Female Masochism in Film

Female Masochism in Film

Film Philosophy at the Margins Series editor: Patricia MacCormack, Anglia Ruskin University, UK ‘Film Philosophy at the Margins’ picks up on the burgeoning field of ‘film philosophy’ – the shift from film analysis and explication to bringing together film with philosophy – and coalesces it with films, genres and spectator theory which have received little critical attention. These films could be defined as marginal due to being considered ‘marginal’ – marginalizing representations of violence, marginal invocations of sexuality and queer performativity, margins of bodily modification from disability to performance art, marginal in their abstraction of representative codes, marginal in reference to their address to the politics of social control, spectatorship and cinematic pleasure as marginal due to its unique status and quality, among many other interpretations of extreme. The film philosophy which underpins the exploration of these films is primarily Continental philosophy, rather than the more dominant field of cognitive film philosophy, utilizing increasingly attractive philosophers for film theory such as Deleuze, Guattari, Rancière, Foucault, Irigaray and Kristeva. The series ultimately seeks to establish a refined and sophisticated methodology for re-invigorating issues of alterity both in the films chosen and the means by which Continental philosophers of difference can paradigmatically alter ways of address and representation that lifts this kind of theory beyond analysis and criticism to help rethink the terrain of film theory itself.

Female Masochism in Film Sexuality, Ethics and Aesthetics

Ruth McPhee

© Ruth McPhee 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Ruth McPhee has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street Union Road Suite 3-1 Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818 Surrey, GU9 7PT USA England www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: McPhee, Ruth. Female masochism in film : sexuality, ethics and aesthetics / by Ruth McPhee. pages cm. -- (Film philosophy at the margins) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4724-1316-1 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-1317-8 (ebook) -- ISBN ) 978-14724-1318-5 (epub) 1. Women in motion pictures. 2. Masochism in motion pictures. 3. Ethics in motion pictures. 4. Motion pictures--Aesthetics. I. Title. PN1995.9.W6M3855 2014 791.43'6522--dc23 2014003684

ISBN 9781472413161 (hbk) ISBN 9781472413178 (ebk – PDF) ISBN 9781472413185 (ebk – ePUB) II

Contents Acknowledgementsvii

Introduction 

1

1

The Deleuzian Model and the Masochistic Contract 

23

2

Masochism, Feminine ‘Goodness’ and Sacrifice 

45

3

Self-Mutilation and (a)signification

71

4

Transgressive Reconfigurations

99

5

Heterocosms, Spectres and the World Remade

129



Postscript

151

Bibliography155 Index165

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Acknowledgements Thank you to my extended family of McPhees and honorary McPhees, for unfailing support emotionally and materially: Joanna McPhee, Paula McPhee, Tim McPhee, Farah McPhee, Sarah McPhee; Katy Holliday, Jake Dyer, and all the rest. Also thanks go to my team of proofreaders for their attentive eyes and astute comments: Tina Kendall, Louis Bayman, Mark Blay and Emily Cooper. Thank you to Sarah Cooper, for patience and encouragement in the early days of this project, and special thanks to Patricia MacCormack for prodding me into action and self-belief.

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Introduction From the mid-1990s onwards, an emergent representational tendency has been visible across a range of otherwise contextually disparate films. These films have in common narratives that are driven by female protagonists and that focus upon female subjectivities, yet, beyond this broad commonality a more specific concern surfaces in the way in which these subjectivities and particularly the sexuality of these female characters is manifested: in terms of a heterosexuality concentrated upon masochistic desires and experiences. These female protagonists find their pleasure through the relinquishing of control to the dominance of the other, placing themselves in perilous or humiliating situations, seeking pain, opening themselves up to the assumption of passive or submissive positions. Female masochism is portrayed in a variety of ways in this body of films, sometimes overtly and in explicit terms and sometimes as a more subtle undercurrent that nonetheless acts as an organizing principle for the protagonist’s subjectivity and for the narrative trajectory of the film. The masochistic desire of these characters is depicted variously as redemptive, sacrificial, mournful, transgressive and in extreme cases as conducive to selfdestruction and annihilation. Furthermore, these thematic concerns are frequently accompanied by an aesthetic that echoes, enhances or engages with the vicissitudes and ambiguities of masochistic desire, and that addresses the viewer in such a way as to catalyse a masochistic form of spectatorial experience rooted in a combination of pleasure and unpleasure. The films included for discussion in subsequent chapters were produced in a range of countries in Europe, North America and Australia. As such they cannot be categorized as entailing a ‘movement’ either in the sense of resulting from a deliberate intention on the part of the filmmakers, or in the more diffuse sense often applied retrospectively within the popular media and academia. Indeed, several of the films addressed here have been individually claimed for other cinematic trends (for example the ‘New Extremism’, British realism and New French Cinema). Just as they cannot be regarded as a coherent movement, nor can they be easily classified as constituting a particular genre and could be designated as belonging to several different generic models (thriller, romance, melodrama, even, debatably, pornography). It is therefore not my intention to pigeonhole these often very different films according to an awkwardly proclaimed label or headline, rather, it is the very fact of the dispersive nature of this group of films and the pervasiveness of this representational motif that suggests a timely

Female Masochism in Film

readdress to two areas of debate is needed: firstly, the place of heterosexuality, female corporeal specificity and embodied desire in the sociocultural realm and secondly, an overdue re-evaluation of the conceptualization of masochism in discursive fields such as feminism and philosophies of sexual difference, ethical enquiry and film studies. The project that unfolds in the following chapters will use these texts as springboards from which to launch meditations upon the cultural and political place of a female masochistic subject that is resolutely embodied and actively desiring. For example Chapter 2 places Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996) and Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (2006) within Western religious and philosophical doctrines of feminine self-sacrifice, the films of Catherine Breillat and Jane Campion demand a productive confrontation with female corporeality, obscenity and film genre in Chapter 3 and Steven Shainberg’s film Secretary (2009) critiques and opens up the restrictive theoretical formations that have surrounded self-harm in Chapter 4. Although the formal strategies used by the filmmakers discussed in this volume are disparate and often highly distinctive between themselves, a shared concern arises with the testing of representational boundaries and taboos in order to present challenging imagery that is rarely found within the space of cinema, whether this imagery be sexually explicit, violent and horrifying or bewilderingly avant-garde. Female masochism, then, has emerged as a means of forging an aesthetic that questions, deconstructs and subverts normative cultural frameworks surrounding female subjectivity and sexuality. It is this process of interrogation and deconstruction that functions to germinate the ethical potential of an exploration of female masochism culturally and philosophically. Value-laden terminology surrounds the masochistic body and the female body alike: these bodies are perverse and taboo, monstrous and obscene, transgressive phenomenon that appear in the consciousness of society to thwart or demolish any stable notions of propriety or normality in regard to the socially situated human subject. Rosi Braidotti is one of a number of recent theorists who have engaged with the concept of the post-human in order to demonstrate not that the category of the human is transforming in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century but that the very concept of the human as expressed in the doctrines of Western Humanism has always been flawed, mired in and constructed according to dominant discursive formations that strive to maintain the illusion of an ideal human subject that mirrors the entrenched positions of patriarchy, capitalism and Eurocentricity. Braidotti neatly summarizes this position: This Eurocentric paradigm implies the dialectics of self and other, and the binary logic of identity and otherness as respectively the motor for and the cultural logic of universal Humanism. Central to this universalistic posture and its binary logic is the notion of “difference” as pejoration. Subjectivity is equated 2

Introduction

with consciousness, universal rationality, and self-regulating ethical behaviour, whereas Otherness is defined as its negative and specular counterpart. In so far as difference spells inferiority, it acquires both essentialist and lethal connotations for people who get branded as “others”. (2013: 15)

Otherness is constituted by the feminine, the lower class, the non-white, the differently abled, the non-reproductive, in short, all those subjects who have been objectified, marginalized and oppressed and in the process categorized as ‘less-than-human’. The refutation of the binary logic that has underpinned Western cultural thought and fantasy forms a central strand of argumentation running through this book, which intends to dismantle the oppositional assumptions governing theories and representations of femininity and of sexuality as they dovetail in the figure of the female masochistic subject, and to contribute to the wider philosophical project of opening up a space for the recognition of multiple subject positions, desires, and pleasures outside the dialectic of identity and otherness. This project is a complex one and, as the discussions and examples that unfold in the following chapters illustrate, may encounter its own contradictions, ambiguities and discursive resistances. Such difficulties should not be ignored amidst an impatient rush towards a redemptive or positivistic outcome, but constitute a crucial part of any ethically enquiring mode of philosophical writing. The question of how to commence the current encounter with female masochism and its attendant debates is only the first of these enquiries, and may be answered by an initial engagement with the significance and conceptualization of masochism in theory and in culture. Defining Masochism

Attempting to define masochism necessitates an imposing but illuminating process that reveals much about the contested status of how this ‘perverse’ sexuality has been (mis)understood through the permutations of psychology, and literary and aesthetic theory, and popular culture. Commencing with the last of these arenas enables the beginnings of a genealogical excavation of the term ‘masochism’ and its social significance. Anita Phillips asserts that by the time the twentieth century came to its conclusion masochism had to a large extent lost its sexual origins and taken on a more generalized meaning, coming to be considered ‘as a kind of emotional and sexual waste-basket, a receptacle for the odds and ends of people’s behaviour’ (1998: 4). She gives examples of the type of practices that may now be labelled masochistic in colloquial parlance: running a marathon, eating a hot curry or researching and writing a PhD (1998: 4), in brief, any undertakings that are regarded as voluntarily painful or selfpunishing. Although anecdotal, the examples given by Phillips are familiar from 3

Female Masochism in Film

everyday speech and are indicative of a conceptual slippage between sexual and non-sexual understandings of the term. They are also enlightening on their own terms because they seem to emphasize the possibility of associating masochism with deliberation, power and subjective agency, describing activities that involve extreme behaviours and strenuous feats of endurance, requiring either a physical or mental testing and mastery of the self. One of the most vital arguments to be made in this Introduction and in subsequent chapters is that the conventional equation of masochism with passivity and submission, apparent across disciplines such as psychoanalysis and feminism, is mistaken and simplistic. While the examples provided by Phillips do not contain the sexual undercurrents that are so important to the specificities of masochistic pleasure portrayed in the films in this book, they do begin to hint at the more complex network of connections between pain, libidinal investment and satisfaction that are at stake. Contemporaneous to the pop culture usage that Phillips describes, the term is used in more specific and specialized contexts and communities. For example, in BDSM subcultures it designates a type of identity and sexual preference, within a clinical setting it is used diagnostically according to a strict set of criteria, and in film studies it has emerged as a means of theorizing the pleasures of spectatorial experience. It is therefore apparent that masochism is a concept with many possible meanings and at times little precision but, as William I. Grossman notes, it is all the more evocative as a result: ‘the complexity is part of the meaning of the term itself ’ (Grossman 1986: 387). The films and theories to be addressed here do not always depict practices that accord with normative conceptions of sexual acts but nonetheless they suggest the need for a firm reestablishment of masochism within the arena of erotic experience, whether in the form of penetrative intercourse or the mobilization of other forms of sensual corporeality, fetishistic obsession and fantasies of devotion. Tracing back the etymology of masochism leads to the literary origins of the word, if not the pathology. As with sadism, the namesake of this perversion was an author of fiction, although the moniker of Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836–1895) is less widely recognized than that of the Marquis de Sade. The terms sadism and masochism were coined, and the symptoms thus consolidated, by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his important and influential study of sexual pathologies, Psychopathia Sexualis, first published in 1886. KrafftEbing’s book was compiled and published within the context of a drive towards the categorization of sexual perversions in the second half of the nineteenth century, part of a body of new studies by writers such as Havelock Ellis, Albert Moll and Iwan Bloch, authors who (amongst others) ‘contributed to the making of modern perversity and realigned the division between the normal and the abnormal’ (Peakman 2013: 8). Sacher-Masoch’s best-known novel, Venus in Furs (1870), was also published during this period and was modelled to a large extent upon the writer’s own relationships. It recounts the story of Severin, 4

Introduction

a young man who beseeches his lover to act as a cruel mistress toward him, giving him orders at all times, admonishing him and whipping him, treating him as her plaything. Krafft-Ebing identifies Sacher-Masoch’s fantasies as expressing the symptoms of a particular sexual psychopathology and describes the distinguishing characteristic of this newly-named perversion as the desire for ‘unlimited subjection to the will of a person of the opposite sex … with the awakening and accompaniment of lustful feelings to the degree of orgasm’ (1965: 183). Early sexological studies by Krafft-Ebing and latterly Freud, who drew heavily on assumptions already laid out in Psychopathia Sexualis in his own work on perversion, pioneered the use of the term masochism to designate a manifestation of the sexual drive in which the subject finds pleasure and arousal in situations involving their submission to a love object, physical experiences of pain, and/or humiliation and debasement. Krafft-Ebing’s contribution to the history and philosophy of masochism, while valuable in naming and beginning to define a distinguishable and unique modality of sexual desire and behaviour, also served to remove masochism from the aesthetic realm associated with literature and to relocate it to the arena of symptomatology and psychiatric diagnosis. In doing so, his account initiated the epistemological process of conceptualizing masochism as a perversion in contradistinction to those sexual behaviours defined as normal and proper, giving it its significance in accordance with the binary logic of rational identity and maligned otherness. The description of masochism laid out in Psychopathia Sexualis acted as a keystone for Freud’s theorization of this paraphilia and provided much of the foundational thought for Freud’s binary schema of sadomasochistic sexuality, a schema that has persisted, with largely negative ramifications, to the present day. Krafft-Ebing describes ‘the perfect counterpart of masochism and sadism’ and instigates the presumption that they are complementary to each other both in their intrinsic characteristics and their external manifestations (1965: 140–141). Freud’s studies of the topic, particularly in early essays such as ‘Three essays on the theory of sexuality’ and ‘Instincts and their vicissitudes’ perpetuate and further ingrain this oppositional matrix into psychiatric thought and cultural consciousness, developing the pervasive binary logic in which sadism, which takes erotic pleasure in subjugating, hurting and dominating the other, is equated with masculinity, activity and dominance and masochism is associated with the converse of these attributes: femininity, passivity, submissiveness and victimization. These early Freudian texts regard masochism as a ‘secondary’ phenomenon that takes place when the aggressive drives present in sadism are introjected within the subject themselves rather than projected outwards onto other subjects and objects in the world. Masochism and sadism are tied ever tighter in a conceptual dynamic that conflates these two different perversions into one, resulting in the figure of the sadomasochistic subject. As will become further apparent in Chapter 1, masochism has 5

