Pornosophy: What Happens When You Fall in Love With Yourself?

“Narcissus” by Caravaggio

Have you ever looked in the mirror and got turned on by the sight of yourself naked? Come on. You can be honest. We’re only as sick as our secrets. But the fact is if your answer is yes then you need help. You’re a real sickie. It’s nice to be aware that the sight of your body may turn others on and it’s part of the reality principle when you realize that it’s time to turn down the lights, when the veins, little rolls of cellulite and wrinkles start to impinge on your once youthful frame. But if you move from the stage where you look at yourself feeling “that's not bad" to the point where you actually find yourself jerking off to the thought of your own naked body, then you have to see a therapist. In The Art of Loving Erich Fromm pointed out that you have to love yourself before you can love someone else. But he wasn’t talking about physical love. When you get the hots for yourself then it’s time to get help--since it’s going to make it hard to get interested in others. Self-involvement is probably not listed as a disorder in the DSM-5 and there probably are not enough people who display this physicalized form of self-interest for the syndrome to be recognized as a recognized pathology, whose treatment would be covered by insurance. Still it’s not something that should be left untreated since lusting after the self, as has been noted in the case of Narcissus, can lead to extreme behavior. Remember? The famous mythological character drowned when he fell for his own image in a pond.

The Berenstain Bears Have a Nervous Breakdown

Remember The Berenstain Bears series that once delighted or may still continue to delight your children or grandchildren. The Berenstains are the Emily Posts of early childhood with titles like The Berenstain Bears Learn About Strangers, The  Berenstain Bears Show Some Respect, The Berenstain Bears and Too Much TV, The Berenstain Bears Get In a Fight, The Berenstain Bears and a New Baby, The Berenstain Bears Go to School, The Berenstain Bears’ Bedtime Battle and The Berenstain Bears Forget Their Manners. But we live in a tell all culture where childhood is no longer an innocent place. It never was, of course, according to Freud whose concept of childhood sexuality still continues to perplex, irritate and enrage those who believe that man’s fall occurs  after puberty. These Berenstain Bears volumes are mild jeremiads meant to protect our little ones from the potholes of early development and it’s surprising there isn’t The Berenstain Bears Stick Their Finger in a Wall Socket or The Berenstain Bears Stick Their Knife in the Toaster (with a cover illustration of a Berenstain Bear getting electrocuted). But what if we let all the talk about equality titrate down to the little ones? What if we included them in the conversation by producing volumes like The Berenstain Bears Deal With Suicidal Ideation (cover illustration showing a bear standing on the ledge of a window that has no protective bars) or The Berenstain Bears Have a Nervous Breakdown (which shows that not very farflung notion of a Berenstain Bear receiving an SSRI and then trying to jump off the same window ledge). Or how about getting down and dirty with The Berenstain Bears Face the Realities of Erectile Dysfunction (who says you can’t teach pre-pubescent bears about Viagra), The Berenstain Bears and Menopause and The Berenstain Bears Read Up on BPH (benign prostatic hypertrophy) under the theory that it’s never to early to think about anything.

A War of the Worlds

"Mars Show Signs of Having Flowing Water, Possible Niches for Life, NASA, Says” was the headline (NYT, 9/29/15) On October 30, l938, Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre on the Air presented an adaptation of H.G. Welles' The War of the Worlds. It was a Halloween Hoax in the form of a series of fabricated news alerts warning that the Martians were coming. Welles apparently was so successful in willingly suspending the disbelief of his audience that he caused panic in the streets.  You may remember a movie directed by Elia Kazan entitled Panic in the Streets and starring Richard Widmark and Paul Douglas as a public health official and police captain trying to avert an epidemic. The latest announcement from NASA created little panic. There was some concern expressed in a subsequent Times editorial (“A Catch-22 for Mars,” NYT, 9/29/15) about the prospect of contamination. But the generalized glee over the finding barely concealed its imperialist motivations. If Mars is suitable to life, it's a prime piece of nearby celestial real estate. A previous Times story “Two Promising Places to Live, 1200 Light-Years From Earth,” (NYT 4/18/13) described a pair of planets orbiting a star, Kepler 62, “in the 'Goldilocks' zone of lukewarm temperatures suitable for liquid water, the crucial ingredient for Life as We Know It.” But Mars is a helluva a lot closer and within the the realm of our capacity to reach. No wormholes are required to get there. In fact, the Soyuz capsule which just brought astronaut Scott Kelly and two Russian cosmonauts, Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka, to the International Space Station, where they will set a record by remaining for a year, anticipates conditions that astronauts will have to face on a long voyage to Mars. However, it’s remarkable, that in spite of the Copernican revolution we still are so earth centered that we're only concerned about what we could do to the planet either from a destructive (contamination) or constructive (condos) point of view. Couldn’t water be a sign that there are superior beings on Mars, a race of wraiths who have simply left their water running? “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” was a famous Twilight Zone that showed the paranoia deriving from the power of suggestion. Could we be taking a lackadaisical attitude to the discovery of water? What if these invisible Martians have their own space program with one of its objects being the subjugation of the earth. There was another famous Twilight Zone where the aliens possess a seemingly benign manifesto, "To Serve Man", which turns out to be a cookbook. What if these invisible Martians become the ISIS of tomorrow? What in fact if they’re a branch of ISIS? Imagine ISM, the Islamic State on Mars, conquering the planet. In fact, isn’t a war of the worlds, what the current conflict with Islamic militants is all about?

