So I believe we've gotten to an exciting place, even if it's taken some time and detours, and a lot of rambling about my own work and the various stages (and there might be more forthcoming, since convincing myself of this depends on me making it cohere with my biographical evidence.) Essentially I am working with this new paradigm now, and rejecting Hypothesis #2, although that hypothesis did actually clarify what the problem was, and deepen our sense for my personal history and its primary motive forces. But there is still so much more to understand about this movement. Why does Phase A not move forward to comedy but Phase B does? Phase B is so dramatic, and yet espouses an anti-dramatic principle. It would seem now that Hypothesis #2 makes a great point about "Delusional Adam and the Garden of Irrelevance" as the dialectic, and Phase C as not the dialectic, not the negotiator between sides, but as the choice of the comedy side, and ultimately, the power of repression on behalf of the "social principle," which is Platonic love, the Apollonian love. The social principle does suppress the sexual principle, which sounds vaguely Freudian, except for Freud this is a division between reality and pleasure, ego and love, death and life, and my characterization is radically different, and even acknowledges Jung's ideology of an unconscious marked by a union of opposing archetypes, even if I consider their imaginal nature secondary. What the dance of archetypes, the mythologies and the religious notions, ultimately amounts to is the experience of psychodrama, the acting out of real passion, love and hostility, within a dream. Love and Hate are the ultimate opposites which are conjoined in sexuality to me, and the conscious/unconscious division that occurs in waking life is the expansion of a conjoined Love-Hate sexuality (but not, as further explained, a Love-Hate Relationship, which is the nature of conscious/unconscious division) into a true suppression on behalf of the social pleasure principle, the peace principle. Feelings of hostility are automatically regulated to the unconscious in my conception, owing to their social inappropriateness and their general unpleasantness for the individual also. And feelings of so-called love, though not erotic love, condition the nature of consciousness and society at large. Reality does not press down pleasure, but pleasure is taboo, in its pure sexual form, because of the feelings of hostility which it includes and honors as constitutive of sexuality. This could explain the Oedipus complex, but it's very ambivalent towards it. For in this conception, sexual delight would depend on the consciousness of the murder of the father, rather than by censored by that discovery.
It is the judgment which is fundamental operation of the mind, and the sexuality which is the fundamental operation of the body, and they are entirely one and the same. Yet in conscious life, in rational life, our loves and our hates are experienced separately, and we are predisposed to favor praise over criticism, both our own praise of others, and others' praise of ourselves, and only resort to criticism as a consequence of needing to strongly adapt to our unconscious hostility, which has overflowed. We would rather be "affirmative" than "negative" and the whole structure of society is set up to encourage this "affirmative," kind, polite, genial tendency. This is not suppression on the behalf of "reality," nor is suppression on the behalf of pure "pleasure," since sexual pleasure is the satisfaction of both loving and hating instincts, which are not separated, and only separated by our psychology. Unconscious hostility is the true motive force of all mental illness, neurotic and psychotic, for when it is not permitted to be expressed and acted upon-- which does not necessarily mean acts of violence, but acts of pragmatic response to a negative judgment-- it is diverted into "straw men and women." Hence political leaders in my conception don't sublimate sex, on a whole, but sublimate the repressed hostile side of sexuality, and draw us into shows of contempt for sweeping generalizations, which allow us to vent feelings of hostility that are otherwise not permitted to be acted upon, either because of the way people around us think and talk or because of ourselves. I would like to take responsibility for the fact that I have very much not wanted to access my feelings of hostility, at the same time while I have been discouraged from doing so, thus it takes two to tango. For this reason I see this as a general human condition. Not only does society repress us from expressing our hostility and dealing with it, but shames us for feeling anger, and teaches "forgiveness" as a corrective rather than practical action, but each of us individually wants to avoid distressing feelings of being alarmed and needing to address a difficult problem, with strenuous exertion. So our alarm must ring quite loud to overcome our complicity in letting others talk us out of our anger. Not only that, but in the pursuit of sexuality, we cannot pursue our sexuality except through the social, outside of unconscious hostility-- we cannot ask our potential mates, do you hate the same thing I hate? Rather, this is gleaned unconsciously, incidentally, instinctively, from a conversation which fixates, as the social principle does, on common ground, by two people whose fervent wish it is to hang onto common ground and avoid the distress of uncommon ground. So in life, heaven is certainly above, and hell is certainly beneath, but in the unconscious, what is called heaven and hell are one heaven.
