SON OF LOSTIN' THOUGHTS: TEMPTATION ISLAND

I suppose I may continue to post this or that item on LOST once it's all been wrapped up (even though I know intellectually that it won't REALLY get "wrapped up.")
But it'll be different once LOST solidifies into a Canon of Known Stuff, much like what happens when a famed author dies and critics can finally start talking about his work in such terms. The message is clear:

Canon= Death.

Before talking about "Across the Sea," a prediction: now that Unlocke has made his nature known to the surviving castaways, they're certainly not going to let him get near them. Given that he probably can't assault them directly or trick them further, that can only mean-- It's Catspaw-Usin' Time!

But who can devilish Unlocke tempt?

Surely not Richard. Richard almost surrenders his soul to Unlocke in "Ab Aeterno," but is pulled back from the brink by the ghost of his dead wife. Richard's not likely to listen, though he is likely to get his earlier wish about dying before the series ends.

Miles, being no angel, is a stronger possibility, but down deep he's essentially a good guy. He's also probably too suspicious for Unlocke to manipulate. Additionally, it's marginally possible that with concentration Miles might be able to read the thoughts of Unlocke, since Unlocke, as "Across the Sea" informs us, is really if not sincerely dead.

Ben Linus, then, is inevitably the favorite. Unlocke knows all of Ben's weaknesses and will probably think he can exploit them again. A typical LOST dramatic moment would be Unlocke giving Ben some powerful motivation for knocking off the candidates, not to mention wild card Desmond. What would the tempter use? Giving Ben sovereignty of the island has already failed. Vengeance for his slain daughter, in the form of Charles Widmore's death, would probably be more likely, which might theoretically put Desmond in the position of saving his bastard father-in-law. But will Ben Linus go even lower than he ever has before? Methinks not. Heroic death through helping defeat the "villain" seems more probable.

I feel good about this prediction. Earlier I predicted that Unlocke would use some catspaw to penetrate the Temple: I only erred in guessing the wrong catspaw. (And I mighta selected Sayyid instead of Sawyer had the writers not SPUN OUT OF WHOLE CLOTH the sudden revelation that the Temple's security depended on Dogen's continued life!)

Next: A Sea-Change.

QUICK, GO: SHOOT THE BARREL-FISH

As noted in my last essay I thought of writing a long piece on the notion of "critical standards" that Matt Zoller Seitz raised but did not demonstrate that he understood. But since I've now read Tom Spurgeon's reactions to the Seitz piece, I'm just going to open fire on some of the fish he was kind enough to offer.

"The strongest part of Seitz's essay comes out of the simple fact that he pays superhero films the respect of holding them to a high standard."-- I might agree with the possibility of someone, somewhere managing to do so. Since Seitz doesn't even begin to articulate standards, beyond his praise for the "rainbow spectrum" of zombie movies, I don't see Seitz's bare assertion of standards as anything but empty rhetoric.

"Then Again, Many Superhero Films Also Fail To Meet Most Low Standards"

Nonsense. The fact that most superhero films in recent years have made excellent-to-respectable money demonstrates that they did, in fact, meet the low standards of the audiences, who often do want nothing more of such films than what Seitz calls "their capacity to kill two hours and change." It would certainly be correct for Tom to say that the films have not met what he considers to be *his* lowest possible standards, by which (for instance) he judges that "all the superhero movie fight scenes combined make a poor cousin to the hallway brawl in Oldboy or even the casino fight in Kung Fu Hustle."

Sidebar: KUNG FU HUSTLE? Really? Yukk.

"Very few emerging film genres have made this kind of money while offering so very little in terms of quality construction, let alone art."

Two words: disaster films. Beside either the earliest or more recent moneymakers in this genre, HELLBOY comes off like a freaking Hegelian tract.

"To return to our original example, Fantastic Four isn't an all-time great comic book because it's about *family* or *exploring* -- give me a break! -- it's a great comic book because Stan Lee is a funny and inventive writer and Jack Kirby had one of the great visual imaginations of the last 100 years and exercised it constantly."

While I don't disagree with the argument that the FF films are incredibly mediocre, the core of the FANTASTIC FOUR comic's success cannot be seen apart from its representation of the dynamics faux superhero family. The exciting stuff was there, but it wasn't the main attraction, as it might've been for (say) CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, which title managed to keep going for almost ten years even w/o Kirby's visual imagination.

