David Cronenberg's Videodrome: Bad Religion

"She kissed his cheek, and the flesh against her lips felt as cold as the snowfl
akes at the window."

--"Mojave" by Truman Capote, from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Music-Chameleon
s-Truman-Capote/dp/0679745661/">Music for Chameleons</a>
"And so it is "I," the person among other persons, alone yet inseparable from th
e community of others, who sees as if for the first time and who reflectively co
mes to know the meanings that awaken in my consciousness." - Clark Moustakas, <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/Phenomenological-Research-Methods-Clark-Moustakas/d
p/0803957998/">Phenomological Research Methods</a>, quote taken from <a h
ref="http://www.academia.edu/693083/Being-in-the-world_of_celebrity_The_phenomen
ology_of_fame">"Being a Celebrity: A Phenomology of Fame"</a> by Donna Rockwell
and David C. Giles
(This contains spoilers for Videodrome, though it is very much written for th
ose who have seen and are familiar with the movie. Given this, no attempt at a p
lot summary is made. There are spoilers for Cronenberg's Naked Lunch as well. Sc
ript excerpts are taken from on-line transcripts at <a href="http://www.script-o
-rama.com">Script-o-rama</a>, for <a href="http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_sc
ripts/v/videodrome-script-transcript-david-cronenberg.html">Videodrome</a
> and <a href="http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/n/naked-lunch-script-t
ranscript-cronenberg.html">Naked Lunch</a>. I am indebted to <a href="htt
p://www.amazon.com/Rule-Metaphor-Multi-disciplinary-Creation-University/dp/08020
64477/">The Rule of Metaphor</a> by Paul Ricoeur, as a helpful, though of
ten difficult, guide on the subject.)
One of the most unsettling movies I've ever seen. Some do not wish to attempt to
examine the mysteries of why a certain film works, especially if it has this ki
nd of memorable power, disturbing or otherwise; that this is like sealing beauti
ful flowing smoke in a glass. The hyptnotizing, electric flow ends with the entr
apment, and there is perhaps something unfeeling as well - this kind of examinat
ion can sometimes be close to trapping insects in jars, and sometimes like pluck
ing their wings off. I know all this, and I look closer anyway. What follows are
my brief explorations of Videodrome. As with all explorations, they are
unfinished.
The first thing to be looked at might be the quality so often remarked about thi
s movie, its prescience. That it features a man who becomes obsessed with a virt
ual reality, to the point that he can no longer distinguish between the real and
his hallucinations, this all is taken as an anticipation of our internet domina
ted lives, now. Properly placed, Videodrome is not a prediction, but simp
ly a reiteration of past themes. Cronenberg himself would dismiss the idea of a
conscious, intentional attempt at augury in many places, among them his introduc
tion to a showing of the film in 2009, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c
b0RbiSlMLc">"Cronenberg Videodrome Intro"</a> (from 1:30-3:00 in the clip):
<blockquote>The movie has been seen as being quite prophetic, as you mentioned,
of everything from the internet to virtual reality, to interactive television an
d so on, I suppose you could say, "Did I anticipate all of that stuff?" and I su
ppose I could say, "Yeah." But so what? Because nothing happens as a resu
lt of that. I wasn't really trying to be prophetic. I was trying to...when you,
if you're an artist, all you've got, that might be unique, are the antenna that
you have, that are sensitive to things that are in the air, that are around, tha
t perhaps other people are not sensitive, as sensitive to, for whatever reason.
And so I think that was what I was really doing then. Because there is a charact
er in this movie [Brian O'Blivion] who is modeled after Marshall McLuhan, and he
was certainly around the University of Toronto when I was there. And his
thoughts, and his presence, and his prophecies, which were quite astonis
hingly accurate, I must say, so for me to...I was really trying to...to distill
something of the zeitgeist of the time, I suppose, and also make something that
was entertaining and sexy and perverse, I think. And you'll let me know if I did
that or not.</blockquote>
The director would again dismiss the possibility, as well as explain the genesis
of the movie in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UZPGhZRA9U">"Cronenber
g on Cronenberg"</a> (15:55-17:42 in the clip):
<blockquote>CRONENBERG
Videodrome really came from the limitations of television at the time. Which was
, I remember as a child, we had an antenna that would rotate, to pick up, each s
tation needed the antenna to rotate to get the best image. So, you'd be watching
your TV set, rotating the image, and seeing it come into focus in a way. And so
metimes, when the major...this is something else that people don't think of. It
wasn't twenty four hour a day television. It was...at eleven o'clock, eleven thi
rty, television was finished. Until the morning. You didn't go all night. After
all the television stations had shut down, you could sometimes pick up some stra
nge signals, from...now, in Toronto it would be mostly from America, maybe Buffa
lo. Maybe from New York. Maybe from Detroit. And those signals were very weak, b
ut you could pick them up late at night. And you would see things, but it would
never be clear. And you wouldn't know what you were watching. And it was very my
sterious. And sometimes very disturbing. And very intriguing. And so I used that
experience with Videodrome. In other words, old technology at the time. I even
have scenes of a satellite dish, and so on, but of course when I was doing it, i
t was an antenna, not a satellite dish. There were no satellites. And it was jus
t that idea of picking up a mysterious, forbidden signal. That somehow you had a
ccess to, via accident. And that's really what it had to do with. Videodrome.
INTERVIEWER
This idea of a hidden channel, is something very relevant, powerful, even today.
[CRONENBERG: Yes.] When you think of the internet [CRONENBERG: Yes.], this dark
net, there always seems to be a place where people are hoping to find something
forbidden, or...
CRONENBERG
Yes. That's actually true, and it's why people sometimes think Videodrome
is anticipating the internet, of course I wasn't really thinking about it, but
it's true that some of the things that I was playing with, which is to say inter
active television, television that would respond directly to you, was, is, in a
sense, an anticipation of something...that has become the internet. Really. So,
it hasn't changed, and yes, there are some very forbidden...imagery and videos o
n the internet which....I mean, it's quite extraordinary that the police could c
ome to your house and discover that you had downloaded some images and arrest yo
u and put you in jail for a long time. Mostly, child pornography and so on. But.
..that's an extraordinary thought. That the images condemn you, immediately. And
that, even though you just sat in your room and clicked to access them. But you
were condemned by doing that. That's extraordinary.</blockquote>
One should note the key element in the TV signals picked up from across the bord
er, and that is the lack of control. The TV signal is described as "mysterious,
forbidden", a transmission where "you wouldn't know what you were watching". We
have perhaps the exact inverse of the contemporary internet, which is defined by
the search engine google, along with content filters like facebook and twitter,
whose orderly and authoritative results arguably disciplined a wild and unruly
place. Whereas the Videodrome signal is something like an unnamed ghostla
nd, unknown and invisible to all atlases. It exists as a result of technology, a
nd yet it also has the qualities of a hallucinatory vision which might seize a c
haracter, and whose meaning they must decipher, whether it has an implication fo
r the here and now, or a portent of the future. This, of course, is a near exact
description of the visions of another movie, which resemble old TV transmission
s, the transmitted warnings of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093777/?ref
_=nv_sr_1">Prince of Darkness</a>.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/uSZ4XtC.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/bafk58b.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/YWptdZM.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
Given that Videodrome is seen as a prescient vision, it might be useful t
o look at someone else from the very same time whose work is seen as predicting
the internet, though that was not his intent, either. This would be the writer W
illiam Gibson, and his book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Neuromancer-William-G
ibson/dp/0441569595/">Neuromancer</a>, published only a year after Vid
eodrome's release. I do not link the two out of any intent to make kleptic a
ccusations; I think Gibson himself properly answers why you might have a similar
focus in the movies and books of the time in <a href="http://www.theparisreview
.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fiction-no-211-william-gibson">"William Gibson,
The Art of Fiction No. 211"</a>:
<blockquote>There's an idea in the science-fiction community called steam-engine
time, which is what people call it when suddenly twenty or thirty different wri
ters produce stories about the same idea. It's called steam-engine time because n
obody knows why the steam engine happened when it did. Ptolemy demonstrated the
mechanics of the steam engine, and there was nothing technically stopping the Ro
mans from building big steam engines. They had little toy steam engines, and the
y had enough metalworking skill to build big steam tractors. It just never occur
red to them to do it. When I came up with my cyberspace idea, I thought, I bet i
t's steam-engine time for this one, because I can't be the only person noticing
these various things. And I wasn't. I was just the first person who put it toget
her in that particular way, and I had a logo for it, I had my neologism.</blockq
uote>
The neologism, the one Gibson put together, was cyberspace, before there was any
thing substantial outside of his fictional world that the name could be applied
to. In this same interview, Gibson mentions his strongest influences: "William B
urroughs, J. G. Ballard, Thomas Pynchon." He gives special mention to Burroughs
and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Naked-Lunch-William-S-Burroughs/dp/0802122078
/">Naked Lunch</a>, describing it as a kind of science fiction without be
ing hidebound to the traditions of the genre<a name="bkfrftnote1"></a><a href="#
ftnote1">1</a>. Lunch has been named by Cronenberg as his favo
rite book, and he, of course, took on the Sissyphean task of making it into a mo
vie. Again, however, we are not speaking of A simply leading to B. "One of the r
easons Burroughs excited me when I read him was that I recognized my own imagery
in his work," says Cronenberg at the time of the Lunch movie's release.
"It sounds only defensive to say, 'I was already thinking of a virus when I read
that!' But there is a recognition factor. That's why I think you start to feel
like you're vibrating in harmony with someone else. It's the recognition, not th
at they introduced you to something that was completely unthought of by you."<a
name="bkfrftnote2"></a><a href="#ftnote2">2</a> Our thoughts slowly c
ongeal into a metaphor, and we see elsewhere the public expression of someone el
se's thoughts in similar metaphors. Lunch's Interzone is the unruly mix o
f many peoples where fantasy is unleashed; Neuromancer separates these tw
o worlds with the vast crowd of the Sprawl, several interconnected North America
n cities - and the unrestricted virtual life of its cyberspace, the Matrix (a te
rm native to this book and not the later movie series)<a name="bkfrftnote3"></a>
<a href="#ftnote3">3</a>; Videodrome takes place in the intere
thnic mix of Toronto with a hero whose business is buying and selling pornograph
y, and where its virtual fantasyland shares the movie's title.
This is how I see Videodrome: as a partial expression of the themes of Naked Lunch, but one that is ultimately truer to the book than the actual m
ovie adaptation. Though Lunch is often taken as surreal nonsense, with no
connection to the actual, I think it is very obviously an attempt to express th
e author's life experience, specifically his drug experience and his queer life,
and the truest method of expression would be through often hallucinatory imager
y. Burroughs had little involvement with hallucinogens, and the images of Lun
ch do not feel like any attempt at reproducing the experiences of such drugs
, but at conveying a specific physical and emotional sense. A gay man, a drug us
er of the time must have felt like a hunted man, and so the protagonist of Lu
nch is someone literally hunted: a man wanted by cops and an undercover spy.
The images are unreal, but not without purpose. The repulsive figure of the Mug
wumps and Reptiles are visions of the addict himself, his flesh in a state of ac
celerated decay, his body deforming into something others consider monstrous, an
d about which he is indifferent:
<blockquote>On stools covered in white satin sit naked Mugwumps sucking transluc
ent, colored syrups through alabaster straws. Mugwumps have no liver and nourish
themselves exclusively on sweets. Thin, purple-blue lips cover a razor-sharp be
ak of black bone with which they frequently tear each other to shreds in fights
over clients. These creatures secrete an addicting fluid from their erect penise
s which prolongs life by slowing metabolism. (In fact all longevity agents have
proved addicting in exact ratio to their effectiveness in prolonging life.) Addi
cts of Mugwump fluid are known as Reptiles. A number of these flow over chairs w
ith their flexible bones and black-pink flesh. A fan of green cartilage covered
with hollow, erectile hairs through which the Reptiles absorb the fluid sprouts
from behind each ear. The fans, which move from time to time touched by invisibl
e currents, serve also some form of communication known only to Reptiles.
During the biennial Panics when the raw, peeled Dream Police storm the City the
Mugwumps take refuge in the deepest crevices of the wall, sealing themselves in
clay cubicles, and remain for weeks in biostasis. In those days of grey terror t
he Reptiles dart about faster and faster, scream past each other at supersonic s
peed, their flexible skulls flapping in black winds of insect agony.
The Dream Police disintegrate in globs of rotten ectoplasm swept away by an old
junky, coughing and spitting in the sick morning. The Mugwump Man comes with ala
baster jars of fluid and the Reptiles get smoothed out.
The air is once again still and clear as glycerine.
The Sailor spotted his Reptile. He drifted over and ordered a green syrup. The R
eptile had a little, round disk mouth of brown gristle, expressionless green eye
s almost covered by a thin membrane of eyelid. The Sailor waited an hour before
the creature picked up his presence.</blockquote>
It is perhaps helpful to look at this imagery next to that of the excellent memo
ir of addiction, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/White-Out-Secret-Life-Heroin/dp/
1616492082/">White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin</a>, by Michael Clune.
Though the book goes through the expected arc of such experience - introduction,
addiction, descent, and many attempts at recovery of a pre-addicted life - it n
ever falls into the monotony of detailing the endless days of addiction as if su
ch dull accounting is charged with interest to the outsider, but effectively con
veys this difficult life through often surreal images. This imagery never sugges
ts an affect, an attempt at novelty, or simple writing games, but an honest rela
ting of the addict's inner life, so involved in inner twistings as to often brea
k from reality. We have it in early description of a dealer:
<blockquote>In that bare front room at Dominic's there is a trembling joy in the
air. The thick sun of June gets trapped, pools, and grows cloudy. Proto-organis
ms form in the cloud of wood-color, heat, and sheet-light. I'm full of angels wh
o fasten their lips and wings and hands to Dominic's body, until he looks like a
beach a thick flock of seagulls has landed on. By the time we get to the kitche
n he doesn't even look human.</blockquote>
We have it in this monologue about invisible spirits and creatures as a junkie i
njects, as intricate and solid a world as that imagined in Lunch:
<blockquote>He held the syringe before all of us. I could never have afforded a
shot like that. It should have been in a museum. "Inducing the creature," he sai
d softly. He felt expertly along his neck till he found the pulsing vein. There
was a black tattoo of a cross running down his neck and the vein pulsed along th
e cross. He slid in the needle and pressed down on the syringe.</blockquote>
<blockquote>"The creature is induced to crawl. Induced to walk. Induced to beg.
To soil itself or not to soil itself. The sin is not the inducement. That's what
those old Christians in the joint never understood."</blockquote>
<blockquote>"The sin is not the inducement," Fathead continued. "That He may rai
se up the Lord casts down. Even unto the pit. This shit we think we're doing her
e." He laughed. "Another eye burns in our eye, another hand reaches through our
hand. This," he held up his thick, needle-scarred hand, "this is a glove." He ga
zed thickly on it. "An abode for any spirit of the air. Every unrighteous and un
clean spirit."</blockquote>
<blockquote>"And that's what God is," Fathead said. "When the creature is induce
d to crawl out of the creature. I've seen it myself. The whatever leaving his ey
es, 'dying.' Crawling into the invisible world. A thousand spirits curled up in
a spoon. You should see the spirit leaving a man's face; you can feel the room g
et thicker. I've done it myself. I'll do it again."</blockquote>
It is there in the sequence where Clune creates for himself a fictional refuge a
s he tries to stop using, a refuge which cannot contain the piercing cold, and t
his imagined sanctuary conveys better than any simple physical details the deepl
y frightening sense of naked vulnerability when trying to kick the drug:
<blockquote>That first night of kicking, I imagined I was living in a castle. A
blizzard was raging outside. I'd been trudging though the blizzard, carrying my
sword and shield, fleeing the enemy. I knocked on the massive oak door of the ca
stle. I heard the slow sound of the bar being raised and the door swinging open.
The friendly warmth rushed out, strong friendly hands pulled me, fainting, insi
de.
"You must be exhausted," said a tall, handsome man in chain mail. "Well, everyth
ing is going to be fine. We have everything you need in this castle. The walls a
re strong; the enemy will never get in. And we have enough supplies to last for
years in here." I nodded and tried to smile.
They showed me to a room high in the walls. A big fire roared in the fireplace.
A clean, white bed piled deep with cushions lay in the corner. I stood for sever
al minutes gazing at it. I repeated the contents of this room in the castle over
and over to myself. I was shivering terribly.</blockquote>
<blockquote>"They have hundreds of soldiers to protect me in this castle. The bl
izzard rages outside. It is warm and safe and deep inside the castle. I'll fall
asleep now." But the shivering cold came through the thick castle walls. They ha
d to move me deeper inside the castle, where I'd be warm.
They had to move me again. Deep in the castle's heart, to a windowless room, wit
h an ancient glowing furnace and a fire burning in the fireplace. They'd never h
eard of drugs. I heard hundreds of soldiers rushing in the corridors.</blockquot
e>
<blockquote>"They're going to their battle stations." I invented the name of the
enemy. The history of the country. The names of the people in the castle army.
"Henry Abelove, Lieutenant." I counted their weapons. Lieutenant Abelove led me
on a tour of their supplies and armaments.</blockquote>
<blockquote>But something was missing. Despite the plentiful stores of food, eve
ryone in the castle looked starved and crazy. Despite the vast fires, the huge f
urnaces, the halls piled high with entire felled forests, I could not stop shive
ring.
"There is no sleep in this castle," Lieutenant Abelove said sadly.
"But," I said, "I thought that one first enters the castle, and then passes thro
ugh into sleep." He shook his head.
"This entire structure is built along the wall of sleep, but at no point does it
penetrate it." I tried to follow his words.
"Can't we use some of these weapons, some of this fuel to break through?" He sho
ok his head sadly. I tried to stop thinking about the castle.</blockquote>
Naked Lunch is a book that is unremitting in its nihilism, though at the
same time full of cheerful laughter. We are lecherous, we are wicked, we are cru
el; virtue and good works will not save us from suffering and painful death, bot
h of which can be very funny to a passerby. The outlook might be that of someone
fallen to the bottom of a barrel, at a dead end bar, laughing at the fellow cri
pples alongside him. The humor is not that of a superior type looking down, or t
he cheerless kind of someone pining for some lost paradise and wanting to bring
it back, but of a writer deep in muck who has no inclination to leave it. The la
ndscape is unsettling, though not a Nowhereland, but very much America. New York
City is life-like, and so is the book's Missouri, filled with American types:
<blockquote>He stands up screaming and black blood spurts solid from his last er
ection, a pale white statue standing there, as if he had stepped whole across th
e Great Fence, climbed it innocent and calm as a boy climbs the fence to fish in
the forbidden pond-in a few seconds he catches a huge catfish-The Old Man will
rush out of a little black hut cursing, with a pitchfork, and the boy runs laugh
ing across the Missouri field-he finds a beautiful pink arrowhead and snatches i
t up as he runs with a flowing swoop of young bone and muscle-(his bones blend i
nto the field, he lies dead by the wooden fence a shotgun by his side, blood on
frozen red clay seeps into the winter stubble of Georgia) . . . The catfish bill
ows out behind him . . . He comes to the fence and throws the catfish over into
blood-streaked grass . . . the fish lies squirming and squawking-vaults the fenc
e. He snatches up the catfish and disappears up a flint-studded red clay road be
tween oaks and persimmons dropping red-brown leaves in a windy fall sunset, gree
n and dripping in summer dawn, black against a clear winter day . . . the Old Ma
n screams curses after him . . . his teeth fly from his mouth and whistle over t
he boy's head, he strains forward, his neck-cords tight as steel hoops, black bl
ood spurts in one solid piece over the fence and he falls a fleshless mummy by t
he fever grass. Thorns grow through his ribs, the windows break in his hut, dust
y glass-slivers in black putty-rats run over the floor and boys jack off in the
dark musty bedroom on summer afternoons and eat the berries that grow from his b
ody and bones, mouths smeared with purple-red juices . . .</blockquote>
By rooting the book so solidly in the United States, rather than create a separa
te new universe of obscenity, it makes clear that its world - of drugs, queernes
s, and nihilism - is a part of America and always has been. "American humor is a
really angry rube humor," a point made by Michael O'Donoghue, insightful observ
er and comedy legend. "Very mean and aggressive. I've always liked American joke
s."<a name="bkfrftnote4"></a><a href="#ftnote4">4</a>
The movie adaptation junks this nihilism, and junks the mean-spirited laughter.
One example: a story about becoming consumed by one's own asshole, which might b
e about the junkie's physical sense of self-destruction, but is most definitely
a nasty joke, is given in the movie a portentous setting of a dark highway, as i
f there were some deep meaning at its heart, and the deep meaning were its purpo
se. We might look at the original story in the novel, told there by Dr. Benway,
and immediately hear the distinction in the lively patter which might remind one
of Lenny Bruce, or other comedians of the time:
<blockquote>BENWAY: "Why not one all-purpose blob? Did I ever tell you about the
man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down yo
u dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard.
"This ass talk had a sort of gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you
gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta co
ld inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit
you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell
.
"This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty
ventriloquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called 'The Be
tter 'Ole' that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever.
Like, 'Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?'
"'Nah! I had to go relieve myself.'
"After a while the ass started talking on its own. He would go in without anythi
ng prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.
"Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy incurving hooks and started e
ating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the ass
hole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouti
ng out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nob
ody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talk
ed all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to
shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing d
id any good and the asshole said to him: 'It's you who will shut up in the end.
Not me. Because we don't need you around here any more. I can talk and eat an
d shit.'
"After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a ta
dpole's tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T.
, Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human bo
dy. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like
burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. S
o finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have amputated spontan
eous-(did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among
Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?)-except for the eyes, you dig. That's one thing the asshole couldn't do was see. It needed
the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so th
e brain couldn't give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off.
For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the
eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out,
and there was no more feeling in them than a crab's eye on the end of a stalk."<
/blockquote>
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/2W1CUpD.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/A5bJMCF.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
The movie has a tragedy in its first act, and this tragedy is its narrative hear
t, a re-play of Burroughs killing his own wife when he tried to shoot a glass on
top of her head, and missed. This is all played sincerely, the protagonist even
shedding tears, whereas an event like this in Naked Lunch, the book, wou
ld be played as a Buster Keaton pratfall. The tragedy pushes Bill Lee (Burroughs
himself, for all intents and purposes) from New York City (a very ersatz one, c
ompared to the very real one of the book) and his fellow writers (a barely disgu
ised Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg) to the mysterious Interzone. The book's In
terzone is very obviously the Tangier that Burroughs stayed in, full of spies, t
hieves, and disreputable characters; the paranoid scenes of the book are an atte
mpt at capturing the paranoid setting<a name="bkfrftnote5"></a><a href="#ftnote5
">5</a>. The movie's Interzone has vague references to the middle eas
t, but is another place entirely of the imagination, the prevalent spies a seemi
ngly arbitrary feature. There, Bill Lee meets a couple who are Paul and Jane Bow
les, but given the names Paul and Joan Frost. This Joan is somehow a reborn vers
ion of the other Joan, Joan Lee, the dead wife. There is the suggestion that som
ehow Bill Lee must overcome his inhibitions about his own queerness, and that th
is will lead to finally becoming an accomplished writer. The movie hints that Bi
ll killing Joan was an unconscious expression of a desire to rid himself of his
female mate, in a conversation with the gay Paul Frost: "They say you murdered y
our wife," says Paul Frost. "It wasn't murder. It was an accident," replies Bill
Lee. "There are no accidents. For example...I've been killing my own wife slowl
y, over a period of years," Frost replies. "Well, not intentionally. I mean, on
the level of conscious intention, it's insane, monstrous," Frost adds. "We appre
ciate," says a typewriter agent, "that you might find the thought of engaging in
, uh, homosexual acts, morally and, uh, possibly even...physically repulsive." B
ill Lee himself speaks of the dread he feels about his own identity: "I shall ne
ver forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands, when the ba
neful word seared my reeling brain. I...was a homosexual. I thought of the paint
ed, simpering female impersonators I had seen in a Baltimore nightclub. Could it
be possible I was one of those subhuman things?" This also shows up as an unfin
ished phrase in his typewriter, with one word made ominous through its absence:
queer.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/GT8T3xV.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
("Hank", also known as Jack Kerouac, and "Martin", also known as Allen Ginsbe
rg)
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/7DJVPfP.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/eCEJfoe.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
("Paul and Joan Frost", also known as Paul and Jane Bowles)
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/Sb3u0QH.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/QEtF33n.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
(from the real life adventures of William and Joan)
"Are you a faggot?", asks a young man who wants to pick up Bill. "Not by nature,
no. I'm not. I wouldn't say...faggot. No." The young man wears a centipede on a
chain, and when Lee picks up a centipede body at the marktet, he has a slow rea
lization of dramatic revulsion. "I'd like you to meet a friend of mine," says th
e young man. "He specializes in sexual ambivalence." Lee is introduced to the Mu
gwump, whose head, covered in phallic tubes that spit jism, also changes into a
typewriter. Both with the various typewriters and elsewhere, we have a theme of
hermaphrodite sex, Lee's aversion to queerness ovecome as the male blends into t
he female. Bill carresses with powder the sensual orifice of a typewriter. Bill
sits with Joan as she types away, the typewriter transforming into a mixed gende
red beast turned on by the erotic story Joan is typing. Bill and Joan have sex,
and this same mixed gender beast joins in. Joan's domineering female housekeeper
, Fadela, is also her lover, a woman who actually turns out to be a man undernea
th, Dr. Benway. Bill first accepts, and is then repulsed anew by his own sexual
identity: he finally sleeps with an Interzone double of the young man who propos
itioned him, and right after he is given a nightmare vision of queer life, a mon
strous decadent piercing the same boy like a captured animal. In this movie with
such a heavy debt to Burroughs own life, that Lee ends in a state of revulsion
at queer sex is perhaps supposed to explain the frightening, malevolent sex of B
urroughs' books. Bill Lee gets Joan Frost back, ransoming her with the Mugwump's
head, the creature of sexual ambivalence. Lee leaves Interzone for Annexia with
this new Joan Lee, who must die again before he can cross over to the new count
ry. Her death is unavoidable, an experience that the writer will annex fo
r his own books, and the moment she dies, Lee is given entrance. All this - the
idea of the tragic, the necessity of confronting the tragic in your writing, alo
ng with the idea of queer life as an issue - is alien to the wiseacre uni
verse of Naked Lunch, the novel.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/XzSIRL7.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/qRzoVnn.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/93FT75l.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/W4TEYNt.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/TF5vxRW.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/hMp4BEn.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/GtPaqIr.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/1RvRniA.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/zAzBZel.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/MTdfBKw.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/ytXX2gl.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/7BYBMCh.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
Videodrome lacks the humor of Lunch, the novel, but it does have t
he book's nihilism. At no point does it seem that there ever was a right choice
for Max Renn to make, to avoid this increasingly strange and dangerous world. Th
e two factions of Videodrome, headed by Barry Convex and Bianca O'Blivion, seem
equally unsympathetic - though Convex takes a slight lead in malice. Neither off
er salvation or safety from the bleakness. Where Lunch the movie is set i
n a phantom New York City, Videodrome takes place in a very real, squalid
, unpolished Toronto, and placing the exotic horror in a specific place makes it
s fearsome effects more acute: this is really happening. "Toronto. I was
terrified to come to Toronto," said Roberto Benigni to Cronenberg, several years
after Videodrome's release. "Because all I knew of it was from your film
s."<a name="bkfrftnote6"></a><a href="#ftnote6">6</a>
There are several points in Videodrome where, if we're looking, we might
see similarities to Naked Lunch, the book, but these are in terms of broa
d concept, rather than anything borrowed for the movie's distinct and memorable
imagery. The book tells us of the Senders, who are able to practice a kind of de
vastating mind control comparable to the way Max is manipulated by the rival par
ties of Videodrome. Overusing this form of telepathic control transforms
the Sender into a centipede<a name="bkfrftnote7"></a><a href="#ftnote7">7</a> and there is a brief moment in Lunch when a man's flesh drips aw
ay as green ooze, revealing a massive centipede underneath; Barry Convex is shot
, and it's as if something primordial emerges from within his dying body<a name=
"bkfrftnote8"></a><a href="#ftnote8">8</a>. A character pulls a black
furred egg from inside a boy, an alien object taken out, just like Barry Convex
inserting a videotape into Max<a name="bkfrftnote9"></a><a href="#ftnote9">9</a>. Lunch's Interzone is a place of unrestrained sadomasochisti
c fantasy, just like the virtual torture chamber of Videodrome<a name="bk
frftnote10"></a><a href="#ftnote10">10</a>. The book ends with Bill L
ee shooting two detectives that are hunting him, and then escaping off into the
unknown, somewhere outside time and space. This might bear a passing resemblance
to the killing spree of Renn, which climaxes in his leaving for a different kin
d of unknown<a name="bkfrftnote11"></a><a href="#ftnote11">11</a>.
Were I to begin to try and get at the source of this movie's power, I would say
that it lies with the movie's visual metaphors lacking anything like a structure
, didactic or otherwise, which defines them. The context of Naked Lunch,
the movie, gives a strong definition to its own metaphors. The creature of mixed
genitalia that entangles itself with Bill Lee and Joan Frost, the typewriters w
ith sensual openings, the jism spitting creature of sexual ambivalence, the Mugw
ump, are all part of the theme of a man unwilling to admit some aspect of his se
xual identity, who is unable to admit to his complicity in his wife's death, and
who must try to admit to both in order to become a great writer. The metaphors
of Videodrome may well be equally didactic, but lacking anything like the rigid
surrounding organization, their power and mystery is enhanced.
For example, the metaphor, "my love for you is a rose bush in flames," whatever
its many flaws, is ambiguous in meaning without setting. Is this love like a hol
y one, a holy love profaned, a great love destroyed, or one so intense that it m
ust be ephemeral? If this line is placed in the context of a short story about a
man discovering his wife having an affair, the line is reduced to a singular me
aning: our great sacred love is now destroyed. The metaphors of Videodrome may w
ell lend themselves to didactic readings, but the story offers no direction one
way or the other. I find this sense of stepping into something etheral, uncertai
n, is there at the movie's very beginning when Bridey James wakes Renn from slee
p:
<blockquote>
ANNOUNCER
Civic TV, the one you take to bed with you.
BRIDEY JAMES
Max, it's that time again. Time to slowly, painfully ease yourself back into con
sciousness. No, I'm not a dream, although I've been told I'm a vision of loveli
