Book Review

Caligula: A Biography

by Aloys Winterling

     Caligula was an insane Roman emperor. Well, hold on a minute, maybe not. Aloys Winterling wrote Caligula: A Biography to examine that dispute even though it is an obscure one at best. For the most part, he proves his point that Caligula was perfectly sane, but the question I have as a reader is why did he see a need to make this argument in the first place?

At the start, Winterling outlines his thesis and the criteria he uses as a metric for evaluation. Caligula’s eccentricities were misunderstood or taken out of context. Nobody could have obeyed his orders if he were insane. No Roman physicians ever diagnosed him as being insane. The accusation of mental illness was meant as an insult as opposed to a clinical psychiatric condition. Some of these criteria are problematic, to say the least, almost so inept that you might wonder how a professor of history could not see his own blunders in his evaluation. But I will come back to that later.

At the time, Caligula was the youngest emperor to have ever led the Roman Empire. He was an upstart, full of youthful vigor, and ready to change the Roman government in ways that were not to the liking of the senate or the aristocracy. After being ruled by the three Caesars, the senate was growing increasingly more weak while the emperors were growing increasingly more powerful. Caligula wished to continue this trend and eventually return Rome to a monarchy. A showdown was inevitable, and a conspiracy to murder the young and naive leader was hatched. Caligula was alerted to the danger and had the rebellion put down immediately. After that he went on a campaign to humiliate and further weaken the senate. Wacky hijinks ensued. The emperor pulled a handful of pranks and practical jokes to make it clear to the senate and the plebs what he really thought of the aristocracy. The oddest incident was when he appointed his favorite race horse consul and proceeded to treat him as such. This, and other stunts, infuriated the senate and caused them to complain of his insanity. Otherwise, Caligula was an unremarkable emperor; the rest of his life involved political squabbles, excessive spending, and watching chariot races and gladiatorial combat for fun. He was assassinated shortly after being crowned emperor without having lived long enough to accomplish much.

That’s all folks.

Winterling states his argument and defends it, but that doesn’t say a whole lot. To say it was impossible for Caligula to be insane because others were willing to follow him is a weak idea. Hitler and Stalin were obviously mentally ill, yet they were able to lead their nations down the path to disaster. Donald Trump was president of America for four years while psychiatrists warned us that he has clear signs of a narcissistic personality disorder. There has been no shortage of religious leaders who were certainly crazy yet they still had their followings. Joan of Arc was schizophrenic. Ronald Reagan had Alzheimer’s disease. Case closed.

No physician in the Roman Empire ever diagnosed Caligula as insane is not such a sound criteria either. Firstly, just because such a diagnosis is not in the surviving written record, that does not mean nobody ever though it was true. Secondly, the Roman Empire was a pre-scientific society so the chances of doctors in that time having accurate knowledge of psychiatric disorders is pretty slim. Besides, Winterling himself does not provide us with any reason to think that he knows anything about psychiatry either.

Winterling’s argument that Caligula’s insanity was an insult rather than a diagnosis is a sound idea, but so what? It makes perfect sense in its context and, assuming that the most important details of Caligula’s life are known about, it isn’t a profound conclusion to arrive at. In fact, if Winterling had written this as a straight biography without outlining his thesis or even analyzing the evidence, I would see nothing in it to make me think Caligula was insane anyways. On the other hand, I take it for granted that people in positions of political power tend to be psychologically disordered to begin with. A sane person wouldn’t want to be an emperor, a dictator, or a president in the first place. I don’t think a sane person would want to be a psychologist either.

Caligula: A Biography is a so-so book. It is written at about a junior high school level of complexity so if you are used to reading more complicated books it is a bit plain. But Aloys Winterling accomplishes what he sets out to do, even if he is going for a low-hanging fruit. Caligula was moderately interesting, but he didn’t live long enough to be a fascinating historical figure. I was actually hoping for more sex and violence in this biography but admittedly, historical accuracy is more important. If you came to this book expecting something like the hilariously dreadful exploitation film directed by Tinto Brass in the 1970s, you probably will be disappointed. But then again, that might be a good thing anyways.

Winterling, Aloys. Caligula: A Biography, translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider, Glenn W. Most, and Paul Psoinos. University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: 2011. 

