DUSTY A Review: SLOW FADING - Outtake

DUSTY - SLOW FADING - HERE

A long outtake from Dusty's POV

YellowGlue is writing a very fine explanation of Dusty's cocaine addiction that while it may not be universal, certainly explains the addiction of so many young people.

THE TERRIBLE CONFRONTATION WITH DEATH

WITH THE VOID

WITH REALITY WITHOUT THE VEIL OF ILLUSION

A REALITY DUSTY SEES. A HYPER-REALITY DUSTY SEES THAT IS UNBEARABLE

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For Dusty is seeing the SCREEN

BAUDRILLARD

DUSTY HAS STOPPED FALLING AND HIT BOTTOM

And then, right there in front of everyone, it finally happens.

I'm not falling anymore.

I fall all the way down.

And the bottom?

The bottom is just dark.

Just alone, with chains and weights and locks you had every chance to shrug off and never did.

The bottom is keeping up appearances through a group picture with eight people who have no idea you just died so that the mother of your murderer can have a pretty picture to hang in her living room.

The bottom is feeling the person you thought for so long was love and home and heart and soul to you, looking right at you without any hint of an idea what she's just done.

The bottom is knowing she doesn't see you.

And if it's better this way, it doesn't even matter, because she never did.

If she had, I'd be walking to the Continental next to her instead of Petey.

I'd have her hand in mine instead of my phone.

I'd be kissing the pulse point I squeezed too tightly, instead of deleting her number and dialing his.

Edward has seen through the SPECTACLE of  graduation porno disguising the emptiness of the ritual. And he sees the horror of the ritual to be continued with marriage, children, your own children graduating, finding something you tell yourself you want to do, and all the while just  waiting for death. It is the awareness of DEATH in life that Malabou writes about. Is this what Jesus meant when he said, "Let the dead bury the dead?" Edward knows he is dead on his side of the window/screen, but so are they, only they are not aware that they are dead. So they do not require drugs giving the deadening of awareness. 

This is the theme of:

DUSTY Chapter 35

I try to remember the last time I looked at my girl through unaddicted eyes.

It's been years. I've been lit, guilty, spun, drunk-wasted the entire time. Every day. Through each I love you, through 

each touch, through each don't ever leave me. All the affection I have ever showed this girl has been habit-stained. 

It's never just been me. Ever. Cocaine has always been there. And before coke, it was bud or E, or shots of Jameson 

on my bedroom floor.

I've been dragging her though my bullshit for years, doing what I need to do to keep her, saying what I need to say to 

make sure she's always around. I dump all of my misuses on Bella because she's the only one who can carry them and still love me the same.

After everything I've done, she forever loves me back.

I take another drag from my smoke and pull at the front of my hair.

Fuck, Fuck, Fuck.

I love her too hard.

I love her unsafe.

I love her to the brink.

Dope sick and tipped, I'm looking at her, and she's so small. She's a seventeen-year-old girl, cluttered with scars, manipulated into loving me. My stigma is all over her. I'm all over her. She never even had a chance against a monster like me.

I influenced her.

I sought and took.

I tricked her into loving me, because I did love her first.

I took advantage.

I've hurt her.

I just made her bleed.

That's not the first time. Cocaine smiles.

I've been with other girls, and I've chosen drugs—

I can make this go away, Dusty.

"Bliss,"I whisper with a throat lodged full of regret. I shake my head in an attempt to clear too many thoughts. I can think straight. I haven't had to think with a straight mind in so long.

"Hey," she says soothingly, brushing my too long hair away from my eyes. Baby smiles and my insides constrict. "Tell me," she says.

I clear my throat. "Princess," I say, brimming with anxiety and regret and self-disgust and how could she let me do this to her?

"Fuck," I moan into B's stomach.

Baby rubs my back and speaks quietly. "Tell me, Edward. Tell me..."

She turns my head with her hands on the side of my face, forcing me to be still, giving me no other choice but to look at her.

"I'm clean. I'm clean," I cry.

Looking at her is too hard. It's all there, on every part of her—our whole relationship. It's in the guilt behind her eyes, and in the purple below them. It's explained in her bitten-too-low fingernails, and in the dark bruises I kissed on her neck. It's in her cut lip and tangled hair. It's her sleeping in the back of this car when she should be at home in her bed. It's how she knows how to talk to me, a drug addict on a week long comedown. It's in the way she touches me, just right. It's in the life she's thrown away for this. It's in her uncertain future. It's in her broken friendship with Alice. It's in every lie she keeps.

It's in her beating-for-me heart.

It's in me, able to ignore all of it because I've been too fucked up to care.

And now I'm clean.

But I don't know how I can stay this way.

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For Edward to tolerate then access his power to be, to be an ubermensch (Nietzsche) this is his task in becoming "clean."

To quote Foucault on curiosity: it evokes "a concern", it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; an acute sense of real which, however, never becomes fixed; a readiness to find our surroundings strange and singular; a certain restlessness in ridding ourselves of our familiarities and looking at things otherwise; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is passing away; a lack of respect for traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential.

