SEX AND DEATH IN THE MOVIES

Chris Kyle, the original "American Sniper"

In the last few days I’ve watched two movies that I hadn’t planned to admit to anyone that I’d seen.  They’re niche movies and the two niches would be -- SHOULD be -- totally opposed to each other.  One is about violence and the other is about sex.  One is conventional and one is transgressive.  One is gritty and one is faux glamour.  Some of my friends would be shocked and horrified that I watched either one or the other, but a few wouldn’t be shocked by either — have probably watched them.  I sort of hate to tell you about them, not because they’re outside the American mainstream, but because they are not, though the two subjects are usually mingled enough to be unrecognizable. Violent military movies are a staple and have been from the beginning.

Popular novel or perfume ad?

Okay. “American Sniper” and “Kink.”  Both streaming on Netflix, both recommended to me by the Netflix algorithm through interpreting what movies I’ve already watched.  (I never do the stars thing.  They only label content subject, never quality or style.)  “American Sniper” is represented to be a “true” biography of a SEAL sniper though there is a website that will tell you all the things that turn out NOT to be true.  The man himself is dead.  One of the things that was added for the movie is a recurrent figure of a little enemy boy who tries to act like an adult combatant, which requires him to be targeted by the sniper.  One is killed and one is spared.

Otherwise, all the deaths are deserved, necessary, so long as the victims were on the other side — if on “our” side, they are tragic, demanding vengeance.  There is online discussion about whether this is patriotism shadowed by necessary killing, whether the emotional effect on the sniper is as bad as physical wounds, and whether the story should have been presented differently.  I haven’t read the book and even if I had, I couldn’t have known what the real experience was like, so I can’t pretend to know what is true and what is not.  But it seems clear that PTSD is real and that this man and a lot of others suffer from it.

The movie called “Kink” shows the making of movies about “algolagnia” which is a kind of extreme pleasure resulting from pain, bondage and mechanical stimulation.  It’s not about the audience or psychological theories — just the people doing it and telling about doing it.  No judgement.  They are all aware of the endorphins generated by extreme experience and how addictive they are.  Compare an adrenaline high from bungee jumping.

James Franco, kitten cuddler

“Kink” is curiously benign, though a few persons hired to be acted upon — who are specifically asked NOT to act, but to just react —freaked and had to stop in spite of having been promised lots of money.  This specific film was prompted and sponsored by James Franco, who clearly has an interest and appetite for extreme experiences, so much so that he’s served time in jail.  He can’t be jailed for auto-generated drugs. Nyah, nyah.  There's a PR agenda.

The film went to Sundance and so on, and was praised in a condescending way.  One reviewer pointed out that this was the shallow end of the pool — everyone is so NICE, everyone had a safe word and it was observed, and so on.  The person doesn’t sketch in what the deep end might be like.  I suppose it might not be voluntary.  I suppose people may be permanently damaged or even killed.

The cat's choice: watching.

Every night on television we watch plots and acting that mix killing and sex.  We pretend it has no effect on us.  Some people say they will NOT watch it and so will leave the room, but leave the door open a crack in order to watch unobserved.  Anyone who thinks they have control over who watches it (including themselves), that children can be prevented from watching, or that evil, violent and violating people don’t watch it to get ideas — is just wrong.  (I am not recommending that ANYONE watch it.)

Several of the producers and directors — who were all kind and appealing folks — said that in high school and college they were not the delinquents flirting with crime and gangs and drugs and all that.  They were nerds.  They read a lot of French philosophy and social criticism that was often framed in fire, blood and feces.  Neither substance is in this sex film, but quite a bit is in “American Sniper.”   (No feces.  No one is scared shitless.)  Mostly just squib splats of blood but spectacular explosions.  Not as much gore as in the more extreme CSI shows.  We aren’t asked to peer into chest cavities.

