“We Found Love” — Addiction, Fun, and What it Takes to Come Alive

Part I—Rihanna

I watched and heard Rihanna’s latest single on my brother’s sofa with him and his girlfriend last week after smoking pot and spending the weekend with them.  It was a love seat.  The video shows her and a hip, attractive young man “[finding] love in a hopeless place”—though her inflection makes it sound as much like “fell in love” (“feh-in,” a rough approximation)—and having a blast.  

This “hopeless place” could be many contexts, and it already is unclear if they “found” this connection waiting in this location, or if their love took shape during a period of time with an approximated geography that later can be seen as a “hopeless place,” as in the idea of not emotionally being in a “good place” at any one period of time.  It becomes clear they are having so much fun with each other and taking on the world as a detached couple not just because they are deeply in love—

Yellow diamonds in the light 

And we’re standing side by side  

As your shadow crosses mine 

what it takes to come alive.

—they are on drugs.  The video confronts this failure of decision-making by narrating a spiral into unhealthy activity (pill montages, increasingly prevalent beer-drinking, her helping him to light a pack cigarettes that are all in his mouth and him trying to smoke them), abuse (scenes of stereotypical comedowns from drugs, irresponsible behavior, shouting, stomping, crying, etc.), and a subtext of violence (he tattoos “MINE” at the top of her leg, she hits him with a backpack, he manaically drives his Camaro in circles and refuses her pleas to stop; this last scene is actually a bizarre re-enactment of the infamous real-life incident that led to them both missing their performances at the Grammys).  

This dangerous, exciting lifestyle (though it ultimately is rendered as an exceptionally terrible manner of living and sustaining a positive relationship with somebody) is exemplified in the techno breakdown; just as the synthesized drums hit stacatto double time and a synthesized laser note rapidly ascends and ascends we have the image of a cigarette being dragged on at a disorientingly increasing speed with the expanding ash shimmering in psychedelic coloration, the ultimate sonic cliché in building up a dance song to bring it back to its hook, which, naturally, is visually accompanied by a montage of variously colored pills.

If you were to explain this to somebody, that the ecstatic (yes, also implying the influence of the drug) dance production of the song was so intense as to be a commentary on dance music and the culture that surrounds it, without watching the video, they would think you were joking.  So then how can the video so seamlessly create the idea that seems contrary to the song itself?  That a commitment to loving and dancing and generally getting Hard-Day’s-Night on reality is a gateway to, or inherently a part of, inter-personal and personal abuse?  The song glamorizes and its production celebrates (as the video itself kind of does), and the viewer/listener wants, the very thing that the video warns us is unhealthy.  Should I not dance with my girl when this song comes on?  Even if I hadn’t been drinking a few beverages I would still feel uncomfortable.  How does one define a functioning relationship, where does one draw the line between healthy and unhealthy pleasure?

Part II—Chris Brown

Since I began this essay in January much has happened.  At the end of January (2012) Rihanna was seen leaving the club with Chris Brown, her infamous R&B-singing lover with whom she spent her first moments in the limelight.  His infamy these days lies in his public physical abuse of Rihanna, a scenario paraphrased by the video that left her injured, him arrested, and both of their performances at the Grammys canceled.  (a good account of how the two have moved on since may be found here:).   Her fame has since massively eclipsed his.   Yet, it was his publicist that was quick to deny that they are back together, as he was with his new model girlfriend, a Ms. Karrueche, also at the club.  In fact Rhianna is creeping in on Chris Brown’s healthy relationship, as the Huffington Post explains: “Karrueche is reportedly upset that Rihanna's male counterpart in her ‘We Found Love’ music video bears a striking resemblance to Chris Brown and Rihanna was less than enthusiastic when a video of Karrueche making fun of her Barbados accent surfaced.”  It is just assumed the Rihanna has absolved Chris Brown and wants him back even more because of his intense emotions towards her; he was the One and always will be because he was insanely jealous and physically abusive or needed her so desperately and was physically abusive or whatever stereotypes people make themselves believe to sustain unhealthy relationships (see Eminiem’s “Love the Way You Lie,” featuring Rihanna).  