"One of the reasons a lot of people grow tired of superheroes as comics readers is because it's a relatively narrow genre that's harder than many to connect to some sort of human experience."

"Human experience" is a loaded phrase. If it means what Tom sardonically referred to as *exploring,* then no, superheroes will probably never be as adept at audience-identification as are, say, the films about the "stone cold killers partnered with daffy blonds" that Tom also mentions. But "human experience" also takes in a wider range of thoughts and emotions than one gets from sitting around BS-ing about relationships (which is one of the attitudes that kills the two FANTASTIC FOUR films for me). Maybe in a future essay I'll enlarge on the reasons why I think why superhero films, like their cousins in the pure-fantasy and pure-SF genres, can tap and have often tapped that range--

And why said superdude films have often done much better in that range than Seitz' beloved zombie films.

SEITZ WARNING

I really hate to give any more publicity (however minor) to Matt Zoller Seitz' goofball essay for Salon.com. From the essay's first paragraph it's clear that this isn't anything resembling serious film criticism. "Superheroes Suck!" is just a sharp stick designed to provoke the grizzly bear (OK, Pooh-bear) of superhero comics fandom. I wouldn't think twice about seeing such poorly reasoned drivel on, say, the online COMICS JOURNAL site, but its appearance on a site with a considerably better rep surprises me. I have to assume that Salon.com's editors commissioned this mess simply to exploit the debut of IRON MAN 2. Given that the essay currently sports almost 100 responses, I guess Salon.com succeeded in manipulating its audience at least as well as your average film sequel.

So, in order to spend as little time critiquing this rubbish as possible, I'll just sum up my disagreements as "Six Things I Hate About Puff-Critique Pieces:"

1) The easiest shot-- just to get it out of the way-- is one that many people have already jumped on: Seitz starts out talking about the superhero genre in his title but within moments is labelling all films in this genre to be "comic book movies." Granted, that's probably what the average filmgoer thinks as well, not taking time to remember all those great comic book movies of other genres. But a critic with any mojo simply can't oversimplify like that, especially since it means not giving due credit to all those other stellar works-- you know, CASPER and RICHIE RICH.

2)"The comic book film has become a gravy train to nowhere. The genre cranks up directors' box office averages and keeps offbeat actors fully employed for years at a stretch by dutifully replicating (with precious few exceptions) the least interesting, least exciting elements of its source material..." Again, others have pounced on this remark with reference to other "Hollywood blockbuster" film-genres. I'll add that a lot of critics from Hollywood's Golden Age would probably have said the same of most of Hollywood's adaptations of literary prose works, ranging from Lewis' BABBITT to Kerouac's SUBTERRANEANS.

3) "And as a critic who made a point of clinging to my sense of wonder long past childhood, I've tried (too hard at times) to find signs of life in formula." Hollywood Writing 101: the critic with a harsh message tries to prove in advance that he's Not A Snob; He's Just an Average Guy. This in invoked again a little later as Seitz anticipates his being critiqued for being either an "aesthetic turista" or a "snooty killjoy." Don't holler before you're hit, Seitz.

4) "Even at the peak of their creative powers, big-budget comic book films are usually more alike than different. And over time, they seem to blur into one endless, roiling mass of cackling villains, stalwart knights, tough/sexy dames, and pyrotechnic showdowns that invariably feature armored vehicles (or armor-encased men) bashing into each other." I'm not sure what to make of this. Take away the bit about "pyrotechnic showdowns" and this could almost be a description of the panoply of Hollywood's classic film noirs. Maybe he doesn't like the similarities in film noirs either?

5)"The superhero movie too often avoids opportunities to summon tangled feelings, lacerating trauma and complex characterizations -- qualities that make genre films worth watching and remembering for reasons beyond their capacity to kill two hours and change." This statement simply assumes that his preference for trauma and entanglement is obviously a Greater Good, sans proof, than "pyrotechnic showdowns," but he's claiming that there are genre-products that have managed to do These Good Things, so let's see what he's talking ab--

6) "--let's set the most notable modern superhero movies alongside titles from another durable genre: the zombie film."

Pardon me?

