility that is shared with Tim Burton is the influence of surrealism. Students of the Surrealist Manifestos and the paintings of Magritte as well as Salvador Dali will immediately recognize key images in this movie and gestures of gratitude to those artists in addition to the Master of the genre, Jean Cocteau, who also gets a nod. (See Cocteau's "Orpheus" and "Beauty and the Beast.")
The central myth unifying the highly sophisticated ideas illustrated in the plot and drawn from quantum mechanics, hermeneutic theory, Asian mysticism and theoretical speculation is the story of Orpheus who must rescue his wife, Eurydice, from the Underworld after her death. Sorrow lives with "Cobb" in the form of "Mal." Orpheus is allowed to bring his wife to the surface (life), only if he refrains from looking back at her lovely features (memory is a thief) until her return to the "day world" of the living. If Orpheus looks back (remembers her long lost beauty and their happiness), Eurydice will be lost forever. Love can only be kept by being given away. Gluck's Opera featuring this myth might have provided a soundtrack to accompany the dizzying images. Memory is a haunting "issue" in all of Nolan's films. ("Out of the Past.")
The parallel myth of Persephone and its linkage to the changes in the seasons is signaled for the audience by transitions from a bleak winter landscape to warm beaches. This is an externalization of what Carl Jung and later Alfred Adler called "guilt complexes" and identity-entanglements that are akin to the relations of particles in the quantum realm explored, as I have said, in other movies by this same director. The Orpheus myth was later absorbed by Christianity as Jesus (in the role of Eurydice) becomes the resident of the Underworld encountering his "wife" Mary Magdalene (the new Orpheus) "as" his resurrection. Noli me tangere. ("'Shoot 'Em Up': A Movie Review.")
The plunge into the Underworld is obviously a psychological journey taking place in the mind of the hero. It is the metanoia journey which is also the descent into madness externalized in science fiction terms and action sequences calculated to get the dollars of young men and their long-suffering girlfriends this summer. From what I saw at the midnight premier of the film, Mr. Nolan will be a much richer man very soon. I am happy for him.
Adriadne's shattering of a glass allows us to step through the mirror and into the "Wonderland" of this film by establishing a relationship between this film, which is explicitly associated with what is "surreal," and the imagery of Luis Bunuel. No accents on this keyboard, sorry. I am aware of where the accents belong in words even if I am unable to supply the accents. (Mr. Bunuel's Mexican films should be studied by Mr. Nolan, especially Cumbres Borrascosas, i.e., "Wuthering Heights.")
Real/surreal is a dialectic that recurs several times in the film. The word "deconstruction" is used by Mr. DiCaprio's character in connection with the dream reality under "inception." A philosopher -- whom I have excellent reason to believe that Mr. Nolan has read -- writes of reality imploding within multiple levels of meaning that are inextricable from memory and language as death nears: "Might something like this -- we might call it Zeno's eternity -- be a model for an enlightenment experience, or for the experience of dying? If our consciousness survived biological death for (only) one minute, but that minute subjectively felt like eternity, would that constitute a satisfactory form of immortality?" (Nozick, "Being More Real," in The Examined Life, at p. 129 and Kurosawa's "Ikiru," which is a recent discovery for me.)
The literal "fall" (Albert Camus) into the abyss ("leap of faith" in Kierkegaard's terms) is depicted in multiple images, most powerfully as the woman the hero loves falls from a ledge ("Mal"). This movie is a deeply religious work which has already received the attention of theologians. Discussions of theological implications of the movie are scheduled for July 18, 2010 at The Journey Church/Upper West Side, at 10:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M., Brandeis, HS, 145 West 84th Street, New York, NY (84th & Columbus). http://www.Journey/Metro.com
From a Christian gnostic perspective the movie is a meditation on sin, evil, loss, redemption and the unbreakable bonds of love. Jesus, according to gnostic accounts, spent one day in the Underworld before his resurrection. (I direct the reader to Rene Magritte's Le Soir qui tombe, 1934, reproduced in Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, at Plate 17 and "'The Matrix': A Movie Review.")
I hope to see and review "Salt" and "The American." Those films are concerned to explore existential and identity questions that are often placed in the context of espionage thrillers.
I.
Ms. Cotillard does not "warble," despite the ravings of Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. Ms. Cotillard is beautiful and elegant in several of the most provocative dresses that I have seen a woman wear on screen for many years. The beauty of this woman's features amplified on screen is worth $13.00. "Mal" (the word means "evil") is a personification of the femme fatal archetype, but she is also "anima." ("Manohla Dargis Strikes Again!")
Several of Jung's archetypes are visible in the film underlining the subconscious messages conveyed by the work: the "twin trains" ("A" and "B," the Nolan Brothers?) that travel in different directions hint at alternate time-journeys (past and future), then and now, masculine (past) and feminine (future). I agree that we are heading into a century that is dominated by the feminine side of the human mind. "All of the facts revealed by the train leaving Paddington Station can equally well be explained," Tom Stoppard assures us in Jumpers, "by Paddington Station leaving the train." ("Faust in Manhattan.")
