Lorelei from Superman III (1983) Reads Kant's Critque of Pure Reason

Superman III (1983)

You can read the above clip from Superman III as a dumb blonde joke writ large or as an insightful riff on philosophy. I am guessing it is the former rather than the latter. 

Playing the supposed ditzy lover of the film's villain, Lorelei reveals she is a fan of Immanuel Kant's transcendental philosophy - the eighteenth-century European thinker's idea that he could bring together two schools of thought - empiricism and rationalism. At least that's the general idea of the book Lorelei's caught reading — The Critique of Pure Reason.

Lorelei: How can he say that pure categories have no objective meaning in transcendental logic? What about synthetic unity? 

It looks like Lorelei has stumbled upon the truth of transcendental idealism — that things in themselves cannot really be known in of themselves. Or did she?

Poem: "Why I’m Not a Good Lover"

when I was a kid

I would swim to the bottom of the swimming pool

and attempt to clutch the sandpaper bottom

so as not to float back up —

“hold your breath in like houdini” —

and I could do it

if I were under the diving boards

at the 90˚ angle

where my dick could push against the cool water spout

and even then, it was great and lusty, a little bit of jouissance for a squirt like me

— excuse the pun —

and then

at the last second,

with a burst of superman

energy

I would kick off

and feel the rush of virginia woolf,

the expectation to break the waves,

a kind of insane desperation —

and it was kinda fun

in those days,

to play that game

in its different variations

and I feel that way now,

hiding at the bottom of the swimming pool —

and it doesn’t help that I’m reading ballard’s novel about boy in a detention camp —

pushing off with my planter wart soles

thumping my chest against the harsh water molecules

desperately —

and I don’t use that word lightly —

to get air

and it isn’t like when I was a kid playing

frivolous games in the lukewarm pot of summer vacation

and I know why I feel this way

that I cannot get air

because a word that comes to me repeatedly

— and you have noted it in your scrapbook —

is “bereft”

a past participle of bereave

and I cannot stand to lose you

that is it exactly

so I feel bereft

and that kind of feeling is too much like swimming up for air,

isn’t it? —

I mean, the time it takes, to kick up from the bottom,

to the moment a mouth kisses air —

is a wide expanse of time and space

and I am afraid of being alone, but pushing you away is all I know how to do

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