The ZOMBIE film?

Not the horror genre as a whole? Not even some genre that more closely resembles the superhero flick's emphasis on heroic violence, like the western, but--

The ZOMBIE film? That's what he thinks has "poetry" and "soul?"

Yes, Virginia Seitz, there are some excellent zombie films out there. But this subcategory of horror films has benefitted in no small way from the rise and advancement of the "adult" horror film. The original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is a cool little film, sure. But would we have some of the other films in Seitz's zombie-rific "spectrum of moods and modes" had it not been for breakthroughs in horror cinema as a whole? Is there an audience for 28 DAYS LATER in 2002 without the seminal breakthroughs of 1973 (THE EXORCIST) and 1976 (CARRIE)?

I'll make it easy for Seitz: no.

Given Seitz's stated distaste for sameness, the mind boggles to see him write as if there were no important differences between films about zombies (a subgenre at best) and films about superheroes (a distinct genre in itself, albeit allied to a variety of related works in what I've termed the superhero idiom). Clearly, the superhero film has been marginalized as kid-stuff to a greater extent and for a longer period than the horror film. Even going back to Classic Hollywood, one can find critics who swooned at the subtleties of Val Lewton or the disruptive scenarios of Franju while disdaining horror films as a whole.

By contrast, the general popularity of 1978's SUPERMAN notwithstanding, it's not until 1989 that Tim Burton gave critics a superhero film that forced many (though not all) of them to devoting a little more thought to the genre's appeal than your basic "action bad-- drama good" schtick (which Seitz is plainly happy to rehearse).

In a future essay I'll probably have more to say about the genre-components of the superhero genre, and how they impact when adapted into film. But I'm really going to try to make this my last endeavor to bomb Seitz.

INCEST WE TRUST, PART 4

"Very often, though we imagine the avant garde to be taking risks, the art culture really reinforces the status quo while popular culture, which seems to uphold tradition, is far more experimental."-- James Twitchell, FORBIDDEN PARTNERS, p. 79.

Twitchell's 1987 study of the incest-motif in culture and literature, written with a heavy dose of doctrinaire Freudian and Bettelheimian interpretation, followed his similarly-Freudian study of horror-fiction (DREADFUL PLEASURES) but preceded his Freudian study of fictive violence, PREPOSTEROUS VIOLENCE, whose thesis I touched upon here. Despite my finding some strong insights in both PLEASURES and VIOLENCE, I put off reading PARTNERS until recently, when I finally decided what Twitchell had to say about the complex that Father Freud thought to be the fundament underlying all human consciousness.

Unfortunately, PARTNERS is a heavily-researched but unimaginative survey of the incest-motif, which repeats some of the basic concepts from DREADFUL PLEASURES but doesn't enlarge on them. And though I agree with Twitchell's opinion above re: the merits of "art culture" and "popular culture," I disagree entirely with his reasons for making that statement.

Like Freud, Twitchell is an empiricist who sees art as primarily a mirror to outward (rather than inward) nature. He defends pop culture as carrying content that can be analyzed in greater depth than your average elitist would admit. And yet the content just comes down to a more tedious recapitulation of the omnipresent Oedipus complex than Freud himself rendered.

Most modern elitists would probably dislike that he largely uses Romantic-era poetry as representative of the "avant garde," but his use of this span of literary work is reasonably well-justified by his assertion that when the Romantics used the incest-motif, they did so less for titillation or instruction (as Twitchell says their literary predecessors did) than for "self-knowledge." Inasmuch as I can see a similar thematic current that informs many works of the later avant-garde, both "modernist" and "post-modernist" alike, I can agree with this proposition.

Further, since it would be impossible for anyone to do a broad survey of all popular fiction as much as to do one for all "art culture" literature, I don't have a problem with his choice to survey only two species of popular culture that arose roughly around the same time as the Romantic era: Gothic novels and novels of pornography.

As a devotee of Jung and Campbell I can picture many ways in which a popular novel might prove itself more "experimental" than a novel shooting for the status of canonical art. Empiricist Twitchell, however, can only picture one: does the work in question portray the threat of father-daughter incest? If so, it is considered more "radical" than the work that elides or displaces the incest-motif into something else, usually sibling incest.

