In Hollywood he had modified his rigid Freudian approach so as to be more à la page and to attract showbiz people. Apart from concepts drawn from the oriental philosophies and religion, such as karma, chakra and mantra, he experimented with psychoactive drugs, which he believed induced local regression, as happens in dreams. In exceptional circumstances, he gave his patients a very new compound, lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD, a substance capable of ‘unlocking the casket of the id’.
Cary had told him about Archie Leach, about the invention of ‘Cary Grant’, about a father who had died a drunk and a loser, about a mother who had died and come back to life, about two failed marriages. Cary couldn’t talk about Nazi spies, missions on behalf of MI6 or encounters with the socialist satraps of a far-off eastern country, but what he had talked about was more than enough. Clapas, sincerely struck, had decided to give him LSD, without telling him of its effects lest he provoke defence reactions.
‘Same time tomorrow.’
Clapas hung on the actor’s every word. Clapas sweated and clutched his linen trousers around his knees. Cary Grant was completely transformed, he spoke in a very heavy English accent, using idiomatic expressions from turn-of-the-century Bristol, and generally talked and talked and talked. Cary Grant was Archie Leach.
Cary watched his own past like a 35 mm film shown on TV, apart from the bright colours, crikey, bright as a fire in which your mother dies, a fire lit by your father. Widescreen, a more distant rectangle than usual, between two black strips. Events follow hot on one another’s heels. Marriage to Barbara Hutton, friend to the friends of Mussolini, interminable parties and bombing raids on London (the latter probably the consequence of the former), Errol Flynn bombing London, Errol Flynn fucking a little girl up the arse in the cockpit of his Luftwaffe plane, MI6 catching him in flagrante and locking him up in a madhouse, every night Errol climbs over the wall dividing the male wing from the female one, managing to fuck Frances Farmer or Elsie Leach, here Cary bursts into tears, Clifford Odets’s hand writes ‘Here Cary bursts into tears’ and brings the scene to an end, Senator McCarthy sends anyone who knows how to read and write to the pyre, the Gestapo tries to arrest Charlot, who defends himself and knocks them flying with his walking stick, MI6 free Elsie in exchange for his cooperation, Cary refuses and says, ‘I’m not James Bond!’ (‘Who the hell is James Bond?’ wonders Dr Clapas), then accepts because Elsie is stuffing him with hallucinogenic wheatgerm, so Cary has to go off on a long journey, he opens the clothes cupboard and inside is a naked Quebecois with a regimental tie around his neck, the Quebecois is Cary’s double, and he is chatting with Josip Broz known as Tito (‘Where the hell does Tito come into it? Clapas wonders), they go together to the Hotel Lux in Moscow, in the corridor papered with portraits of Stalin they are involved in a shooting match, policemen turn up in Louis XVI costumes, Robespierre shows up, grabs the wigs from their heads and tells them, ‘Change, or I’ll send you to the guillotine!’ then introduces himself to Cary, who is now, who knows why? wearing nothing but a pair of swimming trunks. The bathing attendant appears and says to him, ‘Monsieur Bond, au téléphone!’ Cary repeats, ‘I am not James Bond!’ Sir Alfred Hitchcock says, ‘Cut!’ Guillotines are set in motion, heads fall into a single large basket. Cary rummages in the bucket and pulls out a head: it is Joe McCarthy’s. Cary swims, Frances Farmer swimming beside him, then Frances Stevens (Clapas notes: ‘Ask who that is’).
Cary relaxes. Cary goes to sleep.
Cary hardly remembers anything. He wakes up. He feels good. Colours are vivid. His movements are fluid, his bones light.
‘Very, veeeerrrry interesting, Monsieur Grant, but any anamnesis would be over-hasty. I shall administer LSD to you again. Are you available next Tuesday, at the same time?’
‘LSD? Those drops were LSD? Why have you given me a hallucinogenic drug?’
‘In a sense to return you to your childhood, Monsieur Grant, without the inhibitions of adulthood, beyond the reality principle.’
‘I must have been coming out with some foolish things. ’
‘On the contrary, Monsieur Grant. Your visions have been highly instructive. I have a few questions to ask you, but let’s not think about those now. We’ll meet again on Tuesday.’
‘I think the effect is persistent, it’s as though everything were. underlined. As though every object were winking at me and saying, “I’m here, and I couldn’t be anywhere else for any reason in the world”. ’
‘I shall make a record of your description of lysergic perception, monsieur. Is it pleasurable?’ ‘I would really say so, yes. It’s as though everything has a complete shape, but not a fixed one.’ ‘It will last a few hours. In the meantime, try to see and hear as you have never seen or heard before.’ When he is on his own, Clapas writes:
First notes for anamnesis.
The subject has created an alter ego for himself, with a revealing name, the non-existent James Bond. ‘Bond’, a link, a connection. ‘James Bond’ is the super-ego, he is Hollywood, and by extension the American society in which the subject feels ill at ease. In fact, he defends himself a number of times against the accusation of being ‘James Bond’, that is, of having links with this society.
The reference to the alleged korephilic perversions and National Socialist sympathies of the actor Errol Flynn, who later couples with the subject’s mother and a less famous actress, one Frances Farmer, is indicative of the same conflictual relationship.
The Quebecois double in the cupboard, surprised talking to the Yugoslav dictator Tito, represents precisely the fear of failure to conform (Quebec represents cultural anomaly, the stranger in the house), the fear of being accused of anti-Americanism and communist sympathies. The Quebecois double is naked, and hence in a state of innocence close to the truth, but at the same time he is wearing a tie, a sign of indecision between nature and civilisation. That might mean that the subject is effectively a crypto-communist, but that this causes him a sense of qualms and guilt. With regard to this, the parallel between Stalin, Robespierre and McCarthy, which is turned on its head by the execution of McCarthy by Robespierre, indicates an insoluble contradiction: the subject is well aware that democracy will prevail over totalitarianism, so he feels remorse for his communist sympathies, but also suspects that democracy, if it is to win, will have to sink to the level of the enemy, resorting to Terror. McCarthy has shown that this can happen. Given this confused, if not undifferentiated reality, the subject feels partially justified for his choice of communist. All the more so in that there is no parental authority to reproach him or explain to him that not everything is play and fiction, not everything is a stage (see the reference to Clifford Odets) or a film set (see the reference to Alfred Hitchcock). The constant tone is one of rancour at a father who has not only killed the mother, the object of the subject’s Oedipal desire, but who has abandoned his own role as a guide, leaving the subject in an eternal limbo between childhood and adolescence. The situation is aggravated by the schizoid doubling, even tripling of the subject’s personality, divided between the child Archie Leach (who has emerged as a result of locally induced regression, see the markedly English manner of speech), the character Cary Grant and the mysterious ‘James Bond’.
The tripled subject is constantly in search of three fathers (perhaps the trio of Stalin — Robespierre — McCarthy?) and three mothers. Could that be why he has had three wives? Or are they Elsie, Frances Farmer and the unknown ‘Frances Stevens’? The last two swim beside him, a clear reference to the amniotic fluid of the maternal womb.