Notice the contrast between Michael Caine's character as "Philemon" and the "wise child," Adriadne, played by Ellen Page, who is excellent. Again, the reference is to Greek mythology, Adriadne of Naxos. Adriana (same name) fashions a thread through the labyrinth to escape the minotaur. The thread is the thematic unity of the text which guides you in the maze of ideas in which you are inevitably involved by seeing this movie. This is a common motif in hermeneutic writings: "The narrative thread in dream logic." Ms. Page understood that she was playing a "trouser role," where gender was "in question." (See "Oscar" in "The Tales of Hoffman" or Strauss' "Der Rosenkavalier.")
Intertextuality is also important to the movie which uses the music of Edith Piaf -- Ms. Piaf was "played" by Ms. Cotillard in another movie -- to cope with guilt issues while breaking out of the boundaries of the screen canvas. Mr. DiCaprio's "image" of his character "Cobb" is real, but the man on screen is not DiCaprio. The disturbing idea forced on viewers ("incepted?") is that reality itself -- or the very notion that there are "real versions" of persons apart from how they are seen by others -- is doubted or made into a question for the audience. We have entered a hall of mirrors.
Is the person we see doing these "actions" on screen, Mr. DiCaprio? Is Mr. DiCaprio the person "seen" in interviews pertaining to this film? Which version of DiCaprio is real? The dream subject in DiCaprio's subconscious is real to him? The person "acting" in the empirical world is real to others? The person "acting" on screen seems "real" to audiences? Or is the real person known only to himself? Is there a single "Leonardo DiCaprio"? Is "Cobb" Mr. DiCaprio's "shadow equation"? Is there a single "Inception"? Have we seen the same movie when we sit next to each other at a screening of "Inception"? Arguably, all of the characters in this movie are aspects of a single psyche. Incidentally, I do not have a cell phone. Anyone who does have a cellphone should turn it off when seeing this movie because you will need to pay attention.
In a quantum universe, like it or not, we seem to discover a set of realities that are only constructed as we perceive them or through our perceptions of them -- while remaining objective and true -- even "true illusions." The movie is the tree that falls in the forest but only makes a noise when someone hears the "fall." Think again of "Mal's" leap into the darkness. ("David Stove's Critique of Idealism" and "G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism.")
"Schopenhauer regards his deduction of transcendental subject and object as being legitimate ... we are left confronting them as two mysteries: the unknowable subject and unknowable matter. (Perhaps they are rather one mystery, [God?] for our analysis has already led us to expect them to be different aspects of the same thing.) The transcendental subject, as the sustainer of the world of space and time, cannot itself be in the world of space and time; as sustainer of the realm within which the principle of sufficient reason operates, it can itself be neither object nor agent of that principle. For these reasons it could never be an object of empirical knowledge to anyone -- quite apart from the fact that, for other reasons considered separately, it cannot be an object of knowledge to itself. Yet its existence is a necessary presupposition of our having the experiences that we do have. Putting this the other way round, this whole world of experience is perfectly real, just as real as it presents itself as being, but is unconceptualizable in any terms other than such as presuppose the existence of a subject. This is, in a nutshell, what transcendental idealism means." (emphasis added)
There is no "Inception," until you see the movie. The movie is an "inception" into your subconscious. Schopenhauer's interest in Altman, the Hindu "worldsoul" is shared by Mr. Nolan. Today's physicists as well as biologists articulate the same idea in different terms and, often, without realizing that the latest description of the universe is really a few thousand years-old:
"This means that we cannot fall out of time, as the realist supposes us to do when we die. [Death is a character in this movie that is associated also with eros, "Mal."] The idea that we can [fall out of time] is likened by Schopenhauer to childish misapprehensions about space. When a European child first learns that the world is a giant ball, and that Australia is on the other side of it, he commonly imagines the Australians to be walking about upside-down, hanging from the world by their feet like flies from a ceiling, and is puzzled that they do not drop off into space. If he is imaginative he may also wonder why he himself, if he is perched on top of a giant ball, does not slide down the side of it. His puzzlement can be partly removed by gravity's being explained to him, but only partly: such a young child will almost certainly be unable to grasp the point that it has no meaning to talk of an 'up' or 'down' which is not relative to a subject, so that in a universe thought of as being without an observer there could be no up or down at all. His puzzlement about space, like an adult's bafflement about time, would spring from regarding a particular state of affairs as objectively existing when in fact it can have being and significance only for a subject. Our minds seem to be constructed in such a way that in both cases it borders on the inconceivable not just that the states of affairs in question should not be able to exist independently of us but that they do not in fact exist independently of us. ["Is it rational to believe in God?"] Yet so it is. The top of the giant ball is quite simply wherever one is, and separately from that there can be no top. [Where is "Inception" located?] Similarly, 'now' is wherever one is, and separately from that there can be no 'now.' ..." (Magee, The Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, at pp. 116-117, pp. 214-215.) ("Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art" and "Donald Davidson's 'Anomalous Monism.'")
II.
