>> I am not a Freudian, yet I wonder what the knock on catharsis is,
if, like Aristotle, one believes that cathartic experiences >> make us
less (and not more) likely to act out our forbidden desires in real life.
As the Nixon commission on pornography
>> concluded, male sex offenders were less exposed to pornography than the
average man; there might be a lot to be said for >> catharsis.
i hardly meand to knock catharsis [aristotle was smarter than i
am] and
don't think i said anything that might be read that way . . . but
it seems
to me that the clinical view of catharsis, that is actaully creates healthy
[whatever that is] people and cultures, is a non-aristotelian
idea, and
actually a matter of fact . . . unfortunately it is a fact that
remains
indeterminate for we hae not yet devised any reliable way of
determining
whether porn makes us more sexually aggressive or horror more
prone to
violence in our real behavior . . . i would not want to defend
those genres
[which i quite like] in those terms
i also have some problems with the claim that
>> Mulholland Drive is a great film from my perspective, in part because
it compels you
>> think about it...the narrative thread is so skewed that you can
only make sense of it by doing so.
by this logic any text so screwed up that you had to drive
yourself crazy
sorting it out would be preferable to a cogently made case . . .
by extension
my students' critical papers, which really do make me crazy at
times because
of their incoherence, would be preferable to the kind of discourse
that
occurs on this list-serv . . . or, if we need to distinguish
between critical and
what is called "imaginative" work, that the creations of students
in a
poetry writing seminar is worth more than the work of great poets
. . .
sorry . . . i don't buy that . . . it's not the surface incohrence
itself that
makes work valuable; it's what more powerful coherence emerges
when one sees it clearly . . . so far as i can tell no such
coherence
emerges from lynch . . . nor do i see how BLUE VELVET is
insightful
on the subject of scopophilia; sure the protagonist takes great
but
comnflicted pleasure in looking at sexual behavior, but that's
nothing special . . . and the way that pleasure is developed and
treated in the film seem to me little more than grand guignol
mike
PS -- good lord!! . . . i'm getting very argumentative, almost
hostile i fear . . . wonder why . . . in any case i apologize if
i've offended; i'm just trying to sort things out clearly
