I was talking to one of my (many) film teachers after class today, along with some other people. Someone was talking about how director's commentary annoyed them, and I mentioned Roger Corman's insult thinly veiled as commentary on the Pit and the Pendulum. I mentioned how Corman admitted to all his cheesy tricks (such as filming Vincent Price going down the same staircase ten times to make it look like a huge staircase) and she was amazed he talked about all of this. So was I. I wasn't nearly as amazed, though, when Corman was talking about how Edgar Allen Poe's writing was a precursor to Sigmund Freud's work. What? My teacher claims other people feel this way as well, but I can't fathom it. Poe was a chronically depressed alcoholic who pined for countless women who were quite happy to stomp all over his poor heart with the giant spiked heels of cruelty, making him a perpetually miserable mess. Oh yeah, and some of the women he was in love with happened to die at a young age. Lovely, eh? He married his cousin and died facedown in a gutter. Literally. His stories usually involve people with long-rulled diseases and a morbid fascination for the dead and the process of dying. His poems are sad, his stories are black... even his comedies smack of filth, death, and all that is vile. He also was an avid gardener and wrote articles on the subject. He wrote tall tales and mysteries. He was a poet first and foremost, and his skill in playing with words and diction is truly unmatched. I do not see any of this reflected in any way, shape, or form in the work of our pal Siggy "Stardust" Freud. Freud was all about Oedipus and guys trying to fuck their mothers and kill their fathers. Now, the only thing Freudian you could possibly read into Poe is that he wrote poems that could be construed as suggesting that he was in love with his mother-in-law. This is a far cry from trying to fuck your mother and murder your father. HIS MOTHER-IN-LAW. NOT HIS MOTHER. Jesus Christ, you guys. Way to fucking project onto someone who's too dead to defend himself. I'm going to look further into this, but my preliminary findings are that anyone who thinks Poe's work was Freudian is a crackhead.

Oh, for those of you that would advance the notion that with Freud, everything was sexual, and would attempt to apply that to Poe... guys... grow up. Poe was a doomed romantic, not a hormone-driven loser. You do not spend decades crying into your beer over a particular women if you just want to fuck them. If he just wanted sex with a veritable zoo of women I'm sure he could have managed that with his lively words and popularity as a writer. Hell, 'The Raven' was printed more than 18 times during the course of his life. If it was all about sex, he wouldn't have felt these pains deeply, and wouldn't have written poems with women's names coded into them, acrostic style.

Note: Popularity does not equate to riches in Poe's case. He would slave over a poem for months and get paid pennies for it. Motherfucking magazine bastards.

You could make the argument that he was fucked up because his mother died early, I suppose. See the poem 'To My Mother', written mere months before his death. The 'mother' Poe writes about here, is clearly not his own, but the mother-in-law he loved. With apologies to the late Edgar Allen Poe, I present a quote from the poem to illustrate me point. The line, "The angels, whispering to one another/Can find, among their burning terms of love/None so devotional as that of 'Mother'." That sounds like it makes a good case for Freud, but that's just incorrect. In a later line in the same poem we get, "Therefore by that sweet name I love have called you--/You who are more than mother unto me." This also sounds like a good case for Freud and his complex. But this, too, is wrong. Why? Well, this line pretty much spells it out: "My mother--my own mother, who died early/Was but the mother of myself; but you/Are mother to the one I loved so dearly/And thus are dearer than the mother I knew." Right. His mommy died young and he has great admiration (or whatever) for his mother-in-law BECAUSE she gave birth to his wife. I'm not sure you can read into this that he was in love with his mother-in-law. It seems to me more like he thinks she's great because she birthed the woman he's in love with. It is not unreasonable, furthermore, to believe that many of the traits that made his wife so dear to him were inherited from her mother. Could it be that after his wife died of tuberculosis, her mother was the one that comforted him? Maybe in his grief he turned to her and saw his beloved reflected in her. While I would never do anything like that, I can at least understand it. It is also very different from Freud's Oedipus rantings.

In conclusion, Corman, shut your mouth and get back to making b-movies, and the rest of you people who want to stick Poe into the Freudian model, go soak your heads.