Soft focus? The glaze and "the gaze"? Sheer ideology!
Soft focus, the veil, the covering, the glamour, hiding a reality, and substituting itself for the reality, has an economic and political aspect, and identified by Roland Barthes when discussing "Ornamental Cookery".
Set in aspic . . .
In Mythologies, a 1957 book by Roland Barthes, consisting of a collection of essays taken from Les Lettres nouvelles, examines the tendency of contemporary social value systems to create modern myths. Barthes also looks at the semiology of the process of myth creation, updating Ferdinand de Saussure's system of sign analysis by adding a second level where signs are elevated to the level of myth. He writes thus on:
"Ornamental Cookery"
The weekly Elle (a real mythological treasure) gives us almost every week a fine colour photograph of a prepared dish: golden partridges studded with cherries, a faintly pink chicken chaudfroid, a mould of crayfish surrounded by their red shells, a frothy charlotte prettified with glacé fruit designs, multicoloured trifle, etc.
The 'substantial' category which prevails in this type of cooking is that of the smooth coating: there is an obvious endeavour to glaze surfaces, to round them off, to bury the food under the even sediment of sauces, creams, icing and jellies. This of course comes from the very finality of the coating, which belongs to a visual category, and cooking according to Elle is meant for the eye alone, since sight is a genteel sense. For there is, in this persistence of glazing, a need for gentility. Elle is a highly valuable journal, from the point of view of legend at least, since its role is to present to its vast public which (market-research tells us) is working-class, the very dream of smartness. Hence a cookery which is based on coatings and alibis, and is for ever trying to extenuate and even to disguise the primary nature of foodstuffs, the brutality of meat or the abruptness of sea- food. A country dish is admitted only as an exception (the good family boiled beef), as the rustic whim of jaded city-dwellers.But above all, coatings prepare and support one of the major developments of genteel cookery: ornamentation. Glazing, in Elle, serves as background for unbridled beautification: chiseled mushrooms, punctuation of cherries, motifs of carved lemon, shavings of truffle, silver pastilles, arabesques of glacé fruit: the underlying coat (and this is why I called it a sediment, since the food itself becomes no more than an indeterminate bed- rock) is intended to be the page on which can be read a whole rococo cookery (there is a partiality for a pinkish colour).Ornamentation proceeds in two contradictory ways, which we shall in a moment see dialectically reconciled: on the one hand, fleeing from nature thanks to a kind of frenzied baroque (sticking shrimps in a lemon, making a chicken look pink, serving grapefruit hot), and on the other, trying to reconstitute it through an incongruous artifice (strewing meringue mushrooms and holly leaves on a traditional log-shaped Christmas cake, replacing the heads of crayfish around the sophisticated bechamel which hides their bodies). It is in fact the same pattern which one finds in the elaboration of petit-bourgeois trinkets (ashtrays in the shape of a saddle, lighters in the shape of a cigarette, terrines in the shape of a hare).This is because here, as in all petit-bourgeois art, the irrepressible tendency towards extreme realism is countered - or balanced – by one of the eternal imperatives of journalism for women's magazines: what is pompously called, at L'Express, having ideas. Cookery in Elle is, in the same way, an 'idea' - cookery. But here inventiveness, confined to a fairy-land reality, must be applied only to garnishings, for the genteel tendency of the magazine precludes it from touching on the real problems concerning food (the real problem is not to have the idea of sticking cherries into a partridge, it is to have the partridge, that is to say, to pay for it).This ornamental cookery is indeed supported by wholly mythical economics. This is an openly dream-like cookery, as proved in fact by the photographs in Elle, which never show the dishes except from a high angle, as objects at once near and inaccessible, whose consumption can perfectly well be accomplished simply by looking. It is, in the fullest meaning of the word, a cuisine of advertisement, totally magical, especially when one remembers that this magazine is widely read in small-income groups. The latter, in fact, explains the former: it is because Elle is addressed to a genuinely working-class public that it is very careful not to take for granted that cooking must be economical. Compare with L'Express, whose exclusively middle-class public enjoys a comfortable purchasing power: its cookery is real, not magical. Elle gives the recipe of fancy partridges, L'Express gives that of salade niçoise. The readers of Elle are entitled only to fiction; one can suggest real dishes to those of L'Express, in the certainty that they will be able to prepare them.
An aesthetic governed by the "diaphanous", a "see through", "sheer ideology" . . .
The girl next door talks dirty . . .
"So... I only told you how I look in my shirt, but, that's just the beginning. I also know that you love it when I talk about my big, juicy breasts. Well, how about we start playing around with the sheer chemise and see how hot my tits will look in it. Hhmm You know, I just hate wearing bras when I'm home. It just feels much better letting my boobs move freely under my clothes when I walk around the house. So... right now, I'm still looking in the mirror and if I just... shake my shoulders a little, like that, my tits look so hot when they wiggle around. Can you picture that? They almost want to slip out of my chemise. See, I'm... still shaking them and they bump into each other, just like that. Hmm, this is fun. Oh... I can even hear them clapping, now. I love to hear that, it's so sexy. Hhmm all that chest meat, just bumping into each other... Can you hear it? What if I move my phone down there . . ."
Reason and philosophy tearing the veil from truth
Enlightenment?
This is a detail from the frontispiece of the Encyclopédie (1772). It was drawn by Charles-Nicolas Cochin and engraved by Bonaventure-Louis Prévost. The work is laden with symbolism: The figure in the centre represents truth—surrounded by bright light (the central symbol of the Enlightenment).
Two other figures on the right, reason and philosophy, are tearing the veil from truth.Re:LODE Radio considers Playboy to reflect aspects of ongoing social change (or turmoil) in capitalist societies, and in its primary influences, patriarchal.
This type of patriarchy and social agenda are more in line with the so-called "freedoms" so beloved of neoliberals, and the dominant version of global capitalism, freedom to express, to choose (but in a market skewed toward the pursuit of private profit), to make money etc. A key promise of the enlightenment was the possibility of "emancipation", but social values shaped by aspirations in a consumer society, also created new "constraints". Wealth and glamour became the goal rather than self actualisation and the emancipatory potential has withered in a cold wind. Meanwhile gendered roles were mobilised and defined by materials such as in these "public information" films. These propaganda efforts sought to promote the commodification of the suburban woman into a "thrifty wife", and co-opt the "family" as the antidote to the spectre of communism "at home".
The woman who runs the home is . . .These obviously propagandistic films run in a seamless sequence in an ongoing production and process of acculturation. Its smoothness, its fairytale attractiveness, enables the efficient internalisation of an oppressive ideology. An ideological programme developed over the previous two hundred years in what we may call "conduct" literature. This literature, often written by men for women to read, and for their "instruction", reinforces the existing and regressive gender definitions of "economic man" and his helpmate, "domestic woman".
The hot wife starter kit
Gender related patterns of power don't shift much, but the terms of the fantasy are increasingly wide open, and freely applied in the retrograde and regressive evolution of things, as in this example of a 2015 conduct book advising readers on how to get:
Your Sexy Back
Dear Overwhelmed and Under-appreciated Wife, it’s hard to be a grownup these days, especially when you’re trying to hold together a home and family, and even more so when you’ve got kids. As women, it’s our nature to put our families before ourselves, and often to our own detriment.
Despite our best intentions, marriage often causes this odd phenomenon I like to call Mrs. Scrunchie-Sweats. Whether you had kids or you just got busy with the daily grind, one day, you look the mirror and you notice something:
Your standards have changed. You’re walking around in the world wearing sweats and a scrunchie. In public. And you’re justifying it to yourself, most likely thinking you’ve got more important things to worry about than the way you look or carry yourself.
