SOURCE: Jackson, Earl, Jr. “Death Drives across Pornotopia: Dennis Cooper on the Extremities of Being.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 2 (1994): 143-61.

[In the following essay, Jackson studies the interrelationship of sex and death in Cooper's fiction and the author's explorations of the limits of self-knowledge and metaphysical longing, as depicted in scenes of ritualized sexual violence and physical degradation and mirrored in the simulacra of voyeurism and pornographic images.]

You go not till I set you up a glass
Where you may see the inmost part of you.

Hamlet 3. 5. 19-20

Perhaps our true sexual act consists in this: in verifying to the point of giddiness the useless objectivity of things.

Jean Baudrillard

Like Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs before him, Dennis Cooper writes consistently within predominantly male homosexual contexts, but his subject is rarely “homosexuality” per se. Moreover, the sexual practices thematized in Cooper's work are not part of an identity politics, but are rather subordinated to an investigation into the interior of the body, a movement of objectification and obsessive violation of the body's contours, a peering inside the costume of the person to his real location. Of the generally accepted erotogenic zones, the penis receives far less attention than the anus and the mouth: orifices, ruptures between the surface of “personality” and the murky labyrinths within, apertures into the more tenebrous realities of the organism.

Cooper's concerns, however, are decidedly inflected and nuanced by the sexual orientation of his male characters. The violence in his writings can be articulated “as a kind of studying the self” without participating in or extending the history of male violence against women that complicates similar themes in heterosexual literature and film (qtd. in Meyer 64). Furthermore, the AIDS epidemic is often a non-explicit horizon of Cooper's writing—a terrible historical accident that imposes an unanticipated literalness upon the risks to the body and the self that sex constitutes in much of his work.¹ As he writes in “Dear Secret Diary”: “When I'm fucking someone and he accidentally falls off the bed I like to pretend he's about to be shot for trying to defect. Or I did before AIDS ruined death” (5). The present essay is an attempt at a critical account of Cooper's meditations on sexuality and death in his major works, and of how their dynamics not only delimit but also inform human experience.

THE MELANCHOLIA OF DESIRE: “SQUARE ONE” AND “A HERD”

Cooper's early work celebrates the boys who were the targets of his youthful sexual obsessions (Tiger Beat, Idols). From The Tenderness of the Wolves on, however, there is a shift to an exploration of the vagaries of desire itself—its nature and its location in and among the bodies of both its subject and its objects. Cooper's meditations on the enigma of desire are perhaps most densely encapsulated in “Square One,” a highly personal essay on pornographic film as both a rehearsal of that mystery and a clue to its intractable solution. Here Cooper demonstrates how fantasy and memory condition sexual experience and give reality its lie. “Square One” has three foci: Jeff Hunter, “star of half a dozen videos and films … [whose] physical makeup fits my master plan for the ‘ideal sex partner,’ a guy I've refined from my 15 or more years of fucking and fantasizing” (83); George M., a “long-lost friend and Jeff lookalike … the most focused part of what I'd fashioned into a sex life in '71” (85); and “Ron, Rod, or Rob,” someone Cooper “had sex with in a dark hall behind the screen” (89).²

Cooper retraces the history of his interest in Jeff Hunter from his first viewing of Pacific Coast Highway to finding Jeff accidentally several years later, burnt out and being fistfucked in a porno magazine. In reflecting on his attraction to Jeff, Cooper realizes that it stems from Jeff's resemblance to Cooper's “long-lost friend,” George. At the point of this recognition, the narrative scene alternates between a porn theater where a Jeff Hunter film is playing and memories of seducing George as a teenager. Cooper attempts to extricate memory from fantasy through a real sexual encounter in the theater:

I just had sex in a dark hall behind the screen. I stretched out on a filthy mattress with someone named Ron, Rod, or Rob. … I don't know who I expected to fuck but it wasn't a poorly lit man whose name I couldn't catch. …

I felt like saying, “You're sweet,” but it didn't suit the occasion. So I said, “Bye, Ro-,” muffling the last consonant to be safe.

When I was with Ro- I thought of someone else. First Jeff reared his jaded head. I grabbed Ro-'s ears, shoved my cock up his ass until George's face came up for breath.

(“Square” 89-90)

“Real sex” seems to obfuscate the mechanisms of desire more than it illuminates them. In fact, the real experience on “the filthy mattress” gained its significance parasitically from the fantasy and the memories that circumscribed it. The relation between Jeff and George is clearer, but no more consoling:

They're distinct. George is the beauty. Jeff's the statue erected of him in a public place, so he'll remain aloft. … Jeff's just the shadow that falls across us when we're at certain points in our lives. By now we know what we've missed and become depressed. I'm a man brushing tears, imaginary or not, from my face.

(86)

The despair comes from a network of intersecting deadends: a fantasy/film image that is unfathomable because it has no depth; a memory whose essence is the sense of loss it shapes; and a genital event that can neither correspond to the power nor fulfill the promise of either of the former.

The alternation in the narrative between the Jeff Hunter film and the memories of George figures the vacillation in the modalities of the narrator's desire between mourning and melancholia, with a decided emphasis on the latter. George is the object of Cooper's mourning, Jeff of his melancholia. Mourning is the process of reconciling oneself to the loss (usually the death) of a loved one (Freud, “Mourning” 243-44). Melancholia may be triggered by a similar loss, but often with more tenuous relations to external circumstances. Often the loved one “has not actually died, but has been lost as an object of love,” as when one is “jilted” (245). Cooper's relation to Jeff maintains the logic of melancholia, but reverses its symptom: rather than the object not really being absent, here the object is not really present. Introducing Jeff into his fantasies creates an attainment that is a form of loss, which at once ameliorates and reiterates the real loss of George.