ness. I'm your faithful girl Friday, Bridey James, here with your wake-up call o
f today, Wednesday the 23rd. You got that? Wednesday the 23rd.</blockquote>
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/es07Zg1.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
I always hear ease yourself back into consciousness as having a slight ai
r of menace, as if Bridey knows of the dreamworld that is soon to come, and you
can wonder to what extent she's a conspirator with the other players in what com
es next. Bridey has this ambiguity because like all the other characters in the
movie, there really is no character there. They do what's necessary for the plot
and provide exposition, but do not have much more substance than that. Nicki Br
and is an enigma of unreconciled elements. She hosts the "Emotional Rescue Show"
("You want help. You need help."), and she's clear that she thinks Renn's movie
s are dangerous, "We always want more, whether it's tactile, emotional or sexual
. And I think that's bad" Yet her first words at Max's are, "Got any pornos?" Sh
e always wants more as well, a needle through the ear, a cigarette burned in her
breast, and finally giving it all up to live her dream: to be on Videodrome. An
actual character might give an intuitive coherence to these polarities, but she
does not. Brian and Bianca O'Blivion are the movie's only guides to the halluci
natory technology, and they may be villains as well - but that is left entirely
to us. There is nothing in their character that implies one thing or the other,
and we might read what we want.
The metaphors of the movie, as said, could be read in the simplest terms, of mov
ies transforming men and women into the ideals of their gender. The identificati
on with these ideals, our approaching these ideals, gives us a sense of power, y
et ultimately we are submissives, submitting to media, whose ability to reproduc
e and distribute images throughout the world can be thought of as a near divine
power. Nicki is submissive, longs to play a role where she's constantly submissi
ve, and she disappears to be an image, though it's as an image she becomes domin
ant. We see her choke O'Blivion to death, and we see her take over Renn's video
system, where she entices Max to bury himself within her. This last, where he st
icks his head inside the tumescent screen of her lips, doesn't suggest male pene
tration so much as male surrender. Max becomes the movie ideal of his own gender
, a man with a gun, and yet it's also a position without power or choice. The gu
n seals itself to his hand, and he becomes only one thing, an assassin, just as
Nicki becomes only one thing, an image. He kills at the command of others, for t
heir reasons, first his work associates and then Barry Convex. The gun should be
a symbol of dominance, and yet he's only submitting to the commands of someone
else. Before the gun melds to his hand, it first sinks into the genital crevasse
of his stomach, the same place where the tapes are inserted that give him his k
ill orders. "When I first got on this picture, I was an actor. Now I feel like I
'm just the bearer of the slit," James Woods would say to Debbie Harry during pr
oduction. "Now you know what it feels like," she replied<a name="bkfrftnote12"><
/a><a href="#ftnote12">12</a>.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/mT5PfSl.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/FHlXmal.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/Maopui8.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/NO3IbXs.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/fFKPB6r.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
(The newspaper story featured in the corner of this still is its own separate
epic, detailing the adventures of rogue CIA agent Ed Wilson, who would sell wea
pons to Qaddafi in 1981. The Times story featured here is <a href="http:/
/www.nytimes.com/1981/11/08/us/records-show-wilson-made-millions-on-cia-experien
ce.html?pagewanted=print">"Records show Wilson made millions on C.I.A. Experienc
e"</a>, while this site early on reviewed Peter Maas's excellent book on the sub
ject in the post <a href="http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2011/11/12/a-libyan
-footnote-the-sorry-tale-of-edwin-paul-wilson-or-manhunt-the-incredible-pursuit-
of-a-cia-agent-turned-terrorist-peter-maas/">"A Libyan Footnote, The Sorry Tale
of Edwin Paul Wilson, or: Manhunt - The Incredible Pursuit of a CIA Agent Turned
Terrorist (Peter Maas)"</a>.)
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/jM65W3M.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/NtIK7Dd.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/fvDhfIM.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/zd46Wf0.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/ZdOiLvr.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
This, I think, is a credible reading, but one without certainty. There is nothin
g in the surrounding plot or characters to push us towards this reading, only ou
r own experience and the suggestibility of the metaphors themselves. There is so
mething of the unconscious in the movie - "the film drifts along like a dream fr
om one disturbing episode to another," Keith Phipps wrote in an excellent discus
sion of the film<a name="bkfrftnote13"></a><a href="#ftnote13">13</a>
. We might compare it to another movie of the unconscious, seemingly untainted b
y rule-making or restriction, David Lynch's Blue Velvet. Here, we are als
o given images in which a great deal can be read, whether it's Sandy staring at
Jeffrey with newfound fear on the way to Dorothy's, the sensual mouth of Dorothy
open with pleasure and holding a chipped tooth, a crippled mute father, a woman
commanding a boy for sex, an abusive man dominating a woman who call each other
mommy and daddy, etc. There is something beguiling in what is unseen in Velv
et, that we're never given the full truth of the conspiracy between the Boot
h gang and the police department, and that there's something to the characters o
f Sandy and Dorothy that remains unknown.
This makes sense as part of the movie's perspective, of an adolescent boy who ha
s just touched on the world's secrets, and will only know more of them much late
r. The characters of Dorothy and Sandy may not be fully seen, but they are full
characters, with what we do see hinting at what's beneath. Though Blue Velvet
 may be dream-like, it at least gives us some context for these images, conn
ecting them to sex and sexual roles. The father's physical decline pushes the so
n into the role of an adult, at the same time that he moves into the frightening
and alluring world of sex beneath happy domesticity. Sandy is drawn to Jeffrey,
and she might be drawn to him because he's a detective, because he's a pervert,
or because he's both. He wants to play the role of a hero and help Dorothy, but
he wants to play the role of Frank as well, and hurt her. He wants to be with S
andy the way he's with Dorothy, and Sandy wants that as well. The movie gives us
this context for these images, so they undulate around a specific possible mean
ing, without ever becoming head smackingly specific: the secret revelation of Blue Velvet is not that Jeffrey's father abuses his mother, or anything els
e of tangible fact. There are no secret revelations, only endless dreams.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/2LpKa0g.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/xXxD7AG.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/sInc31U.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/buisRj3.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/y6QWRi7.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
We are given a context, in the characters and story of Blue Velvet, throu
gh which we might see these images, where we are given nothing comparable in 
Videodrome. There is nothing equal to those characters, which are not hidden
, but seemingly not there at all, letting us, say, read as much mystery as we wa
nt in Bridey's opening lines. Velvet allows us to reduce its images to a
possible haze of meaning, while Videodrome gives us no such net. We are l
eft with only the limits inherent in the images themselves, a vaginal gulf erupt
ing in a man's stomach, a gun falling within, and the gun grafting itself to his
hand. The metaphors imply ideas that are not foreign to us, though the images t
hemselves are alien. In a book with a realistic setting, these images would be a
cceptable similes, with obvious meanings of longing and violence. You are like t
he lips on the TV screen in which I bury myself. I am like the gun from which a
man extends. I feel like TV is killing me. In Videodrome, these similes b
ecome metaphors that the characters inhabit. You are the lips on the TV scree
n in which I bury myself. I am the gun from which a man extends. T
V is killing me.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/7JseIpe.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
I have attempted to use Naked Lunch as a helpful prism through which to s
ee Videodrome, as images that are not unprecedented or some discrete isla
nd, but a set of metaphors kindred to Lunch, both of which find more feli
citous expression in the fantastic than the literal. The other helpful perspecti
ve, which I don't think is mentioned often enough, is to see Videodrome t
hrough the lens of faith. Max Renn lives in a squalid, decaying city trafficing
in a product that has value but no substance, and little or no utility. Capitali
sm is decadent, his city is in decline, like Rome's, and here we have an interes
ting setting for his introduction to the mysteries of Videodrome. It is Masha wh
o leads Renn to the O'Blivions, and in her first scene, she sells him a video of
a roman orgy, Apollo And Dionysus (the gods are greek, but it looks very
much like a roman bacchanal), and the second opens with a dancer and a restaura
nt, both clearly in a faux oriental style. We might see here references to the t
wo capitals of a past empire, Rome and Byzantium, before the arrival of a new cr
eed. Where do we find the O'Blivions? At The Cathode Ray Mission, where t
hey evangelize the poor and abandoned, just as any church might. Max: "You think
TV can help them?" Bianca: "Watching TV will help patch them back into the worl
d's mixing board."
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/2pNgwwd.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/cY3vLKX.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/Kl9q7NO.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/IoeOJUe.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/DuKP1YW.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/kLZdDDn.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/jNe0Td3.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
A book I found very useful for looking at this movie in this light is Emile Durk
heim's <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41360">The Elementary Forms o
f the Religious Life</a>, an attempt to find the essential underlying forms
of religion by investigating the religious life of the tribes of Austrlia and No
rth America. How much of its scholarship has been superceded by later efforts I
am uncertain; I have found it a valuable source of insight whatever was publishe
d afterwards. The book's description of how the concept of a soul may have come
about is especially striking:
<blockquote>In order to find the elementary form of the religious life in these
animistic beliefs and practices, three desiderata must be satisfied: first, sinc
e according to this hypothesis, the idea of the soul is the cardinal idea of rel
igion, it must be shown how this is formed without taking any of its elements fr
om an anterior religion; secondly, it must be made clear how souls become the ob
ject of a cult and are transformed into spirits; and thirdly and finally, since
the cult of these spirits is not all of any religion, it remains to be explained
how the cult of nature is derived from it.
According to this theory, the idea of the soul was first suggested to men by the
badly understood spectacle of the double life they ordinarily lead, on the one
hand, when awake, on the other, when asleep. In fact, for the savage, the mental
representations which he has while awake and those of his dreams are said to be
of the same value: he objectifies the second like the first, that is to say, th
at he sees in them the images of external objects whose appearance they more or
less accurately reproduce. So when he dreams that he has visited a distant count
ry, he believes that he really was there. But he could not have gone there, unle
ss two beings exist within him: the one, his body, which has remained lying on t
he ground and which he finds in the same position on awakening; the other, durin
g this time, has travelled through space. Similarly, if he seems to talk with on
e of his companions who he knows was really at a distance, he concludes that the
other also is composed of two beings: one which sleeps at a distance, and anoth
er which has come to manifest himself by means of the dream. From these repeated
experiences, he little by little arrives at the idea that each of us has a doub
le, another self, which in determined conditions has the power of leaving the or
ganism where it resides and of going roaming at a distance.
Of course, this double reproduces all the essential traits of the perceptible be
ing which serves it as external covering; but at the same time it is distinguish
ed from this by many characteristics. It is more active, since it can cover vast
distances in an instant. It is more malleable and plastic; for, to leave the bo
dy, it must pass out by its apertures, especially the mouth and nose. It is repr
esented as made of matter, undoubtedly, but of a matter much more subtile and et
herial than any which we know empirically. This double is the soul. In fact, it
cannot be doubted that in numerous societies the soul has been conceived in the
image of the body; it is believed that it reproduces even the accidental deformi
ties such as those resulting from wounds or mutilations.</blockquote>
This idea of a double, exactly like us but enhanced in some traits, comes to us
from a century old book, and yet it describes well the avatars people have in vi
deogames, and the proxies they seek out in movies and TV. The ability for men or
women to identify with a particular actor is often considered essential to thei
r success, for the audience to be able to see themselves as this person and live
vicariously through them, on-screen and off. Hollywood is called the dream fact
ory, and celebrity life is often thought of as dream-like, with the on-going que
stion of how "real" it is. In one disturbing moment, Max slaps Bridey, but he's
actually slapping Nicki, but no - he's not slapping anybody at all. Here, and el
sewhere, we have something not unlike when we find ourselves in a very real-like
dream, only to act, and to find ourselves awake. We also have the worry that lo
ng precedes any concerns about violence in videogames and movies, about whether
the subconscious brutality and sex that emerges in our dreams is something dange
rous.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/P2n2NIK.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/VgPcwtO.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/S0CQF6R.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
We might also find something insightful in its description of the ways in which
animist beliefs arose, which might apply to the imagery of the movie:
<blockquote>Since the first beings of which the child commences to have an idea
are men, that is, himself and those around him, it is upon this model of human n
ature that he tends to think of everything. The toys with which he plays, or the
objects of every sort which affect his senses, he regards as living beings like
himself. Now the primitive thinks like a child. Consequently, he also is inclin
ed to endow all things, even inanimate ones, with a nature analogous to his own.
</blockquote>
The world of Max Renn is one where objects take on a kindred human sensibility;
he is transformed by the Videodrome signal, and these objects are as well. He im
agines himself slapping Nicki, whipping a TV carrying her image, he is moved to
sexual ecstasy by the masochism of Nicki and the idea of sexual violence. The ta
pe's pockets stick out like teeth, eager to bite, with the same appetite for vio
lence as Max, his TV swells with a veined tumescence, turned on by the image of
Nicki. The child transposes his feelings on his toys, and Max sees his essence a
nimating his objects as well.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/zEM1y17.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/5XpRw6D.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
Brian O'Blivion is a leader in this new faith, and his explanation of how he acq
uired his gift of sight suggest something like the paradox of god and the first
cause. The universe requires a first cause, which is god, and that in turn bring
s up what was the first cause of god, where we might say the divine is its own f
irst cause, or that cause and effect breaks down in the field of the divine, or
some other solution. Brian O'Blivion, we are told, helped create Videodrome, aft
er which he was killed by his fellow creators:
<blockquote>BIANCA
My father helped to create Videodrome. He saw it as part of the evolution of man
as a technological animal. When he realised what his partners were going to use
it for, he tried to take it away from them and they killed him, quietly.</block
quote>
Yet at the same time, the very hallucinations of Videodrome create it:
<blockquote>BRIAN
I had a brain tumour. And I had visions. I believe the visions caused the tumou
r, and not the reverse. I could feel the visions coalesce and become flesh, unco
ntrollable flesh. But when they removed the tumour, it was called Videodrome.
We have a phenomenon, that like the divine, is its own first cause, and where or
derly cause and effect disappear. Brian O'Blivion is dead, but his words continu
e to guide the living. "This is him. This is all that's left," Bianca says, poin
ting to shelves and shelves of tapes. He is seemingly dead, but he isn't. Max: "
But he was on that panel show." Bianca: "On tape. He made thousands of them, som
etimes three or four a day. I keep him alive as best I can. He had so much to of
fer." Again, this might be seen as something strange and new, when it is simply
a transposition of a tradition common to any religious faith, where adherents co
nsult the words of beings of the past, no longer on earth, but who have prescrip
tion, guidance, or wisdom for every occasion, whether they be Buddha, Jesus, Mos
es, Muhammad, or another.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/0mWR12w.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
The conflict between the O'Blivions and Barry Convex might be seen as that betwe
en different schisms of the same faith, with the O'Blivions wanting to achieve t
ranscendence through the creed, while Convex wishes to use the creed for practic
al ends, as a force to shape a hard nationalist ethos.
<blockquote>HARLAN
North America is getting soft, patrn, and the rest of the world is getting tough.
Very, very tough. We're entering savage new times and we're going to have to be
pure and direct... and strong...if we're going to survive them. Now, you and th
is...cesspool you call a television station...and your people who wallow around
in it and your viewers... who watch you do it...you're rotting us away from the
inside. We intend to stop that rot.</blockquote>
This is a movie where the villain runs Spectacular Optical, a business that sell
s glasses, a villain named Barry Convex, and a convex lens is one that fo
cues light to a particular point. He wishes to use this new religion as a direct
ed force, while the goals of the O'Blivions are separate from any state or any
earthly purpose. Convex is killed during the presentation of his new Medici line
, and perhaps the name is not idly chosen. The Medicis, as most know, would come
into conflict with the fanatic Savonarola, who wished to reform the catholic ch
urch which had close ties to the merchant family. We might see the fight between
Convex, who wishes to use the creed for secular objectives, and the O'Blivions,
who see the faith as an end in itsself, as echoing this old division between th
e Medicis and the zealot.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/g7HpTgL.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/f5RWK0l.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
The O'Blivions genuinely wish that people achieve a final stage, the new flesh,
which Max attempts in the movie's ending. We have here another similarity with r
eligion, where the apotheosis of faith is considered the abandonment of flesh it
self. Durkheim touches on this phenomenon as well, when discussing the shared tr
ait of all religions of keeping separate the profane and sacred worlds. The most
dedicated of the faith attempt to avoid the profane as much as possible, with t
he most extreme answer the avoidance of all profanities of the flesh by forsakin
g it completely through suicide:
<blockquote>The two worlds are not only conceived of as separate, but as even ho
stile and jealous rivals of each other. Since men cannot fully belong to one exc
ept on condition of leaving the other completely, they are exhorted to withdraw
themselves completely from the profane world, in order to lead an exclusively re
ligious life. Hence comes the monasticism which is artificially organized outsid
e of and apart from the natural environment in which the ordinary man leads the
life of this world, in a different one, closed to the first, and nearly its cont
rary. Hence comes the mystic asceticism whose object is to root out from man all
the attachment for the profane world that remains in him. From that come all th
e forms of religious suicide, the logical working-out of this asceticism; for th
e only manner of fully escaping the profane life is, after all, to forsake all l
ife.</blockquote>
There are many examples of this, but I turn to one of the more well-known of rec
ent ones, when thirty nine members of the Heaven's Gate cult peacefully committe
d suicide. This was not considered by them a rejection of life, but an attempt a
t a kind of space travel, which required them to leave their physical bodies. "W
e are all choosing of our own free will to go to the next level," says one of th
e women who died<a name="bkfrftnote14"></a><a href="#ftnote14">14</a>
. The "next level" was one way they referred to it; "Evolutionary Level Above Hu
man" was another. The process of leaving their bodies was called "exiting the ve
hicles" or "disengaging from the body or vehicle". This exodus was initiated by
the return of the Hale-Bopp comet, after which they were to return to their home
world of Sirius. Before death, they recorded messages of calm happiness: "I've b
een looking forward to this for so long" or, "I couldn't have made a better choi
ce."<a name="bkfrftnote15"></a><a href="#ftnote15">15</a> Ten years a
fter the event, the L.A. Weekly piece <a href="http://www.laweekly.com/20
07-03-22/news/heaven-s-gate-the-sequel/?mode=print">"Heaven's Gate: The Sequel"<
/a> by Joshuah Bearman, would describe the belief system and place it as part of
a long tradition: "Updating esoteric, early Christianity by way of science fict
ion, their millennial paradise could be found only by renouncing terrestrial att
achments and shedding one's "container" or "vehicle" to ascend into space and li
ve eternally with the Chief of Chiefs, or God." In the context of such events, t
he movie's final moment where Max Renn says "Long live the new flesh", then shoo
ts himself, does not seem alien at all, but part of a larger tradition as well.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/ku3FDUH.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/o2StMSk.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/EhJdfPS.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
A LIQUID PRISONER PENT IN WALLS OF GLASS<a name="bkfrftnote16"
></a><a href="#ftnote16">16</a>
That the O'Blivions are equally malicious as the Convex faction is strongly hint
ed at, I think, in this final scene. Only a little while earlier, after Max's fa
iled attempt to kill Bianca O'Blivion, we have this dialogue:
<blockquote>
BIANCA O'BLIVION
They killed her, Max. They killed Nicki Brand. She died on Videodrome. They used
her image to seduce you but she was already dead.</blockquote>
Given that the image of Nicki Brand was used before to seduce and manipulate Max
, and given that Barry Convex and Harlan are now dead, the only source for the m
ovie's closing image of Nicki must be Bianca. Since this is an image that has be
en used in the past to manipulate Max, it might be asked if it's being used here
for the same purpose, this time by Bianca, in order to dispose of an inconvenie
nt leftover assassin. Even the same line said earlier, "Come to Nicki", and the
same seductive tone, is now used again:
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/fDHiYVs.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<blockquote>NICKI
I want you, Max. You. Come on. Come on. Come to me now. Come to Nicki.</blockquo
te>
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/CbsX0mW.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<blockquote>NICKI
Don't be afraid to let your body die. Just come to me, Max. Come to Nicki.</blo
ckquote>
So, Max Renn is perhaps being lured by another kind of illusion, the possibility
of a transcendent afterlife. We might also note the non-specificity of the deva
stating phrase, "They used her image to seduce you but she was already dead." Wh
at seduction is Bianca speaking of, and from when on was Nicki already dead? It'
s right after Max Renn is exposed to the videodrome signal that he meets Nicki o
n the talk show, and I've always felt the dialogue in that scene to be unnatural
. I try to think of what their banter reminds me of, and then I remember: the st
range, uncomfortable talk in between the action of old soft-core porn.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/M2bsfLI.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<blockquote>RENA KING
What about it, Nicki? Is it socially positive?
NICKI
We live in overstimulated times. We crave stimulation. We gorge ourselves on it.
We always want more, whether it's tactile, emotional or sexual. And I think tha
t's bad.
MAX
Then why did you wear that dress?
NICKI
Sorry?
MAX
That dress. It's very stimulating. And it's red. You know what Freud would say a
bout it?
NICKI
And he would have been right. I admit it. I live in a highly excited state of ov
erstimulation.
MAX
Listen, I'd really like to take you out to dinner tonight.</blockquote>
<blockquote>RENA KING
Nicki...is Max Renn a menace to society?
NICKI
I'm not sure. He's certainly a menace to me.</blockquote>
Is this lack of versimilitude an unintentional effect, or a very intended one, o
f a man who isn't meeting a live woman at all, but only the image of a dead one?
I hear "they used her image to seduce you", and I think that there can be only
one possible meaning, because Renn is first seduced by Nicki on the talk show. F
rom which it naturally follows: Nicki is already dead, only an image, throughout
the movie.
The idea of an image superceding the life that inspired it, is one more exotic i
dea not native to Videodrome, but a commonplace of our world, where the l
iving are often an impediment to the power of the icon's image. We might return
briefly to the work of William Gibson, to see him touch on the idea of the supre
macy of the image in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Idoru-William-Gibson/dp/0425
158640/">Idoru</a>, where a living singer marries another singer, one who
is only a hologram. This, however, is only the use of the near future as a meta
phor for the ever present. To take one of the more obvious examples, the image o
f Marilyn Monroe is eternally that of a woman who never reaches forty, without a
nything alive to grow old, anything to remind one of Monroe as anything human, a
nything other than an icon. One anecdote told in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/
Goddess-Secret-Lives-Marilyn-Monroe-ebook/dp/B009S33ICC/">Goddess</a> by
Anthony Summers, is of Monroe's interest in Juliette Récamier, who commis
sioned a nude statue of herself. As Récamier aged, and her figure started
to go, she had the breasts of the statue smashed. When Monroe began to age, she
smashed herself<a name="bkfrftnote17"></a><a href="#ftnote17">17</a>
. The cruelest thing that can be said of Elvis Presley's death is: good career m
ove. The cruelest thing that can be said of Marilyn Monroe's death is: good timi
ng.
This kind of image, an icon that persists and supercedes the actual performer's
existence, derives its power from being an engima whose questions are never answ
ered - who exactly was Marilyn Monroe? - which is intertwined with its se
cond quality, someone intimate yet always at a great distance as if we are seein
g them as part of a massive crowd. There is an exact moment in Monroe's life whi
ch captures this, when she appears before thousands of troops in South Korea, an
d it was this moment that made obvious how big a star she would become. From <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/Genius-Goddess-Arthur-Miller-Marilyn/dp/0252035445/"
>The Genius and the Goddess</a> by Jeffrey Meyers:
<blockquote>Performing for the first time before a live, rapturous audience, Mar
ilyn did ten shows in four days and entertained 100,000 troops. The soldiers wer
e muffled up in fur hats with ear flaps, heavy winter jackets and thick combat b
oots, while she gamely appeared, outdoors and in the extremely cold Korean winte
r, in high heels and a tight, strapless, low-cut dress. She enlivened the show w
ith some suggestive jokes, and asked, when describing sweater girls, "take away
their sweaters and what have you got?"
She sang four songs: "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," "Bye Bye Baby,""Somebo
dy Loves Me" and "Do It Again."The refrain in the last song - "Come and get it,
you won't regret it" - was considered too provocative for the sexually starved t
roops and had to be dropped from the repertory. She excited the audience, who sc
reamed with delight and craved what she was offering, and brought the shows to a
frenzied climax.</blockquote>
This allows us to move easily into the life of another woman who became focused
on the ecstasy of the crowd's reaction, and wanted something likewise in her own
life. From <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sinner-Takes-All-Memoir-Love/dp/15924
06076/">Sinner Takes All</a> by adult performer Tera Patrick with Carrie
Borzillo:
<blockquote>How bad do you want what you want? I wanted to be famous and adored
so bad it nearly killed me. Well, in all honestly, I nearly killed me. But befor
e we get to that, let me start at the beginning....
In 1986 I was ten years old and my mother had already left us. It was just me, L
inda Ann Hopkins, and my dad, David Hopkins, a carefree hippie of English, Dutch
, and Irish descent. I was born in Great Falls, Montana, but was living with my
dad in Fresno. On a rare father-daughter day out, he took me to a thrift store i
n town to do some shopping. We were on a budget. As we made our way though the t
iny, cramped shop, I saw her hanging on the dusty wall behind some cracked vases
and rusty candelabras. It was a beautiful black-and-white photograph of Marilyn
Monroe from the Korean USO tour she did in 1954. She was beaming as she posed f
or hundreds of handsome men in uniform, who in turn were ogling her in all her b
lond-haired, blueeyed glory.
Something lit up inside me when I saw that photograph. I thought, "Someday, men
are going to look at me that way."
I couldn't stop staring at this photo, thinking how much I wanted to be that gir
l. The girl everyone adores. The girl whom fame made so happy (little did I know
what a sad wreck she really was). All I knew about Marilyn at the time was how
much I wanted to exude the power that she did. I wanted to be famous like that.
I just didn't know what for yet. I never thought it would be for porn.</blockquo
te>
That what Patrick wished for, what she wanted fulfilled, was fame more than anyt
hing else, is stressed in two other places in the memoir:
<blockquote>She [photographer Suze Randall] followed through. We shot that Frida
y for Penthouse. It was just a few days before my scheduled Monday meetin
g with Playboy. I couldn't believe it was happening so fast. All I could
think was, "I'm going to be in Playboy and Penthouse, make tons of
money, and be famous!"</blockquote>
<blockquote>When I entered the adult industry, it was not my goal to become a ma
instream actress or star. If that's what I wanted to do, I would've gone the typ
ical route of taking acting lessons, going in for auditions, and trying to get b
it parts like every Hollywood hopeful does. But that wasn't my quest. I'll be ho
nest, I just wanted to be famous and I liked to model and to be nude.</blockquot
e>
Patrick would eventually achieve her goal, and she gives us a scene in her memoi
r comparable to Monroe's, of a crowd infatuated with her presence. She herself s
tates that "it's easier to perform for a larger audience than a more intimate on
e," and it might be argued that this is what the fan wants, not intimacy, but in
timacy combined with distance, the woman nude on-stage amongst a crowd of thousa
nds. The meet and greet afterwards does not involve meeting a person separate an
d apart from the image, which the image reproduces, but rather, meeting a person
who is a live reproduction of the image, and so the distance on the stage and t
he brief meet do not impede the wanted effect, but are necessary for it to take
place.
<blockquote>One of the biggest conventions I ever did was the Sexpo in Sydney, A
ustralia, in 2004. I appeared at the convention for a whopping fee of $20,000 (a
nd first-class airfare and accommodations, no less!), but where we really made b
ank was when they booked me to dance at a venue that normally hosts big rock ban
ds and seats eight thousand people. I had eight nearly sold-out shows in four da
ys there.
Before we knew how big the venue really was and that it was sold out, Evan gave
me this pep talk: "Don't worry if there's only two hundred people there. You're
new to the market. Don't worry." And then we show up and there were thousands of
people there. Once again there wasn't a stripper pole on the stage because it w
asn't a strip club, so we decided to improvise a bit and use a chair in the cent
er of the stage as a prop. But that didn't help much. The huge stage made our ti
ny chair look like Stonehenge from the movie This Is Spinal Tap. We were crackin
g up over that. Evan decided to just treat it like a rock show and use the video
monitors at the venue to show my performance. That did the trick.
The large crowd didn't freak me out at all. In fact, it's easier to perform for
a larger audience than a more intimate one. It's easy to be great when you have
thousands of people screaming for you. The intensity of the crowd really got me
going, and I killed!
The line for photos and merchandise afterward was the longest line I'd ever had
in my entire career. It was so long and so slow that Evan got a megaphone and wa
s walking down the line telling people, "Due to the large volume of fans, we are
selling one thing. It's a package with a DVD, a Polaroid with Tera, and an auto
graphed eight-by-ten photo for fifty Australian dollars." He was embarrassing me
. He'd stand up on the table and shout out: "Cash only!"</blockquote>
The relationship of the audience to the famous individual here, which also trans
fers over to the image of the famous individual, is expressed well in dialogue f
rom one of Patrick's films, Tera Patrick Filthy Whore 2. Whatever happens
after this dialogue is of no importance here. I bold the most important point:
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/VMJTVAn.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome -
Bad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/eih1nv0.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome -
Bad Religion" />
<blockquote>BELLA DIAMOND
The fans are out there by the thousands.
RUDY PARADISE
You know I had it with those damn premieres, all those screaming people. Those g
reat unwashed.
DIAMOND
We're royalty to them, honey. Dollar Diamond and Ruby Paradise. The great screen
lovers. They support us in grand style. The least we could do is let them wo
rship us once in a while. What's that?
PARADISE
Oh, honey that's not you think, it's-
DIAMOND
IN MY DRESSING ROOM!
PARADISE
No, no-
DIAMOND
YOU SCREWED ANOTHER WOMAN IN MY DRESSING ROOM!
PARADISE
It's not what you think. It's a present for the premiere. C'mon.
DIAMOND
Are you telling me the truth?
PARADISE
Would I lie?
DIAMOND
Glamour puss?
PARADISE
You're my glamour puss, sweetie. C'mon, you're the glamour puss of the century.
DIAMOND
It is beautiful. You have great taste, Rudy. Where did you find it?
PARADISE
Oh, from a guy down in de Vandeville. I put a little money on layaway, just for
the right time.
DIAMOND
Pay her the rest, darling, because this baby has found a home.
PARADISE
Oh come on, that's not a kiss.
DIAMOND
You can fuck me darling, but you can't mess up my make-up.</blockquote>

