Matt Kindt’s Mind MGMT (by Dark Horse Comics) unfolds like a dream. Not like a Hollywood dream, where, despite some strangeness, the dream remains coherent and dictates useful messages to the protagonist to be sussed out in waking life. Nor like the constructed dreams in Christopher Nolan’s wildly overrated film Inception. That film had the worst representation of dreaming I have ever seen. Its insistence that dreams have to “make sense” or else the dreamer will awaken is at odds with how severely and fascinatingly strange dreams can really be—a strangeness our dreaming selves can sense or even question, but that does not disrupt the dream. In fact, it is the very understandable abruptness of the sensation of falling or violence that often startles us awake, not the strange, not the incoherence of the dream. The kinds of compression and transference that occurs in dreams—the conflation of people, the access to pure knowledge, displacement of people and events in time, the superimposition of places, the transgression of social norms, etc…—is the normality of the dream-world. The cold sleek video game-like architecture of Inception is really the death of dreams and of human imagination—plus, the film itself is a mess that fails on the many levels of genre it tries to emulate. Inception completely misses what makes dreams useful and fun. Dreams are malleable protoplasmic psychical energy that functions as a form of mind management that resists interpretation, and that is often diminished by attempts to do so.
The problem with representations of dreams in literature and movies echoes Susan Sontag’s concerns in her seminal essay “Against Interpretation.” She writes, “Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there.” The same is true for dreams. In her indictment of the interpretive impulse of the contemporary critic, she of course brings up Freud, whose work, despite being widely discredited, has permeated Western views of art, relations, culture, what-have-you, to such a degree as to become a nearly invisible force. He remains unnamed, even as his terminology is put to use or re-appropriated in the language of not only critics, but everyday conversation. Sontag’s concern with the hermeneutics of Freudian interpretation emerges from the problems inherent to the manifest content of the dream (“the dream” in this case being the stand-in for “art”) being a transformation of an unreachable latent content. As Freud writes in The Interpretation of Dreams, “I am led to regard the dream as a sort of substitute for the thought-processes, full of meaning and emotion, at which I arrived after the completion of the analysis.” The emphasis there is Freud’s, but if I were to emphasize something it would be: at which I arrived. This is nothing new, I guess, but the idea that Freud or his psychoanalytic protégés serve as gatekeepers for secret knowledge gleaned from the free association of dream material is laughable. Freud’s own writing feeds this doubt. He admits the over-determined nature of dream imagery, making their connection to a singular source (and thus meaning) impossible. He explains that “[Dream-work] only comes into operation after the dream-content has already been constructed. Its function would then consist in arranging the constituents of the dream in such a way that they form an approximately connected whole, a dream-composition.” In other words, even telling a remembered dream, even before its content is analyzed, is a form of preliminary interpretation. This form of dream-work deals with the consideration of intelligibility. To re-tell the dream the dreamer must order and edit the dream and/or make poor excuses to mitigate its incoherence. “And somehow, despite looking like mi abuela’s nursing home, I knew it was my college cafeteria…”
Sontag is right that in making the meaning of the dream the primary concern, the experience of the dream is lost. She warns that the over-emphasis on the content of art devalues critical concern with its form. In the case of dreams, we seem to have something that resists attainable meaning in terms of its images, scenarios, sensations, but whose form is predicated not on its experience, but on its telling—a telling that requires a bit of both conscious and unconscious interpretation. She writes that “interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable,” and that certainly falls in line with Freud’s interpretation of dreams. In Freud’s view, dreams are a form of wish fulfillment in which the latent conflicts our conscious mind will not let us express manifest themselves in the incoherent and fragmented experiences of the dreaming vision and sensation. Dreams then are a form of safety-valve that lets out the pressure built within the dreaming subject through conflicts between id and super-ego but that transforms them from the literal desire into the strange and symbolic. The dream manages the mind’s discomfort with the mind’s own anti-social taboo desires. Maybe. Maybe not. Whatever the source and function of the dream experience, more time needs to be spent with the dream itself—with the dreaming of it. The same is true in literary analysis. More time must be spent with the text. Whatever my other theoretical concerns may be with any text, the foundation of the work is the experience of (close-)reading.
Mind MGMT provides ample material for just that—spending more time with the dream itself. It is a fantastic example of how compelling dreams can be. While the series itself does not purport to convey a dream world like Nolan’s Inception or 1984’s cheeserific Dreamscape, it constructs a dream-like world nonetheless. In fact, since its world slowly unfolds through the eyes of Meru (or sometimes—as in a dream—from outside of herself) without calling itself a dream, the sense of it being dream-like is all the more compelling. Furthermore, the inclusion of strange complimentary stories, mission briefs and directives in the margins of its pages, provides hypnogogic knowledge—the sense of just knowing something, as you often do in dreams. In this way, Mind MGMT avoids even the certainty of doubt, and lets the reader float along as layers of secrets are peeled away to reveal more mystery.
Reading the first collected volume, The Manager, the series begins with a reference to dreaming, with the focus of it panels shifting from a fighting couple falling from a balcony, to a figure on the street below throwing a Molotov cocktail into a bookstore window, to a man walking by the burning store to shoot another man in the head, but who in turn has his throat slashed by a woman with a large knife. The captions read: Ever have a dream that is like a story? And at the end of the dream there’s a twist ending? Some kind of shocking surprise? How can your mind do that to you? You’re creating the dream.
These multiple shifts of perspective in the first couple of pages set the tone for the rest of the series. A blacked-out panel provides the only transition to the “real” story, Flight 815 (a Lost reference–Damon Lindoff wrote the intro for the first collected volume) where all passengers and crew apparently and very suddenly lost all their memories. Two years later they have not regained them. This disassociation is shared by Meru who “awakens” in her apartment with no food in her fridge, a table full of past due bills and her ”new” idea to write about the amnesia flight, a follow-up book on her true-crime bestseller. However, upon calling her literary agent, it appears as if the idea is not as new as it seems to her. Somehow he already knows, but this does not strike her as strange. Sensing something familiar even as she starts a project anew, Meru’s hunt begins to find Henry Lyme, who according to the flight manifest, boarded the plane, but was not among those who got off when it landed.
A dream is a strange limbo in its ability to put the dreamer in a state of simultaneous knowing and unknowing. There is a great library of knowledge immediately accessible to you—you just know things and the experience of the dream cannot shake that knowledge. Conversely, there is the experience of cognitive dissonance—not accessing what you know you know. Meru’s search for Henry Lyme becomes one of these simultaneously impossible and possible tasks that even accomplishing does not accomplish. As complications increase, she becomes enmeshed in a complex plot of agents and former agents of Mind MGMT—a defunct and yet somehow still-functioning agency of paranormal people: immortals who can recover from any wound, animal empaths who teach dolphins to talk, people who can see the immediate future, ad writers who can encode brainwashing messages into their ads, a man who can kill by pointing his finger, and so on. Meru’s investigation for her book — which should be at least somewhat routine given her previous success at investigating “true crime” and writing a best-selling book — becomes mired in a fruitless cycle of discovery and amnesia—a deep questioning of the “true.” Secrets are peeled away to reveal more secrets, more mysteries. Mind MGMT, both the comic and the agency it is about, is a journey through layers of secrets hidden by barely disguised suspicion that serves as a fetish—obsession with peeling away the façade of intelligibility of the dull everyday waking life in search of more intelligibility, which itself can only be another layer of façade—an eternal onion with no center. If the cycles of the dream experience are allowed to continue it becomes the substitute for understanding through interpretation. Each latency is the manifestation of another latent conflict.
Meru’s quest—and thus the reader’s—however, becomes not about learning some truth, but about constructing some form of legibility in a world that increasingly seems like it has no stable framework. Meru is learning to interpret this dream she is living in. As such, Kindt’s book becomes about the experience of interpretation, of encoding intelligibility upon the unintelligible. It challenges the reader to take up Sontag’s perspective on art regarding the experience of it, while providing an experience of the intellectualized process of interpreting it.
The transformation of discovery into more mystery is reinforced when even finding Henry Lyme fails to lead to an end, but just turns Meru’s quest back on herself. She is the source of mystery, or at least the mysteries she explores in the outside world are just mirrors of her own half-remembered history—the self-created dream with the surprising end. Even her name, Meru, calls to mind Mount Meru, a sacred mountain in Hindu, Jain and Buddhist cosmology, considered to be the center of all the physical, metaphysical and spiritual universes, suggesting that she is the source of all she investigates. In Lacanian terms her self only exists as a symbolic relation to an unattainable self. The self is a narrative that is told through a dream language of expanding and compressing symbols that can never be read the same way twice.
As such, Meru’s hunt for herself is in relation to a fluid dream vision of history in Mind MGMT —tensions between Mind MGMT and a Soviet counterpart either parallel Cold War anxieties, or a schism in the agency creates them. A variety of crimes and disasters, Hollywood murders, Zanzibar tsunamis, suburban riots, university uprisings, the undefinable terrors of human history are revealed to be the results of Mind MGMT agents working with or against orders—who can tell? Some agents are put into a form of sleep, unaware of their mission or abilities, until awakened, accidentally or intentionally to cause mayhem when the conflicts of a constructed life and their secret lives come to the surface—but even that secret life might turn out to be constructed when picked at again. As the story progresses Meru moves from the periphery to the center. The CIA agent tailing her and apparently ignorant of Mind MGMT may have once been her lover and one of their recruits as well—knowledge and relations are suddenly constructed from nothing with equal measures of doubt and certainty. Examining the panels of early issues reveals that figures later revealed to be involved in the layered conspiracies were there all along, in crowd scenes, in the background, as a shadow. Kindt succeeds at making the coincidental seem planned and vice-versa. Mind MGMT exists to shift public opinion and fulfill political goals, but also to police itself. The world is managed and the managers are managed until all sense of origins is lost. There is no unmanaged mind. It is always already managed—managing itself, managing others into managing it. And so on. To arrive at a place against interpretation is to have interpreted your way there.