The tabloids love a narrative and it was easy to celebrate Rihanna as a bad-ass abuse survivor.  Such a hook, however, can very easily go stale.  Chris Brown is now irrelevant to pop culture, he ekes out a successful career exclusively in the R&B charts, and the story is no longer relevant.  This is certainly my most cynical thought of the day, but it strikes me that the media (from HuffPo to her record company to Mtv to Rihanna herself to a certain extent) need to prolong the urgency of this narrative, to replay it in her videos (3 now, “Man Down” also plays out the revenge narrative of the abused), and to maintain an association with an intense, unhealthy relationship that accompanied her catapult into fame.   It is not new to say that what is required of celebrities is unhealthy and often perverse; but to surround an artist by a vague cloud of the very trauma she is trying to move past is special kind of wrong.

What is therefore even more startling is that since I began this I have learned many facts about the extent of Chris Brown’s massive post-criminal success and how little he is blamed—even celebrated—for his violent actions; and he has performed at the Grammy’s.  It’s like a bizarre alternate reality has been aloud to exist where—after this fateful evening when Chris Brown sent his girlfriend to the hospital—he gets to redo the mistake and he is on top of the music world and he gets to forgive and forget.  The Grammy executive who declared the return of CB to the Grammy’s in this Twilight Zone also described how it was the Grammy’s who were “the victim” of the night CB punched Rihanna in the face.  No joke.

See also, on “Man Down”.

Part III—Michael Fassbender

I started this essay in my journal as a discussion of the “We Found Love” video, which I had seen the week before, and the film Shame, which I had seen that day.  Again, when is pleasure good?, is the discussion of the film.  Visually, the film is frequently unpleasant—awkward, perverted, and cringe-inducing. It should also be noted I saw it with my parents; I sat next to my mother watching this film about sex addiction.  The power was out at the first theater we went to, and, like a productive session of therapy, I was brought to painful truths at my former place of work, the local art-house theater.  

The shots are long—really long—to reinforce the film’s complete revelation of its actors. We first see both protagonists (brother and sister) naked; and we see Carey Mulligan for the first time with Fassbender, startled in the shower, the same shower where we also see him masturbating in the same bathroom where he also gets startled by her while, again, masturbating.  What a long shot can reveal is pathology.  A quick shot of someone watching pornography and masturbating is interesting character development; a film about someone doing this is deeply perverse, or perversely deep, depending on who you ask.   For minutes he will be “undressing [a woman] with his eyes,” as David Edelstein noted, without flinching.  In a RomCom this would be a few charming seconds, the cinematic equivalent to a cartoon eye sparkle.  The wry, deadpan smile and intense, sexual stare of Fassbender in its suspension becomes unhuman; and the connection he makes with this eye contact on the subway feels more real than the one he has with a co-worker during a date which is captured in two long shots: a dinner and a walk.  The dinner shot is particularly ambitious (five minutes, perhaps?) as it is neither boring nor contrived while simply being the small talk and ordering at the beginning of a date.

Carey Mulligan sings a deconstructed version of “New York, New York” in what might be considered somewhere between quarter speed and no speed whatsoever.  Most of the song is just a shot of her head occupying the middle third of the screen.  We also cut to her brother who finally shows an emotion other than lust or shame: he sheds a tear.  The irony of the song is well captured by this comment found on the aforementioned review: 

I have lived in Manhattan my whole life, and have worked in upscale nightclubs. This movie is the FIRST film I have seen that accurately portrays not just sex addiction, but the sentiment felt by so many lonely, miserable people in New York. Working at night sober, I watched married man [sic] stumble in like Brandon's boss and try to sleep with the closest thing possible, then return to their family. Others in the group will try and partake in cocaine filled sex parties, and be on a bender until they need to go into the office to close a deal. The men in finance who work from 6am-2am can't hold down a relationship, get out of the office go to some client dinner and then take home anything that will fill the void of the fact that they are miserable, hoarding some money from their finance jobs, and doing lines of coke to stay awake. This movie shows how having the seemingly 'normal' life, a great job, beautiful apartment etc. you could be dying inside. Coupled with immorality, and the lack of sincerity creates an extremely lonely protagonist in the form of Brandon.

