Bent, folded, spindled, mutilated.
Sarah Weinman has a post on The New Yorker's "Page-Turner" blog ("Who Was the Real Woman Behind 'Nine and a Half Weeks'?"; posted Friday, 30 November) that caught my eye.
I read 9½ Weeks (credited to Elizabeth McNeill, published in 1978) in the late 1980s, after I saw the dull 1986 movie version starring Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger. (And seriously, what's with director Adrian Lyne's rep as a great director of sex scenes? He's as soporific as one of the screenwriters on that turkey, the future maestro of soft-core snore-fests Zalman King, who was proclaimed -- hilariously, in retrospect -- by Harlan Ellison in the early 1970s to be the next great actor of his generation.) While I found the book to be a better use of my time than the movie, I still didn't like it; the author/narrator was too skeevy, shallow, and off-putting for me to sympathize with her, and the sex depicted therein was so not my thing that I couldn't even take it as a spank-book.
Weinman writes that "Elizabeth McNeill" is actually Ingeborg Day, who published a memoir in 1980 called Ghost Waltz that is, in Weinman's telling, even more disturbing -- and damning -- than Nine and a Half Weeks (or 9½ Weeks; since the copy that I have, somewhere, is the mass market paperback movie tie-in edition, the title is rendered as "9½ Weeks") is. While McNeill was outed as Day three decades ago ("McNeill's true identity as Ingeborg Day was first revealed by Steven M.L. Aronson in his 1983 book 'Hype,' which is about the ways in which public figures transform themselves, physically and existentially, to satisfy the marketing machine"), what Weinman's piece offers that is (presumably) new is a comparison of the two memoirs, along with the intelligence that Day was an editor at the feminist magazine Ms. (she also notes that Day was conspicuously absent in the valedictory roll call of staffers during its 40th anniversary celebration last year), apparently at the same time that she had the S&M affair that she documented in Nine and a Half Weeks; that Day was the daughter of an Austrian SS officer whose induction into the Nazi Party heralded that of the entire Austrian police force; that Day never condemned her father's wartime activities, even after obsessively researching them and writing about some of them in Ghost Waltz; and that Day was unapologetically anti-Semitic, and wished that she could more openly express her prejudice.
So the woman with a taste for being dominated (at least for a little while) in a pretty heavy S&M relationship also hated -- or, at minimum, strongly disliked -- Jews. Sounds a bit too much like The Night Porter (another dreary, dreary film) for my taste.
Day also obviously had some serious daddy issues, as witness her submissive bent and the fact that she eventually married someone who was nearly fifteen years her senior. She also didn't seem to be bucking for "Mother of the Year," given that she had a teenaged daughter (her son died when he was seven) when she was living the old Stooges song "I Wanna Be Your Dog." (Weinman reports her failure to discover what became of the daughter during this time.)
While I found this piece interesting, it in no way inspired me to go rummaging in my boxes for my copy of 9½ Weeks to re-read (for all that Weinman favorably compares it to "what passes for erotica today...over-the-top fictional fantasy"). It was a bummer when I first read it, and I doubt that it would gain any luster were I to revisit in in my middle age.
I read 9½ Weeks (credited to Elizabeth McNeill, published in 1978) in the late 1980s, after I saw the dull 1986 movie version starring Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger. (And seriously, what's with director Adrian Lyne's rep as a great director of sex scenes? He's as soporific as one of the screenwriters on that turkey, the future maestro of soft-core snore-fests Zalman King, who was proclaimed -- hilariously, in retrospect -- by Harlan Ellison in the early 1970s to be the next great actor of his generation.) While I found the book to be a better use of my time than the movie, I still didn't like it; the author/narrator was too skeevy, shallow, and off-putting for me to sympathize with her, and the sex depicted therein was so not my thing that I couldn't even take it as a spank-book.
Weinman writes that "Elizabeth McNeill" is actually Ingeborg Day, who published a memoir in 1980 called Ghost Waltz that is, in Weinman's telling, even more disturbing -- and damning -- than Nine and a Half Weeks (or 9½ Weeks; since the copy that I have, somewhere, is the mass market paperback movie tie-in edition, the title is rendered as "9½ Weeks") is. While McNeill was outed as Day three decades ago ("McNeill's true identity as Ingeborg Day was first revealed by Steven M.L. Aronson in his 1983 book 'Hype,' which is about the ways in which public figures transform themselves, physically and existentially, to satisfy the marketing machine"), what Weinman's piece offers that is (presumably) new is a comparison of the two memoirs, along with the intelligence that Day was an editor at the feminist magazine Ms. (she also notes that Day was conspicuously absent in the valedictory roll call of staffers during its 40th anniversary celebration last year), apparently at the same time that she had the S&M affair that she documented in Nine and a Half Weeks; that Day was the daughter of an Austrian SS officer whose induction into the Nazi Party heralded that of the entire Austrian police force; that Day never condemned her father's wartime activities, even after obsessively researching them and writing about some of them in Ghost Waltz; and that Day was unapologetically anti-Semitic, and wished that she could more openly express her prejudice.
So the woman with a taste for being dominated (at least for a little while) in a pretty heavy S&M relationship also hated -- or, at minimum, strongly disliked -- Jews. Sounds a bit too much like The Night Porter (another dreary, dreary film) for my taste.
Day also obviously had some serious daddy issues, as witness her submissive bent and the fact that she eventually married someone who was nearly fifteen years her senior. She also didn't seem to be bucking for "Mother of the Year," given that she had a teenaged daughter (her son died when he was seven) when she was living the old Stooges song "I Wanna Be Your Dog." (Weinman reports her failure to discover what became of the daughter during this time.)
While I found this piece interesting, it in no way inspired me to go rummaging in my boxes for my copy of 9½ Weeks to re-read (for all that Weinman favorably compares it to "what passes for erotica today...over-the-top fictional fantasy"). It was a bummer when I first read it, and I doubt that it would gain any luster were I to revisit in in my middle age.