Naked women: why?

To the Donmar Warehouse, for the heralded all-female production of Julius Caesar. As politeness requires, I’ll start with the positive and praiseworthy.

 

One It was short, two hours, with no interval. Not a minor point at the Donmar which must have the most uncomfortable seats of any internationally renowned theatre.

(This might also help stoke the slight but unmistakable air of smugness in the crowd. They have not just managed to get tickets for such a famous little house but they have suffered for their art. They exhale the same air of entitlement that plumes from the mouths of the people queuing outside this month’s most hippest no-reservations restaurant. Pitt Cue, say. Oh, I know, I am so early 2012. Slap my wrist.)

Two They did a great job of editing it down. The story shone through and was easy to follow, even if you didn’t know much or any Roman history. Again, not a minor point. It’s an unwieldy play. The guy in the title is dead half-way through. There’s not much in the way of sympathetic characters. There is no surprise about either the murder or the denouement. All that stuff about divination etc makes no sense to modern minds. Etc, etc (to drop suitably into a little Latin).

Otherwise? Well, it wasn’t very good. When asked at the end, I replied: one star. And, feeling poncey, added: jejune. Later, I also said: same kind of half-dead tropes there had been in guff like my school’s student production of Titus Andronicus. Neon lights! Paramilitary uniforms! Shouting! (Even! More! Than! Usual! For! A! Shakespeare! What is it about actors and Willie the Shake? Why do they have to shout lines that should be spoken? My first theory: they, like memsabs addressing foreigners, are convinced that volume enhances comprehension. My second theory: they know not what they do — or what the lines mean.)

Okay, okay, I hear you say. So far, so usual, what’s your point and can’t you get to it quicker?

So: nakedness. Naked women, in particular. One naked woman, in this case. She was wandering around at one point. It was a bit of a shock. Mostly because, well, it made no sense. At all.
Why, oh, why do directors persist in prevailing upon actresses to take their clothes off in the name of art? Obviously, it does make sense some times. I remember a production of Sondheim’s Passion in a theatre even smaller than the Donmar. The show starts with a couple rising from a bed where they have just had sex. We had front row seats. The singer-actors were naked. As singers, they were wonderful. They also had singers bodies. I couldn’t make up my mind whether their lack of beauty enhanced the humanity of the story or merely distracted the audience into physical critiquing.

I asked one of the two women who came to Julius Caesar with me about the naked woman. Yes, she said, I couldn’t work out what it might have signified either. Also, she added, it wasn’t as if the actress was the . . . Then she said something that if I’d said it, I would have had angry stares at least. She was, let’s put it this way, less than enthusiastic about the actress’s physique.
I’d thought that, too, obviously. I’d had another thought, too. That the director and the other actresses might well have pushed her into it. Its pointlessness whiffed of bullying. Women, almost invariably, are far, far more judgmental of other women’s bodies than men are.

So, for me, that was the only moment that the all-femaleness of the show made sense. Just as a gang of senators gang up on JC, so here a gang of gals gang up on another gal. That the parallel of this untethered emotional violence was unseen by its perpetrators made it all the more poignant but also genuinely tragic. Julius Caesar meets Mallory Towers.

Meantime, here is some decent female nakedness, in a short fashion film made by my daughter.

PS I didn't want this text to be centred but there is something that goes wrong in blogger when you paste in an image. The text centres itself and you can't reset the alignment. At least, I can't. Any thoughts etc welcome.

Back on the chain-of-thought-gang

Something of a break since I last updated this, no? Why? Thinking mostly - wondering how to progress with this series of self-questionings, about Freud and why I did the course etc?

What gave me pause for thought were comments posted on my last posting. (You can look them up a little further down the page - and add your own views if you want.) They were smart and intriguing and worthwhile comments and questionings of what I'd written. They raised really interesting points, some of which I felt I could answer easily and others which I thought would inevitably raise other questions - which, in turn, might be best resolved with more evidence etc.

