That's not a kiss

Can someone out there more clued-up than I in the ways of psychoanalysis give me some sort of explanation of the hysterical hype about The Kiss on the balcony after The Wedding? This, at least, was not only the meeja's fault. The crowd appeared to be howling for it as well.

The newlyweds have been shagging for the best part of ten years already, so it can't have been the novelty value. Did this (to my mind) utterly weird and not a little icky lustlust (as opposed to bloodlust) come from some deep unsatisfaction in the hive mind, a desire for vicarious untainted lerve – as opposed to the crowd's and, presumably, the journalists' own unsatisfactorily imperfect love lives? Are we all now so shaped by screen conventions and tropes that we think of a kiss as some sort of compulsory narrative climax? Was it just porn in acceptable form?

Or was it a remnant of the days when newlyweds hung the bloody sheet out of the window the morning after the wedding? (Look! A woman has been caused to suffer pain, shed blood, and prove that she is no-one's chattel but her new husband's, and therefore all is right with the world! Don't laugh, Diana was medically examined for virginity before her wedding to Charles could go ahead, a test Camilla could not have passed at the same age, much less by the time she married him herself.)

I really was a bit shocked, and more than a bit squicked, by the way the commentators in particular, and the print journalists afterwards, ceaselessly harped on The Kiss. They might as well have been shouting 'Give us the money shot!' But it seemed to me to go much deeper than that. Especially with the crowd. People are incredibly strange, she said profoundly.

At one point Camilla picked up her bridesmaid-granddaughter awkwardly under the arms and appeared to be about to dangle her over the balcony like Michael Jackson, which would have been far more interesting for journalists, you would have thought. And what are they going to do when Harry gets married? Encourage him to barf over the balcony onto the furry heads of the Grenadier Guards? (He looked as if he was going to, I thought, as he and William made their way towards the Abbey; he looked far more nervous than the groom, though it was probably just a hangover. And what's with the walk? Hasn't even the Army been able to teach Harry how to carry himself, or is it some sort of undiagnosed childhood hip wockiness?)

Speaking of Harry, I found this wonderful comment when, struck yet again by the total lack of physical similarity between the groom and his brother, I went image-googling and stumbled on this wonderful remark, by which I was completely convinced:

His glare/look is exactly the same of that of Prince Philip ... he does have that ‘I will tear you apart from limb to limb Mr Fox and drink your blood through a straw‘ look.

Would I trust Prince Harry to look after my Children’s pet rabbits and hamsters if we went away?

No I would not.

Anyway. All theories about the Kiss weirdness gratefully considered. And in the meantime, if I have to look at other people's kisses then I might go with this one, thanks.

Perspective

One of the many lovely things about reading fiction for a living is that it tends to make you an armchair (time-)traveller. Just in the last few weeks I've read books set in the 1990s, the 1970s, the 1950s and the 1760s; books set in Scotland, Leningrad, Berlin and Buenos Aires, the Netherlands, the English Midlands, Chennai, Chicago and country Victoria, just off the top of my head.

Many of the novels I read for review are partly or wholly set in times and places of brutal regimes. One juxtaposes 1970s Argentina with the German Democratic Republic (so-called) of the same era. Another is set in Leningrad in 1952, where survivors of the wartime Siege of Leningrad are now living under Stalin, speaking in whispers, fearing their neighbours, watching their own every move. A third is partly set in India, where everything that happens is immediately politicised and a herpetologist knows better than to try to find out who it was, knowing that he would come home that night exhausted and therefore not thinking or moving quickly, who left a deadly snake in a basket on his verandah.

So every time I see people snarling and squabbling over Rudd v Gillard, or even over Gillard v Abbott, much less get irresistibly drawn into said squabbling myself, I think of a phrase that has been much in my thoughts ever since I first came across it, one that has had a calming effect on many occasions and has reminded me again and again how extraordinarily useful and powerful a psychoanalytic angle can be in explaining our behaviour to ourselves: 'the narcissism of small differences'.

Randomly plucked from the vast lucky dip of life's mysteries

Among the numberless occasions afforded by life for irritation, here's one that's been getting to me lately more than usual: can anyone explain to me why so many people (on and offline) who all too clearly know less than nothing about (a) literature, (b) psychoanalysis and/or (c) feminism will go a long way out of their way to belligerently trash all ideas and enterprises involving one or more of them? It seems to be mainly a boy thing. I can understand why blokes feel threatened by feminism, at least until they've actually taken the trouble to find out a bit about it, but what's the problem with the other two?

All suggestions gratefully received, although I'm expecting at least one drive-by from at least one of the types described above and I won't be grateful for that at all.

Home Maintenance for Women and the Pillars of Modernism

Tonight in Week 2 of my WEA class, I did something I've never done before in my life: I used a power drill. Unfortunately I've been too long acquainted with the works of Freud not to be a little giggly about it. As T.S. Eliot once said, 'After such knowledge, what forgiveness?'