Or maybe you’re just not putting yourself together like you used to, and you might even think that’s what you’ve got to deal with when you’re a busy married woman - you’re not the only person you’ve got to worry about, right?
But something inside you feels a little twinge of jealousy every time you see a woman who seems totally put-together. You know the type - she makes “having it all” look like a breeze - and she looks freaking fabulous while she does it.
Discover the closely-guarded secrets of the hottest, most amazingly sexy women in the world- the simple-to-apply principles they use in their day-to-day lives that separate you from the sexy, stylish wife you want to be.
Get an inside look into why The Hot Wife Guide will work for you, and find out how a taking a few minutes for yourself each day can change your entire life. With this free starter kit, you’ll learn some of the great tips from The Hot Wife Guide.
The trophy wife?
The marriage of former Playboy Playmate Anna Nicole Smith to oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall was widely followed by the US mass media as an extreme example of this concept. At the time of their marriage, he was 89 years old and she was 26.The objectification implicit in the notion of the trophy wife, a wife who is regarded as a status symbol for the husband, is not far from the explicit commodification involved in the hotwifing fantasy of a husband showing off and sharing his “hot wife.” The term is misogynist in its use, derogatory or disparaging, implying that the wife has value only in her physical attractiveness, a value that requires substantial expense in maintaining her appearance, and does very little of substance beyond remaining attractive.
Nostalgia as retrogressive
The "retro" appeal of the archive film material of 1950's suburbia in the twenty-first century generates a sense of nostalgia, that enables an invented version of what was a partial reality, get in the way of understanding what the cultural, economic and political shifts actually were in the 1950's and 60's. And this is reflected, perhaps, in the Playboy archive too.
The idea of "the fifties" in America remains as an ideological construct for the present day, and occasionally mobilised to re-shape a shared understanding of a history that's a selective, or false, version of reality.
Sexual and self-actualisation, emancipation and Revolution?
In the context of culture and entertainment rather than history, the director of the American film from 1998, Pleasantville, Gary Ross explained that:
"This movie is about the fact that personal repression gives rise to larger political oppression...That when we're afraid of certain things in ourselves or we're afraid of change, we project those fears on to other things, and a lot of very ugly social situations can develop."
The fantasy plot of this film features High-schoolers David and his sister Jennifer. David spends most of his time watching Pleasantville, a black-and-white 1950's sitcom about the idyllic Parker family. One evening while their mother is away, David and Jennifer fight over the television, breaking the remote control.A mysterious TV repairman arrives and, impressed by David's knowledge of Pleasantville, gives him a strange remote control before departing. When they use the remote control, David and Jennifer are transported into the black-and-white world of Pleasantville, finding themselves in the Parkers' living room. David tries to reason with the repairman, communicating through the Parkers' television, but the repairman declares that the world of Pleasantville is better than the real world and they should be lucky to live in it.Forced to act as the show's characters Bud and Mary Sue Parker, David and Jennifer explore the wholesome but peculiar town – fire does not exist and firefighters merely rescue cats from trees, and the citizens of Pleasantville are unaware that anything exists outside of their town, as all roads circle back with no escape. David tells Jennifer they must stay in character and not disrupt the town. Trying to maintain the show's plot, Jennifer dates a boy from school but has sex with him, a concept unknown to him and everyone else in town.Slowly, parts of Pleasantville change from black-and-white to color, including flowers and the faces of people who experience new bursts of emotion and foreign concepts such as books, fire and rain begin to appear. After Jennifer introduces sex to her peers, many of her classmates go to Lover's Lane to engage in sex, becoming "chromatic" in the process.David introduces Bill Johnson, owner of the soda fountain where Bud works, to colourful modern art via a book from the library, sparking Bill's interest in painting.
After learning of sex and masturbation from Jennifer, Betty pleasures herself while bathing and, upon reaching orgasm, sees color and eventually becomes "chromatic" herself. Bill and Betty fall in love and she leaves home, bewildering her husband George.
Only the town fathers remain unchanged, led by the mayor Big Bob, who views the changes as a threat to Pleasantville's values, and resolve to do something about their increasingly independent wives and rebellious children.As the townsfolk become more colourful, a ban on "chromatic" people is initiated in public venues. A riot is ignited by Bill's nude painting of Betty on the window of his malt shop. The soda fountain is destroyed, books are burned, and people who are "chromatic" are harassed in the street, while Betty is harassed by non-chromatic teenage boys. The town fathers forbid people from visiting the library, playing loud music or using colourful paint.In protest, David and Bill paint a colorful mural depicting their world, prompting their arrest. Brought to trial in front of the entire town, David and Bill defend their actions and arouse enough anger and indignation in Big Bob that he becomes chromatic as well and flees. Celebrating their victory, David notices that the television store now sells colour televisions, broadcasting new programs and footage of other countries and that the town's roads now lead to other cities.With Pleasantville changed, Jennifer chooses to continue her new life in the TV world. Bidding farewell to his sister, his new girlfriend and Betty, David uses the remote control to return to the real world while only an hour went by there. He comforts his mother, who had left to meet a man only to get cold feet and assures her that nothing has to be perfect.
It's fine . . .
People of colour?
This was the first time that a new feature film was created by scanning and digitizing recorded film footage for the purpose of removing or manipulating colours.Jesse Walker, writing a retrospective in the January 2010 issue of Reason, argued that the film was misunderstood as a tale of kids from the 1990s bringing life into the conformist world of the 1950s. Walker points out that the supposedly outside influences changing the town of Pleasantville — the civil rights movement, J. D. Salinger, modern art, premarital sex, cool jazz and rockabilly–were all present in the 1950s. Pleasantville "contrasts the faux '50s of our TV-fueled nostalgia with the social ferment that was actually taking place while those sanitized shows first aired."Later in this article Walker goes on to comment on the so-called sexual revolution and quoting the work of Alan Petigny, a reporter turned historian who teaches at the University of Florida. Petigny examines how deep that ferment went in The Permissive Society, a study of the postwar period. The Truman and Eisenhower eras, he writes, were marked by "an unprecedented challenge to traditional moral restraints." Walker writes:
The debut of Playboy in 1953 may have been a watershed moment in the sexual revolution, but it didn't spark that revolution. "Placing changes in sexual behavior after those in the consumer culture—or, in other words, putting Elvis or Hefner before mass changes in behavior—essentially puts the cart before the horse," Petigny writes. "The crucial distinction between the fifties and sixties lay in word, not in deed. During the 1960s, Americans were simply more willing to acknowledge the extracurricular activities of their youth than they had been during the previous decade."
Entertainment Weekly wrote a mixed review: "Pleasantville is ultramodern and beautiful. But technical elegance and fine performances mask the shallowness of a story as simpleminded as the '50s TV to which it condescends; certainly it's got none of the depth, poignance, and brilliance of The Truman Show, the recent TV-is-stifling drama that immediately comes to mind."
The film also received a mixed review from Christian Answers, but was criticized because "On a surface level, the message of the film appears to be 'morality is black and white and pleasant, but sin is color and better,' because often through the film the Pleasantvillians become color after sin (adultery, premarital sex, physical assault, etc...). In one scene in particular, a young woman shows a brightly colored apple to young (and yet colored) David, encouraging him to take and eat it. Very reminiscent of the Genesis's account of the fall of man."
Hendrick Goltzius The Fall of Man (1616), The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. U.S.A.
The appearance of "perfection" in these smooth surfaces, whether rendered black and white or in colour, reflects an essentially WHITE American world. Re:LODE Radio wonders if on his return to reality David inhabits a cultural geography capable of acknowledging differences in a wider world. Where do the roads in this American geography lead? to a wider world that has been, or is on the way to being Americanised?
