The Leader of the Pack (Freud and The Shangri-las)

Produced by the legendary Shadow Morton, ‘Leader of the Pack’ locates Charles Darwin's dominant male in the midst of the Blackboard Jungle of an American High School in the early 1960. As Ellie Greenwich, one of the writers recalls, it is about ‘that bad guy that every girl wanted to go out with ... then there was the motorbike. Back in the sixties, when you started making money, you’d buy a motorcycle’. Just as, on the lawless plains of Africa according to Darwin, it is the biggest, baddest primate who hoards all the females, so it is the meanest, coolest guy on the fastest motorbike who ‘every girl’ wants to go out with, particularly in popular post-war High School myth. In ‘Totem and Taboo’, Freud does not argue with Darwin's evolutionary reasoning about sexual selection in The Descent of Man, but does note that human societies have always involved prohibitions, notably on murder and incest. Freud speculates that these prohibitions arose out of the violent sacrifice of the tyrannical leader, his authority becoming internalized, through shared guilt, as moral law. Freud's lesson to modernity, then, is that the death of God leads not to a liberation of enjoyment, but to a redoubling of its prohibition.

The Shangri-las reject this model. For Freud, a mythical originary act of rebellion and murder retroactively grounds law in a guilty parricide. The Shangri-las rewrite this this myth for the post-war baby boom generation, its romantic rebellion introducing a new law of consumption in place of prohibition. The Shangri-las’ myth discloses that modernity has moved into a new phase: they sing from a different position to the murderous sons and brothers, and without the strange remorse that derives, Freud speculates, from a disappointment at discovering that no man can individually occupy the dominant place, consequently prohibiting it. Their anti-oedipal tale is told from the point of view of the women, a position neglected by Freud. But not by Lacan, who suggests, in Seminar XVII, that the women would have had other ideas.

The Shangri-las' version of ‘Totem and Taboo’ is, fittingly, not a macho tale of male rivalry, violence and tragedy, but a romance in which death and melodrama are, of course, key elements. Named after an imaginary earthly paradise -- the hidden valley in J. Hilton’s Lost Horizon -- resonating with an all-too conventional promise of some feminine verdant cleft, the Shangri-las foreground the kind of utopian bliss, or Nirvana, that Freud associated with the death-drive. Though, on first hearing, 'The Leader of the Pack' seems to describe a tale of male rivalry and prohibition: the tyrannical nature of paternal law is negatively affirmed and atoned for by the sacrifice of the young biker who assumes a symbolic place in death. 'Is that Jimmie's ring you're wearing?' Jimmie reminds us of Jimmie Dean, crash dead by the time this song was a hit, and already the symbolic leader of a new rebellious generation of baby boomers. The function of the Ego-Ideal is transferred, via the crash, to the signifier in whose name rebellion is authorised, and an unspeakable jouissance promised.

But this would be to misread the song. For a start, it is clear that the romance between Betty and Jimmie has not been forbidden absolutely. In order for the paternal function to shift smoothly from father to surrogate son, the father would have had to have uttered the classic paternal prohibition: 'you will go out with that bad lad over my dead body!' Jimmie's sacrifice then guarantees the transfer of paternal authority on the father's terms. However, this is not what happens at all. While Betty's folks complain about Jimmie, are always 'putting him down', and are apparently unhappy about his background, they do not stop her riding with him on a regular basis and having a great time. All the other High School girls are jealous. She's even wearing his ring. Then, 'one day', she decides to find someone new. Her father's law is invoked, but as a law that demands novelty rather than moral judgement. He is not reported as saying 'find someone better', in a moral sense, but merely 'find someone new'. The suspicion remains, then, that Betty's invocation of paternal law is simply an alibi. While her father, no doubt slumped in front of the tube watching re-runs of 'I Love Lucy', remains vaguely disgruntled, it is Betty herself who has decided she needs a new boyfriend. As her friends say 'What do you mean when you say you better go find somebody new?' The Leader of the Pack is nonplussed: 'He stood there and asked me why?' Che vuoi?’ Poor Jimmie pathetically inquires after the desire of the Other, but is met with silence: 'All I could do was cry'. Clearly, Betty is bored and is looking for someone with a better, faster bike. At least, this is how Jimmie interprets her tears as he accelerates off in a vain and fatal attempt to go faster, to keep up the demanding pace. The song is of course about amorous rejection. Betty knows that the Leader of the Pack is no mean, bad lad: he's just a bit sad, the cause of regret and a few tears, but no great loss and easily upgradable.