Melancholia can also arise when the subject is not conscious of whom he/she has lost, or when the subject knows whose loss he/she is mourning, but cannot understand what it is in that person that the subject has lost by losing that person (244). Much of this applies to Cooper's object-relations to both Jeff and George, even when George was present. In fact, the conditioning factors of melancholia describe some of the pervasive features of desire as Cooper elaborates them throughout his works. What Cooper lost in George is that which one needs from the object of desire, but Cooper characterizes his sexual relationship with George with the same melancholic inability to ascertain what that is and for what loss its attainment will compensate. Pierre, the porn star in Cooper's novel Frisk, reflects on the mysterious qualities of sexual motivations from the perspective of the “object” of melancholic desire: “[T]he way men deal with me is like I'm a kind of costume that someone else, someone they've known or made up, is wearing” (67). Recalling a client who had been sexually enthralled with him, Pierre said his lovemaking was “like if I was where someone had buried some sort of treasure or antidote to something malignant in him” (87).

The riddle that is incessantly posed to the desiring subject is the nature of the attraction, and the relation of the body desired to the person desired, a riddle whose frustration is most dramatically expressed in “Square One” when Cooper admits that “It was [George] I imagined my cock entering each night, not just his flimsy ass, though that's the first thing I opened when I got the chance” (85). The plots and themes in Cooper's texts often involve the same operative paradox: the persistence of obsessive metaphysical gestures within a radically demystified world, gestures expressing a longing for that X which seems to inhere within a human object of desire that is nevertheless not coextensive with the physical body in which that desire is given shape and through which the desire is brought under control. A desire to know that X—that essence of the person—is overliteralized in acts of mutilation and murder. As Cooper continues to learn nothing of his own desire in reviewing memories of sex with George, he muses, “If I'd sliced into George I'd have been covered with blood at least. There'd be evidence, if no answer” (88).

Cooper's earliest sustained prose exploration of the relations among sexual desire, the transcendence of beauty, and horror is the story “A Herd,” which chronicles several weeks in the life of Ray Sexton, a John Gacy-like serial killer of teenage boys. Sexton begins his ritual as a voyeur, the images of the boys framed in their bedroom windows analogous to the movie screen in porno theaters:

When a boy was undressing in his room … he was relaxed. And if he was watched through a window, cut in three parts by the partly closed shades, by a viewer who had nothing gentle or worthy to do, it was very much like that boy was performing a striptease. … Everything was seen and judged from the window.

The man outside mulled an aesthetic to fit the occasion and fashioned rewards from these limits.

(“Herd” 53)

The visions of boys seen through the windows are an accidental and intermediate instantiation of those commodified images of desire that porn perpetuates, as do other, more pervasive media, such as the fanzines of teen idols who configure Sexton's obsessions: “[Teen magazine] stars were Ray's angels, freed from the limits of IQs and coordination, whose distant looks had a cloudy, quaalude effect.” Sexton transforms the compromise “aesthetic” of voyeuristic/consumer passivity into an active and destructively creative one through the slaughter of the boys he desires. The “star” quality that originally attracted him to his victims appears sporadically in their faces during the ordeals he inflicts—“an idol's look would appear. … Then what Ray had done took on meaning” (56).

Sexton's practices suggest a kind of dark Platonism, a searching for absolute beauty by destroying the individual accidents of its corporealizations. Diotima rhetorically asks Socrates a question to which Sexton provides a horrifying answer: “How would it be … if someone could see the Beautiful itself, pure, clear, unmixed—not infected with human flesh and color, and a lot of other mortal nonsense—if he were able to know the divinely Beautiful itself, in its unique form?” (Symposium 211E). Whatever and wherever a boy is once Sexton is finished with him, he is not “the thing on the table.” Diotima's prescribed ascent to the Beautiful requires serial experiences of the physical beauty of boys, leading to increasing generalization and abstraction. Sexton liberated the ideal from the boys' bodies, and kept it within him, checking his memory of each victim with the newspaper photographs after the bodies had been found: “Ray looked at the face of a boy in the newspaper. The young man had put his lips close to a camera and pouted. The camera had focused, flashed. The face had slid through a hole in its side, unfogging slowly” (73).

The essence of a person becomes something which radiates from the body, as a numinous simulacrum of the face that had held it captive. This version of the ideal gives it a shape intelligible to its worshippers, transforming the boys at times into idols who look down from incomprehensible distances—at once fully accessible and absolutely unattainable (like Jeff Hunter's image on the movie screen). This is also the principle of Cooper's volume of poetry, Idols, panegyrics to boys in high school he loved or longed for, and to teenybopper heartthrobs of the '70s. In the prose poem “Teen Idols” Cooper reflects on the pop-culture processes of mass-market image cathexis:

Teen idols are the best boys on the block. … Always romantic, they sign their photos “I think of you and you're beautiful” and then “love always” and then their first names. They know how to please us, to keep us hanging on.

(Idols 58)

Note the similarity of this description to Sexton's of a boy called Jay: “Ray wished he could hand this boy his photo to autograph. The boy would write, ‘loved you, kissed me, I'm yours … let's fade away’ then his first name” (“Herd” 73). Sexton made Jay a celebrity—an “idol”—by negating his existence—reducing it to the fleeting fame of a newsphoto—a photo of “someone who didn't exist.” Sexton's action is complemented by Craig in the title story of Cooper's collection He Cried, who made enlargements of the newsphotos of a serial killer's victims: “He tacks it next to the others, across his bedroom wall. Ten corpses stare through the grain like hallucinations he used to worry he'd never come down from” (Cried 30).

If Sexton represents a homicidal extension of the idealism of the Symposium, the porn theater in “Square One” is a site for a psychoanalytic inversion of the epistemology of the Republic. In Book VII, Socrates likens the unenlightened to people chained in a cave, forced to look only forward at the wall. Behind them is a flame and between the flame and the prisoners, people walk continually holding up puppets and images of animals and other objects. The only knowledge of objects those restrained have is of the shadows of the puppets projected onto the wall of the cave; such “knowledge”—eikasia—the acceptance of images as reality—is the only option for these unhappy prisoners (514 a-c). The men in Cooper's porno theater have consciously induced a state of eikasia in themselves.³

In Plato's allegory, there are at least two more levels of reality beyond that of the shadow play. The unshackled prisoner could turn from the shadow of the bull-image on the wall to see the real bull-image casting the shadow. The freed prisoner could be led out of the cave to see a real bull. No parallel options exist for Cooper's moviegoers. If the need for the real incited a revolution in the porn audience, the Platonic paradigm could not provide a basis for any reasonable or satisfactory action (in fact all actions arising from such a need would destroy the possibility of the type of satisfaction obtained by viewing the film): “[T]he screen hangs between paying customers and our ideal lovers. If we charged, ripped it down, we'd find a wall of unsupported brick” (“Square” 88).

