Free Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics) by Bell Hooks Page A

us.
MFA:
When I think about madness, I am reminded of R. D. Laing who said that one’s self is an illusion; that we hallucinate the abyss, but that we can also make this leap of faith that the abyss is perfect freedom—that it won’t lead to self-annihilation or destruction but the exact opposite.
bh:
I think the reality is that the world exists only inasmuch as people like us make it. So, I don’t want to suggest that we can’t have it. We have to make it. However, if I am lured into thinking that because everyone’s bought my books and I’ve got these reviews, there’s already a place—that’s where I could get really screwed. You can go crazy looking for these people who bought your books, wrote reviews and said you were a great thinker, or da-da-da-da-da. I think that’s where envy comes in. That’s why the movie Amadeus was so fascinating because it says that sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power—not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist. That’s why Madonna, who is one of the most powerful, creative women in the United States today, has reinvented her public image to be that of the subordinate, victimized woman. In a sense, it allows her to exist without horror. What would really be going on for Madonna if she was putting forth an image that said: “I’m so powerful, I’m going to recover myself. I’m going to deal with the childhood abuse that happened in my life, and I’m going to continue to creatively imagine ways for women to be sexually free”? I think she would be a much more threatening image than she is in some little-girl pornographic shoot in Vanity Fair. Such images allow her to be bought and dismissed.
MFA:
Perhaps it’s a conscious strategy on her part: One soothing little girl photo session, then bam—she breaks or at least confronts a new taboo.
bh:
Sandra Bernhard is another creative woman who has struggled with questions of transgression and has broken new ground. I just finished reading her book, Love, Love, Love. There’s something particularly exciting in the way she toys with notion of difference, the way she problematizes black female and white female relations, and the way she talks about traditional seduction and gaslighting sexuality—capturing and conquest.
MFA:
Which is a concept—to seduce and betray—that comes back a lot in your own work.
bh:
I used to have this friend, we always wrote about movies in our journals—discussions of different movies. One of the things we wrote about was a discussion about gaslighting and how in the great gaslighting films of Hitchcock there was always some attempt at reconciliation, whereas now we get gaslighting films like Jagged Edge where no order is restored by the end of the film. There is not restoration of harmony that involves a union of male and female—some reconciliation of the act of betrayal. In real life—with friends, with lovers, with parents—we’re always having to struggle to reconcile betrayal. We don’t just drop everyone who betrays us and move on to better love. We are called upon by life to work through certain forms of betrayal.
MFA:
To get to better love.
bh:
Absolutely. Grappling with betrayal leads to an understanding of compassion, forgiveness, and acceptance that makes for a certain kind of powerful love. People get annoyed at me for this, but I liked Streisand’s Prince of Tides. I thought that Prince of Tides was two films. One is about the issues of self-restoration in order to love, which is what the Nick Nolte character is all about. Then there’s the bullshit film of Barbra Streisand wanting to seduce the WSAP man. I recently looked at Prince of Tides fast-forwarding all the scenes of her sexual relationship with him and it became a very poignant film about male return to the possibility of love. The film does suggest to men the they’re not going to be able to love and experience any kind of mature