In this skewed survey, Twitchell is probably less directly beholden to Freud than to another of Freud's intellectual descendants: Bruno Bettelheim. Just as Bettelheim argued that fairy tales were essentially about teaching juvenile audiences the cruel ways of the world, Twitchell asserts that the Gothic novel is all about "one general message to young women... with regard to relationships with an older male relative: always stay away from him" (p. 155). In his appendix Twitchell even seeks to ground the prevalence of the motif in terms of sociobiology's take on incest:

"Sociobiologists have conjectured that intense, although unconscious, competition may account for the fact that father-daughter incest is far more common in all human societies than mother-son incest."

I find that sociobiology, like Levi-Straussian structuralism, relies a little too heavily on tautology: "X did Y because it was advantageous for X to do Y." In any case what's noteworthy here is that Twitchell's justification of popular fiction is built upon pop fiction's supposedly superior ability to replicate some pattern of human life that is verified as statistically dominant through an empiricist's lens. My own take on popular fiction is precisely the opposite: it does indeed reproduce aspects of the consensual world, even as does "art fiction," but in both those aspects of the objective are fused with a subjective range of expressive emotions far beyond the scope of sociobiology's scope. "Art fiction" usually inculcates a more distanced and intellectual take upon subjectivity than does popular fiction, but at heart the two are more like one another than they are like such purely discursive disciplines as psychology and philosophy.

In conclusion, much as I disagree with Twitchell's take on art and empiricism, I did enjoy his breakdown of the Latin roots for the word "incest," which in essence comes down to "in + castus (pure)"= impure. Thus my punny title for this series could be boiled down to, "Impurity/unholiness we trust."

Bataille, who wrote that the transgression fulfilled the purpose of the taboo, might have approved.

INCEST WE TRUST, PART 3

The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends. For all ego-consciousness is isolated; because it separates and discriminates, it knows only particulars, and it sees only those that can be related to the ego. Its essence is limitation, even though it reach to the farthest nebulae among the stars. All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood. It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises, be it never so childish, grotesque, and immoral.

"The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man" (1933). In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. pg. 304

It's significant that even in the midst of Jung's highflown praise of the "all-uniting depths" one finds in dreams-- a propensity clearly related to what Jung calls elsewhere "fantasy thinking"-- he makes no bones about the fact that the dream in its raw state may be "childish, grotesque and immoral." For the pluralist critic this means that the grotesqueries he observes in popular fiction, whether personally attractive to him or not, must be understood as the products of "fantasy thinking" that realizes no boundaries of taste or intellectual purposiveness. The practice of railing against these products as being produced by secondary factors-- the racism or sexism of a given culture (Legman, Berlatsky) or even a given subculture (Groth, Deppey)-- is clearly the province of uncritical elitists.

On a related note, I said of the first significant pluralist comics-critic, Jules Feiffer:

He certainly did not argue that [junk] had no relevance, as does the "content elitist," for he asserted that its very value was being able to "say or do anything" and to be "the least middle-class of all the mass media."

In a way, though as an artist Feiffer seems much more influenced by Freud than by Jung, in his comics-criticism Feiffer seems to partake somewhat of Jung's more freewheeling appreciation for fantasy in all its forms, and a distaste for the demands of the opposing form of thought that Jung called "reality thinking."

"Reality thinking" is particularly on display in the two quotes of Sigmund Freud and Claude Levi-Strauss that I cited in Part 1 of this series. The two scholars have radically-opposed ways of seeing the way that the phenomenon of incest impacts on human beings, for one emphasizes individual development while the other focuses on societal development. But despite this divergence the two scholars are alike in their attempt to fit humankind into a monocausal straitjacket, based on a Johnny-One-Note conception of empirical evaluation.

In Part I I demonstrated the superiority of Georges Bataille's approach to the questions of sexual transgression in culture. Bataille, like Feiffer, is probably more influenced by Freud than by Jung: I don't see Bataille being all that interested in Jung's ideal of the "eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night." And yet Bataille comes closer to Jung than Freud too, in that Bataille can invest himself more fully than Freud in pure "fantasy thinking" in order to arrive at how any transgressive phenomenon-- incest, violence, war, man's relationship to the animals-- might have impacted upon the emotions of the primitives who originated most of humanity's concepts of transgression and of the resultant taboos.

