The Artist and the Scholar

What you doin’ Lars? I want to see art, not waste an evening down at Raymond’s Revuebar. Come on Mr von Trier. Tarkovsky. Bergman. Visconti. These are what I expect from you. Not giggling behind the bike shed with Playboy. Nymphomania! There’s the top shelf for that nonsense.

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After five hours of sex - our minds steaming, our exhausted bodies run out of sweat - we learn an important lesson; Seligman, alas, has not: Joe wants to abort her pleasure not give birth to it. Ditched in a back street alley, then brought back to life in this room - a Yeatsian fairy tower - her existence has crossed the Rubicon - Seligman likes his classical references - and she can no longer return to those sex-crazed days. Only the stories remain. Alas, they condemn her. Rescued from the street, feeling safe in this flat, enthralled by her interlocutor, Joe believes she has at last escaped the treadmill of desire. A life without sex! Such a life Seligman has lived for many years; his passion books not the human body. What she doesn't understand is that a life detached from desire is one that can have no empathy. Seligman, indifferent to the world, whose events are little more than images on a screen, cannot feel others, and is thus unable to penetrate and thus touch their sensibilities. He is only part human; this machine of words, a camera eye, an affectless observer of other people’s joys and miseries; their experiences not felt but abstracted, the material for a theory, a chance to parade his Kant. To those, like Joe, she is a forest fire of feeling, such a place is a quiet harbour by a temperate sea. She dives into the cold waters. 

Seligman repays her stories from the underworld of sex with the wonders of the Fibonacci Sequence, Walton’s Compleat Angler, Bach, the Great Christian schism, Freud, Proust, Mann and a library shelf of science. Here is a place where the personality, detached from the person, its body, its desires - we quote the clever psychologist - lives in a world of pure mind. In this scholar’s room there is no sex because there are no humans; just ideas, images, facts, quotes and those theories. To Joe this is a paradise.

Poor Joe, her presence pollutes this Eden. These stories of sexual adventure can only destroy the naivety of a man like Seligman, who has removed the human element from the civilisation he worships. A collector not a thinker, no artist simply a connoisseur, he is oblivious to the source of art in the feelings and passions of those who create it. Such dangerous characters. Joe, here this night, in the stories she tells, is the artist, bringing the dark powers of creation into the domestic innocence of this enchanted room. Poor deluded fools! Seligman hasn't a chance. This man not robust enough to withstand the demonic power here now before him.

Joe enters the room, where she is to wish her deepest wish…. Good, you recognise the reference. Alas for Joe - more desperate, or more innocent: this world of books looks so safe - she makes that wish. Writer and Scientist were more sophisticated, only too aware of the risks they run. The room is a dangerous place. In the room you must not forget your own history. And you must listen to Stalker; the tales he tells, the warnings he gives. But Joe does not understand Seligman, and overlooks the flimsy fences that hold in his good sense and self-control. To wish your deepest wish you must do so in full comprehension of the consequences, and how they are determined by your own past. Your deepest wish no jump into the vast unknown - a space ride into another galaxy - but a test of character; what remains of mind and body after that long tough trip on the dirt tracks of a life. You want to be rich overnight? But what if you haven’t the resources to handle this much cash? One shot of pure heroin and you’re dead in the hour. I exaggerate? Stalker tells a story of a man who wished to be a millionaire: he died within days of winning the lottery. Stalker gets angry at Writer, he rages at Scientist. This weakness, their indecision, the Scientist’s antipathy, is poisoning the room. As I say, these men are sophisticates. Poor Joe. Silly Seligman. These are innocents. The room not strong enough to contain the influence of Joe’s murky past; she defiles this sacred place even as its beneficence changes her. And Seligman? He is getting emotional. A bad sign.

