Just watched this. Few comments.
1) In my view, it shows the depravity and moral compromising which is an essential part of Hollywood. Among other scenes there is an obviously younger girl in the middle of a sex party–who symbolically has been made to perform sexual acts–and the whole thing was so drunken that I felt drunk at the end of watching it. He has on the one hand the artistic pretensions, and on the other the sordid and really unpleasant reality.
2) In that era, suggesting homosexuality as a latent motive was daring and bold. On my “reading”, the latent subtext was that the Director, played by John Huston in an obviously self referential move, was a latent homosexual, and that his career consisted in creating scenes originating in a sort of self loathing voyeuristic homosexuality.
Within this subtext, we find that his young Adonis and acting protege was himself molested, much in the spirit of the British Public Schools, and encounter a teacher who himself we initially think is thrilled watching a naked woman, but come to find was in fact fascinated by the naked young man.
As I have commented, this seemed to me to be the only real substance and interesting content in “Catcher in the Rye”. It seems to me this has long been a secret problem of our own, and probably most other societies. Perhaps the Afghans and Pakistanis, with their dancing boys, are merely more naive and open about this problem, and I DO see it as a problem. Such men grow up to be controlling, angry and often sadistic. It is a self perpetuating cycle.
3) “Sex”, per se, is only one domain in which latent psychological conflicts–and we use this phrase as a cliche, when I think what is more accurate is to say unresolved traumatic events–come into play. It is possible to be more intimate with someone without a word said, without a touch, than it is to be in any form of sexual intercourse.
We say that to be gay in a “heteronormative” world is difficult and traumatic. This may well be true. I’m not gay, so I can’t say. But I can say that even as a heterosexual I find maintaining intimacy in sex to be difficult. The sex part has nothing to do with it. It has everything to do with an emotional split, and with the insincerity, the play-acting, the role playing that we learn to do early on. Everything in our world has a sense of urgency. You always have to be out and doing, and we train our children in that dross early on. There is no time for unfolding, for seeing. In any event, few seem to want to make the time. Because what do you see? Feelings you don’t want. We do not live in a nurturing civilization.
America is not an “empire” (other than that we conquered the land we live on and killed or marginalized the original inhabitants, which we certainly did do), but it is not wrong to say we are trained in imperialism, which is to say to duty, to reflexive adherence to Authority, to a need to be a part of some army or other. Antifa is just one more answer to people trained in that tradition. They are not free thinkers. They are, on the contrary, in the main consolidated drones, chanting slogans just the way any other goose-stepping group has at any point in human history. They are not a new story–their story is many thousands of years old.
Gayness–and more recently Transgenderism as the new ideology to replace the notion of “sexual preference”–is one way of distracting from the core truth of meaninglessness, anomie, and “adriftness” (which I will suggest as a good English equivalent of Verworfenheit). The mania is the reality. The pain of confusion is the reality, and everything else a deflection. The ideas, and the things people do which support them, are secondary. There is no desire to help anyone when we are told that “sexual preference” is no longer acceptable to the Commissars. There is simply a thirst for destruction, of precisely the type shown in this movie.
4) I think there is some truth that photographs steal some part of us, weaken some part of us, as suggested at the end, in what most likely would have been Welles own chosen ending (the middle would have been the negotiation and editing).
If I trivialize some part of me every time I take a picture of myself, what are we to make of selfies? Are iPhones little vacuums, sucking out our souls?
For myself, I have long hated having my picture taken. I just don’t like it. I never have. I intentionally step out of most pictures. I have been many places–events with groups of people–and you will find no photographic record of my presence. I seen to sense cameras, and I avoid them. I have never posted ONE selfie, ever, even though I have been many places.
5) Consider the central role of mass media, of Hollywood, in our culture. When I cancelled my cable, they asked me “what are you going to do for entertainment?” I told them: anything else.
6) All of us, instinctively, look to one another for answers. As I think about it, it has been obvious to me for some time that I don’t anyone who has any answers worth listening to. Methods, yes. Techniques, yes, which I can use to find my own way. But I can’t look to others. It is a circular firing squad, which is more or less what Welles showed.
7) Really, how could he have completed that movie without repenting much of his life? At various points, he must have wished he was the one who died in the car wreck.
8) Reading his biography , Welles obviously had many unprocessed issues. You can make manic energy work for you for a while, especially when you are young, but it catches up with you.
9) John Huston and Welles must have shared much in common.
Here is a snippet on Huston: According to actress Olivia de Havilland, “she [his mother] was the central character. I always felt that John was ridden by witches. He seemed pursued by something destructive. If it wasn’t his mother, it was his idea of his mother.”[4]
10) In my view, there is little redemptive about psychological understanding. I think knowing your “story” is useful, but that is a map of the known. The task is to map out the new, from a new viewpoint. In this, “spirituality”–let us call it a “sense of space and the sense of freedom within it”–is the sine qua non.
My work continues. This movie was useful to me in multiple ways, none of which I have written about here.