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KEYS TO THE CHARACTER. Seduction is a form of persuasion that seeks to bypass consciousness, stirring the unconscious mind instead. The reason for this is simple, we are so surrounded by stimuli that compete for our attention, bombarding us with obvious messages, and by people who are overtly political and manipulative, that we are rarely charmed or deceived by them. We have grown increasingly cynical. If one tries to persuade another by appealing to their consciousness, by saying outright what he or she wants, by showing all their cards, and what hope do they have? They are just one more irritation to be tuned out. To avoid this fate you must learn the art of insinuation, of reaching the unconscious. The most eloquent expression of the unconscious is the dream, which is intricately connected to myth. Waking from a dream, we are often haunted by its images and ambiguous messages. Dreams obsess us because they mix the real and the unreal. They are filled with real characters, and often deal with real situations, yet they are delightfully irrational, pushing realities to the extremes of delirium. If everything in a dream were realistic, it would have no power over us. If everything were unreal, we would feel less involved in its pleasures and fears. The fusion of the two is what makes it haunting. This is what Freud called the "uncanny", something that seems simultaneously strange and familiar. We sometimes experience the uncanny in waking life, in a déjà vu, a miraculous coincidence, a weird event that recalls a childhood experience. People can have a similar effect. The gestures, the words, the very being of men like Kennedy or Andy Warhol, for example, evoke both the real and the unreal. We may not realize it, and how could we, really, but they are like dream figures to us. They have qualities that anchor them in reality. Sincerity, playfulness, sensuality. But at the same time their aloofness, their superiority, their almost surreal quality makes them seem like something out of a movie. These types have a haunting, obsessive effect on people. Whether in public or in private, they seduce, making their victims want to possess them both physically and psychologically. But how can they possess a person from a dream, or a movie star or political star, or even one of those real-life fascinators, like a Warhol, who may cross their path? Unable to have them, they become obsessed with them. They haunt their victims' thoughts, their dreams, their fantasies. Their victims imitate them unconsciously. The psychologist Sandor Ferenczi calls this "introjection". Another person becomes part of our ego, we internalize their character. That is the insidious seductive power of a Star, a power you can appropriate by making yourself into a cipher, a mix of the real and the unreal. Most people are hopelessly banal, that is, far too real. What you need to do is etherealize yourself. Your words and actions seem to come from your unconscious, have a certain looseness to them. You hold yourself back, occasionally revealing a trait that makes people wonder whether they really know you. The Star is a creation of modern cinema. That is no surprise, film recreates the dream world. We watch a movie in the dark, in a semisomnolent state. The images are real enough, and to varying degrees depict realistic situations, but they are projections, flickering lights, images. We know they are not real. It as if we were watching someone else's dream. It was the cinema, not the theater, that created the Star. On a theater stage, actors are far away, lost in the crowd, too real in their bodily presence. What enabled film to manufacture the Star was the close-up, which suddenly separates actors from their contexts, filling your mind with their image. The close-up seems to reveal something not so much about the character they are playing but about themselves. We glimpse something of Greta Garbo herself when we look so closely into her face. Never forget this while fashioning yourself as a Star. First, you must have such a large presence that you can fill your target's mind the way a close-up fills the screen. You must have a style or presence that makes you stand out from everyone else. Be vague and dreamlike, yet not distant or absent. You don't want people to be unable to focus on or remember you. They have to be seeing you in their minds when you're not there. Second, cultivate a blank, mysterious face, the center that radiates Starness. This allows people to read into you whatever they want to, imagining they can see your character, even your soul. Instead of signaling moods and emotions, instead of emoting or overemoting, the Star draws in interpretations. That is the obsessive power in the face of Garbo or Dietrich, or even of Kennedy, who molded his expressions on James Dean's. A living thing is dynamic and changing while an object or image is passive, but in its passivity it stimulates our fantasies. You can gain that power by becoming a kind of object. The great eighteenth-century charlatan Count Saint-Germain was in many ways a precursor of the Star. He would suddenly appear in town, no one knew from where. He spoke many languages, but his accent belonged to no single country. Nor was it clear how old he was, not young, clearly, but his face had a healthy glow. The count only went out at night. He always wore black, and also spectacular jewels. Arriving at the court of Louis XV, he was an instant sensation. He reeked wealth, but no one knew its source. He made the king and Madame de Pompadour believe he had fantastic powers, including even the ability to turn base matter into gold, the gift of the Philosopher's Stone, but he never made any great claims for himself. It was all insinuation. He never said yes or no, only perhaps. He would sit down for dinner but was never seen eating. He once gave Madame de Pompadour a gift of candies in a box that changed color and aspect depending on how she held it. This entrancing object, she said, reminded her of the count himself. Saint-Germain painted the strangest paintings anyone had ever seen. The colors were so vibrant that when he painted jewels, people thought they were real. Painters were desperate to know his secrets but he never revealed them. He would leave town as he had entered, suddenly and quietly. His greatest admirer was Casanova, who met him and never forgot him. When he died, no one believed it. Years, decades, a century later, people were certain he was hiding somewhere. A person with powers like his never dies.