Her stories though emotionally true may not be factually accurate: ten lovers in a night replacing the actual one or two? These are the truths of fiction not history. All point to the same moral. I had only one desire, Joe tells Seligman, it was to satisfy my cunt. Sexual pleasure had become a passion which turns into an addiction. For years it was fun. It began as a wonderful adventure, exploring the wild side of desire, its fantasies, its risks, the damage one could cause - sex is a tyranny, but we like a tyrant when it is we who occupy the throne. There was her friend Alex, a sexual Columbus extending the geography of the erotic. She has a genius for inventing new ways into sex’s terra incognita; such as the brilliant train-game, where you compete for the most fucks in a single Journey.

So extreme, it is a parody of those first transgressive footsteps when adolescents leave the sentimental securities of home. Alex is a sophisticate; a thinker of sorts, sex an idea she seeks to explore and evangelise. She is a charismatic presence - a leader - who creates the belief upon which others act; Joe a committed member of this sex cult. They are different characters. Both are highly intelligent, but Joe’s intellectual gifts are psychological - she is a marvellous reader of people and situations - giving her a subtlety that Alex lacks. This alters their relationship to sex. What for Alex is a mind game is for Joe a physical phenomenon; although Joe, overwhelmed by Alex’s personality, absorbs her ideas and believes in them like any good disciple. She has a literalism alien to her more sophisticated friend. It is why Joe leaves the cult when Alex breaks its rules of serial monogamy: you are only supposed to fuck a person once. We suspect that for Alex sex is an excuse for transgression; her adolescence a time of experiment and danger before she settles down to some purposive task: office, home, the morality columns of a national newspaper. More mature than Joe she will grow out of this wild adolescent stage when she first finds love; just like that other Alex.... Oh, you didn’t notice that young thug from A Clockwork Orange? What’s it going to be then, eh? Alex to go out with Alex. Alex squared. A couple on the London literary scene.

Free of this charismatic presence Joe yields to her instincts: sex as pure physical sensation, straight pleasure. She has a brilliant few years. And she enjoys all the side-benefits of her own egotism, which expands with her imperial disdain, looking down on the men she fucks, conning them with illusions of love and adoration, playing with their stupid fantasies - wow! your first orgasm, a favourite delusion. Pleasure and knowingness, what more could a young lady want?

Unhinge sex from the feelings. Untie the rope and let the yacht sail out to sea…. It is the perennial fantasy. The young sailor unaware of the estuary’s narrow channel, and those rocks, like sharks, waiting for their prey.

Joe meets the deflowerer years later, and falls in love: it is the way Jerome organises his desk, his tidiness has the aesthetic touch. Soon she is helplessly in love; heated up beyond boiling point by his rejection and marital disappearance. Love. A hot iron on a trembling thigh. It even turns her off sex for a while. An aquarium tank full to the brim of feeling, and plonked on the sideboard, where it is left…for days, weeks, it feels like months, even years. Time slows down; energy seeps away; all interest is lost; life a few dead fish floating in stagnant water. Love. So boring. Oh! Oh! Oh! It is ecstasy! Shacked up in the toilet, humping to the rhythm of the tracks, we’re on a Bullet train to Tokyo: Jerome is back, and cock connecting to cunt a light goes on inside the head. Sex plus love equals the sublime. Alex - we should have known - was right after all.

Organs like machines have a limited lifespan. Like a modern washing machine we give them ten years. One day Joe loses all sensation in her clitoris. It is a devastating loss. Her life has been a cornucopia of orgasms. Now that big horn has run dry. She tries various experiments. All fail. This cunt has packed out, it is dead. Yet that yacht…it hasn’t even got past the harbour wall. Oh Joe! You’re still in love with Jerome, who, with the self-sacrifice of the infatuated, suggests other sexual partners: I am not enough for you, he says; an amateur outstripped by a virtuoso. Innocents. There is a tension between love and sex - they are not so simply separated - which will now wreck their relationship, especially as Joe’s need for orgasm has become compulsive - despite that numb clitoris - leading her to ever greater sexual extremes. It is a return to her adolescence, when sex was almost as much idea as act; but now the ideas lead not to transgressive games but a fucked-up addiction. 

