Bitch Page 9

  The story of Samson and Delilah is also the Bible’s first telling of love by choice, unsanctioned by parents, by the demands and definitions of clan and kin. They met somewhere or other, they obeyed their hormones and desires, and set up house the way a couple in contemporary society would. And of course this is naturally a caveat for future generations who would choose to fall in love rather than, I suppose, aspire to love someone who is appropriate: this love of choice that Samson has come up with is, after all, a relationship lost in the wilderness, it has no context, no place to function acceptably except within its private domain. But marriage, and life partnership, are meant to be public because any love allowed to exist solely in a vacuum has no higher authority to answer to. It can end anytime without consequences because the couple is not mingled into a community that cares, that has a stake in their stability. Secret and secreted love is thrilling for its lawlessness, but it can get twisted and self-involved in its isolation, what seems delightfully intoxicating can become horribly suffocating, and the way love plays out in this petri dish, the calamitous conclusion it can come to, can be blamed on nobody. Samson and Delilah chose an unconventional path, and that choice cost them both. Somehow these complexities tend to get tossed into the dustbin of popular history.

  Every marriage possesses its own mysteries, which is why the play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee or the novel Desperate Characters by Paula Fox and even older works like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or Ibsen’s A Doll’s House are so interesting: through close observation and character study, they try to disinter the deep-down truths of the marriages they portray, but as much as they leave us with a basic picture, a human understanding of what went wrong or why, there is still so much we will never get, never imagine. As outsiders we are in both a better and a worse position to see than those enshrined in the drama. That it is not quite satisfying, that the arrangements and compromises made, the devil’s deals struck are never entirely comprehensible to us, and that the dull thud that is the end or sometimes just the continuum of an empty marriage remains curious to the audience, is how we know that these works speak truth. Writes Jouhandeau in his Chroniques maritales: “You realize that you are a victim of a poison, but you have become habituated to it. How to renounce it without renouncing yourself?… When I think of her I feel that conjugal love has nothing to do with sympathy, nor with sensuality, nor with passion, nor with friendship, nor with love. Sufficient unto itself, reducible to none of these various sentiments, it has its own nature, its particular essence, and its unique character, according to the couple it unites.”

  One other problem is that this is a great story that actually has no bearing on real life. In reality, many more women have gone overboard over some guy than the opposite. I always feel obligated to point out that Fatal Attraction is actually a movie about a woman who is wrecked by a man, not the opposite. More to the point, this whole way of thinking must stop, this notion that women drag men down with sex. It is the basis for too much silliness—it is the reason why rape victims are not named but alleged rapists are—implying that the former, not the latter, should be ashamed because she must have made him do it—she drove him to a felonious act. I mean, if our attitude toward female sexuality were normal, rape victims would proudly proclaim their names for all the world to hear because they’d feel good and brave about their decision to prosecute the perpetrator, while the rapist would be cowering in abject shame for being a perverted monster. It is the reason we can’t get a woman elected President, the reason Sol Wachtler felt he had a right—was somehow entitled—to stalk Joy Silverman, the reason people still think Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles and the reason that in the 1988 issue of Esquire devoted to “Women We Love,” a double-page spread of some girls that the editors didn’t much love was completely comprised of look-alikes of Donna Rice, Fawn Hall, Jessica Hahn—all the year’s scandal girls—posed and presented as women who somehow collectively were bringing down the whole nation. Women don’t bring men down; men, for whatever reasons, bring themselves down, and then all of a sudden it’s cherchez la femme.