Meanwhile . . .
. . . in the wider real world, Playboy participates in a system of eurocentric cultural dominance, essential to the continuance of global capitalism.
Re:LODE Radio chooses to juxtapose American exceptionalism and the bubble of the American dream/nightmare, an inward looking narcissism and an outward looking colonialist pursuit of cultural and ideological hegemony, with something . . .
. . . so MAD it's GOOD!
W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism!
Enjoy this . . .
This 1971 film by Serbian director Dušan Makavejev translates the trans-Atlantic (and Anglophone) counterculture's so-called sexual revolution into what we might call "the culture wars of the Cold War". The film explores the relationship between communist politics and sexuality, as well as presenting the controversial life and work of Austrian-American psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957).
The film's narrative structure was, for the early 1970's, considered unconventional, intermixing fictional and documentary elements, but for Re:LODE Radio it has a power that comes from throwing ideas against the fixed and established norms of ideological correctness. It's also MAD!
After initial screenings, both in and out of Yugoslavia, W.R. was banned in that country for the next 16 years. Makavejev was subsequently indicted there on criminal charges of "derision" towards "the state, its agencies, and representatives" after he made intemperate remarks to a West German newspaper about the ban.
The New York Times reported in 1973.
BELGRADE, Yugoslavla, Feb. 3 — Yielding to demands by World War II Partisan veterans indignant over allegedly having been called Stalinists, the Belgrade prosecutor has moved to indict a leading film director on a criminal charge of derision “of the state, its agencies and representatives.”
The director, Dusan Makavejev, made the remark about Stalinism, the veterans charge, during an interview with a West German newspaper about the banning of his controversial film combining explicit sex and politics.The film, finished two years ago, is titled “Wilhelm Reich: Mysteries of the Organism.”Although it won acclaim from critics at the Cannes festival in 1971, the film has been shown only to a few selected audiences in Yugoslavia.It was reported this week that the veterans association in the autonomous province of Vojvodina had asked the Belgrade prosecutor to open criminal proceedings against Mr. Makavejev.The veterans protested that Mr. Makavejev had told the German interviewers that his film had been banned in Yugoslavia because of the opposition of the Veterans League, which he reportedly said was “most eager to return to the Stalinist period.”The prosecutor replied to the veterans that he lacked competence to take action and that they should file a private complaint.The veterans declined, to act as a private group, insisting that Mr. Makavejev was guilty of “hostile acts” against the state and the veterans, led by President Tito, “who by their struggle, blood and life, created Socialist Yugoslavia.”The prosecutor's office, in a statement, indicated that it had changed its mind. It reported that a proposal had been made to the Belgrade district court that the 40‐year‐old film director be indicted “for having committed a criminal act punishable under Article 174 of the. criminal code.”The article says: “Whoever brings into derision the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a Socialist Republic, their flag, coat of arms, their highest agencies of authority or representatives thereof, the armed forces or the supreme commander, shall be punished by imprisonment for not less than three months.”To add to Mr. Makavejev's problems, workers at the Neoplanta studio in Novi Sad, where the film was produced, decided this week that “Wilhelm Reich: “Mysteries of the Organism” was “ideologically harmful” and should be banned permanently from sale abroad as well as showing in Yugoslavia. The sexual teachings of Dr. Reich, the Austrian‐born psychiatrist, provided. Mr. Makavejev with his theme.The film tells a love story of a Yugoslav girl and a Russian, with scenes of sexual intercourse, and presents a political message related through the use of newsreel clippings and scenes from, old films.In remarks to an interviewer at the Cannes festival, Mr. Makavejev was said to have remarked in reference to pornography and politics: “I find Stalin a terribly pornogrephic figure. Any man responsible for killing all his friends and associates, for putting millions into concentration camps, and then saying, ‘Now we are happy,’ is obviously indulging in a kind of pornography.”One scene in the film shows an American having his phallus cast in plaster. As the mold is opened, a character depicting Stalin proclaims: “The first step to Communism has been achieved.”REMEMBER THE NEEDIEST!
His exile from his home country lasted until the end of the regime. The American film critic J. Hoberman said of this film that it was . . .
. . . the most Godardian flick Godard never made!
J. Hoberman was also quoted in the ARTFORUM notice following Dušan Makavejev's death in January 2019.
Makavejev was a pioneer of the Black Wave filmmaking school that emerged in the former Yugoslavia during the early 1960s. His films deployed subversive provocation, playfulness, and humor to incisively comment on and combat aspects of life under Tito’s authoritarian socialist government. Much of his work was banned in Yugoslavia and resulted in his leaving the country to live and work in Europe and North America, though he intended to eventually return. “The Yugoslavian system is good for filmmakers,” he said in a 1975 interview. “The system is good. . . . But I am too much.”
W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism begins as an investigation into the controversial sexual and political theories of the radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich before imploding into a freeform narrative on sexual liberation, all the while mocking everything from the cult of Joseph Stalin to World War II partisans. “W.R. was to be the last utopian Communist film (that it was produced at the height of the ’60s in a no-longer-existent country adds to its fairy-tale quality), but only the first to appropriate Socialist Realist texts,” J. Hoberman wrote in Artforum. “[It is] the most intense critique of the October Revolution ever produced in a Communist country.”
Senses of Cinema
The Melbourne based online film journal Senses of Cinema posted a review of WR: Mysteries of the Organism (Dušan Makavejev, 1971) by Darragh O’Donoghue October 2018 CTEQ Annotations on FilmIssue 88. He writes:
Cold War-era WR: misterije organizma (WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Dušan Makavejev, 1971) sets West against East with two opening sequences. In the first, Tuli Kupferberg shambles into a New York street and prepares for a street performance. Kupferberg was a member of rock group The Fugs, whose biliously sarcastic songs bark over several key sequences of the film (“Kill for Peace”, “I’m Gonna Kill Myself over Your Dead Body”). Kupferberg changes into a tattered orange jumpsuit, of the kind worn by convicted criminals in the US, implying that he has escaped from a penal institution (perhaps the penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich – the “WR” of the title – died in custody) and has been on the run for some time. His outfit is completed by an infantry helmet and a machine gun. Kupferberg’s criminal/soldier/fascist is in the same mode as William Klein’s titular ‘superhero’ in Mr. Freedom (1968), a hyper-manifestation of the violent, militaristic values promoted in the US during World War II, the conformist 1950s and the then-raging Vietnam War. The deliberately shocking line in “Kill for Peace” – “The only gook an American can trust is a gook that’s got his yellow head bust” – alludes to attitudes expressed by US Army commanding officers in Emile de Antonio’s blistering Vietnam documentary In the Year of the Pig [1968]). Throughout WR, Kupferberg patrols the streets and footbridges of New York, including the financial district, masturbating his rifle with a manic stare.This terrifying yet clownish introduction to a West dominated by the US – in an outdoor street scene – is followed by the credits sequence, filmed in a Belgrade interior. Three young people huddle together: Milena (Milena Dravić), a woman whose intellectual commitment is signalled by wearing glasses; her ‘free-spirited’, physical, instinctual, non-intellectual roommate, Jagoda (Jagoda Kaloper), who spends most of the film screwing; and her current lover, a slovenly soldier (Miodrag Andrić). The sexual acrobatics of Jagoda and the soldier under a photograph of the smiling Reich will contrast later in the film with solitary Milena, spouting sterile Reich-influenced philosophy. It is a philosophy that Makavejev appears to endorse – Milena denounces the decrepitude of a communism that cannot put human sexuality at its centre, thereby inflicting psychosomatic illness on its citizenry – but it is a philosophy embodied by Jagoda rather than the idealistic Milena, who lives in her head rather than