DEATH WISH 7 BILLION
by
ROBERT J. LEWIS
_____________________
According
to Freudian analysis, the man in the movie who has raped and killed
the father’s only daughter is expressing a death wish, which
Charles Bronson, at the end of two hours, is only too happy to
oblige. Since the guilty party about to receive his comeuppance
is prepared to kill in self-defense, Mr. Bronson is expressing
his own death wish, to which Freud would answer with a sniff and
shrug: no surprise there. The Death Wish films, beyond the edifying
entertainment they provide, offer not so subtle glimpses of Freud’s
theory in full operation.
In
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922), Freud postulated
that all humans entertain an unacknowledged death wish or wish
to return to “the inanimate,” which he sums up as
the universal desire to commit suicide. Freud, the Columbus of
the mind’s deep, who was also inordinately fond of cocaine,
goes on to say that “the aim of all life is death,”
that the latter forces an appreciation of the transient former
with the death wish supplying the connective tissue.
Of all
Freud’s theories, the majority of which have been rejected,
the death wish in particular strikes us as pretty far-fetched
as we pursue our Saturday night bowling careers and Sunday afternoon
picnics in the park. But what if these activities aren’t
as innocent as they seem, that their universal appeal reveals
states of mind that in fact support Freud’s claim, especially
if what are enjoyable in bowling, picnicking and the weekend rave
party are not so much the activities in themselves but their diversionary
agency and pleasurable deadening effects on the mind.
All of
us, in varying degrees, are uneasy when in the presence of the
unknown, which is why when we succeed in making something known,
the mind is allowed to rest easy, which is its reward. This is
how it has always been, and since death is unknowable, all cultures,
in turn, are obsessed with with making it known -- the fact of
which does not necessarily translate into a death wish. One could
plausibly argue that our curiosity about death is in fact our
disguised fear of it (the unknown), and we flirt with it not because
we long for it but want to make its acquaintance in order to allay
our fears.
When
we deliberately undertake (or enjoy attending) life-threatening
pursuits such as high speed events or violent contact sports,
are we, as some Freudians propose, expressing a subconscious death
wish? The sport of boxing satisfies the death wish only in the
sense that we subconsciously hope to witness ‘someone else’s’
death, and beyond that, the fallen boxer’s miraculous resurrection,
which satisfies our longing for immortality. That all cultures
indulge in some form of lethal sport speaks only to the fact that
we are incurable as it concerns our curiosity about death, and
we countenance high risk behaviour because it allows us precious
glimpses into the acts and facts of dying and death.
If there
is a Freudian death wish that operates through all of us, it is
revealed in our universal desire to temporarily seek out non-subjective,
quasi-mammalian states of (un)consciousness. The reasons for this
bear directly on the kind of intelligent life we are and persistent
inability to deal with the implications of self-consciousness.
The discomfiting
effects of being self-aware issue from a locus of feelings that
are directly related to how we are affected by the gaze of the
other. Much of our behaviour is determined by the other from whose
judgment there is no formal escape, which is why we dress one
way in public and another in private. In our quotidian we are
constantly negotiating societies (workplace, the mall, restaurant
dining), whose codes and protocols allow no respite from self-consciousness
-- and to such a degree our constitutions eventually revolt because,
in the long consideration of the evolution of life, being self-aware
is a very recent development and we simply haven’t had enough
evolutionary time to adapt. On top of which humans are the only
species that can call itself into judgment (which can give rise
to shame), that requires a purpose in life ( which can cause despair).
André Malraux, in The Voices of Silence, writes:
“when we see a meadow ablaze with the flowers of spring,
the thought that the whole human race is no more than a luxuriant
growth of the same order, created to no end by some blind force,
would be unbearable, could we bring ourselves to realize all that
the thought implies.”
It is
self-consciousness and all that it implies that is too much with
us, which accounts for our universal attraction to the opposite
state, that led Freud to hypothesize a universal death wish, which,
incidentally, does not contradict the pleasure principle since
we all enjoy being relieved of our subjectivity.
In light
of the fact that humans have never been comfortable in their self-conscious
skins, they learned very early in the game that if they could
knock out the neo-cortical functions responsible for self-consciousness
they would revert back to non-subjective states of being. To this
end, humans have been brilliantly inventive in providing for the
activities and ingestibles which facilitate this marvellous short
circuiting, for there is no apparent cure for self-consciousness
other than to desensitize the area of the brain responsible for
it. Which is why when humans, if only fortuitously, manage to
catch glimpses of themselves in the truth of their being, they
rudely discover that “the will to power” seamlessly
accommodates the “will to lobotomy,” – which
the facts on the ground bear out: from time immemorial Man has
arguably been at his happiest when surrendering to the DNA-deep,
anti-ipseity impulses that reside within.
What
unites all cultures in a common cause are the socially sanctioned
customs and institutions that offer relief from self-consciousness.
From the consumption of alcohol and drugs to the obliteration
of the other in the darkness of the cinema or atavistic setting
of the sports arena, we are uncompromising in the ‘wish’
to anaesthetize those faculties of judgment upon which, ironically,
our very humanity is grounded. Even the arts, presumably serving
our edification, have been bent to serve mind-numbing ends. The
sharpest mind will shut down after being exposed to the high octane,
one-note pounding that characterizes Rap music or the endless,
one-note drone that distinguishes India’s songbook. In the
visual arts, monochromatic painting, otherwise known as Minimalism,
serves the same narcoleptic end.
In Dancing
in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (2007), Barbara
Ehrenreich reports that in medieval France one in four days was
given over to Saints’ Days -- religious celebrations which
were in fact excuses to glut out on food, alcohol and dance in
order to achieve the bliss of unselfconsciousness. In our time,
we only have to think of Mardi Gras, the Mexican Day of Dead,
The Rio Carnival and the all-night rave party to be reminded that
the burden of self-consciousness remains the same from one culture
to the next. It’s not for nothing that we turned Dionysus
into a God for all seasons and that his unacknowledged devotees
number in the billions.
So if
we don’t literally harbour a death wish that is supposed
to culminate in the act of suicide, we are profoundly and transparently
attracted to states of mindlessness that prefigure death, the
remarkable insight of which secures Freud his highest ranking
among the great geniuses of the 20th century.
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