THAT AFTERNOON! - A Deconstruction Reading

Everyone has seen the pictures from That Afternoon so no sense reposting them.

Here's my reading of how it went down:

Rupert Sanders called her on the phone while she was in her car going home saying he had something important to talk with her about right now. She turned around and went to pick him up where he told her he would be. It is an empty parking lot. He gets in the car and tells her how he feels and she is probably astonished, listening to this. Then he grabs her and kisses her, her back to the driver's window. 

This is only if the paps story is correct about how fast it happened. That may or may not be true. It could have happened slower.

Kristen is now in a double bind situation. They are good friends, she thought, so being angry, furious, insulted, indifferent, are not really options. They are under contract to do another movie together. What do you do? You suggest they go somewhere private, neutral, outdoors where there aren't many people (but some, for that is important) to talk this over, to get him to calm down. So she drives to a park.

They get out of the car, she walks to the wall and looks out over it to hide her face, her back to him. I - and this is me - would expect him to stand beside me so we could talk. But no, he comes up behind her and presses against her holding his arms and hands on either side of her. Perhaps she started out facing him but decided to turn. I don't know. And if I don't know, no one knows, unless they watched it all and since no one ever sees the same thing in a scene in real life, a movie scene, a picture, or a description, who can EVER know. She lays her hands over his to calm him, the way you do with a horse, a dog, a cat, a child, a person.

He probably begins telling her the same thing over again and she is at a loss. At some point she realizes they have been papped,

and now begins her anxiety and fear and trembling

She probably knows there is a possibility that the pictures can be bought.

Now here is my reading on the aftermath. 

Why wouldn't she just call Rob or go home and say this awful thing just happened! And then tell him. Then, "What shall I do? What shall I do?"

Now if she didn't do this the only explanation I can imagine or come up with is:

She did not trust Rob to trust her on this. 

And why would that be?

My guess, and that's all it is, just a guess, is that he has acted jealous about this man, has sensed he was after Kristen, and has been acting jealous and hostile over them, particularly since they are going to work together on Part 2 of SWATH.

So she is afraid to tell him. What do children do when they are afraid to tell you something? Afraid you won't understand? Afraid you will punish them? And why are they afraid in the first place?

As a parent it is ALWAYS your fault. They are afraid to trust you.

This is what Simulated Reality is folks. This is exactly why Baudrillard spent so much time writing about it. Looking at it from all different possibilities, all facets of it. Why Jean Baudrillard said "It is the greatest danger we face right now!"

When it is total then we will be in Virtual Reality! No escape possible.

Right now no one knows what happened. The tabloids are saying whatever they feel like saying that they think is CREDIBLE to their readers. Once it is out there, it is credible. There is no truth, no false, only credibility.

What if someone had seen them? What if that person had then told what s/he had seen. That would only have been a CREDIBLE description of what they had seen. 

The credibility completely depends upon the integrity of the person giving, offering the information. If I don't know this person very well, then they will have no credibility, positive or negative for me. Sometimes the papz tell the truth, sometimes they lie. They have no credibility for me. I can go through what they say and pick or choose according to my own projections, but that is no different from going to a jumble sale.

What is TRUE is that I can't know. 

When all is lies, the truth becomes a weapon - Batman: The Dark Knight Rises.

No one can know what happened and the two people involved can only know part of it. You know how when you are arguing with a loved one or friend about something that just happened and both of you see it differently and start arguing about it.

So all you judges out there, all you casters of the first stone, each of you has a reading of this situation. Just as each of you would have a different reading of a

Rorschach Test!

This is what it is going to be like when more and more of our world becomes Simulated Reality which most everyone is running to embrace. 
When it is total and we are in Virtual Reality there will be no escape, no one will know anything - ever.

Seduction is the only defense. And seduction cannot be produced which is why - since it cannot be produced - it is our key, our only key.

Now recognize this awful danger coming at us. Our lives will be exactly like what just happened to Rob and Kristen. It will be like that all the time. No one will ever know anything for sure. No one will ever be able to trust anyone for sure.

Hunger Games, here we come!

Fanfic Review: Isla de Cullen By CaraNo

Warning: Porn links ahead!

Edouard Manet - Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe 1863 Salon des Refuses

The above painting was a huge scandal in 1863 when it was first exhibited as is the photo in the fanfic story in our time. Some things never change. 

fanfic: Isla de Cullen - Lolypop82 photo MANIP

Isla de Cullen has moved to wordpress

This fanfic is fascinating in a variety of ways. Reading Isla de Cullen through Baudrillard invites the reader to contemplate what Baudrillard has written about sex, femininity, women, and the unequal relationship between women and men, as he describes it, because this fiction is fictionalizing Baudrillardian theory. This in itself is enough to recommend reading it, although there are many other compelling reasons, such as very erotic and graphic sex that is vanilla NOT.