Which is what gave me pause (nearly a month of it) for thought. It wasn't that I wasn't willing to engage in the discussion and debate. I was fine with it. Relished it, in fact. As anyone who has known me for more than, oh, thirty seconds can confirm, I rarely shrink from an argument. As some gamblers will bet on raindrops progress down a wet window, so I'll easily slip into a debate on why that might be happening. Too easily, I guess.

And that was the trouble. As much as I itched to get into a nitty-gritty, down-on-the-mat, punch-them-in-the-kidneys 'discussion', I knew that, very soon, there would be no one left in the room watching or listening. It would alienate just everyone - except car-crash fanciers.

Which led to another problem. I thought the questions raised deserved to be answered. I didn't want to seem to be avoiding them. So . . .

That's why I shut up for a bit. And?

Rather than not answer the questions, I'll just not answer them on the blog. I'll do it either directly on the comments - which means you can have a look if you want but it's not in-your-face. Or, if I think it's too detailed/boring even for the comments section, I'll answer my inquisitors directly. (They are not unknown unknowns. They have previous. They are, of course, friends of mine.)

Meanwhile, I'll just plough on with answering my old friend's challenges here on the main page. Which is what I'll be doing next here. Well, almost. First, there will be a little something else . . .

Next up A visit to the motherfucking theatre

Meanwhile some diversionary moments . . .

DM1 The scent of a man

DM2 The magic of a woman*

DM3 The rottenness in the state of Denmark

DM4 Home is where you park your jetplane

* Despite her name, she's a Londoner, by the way - and a serious artist, too, of course. Which puts me in mind of those great chroniclers of modern manners, Chas 'n' Dave:
'I've been to the east and I've been out west
And I've been the world around
But I ain't seen none come anywhere near
The girls from London town.'

Eine kleine nacht spiel, part one: the where of it

A father and (younger) son outing to a mother-and-daughter evening: Mrs Klein, a play, at the Almeida Theatre in Islington. Oddly, although I go to the theatre quite a bit, I’d never been to the Almeida. Which, given its reputation, is even odder.

A regular — an enthusiastic regular — had described it to me as ‘a jewel’. He was right, of course. It’s a Lottery theatre, one of that turn-of-the-century generation of rebuilds funded by channelling the hapless dreams of the poor into bricks-and-brushed-steel arenas for dreams of the rich. From Lottery tickets to theatre tickets.

A century or so ago, Frank Matcham was responsible for creating something like two hundred theatres of a distinct type in Britain. (Hackney Empire, London Palladium, Buxton Opera House etc etc.) I reckon that, a hundred years from now, the Lottery generation of theatres — though not as numerous — will be seen similarly, through a prism of stylistic similarity.

With its amused joining of original building and modernist additions, the Almeida is happily typical of the type. Concrete access ramp meets classical columns — with bar and education facility. It also had the best-dressed and most attractive looking audience I’ve ever seen at the theatre. You really felt as if you were out for a night with Islington society.

First, I wrote ‘the great and the good’, then I typed it out. Not just, embarrassedly, because it was a lazy cliché. But because any notion of there being such an entity as ‘the great and the good’ could surely not survive the merest brush with Freudian thought, let alone an evening round the Kleins.

PS1 This is the first of five blogs about Mrs Klein and her two daughters, one a day for the rest of the week — kind of like a week of analysis.

Next up I get to the play — and the two daughters

What I did on my holidays
Part one: a pantomime

Every family has its Christmas traditions. Ours includes a trip to a pantomime or some such seasonal show.

Actually, it’s quite a recent tradition, almost a fake one really. We took our children, dutifully, to pantomimes when they were young. But, to be honest, they had their doubts. Sometimes they cried. Sometimes they screamed. At least once, one of them had to be carried out, crying and screaming, then soothed in the lobby for the rest of the show. What didn’t they like? The noise, mostly. And the flying in the case of the one who was happiest watching the show from the lobby.

