Are dreams pornographic by their very nature? Flat worlds populated by simulacra? Simulacra with a singular, dictatorial source? But there was also a tension, something unresolved, in the way he responded to her questions (too lewd to be reproduced here). The eerie hesitancy of dreaming, of seducing oneself, or wishing to believe. But not only this.
The video game mind is infiltrating our subconscious like never before. As is our conflicted desire to "break free" of the simulacra, to be wounded by the Real. Soldiers in Iraq dream of exploding computers, and conversations with Bin Laden. In these conversations, Bin Laden is rational, human, and strikingly banal. Almost a sort of father figure, even. Mumia writes of the father-hunger among his fellow prisoners. But back in the tanks and Humvees, musical mantras provide a pre-emptive emotional shield, a necessary immunization against the horrors of the Real. Pre-emptive mourning. Eminem as modern day opera.
A pornographic gaze - what might this mean? A gaze that constructs the other as the same? As somehow flat, voyeuristic, or parasitic? A surreal glaze that strips the other of some crucial element of unpredictability. A sovereign gaze. Perhaps a gaze oblivious to and ignorantly devoid of genuine terror.
One thing that has always irked me about W: he has not the slightest appreciation for real terror. Terror, incidentally, is not a nation-state but a profound philosophical condition or sensitivity to which Dubya is hopelessly and willfully oblivious. Dubya for instance, would not begin to grasp the subtleties of a film like Berman's Hour of the Wolf, much less the allegorical significance and complexity of the Bible.
There is a scene in Bergman's film where Johan - the brooding artist haunted by his past - refuses to watch a puppet show being put on for the benefit of an inebriated, malicious, bourgeois gathering. The scene is of a solitary figure, arms raised, in front of temple steps. The music, I believe, is Mozart's "Magic Flute." While the other guests gaze in utter rapture - suddenly silenced into pious awe - the camera pans to Johan's face and ever so briefly zooms in a notch. His eyes are closed, his gaze cast downward. He is listening. The camera shifts to the puppeteer, who is intensely watching the watchers. The only gaze that is not pornographic is Johan's.
Afterwards, when pressed by the puppeteer, Johan gives a little speech, which has perhaps the ring of (Bergman) autobiography or manifesto to it:
"I call myself artist for lack of a better name. In my creative work nothing is implicit...except compulsion....I've felt megalomania waft about my brow...but I think I'm immune. I've only to consider the utter unimportance of art...in the world of men...and I come back to earth with a bump. But the compulsion remains."
The guests respond immediately with gushing applause - that time-honored pre-emptive bourgeois weapon against painful truth. One of the women hangs about Johan's neck. Her fingernail catches in his cheek or neck and makes him bleed. She uses the charade of repentence, wiping the blood away, to remain lecherously hanging about his neck. (A gesture, we later learn, deeply entwined with another quite Biblical, founding murder scene that I won't go into here.)
Finally, recall the look on Veronica Vogler's face, when Johan's Hitchcockian dream is interrupted by the recurring sinister laughter of the (now quite vampirish) crowd.
As David Foster Wallace puts it: "It's the sort of expression that looks devastating in a photograph but becomes awkward when it's maintained over time" (Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, 62).
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