You're just too good to be true...
This pretty boy is getting slugged around a squalid Queens apartment. He went there willingly, and should not really be surprised. His instinctive body is radiating threat, but his face is cool and showing no emotion: he may as well not be there.
For whom exactly is this scene taking place, and where? In the room itself, nothing but silence is being spoken: it is just a combinative there. A fist hits a mouth and draws blood, and then two men fuck like a duty. No anxiety, no hesitation - and is this not pure sex itself? The eternal dream of sex, how sex itself imagines sex. A mechanical algebra of bodies colliding, and nothing sublime or sacred at all.
But then why these bodies in particular: why have they combined tonight, and why in this way? This skinny kid, really just a social ghost, and his adult partner, really just a thuggish tool of forces. The former, believing hardly and sincerely in his own cold and careful absence, who wants to be more other than the others. The latter, more present than presence itself, desiring desperately, with his whole heart, to be more like the others than they are themselves.
If this means violence, so be it, so long as the harsher violence is avoided - in this variation, Jane Eyre, once become Jane Eliot, never must become Jane Eyre again. The trauma turns precious, and transfigures itself into the secret-as-such. "I just hate when they look like Tarzan, and talk like Jane," observes Neil imperiously, following the staggering insult of some cursory politeness, and the real point here is that it is appearance itself which has become prohibited. In contrast to the hysteric Brian, reaching for the safety of the screen memory, Neil is properly psychotic: he recognizes no distance whatsoever between his desire and society, and thus recognizes within himself no sovereignty at all. This is how he deliberately abjects his identity, and carefully turns himself into an object without will, to be passively carried along by the libidinal flows of the world, come what may.
It is this paradoxical determination of sovereignty, sovereignty geared on the ground of the absolute absence of sovereignty, to which the figure of the rent boy owes his supreme status as the modern avatar of authenticity. Is there any subject less oedipalized, in our post-Freudian age, than the subject who consciously fucks surrogate fathers for money? Even the junkie pales in comparison, since his lack of direction is clearly still self-indulgence, requiring perpetual material reiteration; thus the contrasting fortunes of the memoirists J.T. LeRoy and James Frey. The latter, his cover story of significant suffering exposed as fraudulent, finds himself summarily exiled from the contemporary literature scene; meanwhile, the former, who never even existed, and whose literary construction represented a far more extensive and calculated dishonesty, is categorically exonerated on the grounds that 'a touching expression of longing, suffering, love, and endurance is not disqualified simply because it issues from a construct. He exists because if words and stories resonate and move the reader, then it matters not that the hand writing them signed another's name.'
Move the reader, fine, but move them where - and whose fantasy is this anyway? The answer is surprising. The social scenography of this character, passionately clinched in the name of the real by a whole gamut of fashionably transgressive writers, who in their fiction had already written him into existence, clearly, if J.T. LeRoy did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him, and indeed, so it proved. But what precisely is being invented here is in fact not really a fantasy itself, but rather a symbolic screen, enabling fantasmatic projection. The rent boy, as the one who himself needs no imaginary screen, and thus by this special heroism, serves to incarnate the pious dreams of this world.
For whom exactly is this scene taking place, and where? In the room itself, nothing but silence is being spoken: it is just a combinative there. A fist hits a mouth and draws blood, and then two men fuck like a duty. No anxiety, no hesitation - and is this not pure sex itself? The eternal dream of sex, how sex itself imagines sex. A mechanical algebra of bodies colliding, and nothing sublime or sacred at all.
But then why these bodies in particular: why have they combined tonight, and why in this way? This skinny kid, really just a social ghost, and his adult partner, really just a thuggish tool of forces. The former, believing hardly and sincerely in his own cold and careful absence, who wants to be more other than the others. The latter, more present than presence itself, desiring desperately, with his whole heart, to be more like the others than they are themselves.
If this means violence, so be it, so long as the harsher violence is avoided - in this variation, Jane Eyre, once become Jane Eliot, never must become Jane Eyre again. The trauma turns precious, and transfigures itself into the secret-as-such. "I just hate when they look like Tarzan, and talk like Jane," observes Neil imperiously, following the staggering insult of some cursory politeness, and the real point here is that it is appearance itself which has become prohibited. In contrast to the hysteric Brian, reaching for the safety of the screen memory, Neil is properly psychotic: he recognizes no distance whatsoever between his desire and society, and thus recognizes within himself no sovereignty at all. This is how he deliberately abjects his identity, and carefully turns himself into an object without will, to be passively carried along by the libidinal flows of the world, come what may.
It is this paradoxical determination of sovereignty, sovereignty geared on the ground of the absolute absence of sovereignty, to which the figure of the rent boy owes his supreme status as the modern avatar of authenticity. Is there any subject less oedipalized, in our post-Freudian age, than the subject who consciously fucks surrogate fathers for money? Even the junkie pales in comparison, since his lack of direction is clearly still self-indulgence, requiring perpetual material reiteration; thus the contrasting fortunes of the memoirists J.T. LeRoy and James Frey. The latter, his cover story of significant suffering exposed as fraudulent, finds himself summarily exiled from the contemporary literature scene; meanwhile, the former, who never even existed, and whose literary construction represented a far more extensive and calculated dishonesty, is categorically exonerated on the grounds that 'a touching expression of longing, suffering, love, and endurance is not disqualified simply because it issues from a construct. He exists because if words and stories resonate and move the reader, then it matters not that the hand writing them signed another's name.'
Move the reader, fine, but move them where - and whose fantasy is this anyway? The answer is surprising. The social scenography of this character, passionately clinched in the name of the real by a whole gamut of fashionably transgressive writers, who in their fiction had already written him into existence, clearly, if J.T. LeRoy did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him, and indeed, so it proved. But what precisely is being invented here is in fact not really a fantasy itself, but rather a symbolic screen, enabling fantasmatic projection. The rent boy, as the one who himself needs no imaginary screen, and thus by this special heroism, serves to incarnate the pious dreams of this world.
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