Tag Archives: Walter Goggins

What is a “cute Asian girl”? On Desire & Love in Real Life

Film still, White Lotus: Season 3, episode 5, “Full Moon Party,” the face of Rick (Walter Goggins).

“Giving what you have is throwing a party, not love.”1

“If love is to forge a link between the One and the Other, it must involve a two that remains two—a two that does not collapse the Other into One. This is very rare indeed!“2

“Only love allows jouissance to condescend to desire.”3

I.  

Sam Rockwell’s monologue on White Lotus: Season 3 (wherein he plays a mercenary named Frank) is a beautiful, surprising, and captivating moment—entirely eclipsing the development of sibling incest in the same episode—and one worth beholding in all of its kaleidoscopic splendor:4

We are all—if “we are all” a bit mad or even just mildly more interesting than a hotel restaurant—Frank’s befuddled friend, Rick (Walter Goggins). We can’t stop listening to Frank. We are fixated on his self-questioning.5

Frank asks several really good questions: “What is desire? The form of this cute Asian girl, why does it have such a grip on me?” His “insatiable” desire for the form of a “cute Asian girl” is the obvious subject of his monologue.

“Cute Asian girl” is, as Frank tells us, a “form.” As a form, “cute Asian Girl” = an abstraction. Notice that “Asian girl,” “girl,” and “woman” are all synonyms in Frank’s monologue. What he desires is an Ideal. “Asian girl” = Woman.

Curiously, what Frank misses most about his life before becoming a Buddhist and celibate is “pussy.” “Being sober isn’t so hard,” Frank tells Rick, “[b]eing celibate, though. I still miss that pussy, man.”

Sobriety may not be so hard because it dulls desire, but “pussy,” as Lil Wayne was the first in the male hip-hop world to acknowledge and celebrate, is a site of agitation.6 Frank’s ongoing desire for “pussy” makes me curious about the possibility of, in Lizzo’s words, “love in real life.”

Is love what Frank wants? Does Frank want to love an actual Thai woman?

II.

Frank’s surprising discourse likely inspires a degree of defensiveness that may stymie our curiosity. We may be inclined to dismiss Frank as just another middle-aged, straight white male colonialist for whom “cute Asian girl” = fetish.

Frank does allude to fetishism in his monologue. Recall that Frank briefly wonders if “cute Asian girl” completes him, echoing Aristophanes’s tragic speech in Plato’s Symposium.

Aristophanes, a comedic writer, gives a tragic speech about the anxious gods and their monstrous creations: doubled-humanoids. Threatened by these two-headed, four-legged creatures of three different sexes (androgynous, male, and female), Zeus disempowers them by cutting them in half. Thus, love = the pursuit of one’s missing half (e.g., if a male were originally one-half of an androgynous whole, a male and female creature, then his search would be for his missing female half).

In a way, “cute Asian girl” does “complete” Frank. As Frank is getting fucked by various dudes, he looks into the eyes of an Asian girl he has paid to witness him getting “railed.” At this moment, the asexual Asian girl is functioning as a fetishistic object. She enables Frank to become her by affirming him: “Yes, what you see in the mirror of my eyes is you!” Thus, in fucking himself (he is both the male and female in this scenario), he returns to himself what has been cut off.

As a fetishistic object, “cute Asian girl” sutures Frank’s lack. Perhaps, but Frank doesn’t take fetishism seriously. “I realized I could fuck a million women and still never be satisfied.” Frank knows that fucking a million women will not give him back what has been cut off.

III.

Enter: Buddhism.

Frank states that Buddhism “is all about . . . detaching from self,” but I think what Buddhism does for Frank is cut off his desire from the (death) drive. “I realized I gotta stop the drugs, the girls, trying to be a girl. I got into Buddhism, which is all about, you know, spirit verses form, detaching from self, getting off the never-ending carousel of lust and suffering.“

According to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, desire qua desire is insatiable. That is, desire has no purpose.7 Desire is for desire. It is, as Frank feels, never-ending. But desire is not always a “never-ending carousel of lust and suffering.”

Like a hummingbird, desire flits from this to that. The (death) drive traps desire in repetition or obsessive fixation—in Frank’s case, on Woman. In the clutches of the drive, desire is immobilized. It becomes boring and monotonous.