 

Book Review

Freedom's Orator:

Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s

by Robert Cohen

     In the fall of 1964, onSproul Plaza of the UC Berkeley campus in Oakland, a young physics student climbed on top of a parked police car and made a speech. The car was surrounded by several thousand students, all sitting on the pavement, making a coordinated effort to prevent the police from approaching it and driving it away. This was the beginning of the Free Speech Movement and the student on the police car was Mario Savio, its main spokesperson. The Free Speech Movement began when the administrators banned political speech at Berkeley, primarily to prevent student activists from educating others about the Civil Rights Movement which was approaching its peak at the time. Robert Cohen’s biography Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s does a quality job of bringing the days of the FSM to life for readers in our current times.

As any biographer would, Cohen starts off with the family upbringing of the young subject, showing how Mario Savio’s childhood prepared him for his role in later life. His parents were working class immigrants from Sicily who raised Savio in Brooklyn. The youth was an academic high achiever who suffered from a severe stutter that was caused by anxiety and got worse when in the presence of authority figures. Cohen returns to this fact repeatedly throughout the book to illustrate how overcoming this problem propelled Savio to be an advocate of free speech and an effective speech-maker throughout the rest of his life. Other contributing factors in Savio’s development into a political activist were his grandfather’s membership in the fascist party of Mussolini and the trauma of childhood sexual abuse which made him feel a deep solidarity with all the downtrodden people of the world.

Mario Savio went on to be involved with activism as soon as he left high school. He went to Mexico to help indigenous people build modern housing for themselves and spent time in Mississippi working with SNCC to register African-American voters while the KKK were trying to terrorize and kill them. When he returned to Berkeley he participated in non-violent demonstrations in favor of equal representation for Black people in the labor market. When SNCC, CORE, and other leftist political organizations began setting up tables on UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza to educate students about Civil Rights, the pro-establishment administration called the police to have them arrested and removed. That led to the spontaneous demonstration where Mario Savio made his groundbreaking speech.

From there, Cohen details what happened with the Free Speech Movement and their two committees that worked on solving the conflict they had with the authorities. The FSM not only had conflicts with Berkeley’s management team, they also had internal conflicts that had to be overcome. Mario Savio was also a man who had his own deep, internal conflicts. The biography examines these issues both sympathetically and critically, never shying away from pointing out where the FSM’s weaknesses were even though he wholeheartedly admires what they did.

Other topics covered are Mario Savio’s relationship to the New Left movement and the hippie counter-culture, neither of which was he enthusiastic about in his support, his battle with mental illness, his career as a college physics professor, and his lifelong commitment to advocacy for minority and low-income students in their struggle to pursue higher education. The final part of the book is a collection of Savio’s speeches and essays. This was the least memorable part of Cohen’s biography, mostly because all the key ideas there were already addressed in the first three sections. The final essay, an effective explanation and defense of affirmative action, hits all the right notes and is well worth your time even if it is a bit dry.

Aside from the clear and precise details, a strength of this biography is how well Cohen explains the methods of the Free Speech Movement which provides a good contrast to the political activism of our current times. Mario Savio saw the educational institutions of America as being run like machines so they believed in shutting down their operation through demonstrations and forcing the authorities into a position where they would have to negotiate in order to get the machine running again. When the Berkeley students seized the police car, they held it for ransom and the price was a place at the negotiating table, not some outlandish over-the-top abstract claim like ending the patriarchy now or stopping capitalism. The FSM risked their safety to put themselves into a position where they could make demands. Their activism was done with the intention of reaching short terms achievements that could lead to more short term achievements which collectively would result in a larger transformation of society at a later time. Political activism today is mostly done by ineffective street demonstrations and picking fights with strangers on the internet, neither of which have proven to be effective. The end result of political correctness was Donald Trump. Occupy Wall Street is a great example of the colossal failure of the 21^st century American left; it was a massive demonstration where nobody made any clear demands and so nothing got accomplished. Today’s activists should learn a few lessons from the Free Speech Movement and the Civil Rights Movement to see how things actually get done. Demonstrations are not magic spells that correct the world’s problems. Arguments on the internet have never, ever, succeeded in convincing anybody to change their mind about anything significant. Without direct action that leads to realistic demands and negotiation, activism amounts to nothing more than vanity, publicity stunts, and whining.

Mario Savio is here portrayed without any embellishments. His style was plain and down-to-Earth. There was nothing flamboyant in his character which again stands in stark contrast to the celebrity boutique activism we have now and the McLeftist-tainment costume shows we get from activist at the street level. Savio acted out of conviction more than egotism. For him, change was more important than fame and that is why he was able to lead the Free Speech Movement to victory armed with nothing but the minds and bodies of the people who supported the cause. Mario Savio comes off as any ordinary man on the street, albeit an ordinary man on the street who made a significant difference in the conduct of our nation.

