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!

Another Snow White Premiere

A New Confident and Singular Kristen Stewart

An Earlier Premiere

Liberty Ross has made it clear that she wants to shine, to take fashion center stage at the premieres. This is also a resonance from Snow White. Just as the movie Black Swan resonates with Snow White. The jealousy and fury of aging beauty being replaced.

In the Haute Couture world of women there is a comraderie with a bedrock of competitiveness. Women dress for women. They observe each other, notice every flaw, every sign of aging. It is a merciless world that ruthlessly pits beautiful women against each other in socially acceptable ways. 

Kristen has said Oh no, I'm not gonna play that game.

Kristen becomes androgynous

Sontag: 
the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one's sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

Of course he is sexually attracted to her. And any woman knows when a man is sexually attracted to them. It happens every day. You always know. So yes, Kristen knew. So fucking what! Rain Makes Applesauce to quote a children's book from the 1960's.
The sun came up today.
What else is new.


The camera loves Stewart to such a degree that, after her first few Wild scenes, I started suspecting she probably could have given Lillian Gish or Greta Garbo a run for their money during the Silent’s heyday some eighty-odd years ago as, to misquote Norma Desmond, “They had faces then.”As Tracy, Stewart’s beautiful, unguarded visage manages to convey both freshness and world-weariness, allowing the talented newcomer to project something akin to a jaded purity, which I’ve never seen on screen before.A lovely review of Kristen Stewart in Into The Wild and the entire review is here:  http://littleblogtoo.blogspot....

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?

A Student/Teacher Relationship On the SWATH Set - Kristen Stewart and Rupert Sanders

An actress who has said she wants to direct is learning how to see the scene from her director - to stand outside of herself.

Sanders is directing a scene, dressed casually but with some thought, standing relaxed, competent with natural authority IMO. His is not a tense set.

Kristen has not looked this young and carefree since way before Twilight. Unguarded and happy. Rupert looks pleased and happy that she feels this way that she feels like a CHILD!

Panic Room premiere

Kristen is explaining her answer to a question in a competent way. Sanders is listening , focussed.  Stewart is not fussing with her hair, or waving her arms, just quietly saying what she wants to say. Maybe she is not exactly eloquent, but this situation does not require eloquence, only clear direct language. She has learned this on the SWATH set, as she did not possess this public level of confidence before now.

Where did she acquire it? Her director Sanders has said she contributed important observations during filming. Does this mean he listened to her?

When someone values your observations, listens to you, you feel validated, your intelligence feels validated.

This is important if you have not had much formal schooling.

It also means you have not had your perceptions shaped by the public educational system.
See my review of the wonderful film on this subject Monsieur Lazhar. 

Informal, relaxed, still no flirting. Kristen is learning not trying to seduce. Sanders is pleased that she is learning what he has to teach her. That's all I see. Just the fact that they have a good working relationship, that they like each other.

Not once have we seen him use The Gaze, the all important variable - according to deRougemont  on seduction .  Nice good looking guy.

Speaking about his lead actress in the role at one of the movie's premieres last month, Rupert said he was thrilled by Kristen’s performance.

He told E! News: 'She's got a great spirit, she's really quite rebellious...and feisty and kind of wild. And that's really what I wanted the modern Snow White to have.

'I didn't want her to be timid and I didn't want her to be frightened and relying on men, you know.
'She's very strong and very driven, and I think that's true in her personal life... She's got a big weight of the world on her shoulders and she carries it incredibly well.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2178788/Liberty-Ross-deletes-Twitter-Kristen-Stewart-cheated-Robert-Pattinson-Rupert-Sanders.html#ixzz22WAl68jx

Sanders and Liberty Ross on SWATH set. This kind of comfortable happiness is not faked  IMO

Snow White and The Huntsman Premiere Image

Which One Captures Your Eyes?

Liberty Ross is elegantly seductive

Seductively elegant

Shimmering, glittering vibrant and glowing

Gowned in a skin like a bird in tiny prickling brilliant feathers

A skin to be peeled off

And Charlize and Kristen 

are NOT wearing gowns

This Is Not A Dress

These Are Not Dresses

These are signs, "floating signs"

Designed just for the Red Carpet

To be worn as masks

asserting? denying? disassembling? contradicting?

They are beautiful, witty, and very funny

Not at all like second skins

This Is Not A Pipe - Michel Foucault

Mirror mirror on the wall
Who is fairest of them all?

Kristen and Rob at Comic Con July 12, 2012

Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson Comic Con July 12, 2012

Please just look at this image quietly. What do you see?

Adolescent Sulking? 

Rob is shut down; depressed/repressed anger; face of stone. 

This is 13 days before That Afternoon.

Does he feel what's coming? Maybe. Maybe not.

But he does want the world to know exactly how he is feeling. Cool, unloving, indifferent.  This is the way teens are. They want you to know how they are feeling by their sulking. They do not want to tell you in words. They want you to feel bad. Feel guilty because they feel bad.

Everyone has been through that, haven't they? But in such a public way?  He wants everyone to know he is angry at her. 


What has she done or said?

This day he is not very nice to her. In public. In front of the cameras and audience. 

It is important for him to make her feel uncomfortable. Kristen is professional, leaning into him, her hand on his shoulder, her face composed,  strained, stressed. 


Rob is intent on withdrawing his love from her not only in public but at a public Event. In front of an audience. In front of cameras and camera phones. In front of the world. The intent is to humiliate her so all can see her humiliation.


You can see it is difficult for her. He has made her feel uncomfortable. He has made her reveal it. He dominates in this image.  But she refuses to be humiliated on this day.


All the joy of being together on the 4 year anniversary of Comic con, the beginning of the ride, 
POUF!

Kristen Stewart has 3 older brothers. she knows all about this behavior.


This behavior is why guys don't like Rob.




An email to me observing Rob at Comic con


 And, yes, god, that 'off the record' part in the interview.



"You are so much more eloquent in your interviews." ,expecting the careful threading around the ego, oh, no, Rob, you're wrong or something. Or shhhhh from the Eclipse commentary. Or tap on the head like with Cronenberg. Good boy.

Kristen says You used to be, bam, virtual slap in the face. You're not what you used to be.
My priorities changed....meaning YOU are what changed my priorities and YOU made me less eloquent. 


Then, almost slap, I just wanna someone to push you off the chair...and then, he doesn't really mean that, in case anyone's wondering. Of course everyone's wondering, but they do not see it as asshole behavior, just goofy Rob or whatever. Cause Rob can do no wrong.Except that he just did, behaved like an idiot on camera for the millionth time and she needs to shrug it off. Rob's not thinking, not giving a shit about anyone but himself. 


Selfish, jealous, insecure....and malicious move.

Here, and this is the Liberty Valance moment as kd plays it perfectly. all mimesis, given away: "All I've ever learned from love," she confesses, is "how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya."  

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? 
_________________________________________________________________________

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?

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