The Importance of Being Richard

Decades of feminist toil notwithstanding, the framework of the relationship between the male and female of our species remains on display in the exchange between male John and female prostitute: women continue to be granted access to the means for economic survival only to the extent that their sexual wares remain for sale. The inviolability of this sexual paradigm in late twentieth century and post-millennial America is writ large in the Hollywood career of Richard Gere.

Gere first shot to fame via 1980’s American Gigolo, in which Gere flipped the sexual script in his portrayal of the male prostitute servicing a female clientele. The success of this film hinged on the erotic potency of the violation of taboo found in its illicit rearrangement of sexual typecasting (re. the box-office potential of taboo-busting, witness the aptly titled pornographic film Taboo, one of the highest grossing blue movies to date, in which a male in his late adolescence lusts after, and ultimately consummates a sexual relationship with, his mother). The success of American Gigolo simultaneously made and unmade Gere, as he had unquestionably ascended to star status, but on his way up became marked as persona non gratis, effectively emasculated by the viral femininity that had leeched into his Hollywood aura during his turn as prostitute, i.e. Woman.

It is crucial not to let the box-office success of Gere’s 1982 smash hit, An Officer and a Gentleman, muddy the waters. Understood correctly, An Officer and a Gentleman is the exception that proves the rule that when one swims against the tide of masculine domination, one swims at one’s own risk. Gere’s ability to temporarily transcend the stain from American Gigolo is secured in the famous final scene of An Officer and a Gentleman in which Gere, in full Marine dress blues, storms onto the factory floor and literally sweeps Debra Winger off of her feet and out of the factory, to the cheers of her female factory co-workers. Each element in this scene is crucial to Gere’s brief transcendence. The marine uniform as warrior’s cloth cloaks Gere’s sexual stain, obscuring it from the viewer’s gaze. Gere sweeps Winger off her feet in a factory, the archetypal site of involvement in the wage economy, symbolically removing Woman from the labor pool and placing her economic survival back in its rightful domain of sexual object-hood. Winger swoons in Gere’s masculine embrace, an embrace which clearly references Man’s purchased ownership of Woman’s sexuality via marriage as rendered in the traditional carrying of the newly betrothed bride over the threshold, which is always a precursor to laying the virgin down in the marriage bed and taking possession of her sex. This shot reverses the transgressive act of taking women back across the threshold into sexual freedom that Gere, by bedding them for pay, had symbolically accomplished in American Gigolo. Finally, the cheers of Winger’s female factory co-workers signal their complicity in the sexual status quo, as they long to be liberated from the oppressive workaday life of factory labor by their own knight in shining armor; a life of indentured sexual servitude seems a small price to pay at the end of an eight hour shift on the factory floor for peanut wages. These women’s cheers signal that the feminist’s victory has in fact been Pyrrhic in nature, as the fruits of liberation from masculine domination are revealed as but a subjugation of a higher order. The song of women’s liberation is lost in the throbbing beat of workingman’s blues.

Post- An Officer and a Gentleman, Gere’s career entered its wilderness period, as the stain of American Gigolo, temporarily undone in the narrative of Officer’s denouement , reasserted itself in a near-decade long series of box-office disappointments. The only heat Gere generated during this period came in the form of a perverse urban legend. Legend has it that Gere engaged in a radical form of bestiality, inserting a mouse encased in a condom inside his rectum, with the frantic scratching of the mouse intended to generate sexual stimulation. Gere almost certainly never actually engaged in any such sexual shenanigans, but the viral spread of this rumor, which became so commonplace as to be considered a matter of course, had nothing to do with whether Gere actually stuffed a mouse in his arse. The ubiquity of this urban legend was an expression of zeitgeist, a collective recognition of the stain attached to Gere as a result of his actions in American Gigolo. The urban legend was a reformulation of the cultural stigma attached to Gere’s transgressive sexual persona. It was the very success of American Gigolo, in which mass culture encountered its own unacceptable desire for non-traditional sex, which foundered Gere. Gere’s stain, translated to narrative form via the urban legend, was the accompanying equal and opposite reaction to our collective repression of unacceptable, libido-driven desire.