Cooper's theater does not possess the escape exits of Plato's cave, because its patrons retain the pessimism and frustration caused by idealism, but have discarded the faith in any metaphysical system that would support the epistemological teleology of Plato's allegory. The transition from shadow, to icon, to real object parallels the transition Socrates urges us to make when he condemns art in Republic X: from an artificial representation (a painting of a bed) to a tangible object (an actual bed) to the intelligible object (the Form of ‘bed’). The images on the movie screen hold no guarantee of an accession to higher forms of objects of which they are emanations. The ontological saturation of the film image itself is an ontology by default, due to a technology that can only reproduce a reality that no longer exists by the time of its re-presentation.

Unlike Plato's cave dwellers, the porno spectators actually know the difference between image and reality, but have consciously repudiated this knowledge in order to maintain a fantasy that feeds their desire. In fact, the men in the audience suspend their disbelief precisely because they know that the referent of the image does not exist. The suspension of disbelief in film spectatorship is often compared with the “split belief” of the subject's defensive disavowal of castration.⁴ But this contradictory belief can also reflect aberrations in the mourning process. When the subject's resistance to the reality of the object's loss is particularly great, the subject may reject “reality” and retain the object in a “hallucinatory wishful psychosis” (Freud, “Mourning” 244-45). Hallucination nullifies the distinction between a presentation in consciousness and a perception (Interpretation of Dreams 565-66); such states appear to be regressions to an earlier phase in which the child imagined objects of satisfaction not really present (Interpretation of Dreams 544-46), a habit gradually overcome by the adaptation to “reality testing” (“Two Principles” 219-21). Hallucinations are not actually brought about by a regression, but rather by the ego's withdrawal of cathexis in external reality (“Metapsychology” 231). Dreams represent a non-pathological form of this renunciation (232); film viewing is a culturally sanctioned and controlled version of this deliberate withdrawal from reality testing. The realism of a film concretely produces an analogous experience to the identification of ideation and perception. If the structural dynamic of spectatorial belief resembles a refusal to complete the work of mourning, the spectator's cathexis to the screen image enacts melancholia in its epistemological and ontological contradictions. Claiming possession of the desired object through its image is also acknowledging the impossibility of that possession. The image is object as non-existence. The spectacle of the porn-image is no longer a subject but a memorial to the abnegation of subjectivity (the subject's deliberate becoming-object of the gaze); but it is also a sign of that object's absence as well. Guy Debord writes that “the spectacle is affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human life … as mere appearance. But the critique which reaches the truth of the spectacle exposes it as the visible negation of life, as a negation of life which has become visible” (10). Cooper's texts are one such critique of the “truth of the spectacle.” In exposing that spectacle as the “visible negation of life,” Cooper also lays the groundwork for reconceiving representation as a concrete cultural elaboration of the death drive. In his increasingly psychomythic narratives in which his characters embody and enact this representational tragedy, Cooper delineates the death drive as a force whose symbolization “allows for an intuition of the unconscious, even though it is already at the level of discursive thought: a theoretical exigency, the refracted derivative of desire” (Laplanche 109).

The inevitable temporal and spatial disjunction between the scene of filming and the scene of projection gives any film a potentially elegiac aura: even in mainstream cinema, the film often shows stars no longer young or long dead, times and places no longer possible to experience as they are depicted. The mortality of the depicted real that the film image both denies and demonstrates is magnified to its most nightmarish extreme in gay male porn. Since the onset of the AIDS pandemic, there is a macabre likelihood that a significant number of the cast of any gay porno film is dead. The porn actor, who, like any film actor, gives himself up to the camera, allowing the cinematic apparatus to produce an image of him that will bracket (and thus negate) his biosocial individual particularity, may also be participating in his actual (extrafilmic) obliteration. The acts engaged in in the films also suggest the actual occasion of the infection: porn videos made since 1980 that feature unprotected anal sex may be delayed reaction snuff films. Therefore, the general paradoxes of the cinematic situation (the viewer's deliberate ascription of reality to flickering images; the cognitively full representation of a non-present world) become intensely imbued with death in the gay male porn that Cooper discusses. The films hybridize the qualities of the pop star posters, in the glamorization of male beauty, and the newsphotos of the murdered boys in “A Herd” and “He Cried,” in the funereal quality of these images. In both cases physical attractiveness is an indirect cause of death. (Eidolon, from which “idol” is derived, means both a representation of a god and a phantom of a dead person.)

The other major form of disavowal operative within the split belief of film spectatorship is the fetish. Because Cooper writes outside of heterosexual presumption, he returns “fetish” to a pre-Freudian meaning—independent of the castration complex and male fears of sexual difference. Instead the fixation on representation in lieu of referent becomes akin to a more traditional religious meaning of fetish: “An inanimate object worshipped by savages on account of its supposed inherent magical powers, or as being animated by a spirit. A fetish differs from an idol in that it is worshipped in its own character, not as the image, symbol, or occasional residence of a deity” (OED; see also Pietz).

Cooper's search for an absolute that would at least justify the vehemence of human need (most viscerally expressed in sexuality), if not satisfy it, recalls earlier attempts to rediscover the numinous in the phenomenal as a response to a loss of faith. In his concentration on the physical beauty of men, Cooper betrays a nostalgia for certain patterns of Western transcendence. Equating in Safe the “truth” of Mark's body to a skeleton is a virtually medieval gesture both in its iconography and in its repudiation of the flesh. In “Teen Idols” he posits the teen stars as entities “behind” their photos. In “Square One” Cooper ventures behind the screen to have “real” sex with Ro-. Reality is behind the veil, but it is a disconsolate discovery, and one that leaves the ineffability of the screen images intact. It is interesting too that instead of following Plato's cavemen out into the sun, Cooper goes further into the theater, to find that the “real” is banal, and only tolerable when punctuated and screened over by the images of irrecoverably lost objects.

