Such a brave and courageous act this girl has accomplished. And in one afternoon!
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.
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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".....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
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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)
_______________________________________________________________________
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
_______________________________________________
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?
