"The Prestige": A Movie Review.

The Prestige, Director Christopher Nolan, Touchstone Pictures/Warner Brothers, Newmarket Films (2006).
Christopher Priest, The Prestige (New York: Tom Doherty, 1995).
Richard Matheson, Now You See It ... (New York: Tom Doherty, 1994).

Many scholarly and artistic works are referenced in this review. However, I wish to emphasize two works that are especially helpful in my interpretation of this film and its sources:

Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).
Lisa Randall, Warped Passages (New York: Harper-Collins, 2005).

Mr. Nolan's "Inception" is scheduled to appear on July 16, 2010. I plan to review that film and "Shutter Island," together, since both works feature performances by Leonardo DiCaprio and explore parallel philosophical themes which seem to interest Mr. DiCaprio as they are prominent in his film work.

This essay has been selected for inclusion in http://massdensity.com/category/uncategorized/paper/2/

Curtain Rising.

I begin my review by summarizing the elaborate plot of this film. I then discuss some scientific issues at the center of the story. I turn next to the philosophical puzzles woven into the narrative. I examine the aesthetics of deception in literary devices and film-making. This is a story told with "smoke and mirrors." But then, isn't cinema always a kind of "rough magic"? Can the same be said of politics and religion?

Dangerous metaphors associated with key symbols lurk under the surface of this seemingly familiar sci-fi story. Don't be surprised if God turns out to be a stage magician, one with a wicked sense of humor. I conclude by borrowing from the philosophy of mathematics and the new logic of fictional objects in multidimensional spaces -- a logic which may be analogized to the uses of legal fictions in jurisprudence. I expect to unify these thematic analyses by means of the structure of this film. Perhaps this review essay is also best written and read with mirrors, as a reflection of a more personal set of issues for me. There is at least one person who will understand what I mean. The meanings of this essay are deliberately enfolded, one within the other, each stands alone while implying all of the others. ("Metaphor is Mystery.")

The director of a film -- like the author of a novel -- becomes a magician performing the ultimate disappearing act. The person who writes a book is sometimes very different from the author found "in" the book. Hence, Shakespeare's mystery. Much the same is true of actors and their "images." ("Michel Foucault and the Authorship Question.") If the work of art succeeds, then the artist disappears, since the creation takes on a life of its own. Think of a magician who makes not his assistant, but himself disappear into his audience. ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")

As for "the Prestige," which is the term for every magic trick's final movement and resolution, the reappearance of the artist (director, author) is in the form of the recipient of the art-work (audience member). One subject of this film, then, is metaphor (art and theory) as both deception and revelation in multiple contexts. This theme leads to the most important questions concerning metaphysics and knowledge, philosophy and science, illusion and reality, identity and meaning. ("Master and Commander.")

Like Prospero, the artist-magician "abjures magic," only to invite the recipient of the art work to create his or her own "trick." Michael Caine's character, the "engineer," is an obvious "stand-in" for the author or director. He sets the stage -- to make use of an apt metaphor -- for the viewer of the cinematic work or aesthetic trick. That's you. It is the goal of some artists for recipients to know more than the subjects of their works in order for that person to make judgments that are not available to the subject, even as he or she is inspected and judged by the work of art. This is the diamond-to-the-light quality or "fusion of horizons" achieved in aesthetic encounters.

"Every magic trick," Caine's character tells us, "has three steps": 1) the "Pledge" which is sometimes called "the Magician's Choice" offers audiences an option, but really tips the process, favoring one option over others. In the same way, life seems to offer everyone the same set of choices, when (in reality) the best choices are more "real" in some lives than in others. 2) The next phase in the magic trick is the "Turn," transforming one possibility into another unexpected possibility; and finally, 3) the "Prestige," or return of the original promise in a surprising fulfillment or realization, such as the reappearance of the person who has first vanished.

Think of this sequence as a version of the hermeneutic circle. These stages also parallel the hero's journey described by Joseph Campbell and metanoia, as analyzed by both Carl Jung and R.D. Laing. The stages on life's journey: first, encounter with "the quest" or "challenge"; second, the "adventure" resulting in loss or death; third, "the return," either healing from the hero's wound ("Tristan") or rebirth of the dead god: Osiris is held by Isis in Egyptian mythology, which mirrors the later Gospel story, when Mary holds Jesus.

Death and rebirth is a theme in this work and in the universe. The triangle of birth, death, rebirth is a version of the dialectic which is universal. Each of these roles is usually embodied in a character or archetype in world mythology: Mary (birth), Jesus (dying god), rebirth (resurrected Jesus, fusion with Holy Spirit). This dialectic will be modified in this film because the sequence is time-altered for heuristic purposes, as we shall see, but the work does rise to the level of mythology. I suggest a glance at Hans Georg Gadamer's Hegel's Dialectic.

I. The Pledge.

Robert Angiers ("A") and Alfred Borden ("B") are clearly aspects of a single warring psyche. Set aside the obvious references to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Borden is rougher, source of greater genius (id), while Angiers -- who will call himself "The great Danton" (Marat?) -- is more polished, diplomatic and political (ego). Two beautiful look-alike asistants, doubles or twins, are first presented as (a) the dying wife of Angiers (possibly killed by Borden), then (b) as a new assistant to both rivals. Incidentally, see Jean Louis David's painting "The Death of Marat."

"Pour le vaincre, pour le atterer, que faut-il? De l'audace, encore de l'audace, et toujours l'audace." (Danton, September, 1792.)

Scarlet Johansson's character in a push-up bra is not to be missed. In fact, slow motion is highly recommended in any scene when she appears, until her exit, which -- if you are fortunate -- will allow Ms. Johansson to turn her back to the camera. She is beautiful and desirable, also just right as a young working class woman on the make, skeptical of both central characters. ("That's so sexist!")

Mirrors and doubling-reflections will play a prominent role in this film -- and in this essay -- as does the idea of the double and doubling in life and art. The analogy to the mathematics of "manifolds" and quantum trickery will be developed later, along with the philosophy of identity in splitting cases, schizoid breaks. Bernard Williams will be brought into relation with R.D. Laing and the young Michel Foucault. David Bohm and F. David Peat will confront Steven Hawking and Brian Greene, also Lisa Randall teams up with Roger Penrose.

