Is There a Croesus Complex?

"God the Father" by Cima de Conigliano (1515)

The Times recently ran a piece about the discipline of financial therapy (“Stressed by Money? Get on the Couch,” NYT, 2/9/15). Usually one needs some degree of financial security to pay for therapy which is only covered on a limited basis by most health plans. So the kind of person who one imagines going into financial therapy because he or she has financial problems may be hard put to pay for it. For instance the person who spends more than they have might go into financial therapy, but if the therapy were long term, it might result in bankruptcy as a result of the treatment itself. There’s an old Pete Seeger line which might apply here, “Oh Dr. Freud, Oh Dr. Freud. How we wish you had been differential employed. For the set of circumstances sure enhances the finances of the followers of Dr. Sigmund Freud..." Or let’s take the person who is frugal, he or she is not going to go into financial therapy to improve largesse because he or she doesn’t like to spend money. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tverskty, the nobel prize winning economists, have written about “loss aversion,” a condition where people make bad decisions due to irrational fears. Money along with sex and relationships are subjects that people in any form of therapy talk about, but financial therapy like sex therapy obviously has a particular aim. In normal therapy the idea is that if a patient deals with deep seated problems that result in maladaptive behavior, a person will start to make better decisions when it comes to money or sex. Just as a gambler might start investing in low yielding, but secure tax free municipals, a promiscuous man or woman might settle into safe and secure relationships that are totally lacking in passion. However, let’s consider the case of the patient who decides his or her basic problem isn’t his or her personality. It’s just money. Such an individual might go to a financial therapist who will improve their yield or a sex therapist who will enable them to have lots of hot sex with the same person—say a partner who liked to dress up like a male or female whore. However, caveat emptor. No matter how much credit card debt you retire, you may still suffer from bigger problems than just money or love.  For example, you might be suffering from the kind of existential anxiety that comes from the realization that God is Dead.

The Girl or Guy of Your Nightmares

What if you were grotesquely deformed and you wanted no one to see you? Yet you had a need for contact and so began to communicate on line employing another avatar. This isn’t even the stuff of science fiction. It probably takes place. One thing the on-line universe provides is an almost unlimited series of possibilities when it comes to hooking up and there are sites which cater to literally every wish imaginable. Whether cyberspace has unlocked a Pandora’s Box of paraphilias that might have been repressed at other times of human history remains to be seen. If it’s been said it’s been done and if it’s been done it’s been said goes the old saw. Yet again it’s not only possible, but probable that many secret urges that are unearthed in cyberspace come to fruition in reality. The marketplace is just that much larger. Shame naturally exists, but there will be no dearth of prospects who will find x, y or z totally permissible and if shame itself is your thing you will find plenty of candidates will to share or inflict it on you--depending on just what does or doesn’t turn you on. If Catherine the Great had sex with her horse, who is to say that in the age of cybersex there isn’t someone who has engineered sex with a polar bear or someone with a death wish who has laid in bed with a boa constrictor or even a bug. The famous Twilight Zone episode, "Eye of the Beholder," told the story of a grotesquely deformed woman who actually turns out to be beautiful by the standards of the television viewer. That is the chilling climax as we stare up at the ghouls looking down at her and pronouncing the attempt to revamp her face a failure. No doubt today there are sites where women with beautiful faces can hook up with the ghouls of their nightmares or the Wicked Witch of the West types can be rescued by knights in shining armor who have a thing for what might be euphemistically be called imperfection. The surrealistic nightmare becomes a reality thanks to the cyber universe and you wake up to find the girl or guy of your dreams lying next to you, only he or she has a paper bag over their head.

Botched Acrobat

“The Flight of Icarus” by Jacob Peter Gowy

A recent Times piece (“Risking a Life for TV Ratings,” NYT, 10/31/14) quotes the Discovery Channel’s Howard Swartz, who was executive producer of “Skyscraper Live With Nik Wallenda," as saying, “There is something just really compelling about watching people push themselves to the limit. There is an element of must see.There is an element of risk. There is an element of awe and danger and inspiration that is very compelling and relatable.” There is also an element of lunacy. Walking a tightrope blindfolded, 600 feet above  ground with no net is a far cry from Ringling Brothers. One wonders what will be next in ratings wars. Under the theory that there’s always someone or thing bigger, stronger and more frightening, broadcasters are going to have to search for even more death defying stunts. Or perhaps the next stunt will be the opposite. Maybe some hapless soul who is down on his luck will star in “Botched Acrobatics” in which he or she will simply offer to jump out of a window with the cameras rolling. You hear about suicide, but not everyone has seen the kind of mess a falling body can make on a sidewalk. If this sounds like black humor that’s in bad taste, don’t be surprised if you find a hot new piece of reality TV that aims to break the death barrier. Maybe there will even be a program where people jump out of windows, and return in séances attended by their survivors not long after their bodies have been removed from the street. What seemed titillating and shocking enough to result in huge viewing audiences yesterday is likely to be looked on with apathy today. Few other mediums besides broadcast television require such an exponential increase in novelty. Deadline.com ran this headline after Wallenda attempted to repeat his earlier success, “Nik Wallenda Ratings: Wallenda Plunges in Second Highwire Walk For Discovery Channel” (Deadline.com, 11/3/14). In medieval times the spectacle of a convicted criminal being drawn and quartered was a popular attraction; in Puritan New England the sight of sinners in stocks provided a welcome distraction from the hard life of the early settlers. Will it be long before the networks seek out subjects who are willing to endure CIA torture techniques like waterboarding in order to create a ratings blitz? Will television record death by lethal injection the way the blood lust of the crowd, in l9th century England, was gratified by the hangings outside the Old Bailey?