I must interrogate myself about my own reactions, not just guess how others react.  “American Sniper” left me largely untouched.  To my sensibilities the hero himself was a caricature.  It’s not the fact of him being a sniper.  What was the name of the film in which Rudy, called “Fruity”, taught sharp-shooting?  The one with an embedded reporter?  It was more convincing.  And as for “Kink,” if I’d been hooked up to one of those plethysmograph gismos, well —  forty years ago I saw the fashionable porn movies which were explicit to the point of being silly ("Deep Throat"), but they were nothing like this.

So now I’ll do what some people consider worse than porn, which is to reflect from outside the experience.  Head tripping.  Unforgivable to some. “Algolagnia,” is the fancy name for pleasure that is mixed with pain or caused by pain.  Scab-picking, cutting, beatings, and worse things like joint-stress and muscle distortion.  Water-boarding.  (The official USA guide for torture is no major organ damage.)

Mixed with eroticism: the female guards performing. Jailers who rape.  I suspect that a lot of the people tortured by the US military forces have taught prisoners that nothing can be so intense again.  Done to young people it can so confuse and distort their hard-wiring that they cannot recover normal physiological reactions, let alone psychological.  And what about the torturer?  Those have been interesting movies.

Abu Graib photo.

These practices have been done as long as there have been, well, modern humans, because they are products of empathy — second-hand extreme sensation and reaction.  Brain-blasts in the pre-frontal neocortex and parts of the limbic system.  The imposer of the experience watches carefully, eats empathy.   A black and perverse sort of empathy, but not available to sub-primates at least, and probably not to pre-human primates.  I haven’t read any convincing evidence of chimps torturing — just killing and eating each other.  

Humans do that, too, even to their own family.  Maybe mostly to their own family — because they have access and get aggravated and think they have entitlement.  People feel they own their children and partners and pets, right out to the ultimate death, but sometimes only to near-death.  This is not like a sniper dropping someone from far away, portrayed as like hunting a deer.  Nor is it like the emergency adrenaline explosion of shooting someone close, maybe to prevent them from killing you.  

It’s like trying to change destiny, to deflect blame, to go to the infant’s level of rage.  It’s power.  It is so powerful that people who could and ought to intervene don’t do it, paralyzed by the second-hand experience, imagining themselves as the object.  AND torturer.

Humans incapable of ordinary emotion can sometimes get to feelings through this intense empathy, esp. with someone with whom they are intimate.  But also empathy can transfix with second-hand algolagnia, unresolvable in the moment.  To the victim, failure to intervene will haunt and torment them forever with the conviction that no one will protect them.  

Add that as a third wire.  It will hook helpers, none of which can meet the challenge, assuming they ever get access.  It is well-known that wife-beating episodes are followed by dramatic performances of regret and renewed love, sometimes amazing rough sex — until the addicted victim leaves, if only through death.

The terms “algolagnia” and “kink” and BSM, etc. etc. are terms made up by people who had realized what was happening and wanted to talk about it.  Mostly in the 19th century.  They are not diagnoses, just labels.  Before the words existed, no one really knew these practices existed as something beyond ordinary brutal behavior, sanctioned or not.  No one knew anything about endorphins.

Some of them couldn’t have existed since they are technological (vibrators).  Ingenuity is part of that culture.  But as soon as there were labels, diagnoses, secrets, opinions, confidential reports, they were everywhere and none of it is secret now — not even discrete.  Nor is the use of snipers in urban combat, even domestically with SWAT teams.  

Where do we go from here?  Will there be a return to secrecy and taboo, something like the countries where virgins are so valued that a surgeon can make a living sewing the tissue back together?  And then the women make a living pretending it's the first time?  Some parts of the world now watch beheadings and mass murders, routine rape and torture.   Their ordinary lives are so tough, they are prepared by being numb, emotionally calloused.  But some fight back and others critique the relationships, as in the vid linked below.  Not us.  We think watching movies about people watching the real thing is different. 

https://crossingenres.com/power-and-opposition-sadomasochism-inc-5f4a565586fb#.1yt5nufvq

HEADED FOR . . . WHAT?

Jennifer Granick

Stand back!  Here come those four horses again!  This time their names are:   "Centralization, regulation, and globalization," Granick said, have wrought havoc on a space once thought of as "a world that would leave behind the shackles of age, of race, of gender, of class, even of law."