The Shangri-las' 'Leader of the Pack' re-writes Freud's originary myth according to a more arbitrary and technological law of novelty, consumption and performance. 'I met him in the Candy Store'. The initial scene of the romance is set in a conventional place of conspicuous adolescent and pre-adolescent consumption of pure luxury items: the Candy Store points towards the sumptuous spectacle of the shopping mall and an abundance of choice, an excess of sweet tempting options. The relationship is no different: Betty, wearing his ring, appears as the choicest sweetmeat of the saccharine horde that he is supposed to lord over. But it is Betty who sets the standard of performance for the male subject, Jimmie, who is precisely subject to the law of the commodity himself. Ultimately, he is no better than, and as replaceable as, his technological prosthesis, his bike. And it is of course the bike, purring and growling at significant points throughout the record that is its real star and selling point. The Leader of the Pack, a potential Ego-ideal like Jimmie Dean, is dependent upon the technological processes that endlessly reproduce his image, to supplement and replace it with a host of Elvises, Marlons, Marilyns or whoever.

The motorbike is pre-eminently, in postwar America, the signifier of transgression, crossing thresholds and barriers. The result of technological innovation and a human desire for speed and thrills, the motorbike ideologically embodies the pioneering spirit of the lone rider of the West, the vehicle of the urban cowboy's 'rebellious' phallic narcissism. But the Shangri-las' 'Leader of the Pack' suggests that this narcissism is staged for the gaze of the Other who always demands more: be more daring, make it bigger, harder, faster: paternal law is secondary to the demand or imperative that seems to drive technological innovation for its own sake: keep up with the pace of the machine that is always just that bit faster, adapt to its always new horizons ... or die in the process. By becoming the very locus of material existence, by marking its threshold, technology functions as the Other: the reservoir of an Other knowledge and, at the limit of that knowledge, an Other jouissance that exceeds the phallic imaginings of the subject. This would therefore be the meaning of the crash for the subject who crashes in this epoch of the incorporated crash: that there is no relation to the crashing machine.

From Fred Botting and Scott Wilson ‘Venus in Foam’ New Formations 46 (2002): 64-84.

‘Hamlet (Pow, Pow, Pow)’: Songs from the Botting & Wilson archive (occasional series)

POW POW POW

Grinding wire, rumbling skin, taut metal slice, blood drawn strings.
Voice retching down a well of misery, spelling it out.


aytch … chayh … yemmh … mhell …

…yyeaeuuURrrGHh


POW!!


‘Hamlet (Pow, Pow, Pow)’. The Birthday Party plays a Hamlet of Bataillean proportions. Nick Cave sings Bataille now in a performance that sketches in, allusively, various philosophical incarnations of Shakespeare’s most perverse character.

Hamlet got a gun, now,
he wears a crucifix


Priestly, prophetic, sovereign in his visionary expenditure, the German Romantic Hamlet appears in all his doomed, artistic individualism: heroically, vainly, struggling against the overwhelming torrent of historical destiny. Hegel’s Hamlet, for example, moving beyond ‘the rightful sense of vengeance’ and a forced violation of morality, is a figure whose ‘real collision’ turns on the ‘particular personality’, on the ‘inner life’ ‘whose noble soul is not steeled to this type of energetic activity’. Similarly, for Goethe, time is out of joint because a pure, noble and moral nature is not up to the performance of the great action for which events call, sinking, instead, under a burden it cannot bear. The noble soul of Goethe and Hegel is unable to meet the demands of destiny, a human destiny that, for Schlegel, becomes enmired in the ‘dark complexity’ of world events. For Tieck, the dark passions are those of the melancholic soul cursed with the gift of an unbearable interiority, an accursed hole, ‘these beautiful contradictions from which nearly every gifted individual suffers’. But


don’t let ‘em steal your heart away
he went and stole my heart POW!


Hamlet’s heart is gone. Yet still Hamlet refuses to give up on his desire. ‘Is this love?’ Hamlet also appears as an amorous, anguished individual animated by an uncanny object of adoration and animosity: ‘I believe our man’s in love’, ‘some kinda love’. Some kind of love: for Charles Lamb it is a ‘supererogatory love’, ‘love awkwardly counterfeiting hate’. Hence the confrontation between Hamlet and Romeo.

WHEREFORE ART THOU BABY-FACE?

‘Hamlet got a gun’, he’s a vengeful pursuer seeking out his Romantic double; he is loverman, master of love-hate drawn out to the extreme limit of Romantic subjectivity and

he likes the look of that CADILLAC
POW POW POW POW

The gangster of love’s on a death drive.

Hamlet’s fishin’ in the grave
thru’ the custard bones
he ain’t got no friends in there

The melancholic subject seeks the impossible: a lost object in the hole in the real, the very point of nonknowledge, according to Lacan, around which the symbolic cannot close, the hole that pulls the symbolic out of joint. As Lacan insisted, ‘we do not know what happened [to Antigone] in the sepulchre any more than we know what goes on when Hamlet goes down into the sepulchre’. This rupture is also characterized by Lacan as the limit where the possibility of metamorphosis is located. When, for example, Antigone goes fishing in the grave to re-cover the corpse of her brother she begins to moan like a bird that has lost its young. Hamlet, however, becomes Ophelia, his own lost object:

