1160
That’s how many views I have. Or, that’s how many I had the last time I checked so I might have a few more by now. I have seven ‘likes’, I write mock-excitedly. And one thumbs down, I’ll report with a frown.
What does it mean? What does it say of my presentation, “Dr. Strangelove in the 21st century: or how I learned to stopped worrying and love my phone (Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the virus—it’s alternative title since mid-March, for obvious reasons), that no one has, uh…commented? What do I expect? That people will have an opinion, and express it? Firstly, I quibble, it’s not clear what the number represents. A ‘view’ could mean that someone clicked on the video, intrigued by the subject and heading, and watched the slideshow plus clips and commentary in its entirety. A view could also mean that someone clicked on the video, watched and listened for a few seconds, decided that it was dull and therefore clicked away, perhaps to watch a clip from the film with no commentary instead. What did the viewer expect? Just clips from the film, justifying justifiable tributes–“one of the greatest films ever”, is a typical response–with little interest in the commentary? The title (of my talk) portends a satire that—as the informed viewer might think—parallels the satire of the film. Perhaps that’s a pretentious aim, to suggest parallel, which is a kissing cousin to the notion that my presentation and Stanley Kubrick’s great film belong in the same breath. But again, if that thought represents a sample of reaction, why was it not expressed? The internet population is not exactly well known for holding back. Isn’t it the great bastion of uncensored thought, after all? But perhaps that supposition supposes something else: that viewers will care. To write a comment is to make an effort. And if a viewer is known to me, a comment exposes, risks my displeasure if the first displeasure was theirs.
I could drive myself bat-shit crazy with all of these flitting theories. I haven’t, for I am bat-shit crazy for other reasons, yet this thought segues to the early substance of my talk (or perhaps the lack of substance, as my analyst suggests), which focuses upon the silly names of Dr. Strangelove’s characters. I don’t start with the eponymous ex-Nazi scientist played by Peter Sellers, but instead a minor character named Bat Guano, played by veteran character actor Keenan Wyn. See, I thought it wryly amusing that I didn’t know the meaning of Bat Guano for many years, despite being enamored of the name from the film. I simply thought it a silly-sounding pair of words, which betrays that I will sometimes settle for aesthetics and forsake meaning in my patronage of the arts. Still, I was open enough to meaning to notice the term in a James Bond novel, Dr. No; to make the link with the character from Dr. Strangelove, find it funny that I’d been unknowingly amused by the term for at least two decades, and then say to myself something like, oh right…bat shit crazy!
Internal dialogue. That reminds me of a critique I once received of a novel I wrote ten years ago. It was a comment from someone who cared. Too much internal dialogue, they said, without explaining why this was a problem necessarily. Oh well. Anyway, here’s my critique of my bat-shit aside: perhaps too much time was spent in the early part of my talk musing anecdotally upon funny-sounding words. It’s not as if I am famous and can therefore indulge myself knowing that an audience or readership will “bear with me”. I should have gripped the listener with something more directly substantive about the film, about its relevance to 21st century concerns, as I had promised. Had I prepared this talk about two months later than I had, I might have included a bit about so-called Chinese “wet” markets being, uh, bat shit crazy. I’d like to write that concerns about bad taste intervened, but in truth it was hindsight, the arrival of a late-arriving consciousness that had me saying to myself something like, oh right…I could have said that thing about bat shit crazy. In my video’s box of description, I’d promised more than cute personal anecdotes. The listener would get psychoanalytic commentary, a comic impersonation of two (my deep-voiced impression of toxically masculine Jack Ripper, most notably), a few comic asides, plus a musical ending to—again—parallel the film, its sentimentalized climax.
By the time the dense section of my talk begins, which is about ten minutes into it, I might have already lost most of those 1160 viewers. Is dense the same as substantive, you may wonder? Now that you are a few minutes into this blog entry, and have sort of demonstrated that you care, I will bother to recap a thought or two. Firstly (deep breath), I review the psychopathy and underlying neurosis of the film’s Ripper character. I offer that he plus a few others may remind us of some who roam the corridors of power today. Secondly, I suggest that we are as concerned with man-made threats to the planet as we were in 1964, though with more emphasis upon slowly-moving climate change than the quick flashes of nuclear annihilation. I remind that we seem as nervous about the Russians as ever (though again, for slightly different reasons), and lastly—and wearingly for some, maybe—that we are as enslaved to technocracy as ever. This is Kubrick’s most indelible message, I suggest: that we’ve left HAL in charge. However, the Ripper material is somewhat esoteric, focusing upon his defensive rants about fluoridation, which have justified his wanton launch of a nuclear attack, and which conceals an underlying sexual inadequacy, which he sort of confesses to his confidant, the amiable Lionel Mandrake. That he is unable to act upon his remorse and accept Mandrake’s path of redemption (“give me the recall code, Jack!) reveals what Kleinian theory describes as a “negative therapeutic reaction”: an important analytic idea denoting that person who has too much hate, too much persecutory anxiety, that they cannot accept the possibilities of redemption, or of reparative love. They can only seek destruction, firstly of persecutors, and then, finally, of themselves. Hence, Ripper commits suicide.
Is that relevant to our world today? Interesting? Worthy of comment? Who knows? It’s too early, maybe, to determine if my thoughts bridge time and place with popular art, adding anything of note. Perhaps scores of those 1160 viewers are taking in what I’ve said and not so much moved on but…see, I can’t finish the sentence. I just don’t know what they think, so I’m left in a field of my own projections, wondering, fantasizing. Indulging? For one thing, this is no more than what I get for privileging Facebook as my vehicle of promotion. Further, no more than scores of patients who sit with people like me, speaking of their neuroses, which often congeal around the mysteries of others’ thoughts: what do other people think? Do they care? Are they dangerous, and where does that leave me in the equation? And what does he think of me, because he won’t tell me. Not really. There are 1160 people who have clicked on to my Dr. Strangelove talk and slideshow. As far as I know, that’s far more than the number of people who have read any of my self-published books. A handful have indicated that they like my talk, but said nothing more. That’s how it is at the end of a talk that was scheduled for a live presentation in May. For that now cancelled event I’d anticipated applause, some of it enthusiastic, some of it merely polite. The technocratic medium robs me of that lovely ambiguity. Now silence and absence is the end of the talk, and of my story.
Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 