In the previous post, I said that my methodology is anecdotal. This can be somewhat problematic because it means I sometimes talk about people other than myself. The girl I call "Jess" I call Jess because it would be immoral to use her real name; I feel awkward talking about Jon Stewart because it seems so crazy to say that I was imaginary friends with him for such a long time but it seems to me important to share. I sometimes think of my madness as a kind of mystical experience, that taught me things worth sharing, and this is why I mention him by name. I could just say that I was imaginary friends with a television personality but this wouldn't be enough; I feel that many readers will have been watchers of The Daily Show and, by saying that I often imagined conversing with Jon in my head, that we were friends, I say something about myself.
In the previous post I discussed how, during an intense episode over the summer of 2009 and 2010, I was in a triangular relationship with these two, Jon and Jess. There have been many theories of desire, the most famous being that of Freud's, but a lesser known but still interesting theory is the one devised by philosopher and anthropologist Rene Girard. Girard argued that desire is mimetic and invented the notion of a triangle of desire. The three vertices of the triangle are the subject, the object and the mediator. The mediator desires the object and the subject learns to desire the object by imitating the mediator. Because both subject and mediator desire the same object, Girard argued, this can lead to mimetic rivalry and often violence. Girard proposes that this violence and the strategies required to mitigate such violence is at the root of all culture and even language itself.
Girard's theory is interesting but is it true? I don't think so – but it interests me because, particularly over that summer of 2009 and 2010, as I have said before, I was involved in a kind of triangle. It would be tempting to see this as a Girardian triangle in which I was the subject, Jess was the object and Jon the mediator. But this does correspond very accurately to what actually happened. When I first met Jess, and I'm talking here about the real girl rather than the one I imagined I was talking with in my mind later, and fell for her, I wasn't imitating anyone else's desire. I fell for her because she was smart, cool, pretty and also liked T.S Eliot. When Jon became involved he was an intermediary, a go-between, an imaginary best friend who could recognise and validate my relationship with Jess. Although in this story I was writing in my mind, he was as capable as me of recognising how loveable she was, Jon himself did not compete with me for Jess. In fact, Jon had his own girl, a half Native-American, half black woman he'd met at a buffet. He'd had a mid-life crisis and had left his wife for her but, towards the end of that summer, Jess and I persuaded Jon to leave this girl and return to his wife.
So I don't think Girard's theory is a satisfactory account. To put it simply, at this particular time in my life, I desperately needed a straight best friend and wing-man, and a girl to love. In a way Jon was a role model, not a mediator – I did not learn my love for Jess from him, it was more as if he learned to love Jess from me.
Girard's triangle and love triangles generally relate to sexuality and I would like to propose something now relevant to the treatment of the 'sexually muddled'. As I said before, I felt, when I first became a patient of the Mental Health Service, that I had been 'diagnosed' homosexual. This was appalling for me at the time and generally I just tried to put it out of my mind because I couldn't bear to think about it and because I didn't know how to correct this mistake. You'd think it would be simple to rectify an error like this but in fact it isn't. In 2008, I received 'therapy' of a sort from a middle aged Scottish nurse. At one of my first sessions with her she said something like, "I should be a young beautiful woman!" At the time I had no idea why she said this – I thought we would be talking about my parents' divorce when I was seven, that this was the proper topic of psychological therapy. I didn't understand why her looks would be relevant. Of course, what I know now and sort of knew then, was that she thought I was sexually muddled and obviously believed that the best way to treat sexually muddled men is to present them with beautiful female therapists and hope transference will cure them of their homosexual inclinations. This may be a common misperception among a lot of mental health professionals – but it is incredibly stupid. I wasn't sexually muddled but I was ill and I was in a terrible way under siege by those around me. I didn't need to be exposed to hot women to be 'cured'. What I really needed was a straight male friend who knew I was straight.
In 2012 and 2013, as I said in the previous post, the real Jess experienced a long awful period of psychosis. I sensed somehow the crisis she was going through, that she was on the verge of ego-death, that she might go over to the other side, and thought I should try to help her. Aside from reentering the service again to say that I was straight, I would send her song suggestions every day, the one to which she eventually replied being "Perfect Day" by Lou Reed – but I didn't really know what I was doing. My efforts to help her were complicated, obstructed, by the fact that I didn't just want her to be straight, I wanted her to be mine. Jealousy was a significant component in my feelings about her. But I didn't succeed in 'saving' her and the reason I didn't succeed was fundamentally because I was the wrong gender. Jess didn't need a man saying he loved her to straighten her out. She needed a straight female best friend and this was precisely what she didn't have.
If any readers of my blog have also read the film I wrote about her, The Hounds of Heaven, you'll have noticed that the Jess of that film has only one female friend, her key worker, and this woman is just a fake friend, not a real one. In the writings of the real Jess since, I have noticed that she has, now, an ambivalence towards women, at once a yearning for female friends and an aversion towards them, an indication of the cruelty inflicted upon her.
People need friends of the same gender but if you're in a situation where all such relationships are viewed as suspect, how can one acquire them?