There is a moment early on, when Meru—being simultaneously led and followed on her hunt for Henry Lyme—is alone in a Chinese jungle. The text reads “She’s stripped down to nothing. Just a translator. No provisions. No map. No weapon. But…no rent due, no utilities turned off. No bounced checks.” The suggestion is that this nightmarish adventure is a form of wish fulfillment—an escape from the mundane responsibilities of her life. And yet, at that point the narration is Lyme’s voice, not hers. He is narrating her desire and perspective. She sees herself from without. The concerns Lyme imagines she escapes from are the modern post-industrial concerns of an elite worker class that finds itself scraping by as the apparent systems of world capital fail it. It is not until Meru finally finds Lyme, that the narration shifts and her voice takes over telling the story. Could it be that that those everyday concerns are also a form of wish-dream? Lyme’s word balloons are blotted out by Meru’s narration in caption boxes, and for the first time she seems to awaken into her real self through his telling her of his own history—but even that will come into doubt. The timelines of their narratives don’t match up, nor do the identities and motives of the people they involve. As in a dream, times, places, events, people are unanchored.
As the story unfolds and collapses, Kindt’s art beautifully reinforces the dream vibe. The use of watercolor throughout creates a fluidity marked by the translucent saturation only possible with that medium. The panels are a bit of dreamy haziness as the color bleed out of the penciling in several places. Furthermore, the panels are placed within the confines of non-photo blue guidelines that indicate the area on the page within which Mind MGMT agents are to print their reports, creating a juxtaposition between the wash of uncertain color and the officiousness of the blue ink’s message. The comic itself is uninterrupted by ads, except those that seem to be selling something encoded with secret messages to possible Mind MGMT recruits—but to further confuse the issue, sometimes the back page seems to all have small classified ads for actual comic shops and the like.
Ultimately, there is something Foucaultian about Mind MGMT and its depiction of the relationship between power and knowledge. In the series, power is dispersed globally and manifested through the creation of knowledge. As Foucault reminds us, not only does knowledge equal power, but more surreptitiously, power equals knowledge. The Mind MGMT agents use their powers to create, destroy and shape knowledge for each other, for themselves and for the world at large. The very concept of “meaning” loses all meaning when experience is shunted aside as a valuable category by the Freudian hermeneutics that freely associate discrete categories of latent meanings to infinite manifestations. Mind MGMT effectively demonstrates that the distinction between experience and interpretation is a false dichotomy. The mind is always already managed. Returning to Lacan, I can’t help but think of his concept of the unattainable Real. It is impossible to exist outside the symbolic. As such, rather than concern ourselves with the categories of experience (of the body and the senses) and intellect (of the mind), it is better to perceive the human condition as the Sinthome (symptom without cause). Meru’s troubled stories (for Mind MGMT arcs overlap and partially efface each other) are a telling of the sinthome, which “can only be defined as the way in which each subject enjoys (jouit) the unconscious in so far as the unconscious determines the subject.” Mind MGMT revels in that sometimes (often times?) frightening space of the undifferentiated conscious and unconscious and finds joy in being, but understands simultaneously that to be is to be in relation to being.
I recently stumbled on this piece I wrote four or so years ago for a sex website which, as far as I’ve been able to tell, never used it. I still think it’s funny — so I figured I’d see if anyone else agreed.
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“Adam’s young bride was proud of her man, but she blanched at the thought of the ghastly White Worm.”
Bram Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm
Nothing spurts out fanciful narratives quite like a penis. The best mythologizer of the privates, of course, was Freud who, one portentous day, stroked his beard, sat on the pot, looked nether-ward, and suddenly shouted, “Eureka! I bet Martha wishes she had one of these!”
Sure, Freud was a silly bugger — but phallic disinformation afflicts us all. To rectify this classic malady, read on.
Break You Off — That’s Just an Expression, Right?
Can you break an erect penis? Obviously, you’re hoping that the answer here is “no.” And, in fact, a penis has no bones, so you can’t damage it in quite the way you would an arm or a leg. Still, if you’re young, determined, unlucky, and, maybe, kind of dumb, you can, in fact, injure yourself in ways that will surprise you and make you go…ergh.
When you get an erection, two tubes of spongy tissue that run along the inside length of the penis fill with blood. These tubes are called the corpora cavernosa, and they are located in a tough sack made of tissue called the tunica albuginea. Now, let’s say you’re not only lusty, but also young, which means that you are especially rigid. And let’s say further that you’ve got a willing peasant girl spread out on a bed at the other end of your palatial throne room. You emit a lascivious grunt and begin to race towards her…but, unfortunately, in your haste, you fail to notice the second peasant girl sprawled on the floor…you trip over her…sail gracefully thorough the air…and smash erection-first into the decidedly unyielding flagstone floor.
At this point, the tunica albuginea will tear, and blood will start to leak out of the tubes. What you’ll hear is a cracking sound, and then you’ll probably say something like, “Zounds!” or, “Holy fucking fucking fuck!” because it’ll really hurt. Your erection will go down, and you and the peasants can then sit around watching your bruised and probably visibly bent penis swell and take on a meaningful shape as it adjusts to its new and complex reality. You can also consider what your life will be like now that you can no longer sustain an erection, or — if your injury is especially spectacular— pee. Alternately, you can get up off your butt and GO TO THE DOCTOR! RIGHT NOW! YOU JUST BROKE YOUR PENIS! RUN, FOR GOD’S SAKE! RUN!
Once you get your sorry, sorry dick to the hospital, you’ll need surgery to repair the tears in the tunica albuginea. In most cases, this should solve all your problems and allow you to live a productive, erection-and-pee-filled life. In other cases, you will need a transplant, usually using tissue provided by bonobo monkeys, or occasionally, by Robert Plant. No, that whole last sentence isn’t true. I don’t know what happens in other cases. Furthermore, I don’t want to know, and I doubt you do either.
I Love the Smell of Wood in the Morning
Lots of people think they know the secret of morning wood. “Oh, yes,” they will tell you nonchalantly as you and your stubbornly conspicuous thing shuffle bathroom-wards. “Morning wood. Caused by a full bladder pressing on the medulla oblongata of the lower reaches.”
In fact, morning wood is not caused by a full bladder. It doesn’t seem to be caused by alien transmissions or nanomachines, either. Nor by the Masons or the Trilateral Commission. What does cause it, you ask?
Well, um,…the same thing that causes nocturnal emissions! Yes, you see, while they’re asleep, any man without erectile dysfunction will just get an erection, and sometimes one of those erections is still hanging around when they wake up. In fact, this is one of the main ways that experts diagnose erectile dysfunction. If you’re having trouble maintaining an erection, your local upstanding erection expert will fit you with an elastic thingy (technical name elastic thingy) to wear on your penis to monitor its friskiness and girth. If, on a romantic night, the penis is sufficiently frisky and girthful, a computer dings and the expert knows that your dysfunction is psychosomatic; if the computer refuses to ding, the expert knows that there’s a plumbing prob….
What was that? What causes the nocturnal erections? Errr….
Okay, we don’t know! All right? The penis, it just goes up at night! Stop bothering us with this crap!
In other words, experts are baffled. They have given the phenomena a great name though: nocturnal penile tumescence. I don’t think we can really expect more from science than that.
Diet Like a Porn Star
“Some people think semen is low-carb,” my esteemed editor told me. “You should write about that.”
“What? Who cares? It’s not like you’re eating enough of it to…”
He fixed me with a gimlet eye. Over email. And you’ve never been gimleted by an eye until it’s been disembodied and sent electronically. Gross.
So, fine. Semen’s made of fructose and enzymes, and it’s not low-carb. Now you know.
XY Marks the G-spot
Long, long ago, when men were men, Neanderthals were Neanderthals, and butt plugs were carved out of flint, a tribal wise man named Ernst Gräfenberg discovered the female G-spot in the latest issue of Cosmo. Shortly thereafter, of course, some disreputable wag with a monosyllabic appellation — Ogg, let’s say — piped up with the inevitable query: “Erg! Ugh! Grunt? (snicker)” Or, translated, “Hey Gräfenberg! Screw the gals! Where’s our G-spot? (snicker)” To which Gräfenberg responded frostily (it being the ice age) “We don’t have a G-spot, okay? And if we do, I don’t know where it is. I only read Sports Illustrated for the interviews.”
Well, believe it or not, Ogg the Wag has the last laugh. The female G-spot remains a site of violent and sweaty theoretical exploration by scientists and feminists alike, but everyone agrees on the existence and location of the male equivalent. For guys, the G-spot is simply the prostate, right there at the back of the penis, bung up against the anus. To locate it, lie on your back with your legs elevated, and then gently push a well-lubricated finger into the anus. Two inches beyond the anal opening you should feel a bump about the size of a chestnut. Manipulate it and you too will wag like Ogg.
So there you are. You’ve now got more penis facts in your pocket than even Sigmund Freud, and some of them are even true. Whip ’em out to awe your friends, impress the ladies, or just for the pleasure of playing with your ever-expanding diction.
Being John Malkovich is an almost certainly intentional, not to mention deliberately parodic, riff on film theory. As I am not the first to point out, the movie gleefully presents the viewer with mirror images, women who want the phallus, explicit sadistic fantasies of control, identification with the gaze, identification through the gaze, and a chimpanzee with a traumatic backstory —all couched in an absurdist narrative. At one point we even get a tour through John Malkovich’s subconscious which begins (of course) with a primal scene as young John watches his parents do that thing that Freudian parents do.
It’s pretty clear that writer Charlie Kaufmann and director Spike Jonze are both referencing and undermining Laura Mulvey’s gaze theory. On the one hand, Craig Schwartz, the protagonist, is the protoypical sadistic viewer — he is a puppeteer by profession, and he explains at some length how he loves to get inside other people, to enter their skin and feel what they feel. This speech is made by Craig to Maxine, a woman with whom he is sexually obsessed — and soon thereafter he makes a puppet of her to play with, so the fetishistic content is not exactly subtle. Craig wants to enter others as a way of fucking others; empathy and identification are for him a means of sadistic control.