This idea of worship is not so remarkable or noteworthy to stand out at all in t
his movie or anywhere. I think it's only by looking at the connections between t
his kind of idolatry and the religious form that we might have a sense as to why
it's so important for Tera Patrick to be famous, that she "wanted to be famous
and adored so bad it nearly killed me", a feeling which is not some isolated pat
hology but considered a common desire. We might find some insight by returning t
o Durkheim, who pinpoints something called mana as being central to the r
eligion of various melanesian tribes:
<blockquote>Now among these peoples, we find, under the name of mana, an
idea which is the exact equivalent of the wakan of the Sioux<a name="bkfrftnote1
8"></a><a href="#ftnote18">18</a> and the orenda of the Iroquois<a na
me="bkfrftnote19"></a><a href="#ftnote19">19</a>. The definition give
n by Codrington [<a href="https://archive.org/details/melanesiansstudi00codruoft
">The Melanesians : Studies in their Anthropology and Folklore</a> by Rob
ert Henry Codrington, link is to the full text on archive.org] is as follows: "T
here is a belief in a force altogether distinct from physical power, which acts
in all ways for good and evil; and which it is of the greatest advantage to poss
ess or control. This is Mana. I think I know what our people mean by it...It is
a power or influence, not physical and in a way supernatural; but it shows itsel
f in physical force, or in any kind of power or excellence which a man possesses
. This mana is not fixed in anything, and can be conveyed in almost anything. .
. . All Melanesian religion consists, in fact, in getting this mana for one's se
lf, or getting it used for one's benefit."</blockquote>
This idea of mana, and the related concepts of wakan and orenda
, are not parochial concerns, but arguably underlie all the religions which
follow:
<blockquote>This is the original matter out of which have been constructed those
beings of every sort which the religions of all times have consecrated and ador
ed. The spirits, demons, genii and gods of every sort are only the concrete form
s taken by this energy, or "potentiality," as Hewitt calls it, in individualizin
g itself, in fixing itself upon a certain determined object or point in space, o
r in centring around an ideal and legendary being, though one conceived as real
by the popular imagination. A Dakota questioned by Miss Fletcher expressed this
essential consubstantiability of all sacred things in language that is full of r
elief." Every thing as it moves, now and then, here and there, makes stops. The
bird as it flies stops in one place to make its nest, and in another to rest in
its flight. A man when he goes forth stops when he wills. So the god has stopped
. The sun, which is so bright and beautiful, is one place where he has stopped.
The trees, the animals, are where he has stopped, and the Indian thinks of these
places and sends his prayers to reach the place where the god has stopped and t
o win help and a blessing." In other words, the wakan (for this is what he was t
alking about) comes and goes through the world, and sacred things are the points
upon which it alights.</blockquote>
<blockquote>We are now in a better condition to understand why it has been impos
sible to define religion by the idea of mythical personalities, gods or spirits;
it is because this way of representing religious things is in no way inherent i
n their nature. What we find at the origin and basis of religious thought are no
t determined and distinct objects and beings possessing a sacred character of th
emselves; they are indefinite powers, anonymous forces, more or less numerous in
different societies, and sometimes even reduced to a unity, and whose impersona
lity is strictly comparable to that of the physical forces whose manifestations
the sciences of nature study.</blockquote>
<blockquote>The wakan is the cause of all the movements which take place in the
universe. We have even seen that the orenda of the Iroquois is "the efficient ca
use of all the phenomena and all the activities which are manifested around men.
" It is a power "inherent in all bodies and all things." It is the orenda which
makes the wind blow, the sun lighten and heat the earth, or animals reproduce an
d which makes men strong, clever and intelligent. When the Iroquois says that th
e life of all nature is the product of the conflicts aroused between the unequal
ly intense orenda of the different beings, he only expresses, in his own languag
e, this modern idea that the world is a system of forces limiting and containing
each other and making an equihbrium.
The Melanesian attributes this same general efficacy to his mana. It is owing to
his mana that a man succeeds in hunting or fighting, that gardens give a good r
eturn or that flocks prosper. If an arrow strikes its mark, it is because it is
charged with mana; it is the same cause which makes a net catch fish well, or a
canoe ride well on the sea, etc. It is true that if certain phrases of Codringto
n [<a href="https://archive.org/details/melanesiansstudi00codruoft">The Mela
nesians : Studies in their Anthropology and Folklore</a> by Robert Henry Cod
rington, link is to the full text on archive.org] are taken literally, mana shou
ld be the cause to which is attributed "everything which is beyond the ordinary
power of men, outside the common processes of nature." But from the very example
s which he cites, it is quite evident that the sphere of the mana is really much
more extended. In reality, it serves to explain usual and everyday phenomena; t
here is nothing superhuman or supernatural in the fact that a ship sails or a hu
nter catches game, etc.</blockquote>
This idea of mana, a universal, ubiquitous force, is already well-known to us as
an abstraction in a fictional universe, so well-known that I can quote a monolo
gue about this very idea, and I have no need to identify the source movie as mos
t readers will know from where it comes:
<blockquote>Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm.
And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. L
ife creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous be
ings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; between
you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere. Yes, even between the land and the ship
.</blockquote>
We might take the divine as something like an infinitely dense cluster of a quan
tity like mana. At the same time, it is not something outside of society,
but contained within and dependent on the society itself:
<blockquote>But a god is not merely an authority upon whom we depend; it's a for
ce upon which our strength relies. The man who has obeyed his god and who, for t
his reason, believes the god is with him, approaches the world with confidence a
nd with the feeling of an increased energy. Likewise, social action does not con
fine itself to demanding sacrifices, privations and efforts from us. For the col
lective force is not entirely outside of us; it does not act upon us wholly from
without; but rather, since society cannot exist except in and through individua
l consciousnesses, this force must also penetrate us and organize itself within
us; it thus becomes an integral part of our being and by that very fact this is
elevated and magnified.</blockquote>
That the veneration of those in society overlaps with this idea of someone havin
g great mana, great divine power, is obvious to Durkheim as well:
<blockquote>Also, in the present day just as much as in the past, we see society
constantly creating sacred things out of ordinary ones. If it happens to fall i
n love with a man and if it thinks it has found in him the principal aspirations
that move it, as well as the means of satisfying them, this man will be raised
above the others and, as it were, deified. Opinion will invest him with a majest
y exactly analogous to that protecting the gods. This is what has happened to so
many sovereigns in whom their age had faith: if they were not made gods, they w
ere at least regarded as direct representatives of the deity. And the fact that
it is society alone which is the author of these varieties of apotheosis, is evi
dent since it frequently chances to consecrate men thus who have no right to it
from their own merit. The simple deference inspired by men invested with high so
cial functions is not different in nature from religious respect. It is expresse
d by the same movements: a man keeps at a distance from a high personage; he app
roaches him only with precautions; in conversing with him, he uses other gesture
s and language than those used with ordinary mortals. The sentiment felt on thes
e occasions is so closely related to the religious sentiment that many peoples h
ave confounded the two. In order to explain the consideration accorded to prince
s, nobles and political chiefs, a sacred character has been attributed to them.
In Melanesia and Polynesia, for example, it is said that an influential man has
mana, and that his influence is due to this mana. However, it is evident that hi
s situation is due solely to the importance attributed to him by public opinion.
Thus the moral power conferred by opinion and that with which sacred beings a
re invested are at bottom of a single origin and made up of the same elements. T
hat is why a single word is able to designate the two.</blockquote>
Thus, we can explain the desire of Tera Patrick and others to be famous. They wi
sh to be touched by mana, they wish to become sacred objects. The sense o
f a sacredness mentioned here, the necessary "distance from a high personage", i
s something recognizably intertwined with celebrity, where the famous are seemin
gly kept excluded and away, in private planes, high class restaurants, the VIP r
oom of the club, a secret society outside of sight. For the famous to be seen in
our world, in public and without make-up, seemingly ordinary, is treated as a r
evelation. The only moments when the sacred and the profane are officially to me
et, when the profaned might gaze on the sacred is during tightly organized cerem
onies, as carefully planned and supervised as anicent religious rituals, such as
red carpet events and the Oscars. Durkheim's passage here on the prohibition of
the profane touching the sacred, the negative cult as one organized around such
contact, is helpful when we consider celebrities and their environs as the sacr
ed, prohibited objects:
<blockquote>There are religious interdictions whose object is to separate two sa
cred things of different species from each other. For example, it will be rememb
ered that among the Wakelbura the scaffold upon which the corpse is exposed must
be made exclusively of materials belonging to the phratry of the dead man; this
is as much as to say that all contact between the corpse, which is sacred, and
the things of the other phratry, which are also sacred, but differently, is forb
idden. Elsewhere, the arms which one uses to hunt an animal with cannot be made
out of a kind of wood that is classed in the same social group as the animal its
elf. But the most important of these interdictions are the ones which we shall s
tudy in the next chapter; they are intended to prevent all communication between
the purely sacred and the impurely sacred, between the sacredly auspicious and
the sacredly inauspicious. All these interdictions have one common characteristi
c; they come, not from the fact that some things are sacred while others are not
, but from the fact that there are inequalities and incompatibilities between sa
cred things. So they do not touch what is essential in the idea of sacredness. T
he observance of these prohibitions can give place only to isolated rites which
are particular and almost exceptional; but it could not make a real cult, for be
fore all, a cult is made by regular relations between the profane and the sacred
as such. But there is another system of religious interdictions which is much m
ore extended and important; this is the one which separates, not different speci
es of sacred things, but all that is sacred from all that is profane. So it is d
erived immediately from the notion of sacredness itself, and it limits itself to
expressing and realizing this. Thus it furnishes the material for a veritable c
ult, and even of a cult which is at the basis of all the others; for the attitud
e which it prescribes is one from which the worshipper must never depart in all
his relations with the sacred. It is what we call the negative cult. We may say
that its interdicts are the religious interdicts par excellence.</blockqu
ote>
The sacred ultimately resides exclusively in images, with the actual encounter w
ith the celebrity behind the image often a disappointment, not due to their own
inherent failings, but simply because they are not an image. When the celebrity
dies, any such impediment to the process dies, and if they die at thirty-six lik
e Marilyn Monroe, any evidence of a life of aging, disease, or physical deterior
ation which might imply the limits of the image, this dies as well. The image di
vests itself of all connections with life, like Max Renn in Videodrome or
any other devotee to a religious ideal, and becomes even more sacred. The image
, even and especially the sexual image, is only that, without the element of the
tactile or the tangible. Something of this is gotten at in this discussion from
1991 with Norman Mailer, on the idea of people who become objects of desire. I
pay no attention to the digressions into feminism. From <a href="http://www.yout
ube.com/watch?v=H6PwHOiicu8">"Norman Mailer on Bookworm, Part Two [1991]"</a> (1
5:20-17:28 in the clip):
<blockquote>MICHAEL SILVERBLATT [program host]
I don't think I've heard anybody say this...there's an enormous fear...on people
's part...to be the object of desire. To cause desire.
MAILER
Well, there you may have something. Certain people, not all. [SILVERBLATT: Not a
ll people.] You gave me an idea. I think it's people who have set their course i
n life, and they're what I would call uni-souls...that is, they do not really wa
nt to have a deep relation with anyone else. Because that'll deter them from the
ir objective. It's as if the navigator in them has lined up their sights, and sa
id to them, "You are a torpedo. And if nothing deters you, you will be a huge su
ccess. You will blow up that huge target that is the very end of your ambition,
and you will be immortal. And so, don't let anything get in your way, just be a
torpedo." Well, people like that, sexual harassment's absolutely outrageous. And
it's interesting that women who are leading feminism very often are that way. T
hat is, they are singleminded in their goals. Feminism is their life. They see n
othing to the left or the right of feminism. It's not like, let's improve men an
d women together, or: let's try to rise to a higher level of human relations. It
's: feminism is the most important single thing in their lives, and they work fo
r it twenty-four hours a day. They're devoted to it. And they too are torpoedoes
. You know, they got one goal.
SILVERBLATT
I don't know if it's even characteristic of feminism. What I notice, living here
in Los Angeles, which people call nowadays, "the least sexy city in America." T
he most beautiful looking people, and the least sexually in kind people. Very lo
w libido levels. The look is meant to create attraction, but there's a strong "d
o not touch". Because of exactly that torpedo factor you are talking about. Peop
le wanting to spring themselves into the future, and land at the center of the b
ullseye, and along that trajectory, attraction and dalliance can only be an inte
rruption.</blockquote>
The place that Marilyn Monroe and other dead icons hold in our culture might be
found in Durkheim's distinction between ghosts and spirits, with Monroe very muc
h a spirit:
<blockquote>[A] ghost is not a real spirit. In the first place, it generally has
only a limited power of action; also, it does not have a definite province. It
is a vagabond, upon whom no determined task is incumbent, for the effect of deat
h has been to put it outside of all regular forms; as regards the living, it is
a sort of a exile. A spirit, on the other hand, always has a power of a certain
sort and it is by this that it is defined; it is set over a certain order of cos
mic or social phenomena; it has a more or less precise function to fulfil in the
system of the universe.
But there are some souls which satisfy this double condition and which are conse
quently spirits, in the proper sense of the word. These are the souls of the myt
hical personages whom popular imagination has placed at the beginning of time, t
he Altjirangamitjina or the men of the Alcheringa among the Arunta; the Mura-mur
a among the tribes of Lake Eyre; the Muk-Kurnai among the Kurnai, etc. In one se
nse, they are still souls, for they are believed to have formerly animated bodie
s from which they separated themselves at a certain moment. But even when they l
ed a terrestrial life, they already had, as we have seen, exceptional powers; th
ey had a mana superior to that of ordinary men, and they have kept it. Also, the
y are charged with definite functions.</blockquote>
That there is this kinship between ancient mana and fame, that we might speak of
wanting mana when we say we want fame (and vice versa), is perhaps why there is
a constant necessity to see some benevolent order in celebrityhood. Mana is div
ine material, god is inherently and eternally good, and therefore mana and fame
are distributed according to virtue. The most famous are supposed to do good wor
k, adopt children, and otherwise make obvious that this organization has the qua
lity of divine sanction. This, of course, is utterly false. We might see the gul
f in the life of Jenna Jameson, as described in her memoir <a href="http://www.a
mazon.com/Make-Love-Like-Porn-Star/dp/0060539100/">How to Make Love Like a Po
rn Star: A Cautionary Tale</a>. Patrick and Jameson were engaged for a while
in a not entirely friendly rivalry, and I make no attempt to weigh favor in tha
t larger dispute when I say that Cautionary Tale is my preferred book of
their memoirs, whether because of Jameson's ghostwriter Neil Strauss (who played
the same role for the memorable <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Long-Hard-Road-O
ut-Hell/dp/0060987464/">Long Road out of Hell</a> by Marilyn Manson), or
the raw materials of the life described. I do not elevate Jameson's book out of
any attempt to be a provocateur, only the virtue of the book itself, and only fo
r that reason I think it serves as an honest and invaluable document in capturin
g what life was like now, more insightful than many books more distinguished and
higher browed.
That I speak of a divine order of fame that would include pornography is perhaps
unexpected, but not without basis. We might speak of a system of organization a
nd distribution, in the manufacture and sale of products whose power is so great
as to suggest the divine. This system might be called capitalism, whatever its
actual qualities, a system which transmits the images of any beauty throughout t
he world, that produces powerful computer technology, that gives you access to a
ffordable food and shoes. Pornography is part of this system's god-like power, b
ecause it is through this vast system that beauty, the beauty of Jenna Jameson a
nd Tera Patrick, a beguiling surface that might be called something like a divin
e ideal, is exposed and unveiled for the billions. It is an order of divine powe
r, with an underside that hints at the infernal. The disgusting conditions of th
e Amazon warehouses, the workers who are poisoned while making iPads, the childr
en who make my shoes. There is the literally infernal as well, the hundreds who
burned to death last year in the clothing factories of Bangladesh. The life of J
enna Jameson is the raw amoral anarchy that lies underneath, a godless world whe
re there are only the strong above and the weak below, of contempt and control.
There is nothing here like the humble submission and divine benevolence as that
between the worshipper and say, the Holy Virgin. Jameson is a picture of blonde
innocence, a ruthless survivor, and a proud cash machine. "I was in control-of m
yself, and the men around me," she writes of her first time dancing in a strip c
lub. "And I loved it: I loved the attention and the confidence it gave me."<a na
me="bkfrftnote20"></a><a href="#ftnote20">20</a> The strip club is a
classroom, and the class is social dynamics. Once geeky and asocial, she learns
how to talk. She learns how to act. She learns how to lie. While the customer mu
mbles on, she pretends to be open and caring. "Everything that came out of my mo
uth was complete bullshit. I could tell by looking at each person what he wanted
to hear." She is soon someone else. "Within weeks at the club, I began to trans
form from a geeky teenage girl into a money-crazed psycho. And I loved it." Her
look of innocence becomes even more innocent. "Since most of the men were into m
e because I looked so young and innocent, I decided to amplify that...I put my h
air up in pony-tails, wore little pink shoes, and carried a plastic Barbie purse
, which further contrasted me from the hardened girls."<a name="bkfrftnote21"></
a><a href="#ftnote21">21</a> She gets two lessons from another girl.
Number One: "Be personable. Make him like you. Talk to him. Ask about his job. A
ct like you are interested." Number Two: do shots with the customer, and make su
re his are extra strong and yours complete water. "Get him as drunk as possible,
" the other girl says, "and rack those songs up."<a name="bkfrftnote22"></a><a h
ref="#ftnote22">22</a>
This is about money, but it is more about control. "It was a high to get the upp
er hand over a customer. They were dumb, they were drunk, and they deserved it."
The woman is naked, the woman is powerless, the woman has more power than the c
ustomer ever will. "The mentality is that if these guys are going to victimize u
s, we're going to totally victimize them right back."<a name="bkfrftnote23"></a>
<a href="#ftnote23">23</a> A local politician was into her and liked
to be dominated. She pees in his beer and forces him to drink it. He buys her a
corvette. "If you can walk into a room, lead on a bunch of guys, and then leave
with thousands of dollars in cash in your pocket and no obligation to anyone...l
ife is good."<a name="bkfrftnote24"></a><a href="#ftnote24">24</a> Sh
e dances for celebrities, and she doesn't care. Those assholes were Pantera? Tha
t old weirdo was Jack Nicholson? "Did you know you were just dancing for Whitesn
ake?" "Really, like I give a crap."<a name="bkfrftnote25"></a><a href="#ftnote25
">25</a> She moves on to photo work, and she has to contort herself i
nto an aching pose that has nothing to do with the ecstatic state she appears to
have in the picture. She looks over her shouldeer, nude, at the camera. "I had
to arch so hard that my lower back cramped," she writes. "When I see those photo
s now, it seems obvious that the sexy pout I thought I was giving the camera was
just a poorly disguised grimace of pain."<a name="bkfrftnote26"></a><a href="#f
tnote26">26</a>
She gets into porn as an act of revenge when a boyfriend cheats on her<a name="b
kfrftnote27"></a><a href="#ftnote27">27</a>. She stays in for the mon
ey. She starts out girl-girl, then shoots her first boy-girl scene when she's ei
ghteen with Randy West, who she describes as a decent guy, but a little old (for
ty six or forty seven), with the fashion sense of a homeless wrestler<a name="bk
frftnote28"></a><a href="#ftnote28">28</a>.
<blockquote>Randy: So, are you interested in coming out to L.A. to shoot
a video?
Me: Absolutely not. I only want to do high-end stuff.
Randy: The pay is three thousand dollars for one scene.
Me: What day you want me there?</blockquote>
<blockquote>Randy: How about doing a shoot with just me tomorrow?
Me: How many times do I have to tell you, I don't really want to do that.
Randy: How about I pay you two thousand dollars more?
Me: Two thousand more than today?
Randy: Yes.
Me: Is tomorrow good for you?</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Chris Nieratko, from a 2013 interview (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/wa
tch?v=JVyS4XiWanY">"Jenna Jameson Interview"</a>): Did you feel any of that when
you were eighteen, really grossed out by these greasy men?
Jameson: Absolutely. Oh my god, you have no idea. I hate to throw him und
er the bus, but Randy West, god bless him, but he creeped me out so bad.
I was just watching a documentary, I was on NetFlix, and they did this documenta
ry called After Porn [<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1291547/?ref_=
fn_al_tt_1">After Porn Ends</a>]...and I was, like, okay I wanna watch th
is. It'll be interesting, it's kinda my generation. So, he's talking about this,
there's this little blonde girl, they called me and asked me if she can do a mo
vie, and when I saw her, I saw dollar signs in my eyes, and I was like, okay, th
at's creepy. I had just turned eighteen years old, and he had to have bee
n at least fifty [the scene is from <a href="http://www.iafd.com/title.asp?title
=Up+And+Cummers+11&year=1994">Up And Cummers 11</a> (link is relatively S
FW, contains no pictures) which was released in 1994, and West was born in 1947,
<a href="http://www.iafd.com/title.asp?title=Up+And+Cummers+11&year=1994">accor
ding to the same database</a>, so he was either 46 or 47.]. And he was just so g
ross. And he totally lied about everything that happened that day. But I'll just
give it to him though. You know, whatever, he can have his little fantasy.
Nieratko: How do you get a girl boner to make a scene with a guy who's fi
fty when you're eighteen?
Jameson: You don't. You're just a good actress.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Randy West, from <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1291547
/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">After Porn Ends</a>: I used to say it's like borrowing
somebody's body to masturbate with. "Excuse me, if you're not busy, do you mind
if I jerk off in your pussy, with my dick?" It's kinda like that, which is not
bad...you know, better than real jerking off. Right after I started producing Up And Cummers, I get this letter in the mail, I opened it up, and I see th
is unbelievably good looking, very young looking blonde girl...with beaut
iful natural boobs, little baby face, and she wants to know if I can help her ge
t into the porn biz. The girl's name was Jenna Jameson. I remember saying to som
eone, "Holy christ, if I get this girl to shoot for me, we're going to sell some
tapes." I said, "Well, if you don't wanna do guys, I'll let you pick whatever g
irl you want to do that. She liked girls, so she picked this girl that I happene
d to be working with that day, who was doing her first movie, Kylie Ireland, so
Kylie and Jenna were doing their thing together, and everything was going good,
and they took a little break, and I said something like, "Man, Jenna, that's a t
asty looking pussy you got there." And I believe she said, "Why don't you come i
n and taste it?" And I went, *taken aback motion* "Okay!" I was doing the camera
, but I handed it to my assistant, "Bob, hold on to this, start shooting." So I
get in there, and I start going down on her, and she starts squealing that squea
l that she had...I'm guessing she's kinda liking it, she seems like she's gettin
g off, and everything is good, I said, "Man, I am so fucking horny now, you guys
mind giving me a double blow job or something?" She said, "Sure, we can do that
." *makes a prayer of thanks motion* "Oh thank you." And they did, and it
went well, and a week later, she kinda called me back, and said "You know what?
You weren't so bad, I could probably do a boy-girl scene with you," the rest is
kinda history after that.</blockquote>
A summary of the scene can be found in a review on an old mailing list, <a href=
"http://www.rame.net/reviews/heretic/rev-477.html">"Dunbar Reviews: Up and Cumme
rs #11"</a>:
<blockquote>Jenna Jameson. A sweet-looking, young little blonde. Nice natural
tits, cute ass. I've heard told that she has since destroyed her body with fake
tits (which she definitly did not need) and tattoos? Why do they do that? They
do missionary and cowgirl shot from both the front and the back, and finally do
ggie. Randy finishes by coming inside her. It looks like he manages a decent l
oad as she squirts it out of her cunt and it oozes into a puddle on the bed spre
ad. Kind of gross if you ask me, but definitely out of the ordinary.</blockquot
e>
Jenna Jameson starts doing meth, then becomes entranced as she watches her boyfr
iend take apart a lightbulb, cook the meth in the glass, and inhale the smoke fr
om the open base. She takes her turn, and the air comes in glassy smooth against
her lungs. She lets out a three foot column of smoke from her lips. "Everything
seemed to move in slow motion, and then someone pressed fast forward. My heart
felt like a woodpecker was inside, hammering hard enough to burst through my che
st at any moment."<a name="bkfrftnote29"></a><a href="#ftnote29">29</
a> She starts smoking every day. She organizes and re-organizes her bathroom a t
housand times. She endlessly builds artwork with a gluegun. She plays so much ha
ndheld poker that her fingers bleed. In photo shoots, her bones stick out of her
body and she starts clenching her jaw hard. "Jenna, relax," the photographer sa
ys. "Let the tension out of your face."<a name="bkfrftnote30"></a><a href="#ftno
te30">30</a> The drug nearly kills her, then she comes back to life a
nd has an even bigger career. She goes to Cannes with two other porn stars, Kayl
an Nicole and Juli Ashton. "They had realized that with their beauty, boobs, and
status, the rules that applied to the rest of the world didn't apply to them,"
she writes of Nicole and Ashton. "They had the attitude that they could do absol
utely anything they wanted." <a name="bkfrftnote31"></a><a href="#ftnote31">31</a> She emerges from the plane into another world, the one she's alway
s wanted to be in, the one that Tera Patrick also longed to join. "It was one I'
d dreamed about since I was a little girl, imagining what it would be like to be
an international jet-setting model. In fact, it was wilder than my dreams. Flas
hbulbs went off everywhere." The photographers have no idea who she is, only tha
t she is a kind of sacred object, which their flashbulbs make more sacred. "The
paparazzi screamed and fought to take pictures of me, even though they had no id
ea who I was. It was so overwhelming and disorienting being pushed through the a
dmiring crowd toward a waiting limo. I knew, for the first time, what an actual
celebrity must feel like."<a name="bkfrftnote32"></a><a href="#ftnote32">32
</a>
She becomes a big star, and does some reporting for the E! Channel. "So you're t
he reporter from the E! Channel," says Wesley Snipes. "Why don't you join us?" S
he accepts the invite. "So," Wesley Snipes asks. "do you like it up the ass?" An
al sex, she writes, "is an exchange of power. And every man I've ever met loves
the idea of dominating a woman by pushing his massive dick into her tight sphinc
ter so that she loses control."<a name="bkfrftnote33"></a><a href="#ftnote33"><s
up>33</a> There are few people she'll trust with anal. And she doesn't lik
e the closeness after sex. She sleeps with a waiter at Cannes. "When it was all
over, he wrapped his naked body around mine. Instantly I stiffened. I hate cuddl
ing."<a name="bkfrftnote34"></a><a href="#ftnote34">34</a> She starts
hooking up with the Anti-Christ Superstar, Marilyn Manson. They sleep together.
"Why don't you just stay and cuddle?" he asks. "Did you just say the c-word?!"
she asks. "I don't cuddle, but I lay with him for a little while longer and list
ened to him talk about religion."<a name="bkfrftnote35"></a><a href="#ftnote35">
35</a> Marilyn Manson likes to cuddle, and he's a little too into ana
l. "Every time we were naked, he'd be going for my butt like a rat to cheese."<a
name="bkfrftnote36"></a><a href="#ftnote36">36</a> This is an act of
power, of control, and you only do it with those you absolutely trust. "I've be
en offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to do anal," she writes, explaining
why she'd only done it with three men up until then, and never on camera. "Doing
it on camera would be compromising myself."<a name="bkfrftnote37"></a><a href="
#ftnote37">37</a>
Anal is about control, porno is about control, though the power isn't always whe
re you think. "It's time to meet the man you thought you envied," we're told abo
ut the boyfriends and husbands of porn stars who also act as their managers, "th
e suitcase pimps." We're given an overview of a manipulative wretch burdened by
an emasculating fanny pack, which carries the porn star's baby wipes, her lighte
rs, and all other conveniences. These men are filled with get rich plans that ne
ver work, who buy the porn star dinner with her money while insisting she only e
at salads, and is hooked on oxycontin, cocaine, steroids, or many other possibil
ities. The last instruction on playing this role: "Finally, when she is addicted
to drugs, aged beyond her years, and can't work anymore, help start the career
of a fresh girl."<a name="bkfrftnote38"></a><a href="#ftnote38">38</a
> As Jameson's own marriage fell apart, her director husband would wreak vengean
ce through the roles given. She does a scene where she gets hosed down surrounde
d by electric wires, one where she rides half naked on a blind horse, another wh
ere she plays a firewoman in balloon pants and a defective oxygen tank. In this
last one, she has sex near a wall of actual flame while wearing a long blonde wi
g. "Will her flesh fry? Watch and find out!"<a name="bkfrftnote39"></a><a href="
#ftnote39">39</a> A brief interlude featuring questions and answers w
ith a male perfomer includes the most obvious query: "A lot of guys want to get
into porn to get laid. What are your thoughts on that?" Answer: "Getting into po
rn is a death sentence. As a male performer you are doomed to be single for the
rest of your life." Why? "A guy performs seven to ten scenes per week at least.
The number one performers do fifteen scenes per week. So what girl is going to g
o out with a guy who's pounding fifteen other girls every week? No one. The guys
don't have any social life, because they are on set so much. And when they do g
o out, they are like lepers. Girls won't touch them."<a name="bkfrftnote40"></a>
<a href="#ftnote40">40</a>
Jenna Jameson's most frightening dream, the one that always recurs, is that ther
e is someone nearby who can hurt her and she gives herself away.
<blockquote>For as long as I can remember, I've had the same nightmare. I am bei
ng chased through a large dilapidated house. There is someone directly behind me
, but I can't see him. I hide in the closet. I'm terrified. My heart is heaving
in my chest. I know he's right outside. I try to hold my breath so he can't hear
me. But I can't stop gasping. It's deafening. I know if he hears me, he's going
to open the door and get me. But there's nothing I can do to quiet my fear. He'
s coming closer. He can hear me now. It's over. I'm going to die.
And then I wake up. To this day, I've never seen that person. Knowing that someo
ne who wants to hurt me is so close by and that I am giving myself away is the w
orst feeling in the world.</blockquote>
The book ends with Jameson at the height of her powers. She tours as a feature d
ancer, and each night in each city she tells the crowd it's her birthday. Instea
d of celebrating it on her own, she's decided to spend it with them. "So I'm her
e, happy birthday to me," I thought. The grateful crowd always throws in extra c
ash. "That's right, fuckers. Cough it up."<a name="bkfrftnote41"></a><a href="#f
tnote41">41</a> She knew who had the power:
<blockquote>So if I caught a guy saying something obnoxious to his friends, I'd
knock his hat off or spill a drink on his pants. At one show, when a guy threw a
penny at me, I kicked him in the throat with my heel. I got in constant fights
with local dancers-I even hocked a loogie in one girl's face-and had guys thrown
out of the club on a nightly basis. If some asshole dared to touch me, I'd rewa
rd him with a backhand to the skull. I was out of control. It was awesome.</bloc
kquote>
She goes out on another feature tour with a dancer who's an occasional girlfrien
d, Nikki Tyler, and a man known as Mr. 187, after California's code for murder,
and who's a sergeant-at-arms with the Hell's Angels. "Mr. 187 was a badass mothe
rfucker who was angry at the world and enjoyed nothing more than snapping a guy'
s arm for looking at him wrong. So naturally, we took him on tour with us."<a na
me="bkfrftnote42"></a><a href="#ftnote42">42</a> A few years later, M
r. 187 was charged with murder for killing a club patron, then acquitted, on gro
unds of self-defense. A few years after that, he was killed at the funeral for a
nother member of the Hell's Angels<a name="bkfrftnote43"></a><a href="#ftnote43"
>43</a>. But back then he was still alive, and they were a three pers
on wrecking crew. "They had realized that with their beauty, boobs, and status,
the rules that applied to the rest of the world didn't apply to them," she said
of Kaylan Nicole and Juli Ashton, when they were veterans and she was a newcomer
. She knew now what they knew then. She and Nikki would demand $5000 a night, an
d they would get it. With merchandise and tips, they'd get $100,000 for a three
night booking, plus limos, plus security, plus a five star hotel with room servi
ce, and a rider complicated enough to make sure that people got their shit right
<a name="bkfrftnote44"></a><a href="#ftnote44">44</a>. And they were
an utter wrecking crew:
<blockquote>Nikki and I were angry at the world in our own way, and Mr. 187's fu
nction was to justify and enable it. He'd fan the flames of our Vicodin-and-vodk
a-fueled rage to the point where we got so out of control that even he couldn't
handle us. I'd smash out mirrors in dressing rooms; Nikki would clamp guys in le
glocks until their heads turned purple; we'd kick drinks in guys' faces; and we'
d pass out on top of each other onstage.</blockquote>
There may be a habit of thought which sees Jameson as the chaotic exception, the
intruder into elysium, distinct in an otherwise placid landscape. One reads the
account of her childhood, and she is re-seen as something else, one more point
in a mass that is raw, violent, savage. The movie Naked Lunch has nothing
to do with the nihilist tumult of the book, but How to Make Love Like a Porn
Star very much does. We are given excerpts of Jameson's diary, before her s
tage name, when she was Jenna Massoli, and the girl there is bright eyed, tender
, vulnerable. She is an unhappy iterant, moving from Vegas, to Florida, then Col
orado, back to Vegas, then Montana, then Vegas again.
<blockquote>January 1, 1983
Dear Diaree,
I'm 8 years old.
I watched funny car racing. And I took tinsel off the Christmas tree. "real exci
ting," My dads off tomoro. I watched a new show "Battle of the Beat." I have a d
og named "Ming." My Grandma came over. My brother keeps on singing "You don't wa
nt me anymore." We had a good Christmas. I got a canopy. And my brother got a gu
n.
I watched the Black stallion.</blockquote>
<blockquote>April 1, 1983
Dear Diaree,
I broke my arm about 5 weeks ago. I just got my cast off. While I'm talking abou
t hospitals my dads getting a chin augmentation. Hes getting it tomoro at 10:00.
He's nervous. He wants it to come in two minutes. I played a joke on my <strike
>mommy</strike> Marjorie. I pretended to see a giant spider. She was scared, the
n I said APRIL FOOLS! She said you dirty rat. I laughed so
hard. She was really mad. It was funny. Then we played Lego's. It was fun. Were
going to paint easter eggs.
Its going to be fun.
Bye Diaree</blockquote>
<blockquote><strike>tomorrow</strike>
tomorrow
<strike>tommorow</strike>
June 24, 1984
Dear <strike>Diarree</strike> Diary,
Sorry it's been so long. I've had a lot on my mind. Well I'll tell you all what'
s happened. We moved in with grandma. We live on 7th & Franklin. I go to John S.
Park school. I past into 5th grade. I turned 10 April 9th. My brother's thirtee
n's. Weve been having bad troubles. My mom and dad are getting separated. These
last few days have been awful. Its been really hard on me a lot more than Tony c
