12 Years a Slave- Reading Through Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe

Solomon Northup Kidnapped and Held As a Slave 1841-1853

In the beginning of this film  when drugged and kidnapped, Northup protests that he is a free man. He is accused by the auctioneers of being a runaway. He is not but perhaps they do think he is. There is no reason for these sleazy businessmen to believe him, to check to see if he is in fact a free man. That would take time eh. And a lot of money is at stake. So why would they let him go even if they believed him.

My perception always has a Foucault default. I am reading Richard Cote The Life of Dolley Madison, a sort of very readable biography of Dolley with lots of pictures of her homes in Philadelphia just a few blocks from where I used to live so that's why I picked up the book. 

It begins with her ancestry which was Quaker. Her father was disturbed by the fact that he owned slaves to work his plantation in Virginia. About 50 of them. He had converted to the Society of Friends after he married Mary Coles who had been disowned by the Quakers for marrying him, an Anglican. He becomes more Quaker than a Quaker as converts often are wont to do. And his conscience is troubled by the fact that he owns slaves. 

In 1760 in Virginia the Law as passed by the Virginia House of Burgesses read "that it was illegal to emancipate a slave in Virginia except by Government act. Virginia Quakers and their meetings could oppose slaveholding and support emancipation, but they were prohibited by law from freeing their slaves. If a slave was freed, by a Quaker or anyone else, he or she could be captured and sold as a runaway."

A paragraph that a reader could read and continue on to the next page. But with Foucault on default it stops you in your tracks. Foucault spent his life in archives reading tattered papers, partly illegible to uncover statements like this. It is a colonial law of the colony of Virginia. There are certainly similar laws in Alabama,Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, etc. But this is Virginia, the place where Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe all have family plantations with enslaved workers. 

That's 4 out of 5 of our first presidents, all from Virginia, all with family plantations going back to the 17th century. Yes we know they are racists but that is the tip of the iceberg here.

The Law reads what you can't do. You can't free your slave. Assuming you are a decent person if you want to free your slave, what are the consequences if you do this. Capturing/kidnapping and being resold to the highest bidder, and very likely a far worse situation from which you are freed. 

This Law also has an emptiness. The only thing you are not allowed to do is FREE your slave. 

You can beat, maim, kill, rape, torture, breed, set dogs on, force fights to the death, well just about anything the perverse imagination can come up with, you can do. 

The only thing you can't do is FREE  this slave. And if you do this slave will never really be free. This slave will always be looking over her/his shoulder as there are stories of abductions and disappearances. 

Switching my reading to Zizek/Lacan, the Big Other owns the slave you think you own. If you can only free this slave by government approval, then you really don't own the slave, do you? The Big Other owns the slave you think you own. You can do all manner of evil to this slave, BUT YOU CANNOT FREE HER OR HIM! (p.64)

At the base of our legal system by 1760 is pure sophistry. A Law by Pharisees. It contains a poison pill. It puts the person of integrity in a CATCH-22 situation. Unable to keep a slave or free the slave. It forces hypocrisy. 

Now who is responsible for this law? Does anyone think that the largest plantation owners in Virginia, the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Madisons, and Monroes were innocent of this law? We know James Madison's grandfather served in the Virginia House of Burgesses from 1761-1769. He would have had to have known of this law. Who formulated it like this?

And why this law at this time? Foucault teaches to look at what else is going on. To look at the intersections of different "comings to be" and in this case it is the influx of Quakers from Pennsylvania to the Carolinas (liberal Constitution) and Virginia to farm large tracts of cheap land through the use of slave labor. Quaker meetings are not about listening to someone give a sermon. They involve silence and the necessity someone feels to speak to the group. So one can expect there were many raised discussions about slavery, and surely the well known founding fathers of the Anglican persuasion knew about these dissenting discussions.

Virginia was a bastion of slaveholding.  In 1765, the Quaker minister John Griffith wrote that "the life of religion is almost lost where slaves are numerous....the practice being as contrary to the spirit of Christianity as light is to darkness." (p. 64) By 1769 the Paynes had come to believe that slaveholding was morally indefensible.  Three months after the Declaration of Independence was signed, John Payne, Dolley's father freed one of his slaves in a formal declaration leaving no doubt as to his intent. Then he freed the rest of them. In defiance of Virginia Law. 

