In the recent film, Perfect Sense, imperfect lovers Susan and Michael, played by Eva Green and Ewan McGregor, play a game she calls "Make Me Special." The object of the game, she explains, is to tell your partner something nobody else knows about you. Susan begins by telling Michael that she can’t have children and as a consequence she often hates her sister's kids. Michael then tells her that when his fiancé got sick, he abandoned her.
"It works," she says. "You're making me yours."
"I'm an asshole," he replies.
"So am I," she says.
"A couple of assholes," he says.
"Mr. and Mrs. Asshole," she declares.
This declaration works in just the way the screenwriters intended it to. It redeems our feelings about our two narcissistic main characters by tempering their self-evident assholism with a bit of self-deprecating humor. But it also works in a way the screenwriters may not have been aware--unless they had been schooled in the writings of my guru, Norman O. Brown, who wrote a lot—and rather brilliantly--about assholes. In Nobby’s landmark book, Life Against Death, "Part Five: Studies in Anality" centers around Jonathan Swift’s notorious scatological 18th century poetry, especially the verse where a lover laments a certain realization about Cealia, the object of his desire: Not wonder how I lost my wits/ Oh! Caelia, Caelia, Caelia shits.
Nobby writes:
The thesis of this chapter is that if we are willing to listen to Swift we will find startling anticipations of Freudian theorems about anality, sublimation, and about the universal neurosis of mankind…For [Swift’s poems’] real theme…is the conflict between our animal body, appropriately epitomized in the anal function, and our pretentious sublimations, more specifically the pretensions of sublimated or romantic-Platonic love…what is exposed is the illusion in the head of the adoring male, the illusion that the goddess is all head and wings, with no bottom to betray her sublunary infirmities.”
In owning up to what shits they are in the "Make Me Special"game and declaring themselves Mr. and Mrs. Asshole, Susan and Michael achieve an equality of the sexes that goes beyond woman’s suffrage or equal pay for equal work. This is an equality that transcends cultures and politics and cuts to the essence of our humanness.
Ostensibly, Perfect Sense is a science fiction movie about the loss of the senses. First to go is smell, which is preceded by an overwhelming sorrow about all the regrets in one’s life. Then goes the sense of taste, which is preceded by a ravenous, hideous hunger. Just before losing their sense of hearing, people all over the world viciously lash out in anger at those closest to them. (The filmmakers may have the exact causes and effects a little mixed up, but a recent study that links psychopathic behavior to a malfunctioning sense of smell suggests they may have been on to something.) If we follow Norman O. Brown’s logic through his interpretations of Jonathan Swift and Sigmund Freud, we can see Perfect Sense as a perfectly extended metaphor for our human state when we become alienated from our bodies. In the end, stripped of their senses, the lovers, like those all around them, have virtually been reduced to not much more than assholes.
At that ending, the Great God Irony once again struck me to the core. My glass-half-full mate was thoroughly shaken by the bleakness of the ending. I, a glass-half-empty guy if ever there was one, was awash in tears--not at its bleakness—but at its profound revelatory power. This was not the cheap, feel-good revelation found in one of those old Movies of the Week where you watch someone struggle with blindness or some other affliction for two hours and then walk away saying to yourself, “There but fortune go I.” This was revelation where you realize, “Therein lies the fortune of me and every other human on the planet.”
Through my lifelong obsession with Norman O. Brown, especially his Love’s Body, I’ve often encountered people who out of frustration with the psychoanalytic language of the book or impatience with its metaphors, ask me to explain what the hell it’s all about. This blog was primarily set up to answer that question. Fortunately every once in awhile a film (or other work of art) comes along that captures it pretty well. Like Hope Springs, which got churned through The Nobby Works a week ago, Perfect Sense shows how our redemption…our deliverance…is through our ever-decaying, but ever-loving bodies.
I really don’t like to bog my blog down in the news of the week, but I can’t help but sense a reasonable connection here between our love’s body and the current political situation. There is serious evidence that the increasing gap between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in the presidential tracking polls is due as much to body issues—Medicare, reproductive rights…hell, basic female anatomy--as to any other issues of war or peace. It may not be to the point where Obama headquarters hangs up a sign that says, “It’s the body, stupid.” But there’s surely something happening out there that’s mitigating for him the awful economic numbers.
This widening gap has increased pressure on Romney to perform well in this week’s first debate. Lots of suggestions out there as to what he should do. For my part, to help reduce Mitt’s performance anxiety, I offer the following: Right off, Mitt, look into the camera and say, “Ladies and gentlemen, you know that video that made the rounds recently of me basically dismissing half the US population as assholes? Well, that was an asshole thing for me to say, so I’m an asshole for saying it. And the folks who paid $50,000 a plate to hear me say it and slurped it up when I said it? Well, they’re assholes, too. But there’s really been too much ‘You’re an asshole!’ ‘No, you’re an asshole!’ going on in the country these days. So I’d like to declare a truce. I hope President Obama will join me in admitting that we’ve all got assholes, and sometimes we can't help but behave like them…shitting all over America the beautiful and stinking it up to the high heavens. Like, Ann and I were watching the terrific movie Perfect Sense the other night, and I turned to her and said, 'You know, I think I've been losing my senses. I'm such an asshole.' And she looked back at me and fluttered those eyebrows of hers that are just the right length and she said, 'So am I, Mitt.' And she was right. We are Mr. and Mrs. Asshole. But aren't we all? So won't you join us in admitting it? I believe it would really be something special. And I believe that on such hallowed common ground we could begin to build a better and brighter tomorrow. God bless the assholes of America.”
The game changer Mitt needs? Hard to tell, but it couldn't hurt.