Reading Rob Pattinson, Baudrillard and Rand Through Nietzsche

Rob's Early Career

Rob Pattinson's deleted lovely face in Vanity Fair has taken on some legs since first I imagined it into existence. IF that scene with his beautiful 17 year old face had remained in that film, turning everyone else in it into oval oblivion, then clearly his film career would have begun in that moment, and he might never have been Cedric or Art or the cutesy in Bad Mother's Handbook. Can't you just see the stream of studley teen movies they would have put him in, and Rob, who inherently likes to please and be loved, probably would have succumbed for awhile as did Brad Pitt. Yeah I think he would have awakened form his Sleeping Beauty role after awhile. But surely no Edward Cullen would have been considered, nor the Scummit machine tolerated.

This is what Baudrillard calls Nietzsche's revenge when the same happens to him. Baudrillard's reading of Nietzsche is "worse", excessive, too much for the examiners.


This is following Nietzsche through Baudrillard. Rob's beauty in Vanity Fair was more beautiful than beautiful; hyper beautiful; obscenely beautiful as all the others in the scene looked dead; hence, implosion. It was "worse" as Nietzsche might have said. Too  much to be there, to exist there. Crash and burn.

Baudrillard takes his examinations and both the oral and the written are on Nietzsche. Since he has immersed himself in Nietzsche in German, this is a big piece of luck for him. His reading is not agreed with by the examiners and they fail him. He calls this Nietzsche's revenge. At that point in time he stops reading Nietzsche, never to go back to him again until the end of his life. Nietzsche goes underground in Baudrillard's mind, heart and psyche, never to leave, always to be a deep part of him. Forever. This, he acknowledges: (Fragments)

Nietzsche is in me in the mode of the unzeitgemass as he puts it himself, the mode  of the untimely. 

Beautiful I think

Genealogy of Morals

Ayn Rand reads Nietzsche  at University when very young in Russia. Nietzsche is not part of the curriculum so she reads him on the sly, following her heart, already aware of Soviet propaganda and surveillance. This early Rand is even then crossing the boundaries of mainstream. At 21 she comes to the US and she is still reading Nietzsche. Nietzsche is the first book she buys in English. As a young woman in Hollywood she is still reading Nietzsche. Seriously.  Rand did everything seriously. And all the way up until the 1940's (She was born in 1905) until  she is finished writing The Fountainhead. Each chapter was to be headed by a Nietzsche quote. Fountainhead was published in 1943, on wartime paper, even though it was a very long novel. Egad! No Nietzsche no no no must Bobbs-Merrill have said - so no Nietzsche chapter heads. At that point in her journals she disavows Nietzsche as just an early interest - infatuation?  Her journals have been scrubbed and scrubbed again to get Nietzsche outta Dodge. (Goddess of the Marketplace)Some Nietzsche quotes and thoughts about him  had to stay because everyone knew Howard Roark and especially John Galt were Nietzschean Supermen, so the obvious references and interpretations remained. (These are "floating signs" masking the deep references to Nietzsche.)But the deep underground of Rand's mind, heart and soul belonged to Nietzsche. This is what makes her a post modern philosopher who wrote fiction. Just as a Cronenberg makes films.

Rand Early Hollywood

Both Baudrillard and Rand disavowing Nietzsche during the 1940's? While Hitler is praising him to the skies as Leni Riefenstahl shoots him, Hitler that is, against the blue sky in her film Triumph of the Will; the Superman, the Overman of Nietzsche. Even the great and powerful Foucault, after the war, did not admit the great influence and debt he owed Nietzsche for his genealogy. Only towards the end of his life did he say that he wished he had acknowledged Nietzsche earlier on. And we all know the neverending hits and slurs that Heidegger took, and still takes, for his early pro Nazi sympathies. Not to mention the loss of his lover Hannah Arendt.

Baudrillard and Rand were wise to shut up and Foucault also.

Only now is Nietzsche taking his rightful place in the sun. 

Baudrillard acknowledges Nietzsche's permanent and ongoing influence, but more in the vein of flowing through his blood and guts than in any quotes, said or written. Would it have been any different for Rand who doesn't think in terms of unconscious rivers running deep in her psyche? Denial first, second and third for Rand. But Nietzsche is still there for the discerning reader of Rand, Nietzsche and Baudrillard.

But how to tease it out of Rand. Maybe Nathaniel could tell us. Or myself who, once upon a time, long long ago in a kingdom by the sea, was an Objectivist from 1960-1964. A serious one.

Vanity Fair Interview:Rob Pattinson 3-11

Most Rob fans don't like this interview but don't seem to know exactly why except for the fact that many redundant questions are asked.


Foucauldian thought looks at it from a different POV. In Foucault's 1974-75 Abnormal Lectures at the College de France he goes into great detail about the genealogy of confession beginning with the Inquisition. In Western Civilization the Roman Catholic Church began persecuting heretics in the 12th century continuing until the early 19th century.


Confession was afterward initiated to probe the minds of members of the church by their village priests and began to be incorporated into the hierarchy. Eventually confession landed on the psychoanalyst's couch where it continues today. The practice is widespread and completely accepted in our modern times. Confession is the accepted prevailing Discourse for the interview. The confession is to be extracted from the interviewed object by the interviewer subject. Extracted confession is the important term to be understood.