ause he hates her.
I've had her as a mother since I was 2. My poor dad is feeling awful. She's movi
ng out today or tomorrow.
My heart is so broken I could just cry.</blockquote>
<blockquote>July 30, 1984
We moved to Boulder City and I'm doing fine. Today I saw my old friend beth. She
does toe. She had an extra pair and let me have them. I can do toe at ballet cl
ass now.
There black. It's about 10:07 at night. My dads home late at about 12:00. I can'
t wait till then. I feel safer. We called into MTV Friday night video.
Duran Duran won. Ming's sitting right beside me watching me write.
My Most Treasured Things
Diary
toe shoes
canopy bed
white dress
Real mothers neckless
dad
beth
Unicorn Collection
</blockquote>
<blockquote>December 21, 1986
Dear Diary,
This is Jenna reporting from the cold region of Elko Nevada. I really like it do
wn here. I have a lot of friends such as Natalie Glass, Kristine Poljak, and Gin
ny Richey. We got a new puppy. He's a black Labrador. His name is Digby & he's t
wo months old. Welp, it's almost Christmas & I don't know a thing I'm getting! I
'm in the bath writing this! Well I've finally gotten hair and I'm starting to g
et some boobs.
Well I better wash my hair.
Bye,
Jen
</blockquote>
<blockquote>November 24, 1987
Hello. I'm in Las Vegas now. We moved back. Vivian [her father's ex-girlfriend]
is history. Oh well. I will probably look back on my childhood and laugh. I laug
h at it already. I have a lot of friends but I never go anywhere. It's very depressing.
I went to State and I won young Miss Modeling Queen. And then I went to Nationals Recently and I got top ten in the country in my pageant.
I had a lot of fun.</blockquote>
<blockquote>September 20, 1989
Hi there! Well I moved to Montana and I'm not really very happy here. I miss Owe
n. He was my latest boyfriend in L.V. [Las Vegas] before I left.
Well here is whats been happening since I got to this place. Well, I am very pop
ular but some fo the girls at school don't like me.</blockquote>
<blockquote>October 1, 1990
Dear Diary,
The WORST thing in the WORLD happened today.
It's so horrible I can't even write it down or tell my dad or my brother anythin
g.
I HATE Montana. I WANT to KILL MYSELF.
But that wouldn't be fair to my dad. I am not going to write anything down anymo
re. I am going to get out of here and forget all about this place.
I am so sad and torn apart and confused. I don't understand people. How could th
is happen to me? I don't know what to do. Life sucks.
Goodbye Forever Diary,
Jenna</blockquote>
From a series of family interviews in the book, with Jenna, her father Larry Mas
soli, and her brother, Tony:
<blockquote>
Larry: I'd like to know what happened in Montana.
Jenna: I don't know if I'll ever be ready to talk about it.</blockquote>
Larry Massoli, Jenna's father and easily the most interesting character in the b
ook, worked as a police officer when they were first in Vegas, and where he got
caught in a war between two rival borellos. Mobsters tried to kidnap his childre
n, Jenna and Tony, they put out a contract on him, they come to kill his family.
The Massolis move to Florida. "I guess Florida was awful," says Larry. "Ugh, Fl
orida was ghetto," agrees Jenna. Her school had a barbed wire fence and the kids
' tricycles were chained down together because otherwise they'd get stolen<a nam
e="bkfrftnote45"></a><a href="#ftnote45">45</a>. Someone tries to bre
ak into their house, but it's okay: Tony has a gun. Tony slept with guns since h
e was six years old<a name="bkfrftnote46"></a><a href="#ftnote46">46<
/a>. When they are back in Vegas, Jenna and her brother act like utter hellions.
They steal fire extinguishers and spray passers-by. "We would go down to crackt
own and see the crack hos on the corner and we'd fog 'em up!," she remembers. "I
remember one time we got this kid on a skateboard and there was a cop that saw
us. We were in this total car chase, and we got away."<a name="bkfrftnote47"></a
><a href="#ftnote47">47</a> They would build giant sculptures in peop
le's yards, Jenna would light them up, and then-
<blockquote>Jenna: Finally, boom! Everything would explode in flames. People wou
ld be coming out of their houses freaking out. And then a couple days later on t
he news, "There's been a rash of arsons across the Las Vegas valley." And we're
all like, "Yaaaayyy!" Our dad had no clue.</blockquote>
Her father moves them again to Montana, to raise cattle and try to keep Jenna ou
t of trouble. At school, the boys liked her and the other girls didn't. They wou
ld chase her, throw her down, and punch her in the stomach. "One girl would get
me by the back, and one would punch me in the stomach. They didn't really hurt m
e, but Jesus Christ I got the wind knocked out of me. Or they would rip out my h
air."<a name="bkfrftnote48"></a><a href="#ftnote48">48</a> Before fin
ally leaving Montana, Jenna saw the girl who picked on her the most getting some
thing from her locker. She goes up and smashes the locker door so hard, it split
s the girl's head wide open<a name="bkfrftnote49"></a><a href="#ftnote49">4
9</a>. This last act takes place after the worst thing in the world happen
ed to her, after she's stopped going to school because of it, after she's decide
d she wants to get as far away as possible from Montana. She finally reveals in
her memoir what it is, when writing about her first time on "The Howard Stern Sh
ow":
<blockquote>He kept saying that something didn't compute. He asked if I had a sc
rewed-up childhood, and I said no. He asked if my parents had been strict, and I
said no. He asked if my dad and I still talked, and I said we did. He asked if
my mom minded what I was doing, and I said no. I had decided in advance that it
was better not to discuss her death on the air. I didn't think I could handle it
.
But then Howard asked me if I'd ever been molested or abused. It was the one que
stion I wasn't prepared for.</blockquote>
This is the moment on the show, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV6aQz3j
Rdk">"Jenna Jameson first appearance on Howard Stern (1995) Part 1"</a>:
<blockquote>STERN
You know what, sometimes I look at porno movies, and I go, man, that girl is so
good looking. How could she be in porno movies? And I can't figure it out. You k
now what I mean?
JAMESON
Right.
STERN
Listen. I have a lot of porno stars in here, but a lot of them I reject, because
it's like, how many times can you have a porno star? But then when I saw your p
ictures, you were such a piece of ass, I mean, look at this, is that a modeling
ad, or what?
QUIVERS
I thought that was some Sports Illustrated model.
STERN
Look at that. So then I said, she's gotta have a screwed up story, she's so damn
ed beautiful. I see beautiful women in these pornos, and I go: how the hell do t
hey get them to have-
QUIVERS
Why are they in there.
STERN
-wild monkey sex in these pornos. You have to have had a screwed up childhood, r
ight?
JAMESON
No. Actually-
STERN
Oh, come on. Something happened-
JAMESON
My dad was a cop.
STERN
And he never molested you?
JAMESON
Maybe it's a rebellious thing.
QUIVERS
Were they strict or what?
JAMESON
No. Not at all. I ran wild.
STERN
What happened? You just ran wild.
QUIVERS
You had no supervision whatsoever.
JAMESON
Not really.
QUIVERS
There you go.
STERN
They weren't strict at all?
JAMESON
No.
STERN
They let you do whatever you want?
JAMESON
I was out of control.
</blockquote>
What happened was simple: she was beaten and gang raped by four boys after a foo
tball game. We are not allowed the comfort that these boys were something alien
or obviously monstrous: she describes them as funny, good-looking guys. They rap
ed her anyway. The family moved back to Las Vegas, and there, she was raped by h
er boyfriend's uncle, a man named Preacher. "I've never told anyone about either
the Montana experience or the one with Preacher because I don't want to be thou
ght of as a victim," she writes. "I want to be judged by who I am as a person, n
ot by what happened to me."
This is someone who appears to live in a society without the protection of laws
or social codes. Gangsters try to kidnap her, attempt to kill her family, indiff
erent to her father being a policeman. No taboo, restriction, or moral perimete
r keeps women from punching her in the stomach, men from misusing her, men from
raping her. The only guaranteed protection against home invasion are your own gu
ns, the only thing that keeps other people from hurting you is your own spine. T
hat the image of this woman is known to billions is a result of the most advance
d technology, and yet the world she lives in appears to be lawless, modern Ameri
ca and pre-modern America, the west described in Orwell's <a href="http://www.ne
tcharles.com/orwell/essays/mark-twain.htm">"Mark Twain: The Licensed Gesture"</a
>: "The State hardly existed, the churches were weak and spoke with many voices,
and land was to be had for the taking." However, the law that Orwell emphasizes
as absent, economic pressure, is overwhelming in Massoli's life, is the only la
w that seemingly exists. It is because of money that she is able to act with ful
ler freedom than ever before - "I was out of control. It was awesome" - she has
the license to be out of control because she's pulling down five grand in three
nights. This might be one of the few books where a woman speaks of sleeping with
other women without any mention of it being a perceived transgression, a rebell
ion, or a violation of society's rules. "As I was talking, she suddenly reached
across the table, put her hand under my chin, pulled my face into hers, and kiss
ed me," she writes of another stripper she's tutoring in necessary work skills,
when the student makes a move on her.
<blockquote>It wasnt a peck on the lips, or one of those fake sexy kisses that gi
rls do with other girls to turn men on. It was a full-on tongue-exploring-mouth
soul kiss. My breath quickened, and my mind raced. I was in shock. But, at the s
ame time, I wasnt. This was why I had really come up to her. I didnt want to help
her become a better stripper at all. I wanted to run my hands through her hair,
feel her cheek against mine, and hold her in my arms. I had to make a split-seco
nd decision. And that decision was yes. Yes, I wanted to throw down with this gi
rl.
She released my mouth and looked softly into my eyes. I wrapped my right hand be
hind her head, and she pressed her lips once more against mine. She kissed with
the confidence and passion of a man.</blockquote>
Scenes such as this are not written for the appetites of men, but only as a blun
t description of events that took place. From an account of times with another g
irl: "She could come fifteen times in a single session, and always wanted to eat
me out when I was on my period. She called it war paint." There is no mention o
f a contrast with what other women do, or what society expects of a woman to act
, or any larger gay culture. These women and this society doesn't exist in her l
ife, and may as well be on a distant planet. If society does not exist to protec
t you from rape, robbery, and kidnapping, why should it even be acknowledged for
such humble acts as this? In the review of the book by Charles Taylor, <a href=
"http://www.salon.com/2004/08/25/jenna_6/">"How to Make Love Like a Porn Star
 by Jenna Jameson"</a>, this often insightful critic writes of Massoli as pa
rt of a larger group of sex workers in opposition and outside the values of the
middle class:
<blockquote>What could seem a better way to flout middle-class values than going
into stripping or nude modeling or adult movies (even though, for some of the p
eople who go into them, they are the quickest route to middle-class stability)?
But though sex workers have often been looked down on in the name of middle-clas
s propriety, its interesting to think about what they share with the middle class
. </blockquote>
Taylor re-assures us that these people are finally us as well: "Often tho
se people wind up living traditional middle-class lives they get married, have k
ids, buy a home." This overlooks that Massoli was never middle class at her most
successful, she was a multi-millionaire and part of the one percent, and it mak
es the mistake of placing Massoli as part of a larger group. Her life is the mos
t extreme expression of unrestrained independence that might be found, without r
eliance on the government or solidarity with anyone, her career born in the ruth
less desert state whose lack of gambling laws allowed its foremost industry to e
xist. "Fuck Gloria Steinem," she writes<a name="bkfrftnote50"></a><a href="#ftno
te50">50</a>. You are alone in this world, so you'd better figure out
how to handle it quick. There is no ethos or philosophy that can be conn
ected to this life, except for one thing: Jenna Massoli has been able to survive
a great deal.
That there is something lost in existing like this, in having to live like this,
is suggested in one of Jenna Massoli's longer diary entries. She expresses some
thing that might be called innocence, and to find it appealing might seem like a
longing for a pristine state that cannot exist in harsh life, like orchids that
cannot survive outside the hothouse, but I think it is only for a person who ca
n allow themselves to be vulnerable, for the possibility of giving themselves aw
ay, without feeling unsafe. Those who've read this book will find one sentence e
specially striking: "The next day I found myself alone in his room, him holding
my body close to him." Jenna Massoli had no issue with snuggling then.
<blockquote>
June 9, 1988
Victor,
A boy or should I say a man moved into our apartment yesterday or the day before
. Amy and I were walking & we encountered one of her classmates. We talked awhil
e out at the swimming pool. He spoak to me about an attractive friend of his nam
ed Victor. He described him as blonde buff & tan. And of course he sounded attra
ctive to me. I secretly inside wanted to meet this mystery man. But I was very t
imid about meeting strange men. But Amy said to just come and sit in the grass i
n front of his so called apartment. So I did.
We sat and had a few meaningless conversations, until I saw 2 dark figures movin
g at a somewhat fast pace. All at once they sat down in our huddle in the grass.
One was dark haired and very old looking, sitting on his motorcycle helmet. The
other, he was hard to take my eyes off. He struck me as the wild type, someoe w
ho could release my secret desire to be wanted in a seductive manner & to be tre
ated & looked at as an attractive woman. And to throw away peoples tendency to l
ook at me as a <strike>cute</strike> pretty but young girl. As time went on, he
became more and more sexy. But I couldn't show my secret desire to touch him. I
think he realized how much I wanted him & he came and made himself comfortable u
nusually close to my warm body. He made me feel like no other boy or man ever ma
de me feel. It was getting quite late so I got up and started to leave-thinking
to myself it was silly of me to even think of being able to satisfy his needs.
But as soon as the thought ended and I was within two arms lengths away from him
, a phrase I was secretly wishing he would say left his mouth, "When will I see
you again." My heart filled with joy and passion. "Tomorrow," I said. The next d
ay I couldn't see him at all. But at about 11:30 p.m. I peered through my window
and there he was. No, he wasn't a figment of my imagination. He was real. He wa
s standing beneath my open window, staring up at me. We greeted each other and I
yearned to hold him close to me, like I so often thought about. He gave me his
telephone number and he disappeared into the darkness. The next day I found myse
lf alone in his room, him holding my body close to him.
He gave me a few playful pecks on my arms and my face. Then he gave me the most
passionate and deep kiss I have ever even assumed there could be. My god. I want
ed to stay here in his arms and make love to him over and over again until my bo
dy was so tired it had to stop. But I had to leave. He is the one that I want to
be with day & night. But I don't think you know that. Try to understand how muc
h I want & need to be with you. Sorry for making it so long but I couldn't tell
you in any other way.
I will never ever stop wanting you.</blockquote>
There is the interesting contrast that Jenna Jameson has said in several places
that she's submissive when having sex with men (she is dominant with women), so
the mass of images is of herself submitting to men, when she has a very differen
t attitude in actual life, outside the bedroom: of being very strong, of someone
giving orders, someone who never wishes to be vulnerable<a name="bkfrftnote51">
</a><a href="#ftnote51">51</a>. We have something similar with Tera P
atrick, who gives her sexual likes as "rough sex, hair pulling, mild choking, ge
tting tied up, playing the submissive, strong, tough, tattooed men", yet this al
so is not to be taken for emotional fragility. Her attitude when she first enter
ed this industry, and one that fit so well with it: "I was enjoying life. I was
free. And I was horny. My motto was: 'Get it up. Get it in. Get it off. Get it o
ut.'" This is all there in Nicki Brand, who is a submissive throughout the movie
, yet who gives the orders to Max Renn, commands which he always obeys, includin
g the final one to destroy himself. As always here, we also have the question of
whether our power we truly have. This is the question of any performer in the a
dult industry, even top stars such as Jameson and Patrick, and it's a question i
n Videodrome. The image of Nicki Brand gives these orders, yet this image
is manipulated first by Barry Convex, and later, presumably, by Bianca O'Blivio
n. Bianca is the other powerful woman in the story, yet she sees herself as only
exercising her father's will - "I am my father's screen."
If we might see Jenna Massoli's life as part of a broken symmetry, the unshelter
ed life in the wake of a collapsed universe, then her own father's life might be
its mirroring arc. As said, Larry Massoli, Jenna's father, is easily the most i
nteresting character in the book. Where she lives seemingly outside of any state
, he worked as its servant, a military advisor in Vietnam before the United Stat
es had officially entered the war<a name="bkfrftnote52"></a><a href="#ftnote52">
52</a>. Later, his job is to organize and train fighters to suppress
the Simba rebellion in the Congo. Something there changes him. "Its interesting b
ecause when you first go over you try to be so righteous," he says in one of the
book's interviews with the Massoli family. "I grew up with Roy Rogers and Gene
Autry, and they never shot anybody in the back. It was the white hats against th
e black hats. You have to do everything fair." I'm very sympathetic to this man,
and I'm not sure what I would see if I were to look closely at what took place
where he was in Vietnam, or more importantly, what he says took place in Simba i
n response to his own side suffering massacres: "I would come up to a village an
d, instead of going house to house, I would level the whole place...We went from
village to village killing them all. We just didnt care. We didnt care." One is s
truck by this entire passage, gone somehow unnoticed, perhaps since this is a bo
ok about pornography and therefore nothing it says about war or America is to be
given thoughtful consideration. This phrase, especially: "When I got to Africa
I still had some humanity left."<a name="bkfrftnote53"></a><a href="#ftnote53">53</a> When Larry Massoli returns, it takes him a decade to fit back i
nto society. Like Freddie Quell, he turns to Scientology for structure and comfo
rt; they get him a job at a Las Vegas TV station<a name="bkfrftnote54"></a><a hr
ef="#ftnote54">54</a>. His dear wife dies of cancer when Jenna is two
, the woman Jenna's memoirs is dedicated to, and who continued to dominate their
lives, in memory. Afterwards, Larry Massoli decides to do "what I had always wa
nted to do. I became this big crusader asshole. Because I couldnt save your mothe
r, I was going to save the world." It's when he refuses to look the other way or
take a bribe during a war between two bordellos in Vegas that there are the kid
napping threats and a contract is put out on his life. Most important business i
n Jameson's book is handled unofficially, and Larry Massoli settles this unoffic
ially as well. He goes out to the brothel owned by those who threatened his fami
ly and put out a hit on his life, drives his patrol car through the front door,
and empties two clips of a Thompson submachine gun into their bar. "I want you f
uckers to stop fucking with my family." Problem solved<a name="bkfrftnote55"></a
><a href="#ftnote55">55</a>.
After this, he enters a descent, a dark mirrored image of his previous life. He
ends up on the run with his son, Tony, and out of contact with Jenna after anoth
er contract is put out on their lives, having to do with some other Vegas busine
ss that goes awry. He does acid with his kids. He does coke with Jenna and Tony.
When they all do coke together, Jenna looks over at Tony and says, "Go, Dad." L
arry: "I completely reversed myself from being the self-righteous stupid ass tha
t I was to a psycho." Jenna: "Get down with your bad self, Dad."<a name="bkfrftn
ote56"></a><a href="#ftnote56">56</a> He ends up dating a stripper, r
unning a strip club with his brother where his daughter is a feature dancer, and
smoking meth. Larry: "You know what? I dont miss any drug. But the only drug I e
ver liked was crank. Its the best drug on the planet, but smoking it. Not sniffin
g it."<a name="bkfrftnote57"></a><a href="#ftnote57">57</a> He had le
ft the world of heroic duty, whatever might be underneath, for his daughter's wo
rld, a place of raw anarchy.
<blockquote>Tony: ...its always been us against the world...
Jenna: Thats right.
Larry: ...and it always will be.</blockquote>
That I write of these women, Tera Patrick and Jenna Jameson, as being something
like sacred objects to be kept away from the profane, when they are in an inhere
ntly profane medium, pornography, is not a contradiction. There remains an eleva
tion, a creation of distance, an abstract image to be worshipped, though the pro
faning of these sacred objects is different than it might be for other celebriti
es. What profanes the sacred for this kind of performer is anything that erases
the distance between themselves and the general population, and these are tied a
lmost entirely to their beauty: age, bad surgery, drugs, desperation, humilation
. These all affect other celebrities as well, though they can be humiliated, or
profaned, in ways that Jenna Jameson and Tera Patrick cannot, through nabbed nud
e selfies and sex tapes.
That we might liken fame to this religious phenomenon of mana, and that i
t should be so prevalent in a secular society, perhaps explains why there are th
e constant countervailing impulses of making people famous, creating these sacre
d objects, and profaning these same sacred objects, humiliating the famous. An e
xample of this might be seen in the career of Britney Spears, who was especially
suited for the kind of sacred image making that resembles Marilyn Monroe's. She
was seemingly innocent, by which we mean sexually innocent, somehow unco
nscious of the electric sexuality of her poses, and so we have, literally, the s
acred vessel unprofaned, as well as the cryptic quality of her image<a name="bkf
rftnote58"></a><a href="#ftnote58">58</a>. It might be added that thi
s applies especially and exclusively to her image, one that allows the viewer to
project a multiplicity of things that may not be there. Such a phenomenon takes
place in a recent article on her Vegas show, <a href="https://medium.com/@taffy
akner/miss-american-dream-31c823ad0e5a">"Miss American Dream"</a>, by Taffy Brod
esser-Akner. It is a very good article, one where the author never actually inte
rviews Spears, but discusses her image alone, in the preparation time up to this
premiere. She speaks to one woman who became a fan when Spears shaved her head.
"She was just saying fuck you to the world over and over. This was who I knew s
he was," says the fan. "In the early 2000s, she was a phony. This was really her
."<a name="bkfrftnote59"></a><a href="#ftnote59">59</a> The obvious q
uestion is: are you sure? Is it not possible that she simply had a nervous break
down? That perhaps whatever we see of her, the public, is always phony, a
lways false out of emotional necessity. <a href="http://www.academia.edu/693083/
Being-in-the-world_of_celebrity_The_phenomenology_of_fame">"Being a Celebrity: A
Phenomology of Fame"</a> by Donna Rockwell and David C. Giles (I came across th
is study via the Alice Robb piece, <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/1
16227/celebrity-study-four-phases-accepting-fame">"The Four Stages of Fame: How
Celebrities Learn to Accept and Regret Their Popularity"</a>), describes one sur
vival strategy: "The celebrity copes with intense public scrutiny through charac
ter-splitting. He or she divides into two identities by contriving a celebrity e
ntity, a new self presentation in the public sphere. Arguably, there are people wh
ose private personality works extraordinarily well as a public one, an enigma ne
ver to be resolved, a riddle that cannot be answered, under which there is nothi
ng. Spears is asked over and over again, "What do people not know about you?", a
nd "Miss American Dream" treats the answer, "Really that Im pretty boring," as a
defensive gesture when it perhaps is not<a name="bkfrftnote60"></a><a href="#ftn
ote60">60</a>. The image alone implies that this cannot be the full a
nswer, that the enigma cannot be unending, when it may well be<a name="bkfrftnot
e61"></a><a href="#ftnote61">61</a>.
The metaphors of Videodrome have such a variety of meanings because there
is so little to restrict any and almost all interpretations. The character of N
icki Brand is a blank, and that's what makes her image so beguiling, and the pub
lic character of Britney Spears is a blank as well, making her image equally pow
erful. We are left to guess at whether shaving her head is a nervous breakdown o
r an expression of strength, whether the song "Work, Bitch" embodies the sadisti
c grinding of life now, or it's a subtle rebellion against all these forces. The
video of "Work, Bitch" features Britney dominating a group of dancers in leathe
r and gimp masks, holding them fast in leashes, whipping one like Max Renn whipp
ed a TV. We might read whatever we wish into either image, with nothing in the c
haracters to guide us. This image might be provocation for laughs, it might be i
ronic, it might be sincere. Britney Spears was a sacred object and everything wa
s done to try to profane her, to humiliate her, yet she has remained sacred anyw
ay. She has kept her power, and now she'll exercise it. She's in control. It's a
wesome.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/MoeWowV.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/5Bcc7ea.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
The fan in "Miss American Dream" who loved her post-breakdown is the only one wh
o ends up not liking the Vegas show. The fan, a dominatrix, compared it to the t
ime she threw a party where she had to hire a prostitute who clearly didn't want
to be there. She had a vacant look in her eyes that killed the whole vibe, and
Britney had the same look<a name="bkfrftnote62"></a><a href="#ftnote62">62</a>. Again, I wonder: what is the difference between Britney's enigmatic l
ook and her vacant one? We might see whatever we wish, just as we might read lif
e or death in the eyes of Nicki Brand. The apotheosis of being able to read what
ever we wish is when anything human no longer exists, and the image remains as a
riddle to be puzzled over infinitely, something like Marilyn Monroe. One tradit
ion described in Durkheim is the use of tattoos to mark someone as being affilia
ted with a totem worshipped by their clan; another is the idea of a mythic ances
tor who is a protecting genius, a protecting spirit<a name="bkfrftnote63"></a><a
href="#ftnote63">63</a>. Megan Fox used to carry a tattoo of what mi
ght be thought of a mythic ancestor, giving an explanation in <a href="http://ww
w.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/magazine/15Fox-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0">"The Sel
f-Manufacture of Megan Fox"</a> by Lynn Hirschberg, which coheres well with thes
e ideas:
<blockquote>On her right forearm, Fox has an intricate tattoo of Marilyn Monroe.
Although she has read biographies of Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor and other mo
vie-star icons, Fox is particularly fascinated by Monroe. While Gardner led a wi
ld life, her work is forgotten. Monroe created a legacy: her persona is instantl
y recognizable. Its not a character she played in a particular movie like, say, V
ivien Leigh as Scarlett OHara in Gone With the Wind. Monroe was her own brand befor
e branding existed.</blockquote>
One might note that word which perfectly matches a character's last name, sugges
ting it's not arbitrary: Nicki Brand. Yet Fox does not keep this tattoo,
perhaps because this spirit does not protect at all, it's an image whose eternal
ity is connected with its own creator's early self-annihilation. It's almost ent
irely gone in the infamous piece, <a href="http://www.esquire.com/print-this/meg
an-fox-photos-interview-0213?page=all">"Megan Fox Saves Herself"</a> by Steve Ma
rche: "All that remains of Marilyn is a few drops of black against skin that is
the color the moon possesses in the thin air of northern winters," and [Fox] say
s why: "I started reading about her and realized that her life was incredibly di
fficult. It's like when you visualize something for your future. I didn't want t
o visualize something so negative." Marche took a great deal of flack for invoki
ng the idea of Aztec sacrifices in connection with celebrity (say, <a href="http
://www.vice.com/read/this-interview-with-megan-fox-is-the-worst-thing-ever-writt
en-esquire">"Esquire's Interview with Megan Fox Is the Worst Thing Ever Written"
</a> by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete), yet I don't think there's anything flawed or fo
olish in finding connections between our idol worship and that of the past, that
the similarities compel you to look in such areas.
After she erased the tattoo, Fox would compare Monroe to one of her contemporari
es. "She wasn't powerful at the time. She was sort of like Lindsay. She was an a
ctress who wasn't reliable, who almost wasn't insurable.... She had all the pote
ntial in the world, and it was squandered." Despite being a sound assessment, in
a conflict averse industry, even this mild claim required self-censure<a name="
bkfrftnote64"></a><a href="#ftnote64">64</a>. In a recent story, <a h
ref="http://www.vice.com/read/bungalow-89-0000347-v21n6">"Bungalow 89"</a> by Ja
mes Franco, describes an actress who very much resembles Lindsay Lohan, and even
carries the name "Lindsay Lohan". The same countervailing factors mentioned ear
lier took place in this woman's life. We want you famous. We want you sacred. We
want you wasted. We want you naked. We want you humiliated. We want you destroy
ed. The sacred is profaned, it ceases to be sacred, and the interest ends. That
this "Lindsay Lohan" has none of the magnetism of the central character of the w
ell-known piece, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/magazine/here-is-wha
t-happens-when-you-cast-lindsay-lohan-in-your-movie.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0">"H
ere Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie"</a> by Stephen Ro
drick, is because it's not enough for fiction to evoke the real-life character,
but must re-create the essence of their potent beguiling qualities. In this case
, it is the th mixture of the actress's incredible talents and her self-destruct
iveness, and this, the story does not convey, giving only a few squalid details
that would make the story go completely unnoted if the author and his subject we
re untouched by our modern mana. There is one line, however, that contain
s great insight, of especial value here, a piece of direction given by Nicolas W
inding Refn to Franco. "Less is more; nothing is everything."
(Images from Videodrome and Prince of Darkness copyright Universal Pictures,
images from Naked Lunch copyright 20th Century Fox, images from Blue Velvet copy
right De Laurentiis Entertainment Group. Artwork from How to Make Love Like a Po
rn Star by Bernard Chang.)
FOOTNOTES
<a name="ftnote1"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote1">1</a> From <a href="http
://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fiction-no-211-william-gibs
on">"William Gibson, The Art of Fiction No. 211"</a>:
<blockquote>INTERVIEWER
When did you encounter the Beats?
GIBSON
More or less the same time I found science fiction, because I found the Beats wh
en the idea of them had been made sufficiently mainstream that there were paperb
ack anthologies on the same wire rack at the bus station. I remember being total
ly baffled by one Beat paperback, an anthology of short bits and excerpts from n
ovels. I sort of understood what little bits of Kerouac were in this thing-I cou
ld read him-but then there was William S. Burroughs and excerpts from Naked Lunc
h I thought, What the heck is that? I could tell that there was science fiction,
somehow, in Naked Lunch. Burroughs had cut up a lot of pulp-noir detective fict
ion, and he got part of his tonality from science fiction of the forties and the
fifties. I could tell it was kind of like science fiction, but that I didn't un
derstand it.</blockquote>
://realitystudio.org/interviews/1992-burroughs-cronenberg/">"Which Is the Fly an
d Which Is the Human?"</a> by Lynn Snowden, hosted on <a href="http://realitystu
dio.org/">Reality Studio: A William S. Burroughs Community</a>:
<blockquote>"It's a limited kingdom," Cronenberg says with a proud smile, "but i
t's mine. One of the reasons Burroughs excited me when I read him was that I rec
ognized my own imagery in his work," he says. "It sounds only defensive to say,
'I was already thinking of a virus when I read that!' But there is a recognition
factor. That's why I think you start to feel like you're vibrating in harmony w
ith someone else. It's the recognition, not that they introduced you to somethin
g that was completely unthought of by you.</blockquote>
://www.amazon.com/Neuromancer-William-Gibson/dp/0441569595/">Neuromancer<
/a>, the witty point made in the description of the Sprawl is to liken this phys
ical entity to an electronic one, so that even though the Sprawl and the Matrix
are separate, they merge in their likenesses.
The Matrix:
<blockquote>A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly.
All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Nig
ht City, and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic un
folding across that colorless void ... The Sprawl was a long strange way home ov
er the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy.</blockquote
>
The Sprawl:
<blockquote>Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.
Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a
single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. The
n they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulati
on. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a mill
ion megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out
certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial par
ks ringing the old core of Atlanta . . .</blockquote>
://playboysfw.kinja.com/mr-mikes-america-a-comics-trek-with-snls-first-head-w-15
66902994/+AlexBelth">"Mr. Mike's America: A Comic's Trek with SNL's First Head W
riter"</a> by Paul Slansky:
<blockquote>O'Donoghue counters with one that Belushi used to tell about Adam an
d Eve. He doesn't remember the setup, but the punch line has Eve washing her pri
vate parts in the river and God shouting down, "You asshole! Now all the fish ar
e gonna smell like that!"
"American humor is a really angry rube humor," O'Donoghue says. "Very mean and a
ggressive. I've always liked American jokes."</blockquote>
<a name="ftnote5"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote5">5</a> Some sense of the
place can be found in the very good biography of the author, <a href="http://www
.amazon.com/Literary-Outlaw-Times-William-Burroughs/dp/0393342603/">Literary
Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs</a> by Ted Morgan:
<blockquote>Tangier being by definition a place where everything was freely boug
ht and sold, it gained a reputation for wickedness. In his widely syndicated col
umn, "As I Was Saying," Robert Ruark wrote in 1950 that "Sodom was a church picn
ic and Gomorrah a convention of Girl Scouts" compared to Tangier, which "contain
ed more thieves, black marketeers, spies, thugs, phonies, beachcombers, expatria
tes, degenerates, characters, operators, bandits, bums, tramps, politicians, and
charlatans" than any place he'd ever visited.</blockquote>
<blockquote>In 1955, Burroughs began to see that Tangier could serve as a model
for the setting of his novel, which he called "Interzone." Tangier was as much a
n imaginative construct as a geographical location, a metaphor for limbo, for a
dead-end place, a place where everyone could act out his most extreme fantasies.
On one level, Tangier was a reconstruction of the world in a small place.</bloc
kquote>
://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb0RbiSlMLc">"Cronenberg Videodrome Intro"</a> (from
3:23-4:00 in the clip):
<blockquote>Speaking of Toronto, by the way, Roberto Benigni, who did the movie
Life is Beautiful, italian film-maker...when he came to Toronto, and I me
t him...of course, this is when he won his Oscar for Life is Beautiful...
he immediately got on his knees and started to kiss my feet, my shoes. "Great, R
oberto." Then he got up, and he said: "Toronto. I was terrified to come to Toron
to. Because all I knew of it was from your films."</blockquote>
<a name="ftnote7"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote7">7</a> From Naked Lunc
h:
<blockquote>Techniques of Sending were crude at first. Fadeout to the National E
lectronic Conference in Chicago. The Conferents are putting on their overcoats .
. . The speaker talks in a flat shopgirl voice:
"In closing I want to sound a word of warning . . . The logical extension of enc
ephalographic research is biocontrol; that is, control of physical movement, men
tal processes, emotional reactions and apparent sensory impressions by me
ans of bioelectric signals injected into the nervous system of the subject."
"Louder and funnier!" The Conferents are trooping out in clouds of dust.
"Shortly after birth a surgeon could install connections in the brain. A miniatu
re radio receiver could be plugged in and the subject controlled from State-cont
rolled transmitters."
Dust settles through the windless air of a vast empty hall-smell of hot iron and
steam; a radiator sings in the distance . . . The Speaker shuffles his notes an
d blows dust off them . . .
"The biocontrol apparatus is prototype of one-way telepathic control. The subjec
t could be rendered susceptible to the transmitter by drugs or other processing
without installing any apparatus. Ultimately the Senders will use telepathic tra
nsmitting exclusively . . . Ever dig the Mayan codices? I figure it like this: t
he priests-about one percent of population-made with one-way telepathic broadcas
ts instructing the workers what to feel and when . . . A telepathic sender has t
o send all the time. He can never receive, because if he receives that means som
eone else has feelings of his own could louse up his continuity. The Sender has
to send all the time, but he can't ever recharge himself by contact. Sooner or l
ater he's got no feelings to send. You can't have feelings alone. Not alone like
the Sender is alone-and you dig there can only be one Sender at one place-time
. . . Finally the screen goes dead . . . The Sender has turned into a huge centi
pede . . . So the workers come in on the beam and burn the centipede and elect a
new Sender by consensus of the general will . . . The Mayans were limited by is
olation . . . Now one Sender could control the planet . . . You see control c
an never be a means to any practical end . . . It can never be a means to
anything but more control . . . Like junk . . ."</blockquote>

