Xuetong's Prince

Yan Xuetong, a professor of political science at Tsinghua University recently wrote an Op Ed piece in The Times entitled “How China Can Defeat America." Mr. Xuetong is also the author of a book entitled Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power. One can be sure his Op Ed piece was studied by our own intelligence services as Mr. Xuetong is uniquely qualified to talk about power in a mysterious country that maintains two parallel systems: one a competitive market economy and the other a dictatorship of the proletariat as represented by the continued importance of the Communist Party. Xuetong begins his piece by saying that though he is often considered a hawk, he is "a political realist." He goes on to point out that “realism does not mean that politicians should be concerned only with military and economic might.” Xuetong cites “the ancient Chinese philosopher Xunzi" who described “three types of leadership: humane authority, hegemony and tyranny.” Essentially Mr. Xuetong has written a 21st Century version of Machiavelli’s The Prince that is a benign prescription for Chinese dominance. “Humane authority,” Mr. Xuetong avers, “begins by creating a desirable model at home that inspires people abroad.” He goes on to conclude, “thus the core of the competition between China and the United States will be to see who has more high-quality friends. And in order to achieve that goal, China has to provide higher-quality moral leadership than the United States.” In The Man in the High Castle Philip K. Dick imagines a parallel universe where Japan (along with is fascist allies) wins the Second World War. The implication of the book is that Japan wins by military might. How would Dick describe the triumph that Xuetong envisions? How would the economic juggernaut that is modern China assert its moral superiority? Confucius say, country with population well over billion have many mouths to feed.

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.

Submission

Masochism, a self destructive impulse in which one derives pleasure from self-destructive, painful or self-abnegating impulses,should not be confused with submission. Submission, in the service of taming a raging ego, is one of the highest spiritual goals. For instance in martial arts, advanced students tend to demonstrate a higher level of humility than lower belts. There are exceptions but the greater the fighter the less the tendency to braggadocio and exhibitionism. Bruce Lee believed in economy of motion. He didn’t need to show off  his technique, to mix it up with opponents to win. Great martial artists submit to a creed, to a way of the warrior like Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The problem of submission, of course, for those who don’t study something like karate or jiu jitsu, is who or what to submit to. Self proclaimed prophets are like the pied piper. Demagogues and tyrants can be charismatic, yet this kind of submission—which involves being a supernumerary to a fascist—is surely not the effective way to go. What is one left with? God, the Buddha, the dictatorship of the proletariat? Faith, by definition, is predicated on uncertainty. The further from materialization the ideal is, the more difficult it is to find, the more literal and instantiated, the more labile. People tend to disappoint as ego deflating ego ideals. Those who search for deflation are caught between a rock and a hard place.

Sleeping Beauty

Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty is a 21^st Century Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai  du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Chantal Akermann’s l975 work, which dealt with the quotidian existence of a prostitute, could be called feminist in the same way that Leigh’s work is—both films turn the female body into a commodity. The fact that Jane Campion the director of The Piano is the producer of Sleeping Beauty would seem to be significant, though the hierarchical universe Leigh’s movie portrays is a far darker view of the existence of at least one woman. There are also shades of Salo, The Story of O, and Genet’s The Balcony at work in the movie. The story takes a university student named Lucy (Emily Browning) from her stultifying existence doing office work, waitressing and offering her body up for scientific experiments to a chateau where she is the subject of another set of experiments or shall we say examinations by a succession of aging men who don’t really need to be told that penetration is forbidden since most if not all are incapable of the act. There are many levels to Leigh’s first feature and many of the set pieces are rich from the point of view of iconography. In his essay on On Racine Roland Barthes deals with the significance of the varying chambers in which the tragedies evolve and here the lush chamber in which Lucy’s self consciously pre-Raphaelite form rests in a drugged stupor allows for a mini disquisition on colonialism, for these impotent old men are definitely representations of a dying order. There’s also a perverse allusion to the crypt in which Juliet lies in the Shakespeare tragedy. The layering of meanings allows the director  to go beyond the limitations of a simple feminist diatribe. Lucy, for instance, moves into a glass tower where none of the windows are covered and everything is revealed while her life as a prostitute is totally shuddered in hiding and secrets. In this version of the myth, by the way, our princess wakes from her sleep screaming. It is interesting to note that another woman director, Catherine Breillat, has recently also offered up her version of Sleeping Beauty.

Park Ave S&M Mag Ring Exposed!