But the legal tide began to change. In  1782 manumission became legally permissible. In Virginia.  Notice the wording. You are now permitted to free your slaves, meaning that someone who really owns them gives you that permission, the Big Other. of Lacan. (Only in Virginia that I know of. A liberal state.A great genealogical research topic for someone.)

The Virginia Legislature passed a law that gave all slaveowners the power to emancipate their slaves by will after death, "or by acknowledging the will while still alive, in open court, provided they agreed to support all the aged, infirm, and young persons thus set at liberty.  (p.68) And here we have another poison pill, another Catch-22 eh. Legally they cannot be kidnapped, captured and resold but of course it went on up to 100 years later - Solomon Northup. And how could a farmer, no matter how wealthy, take on the feeding, sheltering and care of so many people having lost a free labor force. John Payne tried sharecropping with the ones that stayed with him but that was not profitable for either the freed slaves or the former owner.

The great wealth of plantations depended completely on slave labor. Without the slaves the wealth was gone. 

Is it not wickedly ironic that the two areas of Western Civilization that produced democracy - Athens and the North American colonies - also produced the intellectual leisure of enough men to imagine freedom, buying the time for this by slave labor.

At the structural base of our judicial Law lies a terrible contradiction embedded in it. The Sophistry of a Law contradicted by its inability to be enacted and enforced properly. This is the reality. The word racism only conceals this deeper dirty little secret. (p.68)

And beyond this lies the REAL - the invisible REAL - of Zizek thinking through Lacan. Invisible is the early capitalism that inspires this disastrous hypocrisy of subterfuge and deliberate lies. 

Who are the legislatures that couched these two laws in such duplicitous language? Did our "forefathers" aid them. Here's an example of Jefferson's thinking worthy of a subtle Jesuit or ancient Chinese wise man on where to have the capitol city. Philadelphia wanted it - but do not forget the Quakers were there (a danger) in great strength of wealth and numbers - New York also but it was a center of commerce. The Virginians wanted the new city on the Potomac and here's how Jefferson got a go on that:

In June 1790 Jefferson called a meeting with Madison and Hamilton in New York. They struck a deal. Hamilton had proposed that the federal government pay off the federal debt and assume the debts incurred by the separate states during the Revolution. Madison opposed this. Jefferson proposed that Hamilton get the Pennsylvanians to vote for a permanent capitol on the Potomac in exchange for locating it in Philadelphia for a decade. Madison should not object too strongly to the debt assumption bill. Jefferson got what he wanted. This is the same kind of thinking in the earlier slave laws eh. Give them something they want so you can get what you really want. (p.83)

Notice who was paying for this.

Is it any wonder that Cumberbatch's character did not free Northup but resold him. That Pitt's character was afraid to write the letter he promised he would.

REVIEW: Reading DIVERGENT Through Ang Lee's LUST,CAUTION

Trailer for Ang Lee's Lust,Caution. The scenes I am referring to are the clips with the diamond ring and his throwing himself into his car.

For Lee, an astute observer of the warping power of sexual desire and repression (not just in "Brokeback Mountain," but also in films as disparate as "The Ice Storm," "The Wedding Banquet" and "Sense and Sensibility"), the allure of "Lust, Caution" lies in the irreducible mystery of its love story, which culminates in a seemingly rash and irrational act. "It's complex and hard to pin down," he said. "Maybe it can't be pinned down." LINK

This pivotal scene takes place when the two lovers are in the jeweler's shop viewing the large pink diamond he has bought for her which they see set for the first time. He does not want to see the ring, but only to see it on her hand. She puts it on and leans into him whispering/saying:

"Go. Now."

He is uncomprehending so she repeats it:

"Go. Now." 

He gets it, runs down the stairs, across the street sliding on his stomach into the back seat of his car which roars away.He escapes the assassins clustered around the jewelers waiting for his exit to kill him.

Since the entire movie has been about her playing a part to seduce him (he is a collaborator with the occupying Japanese in the 1940's in Shanghai) in order to assassinate him, this turn around has been the subject of much lit crit and has confounded all interpretations. WHY DOES SHE DO IT? Ang Lee has said he had great anxiety about this scene and trusted the actors to convey it intuitively and accurately, which they did. This is Eileen Chang's novel who was considered the cruelest writer writing in Chinese.