  Can women use sex as a weapon? Of course. But as Eleanor Roosevelt once said: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Meanwhile, Hillary stands by Bill, Dick Morris’ wife stands by him, Lee Hart stands by Gary, Magic Johnson’s wife stands by him—I doubt too many men would put up with what they put up with. As Simone de Beauvoir noted: “The misbehavior of a man in more modern societies is only a minor folly, often regarded indulgently; even if he disobeys the laws of the community, man continues to belong to it; he is only an enfant terrible, offering no profound menace to the order of society.” If you don’t understand this point, put it this way: Where exactly is Tonya Harding now? Working as a professional wrestling promoter back home in the Portland area? Getting divorced again? Publicly apologizing to Nancy Kerrigan in another round of publicity fodder? But, of course, we all know exactly where convicted rapist Mike Tyson is. We all know Evander Holyfield beat him out of the title. It is only the fact of his defeat that gives his story a bit of justice. Ah, sweet Pyrrhic victory.

  After thousands of years, it seems like time we buried the hatchet on Delilah and her ilk, which is to say all of us women. The idea that women are predatory is an odd one, since of course our strength is less than men’s, which is why the belief persists that when a woman “takes” a man it is assumed that there is magic involved, not unlike the way it is believed that Othello employed sorcery to win over Desdemona, a blonde beauty who could never truly fall for a Moor without the employment of some magic, black or otherwise.

  In Body of Evidence, a truly terrible Madonna movie, the plot is predicated on the notion that a young, conniving woman can carefully choose older lovers with weak hearts—in the physical, not the emotional, sense—and engage them in sex so tiring and grueling that she finally fucks them into death by way of coital heart attack. Of course, only weeks before the death dance, her men always rewrite their wills to make her sole beneficiary. At one point in the movie, Joe Montegna, pressed into service as a hapless prosecutor, says of Madonna, “She may look like a beautiful woman, but she is a weapon no different from a gun or knife.” She kills with her pussy: this terrible movie is the most fully realized version of the vagina dentata.

  And in the trailers to promote the TNT miniseries of Samson and Delilah, the voice-over—narrating a montage of footage of Elizabeth Hurley lying beneath Samson in various orgasmic positions—simply says, “Where just a touch of a woman could crush the strength of a man.” Of course, David smote Goliath (thought by some to be a descendant of Samson, the theory being that while in prison the Israelite strongman was put out to stud) with just a slingshot and God on his side—but it never seems to have occurred to anyone that Delilah too had God on her side. In fact, the rabbinical reading of Samson’s story vindicates Delilah more than any other interpretation does, because it believes that all activities are God-ordained, we are all pawns in His plan.

  This view assumes that everything that happened was part of some overall strategy, a plan for Samson to wage his private, one-man guerrilla war on the Philistines. He married a Philistine woman as a camouflage, so the rulers would never suspect he was actually fighting on behalf of his people—he made it all look like personal vendettas. Samson was far from being hotheaded and a slave to lust; all of his actions were by design, according to the rabbis. This makes Delilah look as if she was manipulated by him as a way to make the Philistines mad. In a way this is no better: far from being a clever, crafty woman, she is passive and simple like all the other Bible babes. This does not improve matters much at all.

  And this interpretation of Delilah is not one that has held much sway. She is almost always seen as a woman working in the service of Satan. Her weapon is her beauty—or if we choose to assume that Delilah did not have the gift of pulchritude in the purest sense, that, as with Cleopatra, her charisma came from a deeper well within, then her weapon is her allure, which we
might as well call beauty. But beauty is not innocent, whereas a child’s toy, some marbles and a string, a slingshot, is. Beauty is only innocent if it’s chaste—and yet, the first thing any man wants to do to a beautiful woman is fuck her silly, thus rendering her used, sullied, discardable and therefore possibly angry and furthermore most likely dangerous. Man in his suspicion creates woman in her danger. For some reason, in the Delilah myth a celebration of her charms is always subordinated to a rank fear of them. “The woman who makes free use of her attractiveness—adventuress, vamp, femme fatale—remains a disquieting type,” writes Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex. “The image of Circe survives in the bad woman of the Hollywood films. Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful. And in the prudish umbrage of provincial virtue before women of dissolute life, an ancient fear is kept alive.”