Wait!  That’s only three horses.  Read this story to figure out what the fourth horse’s name is.

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/08/06/dream-internet-freedom-dying-warns-top-civil-liberties-attorney

Already this morning people are finding they are blocked from this blog.  I’m glad they tell me.  But worse is the plague of people who know what’s wrong, which to their minds is either due to my deficiencies (user error) or a lamentable lack of knowledge and superior judgement that they happen to have.  

Helpers, like the people who want to “help” me by coming over and getting all my property in shape: mowing the lawn, getting rid of the cats and books, and forcing me to buy a new wardrobe.  They never realize that conformity is a source of violence, unless they’re asked to put in a water meter or wear seat belts or stop driving drunk or make sure their kids are vaccinated.

So the people who wish me well set out to “fix” my problem with the Internet.  Except for the techies at 3Rivers who are employed on the premise that they will do this, if they can spare time from telling me how much 3Rivers appreciates me and advising me to “have a nice day.”  They tell me lots of irrelevant things in jargon I don’t understand.

If I wrote what I know about kittens, people would scream, because they haven’t known what happens to kittens and cats, how much they are metaphors for both that which is cute (but expendable) and that which is malevolent.  Terrible, daily, blood-soaked fates for many animals.  Cuteness and hiding are not very effective defenses.  The most vicious people on the planet are those who insist that human babies be conceived, carried to term and born.  At that point, they are abandoned: no help for food, shelter, and education.  Controllable. Commodities.

Medium.com is another place where I post.  It’s in a state of becoming, always adding and subtracting features, which is what the techies love, but I can never anticipate which feature will work when, so I just write my posts on iPages (which cannot be upgraded in the US -- I suppose it’s a legal loose end from when Apple bought it) or on Blogger (prairiemary.blogspot.com)  and then cut and paste.  Don’t tell anyone, because if they figure that out, they’ll block it.

They don’t understand why I write.  On Medium.com this post will appear as a “response” to one of Tim’s raving rippers which is classified as a “response” to some nice perky little high school assignment about why you should write short stories, even if they don’t sell.  I think that eventually Medium will have to begin censoring content.  I hope they censor the stupid.  Maybe they could start a parallel stream for the darker folks.  Maybe they could put a little black bat on those posts as a warning.

Tim writes from his gut, explosive and vulgar -- but real.  He says his alternative is to go crazy.  I don’t care why he writes -- I just love the energy and surrealism.  I write because I love the act of writing and I don’t care whether it sells or anyone reads it or I get praise.  People usually praise the wrong thing anyway.  They read as voyeurs and force readers into their fetish life.  You don’t think perky naive little females have a fetish life?  They ARE fetishes.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/if-you-give-a-mouse-a-xanax-1438978022  Last night I read this snarky little review of LeDoux’s new book, “Anxious”.  The reviewer missed the point.  The book is a sort of summary of what we know so far,  that addresses our unbalanced neglect of our pre-existing mammal processes.  The standing order of scholarship is based on writing, logic, and other white male European priorities. In that context, all is words and that’s our entitlement and superiority as humans, so why consider anything else? 

But LeDoux is a musician -- he can think in sound patterns and emotional valences.  Without words.  This is exactly what I’ve been working on in terms of the meaningful experiences we call “worship, ritual, ceremony, liturgy” in order to get beyond all the verbiage, which someone always wants to copyright.

LeDoux is a major scientist making genuine breakthroughs about how brains work.  He sent me a response worthy of Wittgenstein, who famously said that sometimes words are useless to convey a concept and all you can do is point.  I sent LeDoux an email to nudge him about Stephen Toulmin, who was a good pointer.  So LeDoux, who knows this, was happy to be reminded of Toulmin, and knows that I have a vague idea of Wittgenstein, so he sends me a single emoticon.  A smiley face.

