Lewinsky and such

I went to a lecture last night by Chris Castiglia: “Monica Lewinsky, The Scarlet Letter, and The Music Man.”

I can’t cover it in detail, because it danced with incoherence and I’m tied up in other stuff. However, I just wanted to jot a few notes.

Castiglia opened with the premise that American democracy is based on an idea that moral values are considered to be private and internal; this is a rather perverse conception in his view, because democracy is by definition public and external to the individual. He then covered some material regarding phrenology in the 19th century. “Perverse behavior” was thought to reside in some sort of internal place in the body (predictable by the bumps on your head). His contention was that the attempts to eradicate perversion from the body opened up a space where moral values could supposedly reside in the American consciousness. Castigila also noted that according to the phrenology “maps” of the early president’s heads, they all were noticeably deficient in the bumps thought to be connected with fantasy.

Then he sang a song from Les Misérables. Seriously, I’m not kidding. Yes, he is gay. The next part of the lecture was about the nature of crushes. Crushes reside entirely in the land of fantasy, and by his definition are only crushes when they represent an unattainable fantasy ideal. He sketched a portrait of the Broadway musical as the ultimate representation of the crush, both in structure and in plot. Then he revealed that the song he sang was sung by Lewinsky at her high school talent show. She won a big prize for it.

Next, it was off into Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. Superimposing the Lewinsky debacle on the Scarlet Letter was perhaps the most entertaining part. I never thought of her as Hester Prynne before. Fun stuff. I think he overplayed the fantasy part of the novel, but, still it was an interesting thesis.

He lost me somewhere in the middle of The Music Man, and I’m not sure if I’m buying his thesis all that much, but it was fun. Ultimately he argued that Monica Lewinsky represents a new hero for the country, because she was never a “rat” and displayed a healthy fantasy crush. The funniest thing though, was Zabelle Stodola describing how they met. Her specialty is early American captivity narratives (stories written by white folks held captive by the natives). Captivity narratives also played a big part in Castiglia’s first book. Dr. Stodola proclaimed:

“We met in Chicago when I was researching there about ten years ago. While Chris has moved on, I’m still wrapped up in bondage.”