He will order the round up of her and her partisan group, have them lined up, shot and dumped in a large trench for a grave that is in front of them.

_______________________________________________________________________________

I think Neil Burger has replied to Ang Lee in the pivotal scene in Divergent:

Pivotal Scene to Wake Four Up

Tris enters the control room to stop the simulation program, sees Four connected to a drip, releases him only to have him come at her to kill her. A violent physical fight begins and then Tris gets a hold of her gun on the floor, saying,

Stop! 

and holding it on Four. He stops and freezes. He has no fear of being shot.  But she can't kill him and we know that.

His second greatest fear is killing an innocent whom he must look away from to perform the ordered killing. Tris has been in his fearscape and knows this. She turns her gun on herself, pointing it at her forehead and Four leaps to grab the gun, to take control. She is bloody, crying his name to wake him up from the simulation serum saying, "It's OK, it's OK, I love you, it's OK. Four it's me, Four wake up, wake up. Now he is close to her and in control so she can touch him, touch his lips, his mouth, his face, his skin while she is saying his name to wake him up. He turns his head away as he cocks the gun and she pulls his face back saying, "Look at me, look at me. It's me, it's me." And then he begins to wake up and says, "Tris?" And Tris smiles and says, "It's OK, I love you."

Then she says softly and carefully:

GO.

And he turns on a dime and mows down the ones with guns behind him and becomes a killing machine while Tris goes after Jeanine to stop her. When it is over both will have to run because the leadership of Dauntless is coming after them. So they hop the train with Caleb, Peter, some other Abnegation members including Marcus.

In Lust,Caution why does Wang warn Yee? Why does she save him? I think Burger is saying it is love, just as Tris is saying, 

"I love you enough to die for you. I cannot kill you. Wake up."

And the enigmatic word GO links these two films with love.

REVIEW:Reading DIVERGENT Through Zizek and Lacan

First scene between Tris and Four

Beatrice is wrapped in the net as she comes to rest after her jump. She has an expression of happiness on her face for the first time that we see. She has faced a fear of plummeting seven stories down and is in a state of euphoria. This is what we see and what Four sees but we do not see Four seeing; only imagine his seeing. He pulls the net to allow her to sit up and he grabs and lifts her out.

Roth's account of this scene is fragmented between the action, what goes through Beatrice's mind about the name change, the dialogue between Lauren and Four and the snippets of conversation between Four and Beatrice/Tris. 

Beatrice/Tris is the first female Abnegation transfer so she is a surprise. The fact that she is first jumper is also a surprise. The screenwriting team has edited Roth's account. 

Our first look here at Four reveals his open and rather surprised face. He has witnessed a gift from the sky, from the Heavens miraculously appearing in the net. Like a Silkie from the deep. 

Four: What,you were pushed?(quietly)
Beatrice: No. (all breathlessly happy)Thank you. (as he helps her down)
Four: What's your name?
Beatrice: B......stuttering
Four: Is it a hard one? 
Beatrice: nodding yes embarrassed
Four: You can pick a new one. Make it good. You only get to  pick once.(emphasis on choosing with no reversal)
Beatrice: stuttering saying Tris. My name is Tris.
Four: First jumper - Tris! Welcome to Dauntless.

So quick. The contained surprise that the first jumper is a girl, from Abnegation, who appears elated rather than frightened by her ordeal so far. Four is open faced, nice, assertive and non-threatening, non-aggressive. 

The presentation of the ideal masculine social construction of gender is performed. Four has a beautiful face, intelligent and sensitive and sexy. But he is matter-of-fact all business here, gently and firmly. No provocation, just a short intimate moment.

People say that the first minutes of any encounter encompass the whole relationship in miniature. - ALEX by Pierre Lemaitre (p. 339)

There is quite a bit of subtext in this short and vivid scene:

1. He underestimates her sort of by alluding to the fact he thinks she was pushed.
2. He offers her a way to change her name with the limiting factor that it is a one shot choice with no return.
3. He intuits her dissatisfaction with Beatrice and suggests it is possible for her to change her name, become a different person, become Other.
4. His welcome is warm and accepting. This is unlike Eric's immediate dislike of her when she volunteers to be first.
5. Through Lacan, Tris rhymes with Chris, short for Christina her first friend. 