Female Masochism in Film

struggled to escape the shadow of sadism into which it was cast by Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud makes a peculiar and revealing statement when writing of sadomasochism. In ‘Three essays’ he writes: ‘the most common and the most significant of all the perversions – the desire to inflict pain upon the sexual object, and its reverse’ (1953: 157). Again, he is replicating a statement found in Krafft-Ebing’s text in which sadism and masochism are described as the fundamental forms of psycho-sexual perversion (1965: 142). Leo Bersani makes explicit that what is implied by Freud’s assertion, even if the psychiatrist himself is unwilling to engage with these implications, is that within Freudian theory cruelty is located as a key component of human sexuality; it may even be, Bersani argues, the elusive ‘essence’ of sexuality which theorists have repeatedly shied away from as a result of its opposition to socially and culturally accepted forms of human relations (Bersani 1986: 37). The inherence of cruelty within human sexuality accords with the repetition of the themes of excess and violence that run through the films to be explored in later chapters in imagery and narratives that include violations, mutilations and even decapitations. It also accords with the work of the theorists of sexuality that will be drawn upon in subsequent discussions, perhaps most notably the writing of Georges Bataille which, in both its fictional and non-fictional forms, encompasses the ambivalent and often transgressively violent nature of embodied sexual desire. The violence and cruelty that exist within human sexuality are frequently disavowed in social discourse or relegated to the realm of the unthinkably perverse, however, it often proves to be these moments of disruptive extremity that offer the most fertile grounds for an ethical rethinking of paradigms of erotic experience and a socioculturally embedded heterosexuality. Freud returns to what he regards as the puzzle of masochism in later essays, namely ‘A child is being beaten’ and ‘The economic problem of masochism’. In these works, he does begin tentatively to recognize the possibility that a ‘primary’ form of masochism exists, one that stems not from aggressive instincts toward the other but from self-destructive instincts apparent within the self. This shift in perspective takes place during one of the most pivotal moments in Freud’s career with the development of the theory of the death drive, a transformative notion that is laid out in ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’. His observations on the fort/da game in this essay (1955d: 14–15), in which a child repeatedly casts away and demands back their toy, suggests to Freud that in some cases there may be a compulsion for the subject to repeat or seek out traumatic and painful experiences spurred on by something beyond the drive for pleasure. Michele Aaron notes that the fort/da game indicates the existence of the repetition compulsion in which pleasure is not only experienced through the pain of loss, but actually increased by it. Unpleasure thus becomes a crucial component in the achievement of joy (Aaron 2007: 54–55). Although not a line of enquiry pursued by Freud, the fort/da game also demonstrates that the courting of 6

Introduction

unpleasure and pleasure, deferral and satisfaction, may be orchestrated by the subject themselves rather than something to which they are subjected from without. A crucial component of the enjoyment taken in this process is the combination of control over the object followed by a subsequent feeling of powerlessness once the object has been thrown away. For Freud, this leads to the realization that the pleasure principle, Eros, must work in conjunction with an opposing and more threatening instinct, Thanatos. It is only with the ‘discovery’ of Thanatos the death drive that Freud begins to entertain the idea of primary masochism (1955d: 55). The combination of cruelty and pleasure that characterizes human sexuality and, more esoterically, the dynamics of love, is a manifestation of the encounter between Eros and Thanatos and is a combination that finds its most overt form in masochism. The apparent reluctance and initial bewilderment with which Freud greets the idea of primary masochism is further reflected in title of his final paper on the subject, ‘The economic problem of masochism’ (my emphasis). Freud’s sentiments echo down through the twentieth century as theorists of masochism remain preoccupied with the paradox that lies at its heart: the seemingly irresolvable combination of pleasure and pain, long regarded as polarized elements within the matrix of human experience. It is quite impossible to liberate masochism from this paradox without first deconstructing the dualistic and oppositional logic that provides the framework for Freudian theory and for the institutionalized systems of Western knowledge to which Freud belongs. As early as 1986, Grossman makes the point that masochism only seems contradictory if pain and pleasure are taken to be opposites in the most absolute sense (1986: 410). A simple point, and yet the Western conviction of the aversive nature of pain remains predominant and behaviour associated with the deliberate pursuit of pain and other sensations of displeasure is still widely regarded as at best a puzzlement and at worst a perversion that signifies mental disturbance and the potential for the destruction of self or others. Pleasure and pain remain trapped within a structure that can regard them only as opposites rather than different modes of sensation. However, it is precisely the potential of masochism and its attendant physical and psychical experiences to throw open or render redundant oppositional binaries that enables it to act as a radical and ethical force. Masochistic sexuality and the masochistic aesthetic that expresses it in formal terms demonstrates firstly, the restrictions upon thought imposed by existing theoretical paradigms, and secondly, the inadequacy of these paradigms for a truly ethical consideration of any subjectivities and intersubjectivities positioned as exterior to majoritarian norms. Consequently, one of the central argumentative strands needed for the catalysing of masochism’s potential as a disruptive and ethical modality is a rigorous deconstruction of the pervasive oppositional binaries that still dominate theory and cultural representation. The films to be addressed in 7

Female Masochism in Film

subsequent chapters are so significant because they refuse this reductive logic and demand a reconceptualization of masochism, desire and pleasure that is situated outside of this Freudian model, which despite many critiques of his form of psychoanalysis has remained exceptionally persistent across a range of disciplines through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. As the ideas that unfold in these films and the theories that accompany them in the following chapters demonstrate, it is not merely a question of reversing the existing schema but of proposing an alternative and flexible philosophy of sexuality, sensation and aesthetics that is better equipped to facilitate ethical encounters between subjects, experiences and the cultural imaginings that mediums such as cinema express. Brian Massumi argues in favour of a theorization of bodies and what they can do in terms of emergence and process, rather than rigid significations and codings that tie them into fixed positions. Approaching bodies in this way involves the discarding of oppositional logic: ‘“Passing into” is not a binarism. “Emerging” is not a binarism. They are dynamic unities’ (2002: 8). Massumi’s call for a more ‘limber’ and even playful perspective that enables the transformative and multiple processes of the body to be put into thought without becoming fossilized resonates with the project of this book, which posits that masochistic sexuality may be conceptualized from a radically different perspective: not as a simply passive or reactive form of desire, but as a complex, emergent and ‘in-between’ phenomenon that throws into chaos such oppositional definitions as subject/object, normal/abnormal, and pleasure/ pain and calls forth alternative modes of thinking about the embodied self and the relation of this self to others. Just as the demand for the theoretical reconfiguration that masochism calls into being emerges from its prior position of ensnarement within the binary web, so the beginnings of the alternative conceptual route to be plotted may be found in the marginal and conventionally derided category of perversion. As Julie Peakman establishes in her comprehensive cultural history of perversion, the conceptualization of sexual behaviour in normative and nonnormative terms is hardly a modern phenomenon and can be traced back many centuries: ‘Sexual perversions have been termed “deviant acts”, “abnormal behaviour”, “acts against nature”, “unnatural acts”, “abominable vices” and so on’ (2013: 8). The emergence of the discourse of perversion that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century consolidated these terms and enabled the construction of a ‘scientific’ body of knowledge about abnormal sexuality, an arena within which masochism become firmly situated and which has subsequently informed the predominantly negative aura that surrounds masochism in existing theory. Initially, the pervasive association of masochism with perversity may appear an obstacle that must be contextualized historically and socioculturally in order to be dismissed as irrelevant to twenty-first century understandings. However, studying the significance of perversity opens up 8

Introduction

many fascinating and valuable avenues of enquiry that augment the positioning of masochism as ethically and aesthetically radical. This can only be of benefit in challenging and rethinking the normative structures that have governed how sexuality, gender and embodiment are perceived and represented within culture. Furthermore, the designation of masochism as a state of psychical abnormality and, in fact, as a mental illness persists into the twenty-first century. The World Health Organization continues to offer an outline of diagnostic criteria for the condition ‘Sexual Masochism’ as a ‘Sexual and Gender Identity Disorder’ in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the current version being the DSM-V, despite critiques from some quarters of psychiatric discourse (see Krueger 2010, for a summary of these debates). The DSM-V documentation uses the more modern term ‘paraphilia’ in place of ‘perversion’, a linguistic shift common to recent writing on the subject of non-normative sexualities and an attempt to avoid the connotations of moral judgment that have historically been entrenched in the word perversion. Peakman describes the term paraphilia as used in the DSM to connote ‘a sexual arousal in relation to a certain object, situation or individual which is not regarded as part of normative stimuli’ (2013: 11). It is apparent that despite this terminological update many of the tropes recognizable from Freudian theory are maintained in modern accounts of paraphilias, and masochistic fantasies and behaviours continue to be associated with pathology and deviance according to the values of the dominant. What, then, is Freud’s justification for designating masochism a ‘perversion’? A closer examination of his ‘Three essays on the theory of sexuality’ reveals that his definition of perversity is remarkably (and notoriously) broad, encompassing any activity that either extends anatomically beyond the genital regions of the body or that lingers for too long over the ‘intermediate relations’ that take place en route to the ‘normal’ sexual aim of genital heterosexual penetrative intercourse (Freud 1953: 150). Such a definition of perversion is, at best, imprecise; taking Freud at face value here would suggest that much of human sexual behaviour entails an element of perversity, a claim that paradoxically renders his project of defining a ‘normal’ model of sexuality rather futile. As Jacques-Alain Miller argues, the very notion of ‘normality’ is thrown into question by Freud’s account because it demonstrates the fact that subjects can seek sexual gratification outside normative forms of biological coupling (Miller 1996b: 311). Furthermore, not only does it demonstrate that the subject may seek gratification elsewhere, but that much of the time this gratification is successfully found and proves to be preferable to the subject when compared to the more restrictive pleasures (and, indeed, unpleasures) of normativity. The second, related, point that Miller articulates is that Freud himself presents the evidence for perversion being a primary state in his work on infantile sexuality (Miller 1996b: 313). Just as sadism and masochism emerge as fundamental aspects of human sexuality in ‘Three essays on the theory of 9

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sexuality’, so Freud argues that children have a polymorphous sexuality which is not limited to genital satisfaction but takes in stages such as the oral and the anal, and in doing so he locates perversity at the centre of erotic experience. What is regarded as perversity by the dominant is therefore a primary state and ‘normal’ sexuality is secondary and socially learned (Freud 1953: 191). We are all, to some extent, perverse subjects; each of our bodies holds the potential for polymorphous pleasure and the defiance of a socially prescribed form of embodied desire. As Karmen MacKendrick puts it, whether Freud intends to or not his theory makes clear the ‘inherence of the perverse within the normal’ (MacKendrick 1999: 7). Despite Freud’s best efforts to demarcate the hierarchical categories of normality and perversion, much of his body of work and in particular his conceptualization of infantile sexuality demonstrates the impossibility of this task. More recently, Nobus, drawing upon Benjamin Karpman’s work on sexual offenders (1954), suggests that the broadness of Freud’s description has led, somewhat absurdly, to the introduction of a distinction between the oxymoronic category of ‘normal perverts’ and that of ‘abnormal perverts’, the latter engaging only in non-reproductive activities (Nobus 2006: 7). Such a formulation indicates the arbitrariness of categories of normality and abnormality, but sidesteps the question of why so many facets of human sexual behaviour have been relocated to the marginal arena of perversity and, furthermore, does not address the possibility that heterosexual genital intercourse may entail pathologies of its own. According to the logic outlined by Nobus, the majority of the protagonists of the films to be studied here would be classified as ‘normal perverts’ because they are also depicted as engaging in heterosexual vaginal penetrative intercourse. Yet, they are characters whose masochistic subjectivity inspires them to act in ways that transgress ‘normality’ and stray at times into the equally conceptually problematic area situated precariously on the boundaries of sanity and insanity: they may be labelled selfloathing, self-destructive, mad in the desires that seem incomprehensible when measured according to normative standards. Therefore, it is more constructive to move away from the psychoanalytic preoccupation with labelling specific acts as ‘perverse’ or ‘normal’ in themselves and instead conceptualize perversity as a structural mode that transgresses and deviates, in the most literal sense of the word, from dominant systems of thought, representation and action. Lisa Downing argues that the modes of sexual fantasy and behaviour that came to be known historically as perversions, and frequently continue to be regarded as such, still offer a potentially fruitful area of investigation and should not be hastily dismissed or overwritten (Downing 2006: 159–60). This is not to suggest that the many problematic assumptions tangled up with the concept of perversion as cultural construct should remain unchallenged, but rather that an interrogation of what is labelled ‘perverse’ and who is categorized as a ‘pervert’ may offer valuable insights for ethically-focused enquiries into 10

