Or, An Exploration of the Possibility of the Filmic Representation of the Postmodern Sexual Experience
In 2006, a United Kingdom television station broadcast Slavoj Zizek’s three-part documentary about his reading of film, entitled The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. Though the title might appear to indicate racy material, it is disappointingly straight as an arrow and dominated by Zizek’s now familiar concepts regarding the reading of film. Though the formal structure is interesting and unique – Zizek explains his ideas by filming at the original locations, or recreated sets and scenes from the films he discusses – it is unnecessary or excessive for the nature of his thought regarding film. The film’s strongest point is Zizek himself, a charming intellectual with a wonderful sense of humor. According to Zizek, “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema is really about what psychoanalysis can tell us about cinema.” Zizek’s Lacanian psychoanalytic interpretation of cinema is particularly well known through his writings on the work of director Alfred Hitchcock, whose films generally feature perverse, sometimes attractive characters, whose relationships to their mothers are often complicated and a bit too intimate. Hitchcock’s troubling treatment of the female actors in his films and his depictions of violence perpetrated against women by effeminate or maladjusted male characters has become one of the more well-known aspects of the “legend” of Hitchcock, whose familiar profile is indelibly printed on the pop culture psyche of America and beyond. Zizek concentrates on these supposedly Oedipal issues and their social relevance in Hitchcock’s films. A detailed analysis and argument against Zizek’s analysis of Hitchcock’s and other directors’ films would require far more than the available space; suffice it to say, his documentary is hardly about sex and mostly about the now out-of-fashion psychoanalytic perspective on filmmakers to their films. Today’s post-sexual-revolution world of video voyeurs, internet exhibitionism, and absurdly instant gratification has progressed beyond the boundaries of the Freudian and Lacanian discourse. Rather than looking for what psychoanalysis can tell us about cinema, why not explore how can we use cinema to talk about sex?
The era in which Freud wrote is in striking contrast with the over-sexualized Western world following the sexual revolutions of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s: not talking about sex appears to have become taboo. Homosexuality entered the public discussion and began the slow journey towards no longer being characterized as an “illness” or “sexual deviation,” while feminists tore Freud’s writing apart and began to explore the possibilities of pleasure outside of conception. While the discussion of sexuality has shifted a great deal in terms of vocabulary and content, the demand for constant revelation and explicitness represented in the media and in the general social atmosphere works just as strongly as an enforcer as the repression of Freud’s era. With something like the end of the “mystery of love,” sex becomes entirely, coldly scientific, political and public. As Andrea Dworkin writes in the 1987 book Intercourse,
There is no imagination in fetishlike sexual conformity; and no questions are being asked in political discourse on sex about hope and sorrow, intimacy and anguish, communion and loss… we are inarticulate about sex, even though we talk about it all the time to say how much we like it – nearly as much, one might infer, as jogging. Nothing is one’s own, nothing, certainly not oneself, because the imagination is atrophied, like some limb, dead and hanging useless, and the dull repetition of programmed sexual fantasy has replaced it. (Dworkin, 49)
While the “sexual conformity” Dworkin refers to is easily applicable to the practices of Freud’s era, the norms imposed by “sexual freedom” can lead to the same degree of conformity, though perhaps in another direction or to another purpose. The scientific language Freud used to make his work publishable and palatable to the intellectuals of his time, while bringing sex safely into objective discussion, has perhaps done little to alleviate the anxiety surrounding this now ever-present act. The manner in which Freud diagnosed, measured, and catalogued sexual behavior distorted or denied the emotional nature of the sexual encounter. Suggesting that the sexual act can be defined through the separate, individual psyches of the parties involved denies the inherently shared nature of intercourse (though perhaps not when practiced with oneself). Perhaps revealing the hidden sexual nature of every behavior, and every subtly suggestive image or object, has negatively distorted sex as it is communicated to the inexperienced and experienced alike, and perpetuated the fears and “problems” still frequently the topic of discussion regarding to sexual relationships (as evidenced by the continued presence of Freudian psychoanalysts, as well as the newly academic fields of “sexology” and the increasingly popular sex therapist). How do we discover a new language, a new perspective on sexuality? Can cinema reignite the sexual imagination Dworkin sees as long absent from the discussion?