Pornosophy: Vice isn’t Nice, but Neither is Sex

Oedipus at Colonnus by Jean-Antoine-Theodore Giroust (1788)

For some people sex is an embarrassing painful and even expensive process whose only reward leads to the birth of a little tyke who trails you around admiringly for at least the first few years of its miserable life. Gay folks used to be exempt, but now that eggs and sperm can easily be drafted into service, sexual orientation no longer matters. Later the tyke will grow up and hate your guts so much that it may even want to off you, especially if it’s a motherfucker who wants its dad dead. Oedipus tried to run away from his fate, but ended up murdering the appropriately named Laius. But getting back to rewards. It’s like the time trials for the l00 yard dash. Some people exhaust themselves and end up with nothing more than cramps. There are a minority who enjoy sex. Usually these are the same people who trumpet the notion of art for art’s sake. This small but voluble group are always trying to get more conscripts through the creation of hedonistic propaganda. The Marquis de Sade, Frank Harris, D.H. Lawrence, Pauline Reage, Henry Miller and most recently E. L. James of 50 Shades of Grey fame are literary examples of this tendency, along with Gustave Courbet (“The Origin of the World”), Egon Schiele, Bernardo Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris) and Lars Von Trier (Nymphomaniac) representing the fine arts and film. But one wonders if they would shut up if they actually had to put up. Talk is cheap. Is the pursuit of pleasure, Freud’s “pleasure principle,” actually all that it’s cracked up to be?

Fifty Shades of Grey

Love Story was the big splashy romance of l970 which every serious filmgoer and critic loved to trash. Fifty Shades of Grey is the candidate for 2015. The difference was--and it would be quite telling to analyze the cultural substrates out of which both films were conceived--that Love Story’s melodrama derived from dispossession while the catharsis or lack thereof in Fifty Shades derives from possession. Possession is part of the lexicon of sado-masochism as is control which Fifty Shades underscores as a kind of meaning making in and of itself. Action seems to have more significance precisely because it becomes a religion which is prescribed and ritualized to the point where its intention is totally transparent; the freedom and poetic ambiguity which is the lingua franca of so-called normative love is replaced with something  more emphatic. For instance one of the great S&M masterpieces of all time, The Story of O,  derives its power from the protagonist’s complete and utter abandonment of her ego, the loss of self that  comes from giving one’s will over to another person entirely. Fifty Shades is a romance in which there is a sado-masochistic sub plot. It’s a peccadillo of Christian Grey’s (Jamie Dornan) that Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) has to put up with to win him over. Similarly though Grey claims that he's not looking for love, he's constantly negotiating and caving in on his demands in order to win over a woman who is more a wild card than a true submissive. It’s always fun to consider works of popular entertainment like Fifty Shades beneath contempt. But it’s also boring because what's bad about it, the stock characters (the rich guy and ingénue girl with their respective wounds) and settings (the dressing room filled with ties that have multiple uses and the overly polished executive suite with its fashionista secretaries) is more obvious than what has potential interest. For instance Christian presents Anastasia with a contract specifying the acts which she will consent to participate in and the devices. She rejects genital clamps, along with anal or vaginal fist fucking. But she’s a good sport when it comes to floggers and suspension. It’s the sadomasochistic version of a prenuptial agreement. But isn’t this exactly what the state of California is requiring in its latest affirmative consent statute whereby on campus foreplay becomes reduced to litigation (“I’m not going to touch you until I have your written consent,” Grey says). True sadomasochism in both pornography and serious art films like Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac participates in no such mediation, providing instead the illusion of the disturbing kind of degradation and humiliation that's the vehicle by which not only clothes but ego are shed. The character of Christian Grey as rendered by Sam Taylor-Johnson's direction of the E. L James novel, is too tentative to be truly unsettling. His childhood trauma has made it impossible for him to trust or tolerate intimacy as much as he's portrayed as desiring those very things. So the affect of dominance allows him only the illusion of control. In fact, he’s a sheep in wolf’s clothing. The ambivalence with which Grey undertakes his calling may account for the character’s commercial appeal. But in this case, it also humanizes him and almost makes him interesting.