The logical conclusion of this reasoning is that for the world to "hang together," as it does, there must be a unifying consciousness underlying reality keeping our scientific knowledge in place and fixing the order in the cosmos (or as that order) in the absence of any particular individual or of all persons in the world. The question that arises next for film makers and audiences concerns the freedom of the protagonists and viewers "conditioned" by subconscious forces and desires, trapped in the logic of dreams and the mysteries of a universe that is also a "dream" seducing all of us. This coincides with the so-called "dreaming universe" theory postulated by physicists. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")
The various levels of the subconscious are similar to the levels of ascent for the soul in Dante's "Divine Comedy" -- from "Inferno" to Purgatory," then to "Paradise." Paradise is symbolized in the love and innocence of children and the idea of "homecoming." Milton's "Paradise Lost" and battle in the heavens is also analogized by a director who has done his homework. I suspect that Mr. DiCaprio's character would have found "Mal" in his "home" at the end of the movie wearing a lovely dress, as a blond perhaps, wondering whether he wanted a sandwich for lunch. ("Duality in Christian Feminine Identity" and "'The Da Vinci Code': A Movie Review.")
Mr. Nolan is beguiled and frightened by a reality expressing itself in his works that contains genuine horrors (I don't blame him) together with the beauties also found in the world. Terror and joy at beauty seem to come from women for this film director. One shudders to think of Mr. DiCaprio's views of women. The universe -- like women -- plays tricks on us in a quantum reality that we are only beginning to understand. I can spare Mr. Nolan many years of puzzlement: He will never fully understand women. As for Mr. DiCaprio, I would never presume to offer him advice on the subject of women. ("God is Texting Me!")
We learn of "levels" of the subconscious (Underworld), also in particle physics, where reality is manufactured and may be programed by observers. As with "The Prestige" and "Memento," the "I" (Cobb) is divided into a duality (Adriadne), Hamlet and Horatio. Schizophrenia is a constant presence in Mr. Nolan's films, perhaps as a way of commenting on what must be an interesting relationship with his brother. The Nolans are gentile versions of the Wachowski brothers of Chicago. My guess is that Christopher Nolan is the older brother. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
Mr. DiCaprio's "Cobb" is a corporate spy who "plunges" into the dreams of his targets or victims -- which is what Mr. Nolan is doing to all of us, plunging into our minds, with "his" movie -- ostensibly in order to steal secrets that are worth money to sinister corporations. There may be no non-sinister corporations. This is evidenced by the logo of "Time-Warner" that accompanies this movie. More difficult is "inception" or planting an idea in the mind of a subject who will act on that idea in the real world. Subconscious manipulations were charted by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World Revisited. The C.I.A. is very good at that sort of thing. This effort involves actual entry into the mind of another through hypnosis and other, sometimes horrifying interventions. Sexual analogies are intentional and obvious. ("What You Will ...")
Behaviorists at Yale University experimented with "creatures" (this was the term used for all "animals") by stitching their eyelids shut and rotating them on sticks -- sometimes very rapidly (spinning tops?) -- using electrical prods (on humans!), as well as many other indescribably cruel techniques for inducing continual stress and "defensiveness" leading to collapse or self-destruction, starvation maybe. This psychological torture method probably accounts for the constant "error" insertions in these writings and other harassments I deal with, every day. The goal of hackers is to cause permanent and severe psychological damage through constant anxieties and frustrations. Much of this research is parallel to developments in the plot-line of the movie:
" ... at higher levels the subject becomes more and more sensitive to pain; his torment becomes exquisite. However, should this cycling continue without diminishment, then one would observe at last, 'the ultimate demoralization of behavior': a nervous breakdown." (Rebecca Lemov, "Circle of Fear and Hope," in World as Laboratory: Experiments With Mice, Mazes, and Men, at pp. 92-93.) ("Behaviorism is Evil" and "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture." Has Joseph Nye visited my sites?)
Saito (Ken Watanabe) wishes to enter the mind of his victim Cillian Murphy's character, whose father, Pete Pothelwaite, is a business rival of Saito in order to have him break-up the rival empire controlling all of the energy in the world. Topical allusions to "evil empires" seeking control of the world's energy are obvious and (I think) secondary to the metaphysics of the film. Elaborate subconscious defenses or security forces (Mr. Cheney is burned in effigy) are developed to cope with such threats, as in a torture chamber. The analogy to viruses in electronic space and our adventures on-line makes the collective subconscious depicted in "Inception" like the Internet. This is is to describe persons inserting "errors" in my writings as a virus or fungus of evil.
Beyond Freud, Jung's experiments with altered consciousness and anthropological studies led him to formulate theories of individual, then collective and/or species subconscious (the realm of the archetypes) where we find ourselves in this movie. Collective mind is transcendent consciousness. This is a Buddhist concept and also, I keep insisting, a doctrine discussed in physics and mathematics today. For example, by Oxford's superstar quantum physicist and computer expert, David Deutsch, and fellow Oxford superstar, biologist Rupert Sheldrake:
"Thus we have arrived at a significant moment" -- with the development of probability theory and, soon, quantum computing -- "in the history of ideas -- the moment when the scope of our understanding begins to be fully universal. Up to now, all our understanding has been about some aspect of reality, untypical of the whole. In the future it will be about a unified conception of reality, [that spinning top,] all explanations will be understood against the backdrop of universality, and every new idea will automatically tend to illuminate not just a particular subject, but, to varying degrees, all subjects. The dividend of understanding that we shall eventually reap from this last great unification may far surpass that yielded by any previous one. For we shall see that it is not only science, but also potentially the far reaches of philosophy, logic and mathematics, ethics, politics and aesthetics; perhaps everything that we currently understand, and probably much that we do not yet understand." (Deutsch, "The Theory of Everything," in The Fabric of Reality, at p. 29.)