Time is no longer linear in the aftermath of the quantum mechanical revolution, so this film begins with the final events resulting in a trial, moving backwards and forwards in time, and ending ... but is there an ending? Maybe we are only offered a new beginning, a circle.

"The universe is therefore pictured," Physicist F. David Peat writes, "as emerging out of a series of highly subtle and enfolded levels in which process and active information can be thought of as two sides of a single order. The end result is the emergence of explicate orders of mind and matter out of their underlying enfolded forms. According to this account therefore, mind and matter are not distinct substances but two sides of one reality, [dual aspects?] orders which emerge out of a common spectrum that contains additional subtle, and yet unexplored orders that may be found to play a significant role in events at a subquantum level, the evolution of life and the operation of society." (emphasis added)

Notice this next paragraph:

"Clearly, this whole account should be taken in the spirit of a metaphor, for the complexity and subtlety of the universe lie beyond all attempts to capture it in language and images. [Is that like God?] However, the essential point of this image is that it involves a central creativity that pervades everything, from its continuous origin in an unconditioned act of perception, to the constant subtle movement of its various orders, levels, and structures."

Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind (New York: Bantam, 1987), pp. 214-215. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London & New York: Routledge, 1980), p. xiii: (" ... this field [the universe] must be discontinuous as well as particle-like, and ... it is as undermined in its actual behavior as is required in the particle view of relation as a whole.")

"I am," Sartre says, "an enemy to myself." The French existentialist was articulating the darkest realization of humanity in the twentieth century: Are we designed to self-destruct in order to give birth to another self? Or to a child? A loved-one? A new species? The theme of "self-sacrifice" emerges in the film as subtext. What is it that self-destructs? Star dust. What is it that this star dust becomes? More or a new arrangement of star dust. So does it ever really self-destruct? Perhaps not. The intricate interaction of space and energy continues, like an elaborate minuet, forever, a never-ending "dance to the music of time." (See the film "Sliding Doors," then "A.I.")

This is true in the external universe and within the psyche in schizoid reactions, developing as a means of surviving an impossible double-bind situation. For example, life in a torture chamber, as the victim is reminded by torturers to be "ethical." R.D. Laing points out that such forms of splitting the self may be the most rational reactions to evil situations -- especially for children -- so that, any one of us under circumstances of impossible competing demands, is likely to divide or replicate, spontaneously, in order to survive the experience:

"In fact," R.D. Laing writes, "any of us are only two or three degrees Farenheit from experiences of this order. Even a slight fever, and the whole world can begin to take on persecutory, impinging aspects." The Divided Self (London: Tavistock, 1960), p. 46. In conditions of interrogation, forced hypnotic, impaired, or so-called "heightened questioning" combined with Vietnam-like levels of stress, such reactions are common. (See "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli and New Jersey's Agency of Torture," "What is it like to be tortured?" and "Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.")

Michel Foucault links "madness" to social conditions of extreme pressure on identity. Few people realize that Foucault trained in psychology with Ludwig Bingswanger, a great Jungian-existentialist therapist. Women sexually assaulted early in life, for example, display pathologies of "repetition and disassociation," together with schizoid reactions, as means of escape from trauma. Not only is it meaningless to "blame" victimized women for such reactions, but it is predictable that they will experience them. They can only be helped by understanding and treatment aimed at rebuilding relationships of trust and love in their lives. The best way to destroy such women is to take away meaningful loving relationships that provide confirmation and reinforcement for the superego. Michel Foucault, "Passion and Delirium," in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage, 1965), at pp. 85-116 and Greg Hollingshead, Bedlam (New York: Picador, 2004).

Jungians will point to doubles in world mythology, alternative selves entrusted with aspects of the threatened psyche (often female), usually innocense or goodness. Versions of the evil twin trapped in a mirror and released only when seen by lover glancing at his own reflection (usually male) exist in many varieties. Typically, the female image in the mirror enlists the male for purposes of escape or survival, the tale of Narcissus is a distant ancestor of these stories. ("'Diamonds Are Forever': A Movie Review.")

One reading of "The Prestige" is that the film dramatizes the universal elements of the human psyche in Jungian archetypal terms. The best measure of the accuracy of accusations directed today against American interrogators, is the quick denial of what is now painfully obvious. "We do not torture people," former C.I.A. Director George Tenet said to a CBS interviewer. "This was after acknowledging signing off on numerous 'black-ops' as well as 'enhanced interrogations,' and admitting to knowing what this meant."

Nobel laureate Harold Pinter comments on the devices by which torturers distance themselves from their actions: "It never happened, even when it was happening, it wasn't happening." It is not only victims, also torturers must do this "splitting." How does a Jew become Mengele, Terry? Denial?

Each of these men, "A" and "B," seeks to outdo the other, appearing in false beards and costumes to "stage" attacks against one another, competing in their magic acts. Borden first develops "The Transformed Man" trick, then "The Great Danton" pursues Nicholas Tesla -- a genuine scientist and inventor, whose genius is responsible for many of the marvels of the modern world -- to replicate and surpass his rival's achievement. The analogy here is to artistic rivalry and Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence."

Tesla's cautions concerning scientific hubris and obsession are ignored. The analogy to the horrors of nuclear weaponry in the twentieth century are equally obvious. Scientists are the "wizards," doing in fact what magicians only appear to do. Each character is indeed "transformed"; each dies and is born again. Analogies to Shrodinger's cat and Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty are available for science or philosophy geeks, like me. The bouncing ball used in Borden's trick is a symbol for the mysterious electron in the quantum realm. See Nicholas Mosley's novels of ideas, Hopeful Monsters and Accident.

The uncertainties and doubts of scientists, the dangers of mysteries -- both within the psyche and in nature -- are left as issues to be explored by viewers. The screen characters are metaphors for archetypal forces, as I say: Icarus hovers as an offstage presence in this story. The replicants are mirror-images making the transformation possible on stage, but paying for it with their lives. Each man's destruction -- even in Danton's death there is a duplication of an earlier drowning -- foreshadows the demise of the other.

A lesson here is the Jungian point that self needs its shadow, not as an enemy, but as an integrated component of the psyche. Animus is needed by woman; anima is needed by man. "A" desires "B."

