R E C E N T L Y
Deconstructing the Kennedys
Should an economist wear a short, tantalizing black dress to work?
Prozac is for wimps
The nanny trial, "Boogie Nights" and feminist writing about men
Martha Stewart, I salute you
- - - - - - - - - -
A L S O
About Camille Paglia
- - - - - - - - - -
C O L U M N I S T S
Sexpert Opinion
Bestseller Hell
Spice of Life
Free at last?
Right On!
Word by Word
Ask Camille
New Year's wish for the Reverend Al
Sound Salvation
Unzipped
The Awful Truth
|
A S K_C A M I L L E +|+ C A M I L L E+P A G L I A
Dear Camille:
Do you think Unabomber suspect Ted Kaczynski is a product of '60s culture/liberal permissiveness, as some on the right suggest (like one of his victims, David Gelertner)? Or is he just your garden-variety lunatic?
Trapped in the ivory tower Dear Trapped:
Of all the false charges against the 1960s, this has to be one of the most
absurd. Ted Kaczynski, the loathsome coward who recently tried to hang
himself with his underwear in prison and who should have been given cyanide
pills to help him along, is clearly a clumsy, pathetic loner who has more in
common with Anthony Perkins in "Psycho" (1960) than with Peter Fonda in "Easy
Rider" (1969).
Kaczynski as wilted, sociopathic wallflower seems to have sprung from a
hothouse immigrant-family cubicle ruled by dictatorial parents who were the
real objects of his infantile wrath. Of course, smothering, push-pull, piano-lesson-obsessed Polish matriarchs of that kind can also produce a Liberace, so
we have to allow for DNA glitches.
Fleeing from glommy Mommy and cringing from remote, superpotent Dad (the
machine-master male targeted again and again as his victims), Kaczynski feared
women, avoided men and had no sex life apart from his autoerotic play with
his own itty-bitty woodies -- the intricately carved and planed wooden
components that were the signature of his bombs.
His primitive cabin wasn't Thoreau's Zen station but Freud's self-befouling,
still-in-diapers toilet. He was a tedious plagiarist -- getting his anti-tech
vandalism from Charlton Heston's "The Omega Man" (1971) and his bomb themes
from the trust-fund-baby Weathermen, who managed to blow themselves up next to
Dustin Hoffman's Manhattan townhouse. (When only a pinky finger was left from
the latter escapade, the Jefferson Starship penned a paean to its debutante
owner -- "Diana.")
Please notice, yet again, the truth of the Paglia principle as enunciated in
"Sexual Personae": "There is no female Mozart, because there is no female
Jack the Ripper." My theory is that artistic genius and extreme criminality
are forms of deranged abstraction that primarily affect the male brain. Where
are the female Kaczynskis? Women have more sensible ways to express their
frustrations -- like stuffing themselves with fudge-ripple ice cream and
cinnamon buns.
All serial crime, in my opinion, contains a secret sexual symbolism.
Kaczynski is just a pretentious, fuzzy-wuzzy, soured-academic version of Son
of Sam, that clammy nerd who ambushed dating couples. We've seen these losers
come and go -- from pudgy, dough-faced, myopic Mark David Chapman and John Hinckley, with their gaga
killer crushes on pop stars, to gawky Timothy McVeigh, with his 12-year-old
mind and preschool Big Truck complex. When the corrupt Northeastern media
stops putting these toads on magazine covers, maybe we can get the glory out
of scumbag crime.
Listen, fanatics were murdering archdukes, massacring nuns and burning down
the Temple of Ephesus long before the 1960s -- a decade whose monumental
cultural and political achievements far outweigh its horrors.
Dear Camille:
Quentin Tarantino is one white boy who knows how to say "nigger, nigger,
nigger" and get away with it. I am black, and I've not been offended
with his films. Is it a sign of one's cultural maturity when one can
move easily in and out of different ethnic environments and situations
without offense?
Galen Brooks Dear Galen Brooks:
I'm very interested in your defense of Quentin Tarantino, who has been
attacked by director Spike Lee for over-reliance on what Oprah calls the "N-word." When my significant other, Alison Maddex, and I recently saw
Tarantino's latest film, "Jackie Brown," we disagreed on this very issue.