So we gave up on pantomimes when our children were actually quite small. We only went back when the youngest was almost grown up — old enough, at least, to have a glass of wine at the big family dinner afterwards. (Though it’s also true that his sister was so determined to grow up that she started requesting wine with her meal soon after she mastered international direct dialling to her cousins — which itself was not that long after she learned the rudiments of walking and talking.)

Why did we start going to pantomimes again? In part, it was just a way of adding a family event to the seasonal schedule that wasn’t rippled with the emotional complications of food, eating and food preparation. But it was also that I’d seen so many clever, original adult stage shows that I decided there must be similarly inventive pantomimes etc.

So, for the past few years, the youngest child and I have secretly chosen a show, bought tickets and told everyone when they’re going — but not to what. Even the location is only revealed en route. We just tell them they’ll be having an adventure, with dinner afterwards. Wine, too. Beer, if they prefer.

Generally, there are also foreigners involved — family from around the world, generally. This year, there was an Israeli and a Zurich-based Slovak, both young, both female.

The show was Hansel & Gretel, a promenade performance at the Barbican. I figured the foreigners would never have seen a promenade performance before and would be slightly staggered by it. They were. Not, though, as staggered as they were by the show itself.

Somewhere, on a shelf, in another room, there’s a copy of Bettelheim’s The Uses Of Enchantment, a psychoanalyst’s view of fairy tales. I can’t bring myself to open it again. He’s a stunningly boring, repetitive writer, even by psychoanalysts’ standards, and I’ve never really been able to look him or his work in the eye since I read that he hit children — not even his own but those in his care.

I can half-remember and half-guess, though, what Bettelheim would have had to say about Hansel & Gretel. Like so many fairy stories, it’s a stepmother narrative. Why so many? The traditional explanation is that maternal death rates were once far, far higher, so stepmothers, wicked or not, were far, far more common. The other view — Bettelheim’s, I should imagine — is that the stepmother figure is a euphemistic replacement for the real mother. We pour public hate on the stepmother as a way of expressing our private hate for our real mother.

Hate? What about love, then? There’s that, too, of course. Hopefully, for our emotional equilibrium, more of it. But the only people who don’t have mixed feelings about their closest and dearest are those who have no feelings.

But why hate? Isn’t that a bit strong? Well, psychoanalysts are big on the word ‘hate’, particularly if they’re Kleinians. Really, they mean negative feelings — or, at least, the primitive, childish part of ourselves that can only think in the most black of blacks and the most white of whites. Which of us didn’t, at some childish point in our lives, say ‘I hate you’ to a parent or two?

This particular stepmother? Very black, with a touch of purple — and a passion for the Bay City Rollers. She was young, short-skirted, made-up, uninterested in household tasks, visibly (and fakely) big-breasted. Not so much a person as a disco dancing symbol of sexual desire — of the father for the stepmother, and, if you credit the psychoanalytic view, of the real mother for the real father (if only in the child’s imaginings).

It was a tiny cast so the same actress played the witch, too — and screamed with worrying accuracy when stuffed into the oven and death. Bettelheim, I guess, would say the witch is also a kind of secret substitute mother.

It was that kind of show, never frightened to make the latent manifest. I’m not sure, though, that the small people in the audience were that keen on having the latent made manifest for them. I think they had their doubts about walking through a forest of dismembered and mutilated dolls. I also think they were confused, at best, by the scene in which the father and stepmother could be heard offstage making noises which were clearly meant to sound like they were having sex. If the fairy tale stepmother really is a euphemistic substitute for the real mother, then this was clearly what Dr Freud called the primal scene.

By and large, the children didn’t scream or cry or demand to be taken out. They were beyond that, I think, judging by the blankness of their faces. They put me in mind of the shot of the audience in The Producers in which it’s faced with the full horrific truth of Springtime For Hitler — open-mouthed, fish-eyed. Then the audience decides it’s a camp joke — in both senses. So they can laugh.