And this is confusing because hostility is unconscious. Yet what I mean here is that, perhaps, during waking life hostility is pre-conscious, or it attempts to be. In the core of the unconscious is the sexuality which is erotic-- and expressive of hostility as well as of affection. Love and hate are one force of sexuality. And sexuality is so powerful and hypnotizing because of the simultaneity of its expression of love and rage. Yet what I mean by this is not the notion that when we have sex, we are necessarily drawn into a domination/submission exchange. What I mean is that psychologically, at the heart of each person, is a value system rooted in their experiences, and the Yays and the Nays of that value system are expressed in intellectual, utilitarian life in separate categories. The love for the friend, in the sex act, is indistinguishable from hatred for the enemy. Love for the friend, hatred for the enemy. So we do censor sexuality as a matter of course, but only one-half of sexuality. It is the aggressiveness of sexual movements that make them profane and disruptive out-of-context, within the 'polite' company of normal society, which is polite and Platonic. Dancing and drinking, and the relation to music, the Dionysian, they have, show that music is a force of love and hate, conjoined in the same way as sexuality, and the dance is a way of making sexual movements the most overt without eliciting, by way of directly revealing, aggression. Dance is the ultimate subversion. For the full powers of sexual love and hate, the instinctual violence of two bodies' defense-mechanisms connecting and exerting rage outside themselves as a unit, are put on display when we are dancing, while ostensibly conducting an act of social politeness. We dance with each other socially all the time, holding the door for another person, trading jokes, managing eye contact during a perfunctory communication. But The Dance is when it is obviously sexually charged, like flirting, and the social dance which is merely polite and well-mannered is charged with sexual aggression with flirtation or by direct dancing.
We lower the defense mechanisms one way or another of the lover we seduce, no matter how far we come, but sexual union is not the lowering of defense mechanisms exactly, in that one person gets another's shields down so they can do what they want with them. Rather, the promise that makes a person put their shield down is the fact that the other person represents an extension of that shielding. There is never any cause to be defenseless, for an organism. Defense mechanisms are not lowered, but fused together, allied, during the seduction. If this seduction is false, under false pretenses or having a nasty surprise at the end of some sort, then the defense mechanism reasserts itself as something separate from the lover. So the lover who seduces us doesn't lower our defenses, they become what we project our defense mechanism on, and this directs the lover, like a weapon, against the enemy, and fuels the powerful unconscious drive towards them beyond just the 'rational' appreciation of them, or even the 'aesthetic' appreciation of them. The lover who seduces us embodies "security" and security is violence against our enemy, against what we identify as our predators. Hence, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. And I suggest that it works the same way for men and women, for all sorts of sexual relationships. And works less so this way, actually, for fleeting sexual unions. This is a deep connection to someone, to their psychological value system, whereas a fleeting sexual union only appraises that skin-deep. So when we distinguish sex from love, we actually distinguish a sexuality which is closer to Platonic love, in which defenses are not exceptionally combined, in which mutual appreciation is the driving force, and when we speak of love as an intimate sexual relationship, we are speaking of people whose hatred is one thing.
Sexuality is uncanny, and has the flavor of dreams, because of how much our Apollonian rational mind 'checks out,' and we seem in the throes of lust. And this uncanniness, this mystical quality, which all religions emulate even if it is a sublimation in the sense that their emulations would substitute for sexual activity derives from the simultaneity of an expression of love and hatred. I contend, rightly or wrongly, that the conscious "mind" versus the unconscious "psyche," is specifically divergent in its only being able to manage one or the other side. There is lowercase-l love, and capital-L Love, and the capital-L Love is the Love where love and hate are one. Like The Residents' God in 3 Persons, the conscious mind divides them, and wishes to relegate the pain of hatred to the unconscious, and fixate on the conscious love. This is a sensational, mythological story in that album, but really it's just the way the mind can get a handle on the individual ideas of loves and hates, on a particular judgment, which is either negative or positive. Music, dance, sex, art, the Dionysian-- here love and hate are one thing, whereas the mind's judgment points towards either something being good or bad, but implying, unconsciously, the opposite. Both love and hate can travel into the unconscious, but the social rule of order is actually lowercase-l love, and the typical rule of thumb is that the angst of the 'reality principle' is far more repressed than is the romance of the 'pleasure principle.' Angst is the motivation to work, and love is the relaxation into homeostasis. Or shall we say "peace"? Perhaps the peace principle reigns supreme, whereas the unconscious hostility is our call to action.