There is a duplication also in the marriage relation and reproduction. An analogy to the showmanship in politics and law is also obvious. A judge wears robes and bangs a gavel. A courtroom is a theater, things may not be as they appear to "audiences." Hence, the need for legal fictions to accomplish policy goals. Are corporations "persons"? The cabinet from which persons appear and disappear in the movie is an hommage to "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" -- a silent screen classic. Religion is also analogized. The pulpit is viewed as yet another stage with its theatrical tricks.

The artist who makes this film is the magician, again, offering you (the viewer) an illusion. Is it an illusion that we all want? Perhaps. Freud's pleasure principle is useful at this point. The author does the same trick for readers. The political candidate does much the same, as does the priest. "The trick is everything," we are told, "the secret is nothing." We are fooled. We need to believe in magic. Does this explain the continuing appeal of religion? Science? Romance? Why do we enjoy being fooled? Too much reality is unbearable. Movies? Special effects? "The Hair Club for Men"? Consider this item:

"I, Sexbot," in Harper's Monthly, March, 2010, at p. 25. http://www.truecompanion.com/

This company offers "ROXXXY" the world's first autonomous sex robot. Designed by artificial intelligence engineer, Douglas Hines, ROXXXY is available in six different personalities, including "Frigid Farah" and "Mature Martha," and is priced starting at $7,000.00. The same society that allows for the sale of this sex robot criminalizes prostitution for persons engaging in sex acts for money. (See the film "Cherry 2000" which dates from the late eighties.)

How many of America's cinematic "sex goddesses" are really versions of "ROXXXY"? Are we surprised about what happens to such women? Marilyn Monroe? Brittany Murphy? Seeing a character on film as distinct from the artist creating that character is the opposite of objectifying. To see a character on screen is to respect its independence and "reality." Stuart Sim, Lyotard and the Inhuman (New York & London: Totem Books, 2001), pp. 48-49. ("... we are all chimeras, fabricated hybrids of machine and organism.")

"I am a realist," says the middle-brow scientific, nihilistic skeptic. Of course, this skeptical stance is only another set of illusions -- illusions of control and pragmatism. "I don't believe in any nonsense because I see the world as it is," would-be scientists say. But your belief that you see the world "as it is" only amounts to your version of "nonsense." You can still have objectivity and truth, by the way, even if you recognize this point. ("Hilary Putnam is Keeping it Real.")

Both lead characters will disappear (die); both will reappear (be born again). The coin of meaning appears in this hand, then in the other, only to disappear again. The magician needs the audience. Politicians need voters. Priests need the faithful. Man and woman need each other. Judges need litigants, although not as much as lawyers do. Humanity needs God. Each partner in the dialectic -- each mirror-image -- requires the other for completion. Each of these relations are circles or spirals, not linear progressions, whose resolution is a new beginning. A hermeneutic circle? This circle represents our latest understandings of time and eternity.

Humanity's need for God may be displaced in a suspicious and skeptical age, but it is still God that is sought even when we think we want money, sex, power, achievement. Substitute the word "love" for "God." When will the dialectic be complete? When we are one. What makes us one? Love. The ultimate symbol of this unity is still, for me, the crucifix. All of the great religious symbols point at this unity. Global religious traditions gesture at this single wisdom: the "homecoming of humanity" is unity with divinity, or love.

"As to Wordsworth, so to Schelling, everything in Nature seemed to be alive. The inorganic he regarded as the extinguished product of a lower form of life, a kind of petrified intelligence. In a dazzling aphorism he called Nature 'das verdende Ich,' the self which is in the process of becoming.' In other words, Nature was to be understood as the embodiment of a process by which the spirit tends to rise to a consciousness of itself. In passing we note that similar ideas, albeit with markedly Christian overtones, came to be expressed in our time by the daring Catholic thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin" -- also a noted scientist -- "in his remarkable book, The Phenomenon of Man."

H.G. Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics (New York: Anchor, 1966), pp. 179-180. For a linking of the latest theoretical work conceptualizing metaphor with German idealism and contemporary science, see Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 30-42 ("The Hermeneutics of Nature").

"But if we think of God as something embodied within, or something that uses, the laws of physics, then the relationship between the vacuum and the existing universe suggests a God who might be identified with the basic sense of direction in the unfolding universe -- even, perhaps, with an evolving consciousness within the universe."

Danah Zohar, The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics (New York: Quill, 1990), p. 226 (emphasis added).

II. The Turn.

This brings me to the mystery of identity. The invitation extended in this film, as art, is the eternal invitation in all genuine artistic works: "finish it." Perhaps this is God's one instruction to humanity -- "finish it." (See "'The Fountain': A Movie Review.") Complete creation by supplying it with your meaning, which can only be love as the achievement of selfhood. (See "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.") Physicist Lisa Randall comments:

"One question, of course, is whether we will find that space and time are so complicated ... that we can't really talk about a beginning in time. We've got to accept that we will have to jettison more and more of our common sense concepts as we go to these extreme conditions."

Simultaneities. And again:

"It is symmetry that relates the properties of bosons to those of their partner fermions (bosons and fermions being two types of particles distinguished by quantum mechanics). Bosons have integral spin and fermions have half-integral spin, where spin is an integral quantum number. Without supersymmetry, one would expect these two particle types to be unrelated. But given supersymmetry, properties like mass and the interaction strength between a particle and its supersymmetric partner are closely aligned." (See the mathematical descriptions of "Branes.")

"Theories of the Brane," Edge, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/randall03/randall03_p3.html and Warped Passages, at pp. 6-7 (discussing the "warped geometry of extra dimensions"). By way of comparison, see James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York & London: Viking, 1987), pp. 83-118; and Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 442-449 (" ... the strange role of time in conscious perception" and "a child's view!"). Identity and supersymmetry. Action at a distance. ("George Santayana and the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics.") Yes, Lisa, those particles are very closely aligned. I can "feel" that much. A needs B.

The missing factor in the quantum realm may be the entanglement relation that explains anomalies in experimental and observational experience. "Quantum entaglement is one of those things that is easy to understand but almost impossible to believe -- like free checking or protestations of innocence from tobacco executives. ... The probabilistic nature of quantum measurement arises not from magic, but from the working amplifiers, the bridges between the quantum world and the classical one." Robert Laughlin, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics From the Bottom Down (New York: Basic Books, 2005), pp. 52-53; and see Sir John Eccles, Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 559; and discussion at David J. Bartholomew, Uncertain Belief: Is it Rational to be Christian? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 73.