Although in this scenario the belief in the reality of images seems to borrow its pathos from the traces of idealism in a post-idealist world, the involvement with non-real figures acquires additional meaning from a psychoanalytic discovery not to be found in premodern thought: Freudian “psychical reality”—the legitimation of unconscious fantasy, and hence of phantasmatic representations (Laplanche and Pontalis 8-9). The psychical realities (unconscious wishes) that find shape most vividly in dreams allow the embodiments of the fantasies (porn stars, strippers, hustlers, movie stars, and rock musicians) to be replaced as primary objects by the visual records of their allure: these are fantasies whose gratification no longer presupposes even potential physical contact with the bioenergetic entities the icons memorialize:

There are magazines to present them endlessly, in love and lonely. … The boys lounge suggestively each moment of their lives. Pictures prove that. In some ways these photos are the idols, not the boys behind them. …

(Idols 58)

Visual images become an end in themselves, because of the recognized unattainability of the stars who had posed for them, and because of the perfection possible within these representations that life cannot offer.⁵ While pornography aids in concretizing and confirming fantasies through its maximalization of the visible, it is also predicated upon the impossibility of the “total fulfillment” it depicts. Furthermore, the transparency of pornography to its object exposes the secrets of the body, but not the mysteries of the body's fascination for the viewer. Desired bodies can be documented, but what makes those bodies desirable cannot be so easily accounted for. The frustration involved in desire arises from the contradictory ontological status that physical beauty is assigned. Beauty is both immediately accessible and ultimately indefinable, at once apodeictic and arcane. Beauty and sexual allure take on transcendent roles within pornographic film, at once manifest as the visible surfaces of the bodies, but also functioning to hypostasize the significance of those bodies beyond the very physical limitations that the film insistently exposes:

Beauty … [is] the deity panning for gold in these wasted stars' used up bodies. It creates dreams out of people the cat wouldn't drag in, aiming our cocks at, averting our minds from “the ditch of what each one means,” as Bob Dylan whined. …

(“Square” 92)⁶

Although the director, as high priest of the fetish-religion, controls the basic structure and sequence of the images in the film, there is something inherent in the body those images depict, something before which the director “is as powerless as the trained dog running alongside a herd of cattle, each of whom could crush him with a misstep. He is merely the right man at the right place, right time” (“Square” Soup 71). The reality of the porn film (“they're really doing it”) is still a delayed—posthumous—one: those “real people” “really doing” it are no longer there. In fact they perform in a non-existent space, one Cooper finds essentially morbid: “I have faith that the man who composed [the scene] has managed an accurate portrait of what it would be like to stand in a place far beyond mine, one I compare to death” (“Square” Soup 72). But the plane in which fantasy and reality, desire and satisfaction coincide is limited to the movie screen, and has no correlate in “real life”; there can be no change of venue, and all attempts to construct a materialist compromise, a spatialization of the ideal, result in a despondent parody (the hall behind the porno screen in “Square One”), in paralyzing hallucinatory refuges (George's Disneyland in Closer), in psychotic parodies of childhood whimsy (Gary's playroom in Frisk), or in sheer life-denying chambers of horror (Ray's crawl space in “Herd”).

Robert Glück has called Dennis Cooper a “religious writer” who, “like Poe,” uses “the horror genre … to test the boundaries of life, generate feelings of wonder and awe” (“Running”). Glück's observation also indicates the affinity both writers have for the work of Georges Bataille, who viewed sexuality and religion as two manifestations of a “disequilibrium in which the being consciously calls his [sic] own existence in question” (Erotism 31). Glück's interest in “the sublime” and Cooper's definition of “God” are both unquestionably Bataillean in character. Glück describes the “sublime” as “nothing, … a catastrophe, a violent orgasm … anything that expresses a void which our communities have filled with religions and monsters in order to understand the absence of ground” (“Truth's Mirror” 41-42). Cooper first distinguishes his conception of “God” from the ordinary Christian one, which he dismisses as “that simple and rickety projection into which our ideas about death tend to focus when we get lazy” (“Smoke” 1). He lists the probable locations of his more awesome and seductive “God” in “sleep, hallucinations, daydreams, orgasms, comas, one's own body, others' bodies, the dark, the sun …” and suggests that it is not only aligned with death, but is a powerful temptation toward death, drawing the living out of the boundaries of life. God is a “Siren” and is disruptive of life in ways that inform sexual desire and aesthetic inspiration: “[W]hen we want to see God we might as well get specific—seduce someone, make art, commit suicide, masturbate. …” (“Smoke” 2)

The means by which Glück and Cooper depict sexual access to “the sublime” or “God,” respectively, differ in ways that reflect each writer's schematics of the relations between sexual ecstasis and intersubjectivity. Although Glück's narrator “Bob” in Jack the Modernist is the penetrated spectacle for the involved onlookers in the baths, the orgasm he achieves is his own, through the others but not with them. And sexual culmination is as much an evocative negativity for Glück as it is for Cooper: “I felt a soldier's fidelity to the orgasm … singled out from all the orgasms in the flux. … [T]he spasms that were not me overtook and became me along with a sense of dread. I felt like a tooth being pulled. … I relinquished the firm barrier that separated us—no, that separated me from nothing” (Jack 55-56). In Cooper's system, the subject of desire is never the object of desire; the unidirectionality of desire is modelled on the relation of the spectator to the screen, which also figures both the subject's melancholia and his fetishistic awe of the object.⁷

Desire is further schematized throughout Cooper's individual works in oppositions between subject-meaning (meaning as an intentional act) and object-meaning (meaning as effect/affect). “Subject-meaning”—what the subject intentionally means by what it does/desires—is one of the themes of Cooper's poem, “Poem for George Miles” (the “George M.” of “Square One”), which is an elegy both for the object of desire and the quality of that desire. The lyric voice is a twenty-nine-year-old “I” looking back at a poem written for George when that “I” was 19 (the nostalgia and the temporal discontinuities of the speaking subject are reminiscent of Beckett's “Krapp's Last Tape”):

When I first sharpened a
pencil in purpling language
and drew my first poem
from its raveling depths
it “poured my heart out”
as thoroughly as I would,
make that could, at 19. …
The poem is now cleaned
out of power, as bed is
once sunlight has entered.
I see its mathematics: lines
built as an ornate frame
around a skeletal feeling
that's faded from sight.
Who knows what I meant?

