Dirty Mirror

This is a video from my favorite show “Dirt.” Which is about the salacious inner workings of a tabloid magazine. In this particular episode a washed up child star holds the entire magazine staff hostage to gain some much needed publicity and attention. If you fast forward to about 6mins 00secs there is a really cool quote that touches on the mirror stage and some of the identity theory that we’ve been talking about.

It ends at the 5mins mark, so you don’t have to watch the whole clip. But if you press play and then press pause the clip will load faster, which I figure most of you know cause we all love You Tube.

Twain and Lacan

One of the first things that I picked up on when I was reading Puddn’head Wilson, is the importance of babies at the beginning of the book. In the first chapter, when Twain is introducing the characters, he points out whether or not they have children and how that has affected theit lives. It seemed strange that he added the bit about if they were childless while he was introducing them morally and professionally. The significance of the child, particularly the baby reveals itself later when Roxy, in a moment of desperation, decides to switch her baby for Driscoll’s. A switch like this is only possible with infants because they have yet to establish a real personality, and because they are not cognizant of what happens to them. The idea of the infant as a human that has yet to come into being ties directly back to Lacan and the “Mirror Stage”. There is a quote at the end of chapter 3 that illustrates this point. Twain writes, “all Roxy had to do was to get them both into a gale of laughter when he came about; then their faces were mainly cavities exposing gums, and he was gone before the spasm passed and the little creatures resumed a human aspect”. The choice of words here is particularly interesting. The word cavities makes me think dark and mysterious, there is no way of knowing what cavities hold. Using this to describe humans compares the babies to something unknown. Also, he says that they resumed a ‘human aspect’. Tom and Chambers don’t have real identities and are not real people. They are merely lifeforms that resemble humans but have yet to develop into