Mind and world are described, again, as mirrors set facing each other which is to describe the postmodern condition:
"The very existence of general explanatory theories implies that disparate objects and events are physically alike in some ways. The light reaching us from distant galaxies is, after all, only light, but it looks to us like galaxies. Thus reality contains not only evidence, but also the means (such as our minds, and our artifacts) of understanding it. There are mathematical symbols in physical reality. The fact that it is we who put them there does not make them any less physical. [Immanuel Kant] In those symbols -- in our planetariums, books, films and computer memories, and in our brains -- there are images of physical reality at large, images not just of the appearance of objects, but of the structure of reality. There are laws and explanations, reductive and emergent. There are descriptions and explanations of the Big Bang and subnuclear particles and processes; there are mathematical abstractions; fictions; art; morality; shadow photons; [DiCaprio/Cobb?] parallel universes. To the extent that these symbols, images and theories are true -- that is, they resemble in appropriate respects the concrete or abstract things they refer to -- that existence gives reality a new sort of self-similarity, self-similarity we call knowledge." (Deutsch, "Criteria for Reality," in The Fabric of Reality, at pp. 95-96. "Gravity?")
This dialectical form of transcendental realism/idealism (Roy Bashkar) amounts to much the same as scientific phenomenological-hermeneutics as outlined beautifully in this movie through the symbol of a spinning top.
"The symbol gives rise to thought," as Paul Ricoeur has taught us. The deployment of master symbols and their use in defense against governmental efforts at manipulation is an unexplored aspect of the continuing controversy over subliminal conditioning or "inception." ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")
III.
Scientists and others speak of the "many minds" or mentalistic interpretation of quantum theory. (Octavio Paz, David Deutsch) Religious persons speak of "God." However, the insight is very similar for both types of persons. Mind is required to hold intellectual order in place. You are "Inception," as you experience the movie or through your interactions with the work because you are changed by the movie and your accounts of the movie to others changes their ways of seeing "Inception." If scientists are to be believed, the same is true of what is laughingly called "Reality." We change reality, even as reality changes us. This is another way of describing the unitary message of the great religions concerning the experience of God. ("Is this atheism's moment?")
"Ontology" (the study of the ultimate nature of reality in metaphysics) is "bracketed" or set aside for viewers experiencing the movie. (Edmund Husserl, Hans-Georg Gadamer) The spinning top is the "hidden variable" in quantum mechanics to which David Bohm referred in his discussions with Albert Einstein. Orson Wells calls it "Rosebud" the hidden and then exploding symbol that keeps "Citizen Kane" unified, as a character and in terms of that classic movie. "Rosebud" is the symbol of what mattered in a life as that life ended. William Randolph Hearst on whom "Kane" was based, used this term, "Rosebud," to describe a portion of his wife's anatomy. This cannot be "verified" empirically. Deeper levels of reality explain what appears mysterious to us, except when it comes to women, of course, where one is simply faced with a "conundrum" (as it were) that is irresolvable. "Rosebud," indeed. (Gore Vidal)
Time is the liquid in which this cinematic experience floats for the viewer. Ironically, levels of reality are in tension, once again, because it may take years to complete a film that audiences will enjoy over two-and-a-half hours. Time orders weave together in "Inception." This is true within the cinematic text and outside of that text, for us, as viewers. ("A Review of the t.v. Show, 'Alice'" and "Time is the Fire in Which We Burn.")
A field is established for interaction. We are shaped, subconsciously, by the movie and the movie changes based on how we see it, with some people seeing more and others less of what is on-screen. This is a dialectic without termination. The movie is always new for somebody. The narrative, then, in which we are -- you can call it God, if you like -- is increasingly elastic today, protean, variable, yet still real and true, even necessarily true. To hold these ideas in place the image of the spinning top serves as a Sufi device for disorienting and refocusing the mind. This achievement of dislocation is the traditional role of madness as a journey in human experience aimed at integration of the fragmented self. For this reason, psychological dislocations from normality were sought by mystics, great scientists, and many artists throughout human history as their chosen "doorways" to illumination. ("'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review" and "'The Reader': A Movie Review.")
Philip K. Dick's great subject is this boundary between sanity and madness:
" ... we have entered the landscape depicted by Richard Condon in his terrific novel The Manchurian Candidate: Not only can delusions and hallucinations be induced ["incepted"] in virtually any person, but the added horror of 'posthypnotic suggestion' gets thrown in for good measure ... and, by the Pavlov Institute, all this for clearly worked-out political purposes. I don't think I'm wandering into fantasy here, because recall: Freud originally became involved in a form of psychotherapy that utilized hypnosis as its cardinal tool. In other words, all modern depth psychology -- that which postulates some region of the mind unavailable to the person's conscious self, and which, on many an occasion, can preempt the self -- grows from observation of individuals acting out of complete convictions and perceptions and motivations implanted by 'suggestion' during the hypnotic state. Suggestion? How weak a word and how little it conveys compared to the experience itself. [Forced hypnosis is a kind of violation comparable to rape.] I've undergone it and it is, beyond doubt, the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened to me.) ..." (Philip K. Dick, "Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality," in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, at pp. 169-170.)
