Woman with objects fetish marries Eiffel Tower - Telegraph

Woman with objects fetish marries Eiffel Tower

A woman who has a bizarre fetish for inanimate objects has married the Eiffel Tower.

 

By Aislinn Simpson
Published: 12:43PM BST 04 Jun 2008

Erika La Tour Eiffel has 'married' Paris's famous monument

Erika La Tour Eiffel, 37, a former soldier who lives in San Francisco, has been in love with objects before. Her first infatuation was with Lance, a bow that helped her to become a world-class archer, she is fond of the Berlin Wall and she claims to have a physical relationship with a piece of fence she keeps in her bedroom.

But it is the Eiffel Tower she has pledged to love, honour and obey in an intimate ceremony attended by a handful of friends.

She has changed her name legally to reflect the bond.

She revisits the massive structure as part of a documentary on Five on Objectum-Sexual women. There are around 40 people in the world who have declared themselves OS, all of them women and many of them also Asperger's Syndrome sufferers.

The OS term was first coined by Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, a 54-year-old woman who has been "married" to the Berlin Wall for 29 years.

Before returning to Paris for her first wedding anniversary, Mrs La Tour Eiffel visits the Berlin Wall, where her affection for what many Germans see as a symbol of repression leads to an uncomfortable encounter with a member of the staff at the Checkpoint Charlie museum.

"I just don't understand how some people can bring someone into the world like a child - an object - and then not love them," she said.

She explained that she feels an affinity with the wall: "I am the Berlin Wall. Hate me, try to break me apart, but I will still be here, standing."

She blames her upbringing for her condition. She claims to have been molested by her half-brother and abandoned by her parents to various foster homes.

"If I am the way I am today because of everything that happened to me, then I'm alright with it," she said. "I wouldn't change who I am now."

Jerry Brooker, from New York State, one of the psychotherapists interviewed for the documentary, said that OS women were motivated by a need for control.

"Someone who falls in love with objects can control that relationship on their own terms," he said. "Their objects will not let them down. That is extremely attractive for a person who is otherwise often desperately lonely."

The Woman Who Married the Eiffel Tower is on Five at 10pm on June 4.

"Joy and Freddie" - new "Psychoville" teaser

A short clip from "Psychoville" introducing the character of Joy played by Dawn French and her baby doll Freddie. "Psychoville" is set to hit our screens in June.

Neurologists with theories about laughter currently believe the nerves that produce a big fat guffaw are in the part of the brain that deals with respiration. Laughter is essential, in other words — as natural as breathing. Which clearly can’t be entirely true. We breathe all the time. But jokes are constantly changing — styles come in and out of fashion and comedians who once set the agenda may suddenly struggle to stay on the stage.

Take, for our thesis, The League of Gentlemen. It’s hard to think of a more influential troupe from recent comedy history. “They probably changed stand-up for ever,” says the comic Marcus Brigstocke. “When they arrived in Edinburgh in the mid-1990s, they were doing these incredible sketches and characters with just rubber bands on their faces and sheer energy. It made comics realise they weren’t limited to stand-up.”

Series such as Little Britain and The Catherine Tate Show, featuring grotesque and maddening characters locked in cycles of behaviour, also owe much to the distorted inhabitants of the League’s fictional town of Royston Vasey. Indeed, League member Mark Gatiss and its director, Steve Bendelack, worked on Little Britain’s first series. League members helped out with Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes’s Spaced, appeared in and wrote for Doctor Who, as well as taking roles in or helping out with the scripts on Nighty Night, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer’s Catterick, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Shaun of the Dead and Benidorm — if there’s been something on screen that’s dark and funny, they have probably had a hand it.

So it came as a bit of a shock when, a couple of years ago, two of the League found their jokes weren’t considered funny any more. “Reece (Shearsmith) and I had been working on this script, took it to the BBC and were told they weren’t interested in dark comedy now,” explains Steve Pemberton — who, in The League of Gentlemen played, among others, Tubbs, that “local” shopkeeping femme bizarre. “So we thought, we’re stuffed.” “They said they wanted it big and funny,” adds Shearsmith, who played Tubbs’s brother-cum-lover, Edward. “We thought, what’s that? It’s a Knockout? But we wrote this anyway, and it’s not big and funny. It’s dark and little.”

