One-Dimensional Man?

There is a wonderful description of Michel Houellebecq in Anthony Daniels’ New Criterion essay (“France’s ‘Submission,’” February 2015).  Firstly here is Daniels on the writer’s credo: “Houellebecq is a writer with a single underlying theme: the emptiness of human existence in a consumer society devoid of religious belief, political project, or cultural continuity in which, moreover, thanks to material abundance and social security, there is no real struggle for existence that might give meaning to the life of millions.” Put another away Houellecbecq might be seen as the Zola of his generation. He is a determinist who disparages enlightenment notions which only detract from the tragedy of the inevitable. One might say that the anti-Christs in Houellebecq are the inveterate optimists, for instance 60’s utopians, who believe in the notion of human freedom. They remain paradoxically unenlightened enough not to realize the extent to which, like a stampeding mob, they trample on the needs of others as they seek to achieve their own private nirvanas. Daniels' essay comes on the heels of the publication of Houellebecq’s latest novel in which as Daniels states “a Muslim is elected President of France.” Houellebecq had at one point been charged in France when he publically stated Islam is "the most stupid religion” (“Calling Islam stupid lands author in court,” The Guardian, 9/17/02) Uncannily, his latest novel was released on January 7, the day of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.  But here is Daniels' description of the author: “Houellebecq’s physical appearance as relayed in the press suggests that  he fully inhabits the world he describes. He looks like a man who has crawled out of a giant ashtray after a prolonged alcoholic binge in clothes that have not been washed for weeks.”  Houellebecq would shudder but there is a comparison to be made between him and Herbert Marcuse, the Frankfurt school Berkeley philosopher who coined the term “repressive desublimation” in his famous tome One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. The two have different agendas, but they might offer the same diagnosis about dark side of pleasure seeking. Houllebecq is now a film star too. He appears in The Kidnapping of Michel Houllebecq which just opened at Film Forum.

The Tummy Tuck

There’s an infomercial for the Tummy Tuck that has been occurring on a channel called Cozy TV which specializes in reruns of old television series like Magnum P.I. . The infomercial occurs after shows like Magnum go off the air and offers the prospect of a flattened stomach without diet or exercise. The infomercial should be commended for its naturalism. It doesn’t use the kind of perfect looking actors who are common on advertisements say for an all-inclusive resort like Sandals. These actors are even more true-to-life and less appealing than the older couples who appear in the ads that tout PDE5 inhibitors so you can be ready in the unlikely event the right moment comes. No this universe is nothing like the charmed world of aging models who are used in the commercials for Medicare Part B coverage. The Tummy Tuck commercials give you the real America, the people you see wheeling shopping carts full of junk food down the aisles of BJ’s, the people with large rolls of hanging fat. The Tummy Tuck magically transforms them, but they are no more appealing with the rolls of fat gone. They’re imperfect creatures who have led hard lives. In this sense the experience of seeing the infomercials for the Tummy Tuck is a little like reading  a Zola novel like Germinal, dealing with the tough life of the miners in l9th century France. The only other referent for the enervating experience of watching the Tummy Tuck infomercial night after night is the experience of watching Jerry Lewis doing his annual Labor Day MDA telethon which started in l966 and ran until 2010. It would be interesting to do a survey and find out how many of the actors in the infomercial watched Jerry Lewis telethons for the MDA when they were growing up.

Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq is our contemporary Zola. He’s a determinist for whom the notion of human freedom is an oxymoron. The Elementary Particles is perhaps his most well-known work to American audiences though his most recent novel The Map and the Territory won the Prix Goncourt in 2010. The Elementary Particles uses the ideological windmill chasing of the sixties, with its cults of sexual liberation, as its petrie dish. The two half brothers, who are the protagonists of the novel, are the progeny of a hipster mother, who has abandoned her role as a parent in her quest for enlightenment. It appears that there’s an autobiographical element in The Elementary Particles. Houellebecq’s mother abandoned him in reality and one of the brothers in the novel is named Michel and has moved to Ireland (as Houellebecq did). In his review/essay, "Off the Map,” (The New Yorker, 1/23/12), James Wood remarks “Houellebecq’s men are unattractive, unsociable, frigid, sexually unconfident, physically underequipped, erotically bored (or some combination of these negatives); they are panhandlers in the sexual souk, and spend much of their time trying to grab what wares they can, by way of porn, prostitutes, or swingers’ clubs.” Houellebecq is a vivisectionist like Zola. Remember Zola himself described the Rougon-Macquart novels as “the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire.” Sex is the lingua franca of the Houellebecq novel, but the perversity is only a symptom of a more profound pathology. As Wood says about Houellebecq, “Essentially, he argues that contemporary sexuality, though it sails under the colors of liberation and left-ish utopia, is just a continuation of the capitalist, neoliberal market, in which there are always winners and losers.”

