Only PRAISE for Kristen Stewart: She has Torn the Veil of Illusion from their eyes

Such a brave and courageous act this girl has accomplished. And in one afternoon!

Cosmopolis: He didn't know what he wanted. Then he knew. A haircut.

Kristen Stewart: She didn't know what she wanted. Then she knew. A meeting with her SWATH director.

And in one afternoon she accomplished what it took Eric Packer the entire day to do. 

I have consistently said that Eric Packer is a visionary, not a self-destructive loser. I say the same about Kristen Stewart. What links the character Packer with Kristen Stewart/Snow White that none of them consciously had  premeditatively set out to do this. I include Jesus here. Jesus in his Passion throwing the money changers out of the Temple (for financial dealings).

A meeting in the afternoon, such as every high school girl has had. Only she never did because she didn't go to high school. She was home schooled with a correspondence course. Almost all of her girlfans had had this at one time, but she never did.

She is the princess - say Snow White - NOT  waiting in a deep unconscious deep freeze for the prince to come wake her up and make her his queen. Nor is she slobbering over images of her fantasy prince on the internet everyday. But It happened anyway. The prince arrived in Catherine Hardwicke's bedroom one day and kissed her awake. 

She got her castle as one fangirl said. Became the highest paid actress in Hollywood. Had the adoring love of the most wanted man on the planet. She has her own fortune in her own hands. Well, she has everything doesn't she? Eric Packer had everything didn't he? But neither of them knew what they wanted. Neither has any desire because desire is in a non separable relation with lack. No lack/ no desire. 

A yen maybe?  A yen for yen?  A yen for a haircut? A yen for an afternoon with her SWATH director? 

Think about Rupert Sanders for a minute. "Happily" married to a beautiful wife who tweets about him. Ahem. A filmmaker who does slick sleek advertisement videos is then given a 170 million budget to direct his first film. They wouldn't even give The Truman Show to its writer Andrew Niccol because he had never directed before, so he has had to work his way up or rather down, since he started at the top with his Truman screenplay. Sanders life has just changed because SWATH is a financial success. And the sequel has a go ahead, or it did until the other day. And he has guided "Snow White" to be a Woman Who Runs With The Wolves. Pinkola Estes deconstructs Fairy Tales for the TRIAL inherent in each of them. 

What is Snow White's trial? She can stay passively asleep and wait for the prince. But SW can be inverted to read Snow White can actively defeat her wicked stepmother, regain her kingdom and find her prince. 

At an award for Twilight Robert Pattinson in accepting his surfboard thanked Catherine Hardwicke for everything he now had in his life. "And Especially for Kristen." The assumption of his utterance was that it all was "given" to him. Even Kristen was given to him by the big Other as Zizek and Lacan would say. To "give" Kristen, then someone must have had her in order to give her to him. If someone gave her to him, then she could be taken away. This is Dominique Francon's dilemma in Fountainhead. Someone somewhere and you don't know who or how or when or why waits to take it from you - meaning Roark. So Dominique must destroy him. Dominique is not a self-destructive masochist either BTW, as all the psychological interpretations have reviewed and written for 70 fucking years. She is a Nietzschean strategist. So is Kristen. 

Kristen's "Prince" has been given to her "by magic". He and everything else can be taken from her "by magic". At any moment and she knows there are grasping hands all over waiting to take her career, her prince, her very world away from her. Eric Packer has put himself in this position by speculating on the yen in the dialectic where what goes up must come down. When he sees Burning Man he sees what the market cannot absorb, what will disprove Vija's theory and he implodes the currency market feeling one with the radical energy of the demonstrators all around. 

There is no transcendence without transgression. Nietzsche says you must lose it all. Only then can you find out who you are meant to be. Packer in his last moments imagines building it up all over again but he doesn't want that, the Eternal Return.  Kristen could have broken up with Rob, begun her life alone the way her fans have authoritatively said she "should" have done. They are recommending she enter the Order of Production, to follow a normal way of freeing herself. Ha! 

