<\/p>\n
Embracing Passion and Obsession:\u00a0 A Crash Course in Kissing<\/strong><\/p>\n Of course I went to see Kissed<\/em> the first night it came to town.\u00a0 The trailers for the film looked positively compelling, after all, and the issue — the erotic component of death — is pretty compelling in its own right, and deliciously forbidden to boot.<\/p>\n Let me tell you this film by novice director Lynne Stopkewitch, adapting a short story by Barbara Gowdy, is one fine piece of work.\u00a0 Forget Crash<\/em>.\u00a0 This is a film by someone who truly understands and appreciates obsession, or at least a film by someone who understands and appreciates my<\/em> kind of obsession.\u00a0 Or, better yet, a film by someone who feels<\/em> this particular kind of obsession from the inside, since cognitive understanding probably has precious little to do with what\u2019s important about obsession anyway.\u00a0 And wouldn\u2019t you know it would be the women who dive into the obsession thing, leaving guilt and shame behind, rather than the guys.<\/p>\n I am definitely one of those \u201cwrong\u201d people that Greta Christina teasingly calls \u201cnattering nabobs of negativity\u201d — I walked away from Crash<\/em> feeling surprisingly unmoved, certainly erotically unstirred.\u00a0 If Crash<\/em> is their statement, then as far as I\u2019m concerned, director David Cronenberg (whose work I generally love) and writer J.G. Ballard just don\u2019t get it about obsession — don\u2019t understand, don\u2019t feel the mystique, the magic, the swoon of what it means to be drawn off the ledge of the sensible world and go inside the cloud of the obsessive altered state.\u00a0 Or maybe their way of being obsessed just lives in another universe from mine.\u00a0 But Crash<\/em> just left me cold.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not really that I didn\u2019t like Crash<\/em>.\u00a0 I liked it well enough, I guess, in that Twin Peaks\/David Lynch sort of way — you know, the succession of fairly random surrealistic twists and turns that come out of nowhere, go nowhere, and in the end have almost nothing to say except that its cool to be quirky for the sake of being quirky.\u00a0 I gave up on David Lynch after Blue Velvet<\/em>, where he sort of had it and lost it (what Blue Velvet<\/em> had might have been thanks to Dennis Hopper as much as anything Lynch brought along).\u00a0 But after Blue Velvet<\/em>, as far as I\u2019m concerned, Lynch has never had anything to say.\u00a0 I mean, really, it isn\u2019t the 70\u2019s any more.\u00a0 Tripping out for the sake of tripping out is seriously old news, the post-modern thing has long been beaten to death except (or especially) for college undergraduates, Picasso\u2019s restructuring of the nature of reality happened a long time ago, and Andy Warhol, having performed his service for the evolution of perception, in the end got what he deserved.\u00a0 But I digress.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t understand it when I was walking out of the theater, but the real problem I had with Crash is that it is an anti-obsessionist\u2019s film about obsession and I was wanting a film by someone who embraced obsession instead rather than someone who was afraid of it.\u00a0 Ballard admitted as much in an NPR interview with Terry Gross, much to Gross\u2019 surprise.\u00a0 Ballard is nervous to think that we have come to the point of welcoming all the perverts into society, of glorifying their deviance.\u00a0 He wants to go back to the days where the weirdoes were kept on the outskirts of town, kept where they couldn\u2019t hurt anybody.\u00a0 He may have something of the obsessive thing inside him, but he\u2019s too terrified of that part of himself to welcome its passionate nature.\u00a0 And so he has written a story that let\u2019s us see how cold sexual obsession can be — how slimy, how sleazy, and not the fun kind of sleazy either.<\/p>\n So as much as Cronenberg may have tried to turn the thing around, in Crash<\/em> we are left with all these soulless, empty-lived L.A. types tripping off into the land of the strange and exotic, but going there in the distinctly distanced, disconnected sort of way that reeks of lost souls wandering up blind alleys looking in vain for a home — dry souls wandering forty years in the dessert, trying to find juice here, there, and everywhere, but coming up parched over and over again.\u00a0 Have you ever watched bored people at a bad s\/m party paddle away at each other until the whole scene just peters itself away into exhaustion?\u00a0 It came, it was, it went — pass the jam, and where do you go to find a good cup of coffee?<\/p>\n Obsession as a repetitive, futile attempt to compensate for some psychopathological, or perhaps existential, emptiness.\u00a0 Thank you very much, Dr. Freud, but get a grip.\u00a0 Obsessive passion is not necessarily some misguided attempt to deny and avoid the emptiness born of a loveless childhood or a culture that has lost its moorings.\u00a0 More likely it\u2019s the other way around:\u00a0 Emptiness of the soul is what\u2019s left when the obsessive power of primal passion gets vilified, denied, and suppressed.