  But it seems unfair, once again, that men want women to be beautiful, but when they actually are they are suspicious of it—unless all they are is beautiful, which makes it less threatening. But actually, in nature the most beautiful creatures tend to be the least predatory—cats, dogs, birds—while it is the ugly, slimy, gray and grimy—rats, reptiles—who tend to be the most likely to do us harm (this does not take into account the gorgeous lions and tigers who would be happy to devour us if given the opportunity, but somehow, for whatever reason, they don’t tend to live among us). One undeniable exception is the beautiful coral-striped snake that bites with lethal poison. And of course it was a snake who was in cahoots with Eve. But it is strange that all the qualities that are supposed to make a woman desirable also make her a target of disquiet and distrust.

  Though Delilah may be a minor player in the text of the Samson story, her myth has writ large over time, making her seem significant, which would seem to suggest an anxiety about such a woman and her power. And the cultural artifacts of this desert romance are considerable: Rembrandt painted several depictions of Samson’s life, including Samson’s Wedding Feast and Manoah’s Offering, both of which hang in Dresden, and Angel Announcing the Birth of Samson to Manoah, which is on display in Stockholm. Erte gave a sexy, swervy Art Deco look to his design of Samson and Delilah. In his Duino Elegies Rainer Maria Rilke imagines Samson pushing against the pillars—his final act of life—as childbirth. Cecil B. DeMille made the love into a sort-of silly Hollywood epic, and Nicholas Roeg made an even sillier—all the more so because of its aspirations of authenticity—TNT miniseries with Elizabeth Hurley as a heavy-breathing Delilah in Estée Lauder’s heaviest eye shadow, and unknown actor playing Samson-as-Eddie Vedder. Dennis Hopper makes an appearance as Ms. Hurley’s malevolent mentor at court, and the pair are compelled to engage in stilted dialogue that tries for sensual and suggestive banter with a conspiratorial edge, and simply fails. (Hopper: “You are a loose woman, Delilah.” Hurley: “And if I were not a loose woman, I should be very insulted.”)

  I much prefer references to this ancient couple like the allusion made on a Seinfeld episode where a ponytailed salesman whom Elaine is dating falls asleep on her couch and has his hair cut off because a Nicole Miller dress he promised to bring home from the store he works at fails to materialize. While it’s uncertain if he loses his strength, he certainly does lose his job. But sex and seduction accompany the myth far more than virile vigor—although the former’s ability to wipe out the latter is the whole story. The A&E Biography show that traced the true story of Samson and Delilah was promoted with thirty-second spots that sketched out their scandalous love, followed by the dramatically intoned question: “Is it Melrose Place? No, the Bible!”

  Of course, there are Samson myths in many cultures: the Babylonian sun hero Gilgamesh (brought down by the goddess Ishtar, who also, in a sense, brought womanizer Warren Beatty down for a bit), the Greek Herakles, the Phoenician Melkarth, the two Babylonian sun deities Marduk and Nergal, the Assyrian solar gods Sarapu and Ramman, the Sumerians’ Tammuz, the Indians’ Vishnu, the Celtic Cuchulainn, the Macedonian Alexander the Great, the founder of Buddhism, Gautama, not to mention the more modern cult of the long-haired manly man, be it Gregg Allman, the Calvin Klein model of a few years back whose name was, improbably, Attila, and the many biker dudes idealized in Diane Wakoski’s Motorcycle Betrayal Poems. Never mind the show/movie Hair. Or all rock stars, with all their songs about how they have a right mind to shoot that woman down. Even the cult movie classic Billy Jack is a recast of the Samson saga, to the point where toward the end one of the girls asks the title character, a former Green Beret turned protector of Native American kids, about the medicine bag he is carrying. To explain why he always carries the little pouch, Billy tells her, “Without it, I am cut off from the forces of life.” She responds, “Kind of like Samson and his hair?” And considering that Samson was conceived, apparently immaculately, to a barren woman following an annunciation via one of God’s angels, the story of Jesus Christ can be said to be a variation on the Samson myth, the difference of course being that instead of getting dragged down by a whore, Jesus lifts Mary Magdalene up. By virtue of this, the story of Jesus can be seen as a correction of the Samson saga. In their etymological roots, both Delilah and Lilith are the same name, joining our heroine with the first wife of Adam, the original Eve, the woman who said no and who was recently transformed by Jewish feminists into a historic refusenik, so much a symbol of womanly assertion that a magazine was named for her. Delilah also weaves like Penelope, a woman holding all her suitors at bay while she waits for Odysseus—a symbol of feminine virtue, not malice. Of course, Calypso, the lover on the lam, was a weaver as well. All this may just tell us that way back when, women spent a lot of time at the loom.

