She's like a hologram vibrating in the depthless space of modern media -- a figment of our imagination who has lost her way in Wonderland. -- Camille Paglia
Nobody lately has come closer to bearing witness to the reality of black magic in Los Angeles except for David Lynch, who of course couldn't do it pithier than Paglia because he had to communicate through his masterpiece Mulholland Drive to get it right. Unsurprisingly both Paglia and Lynch evoke precisely the same state of lived unreality, which is the uncanny and unholy condition of black magic that Rieff called false (creedless) charisma. Naomi Watts' 'character', therapeutically disambiguated as she is in a way that collapses against the sheer weight of guilty remembrance, not only eerily predicts the career trajectory and psychological publicity of Britney Spears (the overyoung, cheery debut, the sultry bombshell, the lesbotic interlude, the relationship failure, the humiliation before the in-crowd, the post-punishment exhaustion) but also describes the nightmare of all too many therapeutic alter egos in LA -- and the inability of the therapeutic to successfully escape the guilt reckoning: at least without suicide. And even then.
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