General Della Rovere

Roberto Rossellini’s General Della Rovere (1959), which was recently revived as a part of Vittorio De Sica retrospective, currently playing at Film Forum, is a chance to see the great Italian director (Bicycle Thieves, 1948, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, 1970), act. The role would be a plum for any thespian due it’s marvelous conceit. De Sica plays the part of Vittorio Emanuele Bardone, a fraudster who exploits the misery of occupied Italy and in particular those whose relatives have been imprisoned by the Nazis. Bardone gets caught up short by his fascist counterpart, a savvy S.S. colonel named Muller (Hannes Messemer) who outdoes him at his own game. The mixture of rivalry and admiration that forms the basis of the relationship between Muller and Bardone is reminiscent of that between von Rauffenstein (Eric von Stroheim) and de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) in Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion (l937). General Della Rovere is based on a novel that apparently had some basis in fact, but there’s a disconnect. The  contrived theatrical quality which sets the stage for De Sica’s tour de force is almost at odds with Rossellini’s stark neo-realism. It’s as if  the intrinsic melodrama of the narrative were being mollified by the director’s signature style. An unforgettable scene where resistance fighters hover in a snowy piazza recalls the gritty Rossellini masterpiece Rome, Open City (1948). But then there are also the shots of the prison with its futuristic lines of black cell doors complemented by a soaring interior whose Beaux Arts style is as duplicitously high-minded as the film’s final con--where Bardone impersonates the title character. Has Bardone finally undergone a conversion and become a hero? You might admire  De Sica’s acting, but it’s hard to believe the figure Rossellini creates has finally seen the light.

What Do Camelot and Hell Have in Common?

Camelot was the court of King Arthur, but it also was term given to the Kennedy White House. The knights in shining armor were of course Jack, Bobby and Teddy and there were a cast of characters that included the Harvard professor, Arthur Schlesinger who might be equivalent of Merlin, the press secretary Pierre Salinger, the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara with his signature rimless glasses and off-center part and advisors like Ted Sorensen. But what would the opposite of Camelot be? Inferno? “Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate” (“abandon all hope, ye who enter here”) were the words above the entrance to hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy. "Arbeit macht frei" were the words that greeted the unfortunates who entered Auschwitz. The Times recently ran the obituary of Ieng Thirith (“Ieng Thirith, Khmer Rouger Minister in Cambodia, Dies at 83,” NYT, 8/22/15). If nothing else the piece will disabuse you of the idea that Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was at least a meritocracy. Reigns of terror have their own blue bloods, their own best and brightest. According to the Times, Thirith “was the most powerful woman in the Khmer Rouge.” Her husband was Iang Sary the foreign minister and deputy prime minister and most remarkably “she graduated from the Sorbonne, majoring in Shakespearean studies.” As anyone who studied Shakespeare will tell you, it’s hard to get a job in that area, even with a degree from a good school and that may have radicalized Thirith. It wouldn’t be surprising if she hadn’t done some of her scholarship on Titus Andronicus which was one of the bard’s bloodiest plays. But getting back to aristocracy, according to the obit, her sister, Khieu Ponnary, was married to Mr. Big himself, Pol Pot. Well there’s not really much to say. “The rest is silence” are  Hamlet’s last words. But one thing that Camelot (the Kennedy White House) and Hell (Cambodia under the the Khmer Rouge) had in common was this: they were both run by a clubby little group of people who were either related or met at elite institutions like Harvard or the Sorbonne.