Here is Four's account of that first meeting with Beatrice/Tris in Allegiant:

When her body first hit the net, all I registered was a gray blur. I pulled her across it and her hand was small, but warm, and then she stood before me, short and thin and plain and in all ways unremarkable--except that she had jumped first. The Stiff had jumped first.

Even I didn't jump first.
Her eyes were so stern, so insistent.
Beautiful. (Allegiant p. 491)

All this in 9 short sentences and the images. Now that is a screenplay folks.
Four introduces himself to the group as their instructor and says: My name is Four.

Christina: Like the number four.
Four: Exactly like the number four.
Christina: Were one, two and three taken? 
Four: What is your name?
Christina: Christina.
Four: (stepping closer to her face, half smiling)
Four: Well Christina, the first lesson you will learn from me, if you want to survive here, keep your mouth shut. Do you understand?
Christina: (nodding yes) 
Four: Good. (stepping back from her)

All this is said firmly, assertively, non-threatening in a way that projects that he means what he says.

Later at dinner in the cafeteria Tris sits next to him because Christina has maneuvered herself away from him. They are with the transfers from other factions, the ones Four will work with.

Tris: Were you a transfer or Dauntless born?
Four: Are you kidding?(softly)
Tris: No, (smiling and flustered)
Four: (coldly) What makes you think you can talk to me?
Tris: (abashed now and slightly smiling in embarrassment) Must be because, you're so approachable.
Four: (muttering quietly) Careful.

His very un-approachableness signals approach, reading through Lacan. "Don't come near me" signals the opposite as a "floating sign" which Tris has accurately picked up.

There is more as he takes her through her fear simulations. He is puzzled by how fast she gets through them and her inability to say how she does it so well. After the water drowning sequence:

Four: How did you do that?
Tris: What?
Four: How did you break the glass?
Tris: I don't know. I just did it.
Four: (sitting down beside her) What were your test results?Your aptitude test.
Tris:  Abnegation (flustered)
Four: (continuing to look at her) I don't think so.
Tris: What?
Four:I think you're lying to me.
Tris: Why would I lie to you? 

Here is where it gets unusual. He does not accuse her, try to trap her in her lie, argue with her or threaten her. He avoids the Dominating Discourse and does not allow it to frame his thinking or his reply to her.

Four: I'm going to ask you one more time. What were your test results?
Tris: (still softly) Abnegation. 

Four gets up,  and says, "Time to go." Tris stands up and starts to walk out. (He says what he means and he means what he says.Consistent.) 

Four: Tris! Just so you know. (as she exits out the door) Dauntless never break the glass like that. 

Ancient Asian wisdom: To be sincere in the land of the insincere is dangerous.

Now we think that he has guessed the truth, that she is Divergent and no one has said a thing out loud. It is a fine, nuanced scene by both actors, subtly performed. A scene for adults I would say or for teens who are observant. The screenplay and the director have a respect for their audience that we don't often see so simply presented.( This is what makes the Divergent screenplay superior to all the others in these YA franchises. The screenplay transcends the plot.Unfortunately this screenplay team will not do Insurgent nor Allegiant nor will Neil Burger be back as director. So do not expect the same quality in the future.

Four is still puzzled. The next thing he will do on this subject is to invite her to go through his own fearscape partnering with him. 

If someone lies to you that means the truth is too dangerous for them to say. They feel threatened by you. They don't trust you. This is the meaning of the lie. This is what Four understands and by taking her into his own fearscape he offers his trust to her as a gift.
Tris: In my fear landscape? Four: No in mine. We're going to go in together.
Tris: Have you ever done this before?
Four: No.
Tris: You're going to let me see into your head? (astonished)
Four: (nonchalantly)Why wouldn't I?
Tris: I don't know. You've never told me anything about yourself and now you're going to just let me in your mind?!!!
Four: Are you afraid of that?
Tris: Aren't you?!!!
Four: No.

This is his gift of trust to her.

These early scenes establish the character of Four. This is communicated to us linguistically by unambiguous language. Assertive but not aggressive. Not especially emotionally rendered either, very matter of fact, nonchalant. He so far has been consistent. I have left out the exchanges taking place during physical training, but they are factual and low key also. 