Action at a distance affecting an emotional "partner" provides an uncanny echo of medieval discussions of witchcraft and contemporary mathematical descriptions of virtual organisms in electronic spaces. Compare Charles Williams, Witchcraft: A History of Black Magic in Christian Times (New York: Meridian, 1971), pp. 123-152 with Mark Ward, Virtual Organisms: The Startling World of Artificial Life (New York: Macmillan, 1999).

What explains the state of Schrodinger's cat when it is not perceived by an observer may well be "emergent phenomena" and "entanglements in a network of relations," most of which are not perceived as coextensive in time and/or alternate spacial dimensions. Analogously, personal identity may be shaped by "entanglements" in relationships which are life-enhancing (love) or just the opposite (hate in a torture chamber). In the human realm let us speak of "dialectics" and "love." Terry Eagleton's conclusion of his recent essay on "The Meaning of Life" is helpful:

"When St. Paul comments that we die every moment, part of what he has in mind is perhaps the fact that we can only live well by buckling the self to the needs of others, in a kind of little death, or petit mort. [Yes, Freudians, the "petit mort" is another term for sexual climax.] In doing so, we rehearse and prefigure that final self-abnegation which is death. In this way, death in this sense of a ceaseless dying to self is the source of the good life. If this sounds unpleasantly slavish and self-denying, it is only because we forget that if others do this as well, the result is a form of reciprocal service which provides the context for each self to flourish. The traditional name for this reciprocity is love."

The Meaning of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 58-59.

Only in relation to those I love -- all of them -- can I truly "be." Love is mutual self-giving. Thus, by being trapped in relations of enmity the two characters in this movie are locked in a sinister hall of mirrors, whose "no-exit" dilemma is impossible to remedy in the absence of love. Loving relations for each are necessary, if they are to walk towards the light as opposed to remaining in the darkness. Love is the only exit from hell. By loving, you escape hell through a "transformation" into another self without the need for a magic cabinet.

This brings me to Bernard Williams, Robert Nozick, and the philosophical problem of identity.

III. The Prestige.

Among the most interesting independent discoveries of particle physicists and philosophers exploring the mysteries of identity is what might be described as a "Copernican" revolution in our latest thinking about both areas of inquiry. "Spontaneous symmetry breaking" in the quantum realm is a phenomenon explicable -- not by any alteration in events -- but by a shift in perspective on objective reality on the part of an agent-observer who sees only a part of that reality. Observer-distortions become observer-constructions. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" and "'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Movie Review.")

I suspect that this crucial insight informs much of the mathematics of cubes and multidimensional objects, possibly explaining Mr. DiCaprio's interest in fragmenting identities and selfhood as a kind of triptych. (Again: "Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" and "'Inception': A Movie Review.")

If I am correct about this concern by Mr. DiCaprio, then we may expect -- at some future point -- a third film exploring similar patterns, assuming it has not arrived already. There are other thematic concerns for this Hollywood character, which are similar to those of Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, "Leonardo DiCaprio." ("Celebrity?") If Mr. Nolan is both the Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale characters in "the Prestige," then is Christopher Nolan also Mr. DiCaprio's character in "Inception"?

" ... instead of having atoms coming individually and attaching themselves at a continually moving growth line (classical crystal growth), one must consider an evolving quantum linear superposition of many different alternative arrangements of attaching atoms (by the quantum procedure U). Indeed, this is what quantum mechanics tells us must (almost always) be occurring! There is not just one thing that happens; many alternative atomic arrangements must coexist in complex linear superposition." (Roger Penrose, at p. 437.) ("Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art.")

Rubik's Cube. Identity-options recur in patterns for very good actors who explore mysterious sides of themselves through characters that embody one side of who they are. For example, for Mr. DiCaprio: public self ("Celebrity"), private or social self ("Revolutionary Road"), inner demons, subconscious, dream self ("Inception"). Superego, ego, id. This inner exploration and revelation, in public, takes courage.

My presence at dinner alters the dynamics in a room, shifting or morphing the symmetries in the network of relations for all others who are present. But what if my absence does the same? If my presence is needed by, say, "B" and I -- just call me "A" -- am not there, what is the result? Think of Sartre waiting for Pierre in the restaurant. Beckett's tramps "expecting" Godot. "Absence," Sartre insists, "is also a presence."

The loss of a parent, for example, is an absence that is felt as a present pain or loss. This is much more true in the case of a missing "other self." Hence, "A" (ego) cannot live without "B" (id), even less in a relation of conflict or hostility. Masculine cannot live without feminine. The older self cannot exist without the younger self who makes that older person possible. One interpretation of the finale of this movie is that the death of each man produces the continuity of a third person, integrating aspects of both, in new relations with all others in a community. A new beginning? Possibly. Aufgehoben. Mr. DiCaprio needs all of the various versions of himself in order to "conjure" his tricks for an appreciative audience. ("Sinbad's Excellent New York Adventure.")

There is a lesson in this insight about "entanglement relations" concerning racial harmony in America and the world. Please see the films "Glory" and "Amistad." Perhaps the resulting void warps the space around the missing "A" (he) in my own example -- creating an abyss, a black hole -- into which "B" (she) may fall. ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.") Such a forced separation may then be FATAL for both "A" and "B." Get it, Terry? Diana? Any questions, Stuart? Anne Milgram?

This insight is now given mathematical expression in the theory of "manifolds," developed to describe effects in multiple dimensions, which is actually as old as Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. An idea expressed in mathematical or scientific language may receive respect, even when it is ignored in a clearer philosophical language. The opposite may also be true. Respect is something we all need, but so few of us receive it. Some of us even have our written work destroyed or altered by hackers. Think of this as the "Rubrik's Cube" theory of the universe where everything can only fall into place with your manipulations of the "options."