h:
<blockquote>Blast of trumpets: The Man is carried in naked by two Negro Bearers
who drop him on the platform with bestial, sneering brutality . . . The Man wrig
gles . . . His flesh turns to viscid, transparent jelly that drifts away in gree
n mist, unveiling a monster black centipede. Waves of unknown stench fill the ro
om, searing the lungs, grabbing the stomach . . .</blockquote>

The death of Barry Convex in Videodrome:
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/JdEh2xC.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome B
ad Religion" />
h:
<blockquote>The boy felt a silent black clunk fall through his flesh. The Sailor
put a hand to the boy's eyes and pulled out a pink scrotal egg with one closed,
pulsing eye. Black fur boiled inside translucent flesh of the egg.
The Sailor caressed the egg with nakedly inhuman hands-black-pink, thick, fibrou
s, long white tendrils sprouting from abbreviated finger tips.
Death fear and Death weakness hit the boy, shutting off his breath, stopping his
blood. He leaned against a wall that seemed to give slightly. He clicked back i
nto junk focus.</blockquote>
<a name="ftnote10"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote10">10</a> An excerpt from
Naked Lunch, when a woman has sex with a character who's just been kille
d in a hanging:
<blockquote>She locks her hands behind Johnny's buttocks, puts her forehead agai
nst him, smiling into his eyes she moves back, pulling him off the platform into
space . . . His face swells with blood . . . Mark reaches up with one lithe mov
ement and snaps Johnny's neck . . . sound like a stick broken in wet towels. A s
hudder runs down Johnny's body . . . one foot flutters like a trapped bird . . .
Mark has draped himself over a swing and mimics Johnny's twitches, closes his e
yes and sticks his tongue out . . . Johnny's cock springs up and Mary guides it
up her cunt, writhing against him in a fluid belly dance, groaning and shrieking
with delight . . . sweat pours down her body, hair hangs over her face in wet s
trands. "Cut him down, Mark," she screams. Mark reaches over with a snap knife a
nd cuts the rope, catching Johnny as he falls, easing him onto his back with Mar
y still impaled and writhing . . . She bites away Johnny's lips and nose and suc
ks out his eyes with a pop . . . She tears off great hunks of cheek . . . Now sh
e lunches on his prick . . . Mark walks over to her and she looks up from Johnny
's half-eaten genitals, her face covered with blood, eyes phosphorescent . . . M
ark puts his foot on her shoulder and kicks her over on her back . . . He leaps
on her, fucking her insanely . . . they roll from one end of the room to the oth
er, pinwheel end-over-end and leap high in the air like great hooked fish.
"Let me hang you, Mark . . . Let me hang you . . . Please, Mark, let me hang you
!"</blockquote>
<a name="ftnote11"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote11">11</a> From Naked L
unch, Bill Lee killing Hauser and O'Brien:
<blockquote>I squirted a thin jet of alcohol, whipping it across his eyes with a
sideways shake of the syringe. He let out a bellow of pain. I could see him paw
ing at his eyes with the left hand like he was tearing off an invisible bandage
as I dropped to the floor on one knee, reaching for my suitcase. I pushed the su
itcase open, and my left hand closed over the gun butt-I am right-handed but I s
hoot with my left hand. I felt the concussion of Hauser's shot before I heard it
. His slug slammed into the wall behind me. Shooting from the floor, I snapped t
wo quick shots into Hauser's belly where his vest had pulled up showing an inch
of white shirt. He grunted in a way I could feel and doubled forward. Stiff with
panic, O'Brien's hand was tearing at the gun in his shoulder holster. I clamped
my other hand around my gun wrist to steady it for the long pull-this gun has t
he hammer filed off round so you can only use it double action-and shot him in t
he middle of his red forehead about two inches below the silver hairline. His ha
ir had been grey the last time I saw him. That was about 15 years ago. My first
arrest. His eyes went out. He fell off the chair onto his face. My hands were al
ready reaching for what I needed, sweeping my notebooks into a briefcase with my
works, junk, and a box of shells. I stuck the gun into my belt, and stepped out
into the corridor putting on my coat.</blockquote>