Life changes dramatically. Once she was a queen in command of her kingdom. No longer. She experiments with fucking the alien - two black men who don’t speak her language. No dice. She tries masochism. This works - under the most excruciating pain she achieves orgasm - but it goes against her character: strong, independent and dominant she finds it hard to be at another's mercy. Joe goes back to the usual tricks, playing with multiple partners, enjoying the frisson of her deceptions and their adulteries. It’s not like the old days. These characters are not as young, interesting or exciting as before, when Joe was eighteen, and every sexual steal was a magic act. When you were that young you didn’t care about a lover’s commitments, and anyway sex rarely lasted for more than a weekend. Now men want to marry her. They leave their wives!  Who come around to play the Strindberg scene. Here is Mrs H, with her young children, in Joe’s flat spilling out her pain. The helplessness is horrifying. And for what? A flicker of interest between two legs?

Joe is in decline. This need for a conveyer belt of orgasms eventually alienates Jerome, who cannot live with a woman who has become a mere assemblage of body parts, hammered, welded and screwed all down the production line. With addiction comes indifference: for a few seconds of sexual ecstasy Joe risks the life of their baby. It is a fuck too far. What was once fun has become a reflex and a duty, which both degrades and abuses her; she is becoming haggard, there are sores on her thighs, her vagina bleeds. This once proud queen a serf to that aristocrat addiction. She is travelling to the other side. No longer a master she is a fugitive, who scores her sexual hits in the underworld of sex and entertainment. Inevitably her views on society change; Joe now seeing herself as alien, rebel, even criminal. As the senses numb the desire to feel increases; she becomes insane for sensation. Of course she takes up crime. And anyway, it’s the only job that’ll have her. There are satisfactions. Practicing her virtuosic skills of psychological insight she manipulates her victims with impunity. In the underworld there are no limits to how she can treat a man. Sex now a weapon she uses to destroy others. Not that crime restores the clitoris’s sensitivity. This sex is in the head, which produces unusual effects: to mind-fuck a victim is to see them with a clarity that is impossible if the senses were engaged; Joe seeing even the most pathetic characters in their full humanity. This arouses pity. She feels empathy for a paedophile; just another outsider, one more pervert and addict like herself. 

Outside of respectable society, her body disintegrating, her mind searching for evermore fanatic effects, journey’s end is surely prison or a violent death. Instead, there is a surprise.  Love again. Joe is seduced by Peep, a surrogate step-daughter. This relationship is her undoing, as she is now too weak to withstand the agonies of loss and jealousy when the affair ends. And then, in one of the many coincidences - Joe is an artful storyteller - Jerome returns, and enthrals Peep. It is too much. She tries to kill him, fails, is beaten up and - it is the final degradation - is pissed upon.  

The film begins.

Joe’s first fuck - three in the cunt, five in the arse - is an example of the Fibonacci Sequence, Seligman says. As is her last, he also points out. For Joe it is ground zero of her addiction, her utter degradation. Jerome does the Fibonacci on Peep in full view so as to cause the maximum humiliation to a wife who had wrecked his life on the rocks of sex. That coup de grâce - to be used as an urinal - is the grace note. A mathematical explanation is beside the point. For Joe it signifies the beginning and end of her sexual life. This Fibonacci is revenge, it is nasty and malicious. The first Fibonacci was an act of submission and helplessness, which she has spent a lifetime reversing. And so it goes on. A picaresque novel turned into an academic treatise, of a high quality, for sure, but utterly beside the point. Alex’s train-game was not some exemplar of bait. No Isaak Walton this. No! It was an adventure; the excitement of risk, and that feeling of power: these young girls ruled that train. Screwing three different lovers at the same time is not an aesthetic pleasure - on a par with Bach - but a need for sexual variety, with its sensual stimulation. A world of the senses is replaced by abstract theories that while intellectually intoxicating do not really explain them. Seligman’s stories are fairy tales. Joe is explicit: you explain away all the bad. We are more precise: Seligman filters out the life.