Introduction

gender, sexuality and embodiment. For example, is perversion gendered, and if so, how? Pertinently for this study, what is the relationship between feminine desire and perversity, particularly in relation to fantasies and acts that deviate from the normative model of reproductive heterosexuality? What does it mean for an intersubjective encounter to become perverse, and what might the ramifications of such an encounter be? To argue in favour of perversion as an active, questioning state of being as well as a series of practices is to recognize its disruptive potential and to acknowledge the challenges and demands that perverse sexualities such as masochism make upon dominant and damagingly ossified modes of thought around gender, sexuality, mental illness, and the body. Nobus writes that if ‘perversion is inseparable from a regulatory discursive system of normality, then it could be argued that those theorizing and diagnosing the condition merely pathologize, as authoritative extensions of the ruling ideology, those behaviours that threaten the sustainability of the system, with a view to their segregation and eradication’ (2006: 11). In line with Nobus’s claim, it is evident that the psychoanalytic and psychiatric definitions of perversion and paraphilia function in accordance with two discursive regulatory systems that have played a critical role in shaping the conceptualization of sexuality: the religious and the economic. The tenet that reproductive heterosexual intercourse is the only proper and acceptable form of sexuality runs parallel to the sanctioning of sex only within wedlock by the Christian church, a demand which although outmoded still retains an ideological hold upon the morality and to some extent, legality of Western social systems. ‘The legitimate and procreative couple laid down the law’ (Foucault 1976: 3). The emphasis on reproductive sexuality is further attributable to the elevation of production as the paramount imperative of capitalist society from the seventeenth century onward, as Foucault suggests in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, The Will to Knowledge: ‘At a time when labor capacity was being systematically exploited, how could this capacity be allowed to dissipate itself in pleasurable pursuits, except in those – reduced to a minimum – that enabled it to reproduce itself ?’ (1976: 6). Masochism is positioned as exterior to the reproductive aim so cherished by Western religious and politico-economic doctrines. Instead of progressing towards the ‘end-point’ of sexual pleasure and the completion of satisfaction it thrives on scenarios of suspense and delay, eschews the genital zones in favour of more dispersive realms of the body, or displaces erotic experience from the human body through disavowal and fetishism (for example, the fascination with fur garments in Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs). Foucault further acknowledges that as the normative model of the legitimate couple became consolidated, so too categories of perversions multiplied, a proliferation of ‘abnormalities’ that could be studied, treated and otherwise regulated: ‘a distribution of points of power, hierarchized and placed opposite to one another; “pursued” pleasures, that is, both sought after and searched 11

Female Masochism in Film

out; compartmental sexualities that are tolerated or encouraged’ (1976: 46). The regulation of sexuality according to ideological tenets emphasizes the inextricable connection that has developed over many centuries between power and not only the practices of sex themselves but the representation of sex and sexuality, the way it is spoken about or envisioned, who is authorized to speak about it, what is said and what is silenced. The exploration of the sexual body and its practices from various perspectives over the course of chapters 1 to 5 of this book, takes as a starting point the notion of the body, and in particular the female body, as a locus within these hierarchical networks of regulation and power and will attend to the question of, to paraphrase Foucault, what type of power is brought to bear on the body and on sex (1976: 47). In this context, one of the most significant aspects of masochism is the way in which it foregrounds the question of power as an overt element of its practices, performing and making visible the negotiations of power that lie beneath all sexual acts. The discussion that unfolds in the following chapters will oscillate inwards to explore how social power works upon the body, and outwards, to question the ways in which the perverse body and its pleasures might enact its own force upon the social realm in turn. In a more recent text that carries echoes of Foucault’s work, Lee Edelman argues that Western society in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century still revolves around the rhetoric of what he terms ‘reproductive futurism’, a sociopolitical agenda in which the projected figure of the Child ‘remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention’ (2004: 3). Any non-procreative sexualities or identities are ejected from the social sphere as a result of their presumed inability to engage with or effect any politics of future life, with this exteriorized position coming to encompass a queerness which is figured as antithetical to the ‘good’ of the social realm and is regarded as embodying the social order’s death drive: an otherness of the most extreme form. However, Edelman’s avowed project is not to reject this position of negation in order to move towards the assimilation of queerness into the norm, but to embrace it as an ethical stance that enables the articulation of ‘a constant no in response to the law of the Symbolic’ (2004: 5). The ‘good’ embodied in the illusionist avatar of the future Child and the ideological regulatory practices that circle around this avatar would, in the conception of queerness that Edelman proposes, be superseded by ‘something I want to call “better”, though it promises, in more than one sense of the word, absolutely nothing’ (2004: 5). That the ‘better’ that Edelman evokes remains undefined is key to its ethical nature and reiterates Massumi’s delight when he asserts that philosophies of emergence should be attentive to the potential of vagueness: ‘Vague concepts, and concepts of vagueness, have a crucial, and often enjoyable, role to play’ (2002: 13). A lack of determinacy is vital in order to avoid replacing one set of ossified and restrictive cultural fantasies and narratives with another; the aim is not to 12

Introduction

rearrange the hierarchies by which similarity and alterity are organized but to transform the terms of the debate altogether in ways that must remain fluid, multiple and open to new passages of thought. The masochistic embodied subject is located at the intersection of regulatory practices that strive to govern sexuality and enjoyment, yes, but also physical and mental health, suffering (as in who is expected to suffer and how, or whose suffering is socially recognized), and vitally, gender. Pulling at one of these threads necessitates a reconfiguration of the rest as new formations of thought and representation are coaxed or even forced into being, and it is for this reason that masochism holds theoretical and ethical significance beyond the relatively narrow realm of perversion. Masochism and the Female Subject

Thus far, masochism has been expressed in general terms without particular attendance to the question of gender. Now attention must turn to the specificities of female masochism and the theoretically and politically fraught figure of the female masochist. The first notable point to make about these debates is the pronounced absence of the female figure in many nineteenth and twentieth century accounts of this perversion. With one evident but problematic exception, Freud’s essay ‘A child is being beaten’, Krafft-Ebing and Freud scarcely consider the possibility of masochistic desire occurring in women or girls. In these and later psychoanalytically-influenced studies by authors such as Theodor Reik, Gilles Deleuze and Gaylyn Studlar (to be examined further in Chapter 1) the female masochist finds herself all but written out of theory, a failure of articulation in line with the difficulties Western discourse has in recognizing alterity outside the default assumption of the human subject as male. While it is true that the impetus behind ‘A child is being beaten’ results from female patients who have described beating fantasies to Freud, his explanation for this phenomenon is strictly contained within masculine frameworks. Kaja Silverman observes that Freud can only account for female occurrences of this perverse sexuality by attributing them to identification with the male subject, and through the audacious invention of an entire stage in the fantasy sequence: a ‘subconscious’ phase that reaffirms the masochistic position as a crisis of the male subject position and in doing so judges female sexuality by the standard of the male (Silverman 1992: 201–203). There are female patients and desires at stake here, but they are once again overwritten by the drama of masculinity and effectively silenced. Freud’s final essay on the topic, ‘The economic problem of masochism’, is further suggestive of the reasons for the omission of the female masochism on her own terms, rather than those of the masculine. Here, Freud identifies three typical forms of the pathology: erotogenic masochism, feminine masochism and moral masochism. The first of these constitutes the basic criteria 13

Female Masochism in Film

of finding sexual excitement in pain and is also at the root of the other two. Feminine masochism is described by Freud as the expression of what he terms ‘the feminine nature’ and manifests itself through the desire to be castrated and to be passive in the sexual relationship, with further associations with infantile behaviours through a relinquishing of control and agency (1961a: 162). Moral masochism, which will be revisited in more detail in Chapter 2, suggests a loosening of the sexual urges as the desire to be punished leaks into all areas of the subject’s life. It is the label and form of feminine masochism that is of particular interest in the context of the elision of the female masochist subject, and the reductive ramifications of Freud’s dualistic theoretical pattern are again all too apparent. When discussing feminine masochism he assumes that it is a condition that only afflicts male subjects as an aberration. He appropriates those attributes that are normatively regarded as feminine (submission, passivity, lack) in his description of male masochism while simultaneously sidelining the female subject herself. Silverman has accurately observed that Freud assumes feminine masochism is pathological, and therefore worthy of comment, only when it occurs in the male subject. For the female, experiences of passivity and submission during sexual acts and within relationships more broadly are regarded as ‘natural’ parts of her subjectivity and are not, therefore, indications of mental abnormality (Silverman 1992: 189). Silverman furthermore suggests that this assumption pervades not only the work of Freud, but also that of Krafft-Ebing, Reik and Deleuze (1992: 190). Deleuze can perhaps be forgiven as his essay ‘Coldness and cruelty’ focuses primarily upon the literary style of the male masochist Sacher-Masoch and the way in which this style echoes the formal qualities of masochism. Nonetheless, these theorists who have been so central to the conceptualization of masochism and the psychiatric, perverse and aesthetic discourse around it have resoundingly neglected the female masochist and the accompanying experiences that specifically attend to or are reliant upon the female body. For feminist and lesbian and gay theorists the ‘problem’ of masochism took on another shade in late-twentieth century debates as the practices of sadomasochism and bondage become a hotly contested topic in the ‘sex wars’ of feminism, with the result that attention was drawn to this paraphilia in its most explicit form. Mandy Merck notes that during this period of fierce debate the discourses surrounding s/m become less about specific acts and more about wider concerns surrounding gender, power and what constitutes ‘proper conduct’ (1993: 237). These debates were fuelled by incidents such as the 1990 Spanner investigation in England in which 15 men were charged with Actual Bodily Harm after engaging in gay s/m acts, despite these acts being consensual and private. Eight were given prison sentences, the longest of which was four and a half years (see Thompson 1994 for a more detailed analysis of this case). In line with Foucault’s assertion that sexuality has been the subject of regulatory 14

Introduction

discourse from a variety of angles including religious, medical and legal, during this time the distinctions between private and public become decidedly blurred as once again sexual practice became a hub for concerns about morality and propriety. Pat Califia, one of the most outspoken proponents of s/m as a valid form of sexual practice, states that the Spanner case was another incident in which the ideology of the state shifted what had previously been private and personal into the political arena (Califia 2000: 146). Thus, the question of masochistic sexuality and its social, moral and political significations rose to troubled prominence in feminist theory. Much of the pro-masochism writing in relation to s/m communities has focused upon lesbian and gender-queer relationships (for example Califia and Samois 1983, Califia and Sweeney 1996, Merck 1993). These accounts regard the enactment of sadomasochistic scenes as a space of exploration and play external to the patriarchal power dynamics that prevail in everyday life, taking a celebratory and even redemptive view of an area of sexuality that has historically been shadowed by the spectres of pathology and perversion (a perspective that is, to some extent, replicated in Secretary, as Chapter 3 will address). The possibilities that heterosexual sadomasochism holds for the subversion of sociocultural gender dynamics has most commonly been located in couplings that seem to reverse patriarchal power structures through a female dominant and a male submissive (for example McClintock 1993); this succeeds in offering a more positive and constructive portrayal of sexual preferences hitherto thought of as deviant, but continues to either ignore female masochism or depict it from the derisive perspective of being ‘bad for feminism’. Texts retaining a positive attitude to BDSM in general, if not to the female masochistic position specifically, were counterbalanced in the ‘sex wars’ by feminist responses arguing strongly against sadomasochistic sex play and in particular against the adoption of the submissive or passive role being taken by the female subject. Collections such as Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis (Linden 1982), for example, regard masochism in women as the perverse effect of the fantasies of patriarchal ideology functioning to normalize the victimization and objectification of women. Louise J. Kaplan’s book Female Perversions (1991) develops this premise to offer a sustained but critical study of female masochism. Kaplan’s argument asserts that aberrant female sexuality takes the form of compulsive behaviours such as self-mutilation, anorexia and kleptomania in contrast to male perversions such as fetishism and sadism. Downing has described Kaplan’s formulation as one in which perversion manifests itself as a ‘distorted exaggeration of the socially prescribed gender characteristics of each sex’ (2006: 158). Female masochism in its overt form is thus conceptualized negatively as an introjection of the patriarchal restrictions placed upon women that force them into roles of passivity and subjugation, with the actions and desires of the female masochist serving to re-inscribe the power dynamics of a society dominated by men and phallological structures. 15

Female Masochism in Film

The oppositional categories set in place by Freudian theory remain intact in these critiques: the stubborn association of masochism with a denigrated feminine position of passivity remains and the question of what masochistic embodied experience may mean to those who undertake it is left unexplored. Lynda Hart’s work on sadomasochism and performance offers a useful rebuttal to these critiques, in particular the emphasis that she places upon the distinction between ‘being’ and ‘seeming’. Running through Hart’s book Between the Body and the Flesh is a recognition that much of the anxiety about sadomasochistic practices and desires in theory and in society at large is related to concerns about what is ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ and what is ‘faked’ or ‘pretend’. When addressing the realms of fantasy, desire and pleasure, however, it is often impossible to draw such dualistic divisions between these realms, as Hart acknowledges. As several of the films and theories that appear in subsequent chapters make clear, masochism does not operate according to the ontological schema in which all must be as it seems, or appear as it actually is. Hart argues that feminist critiques such as those of Linden and Kaplan are locked into an assumption based upon a visual economy in which because heterosexual female masochism looks like the oppressive model found throughout patriarchy, it must consequently be a direct replication of it (Hart 1998: 85). This visual economy ignores the elements of performance and drama that are often critical within a masochistic scenario and neglects to consider the actual physical sensations of pain and pleasure that the subject may experience. To consider all heterosexual female masochism under the rubric of the internalization of patriarchy is to construct a predetermined position that leaves no space for the emergence and transgressive potentiality of this perverse sexuality. The same formula is repeated: masochism equals passivity equals powerlessness equals negativity. Hart argues that this results in a cultural attitude that positions masochistic women as the most pitiable and even despicable group amongst the range of identities apparent in modern sexual life: they exhibit too explicitly the shameful thing that they already ‘are’ (Hart 1998: 31). The residual trace of Freud’s binary logic echoes through feminist critiques of female masochism and this is a logic that means ‘women cannot perform the masochistic role because they are masochists’ (Hart 1998: 89). Male masochism, whether conceptualized as a pathology or a role-reversing aspect of sex play, appears as an ‘unnatural’ or performed state. Female masochism is seen as corresponding to either the ‘facts’ of feminine nature or to the patriarchally constructed norms of feminine behaviour. The reluctance of some feminist writers to theorize masochism from a more positive perspective is perhaps understandable, but the films explored in later chapters demonstrate how the assumption that masochism serves only to underline existing patriarchal power relations is based upon the mistaken binary logic that new philosophies of subjectivity and sexuality must strive to avoid. One of the inherent flaws apparent in feminist critiques of female masochism 16

