Playing with the horror of the world
Voyeurism, Bond and the perverse appeal of Aphex Twin. All part of life, according to Freud.
“Pain itself is merely a consequence of the desire for pleasure, the desire to destroy, to annihilate; in its supreme form, pain is a variety of pleasure.”
From The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek
“Sigmund Freud, analyse this…
I’m gonna break the cycle
I’m gonna shake up the system
I’m gonna destroy my ego
I’m gonna close my body now
I guess I’ll die another day.”
From Die Another Day by Madonna
A woman unravels in Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher. She turns inside out.
Erika Kohut is in her forties. She lives in Vienna with her controlling mother, who has subjected her to years of systematic psychological abuse. The mother kept her from friends as a girl, and certainly from any whiff of proximity to boys.
She determined that Erika would become a concert pianist, only for Erika to fail terribly at an important audition, leaving mother and daughter equally crushed. Erika is now expected to generate an income through teaching the only thing she knows to do. Her mother also expects to know Erika’s whereabouts at all times. When Erika stays out late, her mother stays up for her return and physically attacks her. If Erika doesn’t come straight home, her mother assumes she is seeing a man, which is not allowed.
Erika likes to buy fashionable dresses, imagining occasions she knows she’ll never experience. Her mother cuts the dresses in a rage.
Erika also indulges her voyeuristic fantasies. She secretly tours the seedy nightspots of Vienna. She goes to peep shows. She hides in bushes to watch strangers having sex. She embarks on a violent affair with one of her students. Out of unacknowledged jealousy she leaves broken glass in the pocket of a younger woman’s coat. She spins wildly out of control.
Erika turns inside out. Previously prey, she becomes a predator. Pain and pleasure become confused in her psyche. Her behaviour swings from extreme to the other. As we see her finally step beyond her mother’s control, after a lifetime of proscribed behaviour, Erika’s repressed urges get the better of her. Self-destructive tendencies manifest in ways she can’t control. She goes too far too fast too soon.
If this all sounds a little dark, well, it is. But it’s also told via an extraordinary piece of writing. Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. You can also watch the film, an adaptation made by Michael Haneke which won the Cannes Grand Prix. Jelinek’s prose pulses and glistens like neon. The novel is psychological more than it is titillating, though it is thrilling - “seductive as sin,” as Scott Walker might have described it. You feel yourself drawn into Erika’s self-destructive tailspin. In one scene, after her last lesson of the day, Erika heads off in search of a notorious spot, on the edge of town.
“Erika, drawn by the darkness, strides into the meadows. Erika’s goal is Jesuit’s Meadow. That’s still quite a ways off. First, the amusement park. Distant lights flash off and dash away. Shots ring out, voices roar victoriously. Adolescents scream with their battle implements in the video arcades, or else they shake machines, which rattle all the more noisily, chattering, clattering, hurling bolts of lightning. Erika resolutely turns her back on this commotion even before she lets it get to her. The lights grope towards her, find nothing to hold on to, run their fidgety fingers over her kerchief, slide off, draw a regretful trail of colour down her coat, and then fall on the ground behind her, to die in the dirt. The gigantic Ferris wheel made up of sparse lights dominates everything else. But it has its rival in the far more harshly lit rollercoaster, where tiny screechy cars zoom by, carrying shrill daredevils who, terrified by the power of technology, cling desperately to one another. The men have flimsy excuses to cling to the women. This is nothing for Erika. If there’s one thing she doesn’t want, it’s to be clung to. At the peak of the Haunted Ride, an illuminated ghost greets the world. He won’t catch any fish with his bait, at most some fourteen-year-old girl with her first boyfriend, the two of them, like kittens, playing with the horror of the world before they themselves become part of that horror.”
There is a barely contained violence here - all noise and movement and nervous energy. Machines are shaken, lights grope. Cars screech. Adolescents scream. These “shrill daredevils'' are on the cusp of innocence and experience, doing what all young adults do. All except Erika, that is. That’s why she isn’t interested in what’s here. Any simmering threat bounces off her. It’s only an ‘amusement park’, after all, a faux-scary rollercoaster - just a thrill. Erika is heading straight for the dark and dangerous adult world beyond. Her mother has done a number on her, and it leaves her both dismissive and judgemental of the young people she sees. “Kittens, playing with the horror of the world.”