This is a different kind of man and intimate conversation women want but have difficulty engaging in because of the man and their own preconceptions. In this setting we have a master(teacher)/student relationship that is very often emotionally and erotically charged.

Reading through Calchi-Novati: LINK

Who We Might Be

Performing the Potentialities of Otherness and Selfhood: Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga
Gabriella Calchi Novati

Abstract
In Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach argues that vampires ‘can be everything we are, while at the same time, they are fearful reminders of the infinite things we are not’.

 Disagreeing with her reading, I will show that the Cullen family of vampires in the Twilight Saga tells us not who we are, but rather who we might be. Drawing primarily from the writings ofJacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, this paper aims to analyse the performance of otherness and selfhood in the Twilight Saga and the upshot of such a performance. 

In using this paper by Calchi-Novati in reading the performance of Four in Divergent, is to show a man, not as most men are, but as men might be.

Four is a Zizekian "sign from the future" that we must make space for in the words of Calvino:

Calvino:“seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

Of course Roth has begun to castrate Four in Divergent, increased  in Insurgent and finishing the job in Allegiant. Roth slops around in the psychological interpretive swamp until there's not much left of him. By the time she has finished Four is diminished and ground down into gray mediocrity. 

There are so many ways to be brave in this world. Sometimes bravery involves laying down your life for something bigger than yourself, or for someone else. Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved, for the sake of something greater.

But sometimes it doesn't.

Sometimes it is nothing more than gritting your teeth through pain, and the work of everyday, the slow walk toward a better life.

That is the sort of bravery I must have now. (Allegiant p. 509)

Ugh.

And then the Epilogue which is pretty bad also. Hopefully the movie will not follow the book literally. But with Scummit Summit's template of "directors for hire," after the first film, rather than a director like Burger who is an artist, I think we can expect the worst. 

Divergent Review of Divergent:Foucault;Baudrillard;Lacan

Divergent Review of Divergent:Foucault;Baudrillard;Lacan

An ordinary girl until she became the First Jumper.

The First Jumper.

 The first image we see of her after she lands in the net is of a happy, relieved, delighted young girl wrapped in her Abnegation robes lying innocently erotic, erotically innocent in the net. 

ONDINE

Like a Silkie or a mermaid from the deep. We are not given the cliched shot of Four looking at her, their eyes locked, but we can imagine Four sees her for the first time just as we see her for the first time. Silkies are women from the sea caught in the nets of fishermen as are mermaids. They can be captured and kept but if they find their pelts they will return to the sea. This Silkie in Divergent appears to have dropped from the skies, the Heavens as a gift, lying there in the net as she does. 

Reading through Lacan, Beatrice means "Bringer of Joy, Blesses, Dante's guide through Paradise, his lifetime muse." Tris is an off homonym with the French tres meaning very, excessively so, the diminutive for Beatrice. 

But the net is also a metaphor of the Foucauldian Grid, the mesh of the net of power/knowledge, The Matrix. It carries with it a Dominating Discourse of language and action just as Abnegation does.

Image of Foucault straddling the chasm

What is concealed immediately is her jump over the chasm, the abyss. Where Foucault stops at the edge of the abyss (where one resists) - as Baudrillard writes in Forget Foucault! - The soon to be Tris hurtles across it.

This is the metaphor for the EVENT!Beatrice becoming OTHER!

As Four addresses her and grabs her out of the net, the screenplay begins its wonderful editing process of Roth’s book defining Four’s character precisely and creating the new masculine ideal: Edward Cullen, dreamed by Stephenie Meyer into existence has now morphed into Four played by Theo James opposite Shailene Woodley's Tris.

Most of the reviews compare and contrast Divergent with the other YA franchises by Scummit/Summit with female leads. Then the interpretive critique begins. Everything sinks into that “swampland of psychological interpretation” Foucault — and Sontag — have demolished. Instead of pitting them as rivals against each other, I suggest reading each one through the other to deepen the meaning of each against the resonances of the others.

Each has a love story, but many books have this theme. What is unique about these three is what is revealed/concealed in them. We have the love story following Tristan/Iseult and Twilight’s Courtly Love, the Hunger Games romance and Divergent’s master/student relation. We also have the menacing presence of: 

surveillance; 

confinement; 

totalitarianism, 

Simulated Reality and 

Virtual Reality, 

all subsumed under the label of Dystopian Worlds, all of which are invisible.