When his boss, who he is with, goes home with the siblings and into the bedroom with the sister, Fassbender expresses a profound anger and expels it in a run, captured in another long shot, the camera keeping perfect pace with the striding athletic tortured soul.  When he is forced to stop at an intersection the camera stops with him, but stays there when he crosses.

What is so disturbing about the film is the destruction of what is typically considered attractive: confidence (his awkwardly honest boss is a bumbling fool), sexual prowess (repression has long been out of style), mystery (complete honesty is never interesting), and generally not desiring to commit to a meaningful relationship.  This will always be more attractive than traditional family-centric values.  And, anyway, commitment is about the restriction of pleasure, and what self-(un)respecting young man would be interested in that?

Part IV—Vincent Cassel

Michael Fassbender, now as Carl Jung, says he does not believe in coincidence in Cronenburg’s A Dangerous Method.  I am not so naive as to think that Fassbender is, himself, telling me that I should see a connection between his two recent films (I will leave out the horrendous Haywire, which I also just saw); however, I have read Jung’s “Synchronicity,” agreed with it, and neither do I believe in coincidence.  I read the essay years ago in college during my acid-eating days and revisited it for my work on Seinfeld a few years later in my efforts to tie the show’s clever storylines with a deeper understanding of reality.  And, obviously, I still keep a close ear to reoccurrence, pattern, what other people call coincidence.

The film catalogues the relationship between desire for pleasure, psychological health, and the intellectual conception of the two’s relationship.  It could be paraphrased in one of Fassbender’s lines: isn’t a certain repression necessary for a civilized society to exist?  Vincent Cassel’s historic personage Otto Gross says no—repress nothing.  Cocaine-addicted Cassel (I use the actor’s name when it is more him, or the myth of the real person, than the real person, in this case someone I did not know existed before I saw the film; I am sorry if this is confusing) enters the film and Jung’s life as a former patient of Freud’s.  He dialogues with Fassbender about monogamy, pleasure and repression, and ends up, in the film’s most bliss-filled minute, fornicating with a nurse in the hospital’s garden, hopping the wall and fleeing, not before shaking Jung’s philosophies deeply and, the film argues, changing the course of the remainder of his thinking and work.

Part V — Kyle MacClachhlan

Until this past week I had never watched Twin Peaks.  I began it the Sunday of the Super Bowl at 1 AM, technically the next day, after a day’s worth of drinking.  I am not a football fan, I should note.  I had planned to translate a good share of Pablo Neruda’s Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada, as an exercise in comparison before going to host an open mic as I do every Sunday, usually while drinking.  Instead I received a phone call from some friends who had invited me to an open bar, all-you-can-eat Super Bowl event the day before (for $40): they were given a free wristband upon entering and they wanted to give it to me.  So, in lieu of Neruda, a quiet afternoon, etc. I went and ate pasta salad, plates of nachos, biscuits and drank several screwdrivers, beers, whiskey gingers, whiskey cokes, whiskey shots, and then headed on bike to host an open mic that started off slow—I played several songs, apparently with a friend of mine, handed out a bunch of ‘zines I had met en route to the bar (a compilation of sign-up sheets from months back)—and then picked up when the Super Bowl ended and the football-loving Americans showed up.  I then went to karaoke, to fulfill my Sunday routine, before heading home.  None of my friends made it, apparently having gone to bed, or sofa, by nine.

I managed to finish the better part of an hour, or the lesser part of the pilot before falling asleep. 

The next morning I finished the pilot and watched two episodes before managing to get out of bed.  I decided I needed a really big Horchata and a greasy chile relleno burrito.  Just like they rellenaron the chile with cheese I was going to be refilled, begin anew with my lunch for breakfast at 1 PM.  I got back on my bike and took in the view of the Monterey Bay below, to the tune of the Twin Peaks theme, and descended.  And so it began, the two weeks that FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper helped me save my own life.  I was shown that synchronicity, the destruction of coincidence, could be better understood through repression; darkness consumes you, it does not guide you.  The owls are not what they seem.  Etc.