Erika’s view, of course, is a morbid one. She can only see “horror” because for her there is no pleasure without pain. But we get what’s happening. We know those kids are gaining important experience. They’re testing the boundaries of the world from a relatively safe realm. Admittedly, that experience might be awkward, quite probably embarrassing, possibly even traumatising. But those thrills are steps towards the threshold of adulthood.
Unlike Erika, those youths have been given a chance to sublimate their self-destructive tendencies before being overwhelmed by them.
According to Sigmund Freud, the impulse towards the dark and the dangerous is something we all experience. It’s part of life, inextricably linked to our search for affirming experiences. These two impulses are known as Eros (the ‘life drive’) and Thanatos (the ‘death drive’). The death drive can appear irrational, or at least as if it operates by a logic outside the usual conventions. The book Freud wrote about his theory was called ‘Beyond The Pleasure Principle’.
In psychoanalytic theory, the death drive can manifest as self-sabotage, or as an urge to re-live painful past events. At its most extreme it might present as a desire to end it all. Psychologically, we hanker after a return to a hypnagogic state, to disappear, submit to a time free from the pressures and pain of existence.
Freud argues that the drive is an unavoidable aspect of life. You can’t wish it away. Denying or repressing it leads to depression or destructive tendencies. We need ways to channel these impulses, either by direct or vicarious experience.
For those kids in the amusement park, the noise and movement - rollercoasters, sex - are not only a rite of passage, they are a way of inoculating themselves against more destructive urges drive. Experiments are a vaccine. They prevent a more dangerous level of infection.
In Love and Let Die, John Higgs uses Eros and Thanatos to compare the parallel lives of Britain’s two biggest and longest-lasting cultural exports. The Beatles’ first single and the first James Bond movie were released on the very same day in October 1962, and Higgs says we can best understand this relationship as a battle for the psyche of Britain. The Beatles represent Eros: togetherness and love, a world of cooperation and possibility - a desire to find something bigger, something spiritual. In contrast, Bond represents Thanatos: aggression, cruelty, destructiveness. He has a licence to kill, after all.
As Higgs says, our attraction to the death drive is a dangerous thing, but can be mitigated if channelled in ways that minimise the danger we might do to ourselves. “One of the best examples,” he says, “is action cinema, which allows people to enjoy the visceral thrill of car crashes, shoot-outs and explosions without anyone actually getting hurt.” Although we risk being desensitised to violence, “it is probably healthier to enjoy screen-based action than it is to deny that we are drawn to it in the first place.”
If rollercoasters and other rites of passage offer a taste of adulthood, movies like Bond offer a social and cultural valve in much the same way. But film doesn’t require action sequences to achieve its effect of inoculation. It is by nature a psychological artform, portraying imaginary worlds driven by conflict and personal change, as shown by Projections - a rather brilliantly named podcast that examines films for elements of Freud’s ideas. Projections provide film courses via the Freud Museum’s website. In one called Death Drive On Film, you can learn to “isolate the death drive on film, engaging with cinematic representations of the urge to re-live painful past events, sadistic actions taken against the self and others, the unconscious wish of returning to an inorganic state, and rejecting the well-intentioned call to “choose life” in the popular discourse.”
The films under analysis form a broad spectrum, from American Werewolf In London to Weekend At Bernies. Presumably, Trainspotting could also be included.
“There is cultural merit in coming to terms with the death drive,” says the academic who runs the podcast (called, also brilliantly, Mary Wild), “as it helps us to identify, comprehend and integrate harmful impulses in a functional sublimated way.”
Film isn’t the only cultural mediator, of course. We can vicariously manage our destructive tendencies via avatars in other realms, like games (often determined by the ‘lives’ we lose) and novels (by writers as varied as Fleming and Jelinek, it seems).