(Cried 24)

On object-meaning, any number of illustrations could be selected. For example, Cooper's musings on Jeff Hunter:

It's not Jeff who moves me, like I said. He's the part I can relate to. It's as though some concept way over my head has taken human form so we can communicate. … It's as if Jeff is moaning, “This is as much as you'll grasp,” and not, “Fuck me,” continuously.

(“Square” 84)

In his prose, the object of desire (the object-meaning) often proves impermeable to revelation while it remains the focal point of the narrative. The narrative itself becomes the flux of desire and is what gets revealed (the subject-meaning), illuminated in contrast to the opacity of its object. This is the dynamic of Cooper's first full-length novel, Safe, a triptych, three separate views of the same enigmatic young man, Mark Lewis. The meaning and nature of the desired object's power is as resistant to explication as Mark is ultimately rejecting of the love of his three suitors in these narratives. At times the subjectivity of the viewer becomes “entangled” (a word Cooper likes) with the object, in the attempt to excavate the secret of the object's power. In the “My Mark” section of Safe, the first-person narrator, “Dennis,” deconstructs a photograph of Mark in which intentional and affective meanings coalesce over Mark's absence (or the absence which Mark embodies) and the enigma of Mark's erotic power:

A head that has power over me. A globe lightly covered by pale flesh, curly black hair, and small, dark eyes whose intensity's too deeply meant to describe or remember the color of, seemingly smeared and spiraling.

I fill a head with what I need to believe about it. It's a mirage created by beauty built flush to a quasi-emotion that I'm reading in at the moment of impact: its eyes on mine, mine glancing off for a second, then burrowing in.

(62)

What Mark reveals to his lovers, his beauty—as captured in the narrator Dennis's photo of Mark's face—is also what conceals his “true self” from them. The fascination Mark held for Rob, Dennis, and Doug drew them to him but ultimately kept him a secret. Dennis's truths are always finally elegiac, his meanings trivial when compared to the inarticulate radiance of the desired object. “My Mark” is both exploration and resignation:

What's left behind is Mark's beauty, safe, in a sense, from the blatant front lighting of my true emotion, though it creeps in. I'm moving stealthily closer, I think, to the heart of the matter, where Mark's body acts as a guide to what he has been feeling. That's his, like great art is the century's it was created in, though still alive in the words of a man who speaks well of him.

(Safe 58)

POSTMETAPHYSICAL SACRIFICE: CLOSER

Cooper's characters have a resentful fascination with the body's limitations, without the option of cyberspace (as in William Gibson); they act on a suspicion of the body's truth, without the promise of a supraphysical plane (as in writings of religious mystics and in ghost stories). The characters in Cooper's fiction often either embody or act out a paradox central to any sexual desire and practice, no matter how refined and urbane. Roland Barthes comments on the irony in the great care he lavishes on his appearance to arouse his lover to engage in acts of passion that will ruin that very highly groomed self which had been designed to incite its own destruction. This observation on the contradictory nature of the “toilet” he performs on himself in preparation for the “encounter” leads him to investigate the etymology of the word “toilet,” where he discovers two obscure meanings:

“the preparations given to the prisoner condemned to death before he is led to the scaffold”; … “the transparent and oily membrane used by butchers to cover certain cuts of meats.” As if, at the end of every toilet, inscribed within the excitation it provokes, there were always the slaughtered, embalmed, varnished body, prettified in the manner of a victim. In dressing myself, I embellish that which, by desire, will be spoiled.

(127)

In Safe Rob discusses Ray Sexton with his lover, “equating the shambles Sexton left high school gymnasts in to the flushed, dripping wet mess Mark becomes in his arms”(20). The contradictory impulses of self-assertion and self-abnegation that cofunction in sexual desire also subtend the parallels of violence and sexual intercourse in the (usually unwelcome) threat that violence constitutes to the physical integrity of the body and the (often sought after) threat to the ego-boundaries in sexual union. These parallels, as well as the similarities between orgasm and death as annihilations of the discrete self, inform the sense of erotic horror that permeates Cooper's work.

Just as the movie screen concretizes a heaven that evacuates all metaphysical longing, the mass media problematizes the structure of the psycho-physical self—particularly in terms of the relations between the external and internal “person.” The boys in Cooper's work live in a media-ocracy in which the ultimate significance of a person is flattened out into a form of celebrity (as in Warhol), absolutely exteriorizing the self through a radical identification between the “self” and its public persona (the “Sean Cassidy” and “John F. Kennedy, Jr.” poems in Idols, for example). The real boys experience contradictions between external self and internal life that never disturb the blissful sheen of their cult heroes's posters. Furthermore, the literalization of space described in “Square One” and “A Herd” is paralleled here in the pervasive interest the characters take in the difference between the beauty of the visible body and the awful “truth” of the internal organs. “Interiority” loses its mystical and psychological meanings of soul and mind, and is transposed onto viscera. Jeff Hunter's “heart” cannot even nostalgically suggest a center of human emotions, as it is simply “a lump of confusing blue tissue two feet up his asshole” (“Square” 89). This dualism renders the human fundamentally inexplicable. The beauty, personality, and actions of the boys are a veneer whose interior reality is simply a complex of body parts that would be disgusting to most people, and meaningful only to medical specialists.

Closer concerns a half dozen wealthy gay high school students in a suburb of Los Angeles, all of whom are sexually obsessed with one another, and in particular with George Miles. The boys are divided into subjects and objects of desire, the subjects being at least relatively articulate, and the objects either dazedly incommunicative, like George, or immersed in a fantasy world, like David, who believes he is a rock star. The key actors in the novel each have a specialty that involves a particular manipulation of the body: John is an artist who sketches the boys, Alex is an aspiring filmmaker who documents some of the sexual activity central to the plot, and Steve is an entrepreneur who fills his converted garage nightclub with bodies and sets them dancing. These would represent the positive creative urges, matched by the negative creative urges of the two adults in the novel, Philippe, who dreams of mutilating and murdering young men, and Tom, who actually does.

