Now that I am overcome with shame, the feeling is akin to losing one’s grip and falling. In their embarrassment the shy person folds their arms and hangs their head. They can feel the ground collapsing under their feet and are trying hard not to fall. They had been clinging to the group and believed they were a branch of the social tree, and, all of a sudden, it is as though they no longer have anything to hold on to. We could turn this around and assert that physical disgust, moral disdain and social indignation are all ways of unifying the group, which becomes of its own accord the repository of the majority view.
- Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Shame
Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956)
Cluny Brown (Ernst Lubitsch, 1946)
Were you to have some time on your hands and were you to therefore ask me what I think shame is, I would try to underscore its polar nature and I would say that shame is when people, places, and/or things make you feel worthless and defective. I got into the habit of being called worthless and sometime after that I graduated to actually being and believing I was worthless. I’m very much in alignment here with philosopher Frédéric Gros, then, as he sees the purified and untainted voice of shame itself in the simple but always hurtful utterance: shame on you. I also once heard a wise man say that the healthy part of shame, the part that can be metabolized and utilized, is the part that prevents one from spiralling off into shamelessness and grotesque entitlement. If you say shame on you to me today, I confront you with my eyes until you flinch. The shame isn’t on us. It moves around like some kind of specialized counterfeit money.
The final statement on the increasingly apocalyptic discrepancy between good ol’ right-sizing shame and bombastic bomb-the-Technicolor-torpedos spree-happy shamelessness is Nicholas Ray’s outrageously subversive but just-syrupy-enough 1956 masterpiece Bigger Than Life, with James Mason as Ed Avery, a school teacher with a secret part-time cab driver hustle on the side whose system is pumping way too much cortisol and whose finances are likewise stressed, all the lovely things and places of the ‘50s commercial universe and not a dime left to pay for any of it, and thus when the doctors put him on a corticosteroid to treat inflammation of the arteries, he goes full psychotic and outrageously performative…and I guess we shouldn’t really be surprised. At the climax of the meek professor’s self-aggrandizing psychosis, he goes upstairs to kill his son and tells his wife he’s like Abraham setting about to go sacrifice Isaac. She reminds him that God ultimately spared Isaac, and at this moment, pinnacle of 1950s cinema to many connoisseurs, James Mason loudly declaims “God was wrong!” in a manner that perfectly combines the stentorian self-seriousness of a politician and the distressed confoundedness of a child. It is the child who when told shame on you cannot really understand, even if the neural wiring of that child on some level nevertheless does.
Telling the story of a year in the life of Leo Feldman, imprisoned in a state institution as a result of having run a shady below-board black-market-type operation out of the basement of his department store—or maybe he’s just bad—Stanley Elkin’s early novel A Bad Man is all about the allocation and placement of shame in a way that mirrors the representation of guilt and institutional absurdity in Kafka’s The Trial. Whereas Kafka leans into ascetic dry humour and the origins of his form and style in parable, Elkin is all vaudeville and post-bop jazz. Assessing himself and his life, Feldman, the no-questions-asked business operator, fundamentally grey market in makeup, reflects upon himself and his life up to arrest: “everyone had already been tempted, that everyone had already succumbed, had had those things happen to him which he wanted to have happen, and was looking for them to happen again. Seduction was routine; yielding was; everyone had a yes to spend and spent it.” The free market would like to encourage just enough shamelessness such that each yes becomes good and lubricated. Those of us who find ourselves in a bipolar mania are want to throw currency around like tinsel. For a very long time the advertisers have been working on disinhibiting our behavioural patterns.
Through some purely organic though also perfectly worlded process, your epigenetic program is imprinted within you from the beginning and the genes fire and misfire, or adapt or evolve, as you engage your world from the embodied standpoint of materiality, sequence, and cognizance. You will internalize all the signs presented to you and some of them will be seedlings, good and bad. You oughtn’t remain cavalier out here for long. Remain morally and ethically resolute…right when you need to most especially. It has to be a rigid and loose program, and therefore a flexible/foldable one. “Why is the line of flight a war one risks coming back from defeated, destroyed,” pose Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “after having destroyed everything one could?” I love how at the end of Ernst Lubitsch’s Cluny Brown, the greatest ever comedy about the line of flight, Cluny (Jennifer Jones), having attained her line of flight and crossed a whole ocean, faints, presumably having also in a fairly short time window gotten herself pregnant by Charles Boyer’s continental Lothario. It is the job of comedy since Shakespeare to produce a number of saleable couples by the end of the final act, but the especially epic and heroic couple breaks free, negotiates with the geography, and transplants itself to where it can have the right kind of light (even at night). For those who have been shamed out of existence, the answer can only ever be persistence…
No comments:
Post a Comment