House of Pleasures

Emile Zola is alive and well in the Paris of Bertrand Bonello’s House of  Pleasures, an almost clinical study of a turn of turn of the century brothel called L’Apollonide. The film employs jazzy cinematic tricks such as replaying a previously shown sequence in medias res. It’s one of a number of techniques which create several degrees of separation from pure naturalism. The cinema verite of Battle of Algiers could have been one way to deal with the subject, but it’s definitely not the approach here. Rather what we have is a lot pyrotechnics in the service of a didactic message that actually would have been better told in documentary style. There is the Jewess whose mouth is slit by a sadistic patron and who because of her disfigurement becomes known as “la femme qui rit”, “the woman  who smiles.” Another courtesan, Julie, is disfigured by the syphilitic canker sores which cover her face. One of the prostitutes weeps as she reads a scientific tract called Anthropmetric Study of Prostitutes and Thieves, given to her by a client, arguing that prostitutes have smaller heads which therefore contain less brain matter. The extravagant set piece in which the girls live is contrasted to the harsh lives that is microscopically observed from the start. They live in a state of perpetual debt to the madam that can never be paid off and the rituals of abuse, cleansing and routine inspection by an unkindly doctor are all acutely scrutinized by the camera. It should be mentioned that time is a sub theme, though it’s something that is relatively undeveloped. We are at the “twilight” of the nineteenth century as the film begins and at the “dawn” of the twentieth at another moment. And then with a rock score in the background we view street walkers in present day Paris. The world’s oldest profession indeed, but Nicholas Kristof’s Times columns about sex trafficking are ultimately a far more direct and effective jeremiad than the studied confusion of Bonello’s film.

Paris Journal: Cezanne and Paris

The Cezanne and Paris show at the Musee du Luxembourg is dramatic and simple in many ways. Cezanne was a good friend of Zola’s and was urged to come to Paris by the writer. The show documents the potent influence of Zola’s realism on the nascent imagination of a great master whose work would eventually go beyond realism and even impressionism. When we speak of post-impressionism we can't but think of Cezanne so it’s dramatic to see paintings like  “Les Toits de Paris” (1881-2) with a classic and almost iconic view of the Paris skyline counterposed to a painting  like “L’Eternel Feminin ou Le Veau d’or” (1877) with its break from classic perspective. Hitchcock made cameo appearances in his films and here you can see Cezanne’s bald pate amongst the gallery gazing on the lusty ideal of femininity that the artist portrays. Naturally since it’s a Cezanne show there are plenty of apples and portraits too-- those of  his wife and his famed dealer Vollard, for example. The antimonies of figuration and abstraction are also juxtaposed with those of urbanism and nature. The artistic world of Paris obviously had its allure for Cezanne, but the conclusion one must make on viewing a show explicitly centered on Cezanne’s relation to Paris was that the artist found his real home artistically and spiritually in the rural world of the provinces, in particular Provence.

Buried Alive

It turns out that Nagg and Nell, the elderly couple buried up to their necks in ash cans in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, were not inventions at all. As it happens, they are alive (barely) and unwell in Chicago, as the Times recently reported in its National Briefing section (“Couple Found Buried in Debris at Home,” NYT, 5/25/10). However surreal-sounding, the pair’s condition does not seem all that improbable if you’ve ever known people who’ve occupied the same residence for many years and suffer from the inability to throw things away. The DSM, the famed diagnostic manual of the psychiatric profession, provides terms that describe all types of abnormalities. For instance, people who can’t write suffer from dysgraphia; for people who can’t identify objects, it’s agnosia; and for those who can’t enjoy themselves, the diagnosis is anhedonia, etc. Although there is no rubric in the psychiatric manuals under which the inability to jettison junk seems to fall, the case of the South Side couple mired in “piles of food waste and trash” may throw some light on the genesis of Beckett’s imaginative concept. Like Godot, Endgame (Fin de partie in the original French) has been the subject of much interpretation by scholars—beginning, of course, with the chess reference of the title. But few scholars have underlined the realistic roots of the play, roots that situate this work closer to the naturalism of writers like Zola than the absurdist, existential comedies of the dramatists with whom Beckett is often associated. The recent discovery of these true-fiction Beckettian characters illustrates that Endgame is best understood as a jeremiad about what happens when elderly couples fail to throw things away.