Seduction and Betrayal

I used to write a column on repertory film called Seduced and Abandoned. The title came from a film by Pietro Germi, the Italian director whose mini-retro was my first theme. It was named, too, after the way I often felt about rare rep screenings; that's how I felt especially after that whirlwind of a Rivette series in the winter of '06: swept off my feet, caught in a battery of incessant smart-crazy-fun stimulation, then left high and dry. Devastating.

But the more subtle, and also straight-up reverential, reference was to to an essay by Elizabeth Hardwick, "Seduction and Betrayal" (also the title of her collection of feminist literary criticism.)

Here is the introduction to that essay:

Seduction may be baneful, even tragic, but the seducer at his work is essentially comic. It is a question whether there is even such a thing as seduction when the affections play a part; and yet this is a murky matter because of the way affections, even those of tenderness and concern, have a tendency to diminish and augment, to transform themselves under the influence of experience, satisfaction, or disappointment. The seducer as a type, or as an archetype, hardly touches upon any of our deep feelings unless there is some exaggeration in him, something complicated and tangled and mysteriously compelling about a nature that has come to define itself through the mere act of sex. For the most part the word "seduction" indicates an effort of the persevering, thoughtful sort. When it is successful we naturally look about for a lack of resolution and resistance in the object; guile and insistence are clever at uncovering pockets of complicity. A seduction is the opposite of the abrupt, which is, of course, rape.

The most interesting seducers are actually rapists; for instance, Don Giovanni and Lovelace. Their whole character is trapped in the moil of domination and they drudge on, never satisfied, never resting, mythically hungry. The fact that the two characters mentioned are gentlemen gives a stinging complication to their obsessions. Ritual comes naturally to them and birth bestows rights and blurs cruelties. What we may feel is a misplaced elaboration of desire in a gentleman would be in a man of less imagination and inferior social and personal decoration simply coarse or criminal. In the common man, excessive demand for sex is repulsive. Gentlemen merely run the risk of being ridiculous. To have in Ispagna alone, mille e tre, is a most exhausting dedication, and also quite funny.

And it only gets better.

Elizabeth Hardwick