My father used to sign letters with a little drawn smiley.  When I was starting out in Browning, I drew one with a scribble of curly hair and round glasses.  I did that so much that Bob made a rubber stamp of it.  He thought it was cute and funny, though rather childlike, but I was much younger than he and did what he told me, like a rubber stamper, so his assumed concepts came through in that act, a gift.

It was education in theatre and thought that revealed this invisible subtext, and that eventually ended the relationship.  Because though he was older and admired by many, I could not explain this to him -- he didn’t want to hear it.  So much of helping and generosity is a cover for control.  So much of control is a matter of denying reality, reducing it to little cartoons, using white-out to deny suffering.  I wanted a little control.  I stopped drawing that face and threw away the rubber stamp.

The irony and tragedy is that Bob was also a musician, a jazz musician at that.  But what I saw was a man wearing himself out, shrinking his brain through age, self-abuse, bad nutrition, heart attacks, little strokes, suspicion of doctors, efforts to control.  All because he needed to be famous.  And what I saw after his death was hyenas parting him out for profit, dispersing his lifework to suit their own importance, denying and distorting him for politics.  It happens to everyone, including Charlie Russell.  So why create a body of work?

Why is Joe LeDoux doing much much more than offering Xanax to mice?  If you don’t know, just go buy an anthology of short stories instead, the ones written by perky little girls who shone in high school and still think that going to a bookstore to read her writing to an audience of three, one of whom is stone deaf, means anything at all.  After all, she’s wearing pink feather handcuffs like Helen Mirren in that movie -- what was it called?  Oh, yeah:  “Love Ranch,” about a Nevada brothel.

The fourth horse is called “Who’s on Top?”

DESPERATE THRASHING

When I looked for the formal definitions of “thrashing” I did not expect to find a computer term, although many things have become metaphors for something technical in the computer world.

“When referring to a computer, thrashing or disk thrashing is a term used to describe when the hard drive is being overworked by moving information between the system memory and virtual memory excessively. Thrashing is often caused when the system does not have enough memory, the system swap file is not properly configured, or too much is running on the computer and it has low system resources. . .

"When thrashing occurs, a user will notice the computer hard drive always working and a decrease in system performance. Thrashing is bad on a hard drive because of the amount of work the hard drive has to do and if is left unfixed will likely cause an early failure of the hard drive.”

The original word, which has an onomatopoeia element (sounds like what it means) is about separating wheat from chaff by beating on the grain stalks, forcing the meat of the seed out of the husk.  Since grain harvest is done by machinery now generally -- people use the word to mean beating or fighting.  They also use it to describe violent punishment, like a parent beating a child to an extreme, presumably beating out bad traits.

Shark. Thrashing attracts them.

The meaning I want is psychological, but I don’t see it in the definitions.  Maybe it’s local but my friend the psychiatric nurse recognized it.  I mean a situation when all hope is lost and the body goes into a state of wild random energy, throwing the body around, pulling and pushing -- because there’s no rational way out and there’s nothing left to lose.  Once in a while it works.  The first time I set my cat trap, the cat I caught (which I never saw, only heard) thrashed around enough to pop the door open and escape.

But decades ago we visited the scene where a grizzly had been trapped and had thrashed but didn’t escape.  It had plowed the ground around the point of entrapment to a depth of two feet, it had torn up trees six inches across, it had thrown logs, and bellowed loudly enough to make the sheepherder some distance away cower in his flimsy wagon.  The bear did not escape.  It is dangerous to approach a thrashing animal to rescue it.  When daylight came, they shot the bear.

We're just trying to help you.

So people, when trapped in some circumstances with no way out, will throw themselves emotionally against the “walls” of the people around them, especially those with whom they have a strong pre-existing connection.  The thrashing brain will see ghosts of all the most feared forces of their lives: oppression, blame, lack of success, punishment instead of love, injustice, on and on and on.  The people who are the walls can suffer because cause-and-effect have been disconnected.  If they are lucky walls, there won’t be physical violence or only ineffective physical violence -- just verbal attack.  If they are not lucky and if the thrasher is armed, the consequences might be in the newspaper.  But usually a thrasher is too disorganized to plan.  Shooters are deluded but not out of control.  They are over-controlling.