"...when I join the nosy chorus asking if his on screen love mirrors his relationship in real life," Pattinson says laughing, Are you asking me if I'm really a vampire?

"As I wait for an answer, Pattinson literally starts squirming, Yes. Um. No, not really, he says, It's pretty hard to...It's just very traumatic, he says cryptically."

The interviewer is asking whether he is fucking Kristen Stewart. Confession was initiated to probe sexuality to root out the heresies of Catharism and along with analysis sex continues to be of prime interest in interviews and on the couch. Vanity Fair's interviewer is extracting the confession, a Discourse that began in the 12th century. The interviewer is also torturing Pattinson as she waits for an answer while he squirms.


It is clear that she has made him uncomfortable and has no intention of doing otherwise.


Going back to his first response, Are you asking me if I'm really a vampire? he is expressing his feelings unconsciously. Switching from a Foucault reading to Lacan we can invert his sentence: I am asking you if you are really a vampire. Yes, Rob, you are telling the interviewer she is a vampire and the interviewer really is a vampire. That is exactly what you are saying. To extract a confession you must be pierced, crushed sometimes, and the confession pulled out, extracted, from the unwilling but complicit object that is being tortured, however politely and according to custom. An analyst trained in Lacanian listening will hear what he is saying. (Remember Bush 1 and his astonishment at the bar-code? Bar being the name his wife is known by. Read Diane Rubenstein for a long discussion on this.) But Rob is squirming because he has not heard what he really said and so instead of sitting calmly he is squirming.


And the bitch doesn't stop. "I mean, are you very intense about each other?" Oh, I don't know, "he says finally." She's really cool. Even before I knew her I thought she was a really good actress. Like, I saw Into the Wild, and I thought she was really good in that. ....And then he goes on to say that when all this is over things can go back to some sort of normality.


Baudrillard has interesting things to say about the interview situation, especially since he has given many of them. Essentially he says that what he has said about the hostage situation applies to the interview. The interviewer and the interviewee are in complicity.


Rob is complicit in this interview. He is allowing himself to be tortured. When asked the same kind of question by her recent Vogue interviewer, Kristen replied, That's not my job. She didn't squirm, she responded assertively, a tad aggressively in fact, as the interviewer had no right to be trying to extract a sexual confession out of her. Kristen is not complicit, so with her the hostage analogy does not apply in quite the same way.


Ramping up confession and torture please turn to my review of Inglourious Basterds Part 6 posted down on this blog. It's from the very first scene of IB, another masterpiece by Tarantino. An excerpt:


But back to the first scene of IB. Landa knows and he could just simply have his officers rape the farmer's daughters, torture them in front of him until he tells, shoot them all, whatever. But no, he sits down to drink a glass of fresh milk, chat a little over tobacco, and squeeze more fear into his victim. Because the farmer knows he knows but hopes he doesn't. His careful performance is perfection. His eyes get stony with protective cover. He sweats and Christoph Waltz watches with pleasure and he tightens his hold. They speak English, so the Jews underneath won't understand. He reaches a climax where he tells him ever so charmingly that he will take his family in for interrogation or he can just indicate with a nod where they are hiding. The French peasant is known for his astuteness, and this one needs no prodding. He knows what will happen to his young and beautiful daughters. He knows the Jews down below are doomed anyway. Now he is being asked to become a collaborator, to sully his soul, to do such a despicable act that he will forever torture himself afterward. (Think Sophie's Choice.) Now this is violence. He is asking him to be Judas. His reward is not 30 pieces of silver, but the safety of his daughters. He can berate himself the rest of his life by weighing the two alternatives and BTW Corrie Ten Boom had Jews hidden in her house walls and wouldn't tell and she and her family and all the Jews went to a camp. But that's another story.


So this nice polite well thought of interviewer for Vanity Fair is really in collusion with her more violent comrades in arms. She has performed an evil act. It is transparent and condoned and accepted by all and sundry. It is even published and paid for.

Vanity Fair March 2011 cover Rob Pattinson

An old-fashioned young man went fishing one day. He caught a huge fish. It was so big and heavy that he had to sling it across his shoulders to carry it home. It became an Albatross around his neck just like the Ancient Mariner. It was as tough as shoe leather and had vicious teeth that could bite him, tear him to pieces and even kill him. Did he catch the fish? Maybe it caught him.

Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea caught a gigantic fish. In bringing it home it was eaten by sharks, torn apart day after day. Until when he came home, only the skeleton remained, all goodness stripped from the gift from the sea by the sea.

Jesus carried his cross, beaten and bloody and was nailed on it. A sacrificial willing victim to fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah.

Steinbeck's Kino opening oysters day after day at last found the Pearl of the World. Unable to exchange it for its worth he threw it back into the sea.

There is only one world. You have only one life. Neither one of these can be exchanged since there is only one. Baudrillard calls this Impossible Exchange. However, Virtual Reality can steal both of them. Baudrillard calls this The Perfect Crime.

The young man found a girl. As David in the film David and Lisa says, "A pearl of a girl."