The identity potentials of "A" and "B" are products of an "entaglement relation" or dialectic. A manifold in mathematical theory "is something like a rubber sheet. Generalizing the properties of such smooth, pliable objects to higher dimensions [which] has allowed mathematicians to invent a host of strange new objects." Lawrence M. Krause, Hiding in the Mirror (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 185. Self-entangling octagons. Mr. Nolan clearly sees movies as comparable open-ended objects. Perhaps we can say the same of dreams. ("Umberto Eco and the Semiotics of Power.")

If A is directed towards B, then multiple options become available; if A is directed at C or D, then there is a shut down or closure, even active harm to self and others, as a response to negative "reflections" returned to A, along with denials of "options."

Even a fictional object in mathematics is governed by a necessary logic leading to truth, as in four dimensional object theory. See Philip J. Davis & Ruben Hersh, "True Facts About Imaginary Objects," in The Mathematical Experience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), pp. 406-411. In light of my discussion of dialectics and entanglement relations, look up "Goldbach's conjecture" in mathematics. Let us give the devil (in the form of Professor Salmon) his due, see Nathan Salmon, "The Limits of Human Mathematics," in Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Meaning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 243-265, then Robert Nozick, "Newcomb's Problem and Two Principles of Choice," in Socratic Puzzles (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 45-74.

Actors know the logic of their characters' personalities and their possibilities. Actors can tell writers what their characters would not do. Any writer should listen to actors carefully when they offer such advice.

This technique in math theory suggests that alternate dimensions, creating variable possibilities -- each folded into the others -- may be described soon, with the assistance of computers, by using the language of manifolds. Each one of us is many different persons, with many possible futures, only one of which is ultimate self-realization because one future alone contains love. A way to describe these possibilities of meaning in the human realm is through art. This film, for example, opens a door to a closed room for many people, a room where philosophical discussions and dramatizations of ideas are possible. In fact, aren't films fictional stories with their own logic and truth? I think so. An education is avaliable merely through seeing movies. Best of all, film language may allow for communication with persons who cannot be reached in other ways.

If you've seen the Matrix: Reloaded, then you'll remember the scene with Neo and the Architect in which numerous screens depict both the contents of Neo's mind, as possibilities, and the rival "unfolding" of events or reactions (by him) to what is being said in alternate dimensions. The mathematics of manifolds may allow for the mapping of these possibilities and descriptions of the exact plausibility of each scenario before (or as) it occurs. The multiverse theory says that each scenario does occur in a different universe.

For each person, then, there are any number of possible selves determined by relations to a few others or maybe to one highly significant other person. One person for each of us allows our relating to all others to "unfold" in a loving or optimum mode. The absence of that single person ALONE may result in the opposite way of relating to others. "B" needs "A." Sometimes there are two people together providing optimum "functioning" for a single creative artist or thinker, or for the artist and thinker within each of us. I am sure that these relationships fit together in networks that must be integrated in societies and among all human beings. This integrating is a kind of "quantum looping."

It is not simply that we find ourselves, necessarily, placed within "networks" of meanings and narratives, but that we have all become networks of meanings and narratives through the process by which we construct our identities through sharing in communal events, like 9/11.

"It would be nice to think that the realm of reality itself is not already prefixed in a hierarchical order," Robert Nozick writes, "but is open to new ways to combine and integrate its dimensions. Not knowing the complete ordering in any case room is left for creative endeavor from us. We become most real not by moving up a prefixed scale but by finding and inventing our own new way of combining and exhibiting reality's dimensions." The Examined Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 210; and Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 294-316, pp. 317-362.

What word would you use for the universe's capacity to combine reality's dimensions in such beautiful ways? It is a short word. Christopher Isherwood said that he was the camera when writing some of his beautiful short stories in Berlin. Not only film directors, but also great cinema actors become the camera, photographing you (the audience) by anticipating your reactions, making you a participant in the film. I defy you to see "Sense and Sensibility" and not fall in love, a little bit, with Marianne Dashwood as distinct from Kate Winslet. (The Last Tycoon: "You would not have asked about the nickel.")

"We can note that wide and inclusive as the whole category of reality is, traditions speak of another realm we have not yet touched, which they call the Void or Silence, or Emptiness; specific meditative practices are said to allow us to live within this realm which is inside of us."

The Examined Life, p. 211.

"A" and "B" will find each other, even if it is only inside themselves. By way of comparison, see Bernard Williams' discussion in "Personal Identity and Individuation," in Problems of the Self, at p. 11. ("Suppose a magician is hired to perform the trick of making the emperor and the peasant become each other.") Film buffs will think of the many versions of "The Prince and the Pauper" and please read Gore Vidal's essay Screening History, which is the best film criticism I have encountered. All of this leads us back to the discussion of love as an orientation towards the world and the networks of relations made possible by love. Think of that short word again. ("Martha Nussbaum on Iris Murdoch's Philosophy of Love.")

A Final Bow.

The ultimate trick each person must perform in life is called: "The Transformation." This is a trick which is only possible by becoming our best selves in relation to that needed "other self." To love is to be. To love is to orient ourselves to the world in a welcoming and engaged mode, as self-giving. The most common quality I detect in evil persons is closure to the world of others or beauty, even hatred of beauty, meaning, goodness. John MacMurray's justly famous discussion of the self's "modes of reflection," in a constitutive dialectic, will serve as my final comment on issues so beautifully dramatized in this film, as metaphors, also in my review as metaphor:

"Both these modes of reflection are activities of knowing. [Science and Art.] This will be accepted without question in the case of science; but not, perhaps, in the case of art. Yet if one of the two is to be refused the title of knowledge -- and I can see no reason for such a discrimination -- it is art that has the better claim. For whatever concerns us as merely means to an end is never apprehended for itself, but only in relation to something else. Our interest is only in those properties which make it useful to us, and these are general properties which it shares with other things. They are often regarded as causal properties. Intellectual reflection, as knowledge of the world as means, aims at knowing everything in the world in general, but nothing in particular. In this mode we come to know a great deal about things" -- MacMurray is saying that we are not and cannot be only "things"! -- "without knowing them. It is only when our interest, and so our valuation, comes to rest in some thing [or person] for itself, only when something becomes for us an end-in-itself, that we seek to know it for itself, instead of making generalizations from it. [Subjects.] This knowledge of things [and especially of persons] as they are in themselves is the intention of [loving] contemplation. When something of which we have been aware attracts our attention so that we stop to contemplate it, we really see it for the first time."

