Getting Frisky
When I was young I wanted to learn how to do magic tricks. I was, like most young children, basically terrible at them. I liked the feeling of being astonished, and wanted to be on the other end of it. I devoured books on magic tricks, pressed my parents to buy all sorts of gimmicky little objects that could be used to do all sorts of stunts. The problem with every magic trick is that once you know how to do it, it doesn't work anymore. The magic is gone. I was always bad at performing them because on some level I didn't want to be the performer, I wanted to still be the spectator. Sure, I wanted the attention, the thrill of performance (yes, I was a theater kid) but it was unsatisfying without the zing that comes from seeing the magic. Broadly speaking there's two components to a magic trick, the sleight of hand or the gimmick that makes it work (the box has a false bottom, the cards are marked, a clever use of mirrors) and then there's the misdirection, the story you tell to the audience about the magic you're doing (I'm waving a magic wand, I've trained the magic rope to fuse itself back together, I'm sawing the lady in half.) The effectiveness of the trick hinges on the performer's ability to conceal the banal and boring gimmick and sell the exciting misdirect. In middle school I understood this maybe on some intellectual level, but when I was doing the trick I never managed to properly de-emphasize the moment where the trick actually happens. I think I hoped if I just did it well enough, magic.
I was thinking again about this when I was reading Dennis Cooper's Frisk which is not about magic tricks. Frisk is the second book in Cooper's George Miles Cycle, a cycle of five books he wrote as a tribute to a man he had known in his youth, and with whom he'd had an intense relationship. In these books (and the rest of his writing) he explores desire, intimacy and sexuality by looking at men who are into extreme or violent sexual acts. Let this be a warning for the rest of this post, these aren't books for everyone. Mom and dad, you might want to stop reading this one.
Frisk is about a man named Dennis Cooper[1] who's life is changed when, as a child, he sees a series of pornographic photos depicting a dead body. Years later he is having sex, and he recognizes the man he is having sex with (or maybe more accurately for Dennis, the man he is doing sex to) as the model from the photographs, who he had always assumed was actually dead. He did not think such things could be staged. It isn't clear what role these photos were playing in his sexual imaginary at the time, we know at least that he had a type, and the type was essentially like-the-kid-in-those-photos (it should be said, the subject of the photographs was young.) We learn that at least after that encounter, Dennis becomes obsessed with actually killing someone during sex. He can never bring himself to do it. We hear that a character died, murdered most likely during a sexual encounter with a different character, but Dennis Cooper doesn't show us this, he shows us the scene re-imagined by him for a kind of artsy novel retelling of the events. One of the core preoccupations of Frisk is the failure of writing and photography to capture the real of reality, and the failure of reality to capture the excitement of photography and writing.
It feels important to note that no matter how explicit the scenes get they are never pornographic. They are never meant to titillate or excite. And they don't. That's not just me saying that—in a 2011 interview for the Paris Review's Art of Fiction series Cooper explains that when he was writing Frisk, if he ever found himself getting turned on, he stopped, edited, rewrote, changed tack. The few sex scenes that are more run of the mill come off gross rather than hot. They're also quite funny. In that scene where Dennis realizes that he's having sex with the guy who posed for those snuff photos years before, we get a scene of him and his boyfriend doing all sorts of grotesque sexual acts to his drugged an near-lifeless body. When Dennis notices that the guy doesn't have an erection, he asks his boyfriend why the people they have sex with never get erections. "Is it because we attract the asexual type?" This is both hilarious from Dennis (we the reader are not at all confused about why the guy in question doesn't have an erection) and a good introduction to another of Cooper's themes, the dehumanizing and blinding possibility of sexual desire. Quite a lot of Frisk consists of Dennis' analysis of himself, why he wants the things that he does, and why he acts the way he does. And so much of it is so clearly wrong. He explains that for him, having a type is a lot like being in a long term relationship. "It's like being involved with the same person over and over without getting bored. That's how I think of it. Anyway, it's the closest I'll get to a long term relationship." Anyone who's been in a long term relationship can probably recognize that this is a kind of self-assuring delusion. It's cope. One of Dennis' central problems (I hesitate to say the problem because he has many) is exactly this failure to understand the possibilities of the encounter with the other. His desire takes the form of a specific look and a specific act, and as a result the possibility of romance or of what some might call intimacy are completely foreclosed. So much of the horror of Cooper's work comes from how universal this sort of dehumanization is. I think my girlfriend put it best: "people always say, 'wow, Dennis Cooper's really out there' but he isn't, he's in there. The call is coming from inside the house."
Of course this leaves wide open one of the main questions about Cooper's work: why does it have to be about snuff kink? If so much of what Cooper has to tell us about desire is universal, applies to the desire of so many people, why does he choose to tell us about people who fantasize about sexual death? There are many answers. As I read through the George Miles cycle, I'll probably have more to say. This is very likely not the last post I'll make about Dennis Cooper. For now, let me just say this. Frisk shows you that the problem with Dennis is not his perverse obsessions. It is the dehumanization he performs in the name of these obsessions. Murder is wrong, but people who participate in snuff kink don't usually actually want to murder someone. Even Dennis who claims to want to murder someone can never bring himself to do it, and the mystery of why he can't, which he spends so much of the book pondering, has a fairly simple answer: he doesn't really want to. Sawing someone in half is never as glamorous as snuff porn or David Copperfield would have us believe.
- I'll stick to referring to Dennis Cooper the character in Frisk as "Dennis" and Dennis Cooper the author as "Cooper" insofar as this is coherent and possible to do. ↩︎
