Dismemberment and Embarrassment

A psychologist friend of mine once complained to me that all her clients come to her wanting to get a closer look at themselves. She, on the other hand, has always hoped to gain a little distance. At the time this seemed the smartest thing a psychologist ever said to me, and right now it seems to fit into our discussion. Her point was that her clients' desires to dissect themselves never lead to self-knowledge. The illusion of wholeness achieved through distance (as in the mirror-stage) is at least more comforting, if not more enlightening. One just has to avoid looking too closely.

The two ideas we have running right now, intoxication and dismemberment, remind me of another film about losing body parts, or at least the threat of it. In the spectacularly stylised Omaha Beach landing sequence in (dickflickmaker) Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, a soldier who is missing an arm wanders into the frame. Oblivious to the bullets flying around him, he searches through the bodies littering the beach until he finds the disconnected limb. Picking it up, he drifts aimlessly away. Literally disarmed by the violence around him, he serves for me as an analogy for our most basic fear about what images, especially violence ones, can do to spectators. The belief that violent images can disarm, that is charm, fascinate or intoxicate, drives the popular fear and condemnation of violent representations. Through intoxicating images (or ideas) we might possibly be opened up to suggestions we wouldn't ordinarily entertain, if we remained, so to speak, whole. Maybe this is why we worry so much about letting our children watch something like Lost while encouraging them whole-heartedly to read about it in books like Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl and Lemony Snicket. We don't think of kids as finished human beings, so we fear they might be particularly susceptible to images.

Apropos Poe. I have always been fascinated by the under-current and (as c-franklin pointed out in the quote) sometimes explicit element of embarrassment in his stories. I think there must be some connection between dismemberment and embarrassment. Last night I watched yet another TV program about the dangers of liposuction and cosmetic surgery and couldn't help but connect these poor people's disfigurement, and the accompanying embarrassment, with the ideas about dismemberment and wholeness circulating here.