her body (the sexism of this contrast is obvious). Milena first figuratively then literally loses her head over a series of male gurus – Reich, Chairman Mao and finally the dangerously repressed Stalinist skater Vladimir Ilyich (Ivica Vidović).In this credit sequence, however, Milena, Jagoda and the soldier face the viewer as they manipulate an egg yolk. No doubt there are all sorts of symbolic reasons for the egg, (see first endnote and I am the egg man . . .) but, first and foremost, it is a tactile, messy, unruly substance that breaks its bounds and cannot be reconstituted. It contrasts with a later squishy substance: the plaster within which artist Nancy Godfrey encases and mummifies the erect penis of Screw magazine editor Jim Buckley in probably the film’s most (in)famous sequence. Documenting a situation with little claim to subtlety, Makavejev subtly undermines the apolitical ‘sexual liberation’ that would be the main legacy of the US counterculture. The penis may be celebrated as a ‘life force’, but its rigid resin avatar paradoxically corresponds to the gooey yolk which, having broken its shell, loses all its life-giving properties.WR is frequently called a “collage film”, because it admixes disparate elements: Makavejev’s own material shot in the US and Belgrade between 1968 and 1971; ‘real’ and ‘faked’ documentaries (including harrowing images taken in a psychiatric institution); photographs; stock footage; dance and vocal performances; cinéma vérité interviews; docudrama reconstructions – all intercut with a fictional narrative and a 1946 hagiography of Stalin, Klyatva (The Vow, Mikheil Chiaureli). And this is only what’s on screen – the soundtrack includes natural sound; communist hymns, folk music and protest rock; interviewees’ speech and external commentary.The variant of collage known as photomontage was originally invented by the Berlin Dada group towards the end of World War I. By combining, superimposing, tearing and rearranging photographic materials of differing provenance, scale and texture, they mobilised in one image a cacophony of competing and contradictory visual narratives to counteract the unitary, discredited imperial narratives that had generated the war’s mechanised slaughter in the first place. That political, confrontational, satiric aspect of collage, of photomontage as an aggressive assertion of truth(s) in a climate of totalitarian lies, is continued by Makavejev in WR, redirected at the dominant Cold War ideologies of US capitalism and Soviet communism, whose representative images are dismembered and rearranged on the paper of socialist but non-aligned Yugoslavia, caught haplessly between the two. (see second endnote and the original Re:LODE section on Methods & Purposes and the articles on The Information Wrap and The montage of attractions) That Makavejev hit his targets was proven by the film’s being banned in Yugoslavia, the director being indicted and exiling himself to the West, and the effective stalling of his career.In another way, to call WR a collage film is a tautology – any film of more than one shot and/or with an image track is some sort of collage film. It might be more useful to situate WR in another Dadaist form that was resuscitated by the 1960s counterculture: performance art. Besides their thematic interplay, what the film’s two opening sequences share is an emphasis on frontally presented performances before an implied audience – the whole film is essentially a compendium of such ‘attractions’. Where photomontage cut up and reassembled static bodies, performance art tended to unmoor bodies in circumscribed yet unpredictable situations of violence and endurance. Its 1960s variants ultimately derived from the Theatre of Cruelty of dissident Surrealist Antonin Artaud. Sub-rational rituals enacted by the performers were designed to have a visceral effect on the viewer, to purge body and soul of the received ideologies that were impairing physical and spiritual health. In other words, Artaud in performance paralleled Reich’s work in psychology and WR is Makavejev’s attempt to fuse both. His experiments with performance would reach their apogee/nadir in Sweet Movie (1974), a black comedy featuring the Viennese Actionists, that audience-baiting association of excreting exhibitionists. Sweet Movie is Makavejev’s cry of despair at the failure of the counterculture he celebrated with qualification in WR. The earlier film, for all its blind spots, remains engaging, invigorating and perversely joyful, a testament to ideological and aesthetic roads not taken.Endnotes:
- J.C. Cooper’s list includes “the life principle”, “potentiality”, “the germ of all creation”, “the primordial matriarchal world of chaos”, “the womb”, “all seminal existence”, “the perfect state of unified opposites”, “resurrection” and “hope” – several of which seem relevant to WR; see J.C. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978), p. 60.
- Makavejev’s return to the Dadaist roots of photomontage is a rejection of the Soviet collage he grew up with, which mirrored, promoted and yet occluded the more vicious rearrangements of bodies undertaken by the state.
Watch this . . .
Re:LODE Radio considers the view of the film by Darragh O’Donoghue in October 2018 points to artistic methods employed Dušan Makavejev seem to fit "the times" as Re:LODE Radio finds them, especially when it comes to DADA!The characters that figure in the film deserve a wider consideration, and at least with an equal consideration to Playboy as the key to understanding the Americanisation of the World!
Wikipedia's article on the Film W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism includes this Synopsis:The film intercuts documentary footage and clips from other films — notably the Stalinist propaganda film The Vow (1946) — with an imaginative and satirical narrative about a highly political Yugoslav woman who seduces a visiting Soviet celebrity ice skater. Despite different settings, characters and time periods, the different elements produce a single story of human sexuality and revolution through a montage effect.The woman, Milena, violates her proletarian convictions (and rejects the sexual advances of a worker) by pursuing a Joseph Stalin-like celebrity ice skater — Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin's first and middle names) — who represents both class oppression and corruption from the West into communist beliefs. She succeeds, with difficulty, in sexual consummation, but V.I. is unable to reconcile his inner conflicts and ends the encounter by decapitating her. Distraught, V.I. sings a Russian song after the murder:
"François Villon's Prayer" . . .
This song,"François Villon's Prayer", by Bulat Okudzhava, a Soviet and Russian poet, writer, musician, novelist, and singer-songwriter of Georgian-Armenian ancestry, has its own origins and inspiration, rooted in transgression.
Bulat Okudzhava was one of the founders of the Soviet genre called "author song" (авторская песня, avtorskaya pesnya), or "guitar song", and the author of about 200 songs, set to his own poetry. His songs are a mixture of Russian poetic and folksong traditions and the French chansonnier style.
His inspiration for this particular song is the work of François Villon, the best known French poet of the Late Middle Ages. As an individual, and as a remarkable poet, François Villon may be regarded as unusual, transgressive, bad rather than mad, involved as he was in spectacular criminal enterprise, having had multiple encounters with law enforcement authorities, experiences that Villon wrote about in his poems.The Threepenny Opera, from 1928, by Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht, contains several songs that are loosely based on poems by Villon. These poems include "Les Contredits de Franc Gontier", "La Ballade de la Grosse Margot", and "L'Epitaphe Villon".The title of this Threepenny Opera is explained in a draft narration by Brecht for a concert performance:
"You are about to hear an opera for beggars. Since this opera was intended to be as splendid as only beggars can imagine, and yet cheap enough for beggars to be able to watch, it is called the Threepenny Opera."This "play with music" was adapted from a translation by Elisabeth Hauptmann of John Gay's 18th-century English ballad opera, The Beggar's Opera. Set in Victorian London, the play focuses on Macheath, an amoral, antiheroic criminal, a character not so distant from the poet and villain Villon. For Brecht this was a socialist work of art intending to critique capitalism, sexuality, and sexual relationships.Macheath ("Mackie," or "Mack the Knife") marries Polly Peachum. This displeases her father, who controls the beggars of London, and he endeavours to have Macheath hanged. His attempts are hindered by the fact that the Chief of Police, Tiger Brown, is Macheath's old army comrade. Still, Peachum exerts his influence and eventually gets Macheath arrested and sentenced to hang. Macheath escapes this fate via a deus ex machina moments before the execution when, in an unrestrained parody of a happy ending, a messenger from the Queen arrives to pardon Macheath and grant him the title of Baron.