The body in Closer is repeatedly demythologized. John conceives of his drawings as a means to disable the beauty of his subjects, to “reveal the dark underside, or whatever it's called, of people you wouldn't think were particularly screwed up” (5).⁸ Even sex does not allow the body to elude the sense of its grisly facticity. When John has sex with George, he wonders at the fact that “George's skin felt so great. That was the weirdest part, feeling how warm and familiar George was and at the same time realizing the kid was just skin wrapped around some grotesque-looking stuff” (7).

David's biologist father decorated the walls of their house with pictures of semi-dissected adolescents. At dinner David cuts his “quiche into eight thousand pieces,” trying to keep his eyes averted from a poster above his father's head of a boy roughly David's age, whose “back is turned and where his ass used to be there's this thing that looks half like drawn curtains and half like what's left of a cow once it gets to the butcher's shop” (28). Such brutal reality may be one of the factors that had driven David into his rock star delusion and his obsession with his own beauty that he admits “helps me believe in myself and not worry that I'm just a bunch of blue tubes inside a skin wrapper” (22).⁹

Both of these sentiments suggest the incorporation of an ego that is as entirely surface as the posters and movies that have formed it. Such an ego bears a striking resemblance to Didier Anzieu's notion of the “skin ego,” which is part of his adjustments of Freudian psychoanalytic models to empirical changes in predominant pathologies. When Freud was practicing, the majority of patients were suffering from “straightforward neuroses,” but in Anzieu's own practice he notes a significant increase in “borderline cases” between “neurosis and psychosis” in which the patient suffers

from an absence of borders or limits … uncertain of the frontiers between the psychical and bodily Egos, between the reality Ego and the ideal Ego … unable to differentiate erogenous zones, [the patient] confuses pleasant experiences with painful ones, and cannot distinguish between drives, which leads him [sic] to experience the manifestation of a drive not as desire but as violence. The patient … experiences a diffuse sense of ill-being … of watching the functioning of his body and mind from outside, of being a spectator of something which is and at the same time not his [sic] own existence.

(7)

These borderline states lead to a profound sense of emptiness in attempts at meaning that produce, instead of an ego-object relation, an ego-abject relation (Kristeva, “Within” 43-44; and Barzilai 295). “Abjection” is the dread of that which was once part of the body but was expelled as “unclean” or “disgusting.” These abjects however continue to threaten the integrity of the subject with a chaotic dissolution of the boundaries of inside and outside (Kristeva, Powers 3-4). The precarious balance between the skin ego and the viscera in John and David's psychic structures should be clear from the above passages. The balance is displaced as the narrative progresses.

Within this wasteland of self-preempted youths, George becomes deeply involved with Philippe, an older Frenchman with bizarre tastes. Their sex involves necrophiliac fantasies, beatings, and coprophagia. Eventually Philippe introduces George to Tom, another older man who examines George matter-of-factly and brutally, forcing a hand down his throat and up his anus. After a particularly violent threesome, Tom drives George home, and tells him if he ever considers suicide, to call him. George makes note of that invitation, and its ambivalence. He then goes into his room to examine his ass, to see if he can understand what these men find so attractive about it. Here George attempts to assimilate the inexplicable pleasure of the Other into his assessment of his own value as a person. He mistakes Philippe's and Tom's objectification of him as a confirmation of him as a subject (it is exactly the opposite).¹⁰ This is the same error that Henry makes in Frisk when he describes a recent sexual experience and his interpretation of it:

[L]ast weekend I slept with two … guys. … They kept calling me “that.” One would ask, “What does that taste like?” and “What's the temperature inside of that?” … It made me realize I'm important to certain people.

(Frisk 7)

The boy's need to reduce thought to neurological quiescence through excessive drug use, and their compulsive fashioning and delimiting of the self to fit the desire of the Other, are expressions of the death drive that takes George to Tom's house after George's mother's death. As he writes in his diary before leaving for Tom's, “It's like a party or something to say my goodbye to the person I am” (Closer 98). George did not realize how true that might have become: Tom novocained him and began “chopping him down” in his basement. When Tom asked him if he had “any last words” George intoned the words of the Disneyland ride, “Dead … men … tell … no … tales,” which brought on the tears that literally saved his life: disgusted at this display of emotion, Tom threw him out of the house (99-100).

The importance of Disneyland to George cannot be dismissed as a deus ex machina. It locates the kind of pervasive vacuum in which George lives and which he particularizes in both his self-apprehension and his willingness to subject himself to dehumanization.¹¹ George becomes a (necessarily) inarticulate embodiment of the postmodern environment that engendered him. For Baudrillard, Disneyland is “a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: Pirates, the Frontier, Future World, etc.” (Simulations 23-24).¹²

George becomes as much a simulation of a person as the automated denizens of the Disney pavilions, or the inexhaustibly available images of the porn stars. Alex describes George's “hyperreal” state best when he compares George's looks to “the real boy that Pinocchio was forced to become” (Closer 62). When Philippe sees George fall on the street, he reacts in a way that explains why he can use George as he does: “When Philippe pictured George's expression approaching the ground, he saw pretend pain, the look that would creep over dolls' faces when children left them alone in the dark” (105). George's beauty taken to be an unreal perfection of reality suggests Baudrillard's “automaton”—particularly in the kind of deadly curiosity George arouses in his adult admirers: the automaton is “an interrogation upon nature, the mystery of the existence or non-existence of the soul, the dilemma of appearance and being. It is like God: what's underneath it all, what's inside, what's in the back of it?” (Simulations 93). These are precisely the questions that Tom and Philippe (and before them Ray Sexton, and after them the “Dennis” of Frisk) attempt to answer.