At the same time, the film messes with Mulvey’s formulation, in which the male viewer is supposed to be the subject of the gaze and a female character is supposed to be the object. For instance, the person Craig inhabits and controls is not a woman, but a man, John Malkovich. In the movie’s main absurdist conceit, Craig finds a secret, moist tunnel in his office which literally leads into Malkovich’s consciousness. This not only feminizes Malkovich (the tunnel is literally referred to as Malkovich’s “cunt” at one point) but it also feminizes Craig. In the first place, he’s engaged in male-male sex too; Maxine calls him a “fag.” And furthermore, towards the end of the film he essentially experiences a full-body castration, giving up his own life and self in order to inhabit and become Malkovich.
The film also critiques/parodies Mulvey by handing the male gaze over to a woman. Craig’s wife, Lottie, also uses the tunnel into Malkovich’s head — and she finds the experience both exciting and sexually stimulating. Indeed, after entering Malkovich while he’s taking a shower, desire and identification flip, and she decides she wants to be a man. Later, she goes into Malkovich again, and rides along as he receives a sexually charged phone call from Max…with whom both Lottie and in consequence Malkovich instantly fall in lust. The sadistic male gaze, therefore, becomes a sadistic female gaze, giving women access to the phallus and (not coincidentally) to objectification of other women.
The point is further driven home (if that’s the right metaphor) by the fact that Max reciprocates Lottie’s affections — but only when Lottie is in Malkovich. Malkovich is the phallus himself, but he cannot have the phallus — just as is supposed to be the case for women in Lacan. Actual women, on the other hand, can hold the phallus and wield it for their own pleasure — the only caveat being that to hold the phallus they have to hold the phallus. Masculinity and mastery, contradictorily, seem to inhere, not in men, but in women. Even paternity becomes a female prerogative — Max becomes pregnant when Lottie is in Malkovich, not when Craig is. Lesbians, it seems, are better men than men are.
The film, then, in some ways seems to deliberately mock masculinity — or at least, Mulvey’s formulation of masculinity. In other ways, though, its position is less clear. In particular, it seems significant that Malkovich’s castration is in many ways actually a kind of apotheosis. Malkovich is, after all, famous for being other people. The film, then, becomes an extended allegory of his talent; Malkovich is everyone, and everyone is Malkovich. The very funny scene in which Malkovich goes through the passageway into his own head and ends up in a restaurant where he is literally all the people in the room, whether women, dwarfs, waiters or patrons, definitely ridicules his persona. But it also elevates that persona into existential dilemma. Similarly, Malkovich’s vituoso performance as Craig inhabiting John Malkovich becomes the ultimate version of disappearing into a role. No costume, no props, and yet he is magically (and convincingly) doing a quadruple-layered acting feat, playing John Cusack playing Craig playing John Malkovich playing John Malkovich. This is in part about Lacanian misrecognition, where even your self is someone other than your self. But it’s also about method acting. To not be who you are may be a traumatic crisis of selfhood, but it’s also, as an actor, the mark of mastery. The more castrated Malkovich is, the more his phallus grows.
The same is true of Craig. Early on we see Craig performing a puppet show of Abelard and Heloise. Abelard was, famously, castrated. In the puppet show, however, his incapacity is supplemented, or superseded, by Heloise’s insistent sexuality — the puppet humps the wall between her cell and Abelard’s. The blatant display, performed by Craig on a street corner, is so convincing it prompts an irate father to hit him in the face. Craig is castrated like Abelard…but like Malkovich, his belittlement becomes the sign of his mastery. And that mastery is routed through the inhabitation of female desire.
Which raises the question…is the lesbian relationship in the film a rebuke to male fantasies of possession? Or is it an embodiment of them? At one point, Craig enters Malkovich when Maxine thinks Lottie is inside; as a result he weirdly gets to have lesbian sex — a not at all uncommon male fantasy. At the film’s conclusion, Craig is presented as trapped in the consciousness of Lottie and Maxine’s child, staring out impotently forever at the two women he can never have. Again, though, the masochism is perhaps just a little too convenient. Are we really supposed to believe he is not getting off on this fantasy of being inside a woman — and, more, inside the sexual relationship of two women? Who is pulling whose strings, exactly?
In one of his puppet plays, Craig’s doll (made in his own image) looks up deliberately, as if seeing the man who controls him. Being John Malkovich, too, with its absurdist, self-referential plot constantly reminds the viewer of its status as fiction — and of its status as tour-de-force. Writer Charlie Kaufman’s script is as auteurish as Malkovich’s performance, and in the same way. When Malkovich and Kaufman erase and feminize themselves, it is only so that they can be all-the-more controllingly present, all-the-more wielders of the phallus. Masochistic lesbophilia seems, from this perspective not so much an upending of patriarchy as it is a means of creating a more all-encompassing phallic order. Perhaps that’s why there is, running through the film, an air of smug, over-determined self-congratulation. Despite its cleverness, and its deliberate eschewal of traditional storytelling, it still comes across as surprisingly conventional Hollywood narrative cinema, less problematic for Mulvey’s theories than any B-movie slasher.
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As a brief addendum, I just saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which painfully confirms my sense that Kaufman’s absurdist trickery conceals all-too-typical masculine self-pity and predictable Hollywood idiocy. The film’s heroine/love object Clementine claims several times that she’s not just a cipher for male desire and dreams, but again alas the fact that she’s a self conscious magic pixie dream girl doesn’t make her less of a magic pixie dream girl — quite the contrary, in fact. Maybe if there were some vague effort to balance the amount of time we had in our drab hero Joel’s head with the amount of time in bouncy, unpredictable Clementine’s I’d believe that the film saw her as her own person. But virtually all her screen time occurs either when she’s with Joel or when she’s not even herself, but is instead (and significantly) a mental projection inside his head. And, of course, we’ve got not one, but two romances in which Hollywood-hot younger actresses turn down attractive men their own age in order to aggressively seduce significantly older, character-actor-homely men. The PKD meditation on memory and self looks a lot like a feint to distract from the puerile, self-serving wish-fulfillment.
Is there any similar quirky, high-concept, mainstream American film that is told primarily from the point of view of a woman? There may well be. Chalie Kaufman sure isn’t going to write it, though.
This is a belated entry into the Jaime Hernandez roundtable…and so, in Part II (Update: now online here) I’ll be discussing Locas. Forgive the circuitous approach…
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Some months (or possibly years) back, in a roundtable devoted to Charles Hatfield’s book, Alternative Comics, various HU luminaries and commenters discussed the tendency of Gilbert Hernandez to employ, exploit, and self-reflexively examine a variety of sexual fetishes. In particular, though Hernandez is sometimes praised for the depth and complexity of his female characters, there is also a tendency in his work to linger upon, obsessively expose, and/or overemphasize particular “surface” elements of the female anatomy. In the case of his most frequent protagonist, Luba, and her mother, Maria, the fetishization of breasts might be said to reach an extreme. In the roundtable discussion and comments, the term “fetish” was used without any particular theoretical apparatus, and there is no reason why such an apparatus is fundamentally necessary. Certainly, we all know that when we talk about a “fetish,” we are discussing some object that takes on a surprising amount of significance and importance, often without any obvious reason. In the realm of the sexual, a shoe fetishist finds outsized sexual pleasure in a shoe, despite the “normal” social tendency to not view footwear as a necessarily sexual object. Though female breasts are quite often a focus of sexual attention in our (Western, American) society, it is certainly the case that there seems to be no intrinsic reason why they must be so and the heterosexual male’s obsession with women’s breasts may be attributed to a “cultural fetish” of sorts, one that Gilbert Hernandez exaggerates, but certainly does not invent.
Typical understandings of breasts as a cultural fetish might advert to a kind of pseudo-Freudianism, which gestures to Freud without reading his work very deeply. Certainly, anyone who knows anything about Freudian psychoanalysis, knows that it hinges around the notion of the Oedipus complex, or sexual desire for the mother, combined with competition with the father for her love. According to Freud, initial pleasures come principally orally (from eating) and anally (from excreting), before a subsequent move to genitally centered pleasures. Because a baby’s first “oral” pleasure comes from the mother, and at the mother’s breast, Freud argues that the child then “associates” pleasure with the mother and so, when pleasure itself becomes genital, sexual desire too is first directed at the mother. Likewise, since the breast is the first locale of oral pleasures (only for breast-fed babies, obviously…but bottles don’t preoccupy Freud overmuch), it should be no surprise that breasts become a locus of genital/sexual desire (again, through the “association” of varying kinds of pleasure). I would make no argument here for the biological or scientific “accuracy” of Freudian psychoanalysis, but merely note how the fetishizing of breasts might, in a Freudian context, seem like a “natural” one…part of the prescribed journey through the Oedipal cycle and the “natural” fixation on breasts and orality that precedes genital sexuality.
Neither Freud’s nor Hernandez’s version of fetishism is so simple, however, and, in fact, in Freud’s essay on fetishism, breasts don’t get so much as a mention. Instead, Freud defines any sexual fetish as “a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and—for reasons familiar to us—does not want to give up” (842). It no doubt comes as a surprise for those uninitiated into psychoanalysis that women, or our mothers in particular, have a penis, but of course Freud is not really saying she does, or not in so many words. Rather, he argues that there is a point in early childhood that boys, at least, believe that everyone has a penis, and so they are shocked when they learn, by hook or by crook, that their own mother does not. The acquisition of this knowledge, the knowledge of sexual difference, is central to the journey through the Oedipus complex, because it is when a boy learns that his mother does not have a penis that he realizes that his own may be in imminent danger. That is, the boy apprehends his mother as a castrated (wo)man instantiating his own “castration anxiety.”