Introduction

is that they fail to deconstruct the conceptual framework that they are opposing. The visual economy that Hart identifies in these feminist accounts adheres to the obsession with specularity that has permeated Western philosophy and representation, a tendency critiqued by Luce Irigaray as a strategy of phallologocentrism that can be observed in theories from Plato’s cave to Freud’s Oedipal Complex and beyond. Irigaray argues that visibility has always been perceived as an assurance of ontological certainty within the Western patriarchal epistemological tradition (1985b: 26). The complex, transitional and ambivalent arrangements of power that are catalysed through masochistic encounters defy normative understandings of the appearances of activity and passivity, dominance and submission, and cannot be adequately understood through the scopic tradition that Hart and Irigaray identify. Chosen submission, whether arranged according to the fantasies and designs of the masochist herself or of a more unpredictable and even perilous nature, cannot be equated with the oppression of women by patriarchy. To draw such an equivalence denies the masochist her agency and furthermore, refuses to acknowledge the commingled physical and psychical sensations and intensities of masochism. These are after all experiences that take place in the indeterminate space between pleasure and pain, control and submission, interiority and exteriority. Irigaray writes: Perhaps it is time to return to that repressed entity, the female imaginary. So woman does not have a sex organ? She has at least two of them, but they are not identifiable as ones. Indeed, she has many more. Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural … Indeed, woman’s pleasure does not have to choose between clitoral activity and vaginal passivity, for example. The pleasure of the vaginal caress does not have to be substituted for that of the clitoral caress. They each contribute, irreplaceably, to woman’s pleasure. (1985b: 28)

The understanding of the fantasies, sensations and pleasures of the female masochistic body as irrevocably plural will be of great value as this book progresses, moving beyond the genital caresses identified by Irigaray (although not excluding them) and into numerous other facets of feeling including the varied realms of the skin, the fingers and hands, and the new openings of the wounded body that further perplex the demarcation of inside and outside, self and other. The female protagonists of the films explore and express these multiple potentialities of sensation, challenging the assumption of masochism as a rigid identity of victimhood. They are active in the sense that for the most part, it is their decisions and desires that propel the narratives of the films forward, and at least initially they each maintain some level of control over the encounters that take place. That the outcomes of their libidinous urges are sometimes ambiguous or even disastrous should be seen not as a condemnation of the female masochistic position or a failure of masochistic desire, but instead 17

Female Masochism in Film

as an indication of the way in which this position has been marginalized and misunderstood. The inadequacy of the choices available to the women depicted in these films in their fantasy lives and sexual relationships draws attention to the conceptual and representational failures that surround female pleasure and embodiment in a Western sociocultural context more broadly. Furthermore, the emergence of this tendency in recent cinema and the shared aesthetic and ethical concern with explicitly confrontational forms and provocative themes make clear that female masochism is a form of sexuality that should not be ignored, even if it creates discord with what some may perceive as being the project of feminism. A dual need is apparent for a rethinking of the imagery and narratives brought into the world through female masochistic desire, and for an address to the ways in which the spectator is called to respond to these representations. The authorship of these films adds further emphasis to this debate; almost all the cinematic texts included are female-authored to a greater or lesser extent. The majority are both written and directed by women. Some of the included filmmakers are internationally known (Jane Campion, Catherine Breillat), others are on their way to becoming established independent figures (Andrea Arnold, Marina de Van), and some are relative newcomers, as yet receiving little attention from the mainstream media or film academics (Julia Leigh, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani). Of the three main films here directed by male filmmakers, two are based upon source material by women writers: Shainberg’s Secretary upon the short story of the same name by Mary Gaitskill (1989) with a screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson, and The Piano Teacher, directed by Michael Haneke and adapted from the novel by Elfriede Jelinek (1999). Indeed, Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves stand out as a notable exception of an almost solely male-authored film and as Chapter 2 will argue, despite its perhaps controversial pairing of religion and sex, follows a conventionally established trajectory of feminine self-sacrifice that forecloses openness of meaning in a way that many of the other films here do not. The association of female directors with films that tackle so-called ‘women’s issues’ and address the place of the female subject within wider culture is not a recent phenomenon. Even a passing familiarity with the history of cinema throws up numerous examples of women directors producing films about relationships, kinship and domesticity and working within genres regarded appropriate to these themes such as melodrama or romances in Hollywood, independent cinema and the European art-house tradition: the melodramas of Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino, the romantic comedies of Nora Ephron or the politicized addresses to nationality and memory in the work of Julie Dash and Helena Sanders-Brahms. Italian director Liliani Cavani should also be mentioned here for her controversial film The Night Porter (1974) which provided an early study of the ambiguous and self-destructive drives of sadomasochism and which Teresa de Lauretis regards as sitting in troubled proximity to, if 18

Introduction

not directly categorizable as, ‘women’s cinema’ (de Lauretis 1976). Given the disapprobation with which many feminist theorists have approached the topic of female masochism, it seems particularly notable that the bulk of the recent films that have contributed to this emergent depiction of female sexuality have been created by women filmmakers. While it is important to avoid an essentializing viewpoint that suggests it is impossible to find replications of the structures of male sociocultural domination in female-authored work, the predominance of women directors and writers here is further indicative that fantasies of female masochism and erotic investment in these fantasies should not be hastily dismissed as the regurgitated project of a patriarchal ideology, even when these depictions are troubled and violent. Each of the subsequent chapters will identify a key thematic area in order to examine some of the commonalities between these representations of female masochism, and in doing so will address debates around female sexuality and corporeality in the context of aesthetics and ethics. Chapter 1 will explore Gilles Deleuze’s important attempt to disengage masochism from the discourse of psychiatric diagnosis and return it to the realm of aesthetics through an analysis of formal qualities such as suspension, delay, fetishism and disavowal in the essay ‘Coldness and cruelty’. In particular, Deleuze identifies the device of the masochistic contract as being a crucial component of this aesthetic in ensuring the fantasized tableaux of the masochist are carried out according to their design. Deleuze’s study is of particular significance for the argument of this book for two primary reasons. Firstly, the centrality that he gives to the contract re-situates the balance of power from the ‘torturer’ to the masochist, with the latter emerging as the active and controlling force within the intersubjective dynamic of dominance and submission, disrupting the rigid lines inherent within the binary logic of Freudian theory that align masochism with victimization and weakness. The potential ramifications of this shift in power will be further discussed through the example of The Piano Teacher, Michael Haneke’s study of polymorphous perversity and sadomasochism, and Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty. Secondly, the combination of the contract and the formal emphasis in Deleuze’s work means that ‘Coldness and cruelty’ has been of special interest to film theorists who have used his theory as the basis for an analysis of the masochistic aesthetic in cinema and for the proposal of masochism as a spectatorial model. This chapter will therefore additionally examine the relationship between masochism and film studies by focusing upon writers including Gaylyn Studlar and Michele Aaron. In doing so, the need will become apparent for a new theory of masochism, ethics and aesthetics that attends to the specificities of female experience and the disruptive potential held by female corporeality and pleasure with regard to spectatorship and the transgression of sociocultural norms. 19

Female Masochism in Film

Lars von Trier is one of the contemporary directors most strongly associated with representations of female masochism, having produced several films that depict a version of ‘goodness’ which is predicated on a trajectory of feminine self-sacrifice and ensconced within a wider tradition of martyrdom discourse. Chapter 2 will examine his film Breaking the Waves, in which this model of masochistic goodness is simultaneously idealized and sexualized as the body of the protagonist becomes a vehicle of endurance and devotion amidst violation and assault. Von Trier’s film will be juxtaposed with Andrea Arnold’s Red Road, with philosophical writings by Lacan, Bataille and Derrida, and with significant literary characters such as de Sade’s Justine and Sophocles’s Antigone. This conjunction of texts will enable the thinking through of the tensions between the problematically gendered logic of sacrifice in which the feminine body is annihilated in service of the male, and the erotic potential of a chosen relinquishing of self as a response to the vulnerability of the other. A key theme to be introduced in this chapter and developed in subsequent discussions is the question of the (limited) choices that are available to the perverse female subject within a societal order that is dominated by heteronormativity. Then, in response to this question, enquiries into how this desiring being, marked by alterity, may negotiate these choices and forge a new and more ethically aware modality of intersubjectivity. The specificity of the female body and feminine embodied experience introduced in Chapter 2 will be further developed in chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3 offers a reflection upon cultural representations of, and attitudes towards, self-harm, with a focus on the prescriptive modes of meaning that have been imposed upon the self-mutilating subject and the female self-mutilating subject specifically. Both the material and conceptual bodies of this figure have been trapped within discursive webs that force it to signify, variously but equally restrictively, the self-loathing generated by a damaging patriarchy, the evidence of the primitive and inhuman nature of the objectified girl or mental illness and a suicidal pathology. Secretary and The Piano Teacher each combine depictions of ritualized self-injurious behaviour with the evocation of sadomasochistic intersubjectivity, and in doing so raise questions about the place of masochism within discourses of self-harmful practices more broadly. To some extent, these films remain within the pathologized networks of cultural meaning that selfmutilation and masochism have each been subjected to; however, an alternative mode of representation may be located in Marina de Van’s more avant-garde film In My Skin. The experimental aesthetic of de Van’s work, when placed in conjunction with Julia Kristeva’s study of meaning-making, Revolution in Poetic Language, indicates a move toward self-mutilation as an asignifying system that resists normative modalities of language and communication. This asignification catalyses a reflective ethical response in the spectator as they are prompted to think about the wounded or scarred body anew. 20

Introduction

The importance of alternative modes of spectatorship in response to the body continues to be a central concern in Chapter 4. Here, with the help of feminist theorists including Irigaray and Kristeva, it will be argued that Catherine Breillat’s Romance and Jane Campion’s In the Cut perform a process of generic reconfiguration, simultaneously making use of and challenging tropes from dominant modes of filmmaking that are conventionally reliant upon the objectification and victimization of the female body for their construction of spectatorial enjoyment (specifically, pornography and the erotic thriller). Campion and Breillat are each known for their depictions of the vicissitudes of female desire and the difficulties of negotiating heterosexual relationships within Western patriarchal ideology. In the works discussed in this chapter, the masochist aesthetic emerges as inextricably bound up with the project of perverting normative portrayals of the female body through the development of narratives and forms that juxtapose moments of beauty and extreme pleasure with moments designed to provoke disgust and horror. These unpleasurable experiences re-situate the spectator and invoke an alternative encounter with female corporeality and desire that is antithetical to the conventions of phallocratic visual discourse. Chapter 5 offers some meditations upon one of the central and constitutive components of the masochist aesthetic, the heterocosmic impulse: the desire to remake the world according to the perverse and transgressive fantasies and rituals of masochism. Deleuze and others have explored the heterocosm primarily through its significance for the formal aspects of this sexuality, but this chapter will argue that the aesthetic and ethical debates that masochism engages with must always be thought of in relation to each other, intertwined modes of thought rather than separate realms of experience. The experimental imagery and haptic sensibilities of the gialli-inspired film Amer, placed alongside philosophical approaches from theorists including Bataille, MacCormack and Foucault, offer a fertile ground for an elaboration of how the heterocosmic impulse might catalyse the process of rethinking the relationship between self and other and self and world. Crucial here will be the shift from knowledge, as rigid and regulatory practice, to thinking and thought as ongoing processes of exploration, creativity and discovery. Taken as a whole, the weaving together of film and theory in this book offers its own process of engagement with alterity. Those bodies and subjectivities that have been categorized as perverse, insane, disgusting and obscene, and that have been restricted or silenced through the controlling structures of phallocratic knowledge, emerge here to demand a dissolution of binary logic through the creation of new and never-completed networks of experience, desire, encounter.

