The festival of Venus was at hand — a festival celebrated with great pomp at Cyrus. Victims were offered, the altars smoked, and the odour of incense filled the air. When Pygmalion had performed his part in the solemnities, he stood before the altar and timidly said, “Ye gods, who can do all things, give me, I pray you, for my wife”—he dared not say “my ivory virgin,” but said instead—”one like my ivory virgin.” Venus, who was present at the festival, heard him and knew the thought he would have uttered; and as an omen of her favour, caused the flame on the altar to shoot up thrice in a fiery point into the air. When he returned home, he went to see his statue, and leaning over the couch, gave a kiss to the mouth. It seemed to be warm. He pressed its lips again, he laid his hand upon the limbs; the ivory felt soft to his touch and yielded to his fingers like the wax of Hymettus. While he stands astonished and glad, though doubting, and fears he may be mistaken, again and again with a lover’s ardour he touches the object of his hopes. It was indeed alive! The veins when pressed yielded to the finger and again resumed their roundness. Then at last the votary of Venus found words to thank the Goddess and pressed his lips upon lips as real as his own. The virgin felt the kisses and blushed, and opening her timid eyes to the light, fixed them at the same moment on her lover. Venus blessed the nuptials she had formed, and from this union Paphos was born, from whom the city, sacred to Venus, received its name.
(Bulfinch’s Mythology)
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Scottie is not really fascinated by her, but by the entire scene, the staging. He’s looking around, checking up: are the phantasmatic ordinates really here? At that point, when the reality fully fits fantasy, Scottie is finally able to realize the long-postponed sexual intercourse. So, the result of this violence is a perfect coordination between fantasy and reality.
(Zizek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema)
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What exactly was the nature of Pygmalion’s offering?
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This was the moment at which we would have to decide. To wait would mean enduring a more involved procedure — eventually, to wait would mean not to decide, to have our decision made for us. We decided to talk about it, but we did not talk about it, we only set a date or a time to talk about it. When it came up — because it had to come up — my girlfriend lost patience with me. Maybe she had lost patience with herself. I couldn’t imagine what it was like for her, and I didn’t try.
A week before, we had been in San Francisco. I was showing her where I’d lived. I wanted her to have a good time. I was not thinking about it as a last gasp, a new parent’s equivalent of the bachelor party, but the long walk’s mood was on us both. We went out with her friends. We had lunch in Chinatown, took the boat to Alcatraz, shopped in the Mission, even went up Coit Tower. When we kissed at the top of the tower, she laughed and told me I was being cheesy. I had said something about how she was my damsel in distress. When we got back on the ground, she became serious, a different person almost. She was short-tempered with her friends, more so with me. I was not stupid. I knew what had happened. She had thought about it on the way down, thought about what she had to think about. Now, back in Portland, there were none of those things to distract us. We worked. We came home from work and talked about what we would have to do if it was x, what we would have to do if it was y. Still we could not address the question of whether it would be x or y.
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That done, he falls in love with his own work.
The image seems, in truth, to be a girl;
one could have thought she was alive and keen
to stir, to move her limbs, had she not been
too timid: with his art, he’s hidden art.
He is enchanted and, within his heart,
the likeness of a body now ignites
a flame. He often lifts his hand to try
his work, to see if it indeed is flesh.
(Ovid, Metamorphoses)
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The ivory had lost / its hardness; now his fingers probe; grown soft, / the statue yields beneath the sculptor’s touch, / just as Hymettian wax beneath the sun / grows soft and, molded by the thumb, takes on / so many varied shapes — in fact / becomes more pliant as one plies it.
(Ovid, Metamorphoses)
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To become more pliant the more one is plied.
John Berger writes, “The original Pygmalion creates a statue with whom he falls in love. He prays that she may become alive so that she may be released from the ivory in which he has carved her, so that she may become independent, so that he can meet her as an equal rather than as her creator.” Could the same be said for Scottie?
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On the one hand the hypocrisy, the guilt, which tends to make strong sexual desire — even if it can be nominally satisfied — febrile and phantasmagoric; on the other hand the fear of women escaping (as property) and the constant need to control them.
(John Berger, About Looking)
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In Vertigo, we have little doubt that Scottie would rather have a dead Judy than a live one, if she isn’t (or can’t be transformed into) Madeleine.
(Wood, Hitchcock’s Films)
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Neither beautify nor uglify. Do not denature.
(Bresson, Notes)
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Men dream of women. Women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
(Berger, Ways of Seeing)
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Because it was late in the year, and because I would have to wait another year to enroll if I put it off, I decided to enroll at the junior college while I was still undergoing the law firm’s background checks and waiting for their offer to be formalized. As one might expect with a law firm, this process took longer than seemed normal, but the admissions process also took a few days and I was glad not to be starting a new job on top of it. I would be reimbursed for much of the cost once I had been officially hired, and I was assured that I would be hired. The only possible snag was my record, but there was nothing on it that would cause my future employers to reconsider. So I thought.
I was not already a student and had never taken any classes at the junior college, so I had to meet with the head of the certificate program before I could be admitted. This, too, was a formality, I was told, especially given my teaching experience and my master’s degree, but, with her first question, the woman, a lawyer, gave me pause. I stumbled through my reasons for pursuing the certificate. Really, I had no passion for the work at all, had no idea what it entailed, and this must have been clear because she warned me that the work would be repetitive and boring at times, that the challenge was in keeping oneself mentally agile, not allowing oneself to fall into set patterns of thought, to approach each day as though one were starting all over again. I nodded and smiled politely. I would not get in, I thought. After thirty minutes of warning me about what I was getting into, however, she had somehow talked herself around her own objections to my candidacy by emphasizing how new it would all be to me, how I would be a perfect candidate precisely because I had no preconceived notions of the law. I had barely said a word, just let her talk about me. I wondered if my presence had even been necessary, really. I could have been anyone, with any background.