When it comes to music, I reckon the Stooges’ Raw Power is the closest rock ever got to capturing the death drive in sonic form (first three song titles: Search And Destroy, Gimme Danger, Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell). Also, the two times I’ve seen My Bloody Valentine took me pretty close to the edge of of a hypnagogic state, each show climaxing with a twenty-minute, single-chord squall.
There’s also the Madonna lyric quoted at the top of this post, with its direct challenge to Freud and its commitment to self-immolation. Fittingly, given Higgs’ theory, the song is also a Bond theme. The lyric renders the films’ inner psychoanalytic meaning in a way that’s both explicit and ironic. How very Bond.
But recently, I experienced the death drive in vivid, head-spinning form, in the guise of a concert given by The Aphex Twin.
It was at a festival in Bristol, which was jarring in itself. Festivals to my mind exhibit the Eros effect - with their sense of collective possibility, life lived at its fullest. But then, the Aphex Twin (aka Richard James) is nothing if not intentionally jarring. Over the course of an hour and a bit, he played music that was mesmerising and punishing in equal measure. He unleashed an awesome, terrible beauty on us. His music felt at times like a beast to be tamed, or at least withheld.
The visuals had a lot to do with it. Brilliant and pixel-sharp, the whole stage was covered in screens. It was night, but only sunglasses prevented my eyes from hurting. It was like James was forcing you to look away, and sonically it felt the same - a dare, pushing music till it almost lost all sense of form. There were musical elements, and a crushing blend of jungle and hardcore beats. But you had to listen closely to keep track - intentionally leaning in to music that was doing its best to push you away.
It was pleasure made painful. Or the other way round. I couldn’t be sure.
The sounds were industrial, all cranks and squalls and screeches - like an ominous amusement park. Shards of sound crashed incessantly into the mix. There was the faintest trace of structure to cling to, but only via intensive pattern recognition, which was the way I found to navigate the set. A synth line might appear, or perhaps a new breakbeat, and your mind committed to following them as they extended into the night air. But they would soon be buried or drowned or otherwise subsumed into the sonic tsunami, with more breakbeats and synth lines piled on. Gradually you might get a handle on that, only for the tapestry of sound to evolve and mutate once more. The concentration required made it feel almost meditative. The crashing sounds rather less so.
The music seemed fractal, patterns within patterns, but it also felt like the music was scrolling past you. You began to see it visually, in three dimensions, full of intricate, constantly shifting textures. It all pulsed frenetically. There were occasional pauses, a momentary relief, but the brief silences weren’t like those in usual concert sets, a pause for applause, they felt more like the end of movements. As if the music had exhausted itself. Perhaps this is what happens when music feeds off itself, you thought. And then, in broken form, it would begin again...
It was only later that I wondered what it must have sounded like as this noise floated its way across the city. One friend of mine left, unable to take it anymore. Someone told me they saw lots of people leaving, hands over ears - enough! - and pushing their way back through the tightly pressed crowd to escape the torture. By then dancing had long since stopped. The only movement was involuntary - the crowd subject to a residual swaying, a blend of habit and chemicals with nowhere else to go. It was still so very intense, though. Something to endure, even as you weren’t quite sure how you would feel at the end. I’m not sure if anyone was expecting it. At the end we felt turned inside out. Was that fun or awful, we couldn’t tell. Torture or meditation? Pain or pleasure? Was it the feeling of crushed glass in your pocket or the illicit thrill of something you wanted to turn away from.
Synapses still firing, those who had leaned it to the violence and volatility of it all l were on some new trip of their own, albeit one they would find very hard to describe afterwards.
One person managed it, though. My friend’s son captured exactly the way in which Aphex Twin had inverted our expectations - how he’d turned us all inside out. This lad is 14, and a pop fan. He and his mum had watched loads over the weekend, enjoying Raye and Confidence Man the most. She’d warned him he might not like Aphex Twin, but they stayed for its entirety. He later declared it the best set of the festival.
Having found it super-intense herself, my friend asked her son how he'd felt during the performance.
“It was amazing,” he said. “I felt like I was on the brink of death.”