Cultures of Fetishism (16 page)

His second apocalyptic journey concludes with a visit to the morgue. Bill wants to check out the identity of an “ex-beauty queen” who the newspapers report as having succumbed to a drug overdose the night before. Her name was Amanda Currin—Mandy, just like the name of the drugged-out, naked woman in Ziegler’s bedroom. As he gazes at her corpse, Bill leans over as if to kiss her on the mouth—a gesture that suggests he is still under the spell of the necrophilic sex that he had witnessed at the orgy, where men in masks (and some women too) were engaging in joyless copulations with drugged-out, doped-up, hypnotized, mannikin-like, robotic Stepford wives with impecca- bly molded breasts and smoothed out porcelain skin, while the masked guests who were not actively participating stood around peering lasciviously through the eye-slits in their masks. The secret passwords, the rigidly controlled script, the heavily ritualized sex, the orchestrated body movements of the naked women, were all part of a scenario designed to drain sexual expe- rience of all its potential vitality; a scenario governed by the fetishism strategy. At the orgy, nothing errant or unpredictable was allowed to happen. If, by chance, the body of a woman were to come to life, even for a brief moment or two, the world the masked figures had built up with such precision and diligence might collapse in on itself, like Poe’s “House of Usher.”

After his close encounter with making love to a corpse, who may or may not have been Mandy, Bill is summoned to Ziegler’s mansion. Ziegler tells him he has had him followed that night and knows of all his visits. Furthermore, he had seen everything Bill did the night before at the orgy. “I was there.” “I saw it all.” He tells Bill that the entire scene of the naked woman redeeming him by surrendering herself to the judge had been staged. Nobody punished her. Nobody hurt her. She was just “a hooker,” who did what she always did and got what she always got, “she got her brains fucked out.”

Bill makes his way back home to Alice for the second time. This time he is in a thoughtful mood, frightened, sobered. He feels that he has sinned. He needs Alice’s forgiveness. He needs to confess. He awakens her and with a loud sob, throws himself into her arms, crying hysterically, “I will tell you everything.” “I will tell you everything.”

Alice listens to the tale of Bill’s misadventures with compassion, looking at him through half-lidded eyes, all red and swollen, presumably from lack of sleep and crying. By the time Bill finishes his revelation, a grey dawn was already creeping through the curtains. Alice reminds Bill that they had promised Helena a Christmas shopping trip.

Off the family goes to a huge toy store. As Helena bounces about delightedly from one exorbitantly priced toy to another, Alice, wearing the glasses she always wears when she has to look at things closely, such as price tags and math homework and christmas present wrappings, humors Helena’s Christmas fantasies, and at the same time tries to get back into an emotional resonance with Bill. Finally, as Helena dashes off to look at some more toys, Bill asks Alice, “What do you think we should do?”

Like that line, which was taken word for word from “Dream Story,” nearly all the concluding words of
Eyes Wide Shut
are either paraphrases or verbatim quotes from “Dream Story.” However, instead of dividing these words between the couple as Schnitzler did, Kubrick assigns all those phrases of wis- dom to Alice. Bill is the questioner, the one who seeks understanding and redemption. Alice is the redeemer. She pronounces her third and final revelation.

Alice, peering at Bill through her eyeglasses, evaluates his question for a moment. “What do I think? Ummm. I don’t know. Maybe I think we should be grateful . . . grateful we managed to survive all our adventures, whether they were real or only a dream.” Bill asks “Are you sure?” Once again Alice ponders his question and once again paraphrases “Dream Story.”

“Am I sure? The reality of one night, even the reality of a whole lifetime isn’t the whole truth. No dream is ever just a dream. The important thing is we’re awake now and for a long time to come.” Bill says, “Forever” Alice rejects his “forever.” “Let’s not say that word. It frightens me. But I do love you and there is something very important we need to do as soon as possible.” She hesitates for a moment, and then utters a word that would have been unprintable and unsayable in Schnitzler’s world.