<\/p>\n There\u2019s an old joke:\u00a0 After 39.9 years in the dessert, Mrs. Moses decided to take matters in her own hands and asked for some directions.\u00a0 The Promised Land?\u00a0 Right over there.\u00a0 Make a left at the third sand dune.\u00a0 Which is to say that Kissed<\/em> is another story entirely, a whole different take on obsession and on passion.\u00a0 Shut up already with the moralizing, guys, the women have something they want to say.<\/p>\n Seeing Kissed<\/em> did not make me want to have sex with corpses, any more than Crash<\/em> made me want to fuck in a crashed car, but it did make me want to have sex with Molly Parker\u2019s Sandra, while Sandra was in the altered state she entered while she was having sex with corpses.\u00a0 More precisely, watching Sandra transformed made me want to join her in that altered, coming home, state — a state I associate most intimately with being sexual in one way or another, a state of mind I define as being sexually transformed, whether or not it has anything to do with genitals, with touching, or with physical sensation whatsoever — which is why, for me, sex, the transformation, is quite separate from sex, the act.<\/p>\n What made watching Kissed<\/em> so delightful for me was that I could feel that state of transformation and coming home in my body, watching Sandra go there as she danced and mounted her corpses, watching the way her face was transported, the way the feeling shivered through her, subtle yet rivetingly powerful.\u00a0 And I could identify with Sandra just as strongly when she tried to put what was, for her, the heart of the matter into words — the place of rubbing intimately up against death, entering the quality of it, eroticizing the essence of it, because that is so clearly the right, the only appropriate thing to do with the hugeness and intimacy of it, the fear of it, the attraction, the fascination — wanting to know what it is, wanting to feel it, to take it in, to be part of it, to be one with it, to be transformed by it.\u00a0 Crossing over, Sandra calls it, with most excellent and correct precision.<\/p>\n Critics from Greta Christina to the Chronicle<\/em>\u2019s Ruthe Stein have said that Kissed<\/em>, having moved into uncharted waters, doesn\u2019t seem to know where to go with its subject matter.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t disagree more.\u00a0 Kissed<\/em> delivers its perspective eloquently, if obliquely, speaking poetically (some would say vaguely) because there are some things that just cannot be adequately expressed in the flat prose of objective discourse.\u00a0 And the film is equally eloquent in conveying the maddening difficulty of trying to communicate transcendent experience to someone outside that experience.\u00a0 The cautious delicacy with which Sandra tries to be understood by her boyfriend, Matt, is piercingly moving, as is the respect with which Matt initially receives what she tells him, his good faith attempts to honor and understand what this is about for her, his various efforts to be part of her intimacy, and his ultimate failure to join her there except by extraordinary means.<\/p>\n Sandra is as soulful in her obsession as the various characters in Crash<\/em> are soulless in theirs.\u00a0 She is grounded by the integrity of her passion and her willingness to embrace and celebrate it without shame or apology.\u00a0 Crash<\/em> culminates in the damnation of being eternally incomplete, obsession inevitably returning to the emptiness from which it arises.\u00a0 \u201cMaybe next time…\u201d is its closing bit of dialogue, its watchword.\u00a0 In Kissed<\/em>, the obsessive drive to reenact the driving experience comes not from its failure to deliver satisfaction, but from its success.\u00a0 Each act is its own completion — a satisfying return home to the essential self, a connection to the primal erotic core, a confirmation of the possibility of being whole.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Erotic by Nature<\/em> Declared \u201cIndecent and Obscene\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n I suppose it\u2019s been inevitable, but I must say I\u2019m surprised that it\u2019s finally happened.\u00a0 A copy of my sweet, soft, sexy book, Erotic by Nature<\/em>, on its innocent way to a man named Dugald McCullough in Belfast, Northern Ireland, has been seized by British customs as \u201cindecent and obscene.\u201d\u00a0 Dugald has one month to protest the seizure or else his book will be forfeited to the musty back rooms of the British Empire where it will, I suppose, become part of the growing private preserve of customs officials looking for cheap thrills on their lunch breaks.<\/p>\n For nine years we have been shipping copies of Erotic by Nature<\/em> — a lush, hardcover, coffee table collection of decidedly artful erotic and sexual photography, short stories, drawings, and poems — all over the U.S. and the world without any legal problems whatsoever.\u00a0 Individual copies have been sent to mail order purchasers in Britain before without any difficulty.\u00a0 We even have a small distributor in London that sells the book via mail order, copies that we ship to him(expensively) a few copies at a time, in small, unobtrusive packages, knowing that British customs is one of the most restrictive in the world (along with some other British Commonwealth nations, like Canada and New Zealand).