The logic of such a claim is dubious, of course. Is there any particular reason to view a woman this way, as a man “lacking a penis” and therefore not whole? The answer is, of course, “no,” and the preoccupation with the phallus as the seat of all that is whole, central, and important in life is part and parcel of a long history of patriarchal thinking which feminists (even feminists interested in psychoanalysis) rightfully reject. Nevertheless, in the context of Gilbert Hernandez’s “fetishist” (or, at least, fetish-y) comics, and eventually his brother Jaime’s as well, it is useful to follow Freud just a bit further.
According to Freud, when a boy is faced with the supposed castration of his mother, it plays a significant role in the repression of his desire for her. Since he has been in competition with his father for the love and affection of his mother from the outset, the realization that his mother has been castrated introduces fears by the child that the castrating was done by dad himself. This possibility makes the boy a) fear for his own penis (if dad castrated mom, what is to stop him from castrating his son, especially when they are in competition for mom’s affection?), and b) repress his desire for his mother. With the revelation that dad is strong and, apparently, ruthless (willing to castrate his enemies at a moment’s notice), the idea of continuing to compete with him for mom’s affection becomes not only less attractive, but actively terrifying, and so, the boy will repress his sexual desire for his mother, forgetting it altogether and redirecting it onto a more socially appropriate object, simultaneously entering the more “appropriate” social world where incest is unacceptable. In most cases, argues Freud, this is what occurs. In some cases, however, a child is not quite ready to give up the mother’s phallus, and instead “replaces” it with a fetish object. Says Freud, “the horror of castration has set up a memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute” (843) and the substitute will usually be linked to the moment of revelation in some way.
Thus the foot or shoe owes its preference as a fetish—or a part of it—to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy peered at the woman’s genitals from below, from her legs up; fur and velvet— as has long been suspected— are a fixation of the sight of the pubic hair, which should have been followed by the longed-for sight of the female member; pieces of underclothing, which are so often chosen as a fetish crystallize the moment of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic. (843)
Interestingly, Freud argues, then, that the fetish allows for the fetishist both to know and acknowledge the fact that his mother has no penis (to know and acknowledge sexual difference), while simultaneously repressing or denying that fact. Allowing for a replacement for the mother’s penis allows for the fetishist to retain the sexual bliss of the first attachment to the (phallic) mother, while also displacing it away from the mother herself, as well as from the penis itself, which “saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual” (843). Here, Freud reveals himself to be a homophobe, as well as a sexist, and quite possibly a loon, interpreting male gay love as merely another displaced attraction to the phallic mother, which, he suggests, is better displaced upon a shoe, or undergarment.
Given all the logical, political, and social problems with Freud’s argument, it seems like a waste of time to recap or belabor it here in association with the comics of Los Bros Hernandez, except insofar as this Freudian view of fetishism is courted so openly by Gilbert and therefore may help us understand and/or appreciate his work. In Poison River, Gilbert’s first post-Palomar graphic novel, Luba’s husband Peter Rio, runs a strip club whose strippers are pre-operative transsexuals, or in Freudian terms, phallic women. Significantly, Rio demands that the women tuck their penises tightly into their panties while they are dancing, so that they are invisible. Any sign of a bulge offends Rio and, it seems, his fetish, though if he truly did not wish to see “phallic women,” he could presumably run a more conventional strip joint.
In all of this, Rio fulfills Freud’s claims about fetishists to the letter. Fetishists, says Freud, must maintain two “incompatible” claims, “the woman has still got a penis” (which allows the fetishist to retain the notion of the perfectly whole “phallic mother” who was the object of his initial desire) and “my father has castrated the woman” (which allows him to integrate into society, to break away from his family, and direct his desires elsewhere) (844). That is, fetishism allows the man to consciously enter the social world and participate successfully in it, while still being able to fulfill his deepest (unconscious) desires for the mother, and not just the mother, but the phallic mother that preceded the shock he received at the threat of castration. Freud notes how well an “athletic support belt…which covered up the genitals entirely” works as a fetish object, since it “signified that women were castrated and that they were not castrated” (844). The link of the panties of Rio’s strippers to this description seems too obvious to be further “unpacked.” Rio needs the strippers to retain the possibility that castration never occurred, but he needs the “tucking” to signify that it (simultaneously) did.
One could push this further in Poison River and in Gilbert’s work more generally, especially given that Rio’s fetish is not actually (or not only) panties, but bellybuttons, and given his involvement not only with Luba, but with her mother as well. In addition, Peter’s father, Fermin, also has an affair with both Maria and with the transsexual Isobel who later becomes Peter’s mistress. It is, in fact, a running joke of sorts that Peter is only attracted to women whom his father has had first, a clear intimation of his “mother issues” and, as Hatfield discusses, his continuing need to protect his mother from Fermin’s brutal beatings, even after his mother is long gone. Every step of the narrative, then, mirrors the Freudian one of desire for the mother and competition with the father, complicated only slightly by the fact that one of the fetishes involved is not of a different object that replaces the mother’s penis, but of the female penis itself, albeit now attached to different women, indicating further how Peter’s repression of his desire for his mother is insufficient by Freudian standards.
All of this is linked to the social and political pattern Hatfield notes in his reading of the graphic novel. Hatfield argues that much of Poison River is devoted to the attempt by Peter, Fermin, and others to maintain a corrupt “public sphere” of drug trafficking and gang warfare, while “protecting” women from such a world by confining them to an “idealized conception of the home” (Hatfield 90) and keeping them in the dark about male activities. That is, Peter and his “men” enforce “sexual difference” in a variety of paternally protective (i.e. sexist) ways, even as the book indicates the ways in which such an effort is doomed to failure. The drug use of Luba and her girlfriends, for instance, indicate the ways in which it becomes impossible to insulate women from the dangerous “masculine activities” of the public sphere, as does the way in which women serve as pawns or objects in the world of masculine competition. Without their own knowledge, for instance, Luba, Maria, and Isobel all become objects over which Peter and his father compete sexually. They are, then, part of the world of masculine competition (and capitalist acquisition), even when they are unaware of their role within it. Likewise, as Hatfield points out, even the stereotypically feminine world of childbirth and childrearing is tainted by the masculine world of crime and “business,” in the fact that Peter buys a child for Isobel on the black market, a purchase he must later “pay for” in kind.
These thematic reminders of the impossibility of completely separating the worlds of the two genders is complemented by the consistent references to the world that, in Freudian terms, exists before the introduction of sexual difference. The “phallic mother” is an exemplar of a fantasy world that predates the necessity of dividing mother from child (esp. mother from son), male from female, and public sphere from private. While, on one hand, Peter vigilantly enforces social and public gender divisions, in his private/sexual life, he is continually attempting to re-unite the two genders, fixated as he is on the fantasy of the “phallic mother.” While he, like Freud, continually worries that his sexual behavior may be read as “queer” (insofar as he is both literally and metaphorically constantly desirous of the penis which is both missing and present), it is also clear that this “queerness” is itself a utopian desire for a world that predates the gender divisions he also polices.
When, in Palomar and “beyond” so many of Gilbert’s characters reveal themselves to be “queer” in some fashion, attracted to both genders (despite often years of strictly hetero- proclivities), it suggests a nostalgic hearkening back to a pre-Oedipal “queer paradise” before gender divisions, or before we became aware of them. If, after all, gender divisions do/did not exist, what can it mean to even identify someone as hetero- or homosexual? Such terms only have meaning in a post-Oedipal world and not in the paradise of the phallic mother. Poison River never suggests that it is exactly possible to return, regress, or progress, to such a paradise. Rather, the tone, as Hatfield notes, is persistently one of disillusionment and acknowledgment that the effort to retain a paradise of any kind is inevitably a losing one (whether that paradise be the matriarchal world of Palomar itself or the androgynous world of the phallic mother). However, Poison River does serve to both suggest and reveal the presence of the desire for such a paradise and its prevalence, particularly through the mechanism of fetishism. Far from being a text that simplistically fetishizes women, or particular parts of their anatomy, as objects for the male gaze, it suggests that the mere act of fetishizing blurs the divide between male and female. The fantasy is not here of an empty, mindless, female object (though Maria, at times, seems to occupy that space), but of a mother with a phallus, a pure union with a love object that precedes and blurs sexual divisions. As Freud notes, fetishism always moves in two directions, both acknowledging “castration” of the mother and the world of gender divisions which follows and disavowing such divisions, hearkening back to a pre-Oedipal utopia, wherein sexuality is polymorphous, bisexual, and incestuous. Poison River dynamically presents both the pre- and post-lapsarian worlds that are retained in the psyche in the process of fetishism. In all of this, there is an acknowledgment that an entry into the social world where gender divisions are policed and enforced is both inevitable and unfortunate, but there is also a retention of the utopian desire to transcend that inevitability.
But what does any of this have to do with Jaime Hernandez and Locas? Tune in to Part 2!
Works cited
Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” 1927. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed. NewYork: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001, 2010. 841-45.
Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
I’m a huge fan of Sharon Marcus’ book Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. I’ve already discussed the book in a couple of posts (here and here.) But I thought it would be fun to speak to Sharon herself, and she kindly agreed to an interview. We talked at the end of January about fashion, superheroes in speedos, gay and lesbian identity, Victorian pornography, Freud, and, of course, Wonder Woman.
Noah: So, just to get started and maybe let readers know something of what your book, Between Women, is about, I’m going to try to crassly summarize your main point. That main point being that in Victorian England, erotically charged relationships between women were not seen as necessarily lesbian nor as necessarily anti-heterosexual. On the contrary, such relationships were expected and even encouraged, and were considered an essential part of being a heterosexual women. Is that a reasonable two sentence description of what you were getting at, or have I butchered it?