Hamlet moves so beautiful
walking thru’ the flowers …

Down in the hole, Hamlet follows the logic of the signifier outlined by Lacan in ‘Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet’, but with a difference. The young Dane assumes the identity of Ophelia, and then, with a gun and a crucifix, he rises from the grave as phallus. But Hamlet rises as phallus but only to raze it to the ground. Already continuous with his lost object of love, Hamlet’s identity further splits as he goes in vengeful pursuit of the ghost whose place he has taken:

now he’s movin down my street
and he’s coming to my house
crawling up my stairs

Hamlet shadows the ghost of his father, the deadly, fantasmatic double whose visored gaze demands action and revenge. Beyond morality, Hamlet turns his gun on the law in a moment of homicidal expenditure: POW POW POW

* * *

POW POW POW

'Is this love?’ In love, Hamlet encounters the movement of extreme states which, for Bataille, mean he is torn from ‘isolate being’ and opened to ‘what’s beyond itself, to what is beyond the couple even – monstrous excess’. It charts a movement from a desire for union and decision to a lacerating, catastrophic leap. POW POW POW With laughter that ‘opens me up infinitely’, there is a laceration in which being ‘slips into indecisiveness, turns into interference, splits apart’; Hamlet’s indecisiveness becomes a mortal wound: ‘there’s an infinite gaping in laughter, something mortally wounded – this is nature, violently suspending itself’.

Laughter remains an erotic experience and as such it ‘waits upon chance’. Eroticism, Bataille states, ‘always entails a breaking down of established patterns, the patterns … of the regulated social order basic to our discontinuous mode of existence as defined and separate individuals’. Eroticism fucks with communication even as it remains at its base:

For those who understand communication as laceration, communication is sin or evil. It’s a breaking of the established order. Laughter, orgasm, sacrifice (so many failures harrowing the heart) all manifest anguish; in them, a person is anguished, seized and held tight, possessed by anguish. (Bataille)

But the negativity of sovereignty, the eroticism which veers uncontrollably towards death, expends the individuated being beyond the anguish of death, towards the me that is not me, to a real that is not real, impossible … ‘to be or not to be is a question that can never be seriously (logically) raised’. HA-HA-Hamlet.

Sovereign man dies like an animal in the act of living sovereignly, freed from the anguish of death. The sovereign resists individual consciousness, his ‘playful impulse’ ‘proves stronger in him that the considerations that govern work’ … This impulse demands transgression; it enjoins rebellion, provoking the desire to move beyond usefulness, slavish work and the negation that death introduces into the domain of servile existence. … Sovereign play finds its ‘greatest affirmation’ in the killing of the king for it displays a king who cannot die, for whom ‘death is nothing’: ‘it is that which his presence denies, that which his presence annihilates even in death, that which his death itself annihilates’.

Crawlin’ up my stairs
WHEREFORE ART THOU BABY-FACE?
Where-for-art-thou?
POW POW POW POW

POW POW POW POW

Hamlet’s act means he becomes phallus, no longer subordinated to it. Through his moment of sovereign expenditure Hamlet becomes king and dies, sacrificed to the signifier of deathlessness that erases and exhumes him, turning substance into energy, returning him to the ghostly, fatal power that has moved him throughout his performance and beyond it.

Sovereign negativity, as it sacrifices individual identity, as it transgresses all limits, does not become frozen before the mirror, the double of the signifier. Hamlet, spitting bullets in the face of death, discharges signifiers in the grave of the double; Hamlet, fishing in the hole that remains in him more than him, rends life’s fabric and its symbolic death. POW POW POW. Absolute expenditure.

It unleashes a movement beyond the human wager, beyond the risk that restores an uneasy equilibrium between the two deaths in that, risking one, the combatant achieves the recognition of the Other. For Lacan, Hamlet is torn between a real and a symbolic death; and it is only in being so torn, having been given his death wound by Laertes, that he can unleash his revenge. But it is an indifferent revenge. Beyond the risk there is only sovereignty. While Lacan’s Hamlet ends with the rise of the phallus and the return of some kind of symbolic order in the shape of Fortinbras and Hamlet’s request to Horatio ‘To tell my story’ (V.ii.341), Cave’s Hamlet expires in the POW POW POW. The rest is silence.

Absolute in its uselessness, complete only in its utter evacuation of subjectivity, the discharge of sovereign negativity wrenches time out of joint.

...

A Bataillean response, then, to the so-called postmodern, posthistorical period heralded or exemplified by the symbolic death of Marxism is not to resurrect the Kantian moral imperative in the ghostly shape of Marx’s spectre or spirit, it is to follow and act in the negative determinations of the irreversible death, destruction and sacrifice forming the blind spot around which meaning circulates, to act in a Marxism that does not give up on its desire, a Marxism that exists in the sovereign space disclosed by its symbolic death, a Marxism without reserve. POW POW POW

From Fred Botting & Scott Wilson (2001), ‘Pow, Pow, Pow’, Bataille, Palgrave: 127-45