<\/p>\n (The only restrictions we have encountered distributing the book have been with federal prisons, where we can\u2019t even send a flyer advertising Erotic by Nature<\/em> because, as we have been curtly informed by the U.S. Department of Justice, \u201cnone of the funds made available [by Congress] to the Federal Bureau of Prisons may be used to distribute or make available [to a prisoner] information or material [that] is sexually explicit or features nudity.\u201d\u00a0 You wouldn\u2019t want your tax dollars used to enflame the sexual passions of federal lawbreakers, now, would you?\u00a0 Of course not.)<\/p>\n The irony of Erotic by Nature<\/em> being seized as pornographic is that one of the book\u2019s main purposes has been precisely to offer sexually erotic material that is an alternative to commercial porn.\u00a0 As I state in the book\u2019s introduction,<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Because pornography has monopolized the sexual marketplace for so long, it has become easy to believe that direct and powerful sexual\/erotic material is inherently pornographic.\u00a0 This book demonstrates that it is not.\u00a0 It demonstrates that erotic work can be sexy, powerful, and provocative without being stale, without manipulating men\u2019s and women\u2019s sexual frustrations and fears, without depicting sex as an arena for men\u2019s dominance over women, without denying the full erotic subjectivity of all human beings.\u00a0 This book offers an alternative to pornography, one that encourages us all to be fully erotic, fully sexual beings without alienating ourselves, our deepest human values, or the people with whom we are most intimately involved.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Poor Dugald McCullough!\u00a0 As it turns out, this is precisely the reason he ordered the book in the first place.\u00a0 \u201cI have been outspoken against pornography,\u201d he writs in his email, informing me that the book has been seized, \u201cand was attracted to your book because the publicity explicitly states that it honours men and women and manages to celebrate sexuality without being pornographic.\u201d<\/p>\n Dugald, you see, happens to be an active partisan in the British anti-porn movement, much influenced by such guiding lights as American porn-slayers Andrea Dworkin and John Stoltenberg.\u00a0 \u201cIf there\u2019s pornography for sale in a shop I happen to be in,\u201d Dugald proudly tells me, \u201cand if I\u2019m feeling up to it, I\u2019ll challenge sales staff and their managers to think about what they\u2019re selling.\u201d\u00a0 He has even conducted versions of Stoltenberg\u2019s horribly manipulative \u201cmen against pornography\u201d workshops on a BBC television program that was broadcast nationwide.<\/p>\n (These are the workshops where men — mostly heterosexual — are tricked into putting themselves in awkwardly sexual poses in front of other men, while the men shout at them that they\u2019re not doing it right.\u00a0 This is Stoltenberg\u2019s warped idea of what it\u2019s like for women to be porn models or actresses.\u00a0 As the men scramble to cope with their embarrassment at thrusting their pelvises alluringly toward other men, they are encouraged to express how horrible they feel and to vent the anger, which really comes from being brutally manipulated by Stoltenberg, at the world\u2019s pornographers.\u00a0 A nasty, manipulative piece of emotional abuse if I ever saw one.\u00a0 The one time I participated in one of these workshops I was so angry I wanted to spit.)<\/p>\n \u201cIs there a fight here which you will support?\u201d Dugald asks.\u00a0 \u201cAre there people in this country you advise me contacting in regard to this issue?\u201d<\/p>\n Well, sure, I\u2019m ready to help anybody who wants to fight state censorship, even people who campaign for that very censorship, and I have told Dugald as much.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t resist adding, however, that \u201cit is with some amusement that I see you suffering at the hands of the very sort of pornography suppression you probably support.\u00a0 It is as ironic as Andrea Dworkin having her work suppressed under the Canadian anti-porn law passed with her encouragement.\u00a0 Unfortunately, whenever these issues are dealt with by state intervention and suppression it is people like ourselves — whose sexualities are marginalized and therefore subject to easy attack — who suffer the most.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n May 30, 1997<\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 1997 David Steinberg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" <\/p>\n Embracing Passion and Obsession: A Crash Course in Kissing<\/p>\n Of course I went to see Kissed the first night it came to town. The trailers for the film looked positively compelling, after all, and the issue — the erotic component of death — is pretty compelling in its own right, and deliciously forbidden to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comes-naturally","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}