Sharon Marcus: No, I thought that was very reasonable two sentence description. I think that what I would like to throw into the mix as really important is that, there are a lot of relationships that we now group together, including erotically charged ones, which were not necessarily grouped together by the Victorians. It seems that both feminists and people who aren’t very interested in feminism since the 70s see relationships as being on a spectrum of female intimacy. I don’t think the Victorians thought about things that way. They gave a lot more social centrality to female friendships than we now do, in the culture.
Even when I read contemporary sociology about female friendships, the literature was surprisingly scant, and not very specific about the gender of friendships. And when I found examples of people in Victorian England encountering women who were clearly in quasi-marital relationships that seemed somewhat sexual, pretty overtly because one of the partners was somewhat masculine, a lot of people reacted in a fairly blasé way to that which really surprised me. So I was surprised both that they recognized the relationship and that they weren’t that upset by it. Because what I had always heard about the Victorian attitude towards lesbianism was complete denial, ignorance, impossibility of believing it could even exist, or when confronted with incontrovertible proof, total scandalous shock.
What I ended up getting really interested in was that because there wasn’t this clear-cut category of the lesbian which came about with the rise of sexology and psychoanalysis— you know, in the 20th century the category of the homosexual was probably too well-defined. Because there wasn’t that, it meant that there was a lot more play in the relationships between women and in the relationship of women to imagery of women. So the fashion plates that I ended up looking at a lot seemed to be making it part of the community to look at women in a fairly objectifying way. Not just as part of objectifying oneself, but that this was what fashion was about.
Women checking each other out in a Victorian fashion plate.
Fashion was about fetishizing clothing, but it was also about fetishizing the women wearing the clothing. And what I ended up looking at was the similarity between pornography, which was probably written primarily for men, but which had a lot of sex between women. It’s not that different [in that sense] than pornography today, though, in some ways, Victorian pornography was really different from porography today. But there was the same kind of objectification of women, aggressivity of women towards women, intense interest in focusing on specific body parts.
Also the pornography, a lot of the Victorian pornography I found was really obsessed with clothing, which surprised me. They just weren’t obsessed with taking clothing off and nudity and exposure, but they were really obsessed with the latest style, and lace, and what sort of skirt someone was wearing, there was a whole subcategory of pornography that was about corseting. And there were incredible overlaps between pornography and fashion, both in terms of the fetishization, but also, fashion magazines. There was one fashion magazine that for almost two years published letters to the editor about corporal punishment of children, that were really graphic and in many cases overtly tittilated and titillating. And these were later reprinted separately, and the British library now categorizes them as pornography.
So that was a case of literal overlap. And I think the basic link is just an obsession with the body and its impulses. The presentation of the body to others, and how one perceives, and a real emphasis on the visual framing and control and pleasure that bodies can provide. But this was a case where it’s a publication for women to which women are contributing, and that is filled with women.
But it wasn’t what I would call lesbian.
Right, you’re saying that it was women appreciating women and that being part of their heterosexual identity.
And there was no perceived contradiction there. So you asked the question about fashion imagery today and its homoeroticism. And yes, there is a lot of homoeroticism in fashion imagery today. And there’s actually a great article by Diana Fuss which was on my mind while I was researching my book, and I think it’s called Fashion and the Female Homospectatorial Look, it came out in Critical Inquiry 20 years ago now. And she talks a lot about the fashion imagery of the 70s and 80s and early 90s, and the way that it’s playing on desire and identification, and the kind of twinning of women that takes place in a lot of contemporary fashion imagery that shows two women together.
Gwen Loos & Pauline van der Cruysse for Vogue Turkey November 2010 by Mariano Vivanco
But one of the things you ask was, well, is that really different now , now that there is a visible gay rights movement. And I would say, absolutely. And there’s where I can only speculate, I don’t feel like I know enough to say with any certainty what’s going on. But first of all fashion is a very gay world, a very gay male world. So that’s kind of an interesting wrench in the works, because what we usually say is that these kind of images of women together are a heterosexual male fantasy. And I don’t know about the fashion photographers, but certainly the fashion world, I don’t think anyone would claim that it’s dominated by heterosexual men, nor that it’s trying to appeal to heterosexual men.
Right, it’s trying to appeal to heterosexual women mostly, right?
Right, and I think playing too on the affinities there are between heterosexual women and gay men. Especially when it comes to these areas of life that a lot of straight men pretend not to care about, or genuinely don’t care about. You know everyone says that women don’t dress for their men in their lives, who don’t notice or care that much what they’re wearing. Again that’s not always true, but as a generalization it’s what circulates.
But I do think that now those images are always playing with a certain kind of transgressive charge. Like the one that you sent which wasn’t just lesbian, but was Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. So, you know, it’s a black woman and a white woman…
Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, Vogue Paris February 2008
And I think fashion since probably the 60s has become more of a site of potential rebellion or, I mean it remains incredibly conformist, by definition. It’s about being in style and doing what you’re told to be doing this year. But I think there started coming into play in the 60s a certain kind of rebellion or hipness or esotericness, being part of an avant-garde which you see shaping the imagery.
And that was interesting, too, to realize that in the Victorian period, fashion was really much more conventional. And also to see that instead of mothers and daughters fighting about whether the daughters could be in fashion…because now the sense I have is that mothers are shocked by what’s in style a lot of the time and tell their daughters, “No! You can’t dress like that.” When you read about conflict in the Victorian period, it’s about daughters who don’t want to be in style, and mothers saying you have to dress this way, this is what’s expected of us in society.
But more of the time you just got the sense that it was a real bond between the older and younger generation. There wasn’t the same sense of fashion defining a generation and creating generational conflict the way there is now. And part of the main source of generational conflict between parents and children is sex. So fashion is supposed to be sexy, it’s how you show that you’re sexy. And it seemed that non-normative sexualities can sometimes read as more sexy than mainstream ones.
I kind of wonder, it seems like there’s some of what you were talking about going on still. I mean lots and lots and lots of women, women who don’t necessarily want to be all that transgressive and women who do, just lots of women read fashion magazines, right? And they’re all about looking at images of fetishized women. So there still is this important component of being a heterosexual women which is about appreciating the fetishized bodies of other women, and which isn’t necessarily always about lesbianism at all.
I think the real question now is whether for the millions of women— I just watched the September Issue [a documentary about Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue] and it was actually really interesting, because it was a glimpse into how they put together the issue [which is the biggest of the year]…and they were clearly trying to find a story. Because there’s not a lot of suspense. You know that the September issue came out. You can’t sit there worrying about whether they’re actually going to put the issue together.
And a lot of it is about how mean and cold and harsh Anna Wintour is , trying to get some traction around that, but in fact it’s clear that although everyone around her is nervous because she’s the big boss, they also kind of worship her and think she’s amazing. But she’s the editor-in-chief, but she also has a creative director, a woman named Grace [Coddington], who is about the same age she is, and is a former model, and she is the vision behind a lot of the images.
So that was interesting to me, to see that although most of the photographers are men, there’s this women in her 50s, practically 60s, who is really kind of masterminding what the shoots are going to look like, and she loves looking at these models. At one point she refers to a husband, so presumably she identifies as straight.
I think the question now is what’s on women’s minds when they sit, millions of women, who presumably many of them think of themselves as mainstream, not just heterosexual, but mainstream, what’s on their mind as they turn page after page after page of these incredibly erotic images of women. Are they disavowing and denying that there’s any kind of lesbian thing going on? Are they actually enjoying it and perfectly aware that they’re enjoying it? I don’t know how they think about it.
I mean for writing about the Victorian period, I kind of have the convenient problem that there’s no way I can go back and ask the subjects what they’re thinking. I could read what people wrote about fashion and it just…even when there were these sexual scenarios erupting in their fashion magazines, they didn’t seem to take that and extend it to the rest of the imagery that was in the magazine. They just seemed blissfully unaware that there could be a specifically lesbian sexual subtext to any of this. And that in a way licensed the images in becoming that much more erotic.
I don’t know what is on women’s minds now. I mean, I’m a lesbian, so I look at these images as a lesbian. And I do wonder, how are other people experiencing these. And some of them are so overtly sexual, and I think in some other contexts might disturb the readers of the magazine.
from Vogue Paris
But in this context, the fashion context makes it safe, possibly because what the fashion context says is that this is about identification, not desire. But part of the whole creation of a visible lesbian identity is that it gives people a way to cordon off identification and desire. Though in my opinion they’re always blended together and it’s really really hard to say where one stops and the other starts. But they tell themselves they’re different, because identification is what you do if you just like dressing up and looking at pretty pictures of half-naked ladies, but desire is just if you’re a lesbian.
So I found your book because I googled Between Women, because I was trying to find a book that addresses what Eve Sedgwick addresses in her book Between Men, but in terms of women. When I was reading your book, it seems like you are using Eve Sedgwick’s theories, but that you’re kind of moving away from Freud. Because you’re sort of arguing that it isn’t repressed homoerotic….
I think it depends. I’ll free associate in honor of Freud, and say the various things Freud meant to me in writing this book.
The biggest concept would be the concept of repression, and the idea that sexuality is always repressed. And that can be a kind of effective circular definiion. You can argue that if it wasn’t repressed then it wasn’t sexuality. But that seems to be assuming what you need to prove, and I think becomes too restrictive a definition. Some aspects of sexuality at a given moment in time and for a given person may be repressed, but that doesn’t mean that every erotic impulse and interest is necessarily repressed. And I think that in Victorian England, women’s interest in other women was not a huge site of repression. I think that what caused more problem was if a woman didn’t want to marry a man. But a woman who married a man but had children and also wanted to go to the skating rink and exclaim over the beauties of the young women skating around…
There’s the one anecdote in your book where a woman writes about how, if it was in line with propriety and the other women’s comfort she wished that the breast of the women she was looking at would pop out of her clothes.
Yes. Yes. And that woman was married as far as I can tell. I mean I read a lot of her diaries and letters, and it seemed like a pretty genuine marriage. There was no contradiction to her. I don’t think that she actually pursued sex with women. She just felt very comfortable having this erotic appreciation of other women. It didn’t cause an existential crisis for her.