While the cause of free speech in the 21^st century has become the domain of loony conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and other bizarro right wing ideologues, leftists have come full circle and are now demanding censorship for offensive speech. UC Berkeley has become a big part of the reactionary left’s blunders since they have banned Bill Maher, Ann Coutler, and Milo Yiannaoulis from speaking on their campus; the latter two individuals deserve all the humiliation the receive at the hands of the public and then some, but they still should have the right to make asses of themselves on any college campus they choose. Colleges are supposed to be places for the free exploration of ideas, not factories, as Mario Savio would say, for producing pre-fabricated workers for big business and government bureaucracies. Universities are also not meant to be indoctrination centers which is what they become if speech is censored in the name of not offending people. It is a sad irony that UC Berkeley, after having put a commemorative plaque to Mario Savio on Sproul Plaza, is now a hotbed of censorship and cancel culture being propagated by the people who have benefited the most from the Free Speech Movement. Without Mario Savio, some of the advances made in the name of minority rights, women’s rights, and LBGTQ rights would not have been possible. Activists of today’s left owe it to themselves to read a book like Freedom’s Orator so they can raise their awareness of how freedom of speech benefits everybody and censorship only benefits the people of privilege they claim to be fighting against.

Cohen, Robert. Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s. Oxford University Press, New York et al: 2009. 

 

Book Review

 

Freud: A Life for Our Time

by Peter Gay

     Sigmund Freud’s theory and practice of psychoanalysis was one of the most influential intellectual trends of the modern age alongside the ideas of Darwin, Marx, and Einstein. It should be no surprise that an extensive biography of this man would be written and it also would be expected that it would be dense and heavy on analysis of the king of all analysts. Peter Gay’s Freud: A Life for Our Time fulfills this necessity. It is largely a successful biography because it puts Freud’s ideas into context, showing how his theories were born from the social matrices of his family and career.

Freud grew up Jewish in the Austro-Hungarian empire in a town called Pribor which translates to “silverware” in Czech and is now a part of the Moravian half of the Czech Republic. His life growing up was not especially unique in any way. However, despite being a lifelong atheist, his Jewish identity had a strong impact on his thinking. In college he studied biology and eventually went into medicine. He spent one summer in the unusual pursuit of dissecting eels in search of their genitals as part of a research project investigating the hypothesis that these sea creatures are hermaphroditic. He was unable to find their private parts. Try psychoanalyzing that. For the most part, though, Freud’s younger years and family life were ordinary but Peter Gay does draw connections between the relationship he had with his parents and his development of psychoanalytical theory.

After becoming a physician, Freud found a new father figure in a doctor named Fliess. The elder man was a bit of a quack, utilizing hypnosis since some patients often complained of ailments when there was no obvious physical cause. These psychosomatic afflictions were later classified by Freud under the diagnosis of “hysteria” although “hypochondria” would be the more acceptable term these days. Freud came to realize that hypnosis did not ever cure these hysterias but he believed that those patients were legitimately suffering from something, more specifically something that originated in the mind. From there he developed his concepts of the unconscious, neuroses, the Oedipal complex, suppression, sublimation, and all the rest of the jargon that became associated with psychoanalysis.

The practice of psychotherapy was conducted by talking sessions in which the contents of thoughts, especially dreams and fantasies, were interpreted to reveal unresolved psychological conflicts that resulted from traumatic experiences suffered during a child’s infantile sexual development.

Not all of these theories were new. As Gay points out, religious mystics, artists, and poets had been alluding to the existence of the unconscious all throughout history and in a way, saying Freud discovered the unconscious is akin to saying that Columbus discovered America. But Freud did articulate this concept in a way that makes it accessible to more than just the artistic and intellectual elite whose concepts were vague to begin with. One example is the conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle that is mediated by the ego. This is a new version of the Dionysian-Apollonian dichotomy but Freud’s new conceptualization of this had wide ranging effects on our interpretations of history, religion, and human nature. These applications of analysis would be taken up later in his final literary works. In his own way, Freud was a giant standing on the shoulders of giants.