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Chapter 1

The Deleuzian Model and the Masochistic Contract The model of masochism outlined by Krafft-Ebing and developed and cemented in theoretical and, to a large extent, popular thought by Freud’s psychoanalytic interpretation remained predominantly unchallenged until Gilles Deleuze’s intervention on the topic with the 1967 essay ‘Le froid et le cruel’, translated into English with the title ‘Coldness and cruelty’ (Deleuze 1991). The more robust rejection of Freudian psychoanalysis that would follow in Deleuze’s collaborations with Felix Guattari was at this point in its germinal stage. ‘Coldness and cruelty’, therefore, refutes the aspects of Freud’s theories of sadomasochism that Deleuze finds most pernicious while nonetheless utilizing key concepts familiar from Freudian theory such as the death drive, ego and superego. He also retains a focus on the role of infant/parent dynamics in the formation of masochistic subjectivity, however, there is a significant shift in emphasis from paternal law to the figure of the mother, suggesting a subversion of the phallic basis of the symbolic order. Deleuze’s essay has two primary aims that hold particular significance for the discussion in this book and that must be understood in conjunction with each other. Firstly, to put forward a conceptualization of masochism that relocates it from the arena of the pathological with its attendant connotations of mental illness, diagnosis and clinical cure, to the realm of the aesthetic. More accurately, to return it to the specific aesthetic form that permeates the literature of Sacher-Masoch, a form that Deleuze regards as epitomizing the movements and pleasures of masochistic desire and experience. Rejecting the language of pathology, Deleuze argues that this form of sexuality is not named after the novelist because he ‘suffered’ from it but because he transformed the symptoms and forged the beginnings of a ‘masochist aesthetic’ (1991: 142). Gaylyn Studlar comments that in ‘Coldness and cruelty’ Deleuze himself performs a similar ‘break’ with previous patterns of thought, displacing focus from psychiatric and psychoanalytic explanations and repositioning masochism in relation to formal factors such as language, narrative structure and textual pleasure (Studlar 1988: 14). Deleuze’s second intention also instigates a significant rupture with earlier theory. He argues vociferously against the assumed complementary opposition of masochism and sadism that is given such prominence by Krafft-Ebing, and that becomes ever more firmly entrenched in the Freudian oppositional

Female Masochism in Film

matrix that posits sadism and masochism as manifestations of the same drive differing only in aim. That this assumption has been so enduring is perhaps unsurprising, for the intertwined nature of these paraphilias may appear not only commonsensical but also satisfyingly neat. As Deleuze puts it: ‘It may seem obvious that the sadist and the masochist are destined to meet. The fact that the one enjoys inflicting while the other enjoys suffering pain seems to be such striking proof of their complementarity that it would be disappointing if the encounter did not take place’ (1991: 40). The projection of this narrative onto the figures of the sadist and the masochist is indicative of the same cultural fantasies that fuel the abundance of popular representations of happy romances and idealized relationships, visible from romantic comedies to dating websites, the ‘you complete me’ mantra that the perfect partner awaits each of us. Such an illusion of the harmonious union between masochist and sadist is but a slightly more unorthodox version of this fantasy and functions to disavow the transgressive potential that masochism as perversion holds. The enormous success of E.L. James’s recent Fifty Shades trilogy (2011–2012) stands as testament to the continuing cultural investment in this image, drawing upon the allure of ‘illicit’ forms of sexual practice while ultimately reaffirming the heteronormative conviction that for women, the path to a ‘happily ever after’ entails monogamy, marriage and reproduction. Deleuze rejects any such neat formulation and is insistent that instead sadism and masochism belong to entirely separate worlds, each with its own rules, rituals and aesthetic conventions. ‘A genuine sadist could never tolerate a masochistic victim’ that willingly or, even worse, actively and deliberately underwent their torture (1991: 40), just as the masochist described by Deleuze requires a torturer who fits a specific model and can be persuaded into performing their tortures in a particular ritualized way. Studlar argues that the masochist requires ‘pseudosadism’ as an act or performance, not true sadism itself (1988: 83). This ersatz torturer ‘does indeed belong essentially to masochism, but without realizing it as a subject; she incarnates instead the element of “inflicting pain” in an exclusively masochistic situation’ (Deleuze 1991: 42). In resolutely dissociating masochism from sadism Deleuze does much to start dismantling the reductive binary logic that has conceptually bound this perversion, and as a consequence his essay provides the foundation for my own work on the radical potential of masochistic desire and pleasure. Furthermore, this initial act of separation entails a rethinking of the accompanying assumption that masochism is manifested as an entirely passive and submissive sexuality in opposition to the active and dominating drives of sadism. However, this quote also indicates the problem of objectification that arises in the model espoused by Sacher-Masoch and Deleuze, a problem that must be addressed and overcome in order to forge forward with a more ethically aware and open conceptualization of masochistic subjectivity. The pivotal device for, on the one 24

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hand, the theoretically enabling aspects of Deleuze’s study and, on the other, the possible problem of objectification, is the trope of the masochistic contract, a motif that Deleuze regards as central to the structure of the aesthetic. The contract has important connotations for intersubjectivity and the organization of power dynamics in this perverse aesthetic form and as a result will be critical in realigning masochism away from a simple and reductive passivity. Beyond this, the contract as a structural device has also been influential in the discipline of film studies as a means of conceptualizing the relationship and patterns of libidinal investment between spectator and film and therefore has further significance for a discussion of the excessive and transgressive images to come in later chapters. Deleuze draws upon Theodore Reik’s Masochism in Modern Man (1941) to highlight five elements he regards as crucial to the masochistic aesthetic, the first four being taken directly from Reik’s text and the fifth element, the contract, standing as Deleuze’s own addition. The contract will be explored in greater depth as this chapter progresses. The initial four factors require further discussion here as they are instrumental in the construction of the formal style of masochistic desire and pleasure which for Deleuze is a literary concern but for subsequent theorists, most notably Studlar, have been mapped onto the audiovisual medium of cinema. As will become evident in the following chapters, there are aspects of these four elements that may still be identified in the contemporary group of films that portray female sexuality and subjectivity as masochistic, although not without transformations and the addition of further representative strategies and aesthetic tendencies. Reik, a former student of Freud, addresses masochism from a psychoanalytic perspective and yet his four basic characteristics of masochism display a latent awareness of the formal nature of this perversion. It is this potential that enables Deleuze to rework these characteristics into the basis for his theory of the masochist aesthetic, in turn paving the way for scholars of visual culture to make this formalism their focus. The four points as listed in ‘Coldness and cruelty’ cited in full: 1. The ‘special significance of fantasy’, that is the form of the fantasy (the

fantasy experienced for its own sake, or the scene which is dreamed, dramatized, ritualized and which is an indispensable element of masochism). 2. The ‘suspense factor’ (the waiting, the delay, expressing the way in which anxiety affects sexual tension and inhibits its discharge). 3. The ‘demonstrative’ or, more accurately, the persuasive feature (the particular way in which the masochist exhibits his suffering, embarrassment and humiliation). 4. The ‘provocative fear’ (the masochist aggressively demands punishment since it resolves anxiety and allows him to enjoy the forbidden pleasure). (Deleuze 1991: 74–75) 25

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The points outlined above, in addition to the device of the contract, construct an image of masochism that is resolutely performative, even theatrical, reliant upon a staging of desire that must necessarily take place as an intersubjective effort between the masochist and their chosen beloved. The creation of the masochist aesthetic is, in Deleuze’s theory, orchestrated in order to enact or play out activities and practices that have previously been part of their fantastical imagination. The rituals that emerge through the masochistic encounter are a means of bringing these fantasies to life and constructing the pleasures of the dreamworld within the space of reality: ‘the masochist needs to believe he is dreaming even when he is not’ (Deleuze 1991: 72). Whereas for early sexologists the quest for pain and submission in which the masochist indulges was regarded as an indication of mental aberration and the accompanying fantasies a symptom of this illness (discussed at length by Freud in ‘A child is being beaten’, 1955c), the figure depicted in Deleuze’s theory could almost be described as utopian, an idealist attempting to shape the world in accordance with their alternative vision of sexuality and pleasure. ‘Coldness and cruelty’ takes up what Peakman describes as the ‘constructive’ nature of the love of pain and submission given form by Sacher-Masoch (2013: 224) and in doing so elevates this perversion to a position of creativity and artfulness. The place of fantasy, suspense and provocation in the aesthetic and ethical debates prompted by masochistic sexuality will be teased out in subsequent chapters for they reappear as central concerns within the majority of the films explored. However, they take form in ways that frequently deviate from Deleuze’s model in order to reconfigure the male masochistic position into one that is more attentive to female bodies and subjects, and to the choices made by these subjects in an ideology dominated by discursive practices that have systematically marginalized and oppressed female perspectives. Masochism and Film Theory

The space conjured up by Sacher-Masoch and analysed by Deleuze, with its focus on fetishized objects and textures, tableaux of suspension and luxuriant settings is strikingly visual and portrays the material world much more vividly and tangibly than the interiors of the characters’ minds. It is not unsurprising, therefore, that Studlar makes effective and careful use of the masochist aesthetic in In the Realm of Pleasure (1988) to interpret the series of collaborations between director Josef von Sternberg and star Marlene Dietrich in the first half of the 1930s (from The Blue Angel in 1930 to The Devil is a Woman in 1935). The use of sexual pathologies as a model for the theorization of the often ambivalent pleasures of cinematic spectatorship has its roots in the film theory of the 1970s, which took an avid interest in the libidinal processes invested in and 26

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facilitated by the experience of spectatorship. This interest found its form through recourse to Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis with an emphasis placed upon the ‘perverse pleasures’ of cinema viewing and concepts such as fantasy, desire and the gaze. Tanya Krzywinska notes that the theory of spectatorship has been sexualized from the earliest days of film analysis (2006: 195), a tendency that is apparent in influential studies such as those by Christian Metz and, in particular, Laura Mulvey (Metz 1982, Mulvey 1975). Mulvey’s canonical article ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ argues that the primary pleasures of classical Hollywood cinema function according to the Freudian principles of scopophilia, voyeurism and fetishism. Within the sadistic model the spectator identifies with the typically male protagonist of the film, vicariously experiencing a position of activity and mastery, while the female figure on screen is presented as a passive spectacle before his gaze. The subject/ object divide is clearly articulated along gendered lines in Mulvey’s theory, reflecting the rising voice of second wave feminism in the expressed concerns about the violent processes that lead to and stem from the objectification of the female body. Mulvey’s article still stands as a landmark text within the discipline of film studies, not only for the slew of analyses it spawned as theorists found evidence of her model in a wide variety of film genres and eras but also because of the many writers who have offered critiques of this conceptual framework through alternative perspectives on spectatorship. Mulvey herself returned to the debate with a later essay, ‘Afterthoughts’, a direct response to criticisms that her sadistic model leaves scant space for the experiences or pleasures of the female spectator (Mulvey 1999). It was argued in the Introduction that female masochism and particularly female heterosexual masochism has to a large extent been a blind spot in studies of perversion and paraphilias, overlooked or marginalized in discourses that view it as either so ‘natural’ as to be unremarkable or as a source of denigration resulting from its perceived replication of existing oppressive power hierarchies. The female spectator of ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ and ‘Afterthoughts’ is subject to a similar process of under-theorization or pejorative perception. The suggested positions open to her are either transvestism, in which she identifies with the male protagonist, or masochism, an unhappy identification with the passive and frequently punished spectacle of the female star. Mulvey’s view was not untypical for the period or the discipline; when asked in 1979 to comment on women’s love for Hollywood cinema, the critic and theorist Raymond Bellour stated, ‘I think that a woman can love, accept, and give a positive value to these films only from her own masochism, and from a certain sadism that she can exercise in return on the masculine subject, within a system loaded with traps’ (Bellour cited by Bergstrom 1979: 97). A critique of such perspectives aims not to suggest that Hollywood cinema and films that closely adhere to its models of narrative and characterization are unproblematic in terms of how they 27

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represent and address women, but to make clear how entrenched traditional modes of thought are with regard to gender and sexuality more broadly, and masochism specifically. Evident in Mulvey and Bellour’s perspective on female masochistic identification is the more or less explicit assumption that this position is one of weakness and inferiority, to be avoided or derided. The films discussed in subsequent chapters of this book are precisely so important because they refute the deeply ingrained belief that the masochistic subjective position is one of victimhood. As a group, these films portray the ambiguous allure and fascination of masochism, the wilfully sought pleasures and pains to which it speaks, the subversive practices of control it requires and the way that it defies or reconfigures networks of corporeal and sociocultural power. They open up this fertile realm of enquiry through their challenge not only to conventional modes of spectatorship, but also to the ‘classic’ canonical models put forward in spectatorship theory. The emphasis placed upon the scopophilic model has shifted substantially in the decades between Mulvey’s intervention and the present day with studies such as Studlar’s playing an instrumental role in this change of emphasis, along with other important texts such as Tanya Modleki’s The Women Who Knew Too Much, Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women and Chain Saws (1992), Steven Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body (1993) and more recently Patricia MacCormack’s Cinesexuality (2008). Each of these studies puts forward the possibility of finding masochistic pleasure through identifications and experiences that are not necessarily bound by gender, whether in the films of Hitchcock, modern horror cinema or the Italian zombie film. Paradoxically, the notion of the sadistic gaze provided the starting point for a selection of theorists to put forward an oppositional position: that the fantasies, desires and subject positions engaged with and brought into being through cinema spectatorship are more accurately masochistic in nature. In film theory, Studlar’s In the Realm of Pleasure stands as the most obvious antecedent to the project at hand. Her transferral of the concept of the masochist aesthetic from literature to cinema provides a significant influence and sets out some provisional paths of investigation and debate. There are common threads that can be followed from Sacher-Masoch, through Deleuze and Studlar and into the more recent films that portray female masochistic subjectivity, such as the emphasis on delay and suspension, the primacy of fantasy and the construction of an alternative realm of desire through the heterocosmic impulse of masochism (the drive towards the ‘remaking’ of the world), and the use of sometimes highly stylized and mannered formal content. However, the mode of aesthetic that has developed since the mid-1990s also indicates a significant development in regard to the explicit and excessive nature of the imagery and themes portrayed, a gendered extremity that is predominantly connected to the experiences of the female body. Many of the films in this book, for example, include nudity and unconventional images of the female body, graphic 28