The Self as Agent (New York: Humanity Books, 1999), pp. 199-200 (emphasis added).

Love is a kind of seeing for the first time and forever, a synchronicity, a transformation for (and into) the other self. That "trick" of loving is always the best "Transformation." Loving is always now.

Metaphor is Mystery.

This story is for that dame ...

It was a rainy Saturday night when the whole thing started. I made it home on the A-train just before midnight, pulled up the collar of my trenchcoat, tossed my cigarette away, then tucked the newspaper under my arm as I headed up to my apartment on the ancient elevator, complete with peeling wallpaper, in my pre-war building. When I got to my door, I noticed a bald little guy standing there, looking kind of nervous.

My name is Marlowe, Felipe Marlowe. I am a gumshoe, a private eye, an investigator of philosophies, theories, ideas and systems of ideas. When you run into a little problem with your "Critical Theory," I'm the guy you call. When somebody takes off with your "Postmodernist Discourse," you give me a buzz. I take care of things and keep everything quiet for you.

"You looking for me?"

"Are you Mr. Marlowe?"

"Yep."

I turned the key in the ancient lock, opened the door and invited the guy in. He was a little shaky, but he had a hundred bucks written on him. And I needed new shoes. He wore thick glasses, a cheap suit from Sears, an anxious, worried expression and a twittering jitteriness that told me he was in trouble.

I've seen a lot of guys like him. It's always the same story. He was doing fine in "bookeeping and accounts receivable," going to mass every Sunday, paying his taxes -- until some dame walked into his life and gave him a book by Judith Butler or Michel Foucault, maybe something by Richard Dawkins or Dan Dennett.

Some poor guys have to accept that Niezsche, Marx and Freud have made religious belief more difficult, not impossible. For some reason, they just can't do it. They crumble. They can't take the "Masters of Suspicion." I can. I can dish it out, too.

I live uptown because I like the blue collar feel of the neighborhood. It's mostly old Irish and Italian families, ex-cops, firemen, retired schoolteachers, Latinos and African-Americans are moving in, kids looking for cheap apartments in the city. My father was a serviceman; my mother worked as a nurse near the base where he was stationed. I've always lived between cultures, meanings, settings. I may look Anglo on the outside, but I've got Latino on the inside. I'm a mongrel, like my city.

I sound like the places I've visited -- Los Angeles, Florida, Jersey and Manhattan, even Paris and Rome, Havana on misty hot mornings. It's all in my voice and mood. I'm the perfect guy for this business of searching for the gaps and ambiguities in theoretical schemes. Finally, he began to tell his story.

"My name is I.A. Richards." He coughed.

"I'm looking for someone. ... Um, her name is Marilyn. She's an English teacher. They call her 'Marilyn Metaphor' because she specializes in linguistic and cultural theory. She lectures on 'tropes' and 'catachresis.' She does this incredible number in a black evening gown with long gloves, singing in a husky voice two nights a week at Barnard, moonlighting at Princeton sometimes."

"Yeah, I bet her class is filled with eager students." I'd heard it all before.

"It sure is Mr. Marlowe. I have to warn you, Marilyn is very elusive. Philosophers and literary critics -- even scientists -- have tried to find her and no one has succeeded in capturing her mystery."

"I'm not surprised. They're all like you. I'm not so easily impressed, Richards. I've seen a few linguistic devices in my time."

"That's why I came to see you, Mr. Marlowe. I am not satisfied with all the recent scientific efforts to find Marilyn. They seem to missing something important about who she is. Scientists can't seem to get any closer, not making much progress in unravelling her mystery." His hands were shaking. The man could not sit still. I gave him a strong drink -- a tall glass of Dr. Pepper with a twist of lemon.

"Relax, Richards. I'll find her." My guess is that this is dangerous work. She's probably in some kind of trouble. Most contemporary theory and theorists are in trouble. That's why they need me. I sat on my old arm chair, next to my most massive bookshelf, which always impresses customers. I have a large portrait of Paul Ricoeur over the fireplace. I explain that he was my captain when I was on the force.

"It's going to cost you five hundred, plus expenses."

"O.K.," He said. Great. Macy's, here I come.

Richards explained that he's already tried a scientific outfit, but they made a mess of things -- as usual in such matters. I figure that's a good place to start. I'll talk to the boys and girls in lab coats in the morning. I showed the guy out and counted the dough. It's all there. I turned on my radio to some cool jazz, jumped into bed in my undershirt and boxer shorts, still wearing my hat. Some things a guy in my line of work is careful about. I kept my gun strap on and pulled down Ricoeur's 1977 book, The Rule of Metaphor.

"What does science say?"

Next morning I had a nutritious breakfast of cereal and cigarettes, then headed downtown for a chat with a scientist. The egg head's name is Jaron Lanier and he writes for a rag called, Discovery. There was something fishy about him from the start:

"Fortunately, there are ways to get closer and closer to this impossible topic, even if we cannot ask about the experience of meaning."

I don't buy it, Lanier. "Meaning" is not an empirical object. You admit it's an "experience." So how will you measure or weigh it? "Where" is it for you to grab hold of? Metaphor is close to this idea of meaning that we all want. Metaphor is "the stuff that dreams are made of." Metaphor is a seductress. You can't really find her without entering her world, succumbing to her charms and falling for her in a way. Like it or not, you end up playing the sap for her. That goes for Lakoff and Johnson too. Lanier spoke of another scientist named Rama who ...

"... has been interested in how the cross-modal areas of the brain may give rise to a core element of language and meaning: the metaphor."

"Give rise"? Isn't this resorting to metaphor to describe metaphor? See what I mean? Once she's entered a room in one of those slinky dresses, off the shoulders, clinging to those amazing curves, with her hair falling over her eyes -- like Veronica Lake in "The Glass Key" -- you're in trouble. I think she's got me already.

"His canonical example is encapsulated in an experiment known as bouba/kiki. Rama presents test subjects with two words, which are pronounceable but meaningless in most languages: bouba and kiki. Then he shows the subjects two images, one a spiky, hystricine shape and the other a rounded cloud form. Match the words and the images! Of course the spiky shape goes with kiki and the cloud matches bouba. This correlation is cross-cultural and appears to be a general truth for all humankind."

