September 21, 2011

Hold It Against Me

The United States of Stanley Kubrick
by Guy Zimmerman

Aspects of ourselves that we don’t know how to care for give rise to the complex patterns of distraction that we call our personalities. This notion came to me courtesy of Brittany Spears in a small burst of insight that happened also to illuminate the closing moments of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, a film that has always haunted me. I was surfing around on Facebook and I happened to catch a clip of some Marines from the 266 Rein Division lip-synching Brittany’s song Hold it Against Me on a supply base “somewhere in Afghanistan.” One of my characteristic distractions is to locate something conservatives (or the military) are doing, and use it to climb up on my tub and start thumping. This is a habit-of-distraction I picked up as a child of the 1960s, and because conservatives have been ascendant ever since, it has served me quite well. I found it interesting to track how this critical impulse of mine reacted to the immediate vitality of the 266 Rein Division dancers.

Watching these homesick kids bust all those familiar music video moves will strike you as adorable or annoyingly vapid depending on your mood. I suspect, however, that the Corps is only too happy about this kind of R&R activity – these frisky youngsters will make many want to sign up and ship out right away. I got into trouble in the comments section on Facebook when I gave voice to some qualms about the context of this little piece of social media – an armed conflict we have no business waging, a conflict defined by staggering high-tech violence and civilian casualties. I also mentioned the fact that these kinds of fun-loving, extra-curricular video antics have been forever tainted by the depravity of Abu Graib. And yet I found myself honestly conflicted. Homesick kids having fun and expressing a kind of erotic joy in a collaborative performance piece; a surreal expression the infantilizing effects of American culture in an era of global capitalism – both statements embody equally valid responses to the video.

I’ve often had a kind of delayed reaction to the films of Stanley Kubrick, who is an anomaly in the pantheon of great American directors. Without question a major artist, Kubrick distilled the psychological and cultural contradictions of our time into a series of intellectually intricate and formally brilliant, multi-million dollar, studio-sponsored art films. From The Killing 1956 through Eyes Wide Shut in 1999, Kubrick’s films explore the kind of double-bind Freud laid out in his late work Civilization and Its Discontents. Man is the creature who must repress his libidinal energies in order to co-exist, but doing so makes life into a pointless charade. Our sublimated energies give rise to technologies that only amplify our disconnection from experience, leaving us as dissatisfied as ever, especially when our repressed violence returns in the form of devastating conflicts. The best we can do, given our situation, the story goes, is to endlessly distract ourselves, and here, at least, technology is our friend.

The visual motifs Kubrick deploys to explore this fertile set of ideas retain a remarkable consistency – the Classical architecture of the chateau in Paths of Glory returns in the statuary of Claire Quilty’s home in Lolita…and in the ornate décor of the eerie after-world that closes 2001…again in the theater fight in which Alex and his droogs wage war against Billy’s rival gang in Clockwork Orange…throughout the 17th century European settings of Barry Lyndon…the Colonial buildings of Saigon in Full Metal Jacket…and the Boschian mansion where the oddly non-erotic orgy takes place in Eyes Wide Shut. The “Ophuls-ian” tracking shots through the maze of trenches in Paths of Glory repeats in the chase through the labyrinth of The Shining, Nicholson’s Jack Torrance limping after his son in an Oedipal rage that shows up somewhere in every Kubrick film, chin tucked, eyes gazing up in a rictus of primal aggression.

Kubrick’s work is devoid of lyricism and he was uninterested in dramatic narrative, or character as it’s usually understood. Kubrick’s interest was the formal beauty of his films, which often achieve the internal integrity of a work of plastic art. They are art films, truly, and they achieve the object-ness of a painting or a sculpture while playing with the temporal and performative aspects of cinema. I wish Kubrick’s films seemed dated, but I can’t count how many times the lurid characters who shuffled through the corridors of power in the Bush-Cheney regime reminded me of Strangelove’s primitive Generals Buck Turdgison or Jack D. Ripper, or the smug Joker from Full Metal Jacket, or the self-satisfied yuppie doctor played by Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut or even, in rare cases, the noble but deluded Colonel Dax who Kirk Douglas brought to life in Paths of Glory.