Kristen has followed Women Who Run With The Wolves. She has made a huge "CUT" in her life.

She has jumped over the abyss. She has destroyed it all. There is no going back and saying sorry now. She has freed herself from the Legend of Tristan and Iseult and she has freed all of her girl and women fans from the legend of Tristan and Iseult. The princess imprisoned in the castle, For her bubble was like the castle. Watched and connived everywhere. Spied on, gossiped about, seemingly a liberated woman who was not free. 

The only bit of "reality" she could find was an afternoon meeting with a director who had given her Joan of Arc to read. To inspire her to lead her army in the movie. But Joan of Arc has many other resonances. Victory and Success almost immediately. Then failures, adoration turning to  hatred, betrayal, until only her faith in god was left to her as she burned at the stake. 

Kristen is burning now. Bella Swan is burning, the Fairy Tale is burning. Her courtiers have turned on her. Her prince has abandoned her. Her director is groveling to his wife. She is alone. So now she knows what she always knew, that it was all make believe, all fake, all a veil of illusion. All that was "given" to her is now being taken away. Only she didn't wait for them to do it in homeopathic doses over years and years, she did it herself.

I think you have disappointed more than one fan these days; you shattered the dreams of so many in the fandom that I am not sure we will ever be the same. It is our mistake, too, naïve, weak human beings, mostly women who had our share of unhappiness over loss of trust, and sadness over lost love: we loved to see you on screen, “living the dream of true love forever” and we thought that your true love off screen was the same. - Just one bereaved fan. A fan who has been given a great gift and doesn't know it. The Fairy Tale, which Anais Nin has said has poisoned women's lives, is like the Lottery. You can win because you see someone on TV who just won it.

The Dark Knight Rises:

When all is lies, then truth becomes a weapon.

The truth is that the romantic fantasy of "true love" is just that. A fantasy, a nice word for a lie you have bought and paid dear for.  Only maybe it just didn't come true for you. But it did for Bella Swan (I don't think so BTW) and for Kristen Stewart. The Poor Little Rich Girl who had it all eh? This is what every girl has been carefully prepared to want, to desire (lacking it), along with the "castle" to turn it into your very own art museum. 

Stewart has said "fuck it"! And gone off for an afternoon session of REALITY (she thinks.)

Having been given the "gift" of everything, she must return the "counter-gift" or suicide, the same as Eric Packer. The counter-gift must be greater than the gift. (Baudrillard: Symbolic Exchange and Death) So she has just as Packer did.

Now we will see just how well Rob Pattinson understands his character of Eric Packer. We know Cronenberg did not and smothered Rob's attempt at understanding the character and interpreting him.  Kristen has freed Rob also. From Cronenberg and all other misreading directors. Does he know it? Will he know it? 
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Postscript 7-26-12

".....The gesture had touched him but it was necessary to resist, of course, or die in his soul. But this wasn't the only reason to piss away her birthright. He was making a gesture of his own, a sign of ironic final binding. Let it all come down. Let them see each other pure and lorn. <b>This was the individual's revenge on the mythical couple............Let them see each other clean, in killing light."(C. p. 123-24)

Can he do anything worse than disappear her entire inheritance?

So Kristen tools off in the afternoon, picks Rupert up and they go to more or less secluded places, but not really. There is no such place for Kristen. And now we have over 49 photos of kissing, dry humping is it?, body kissing, no penetration it seems, but suggestive as hell eh. Now what could she do to crash everything? Only to be explicit sexually and be photographed  an infinite number of times with another, when she has the most desirable man on the planet at home. Could she have done anything worse than to appear to betray him sexually with another man?

This is Kristen's revenge on the mythical couple.

"Let them see each other clean, in killing light."(C. p. 124)
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You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: 

how else could you become new, if you had not first 

become ashes? - Thus Spake Zarathustra

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Postscript 10-29-12

It’s only when the heart begins to beat wildly and without pattern — when it begins to realize its boundlessness — that its newly adamant pulse bangs on the walls of its cage and is bruised by its enclosure.

