Bettie Page's Eyes

Berardinis, Olivia De. Bettie Page's Eyes. Web. 19 October 2012. <http://www.eolivia.com/site/ProdImages/G-3020.M.jpg>.

      In the first part of the 20th century, sexually charged photographs and artwork surged in popularity of idealized women in scantily clad outfits.  Although the heyday of this artistic style enjoyed its zenith during World War II, the genre continued in the pages of Playboy. A later day master of the style is Olivia de Berardinis, made famous by her renditions of the iconic Bettie Page. The example herein is a very tame example in regard to its lack of nudity, but captures well the essence of the siren-like quality of the pin-up girl. The expression on her face emits seduction, rendering all within her gaze powerless to her charms.

      The unrequited theme here involves the subject being in possession of the art or photo, and becoming infatuated with the image. The idealized fantasy grows within the mind of the subject, distinctly without any participation from the object of the subject's libido. In many ways, the feelings that occur within the subject can be very real and very close to feelings within an actual relationship, even as far as falling in love, obviously which is unreturned.

Love's Deity

Donne, John. "Love's Deity." Poetry X. Ed. Jough Dempsey. 21 July 2003. Web. 19 October 2012. <http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/884/>.

            This poem, written by 16th century English poet John Donne, relates the painful effects of loving someone who does not reciprocate the notion. The god of love is viewed within the work as irresponsible and immature, mismatching incompatible people. In the end the subject tries, or at least has thoughts of trying to cast aside these agonizing feelings. At the close, the narrator thinks of forcing the love of the objectified, but realizes that the lie would indeed be worse.

            Very plainly connected to the central theme, the narrator ponders the great mystery of how to escape feeling the misery related to unrequited love. The commonality once again involves obsessing, this time over an actual person. The fantasy idealized once more in a very self involved manner, feelings of attachment to the objectified entrap the subject in a painful and solitary drudgery, seeking desperately for freedom of this self-imposed imprisonment.

Heavenly Love and Earthly Love.
1602-03. Giovanni Baglione.
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.

I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost,

Who died before the God of Love was born:

I cannot think that he, who then loved most,

Sunk so low as to love one which did scorn.

But since this god produced a destiny,

And that vice-nature, Custom, lets it be,

I must love her that loves not me.

Sure, they which made him god meant not so much,

Nor he in his young godhead practised it;

But when an even flame two hearts did touch,

His office was indulgently to fit

Actives to passives. Correspondency

Only his subject was; it cannot be

Love, till I love her that loves me.

But every modern god will now extend

His vast prerogative as far as Jove.

To rage, to lust, to write to, to commend,

All is the purlieu of the God of Love.

Oh were we wakened by this tyranny

To ungod this child again, it could not be

I should love her who loves not me.

Rebel and atheist too, why murmur I

As though I felt the worst that love could do?

Love might make me leave loving, or might try

A deeper plague, to make her love me too,

Which, since she loves before, I’m loth to see;

Falsehood is worse than hate; and that must be,

If she whom I love should love me.

David Lynch's Lost Highway

Lost Highway. By Barry Gifford David Lynch. Dir. David Lynch. Perf. Patricia Arquette Bill Pullman. Ciby 2000. 1997. DVD.

From the bizarre mind of David Lynch springs a film of obsession and the yearning for the mind to escape the self-inflicted torment of being neurotically fixated on a person who has no interest in the subject. Here, Fred Madison is married to beautiful Renee in a loveless marriage. They begin receiving videotapes of an intruder filming within their home; a strange man speaks enigmatically to Fred at a party, telling him that he is "at his house right now" even though he is standing right before him. The next morning Fred gets another tape, and is horrified to see that it contains footage of him murdering Renee. He is arrested, tried and convicted to die. As he sits on death row he goes through a Kafkaesque transformation, becoming Pete Dayton. Releasing this person from prison, he ends up coming in contact with Alice. She looks exactly like Renee except with a different hair color. Being the girlfriend of a local mobster, she and Pete start an affair where they secretly meet in shabby motels. They form a plot whereby they will steal some money and leave town out of fear that the mobster boyfriend would kill them. The movie climaxes in a scene in the desert where Pete tells Alice "I want you," to which she replies "You'll never have me" and disappears. Pete turns back into Fred, and a sequence of events discovers his wife Renee cheating on him with the mobster. The strange man appears and tells him that Renee is the same person as Alice, and bringing the mobster out to the desert he executes him. The movie ends with police chasing Fred down the highway.

