Cigarette #7: Masochism and Voyeurism, Together at Last!

SEVENTH CIGARETTE, 9:55pm
Inside with the windows open
MOVIE: A Short Film about Love, Krysztof Kieslowski, 1988

In the same way that cheating songs are my musical obsession, voyeurism is my literary obsession. To feed the beast, I turned today to Kieslowski's Short Film about Love. I was struck by this dialogue from the confrontation scene between young Tomek and the object of his voyeurism:

"Why have you been peeping at me?"
"Because I love you."
"laughs"
"It's true. I love you."
"And what do you want?"
"I don't know."
"Do you want to kiss me?"
"No."
"Do you want to f. . . make love to me?"
"No."
"Maybe you would like to take a trip with me? To the Masurian Lake, or to Budapest?"
"No."
"Then what do you want?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"Nothing."

It reminded me of Karmen McKendrick's reading of Venus in Furs from Counterpleasures (which, according to the back cover, "takes up a series of literary and physical pleasures that do not appear to be pleasurable, ranging from saintly asceticism to Sadean narrative to leathersex"):

Deleuze notes that "the novels of Masoch display the most intense preoccupation with arrested movement; his scenes are frozen, as though photographed, stereotyped or painted." For Masoch, concrete reality is insignificant except insofar as it provides images to which the fetishistic memory may return. . . Part of freezing's role is to function as an eternal, or at least indefinite, postponement of climactic possibilities. It appears that Masoch has taken Freudian forepleasure (the pleasure that anticipates the release of tension) to its limit; he is engaged in infinite awaiting.

I usually hate it when people describe my smoking as masochistic, but, insofar as my smoking is part of an effort to make my life more cinematic, it apparently is.