To feel the heart pound is only the beginning. Next is to feel the hurt — the tearing of the psyche — the prelude of entry into the place one has always feared. One fears that place because of being drawn to it, loving it, and wanting to be taught by it. Without the need to be taught, who would feel the psyche rip?…. Without the bruise, who would know where the walls are?

Kay Larson in Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists

Twihards: Why You Didn't Get the Meadow Scene You Wanted

Benjamin's 1936 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction on Dadaism:

Illuminations

One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could not be fully satisfied only later.... The Dadaists attached much less importance to the sales value of their work than to its uselessness for contemplative immersion. (Illuminations 237)

.... Dadaists became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality. It promoted a demand for the film, the distracting element of which is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator. Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested. Duhamel, who detests the film and knows nothing of its significance, though something of its structure, notes this circumstance as follows: "I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images." (Duhamel, Scenes la vie future, 1930 p. 52) The spectator's process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind. (I p. 238)

Benjamin does not note here that the destruction of memory is a consequence. Memory requires time for contemplation, a quality of time not too slow and not too fast. Just right as Goldilocks would say.

In the decline of middle class society, contemplation became a school for asocial behavior; it was countered by distraction as a variant of social conduct. (I p. 238)

New Moon

Distraction and contemplation form polar opposites. (I p.239) And we are aware how Meyer has used the concept distraction any number of times in Twilight. Vampires are easily distracted. Bella is not. Until she is a vampire.

What might all this have to say about ADHD or ADD if there is a difference? Are we reinforcing and provoking shifting attention spans?

The Tree of Life by Terrence Malick is pure contemplation. It is also true that his films have not been blockbusters, although they all have been critical successes in one way or another. Malick is an artist first. He makes the films he wants to make.

He is far more than an auteur director. He is a consummate artist of film in our time. He is preserving contemplation as a way of thinking and he is introducing it to those who have not experienced it before: The distractible ones, the ones who tend to walk out on this film. The ones who find it excruciatingly

The Tree of Life Terrence Malick

boring. The ones who hate it. The ones who would have hated the Meadow Scene as Meyer wrote it. The ones who have probably never watched a Bergman film. And what Rob Pattinson's fans love about him without knowing is his intensity in contemplation, his way of gazing at a person and really seeing them, not a distracted flicking of the eyes. And by consuming every single banal image floating globally the fans are destroying their ability to contemplate him. They are just flicking their eyes down and across a myriad of images on a screen.

Here's DeLillo:

He stood a while longer, watching a single gull lift and ripple in a furl of air, admiring the bird, thinking into it, trying to know the bird, feeling the sturdy earnest beat of its scavenger's ravenous heart. (C p. 7)

Didi: Don't you see yourself in every picture you love? You feel a radiance wash through you. It's something you can't analyze or speak about clearly. What are you doing at that moment? You're looking at a picture on a wall. That's all. But it makes you feel alive in the world. It tells you yes, you're here. And yes, you have a range of being that's deeper and sweeter than you knew. ( p.30)

He watched her. He didn't think he wanted to be surprised, even by a woman, this woman, who'd taught him how to look, how to feel enchantment damp on his face, the melt of pleasure inside a brushstroke or band of color. (C p. 3)

Rob Pattinson as Eric Packer

My mood shifts and bends. But when I'm alive and heightened, I'm super-acute. Do you know what I see when I look at you? I see a woman who wants to live shamelessly in her body. Tell me this is not the truth. You want to follow your body into idleness and fleshiness. .... Tell me I'm making it up. You can't do that. It's there in your face, all of it, the way it rarely shows in any face.  (C 49)

Jane Melman:Pull back. I am advising you in this matter not only as your chief of finance but as a woman who would still be married to her husbands if they had looked at her the way you have looked at me here today. (C 34)

Rob Pattinson as Eric Packer