Hypnosis in the wrong hands can cripple or kill victims by destroying their lives as well as minds as the ultimate form of "inception." Medical techniques should not be seen as "weapons" to injure people in order to serve political objectives, or as a way of keeping victims as personal experimental animals or slaves, much less for purposes of interrogation or investigation of innocent persons. Psychologists agree:
" ... the neo-Jungian or metanoia journey construed madness as an inner journey, [a kind of 'leap of faith" or "fall,"] or one occurring in 'inner space,' rather than as a social artifact occurring in the social domain. In his own words: 'This journey is experienced as going further in',' as going back through one's personal life, in and back and through and beyond into the experience of all mankind, of the primal man, of Adam and perhaps even further into the realm of animals, vegetables and minerals."
Professor Burston associates Jung's theory with the works of Foucault, Laing, then Lacan:
" ... Lacan said the goal of analysis was to deconstruct the ego, rather than to support and strengthen it, [the opposite of adjustment or normalization,] as Freud and his followers had enjoined. This therapeutic objective echoes the ancient Gnostic view that all but a handful of cogniscenti fundamentally misrecognize themselves and their condition. They imagine that they are free, that they know who they are, but their sense of identity is a chimera born of unconscious subjection." (Burston, "Normality and the Numinous," in The Crucible of Experience, at pp. 121-122.)
"Inception" like all excellent art is designed to make us free, to disturb us, to be unclassifiable and not easily absorbed. If the movie bothered you, if you found yourself arguing about what it all meant, then it "worked" as drama and belongs with several of the great films invoked during the course of the "story." I regret that the numerous defacements and vandalisms of this essay or other attempts to injure me will be interpreted in any way as discouraging people from seeing the film. The hostilities reflected in these tactics are directed at me because of my opinions and comments, not at anyone associated with "Inception." ("What is it like to be censored in America?" and "How Censorship Works in America.")
"Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, [homecoming or fusion with divinity,] the unitive knowledge of the imminent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle -- the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: 'How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?" (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, at pp. IX-X.)
Conclusion.
"A labyrinthine human being never seeks the truth, but -- whatever he may try to tell us -- always and only his Adriadne." -- Friedrich Nietzsche. (Krell, Post-Ponements, at p. 15.)
The review in the Times missed many or most of these important themes of the film. The newspaper's critic, A.O. Scott, offered some "conclusory" and dismissive remarks. She also failed to detect nearly all of the cinematic allusions and references in "Inception":
"Freud believed that dreams were compounded out of the primal matter of the unconscious and the prosaic events of daily life. If he [?] were writing now, [Freud lived into the era of cinema and placed films within his theory of art as displacement,] he [?] would have to acknowledge that they [films? or dreams?] are also for many of us, made of movies."
Hollywood has been called: "The Factory of Dreams." Hence, this film which aligns dreams and art in a view closer to Jung's analytical psychology than to Freud's psychoanalysis posits that the unconscious speaks through dreams or art (equally) because both are externalizations of the "powers of the psyche" (Joseph Campbell) that allow persons to cope with life's transitions and crises, like the death of a beloved spouse. We see Cobb and Mal as an old couple, then enter the hero's mind, possibly during his final seconds, as he comes to terms with recollections of this woman and love that are "now" lost to death's dateless night. "This was our dream world for thirty years," Cobb says. This is to describe a marriage. (Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City, at pp. 231-267.)
"Film as dream, film as music." Igmar Berman writes of themes similar to those which feature in Mr. Nolan's contemporary movies: "No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness. [A spinning top?] At the editing table, when I run the strip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood: in the darkness of the wardrobe, I slowly wind on one frame after another, see the almost imperceptible changes, wind faster -- a movement." (Bergman, The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography, at pp. 74-75.)
This narrative called "Inception" is about the loss of one person and self in shifting temporal orders together with the forlorn partner's suffering and pain. This is called "being-there" for the other in the mode of love and compassion. The final image of Mr. DiCaprio's character evokes the compassionate Buddha as love for all suffering children. Please see the film, "Taken." This grieving for a child is a theme of Tim Burton's not always sanguine view of childhood. Is the frightened and threatened child with a great sense of humor in Mr. Burton's films, himself? I certainly understand that child that was (is?) Mr. Burton. (Paul Ricoeur, Keiji Nishitani)
"Inception" is aimed at entertaining audiences and being successful commercially. It is also a movie that helps persons to live through and understand the language of the "collective subconscious" -- by sharing in a dream with these artists -- in order to meet the challenge of individuation so that we can bear the encounter with evil and death. Seeing "Inception" is the meeting with Mr. DiCaprio's "persona" that matters not encountering the man who happens to be an actor in Hollywood.
Nietzsche describes this process of self-narration as "becoming the person you are." Jung spoke of individuation towards mortality. "Inception" is as good as Blade Runner and other films that are now seen as classics. I believe that, in time, this fine film by Mr. Nolan will take its place with those few other movies that endure in our new century. Mr. DiCaprio's way of becoming himself is through the externalization of his inner journey in his art or self-narrative: compare "Shutter Island" with "Inception."