At this point I would like to change the topic but only slightly, and talk about another film I wrote, way back in 2001, when I was only twenty-one. Bear with me reader. It was a comedy called Bruce Sells Out and was a modern riff on Faust indebted to both Marlowe's and Goethe's original plays. The protagonist of the film, an unsuccessful stand-up comedian, encounters and befriends the Devil after a night of dying on stage and general drunkenness and debauchery; shortly after he meets the Devil he somehow acquires a girlfriend. Much of the film shows him torn between his friendship with the Devil, who lives in congnito in Auckland running various tinnie-houses and a multitude of other business ventures, and his relationship with Kathy. The film thus presents a kind of love triangle although Bruce does not tell either party that he loves him or her - in fact his relationship with the Devil is fraught, tense, the Devil being, of course, the Devil and thus not to be trusted. At plot point 2, Bruce accidentally kills Kathy after an argument, enlists the Devil's help in disposing of the body and together they drive north to Cape Reianga to dump the body in the sea. Towards the end of the film, having reached Cape Reianga and emotional rock-bottom, Bruce decides to sell his soul to the Devil to bring Kathy back to life and the film ends with Kathy reviving, Bruce finally telling her that he loves her, the dissolution of his friendship with the Devil and Bruce and Kathy driving off into the sunset. It is a film, at its heart, about a man who sells his soul for love.
The film was obviously playing with issues relating to sexuality but I wasn't unconsciously hinting at any underlying issues I had; it wasn't 'symptomatic' in the psychoanalytic sense. I was playing with these ideas consciously, deliberately. I was taking a risk but I knew I was taking a risk. In the film, Bruce starts sleeping with Kathy almost immediately but his friendship with the Devil is entirely non-sexual. So even then I knew the difference between sex and love.
I wrote the film as part of a screenwriting paper at University. About a year after I wrote the film, I submitted a treatment of it to an international competition. In 2003, I pitched it to a production company and it was accepted into pre-production. Then, shortly after, I was watching Letterman and saw him interview Jim Carrey. Carrey was there to promote the film Bruce Almighty. I felt a sinking feeling. I thought to myself, "Holy shit, they've stolen my idea!" It was the first moment in my life when I experienced real paranoia. I got in touch with my production company and asked them to withdraw my film from consideration – my film was no longer original. Bruce Almighty had rendered my film derivative. Bruce Almighty itself didn't seem like a obvious plagiarism of Bruce Sells Out – the main things it had in common with my film were the title and the fact that it was a comedy with religious themes – yet, when I watched it, all the way through I could detect hints of my original script. It seemed that the writers had taken my film and inverted everything, replacing the Devil with God and having Bruce's wife Grace bring Bruce back to life (via blood transfusion) rather than the reverse. I can't be sure whether someone, or several people, in Hollywood had read my script and ripped it off, but I do know that the writers of Bruce Almighty were paid a million dollars for it, the highest sum then ever expended for a screenplay. I have talked about it with my father since, a lawyer, and he has pointed out that there is no copyright on ideas and so, even if I had proof that people had pirated my film, there is nothing I could do about it.
My film was really a Gnostic film written many years before I knew anything about Gnosticism. God did not feature it it at all– in fact, early on, the Devil says something like, "God buggered off two-thousand years ago. Today there's only me." I was presenting a universe where the Devil existed and participated in the world but God did not. In moments of madness later in life, I would often wonder if the film had some significance that I hadn't realised when I wrote it. Sometimes in 2013 I would wonder if the illness I was suffering was a divine punishment for having written something sacrilegious. At other times I would wonder if the Devil in my film was really God in disguise – some commentators of Marlowe's Faust have pointed out that according to conventional church doctrine it is impossible to sell one's soul because all souls belong to God.
Bruce Sells Out also featured in the psychotic episode I experienced over the summer of 2009 and 2010. Somehow both Jess and Jon obtained copies and read it. When Jess read it, she particularly enjoyed the bit where Kathy suggests Bruce see a psychologist and Bruce says something like, "What are they going to tell me? My mother dropped me down a well when I was seven – thus my obsession with buckets!" Jon for some reason read it secretly in the basement of his house on New Year's Eve. Jon's connection with my screenplay, it became apparent, was that he had been involved with the Hollywood writers who had plagiarised it; he was tormented by feelings of guilt about this. But, even more than the fact that he had done wrong to someone who would later become his friend, he saw himself in the film. Was he Bruce, though, the failed stand-up comic? Or was he the Devil?
I feel that I should point out, perhaps redundantly, that in real life Jon Stewart's favourite singer is Bruce Springsteen.
So this notion of a triangle in which a man is split between a man and woman has been with me for some time. But I don't think it is a Girardian triangle. I think that the idea that desire is mimetic is specious, superficially attractive but utterly wrong. In my life, when I have fallen for someone, it has never been because I was imitating someone else. I always fell for the person. And if I can say one more thing – I detested Bruce Almighty. I think my film was much better.
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