The drive requires repetition/immobilization because it cannot achieve its end. On its own, it cannot bury desire. In and through repetition, the drive drives desire ever closer to what Lacan calls the Real (or, in keeping with my avian theme, the drive brings the hummingbird ever closer to the mouth of the mantis).

For Lacan, “pussy” is Real. And jouissance, like the (death) drive, serves the Real.

Jouissance is what lies beyond pleasure. “Jouissance is suffering” because it = excess pleasure.8 The drive latches onto desire and drives it beyond the limits of pleasure, beyond the amount of pleasure the subject (i.e., Frank) can bear.

According to Lacan, jouissance is “the path towards death,” toward the Real or “the Thing” (i.e., the pussy = the disturbing). “The Thing” is what is there when desire isn’t. Frank is ignorant of the fact that jouissance (= his satisfaction) is the source of his suffering—not desire.

IV.

Frank asserts that Buddhism is the cure for the “never-ending carousel of lust and suffering.” Buddhism may be such a cure, but is a cure what Frank wants?

One benefit of the talking cure (i.e., psychoanalysis) is its potential for disrupting repetition. While we can never fully know our desire (because it is always unconscious), our talk about it (potentially) frees it from the clutches of the mantis (clutches = the drive).

Recall that what gets Buddhist Frank off is “getting off the never-ending carousel of lust and suffering.” Lust and suffering, in and of themselves, do not seem to disturb Frank as much as the idea that they are never-ending features of life (“never-ending” = “a million different” Woman9).

“I still miss that pussy, man.”

V.

Enter: Love.

Frank may be right about sex when he defines it “as a poetic act,” but love is, too. Lacanian psychoanalyst Bruce Fink observes that “[l]ove is a poetic creation, a product of human creative activity.”10

Following Lacan, Fink further argues that love is a social link between the Symbolic and the Real.11 As Lacan intimates, love negotiates a more livable relationship between the Symbolic (i.e., desire) and the Real (i.e., the drive, jouissance, the base materiality of the Other or “pussy”).12

The theme of love appears in and around Frank’s monologue in at least three ways. First, love slips out of Frank’s mouth in his brief reference to Plato’s Symposium. The symposium’s ostensible agenda is to praise the god of love (discussed above in section II).

Second, love appears on Rick’s face. Throughout Frank’s monologue, Rick’s face is fixated on him, while Frank occasionally looks away. Unlike the paid Asian girl, Rick’s face is not a mirror. Rick’s face is Other; it talks back throughout Frank’s self-absorbed questioning, reflecting astonishment and perplexity. However, Rick’s face never appears disgusted or afraid of the substance of Frank’s monologue.

Finally, after Frank shares his final words, “I still miss that pussy, man,” Frank stares at Rick, but Rick looks away, down toward his crotch, and he says, “Yeah.”

“Yeah,” what? Rick is not celibate. So, what does his “Yeah” mean?

VI.

“Yeah” is a transition; it signals a shift from one conversation to another. “Love,” Lacan argues, “is a sign that one is changing discourses.”13

Fink points out the importance of changing discourses in “relations between lovers, the importance of not engaging in battle on the terrain on which one is attacked or challenged, but shifting the discussion to other ground.”14 Rick does not argue with or challenge Frank; he gracefully acknowledges the end of his monologue, shifting their conversation to the next subject.15

Rick’s girlfriend, Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), adores Rick, but everything she says disturbs and irritates him. He never fails to take an opportunity to dismiss or demean her, especially when she is showing the most concern for Rick’s welfare. Frank receives from Rick what Rick is unwilling to offer his girlfriend: grace.16

Nonetheless, Rick’s response to Frank may become a template for Rick’s relationship with his girlfriend. His glancing down at his crotch after Frank has shared how much he misses “pussy” may suggest that Rick (unconsciously) notices his own lack or vulnerability. Perhaps he will continue to “notice” it, opening a pathway to become Chelsea’s lover.17

It is clear that Chelsea loves Rick. In episode 6, “Denials,” Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) demands to know why Chelsea did not hook up with him the night before during the wild full-moon party on the boat (while Rick is away with Frank). Chelsea shares that Rick is her “soulmate” and that having sex with Saxon would, therefore, be “an empty experience.”