No film can "resolve" philosophical issues that have concerned humanity for thousands of years. This movie dramatizes such issues in archetypal forms to make them accessible to all kinds of people who may not otherwise think about such questions. This is a valuable service. "Inception" is a work of public theology that is non-sectarian. The Cartesian spectator in the theater of the mind is you, the audience member. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
"Inception" is a postmodernist text that is highly self-aware and self-questioning because it poses the ultimate riddle of cinema: What is movie reality? What is any reality? What is this "dream" (nightmare?) called "history" from which we cannot awake? (Karl Marx) Personal identity is a narrative which we create or enter through interacting with another "project in time." A personal journey is a project in time. A movie is also a project in time. Interactions that are interpersonal are also intertextual. Experiencing art is a kind of energy exchange, a form of love-making or love-sharing, which happens or does not happen to a different degree for each viewer of the work. There is art in shaping experience into a narrative by making a movie or a personal identity. Everyone is and must be an artist to some degree:
"Accident engages the question of the truth-status of 'fictions,' and therefore of the truth-status of what we call 'reality.' Consider, for instance, the problem of who is supposed to have written the text we have just finished reading. [Who "made" the movie "Inception"?] Is it Charlie, the novelist, or Stephen, who looks remarkably like Charlie?"
Postmodernist artists are suspicious of --
" -- how our everyday experiences are rationalized, plotted, from the moment they slide away from us. Stephen claims: 'You live in the present, which does not exist; it exists in memory.' And Accident argues that what is real is not a text [by creating a text] -- for it is essentially non-narrative, accidental. [A "Memento"?] But Mosley adds the proviso that as 'reality' becomes past it is accessible only as a 'text' ... when it is known through episodic memory, in story-telling." (Stephen Weisenberger, "Afterword," in Nicholas Mosley, Accident, at pp. 195-196.)
Story-telling means objectivity, cohesiveness, unity. Thematic unity can be spiritual, as in the "unity of the Holy Spirit." This phenomenon called "Inception" is real and not real, yes-and-no, the center that is everywhere. (Kaballah) The least significant aspect of the movie from the "point of view" of audiences is "technical." The ideas in the work -- this is and probably will be true of anything that Mr. Nolan creates -- are as ancient as the Buddhist doctrine that the world is "Maya," illusion. In Buddhist lore: Illusion is a woman. Truth is also a woman. ('The Fountain': A Movie Review" and "Metaphor is Mystery.")
The film's gestures in the direction of Akira Kurosawa's interpretations of Shakespeare and Yukio Mishima's "Temple of the Golden Pavillion" lead to the wisdom of the great Kyoto school of philosophers. People who like "Inception" should see Takashi Yamazaki's brilliant, "Returner." Kyoto is mentioned in the script. In light of the relationship between Cobb and the architect, the lore of knights and squires, Samurai and their "youthful assistants" should be kept in mind:
"On the one hand, the thing-in-itself is truly itself on this field, for in contrast with what is called objective reality, it has shaken off its ties with the subject. This does not mean, however, that it is utterly unknowable. For reason, it is indeed unknowable; but when we turn and enter into the field of emptiness, where the thing-in-itself is always and ever manifest as such, its realization is able to come about. On the other hand, on this field the being of a thing is at one with emptiness, and thus radically illusory. It is not, however, an illusory appearance in the sense that dogmatism uses the word [illusory] to denote what is not objectively real. Neither is it a phenomenon in the sense, say, that critical philosophy uses the word to distinguish it from the thing-in-itself. A thing is truly an illusory appearance at the precise point that it is truly a thing-in-itself." (Keiji Nishitani, "The Standpoint of 'Sunyata,' in Religion and Nothingness, at p. 139.)
The audience's "role" is written into "Inception." ("Master and Commander.") Your reactions are necessary at key points in the story for the movie to succeed, a movie whose mysteries also create room for unanticipated developments or reactions by (and within) your mind. If you see "Inception," then you can say that you were in a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio.
If a movie must now be thought of as a whole "gestalt experience," then every movie must be supplied with an "emergent principle of totality" ("Soft Chaos Theory") -- say, elegance, beauty, or simplicity -- in its dream logic. Curiously, it seems that "Reality" also prefers beautiful solutions by creating intelligible order with your help. Spin that top.
Sources:
Periodical Reviews and Articles:
A.O. Scott, "This Time the Dream's on Me," in The New York Times, July 16, 2010, at p. C1.
David Denby, "Dream Factory," in The New Yorker, July 26, 2010, at p. 78.
Stephen Witty, "Building on a Dream," in The Sunday Star Ledger, Sec. 4, July 11, 2010, at p. 1. (Mr. Adubato?)
Dennis Overbye, "Is Gravity Real? A Scientist Takes On Newton," in The New York Times, Science Times, July 13, 2010, at p. D1. (The "ideal" nature of gravity and its "illusory" properties are set forth, allegedly, by daring physicist and Kantian, Erik Verlinde.)
Benedict Carey, "Columbia Lab Halts Research Over Injections," in The New York Times, July 17, 2010, at p. A1. (Columbia University scientists halted research that involved secret injections of harmful substances on unknowing human experimental subjects. Inceptions? My experiences of torture, as someone who has never been diagnosed with a mental illness, are worse than the horrors described in this article.)