It’s not a joke, though, is it. The audience was right the first time, when it thought the play was for real. It is a genuine, heartfelt tribute to a Nazi by a Nazi. Taking it as a joke makes it acceptable. It’s what we do. It’s how we fight the horror, swaddle it in humour.

It wasn’t what the children at Hansel & Gretel did, though. They didn’t laugh. They knew it wasn’t a joke. They knew they’d seen something of life’s truths, stuff they’d rather not know.

We certainly did. When it was finally over and had ended as unsatisfactorily as the Hansel & Gretel story always does (how can they forgive their father?), we smiled at each other like survivors of an unexpected natural disaster.

Then we did what you always do under those circumstances. We went to dinner. With wine. And beer.

Double body

In my last posting, I put a link in where it said 'my wife'. I thought you might like to be reassured (or disappointed) that it wasn't actually my wife in the picture. They just share a name. The clue was the initials on that woman's badge. For more details, look here.

So what is theoretical psychoanalytic studies anyway? (Part two)

The short — and clever dick — response to that question is, of course: if I knew the answer, there’d be no point in doing a course on it. Also, that even if I knew (or rather, thought that I knew) the answer, I should imagine (or rather, hope) that I’ll have a quite different idea by the end of the course. If I don’t, I’ll have rather wasted my time.

So, no, I can’t really say exactly what theoretical psychoanalytic studies is. But I can pass on two or three things I’ve learned studying it.

1. Sandor Ferenczi was a Hungarian psychoanalyst whose Polish father’s original surname was the same as my wife’s maiden name. Maybe we’re related. I’ve also uncovered a similar and less tentative link to one of Freud’s best friends. More about that when I introduce you to my 21st century parlour game, Six Degrees Of Separation Anxiety.

2. Psychoanalysis has nothing to say about death because it has no concept of a negative. As a theory, it can only conceive of things that are, not things that are not. Therefore it has — and can have — nothing to say about death. Thus death does not exist in psychoanalysis. There is, accordingly, no such thing as death.

3. Maybe I dreamed that last sentence.

I’ve also learned a couple of more general things about psychoanalysis, both of which I actually already knew, kind of. Only now I feel I know them well enough to consider them beliefs rather than mere prejudices — though it’s always nice to have one’s prejudices confirmed, especially by people whose brains one would like to be able to borrow whenever you needed to do some thinking.

So, essentially, it’s confirmed and deepened my two core beliefs about psychoanalysis:

1. It’s a really, really interesting and productive way of interrogating the world, of asking awkward, interesting questions. And of allowing — encouraging, even — the world to interrogate you back.

2. It could also quite easily all be total bollocks. Analysts, I know, worry that they are complete frauds — which at least is profoundly different to homeopaths etc who are complete frauds but don’t seem to worry about it at all. Then I think doubt is good — or at least I think I do. Or maybe I just think I think I do.

Still, there are bits of psychoanalytic theory you read and think: hang on a minute, which leg are you pulling today, sunshine? Everyone, I’m sure, has different bits they think have LaLaLand passports. Myself, I have no problem with the Oedipus Complex. If there weren’t something like that going on in us all, the playground taunt ‘your mum’ would not have the life-threatening power it does. But maybe you disagree with me. And if you do, you’ll surely agree with my doubt about the idea that the suckling infant’s mind can conceive of the breast as a penis.

And yet . . .

I was having dinner in Bury St Edmunds recently and I got naughty, really naughty. The woman next to me, having berated Tesco — for being everywhere — fell to attacking Rupert Murdoch — also for being everywhere, essentially. God save my soul but I couldn’t stop myself, I just couldn’t.

I know that both Tesco and Rupert Murdoch are big boys and really don’t need my help. But I rushed to their defence anyway. I rounded up the usual arguments — democracy, free speech, free thinking, free minds, free choice, how no one ever put a gun to anyone’s head to shop at Tesco/buy The Sun etc etc. I meant it, every word. Well, sort of.