After mentioning Freud’s book publications, the establishment of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society, and the rapid spread of interest in psychoanalysis, Peter Gay’s biography takes a major turning point when he writes about Freud’s famous case histories. It is here that we get a sense of how the theory is applied to practice. One interesting case was the Rat Man; this poor guy was tormented by dreams of having live rats stuffed up his butt and the torment was made worse because he sometimes enjoyed these dreams. This was half a century before the urban legend of gerbling took hold of the American public’s imagination; maybe that urban legend was a product of anal-masochistic guilt expressed by adolescents who desired punishment from their fathers for having unconscious fantasies of transgression or something like that. The case of the Wolf Man was a curiosity too. This Russian aristocrat had a dream where a family of wolves were watching him from a tree and Freud interpreted it as a fantasy of sublimated sexuality. Although psychoanalysis quickly became popular, it seems that some of Freud’s interpretations were dubious at best from the start. But the psychoanalytic system had a logic of its own and the pieces all appeared to fit together. At the heart of this all is the Oedipus complex. Freud’s case histories were interesting and important but Gay could be faulted for not introducing this unconscious childhood fantasy until this section of the book. In fact, he never really explains it in detail. He just assumes that the readers know all about what it is. Older readers might get it all but younger readers may need to supplement this book with some research of their own.

Aside from Freud’s theories, practices, and publications, another major theme of this biography is the activities of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society. Freud was respected by most other members of his organization but not everyone was happy. Power struggles were endemic and often manifested in the form of disagreements over theoretical concepts. The most notorious one happened between Freud and Carl Jung, who Freud had chosen to be his successor in the dissemination of psychoanalysis. But Jung had his own ideas, especially about religion and the occult, and chose to leave on unfriendly terms. Peter Gay demonstrates how how the analysts clashed and argued by analyzing each other and then Gay analyzes Freud’s analyses. If you want to analyze Gay’s interpretation of Freud’s analysis of the analysts then you will probably go crazy so it’s just best to take some of this in stride and don’t get too caught up in it.

Other topics covered are Freud’s later writings, his health problems in old age, his life during the two world wars, and his relationship with his daughter Anna who went on to become a prominent psychologist herself. And Peter Gay’s opinions about Freud are not entirely uncritical. For example, he points out some contradictions in Freud’s view of women which at times appeared favorable to the idea of sexual equality and at others not so much, especially in his rejection of the feminist movement. But that was mostly because Freud did not want psychoanalysis to become political. Another contradiction was that Freud’s ideas were subversive to bourgeois values yet psychoanalysis was used as a means of maintaining the status quo. Of course, nobody ever said that Freud did not have a complex mind.

One particular thing that left a gaping hole in this biography is an examination of Freud’s legacy. The book abruptly ends when Freud dies. The influence of this great thinker has never gone away so what does the author make of that? We never find out. A critical examination of Freud’s theories would be useful too. Psychoanalysis is now widely considered to be a pseudoscience and not many people buy the ideas of infantile fantasies in all the details Freud laid out. There is no doubt that children have ambiguous feelings about their parents and that they go through different stages in the development of their sexuality but there is no way of verifying what happens in their unconscious as these processes take place. By designing a theoretical system, Freud invented a way of shaping and molding people’s understanding of their own minds but this leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that the Oedipus complex was implanted by the analyst rather than being revealed through the process of therapy. Furthermore, Freud’s system is overtly authoritarian in nature and can be interpreted as a means of trapping and containing libidinal energy rather than liberating it from neuroses.

In the long run, we still can not be entirely sure what to make of Freud. Was he important only from a historical perspective? Can we disregard him altogether? Did he have some ideas that are worth holding on to? Answering those questions is a task for future generations. He appears to have been right about the structure of the psyche while the minute details are completely wrong. At least Peter Gay did not indulge in such details like the belief that forks and spoons are phallic symbols while shoes and windows are unconsciously thought of as your mother’s vagina. Sparing us these details was a wise editorial decision since they would distract the reader from some of the more significant issues that Freud grappled with.

Freud: A Life for Our Time is as good a biography as we could hope to get. Peter Gay’s Germanic writing style, by which I mean anal-retentive in his attention to detail, makes it a long and plodding read but at least he focused on the right things and wisely chose what parts to leave out. Freud was a pioneer in the exploration of the mind’s contents and his life is worthy of being written out in one good, responsibly written book. There is no character-assassination or yellow journalism here. If you only read one book on Freud, this one should be it.

Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life for Our Time. W.W. Norton & Company, New York/London: 1988.

Book Review

Nightmare Of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood Jr.

by Rudolph Grey

     Edward D. Wood Jr., the godfather of psychotronic and cult films, was a man who had it all. Well , had it all except money managements skills, control over his drinking impulses, and talent. So maybe he didn’t really have it all but what he did have was a nice house in Hollywood, a group of loyal friends, and a huge collection of angora sweaters. He also has a lasting influence on outsider art and counter-culturalism that has lasted to this day. What more could a man want? Rudolph Grey’s biography Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood Jr. examines this auteur and pulp sleaze author. By connecting all the dots presented in these pages, you might even be able to see why films like Glen or Glenda and Plan 9 from Outer Space have survived in popular and unpopular culture.