Richard Perez-Pena, "New Jersey is Sued Over the Forced Medication of Patients at Psychiatric Hospitals," in The New York Times, August 4, 2010, at p. A15. (Involuntary chemical lobotomies inflicted on unsuspecting victims, many of them women -- Jennifer Velez? -- who may have been sexually and otherwise abused. How many of you in New Jersey had sex with Marilyn Straus? New Jersey is accused of "suspending people's civil rights without due process." Many victims are made worse and some are destroyed by this practice. "Jennifer Velez is a 'Dyke Magnet!'" New Jersey may have surpassed Libyia in violating human rights.)
Donald G. McNeil Jr., "U.S. Infected Guatemalans With Syphilis in '40s," in The New York Times, October 2, 2010, at p. A1. (U.S. physicians experimented on unwilling victims by infecting them with syphilis, as they experiment today with techniques of psychological torture in New Jersey.)
Charlie Savage & Scott Shane, "Bush Aide Calls Some Methods Used by C.I.A. Unauthorized," in The New York Times, July 16, 2010, at p. A12. (Circuit Judge Bybee, an architect of America's torture policy, regrets being "inconvenienced" by an inquiry. "Is America's Legal Ethics a Lie?")
Nina Bernstein, "U.S. Court Orders Safety, Not Deportation, for Woman Facing Torture," in The New York Times, July 16, 2010, at p. A20. (Person facing less severe hardships than are deemed legal by Mr. Bybee, or routine treatment of the mentally ill in N.J., will be given asylum in the U.S.)
Anthony Thomasini, "Cause for Worry: A Deep Drink of Bliss, With Confusion for a Chaser," in The New York Times, Arts Section, August 3, 2010, at p. C2. (Review of Gluck's Opera "Orfeo ed Euridice.")
Helen Vendler, "Science and the Poet," in The New Republic, June 24, 2010, at p. 28. (Warum schriftlos leben.)
"The Film Issue," in Granta 86, Summer, 2004 (Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa, Sajat Ray). http://www.granta.com/
Cinema referenced in this work by Christopher Nolan:
1. "Citizen Kane."
2. "A Clockwork Orange."
3. "2001, A Space Odyssey."
4. "Pan's Labyrinth."
5. "Orpheus/Blood of a Poet/Beauty and the Beast."
6. "Apocalypse Now."
7. "The Matrix Trilogy."
8. "Out of the Past."
9. "Casino Royale."
10. "Vertigo/North by Northwest/The Lady Vanishes."
11. "Blade Runner."
12. "Wings of Desire."
13. "Ikiru/Seven Samurai/Ran/Rashomon."
14. "L'Age D'Or."
15. "Returner."
16. "Dark City."
Selected books I have relied upon in writing this essay:
Amir D. Aczel, Entanglement (New York & London: Penguin, 2003).
John Barth, Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction 1984-1994 (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1995).
Roy Bashkar, Plato, Etc.,: Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution (London & New York: Verso, 1994). ("Explanations and the Laws of Nature," esp. p. 35.)
Igmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography (New York: Viking, 1988). (Joan Tate, trans.)
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964).
John P. Briggs & F. David Peat, eds., Looking Glass Universe: The Emerging Science of Wholeness (London: Fontana, 1985).
Daniel Burston, The Crucible of Experience: R.D. Laing and the Crisis of Psychotherapy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
A.S. Byatt, Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Times (London: Vintage, 1997). (The Nolan Brothers?)
Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992). (Particularly good discussion of dissipation theories.)
Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1949), (2nd Ed., 1968).
Joseph Campbell, ed., The Portable Carl Jung (London: New York: Penguin, 1976).
Albert Camus, The Fall (New York: Vintage, 1956).
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). (Analogy to Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology of belief in writings about God.)
Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1998).
Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, Volume 7, Modern Philosophy, Part I, Fitche to Hegel (New York: Image Books, 1963).
Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, Volume 8, Modern Philosophy, Part I, Bentham to Russell (British Empiricism and the Idealist Movement in Britain) (New York: Image Books, 1966).
Edward Craig, The Mind of God and the Works of Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality (London: Penguin, 1997).
Philip K. Dick, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon, 1995).
Thomas Doherty, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Simon During, ed., The Cultural Studies Reader (New York & London: Routledge, 1993).
Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1983).
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Random House, 1966).
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973).
Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). (See the first letter from Rene Magritte to Michel Foucault in the Appendix.)
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961).
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton, 1965).
Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). (Robert Bernasconi, ed.)
Amit Goswami, Ph.D., The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Penguin, 1995). (" ... consciousness is the true foundation of all we know or perceive.")
Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (London & New York: Penguin, 2005).
George Greenstein, The Symbiotic Universe: The Life and Mind of the Cosmos (New York: William Morrow, 1988).
John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (London: mcMillan, 1966).
Ted Hondereich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (New York: Harper & Row, 1946).
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Harper & Row, 1932). (La vie marche vers les utopies. -- Nicolas Berdiaeff's opening quote.)
Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Free Press, 1993). (Focus on the Romantics is perceptive and sympathetic.)
Mark Johnson, Saving God: Religion After Idolatry (Oxford & Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
Carl G. Jung, et als., Man and His Symbols (New York: Dell-Laurel, 1964).