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sex scenes, rape and violence. The ethical dimension that is so critical for an engagement with these confrontational images and narratives is of less concern for Studlar and consequently the relationship of the masochist aesthetic to ethics is as yet unexplored. She does, however, address the politics of gender to some extent through the repeated focus on Marlene Dietrich as the embodiment of the ‘coldness and cruelty’ of Deleuze’s title. The von Sternberg/Dietrich collaborations echo the narrative form of Venus in Furs in their enactment of male masochistic desires, playing out the formula of the male protagonist and the beautiful but punishing woman over and over. Studlar argues that her chosen films construct a masochistic heterocosm: a space outside the ‘real world’ in which normative temporality and spatiality are suspended as an area is opened up in which to emphasize and enact the dynamics of fantasy and desire, as well as to elevate a maternal authority over the masculine law (Studlar 1988: 91–93). Arguably, this is the purpose of cinema more broadly; the banalities of everyday life are pushed aside in favour of narratives focusing on unlikely romances and improbable adventures all contained in a neat 90-minute slot. However, there is a distinction to be made between films that strive to portray a probable world ‘as it is’ according to the dominant tropes and values of the reality in which the film is produced, and films that actively move away from this verisimilitude and towards something more improbable and theatrical. The type of cinema described by Studlar uses baroque settings, fetishized costumes and hyperbolic characterization in order to emphasize the contrasts between the ‘normative first world’ and the ‘second world excesses’ of masochism (Studlar 1988: 93). Within this context the role play and ritualized scenarios dreamed up by the masochist are staged in order to create an alternative world that functions not in accordance with the logic of the dominant ideological system but in line with a logic of perversion in which temporality, spatiality and intersubjectivity operate differently. This description of the form and function of the heterocosm recalls Hart’s explanation of the indeterminate space within which the elaborate performances of sadomasochism take place, a borderland between reality and the phantasmagorical (Hart 1998: 9). Studlar argues that the von Sternberg/ Dietrich films construct an audiovisual version of the themes of ‘disavowal, suspension, fantasy, fetishism’ that Deleuze describes as the key components of masochistic literature’s structural form and thus enact masochistic desire and pleasure through stylistic choices as well as plot and characterization (Studlar 1988: 97). In keeping with the psychoanalytic framework that Deleuze uses to theorize masochism Studlar interprets Dietrich as the fetishized mother figure whom the male child wishes to reconstruct as inseparable plenitude in symbiosis with himself. Thus, the female (mother) figure is exalted to a position of wholeness without need for the father, a shift in the heteronormative balance of power that Studlar regards as threatening to and subversive of Oedipal imperialism and the paternal law (Studlar 1988: 51–52). Certainly from this 29

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perspective, we can follow Studlar’s logic in holding up the masochist aesthetic as positive from the position of feminist politics: male authority is overcome and humiliated and Dietrich appears resplendent and powerful, dominant in terms of both the mise-en-scène and the progression of the narrative (Studlar 1988: 58). The spatial organization of the screen consistently places Dietrich at the centre of an interplay of gazes, encompassing those of the enraptured male characters within the diegetic space and that of the spectator, positing her as statuesque and still (Studlar 1988: 50). She becomes an embodiment of the ‘perfect’ love object depicted in Sacher-Masoch’s novels: the idealized image, frozen in order that it might be apprehended in a different temporal and spatial dreamworld outside the confines of reality (Deleuze 1991: 33). The extraordinarily visual qualities that the masochist aesthetic entails make it clear why film is such an apt medium for the expression of this perversion, particularly when considered in relation to the other vital elements of suspense and fantasy that Reik and Deleuze identify. The effects of visual stillness and temporal disruption can be most effectively achieved when juxtaposed with the movement and progression enabled by the medium of film. The frozen image of the female torturess that stands out in SacherMasoch’s novels and von Sternberg’s films, as well as taking centre stage within the theoretical representation of Deleuze and Studlar, does perhaps enable a reconfiguration of the established Oedipal system and therefore the overthrowing of paternal authority in favour of maternal dominance. However, the figure of the female beloved as manifested in the male masochistic fantasy remains problematic. Each of these twentieth century theories is underpinned by a structure of gender that continues to conceptualize this paraphilia in terms similar to those of Freud’s feminine masochism: a male subject who longs to suffer at the hands of his female love object. Two important consequences follow from this. Firstly, the female masochist is once again left unconsidered in a model that privileges the male and provides no space for an alternative masochistic position. There is a position made available for the female but, and here the second problem arises, it is a place that is extremely risky and that entails the female becoming, once again, a mirrored surface that reflects male desires about femininity rather than allowing her any access to or articulation of her own desires and pleasures. Such an image of the female is more easily read into sadistic discourse as exemplified by novels such as Justine and 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade. In these narratives, the female victim is tortured by a typically male subject who takes pleasure in objectifying her as the locus of suffering and endurance (an envisioning of the female body that will be explored further in Chapter 2). Prior to Deleuze’s theory, the prevailing discourse surrounding masochism folded it into an overarching sadomasochistic narrative that characterized the masochistic position as one of vulnerability and victimhood, albeit with a male occupying the ‘feminine’ role 30

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of the humiliation and passivity. Deleuze’s work makes it clear that just as an ethical conundrum arises from the sadistic fantasy of domination of the other, so a similar lack of reciprocity and recognition may arise from the masochistic fantasy of submission at the hands of the other. The love object – Wanda in Venus in Furs, Dietrich in von Sternberg’s cinema, and any other woman cast in the role of dominant torturess – risks having their own subjectivity and humanness elided as they are called upon to represent the ideal figure: frozen and cruel, lacking in humanity. Deleuze’s writing implicitly acknowledges this risk when he comments, ‘The subject in masochism needs a certain “essence” of masochism embodied in the nature of a woman who renounces her own subjective masochism; he definitely has no need of another subject’ (1991: 43). The masochist as described in ‘Coldness and cruelty’ may overturn previous assumptions about the loss of agency and control entailed in this perversion, but in the process the masochist himself becomes controlling, even manipulative, bending his female partner to the shape of his own fantasies and failing to recognize her outside the iconic image of stillness and punishment he demands so persuasively. The traumatic effects of the demanding objectification apparent in male masochism are evident in the memoirs of Sacher-Masoch’s first wife, Aurora von Rümelin, first published in 1907 under the moniker Wanda von Sacher-Masoch. She writes repeatedly of the ‘torture’ and ‘torment’ that she undergoes as a result of the constant pressure exerted upon her to enact his masochistic fantasies and to embody the idealized vision of the female torturess produced by the male. Her own pleasures and desires are denied over and over and her sense of self begins to crumble. Upon casting Leopold and his whips from her room, she describes her elation at escaping the proscribed narratives that have been imposed upon her: ‘Free! Delivered from the torment of ten years! Finally, to belong to myself again! Never again to don a fur, never again to hold a whip’ (1990: 107). That her experiences were published not under her own name but under that of the literary figure whose shadow constantly darkened her life is further indicative of the cultural inability to imagine female pleasure as alternative or exterior to the male. Although it appears in such a case that the oppositional logic of activity and passivity is reversed, the familiar patriarchal economy that equates the male position with subjectivity and the female position with objectivity remains intact: it is difficult for the woman to escape her culturally posited place as mirror of male desire within the model that Sacher-Masoch and Deleuze propose. Subject/Object?

The problematic status of recognition in masochistic fantasies and practices is symptomatic of the way in which they explicitly dramatize the power dynamics 31

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inherent in any intersubjective encounter and particularly those found in the frequently fraught realm of sexuality. Downing argues that the dangers of objectification apparent in perverse sexual encounters are an exaggeration or development of those found in more normative relationships, for any sexual relationship entails becoming entangled in one’s own potentially alarming and ambivalent desires and fears as well as in the fantasies and anxieties of the other. Such a process of intermingling presents a dual risk of objectification for the subject: they may objectify their love object, constructing them according to a fantasy of misrecognition (evoking Lacan’s famous statement ‘There is no sexual relationship’), and in turn the other may objectify them (Downing 2006: 160). In the Introduction it was argued that perversions may be categorized as ‘normal’ sexual acts that become the source of compulsion or fascination, the ‘intermediate relations’ that Freud describes or to use MacKendrick’s more poetic term for these always already potentially aberrant acts, the ‘forepleasures’ (MacKendrick 1999: 7). From this perspective perversion emerges as a distorted form of normative sexuality, thus, the risks that accompany sexual life in general also appear in convoluted and excessive form within the landscape of perversion. These perils are made explicit in Julia Leigh’s 2013 film Sleeping Beauty, which explores in exaggerated and dramatized form the narrative of a female subject who risks submitting herself entirely to the realm of objectification. Sleeping Beauty is based primarily upon the short story ‘The house of the sleeping beauties’ by Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata (2004), but also draws upon older and more classic literary sources such as the Bible and the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. The disparity in source materials and pervasiveness of the central image of the young and beautiful sleeping woman indicates that this gendered fantasy is one that is strongly embedded in our cultural imaginings. Kawabata’s text follows an elderly man who frequents the eponymous house, an establishment in which men pay to spend time with slumbering young women, drugged to ensure that they will not awaken. Although the structure of this house seems to echo the model of the brothel, it is made clear in the story that the visiting men may not penetrate the women, either with sexual or violent intent. The elderly protagonist spends his time with these girls not idolizing them sexually but reminiscing and fantasizing about past loves; the girls therefore become ciphers whose faces and bodies virtually morph into those dictated by the male visitor. They embody the passivity which is normatively associated with ‘natural’ femininity and as such become empty and reflective surfaces that mirror back the man’s own memories and desires: He would travel back over memories of women with whom he had had affairs. An old love had come back tonight because the sleeping beauty had given him the illusion that he smelled milk. Perhaps the blood on the breast of that girl 32

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from long ago had made him sense in the girl tonight an odor that did not exist. Perhaps it was a melancholy comfort for an old man to be sunk in memories of women who would not come back from the far past, even while he fondled a beauty who would not awaken. (Kawabata 2004: 26–27)

This passage is typical of the time the man spends with the sleeping girls and illustrates the structural place that they occupy in the story: an image of pure and submissive beauty that catalyses the folding in of temporality on itself in order to facilitate the self-reflection of the male protagonist. Leigh’s film takes the skeleton of this concept but switches the emphasis to narrate the story from the point of view of Lucy, one of the ‘sleeping beauties’ who uses the money she earns to pay her rent and university expenses. The underlying theme may perhaps be one of exploitation, but the film presents this neutrally with Lucy positioned as determined and self-aware. The change in perspective that the film performs alters the significance of the encounter between sleeping woman and cognizant man: the spectator witnesses and experiences Lucy as subject in her daily life and as object for the men’s own desires, insecurities and misogynistic outbursts. She is fondled, pulled about and in one disturbing scene burned behind the ear with a cigarette, all while sleeping and entirely passive. The concept of idiopathic identification is of use in understanding the structural dynamic between self and other in these scenes. Idiopathic identification is explained by Silverman as ‘an incorporative model’ in which the self is constituted ‘at the expense of the other who is in effect “swallowed”’ (1992: 205). This is what unfolds in Sleeping Beauty, in which the masculine subjectivity of those who pay to use Lucy’s body is manufactured through the positioning of the female as other who cannot take an active or subjective position of her own. However, because for the spectator these scenes only constitute a small part of Lucy’s life, the distinction between the categories of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ is revealed to be a matter of perspective and not of ‘nature’. The deconstruction of subjectification and objectification in Leigh’s film is in part facilitated by the way in which Emily Browning plays the character of Lucy. For large parts of the film she appears impenetrable and detached from those around her, engaging in apparently random and dispassionate sexual encounters and seldom smiling or revealing emotion. Lucy is objectified twice over, as the passive female form at the whims of the male visitors to the house and as a figure according with Deleuze’s label ‘coldness and cruelty’. She is aloof and disdainful, but depicted throughout as sexually alluring because of this. This glacial demeanour thaws only when she visits her friend Birdmann, a drug addict who towards the end of the film voluntarily takes a fatal overdose and whom Lucy lies beside, quietly crying, as he dies. In the scenes with Birdmann she appears more as the conventional human subject in that she is expressive, 33

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warm and affected by her contact with another. The contrast developed between the scenes in the house of sleeping beauties and Birdmann’s flat further serves to problematize the notion of an objectified female beauty and to suggest that such a notion is culturally constructed and artificial. The proprietors of the house comment on her flawless skin and her ‘unique beauty’, even describing her vagina as a ‘temple’ (a suggestion which Lucy quickly refutes). Her surroundings in this house are opulent, reflecting the fantastical space of commerce that it represents: luxuriant food, rich furnishings and silk bed sheets that pool around Lucy, emphasizing the whiteness and smoothness of her skin. Lesley Chow (2012) has written of the ‘world of sexual transactions touched by magic’ that the film depicts, an apt phrase to describe the dreamlike house as a place external to the ‘real world’ in its detached spatiality and frozen temporality. However, to apply this ‘magic’ to the film as a whole ignores the alternative version of heterosexual encounters presented in the scenes with Birdmann, the moments in which Lucy appears most at ease and indeed, happiest. They take place in his squalid flat and present a divergent version of beauty and romance that is firmly rooted in the realities of the visceral body. Birdmann recounts wanting to kiss her in the past but being unable to because his tongue was ‘furred … putrid … the arsehole of the arsehole’. If Lucy’s encounters with the male visitors to the house of sleeping beauties are predicated upon the notion of purity as surface and superficiality, then in contrast her relationship with Birdmann is characterized by the recognition of the imperfection and vulnerability of corporeal existence. That Lucy is constructed as an object in two quite different ways is also significant. The first is reliant on her absolute submission and relinquishing of knowledge and control. The second, her cold and cruel demeanour, is enacted with deliberation and appears to be a chosen and desired course. This brings the discussion to a further point that Downing makes about the risks of objectification within the sexual relationship and the perverse relationship particularly. She argues that the peril of objectifying the other while simultaneously being objectified oneself is a peril that carries with it the potential for pleasure (2006: 160). And again, if this is the case for a normative relationship, then the perverse encounter may be seen as a source for an increased or more intense pleasurable compulsion. The novel part of this statement and the part that runs contrary to many feminist critiques of female masochism and dominant feminist ideology in general is the suggestion that the experience of being objectified may offer a valid and authentic form of erotic satisfaction, as opposed to an enjoyment of objectification that arises purely from the internalization of the expected gender roles espoused by patriarchal value systems. The recognition of this form of enjoyment is another of the germinal ways in which masochism moves towards the dislocation of binary logic, the illusionistic lines dividing conventional conceptions of object and 34