So step one where I took a different tack from Feud was not equating sexuality and repression.
Step two would be that I don’t think — I think he contradicts himself a lot and says a lot of different things in a lot of different places about masculine and feminine and whether everyone has a mixture of both, or whether everyone has a mixture of both in childhood but then as part of maturity has to become defined much more strictly as one gender rather than the other. He is really interested in castration as the way that gender gets understood, again, kind of contradictory, is that more important for men or really important for both sexes? He really I think sees there being two sexes and that that is very defining for people. And, of course along with castration he’s really interested in Oedipal dynamics, nad in the family as a source of prohibition, and that the family generates sexual desires which it then prohibits. That brings us back to repression, that being really really central. And I was interested in thinking outside of the family as the primary unit for defining, shaping, and containing sexuality. So that’s one place where I was not taking a Freudian perspective.
I think…there’s a book that came out a little bit before mine by Martha Vicinus, called Intimate Friendships, and she’s really interested at looking at how these relationships between women take on different kinds of family models. Like a maternal model, or a sororal model, or a husband-like model. And she definitely finds individual case studies that fit those rubrics. But she wasn’t’ really generalizing about a whole bunch of people. She was looking at a few specific cases, that I think she herself would say were kind of idiosyncratic. Which I don’t see her cases as necessarily as idiosyncratic as she did. I don’t see women who were in intimate relationship with other women as being so cut off from their society.
I think that I ended up getting very interested in things that did not seem to be particularly unconscious. And I guess we would say the main Freudian contribution is that a lot of what we feel and think is unconscious. I wouldn’t necessarily deny that, but it leads to this sort of assumption that for things to be really interesting they have to be hidden. And I found all kinds of interesting, wacky stuff that didn’t seem to be at all hidden. And that people had ignored because it didn’t have that charge of repression, so the critic and the analyst can come along and expose it. I was finding stuff that people were saying in diaries and letters that were meant for other people to read, that people were publishing in magazines, that they were writing in novels — one didn’t have to dig to find erotic desire between women.
And I think that in for Eve Sedgwick, it’s one of her early books, and I think she ended up moving away from this model, but she’s really looking at how Victorian society repressed erotic and sexual desire between men, and forced it to take the forms of either heterosexual exchange of women between men, or violence between men. Repressed desire can only surface as violence. Now I did find a lot of examples of aggression between women or between girls and these female objects of dolls, but again it didn’t seem like it was the manifestation of something that had been repressed, it just seemed like aggression. It seems like aggression is a fundamntal drive between people, and maybe even a fundamental part of eroticism, and it doesn’t seem to me like it’s a sign that something has been repressed.
It didn’t seem like the girls were fantasizing about whipping or being whipped by their dolls because they had no way to express their erotic desires for women. Because the whipping stories were already erotic — if they were supposed to be covering something up or serving as something that masked eroticism, they weren’t doing a very good job of it! And there were always these moments in these stories too where a girl would talk about an older woman in a very admiring or adoring way, or even talk about wanting to marry some woman. So it didn’t seem like any of this stuff was hidden, and perhaps because these were girls who were being discussed and they were so young, there wasn’t as much concern.
From Clara Bradford’s, Ethel’s Adventures in Doll Country, 1880, with sentient sticks for better chastisement. Reprinted in Between Women.
Though that was of course very surprising, because what I would have expected knowing what I know about the Victorian period from a select group of novels…I mean, I’ve read many Victorian novels, but it has to be said that one thing I found was that Victorian novels are not necessarily representative of anything except Victorian novels. There’s a whole other world of Victorian discourse that shows things and says things that don’t show up in novels. The Victorian novels would have led me to expect that girls were supposed to be sweet and not aggressive and not have any kind of sexual desire whatsoever or any kind of erotic expression, and that just turned out not to be the case. And of course these are books written by adults, not by girls themselves, but usually by women, so it was interesting to see that these women are perceiving all these things in little girls that are very very different than primarily male novelists or Victorian painters —who would paint these very saccharine sweet angelic looking little girls — were willing to think of as being part of girlhood.
So yeah, the violence between girls and their dolls doesn’t seem like it’s there because there’s no other way for girls to express affection for feminine objects. It seemed like just part of what it meant to be a girl.
So in arguing that this particular thing isn’t repression, that seems to call into question at least to some degree how much repression works in other areas as well, right? In terms of the repression of homosexual desire and whether that’s really a problem.
I don’t think it necessarily proves that Eve Sedgwick was wrong, because I do think that male sexuality and female sexuality were treated fairly differently. I think it comes as a little bit of a surprise, to me even, after haivng spent all this time with this material, to realize that in some ways male sexuality in the 19th century might have been more severely policed than female sexuality. At least same-sex eroticism. Because we’re used to thinking that men, especially middle-class and wealthy men, you know, there was a double sexual standard, they could have sexual experience before marriage, they could have extra-marital affairs, they could go to prostitutes. None of these things were really allowable for women. They would have caused women to be completely ostracized, whereas this kind of behavior in men was tolerated, even encouraged.
But it turns out that when it came to same-sex eroticism, I do think that men were more policed than women. And I don’t think Eve Sedgwick was…I think that was the intuition she was working with in a way, and some historical research has appeared since her work that suggests that it was actually true. And you know there is no female equivalent to the Oscar Wilde trials. Even though there were women, some of them fairly prominent activists, journalists and artists, who were in relationships with other women. But there wasn’t the same sense that your reputation could be utterly ruined by haivng your same-sex affairs exposed.
from The Queen, 1851, reprinted in Between Women
And partly there was a legal difference, in England anyway. Because it was criminal for men to have sex with each other. Sodomy was a capital crime and, while in the early modern period there were cases of sodomy between women, by the 19th century sodomy was understood as something that existed only between men.
One of the results of this is that your book is a lot cheerier, than Eve Sedgwick’s book. Because for you the erotic relationship between women, it’s all good. It’s good for everybody, right?
Yes. (laughs)
It’s good for women, because they get emotional benefits, but it doesn’t hurt men either, because it makes women more conventional, in some ways.
Yes, that was true of women’s erotic interest in one another, and …the only thing I would want to throw into the mix is that one of the things I ended up wanting to insist upon fairly strenuously was that female friendship, while it offered a lot of the physical intimacy and interest that we associate with eroticism, that female friendship was not the same as what was going on in the fashion magazines. In that female friendship was this very idealized category where women were kissing and hugging and writing each other these rapturous letters that now read like love letters — these relationships really were, many of them, were friendships.
And one of the things I was trying to point out too is that it’s complicated. You can’t read one letter that a woman sends to another and say, “oh here we see, just friendship,” or here we definitely see erotic interest. You have to look at the history and context of the relationship in the person’s life.
So I would say in terms of the cheery view, one of the things that I expected, that had been said a lot in the scholarship, was, oh, women’s friendships were marginalized and suppressed and demeaned. And there are a couple of people [in the Victorian period] who would say from time to time, women shouldn’t put too much energy into their friendships, or women’s friendships aren’t to be trusted. But in general I found this incredible idealization and glorification of female friendship and respect given to it, and that women actually made a lot of time for their friendships. Whether they were friendships with people they saw on a regular basis or friendships that were epistolary. I mean, one thing you come away with from this material was awe at the amount of time people had to write letters. I guess with our age of blogging and emails we probably are giving the Victorians a run for their money.
So female friendship wasn’t seen as competing with marriage. And women’s erotic interest wasn’t seen as competing with marriage. And there weren’t — because there wasn’t a movement of women who were interested in exclusive sexual relationships with women and avoiding relationships with men, those relationships weren’t seen as a threat either because they werne’t linked to a whole political challenge to the system of heterosexuality, even if the individual women in them did see them as challenging heterosexuality.
I just didn’t find a lot of evidence of anxiety.
You also say that there isn’t this anxiety among men, there isn’t this anxiety among women, but at the same time you were arguing that the existence of this sort of normalized erotiized bonds between women meant that women who were lesbian could form marriages. Essentially female marriages then were less controversial then than they are now.
Yes, female marriages didn’t seem as odd because in many ways they overlapped with relationships that the majority of married women had.
So one of the things I was going to ask Is — did the Victorians do better than we do in some sense in terms of their treatment of gay relationships?
I thought that question was very interesting. If I were asked if I would rather live then or now, no question I would pick now. Not only do we have contact lenses, running hot water, refrigeration…but I think that there’s…
Okay, sexual identity really fixed sexual identities are really constraining in a lot of ways, and also often very inaccurate. I know very few straight women who haven’t at some point has some sort of sexual experiment, affair, contact with at least one other women, often several, but they never really stop thinking of themselves as straight.
You may have some sample bias.
I don’t really care, but of course people tell me this stuff, because of who I am.
(laughs)
This is also, like when people were in their twenties, before they got married. I just think things are very fluid still for women, but it all has to be thought of in very different ways.
The way the Victorians had it better off I think is that they didn’t have to sit around torturing themselves with frankly rather inane questions like, am I a lesbian? Am I straight? Am I bisexual? On the other hand, I think it can be difficult not to have ways to organize your experience.
from Revue de la mode, 1885, reprinted in Between Women
I mean the women in female marriages seemed to find each other very easily, so there were these subcultures or networks of women who lived in Italy or lived in England, and a lot of time they were expatriates, and then if they went to Paris they knew who to look up. So they didn’t seem to be isolated — I mean that’s one of the things identities brought people in the twentieth century was a sense of community. But of course communities always end up foundering when they’re based on identity because people start policing the identity and if you step outside the defined boundaries of the identity it can be really problematic.
I think you see the same thing now with gay marriage; the way that the gay community is in some ways fissuring about the question of whether marriage is a permissible part of the gay identity or not. So that people who are really invested in queerness are kind of…I would almost say repulsed by the embrace of gay marriage among a lot of gay people, because they feel that was not what being gay was about. Being gay was about saying I’m going to defy institutions like marriage.