Michio Kaku, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Leszek Kolakowski, Religion: If There is No God ... (Indiana: St. Augustine Press, 2001).
Lawrence M. Kraus, Hiding in the Mirror: The Quest for Alternate Realities, From Plato to String Theory (By Way of Alice in Wonderland, Einstein, and the Twilight Zone (New York & London: Penguin, 2005).
David Farrell Krell, Post-Ponements: Woman, Sensuality, and Death in Nietzsche (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). ("Adriana" ... is the problem of the "mask that looks upon itself as a mask ..." pp. 15-31, and Yukio Mishima's "Confessions of a Mask.")
R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (London: Tavistock, 1961). (Schizophrenia as defense and liberation in environments of forced encounter with extreme evil, like Auschwitz, that shatter the looking glass of identity.)
George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980).
Rebecca Lemov, World as Laboratory: Experiments With Mice, Mazes, and Men (New York: Hill & Wang, 2005). (Behaviorist "Inceptions"?)
C.C. Lin & L.A. Segel, Mathematics Applied to Deterministic Problems in the Natural Sciences (Philadelphia: Society for Applied Mathematics, 1988). ("Tensor Theory," especially so-called "Cartesian" tensors analogous to "leaping" from one dream to another.)
Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
Abraham Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences (London: Penguin, 1984). (Letters have been deleted from this author's name and defacements will probably continue in the future.)
Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1991).
Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact (New York: Pantheon, 2005). ("Dreams on Film.")
Colin McGinn, Mindfucking: A Critique of Mental Manipulation (London: Acumen, 2008). ("Error" insertions, alterations of the alphabetical order or spacing of titles in this bibliography, computer crime, obstructions of my cable signal, harassments intended to injure a person forced to make corrections many times.)
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964). (" ... movies offer as product the most magical of consumer commodities, namely dreams.")
Jonathan Miller, Marshall McLuhan (New York: Viking Press, 1971).
Libuse Lukas Miller, In Search of the Self: The Individual in the Thought of Kierkegaard (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1962). ("Leap of Faith.")
Nicholas Mosley, Accident (Illinois: Dalkey Press, 1965).
Nicholas Mosley, Hopeful Monsters (New York: Random House, 1990). (One of the great novels of the last several decades in which "key" passages are echoed in the dialogue of "Inception.")
Nicholas Mosley, Inventing God (Illinois: Dalkey Archive, 2003).
Nicholas Mosley, Experience and Religion (London: Stodder & Houghton, 1965). ("Anyone can spin any theory ..." see page 39.)
Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley: University of California, 1982).
Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).
Olivier Pauvet, Noir: A Novel (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2005).
Octavio Paz, Alternating Current (New York: Arcade, 1990). ("Notes on La Realidad y El Deseo.")
Octavio Paz, On Poets and Others (New York: Arcade, 1990) ("Labyrinth of Solitude," Reflections on "Jean Paul Sartre -- Memento.")
William Poundstone, Labyrinths of Reason (New York: Anchor, 1976), ("The Maze and the Mystery" or "The Paradoxes of Completeness in the Labyrinths of Ts'ui Pen.")
Douglas Shrader, ed., The Fractal Self (New York: Oneonta Philosophy Center, 2000).
June Singer, Boundaries of the Soul: The Practice of Jung's Psychology (New York: Anchor, 1973).
Ninian Smart, The Philosophy of Religion (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). (What is reality "piercing" -- inception -- to achieve the "religious ultimate?")
Tom Stoppard, Jumpers (New York: Grove Press, 1972).
Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001). ("Closed Loops.")
Gore Vidal, Screening History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
James Waddell, Erotic Perception: Philosophical Portraits (New York: University Press of America, 1997). (How heterosexual men see women.)
Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism (London: Thames & Hudson, 1965). (See Ronald Penrose's painting "The Invisible Isle.")
Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blond: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1994).
Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses: Other Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Andrew Wiles, "Modular Elliptic Curves and Fermat's Last Theorem," in Annals of Mathematics 142 (1995), pp. 443-551. (Fusion approach unifying the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture establishing a dialectic between "elliptical equations" and "modular forms" in order to "prove" Fermat's Last Theorem. ... Every woman is an "elliptical equation.")
Andrew Wiles and Richard Taylor, "Ring Theoretic Properties of Certain Heckle Algebras," in Annals of Mathematics 142 (1995), pp. 553-572. (They had to get the kinks out of the first formulation of the proof by what Goro Shimura described as a "more elegant and beautiful" statement of the field or negative proof of Fermat -- interestingly, in terms of the movie "Inception" -- these approaches are called "phantom equations" and are almost always captured in feminine metaphors. "Mal" is the shadow equation of "Cobb." Each of the movie characters is a shadow equation for the actor playing the part.)
Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). (Williams comments on P.F. Strawson's "Individuals.")
Colin Wilson, The Essential Colin Wilson (Berkeley: Celestial Arts, 1986). ("The Ladder of Selves.")
Richard Wolin, Labyrinths: Explorations in the History of Ideas (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).
Slavoj Zizek, Looking Away: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).
Slavoj Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994). (See what I mean?)
Danah Zohar, The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics (New York: William Morrow, 1990).
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