What a wonderful time to be alive if you love the theater of the absurd! The most popular representatives of this genre are Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard. (The most popular unofficial representative is The Stanley Parable.) Beckett's plays have a reputation for being boring and pretentious among people who had to read them for school, but I promise they're actually deeply playful in, you know, the face of the absurd. They're explorations of a very particular philosophy in a very particular historical context, but I also think they're fully "gettable" by vibe alone.
So. You know what else is an absurdist play to me? Any status-quo franchise that goes on for more than ten years. Some of those guys are waiting for Godot! Some of them are Sisyphus, happy.
That's not a new take, and it's also not one the source material would embrace. It's kind of reading it for form instead of content. After all, a huge Lupin theme is that their lives ARE made into meaningful stories by their will, which is distinctly non-absurdist (existentialist, maybe). So I understand that some people may find that take cynical. I find it extremely exciting.
And anyway: Beckett conceptualises a particular character constellation, the pseudocouple, in his absurdist plays. A kind of love-hate relationship that arises out of the impossibility of defining yourself without an other, the impossibility of full self-possession that drives you to attempt other-possession! Very Hegel of him. And when I found out that this dynamic was a properly theorised literary concept, I was ecstatic. Because it's just kind of generally my favourite thing ever.
And yeah alright it's also a great Lupin/Zenigata framework, if you were looking for one. Should be noted that both of them can inhabit both roles! And some version of this could probably be applied to most of Lupin's relationships, I just don't see any of the others with that ominous edge of oncoming doom.
Here's some excerpts from "From Narcissistic Isolation to Sadistic Pseudocouples" by Elsa Baroghel:
So. You know what else is an absurdist play to me? Any status-quo franchise that goes on for more than ten years. Some of those guys are waiting for Godot! Some of them are Sisyphus, happy.
That's not a new take, and it's also not one the source material would embrace. It's kind of reading it for form instead of content. After all, a huge Lupin theme is that their lives ARE made into meaningful stories by their will, which is distinctly non-absurdist (existentialist, maybe). So I understand that some people may find that take cynical. I find it extremely exciting.
And anyway: Beckett conceptualises a particular character constellation, the pseudocouple, in his absurdist plays. A kind of love-hate relationship that arises out of the impossibility of defining yourself without an other, the impossibility of full self-possession that drives you to attempt other-possession! Very Hegel of him. And when I found out that this dynamic was a properly theorised literary concept, I was ecstatic. Because it's just kind of generally my favourite thing ever.
And yeah alright it's also a great Lupin/Zenigata framework, if you were looking for one. Should be noted that both of them can inhabit both roles! And some version of this could probably be applied to most of Lupin's relationships, I just don't see any of the others with that ominous edge of oncoming doom.
Here's some excerpts from "From Narcissistic Isolation to Sadistic Pseudocouples" by Elsa Baroghel:
Crucially, upon realising that a self-sufficient relationship with
one’s self is impossible, the narcissist is driven to seek – or invent – an
‘other’ in order to restore sufficient distance between subject and object
to enable possession of some aspect of that self in the other. “I would
that what I love were absent from me” cries Ovid’s Narcissus in
Beckett’s translation (1999c, entry 1115, 158).
Master and servant depend on each other; the narcissistic subject
seeks a lovable image of himself in the other’s dependency upon him,
but soon becomes dependent in turn on the other’s dependency, giving
rise to an endless regression. Hence the circular stasis in which the
pseudocouple is caught and which governs the resulting ethics of “nec
tecum nec sine te” (neither with you nor without you). In his essay
“The Anethics of Desire,” Shane Weller analyses these atypical entities
as “neither single nor double, characterized by endless reversibility, the
subject oscillating between love-objects and the object itself oscillating
ceaselessly between being a love-object and a hate-object”. Hamm
and Clov are indispensable to one another, even if the foundation of
their relationship is essentially utilitarian.
The ‘other’ is therefore deployed as a palliative device in order to
distract the subject from his own existential sufferings without curing
their cause; in a nutshell, the ‘other’ is given the function of painkiller.
When there are no more painkillers and the instrumental nature of
the relationship has eaten away the possibility of reciprocal love,
cruelty arises as the only expedient capable of momentarily soothing
the torments of consciousness. Here, the Schopenhauerian subtext
suggests more serious power dynamics in these paired relationships, in
response to the strivings of the will to life: “[the subject] will seek to
mitigate his own suffering by the sight of the suffering of others, which
at the same time he recognizes as an expression of his power. The
suffering of others now become for him an end in itself and a spectacle
in which he delights” (Schopenhauer, 226). Sadism becomes the
ultimate mode of existence of the pseudocouple; for their part,
Hamm and Clov incarnate a “torturer/victim relationship in which violence is
the principal form of contact and communication with the other”
(Weller 2006, 15).