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subject becoming increasingly blurred. Along similar lines, Sartre regards masochism as a dramatization or exaggeration of the processes that exist within all relationships, making overt the problematics of objectivity and (inter) subjectivity that pervade love and the inherently conflictual dynamic between lover and beloved. What the lover wants (or needs) from their beloved is not to possess them as an object, but in fact to be objectified by them in order to become the ultimate and unsurpassable object: ‘In Love the Lover wants to be “the whole World” for the beloved … he is the one who assumes and symbolizes the world; he is a this which includes all other thises. He is and consents to be an object’ (2003: 389). Love, from the side of the lover, therefore emerges as an enterprise of the self in which the beloved is used in the service of the project of self-actualization: ‘By seduction I aim at constituting myself as a fullness of being and at making myself recognized as such’ (Sartre 2003: 394). This is a converse process of self-constitution to that which Sleeping Beauty portrays, because seduction implies a need for recognition from the other which is absent when one half of the encounter cannot acknowledge the subject with their gaze or their utterances. To be regarded as an object from the exterior position of the other is to bestow the self/lover with a sense of being in the world. This description chimes with the design undertaken by Severin, the masochistic protagonist of Venus in Furs, which could indeed be regarded as ‘a project of himself ’ (Sartre 2003: 393). This brings us back to the structural motif of the contract, one of the most crucial tools for the masochist’s project of self-construction or self-objectification. The Contract

The masochistic contract is a central device in Venus in Furs and famously replicates the organization of Sacher-Masoch’s real-life relationships with women. Considering the primacy given to the contract by the author in his life and fiction it is a little perplexing that this aspect of masochistic intersubjectivity remained largely ignored by theorists until Deleuze’s essay readdressed the formal elements used to express masochistic desire and pleasure. Deleuze states that Sacher-Masoch’s work makes the contract into the ‘primary sign’ of masochism (1995: 142). However, despite looking to Sacher-Masoch when naming the perversion, Krafft-Ebing did not regard the contract as notably significant and it does not feature in Freud’s case studies or explicatory essays. Reik’s 1941 account, Masochism in Modern Man, which in other respects offers some fresh and insightful observations, similarly failed to give prominence to this device. Yet, the contract is a concrete element in the establishment of the interplay of power in this particular type of intersubjectivity, taking on a crucial function in ensuring that being and seeming are separated and that all is not as it 35

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may appear from an exterior perspective: ‘The masochist appears to be held by real chains, but in fact he is bound by his word alone’ (Deleuze 1991: 75). It is by means of the contract that the roles of each partner are negotiated and confirmed, and that the masochist may orchestrate events according to their own terms in advance, a process that excludes these terms from the sexual scene itself. Thus, the masochist acts as director of their own play, their control assured but effectively disavowed as the enactment of their submission unfolds. This formal device is therefore pivotal to the argument made throughout this book that masochistic subjectivity should not be equated with powerlessness and passivity, but is instead a position that entails pleasure through chosen submission and mastery which, although not apparent in the acts themselves, must be taken into account when considering masochistic subjectivity and intersubjectivity as a whole. When the contract fulfils its function correctly it may also act as a safeguard against the objectification of the masochist’s partner, for it emphasizes the importance of a recognition that flows equally between the pair. Focusing attention on the relevant passages from Venus in Furs illustrates the reciprocity that is required when the contract is drawn up in the most literal sense. Although it is certainly the case that the protagonist Severin must agree to be his lover’s slave, it is he that initially instigates their arrangement according to his fantasies and before the contract is signed he adds his specified conditions and clauses, making it clear that Wanda has her own duties and responsibilities to adhere to (Sacher-Masoch 1991: 195–97). Indeed, although Wanda becomes steadily more enthusiastic about the plan she is at reluctant at first and Severin must use all his powers of persuasion to talk her into assuming the role of his ideal female torturer (as von Rümelin’s memoirs show, Sacher-Masoch’s literary imagining of this eventual enthusiasm was perhaps some way from the experience of the actual female participant). The masochistic contract is presented in Sacher-Masoch’s work and in Deleuzian theory as a mechanism for ensuring the vital aspects of reciprocity and recognition within the masochistic scenario, thus serving as the primary signifier of the (disavowed) agency and control of the masochistic subject and of the balance of power within such relationships. The contract is the fulcrum around which masochistic pleasure and desire necessarily circle, working to manifest and define the other crucial elements of the masochistic aesthetic: fantasy, suspension, demonstration and provocative fear. Also evident in these paragraphs is the context of tenderness and affection within which the contract is devised. The experiences and practices of masochistic desire are not envisioned as external to or incompatible with a more classic vision of love, rather, Severin’s devotion is portrayed as enduring love taken to its exquisitely painful limits, recalling the assertion that perverse relations present an exaggerated and more intense version of normative intersubjectivity. Slavoj Žižek has commented on the similarities between the pathological understanding of masochism and the structure of courtly love, 36

The Deleuzian Model and the Masochistic Contract

suggesting that with the emergence of masochism as the subject of theoretical enquiry at the end of the nineteenth century the libidinal economy underlying the logic of courtly love was given conceptual form (1994: 89). Significantly, several of the films featured in the following chapters echo the emphasis and pivotal position given to the contract by Sacher-Masoch and by Deleuze, employing devices that occupy a structurally similar position in the narrative and form of the films. Both Breaking the Waves and Red Road utilize the symbolism of the marriage contract in ensuring the bonds and obligations of kinship, up to and beyond the point of death. The conditions of employment undertaken in Secretary and Sleeping Beauty similarly serve as initial catalysts and subsequent framing devices for unfolding events, likewise, Marie’s agreement with her recalcitrant partner at the beginning of Romance and the mutual understanding reached between the woman and man in Anatomy of Hell could be regarded as reciprocal arrangements akin to the more overt and tangible contract in its traditional form. The exact function of these arrangements is contingent upon the intersecting factors of plot, characterization and strategy of each film, however, the recurring motif may be used to identify shared formal and conceptual concerns that relate not only to Deleuze’s theorization of masochistic subjectivity but also to the theoretical and philosophical debates underpinning this book. Michele Aaron has made use of the trope of the contract and the type of relationship that it entails as a means of conceptualizing the bond between film and spectator. In line with theorists such as Studlar and Clover, Aaron asserts that the pleasures of cinematic spectatorship function according to the logic of masochistic desire, however, while for these earlier writers the question of identification was crucial, for Aaron issues of consent, reciprocity and disavowal come to the fore around what she describes as the contractual nature of spectatorship. Central to her argument is the idea that as viewers we come willingly to a film, even those that feature disturbing, disgusting or horrific content. Indeed, it is often this type of imagery that holds the most potent and strangely fascinating allure. It is Aaron’s focus on the compulsion to watch extreme or disturbing imagery that makes the perverse (un)pleasures of masochism so apt for her theory. As she argues, both the cinematic spectator and the masochist enter deliberately into their respective relationships while simultaneously disavowing their complicity in this exchange of power through the donning of the mantle of passivity and submission. Each ‘partner’ within the relationship must then play their designated role according to the ‘contractual’ understanding between them (Aaron 2007: 90–91). Despite the fact that the concept of disavowal derives from Freudian psychoanalysis, through the Deleuzian framework developed by Aaron it suggests a possible avenue out of the deadlock created by the binary logic so apparent not only in many accounts of masochistic sexuality but also in some of the more pervasive classical models of spectator theory. Aaron’s 37

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thesis is also useful because of the emphasis that she places upon the question of ethics and cinema and the relationship drawn between ethical responsibility and the reciprocity of cinematic spectatorship. She argues that ethical enquiry is becoming a vital area in the domain of narrative film for several reasons, one of which is particularly pertinent for the discussion in this and subsequent chapters. Filmmakers are, with increasing frequency, exploiting the contractual nature of the tacit agreement between film and viewer with a significant body of modern films containing what she describes as ‘unconscionable’ content: themes and imagery that step outside the boundaries of accepted morality and into areas deemed pornographic or obscene (Aaron 2007: 88–89). This will become an important question in the explorations of sexuality and corporeality that follow. Masochistic subjectivity has been conceptualized as external to normative moral frameworks in terms of psychiatry, religion and economics and as such the practices and bodies associated with it are socially coded as perverse and taboo. Therefore, the ‘unconscionable’ content that Aaron speaks of comes to occupy a prominent role in the new forms of masochist aesthetic that have emerged since the 1990s. The failure of masochism to fit neatly into the discursive structures of knowledge that regulate morality is one of the crucial aspects to facilitate its opening into the field of ethical enquiry. The images of obscenity and revulsion depicted in these films take advantage of the contract between spectator and cinema to force a confrontation with types of alterity normatively considered obscene or revolting (the self-mutilated body, the profane body, the substances of the female body, the explicit sex act) and to catalyse the process that Aaron describes: ‘an ethics of spectatorship requires us to think through the moralistic treatment of difference in film’ (2007: 113). The ethics of spectatorship that Aaron describes resonates with the enquiries running through this study, and shall become increasingly significant in later chapters. Recognition, reciprocity and consent coalesce at the intersection of the masochist aesthetic and the intensities of spectatorial experience. The contract in its Deleuzian form functions to establish a reciprocal intersubjective relationship based upon mutual recognition, to ensure that the encounter proceeds according to the rituals and tableaux that constitute the ‘dreamworld’ fantasized by the masochist and to enable the masochist’s position of mastery and control to be disavowed. It achieves what Žižek describes as the negation of the conventional dominant subjective position through the suspension of reality (1994: 91). The construction of female masochism in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher offers an insight into what may result when the functions of the contract fail and a crisis of misrecognition arises. The film follows the relationship between Erika, the polymorphously perverse piano teacher of the title who engages in self-mutilation and fantasies of sadomasochism, and Walter, a student whose attempts to seduce her according to his more prosaic conceptions of romance result in escalating acts of violence 38

The Deleuzian Model and the Masochistic Contract

and the disintegration of subjective integrity for both characters. In a theme that recurs through the films in this book, perverse desires find themselves in conflict with restrictive conceptions of heterosexuality as expressed in normative narratives about what constitutes love, courtship and sexual relations. The phallocratic context of these cultural narratives must be acknowledged and the question posed whether the female masochistic subject faces greater resistance than her male counterpart when attempting to orchestrate fantasies and corporeal experiences that deviate from the roles assigned to the feminine by the logic of the patriarchy. Luce Irigaray writes, ‘Feminine pleasure has to remain inarticulate in language, in its own language, if it is not to threaten the underpinnings of logical operations. And so what is most strictly forbidden to women today is that they should attempt to express their own pleasure’ (1985b: 77). In Haneke’s film, Erika’s attempts to articulate her hitherto hidden and intensely personal pleasures are met initially with disgust and later with the subsuming of chosen submission beneath violent coercion as male logic strives to establish itself once again and Walter rapes Erika in the penultimate scene of the film. The item that plays the part of the contract in The Piano Teacher is another form of document: a letter written to Walter by Erika outlining her most fervent but previously unspoken wishes. The importance of this letter is signalled from its first appearance: Erika places it upon the piano top (another signifier of the growing bonds between her and Walter) where the camera lingers over it, pale and portentous against the black surface. In an echo of Severin’s demands for punishment from his beloved Wanda, Erika’s letter contains detailed instructions of the violence and humiliations she wishes Walter to subject her to: Tighten my bonds … Adjust the belt by at least two or three holes. The tighter the better. Then, gag me with some stockings I will have ready. Stuff them in so hard that I’m incapable of making any sound. Next, take off the blindfold, please, and sit down on my face and punch me in the stomach to force me to thrust my tongue in your behind.

Such explicit instructions provide a shock not only to Walter but to the spectator of the film: ‘what is put on paper is too traumatic to be pronounced in direct speech: her innermost fantasy itself ’ (Žižek 2002: 20). This traumatic affect is consolidated by an extended shot of Erika’s face gazing directly into the camera once this passage from the letter has been read out loud. It is a look that does not broker identification but, on the contrary, issues a challenge to the viewer: can our definitions of sexuality and pleasure acknowledge and accommodate these perverse demands? Alas, Walter’s prosaic notions of romance and sex cannot and the trajectory traces the disintegration of Erika’s 39

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subjectivity as, following the refusal of her polymorphous pleasures by the ideologies of masculine heteronormativity, her sense of self begins to fragment. Jessica Benjamin has argued that masochistic sexuality is rooted in the subject’s internal conflict between the desire for autonomy and the desire for the recognition of the other. The successful encounter would thus entail ‘the necessity of the recognizing as well as being recognized by the other’ (Benjamin 1990: 23), a situation that the contract strives to establish. Benjamin explores this idea through recourse to Pauline Réage’s tale of masochistic love, The Story of O (Réage 1965), arguing that in this novel the conflict felt by the female protagonist is resolved through a total renunciation of the self as she invites the transgression of her subjective and corporeal boundaries, resulting in the consequent loss of her own subjectivity (Benjamin 1990: 55–58). Erika, like O, establishes a connection with Walter through the letter as contract, an attempt to garner his recognition and to negotiate the ideal masochistic encounter of disavowed control as played out in her fantasies. However, recognition fails and crumbles instead into incomprehension and disgust: ‘the direct display of her fantasy radically changes her status in his eyes, transforming a fascinating love object into a repulsive entity he is unable to endure’ (Žižek 2002: 21). The process of Walter reading the letter aloud foreshadows the way in which Erika is dispossessed of her own fantasies, which are traumatically and horrifically misappropriated by Walter in the rape scene. Some interpretations of Haneke’s film have suggested that the rape scene represents a genuine attempt by Walter to fulfil the role that Erika has assigned him, with Frances Restuccia calling it ‘the “rape” scene’ and Nina Hutchison going so far as to describe the act as ‘mock-raping’ (Restuccia 2004, Hutchison 2003). Hutchison suggests, not unproblematically, that to read the scene as a rape is to blindly follow entrenched gender stereotypes regarding the feminine position as passive and submissive, and the masculine one as active and dominant; instead, she argues, Erika succeeds in reversing these roles and manipulating Walter into placing her in the position of power. While Hutchison’s attempts to dismantle the binds of gender binaries are to be admired, this interpretation seems to misread the process of Erika’s fragmentation that is traced through the trajectory of the film and fails to account for the horror that the rape invokes in the spectator. Additionally, there is a glaring mistake evident in such an interpretation: the equation of masochistic corporeal pleasures with the act of vaginal penetration. Erika’s letter makes no mention of such an act, indeed, the only penetration that occurs in the passage that Walter reads pertains to Erika’s tongue and his anus. The formula of ‘normal’ sex that has been reiterated over and over in Western discourse overwrites the deviant practices that the masochist covets. The extent to which Walter is in control in this scene is ambiguous, for his subjectivity is also thrown into chaos as the film progresses, but it is clear that this ‘rape’ is 40