     Nightmare of Ecstasy is an oral biography. Grey interviewed people who knew Ed Wood personally and put their accounts together. It is not a linear narrative and is actually more like commentaries on different aspects of Wood’s life. Separate chapters focus on things like his military service in World War II, his transvestism, his friendships with Bela Lugosi and other stars of 1950s horror cinema, his alcoholism, his involvement with the porn industry, and the sad and unsettling end of his life. The book ends with a list and commentaries of the known books and movies he worked on. What was surprising about it all was that the chapters about his movie productions were the least interesting parts of the biography. The stories and descriptions of the man himself were what really made this a good read.

     What kind of a man was Ed Wood? By most accounts he was friendly, humorous, open minded, generous to a fault, charming and extremely good looking. People loved to be around him and his parties were popular. He worked in most aspects of the cinematic industry and his most famous films are just a small part of everything he did professionally. He did know some important people in Hollywood but he also made friends with a host of other eccentrics like Criswell, Tor Johnson, and Vampira. His identity as a heterosexual cross-dresser made him accepting of other people with unconventional ideas and even gained him entrance to a secret club of male celebrities who liked to dress up as women. As Ed Wood became more and more comfortable about cross-dressing in public, his drinking problem got worse. The chapters at the end are harrowing accounts of his descent into self-destruction. He may have only lived at the margins of the Hollywood in-crowd but he had a good life in his younger years and a lot of people loved and admired him. Reading about how Ed Wood lived in hell in the end was a little disturbing.

     Grey’s biography gives details about the life of Ed Wood but it could have benefited from a chapter examining his legacy. He is often laughed at for the being the world’s worst film director but that designation is neither fair nor accurate. Glen or Glenda can be seen as a groundbreaking film and one of the first to explicitly deal with a sexual behavior that was once considered a mental illness but is now considered harmless by most people. Even if few people saw it when initially released, you have to admit it took courage to produce and star in it it in the 1950s.

     While Plan 9 from Outer Space is not a good film by conventional standards, it was far better than even a lot of monster movies made in Ed Wood’s time. While those films may have had bigger budgets, higher production standards, and more professional acting, most of them were boring and formulaic with the same plot: a monster appears and threatens the world, inevitably followed by an hour of people talking about how to kill it. In the last fifteen minutes, they fight the monster and it dies. Only the end of movies like The Crawling Eye or It Conquered the World are worth watching. Plan 9 from Outer Space is actually fun to watch from beginning to end. His films have had an influence on not only trans people and punks but on indy film makers and underground artists as well. In a John Waters kind of sense, being called the world’s worst film maker is an honor, not an insult. Besides, Ed Wood’s films are far more entertaining than anything Bruce Willis, Keanu Reeves, or Sandra Bullock have ever done. I can’t even sit through half of a Quentin Tarantino movie without falling asleep and yet I’ve sat through Plan 9 from Outer Space at least ten times. His books are coveted by collectors too. A copy of the novelization of Orgy Of the Dead sold on Ebay for more than $400. It must be a strange book considering that that movie was little more than a feature length film of women dancing topless in a cemetery. But Grey’s book ends with Ed Wood’s death and does not explore the meaning or significance of what he accomplished.

     Nightmare of Ecstasy shows, maybe indirectly, what sets the films of Ed Wood apart from other b-movies and exploitation films. Ed Wood was a funny and charming guy to work with especially when directing movies in drag; he inspired a lot of people by just being courageous enough to be who he was. The casts and crews he worked with had fun during production times. They knew they weren’t making anything profound or artistically correct. They didn’t care either. This sense of playfulness and joy is what makes his movies interesting despite themselves. They are possessed of the same kind of naive spirit that animates so much of outsider art. Ed Wood and his friends did not take themselves too seriously and that is maybe why he is remembered to this day while other so-called “serious” films like the academy award winning Kramer Vs. Kramer was forgotten a long time ago. Maybe that’s what is missing in today’s world: people who aren’t afraid to be themselves, people who don’t take themselves too seriously, and people who just do what makes them happy. Maybe that is what is needed to revive the jaded film industry we have in the 21^st century.

     The people who knew or remembered Ed Wood are mostly dead now. Being the marginal figure he was, there was not a lot of documentation about him either. This will probably be the last and only biography about this good man. For this reason, Nightmare of Ecstasy should be cherished by fans of Ed Wood and connoisseurs of the unusual and obscure. 

Grey, Rudolph. Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood Jr. Feral House, Portland, OR: 1994.