Only, I didn’t only mean it, I meant other stuff, too; stuff that, disingenuously, I chose not to mention; stuff that the woman next to me couldn’t imagine I might also think. In the end, I had to stop. It was either that or tears and the dinner-giver would never have forgiven me. (How things change. My younger self would have kept on till the tears flowed. Blood, too, possibly.)

The next morning, I found myself wondering: what is it about Tesco and Rupert Murdoch? It’s not just that people dislike them or even that they hate them. They looooaaathe them, with an intensity that seems quite out of proportion. No, not quite out of proportion but completely and incomprehensibly out of proportion.

I’ve tried, again and again, to get a comprehensible answer from them to the question ‘What has Rupert Murdoch/Tesco ever done to you?’. But I’ve never got one. It just seems to be the same kind of fury that some people had about Tony Blair, the ones who’d tell you he was the worst prime minister ever. Generally, they were the same ones who’d said the same before, about John Major, Margaret Thatcher and, quite probably, Bonar Law.

So what is going on here? Obviously, it’s an anger in search of a target but what anger and why these particular targets? I tried putting my psychoanalytic thinking cap on. It didn’t take me very far. But it did take me this far: Tesco: food: mother. And this far: Murdoch: power: control: father. And a little further: mother: breast. And further still: the giant, attacking breasts in Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex. And, even father down the road: the regularly expressed fear of my dinner companion etc that Tesco and Murdoch are out to screw them. Maybe the idea of the breast as a threatening penis does have its merits after all.

I made myself a cup of tea.

(Yes, I know I spelt a word wrong in the penultimate paragraph. Not a Freudian slip but a Freudian deliberate.)

Louise Bourgeois’ unfeasibly large testicles. Her father’s too

After an entire few weeks of study and reading, I thought it was time to take some of it out into the world, see what I’d learned.

The other evening I went to Seduced at the Barbican, a show about sex. It was a members-only evening. True, but I only mention that fact for the joke, of course — and because no-one there made the joke. It wasn’t that kind of evening. We weren’t that kind of people.

It was busy, really busy, almost as busy as it had been a couple of years ago, for a show about the 1960s Brazilian art movement, Tropicalia. Lots and lots of well-behaved, thoughtful men and women — in fairly equal numbers — examining lots and lots of images of other people having sex. They — we — examined the images calmly and with apparent dispassion, denying the actual pornographic urge that gave meaning to most of them in the first place. In a sense, it was less honest than a lap-dancing club, though the floor was cleaner. I couldn’t help thinking we were like Victorian gentlemen claiming they’d bought an Alma-Tadema to further their knowledge of classical plumbing technology.

It wasn’t, as the Guardian had said, the most intelligent show of the year. But it was interesting. The usual British Museum and National Gallery crew were rounded up: Greek pottery, Roman frescos, Japanese prints, Fragonard paintings — though no Alma-Tademas. A grand, historical parade of *****s and *****s and ****ing and ****ing.

(I use asterisks, by the way, not out of any prudishness but because those kind of words still retain the power to shock network server firewalls — as I know to my cost. I’m writing a book about swearing and if I don’t astericise or euphemise, emails to major companies regularly get bounced back to me or sent to Reading gaol or wherever it is electronic sexual transgressions get punished and incarcerated.)

The sheer repetition of all that historical material had the comforting, familiar feel of any collection. There’s a certain eroticism, isn’t there, about any collection — paintings, stamps, antiquities — if only for the collector. Looking at the same thing again and again and again: it’s like children reading the same book over and over. To become bored is to grow up. Repetition is the neurosis, its enactment, its embodiment: that’s what Freud wrote, I think.

There was a Nan Goldin slide show, of ordinary couples having sex while Bjork sang. It was tender and honestly mundane — quite unlike nearly all other sexual images, deliberately so, obviously. It caused a family dispute. My wife thought that including pictures of the ****ing couples’ young children was exploitative: a child can’t give informed consent. I said: there’s no intention to exploit, it’s what was there, it wasn’t set up or created by the photographer. Not my finest logic, I know. Hmm, she said, they still make me uncomfortable. I agreed.