If one is the thrasher, like a little kid at that stage of development when the brain storms and the child beats itself howling against the floor, there’s not much to do in the way of intervention except physical restraint or chemical restraint.  The wall must protect itself and wait for the tantrum to pass.  Even an adult person who is in the grip of the storm cannot get a hold on the situation.  

Psychology Today, always ready to offer pop ideas, suggests there are two kinds of tantrum, as follows.  (Neither is flattering to the person in the storm.)  http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/stop-walking-eggshells/201111/blame-storms-and-rage-attacks-common-borderlines-narcissists

"Both borderlines and narcissists get into rages in which they blame and criticize others. However, the rages are slightly different and are motivated by different things. . . . Keeping these differences in mind will help you anticipate the rage and respond when it happens.

"As you know, people with Borderline Personality Disorder are emotionally unstable. . .  Their intense and annihilating anger comes from believing that others don't care about them, are not listening to them, or are not meeting their core needs. Their pain is your punishment. You're still, though, the equal in the relationship.

"The anger of narcissists, on the other hand, can be more demeaning. Their criticism evolves from their conviction that others don't meet their lofty standards--or worse, aren't letting them get their own way. "Narcissistic injuries," or wounds to the ego, often pave the way for narcissistic rages, which can be passive-aggressive or planned out, as well as sudden. They are above you and you have displeased them and probably deserve punishment they will dole out."

Neither of these ideas addresses the desperation of someone fighting for survival.  Nor do they consider how much a person who is desperate is exploited by other people who can passively and “innocently” deny help, thereby adding more insult and entrapment.  They see a person “in the stocks” -- that old punishment of trapping someone’s head and hands so that they are vulnerable -- and can’t resist throwing rotten objects at them.

Most of the advice in Psychology Today is meant for young adults in relationships or raising children.  I don’t read it often.  This recent study is more helpful.

“A study, published in the March 2014 issue of Psychology and Aging, examined 1,315 men — mostly military veterans who participated in a 15-year survey — between the ages of 53 and 85. Some 80 percent said that at age 50, life became easier.”  But then at seventy things get rough: people die, health declines, money runs out, people are no longer listening, past accomplishments are forgotten.  Then there’s the added element of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, having been in life-threatening circumstances that demanded extreme reaction:  killing, extreme exertion, high risk, major loss.  More than one veteran has told me that it is a truism that when a person has no idea what to do, that all indications are gone but the danger is extreme, it is much better to do anything than nothing.  Even if all you can do is thrash people with your cane.  You might accidentally strike the one holding a gun and knock it to the ground.

When I was working at a nursing home, one of the patients had been an aide in that same place.  She was much admired and loved by everyone.  When she became a patient, she lost her mind and began thrashing:  that is, screaming, throwing herself around, striking people, in what looked like self-destruction and is called “acting out.”  Finally she was sedated into unconsciousness for the sake of the people around her.  If her sane and healthy self had known, she would have been mortified.  But one couldn’t help but speculate (Freudian-style) about whether she had been repressing irritation and impatience all along and now that the restraints were weakened, they were bursting out.  I think that’s putting a psych layer onto something that was purely physical -- not even spiritual, but merely (!!)  the desperate attempt of a body to find some way out.  

In the days with Bob Scriver we shot a gopher every summer morning in order to feed the eagle.  A raptor that doesn’t get roughage (fur and bones) will die.  I got pretty handy with a .22 and there was usually a choice between shooting the critter in the head or the heart.  If you shot them in the head, there were enough reflexes left in the spine so that they thrashed and often the thrashing took them down their hole.  No breakfast for the eagle.  If you shot them in the heart, that was it -- they dropped.  Things are simpler with ground squirrels.  

But even a grumpy old man who “acts out” is trying to survive with the resources at hand.  If he has a lot of "backbone," it will be hard for everyone.  "The system does not have enough memory, the system swap file is not properly configured, or too much is running on the computer and it has low system resources."