Divine redemption?
Deus ex machina?
Divine prefers to remember that $50 trick as ‘God’s work’.
A critique of capitalism?
Steve Giles gives an account in his paper for Writing Brecht on how, since its premiere in 1928, The Threepenny Opera’s Marxist credentials have been a matter of controversy.
Steve Giles writes:
The Threepenny Opera was subjected to a devastating attack in the communist daily The Red Flag, according to which it contained not a trace of political satire and reflected its authors’ inability to depict the revolutionary working class. As we’ve already seen, the 1931 version can be construed as an attempt to make amends in this respect, but it does so in a rather ambivalent manner. I shall try to bring out this ambivalence by looking at the work’s account of economic and sexual relationships, and I’ll finish by considering the work’s ‘revolutionary’ potential.
The exploitative nature of the capitalist economy is grotesquely demonstrated through the nature of Peachum’s business, as his employees exchange a proportion of their labour power for begging licenses. Although Peachum’s firm is a pre-industrial enterprise and the text does not address itself specifically to commodity production, it does emphasize the commercialization of all interpersonal relationships under capitalism, especially bourgeois marriage and prostitution. At the same time, it is precisely in the sphere of sexual relationships that the apparent primacy of economics is obscured. The ‘Ballad of Sexual Slavery’ [added in 1931] implies that Macheath’s behaviour is determined by his sexual appetites, and despite Brecht’s claim to the contrary (‘Texts by Brecht’, Methuen edition, pp.92-3), Macheath’s virtual satyriasis is amply confirmed by the variety and frequency of his sexual encounters. Just as Peachum’s relationship to his employees denotes the economic organization of capitalism, so Macheath’s relationships to women and his implicitly homoerotic friendship with Brown indicate its sexual organization. The Threepenny Opera demonstrates that in bourgeois society, all forms all forms of sexuality are defined in relation to the norm of masculinity. Thus, the sexual identity of women in particular, whether as wives, lovers or prostitutes, is presented as deriving from dependency on men, even though the precise nature of this dependency is mediated in socio-economic terms.
The Wikipedia article on the Film W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism includes a section which is headed as Sequences, and which sets out some the context for a film work that develops "in time" (obviously cinema is a time based art form), but nevertheless, in Re:LODE Radio's consideration, constitutes a work of "collage". This "collage-ing" creates a shifting mosaic of juxtapositions. The placing in time, and then in the realm of memory, of the apposition of elements, with "open" and connective "gaps" to be "filled" in the sequence, allows for audience to synthesise a "connectedness in meaning", essential to the task of representation. This is akin to what Bertolt Brecht called the Verfremdungseffekt (translated as "defamiliarization effect", "distancing effect", or "estrangement effect", and often mistranslated as "alienation effect"). This involved, as Brecht described, "stripping the event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about them". To this end, Brecht employed techniques such as the actor's direct address to the audience, harsh and bright stage lighting, the use of songs to interrupt the action, explanatory placards, the transposition of text to the third person or past tense in rehearsals, and speaking the stage directions out loud.The artistic methods employed by Dušan Makavejev seems to fit with neo-Dada but also the approach that Brecht developed in the combined theory and practice of his "Epic theatre". By synthesizing and extending the experiments of Erwin Piscator and Vsevolod Meyerhold he was able to explore the potential of theatre as a forum for political ideas and the creation of a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism.Epic Theatre proposed that a play should not cause the spectator to identify emotionally with the characters or action before him or her, but should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the action on the stage. Brecht thought that the experience of a climactic catharsis of emotion left an audience complacent. Instead, he wanted his audiences to adopt a critical perspective in order to recognise social injustice and exploitation and to be moved to go forth from the theatre and effect change in the world outside. For this purpose, Brecht employed the use of techniques that remind the spectator that the play is a representation of reality and not reality itself. By highlighting the constructed nature of the theatrical event, Brecht hoped to communicate that the audience's reality was equally constructed, and as such, was changeable.Brecht's modernist concern with drama-as-a-medium led to his refinement of the "epic form" of the drama. This dramatic form is related to similar modernist innovations in other arts, including the strategy of divergent chapters in James Joyce's novel Ulysses, Sergei Eisenstein's evolution of a constructivist "montage" in the cinema, and Picasso's introduction of cubist "collage" in the visual arts.
A critique of capitalism & communism?
Who will protect us from our protectors?
"We are only playboys in the house of the dead. Very few poems get written, fewer still get read . . ."Returning to the Wikipedia article on the Film W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism and the section headed as Sequences, it begins with the phenomenon, contribution and participation of Tuli Kupferberg, the poet and performance artist, and also a member of the band The Fugs. Dressed as a soldier, he parodies war and the sexual nature of man's fascination with guns by stalking affluent New Yorkers on the street and masturbating his toy rifle. The scene is set to The Fugs' 1965 song “Kill for Peace”.
Kupferberg reportedly appears in Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl as the person "who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer." The incident in question actually occurred on the Manhattan Bridge.
Next in the Wikipedia Sequences comes a section on Artists, beginning with artist Betty Dodson who "discusses her experiences in drawing acts of masturbation, as well as her discussions within consciousness raising groups about female sexual response."
Betty Dodson . . .
This is followed by a reference to New York artist Nancy Godfrey who belonged to a group of practitioners called Plaster Casters.
In a meeting with Jim Buckley, co-founder-editor of the porn magazine Screw, Godfrey makes a plaster cast of Buckley's erect penis as a documentary part of the film.
The soundtrack features another song by The Fugs, “I'm Gonna Kill Myself Over Your Dead Body”, with Tuli Kupferberg satirically mimicking John Wayne in his a cappella vocals.
Jackie Curtis, one of Andy Warhol's entourage and Superstar, subject of Warhol's art, as in these two polaroid images, and occasional film star, is shown in W.R. on the streets of New York enjoying an ice cream cone with a partner. Curtis' appearance is prompted by, and highlights for Makavejev, W.R.'s theories of gender and sexuality.
Screw - pornography or a critique of hypocrisy?
Screw magazine is also referenced in the Wikipedia section Sequences in W.R., as the underground magazine that pioneered bringing hardcore pornography into the American mainstream during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Screw ’69, front row: Jim Buckley, Al Goldstein, and 18-year-old Steve Heller, who would next become The New York Times art director for 33 years.
The film shows a behind-the-scenes look at the publication, in which editor Jim Buckley casually consorts with his nude models. Screw's notorious co-founder-editor Al Goldstein is neither seen nor referred to in this sequence.
Originally published as a weekly tabloid newspaper with a statement on the cover offering, "Jerk-Off Entertainment for Men", the magazine was first published in-print in November 1968, and was printed weekly in tabloid form.
Screw featured interviews with counterculture celebrities including John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Abby Hoffman, as well as sensational features, such as Screw's most successful issue, published in 1973, containing unauthorized photos of Jacqueline Kennedy nude.
When it comes to exposing the hypocrisy often found at the heart of the powers that be, on May 2, 1969, Screw published the first reference in print to the Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover's sexuality, entitled:
"Is J. Edgar Hoover a Fag?
At its peak, Screw sold 140,000 copies a week.
Founder Al Goldstein won a series of nationally significant court cases addressing obscenity.