  Since so few people actually read the text of the Bible itself, few realize that many of our cultural myths that evolve into firm ideas in the collective unconscious are based on notions attached to the characters postscript. It’s like a game of Telephone. The Bible is so spare, which is why it lends itself to archetypes and caricatures that reflect readers’ beliefs over time.

  So for me Samson has come to represent some late-stage version Kurt Cobain. When Kurt first died, what with Courtney strung out and ranting on a dais at his memorial service, it was easy to say that the witch killed him. She broke his heart, she drove him crazy, she annoyed him—whatever. It seemed perfectly plausible that her contribution to married life might well have been the death of him. I myself thought, at the very least, that all the people around him—friends, lawyers, managers, family, band—could only have been feeling homicidal when they left him alone in a house full of guns. And I’m right: that was irresponsible behavior, whether you’re going to call it tough love or not. But I have a feeling that a person as miserable, depressed, addicted and reeling as Kurt must have been by the end of his life was a real pain in the ass to deal with. Suicidal souls are exhausting and emotionally draining to all who get near them. And I think, at a certain point, even those who love them completely just say, in deeds if not in words: So fine, blow your brains out.

  They don’t expect it to really happen.

  And Samson was surely one of those people who could make you think enough is enough. Delilah, Courtney, the Philistines, the record industry: blame anyone you want. While the lesson most people take from this story is that if you fall too hard for some broad she will betray you, the truth is just the opposite: Delilah betrayed Samson for not loving her enough, not falling for real. In Eric Linklater’s novel Husband of Delilah, Samson is portrayed as abusive, battering, snide and sneering, always ordering Delilah around. Delilah is constantly afraid of losing him, and uses her relationship with Philistine authorities and her money to keep him. The Philistines are depicted as reasonable creatures, not barbarians, though there is no mention of any interest in the arts or culture, to be fair to the lore attached to them. Linklater also expresses some notion that Delilah must betray Samson in order to be authentic, in order to become a fleshy, fallible human to this man and not just some sex goddess and comfort creature who he idolizes,
but can never quite genuinely love. She is sick of his being obsessed with her, addicted to her—she wants to be loved for herself, to be real. She is tired of being a bit of what he fancies, a distraction from the difficult uses of his strength. She is trying to get the whole situation down to size. The point is that one’s motives in betrayal are often complicated—it’s not as simple as she did it for the money, she did it because she’s a femme fatale and that’s what women like that do. They had a complicated dynamic and a full-bodied relationship that the text does not make us privy to. But most women, like most men, are reasonable creatures, and as Jean Renoir said: “The problem is, everybody has their reasons.” The line comes from Rules of the Game, the masterpiece that in the sexual and other confusion of its plot subtly sketches a cinematic blueprint for the course of relations between the sexes in an age of uncertainty brought upon Europe by the two world wars fought on its land (the film predates the second of the two, but anticipates it as anyone following world affairs at that time would have to). One of the few benefits of being a child of divorce, particularly a contentious one, is that you learn early to construct complex narratives to explain your parents’ behavior: while each of them can afford to demonize the other, as a kid who loves both Mommy and Daddy you must ratify a whole new set of laws in your own mind, must learn to assemble a view of the situation where neither is wrong, both in their way are right.