There were Robert Mapplethorpe’s portraits and self-portraits of extreme homosexual sado-masochism. When I first saw them, at the ICA in the early 1980s, they were shocking. Then AIDS made them tragic. Now, well, they’re historical documents, almost as quaint as Belloq’s photographs of pre-first world war New Orleans prostitutes. A little more uncomfortable, though. How can you get a whole fist up there? asked my wife. Relaxation techniques? I suggested.

There was the artist filming themselves in slow motion. There always is. This time the artist was having sex, naturally. You could only see her face. I found myself thinking: good haircut. It was, at least partly, a female riposte to Andy Warhol’s Blow Job, which was showing on a wall opposite. An art world equivalent to, say, the call-and-response coupling of Hank Ballard’s Work With Me, Annie and Etta James’ answer record Roll With Me, Henry. The artist’s name was all lower case: kr buxey. I can’t be the only one who saw a joke there, too: ee cummings.

And then there were the Louis Bourgeoises, Couples. Two giant, lumpy couples coupling, made of cloth and overstuffed like a child’s soft toys, imprisoned in vitrines. Like all Bourgeois’ work, they are erotic and overripe in their grossness and plasticity. Dreams, not reportage.

Both couples are missionary-positioning. One of the women’s arms, clasped tight around the Mr Blobby-like male, is metal and leather — part prosthesis, part fetish. Between one man-toy’s legs are an oversized pair of testicles. Bourgeois’ father’s testicles, quite clearly. At 96, her relationship with her long dead father has lost none of its perversity and fixedness. Her heart — maybe more of her — still belongs to dada. And to her abiding fury at both his affair with her governess and her mother’s disinclination to admit its existence.

Then you notice that the heads are missing. All four figures are decapitated. This is Bourgeois’ long-simmered act of revenge, the most wonderful, vicious imagining of the primal scene, as Freudians call it. Adults having sex. Not as the child might actually have glimpsed it, accidentally or not, through a keyhole or from the cot, but, as I’ve learned, in its dreams and imaginings. Here is adult sex in the way a small child’s inner world might conceive it — two big, big stuffed toys, face to face. Then, to take it an emotional step further — the small child’s dreams again — you cut the heads off. Daddy’s, mummy’s, the governess’s.

I’m not over-interpreting this stuff, by the way. Bourgeois is quite clear and open about the work’s intentions: parents, sex, the primal scene, revenge. The figures’ cuddliness is not ironic but in itself a further act of violence: that which we can’t physically destroy we attack with jokes. Good old Freudian, bad little Bourgeois.

There’s a common point, regularly made by Freud and other Freudians about Oedipus’s complexity. It’s this: if that sexually and violently resonant mother-father-child dramatic triangle didn’t find an echo in us all, Oedipus Rex wouldn’t still be playing in (subsidised) theatres two and a half millennia later. These ****ing Bourgeois Couples made me think the same about the notion of the primal scene. If they didn’t have some general resonance or touch something embedded in us all, then they wouldn’t chill the way they do.

Later, I read — yes, I did do some half-term, sorry, reading week, reading — something by DW Winnicott. He’s the English psychoanalyst who — among other things, admittedly — was primarily responsible for the erection of a statue of Freud. Now, it sits outside the Tavistock but, originally it stood down the road outside Swiss Cottage swimming baths — to which the erection party repaired for celebratory tea and biscuits. Yes, I know it sounds like I’m making it up or confusing it with a Joe Orton play. But it really did happen like that. And, with one of his life’s major ambitions fulfilled, Winnicott died within months.

This is what he wrote in The Theory Of The Parent-Infant Relationship: ‘Death has no meaning until the arrival of hate and of the concept of the whole human person. When a whole human person can be hated, death has meaning, and close on this follows that which can be called maiming: the whole hated and loved person is kept alive by being castrated or otherwise maimed instead of killed.’

Sex and violence: I suspect they’re here to stay.


Sound & vision

‘Mon coeur est a papa’