A difficult movie to comprehend on the first viewing, and maybe only slightly better by the 31^st, the escapist connotation of Fred denying either the murder of his wife or his wife cheating by metamorphosing remains unclear. Lynch’s modus operandi per rigor is a dreamlike atmosphere, made up of thematic strokes and open to many interpretations. As such, what we can recognize is that although Fred/Pete tries to possess Renee/Alice in an absolutely unrealistic chain of events, she still repels him, and thereby raises the unrequited connection to the second power. Nothing hurts quite as bad as self-inflicting a wound in the same exact spot.

Possession – Sarah McLachlan

McLachlan, Sarah. "Possession." Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. By Sarah McLachlan. Prod. Pierre Marchand. Montreal, 1993. Compact Disc.

             When Sarah McLachlan began to receive copious quantities of letters from an obsessed fan, rather than become fearful, overreacting, or otherwise lashing out, she used her art to cope with the unsolicited attention and wrote a song from what she imagined was the perspective of the person in question. Uwe Vandrei did not fit the dramatic bill of the obsessive compulsive; there were no dead animals sent in the mail or any other types of outwardly destructive behavior. The tale was nonetheless an odd one, with the subject bringing a lawsuit against the objectified, suing for songwriting credit on “Possession” and finally committing suicide before the case was brought to trial.

            The connection here is quite simple, especially within the context of the back-story.  The fixated fan creates the relationship within his own mind, without the acquiescence of the object of his affection in such a resolute way that such permission truly matters not. Certain parts of the song bring thoughts of hardly caring but truly possessing of a piece of property, a thing, an object. Herein lies the flaw of this line of reasoning, the common connection becomes even more lucid between all the above pieces.

Listen as the wind blows from across the great divide

Voices trapped in yearning, memories trapped in time

The night is my companion and solitude my guide

Would I spend forever here and not be satisfied?

And I would be the one to hold you down

Kiss you so hard, I'll take your breath away

And after I'd wipe away the tears

Just close your eyes, dear

Through this world I've stumbled so many times betrayed

Trying to find an honest word, to find the truth enslaved

Oh, you speak to me in riddles and you speak to me in rhymes

My body aches to breathe your breath, your words keep me alive

And I would be the one to hold you down

Kiss you so hard, I'll take your breath away

And after I'd wipe away the tears

Just close your eyes, dear

Into this night I wander, it's morning that I dread

Another day of knowing of the path I fear to tread

Oh, into the sea of waking dreams, I follow without pride

'Cause nothing stands between us here and I won't be denied

And I would be the one to hold you down

Kiss you so hard, I'll take your breath away

And after I'd wipe away the tears

Just close your eyes, dear

I'll hold you down

Kiss you so hard, I'll take your breath away

And after I'd wipe away the tears

Just close your eyes

Punishment by Rabindranath Tagore

Tagore, Rabindranath. "Punishment." Lawall, Sarah. The Norton Anthology Of World Literature. 2nd. Vol. f. New York City: W W Norton, 2001. 1693-1699. Print.

Full text is available online at http://drhanan.com/comp/packet.pdf, pages 26-29

      This perfectly written fable, set in what is now Bengal at the turn of the nineteenth century, tells the story of two brothers; the older brother who kills his wife in a fit of rage, the younger who tries to convince his beautiful and willful wife to take the blame for the murder in order to save his brother. In the middle of the story we learn that the mistrust within their relationship leads them both to react in ways that are not built on actual love, but a jealous possessive nature that is individual to each of them. When Chidam receives attention from other women in the village or comes home without extra earnings after being gone several days, his wife Chandara takes action that ultimately makes him jealous. He tries to lock her away as a possession, and she escapes to her uncle’s house. Although she returns, he is forced to treat her as the kindred spirit she truly is rather than a thing to be owned. “Ever-fearful love for his elusive young wife racked him with intense pain” (Tagore 1696). He betrays her true love yet again by placing her in mortal danger, in response “[s]he turned her heart and soul away from him” (1697). Her love for the man squelched, she sees death as a preferable alternative to living within the confines of his false love. She does not deny the murder, and gives no excuse to her actions. Only when she is sentenced to death and repels any visits to him does Chidam understand the nature of his true love.

      This final connection is an example of a love misunderstood, mistreated, and finally lost. The title aptly refers not only to Chandara’s fate, but to Chidam’s sentence of living on without ever being with his true mate, having realized too late the nature of true love. At his insistence on using her as a mere tool rather than honoring her soulful affection, she withdraws from him and his love found too late is unrequited.