220px-shining-kubrik If Kubrick is vulnerable to criticism it’s that his work is almost autistic in its chilly formalism – he’s all shell, no mollusk. But if you want to write him off you must at least consider his continued relevance. This relevance was cemented when I saw a report on the infamous meeting in June of wealthy conservatives in the Rocky mountains. Hosted by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire Hardy Boys of the American right, the group gathered at the Ritz-Carlton Resort at Bachelor Gulch, a dead ringer for the Overlook in Kubrick’s masterful 1982 horror film The Shining. The Koch brother’s faux grassroots Tea Party movement strikes me as the sociological embodiment of Jack Torrance, played memorably by Jack Nicholson. In thrall to the ghosts of oligarchies past, and driven crazy by an indolent paranoia, the Tea Party limps after poor Barak Obama through the frozen labyrinth of our political discourse dragging an axe.

There’s one camera move in particular that seemed to unlock The Shining for me. It’s about two-thirds of the way through. Wendy goes looking for Jack and she finds his psychotic “work” all typed up beside his typewriter. As she looks at the one line of prose Jack has repeated for page after page, we cut to a SteadyCam shot that pulls out from behind a pillar. The camera moves forward subjectively for a few steps and then the figure of Jack detaches itself from the field of view. The subjective shot has shifted into something quite eerie and odd – we have become the “Overlook” hotel. And this begins to explain quite a lot. The scene unfolds and Wendy knocks Jack unconscious and drags him into the walk-in freezer. A short while later one of the “ghosts” unlocks the freezer. Again, something has shifted. We, in our ghostly form within the film, have become corporeal, able to do things like open freezers so that the “horror story” can continue towards its climax. What Kubrick is commenting on directly here is the aggressive bloodlust that drives audiences into theaters to see “horror” films. Our concealed sadism wants to be satisfied and Kubrick wants to draw that out and capture it in the act, so to speak, in order to show us what lies beneath this particular form of distraction.

What is it, finally, that we are so intent on avoiding? If my own experience is any guide, beneath our distractions we can usually locate an amorphous unease, an undefined feeling of lack. As I’ve noted before in this column, writers like the historian David Loy view this feeling of lack as a major player in the course of history, appearing as the Original Sin of traditional Christian cultures, the alienation cited by Marxists, and the dukkha or “suffering” described by Buddhists as our fundamental challenge. If I resist the impulse to disengage via my characteristic distractions and instead allow my attention to settle down, I often discover that this feeling takes somatic form in some specific part of my body. If I rest there long enough a shift happens, the sense of lack opening out into a kind of quiet but expansive feeling of joy. What had been a source of visceral fear, a dark ground common to jealousy, hatred, greed – all the contracted states that reach up and seize us in the course of daily life – now becomes a portal to a vibrant immediacy.

full_metal_jacket I think again of Full Metal Jacket, which examines the process by which a human being is transformed into an agent of destruction. The film is loosely based on the book by Gustave Hasford, but as usual, Kubrick has taken the script in unexpected directions. The first half of the film is devoted to the institutional sadism of Marine Corps training, complete with an Oedipal murder and suicide. In the film’s second half we find ourselves in Vietnam on the eve of the Tet offensive. Mathew Modine’s Joker, who has secured a cushy job with the press office, finds himself on the frontlines with a platoon that is gradually reduced as it battles to regain lost territory from the Vietcong. Like the Marines in the Brittany Spears lip synch, these characters do not come off as deluded in any special way. Kubrick has gone to great lengths to establish their humdrum humanity. They find themselves in Vietnam for a complex of reasons (including the draft), many of them economic, as do the Marines in the Rein Corps video forty years later.