When Joe mentions the nutcracker - an instrument used to break a foetus’s skull - Seligman turns away: he cannot listen to the details of the abortion. He is angry at Joe’s sympathy for the paedophile. The tale of the sadist makes him uncomfortable. Don’t tell me about these ugly things! There are truths too painful to think about; better read Walton or listen to a Brandenburg Concerto. In a telling remark he accuses Joe of being Far Right. It is because she calls a black man a negro, carefully describes the horrors of abortion, and portrays, with precision, the fragility of a child fancier. The world should be beautiful. It isn’t, and so he hides himself away in books, records and fine liberal sentiments. This is the gap - it is unbridgeable - between the connoisseur and the artist. 

Going deeper into night the stories grow darker, and the balance in the conversation changes; Joe becomes the teacher, Seligman her student. Joe has experienced life. Her interlocutor runs away from it. When Joe says she is a bad person she is stating a fact. She will accept none of Seligman’s sentimental prattle about secular humanism. A human being is a moral animal, whose actions - how we treat other people - will decide our moral polarity. Joe has used others as objects of her own pleasure, with no thought for their feelings; plastic bottles not even worth throwing in the bin. This is immoral. It is bad. Risking a baby’s life for an orgasm is bad. Hurting people is bad. Crime isn’t for the angels. To try to kill someone is an evil act. Are you listening to me Seligman? 

The night fading into morning Seligman is finding it ever harder to explain away sin. Nevertheless, at the last, he appears to triumph; a tired Joe refuses to challenge him, when he mentions some humanist cliché. He has won! You are my first friend, she says. Here is a person to whom she can talk about everything, and who understands her, in his own curious, somewhat opaque way. I will live like you, she decides.

A mistake. Seligman is outside her range of experience. This is one character whom Joe, who has known and manipulated so many, can never understand.

Seligman hasn't grasped the physical side of Joe’s experiences. He doesn't feel them. They have no quotidian content, are but examples of some aesthetic or intellectual idea. An abortion is a bland abstraction - a woman’s choice - that confirms his own humanity. It is why Joe insists on the physical details, its ugliness and pain undermine such insouciance. For Seligman ideas only are real. Joe’s dark stories undercut the reality of these ideas, which in typical fashion falsify life; in Seligman’s world there are no power plays, crime, or sexual perversion. His ideas are less about knowing the world than keeping it at a distance. Hazlitt describes such a character well.

Good-nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all the virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition. A good-natured man is, generally speaking, one who does not like to be put out of his way; and as long as he can help it, that is, till the provocation comes home to himself, he will not. He does not create fictitious uneasiness out of the distresses of others; he does not fret and fume, and make himself uncomfortable about things he cannot mend, and that no way concerns him, even if he could: but then there is no one who is more apt to be disconcerted by what puts him to any personal inconvenience, however trifling; who is more tenacious of his selfish indulgences, however unreasonable; or who resents more violently any interruption of his ease and comforts, the very trouble he is put to in resenting it being felt as an aggravation of the injury. A person of his character feels no emotions of anger or detestation, if you tell him of the devastation of a province, or the massacre of the inhabitants of a town, or the enslaving of a people; but if his dinner is spoiled by a lump of soot falling down the chimney, he is thrown into the utmost confusion, and can hardly recover a decent command of his temper for the whole day. He thinks nothing can go amiss, so long as he is at his ease, though a pain in his little finger makes him so peevish and quarrelsome, that nobody can come near him. Knavery and injustice in the abstract are things that by no means ruffle his temper, or alter the serenity of his countenance, unless he is to be the sufferer by them; nor is he ever betrayed into a passion in answering a sophism, if he does not think it immediately directed against his own interest.  (On Good-Nature, in Selected Writings, edited by Ronald Blythe)

Seligman is oblivious to the consequences of his own comfort, this terrible selfishness that empties life of all human contact. Living wholly in his mind he is happy there. The pain of abortion? He utters the magic words - a woman’s choice - and poof! it vanishes in a puff of conceptual smoke. This is indifference, a lack of care.

Part one is a tale of young adventure, its fun and excitements. Seligman easily turns such a life into theories and analogies; for Joe’s felicity, her picture of sexual freedom and female autonomy, melds seamlessly with his own beliefs, the liberal commonplaces of the day. This conversation little different from a book he would read and elucidate; where sex is reduced to a fine phrase, a well-written scene or a piquant case history. When part one ends he puts down the novel after an evening’s entertainment. 