Unconscious Love, the value system, the sexuality, is divided into peace, and angst. Angst which is motivation to make change, the fury of the will, and peace which is the maintenance of homeostasis. Comedy is essentially deeply entwined with this social peace principle, and the segregation and conscious dominance of the peace principle is the comic detachment, the lack of investment that takes us outside of 'reality.' What comedy does is make unreal what is real, and it is aided in this by a) a psychologically inconceivable combination of things which are real, and b) by our being uninvolved, relating to it as from the vantage point of Nirvana, free of all need with respect to this psychological oddity which could be dangerous.
But witness how much hostility is there in laughter! Even the broadest, most good-natured laugh has a edge of violence, and humor is another great aphrodisiac. Flirtation, if it runs parallel to dance, it very much goes against what I'm trying to say about comedy being the neutral ground of polite company. Nabokov and the Zucker Bros both despise the idea of satire, but I've never been clear how humor is not satirical-- it would seem that all comedy has some kind of bite, that there is no surrealism or absurdism which is free of an attack. And if surrealism is the post-Freudian projection of the unconscious, it would stand to reason that it would stand in no different stead from sexuality proper. Humor is also hypnotic, and so forth; we don't quite understand how it happens. But as I think about it, I think back to too many occasions when sadism is combined with comedic pleasure. and how it sounds insanely far-fetched and half-baked to say that sex is necessarily extra-sadistic (and not intra-sadistic, which would however relate to the overall profile of hatred, rather than the presence of hatred where it doesn't already belong) and not to say that jokes are basically chit-chat bullshit, and the misery they cause when they cause it is only testament to someone's detachment, not the tendentiousness of the joke. The drama of the joke.
Yet the joke is false, a false pretense, like a false seduction. And this is the main thing which carts it off in a different register from sexuality. As Freud says, it evades the censor, allows aggressive impulses to be vented in polite society. But flirtation and dancing exist closer to sexuality, even though the flirtation involves humor, it makes its tendentiousness clearer, and its involvement of humor is only to the end of disavowal-- no, I was not being sexual. I was just being funny. It's humor which permits sexuality to conceal itself, whereas in dancing sexuality is only concealed by the formalism of the dance, which is more akin to artistry generally, without being comedic. The aggression of humor resides in its detachment, just like playfulness does demonstrate some sadism by virtue of the divestment of 'reality,' which is also the divestment of 'empathy.' What we play with, we use, we do not treat seriously, we do not bestow agency. So the so-called serene contemplation, complicating our argument to an extent I'm starting to find baffling, is a form of hostility, a withdrawal of libido. Just like when we hate someone their misfortunes become less real, perhaps the aesthetic attention and judgment of 'purposiveness without a purpose' is not so innocent. And this is the intra-sadistic tendency of sex, what connects sadomasochism to hatred, is the act of using or playing with the other as a tool. Using the lover as a weapon. So play and use are connected. There is more in common between playfulness and utilitarianism than previously thought, because both treat the world as an object, not as an agent. This divestment satisfies hostile impulses-- it could be said that meditation eases anxiety by manifesting indifference for one's enemies. So we see how War and Peace, are flip sides of each other, and connected they are Love. Peace is a covert hostility, an indifference to the object which permits it to be used and played with. Hence the reality-principle, hence the repressive utilitarianism, and how it is in truth a pleasure-principle, just a weaker form of pleasure than sexual. Full sexual pleasure is the simultaneous expression of dual valuation, the release of affectionate/peaceful and hateful/violent.