“This” is Psychoville, named, with loving irony, after the title given to The League of Gentlemen when the series was sold to Japan and Korea. It’s a seven-part, cliff-hanging comedy thriller that weaves the lives of several apparently unconnected oddballs into a complex tale of blackmail and thwarted desire. The main characters begin the series with separate lives in separate towns. There’s Robert, a pantomime dwarf hopelessly in love with the beauty playing Snow White; Joy, a brutally honest midwife who treats her demonstration doll as a real baby; David, a hapless mummy’s boy obsessed with serial killers; Mr Jelly, a children’s entertainer with one hand missing who fashions appalling attachments for children’s parties; and Mr Lomax, a blind recluse with a dodgy community-service home help. All receive a mysterious letter saying, simply, “I know what you did.” They don’t know who sent it and can’t figure out why. This, it turns out, was the hook that landed the dark and little thing a BBC commission.

“The commissioning editor said, who’s writing these letters?” Shearsmith says, smiling. “We didn’t actually know at that point. We just wrote all these red herrings and cliffhangers we thought people would love and want the answers to. So they said, write another two. We managed that. Then we did the read-through, and there was a long gap before it was greenlit — and then we had to write the rest.”

“At the time, we were thinking, why do we have to prove ourselves?” Pemberton admits. “But it hones what you’re doing. And it shouldn’t be easy to get something on television. You should have to work hard for it. You can become complacent after three series, and this shocked us out of that.”

It’s not clear whether a fourth series of The League of Gentlemen would have faced the same resistance. Such a show has long been rumoured, but never been confirmed or denied — today included. What is clear is that, after their 2005 movie, The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse, Mark Gatiss needed a break. The foursome (including the co-writer Jeremy Dyson) had been working together since they met as students. “It did feel like a natural break,” Pemberton nods. “So we said, yes, let’s have a break, as long as we can do a show as well. Reece and I wrote together on the League, and Mark and Jeremy had projects they wanted to write separately.”

The split meant certain changes. For a start, Pemberton and Shearsmith decided to recruit other actors. Thus Dawn French plays Joy, Christopher Biggins plays himself, while Eileen Atkins, Nicholas Le Provost, Daisy Haggard and Janet McTeer all have roles. “There are whole scenes that happen without us in them,” Shearsmith explains. “Which was quite scary, because we’d never had that before.” It’s turned out to be a strength, however. Pemberton would have played Joy — and would have turned in something vaguely similar to his nightmarish restart officer, Pauline. French manages to bring both a lightness and a terrifyingly brittle insanity to the role that helps move the whole show away from the lurching horror of the League and into the twisted realms of later Hitchcock. There’s even an episode shot in the style of the Hitchcock classic Rope, in an apparent single take.

“I don’t think Hitchcock was in our minds when writing it particularly, but because it’s laden with thriller elements, the director (Matt Lipsey) said he got a sense of films like Frenzy and Rope,” says Pemberton. “What we can’t have is what we had with the League, where you thought, who are these people? Where has this come from? It was a total surprise. But we hope there’s a new generation who aren’t steeped in the League, because it hasn’t been over-repeated.” “People will compare it to the League,” says Shearsmith, resigned. “It’s very Steve and Reece — it would have been wrong for us to do My Family. If they say it’s like the League, then great, because that was a really good show.” There’s a pause, then Pemberton sighs: “As long as they don’t say this is just not as good as The League of Gentlemen.”

Psychoville is on BBC2 from June 18

Married to the Eiffel Tower: Strangelove; Location, Location, Location - Times Online

From The Times

June 5, 2008

Married to the Eiffel Tower: Strangelove; Location, Location, Location

Last Night’s TV

Tim Teeman

Married to the Eiffel Tower: Strangelove (Five)

The artist Richard Wentworth was describing his childhood in an interview with me when his eyes flicked to the rubber door-mat, with a concentric ring design, wedged under the café’s door. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he said and took a picture of it. He was fascinated by a ladder leaning at a nondescript angle and some models of London landmarks in a shop window. Wentworth prizes the ephemera of the everyday and uses it in his art; the angles of paving stones, flyposting – all intrigue him. His unique perspective makes you see the city anew, dottily so.

But my passion hasn’t yet blossomed to the levels of the “objectum sexuals” featured in Married to the Eiffel Tower: Strangelove (Five), women (no men) who fall literally in love with buildings and objects. They have sex and relationships with them; their passion as ardent as any human relationship.