Eric Packer cannot reinvent himself either; find the "restless identities stirring":

Maybe he didn't want that life after all, starting over broke, hailing a cab in a busy intersection filled with jockeying junior executives, arms aloft, bodies smartly spinning to cover every compass point. What did he want that was not posthumous? He stared into space. He understood what was missing, the predatory impulse, the sense of large excitation that drove him through his days, the sheer and reeling need to be. (C. 209)

Dusty has decided to leave Bliss knowing she will suffer and knowing what she will realize from it. To become herself. To free her of himself. As Badiou says:

At the heart of love à la française lies the idea of 

freedom. To love truly is to want the other free, and this 

includes the freedom to walk away. Love is not about 

possession or property. Love is no prison where two 

people are each other’s slaves. Love is not a commodity, 

either. Love is not capitalist, it is revolutionary. If 

anything, true love shows you the way to selflessness.

In his recent book, “In Praise of Love,” the French 

philosopher Alain Badiou 

reminds us that love implies 

constant risk. There is no safe, 

everlasting love. The idea 

that you can lock two people’s 

love once and for all, and toss 

the key, is a puerile fantasy. 

For Mr. Badiou, love is 

inherently hazardous, always 

on the brink of failure and 

above all vulnerable. Embrace its fragility, wish your 

beloved 

to be free and you might just, only just, have a chance to 

retain his or her undying gratitude, and love

Now Dusty is out as a book - Innocents

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19214578-innocents

Snow White Fairy Tale - Deconstructed

The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales - Bruno Bettelheim

Snow White is usually considered a fairly harmless fairy tale to be read to children or by them. Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales  goes deep into the unconscious psychoanalytic messages lying submerged in these tales.


Women Who Run With The Wolves - Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Pinkola Estes in her Women Who Run With the Wolves, a Jungian analyst, digs for the TRIAL secretly lying in the story for the reader or teller to be communicated unconsciously to the girl child.

The Savage Mind (Nature of Human Society)
Claude Levi-Strauss

Levi-Strauss blasted open the structure that is present in anthropological rituals, folk tales, kinship systems, practices, myths and legends. A structuralist analysis became the method of choice in researching and writing about all of the above for a few decades. Until Foucault whose method of genealogy modified this way of seeing, not replacing it, as it is still a valuable frame, just adding an alternative way.

The Oedipus Trilogy - Sophocles



For example, to take a familiar myth: the Oedipus myth, so central to Freudian theory. The Oedipal Phase occurs when the boy fixates his libido on his mother. He wishes to have his mother, to marry her, to replace the father, to do away with the father with wishes to kill the father. These "incestual" desires for the mother and the wish to kill the father require the boy to identify with the father and give up the mother. This is a brief summary most people already know.

When Levi-Strauss applied structural analysis to this myth he turned to the observed object of aggression. The boy wishes to do away with his father to leave him a clear field with his mother. 


Levi-Strauss however, observed that the first act of aggression was that of the father! The father directs the shepherd to take the baby boy and set him on a mountain top to be exposed to the weather and wild animals. It has been prophesied that the boy will kill his father and marry his mother. To avoid this the boy has to die, and the father directs his death.

Things change now, don't they. The first act of attempted murder is that of the father against the son. Freud was not a careless thinker, but since he was not thinking within the frame of structuralism he did not "see" it; he certainly did not include it in his theory, and so it went unnoticed until the 1940's or so when Levi -Strauss began working on it in his field studies with primitive peoples.

Snow White contains a dirty little secret. The aging beauty of the mother, who has been made into the stepmother to disguise and mask the tale for real mothers, makes clear that the beautiful woman ages, becomes less and less desirable, and is replaced by her daughter - younger women. This is in the inevitable ongoing history of human life. But the queen is evil, she is the evil queen because she wishes to "kill" her daughter, the younger women, from jealousy, from a narcissism unable to accept that life changes, that she ages. One of my speculations is that the evil is projected on the queen, when perhaps the evil is in a culture that only values youthful beauty.

In fact the real secret is that Snow White is about Death, disguised of course, since Death is never acceptable, especially in children's stories. Children are very concerned with death, but death is a subject to be avoided at all costs with children. Another fantasy of immortality we burden them with. But they know, and also know it is not to be discussed.


Which is where the Fairy Tale enters because it tells them about aging, Death, the loss of beauty and love, all concerns children are very concerned with on an unconscious level. They dream about it. They know in their hearts.

In Asia white is the color of Death and Mourning

Do not be fooled that this tale is not intuited by the adults making this movie. They are making a movie about Death, and Death is denied in western culture. It is there anyway. Sanders feels it, Kristen feels it, Liberty Ross feels it. Liberty is aging, her beauty is aging, Kristen is the young beauty. No amount of feminist inversion of Snow White changes any of this. It merely acts as a mask to obscure Death even more. The poisoned apple the queen gives to Snow White to put her in an endless sleep is Death faked as in Breaking Dawn. The reference to The Sleeping Beauty is ignored. The "sleeping" is the unconscious state the young girl enters during latency until awakening in sexual adolescence. The "sleeping" is also a simulation of Death. Snow White needs to wake up! She also needs to free herself from the influence of the Mother. This is not lost on Kristen. It lies deep in the western mind. It is not lost on the director/ the father who guards his daughter, who is also aware of her beauty, but not his own incestual wishes, and the fact that he will have to give her up to a young man, when he himself feels her attraction. It is not lost on the mother who does not want this awakening which means her time of love and beauty is soon to be over. Liberty Ross knows this. So all these feelings are churning on this movie set, all underneath the surface everyday working environment.

So we got an irruption. Why is it a surprise?