So I see all the negative baggage that comes with identity. I also see how being part of a group that form the start was defined by the mainstream in terms of stigma and deviance, has been kind of a mixed blessing.
But I don’t know, I think it’s in some ways I can’t even answer the question, because it’s hard for me to really imagine what it would like to be me living in this very very different time. I mean I could sort of establish a conceptual and sympathetic scholarly relationship with these people, but I don’t know who I would be if I were in Victorian times.
Well I think one of the things that’s interesting about it is — you could argue about whether the Victorians were better or whether it’s better now, but there was a period in the middle where it was clearly worse than either, right?
Yes.
I was reading John Boswell writing on gay Catholicism in the Middle Ages, and he was basically arguing that the worst time in history to be gay was like 1950 in the west.
Well, yeah, sure, being identified with Communists, perverts, pedophiles, probably serial killers — it’s interesting, because there’ve been periods in time when sodomites were identified with kind of the unthinkable, Satanic, bestial, the thing that’s so bad we can’t imagine. But no one actually thought of an actual person as being a sodomite. This was a point that Alan Bray made in his book on sodomy in early modern England. There’s all this discourse about sodomy as being the worst thing imaginable, so you can’t even imagine it. And then there are all these people writing about how John had sex in a closet with Tom. And they’re not connecting the dots. Why aren’t they connecting the dots? Because a sodomite couldn’t even be a person that you knew. You couldn’t put the two together.
Unfortunately, I think what happened around 1950 was — well I guess everyone had become so closeted that no one actually knew any gay people anymore, they didn’t know that they knew any gay people unless they themselves were gay. And then when you found out someone was gay, it was much easier to connect them to all this propaganda about how evil gay people were. So I think it was the combination of this association of gay people with a set of fears that were really panicking people and the intense closeting that was a response to all the witch hunts that were going on. And I do think that one of the real big things that changed all of that was people coming out more. It’s very, very difficult to really demonize people that you know. I mean, people have proved that they are quite capable of doing that under the right circumstances, but there really have to be circumstances.
And there we go back to the comparison between the Victorians and now. People couldn’t come out unless they come out as something, so there you need the identities. They’re limiting, they allow a group to be singled out, and generalized about in a way that the Victorians just didn’t do. But [identities] also limit what people…I don’t think most people feel comfortable acting on the range of their erotic impulses. Well sometimes that’s good….
(laughs)Well Freud would say that’s really good, right?
Because sometimes those impulses are destructive, but I think that in some ways, yes the Victorians were a little, unexpectedly, counterintuitively, were more sexually free than people are now. Maybe not sexually free, but erotically free. Because there wasn’t the same close connection we make now between erotic impulses and sexual identities.
I also wonder if it’s in some ways possible to sort of see the Victorians in this more positive light because things are…because Eve Sedgwick, part of what was going on with her, part of why it was such a grim view, was because she was writing during the AIDS epidemic, and it was really depressing. And I’m wondering if the fact that now we’re moving towards a place where most people think of marriage between women as okay — if that’s one of the things that makes it possible to recognize that the Victorians thought it was all right as well.
Well, I think it’s impossible to write about the past without being influenced by what’s going on in the present, and I think it was really interesting to me to see how in my lifetime, I’m 44, people had gone from being really incredulous about the existence even of actual lesbians, I mean, like really, is that even possible, what do they do? Side by side with the constant pornographic representation, usually not too accurate, but still it’s there, of what lesbians do. But there was this sense of unreality about lesbians, and maybe hyperreality about gay men.
How quickly people could move from that to, oh yeah, they get married now. Oh yeah, they have kids now. It took so little for people to be able to acknowledge the existence of something which a little while before they had thought of as completely unthinkable. So I definitely approached the Victorian period with a sense that what people thought was possible erotically or what people accepted or what people would or wouldn’t be shocked by could be very different from what I expected, and might be different from one decade to another or one group of people to another. Because I had seen how rapidly attitudes could shift.
So it wasn’t so much only that things had gotten better, but that things had changed so fast and so intensely in ways that you know that in the middle of the AIDS epidemic it didn’t seem possible that things could change that quickly, just as when it started it came out of nowhere. From the 70s being such a period of sexual celebration, and then all of a sudden there was a really huge health crisis going on.
So a lot of what the book is about over and over again is plasticity and mobility and elasticity and how much things can change. And I had definitely lived through that. I hope we don’t live to see things take a massive turn for the worse. But experience says it could happen. It could definitely be something on the horizon.
So getting towards the end maybe I’ll force you to talk about comics. I gave you that link to the post about the superhero swimsuit issue, with the beefcake — which presumably was mostly for men, and in fact, superheroes in general are male fetishized bodies to be observed by men. And that is more or less okay as part of a heterosexual identity — you take some flak for it, so maybe it’s not entirely ok, but mostly ok. So obviously male homosexuality and lesbianism are different, but I wondered if you felt like there was a parallel there.
There definitely seemed like a parallel — it seemed like there were multiple parallels, which made it a parallel. There are these exaggerated bodies that are rendered in ways that are on the one hand are kind of realistic, I mean there’s sort of a photographic aesthetic going on, but the bodies are completely unrealistic, like the bodies of women in fashion plates of the Victorian period — no one could have certain features of those bodies.
by June Brigman and Tom Palmer from the Marvel Superheroes Swimsuit Special
And this is clearly for a male audience, and a male audience that has to be very mixed. I read a lot of the comments, and I know that physique magazines were ways that — the audience for physique magazines in the 50s was a very gay audience, and it was a way to sort of send material through the male that looked like it wasn’t gay.
from Tomorrow’s Man, a 1950s-1960s physique magazine
You know that the guy who drew Superman was sort of really into body building magazines.
Didn’t he also have a whole set of fetish drawings? I saw that book….?
I thought that was really interesting…
So, on the one hand you could say that there’s a double audience. Yes, this is for people who really think of themselves overtly as having gay desires, and then it’s for a straight audience that is just into superheroes. But I think that what is also going on is that it’s for the double audience in each of us. It’s for the gay guy who wants to be into this pretty straight thing of the super-hero, and for the straight guy who’s into superheroes, but, you know, who enjoys looking at these pictures of men with their huge muscles and their bulging speedo bathing suits.
by Jae Lee
And you don’t have to, really more for the straight guy than the gay guy, but you don’t have to have an existential crisis about it the way you would if you were looing at something that was more overtly gay. And also it’s not overtly gay in the sense that it’s not images of men having sex with each other. And I think that’s an interesting difference too. Enjoying looking at pictures of sexualized bodies, it feels different to a lot of people I think than looking at pictures of people having sex, which at this moment in time it’s really easy to find also.
Right. Just a click away.
Yes. (laughs) Hard to avoid them sometimes.
Is there a parallel with the Victorians at all, in terms of there being heterosexual males expressing or being allowed to express desire for other heterosexual males and having that reify their heterosexual identity rather than calling it into question?
Well, in the Victorian period there definitely is a lot of the painting and the photography, there’s a lot of imagery of beautiful men. And people have often glossed over that in talking about the way the body is represented in the 19th century as if only female bodies were represented, but that’s just not the case. And a lot of people producing the imagery of beautiful men were men. Some of them were gay, some of them were not. The audience for this imagery was huge, and so has to have included people of all kinds.
I definitely found a lot of examples of young men talking openly about their admiration for — you know, men in our equivalent of high school or even college — talking about how beautiful another man was or how much they love him, or how jealous they are because he seems to be more interested in some other guy than in him, and it’s not always clear to me, and I didn’t do the kind of in-depth research that might give me a chance to clarify — whether they were talking about someone with whom they were having some kind of physical sexual relationship with, or whether it was just this romanticized friendship that women have with each other. Although I think Eve Sedgwick was right about the cases she was looking at and about the culture in general, I think that even for the Victorians and despite there being more repression of male homoeroticism, it wasn’t completely repressed, and there were male friendships that had a real erotic component.
In terms of pornography I would say, for highly sexual imagery — well comics are not, I mean nobody thinks of speedo bathing suits as pornography — it would just be a comic. I mean you wouldn’t get nervous if you were a teenaged boy buying that in a store, right?
Probably not.
Because Victorian pornography was much less visual. It was much more textual. And the thing I really noticed when I was reading it was how polysexual it was. It was almost as though the convention of it was, okay, now we’re going to have the men having sex, and now we’re going to have the women having sex, and what was really noticeable and very different from now was that so much of it was about family members having sex with each other. Now the uncle and his nephew are going to have sex, now the aunt and niece are going to have sex, now the brother and sister are going to have sex.
That exists now too…
But it’s a niche now.
You know where it has historically been a bigger deal recently is Japan. There’s a…
I know there’s stuff about mothers and sons, I read this…
That’s a fabulous book. That was one of the best books…I read that when I was doing the research for Between Women and I didn’t really get to use it that much, but I thought that was a really really great book.
So I think part of my answer has to be, hmmm, I don’t know, because I didn’t focus on men. I mean in that sense I presumed some of the gender differences that in a way I ended up saying might not have existed, but I had to limit what I was doing somehow. So I think that there are other people that could answer that better than I can. But I know that there are a lot of images of St. Sebastian, and he was kind of a gay icon and they were sort of prized among gay men.
Saint Sebastian by Titian, 1570
But they were hanging in museums and showing everywhere and nobody was saying take that down. It was something that all male art critics and all the men who would go to art galleries would look at. And I think that there were plenty of statues of men, basically the neo-classical equivalent of superheores in speedos, I think that was as common in statuary as images of women. It depends on the country of course, so France seemed to show a bit more of a predilection of images of women. And then in the 19th century there’s sort of less and less imagery of men.