The title was no lie. Erika (surname: La Tour Eiffel) had married the Parisian landmark the previous year. Revisiting the girders where the ceremony took place, clutching her wedding veil, she gyrated against the structure. She could feel the cold of the Tower meeting the warmth of her body to produce an “equilibrium”. But if object-love really was like human love, then Erika was putting it about a bit, because she was also having a torrid time with the Golden Gate Bridge and the Berlin Wall, fragments of which she called “my boys”; the Eiffel Tower she called “she” – maybe she is a bisexual objectum sexual.

At the Golden Gate Bridge she agonised about the two of them ever being alone, what with the traffic and sight-seers. “Our love is no different than the love between two beings,” she claimed. Erika wanted to be an object, not human; her friend Amy was proud never to have been touched by another person (although she did hug Erika).

Amy was in love with the Twin Towers and the Empire State Building, whose flank she nuzzled and whispered sweet nothings to, until a security guard asked her to clear off. So she started loudly exclaiming her devotion – “Chaaaa-CHAAAAA!” – instead. Asperger’s and autism were mentioned as possible conditions underlying the women’s passions, but the only thing they shared was a history of abuse and abandonment. Erika had been discharged from the Armed Forces for refusing to stop sleeping with a ceremonial sword.

You did watch this and think: “The joke’s on me, right? Late April Fool.” But apparently not. On the streets of New York, with its riotous sensory overload, the women were almost delirious. When they went to a fairground to visit a ride with which Amy had fallen in love, things got seriously mucky. Amy had sex with the ride, praising – in the way you might a sexy pair of legs or pecs – “his elegant gondola”. She was beside herself: “After five months, it’s so good to see you – so proud, so noble, so strong,” she rhapsodised, before disappearing under the ride, smearing her face with grease. Erika found a fence – lock up your fences, she really likes ’em – and began straddling and kissing it.

The sex wasn’t as strange as some of the self-analysis. Erika said she felt like the Berlin Wall. She mused that someone must have loved the Wall to bring it into the world; what made them not love it now? Political history meant nothing to her, the Wall was a simple victim of neglect. She didn’t care if people called her “cuckoo”, and while the programme could have easily done that and turned the women’s stories into a guffaw-a-minute freak show, somehow it strove for understanding. There should have been easy laughs, but instead it was moving – particularly when a priest counselled Amy after finding her sexually communing with his altar rail. This was absurdity not treated absurdly – and the Empire State Building did look mighty thrusting and fine.

Location, Location, Location (C4)

A far stranger relationship exists between Phil and Kirstie, no surnames required, whose banter somehow manages to be familial and flirtatious. The presence of Location, Location, Location (Channel 4) feels a little defunct in a stagnant housing market. But they found a freelance community artist (a job like “international car trader” someone will have to explain to me) and a professional couple wanting to move to the country who, after the usual resistance and churlishness, fell for Phil and Kirstie’s persuasive bossiness.

When Phil, grizzling over the hard-to-please professional couple, suggested “a change of tack” to Kirstie over a coffee, she offered, “Suicide? Murder?” Crikey. Do what they say, Britain. Or rent.

JUST ANOTHER CHICK AT THE WALL! The Berlin-Wall - The Best and Sexiest Wall ever existed!!!

The Berlin Wall - The Best and Sexiest Wall ever existed!!!

The Berlin Wall at Harzer Straße, September 1977.

To everything there is a reason...
and a time to every purpose under heaven!!
A time to be born and a time to die,
a time to weep and a time to laugh...
A time to love and a time to hate,
a time of war and a time of peace...
THE BERLIN WALL, you gave me a purpose in life
TO LOVE YOU!!!

The Berlin Wall at Brandenburger Tor in June 1978.

Every little dream I dream about you
Every little thought I think about you
The Berlin Wall I love you so much!

If you would like a further insight into my relationship with the Berlin Wall, I suggest you take a look at the Why The Berlin-Wall?.

'I married the Eiffel Tower' - The Independent

'I married the Eiffel Tower'

Meet the woman whose emotional needs are met by a 1,000ft iron monument – and the other unlikely lovers giving new meaning to the term 'solid relationship'

Erika La Tour Eiffel hugs her 'husband', the iconic Parisian monument