A subversive perspective on sexuality is simply par for the course for surrealist director Luis Bunuel, whose cinematic debut was the racy, nearly incomprehensible Un Chien Andalou, made with collaborator Salvador Dali. Bunuel followed this film with the riot-inducing L’Age d’Or, a film that took Freud’s theoretical conception of sublimation to the extreme, forwarding the idea that modern civilization and the Roman Catholic Church is founded on sexual perversions, particularly coprophilia. Like Dali’s visual art, Bunuel’s films remained surrealist throughout his career and include or focus on a humorous and scathing celebration of deviant sexuality. Bunuel’s 1967 film Belle de Jour demonstrates a surreal sensibility applied to the visualized and filmed elaboration of Freudian analysis and the everyday behavior attributed to Freud’s neurotic and hysteric female patients, particularly in the manner in which this behavior is indicative of illness. The film records a short period in the life of a young woman who realizes her fantasies of humiliation via afternoon prostitution, despite her anxieties regarding sex with her husband, or what Freud would have termed her “frigidity.” The film suggests that her love for her husband is separate from her erotic desires and behavior, and that this love flourishes as she discovers her repressed self through the other “relationships” she experiences in her afternoons as the prostitute “Belle de Jour.” Though she attempts to keep this “other life” secret and separate from her relations with her husband, the interference of a violently possessive young customer and openly promiscuous man, Monsier Husson, interrupts this separation. The young man shoots her husband, and while convalescing the husband is informed by M. Husson of his wife’s daily indiscretions, or so the film suggests – the actual happenings of the conclusion are open to interpretation (and furthermore throw the “reality” of the entire preceding film into question).
Belle de Jour creates an environment in which fantasy and reality blend together by offering only subtle indications of the surreality of the protagonist’s “daydreams” and by allowing the elements of these daydreams to encroach upon representations of what the audience might assume to be incidences of reality. For example, the film opens with a sequence of masochistic fantasy in which Severine (the protagonist) and her husband behave somewhat mysteriously or unusually while still rather believably. Though the audience might be taken aback by this immediate sequence of a woman’s desired sexual humiliation, there is little to suggest that what is portrayed has not in actuality occurred between the characters, beyond the somewhat stiff, phony air of the husband’s actions. Other than the characters’ behavioral shift, the only suggestion of the movement between reality and fantasy in the film is through repeated motifs of jingling bells on the soundtrack and the carriage traveling down a wooded path frequently present during sequences of masochistic fantasy. However, the distinction is only further blurred after Severine begins to work as a prostitute; her achieved humiliation highlights the general “real-ness” of her fantasies, and, furthermore, a client who leaves Severine appearing particularly satisfied carries a small bell in his hand that he rang while he was “entertained.” The presence of this sound of a jingling bell in what was presumably “real” in the filmed universe shakes the foundation of the reality assumed to reign supreme in the separation between the character previously portrayed as Severine and what appeared to be merely her masochistic daydreams. This blending of reality and fantasy demonstrates a “positive” response to Freud’s writings on psychoanalysis and sexuality. Rather than condemning her supposedly “perverse” desires, Belle de Jour instead demonstrates an interest in understanding Severine and respecting the real significance of her fantasies. Belle de Jour submits the possibility of the simultaneous presence of affectionate love and violent desire, social respectability, and sexual experimentation in the life of a relatively “average” woman. Furthermore, the film’s rather straightforward technique and construction of comparison (between the characters Severine and “Belle de Jour”) demonstrate a desire on the filmmakers’ part to create a film both candid and amusing. Severine is not portrayed melodramatically and her sexual “plight” is not made into cinematic tragedy; rather, her character is a woman who finds pleasure and agency through supposedly deviant sexual behavior.
One steadily sexually subversive director who represents the possibility of a post-Freudian voice is the Canadian David Cronenberg. While perhaps more infamous for his use of extraordinarily “gratuitous” (though I might argue with this interpretation) violence and science-fiction gore, Cronenberg’s films represent some of the wildest, most “progressive,” or creative depictions of sexuality available on film. Two films in particular are interested in the horror of human reproduction: The Brood (1979) and Dead Ringers (1988). The Brood skirts the border between horror and science fiction, with its depiction of a strange psychotherapeutic method that releases the patient’s inner problems through an external manifestation, frequently in the form of minor wounds, and, on the extreme end, throat cancer in an angry former patient. The film follows a mysterious number of murders related to a current patient, an especially unhappy woman. The film eventually reveals that she has manifested her depression in pod-like external wombs that, when “hatched,” release sinister, deformed children who kill the people the woman feels have harmed her. As the angry woman raises one of these abdominal pods to her face, she bites into the pod and releases the evil progeny within in a climax of reproductive horror. Similarly disturbing is one of Cronenberg’s special effect masterpieces, Dead Ringers, based on the true tale of twin male gynecologists who spiral downward into a world of drug addiction and disturbed thinking when one of the brothers falls for an “infertile” movie star with three birth canals, rather than the usual one. The love-struck twin becomes obsessed with her reproductive “deformity,” moved eventually to heroin abuse and the design of several strange, terrifying “tools for treating mutant women.” The explicit sex scenes and suggestive aura of an underlying incestuous relationship between the brothers do a great deal to overcome expectations in regard to the portrayal of sexuality.