Alison, who was born and lived for many years in Washington, D.C., with its
overwhelmingly black population, found Tarantino's use of the word realistic,
appropriate and amusing. In a rare spurt of political correctness, I was
jarred by it and felt its use excessive.
I'm sympathetic to your eloquent invocation of "cultural maturity" in these
matters, since the same controversies rage in the Italian-American community
over the entertainment industry's constant linking of Italians with the Mafia.
(See my interview with Mario Puzo, author of "The Godfather," in the May 8,
1997, New York Times.) My parents' generation, interested in assimilation,
deeply resented such things, whereas I rather like the idea that my many
enemies can rightly fear being kneecapped! On the other hand, I despise
grotesque ethnic lampoons like "Prizzi's Honor" (1985) -- which couldn't be made,
for example, about Jews. Certain oxes will never be gored in Hollywood.
I think Quentin Tarantino is a major talent, and I was very honored to have
been asked by the New York Film Critics Circle to present him with the award for best
screenplay for "Pulp Fiction" in 1995. However, I must admit disappointment with "Jackie Brown," which was
edited with excruciating badness. For two and a half hours of my precious
time, I expect "Ben-Hur."
While we all keep our fingers crossed that he will not follow the downward
trajectory of another pioneering enfant terrible, Orson Welles, Tarantino has
to be hailed as an actor's director. It's wonderful to see action star Pam
Grier again -- but she had a lot more verve and coruscating charisma talking to
Star Jones recently on ABC's "The View" than Tarantino ever let her show in
the film. And speaking of racial stereotypes, why does Samuel L. Jackson (whom
I never get tired of watching) always have to play mad-dog assassins?
Tarantino's rediscovery of Robert Forster, however, is a real coup. All you
young 'uns out there should know that, when I was in college, Forster made a
sensation among the Warholites of the world with his portrayal of a
smolderingly glamorous soldier as the homoerotic object of Marlon Brando's
attention in John Huston's "Reflections in a Golden Eye" (1967) -- yet another
of those cult films where Elizabeth Taylor storms around like hell on wheels.
Forster will go down in history for his starring role as an amoral TV
cameraman in Haskell Wexler's "Medium Cool" (1969), a prophetic dissection of
America's tabloid soul. And he was just as memorable as a prowling partygoer
in decadent Alexandria in George Cukor's "Justine" (1969) as he was as an Arab
terrorist hijacking an airliner in "The Delta Force" (1986).
I was thrilled when Forster wrote me a fan letter from Los Angeles in the
early 1990s: We had several interesting phone conversations about Hollywood,
politics, feminism and free speech. He's a fascinating, independent-minded
man, so it's no surprise that Tarantino, another superenergetic maverick, was
drawn to him.
Dear Camille:
Comment if you will upon The Cheerleader: Her Role and Symbolism. What
exactly is her function? What do the pompoms mean?
It used to be that the prima ballerinas of France were the mistresses of
the princes. Is this analogous to the modern-day commercial sports
world?
Bewildered Bulls Fan Dear Bewildered:
Over the course of this century, college football pep squads, which used to be
male, gradually gave way to the perky, peppy and now quasi-pornographic
female cheerleader. In my youth, the blond cheerleader occupied the
glittering apex of the high-school social pyramid. It seemed that feminism
might sweep her away, but no, she went professional in a big way with the
Dallas Cowboys at their 1970s, Roger Staubach-era height. In the vampy, post-Madonna 1990s, only retrograde Dworkinite prudes could fail to see that the
cheerleader's sassy physicality is itself a product of modern women's
liberation.
In Paglia terms, the boob-shimmying, tail-wagging, crotch-baring cheerleader
doing her jumps and splits is a prime example of what I call pagan
exhibitionism, a sacred, life-affirming, sensual principle that Judeo-Christianity has never been able to bury. Her vibrating, multicolored pompoms
are the spring flowers of the goddess, breeze-blown promises of eternal
fertility (see Botticelli's "Primavera"). Like manic dandelions, they tickle
and they flail, whipping up the masses into Dionysian enthousiasmos, a frenzied state of
can-do ecstasy that ignites the team to victory.
Prima ballerinas are hard to come by in this get-down strip-club decade, so
yes, the cheerleader is our glorious, half-wholesome, half-carnal, homegrown
nymph. Long may she live and thrive!
N E X T_P A G E | Do I have to come out to my parents?
|