In “Dream Story,” after Albertine says, “But, now I suppose we are both awake for a long time to come,” she and Fridoline simply lay silently, dozing dreamlessly, very close to one another, as if in a tender affirmation of the bond between them, until a knocking at the door begins a new sunlit day and they hear the sounds of a child’s laughter. “Dream Story” ends with a disavowal of the profound experiences of Albertine and Fridoline, as if every- thing happy and cheerful will go on forever.

In
Eyes Wide Shut
the word that Alice speaks, in response to Bill’s ques- tion, “What do you think we should do?” derives entirely from Kubrick’s imagination: “Fuck.”

And that is the last word of Kubrick’s film, followed by a two-second blackout before the large white letters of the film credits roll down on the blacked-out screen.

Schnitzler did not need to say “Fuck.” Nor did he need to invent a char- acter like Victor Ziegler to exemplify corruption and to insist on the reality of the real. He felt that his “Dream Story” spoke for itself. The ambiguities regarding the differences between dream life and real life were integral to Schnitzler’s psychological insights. Though his cheery optimistic ending seemed to foreclose ambiguities and inconsistencies, nevertheless, the unan- swered psychological enigmas of the fantasy lives of Albertine and Fridoline,

were left by the nineteenth-century writer for his readers to take into themselves, absorb and puzzle through—if they cared to.

Kubrick approaches these enigmas differently. He is intent on asserting the reality of the real—an artistic inclination that, at first glance, seems like an expression of the fetishism strategy. His attempt to reify images and emotions and fantasies that might otherwise have stood on their own as intriguing ambiguities and uncertainties seems, at first, to intrude a note of false resolu- tion to this otherwise expansively cryptic tale. The deus ex machina of the nonchalantly heartless billionaire, Victor Ziegler, who so obviously exempli- fies corruption and so insistently claims that he was a witness of everything that Bill experienced at the orgy (“I was there. I saw it all.”) removes any pos- sibility that Bill’s apocalyptic adventure might have been a dream or fantasy, no more real than his wife’s fantasy of sexual surrender to a stranger. But, this was probably what Kubrick had in mind. He wanted to drive home the point that the apocalyptic nightmare that Bill experienced was real and really happened and really does happen in our corrupt social order. It was not imag- ined. Kubrick poses the fantasy life, the inner life of Alice as a reparation and rejoinder to Bill’s
real
, reality. It is her affirmation of the life of the imagina- tion, the life force, that Kubrick poses as an antidote to the consumerism and commodity fetishism that characterizes the social world of the Harfords.

Kubrick exhibited a kind of bravery, in which Schnitzler was thought to be deficient. Unlike Kubrick, who had gained world renown for his bold confrontations with the social injustices of his times and who used the marital deadness of the Harfords to mirror the necrophilic times, Schnitzler was sometimes referred to as a writer who belongs in the boudoir, “holding a bedroom screen up to his times,” not to reflect the times but to hide them.
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As I thought about the deathlike, porcelain skin of the naked women in Kubrick’s film, I was carried back to some images of women’s bodies from the film adaptation of my book
Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary
.

The 1997 film
Female Perversions
was one of the first of a rash of films with scenes devoted to skin-cutting. The skin-cutters were a thirteen-year-old girl, Edwina, who is trying to come to terms with her menstruation, and the heroine, Eve, a thirtyish female lawyer, who is about to become a judge and who struggles over her hitherto unacknowledged identification with her mother. Then came
The Piano Tecaher
, a film based on a novel of the same name. It describes the life of Ericka, a highly sought-after piano teacher, who sleeps in the same bed with her mother, who cuts into her own skin and puts broken glass into the coat pockets of a younger pianist whose talent she envies so that her fingers will be destroyed, and then, in the bargain, has oral sex with one of her favorite male students in the school’s ladies room. In 2002,
Secretary
was on the big screen and focused on Lee, a lonely young woman who finds true love after learning how to combine her skin-cutting with her fetish for being spanked by her boss.