But I feel tied in knots. What I really need to get at is how the joke itself shows this simultaneity of love and hate, because it does, and it does sponsor an unconscious reaction, appropriately. And the humor of flirtation is not purely that of its disavowal. Rather I am inclined to say that humor features the hostile impulses more substantially, but this requires we think through the difference between agonistic hostility and divested hostility. The hostility of indifference, which is willing to use people, or play with people, is different from the hostility which is directly questing against them. One flavor it might be said to have is that this hostility is symptomatic of repressed hostility, that our indifference, our contemplative remove, allows us to express the effect of hostility without dealing with the hostile feelings directly. It could be the effect of psychological repression or social repression or both. But the manipulative tenor of what we do could also be the flavor of a self-repressed hostility, a revenge best served cold, which is in touch with hostile feelings and satisfies them carefully. So the rage may come out in the person who is officious, obsessional neurotic, and repressed, or the person who is cold and calculating, and aware of their anger, and the behavior might appear quite similar.
And to say this is to throw another sword into the heart of comedy, because it shows that comedy's manipulativeness, its playfulness, the vague sadism of the lie we are telling when we start "putting someone on" with a joke, is an expression of rage, and that when we laugh at Joan Crawford we don't experience freedom from Christina's rage, but release our rage in terms of a suspension of caring. So the joke is a dialectic, which seems to entertain and please the other, but also releases the hostile desires, independent of its content, which are released in any act of play. The "drama" ruins the comedy, but we may yet laugh at horror-- happy, deadly music-- mindlesslaughter-- and express hatred with our laugh, but the high and haughty hatred of one who is protected from the fear which escalates the rage. Sexuality by contrast releases the rage in no high and haughty way, but in a direct act of erotic hostility. Humor is an indirect act of erotic hostility, and so can represent either manipulation or repression, a playfulness which divests, deprives energy from the object involved. An extremely offensive joke: What do butter and legs have in common? They both spread easy if you have a knife. This is funny and happy-making, if it is, because it detaches you from empathy with the terror of the rape victim, for which the appropriate response is rage, not humor. As a joke, it does not necessarily express complicity with the rapist, but it shows unconcern with the rape victim, and this unconcern is in effect hostile, but a muted hostility we can get away with. The 'censor' who would prohibit this joke, who would protest it the loudest, is the rape victim, not rationality, because it turns the horror of rape into a laughing matter, and this in effect continues their dehumanization even if the form of hostility is vastly different. Indifference is not innocent, neither God's or humankind's. Comedy is an expression of this dehumanizing tendency, this tendency to evade the pain of others, and so satirical art is truly a good thing, because it consciously inflicts pain, it takes responsibility for the indifference of the laugh as an attack. Satire is a lesson, and parody is a game, says Nabokov, because he hates didactic writers, piss-poor moralists and politicians. Yet the game of what he calls 'parody' is quite cruel indeed, and to embrace satire does not require didacticism but responsibility for its hostility-- that there is no 'innocent' playfulness, that what we play with we disavow the agency of, we disconnect from and subjugate. I suspect the dislike of satire is actually an attempt to disavow the hostile impulses which are involved in a given comedy, to make more sentimental and child-like the aesthetic practice, to associate it with the social principle, to restrict it from acknowledging its full intention with respect to our judgment. Even little children experience rage, and the psychodrama of that rage shows up in their playing.
We spoke earlier about two forms of fantasy-- the fantasy which denies reality, like the joke's, the fantasy of detachment, which rends something unreal, and the fantasy which in effect is psychological truth, is the projection of a psychodrama upon something we are detached from. These two fantasies both deal with a detached event, but the first fantasy, the humor-fantasy, reinforces the detachment, and keeps us flying aloof from reality-- this fantasy reinforces the detached event, like a story or film, reinforces the detachment from our reality as being that of fantasy's detachment from reality. Christina Crawford's suffering is not real, so earnestly do Joan fans want to believe that, as I wished to believe there was some way to defend Roman Polanski, but there isn't. As many would like to defend Louie CK and so forth, on the basis of admiring their talent. We give the third degree to bad news and accept good news without question. The detachment of someone else's reality, not my own, becomes fantasy, we deny our relationship to someone else's reality, and so we essentially refuse to project upon it, even though we may have major reasons to project on it. The second fantasy, the drama-fantasy, denies the detachment, and projects real emotional feeling on something from which we not connected to. So an event is presented to us as relatively detached, and we either fantasize its absolute detachment in the form of unreality by treating it humorously, or we fantasize the absence of detachment in the form of dramatic projection. And my feeling is that the second form of fantasy, that of psychodrama, is the more fruitful and healthy reflex. Laughter is not the best medicine, but the worst. By involving ourselves in what we watch as outsiders, we empathize, and thus participate in the drama, and thus access our repressed hostile feelings, and manifest more of our sexuality, our wholeness, our love/hate.
