on the possibility of critique

Watching the Gilmour Girls, I keep on expecting a serial killer to jump out from the bushes.  But there is nothing random in this association (it is, I grant, more than an expectation… perhaps even a desire… but a whimsical desire: not the desire for blood, but for a sudden comic denouement): Rory Gilmour’s archetype is Lulu. She is attracted not to a certain type of man, or even manliness as such, but, in a  numbingly methodical fashion, to all the stereotypical manifestations of male erotic energy (brawn, brains and creativity, money…).  It is doubtful that she will settle for one, but, unlike Lulu, she will also  never end up on the streets: she is perfectly meek, perfectly “housebroken.” She curls up with her lovers, and her mother, like a cat. And the measure of her meekness is her precocious, if purely passive, intelligence. She is above all a reader, a perfect student, and, unlike Lulu, lacks the intensity of desire that would destroy all the guises of masculinity save the one that lies in wait for her (brute violence).  One is reminded almost of the simultaneous, and impossible, conjunction of Wedekind’s heroine with another memorable German heroine: Goethe’s Ottilie.  Yet Ottilie and Lulu (one thinks of Pandora’s Box) spoke most eloquently in gestures.  Rory’s satanic nature, in contrast,  manifests itself exclusively in a destructive verbal wit.  And her logorrhea  is a provocation for every intellectual.  Not every close reading is a good reading: now the ruse is no longer the seeming poverty of signifieds, but their fecund proliferation: the  never-ending flow of random cultural references hides the only ones that matter.