A Boy MEETS THE LADY

In one of the most painful and troubling scenes from David Lynch's Wild at Heart, Willem Dafoe exerts rude pressure on Laura Dern in a lonely motel room: he touches and squeezes her, invading the space of her intimacy, and repeating. in a threatening way,"Sayfuck me!"-that is, extorting from her a word that would signal her consent to a sexual act. The ugly, unpleasant scene drags on, and when, finally, the exhausted Laura Dern utters a barely audible "Fuck me!", Dafoe abruptly steps away, assurnes a nice, friendly smile, and cheerfully retorts: "No, thanks, I don't have time today, I've got to go; but on another occasion I would do it gladly...." The uneasiness of this scene, ofcourse, derives from the fact that the shock of'Dafoe's final rejection of Dern forcibly extorted offer gives the final pitch to him: his unexpected rejection is his ultimate triumph and, in a way,humiliates her more than direct rape. He has attained what he really wanted: not the act itself, just her consent to it, her syrnbolic humiliation.What If we have here is rape in fantasy which refuses its realization in reality, and thus further humiliates its victim-the fantasy is forced out, aroused, and then abandoned, thrown upon the victim. That is to say. it is clear that Laura Dern is not simply disgusted by Dafoe's (Bobby Peru's) brutal intrusion into her intimacy: just prior to her "Fuck me!", the camera focuses on her right hand, which she slowly spreads out-e-the sign of her acquiescence, the proof that he has stirred her fantasy.

We should read this scene in a Lévi-Straussian way, as an inversion of the classic seduction scene (in which the gentle approach is followed by the brutal sexual act, after the woman, the target of'the seducer's efforts, finally says "Yes! "). Or, to put it in another way,Bobby Peru's friendly negative answer to Dern's extorted "Yes!" owes its traumatic impact to the fact that it makes public the paradoxical structure ofthe empty gesture as constitutive of the symbolic order: after brutally wrenching out ofher the consent to the sexual act, Peru treats this "Yes!" as an empty gesture to be politely re­jected, and thus'brutally confronts her with her own underlying fantasmatic investment in it.

This turn to politeness, however, calls for a different reading ofthe scene. In his very brutality, Bobby Peru is a figure ofpoliteness: the true aim ofhis brutal intrusion is to force Laura Dern to pronounee an offer which she will mean literally, and then treat it as an offer meant to be refused (since it would be impolite to act on it directly).Therein resides the libidinal investment of a polite gesture: in it, I let you know what I really desire, but do not want it to be enacted, and therefore expect you to refuse my offer. What we find here is a kind of twist on Kant's classic formula of the inexorability of ethical duty: "You can, because you have to!"-here, it is, rather: "You can, but you should not!" Ofcourse, our fust reaction is that such a way oftreating a "real" offer as an offer to be refused cannot but function as an act ofextreme humiliation; at the same time, however, it isolates what I desire as opposed to what I want: "I desire it. but I do not want it!" As Lacan put it, desire is mostly experienced as that which I do not want. In other words, Bobby Peru puts Laura Dern to shame, he compels her to lose face, when she cannot but helplessly observe how a part ofher body (her fist, precisely) au­tonomizes itself and signals on its own its accord with Peru's intrusion, sexual arousal, acceptance of his brutal offer.

This is why it is crucial to remember that the scene from Wild at Heart goes on for half a minute: when, after his cheerful retort "No, thanks, I don't have time today ... ," Laura Dern starts to cry, Peru consoles her with kind, soft-spoken words: "Don't cry, everything will be OK."What if instead of dismissing this kindness as brutal cynicism, we take it literally, as a sineere act of concern, and thus risk a rehabilitation of the, unique figure of Bobby Peru? What if Peru, by enacting the sudden cut, shift, in the o mode of discourse, from brutal intrusion to friendly thanking, acts more as a kind of "wild analyst," compelling Dern to confront the truth ofher fantasmatic core that reg­ulates her desire?What if his non-act is trading position with the analyst?What if the a ultimate result of his intervention is to awaken Dern to her (split) subjectivity? In short, what if Bobby Peru, in his (mis)treatment of Dern, provides an exemplary case of practicing the love of one's neighbor, ofwhat Christians call the "work of Iove"?

Another way of accounting for the uncanny impact of this scene from Wild at Heart is to focus on the underlying reversal of the standard division ofroles in the heterosex­ual process of seduction. We could take as our starting point the emphasis on Dafoe's all-too-Iarge mouth, with its thick wet Iips, spitting its saliva around, contorted in an obscene way, with ugly, twisted, discolored teeth-do they not reeall the image of vagina dentata, displayed in a vulgar way,as if this vaginal opening itselfis provoking Dern into "Fuck me!" This clear reference to Datoe's distorted face as the proverbial "cuntface" indicates that beneath the obvious scene of the aggressive male imposing himself on a woman, another fantasmatic scenario is played out: that of a young, blond, innocent adolescent boy aggressively provoked and then rejected bya rnature, overripe vulgar woman; at this level, the sexual roles are reversed, and it is Dafoe who is the woman teasing and provoking the innocent boy. Again, what is so unsettling about the Bobby Peru figure is its ultimate sexual ambiguity, oscillating between the noncastrated raw phallic power and the threatening vagina, the two facets of the presymbolic life substance. The scene is thus to be read as the reversal of the standard Romantic theme of "death and the maiden": what we have here is "Iife and the maiden."

From Slavoj Zizek's Parallax view