Pre-Halloween post

Pre-Halloween Post:

Concerning Kavanaugh, we've mostly heard arguments which clearly are portraying him as a liar -- that he knew exactly what he had done to Ford, and others, only that he clearly doesn't much care. However, we've also heard considerations that his memory IS actually faulty... that he either has subconsciously adjusted his memories over the years to keep him feeling like a decent person (NYT, I think), so what stands out in his mind now as factual, as TRUE, isn't what actually happened but rather an adjusted account that fits more or less with how society (through film, and other means) has commonly sought to soften-down the connotations of bro-culture, or that he really doesn't remember at all; not a thing. In the "not remembering at all" consideration of Kavanaugh, we're mostly hearing that blackouts mean exactly that -- a blackening out, forever, of any possibility of recall of what you might done when severely inebriated; it's never going to be accessible, but if you're a man it usually means something violent (this is Sarah Hepola's, the author of the book "Blackout," argument in the NYT... and she for some reason feels inclined to persuade us that men always feel remorse -- "tell me I didn't do something terrible"). These are the two considerations I'm hearing. He's either a knowing rapist who thinks women deserve the harm they receive, or he's someone who when he drinks to excess ceases to be "Kavanaugh" and becomes what every man will be when he drinks to the blackout stage -- you nail him as someone who indeed does blackout, and because he's an entitled man, not because he's specifically "Kavanaugh," you've probably got him as a likely rapist... or enough so, anyway, to keep the slime from permanent presence in the highest court.

What is missing here is an argument that we're not to think of who Kavanaugh ESSENTIALLY is, the monster whom he always implicitly is but whom he can be tipped towards being in full when in heavy-drinking-mode, or of him as something all men become if they can be demonstrated to be those who have a need to regularly drink to excess, but of whether at some times he is one person, and at other times, someone completely dissociated, someone completely different, from Kavanaugh, whom one might even think -- fairly -- to give a different, distinct name to, entirely. Dissociated Identity Disorder hasn't come up, but certainly in a recent article in Politico which talks about the duelling versions of Kavanaugh -- "rowdy frat boy" and "church, volunteering[,] [...] chaste" man -- where reconciliation seems not just impossible but misdirected, it's almost being beckoned to. And now with allegations of Kavanaugh being involved in parties where serial mass rape of drugged, passed-out high school women ostensibly commonly occurred, which, with its evocation of an abominable hidden epidemic of destroying under-age people that multitudes of men participated in... of a horrible great giant machine of rape that may have been churning perhaps throughout our country for decades, brings to mind the McMartin trial that we'd thought, safely put to rest, where America was being tipped towards considering that much of their preschool system was full of... rapists, of legitimate demon-people, the image of people containing split-off alternate personalities seems on the verge of once again being pushed towards requiring our serious consideration, even if once again, we don't prove ready to handle really acknowledging that that could indeed be our world.

"Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde," yes, but I don't know many well-known recent novels which explore dissociated personality disorder, but we all know films that do. Usually they're schlock... films like Shyamalan's "Split" that aren't exploring an issue but using a fascinating estimation of what all our brains might do that may even have been disproven as real but which were, when briefly publicly considered as real, revealed as nevertheless a fascinating thing to have considered AS possibly real, to create a kind of adventure with, and that probably work against taking the phenomena seriously by helping relegate it to long-past-over-by-serious-people material that persists owing only to what it continues to emotionally supply sensationalists. But film has done better than this... with the standout film of the 1960s, "Psycho," the most notable example.

And with "Psycho" we see an instance where film, quite some time ago, was onto something we ultimately might even be revealed to have to fall back from considering in our in many ways, our in surely MOST ways, far more woke times. Can we consider that in convicting Kavanaugh we won't actually be convicting him but the personality/person he is when he becomes a psycho-perpetrator, someone whom we might even call by a different name, if our intention is accuracy? Can we consider that in making Kavanaugh a bro, a common-enough type, spread in the millions across the land, we might breach into considering that many, many, many of us have alien people inside us, that WE NEED at times to switch into and which we organize whole organizations, always under more innocuous pretences, to ensure,, and which, owing to their source being trauma suffered upon ourselves, are never innocuous personalities but always devils that hunt for revenge and blood, for scare and fright and humiliation in our victims? Oh how the wind howls!!!

I genuinely wonder if the heroic incidence of "Psycho," combined with our willingness now to thoroughly examine the entirety of bro, the entirety of traditional male culture, might have us understand just how alien a true understanding of our society yet remains for us... that we are in a sense a giant landscape away, still, from being truly woke. The way ahead for film: to look at everything normal as most truly, "the psychopathology of everyday life"? About Psycho, Brody had a terminating line which read, "it’s the difference, of course, between psychopaths and viewers, as well as the connection." Is the way ahead for film to argue more, the psychopaths ARE us... only hidden away, in alternate quarters, and the connection is in fact brain-orchestrated, to be kept severed?