I mean, one of the famous Victorian boys books of the 19th century, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, it’s all about boys worshiping each other, and that book was seen as one of the key contributions to the Victorian discourse of manliness. So boys’ adventure fiction would be another place I would like, a guy named David Agruss has been writing a lot about the homoeroticism of Victorian boys’ adventure fiction. So I think there’s definitely sites like this, sites that seem to be the sort of ne plus ultra of masculinity, of heterosexual masculinity that are so involved with masculinity and so interested in masculinity that they end up being also homoerotic.
Which Eve Sedgwick would say would get them in trouble, but which seemed to not necessarily have done so.
I don’t think the authors of boys’ adventure fiction were getting in trouble.
I was winding the conversation up, but Sharon brought up Lost Girls…so we decided to talk about that a bit.
I was surprised actually that Lost Girls hasn’t come up.
Oh yeah? Have you read that?
Yeah.
What did you think?
I didn’t know it existed while I was writing Between Women and then in 2008 I was actually in Paris on leave for a couple of months and I decided I wanted to engage with an aspect of French culture that I had not engaged with before. So I thought, French movies aren’t what they used to be and I’d seen enough of — I mean, I still went to a lot of movies, but there was another time before that I had been in Paris that I think I went to a movie every night.
So I thought what is there? It’s not going to be pop music, that’s just going to be too depressing. So I thought, oh they’re so into the bande desinee…and in the meantime I had of course read more graphic novels and things like that. And I would frequent these various comic book stores, which were really pretty inspiring and they would have a lot of American stuff. And they had Lost Girls which is British not American right, and I was like — what is this, I’ve never seen this before.
And I think of it as a great retort to A.S. Byatt’s Possession, which is — there are a lot of neo-Victorian literature that one of the main things it does is try to go back and imagine, well, if we were to rewrite all these Victorian stories and put sex into them, what would they be like? So that’s what A.S. Byatt, and that’s what Sarah Waters does, really trying to imagine what lesbian Victorian stories would be. And I really like the idea [in Lost Girls] of taking these actual fictional characters and imagining sex lives for them. And I was really pleased on all levels to see how much lesbian sex there was in there.
(laughs)
It really was like a Victorian pornographic world, because it was just like, let’s go for every configuration possible.
from Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie
So you liked it.
Yeah, I did.
I mean I wasn’t — I’m not a comics critic, so I wasn’t trying to have a really critical take on it, but I found it sort of delightful. Like Alice and Dorothy and Wendy get together, and have a kind of Bocaccio you know Sadeian exchange of stories and sex that just goes on and on and on
It’s interesting because that book is all about the evils of repression.
Well, that’s true…
Right, I mean the idea is that if you — not just if you have sex but if you talk about sex…pornography will free your soul.
Mmm-hmm, mm-hmm right. Yeah. Well, I think I have enough of a late 80s legacy in me that I think, sure, I don’t believe completely in sexual repression and therefore can’t believe in sexual liberation, but I do think that expanding the sexual discourse that we have is better than the alternative, which is closing it down. And I felt that the book — it felt like it had a different sensibility to me than a lot of stuff you read, and so I enjoyed that. That aspect of it.
Did you know that Alan Moore was in a unconventional — he was in a long term relationship with two women.
No — I didn’t know that. Polyamory?
Yes, they were in a polyamorous relationship, which ended when they dumped him. And then the woman he did the — Melinda Gebbie who did the art is his sweetie now. Then and still.
No, I didn’t know that. Nor did I know that, if I’m remembering correctly from your blog, that the creator of Wonder Woman was with two bisexual women. Two bisexual women who were like his roommates?
No, one of them was his wife and one of them was his lover, and he had kids by both of them, and then after he died — he died of I think lung cancer relatively young, and the family stayed together after he died, the two women stayed together until they died. He was an odd fellow.
It’s so interesting to me — it’s not surprising there there are all these varieties of relationship and there are billions of people in the world, so if there are even hundreds of thousands of really distinctive kinds of relationship it’s not necessarily statistically significant for the sociologist. But what is interesting is that people who are in relationships that are so different from what we think is the norm are able to create these culturally central characters and narratives and imagery that a whole bunch of people who might feel really alienated form these people’s life choices can embrace and identify with. It’s kind of like the Rock Hudson phenomena.
The interesting thing about it too, especially for Marston, saying that he was able to create this very popular character despite his kinks — isn’t really right. I mean it’s because of them.
Yeah, no, I wasn’t saying despite his kinks. The “despite” part that you’re hearing is that I think if you polled everyone who’s ever enjoyed Wonder Woman, what do you think of polyamory, a lot of them might be like, “oh not for me,” or “I wouldn’t want anything to do with that,” or “I’m against that.” But then…and it’s not like Wonder Woman was about that, but there must have been some relationship between his life and what he was…
She was totally about his kinks. I mean, it’s kind of insane.
I loooove Wonder Woman.
Have you seen the early stories?
No… I’m not that knowledgeable.
She gets tied up like every other panel.
Yeah…
I remember being a little kid and wasn’t the Lone Ranger always getting tied up? I think he was always getting tied up. Maybe it’s a theme in comics in general.
It’s way more in Wonder Woman — you know he has her getting tied up, and there’s all this very — there are lesbian relationships which are not especially repressed, and there’s all this cross-dressing and there’s — oh, there’s the one story where the Amazon ritual is that they dress up as deer and then they hunt each other and then when they get caught they get put in these giant dishes, and they pretend to eat each other.
Oh my god.
from Wonder Woman #3, William Marston and Harry Peter
Yeah, it’s crazy. He was nuts. And it was great. He was a genius. But it’s really — this is for under 8 year old girls.
The problem with representations of dreams in literature and movies echoes Susan Sontag’s concerns in her seminal essay “Against Interpretation.” She writes, “Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there.” The same is true for dreams. In her indictment of the interpretive impulse of the contemporary critic, she of course brings up Freud, whose work, despite being widely discredited, has permeated Western views of art, relations, culture, what-have-you, to such a degree as to become a nearly invisible force. He remains unnamed, even as his terminology is put to use or re-appropriated in the language of not only critics, but everyday conversation. Sontag’s concern with the hermeneutics of Freudian interpretation emerges from the problems inherent to the manifest content of the dream (“the dream” in this case being the stand-in for “art”) being a transformation of an unreachable latent content. As Freud writes in The Interpretation of Dreams, “I am led to regard the dream as a sort of substitute for the thought-processes, full of meaning and emotion, at which I arrived after the completion of the analysis.” The emphasis there is Freud’s, but if I were to emphasize something it would be: at which I arrived. This is nothing new, I guess, but the idea that Freud or his psychoanalytic protégés serve as gatekeepers for secret knowledge gleaned from the free association of dream material is laughable. Freud’s own writing feeds this doubt. He admits the over-determined nature of dream imagery, making their connection to a singular source (and thus meaning) impossible. He explains that “[Dream-work] only comes into operation after the dream-content has already been constructed. Its function would then consist in arranging the constituents of the dream in such a way that they form an approximately connected whole, a dream-composition.” In other words, even telling a remembered dream, even before its content is analyzed, is a form of preliminary interpretation. This form of dream-work deals with the consideration of intelligibility. To re-tell the dream the dreamer must order and edit the dream and/or make poor excuses to mitigate its incoherence. “And somehow, despite looking like mi abuela’s nursing home, I knew it was my college cafeteria…”
As such, Meru’s hunt for herself is in relation to a fluid dream vision of history in Mind MGMT —tensions between Mind MGMT and a Soviet counterpart either parallel Cold War anxieties, or a schism in the agency creates them. A variety of crimes and disasters, Hollywood murders, Zanzibar tsunamis, suburban riots, university uprisings, the undefinable terrors of human history are revealed to be the results of Mind MGMT agents working with or against orders—who can tell? Some agents are put into a form of sleep, unaware of their mission or abilities, until awakened, accidentally or intentionally to cause mayhem when the conflicts of a constructed life and their secret lives come to the surface—but even that secret life might turn out to be constructed when picked at again. As the story progresses Meru moves from the periphery to the center. The CIA agent tailing her and apparently ignorant of Mind MGMT may have once been her lover and one of their recruits as well—knowledge and relations are suddenly constructed from nothing with equal measures of doubt and certainty. Examining the panels of early issues reveals that figures later revealed to be involved in the layered conspiracies were there all along, in crowd scenes, in the background, as a shadow. Kindt succeeds at making the coincidental seem planned and vice-versa. Mind MGMT exists to shift public opinion and fulfill political goals, but also to police itself. The world is managed and the managers are managed until all sense of origins is lost. There is no unmanaged mind. It is always already managed—managing itself, managing others into managing it. And so on. To arrive at a place against interpretation is to have interpreted your way there.
Ultimately, there is something Foucaultian about Mind MGMT and its depiction of the relationship between power and knowledge. In the series, power is dispersed globally and manifested through the creation of knowledge. As Foucault reminds us, not only does knowledge equal power, but more surreptitiously, power equals knowledge. The Mind MGMT agents use their powers to create, destroy and shape knowledge for each other, for themselves and for the world at large. The very concept of “meaning” loses all meaning when experience is shunted aside as a valuable category by the Freudian hermeneutics that freely associate discrete categories of latent meanings to infinite manifestations. Mind MGMT effectively demonstrates that the distinction between experience and interpretation is a false dichotomy. The mind is always already managed. Returning to Lacan, I can’t help but think of his concept of the unattainable Real. It is impossible to exist outside the symbolic. As such, rather than concern ourselves with the categories of experience (of the body and the senses) and intellect (of the mind), it is better to perceive the human condition as the Sinthome (symptom without cause). Meru’s troubled stories (for Mind MGMT arcs overlap and partially efface each other) are a telling of the sinthome, which “can only be defined as the way in which each subject enjoys (jouit) the unconscious in so far as the unconscious determines the subject.” Mind MGMT revels in that sometimes (often times?) frightening space of the undifferentiated conscious and unconscious and finds joy in being, but understands simultaneously that to be is to be in relation to being.