Terry Southern in Screw #801. Cover: Julius Zimmerman
W.R. stands for Wilhelm Reich . . .. . . who is, of course the primary crux of Makavejev's film. The film sets the scene to document the life and work of Wilhelm Reich in the United States. The film features a rare on-screen interview with neo-Reichian therapist Alexander Lowen, the founder of bioenergetic analysis, during a therapy session, including scream treatment.Reich's daughter Eva (1924–2008) also appears on camera, speaking about the validity of her father's work and the malaise of contemporary life.The Orgonon, Reich's last home and lab near Rangeley, Maine, USA, is seen with brief shots of the interior and exterior, including a cloudbuster, a device designed by Reich, which he claimed could produce rain by manipulating what he called "orgone energy" present in the atmosphere.
A cloudbuster appears in the opening shots of a film trailer for The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich, a 2013 Austrian film about Wilhelm Reich directed by Antonin Svoboda and starring Klaus Maria Brandauer as Reich.
This cinematic dramatisation of Wilhelm Reich's life and work has the usual and conventional approach of contemporary cinema, requiring a narrative that is rendered manageable through the selection of a small percentage of the available complex and confusing facts. This is how modern storytelling has got stuck in a rut. Not unlike modern journalism. Hence Re:LODE Radio's valuing of Makavejev's film as a model of how to assemble a mosaic of available facts. Presenting events, rather than representing them allows for connections to be made, and in making these connections the audience becomes more aware of those patterns and relationships that expose what has actually happened.
Many of the facts of Reich's life and work are buried under the piles of ash, both metaphorical and real, resulting from the incineration of his work by U.S. authorities. The story is complex, and obscured by layers of misrepresentation and deliberate misunderstandings. Makavejev's film revels in the collision of ideologies that Reich's work generated in the U.S. as he picks up some of the pieces left in the wake of the controversies that ultimately led to Reich's arrest, imprisonment and death.Arriving in the U.S. having fled from Norway, partly to escape from the Nazis, Reich's work was to take a turn that has resulted in his work being considered pseudoscientific and more likely viewed as quackery and fraud rather than experimental.
He received a US visa in August 1939 and sailed out of Norway on 19 August on the SS Stavangerfjord, the last ship to leave for the United States before the war began on 3 September. Nearly seven years later, on 5 June 1956, two FDA officials arrived at Orgonon, his home, laboratory and research centre, to supervise the destruction of his orgone accumulators.
A "Sex Box" or "orgone accumulator"?
Most of these devices had been sold by that time and another 50 were with Silvert in New York. Only three were at Orgonon. The FDA agents were not allowed to destroy them, only to supervise the destruction, so Reich's friends and his son, Peter Reich, chopped them up with axes as the agents watched. Once they were destroyed, Reich placed an American flag on top of them.
On 26 June the agents returned to supervise the destruction of the promotional material, including 251 copies of Reich's books.
The American Civil Liberties Union issued a press release criticising the book burning, although coverage of the release was poor, and Reich ended up asking them not to help because he was annoyed that they had failed to criticise the destruction of the accumulators.
On 23 July the remaining accumulators in New York were destroyed by S. A. Collins and Sons, who had built them.
On 23 August six tons of Reich's books, journals and papers were burned in New York, in the Gansevoort incinerator, the public incinerator on 25th Street. The material included copies of several of his books, including The Sexual Revolution, Character Analysis and The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
Although these had been published in German before Reich ever discussed orgone, he had added mention of it to the English editions, so they were caught by the injunction.
It has been cited as one of the worst examples of censorship in U.S. history. As with the accumulators, the FDA was supposed only to observe the destruction. The psychiatrist Victor Sobey, an associate of Reich's, wrote:All the expenses and labor had to be provided by the [Orgone Institute] Press. A huge truck with three to help was hired. I felt like people who, when they are to be executed, are made to dig their own graves first and are then shot and thrown in. We carried box after box of the literature.
Kate Bush's single "Cloudbusting" (1985) described Reich's arrest through the eyes of his son, Peter Reich, who wrote his father's story in A Book of Dreams (1973). The video for the song features Donald Sutherland as Reich and Kate Bush as Peter Reich.
DAZED featured this article (30 October 2015) by Alex Denney in its MUSIC SECRET HISTORY series:
The story behind Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting video
Peter Reich:
“Sometime in 1985, a package arrived with a video cassette and an autographed album. My wife and children, who were five and two at the time, listened, watched and were entranced. Quite magically, this British musician had tapped precisely into a unique and magical fulfilment of father-son devotion, emotion and understanding. They had captured it all.”
Kate Bush:
“I was inspired by a book that I first found on a shelf nearly nine years ago. It was just calling me from the shelf, and when I read it I was very moved by the magic of it. It’s about a special relationship between a young son and his father. The book was written from a child’s point of view. His father is everything to him; he is the magic in his life, and he teaches him everything, teaching him to be open-minded and not to build up barriers... But there’s nothing he can do about his father being taken away, he is completely helpless. But it’s very much more to do with how the son does begin to cope with the whole loneliness and pain of being without his father. It is the magic moments of a relationship through a child's eyes, but told by a sad adult.”
Donald Sutherland:
“Barry Richardson, who was the hairdresser on Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, asked me if I’d do a music video with Kate Bush. I told him no and we went on to other conversations. A couple of days later there was a knock on my door. I lived in the Savoy Hotel (in London). On the river. Suite 312. I loved it there. So cosseted. So private. Only the floor butler rang the door. I opened it. There was no one there. I heard a voice saying hello and I looked down. Standing down there was a very small Kate Bush. Barry had told her where I lived. What can you do? She wanted to explain what her video was about. I let her in. She sat down, said some stuff. All I heard was ‘Wilhelm Reich’. I’d taken an underground copy of his The Mass Psychology of Fascism with me when I went to film (Bernardo) Bertolucci’s Novecento in Parma. Reich’s work informed the psychological foundations of Attila Mellanchini, the character Bernardo had cast me to play. Everything about Reich echoed through me. He was there then and now he was here. Sitting across from me in the person of the very eloquent Kate Bush. Synchronicity. Perfect. She talked some more. I said OK and we made ‘Cloudbusting’. She’s wonderful, Kate Bush. Wonderful. I love that I did it. (What do I remember) about doing it? I remember being in the car and the hill and them taking me, taking Reich, away and looking back through the back window of the car and seeing her, seeing Reich’s son Peter, standing there. And I remember the first morning on set seeing her coming out of her trailer smoking a joint and I cautioned her, saying she shouldn’t smoke that, it’d affect her work, and she looked at me for a second and said she hadn’t been straight for nine years and I loved her.”
The "cloudbusting" video features a Foucault pendulum as an alternative method of demonstrating the rotational motion of the earth to prove the heretical view that the Earth was not the centre of the Universe. The Foucault pendulum in this video simultaneously connects and contrasts the disgraced Wilhelm Reich to both of the respected Foucaults, the scientist, Jean Bernard Léon Foucault and the philosopher, Michel Foucault, who had died one year prior to the video in 1984.
Orgone and/or orgasm?
The concept of orgone belongs to Reich's later work, after he immigrated to the US. However it is important to understand that Reich's early work was based on the Freudian concept of the libido, though influenced by sociological understandings with which Freud disagreed but which were to some degree followed by other prominent theorists such as Herbert Marcuse and Carl Jung.
For Reich libido was a life-affirming force repressed by society directly. For example, in one of his better known analyses Reich observes a workers' political rally, noting that participants were careful not to violate signs that prohibited walking on the grass; Reich saw this as the state co-opting unconscious responses to parental authority as a means of controlling behavior. He was expelled from the Institute of Psycho-analysis because of these disagreements over the nature of the libido and his increasingly political stance.
Reich took an increasingly bioenergetic view of libido, perhaps influenced by his tutor Paul Kammerer and another biologist, Otto Heinrich Warburg. In the early 20th century, when molecular biology was in its infancy, developmental biology in particular still presented mysteries that made the idea of a specific life energy respectable, as was articulated by theorists such as Hans Driesch. As a psycho-analyst Reich aligned such theories with the Freudian libido, while as a materialist he believed such a life-force must be susceptible to physical experiment.