“Once you’ve connected with someone on a spiritual level, you can’t go back to cheap sex,” she says. “Hooking up with you would be an empty experience.” Chelsea further suggests that Saxon is empty: “You’re soulless,” she says to Saxon.

Saxon rightly takes Chelsea’s remark as an insult. There is another way of reading it. If Lacan is correct, and “love is giving what you don’t have,” Chelsea may have (unknowingly) transformed Saxon into a lover.18 Saxon’s challenge is to recognize his lack, something he has so far shown himself unwilling even to contemplate.

Chelsea may represent the possibility that our attachments need not be so beset by “lust and suffering.” In other words, Chelsea may teach us something about love’s diplomacy. Love can work a compromise between desire and jouissance.19

VII.

Enter: object a(utre) = the object cause of desire.

Sex may be, as Frank speculates, “a metaphor” for something, like “our forms.” Love is a metaphor for object a.

Love interrupts the repetition associated with an Ideal, like Woman. It does so by fixating desire on a piece of the Real (= object a), “recognized” by the Lover in their beloved.20 In so far as object a is associated with the Real and captures desire (sans repetition), it may be associated with a compromised (death) drive and jouissance.

Love inspires/causes, fixates, and satisfies desire. It empowers us to get off on “getting off the never-ending carousel of lust and suffering.”

Example: Consider Kylie Minogue’s hit music video, All the Lovers (2010). Her beloved refuses to move, to dance, to be activated by the summons of her love. “Love demands love.”21

Her beloved, we may speculate, is reasonably worried about “all the other lovers that have gone before” him. His mistake, however, is in his thinking that he is, for Minogue, just another beloved. She very clearly tells him (twice) that “all the other lovers who have gone before, they don’t compare to you. . . they don’t compare, all the lovers.”

Like Chelsea, Minogue “recognizes” object a in her beloved. So, unlike her beloved, she is unafraid to enter into the metaphor of love.22

VIII.

Like Kylie Minogue, Frank demands love. Rick offers it, becoming Frank’s incomparable lover.

Rick’s love may inspire Frank to “recognize” his Anora. Or, sticking with Plato’s Symposium, Rick’s love (= an avatar for object a) may enable Frank to “recognize” his ágalma in the real world, in a real Thai woman.

Fink reminds us that

[i]n Greek, [ágalma means] shine and brilliancy: ágalma is something admirable or charming . . . it is a trap for gods – it draws their eyes . . . it is an uncanny object or charm – the Trojan horse, for example, is referred to as ágalma.23

As a “trojan horse,” object a is disturbing. It is disturbing in several ways. First, it is a piece of the Real. It is “pussy.” Thus, love fixates our desire on what we find most disturbing or ugly. Second, in loving object a, we reveal that we love in pieces. Fink (somewhat defensively) observes that

any analyst who has taken the trouble to elicit and listen attentively to the fantasies of actual, living, breathing, human beings is aware that what turns people on in their partners is not the “total person” but something far more partial and specific.24

Love in real life is not normal love. Fink writes,

Often it may seem that we ordinary mortals . . . are willing to love only what we consider to be “normal” in our partner, excluding anything “bizarre,” “perverse,” “weird,” or “abnormal,” excluding, indeed, all that is specific to our partner’s subjectivity. . . we consciously think our partner’s urges and pleasures weird and abnormal, but secretly they intrigue us and turn us on.25

What about Frank’s “urges and pleasures” appeal to us?

“Being sober isn’t so hard,” Frank tells us, “[b]eing celibate, though. I still miss that pussy, man.”

Frank’s Buddhism puts “a halt to repetition,” but what of Rick’s grace? Will it reveal to Frank “the potential to find love and jouissance differently than before”?26

“Yeah”?

