Writing Problems: Seduction
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema [Theorem] starring the late Terence Stamp, shows the power and destruction of seduction. Stamp plays an otherworldly stranger, The Visitor, who arrives at the home of a wealthy family in Milan. The Visitor then seduces and sleeps with each person in the home: the maid, son, mother, daughter, and finally the father. After The Visitor leaves, each person in the family reacts differently to this wild disruption of their lives.
Pasolini said of the film’s allegorical meaning: “I made Terence Stamp into a generically ultraterrestrial and metaphysical apparition: he could be the Devil, or a mixture of God and the Devil. The important thing is that he is something authentic and unstoppable.” The film is both cinematographic and literary.
Literary seduction doesn’t always happen literally the way it does in Teorema, but it happens all the time in more subtle ways: the social media posts of poets vamping on the beach with a National Book Award winning collection draped performatively across their thighs, or even the poet breezing up to the podium in a costume meant to play the role of “poet”. This superficial engagement transfers to the poet the desire of the Instagram scroller or the bookstore audience. Poetry is like The Visitor, something that can absorb desire: for language to break through, for our passions to reflect back, and for the romanticism of poetry to have a human presence.