He wrote in his best known book, The Function of the Orgasm:
"Between 1919 and 1921, I became familiar with Driesch's 'Philosophie des Organischen' and his 'Ordnungslehre'... Driesch's contention seemed incontestable to me. He argued that, in the sphere of the life function, the whole could be developed from a part, whereas a machine could not be made from a screw..... However, I couldn't quite accept the transcendentalism of the life principle. Seventeen years later I was able to resolve the contradiction on the basis of a formula pertaining to the function of energy. Driesch's theory was always present in my mind when I thought about vitalism. The vague feeling I had about the irrational nature of his assumption turned out to be justified in the end. He landed among the spiritualists."The concept of orgone was the result of this work in the psycho-physiology of libido. After his migration to the US, Reich began to speculate about biological development and evolution, and then branched out into much broader speculations about the nature of the universe. This led him to the conception of "bions": self-luminescent sub-cellular vesicles that he believed were observable in decaying materials, and presumably present universally. Initially he thought of bions as electrodynamic or radioactive entities, as had the Ukrainian biologist Alexander Gurwitsch, but later came to the conclusion that he had discovered an entirely unknown but measurable force, which he then named "orgone", a pseudo-Greek formation probably from org- "impulse, excitement" as in org-asm, plus -one as in ozone (the Greek neutral participle, virtually *ὄργον, gen.: *ὄργοντος).For Reich, neurosis became a physical manifestation he called "body armour"— deeply seated tensions and inhibitions in the physical body that were not separated from any mental effects that might be observed. He developed a therapeutic approach he called vegetotherapy that was aimed at opening and releasing this body armour so that free instinctive reflexes — which he considered a token of psychic well-being — could take over.Orgone was closely associated with sexuality: Reich, following Freud, saw nascent sexuality as the primary energetic force of life.
The term itself was chosen to share a root with the word orgasm, which both Reich and Freud took to be a fundamental expression of psychological health. This focus on sexuality, while acceptable in the clinical perspective of Viennese psychoanalytic circles, scandalized the conservative American public even as it appealed to countercultural figures like William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.
William S. Burroughs was a major proponent of orgone research, who often included it as part of the surreal imagery in his novels. Orgone interested Burroughs particularly because he believed that it could be used to ease or alleviate "junk sickness" — a popular term for heroin withdrawal. This fitted well in the context of his novels, which were usually narrative recreations of his own experiences with narcotics and the Beat life. Burroughs explicitly compares "kicking the habit" to cancer in the novel Junky, and ties it to the use of orgone accumulators.
At the time that Burroughs was writing, orgone accumulators were only available from Reich's Orgone Institute in New York, offered for a ten dollar per month donation. Burroughs built his own instead, substituting rock wool for the sheet iron, but believed it still achieved the desired effect.
Jack Kerouac wrote in his popular novel On the Road of an orgone accumulator that was treated more as a type of drug than as a medical device: primarily a stimulant, with strong sexual overtones. This counterculture version of the orgone accumulator feeds the "Sex Box" idea, and so inadvertently supporting attacks on Reich's reputation by a sensationalist conservative print media eager to use this "hot" material. The 2012 film of Kerouac's novel includes a scene with the device, but adds a small window in the accumulator and a funnel to breathe through.In at least some cases, Reich's experimental techniques do not appear to have been very careful, or to have taken precautions to remove experimental bias. Reich was concerned with experimental verification from other scientists. Albert Einstein agreed to participate, but thought Reich's research lacked scientific detachment and experimental rigor; and concluded that the effect was simply due to the temperature gradient inside the room. "Through these experiments I regard the matter as completely solved," he wrote to Reich on 7 February 1941. Upon further correspondence from Reich, Einstein replied that he could not devote any further time to the matter and asked that his name not be misused for advertising purposes.Orgone and its related concepts were quickly denounced in the post-World War II American press. Reich and his students were seen as a "cult of sex and anarchy," at least in part because orgone was linked with the title of his book The Function of the Orgasm, and this led to numerous investigations, putting Reich under a spotlight as a communist, and further denunciations followed under a wide variety of other pretexts. He was, as the New York Times later put it, "much maligned".
The psychoanalytical community of the time saw his approach to healing diseases as quackery of the worst sort, partly because of his comments about UFOs.
The UFO controversy was, to a degree, a result of Reich's deteriorating mental health, but exacerbated by the filing of an injunction in February 1954, by the United States Attorney for the District of Maine, to prevent interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and to ban promotional literature.
From at least early 1954, Reich came to believe that the planet was under attack by UFOs, or "energy alphas", as he called them. He said he often saw them flying over Orgonon — shaped like thin cigars with windows — leaving streams of black Deadly Orgone Radiation in their wake, which he believed the aliens were scattering to destroy the Earth.This paranoia was connected to his earlier 1951 theory that had led to the "cloudbuster" machines. This was when Reich said he had discovered this other kind of energy that he called deadly orgone radiation (DOR), accumulations of which played a role in desertification.
The "cloudbuster" was designed to tackle this "problem". Rows of 15-foot aluminium pipes mounted on a mobile platform, connected to cables that were inserted into water. He believed that it could unblock orgone energy in the atmosphere and cause rain. It has been described as an "orgone box turned inside out".He conducted dozens of experiments with the cloudbuster, calling his research "Cosmic Orgone Engineering". During a drought in 1953, two farmers in Maine offered to pay him if he could make it rain to save their blueberry crop. Reich used the cloudbuster on the morning of 6 July, and according to Bangor's Daily News — based on an account from an anonymous eyewitness who was probably Peter Reich — rain began to fall that evening. The crop survived, the farmers declared themselves satisfied, and Reich received his fee.Over the years the FDA interviewed physicians, Reich's students and his patients, asking about the orgone accumulators. A professor at the University of Oregon who bought an accumulator told an FDA inspector that he knew the device was phoney, but found it helpful because his wife sat quietly in it for four hours every day.The attention of the FDA triggered belligerent responses from Reich, who called them "HiGS" (hoodlums in government) and the tools of red fascists. He developed a delusion that he had powerful friends in government, including President Eisenhower, who he believed would protect him, and that the U.S. Air Force was flying over Orgonon to make sure that he was all right.
On 29 July 1952 three inspectors arrived at Orgonon unannounced. Reich detested unannounced visitors; he had once chased some people away with a gun just for looking at an adjacent property. He told the inspectors they had to read his work before he would interact with them, and ordered them to leave.Things got worse when in February 1954 the United States Attorney for the District of Maine filed a 27-page complaint seeking a permanent injunction under Sections 301 and 302 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to prevent interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and to ban promotional literature.
Reich refused to appear in court, arguing that no court was in a position to evaluate his work. In a letter to Judge John D. Clifford, Jr. in February, he wrote:My factual position in the case as well as in the world of science of today does not permit me to enter the case against the Food and Drug Administration, since such action would, in my mind, imply admission of the authority of this special branch of the government to pass judgment on primordial, pre-atomic cosmic orgone energy. I, therefore, rest the case in full confidence in your hands.The injunction was granted by default on 19 March 1954. Meanwhile Reich and his son would spend their nights searching for UFOs through telescopes and binoculars, and when they believed they had found one would roll out the cloudbuster to suck the energy out of it. Reich claimed he had shot several of them down. Armed with two cloudbusters, they fought what Reich called a "full-scale interplanetary battle" in Arizona, where he had rented a house as a base station.While Reich was in Arizona in May 1956, one of his associates sent an accumulator part through the mail to another state, in violation of the injunction, after an FDA inspector posing as a customer requested it. Reich and another associate, Dr. Michael Silvert, were charged with contempt of court; Silvert had been looking after the inventory in Reich's absence. Reich at first refused to attend court, and was arrested and held for two days until a supporter posted bail of $30,000.Representing himself during the hearing, he admitted the violation but pleaded not guilty and hinted at conspiracies. During a recess the judge apparently suggested a psychiatric evaluation to Reich's ex-wife, Ilse Ollendorff, but this was not communicated to Reich.