Gere’s salvation as Hollywood leading man came with 1990’s Pretty Woman, in which Gere permanently erased his stain by renouncing American Gigolo’s radical core. By portraying a man paying to have sex with a female prostitute, Gere is able to stuff the terrifying specter of our sexual unchaining back into Pandora’s Box. It all plays out like a failed psychoanalysis, in which Gere shares his dream/nightmare of being paid to provide sex to a woman, only to have the analyst misinterpret the potentially transformative content of the dream as a symptom of pathology, the only available treatment for which is a reversion to socially acceptable sexual norms, a real, yet cloaked, pathology invisible to the incompetent analyst; the failed analyst, of course, is you and I.

The erasure of the stain enacted by Gere’s performance in Pretty Woman is as comprehensive as it is pathological. Pretty Woman is Gere’s public recital of the requisite Our Father’s and Hail Mary’s, proscribed by that other analyst figure, the Priest (we are, of course, also Priest, in the church of public opin{repress}ion). One conjugal embrace with girl-next-door cum slut Julia Roberts later, and Gere’s sins are completely absolved. The absolution’s probation period ends with Gere’s installation as People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in 1999. Gere’s new status as Hollywood’s (un)enlightened uber mensch is then codified by his exalted gig as the Dalai Lama’s number one Hollywood henchmen. Namaste!

Gere’s talent as the reverse Harry Houdini, inexplicably capable of re-chaining himself to social sexual norms after the near symbolic-death experience of American Gigolo , is celebrated in 1993’s Somersby. Gere portrays a returning Civil War veteran who, while physically resembling himself as he was before the war, is somehow just plain different enough to raise the question of whether he really is himself after all. Jodie Foster, a real-life “glass closet” lesbian, here dressed in (patriarchal) period costume, perfectly representing the figure of unacceptable, repressed desire, says to the new Gere, in order to prove to him once and for all that he is not the man whom he once was, “I never loved him the way I love you.” Foster’s stated passion for the new Gere is the acceptable, sublimated version of a passion our society is clearly not ready to own: our unequivocal, secret and diabolical desire for our American gigolo.

To Believe or Not to Believe, That is the Question

Those who would reform American education must beware the difficulty in reforming a system which already performs its true function, maintenance of the socioeconomic hierarchical status quo, perfectly. Would be reformers of urban public education (UPE) might initially take great comfort in the need for their services apparent in bulbous dropout rates and other assorted commonplace city school maladies. But the UPE reformer consigns herself to irrelevance when she mistakes the chaotic malaise of UPE as a sign of dysfunction, when in fact the apparent dysfunction is a symptom of UPE’s true function, the cementing of class immobility. The yet-to-be-seen successful UPE reformer must first take the necessary leap of faith and truly believe that really existing UPE is, against all outward appearances, a smashing success, in that it covertly fulfills its sub rosa, sinister function. Only by recognizing UPE for what it is, an instrument in the never ending story of class struggle, and by letting go of what UPE pretends to be, a flawed but curable system for the delivery of education to the masses, can a would be UPE reformer even begin the daunting task of initiating meaningful transformation. As long as the aspiring UPE reformer clings to her belief in UPE as a charming fixer-upper she will remain an unwitting accomplice in the maintenance of UPE as the guarantor of class immobility, as she will inevitably fail in achieving the impossible task of fixing what ain’t broke.

No one is more important in maintaining our necessary collective belief in the fiction of UPE as fixer-upper than the exceptional UPE alumnus who exhibits class mobility. This individual is shot forth from the belly of the beast like a Heimlich-dislodged chunk of meat, a propulsion necessary for the survival of UPE as currently constituted. If we follow the script we should see in this exceptional individual what is truly possible if only we were all to believe in and support our public schools. Ironically, it is the fact that we all already believe in our public schools, a belief paradoxically strengthened by their constant teetering on the verge of collapse, thereby increasing the intensity of our need to sustain them via our belief, which allows them to continue to function as instrument of oppression for the students condemned to their halls. Is it just coincidence that UPE produces just enough “success stories” to keep us all believing that we are just a reform away from tapping the limitless potential of the millions of children in urban schools, a belief mysteriously resilient to the contradictory fact of life as it is lived on city streets?

As a clinical social worker in a major UPE school system, I show up for work each day in order to help one more child become the exception that proves the rule. In doing so I am effectively attempting to feed the machine with the exceptions necessary to maintain our collective belief in the “potential” of UPE, and by now we all know that in touting someone’s potential we are merely gift-wrapping the reality of his or her current shortcomings. Wrapped up inside the shiny silver packaging of UPE spin is the coal-black heart of economic violence. If I am going to be complicit, as we all are, let me be so from within where at least I can spring a few of the inmates.