A pluralist critic must practice this kind of "fantasy thinking" as well. It does not imply that one ignores empirical information where such is available, but it does require one to be constantly aware of the egoistic basis of the dreams from which we render art. This does not mean, contrary to Freud's school, that egoism is all there is to any form of art, even popular art. Feiffer sees pop culture as the "drunk" who can "get away with saying or doing anything," but Northrop Frye is probably more correct in saying that popular art "affords an unobstructed view of the archetypes" through which man expresses both personal egoism and the desire to transcend ego.

It was with this kind of devotion to the rigor of "fantasy thinking" that I made a partial defense in the essay TORTURE GUARDIN' of the idea of heroic protagonists using what I called "inquisitorial torture." I didn't say torture and sadism were necessarily good elements in all kinds of narrative, for I found their use in Brad Meltzer's IDENTITY CRISIS to be stupid and artless. In contrast, their appearance in Frank Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS proved far more artful, resonating as they did with what I called the Batman's "Gothic world."

So too with the transgressive concept of incest. In Part I I went to some pains to explain why Georges Bataille was right to say that no particular transgressive form of sexuality was any more important to human development than any other (in contradistinction to Freud and Levi-Strauss). That distinction made, I will note that the phenomenon of incest is probably the best possible metaphor FOR transgressive sexuality as a whole. Unlike homosexuality and bestiality (for two), incest in its most popular conception-- that is, its heterosexual form-- can give rise to living progeny whose proper relationships will thus be confused after the fashion of the riddle in PERICLES:

I am no viper, yet I feed
On mother's flesh which did me breed.
I sought a husband, in which labour
I found that kindness in a father:
He's father, son, and husband mild;
I mother, wife, and yet his child.
How they may be, and yet in two,
As you will live, resolve it you.

There's clearly more than simple egoism in the riddle of Antiochus' daughter: there's also a pleasure in breaking the boundaries of social categories and even of one's own physical nature ("I feed on mother's flesh which did me breed.") This transgressiveness is the essence of fantasy thinking, without which any kind of art, "high" or "low," is impossible.

Next: What else but--

Incest in the Comics.

LOSTIN' THOUGHTS: COUNTDOWN TO FINITE CRISIS

I hate it when I foresee one of LOST's Machiavellian narrative motifs but I don't get around to saying so in print.

As soon as Unlocke dropped Claire the hint that maybe Kate was still a possible target for vengeance once the group was aboard the plane, I thought, "It's the old shell game. Unlocke can't kill the candidates, though we know from previous episodes that he wants them dead-- but he can maneuver them into killing one another."

As it happened, the possible setup of Claire going after Kate wasn't even a vital part of Unlocke's plan. To be sure, I don't think any viewer could've foreseen the way Unlocke's actual plan would unfold, though, since it hinged on this whole "leap of faith" concept that Jack Shepard is now preaching, as received from the Testament of the One True John Locke.

It's a kind of "rock paper scissors" game of one-upmanship. One presumes that, had Jack managed to persuade all of his companions to ignore the bomb's countdown, the bomb would have failed to detonate as did the dynamite in the Black Rock when Jack played "truth or dare" alongside Richard. But because he couldn't persuade them to his newfound faith, the bomb goes off and Saint Jack is as much at risk as the others from being either blown up or drowned.

I have various problems with "The Candidate" episode, but I do admire the turnaround on Sawyer. At season's beginning Sawyer laid a heavy, and not fully justified, guilt trip on Shepard for Jack's alleged responsibility for Juliet's death. Later, Sawyer cops to his own survivors' guilt, but in "The Candidate" Sawyer is arguably pretty damn responsible for the deaths of Sayyid, Jin and Sun. (Maybe Lapidus too, though I find it hard to believe the writers dragged him across two islands without intending to make better use of him.) Will Sawyer walk a mile in Jack's shoes? He probably doesn't have the time to walk anywhere, much less expound on what he knew or didn't know about the "no kill the candidates" meme.

Jin and Sun's deaths-- I didn't call them either, but I pretty much expected them to "die together" after having "lived alone," or at least apart, for so long. The actors did a good job with what they were given but the setup wasn't especially resonant. Guess Widmore will do without whatever info he wanted from Jin.