Behind the story of young adult first love, finding identity, love and the coming of age rituals - We have no Vision Quest as Twilight, Katniss, Divergent does - into adulthood (This is the reality of the movies and the books.)

 — we have the Zizekian/Lacanian REAL — the invisible REAL — 

and a YA anxious, dreading preoccupation with a future of disaster, where only love can save us, or so they think. A world of totalitarian control unvisioned and unimagined by even Orwell or Huxley, where lies are truth and truth has only the credibility of speculation. An unimaginable horror as Simulated Reality steals our real world in homeopathic doses. The Borges map becomes the territory.

No crime-no victim-no criminal-no crime scene-invisible

In Twilight Bella is caught in the Foucauldian Grid of normality as described in Foucault’s Lectures in Abnormal at the College de France in 1974-75. It is invisible. She is confined in Forks. Simulated Reality occurs as the Cullens perform as humans at school, slowing their movements, during the boredom of classrooms repeating what they have already known for decades. Virtual Reality is what Bella embraces as she turns into a vampire: the acute auditory and visual perception that reads like an LSD trip or Huxley’s Doors of Perception. She desires this and wills it and will live it forever.Like being high an d knowing you are never going to come down.

The Hunger Games divides the people into districts in which they are confined and cannot leave. Panem the capitol is Simulated Reality and the Games themselves are Virtual Reality; meaning there is no escape as Simulated Reality has become total. Katniss will shoot her arrow into the invisible covering, short circuit it with lightning, with Jove’s thunderbolts, and “Welcome to the Desert of the Real” says Morpheus to Neo.

In Divergent there are five factions into which those that have been chosen and accepted live in confinement, more obvious than our own. And each has its Dominating Discourse of language and action. Simulated Reality is a bit more complex and occurs in simulations deliberately projected into people’s minds via serums and transmitters. But there is a strange twist to them. In the aptitude tests and the fear simulations the subject is as if in a dream.

In Journey to Ixtlan — as I remember — Don Juan is lecturing Castaneda on “Controlled Dreaming.” When you are in a dream and become aware that you are in a dream, knowing you are in a dream. This is Tris’s experience in Divergent. She knows she is in a simulation and manipulates it. This is what Don Juan is suggesting Castaneda learn to do in his apprenticeship to the Yaqui Indian. The process is:

1. Become aware that you are in a dream.
2. Bring your hands up in front of your face.
3. Look from your hands to the dreamscape and back again, repeating constantly.

As you do the dream will move to a different level, or as in Divergent, Tris changes the simulation as it changes in response to what she chooses to do. Just as your dream changes in response to your shifting perception going back and forth. If you stare too long at your hands their image becomes hallucinatory and you will go somewhere else without knowing anymore. The idea is to continue this practice and attain mastery over it.

In my case my spiritual quest was not so serious. After I began to be able to get my hands up — very heavy and clumsy at first — I began playing with it.

“If I am in a dream, then I could fly right now.” So I would fly higher and higher. At first it was very hard to get off the ground. Then if I were in a dangerous dream and “woke up in it” I would say to myself, “I can become invisible and they won’t see me.” And I dreamed that. Very freeing and exhilarating.

This is what Tris as a Divergent can do that the others cannot. She possesses the ability to think like the Dauntless, the Erudite and Abnegation where she was from. More flexibility which Don Juan is always forcing Castaneda into to break the conditioned frames his language and academic culture have imprisoned him.

I have much more to say about Divergent but my point here is that in our own classical Hegelian dialectical Dominating Discourse X is always rated against Y. One movie against another. This is Tabloid thinking. One book of the same genre against another. One person against another. The dichotomy of our language, our thinking, our writing, our behavior forces us into this frame.

Hey, you can just walk out of it if you want. It’s only a simulation. That’s all a Discourse is.

WHITE PALACE, LOVE and The SCREEN GAZE

Witness to Love

October 25, 2013

James Spader and Susan Sarandon, White Palace, Universal Pictures, 1990

by Masha Tupitsyn

Seeing love on people’s faces.