The film closes on an extended sequence in which Joker’s platoon gets pinned down in a warehouse district by sniper fire. As man after man gets picked off, it becomes clear that Kubrick has crafted this sequence to incite our aggression toward the unseen sniper. After losing several soldiers, Joker and a marine named Animal-Mother gain entry to the building and discover that the sniper is, in fact, a Vietnamese girl. Wounded, chased to ground, the girl lies on her back, plaintive, utterly vulnerable. The shot is eerie, intimate, and almost unbearably sad, the two Americans gazing down as the girl writhes in pain, begging for death. Our galloping aggression has suddenly been met by an equally powerful, equally primal compassion, and the resulting dissonance is what completes the “full metal jacket,” our slippage past any possible structure of stable, coherent values, any mental construct that distracts us from the full vulnerability of the immediate moment. Kubrick then cuts to a shot of the surviving marines marching through the night across the rubble that once was a city singing, in unison, the Mickey Mouse Club song. The rubble the Marines march across is the final ruin of Western culture, that elaborate cityscape of intricately justified distractions and evasions keeping dark oceans of lack at bay. The ruins are the work of a freedom long denied and pushed away, as implacable as the blankness of the supply base of the 266 Rein Division. With Kubrick, we have gotten more than we bargained for, those of us who are so accustomed to using our values as the basis for distraction.

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September 3, 2010

Citizens Koch

The Face Outside the Window
by Guy Zimmerman

It’s hard to know what to say about Charles Koch after reading Jane Mayer’s astonishing expose in the August 30th issue of The New Yorker. American politics have been running hot for decades; finally we can name the source of the fever. Together with his brother David, Charles Koch owns Koch Industries, the second largest private company in the US; only Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are thought to be wealthier. In a remarkably narcissistic and anti-democratic act, the Koch boys long ago anointed themselves the heroic duo who would “rip government out by the roots.” In the grip of this wayward intention, they have, for the past four decades, pumped billions of dollars worth of high-grade hatred into the bloodstream of American politics. From the PR campaigns against Jimmy Carter in the 1970s to the anti-Clinton crusades of the 90s, to the faux populism of today’s Tea Party, the Kochs have pushed the envelope on right wing propaganda while their corporation rakes in mega bucks on the progressive policies they have thwarted.

Until the New Yorker article the Kochs accomplished all this from the shadows via front groups with deceptive names like the “Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE)” and “Americans for Prosperity.” Now that they have been revealed, hissing, serpent-like, behind the drapes, it’s worth pondering what it is, finally, that has gotten them so pissed off. Forget about David, who plays the submissive role in the relationship; it’s Charles who emerges as a poster child for the neurosis of the Protestant male in its aggressive, active mode, a cartoon version of daddy Warbucks villainy, a caricature of the malignant oligarch in full bloom.

Feeling compassion for a man like Charles is challenging when you consider what his actions have done to working Americans…or why the nation is slipping from the first world to the second…or why our roads are pitted, our health care a global joke and our prisons over-crowded. Given the grandiosity and malice that have animated Charles’ mindless assault on our collective well-being, it’s hard to draw close enough to see clearly what exactly is being acted out. But only by drawing close will we see a way to ease the pointless suffering in the situation, Charles’ as well as everyone else’s.

When the wealthy embrace the principle of weak government there’s the obvious motive of greed, government being that which, via taxation and regulation, impinges on the pure sovereignty of wealth. Rich libertarians are simply feathering their already well-feathered nests when they espouse such “ideals.” In the case of the Kochs, Jane Mayer does a good job showing how their libertarian advocacy dovetails neatly with their financial interests. As one of the top ten US polluters, for instance, Koch Industries benefits directly from the fake controversy Charles Koch has rustled up concerning global warming. Mayer cites other flagrant examples, such as one Koch lobbyist making the ridiculous claim that air pollution reduces the risk of skin cancer by obscuring sunlight. She also cites how the Koch brothers, shortly after contributing twenty-five million to the American Cancer Society, began lobbying hard to prevent formaldehyde being named a carcinogen. She points out that Koch Industries had just become the nation’s largest formaldehyde producer, and stood to gain much more than twenty-five million if regulation could be derailed.

But to point out the transparent fallacy of libertarianism as a political “philosophy” is actually to fall into a tar baby trap. Libertarianism is not a coherent political theory at all – it is a tantrum masquerading as a political theory. Like all tantrums, its true intention is simply to generate opposition. Why the great need for opposition? Once again, David Loy provides an answer:

“… since the sense-of-self is a psychosocial construct, it is ungrounded and ungroundable—hence always insecure. The self is inherently anxious because it is not a “thing” that could ever be secure. We identify with things that (we think) might provide the grounding or reality we crave: money, material possessions, reputation, power, physical attractiveness, etc. This means that if, for example, a preoccupation with making money is my way to become more real, then no matter how much money I may accumulate, it will never be enough.” –Self Transformation, Social Tranformation, Tikkun Magazine

Afflicted by the groundlessness Loy describes, the libertarian strikes out aggressively at the dominant value system, generating a response that seems to provide, albeit in a negative way, a firm foundation for his existence.