Cronenberg’s most interesting and productive exploration of a sort of “postmodern” sexuality is his 1996 film Crash (not to be confused with the recent race-relations Oscar® blockbuster that “borrowed” the title). The film introduces a couple of lovers whose insatiable sexual appetites push them into the arms of others, performing exotic trysts that they then narrate to one another in graphic, exciting detail. They seem rather far along a road that leads only to sexual boredom and dissatisfaction; how will they next get their kicks? James Ballard discovers his next creative sexual avenue in the form of a violent car crash that inexplicably excites him. Through clearly disturbed by his extreme wounds, he becomes fascinated with the imprints of the car left in his flesh like sexual mementos, and the woman who drove the other car whose husband was killed instantly by flying through the windshield – an ejection, or an ejaculation? The mysterious character Vaughan seeks out James, posing as a doctor of some sort who shows James explicit photographs from the crash site. James is then introduced to a small underground community of people sexually aroused by car accidents, a shadowy crowd who meets in the dead of night to watch reenactments of famous crashes, such as the collision that caused the death of James Dean. The obsession is apparently contagious, for James is drawn into the group and pulled along Vaughan’s hypnotic downward spiral into dangerous motor vehicle operation and sexual adventure. Besides the wonderfully explicit back-seat sex scenes and the growing homosexual tension between James and Vaughan, the film explores a sexuality closely tied to modern technology and its power to change the body. James discovers the erotic charge of a vagina-like wound on one severely injured car accident victim, and the smooth angles and mechanical functions of the automobile’s interior. The film creates and explores an apparently original fetish, not merely for titillation – though this is one of the film’s unabashed and fully achieved goals, I should add – but also as a means of exploring the relationship between modern man and his mechanical creations, a “cyborg” sexuality especially close to Donna Haraway’s definition in her “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” This “Manifesto” and Crash offer wonderfully creative, new manners of imagining sexuality in the 21st century and beyond.
Along with the recommended viewing of the catalogues of these two distinctive filmmakers’ work, any truly helpful guide ought to warn the real pervert against films that may have an aura of creative subversion, but which fail to meet the criteria of a truly new sexual language or imagination. For example, while 2002’s Secretary, directed by Steven Shainberg, offers some wonderfully entertaining and beginner-friendly depictions of sado-masochistic sexuality, the film couches these explorations into a “violent” sort of love in the terms of mental illness, as though the early images of a distraught Lee reaching for self-cutting instruments are required to explain away or excuse her satisfaction at the hands of her angry, obsessive-compulsive boss. Freud may not have wanted the average filmgoer to think any relatively well-adjusted bourgeois could secretly be into kink and that it indicated nothing more than creativity in bed, but the world has progressed beyond the conception of sexual normalcy far enough to no longer require a language of “illness” or “deviance” for any non-reproductive sexuality. One example that definitely skirts this line is David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet. The revelation of a seedy underworld composed of disturbingly violent sexuality and unusual behavior beneath the lovely veneer of normalcy marks too sharply the divide between “light” and “dark,” between “normal” and “deviant,” as though the worlds are not only separate but opposed. However, the fact that the wonderfully clean-cut young Jeffrey Beaumont finds himself dangerously attracted to and excitedly participating in Dorothy Vallens’ deviance offers a refreshing threat to this false dualism. Finally, a perennial favorite of the typical Sarah Lawrence College student, Harold and Maude is a wonderfully moving portrayal of a steamy, loving May-December sexual relationship. However, this film, like Secretary, leans too heavily on explanatory mental instability and previous abuse to transcend the age-old fear of such age-defying desire. This isn’t to deny that two people with distinctive personalities and unusual predilections shouldn’t come together in subversive sexual acts; rather, in order for a film to offer a new perspective or exploration of sexuality, generally unhealthy characterization must be left behind or denied as the necessary source of pleasure in perversion. Many other films deserve further exploration for their usefulness as voices of a new sexual imagination. For now, to all you cinephile perverts, happy voyeuristic watching!