Philippe's melancholia reverses the disavowal of the hallucinating mourner and the average moviegoer; he looks at a real person (George) and disavows his reality. George and Philippe share a disorder that is necessary for hallucinations, and that is analogically enacted in film spectatorship: the failure to distinguish consistently between what is internal and what is external to the ego.¹³ Philippe and Tom sought the secret of George through literal invasions and excavations of George's body. George (like the other boys) confused his inner self with his “innards,” in a detour of abjection, which according to Kristeva is an attempt to individuate the self by demarcating the divisions of inside and outside (Powers 60-61).

Even when more successfully accomplished than in George's case, abjection leaves a residue of the contingency of identity in the materiality of its biological components—that which can be expelled or incorporated, but which signifies the morass into which the subject can re-devolve (Powers 9-11; 70-71). The vehemence with which George was handled and literally reduced to bodily secretions/excretions in his encounter with Philippe and Tom actually galvanized his need for these men. The materials they forced from his body made him realize that his interior offered no support for an articulatable self. Furthermore, these “abjects” attest to the “precariousness of the subject's grasp of its own identity,” foreboding the return to “the chaos from which it is formed.” George's dependence on the adults' objectifying lust to fortify his exteriorized ego against this anxiety is a will-toward-death as subject, but it is also a defense against the abjection he experiences at their hands, since this abjection itself is “one of the few avowals of the death drive, an undoing of the processes constituting the subject” (Grosz 74). The dissonance between the scatological horrors of George's sex life and the ethereality of mass media ego-ideals only perpetuates the cycle, since abjection itself constitutes a dual acknowledgment of the necessity and impossibility of the subject's “desire to transcend corporeality,” in which the subject rejects yet affirms “the defiling, impure, uncontrollable materiality of [its] embodied existence” (Grosz 72).¹⁴ Neither George nor Philippe understand what Glück calls the “disjunction between self and body” (“Truth's” 41-42). The sublimations of this disjunction Cooper's characters effect, inaugurate the melancholy mystery of desire and its often tragic resolutions.

The central obsessions of the novel are figured most graphically in Philippe's memories of a snuff film made by one of the members of Philippe's circle:

He'd picked up the hitchhiker, coerced him home, got him drunk, numbed his body with Novocaine, led him into a basement, started the film rolling, mutilated his ass, asked if he'd like to say any last words, to which the boy had said, “Please don't.” Then he killed him.

The only sound in the room was the clicking projector. Sometimes the clicks and the stabs matched for a few seconds. … Then the boy made a very bland face. “Is he dead?” someone asked. “No,” the man answered. “Not yet. Watch.” …

… At what seemed a haphazard point, everyone in the room heard a brief, curt announcement. “Now,” it said. …

The film ended. It flapped like a bat. People redid their pants.

(Closer 108-09)

Like the more innocuous porno audience in “Square One,” these men share a fascination with what the images reveal and what mysteries they mark but mask. The boundaries among living individuals and between the living and the dead are concatenated in this awful ritual, which recalls Bataille's explanation of sacrifice in a less self-conscious historical period of human evolution: “The victim dies and the spectators share in what his death reveals. This is what religious historians call the sacramental element” (Erotism 82). Note the striking similarity in tone and theme in Glück's description of spectator sex in the baths:

Men stood around, serious, watching us. … [O]thers tended me respectfully because the one who is fucked induces awe by his extreme exposure. … [T]heir collective mind said he's doing it which my finite mind repeated. Although they masturbated themselves to obtain immediate knowledge of my excitement, it was as spectators that they solemnly shared in what my pleasure revealed.

(Jack 54-55 second emphasis added)

Each of the passages above concerns the communal witnessing of an event that makes intensely present an extreme boundary of human being: death and orgasm, each an incontrovertible “now” which absolutely interrupts the continuity of consciousness. The mediation of film makes the situation in Closer significantly different. The temporal and spatial divisions between the viewers and the center of attention structures the non-reciprocity of subject-object relations (the object cannot return their look). The boy's murder forecloses the possibility of a full knowledge of what is seen: the onlookers in the baths or in the audience can experience orgasm but not death. The spectatorial situation exemplifies the intersubjective limits of these men's desire; conversely, the transitive negativity of their desire (sexuality as annihilation of the object) informs a theory of representation that is practically an occult reverence for representation as an endlessly iterable expression of this outwardly directed death drive. The snuff film implicates representation, because the filming and screening of the murder are integral aspects of the crime.¹⁵ The film incites a religious awe as a memorial of the point at which the person ceases to be. This, however, is only a peculiar variation on the logic of filmic practice, since any film or photograph is also a record of the absolutely lost, a testament to the absence of the object it represents. Film and photography are thus perfect techniques for realizing and preserving the de-entification of the living person. Film/photography becomes the postmodern version of the functions Bataille discerns in the cave paintings of Lascaux: “The cave drawings must have been intended to depict that instant when the animal appeared and killing, at once inevitable and reprehensible, laid bare life's mysterious ambiguity” (Erotism 74).

The corpse—in its hideous resemblance to the living person now gone—is an obscene subversion of personhood (Kristeva, Powers 9-10; Blanchot 256; Gallop 45); the photographic or filmic image is an attempt to retain what is already gone, which is informed with the death that the corpse literally embodies.¹⁶ Sexual fantasies, either those “within” the person or those expressed in pornographic media, instigate a coalescence of the simulacrum of the corpse with the retention of the lost object. Bazin suggested that “the plastic arts” might owe their real impulse to the “practice of embalming the dead” (What Is Cinema II, 9). Art historians tell us that realistic human portraiture began with death masks (Ariès 257-58).¹⁷ Cooper's work insistently exposes the relation between representation and death—the negation of the real in the image; the self-alienation within desire; the internal negation of the referent of the metaphor—all based on the resemblance of the corpse to the person who has died. The trajectories among representation and reality, life and death, desire and its ends, are dramatized in Cooper's work as passion plays in a childlike world where childhood has always already been invaded by the negativity of adult sexuality (Ferenczi 156-57).