So how might the "potentially” successful reformer, one who believes in the true truth of UPE as the eight hundred pound gorilla sitting not in the room but on the backs of UPE’s students, initiate meaningful transformation? First and foremost, she would have to be a good liar; in order to penetrate the inner sanctum of UPE she must cloak herself in a false but outwardly convincing belief in the party line of accelerating student achievement, which if enacted would of course only ever serve to mint a modicum of exceptional individuals. Once ensconced inside the machine she would have to achieve the fantastical outcome of radicalizing millions of currently colonized consciousnesses, an act which looms larger than moving mountains. But Gandhi got the British out of India. And, perhaps more to the point, Dr. King got Jim Crow out of the American south. Of course, they shot Dr. King as soon as he started preaching economic justice. Which, with untold thousands of Americans dying and killing in the global “war on terror”, leaves me wondering what you and I are willing to lay down our lives for? In the meantime, I’ve got some exceptional children who need my clini(radi)cal assistance.

Oh Merde

Nothing keeps our species honest like the smell of our own shit.  And nothing is consistently funnier or more universal than potty humor; already my 21 month old daughter gets a laugh every time she says “faht” (not sure where she gets the Boston accent).  We are never more vulnerable than when we sit down to take a crap, and even more so after the fact as our human stain lingers in the air for all to smell.  Potty humor works precisely because of this vulnerability inherent to the act of moving our bowels (my all time least favorite euphemism for shit was that used by my maternal grandmother: “B.M.”; those two initials somehow made every shit I ever took in her house approximately five thousand times stinkier).  Effective potty humor releases the tension we all feel regarding our excrement and the act of expelling it by universalizing the absurdity of the act.  Nothing levels the playing field more than the realization that even the Queen of England stinks up the W.C.  Potty humor is the ultimate “I’m OK, you’re OK” moment. 

It is no coincidence that the greatest Zen Masters take their regular turn in the rotation cleaning the monastery’s toilets.  There is no better reminder that each and every one of us has Buddha nature than the fact that each and every one of us shits.  The individual of whom it is said “he thinks his shit doesn’t stink” is in exile from his own Buddha nature and in denial of everyone else’s; taken to its logical extreme this insight reveals the toilet seat as the throne of the son of man.  If we all “love our own brand” it is not because it doesn’t stink but because in the smell of our own shit we smell our own basic humanity. 

The office workplace is revealed, then, as soul crushing antiseptic vacuum by the little can of Glade air freshener in the restroom.  It does not matter whether you spray the can of Glade after you have done your business or not, for the real purpose of the can of Glade is to announce to all who enter that here, in the office, your human stain on the air is unacceptable; i.e. it is your very humanity that intrudes on your purpose here in the office, which is not to have your excrement extracted from your bum into the toilet but to have the surplus value extracted from your labor to serve your employer. 

There is something bracing, invigorating even, about walking into a freshly shat in bathroom.  The stinky bathroom is, if nothing else, alive.  But this honest stench is transmuted when subsumed under the cloying sweetness of Glade. Paired together, Glade and human shit smell like the scent of the stink bug.  The living, breathing, shitting human being is reduced by the office and the can of Glade to the status of pest.  And the pest is nothing other than that which must be controlled.

 

This morning's painful life lesson: While two glazed strawberry Pop Tarts make a delightful dessert, they make a truly nausseating breakfast. Now I am faced with the difficult task of operationalizing this key insight....

Hug This

The emphasis on the man-made origins of global warming/climate change and the corollary insistence upon the greening of human behavior masks a deeper fear. As long as climate change remains our creation, it rests within our power to undo it. Even if we fail to do so, through a collective species shortcoming, we become the authors of our own group suicide, and as such remain the masters of our own universe.

Hidden behind this narrative of climate change in which human beings are cast in the starring role, is the fear that climate change is occurring without any human input whatsoever. It is one thing if, like Thelma & Louise, I choose to steer my car off a cliff; it is another thing altogether if an earthquake rips open the interstate beneath my Toyota Prius and I am gobbled up by the earth.