2003 was a big year for movies about people with a fanatical devotion to self-mutilation. In that same year, for the first time the term
fetishism
was

used to describe the emotional force behind these self-mutiliations.
Thirteen
, a vivid, nearly pornographic portrayal of the body mutilations and sexual activities of a thirteen-year-old girl and her somewhat older, more experi- enced best friend, who indoctrinates her into these practices, arrived in the summer of 2003. David Denby reviewed the film for
The New Yorker
and explained that the events depicted in this movie were not just an odd phe- nomena that applied to single-mother families living in trailer parks, but to our culture at large. “The film could be set in a lot of other places in a coun- try that knocks young girls off their feet with waves of consumer fetishism.”
38
In November, movie critic Stephen Holden described Esther, the heroine of
In My Skin
, a thirty-year-old woman who compulsively slices off, cuts, and bites off pieces of her skin, as “trying to hide her fetish from her boy friend.”
39
As Holden locates the source of her fetishistic behavior, he captures the essence of what I am calling a “culture of fetishism.” Holden says: “In a sterile corporate culture where human appetites are quantified, tamed, and manip- ulated by market research and where people are rewarded for functioning like automatons, uncontrollable tics [Holden is referring here to skin-cutting] are really the anxious, protesting twitches of an oppressed animal spirit.”
40

Skin cutting is symptomatic of a larger culture of fetishism that is infiltrating every corner of our lives, not just the lives of those rare individuals who are drawn to acts of self-mutilation, not just some odd-ball weirdos—but all of us. Like footbinding, wearing stilettos, and tattooing, skin-cutting is a form of writing on the skin. In some hunter-gatherer societies, for example, the eld- ers carve into the skin of a pubescent child as if it were a piece of wood, leav- ing marks that are meant to assure that the youth will conform to the traditional ways and not be led astray by Nature. As we shall see in the next chapter, “Writing on the Skin,” skin-cutting can express many different and contradictory emotions and thoughts. While it can sometimes be a mark of rebellion, just as often it can be a mirroring of the corruptions of the social order. Similarly, it can either be a gesture that undermines and opposes the

fetishism strategy or an expression of it.

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F
i v e

W
riting on the
S
kin

I
n the middle of the twentieth century, after decades of colonialist expansion, when hunter-gatherer societies were still relatively free to forage the scrap of Earth left to them, anthropologists followed them, lived among them, observed them and diligently recorded their daily life. In hunter-gatherer societies, where it was a matter of survival to stay in close touch with the mys- terious and uncontrollable forces of Nature, there was the pretense that social and religious rites could control an otherwise capricious Nature. The growing- up of a child into adulthood was not left to Nature. Writings on the body had to be forceful and declarative—acts of inscription that were tantamount to body mutilations.

Many of the anthropologists were particularly fascinated by the rites of passage, particularly the ceremonial rituals that initiated a girl or boy into adulthood. They took careful notes on the mutilations of the body that these rites usually required; among them (depending on the society): pulling out a tooth; cutting off the little finger above the last joint; cutting off the earlobe or perforating the earlobe or nasal septum; tattooing; scarifying the face, chest, back, legs, and arms; excising the clitoris; perforating the hymen; subincising the penis; cutting off the foreskin.

The anthropologists did not merely record the shapes and sizes of these cuts into the skin, they also interpreted them. Arnold van Gennep, who stud- ied the Barundi of Tanganyika, conceived the theory that the human body was treated like a piece of wood whose surfaces could be trimmed, broken through, written on, whose irregular projections could be carved away or shaped into the forms that a society designates as womanly or manly.
1
From what we know of the fetishism strategy, we could interpret that the body mutilations were the Barundi’s method of taming and subduing what might otherwise be a disruptive vitality. Though the Barundi elders, who used fetish objects in their religious rituals, knew nothing of the fetishism strategy, they nevertheless employed that strategy to control the pubescent urgencies of the