This is the sunny side of the film.

All change in part two. A sexual adventure has become a nightmare ride through hostile territory. The Amazon cannot be explored with the British Library on our backs. In this terrain Seligman’s ideas are lost amongst the underbrush, where wild animals ravage them, and Indian tribes - in small ferocious wars - kill the few that remain.

Knowledge is Seligman’s religion. His intellect its cathedral. Joe’s stories undermine this liberal humanism, where a metaphysical conception of Man has replaced that of the Christian God. Seligman tries to defend the nave, with its fan-ceiling of sentimentality. He will not let the object of worship - Man - be abased. Joe adds analysis to the picaresque. The drunks, perverts and sadists invade the chancel…he holds them back with platitudes.

Miraculously the cliché wins. At the end of her tales the riff-raff trudge out of the church, having promised reform and attendance at the Sunday sermon; some even agree to run the white elephant stall at the jumble sale. Joe has taken a vow of celibacy. 

The European artist has sold out to Hollywood.

On a wall there is a Rublev icon. It reminds us of Tarkovsky, and that explosion of colour at film’s end, the victory of art and the spirit over life’s horrors.

What a bastard! He's playing with us. Lars hasn’t succumbed to the Hollywood dollar; while he raids the great Russian for images and motifs not ideas or moralities.

The reservoir is leaking: Joe has engaged Seligman’s emotions. All his feelings are in his ideas, and when Joe forces him to defend them the emotion they contain is released. At first circling around the ideas, gradually, and under sustained attack, these feelings flow into other parts of his being, to eventually enter his mind and flood his sensibility. Then, when alone in his room, the emotions fuse with Joe’s images - he is watching a porno film for the first ever time - and this world of pure idea collapses: his head now full of sex. That distance between life and concept, mind and body, is fading fast…. Seligman is consumed by feeling, passion, an uncontrollable desire…there is a leak in the earthworks; thin, long fissures strike lightening down the dam’s retaining wall…. Poor Seligman, his mind a crumbling parapet over which his emotions waterfall.

It is still night. Scheherazade has run out of stories.

Seligman walks into the bedroom, a virgin on heat. Joe thought she had found a friend, someone free of sexual desire. Alas, she has not understood this man. Seligman is too disassociated from humanity to feel the normal sympathies. A hermit riddled with inhumanity, he lives in the castle of culture high up on the hill. By weakening this culture - his castle is full of artefacts and abstractions not people - she has created a sex fiend. Lacking the normal sexual experience, its restraints and knowledge, Seligman lacks, at that first throb of desire, any sexual control; the Arctic or the Tropics, there is no temperate zone for him. Taking his cue from Joe, his only teacher, his feelings, when unleashed, are heavily sexualised: he empathises as a cock with a cunt. Seligman can only copy Joe’s emotional topography, its erect hillocks and sweaty valleys; the spiritual seams and folds that lie underneath are too deep for him to penetrate. No miner this; a mere scholar. It is still night. The stories are over. Time to rip off those knickers….

It is the ultimate sacrilege: not to understand a human being, when they have exposed themselves to you. For Joe it is less a betrayal than a confirmation of the world’s obtuseness and her own alienation. He did not listen. Then he abused her trust. She is alone.

Here is a story of the artist and the scholar.1 Speaking the same language, the artist is misled into thinking she is understood. It is not so. To the artist stories have a meaning beyond the words; and she expects others to touch their spirit, feel the fable’s magic. At first she is beguiled by this man’s interpretations, they are so subtle and clever. What she overlooks is that they have nothing to do with life, this art she has created. To the scholar everything is words. And when the words go there is nothing, save this trembling body, its pressure of desire. The scholar has no soul. The artist has too much. Joe shoots Seligman. This is just. It is fair. He promised a paradise, where she would be healthy and happy. Instead, he caught an infectious disease. She shoots him. The only remedy.

(Review: Nymphomaniac)

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 1. Or the therapist and the patient.