Here is a LINK to the readable version in b & w. Why a fanfic on Twilight should be so cutting edge in post modern theory is an enigma to me. Unless this means that women are starting to see that their liberation since the pill has some serious flaws. Of course Stephenie Meyer started it, but fanfic on Bella and Edward has often gone beyond the original Twilight in scope and detail. The immediate reason is that Meyer's Twilight and certain fanfic fiction based on it, challenges the PC Feminist Dominating Discourse, and arouses the ire of PC feminists and authors of young adult fiction for girls. The PCFDD has effectively censored most of what is seen and heard by women forcing popular authors, filmmakers, directors of films and screenwriters, advertising agencies, textbook publishers, and all and sundry that pitch their wares to girls and women to embrace the dogma of PCFDD, consciously or unconsciously. It is a fact that the Dominating Discourse is invisible to you while you are in it. The fish and water analogy, eh?

But some fanfic authors, perhaps because they are publishing on blogs and internet sites, show far more independent thinking.  CaraNo, the author of Isla de Cullen is definitely challenging, defying, and dueling with PC feminist dogma in violating the censorship that always occurs within the Dominating Discourse  in any area during the length of time it dominates. Michel Foucault explicitly details and lays open the crushing domination of this Dominating Discourse beginning with The Order of Things, The Archeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, The Birth of the Clinic, The History of Sexuality (vol 1,2,3) and everything else he wrote. During his extraordinary career he changed the perception of all the human sciences and made inroads in architecture, painting and sculpture and in fact there is little he did not influence. He was considered the leading intellectual force in Europe until his death from AIDS in 1984. Foucault was open about his homosexuality and his consensual S/M practices.  He is not anywhere near mainstream in the US. This is what makes Isla de Cullen so startling.

Foucault's first major challenge came from Jean Baudrillard in his long essay/book Forget Foucault. Baudrillard states in it that Foucault spoke so perfectly about power only because power was over, finished, done. He added that Foucault's prose itself was a spiral of power. Going on from that insight he says that whatever you are writing about, your prose must mirror the subject even more. Stephenie Meyer wrote about seduction and her prose is even more seductive than the seduction she is writing about. And she wrote so well of seduction ritual because the ritual of courtly love, is finished, done. Twilight. Good title. And it is Baudrillardian theory that we see fictionalized in Isla de Cullen, probably without any awareness at all from the author. What is interesting is that CaraNo breaks with the Dominating Discourse of PC Feminism and then leaps across the abyss to follow Baudrillard all unknowingly, which, of course, is exactly why she succeeds. Baudrillard has drawn the hatred of PC feminists in far greater degree than Stephenie Meyer, but CaraNo in her Isla de Cullen has come under the real threat of having her fiction removed from the fanfic site, forcing her to go to blogspot, but it looks like they didn't remove her after all. I am sure the feminist outcry was serious. She says she is from Sweden and perhaps this is why she is different. Or maybe she is just more of a visionary with courage than other writers of fiction for women. IMO I think men should be reading fanfic for the benefit of the girls/women in their lives.

While most of the fanfic starts with Edward as super controlling, they regress Edward to a state of dependency on Bella. Bella either develops into a more acceptable version to PC feminists (as in the screenplays by Melissa Rosenberg in the Twilight films) or Edward has serious addiction problems, to weaken him. The masculine male is in serious difficulties in real life, in fiction, in non-fiction, in the workplace, and he responds with all the strategies that women used to use to sabotage male power.

CaraNo imagines a different kind of man. Not at all complex and complete, but he is a beginning. He is assertive and masculine, often tender and compassionate. The PCFDD will see him as sado-masochistic and he can be seen in this way if one wishes to enter the psychological swamp of interpretation. (Just think about the incest between Lot and his daughters in precession. Do you really want to go there?)There is no doubt that he is erotically seductive. Why? What are his qualities that stimulate this response in women who read this story? Is part of the reason that men are too PC feminized for us? Female adoration of Rob Pattinson has a great deal to do with Stephenie Meyer's invention of the new male in her fictionalized character of Edward. Baudrillard has proposed the invention of the new masculine out of the hysteria of the female, as the femme fatale was invented our of male hysteria. Only now the femme fatale can find no one to seduce or who is worth her time to try to seduce. CaraNo adds additional dimensions to Edward in sexualizing him. Her drawing is not perfect and that is a real plus. Writers have a way to go with male characters. I wonder where they will go next? DeLillo gets constantly trashed -  by guess who? -  for his male characters.

CaraNo's Edward remains a strong male figure throughout. And Bella is truly Other. She is the Baudrillardian feminine who plays a double game consciously. She understands her feminine power, and chooses to display submissive signs, which this Edward demands.  Baudrillard makes the distinction between liberation and free. He says that women have been falsely liberated (only slaves can be liberated) and have lost their freedom. Now seduction must be produced with products and surgeries, but Baudrillard tells us as does CaraNo, that these "floating signs" of seduction are empty signs or they are "signs" masking gender ambiguity. The great power of seduction is that it cannot be produced. And clearly Rob Pattinson is producing it NOT. That's Judith Butler on the left, the go to person on gender. Gender Trouble and the rest of her books at Amazon.

Here is Passion for real by Patti Smith:

Because the Night youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0brHGJ6xqbk  Or paste it in

You are watching and listening to pure passion without all the "floating signs" of femme.

Many of the concepts discussed above are already embedded in my other blogs. Maybe I will get around to linking for you. Maybe not. I did some anyway.