"... Such abstractions seem to be linked to the mental phenomenon of metaphor. For instance, Rama finds that patients who have lesions in the interior parietal lobule have difficulty both with the bouba/kiki task and with interpreting proverbs or stories that have nonliteral meanings."

Lanier, never told me how he defined "meaning" or "metaphor." He never distinguished between the biological preconditions for language use (a working brain, heart, lungs and kidneys for that matter) and the nature and logic of language itself. This "link" -- where is it?

How can a linguistic device -- which is not empirically locatable, even if sections of the brain that have something to do with language use can be identified -- be scrutinized under a microscope or measured? How is something nonmaterial, "metaphor" or "meaning," connected to sections of the brain? Whose brain? Languages are constantly evolving over centuries and are multidimensional, so what part of the test subjects' brains "produce" languages? Isn't it better to speak of languages and metaphors "producing" people? I think so.

Universality of language and its figurative faculty is something humanists have noted for some time. This research only confirms some of Chomsky's theoretical claims concerning the universal and a priori linguistic capacity of humans and language's true social nature.

Also, Lanier focuses on sections of the brains of individual language-users, failing to appreciate the most important aspect of this research by Rama. The social nature of metaphorical devices and their collective or world-altering power. The essence of metaphor is not individual or instrumental, but has something to do with revealing and creating shared realities, that is, collective linguistic meanings. The associations are unlikely ever to be explicable -- as the boys and girls in white coats would like -- in strictly instrumental terms:

"Rama suggests that cross-modal abstraction -- the ability to make consistent connections across senses -- may have initially evolved in lower primates as a better way to grasp branches."

Wrong. The crucial association in metaphor is not between things that exist empirically that we seek to manipulate, practically, but between something that is not -- a falsehood -- so as to illuminate something that is, an object or person, an entity or experience. In other words, metaphors are lies that show us the truth about someone or something. The comparison is always between things that are not alike, in any literal sense, which somehow illuminate one another. This sounds like a definition of art. Movies? Religion?

Many writers have noticed similarities between artists, intellectuals and criminals who are all "outsiders" in most contemporary societies. We need such people to know ourselves as normal. If we can't find them, then we'll create them -- abnormals, outsiders, weirdos, "detainees" -- like detectives who create criminals. The same criminals make us detectives. Maybe America needs "terrorists" to rationalize its national security state.

To use Lanier's example, "Juliet is like the sun" is spoken by Romeo at night, during the balcony scene, to contrast Juliet with the moon. Better yet, Shakespeare writes in the Sonnets that the eyes of his "mistress" are "nothing like the sun" -- in reaction to a literary tradition or set of extravagant descriptions of lovers within well-established and understood poetic conventions, conventions which cannot be removed from this inherited "discourse" by isolating an atomic proposition and placing it under a microscope. In the same way, you may comment on a genre by exploding it for philosophical purposes -- like the detective story for example.

Shakespeare is saying the woman he loves is nothing like what is traditionally deemed beautiful or good and desirable in this literary jargon that he inherits, and yet she is all of those things for him. He'll demonstrate her worth by draping this language on her -- like a silk dress and pearl earrings -- to be worn by her forever in Shakespeare's flower-fragant prose.

Metaphors? Similes? Maybe this whole adventure is an allegory. Lanier suggests that metaphor is about having a small number of words perform multiple tasks. The idea is that by the use of metaphors language grows and new words and meanings are brought to life through performing in unexpected relationships that are imagined and invented simultaneously. Kant and Hegel were way ahead of us, as usual, according to my friend and fellow detective, John McGowan:

" ... 'We are aware that everything finite [the word] instead of being stable and ultimate, is rather changeable and transient; and this is exactly what we mean by that Dialectic of the finite, by which the finite, as implicitly other than what it is, is forced beyond its immediate or natural being to turn suddenly into its opposite.' ... Such sudden turns occur when the existing confrontation of the subject with its negation is aufgehoben (often translated as 'overcome') by the positing of a new subject that better expresses the unity of the previously confrontational pair."

This failure of imagination -- and of explanatory power -- among scientists investigating imaginative uses of language comes from an excessive focus on the literal or pointing aspects of metaphor, its "objectivity," combined with the inability to "see" metaphor's "subjective" figurative or conjuring ability. Metaphor is witchcraft and magic that is designed to help us see some "thing" or person "as" or "become" something new, something totally different. Perhaps there was a time when "science was a woman" (as Nietzsche might say) and close to magic -- that is, to metaphor:

"For science was founded originally on metaphor," Norman Mailer says, "and the twentieth century has shipped metaphor to the ghetto of poets. Consider: science began with the poetic impulse to treat metaphor as equal to equation; the search began at that point where a poet looked for a means (which only later became an experiment) to measure the accuracy of his metaphor. The natural assumption was that his discovery had been contained in the metaphor, since good metaphor could only originate in the deepest experience of man; so science still remained attached to poetic vision, and scientific insight derived from culture -- it was not the original desire of science to convert nature, rather to reveal it. Faust was still unborn when Aristotle undertook his pioneer observations."

"Paradigm" shifts? God particles? Superstrings? "Evolution?" All are metaphors.

Marilyn had a string of broken hearts to her credit: From Aristotle to Donald Davidson, Ricoeur to Mailer -- now Richards and me. She is beyond all of us, of course. Nevertheless, we all will continue to pursue her enigmatic essence.

"There is a danger in metaphor, however; the danger which is present in poetry: contradictory meanings collect too easily about the core of meaning; unconnected meanings connect themselves. So science sought a methodology through experiment which would be severe, precise, and able to measure the verity of the insight in the metaphor. Experiment was conceived to protect the scientific artist from ambiguity."

You cannot love wisdom -- or knowledge -- without accepting danger, just as you cannot love a woman without accepting a risk of pain or even destruction. To love her you must learn to live with her unique mystery, accepting the perils that accompany her into your life. Ambiguity cannot be eliminated from human knowledge which remains knowledge of truth.

Metaphor always involves a danger of miscommunication and misreading. Metaphor's power depends on the receptive and imaginative capacity of those involved in creating and communicating metaphors. Genius in art or science, philosophy or poetry requires a willingness to risk danger, even self-destruction. Aristotle said that "mastery of the metaphor is the sign of genius."