When these screen lovers see each other again… When any screen lovers see each other again…

Do we see (have) these kinds of moments of seeing in real life or do they happen only in camera space? In the fiction of movies. Is the face of the lover loving and seeing the lover restricted tomise-en-scène? Is the lover’s face just another visual trope? Two visual tropes = Love. Seeing the seeing. It’s true, love is also a reaction shot. But who is witness to the reaction shot off-screen? And what is our reaction to love off-screen? In real life there is maybe only the diegetic. No one sees what you are living through. Certainly not what it looks like for you to live through it. Certainly no one sees your face looking at another face. This is why we have literature. And pictures. This is the engine of cinema, where the human face is always an action hero. But by the time art is made of it — of love — it is something else entirely. What is it exactly that we need for others to see that they can’t see? Love needs witnesses (Old English witnes, “attestation of fact, event, etc., from personal knowledge”), as that is precisely one of the things that love is: seeing and being seen.

Footnote:

The story is (told to me a couple of years ago by a reliable source) that these two had an intense affair while making White Palace. Susan Sarandon wanted to leave Tim Robbins for James Spader. Of course we never saw any of this.

---

About the Author:

Masha Tupitsyn is a writer, cultural critic, and multi-media artist. She is the author of Love Dog(Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film (ZerO Books, 2011), Beauty Talk & Monsters, a collection of film-based stories (Semiotext(e) Press, 2007), and co-editor of the anthology Life As We Show It: Writing on Film (City Lights, 2009). Her fiction and criticism has appeared or is forthcoming in the anthologies Women in Clothes (Penguin, 2014), The Force of What’s Possible (Nightboat Books, 2014), The American Tetralogy (Blackjack Editions, 2013), Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology (2012), The Encyclopedia Project Volume 2 (F-K)(2010) and Volume 3 (L-Z) (2014), and Wreckage of Reason: XXperimental Women Writers Writing in the 21st Century (Spuyten Duyvil, 2008), with additional works published by The White Review, The New Inquiry, Fence, Bookforum, The Rumpus, Boing Boing, Indiewire’s Press Play, Animal Shelter, the Shepparton Art Museum, and Ryberg Curated Video.

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Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson Eclipse Premiere

THE COUNSELOR - REVIEW

The Counselor Poster

The first scene shows a biker speeding and we see the road sign Juarez. El Paso is 2 1/2 miles away. None of the reviewers have noticed this resonance, where now thousands of young girls and women's bodies have been found in the surrounding desert. Very young girls come from villages all over Mexico to work in the factories of Juarez and then disappear. Thousands of their unidentified bodies are found decomposed in the desert. It is guessed that many are sold into sex slavery and transported across the border to the US and many are used in Snuff Films while others - well - who knows what terrible lives they lead if alive. All this is conveyed in less than a minute before the scene changes.

But you have to have the political consciousness to know the horror of the dead girls and women of Juarez and their connection to the drug cartel and capitalism, if you are to pick up on the truth of this image of the road sign.

The following scene shows illusion curtains billowing in the breeze as the camera moves to two bodies under the sheets moving slowly against each other, waking up and talking lovingly, intimately to each other. The resonances are multiple. 

Louise Bourgeois - Hamlet and Ophelia

Robert Mapplethorpe

OR

Christo - Wrapped Trees

Rodin The Kiss Wrapped in 1 Mile of Twine by Cornelia Parker

In her review Manohla Dargis of The New York Times remarked on the resonance with Egyptian Mummies

Full circle from JUAREZ to DEATH

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We are abruptly brought under the sheets to be right inside with them watching and unnoticed. 

This is Freud's PRIMAL SCENE. 

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We watch two people obviously intimate and in love experiencing erotic sex without pornographic details, and filmed without a hint of any cliches. We see the difference between performed sex and sex experienced in the eroticism of love. 

The following scenes have been detailed at wiki and in various reviews, most of which say it is a movie about a drug deal gone bad, highlighting individual performances, and the usual complaint about McCarthy's dialogue which they cannot understand. 

The dialogue functions as the chorus in a Greek play - or Shakespeare -  spoken by individuals in prophetic language  that resonates into the future and the past in precession. This is the essence of non-linearity, non progression, non historical but in going forward and backward, bathing the past and the future in clairvoyant light, we are exposed to Nietzche's The Eternal Return and Zarathustra's terrible recognition of it, the spiraling circularity of time.