To make this case stronger I must show how my comedy, which I before said went into an absurdist mode and shed its satirical, dramatic didacticism, was really never absurdist but continuously satirical, but what was gestured by this move as it meant something consciously to me, was a disastrous repression of hostile impulses. Take for example the Pasadena 2007 version of "Radio 729" versus versions of Radio 729 that preceded and followed this incarnation. This version had no social commentary, and was just a study in language and performance, to myself, but used very dramatic music, and its calm seemed to betray an inward drama, which was absurdly counterposed to the meaninglessness of the conversation. This was just a short little film, an exercise in dialogue, and seeing as how I wrote a longer script-- which was yet more 'absurdist' in keeping with Tim & Eric-- and like the earlier America is Heaven sketches, whittled it down to the silly non sequiturs-- saw comedy as a language game, a discovery of strange exceptions, improvisational moments of odd hypnosis to be captured from the psyche-- I was flinching from any satirical 'commentary.' Weary with the lesson, desirous of the game-- but also desirous of the laughter, of the 'comic relief,' the transmutation of my rage and sorrow into humor and lightness. What I see now is that this merely escaped the rage and sorrow by disassociating from it, by emphasizing detachment, and expressed rage in the form of the divestment of energy, in the lack of empathy which the comic outlook I was developing was expressing. This seems to explain the bullied kid who tries to be funny to earn love, the humor they employ secretly protests their treatment, and replies to sadism with a muted sadism, in the form of indifference, the shown commitment to toying with one's prey. Who we make fun of, and who we attack, get different responses-- who we make fun of we don't take seriously, but who we attack we do. But this not taking seriously is hostility, for sure, there's no doubt in it, that this comic serenity is anything but the dehumanization of its subject. And this taking seriously, in combat, can oddly have a bit of respect and eros in the mix, yet it is just hatred in its full regalia, and comedy is just hatred in its Sunday best. Love is a drama, not a comedy, as compassion is dramatic, and hatred is dramatic, and comedy is nothing but the refusal to acknowledge the reality of something. In this way it resembles my "social principle" version of the "pleasure principle," yet we might say it lives on the border of conscious and unconscious, between Platonic love and hate, as a sort of mediator between the separated, a dialectic. It can invoke sexuality because it combines hate with social love, and has an involuntary effect, but it is a false dialectic, a dialectic which enforces separation, whereas sexuality is a true dialectic, because integrative rather than successive. In the sense that sexuality is an original union, which is split apart by conscious life, and fused within social life in comedy, as an ephemeral succession, rather than a return of two energies back to their common energy. It is a "synthetic synthesis," the joke.
This kind of combinatory synthesis is perhaps successive dialectic, which would produce something 'new' out of our combined love and hate, rather than return our love and hate to their common Eros in an integrative movement. And the joke then is a bit like the representative of Eros, the messenger, and not the one who sends the message. The joke works principally on the basis of concealing the hate-motive, and not the love-motive, which is the playful entertainment offered to who hears it. And the best concealment for hate is indifference, which slurs with the more libidinous feeling of peace. So if our social principle is a peace principle, comedy slips past the border of the censor of violence which marks the bias of our conscious mind, and its pain avoidance-- we do not have the indifference to pain to not be biased, to be half-full or half-empty. What makes someone 'half-empty' is just obsessional neurosis, a deferral of real pain and rage to objects upon which an unconscious psychodrama is projected. The chastisement of pessimists is a tragic consequence of the 'peace principle' because it essentially treats their pessimism like a lifestyle choice, when it is either the realistic or neurotic consequence of actual rage, of deeply founded hostile impulses, of critical, visceral and intellectual, psychological judgments. The difference between pessimism and realism is only the latter's projection of rage upon less important subjects, which inflate their drama with a drama something else deserves. Even the 'drama queen' is only histrionic for the fact of their deferral, and the ugliness of their self-dramatization is only the perverted expression of a real wound which is far more agonizing to consider than the substance it is projected upon.
