Thursday, July 28, 2011

Manly Thor's Day Special

LA Confidential: The Manliness Lesson
Well, there isn't one, really, this being a woman's movie in disguise. But it sort of touches on something.

This image is a good way to introduce it:


Through a stupid and clumsy plot device, Russell Crowe's character Officer Bud White has just been made aware of the existence of photos of the woman he loves having sex with another man. So he rushes out in the rain and flips through them. This is a tribute, of course, to a famous scene in Chinatown. There are other homages to the scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Blood Simple.

It works because we all know the feeling. The minute you discover that a woman you are in love with has had sex with another man, you start picturing it. You know it's a crazy thing to do but you can't help it. I've been there myself.

The thing, of course, is that the sex you picture has to perform a key psychological function and that is maintaining the vaguely narcissistic fantasy that this woman's love for you proves something about you. So the sex you imagine has to be animalistic and, oddly enough, erotically perfect in a way that the sex you have had with the same woman is not. It's torture of an exquisitely awful sort but, as the Last Psychiatrist notes, it's better than jumping off a bridge.
That loss of self is what you're trying to recapture with the masochistic fantasies:  she's hot enough to have any guy she wants (and she picked you); she is in total control of her sex, wielding it for pleasure or for profit however she wants; so when she had sex with you, and liked it-- it signifies your own value.  When some faceless stud undoes her bikini top in front of everyone, and she confidently flaunts her body-- that's your self-confidence she's flaunting.
The post that comes from is worth reading all the way through by the way. If any of this is sounding familiar, if you have ever entertained masochistic fantasies after being cheated on, read the whole thing.

I'd like to note something interesting though. In real life, the woman who cheated on you when you were twenty-five and having what you thought of as the greatest romance in the history of romance didn't actually have the greatest sex of her life with a  super-well-endowed hunk when she cheated. She actually had a seedy little affair drenched in all the self-deception and vanity that affairs always are. But in Hollywood—where it is fantasy all the way down—the woman does have the fantasy sex when she cheats. (And the guy she picks is the perfect threat; in the case she cheats on Bud white, who worries that he is stupid, with the super intelligent Edmund Exley.) Hollywood gives us all the things that would usually be in our imagination played out in high quality Technicolor®.

Here is some more from The Last Psychiatrist
 Look closely at these fantasies, at your own cuckold fantasies.  Inevitably in these fantasies there is a fetish object, something that existed in your relationship.  It's seems incidental to the fantasy but it is highly energized, eroticized: a piece of jewelry, clothing/bathing suit, or a location (car, bar, beach, etc).  The sex is the visual focus, but the eroticized negligee that they bought when they were together is the true main character of the fantasy.

Men make the sex the focus, while women make the fetishized object more explicit: they obsess over the ex taking his new woman to the same places; or buying her "the same kind of scarf he got me"; or saying the same phrases ("that's what he used to call me.")

It seems masochistic, driving yourself crazy thinking about what you've lost, making the loss even worse by finding the specific ways that it hurts you.
In the movie the fetish object is the white dress that Kim Basinger is wearing. In real life, Bud White would imagine these things but here we actually get it.

A bit of trivia
Not really related to the above, but interesting nevertheless, one of the subplots involves a character named Tammy Jordan as played by Shawnee Free Jones. Poor Tammy is a poor girl trying to break into Hollywood but ends up getting exploited for the titillation of others.

Well, guess how poor Shawnee Free Jones is used by the makers of LA Confidential?

Yup, she is in the movie so we can all see a brief shot of her breasts, her bouncing breasts, and then she is done for. And her Hollywood career is not much more than that. She was in a number of other moves, almost always for her breasts, and then dispensed with. Her career was over by 2002.

But spell it out for yourself: The movie makes a moral point about how young hopeful actresses were exploited back in the 1950s by exploiting a a young hopeful actress today. And we all participate because we really want to see her breasts.

Voyeurism is a deeply interesting psychological phenomena.

In closing, Shawnee Free Jones is weird name no? That's because her father was a spirituality huckster.

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