The prevailing human-centered narrative of climate change, with its clarion call for a green revolution, is nothing other than a re-boot of enlightenment’s central project, the human domination of nature. The vision of a green revolution that brings humanity and nature into harmony, restoring conditions that reliable sources confirm were enjoyed by American Indians before the arrival of El Gordo (aka The White Man), is the obscuring fantasy that allows the real project of dominating nature to continue right beneath our noses while we post pictures of the family trip to Yosemite on Facebook. If you doubt the depth of the need for climate change, and by extension nature itself, to be ours, just imagine yourself at a cocktail party engaged in a discussion with someone who doesn’t “believe in global warming”. If we are honest about the emotions this (in)human being would provoke, we might need to revive the word heretic.

So what do we do if every last one of us composts and it is still sixty degrees and sunny on Christmas Day in Wasilla, Alaska? We carry on with the really existing debate between the greens and the oil barons: how best to dominate nature? It is only by accepting that this is the debate to be won that the greens can cast off their tattered coat of tree hugging flakiness and attain to their true status as benevolent dominatrix. Clad in leather garb appropriate to the ferocity of this debate, the greens might actually win. And the stakes of this debate, given that homo sapiens (probably) are responsible for climate change, could not be higher. For if Bobby Knight was interviewed by Connie Chung again, this time around he might reformulate his infamous remarks thusly: "If global warming is inevitable, just sit back and enjoy it." There is no more dangerous enemy than he who thinks he is being funny when he is actually being creepy. I'll take a session with my friendly local dominatrix, thank you very much.

Hipster (a working definition):  One whose enjoyment is subservient to one’s perception of the acts essential to one’s self image.  

From a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, the hipster is one with a rigid, perhaps fundamentalist, investment in the fiction of his or her ego, placing the hipster at a radical remove from the truth of his or her subject.

The geek, however, experiences no limitation in his or her enjoyment of the experience; in fact the geek has the opposite problem in getting carried away with his or her enjoyment, in other words going too far in the sense of alienating others. The geek, whether engaged in civil war reenactment or on-line World of Warcraft gaming does not know how to limit his or her enjoyment, allowing his or her excessive enjoyment to interfere with basic social functioning. To use a (possibly hip) Lacanian term, the geek has an over abundance of jouissance. On a personal level, I am a closet geek about tennis equipment, but I have enough of the hipster in me to keep this geek enthusiasm largely concealed.

The hipster’s enjoyment is restricted by a rigid self image, and the hipster’s perception of his or her own sexual attractiveness is a key element in the hipster’s calculus of acceptable acts. The hipster is limited at all times by the idea of how he or she will be perceived by others, unlike the geek who could care less about the opinions of those not engaged in e.g. medieval warcraft and costume gatherings. The hipster is the far more tragic of the two conditions, as he or she is, ironically, as socially and sexualy limited as the geek; just as geeks only get laid by geeks, hipsters end up only having sex with other hipsters. But while the geek must struggle with an excess of jouissance, the hipster, bound by his or her rigid ego, exiled from the truth of his or her subject, can only nibble at the life-giving buffet table of jouissance, while everyone else helps themselves to Cheesecake Factory portions. And the geeks go home with doggy bags.

Finally, the phenomenon of “geek chic” in which the hipster attempts to coopt the yearned for jouissance of the geek but only ever manages to shackle the geek’s excess freedom, reveals the truth of the hipster’s subject as a narrative of the geek in flight from himself, i.e. the hipster is nothing other than the necessary ego fiction accompanying the truth of the repression of the geek into the always obscured subject.  

Witness the author’s circa 1995 immersion into thrift store clothing, wine-colored hair, local Perth indie rock bands, and a subsequent ill-fated long distance love affair with an Australian hipster sheela.  After further romantic catastrophes amidst a prolonged hipster phase, my care of the self has consisted largely of a modulation of my hipster terndencies in an effort to give the truth of my own subject room to breathe, e.g. allowing myself to devote untold hours to staring at tennis racquets on internet tennis gear websites and, ahem, posting thoughts on the pro’s and cons of various racquets on chat room message boards; perhaps if I can let myself chat up the occasional stranger in an elevator about the reason I am considering a switch from Head to Dunlop I will have truly relented my investment in a hip facade.  All that said, the most important step in the journey towards my subject was wooing and marrying a decidedly unhip, but manifestly cool (as in the true meaning of cool in the sense of the real meaning of Christmas) Jewish chick.  L’chaim!