The narrator's exit:
<blockquote>I hung up and took a taxi out of the area . . . In the cab I realize
d what had happened . . . I had been occluded from space-time like an eel's ass
occludes when he stops eating on the way to Sargasso . . . Locked out . . . Neve
r again would I have a Key, a Point of Intersection . . . The Heat was off me fr
om here on out . . . relegated with Hauser and O'Brien to a landlocked junk past
where heroin is always twenty-eight dollars an ounce and you can score for yen
pox in the Chink laundry of Sioux Falls . . . Far side of the world's mirror, mo
ving into the past with Hauser and O'Brien . . . clawing at a not-yet of Telepat
hic Bureaucracies, Time Monopolies, Control Drugs, Heavy Fluid Addicts:
"I thought of that three hundred years ago."</blockquote>
<a name="ftnote12"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote12">12</a> From <a href="h
ttp://realitystudio.org/interviews/1992-burroughs-cronenberg/">"Which Is the Fly
and Which Is the Human?"</a> by Lynn Snowden, hosted on <a href="http://reality
studio.org/">Reality Studio: A William S. Burroughs Community</a>:
<blockquote>And in which scene, Cronenberg wants to know, does he actually show
a horror of female genitalia? I point to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obi
dos/ASIN/B0002DB50E/superv32cinc">Videodrome</a> when James Woods looks on in fe
ar as he grows an enormous vaginalike slit in his abdomen. "He seems to like it!
" Cronenberg laughs. "It's almost like he's proud of it and happy to have it!" Y
eah, and then he loses a gun in it? Isn't that highly symbolic of a well-known m
ale fear? "Well, I've known some women who thought they lost their Tampax and we
re just as freaked out as anybody else."
He tells a story from the making of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/A
SIN/B0002DB50E/superv32cinc">Videodrome</a>, when Woods is forced to spend days
with rubber appliances glued to his chest to attain the previously mentioned ori
fice. "And he turns to Debbie Harry and says, 'When I first got on this picture,
I was an actor. Now I feel like I'm just the bearer of the slit.' And she said,
'Now you know what it feels like.' So I'm forcing him to be the bearer of the s
lit! Reality is what he perceives it to be."</blockquote>
ttp://thedissolve.com/features/movie-of-the-week/559-the-sex-violence-and-new-fl
esh-of-videodrome/">"The sex, violence, and new flesh of Videodrome"</a>
by Noel Murray, Keith Phipps, Nathan Rabin, and Scott Tobias:
<blockquote>Keith: Videodrome fits snugly between the films Cronen
berg made before and the films he made later, but it still feels like a leap for
ward. I think his early films are terrific, and value them in part because of th
eir crude directness, like the way Shivers literalizes every sexual anxiety drif
ting around in the midst of the sexual revolution. There's an elegance to Videod
rome that's absent in the earlier films, though, which I know is a weird thing t
o say about a movie most famous for putting a sexualized, videotape-hungry orifi
ce in its protagonist's belly. Yet the film drifts along like a dream from one d
isturbing episode to another.</blockquote>
The note of unconscious creation is souned in an earlier post from a series on <
a href="http://thedissolve.com">The Dissolve</a> (other than the two list
ed here, there is the third in the series, <a href="http://thedissolve.com/featu
res/movie-of-the-week/561-kill-your-television-before-it-kills-you/">"Kill your
television (before it kills you)"</a> by Keith Phipps) devoted to this movie, <a
href="http://thedissolve.com/features/movie-of-the-week/556-the-prescient-analo
g-nightmare-of-videodrome/">"The prescient analog nightmare of Videodrome"</a> b
y Scott Tobias:
<blockquote>But the key to Videodrome's prescience is that Cronenberg isn
't interested in being prescient at all. He's simply turning the present into a
nightmare, and that nightmare is what the dark side of progress looks like. At t
he height of the VHS era, when the illicit pleasures of the movies-and the outla
nds of cable television-could be indulged, without shame, from the privacy of on
e's own home, Cronenberg starts with that desire and watches it grow. Here, that
means following one man's quest to find the limits of what's possible and go be
yond it, to where the television isn't just transmitting a signal, but is an act
ive partner and biological component, "the retina of the mind's eye." As brainy
as Videodrome is-like Cronenberg's work in general-the film has an intuit
ive, id-driven quality, one that transcends logic by creating its own.</blockquo
te>
ttp://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/29/us/families-learning-of-39-cultists-who-died-wi
llingly.html?pagewanted=print">"Families Learning of 39 Cultists Who Died Willin
gly"</a> by B. Drummond Ayres Jr.:
<blockquote>The farewell tape, broadcast by ABC television, was especially strik
ingly for its upbeat tone, considering what lay ahead for those speaking and pee
ring into the camera. On it, one cult member -- none identified themselves -- sa
id his death would bring him "just the happiest day of my life." and added, "I'v
e been looking forward for this for so long."
A woman who appeared to be in her 20's looked intently into the camera and said,
grinning broadly, "We are all choosing of our own free will to go to the next l
evel."</blockquote>
ttp://www.laweekly.com/2007-03-22/news/heaven-s-gate-the-sequel/?mode=print">"He
aven's Gate: The Sequel"</a> by Joshuah Bearman:
<blockquote>A secretive, itinerant group of self-described monks following the t
eachings of their leader, who was known simply as DO, they'd recently moved into
a 9,000-square-foot mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, which they called "the Monaster
y" and "the Craft," and was paid for by members doing Web design and other techn
ical services. The group had many names over the years but by that time had sett
led on Heaven's Gate. They'd waited patiently for a sign, and DO thought the sky
was now speaking. When another amateur astronomer announced on Art Bell's consp
iracy-minded radio show that he'd taken a picture of Hale-Bopp showing an elonga
ted fuzzy brightness lurking in the tail, word quickly spread in UFO circles tha
t there was an alien spacecraft accompanying the comet. Remote-sensing practitio
ner Courtney Brown collected clairvoyant "data" that also suggested an extraterr
estrial presence. DO's followers went out and bought a telescope. They couldn't
see the ship themselves, but that wasn't important. When Hale-Bopp passed too cl
ose to Jupiter, and the giant planet's gravitational pull altered the comet's or
bit so that it would return every 2,000 years, DO became certain: This was their
long-awaited "indicator," perhaps even the star Wormwood described in The Revel
ation. The group updated its Web site. "RED ALERT" flashed across the top; below
came the announcement "HALE-BOPP BRINGS CLOSURE TO HEAVEN'S GATE."
For years, they'd been hoping to return to the Kingdom of Heaven, which they cal
led "Evolutionary Level Above Human," or the "Next Level." Day in, day out, the
group - which they always said was not a cult but a "classroom for growing a sou
l" - had learned to transcend human existence through rigorous discipline. In pr
eparation for the final step of leaving their human bodies, or "exiting their ve
hicles," the group assembled uniforms: matching black Nikes and homemade black p
ants and shirts, each adorned with a custom-made triangular patch that said "HEA
VEN'S GATE AWAY TEAM."</blockquote>
<blockquote>The Exit Videos are so important to Rio that he includes full transc
ripts in his book. The videos are short; each of the 38 statements (one member c
hose to say nothing) is less than five minutes long. I watched them all. Instant
ly noticeable was how similar everyone looks. In preparation for their future li
ves as immortal, androgynous beings in space, the men and women of Heaven's Gate
were all required to wear matching bowl cuts and baggy, unflattering jump suits
.
Equally striking is their uniform serenity. Seated outside, with San Diego's ple
asant spring dawning in the background, every single member calmly explained the
ir enthusiasm for the wondrous existence awaiting them: "I've been looking forwa
rd to this for so long"; "I couldn't have made a better choice"; "Thirty-nine to
beam up!" Thomas Nichols, who had been a member since 1976 (and was the brother
of Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek), said: "I'm the
happiest person in the world."</blockquote>
<a name="ftnote16"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote16">16</a> This subhead is
taken from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Make-Love-Like-Porn-Star/dp/006053910
0/">How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale</a> by Jenna Jam
eson and Neil Strauss, which in turn gets it from Shakespeare's <a href="http://
www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonnet/5">"Sonnet #5"</a>:
<blockquote>Those hours, that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
Will play the tyrants to the very same
And that unfair which fairly doth excel;
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter, and confounds him there;
Sap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'er-snowed and bareness every where:
Then were not summer's distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was:
But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.</blockquote>