The sacrificial quality of sex, in which the object becomes an opacity of negation and the subject disincorporates itself within the image of the desired object, finds an ancestral model in the cave painting of a man with an erect penis before a dying bison, a paradoxical image which (in Bataille's assessment) asserts the “essential and paradoxical accord between death and eroticism,” a truth that “remains veiled to the extent that the human mind hides from itself” (Tears 53). This is a truth or an awe-filled intuition of the truth that Dennis Cooper explores, most recently emblematized in the entranced gaze at the fake snuff photo in the opening section of Frisk, in which the plaster-of-paris wound on a boy's supposedly shot-open anus takes on the forbidden fascination of death and sexuality itself—an uncanny sight that lures one into the abyss, something which, in Cooper's words, is “too out-of-focus to actually explore with one's eyes, but too mysterious not to want to try” (4).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Dodie Bellamy, Robert Glück, Bo Huston, David Jansen-Mendoza, and Kevin Killian, for their conversation and support.

Notes

1. “I think in my work there's always been a sort of terror about sex. The desire for sex that you could have with someone you objectify but the terror of having to deal with a real person. … Sex is a really scary thing, you've got to choose your partners carefully, and what to do. … I always think the sex in my books is so unsexy, because they're nervous about each other, and it's so much about just wanting to get something out of this body they're with and some idea they have about this person. … [And since AIDS] it's just a general terror that's come over sex. And I think it's reinforcing that in my work” (qtd. in Meyer 64).

2. “Square One” was originally published in Soup 4: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Bruce Boone (1985): 70-72. When I quote a passage that appears only in that version and was not included in the later version, printed in Wrong, it will be cited as “Square Soup.”

3. “An audience made up of men like me has surrendered its collective will to a filmmaker's. Like a cheap spaceship prop in an old sci-fi flick, a grungy theater scattered with hopeful, upturned faces seems to speed toward its destination—giant bodies composed of light” (“Square” 83).

4. Freud, “Fetishism,” and “Splitting”; Mannoni 175-80; Mulvey.

5. Even people with “real” sex lives often prefer the numb and numbing refuges of the world without consequences provided by pornographic media: “The life pornography pictures is ordered. … Doug wants to live in this one-dimensional world. … If someone he fucked died he'd never hear about it and if he did the world wouldn't compute or feel real to him. He'd be involved in his latest orgasm, face drawn so tight nothing else could get under” (Safe 84-85).

6. The Dylan quotation, from “The Gates of Eden” (Bringing It All Back Home), which also refers to the “object-meaning,” is used again parodistically in Closer (5).

7. The only major symptom of melancholia as Freud describes it that is not directly evident in Cooper's narrative personae is the tendency to berate the self as morally inferior (“Mourning” 246-48). A desiring subject in Cooper's texts does, however, tend to disregard his corporeal self as a meaningful part in any sexual encounter. In other words, these subjects never wish to see themselves as objects of desire. The “Dennis” narrator of Frisk states that sexual reciprocation makes him “very uncomfortable,” noting that his tricks “must pick up on my tastes right away, since they almost never want to explore me. They just lie back, take it from me. … Usually I don't notice my body. It's just there, working steadily. I wash it, feed it, jerk it off, wipe its ass, and that's all” (50).

8. John “subtracts from” his subjects by defacing their drawings (Closer 4). “In porn a director can only add or subtract from what exists outside his control—attractiveness” (“Square” Soup 71).

9. Or the clue David—despite himself—in Closer gives the reader of the origin of his rock star delusion: “Once upon a time I was a little boy. I rode my bike constantly. I wandered everywhere. bought stuff, sang songs to myself. I stopped in a mall. This man came up to me. He was an A & R man for a big record company. He told me I was amazing. I said okay and we went back to his house. He tried to fuck me. I bled all over the place. Then he showed me the door and said, ‘Thanks for being so well designed, kid’” (Closer 37).

10. Other characters also assess their bodies' attractiveness in the mirror, attempting to see it as others do: Mark in Safe (41) and Julian and Henry in Frisk (13; 16-17).

11. During George's first encounter with Philippe, he envisioned it as an exploration in a mineshaft in a Disneyland western fantasy geography (50). When examining his wounded anus for its “charm” to Philippe and Tom, he compares the swollen opening to the “painted mouth” of “Injun Joe's Cave,” a Disneyland ride whose entrance always gave him “goose bumps” (90-91). The macabre cross-hybridization of child's play and horror in Disneyland becomes clearer when comparing the boys with the adults. George's Disneyland LSD hallucination is strangely similar to a vision Philippe has as he explores his own murderous feelings toward George. George's trip: “Over his head, a Milky Way of skulls snapped like turtles” (88). Philippe's vision: “Philippe lay in bed imagining George's death. … The world he saw rang with percussion. Skeletons snapped” (106).

12. The “Dead … men … tell … no … tales” line comes from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride. See also Marin, on the postmodern dilemma of Disneyland.

13. A child learns this distinction through noticing that a stimulus that can be removed by motion is external (outside, perception), and one that is not effected through movement is internal (in consciousness) (Freud, “Instincts” 119-120).

14. David also acts this out in his fantasy of being skinned alive during a rock concert he stars in (Closer 26-27).

15. Stephen Heath discusses the relation of filmic representation to death and crime in his expansion of Cocteau's characterization of film as “death at work” through a reading of an Apollinaire story concerning the filming of a real murder (Heath 114). Film inaugurates a representation organically related to death, while becoming the epitome of the depthless surface of the psychotic subject—the “skin ego” (note that in many Romance languages the word for “film” is related to the word for skin).

16. “The image does not, at first glance, resemble the corpse, but the cadaver's strangeness is perhaps also that of the image. What we call mortal remains escapes common categories. Something is there before us which is not really the living person, nor is it any reality at all. It is neither the same as the person who was alive, nor is it another person, nor is it anything else. … Death suspends the relation to place, even though the deceased rests heavily in his spot as if upon the only basis that is left him. … Where is it? It is not here, and yet it is not anywhere else. Nowhere? But then nowhere is here. The cadaverous presence establishes a relation between here and nowhere” (Blanchot 256).

17. I am indebted to Robert Glück for bringing this passage to my attention.

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