The jury found him guilty on 7 May 1956, and he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment. Silvert was sentenced to a year and a day, the Wilhelm Reich Foundation was fined $10,000, and the accumulators and associated literature were to be destroyed.
Reich appealed the lower court's decision in October 1956, but the Court of Appeals upheld it on 11 December. He wrote several times to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, requesting a meeting, and appealed to the Supreme Court, which decided on 25 February 1957 not to review the case.
On 12 March 1957 Reich and Silvert were sent to Danbury Federal Prison. Richard C. Hubbard, a psychiatrist who admired Reich, examined him on admission, recording paranoia manifested by delusions of grandiosity, persecution, and ideas of reference:The patient feels that he has made outstanding discoveries. Gradually over a period of many years he has explained the failure of his ideas in becoming universally accepted by the elaboration of psychotic thinking. "The Rockerfellows [sic] are against me." (Delusion of grandiosity.) "The airplanes flying over prison are sent by the Air Force to encourage me." (Ideas of reference and grandiosity.)On 19 March Reich was transferred to the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary and examined again. This time it was decided that he was mentally competent and that his personality seemed intact, though he might become psychotic when stressed. A few days later, on his 60th birthday, he wrote to his son, Peter, then 13:I am in Lewisburg. I am calm, certain in my thoughts, and doing mathematics most of the time. I am kind of "above things", fully aware of what is up. Do not worry too much about me, though anything might happen. I know, Pete, that you are strong and decent. At first I thought that you should not visit me here. I do not know. With the world in turmoil I now feel that a boy your age should experience what is coming his way—fully digest it without getting a "belly ache", so to speak, nor getting off the right track of truth, fact, honesty, fair play, and being above board—never a sneak . . .He applied for a presidential pardon in May, to no avail. Peter visited him in jail several times, where one prisoner said Reich was known as the "flying saucer guy" and the "Sex Box man". Reich told Peter that he cried a lot, and wanted Peter to let himself cry too, believing that tears are the "great softener". His last letter to his son was on 22 October 1957, when he said he was looking forward to being released on 10 November, having served one third of his sentence. A parole hearing had been scheduled for a few days before that date. He wrote that he and Peter had a date for a meal at the Howard Johnson restaurant near Peter's school.Reich failed to appear for roll call on 3 November 1957 and was found at 7 a.m. in his bed, fully clothed but for his shoes. The prison doctor said he had died during the night of "myocardial insufficiency with sudden heart failure". He was buried in a vault at Orgonon that he had asked his caretaker to dig in 1955. He had left instructions that there was to be no religious ceremony, but that a record should be played of Schubert's "Ave Maria" sung by Marian Anderson, and that his granite headstone should read simply: "Wilhelm Reich, Born March 24, 1897, Died . . ."
None of the academic journals carried an obituary. Time magazine wrote on 18 November 1957:Died. Wilhelm Reich, 60, once-famed psychoanalyst, associate and follower of Sigmund Freud, founder of the Wilhelm Reich Foundation, lately better known for unorthodox sex and energy theories; of a heart attack; in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, Pa; where he was serving a two-year term for distributing his invention, the "orgone energy accumulator" (in violation of the Food and Drug Act), a telephone-booth-size device that supposedly gathered energy from the atmosphere, and could cure, while the patient sat inside, common colds, cancer, and impotence.
Sex? Politics? Science? Revolution?
A week or so after the US presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016 James Strick gave a presentation at Franklin and Marshall College (21 Oct 2016) on his most recent history of science research project, which led to his book Wilhelm Reich, Biologist (Harvard U. Press, 2015). The presentation was headlined:
Sex, Lies and Bookburning: How Does a Scientist End up Getting His Books Burned both by the Nazis and the U.S. Government?
This video montage includes documentation of James Strick's presentation, intercut with archive film of Nazi's book burning ceremonies and a video guide to the Gansevoort incinerator, the public incinerator on 25th Street where Reich's books were burned.James Strick explains thoroughly and concisely just how it was that the scientific work of this admittedly difficult man, ended up being traduced by some fellow scientists. Strick surmises that this was probably because of social and psychological rather than scientific reasons amongst his critics. The upshot of Reich's ideas about sex and politics were just too much of a challenge to those holding "conventional" and/or "conservative" social and political attitudes, including some within the scientific community.
Sex, lies . . .
In the Q & A's following James Strick's presentation he makes reference to contemporary politics and culture, and the presidential election of 2016 and the threat posed by the increasingly hostile environment when it comes to the truth of things, when it comes to progressive politics, democracy, and the so called sexual revolution. In particular he recommends that a student should read Reich's work The Mass Psychology of Fascism in order to better understand what is happening now.
The question at the heart of Reich's book was this:
Why did the masses turn to authoritarianism even though it is clearly against their interests?
In 1933, Reich set out to analyze "the economic and ideological structure of (particularly) German society between 1928 and 1933" in this book. The healthy alternative, he proposes, is a form of "Workers Democracy", whereby those who 'do' the actual work make the decisions as to what, how and why.Reich argued that the reason why German Fascism (Nazism) was chosen over Communism was that of increased sexual repression in Germany - as opposed to the somewhat more liberal (post-revolutionary) Russia. As children, members of the (German) proletariat learned from their parents to suppress nearly all sexual desire and - instead - expend the repressed energy into authoritarian idealism. Hence, in adults, any rebellious and sexual impulses experienced would cause fundamental anxiety and - therefore, instead - social control is used to reduce anxiety. Fear of revolt, as well as fear of sexuality, were thus "anchored" in the 'character structure' of the masses. This influenced the irrationality of the 'people' and allowed (irrational) 'populistic' ideology to flourish, Reich argued:Suppression of the natural sexuality in the child, particularly of its genital sexuality, makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, good and adjusted in the authoritarian sense; it paralyzes the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation. Initially, the child has to submit to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family, which process makes it capable of later subordination to the general authoritarian system. The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and anxiety.Reich noted that the symbolism of the swastika, evoking the fantasy of the primal scene, showed in spectacular fashion how Nazism systematically manipulated the collective unconscious. A repressive family, a baneful religion, a sadistic educational system, the terrorism of the party, fear of economic manipulation, fear of racial contamination, and permitted violence against minorities all operated in and through individuals' (the collective) unconscious psychology of emotions, traumatic experiences, fantasies, libidinal economies, and so on, and Nazi political ideology and practice exacerbated and exploited these tendencies.For Reich, fighting Fascism meant first of all studying it scientifically, which was to say, using the methods of psychoanalysis. He believed that reason alone would be able to check the forces of irrationality and loosen the grip of mysticism and is also capable of playing its own part in developing original modes of political action, building on a deep respect for life, and promoting a harmonious channelling of libido and orgastic potency.
Reich proposed "work democracy", a self-managing form of social organization that would preserve the individual's freedom, independence, autonomy and encourage his/her responsibility and society would thus base itself on these principles:Love, work and knowledge are the well-springs of our life. They should also govern it.
What's it all about? . . .
When it comes to "outing" the so-called "sexual revolution" James Strick responds to another question about how Reich might regard the present state of affairs.
Continued in CONVOLUTE No. 3.
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