NOTES:

  1. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (Book VIII): Transference, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (2015), 357. ↩︎
  2. Bruce Fink, Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan’s Seminar VIII: Transference (2016), 103. I have read a great deal of Lacan, but as I recently discovered, I don’t remember reading any of it. Bruce Fink, Lacan on Love, is an excellent way (back) into Lacan. It is uncanny how it reads like a commentary on Frank’s monologue. Also helpful for understanding Lacan is Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (1996), and Sean Horner, Jacques Lacan (Routledge, 2005). ↩︎
  3. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (Book X): Anxiety, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. R. Price (2004), 209. Cited by Fink, Lacan on Love, 135. ↩︎
  4. See Episode 5, “Full-Moon Party.” ↩︎
  5. We may think of their conversation as an “analytic exchange.” In this case, Rick is the analyst. See Leo Bersani (with Adam Phillips), the first chapter of Intimacies (2010), “The It in the I,” for a discussion of the 2003 film Confidences trop intimes “(translated, inaccurately but ingeniously, as Intimate Strangers)” (4). Anna (Sandrine Bonnaire) mistakenly confuses the tax consultant’s office with her therapist’s office (located just down the hall from the consultant’s). Anna starts to talk about “her ‘personal problem—a couples problem'” before the tax consultant, William (Fabrice Lucchini), has a chance to correct the situation. Bersani writes, “As the real analyst down the hall tells him later, William’s initial silence is understandable (both psychoanalysts and tax specialists are consulted by people with personal problems). . .” (5-6). Bersani argues that “William and Anna test the possibility of a de-professionalizing and perhaps subsequent universalizing of the conditions of an analytic exchange” (27). ↩︎
  6. Fink cites Macbeth: “[Alcohol], sir, it provokes and unprovokes: it provokes the desire but it takes away the performance.” See Macbeth, II.iii.29-30, and Fink, Lacan on Love, 23. ↩︎
  7. Victoria Ratliff (Parker Posey) comments that young people who stay in Buddhist monasteries have “no purpose.” ↩︎
  8. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (Book VII): The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (1997), 184. ↩︎
  9. Woman (singular) is intentional. ↩︎
  10. Fink, Lacan on Love, 153. ↩︎
  11. Fink, Lacan on Love, 102. ↩︎
  12. See note 3 above. ↩︎
  13. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (Book XX): On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, eds. Miller and Bruce Fink, trans. Fink (1999), 21. Cited by Fink, Lacan on Love, 181. ↩︎
  14. Fink, Lacan on Love, 180-181. ↩︎
  15. Another example of a transition in love: My husband asked me to go to the grocery store while he ran other errands with our son. He rightly interpreted the tone of my response to his reasonable request as an unwillingness to go to the store, and he became irritated with me. The tone and character of the conversation changed when I responded to his irritation by sharing that one of my car’s tires seemed to be going flat, and I was worried about driving on the tire and about it going flat in the store parking lot. ↩︎
  16. Similarly, when Frank wonders if he may be, on the inside, an Asian girl, Rick responds, “Right. I don’t know.” ↩︎
  17. Reading Fink, I realized the return of love can be shocking. “Although our tendency in past relationships,” Fink writes, “may have been to fixate on people who did not return our love, our misreading of our current beloved [i.e., construing them in the image of past relationships] may be such that we find our love being returned when we least expect it” (204). ↩︎
  18. Lacan, Seminar VIII, 129. Cited by Fink, Lacan on Love, 35. ↩︎
  19. However, her disdain for Saxon (mirroring Rick’s disdain for her) suggests the situation is more complicated. I think Chelsea is likely mistaken when she argues that because Rick is her “soulmate,” other men cease to be interesting or that sex with other men must be cheap and empty. It is far more likely that she loves Saxon, and something else, perhaps a sense of moral superiority, is holding her back from being Saxon’s lover. In any case, Chelsea is surely not indifferent to Saxon. ↩︎
  20. “Recognized” is in quotation marks because I am referring to an unconscious recognition of the disturbing. Also, if I have read Fink correctly, Ideal (e.g., Beauty) is a link between the Imaginary and the Symbolic. See, for example, Lacan on Love, 74-75, where Fink works out the connection between “ego-ideal” and “ideal ego.” ↩︎
  21. Lacan, Seminar XX, 4, cited by Fink, Lacan on Love, 36. ↩︎
  22. Lacan thinks Socrates made a similar mistake in his refusal to allow Alcibiades to become his lover. See Fink, Lacan on Love, 196ff. ↩︎
  23. Fink, Lacan on Love, 191. Anora also means shining light and is associated with what is honorable. ↩︎
  24. Fink, Lacan on Love, 192. ↩︎
  25. Fink, Lacan on Love, 203-204, emphasis is mine. ↩︎
  26. Fink, Lacan on Love, 206. ↩︎