The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. - Walter Benjamin: Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

This film was made for the educationally literate adult with a political consciousness to match McCarthy's when it can. Another work of art by McCarthy on the evil of the Western World; the greed and evil of the North American viciousness and the devastation of capitalism lying at the heart of the world and the planet and this film. The doom we all face that is irreversible.

Critique is concerned with the truth content of a work of art, the commentary with its subject matter. The relationship between the two is determined by that basic law of literature according to which the work's truth content is the more relevant the more inconspicuously and intimately it is bound up with its subject matter. Walter Benjamin:Illuminations p.4

The counselor goes to Amsterdam to choose a diamond for an engagement ring for Laura. He does not go to a Tiffany's, with or without her, to buy the ring retail. He goes to Amsterdam, the center of the DeBeers Diamond Cartel, to a connoisseur of fine diamonds where he can peruse numbers of stones unset to make his choice guided by an expert. DeBeers is the monopolistic cartel of all the diamonds in the world, overseeing their mining to their wholesale distribution and marketing. The aura of a fine diamond to be given to a woman carries the "floating sign" of forever love, seduction, wealth, cherishing, the romantic dream DeBeers has engraved on every woman's heart. The DeBeers diamond cartel is  vicious and total, the most successful and entrenched and the oldest. Slaves who labor in the mud, often drowning in it when they slip, subjecting themselves to ruthless enemas at the end of each working day and invasive inspections, provide women with these glorious gems of forever love. The counselor is not even aware of this. He is a criminal lawyer in El Paso who springs on technicalities, the drug cartel clients sent to him for lucrative fees. 

The dirty secret of the drug cartel is that it is an incredible, huge industry for employment. The drivers, the ones who restore the truck containing the cocaine, the ones who clean the blood out of it from the shooting, the businesses that enable it, the bars and night clubs that wash the money, employing millions all over South America to deliver the drugs to the US where the prices are high and the demand is great. The cartel is so entrenched and irreversible that no one wants to imagine what would happen were it to collapse. No, it must continue.

In Philadelphia if you want an excellent criminal lawyer you go to one who works for the Mafia. One who knows the judges, one who takes you before a Mafia judge. All is complicity not justice. 

The Law is in the Order of Production. The Law of the drug cartel is in the Symbolic Order: Vengence. When the complications of the drug deal the counselor is entering into for the first time go sour, his accomplices are murdered, Laura is kidnapped in Juarez. If you know Juarez and its horrors you know what will happen to her to cement the counselor in his place in the hierarchy of the cartel. And we see her dead body dumped into a refuse heap by a machine. He has been warned but Cassandra and Tiresias are never listened to. They are doomed to be ignored, these prophets of the future, to which Cormac McCarthy belongs.

The counselor goes to cultured and aesthetically sophisticated men - a lawyer and a judge? - who live surrounded by exquisite art which never guarantees ethical integrity as we know from the Nazis. They also are complicit professionally with the cartel in Juarez and Texas. They cannot help and he is told by the judge that his choices were made long ago and the present consequences are unfolding according to fate and destiny. 

The bartender who wakes him tells him that without love there is nothing. He enters a protest being filmed of women and men holding posters of lost/dead girls and women, crying and chanting for some kind of  justice for their loved ones. The only justice being served is that of the drug/sex cartel criminals being sprung by expensive criminal lawyers. 

When you die your world no longer exists, he is told. In his room he will be given the CD of Laura's Snuff Film, and his world will no longer exist. 

Cameron Diaz is a marvel in this film. She identifies with her wild/tame pet cheetas, the upper lip of her mouth lifting in silent snarls, cutting her eyes in contempt at others, then saying she will go to Hong Kong. Taking the stolen money from the brutal high tech murder of Westray. Of her plans, "Diamonds, I think. They are small and transportable." We already know she knows much about their value when she has analyzed Laura's ring. And so the drug cartel money recirculates back into the diamond cartel inventory to complete the circle.


The Counselor is a film that is the world. As Paul Virilio says at the end of his Speed and Politics, "The world is run by thugs." 

The governments of the world are complicit with the cartels of the world and McCarthy has in yet another work of art shown us another facet of this and its consequences. All his work is of the same theme. It is irreversible and totalizing. 

And the rot of it all is greed - CAPITALISM.