Undercover investigators have discovered a ring aimed at placing highly graphic sadomasochistic pornography in the practices of prominent Park Avenue internists. Informed sources within the office of the Manhattan DA have reported highly detailed blueprints showing how magazines like People in Stocks, Anus Mirabilis and The Scarlet Letter would be added to the worn piles of innocuous weeklies and monthlies like The New Yorker, Time, The Atlantic and Smithsonian which generally appeal to affluent patients. It is uncertain what the purpose of the ring was, but there has been speculation that it might be part of the disruptive activities engineered by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Others have speculated that the plans might have emanated from a totally opposite side of the political spectrum, for example Tea Party organizers hoping to foment a tide of revulsion which could adversely affect First Amendment rights. The plan to place the magazines in the doctors’ offices is regarded as a civil rights violation as well as a terrorist act to the extent that the images in question could cause immediate harm and even death in certain cases. The investigation which has been going on for years has resulted in the arrests of ten suspects who have been charged with conspiracy to provoke  under a number of statutes in the Homeland Security Act. The ten suspects who have already been water boarded, arraigned and released on bail could face lengthy prison terms if convicted.

Lana Peters

The final line of Douglas Martin’s Times obituary of Stalin’s daughter, Lana Peters (“Lana Peters,Stalin’s Daughter, Dies at 85,” NYT, 11/28/11), is a quote from an interview she gave to the Wisconsin State Journal in 2010. “I will always be a political prisoner of my father’s name,” she said.  Usually fiction can take more liberties than non-fiction. But even Dickens with his vast sense of fate and destiny could unlikely have produced the dramatic story that the Times obit tells. History is not just a player in this tale. It is the stage on which it’s set and the turns of fortune are extreme. Born Svetlana Stalina, Americans might remember Stalin’s daughter from two books she published about her life in l969 (Only One Year) and l984 (Faraway Music) under the name of Svetlana Alliluyeva (Alliluyeva was her mother’s last name). In a sense she embodied the paradoxes of Soviet Communism, a dictatorship of the proletariat that produced  its own aristocracy. As Stalin’s purges raged on, proving that power is conservative, self-perpetuating and hardly geared toward the betterment of mankind, Stalin’s daughter, who changed her name to Lana Peters after marrying an American, lived the life of the poor little rich girl. Ironically what happened to her mirrored the fate of the banished  Romanovs who went from enjoying the extravagance of hereditary nobility to that of being dispossessed of all power and slaughtered. The psychoanalyst Leonard Shengold’s book Soul Murder, describes the effect of traumatic childhood experience on a number of great writers including Chekhov. According to Martin’s Times obit there had been  a plan by the KGB to assassinate the once in a future defector, but while Svetllana Alliluyeva aka Lana Peters was never murdered, it’s apparent that her soul was. “He broke my life,”  Martin quotes Peters as telling the same newspaper from the state where she’d died “after decades of obscurity, wandering and poverty.” “ I want to explain to you. He broke my life.”

The Avengers

The Times quoted Paul McMullan former deputy features editor of Rupert Murdoch’s now defunct News  of the World as telling “a judicial inquiry” that “Phone hacking is a perfectly acceptable tool, given the sacrifices we make, if all we’re trying to do is to get to the truth.” The Times (“British Inquiry Is Told Hacking Is Worthy Tool," NYT, 11/29/11)  quoted McMullan going on to ask if “we really want  to live in a world where the only people who can do the hacking are MI5 and MI6.” And McMullan put the icing on the cake when he commented, “For a brief period of about 30 years, we have actually lived in a free society where we can hack back.” If what the Times described as McMullan’s "jaw-droppingly brazen remarks" seemed beyond the pale, they make sense if you consider him as a character in a forthcoming Thames Television series modeled on The Avengers. You remember that Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg starred in that highly popular sci fi and fantasy show back in the 60’s. Well, we can’t be sure until we have hacked into Rupert Murdoch’s private phone, but who knows? Perhaps all the wild antics McMullan describes which included spending “two weeks locked in a hotel room with Princess Diana’s gym instructor” were inspired by The Avengers. Speaking of  Princess Diana, car chases were all the rage until tragedy struck. “I absolutely loved giving chase to celebrities,” McMullan said. “How many jobs can you have car chases in? Before Diana died, it was such good fun.” McMullen could easily take over the role played by Macnee and how about his comely former superior Rebekah Brooks as Emma Peel? And what will these twenty-first century Avengers  avenge? Of course the fact that only enforcement officials get to spy. As we all know, fantasy sells.