<a name="ftnote17"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote17">17</a> From Goddess
 by Anthony Summers:
<blockquote>The Greenes watched bemused as Marilyn plunged into their library. S
he started reading about Napoelon, discovered Josephine, and scooped up every bo
ok she could find about her. Supper conversation in the Greene household was dom
inated for a while by Marilyn enthusing about Josephine and her entourage.
"She was fascinated," says Amy Greene, "by women who had made it." Marilyn espec
ially enjoyed learning how Josephine's friend, Juliette Récamier, who was
renowned for her figure, treated a specially commissioned nude statue of hersel
f. As she aged, and her breasts started to droop, she had the marble breasts sma
shed.</blockquote>
<a name="ftnote18"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote18">18</a> This concept is
explained earlier in Durkheim:
<blockquote>Now among these peoples, above all the particular deities to whom me
n render a cult, there is a pre-eminent power to which all the others have the r
elation of derived forms, and which is called wakan. Owing to the prepond
erating place thus assigned to this principle in the Siouan pantheon, it is some
times regarded as a sort of sovereign god, or a Jupiter or Jahveh, and traveller
s have frequently translated wakan by " great spirit." This is misrepresenting i
ts real nature gravely. The wakan is in no way a personal being ; the natives do
not represent it in a determined form. According to an observer cited by Dorsey
, " they say that they have never seen the wakanda, so they cannot pretend to pe
rsonify it." It is not even possible to define it by determined attributes and c
haracteristics. " No word," says Riggs," can explain the meaning of this term am
ong the Dakota. It embraces all mystery, all secret power, all divinity." All th
e beings which the Dakota reveres," the earth, the four winds, the sun, the moon
and the stars, are manifestations of this mysterious life and power" which ente
rs into all. Sometimes it is represented in the form of a wind, as a breath havi
ng its seat in the four cardinal points and moving everything : sometimes it is
a voice heard in the crashing of the thunder, the sun, moon and stars are wakan.
But no enumeration could exhaust this infinitely complex idea.</blockquote>
<a name="ftnote19"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote19">19</a> This concept is
explained earlier in Durkheim:
<blockquote>Among the Iroquois, whose social organization has an even more prono
uncedly totemic character, this, same idea is found again; the word orenda which expresses it is the exact equivalent of the wakan of the Sioux. "The sav
age man," says Hewitt, "conceived the diverse bodies collectively constituting h
is environment to possess inherently mystic potence . . . (whether they be) the
rocks, the waters, the tides, the plants and the trees, the animals and man, the
wind and the storms, the clouds and the thunders and the lightnings," etc. "Thi
s potence is held to be the property of all things . . . and by the inchoate men
tation of man is regarded as the efficient cause of all phenomena, all the activ
ities of his environment."</blockquote>
<a name="ftnote20"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote20">20</a> From How to
Make Love Like a Porn Star by Jenna Jameson and Neil Strauss:
<blockquote>I was in control-of myself, and the men around me. And I loved it: I
loved the attention and the confidence it gave me. Even though I had no idea ho
w to hustle guys for lap dances, I was the new girl, and they all wanted me.
By my last dance of the night, men were crowding around the stage and throwing m
oney at me. It was then that I knew not only could I make it as a stripper, but
I could get each and every one of those other girls back for laughing at me.</bl
ockquote>
<blockquote>The Crazy Horse Too was the best high-school class I ever took. The
subject was social dynamics. It was amazing how the incentive of cash made it so
easy to talk to people; before, I'd had no motivation to learn to be polite or
carry on a conversation with a guy. They all wanted the same thing anyway. Withi
n weeks at the club, I began to transform from a geeky teenage girl into a money
-crazed psycho. And I loved it.
It wasn't that I discovered some dormant ability to be a natural conversationali
st. Instead, I learned to be an actress, because I was still not outgoing natura
lly. My job was simply to put up with the poor conversational skills of the cust
omers, to seem open and caring while they talked about themselves. When my turn
came to talk, I learned to lie. Everything that came out of my mouth was complet
e bullshit. I could tell by looking at each person what he wanted to hear. I'd t
ell him I was studying to be a real-estate agent, a lifeguard, a construction wo
rker. Anything to steer them away from what was really going on in my life.
Since most of the men were into me because I looked so young and innocent, I dec
ided to amplify that. As my grandmother always said, "What you can't fix, you fe
ature." So one night I put my hair up in pony-tails, wore little pink shoes, and
carried a plastic Barbie purse, which further contrasted me from the hardened g
irls. </blockquote>
<blockquote>"When a guy comes into a club, most girls come up to him and say, 'D
o you want a dance?'" she told me. "That's the last thing you should do. Be pers
onable. Make him like you. Talk to him. Ask about his job. Act like you are inte
rested."
That was lesson one-the basics. Lesson two was to prearrange a deal with the wai
tress to put water in my shot and extra alcohol in the guy's, and then order a r
ound of drinks as soon as I sat with him.
"Get him as drunk as possible," she said, "and rack those songs up."</blockquote
>
<blockquote>For us, these schemes weren't only about the money; they were also f
or the adrenaline rush. It was a high to get the upper hand over a customer. The
y were dumb, they were drunk, and they deserved it. At least that's what I thoug
ht at the time. Strippers can be vicious. The mentality is that if these guys ar
e going to victimize us, we're going to totally victimize them right back. It se
emed like a fair exchange. And it was character building: I was finally learning
to take control of people instead of being so passive in social situations.</bl
ockquote>
<blockquote>They say that money can't buy happiness, but that is an oversimplifi
cation. It actually depends on how you earn your money. If you're juggling high-
stress investments or managing scores of employees or deluged with phone calls o
r hiding something from the authorities, life is no fun. But if you can walk int
o a room, lead on a bunch of guys, and then leave with thousands of dollars in c
ash in your pocket and no obligation to anyone-not even an obligation to show up
to work the next day-life is good. If I wanted to I would splurge on six bottle
s of Cristal champagne for my friends without a second thought. I wasn't concern
ed about the future. My main objective was making money, and I met that objectiv
e night after night.</blockquote>
<blockquote>One local politician liked to be dominated and, although I had such
a submissive personality naturally, one night I took his beer into the bathroom,
peed into it, and then made him drink it. He loved it. The next night, he tippe
d me with a pink slip: for a brand-new Corvette.</blockquote>

<blockquote>"Did you know you were just dancing for Pantera?"
"Really, those assholes were Pantera?"
"Did you know you were just dancing for Jack Nicholson?"
"Really, that old weirdo was Jack Nicholson?"
"Did you know you were just dancing for Whitesnake?"
"Really, like I give a crap."
"Did you know you were just dancing for David Lee Roth?"
"Yeah, what a letdown. I used to have wet dreams over him. But he was rude, irri
tating, and babbled incoherently the whole time. And my friend Carrie just left
the club with him. I've lost all respect for both of them."</blockquote>

<blockquote>Next, she put me on all fours for a butt shot and asked me to turn m
y head back to look at the camera. But since my head looked teeny in comparison
to my ass in that position, she asked me to bend my body so that my face and my
ass were the same distance from the camera and both in focus. I had no idea what
she was talking about.
It was such a challenge to look sexy and relaxed while manipulating my body into
the various uncomfortable contortions Julia was running me through. Even for wh
at Julia considered the simplest pose, like looking over my shoulder with my bac
k to the camera, I had to arch so hard that my lower back cramped. When I see th
ose photos now, it seems obvious that the sexy pout I thought I was giving the c
amera was just a poorly disguised grimace of pain.</blockquote>
Make Love Like a Porn Star by Jenna Jameson and Neil Strauss, two of the ste
ps in her career:
<blockquote>STEP THREE
Teenager becomes a stripper.
REASON
Work, money, and approval of boyfriend.</blockquote>
<blockquote>STEP FIVE
Teenager starts acting in soft-core all-female adult movies.
REASON
Revenge.</blockquote>

ps in her career:
<blockquote>Randy, who of course volunteered to be the man in the shoot, was a d
ecent guy. He was a little old and had the fashion sense of a homeless wrestler,
but I didn't have to touch him if I didn't want to.</blockquote>

ps in her career:
<blockquote>
Usually, he just ripped a strip of foil off a cigarette pack, and inhaled the sm
oke through a sliced-up straw. But one night around 4 A.M., Jack and some of his
friends came over and none of them had any cigarettes. So someone came up with
the bright idea of unscrewing a lightbulb in the kitchen. They heated the base o
f the lightbulb until the glue on it melted, then they pulled off the metal base
. After emptying the bulb, they drilled a hole in the top and stuffed a little m
eth inside. They heated the side of the bulb with a lighter and smoked out of th
e hole where the metal used to be. I just stood and watched the whole thing. It
was a beautiful process, and the smoke smelled so sweet. When Jack offered me a
hit, I decided to try it. It couldn't hurt to do it just one time.
I inhaled a little, and the smoke filled my lungs. Unlike pot or even cigarettes
, it was so smooth I could hardly feel it. When I exhaled, a thin three-foot-lon
g column of smoke escaped from my lips. Everything seemed to move in slow motion
, and then someone pressed fast forward. My heart felt like a woodpecker was ins
ide, hammering hard enough to burst through my chest at any moment.
After that, I never wanted to snort meth again. Smoking it was amazing. At first
, I only smoked it when Jack was around because he was the only one who knew the
mechanics of the whole foil and straw contraption. But since I had no other cha
llenges in my life at the moment, I set my mind to figuring out how to do it for
myself. And once I did, smoking meth became a daily pastime. The high was more
dreamy and intense, but it didn't last as long. Every ten minutes I wanted anoth
er hit, so I constantly asked Jack for more.</blockquote>

ps in her career:
<blockquote>Throughout the photo shoot, they told me, "Jenna, relax. Let the ten
sion out of your face." I was clenching my teeth so hard from the crystal. Even
more embarrassing, in certain poses my bones were sticking out so badly that the
y had to artfully drape my clothes over them so that I wouldn't repulse readers.
There were no magazines for guys with fetishes for anorexic meth freaks at the
time.</blockquote>
<blockquote>I vacuumed so much that the carpets were actually disintegrating. Th
e house looked perfect, but if it seemed too perfect, then I had to rearrange al
l the furniture to make the place seem more natural. I must have organized the f
rigging bathroom cupboards a thousand times, sorting each item according to size
or function or owner or frequency of use-all in the same night.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Some girls who get high pick at their skin all night. I was not a pi
cker. I was a maker. I was constantly amazed by the innovative and profound avan
t-garde artwork I could bring to life with a glue gun. My pieces should have bee
n hanging somewhere, like a mental institution. Though I was infamous amongst Ja
ck's friends for making papier-mch dragons in the closet all night, my greatest cr
eations were my self-collages. I would go through adult magazines and cut my pic
tures from the phone-sex ads in the back. Then I'd glue them to a piece of paper
and stick funny little phrases from Cosmopolitan below them, like, "Is i
t a do or a don't?" "What procedures have you had done?" or "7 ways to make him
beg for more." Then I'd pick up my little handheld poker video game and play it
all night, until my hands literally bled.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Afterward, I spent twenty-four hours packing ten suitcases, because
I knew Cannes was a big deal and I wanted to be prepared for anything. They were
bringing over two other girls, Juli Ashton (a former high school Spanish teache
r) and Kaylan Nicole (the reigning queen of anal at the time), both of whom were
more experienced and popular than I was. As catty as it sounds, I wanted nothin
g more than to prove myself over these chicks. But it was going to be hard, beca
use I was trying to learn from them at the same time. They had realized that wit
h their beauty, boobs, and status, the rules that applied to the rest of the wor
ld didn't apply to them. They had the attitude that they could do absolutely any
thing they wanted. </blockquote>
<blockquote>The minute we got off the plane, we were in another world. It was on
e I'd dreamed about since I was a little girl, imagining what it would be like t
o be an international jet-setting model. In fact, it was wilder than my dreams.
Flashbulbs went off everywhere. The paparazzi screamed and fought to take pictur
es of me, even though they had no idea who I was. It was so overwhelming and dis
orienting being pushed through the admiring crowd toward a waiting limo. I knew,
for the first time, what an actual celebrity must feel like. I had only been pl
aying at being one, but I now felt it was within my grasp.</blockquote>

<blockquote>I walked past a table full of beautiful girls, with Wesley Snipes si
tting smack in the middle of them all. He waved me over.
"So you're the reporter from the E! Channel." He smiled. "Why don't you join us?
"
Hesitantly, I sat down next to him, and all the other girls at the table shot me
dagger looks. He was trying to get in their pants; they were trying to get in h
is pants; and I was confused. "So," he leaned over and whispered in my ear, "do
you like it up the ass?"
Being a porn star, I was used to such questions. But Wesley had no idea I was a
porn star. Either way, I was offended.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Anal sex is an exchange of power. And every man I've ever met loves
the idea of dominating a woman by pushing his massive dick into her tight sphinc
ter so that she loses control.
For me to allow a man to have anal sex with me, I must have trust first. Because
to be on the receiving end of anal sex is to give yourself completely to your p
artner. And that's why, despite the fact that it is practically an industry stan
dard to have anal sex in every sex scene, I've never done it in a film.</blockqu
ote>
<blockquote>When it was all over, he wrapped his naked body around mine. Instant
ly I stiffened. I hate cuddling. When I'm hot and sweaty and sticky, the last th
ing I want to do is be pressed up against something else that's hot and sweaty a
nd sticky. I pulled away, and he looked hurt.</blockquote>
<blockquote>"Why don't you just stay and cuddle?" he asked.
"Did you just say the c-word?!"
I don't cuddle, but I lay with him for a little while longer and listened to him
talk about religion. Then I made my escape. Rod was still waiting in my room fo
r me.</blockquote>
<blockquote>And he wanted to fuck me in the ass a little too often for my comfor
t. Every time we were naked, he'd be going for my butt like a rat to cheese.</bl
ockquote>
<blockquote>It has become a constant issue for me. I've been offered hundreds of
thousands of dollars to do anal. But even if I walked away with $300,000 for ha
ving done it, I would also be taking away the feeling that I gave up something t
hat was really important to me. This is almost embarrassing for a porn star to a
dmit, but I've only given that up to three men, all of whom I really loved. Doin
g it on camera would be compromising myself. Sex, on the other hand, is somethin
g I'm comfortable giving up-albeit not often-to a stranger in a one-night stand.
The fact is, I've only had about fifteen different male partners on camera.</bl
ockquote>
Make Love Like a Porn Star by Jenna Jameson and Neil Strauss, artwork by Ber
nard Chang:
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/Hy31SlQ.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome -
Bad Religion" /> <img src="http://i.imgur.com/hRnuKTp.jpg" title="David Cronenb
erg's Videodrome - Bad Religion" />

Make Love Like a Porn Star by Jenna Jameson and Neil Strauss, artwork by Ber
nard Chang:
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/2apcbxo.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome -
Bad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/7jmxV43.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome -
Bad Religion" />
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/Lp9dAOH.jpg" title="David Cronenberg's Videodrome -
Bad Religion" />
<blockquote>A lot of guys want to get into porn to get laid. What are your thoug
hts on that?
Getting into porn is a death sentence. As a male performer you are doomed to be
single for the rest of your life. A contract girl does eight to ten scenes per y
ear. A guy performs seven to ten scenes per week at least. The number one perfor
mers do fifteen scenes per week. So what girl is going to go out with a guy who'
s pounding fifteen other girls every week? No one. The guys don't have any socia
l life, because they are on set so much. And when they do go out, they are like
lepers. Girls won't touch them. Even girls in the industry avoid them, because i
t's bad for their career to get stuck having sex with just one guy on camera.


