Pleasure and Subversion
Name, Title
About Rob Same
Rob Same was born in San Diego and grew up in Seattle. During his run-of-the-mill dysfunctional childhood he developed an obsessive passion for books. Attempting to fit in he joined the Boy Scouts. After a brief period the relationship ended with both The Boy Scouts and Same agreeing that they were not the right kind of organization for him and that he was not the right kind of boy for them. As a preteen he stumbled upon a PBS program showing old movies by directors like Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, etc. and was hooked. On weekends his family regularly attended the drive-in theater; taking in a wide swath of low budget horror, science fiction, and exploitation films. These were the twin prongs of Same’s dubious cinematic education.
After graduating high school in 1980 he wrote his first novel, Mother’s got a Whip, which languished in obscurity until its publication in 2004. He attended college and ultimately graduated with a degree in Psychology.
After graduating high school in 1980 he wrote his first novel, Mother’s got a Whip, a twisted psychological gothic tale about fanaticism, sexual obsession and exorcism, which languished in obscurity until its publication in 2004. He attended college and ultimately graduated with a degree in Psychology. From that point on Same became a relentless autodidact on a variety of subjects.
Working in fits and starts Same pursued a career in screenwriting and Independent or underground filmmaking, running up one detour and into one dead-end after another, learning a great deal about the international film industry along the way; from avant-garde to art films, from B-thrillers to big budget epics, to mumblecore no-budget indies, to alternative adult video he saw the process of how films get funded, how they get made, how cast and crews get assembled, and how they get promoted and marketed, including the new realities and opportunities of online promotion and video streaming. Same also dashed off the occasional novel, snagging an agent here and there and assailing the traditional publishing industry, getting another guided tour on how things work.
At some point in all of this he ended up living in a rural hell hole coping with a new reality that seemed like a combination of Mayberry R.F.D. and Deliverance with a dash of David Lynch or Harmony Korinne’s Gummo. The old Chinese curse says, “May you live in interesting times.” These were interesting times indeed.
During his long years in limbo Same pursued an assiduous program of study, plumbing the depths of literature, film studies and everything relating to human behavior. All of which has led him to some fairly controversial conclusions about the human condition, the true nature of our sexuality, normal psychological development, capacity for reason, the origin and nature of religious and spiritual experience, our anxiety at the prospect of freedom and our retreat to bankrupt and pernicious belief systems together with the desiccated institutions that stand upon them. In the wake of Ernest Becker, Clinical Existential Psychology and Terror Management Theory he was compelled to contemplate the strategies we use to evade our awareness of mortality and the destructive ramifications of those evasions.
We wander in the ruins of a civilization built on myths, deceptions, distortions and deformations of human nature. We are offered wisdom in various forms but even truly wise disciplines (Buddhism) are contaminated by their origin in the crucible of a post-agrarian culture of hierarchies, power, dominance, loathing and disgust of the body, implicit and even explicit misogyny, a rejection of the sensual and the erotic as illusory traps and threats to one’s balance, equanimity and one's ability to align oneself with that primal unity that they believe to underly the world of appearances.
The citizens of our contemporary Cosmopolis continue to act out roles written on the shredded pages of old scripts. Narratives about the nature of men and women, of sex and love, of marriage and family, nation and community, self and identity, tattered remnants of discredited concepts, deracinated or enervated worldviews, irrelevant and empty rituals and ceremonies performed in a state of fragile hope, evanescent joy, fraught ambivalence and anxiety. Those who manage to struggle free are still torn by the barbs of the past that remain embedded in their psyches, their movements toward liberation infused with the lingering dread of a relentless ambiguity and at times like nothing less than a reeling plunge into the void.
To abandon the map is to lose one’s way so the map is retained even if the maps limitations and distortions suffocate you.
All of us born into the world of the present day bear in their souls the phantom imprints of the dead world, the perpetual night of the living dead through which we drift. We continue to accept or take for granted definitions delivered from a defunct dictionary while simultaneously restlessly seeking for, or trying to construct, markers of identity. Tastes are cultivated and movements joined, recreations adopted, ideological positions assumed, brands consumed, as all the while one tours an alluring and alarming array of subcultures and peer groups to with which to affiliate. The uniform of fashion is assembled as gradually one creates a surface that reflects or indeed shapes the inner sense of self.
And yet it is not enough. This compulsive personal bricolage cannot fill the gap. It is like trying to put together a puzzle using the wrong pieces. They are recognizable and familiar but they don’t fit. The ability of the old order to supply a sense of place and of direction is no longer sufficient to allow us to settle into the reassuring clarity of a readymade straightjacket.
We inhabit the vast ghost town of a derelict civilization. Here on my little website I hope to discuss a world of books and films, scientific and psychological research, philosophy and other meditations on this landscape of mirages that both surrounds and informs us.
Obviously, my first goal is to promote my new underground pulp horror novel Madonna 666, a literary work that buries its serious theme under the style and approach of a sensationalist dime novel aesthetic. I’m very careful to keep my philosophizing, irony and allusions as subtle as possible, like the tracings on a piece of paper where the original image has been carefully erased and dawn over with neon markers.
It was supposed to be a bestseller. A few years ago, desperate to escape a bad neighborhood and naively believing all I had to do was write a novel to earn enough money to engineer this escape, I pounded out the text of what was to become Madonna 666. My personal experiences and ongoing observation of various aspects of the fundamentalist movement had inspired me to write a novel about people who were not just waiting for the end times but longing for them. Indeed not merely longing but actively attempting to make them come about, what the psychologist Robert Jay Lifton termed “Forcing the end.” The phenomenon of absurd books of paperback prophetic exegesis like Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth, the increasingly strident and influential political arms of the right-wing churches, and the overwhelming success of the Left Behind novels, provoked the form of the novel that I ultimately wrote.
(CONT)
Once completed Same passed the manuscript to a film director of his acquaintance who passed it onto his literary agent who offered to represent it. His new agent gushed with absolute conviction that the novel would be a bestseller, that it would make his name and fortune. Sadly, this was not to be the case. The rejection letters were a study in cognitive dissonance, filled with praise and ending with "but." “But it’s just not right for our list.” “It is a strong work but we don’t feel this is the right director for us at this time.” Same had the inescapable impression that the provocative and confrontational nature of the novel and its target – fundamentalist Christianity – intimidated then into passing on it.
There can be little doubt that the legacy publishing industry, more financially strapped by falling readership, more cautious and afraid of taking risks, less willing to accept difficult, challenging or even just new writers, is no longer the best place for a writer with something to say and a novel way of saying it to go. The Internet has provided a venue and an opportunity to both publish new work and reach new audiences and that’s why I am here.
The site is also dedicated to both general considerations of aesthetics and potential modes of production for the independent and underground filmmaking I would like to pursue but also seek out collaborators or fellow travelers for these prospective projects.
And finally, the site will deal with a wide range of subjects touched on above, that inform and embody the prime thematic core of the present book and of the majority of the future work, both fiction and non-fiction, I intend to create.
Landscapes of Ambivalence