This is sort of a hybrid of the two forms of fantasy-- it both embraces detachment's denial, and projects its own psychodrama on the material, but unconsciously-- and the unconsciousness is lent to it by the comic fantasy, by the fact of the obsessional neurosis being a "joke" which the one delivering the joke is not in on. Here again we see how deviance, pathology is interrelated with comedy, how it is very vibrantly funny at a distance, and perhaps infuriating up close, but in full possession of the psychological facts, "no wire hangers" is profoundly sad, and not only for Christina. Perhaps if the treatment of the scene lacks something, contrary to standard critical reception, what it lacks is true sympathy for Joan, some understanding of Joan's anger, so that she appears not so much as a bitch and a cartoon, but seems like a pathological human being, a tragic figure. There's not much to say or show about an innocent child being abused by a sick woman, in terms of character development, but there is a lot to explain about why someone would fixate on wire hangers, would feel so personally insulted by her daughter's using them that she would throw such a tantrum. And why this would coincide with, and be worsened by, alcoholism. The drama of "no wire hangers" does partially belong to Joan, and the film does not explain her behavior or make any attempt to, and Christina's memoir, I have to say, so far does not do much better at that, but nor do I think that is her responsibility. It is like Barry Lyndon, in the sense that the book is a first-person story-- and a story told by a cheap bastard-- who in being put on camera in a third-person way, is made more sympathetic than he is able to make himself. Even though Christina's book is a book about the victim of a crazy bastard, it is in the first-person, and so it's not required to be omniscient, even psychologically omniscient with regards to the narrator's own psychology. The film however, and the third-person narrative generally, has to show the subtext of narration. In a good novel, subtext finds a way to speak through the code of a first-person narrator. A memoir therefore presents a difficulty to an adaptation in that way, the primary difficulty of loyalty to the memoirist's own account, of letting them continue to tell their story or to show their story as something slightly different to what they're telling us, since the art form of film or theater is not memoir, and has a narrative omniscience which a character's subjectivity overtakes at the cost of a banality, a simplicity of impact. The reason this is so is because then we are "Telling" what we are "Showing." The whole dramatic power of a film is that it does not Tell, but Show, as a visceral energy, and if everything that happens is accessible to a character's subjectivity, it weakens the visceral power with the reductive explanation. That many films do this despite this fact, being chatty and obvious and shallow, overwhelmed by the presence of a charismatic main character who just schmoozes us the whole movie like the movie's representative, the mirror of the film's humor or drama, telling us how we should feel while the movie's making us feel it, demonstrates our simplicity bias, our interest in dramatic form coinciding with our desire to escape from it.
Sexuality is the full celebration of pain, and therefore dramatic form is attractive to us, while at the same time, the greatest examples of dramatic art do not reflect the values of the mainstream, and the critical viewership that great dramatic art receives is commonly reductive-- discussing its social relevance, its timeliness, its intellectual craft, its perceived 'message,' rather than its true source of strength, which is its true manifestation of unconscious hostility, rather than its defensive or comic suppression of that hostility, by making it either unreal or by deferring it. In a good work of dramatic art, we are protected from no one's pain in the film, not the heroes or the villains. "The horrible thing about life is that everyone has their reasons," says Jean Renoir, and he's true to that horror in the brilliant Rules of the Game. The major factor of this film, which borders on comedy, is its pathos by comparison with other narratives, similar to other great films, like Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket I discussed earlier, and how with Pyle Kubrick turns our laughter into empathy, gives us 'the stare' that Private Joker earns, wiping his cocky smirk off his face, when he is no longer uninvolved, when he has killed someone in a deeply pathetic situation. The last few moments of Full Metal Jacket are a bunch of people making bad jokes while Joker has no jokes to give.
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