Marilyn won't let you off the hook easily once she knows you love her -- and she always lives between subjectivity and objectivity, as both. Science's many attempts to ignore the subjective side of her, in order to be clear about the objective phenomenon, won't work.

Marilyn's spraying on a little more of that expensive French perfume, right now, kicking off her shoes, slipping into something more comfortable and curling up on the couch waiting for her devoted poets, her knights errant, artists, humanists, philosophers, even a few scientists ... and one beat up philosophical detective. A woman is a "yes" that turns into "no," then "yes," and suddenly "no" again -- only to become "yes" once more. Woman is the source of metaphor. Naturally, this foregoing statement is metaphorical.

"Ambiguity demands double communication to achieve a single purpose. It demands we be ready for a particular course of action and yet for its exact opposite. So it demands double readiness or double function for a single use."

I was stumped. So I called Paul Ricoeur at the preccint and asked for some help.

Paul Ricoeur on Metaphor, Freedom, Interpretation and Hermeneutics.

We met a couple of nights later at a joint downtown. Paul is gray-haired, bespectacled, wise and learned, kind and generous with his counsel. He wore a rumpled gray suit, a white shirt with button-down collar and a good French tie. We chat over dinner and coffee.

Paul did some leg work for me, called Aristotle and Kant, Hegel and Bergson, also Monroe Beardsley and Max Black. "Forget about the so-called 'semantic clash,' " he said, "the juxtaposition of two meanings (the literal and figurative) and concentrate on the 'solution to the enigma that metaphor both creates and is.' " He whispered: "Metaphor is valuable because 'she' forces the listener or reader to interpret freely."

I began to understand that this work of interpretation -- call it "hermeneutics" -- is part of the human metaphoric process. Paul spelled it out for me:

"As a process, [hermeneutics] involves the linking of the word to the context of the whole sentence in which it is located, but also in the cultural context of the discourse in which the sentence is located. This is what it means to be alive -- to be an interpreting being -- and so it is the metaphorical dimension of language that is most alive in language. Metaphor is the part of language that invites -- even requires -- us to do hermeneutics."

I was reminded of Roger Scruton's clue about metaphor ... that metaphor always reveals a "double intentionality," a literal meaning which is false and a deeper, figurative or subtle and subjective meaning that is true. Metaphor is the truth seen "in" a statement comparing unsimilar things that allows us to see something or someone "as," that is, in a surprising or new way.

Metaphors only perform this trick when they are fresh, not when they become stale or lifeless. This lifelessness is not the result of age alone, since Shakespeare's great metaphors still work. It has to do with the thinness of the metaphor as opposed to its original full-roundedness and richness. Marilyn's mystery is inexhaustible. Walker Percy met Marilyn. Paul and I spoke to him, briefly, and Percy said:

"There must be a space between name and thing, for otherwise the private apprehension is straightened and oppressed. What is required is that the thing is both sanctioned and yet allowed freedom to be what it is. Heidegger said that the essence of truth is freedom. The essence of metaphorical truth and the almost impossible task of the poet [and philosopher] is, it seems to me, to name unmistakably and yet to name by such a gentle analogy that the thing beheld by both of us may be truly formulated for what it is."

"Juliet is like the sun." Maybe. "Marilyn is like the stars." Definitely.

Finally, we had an address and telephone number. We tracked Marilyn to a Park Avenue apartment she shared with her sister, a stunning brunnette named "Isabel Allegory." Paul went for the brunnette. He called her "Bouba." I went for the blonde. I called her "Kiki."

"Arriving at metaphorical truth," Paul explained, as he sat down with Isabel. Marilyn smiled and sat on my lap -- "is not a question of judgment on the reader's part. If it were, we would either have to choose between Achilles being a lion or his not being a lion."

The boys in the County Prosecutor's office are always screaming that "it's got to be one thing or the other!" Not really. Not when it comes to blondes and brunettes -- or life's other great enigmas.

"We also cannot accept a contradiction (Achilles both is and is not a lion), which would be silly. Rather, arriving at metaphorical truth is a question of ... readers suspending or bracketing off, their judgment concerning the literal truth of the proposition. Understanding metaphor is a phenomenology of reading."

This phenomenology of reading or "hermeneutics of freedom" applies when reading people, works of art, philosophies, legal systems, religious symbols, in all encounters with human mysteries -- mysteries that are as dual and variable, paradoxical and elusive -- as a woman's subtlest smile or any artistic masterpiece.

What does it mean when a woman runs her fingers through her hair? Everything. Nothing. What do you (or she) want it to mean?

"Metaphor is more than a special effect within language," Professor Karl Sims says in explaining Ricoeur's view, "it is the very essence of language. Even a philosophy of metaphor is itself inescapably metaphorical, so that metaphor cannot be adequately defined outside its own system. Metaphor thus runs out of control through language and through philosophy, the whole of philosophical discourse being an edifice built entirely upon itself without grounding in reality [What kind of reality?] and sustaining itself by an active forgetting of this fact."

Isn't this "forgetting" what we all do anyway? In the legal world, especially, if people stop to consider the fictional and metaphorical nature of so much statutory language and case law, they'd be paralyzed. William Kennedy said that people he encountered suffering from alcoholism and homelessness had one thing in common: "they could not forgive themselves." They chose not to remember, opting for escape, numbness, the oblivion of forgetfulness through a surrender of the metaphorical power to a dull literalness. But to remember is a present act of construction. It is art. It is narration -- narration is not possible without metaphor. To be realistic ... we must dream. Hence, it may be that religious and aesthetic narratives, like movies, are our most realistic accounts of the meanings of human life.

I have only one answer to the question "Who are you?" -- "Let me tell you a story."

Biographical truth or personal meaning is always the achievement of art in the human realm, since it is inseparable from meaning. Truth is a hermeneutic exercise. We need Marilyn to know ourselves -- that's why she's got us.

"I never wanted to say goodbye."

I knew then that I could not live without Marilyn. None of us can. I called Richards and explained the situation, sent back his five hundred bucks and packed a bag. Paul and Isabel skipped town on the midnight flight to Paris. I ran all the way back to the apartment on Park Avenue only to find a note, written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror -- "You'll be seeing me very soon. I promise. Soon. Always."