“Finding oneself in the position of the beloved is so violent a discovery, even traumatic: being loved makes me feel directly the gap between what I am as a determinate being and the unfathomable X in me that causes love. Lacan’s definition of love – ‘love is giving something one doesn’t have …’ has to be supplemented with ‘… to someone who doesn’t want it.'”
Slavoj Žižek, ‘How to Read Lacan’ (2006)
This subject is such a deep well that I have even more to say on the subject of weird old men in film and literature. The original post on this topic remains my most popular blog by far; I’d rather not question why, but choose instead to feel validated by that fact. I’m creating a whole new post to stop the previous one becoming too long and cumbersome, so this essay will be a quick whizz through a couple of additional points: I’m going to dig into some philosophical theories that complement the literary trope or shed some light on what may have influenced its patterns; I will then wax lyrical about Thomas Mann, the greatest novelist on grotesque and painful love; I’ll then talk a little about a new addition to the pantheon in the form of Lydia Tár from the film Tár (dir. Todd Field, 2021). Here is Pervy Old Men: Part 1 for anyone who wants a refresher before we get into it.
Love is giving something one doesn’t have, to someone who doesn’t want it … in Lacan, confessing your desire is seen as an act of violence, a brush with The Traumatic Real. One day, you are living your life, the next you are swept up in a shift in reality, forced to face a new and unfamiliar vision of yourself, a loss of your identity to the power of someone else’s image of you. Perhaps this is why the objects of desire in these Pervy Old Men (POM) narratives always fare so poorly; and from our own experience, we recognise this tragedy unfurling inside them.
Aside from Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault in the second volume of The History of Sexuality wrote about the horror of desire from a particular standpoint entrenched in male sexuality, and in the context of Ancient Greek science and philosophy. In this ancient version of sexuality, men are the victim of sexuality; their vital fluids are being sucked from them vampire-like by women who need their semen to rejuvenate their own bodies. I feel like this attitude towards sexuality is implicit in all the POM featured in the genre so far; they generally exhibit a strong physical and mental decline as a result of their desire, such as Aschenbach (Death in Venice) slowly succumbing to cholera or Dr Barry Nyle (Beyond the Black Rainbow) transforming into some kind of hairless demon.
“A gradual exhaustion of the organism, the death of the individual, the destruction of his offspring, and finally, harm to the entire human race, were regularly promised through an endlessly garrulous literature, to those who would make illicit use of their sex.”
Michel Foucault, ‘The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Vol II’ (1984)
The Use of Pleasure details many interesting concepts of desire and sexuality from the Ancient world, and how they may have impacted later Christian and early modern attitudes. Ancient Greek ideas of sexuality, or as they called it, aphrodisia, connected temporal pleasure with more sinister outcomes such as damage to reputation, loss of resources, fear of death. They had many theories as to what semen actually was and where it came from: they thought it may be spinal fluid, or juice from the brain membrane, or that it came from the lubricant that joins the body and soul together; precious and finite essences. Some ancient philosophers even advised to indulge in aphrodisiac only ‘if one wants to do harm to oneself.’ In any case, the emission of semen has to be carefully policed as wanton desire permanently depletes the resources of the individual (semen as drawn from the whole organism, originates from where the body and the soul are joined, or is formed at the end of a lengthy internal process of food).
“Hair may be a symbol of sexuality and pollution or the very stuff of sacredness. The Greeks saw the head as the source of male semen in the form of the cerebrospinal fluid and considered the state of the hair as an indication of a man’s sexual vigour.”
Robert Brain, The Decorated Body (1979)
Most of these narrative involve in multiple contexts the core theme of exploitations of youth. These exploitations run counter to an idealistic Ancient Greek concept of truth in love, in which the object of the lover is to find why he loves. What is the reason for this strong desire, what does it mean, what can be learned from it? Failure to find this essential truth (lack of self awareness, moderation and responsibility) leads to corruption and lust controlling the individual. Lacan and Foucault, as well as the Ancient Philosophers, only deal with a male-skewed image of sexuality with no other kind of nuance so their ideas are perfect for exploring this trope.
Regarding the exploitation of youth, in 2021 a Swedish documentary was released called The Most Beautiful Boy in the World. It tells the story of Björn Andrésen, a man now in his sixties but who was once the teenager catapulted to global fame for his role as Tadzio in Visconti’s Death in Venice. It also describes his vulnerability, his exploitation by a real-life pervy old man, and his subsequent struggles over the course of the rest of his life. The film attempts to paint Andrésen’s premature casting as Tadzio as the catalyst for the serious problems of his later life, as a real-life POM story, but I am unsure if they are forcing this narrative too much onto reality as Andrésen already had a difficult childhood and there are unrelated problems that Lucio Visconti cannot be blamed for.
Death in Venice, the 1912 novel, features possibly the only sympathetic character in the POM pantheon. Queer, mad, guilty, sad; the protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach has sailed through life thus far so respectably, so cerebral and controlled, that when he finally encounters aphrodisia he has no resistance to the impending madness. And Tadzio, his catalyst, is arguably one of the least damaged by the end of the narrative, out of all of the desire-objects; though of course Aschenbach’s selfishness does indirectly expose Tadzio and his family to the cholera outbreak, that ultimately claims his own life. Their outcome is left ambiguous.
Thomas Mann, across his whole body of work from the very beginning, is the unrivalled genius of relating tales of unrequited, doomed love affairs. The work that best and most concisely exemplifies the Mann image of desire is his 1896 short story ‘Little Herr Friedemann’, which tells of a deformed man (a hunchback after a tragic accident) who goes through life on an even keel dedicated to self-improvement, until he becomes violently obsessed with a married woman and ultimately strangles her upon rejection. Most of Mann’s characters, like Herr Friedmann, are just too sad to fall directly into the POM category.
Finally on the subject of this horrific desire, I have been considering the recent film Tàr (blog post here) as a possible candidate for inclusion on the Pervy Old Men List, which goes against my earlier assertion that only older white men could pose the required level of threat to drive the plot. Even though the eponymous character Lydia Tàr is female, literally nothing about the film would change if she was a man, not even her clothing; her lesbianism only maintains the general continuity of young women as the target of exploitation. The other characteristics generally stand (screenplay written by a white man; character in position of power, much older than her lust-objects; story told from Tàr’s perspective; lust leading directly to her downfall).
However, there are two areas in which Tàr strays from the core criteria. One of her prey, who we don’t meet in the film, is destroyed professionally by Tàr and ultimately commits suicide; so far so POM. However, the second target who is featured prominently in the film, the young Russian cellist, escapes without a scratch or any harm at all. Indeed, she arguably fucks with Tàr more than is fucked with herself, teaming up with another badly-treated employee to cause Tàr’s humiliating downfall. Additionally and unusually for this genre, the pattern of abuse is emphasised as an activity that Tàr has been carrying out for many years with several women. The rest of the old perverts have only one individual as the focus of their desire, often with no or few previous crimes suggested in the narrative; it is their encounter with this ‘nymphette’ (as Humbert Humbert describes Dolores) that is the catalyst for the whole plot, and why these desire-objects are so vehemently blamed for the corruption that leads to the protagonist’s downfall. The film Tàr has two of these nymphettes that drive the plot in different ways.
So, I add Tàr to the list with hesitation; but the film is definitely the closest the trope has come to featuring a non-white-male protagonist. It is also nice to see a recent example of the genre, and a real development. Perhaps, contrary to what I concluded in Part 1, the Pervy Old Man lives on to fight another day.
Sertraline Dreams 