<blockquote>Every night became my birthday. I realized I could pull in more mone
y if I told them that I blew off the chance to celebrate my birthday because it
was so important to me to be there dancing for them instead. "So I'm here, happy
birthday to me," I thought. "That's right, fuckers. Cough it up."</blockquote>
<blockquote>The Pink Poodle was a wild place, an all-nude strip theater that was
always at the epicenter of some major scandal. The girls there were among the r
aunchiest performers I've seen onstage in this country. Nikki and I weren't will
ing to do much more than get fucked-up and fall all over each other onstage, so
our tips suffered accordingly.
The only thing that redeemed the night was meeting Mr. 187-a former marine, an e
rstwhile middleweight boxer, and the sergeant-at-arms for the West Coast chapter
of the Hell's Angels. Mr. 187 was a badass motherfucker who was angry at the wo
rld and enjoyed nothing more than snapping a guy's arm for looking at him wrong.
So naturally, we took him on tour with us.</blockquote>

<a name="ftnote43"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote43">43</a> <a href="http:/
/www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/10.23.97/pink-murder-9743.html">"Anatomy of a
Murder"</a> by Will Harper, describes the killing at The Pink Poodle. <a href="h
ttp://www.mercurynews.com/ci_19121442">"Hells Angels member gunned down at San J
ose funeral"</a> by Sam Webby and Tracey Kaplan is about the killing of Steve Ta
usan aka Mr. 187 at a funeral.


<blockquote>We were as destructive-and self-destructive-as a rock band. With bot
h of us at the top of our game as porn stars, it was our greatest-hits tour. Mos
t guys will watch a favorite porn clip more than they watch Star Wars or Zooland
er, so when they saw us standing three inches from their faces, they went insane
. Hundreds of people would chant our names before each show and fight to get clo
se to the stage.
We brought feature dancing to a new level: Where some girls were getting $250 a
show, we were getting $5,000, simply because we had the balls to demand it. Add
to that Polaroids, tips, and merchandise, and we were pulling in over $100,000 f
or a three-night engagement. We insisted on five-star hotels with room service,
limos to and from the club, and at least two security guards accompanying us at
all times.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Larry: You always lived in great houses. You always had swimming poo
ls. You always had great cars. You always dressed the best.
Jenna: I don't know about that, Dad.
Larry: To me you did. At least, as much as a $40,000 a year policeman could give
you. I guess Florida was awful.
Jenna: Ugh, Florida was ghetto.
Tony: I remember going to school and it was so bad. There was a barbed-wire fenc
e around the courtyard. All the tricycles were chained to a pole in the middle s
o the kids wouldn't steal them. So the only way you could play with them was if
everyone got on their tricycles in unison because they were all tied together. I
was in shock. I sat back and went, "Oh my God."</blockquote>

<blockquote>Tony: Remember that guy who tried to burglarize our place? Me and Je
nna were at home. I think he knew we were latchkey kids. We thought someone had
come onto our little porch area. Then we heard the doorknob wiggle.
Jenna: And Dad and Marjorie didn't believe us. They thought we were insane.</blo
ckquote>
<blockquote>Jenna: Tony started sleeping with guns under his pillows when he was
about six years old. It was insane. Dad would never give him bullets but he gav
e him little Derringers and shit.
Tony: Yeah, but every time Dad dropped a bullet in the house, I picked it up and
kept it in a box. So I was pretty well armed.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Tony: It all started when we were younger and would egg people. Then
we decided to take it to a different level.
Jenna: I came up with the idea of the fire extinguisher. I was like, "They're re
adily available at every apartment complex. We just gotta go break the glass and
take the fire extinguisher, which sets off the fire alarm. But if we get out of
there fast enough, we're fine, right?" So we had a collection of them. And we w
ould go "fog people up," as we called it.
Tony: I'd call someone over to the car to get directions
Jenna: and I'd psssssshhht out of the window. It was great because it's like a c
loud of death. And the people afterward are just coated in white. We would go do
wn to cracktown and see the crack hos on the corner and we'd fog 'em up! I remem
ber one time we got this kid on a skateboard and there was a cop that saw us. We
were in this total car chase, and we got away.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Jenna: Yeah, the way I dressed worked in Las Vegas; it didn't work i
n Montana. But I was popular with the boys, and I wasn't going to give that up f
or these jealous girls in school. So it just got more violent because their boyf
riends would leave them for me. There was this one corner that I had to pass on
my way to school, and the girls would wait for me there and chase me. They were
corn-fed, so they were pretty tough. One girl would get me by the back, and one
would punch me in the stomach. They didn't really hurt me, but Jesus Christ I go
t the wind knocked out of me. Or they would rip out my hair. During school, they
would draw on the back of my shirt with markers, put gum in my hair, stuff like
that.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Larry: One day they called me and said, "We are going to put your ch
ild in a foster home if you don't get her to go to school."
Jenna: Oh, Dad. The worst thing happened in Montana. I never told you but I just
can't talk about it. It was so bad. And that's why I stopped going to school. S
o when you told me that, I slipped a gear. I was like, "Okay, these people are t
hreatening my life and trying to send me to a foster home? They want to play a g
ame? Fine! We'll play a game!" I wasn't going to take this shit anymore. So I ma
rched into school, and the girl who picked on me the most was leaning into her l
ocker to get a book or something. I walked up full force and, boom, I slammed th
e locker door so hard and busted her head wide open.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The job of porn star is not a callingor even an optionfor most women.
However, if you make the right decisions and set the right boundaries for yourse
lf, it can be a great living, because youll make a lot of money while doing very
little work. And youll get more experience in front of the camera than any Hollyw
ood actress. Though watching porn may seem degrading to some women, the fact is
that its one of the few jobs for women where you can get to a certain level, look
around, and feel so powerful, not just in the work environment but as a sexual
being. So, fuck Gloria Steinem.</blockquote>
<blockquote>One local politician liked to be dominated and, although I had such
a submissive personality naturally, one night I took his beer into the bathroom,
peed into it, and then made him drink it. He loved it. The next night, he tippe
d me with a pink slip: for a brand-new Corvette.</blockquote>
From <a href="http://www.askmen.com/celebs/interview/43c_jenna_jameson_interview
.html">"Jenna Jameson: The Interview"</a>:
<blockquote>Q: I was preparing for the interview and noticed that you have been
in movies with both men and women. Do you have a preference to do a scene with a
gentleman or a female?
They are very different. With men, I am very submissive. With women, I am very d
ominant. Which is weird. I try not to be dominant, and it would be nice to do a
scene where I get my butt kicked. But I always end up being the man in the relat
ionship (laughs). I get to be two different people.
Q: That is ironic, given your personality, I would expect you to be dominant wit
h men as well.
Actually, I am very submissive. I think that has to do with my business, when I
get home, it is nice to be a different self.</blockquote>
From <a href="http://www.xtrememagazine.com/2010/07/jenna-jameson-hotter-than-ev
er/">"Jenna Jameson Hotter Than Ever"</a> (NSFW) by Bryan Keith:
<blockquote>Xtreme: I dont know man, youd have to tie a tourniquet around m
e for it not to end. But what do ya think your husband Jays biggest turn-on is?
Jenna: Wow, theres so many. He likes, doggy style, he likes to be the domi
nant force in sex, which is great because Im submissive when it comes to having s
ex with men, so I like a man who can show me whos boss. And hes one of those guys,
thats what turns him onseeing a girl whimper, and Im a good whimperer.</blockquote
>
<blockquote>Jenna: Dads had an amazing life. He went into the service right after
he graduated high school.
Larry: That was in 1957. I was an, um, advisor for 729 days 16 hours and 27 minu
tes in Vietnam in the seventh armored division. But whos counting?
Jenna: Its hard to believe that you witnessed and participated in such violent sc
enes.
Larry: Ill give you an example. I took twenty nuns and some orphans out of a litt
le village sixty clicks southwest of Nha Trang and was waiting for helicopters t
o pick them up. But we were being followed by North Vietnamese regulars and some
Viet Cong. So I placed myself halfway between the helicopters and the tree line
. I had my Thompson machine gun on my back and my M14 rifle in my hands. When th
ey came out of the tree line, I just started picking them off. The next day, the
y found sixty-one bodies that I had killed lying there. And that doesnt include t
he bodies the North Vietnamese hauled off into the tree line.
Jenna: He killed all those guys without batting an eyelash, but he was scared of
bugs.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Tony: Later, he was sent to Africa to fight against a communist revo
lution over there.
Larry: The government came to me and said I could finish out my time if Id organi
ze and train soldiers in the Congo to fight the Simba communist revolution. Its i
nteresting because when you first go over you try to be so righteous. I grew up
with Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, and they never shot anybody in the back. It was
the white hats against the black hats. You have to do everything fair.
Well, I found out in war the best way to come home alive is to sneak up on peopl
e and shoot them. When I got to Africa I still had some humanity left. When we c
aptured the rebels, we would have a trial and then we would pass judgment: we wo
uld imprison them, execute them, or send them back to their village. But after f
our months of walking in the bloody wake of Simba massacres, we flew the black f
lag. If you ran, you were a Simba rebel. If you stood still, you were a well-dis
ciplined Simba rebel. So we shot everyone. I would come up to a village and, ins
tead of going house to house, I would level the whole place. I would call in the
P51 Mustangs. We used Napalm. I had a contingent of howitzers. We went from vil
lage to village killing them all. We just didnt care. We didnt care.</blockquote>

Make Love Like a Porn Star by Jenna Jameson and Neil Strauss, from a letter
Larry Massoli sends his daughter when she's writing the book:
<blockquote>And you dont know this either, but we became Scientologists for a whi
le. Judys brother, Dennis, was always a spiritual seeker. He gave me a job at the
TV station and then turned us on to Scientology. He had been on L. Ron Hubbards
boat with him.
Dennis [his late wife's brother] found Scientology a little expensive, but it di
d us a lot of good and made me a little more compassionate and empathetic.</bloc
kquote>

<blockquote>Larry: It was very scary at that time. They had put a contract out o
n me. I was so worried about the kids. What happened was that a guy named Walter
Plankinton had opened a place called the Chicken Ranch, and a couple of cronies
from a rival bordello came and burned the place down. So my lieutenant told me,
You are going to get a call to go to the other side of the valley. When you get
that call just do what youre told and wait it out, no matter what happens.
And I said, Not on my watch. So I kept them from getting revenge. I refused to tak
e bribes or turn a blind eye to anything illegal, so everybody wanted to chase m
e out of town. It was like the Old West out there, and they didnt want anyone try
ing to tackle the corruption.
Tony: Remember when we had to go hide out in Johnny Whitmores attic?
Jenna: I forgot about that.
Tony: I was sleeping in the dining room at the time, on a day bed. And I heard a
crunching on the rocks, so I knew someone was out there. I looked outside and I
saw a shadow. So I went to dads room. He was married to Marjorie then.
Larry: Oh, Christ, Marjorie. I needed someone to help me with the kids. That was
a mistake.
Tony: So I knocked on their door, and Marjorie was like, Shut the fuck up. Go bac
k to bed. I looked out the window and saw this guy in a bandanna, and he was wear
ing gloves and had a brick in his hand. I was so scared I couldnt breathe. Then t
he brick came right through the window. And you came running out buck naked and
grabbed a Thompson submachine gun and ran through the front door shooting. The g
un lit up the night, and all I could hear was the brrrraaaaappp brrrraaaaappp fr
om the machine gun.
Larry: He got away, so I put my uniform on and code threed it over to the Shamroc
k, which was one of the brothels that had fire-bombed the Chicken Ranch. I drove
the patrol car through the front door and unloaded two clips into the bar with
that Thompson submachine gun. Then I said, I want you fuckers to stop fucking wit
h my family. And we never had a problem after that.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Larry: You know, the incident that sticks with me is when we were at the corpora
te apartment and we did coke. I did it with you, and you looked at Tony and said
, Go, Dad.
Jenna: Get down with your bad self, Dad.
Larry: Thats exactly what you said. I will never forget that. I completely revers
ed myself from being the self-righteous stupid ass that I was to a psycho.</bloc
kquote>
<blockquote>My dad, a former cop, whose sense of righteousness was so strong whe
n I was growing up that he neglected his own children and risked his job to figh
t corruption on the police force, was now living this squalid life on the margin
s of societyrunning away from some sort of trouble in Vegas, dating a stripper, a
nd, unbeknownst to me at the time, smoking the exact same drug he had seen nearl
y kill his daughter.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Larry: You know what? I dont miss any drug. But the only drug I ever
liked was crank. Its the best drug on the planet, but smoking it. Not sniffing it
.
Jenna: When did you smoke crank?
Larry: When I was managing the strip club. I did just enough to stay high all da
y.</blockquote>
<a name="ftnote58"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote58">58</a> An article that
focuses on the seemingly unconscious aspect of her sexuality is <a href="http:/
/www.esquire.com/women/women-we-love/britney-spears-pics-1103?click=main_sr#img"
>"Bending Spoons with Britney Spears"</a> by Chuck Klosterman:
<blockquote>Over the next ninety minutes, I will sit next to a purportedly fully
clothed Britney and ask her questions. She will not really answer any of them.
Interviewing Britney Spears is like deposing Bill Clinton: Regardless of the evi
dence, she does not waver. "Why do you dress so provocatively?" I ask. She says
she doesn't dress provocatively. "But look what you're wearing right now," I say
, while looking at three inches of her inner thigh, her entire abdomen, and enou
gh cleavage to choke a musk ox. "This is just a skirt and a top," she responds.
It is not that Britney Spears denies that she is a sexual icon, or that she disp
utes that American men are fascinated with the concept of the wet-hot virgin, or
that she feels her success says nothing about what our society fantasizes about
. She doesn't disagree with any of that stuff, because she swears she has never
even thought about it. Not even once.
"That's just a weird question," she says. "I don't even want to think about that
. That's strange, and I don't think about things like that, and I don't want to
think about things like that. Why should I? I don't have to deal with those peop
le. I'm concerned with the kids out there. I'm concerned with the next generatio
n of people. I'm not worried about some guy who's a perv and wants to meet a fre
aking virgin."
And suddenly, something becomes painfully clear: Either Britney Spears is the le
ast self-aware person I've ever met, or she's way, way savvier than any of us re
alize.
Or maybe both.</blockquote>
ttps://medium.com/@taffyakner/miss-american-dream-31c823ad0e5a">"Miss American D
ream"</a>, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner:
<blockquote>Andrea is not the real first name of a New York-based dominatrix who
is a Britney obsessive. She is very skinny, with long hair, a pointy nose, smil
ey eyes, and perpetual excitement. We met on BreatheHeavy and Id asked if we coul
d meet the day of the show. She had texted me to look for her Im in a cowgirl look
and she was, boots and hat included.
Shes been a Stan (an obsessive fan, a term plucked from Eminem liturgy) since 200
3; that was when Britney, to Andrea, became Authenticney, less Bubblegumney and
dropping that bullshit wide-eyed Virginey act. It was Meltdowney circa 2008 that
sealed the deal for her, though. Oh, I loved it, Andrea said. She was just saying
fuck you to the world over and over. This was who I knew she was. In the early 2
000s, she was a phony. This was really her.</blockquote>
<blockquote>[Britney Spears] was sitting in a room in the semi-dark, slightly hu
nched over, a little bored, at the tail end of a daylong junket in which TV jour
nalists asked her questions like What do people not know about you? (Really that Im
pretty boring.) and What was the craziest rumor you ever heard about yourself? (That
I died.) and who her secret famous crush is, a question that shes been asked for
years and years and that shes been giving the same answer to for years and years
(Brad Pitt).</blockquote>
<blockquote>Everyone wants her most personal album and her most personal intervi
ew everwe are a nation riveted by Britneys personhoodand no matter how many times s
he answers our questions, still she is a whore and a liar and an idiot and a fra
ud.
Instead she answers the same questions shes always answered: The crazy rumor, the
favorite city to visit, the secret crush (that she died, for Christs sake; Londo
n, but shes not sure why; Brad Pitt! Brad Pitt! For the love of god, its always Br
ad Pitt!). Theyre gonna try to try you but they cant deny you.
So now we get nothing, either because shes wary of us or because she knows that i
f youre reading this, your decision has already been made. Now shes a mystery wrap
ped in a riddle bound together by a hair extension. Now, the weatherman gets to
interview her.</blockquote>
<a name="ftnote61"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote61">61</a> I don't know if
I necessarily agree with the tone of this review, and I've often been hostile t
o this writer's work in the past, but this very point is made in Jody Rosen's re
view of the album Britney Jean, <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2013/12/m
usic-review-britney-spears-britney-jean.html">"Britney Jean is DOA"</a>:
<blockquote>People who dislike pop music will sometimes point to Spears as Exhib
it A as evidence that pop is soulless industrial product, assembled by committee
and performed by singing mannequins. Of all the major pop divas, Spears is the
only one who resembles a singing (in her case, singing) mannequin. But her body of
work is conclusive evidence that great pop forsooth, art can result from indust
rial production. Consider: Baby, One More Time, Oops!...I Did It Again, Toxic, Piece o
Me, Til the World Ends, How I Roll.
These songs are amazing, and theyre amazing not despite but because of Spearss lim
itations. Spears has been one of the most reliable record-makers in music by pla
ying to her strengths: by accentuating the synthetic, by making herself a vessel
for songwriters' ideas about celebrity and sex and other juicy topics, and by l
etting some of the worlds most talented producers treat her voice like sonic Laff
y Taffy, a thing to be coated with sugar, dyed garish hues, and stretched into a
ll kinds of preposterous shapes. It should be noted that credit for this aesthet
ic must go to Spears herself. Whatever she lacks in other areas, Britney has sho
wn exceptional taste and judgment when it comes to what songs to record and rele
ase.
Unfortunately, on her eighth album, Spears had a wacky idea: to try to impersona
te a sentient she-human. Britney Jean is, per Britney, my most personal album eve
r. The thing about personal albums is that they call for a personality, and a voi
ce to project it. Britney Jean is dead on arrival.</blockquote>
<a href="https://medium.com/@taffyakner/miss-american-dream-31c823ad0e5a">"Miss
American Dream"</a> slightly mis-states what the review is reacting against, the
nasty quality of the first single, "Work, Bitch":
<blockquote>On the surface, Work Bitch is a bizarre dance song with depressing lyr
ics.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Vulture published a disgusted review, calling her not just the most
boring singer on the planet but the most boring person, and anti-matter in a belly
shirt.</blockquote>
Rosen's review is not disgusted with the song, but actually likes it:
<blockquote>
It has a couple of moments. I happen to like the stentorian career-counseling se
ssion Work, Bitch, in which Britney affects a bizarre Euro accent to bark out boasts
and warmed-over RuPaul commands: Go call the governor / I bring the trouble You
better work, bitch.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The only fan I met who didnt like the showand I did meet so many fanswa
s, if you can believe it, poor Andrea. A few days later we talked on the phone a
nd she told me that Britney had seemed so unhappy to be there that Andrea, in he
r catsuit and still with her cowgirl hat, almost wanted to leave. Andrea had onc
e thrown a sex party where shed had to hire prostitutes to have sex with a group
of people while she stood over them with a whip. There was this one prostitute w
ho technically did a good jobShe got fucked and sucked, which is all I asked her t
o do, right?but there was something so vacant in the prostitutes eyes, something so
unwilling that it kind of killed the whole thing for Andrea. Thats what this fel
t like.</blockquote>
<a name="ftnote63"></a><a href="#bkfrftnote63">63</a> From Durkheim:
<blockquote>Collective sentiments can just as well become incarnate in persons o
r formulae: some formulae are flags, while there are persons, either real or niy
thical, who are symbols. But there is one sort of emblem which should make an ea
rly appearance without reflection or calculation: this is tattooing. Indeed, wel
l-known facts demonstrate that it is produced almost automatically in certain co
nditions. When men of an inferior culture are associated in a common life, they
are frequently led, by an instinctive tendency, as it were, to paint or cut upon
the body, images that bear witness to their common existence. According to a te
xt of Procopius, the early Christians printed on their skin the name of Christ o
r the sign of the cross; for a long time, the groups of pilgrims going to Palest
ine were also tattooed on the arm or wrist with designs representing the cross o
r the monogram of Christ. This same usage is also reported among the pilgrims go
ing to certain holy places in Italy. A curious case of spontaneous tattooing is
given by Lombroso: twenty young men in an Italian college, when on the point of
separating, decorated themselves with tattoos recording, in various ways, the ye
ars they had spent together. The same fact has frequently been observed among th
e soldiers in the same barracks, the sailors in the same boat, or the prisoners
in the same jail. It will be understood that especially where methods are still
rudimentary, tattooing should be the most direct and expressive means by which t
he communion of minds can be affirmed. The best way of proving to one's self and
to others that one is a member of a certain group is to place a distinctive mar
k on the body.</blockquote>
<blockquote>For the same reason, the personages who for centuries have been the
subject of myths respectfully passed on from mouth to mouth, and periodically pu
t into action by the rites, could not fail to take a very especial place in the
popular imagination.
But how does it happen that, instead of remaining outside of the organized socie
ty, they have become regular members of it?
This is because each individual is the double of an ancestor. Now when two being
s are related as closely as this, they are naturally conceived as incorporated t
ogether; since they participate in the same nature, it seems as though that whic
h affects one ought to affect the other as well. Thus the group of mythical ance
stors became attached to the society of th living; the same interests and the sam
e passions were attributed to each; they were regarded as associates. However, a
s the former had a higher dignity than the latter, this association takes, in th
e public mind, the form of an agreement between superiors and inferiors, between
patrons and clients, benefactors and recipients. Thus comes this curious idea o
f a protecting genius who is attached to each individual.</blockquote>

ttp://www.eonline.com/news/379009/megan-fox-clarifies-lindsay-lohan-marilyn-monr
oe-comparison-in-esquire">"Megan Fox Clarifies Lindsay Lohan-Marilyn Monroe Comp
arison in Esquire"</a> by Bruna Nessif:
<blockquote>"In the newly released article that I did for Esquire, there is a re
ference that is made to Lindsay Lohan that I would like to clarify before it sno
wballs into something silly," Fox wrote.
"The journalist and I were discussing why I was removing my Marilyn Monroe tatto
o, especially since in his opinion, Marilyn was such a powerful and iconic figur
e for women. I attempted to draw parallels between Lindsay and Marilyn in order
to illustrate my point that while Marilyn may be an icon now, sadly she was not
respected and taken seriously while she was still living," she added.

Fox continued, "Both women were gifted actresses, whose natural talent was lost
amongst the chaos and incessant media scrutiny surrounding their lifestyles and
their difficulties adhering to studio schedules etc. I intended for this to be a
factual comparison of two women with similar experiences in Hollywood. Unfortun
ately it turned into me offering up what is really much more of an uneducated op
inion. It was most definitely not my intention to criticize or degrade Lindsay.
I would never want her to feel bullied, as she does not deserve that. I was not
always speaking eloquently during this interview and this miscommunication is my
fault."</blockquote>

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