Sperm Count: Fertishistic Objectification

photo of jockstrap by Jacklee

Fetishistic objectification is a term used by some psychoanalysts to refer to receiving stimulation from a part of the anatomy or the lingerie that is used to cover it. So for instance when you talk about a man’s package or a woman’s rack you're indulging in a form of fetishistic objectification. It’s a little like an erotic form of synecdoche, the figure of speech which refers to taking the part for the whole. For instance, fifty head for cattle, the White House for the presidency, the law for the police are all examples of synecdoche. Synecdoche, New York was also the name of a Charlie Kaufman movie which starred the late Philip Seymour Hoffman and which employs another kind of fetishizing that occurs when you attempt to make art out of life or vice versa. But this erotic form of synecdoche also occurs in the sex act itself. We refer to getting laid rather than making love and then there are the varying kinds of foreplay, fellatio, cunnilingus, analingus which all seem to thingify sex. When you talk about getting or giving a blow job, about fucking or getting fucked you are attempting to create an illusion that sexuality is devoid of emotion. It’s just another act like say brushing one’s teeth or masticating a piece of meat. The fact is that butt fucking someone is an activity that is laden with emotion. Without the emotion, the act would be so denuded of significance as to be lacking in stimulation. The same is true about sucking a penis. It's a statement. It’s fun and exciting to suck or be sucked for that matter, but under normal circumstances most people don’t want a large object inserted into their mouths, unless that object has meaning for them.

Synecdoche, New York Revisited

In Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008), Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a character who is suffering from a number of symptoms, but it soon becomes apparent that the real culprit is existence. Caden Cotard (Hoffman’s character) is dying of life, as we all do. It’s appropriate that Caden is a theater director whose gesamtkunstwerk is an autobiographical piece of performance art because by definition what we his audience all strive for is, at least, the illusion that we're in control of our destinies. And what is life according to Charlie Kaufman? Perhaps no movie has ever envisioned the protoplasm of being in a more poetic way that also rings true. Life is a fungible currency which is  constantly trading. It also resembles a labile dream in which people suffer the neurological conditions of either Capgras syndrome (in which an imposter seems to occupy a recognizable face) or prosopagnosia (in which the ability to recognize face is totally lost). Finally it also resembles the ephemeral stage set Caden is building whose fragile layers comprise a tower of aspiration leading to nowhere, a tower of Babel in which all the inhabitants are locked in themselves and where, lacking a common language, no one effectively communicates with anyone else. Lovers become strangers and strangers turn into lovers. And all the while the director and his proxies wander from room to room, with part of the movie also devoted to Caden’s search for the child who had been snatched away by an estranged wife. Lewis Thomas wrote a classic called Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. In biology the cell is the basic unit of organic matter whose DNA and RNA can tell you everything you want to know about a living organism. In Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman creates the imaginative equivalent of a basic component of human life, fragile, ever changing in shape, elusive and contradictory in its instinct both for creation and extinction.

A Most Wanted Man

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance in Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man begs the question of how many cigarettes a spy can smoke and also how many drinks he can imbibe and still see straight. Spying is a form of perceiving and if your mind is clouded how are you supposed to pick up the clues you are looking for? Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt was plagued by the same problem of depicting a ponderous character carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. in Hannah Arendt the struggles of the title character, the author of the highly controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, were always depicted by shoving a cigarette in her mouth. The props, in this case the cigarette or bottle that is always being reached for, drown out the nuances of a character who sardonically describes his mission as making "the world a better place.” A Most Wanted Man is adapted from the John Le Carre novel and it’s almost impossible to parse the numerous moral dilemmas that the movie poses amidst the fog of smoke. Suffice it to say that the  conflict between fathers and sons, the murky line between victims and perpetrators and the question of means justifying ends all constitute the promising if unfulfilled palette of the film’s concerns. And it’s hard to tell whether to blame the novelist or the screenwriter (Andrew Bovell) for lines like this: “we are fighting the radical offcuts of a nation called Islam. You have crossed the line. You are on their side now.” The Hamburg of the movie is a cesspool. Hoffman meets his informants in bars where the customers pass out on tables. But on the other hand it’s as if ISIS had already taken over. Though the port is renowned for vice, there isn’t a sign of sex anywhere. From the beginning one has the feeling that the director was trying to create a city of shadows in the way Carol Reed did with Vienna in The Third Man and there are moments when Hoffman’s portrayal of overweight spymaster, Gunther, recalls Orson Welles’s tormented Harry Lime. But the phony German accents that Hoffman, William Dafoe and Rachel McAdams all sport fracture the gloom.