Reading Mayer we learn that the Koch’s father, who was among founders of the John Birch Society in the 1950s, made his fortune building oil refineries for Joseph Stalin. The Koch patriarch was harsh with his boys, traumatizing them in the classic authoritarian manner. One way to view the Koch trajectory is that Charles has devoted his adult life to exporting the pain of this emotional abuse on the rest of us rather than experiencing it himself. The anger at the father is split off and projected outward onto “government” that can be campaigned against. And victory is not really the point of the campaign because with victory would come the realization that this Other was just a stand-in for a battle long since lost: the pain waits in the wake of every triumph and the conflict begins anew with ever-higher stakes.

But mixed in with the self-exonerating contempt wealthy men like Koch seem to feel for those less fortunate, one detects an odd element of resentment. In extreme cases this resentment manifests, bizarrely, as a form of envy. To understand what might be at work here, let’s zoom in on a specific imagined event. Let’s imagine Charles Koch being driven through downtown Wichita toward whatever moated sanctuary provides his head with a pillow for the night…and let’s imagine at a stoplight Charles glances out through the tinted glass…and catches the eye of a homeless veteran begging with his cardboard sign. It’s easy to understand why that glance that might trigger in Charles’ heart feelings of disgust, annoyance, contempt, even guilt…but envy?

Perhaps the answer to this riddle lies in the different ways these two men relate to the experience of our common mortality. After all, there will come a time, in the dead of a night not so far from now perhaps, when death steals in through Charles’ bedroom window and makes a bee-line for that delicate, beating heart. There will be no bargaining then. Money will have no currency. And though that night has not yet arrived, Charles’ sleep is troubled already by the dark mystery of his inevitable death much as the vet’s sleep is troubled by the idea of dying. It’s not hard to imagine Charles lying sleepless disturbed by the realization that there will be no difference, finally, between the death of Charles Koch and the death of his newfound acquaintance crouching in his plywood shelter.

The insidious aspect of wealth is how it supplies an ability to arrange things in a way that encourages the delusions of the self. To a narcissistic personality this ability to arrange things seems to imply a control that he does not have, and can never have. When such a man encounters the “less fortunate” he discovers, in the moment, that the story of wealth is just that: a story. Having money does not, in the end, address the feeling of lack that we all hope it might address. As Loy points out, the homeless man on his street feels himself to be, in the moment, as “real,” as Charles does looking out his window. The vet is, if anything, more likely to be reconciled already to his own vulnerability such that he experience his life with some amount of presence. And this is why it’s not hard to imagine Charles looking out and feeling something like envy toward the vet…and being bewildered, scandalized even, by this feeling of envy.

If visualizing a homeless man introduces distracting issues for you, feel free to substitute any working American into the above scenario. The point is that the problem with wealth, adorned as it is with false promises, is how it can seduce us away from our true humanity…sometimes so far away there is no path back. Then we must confront our death alienated from our fellow man and feeling as though we have not been truly alive. This knowledge may be buried deep at the level of dreams, but it consumes our hearts with bitterness and regret. Spiritual leaders have understood this quite clearly. Remember, for example, Jesus’ famous dictum that it’s easier to “pass a camel through the eye of the needle” than to bring a rich man into heaven. Such statements point to how corrupting wealth can be when it is allowed to fuel the delusions of the self.

On one level, the levers of power must be removed from the hands of Charles Koch, and men like him, as quickly as possible. The power wealth gives these deluded souls will only add to the sum of human suffering, theirs included. But accomplishing this task will be easier when the curtains around Charles’ little Oz machine have been pulled aside. Then we will recognize how his affliction is just an amped up version of our own struggles with delusion, malice and longing…and we can move on and devote our common energies to the very real problems that confront us.

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