Sayyid's death is more frustrating because I saw some openings whereby the writers could have resolved a lot of the vexing narrative questions about the whole "Nadia's death/Jacob's semi-intervention" business. While the topic might be touched upon in the remaining eps, I've a feeling that whole plotline is going end up as more fodder for DVD-commentary.

Hurley rescuing Sawyer from the briney deep reflects a little on the accident that originally caused Hurley's trip to the nuthouse, wherein Hurley's weight is a factor in the deaths of two innocents in the sea. Still, like the deaths of Jin and Sun it seemed more functional than poetic.

The incompetence of Charles Widmore's people seems to know no bounds, at least when it's convenient to the story. I certainly hope Charlie has something better up his sleeve than what we've seen so far.

Another journey into the dark night of John Locke's soul? Been there, done that.

At least we get more Man in Black next week.

INCEST WE TRUST PART 2

In the first essay in this series I've advocated two of Georges Bataille's concepts of sexuality: (1) that all sexuality is on some level transgressive, and (2) that, contrary to the assertions of Freud and Levi-Strauss, no type of sexual behavior/culture should be regarded as the central yardstick against which concepts of normality and deviation should be measured. Thus any theory of sexuality that posits such a central concept must be seen as incoherent and manipulative. All sexually-related cultural taboos, whether they are raised against spectres of incest, bestiality, homosexuality or menstruation, should fall within the sphere of Bataille's rather Kantian concept of a "universal prohibition." Through one's understanding of such a prohibition, one may form a more rounded concept of the range of existent sexual manifestations, and thus thus avoid the misplaced concreteness that one finds more often than not in ideologically-motivated literary interpretations, like That Ole Devil Queer Theory.

A wider understanding would also help lend one more depth if one chooses to make even a loose comparison of two different human cultures. For instance, here's Noah Berlatsky expressing sentiments I've heard a few times before, about the Japanese preference for deep relationships:

In Cardcaptor Sakura, and in shojo in general, the stories are held together by relationships. Many of those relationships are unrequited or unspoken...but that doesn't make them less important. The love you don't say can be the point of your life; secret love is meaning.

But guess who's not so into relationships? Ah, it's those demmed Americans:

In contrast, the American comics I've been discussing look suspiciously like the emotionally empty world which Sakura struggles to avert...Batman and Cerebus and Jimmy Corrigan all hide the fact that they have nothing to hide. The inside of their closets contain, not love, but love's absence — an incoherent dream of an identity that never was.

Elsewhere I've disputed the feasability of making "queer theory" interpretations that skip over actual content within the stories interpreted, as well as suggesting that it makes no more sense to fault one genre-product for not having the qualities of another than to complain that a rabbit can't fly as well as a duck. It goes without saying that Berlatsky, despite the fact that he seems better-read about kink than many comics-critics, is too busy trying to work his way to a foregone conclusion to appreciate the nuances of a truly polymorphous perversity.

Is it possible to write intelligently about a particular species of kink without overinterpretation? Here's a counter to the example of Berlatsky: this Comixology article by manga expert Jason Thompson, taking on the subject of incest-motifs in Japanese manga.

To be sure, Thompson isn't trying to place the particular kink on which he's reporting into some greater theoretical matrix. Thompson's brief survey of the incest-motif in manga is reportorial in tone as he tries to explain the prevalence of the motif. He gives some examples of the motif's manifestations in modern Western cultures before going into greater depth with an assortment of the Japanese manifestations. But Thompson makes no attempt to stigmatize the East for having too much incest or the West for having too little.

The closest Thompson comes to the abstractions of theory is to note the dichotomy between reality and fantasy that exists for Japanese audiences, and presumably for those American audiences who partake of manga as well. He says:

In all cultures, real incest involves uncomfortable power issues and squick factor, but theoretical incest is the stuff of myths. If the reality is Freud, the theory is Jung: forbidden magic and high drama.

The reference to Jung is not pursued, but it has relevance beyond the scope of Thompson's article. I'll pursue said relevance in more detail elsewhere, but for now I'll conclude with repeating Jung's admonition that analysts should judge any given fantasy for what it communicates in itself, and not (as I put it earlier) "what it looks like through an extrinsic [conceptual] lens."