The Deleuzian Model and the Masochistic Contract

most certainly a rape which does not occur in accordance with Erika’s fantasies or compliance and over which she exercises no control. Apparent in both films explored in this chapter, but particularly in The Piano Teacher, is the ethical conundrum that the self faces when entering into the intersubjective dynamic, with the masochistic relationship dramatizing in overt form the cruelties, vulnerabilities and responsibilities that are inherent in any meeting between self and other. The significance of responsibility as it pertains to masochism will be examined further in Chapter 2, thus, here I will focus for a moment upon the problematic convulsions of cruelty and vulnerability. If, as Aaron emphasizes, one of the most vital questions for ethical enquiry concerns the response of the self to difference, then the reactions of Walter (and the cinematic spectator) to the radical otherness of Erika’s desires is of paramount importance. The intersubjective encounter arises as an inherently traumatic event that evokes in the subject extreme anxiety and even fear, and this is precisely the difficulty contemplated first by Freud and later by Lacan in regard to the ethical entreaty ‘love thy neighbour as thyself ’ (Freud 1961b, Lacan 1992). The ramifications of this phrase are illuminating in regard to the treatment of alterity in Haneke’s film, in addition to assisting with the consideration of the ambivalent feelings that mark the self/other dynamic more broadly. Lacan’s exploration of the commandment ‘love thy neighbour as thyself ’ provides two starting points. The first of these concerns the relationship between the self and the other, and the second the relationship of this to jouissance. Before following these paths of enquiry directly it is necessary to return, as Lacan does, to Freud and specifically to Freud’s texts ‘Project for a scientific psychology’ and ‘Civilization and its discontents’. Freud identifies the concept of loving thy neighbour as thyself as one of the oldest and most ‘ideal demands’ of civilized society, a demand that predates Christianity but finds its Biblical intonation in Leviticus. Freud also observes, however, that this seemingly simple demand solicits feelings of incomprehension and resentment in the subject: ‘why should we behave in this way? What good will it do us? But above all, how shall we manage to act like this?’ (Freud 1961b: 109–10). This line of questioning suggests that it is a struggle for the subject to assume a generous and open position in relation to the other, reaffirming Bersani’s declaration, discussed in the Introduction, that cruelty takes a central role within human subjectivity. On this occasion Freud is aware of the radical theory he is putting forward and thus attempts to explain the revulsion that the subject feels when confronted with the figure of the nebenmensch or neighbour. One initial and rather unconvincing explanation he offers is that the subject’s love is precious and would lose its meaning if doled out indiscriminately (Freud 1961b: 110). This, perhaps, may account for the reluctance felt by the subject, but not for the creeping dread. Addressing this aspect of Freud’s work, Joan Copjec states that the question of ethics in the psychoanalytic context stems not from the 41

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impulse to found our happiness in the happiness of all, but ‘in the horrified recoil from this impulse’ (Copjec 1995: 88). This seems, superficially, a rather extraordinary claim. Why should the subject find the idea of loving the other so difficult to comprehend and so challenging to put into practice? Copjec argues that this is because the other, the neighbour we are faced with, appears to us not as benign or ‘good’ but as aggressive and malevolent, unworthy of the love we have to bestow. They emerge into our consciousness as a malign figure willing to commit terrible cruelty upon us in the quest for the accrual of their own pleasure or violent jouissance (Copjec 1995: 92). Once again, however, this explanation is inadequate. Why does the neighbour appear to us thusly, what is our rationale for assuming this malignancy and desire to cause harm? The subject faced with the entreaty ‘love thy neighbour’ presumes hostility and aggression in the other because they recognize it within themselves. As Freud observes, the cultivation of too close a proximity tempts out and reveals the violence at the heart of the human subject (Freud 1961b: 111). This begins to untangle part of the complicated knot that ties together ethics, selfhood and alterity. The existence of the other who confronts us calls out the cruelty at the heart of our self; their very presence acts as an invitation to hurt and humiliate them, to abuse and exploit them in the service of our own pleasures and enjoyment – a very similar situation to that which is played out in The Piano Teacher as Walter finds himself in close proximity to an otherness he had never envisioned. The anxiety raised by the figure of the other is, therefore, a fear of the self or more precisely the fear of the otherness that resides within the self but that is constantly being tempered and restricted by symbolic discourse. Freud’s theorization of this paradoxical dilemma is given name in the concept of the Nebenmensch complex, a concept that expresses the contradictory and ambiguous feelings of the subject for the other. They appear as love object but also hated enemy, attractive yet revolting, simultaneously comparable and incomparable to the self (Freud cited in Critchley 1999: 208–209). The ethical encounter is rooted in trauma and ambivalence, not simply a matter of ‘treat others well’ but of loving the neighbour as thyself, a return to the very core of the subject’s own fraught identity and sometimes violent impulses. Lacan elaborates on this paradoxical movement in his identification of two primary aspects to the Nebenmensch complex. Firstly, the other stands over and against the subject as the incomprehensible Thing (das Ding), baffling and threatening, the ‘element that is initially isolated by the subject in his experience of the Nebenmensch as being by its very nature alien’ (Lacan 1992: 51–52). Yet despite this, it also offers the possibility of recognition, of understanding and being understood in its capacity of similarity to the self. Inherent in this relationship is a contradictory movement of ‘beside yet alike, separation and identity’ (Lacan 1992: 51). As the representations and sociopolitical debates that run through the following chapters demonstrate, the challenges of opening 42

The Deleuzian Model and the Masochistic Contract

up new networks of engagement often revolve around the fraught identities and identifications that are inherent within any relationship between self and other (or indeed, between self and self). The anxieties made apparent in the Nebenmensch complex highlight some of the difficulties that may be encountered when one subject comes up against the desires of another. As will become increasingly apparent, the likelihood of confronting such anxieties about the threat to the self from alterity is significant when the alterity in question is female masochism. This subjective position, this body, has been othered from multiple angles: the female body is abjected and her pleasures silenced; the body in pain is incomprehensible and the deliberate quest for unpleasure pathological. And yet, as Lacan (perhaps unintentionally) implies with his acknowledgement of the possibility of recognition, a path out of the cruelty and misrecognition that has marked the place of the female masochist in sociocultural discourse may be envisaged. The cinematic texts and debates to follow address this possibility without flinching from the ambiguities and conundrums that such a path entails.

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Chapter 2

Masochism, Feminine ‘Goodness’ and Sacrifice One of the most pervasive tropes to have emerged in representational forms that portray a specifically female masochistic subjectivity has been that of feminine self-sacrifice. Cinematically, this has been most notable in genres such as the melodrama, as discussed in Mary Ann Doane’s studies of spectatorship and the ‘woman’s film’ (1988, 1992), but it is also apparent in wider cultural discourses that associate femininity with a drive towards self-sacrifice, often operating in the service of dedication to male partners or other causes typically regarded as existing within the ‘female’ sphere such as family and domesticity. This chapter will explore the meanings and structures of sacrifice in the context of philosophical questions of goodness, guilt, religion and martyrdom, and of mourning, forgiveness and subjective rebirth in relation to Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996) and Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (2006). Notably, both films frame the possibilities of ethical self-sacrifice within the sphere of sexuality, with graphically portrayed sexual acts providing the means for the female protagonist to sacrifice herself, thus forging a strong connection between sacrifice and masochistic erotic experience. The logics and outcomes of these acts differ from film to film, however, and their implications for ethical subjectivity are consequently distinct. Breaking the Waves follows Bess, a highly religious young woman living in an austere and traditional Christian community on the Scottish coast. The narrative of the film is set in motion when Bess marries an outsider, Jan, a worker on an oil rig. Bess struggles with his absence on the rig and prays for his return; return he does, but following an accident which leaves him paralyzed and ill. Bess becomes convinced that her taking other lovers will lead to Jan’s recovery, a belief that ultimately results in her visiting a man she knows is likely to mortally harm her. Seemingly miraculously, Bess’s death coincides with Jan’s recovery. The process of sacrifice presented in Breaking the Waves begins as a very reluctant Bess starts to have sex with other men after Jan persuades her this will make him happy (whether this is also an act of sacrifice on Jan’s part to try to force Bess into a ‘full’ life, or whether, as one of the other characters claims, he is ‘sick in the head’, is never made clear); it finishes with her knowingly giving up her life for his in an act of self-destruction akin to assisted suicide. The imagery and language associated with the character of Bess, along with the religious context

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of the story, situates her firmly within the realm of martyrdom discourse, a representational tradition that manifests self-sacrifice in its most extreme form and that will be explored in more depth shortly. Red Road is a very different film in terms of narrative, style and context. Arnold’s film is set in the urban streets of Glasgow, particularly around the deprived area of the Red Road flats (demolition of these towers began in 2012 and is due for completion by 2017). The protagonist here is Jackie, a CCTV security operator who one day spies a familiar face on one of her screens. The audience is left in ignorance of the source of Jackie’s increasing obsession with this man, Clyde, as she progresses from watching him via the CCTV screens, to following him around the Red Road area, to ‘seducing’ him in a highly ambiguous sequence of events in which her motives and feelings remain largely enigmatic from the spectator’s perspective. Following a graphic sex scene, she frames Clyde for rape. It is only now, as the film reaches its conclusion, that the audience discovers Clyde was sent to prison for killing Jackie’s young daughter and husband in a drug-driving accident, and her obsession stems from horror at his early release. There are two ‘sacrificial acts’ performed by Jackie within the narrative of Red Road, albeit much subtler than Bess’s explicit suicide in Breaking the Waves. Firstly she must have sex with Clyde in order to accuse him of rape and secure a more lasting justice for her family, an experience that can clearly be read as a self-sacrificial act in which disgust and sexual pleasure are mingled in a masochistic process of fascination and repulsion. This is a pivotal scene that engages with the problematics of obligation and duty in relation to kinship structures, specifically the dilemma of to whom the subject must answer when attempting to act in an ethical way (themselves? their family? social law?). Jackie’s second sacrifice occurs in the act of dropping the charges against Clyde and instead confronting him herself in a scene that, whilst distressing and inconclusive, appears to herald a subjective ‘rebirth’ for Jackie as she moves forward with the grieving process and with her life. Suffering and Beauty

Lars von Trier, the Danish director of Breaking the Waves, has emerged in recent years as a controversial auteur and as one of the darlings of contemporary cinema scholarship. The thematic content of Breaking the Waves (religion, sex, death) is typically provocative and the imagery no less so as scenes of explicit and uncomfortable sexuality are woven together with violence against the female body. Such violence occurs throughout von Trier’s work, from the heartwrenching execution of Björk by hanging at the end of Dancer in the Dark (2000), through the repeated rapes of the heroine in Dogville (2003) and perhaps most infamously the close-up shot of a masturbating Charlotte Gainsbourg cutting 46

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off her own clitoris with a pair of scissors in Antichrist (2009). Such imagery and narrative content have resulted in accusations of misogyny as well as in rapturous praise for his bold and uncompromising filmmaking. Responses to Breaking the Waves within the discipline of film studies have been no less polarized. Bess’s final act of suicidal self-sacrifice has proved crucial to interpretations of the film, which fall broadly into two camps: the film provides a ‘positive’ outcome with the finale demonstrating the power of feminine goodness and morality to exceed and transgress patriarchal power structures (see for example Keefer and Linafelt 1999, Makarushka 1998, Heath 1998), or the film is ‘negative’ in its portrayal of female subjectivity and sexuality with Bess’s death acting as the final valorisation of a damaging female masochism and drive towards self-destruction in the name of male salvation (see for example Faber 2003, Penner and Vander Stichele 2003). In part, these polemical responses stem from the unstable nature of the film itself. It contains deliberate ambiguities and even encourages directly oppositional readings through its formal style and narrative structure. Stephen Heath identifies two possible but contradictory interpretations of Breaking the Waves which are simultaneously promoted. A naturalistic reading in which a naïve girl is destroyed by her religious faith and her love, and a supernaturalistic reading in which Bess’s self-abasement and ultimate act of suicidal sacrifice does actually lead to the miraculous recovery of her husband (Heath 1998: 94). As a result of the tension between these concurrent narratives, two oppositional spectatorial positions are required, as Suzy Gordon suggests, ‘critical distance and unmitigated faith’ (2004: 209). The final scene of the film appears to reward this faith with the much-discussed image of enormous bells tolling in the sky, seemingly celebrating and confirming Bess’s sacrifice and affirming her status as morally ‘good’. The discussion of von Trier’s film presented in this chapter is not intended to assume a position on one side of this debate or the other but rather to explore what the character of Bess and her final act may suggest about the traditions of feminine ‘goodness’ within cultural discourse, with particular focus upon the centrality of the female body and female suffering. Suffice it to say that strongly critical readings of Breaking the Waves tend to repeat the entrenched associations of female masochism with negativity, misogyny and straightforward self-destruction, while positivist interpretations may overstate, sometimes drastically, the potentiality of Bess’s gesture as a genuinely transgressive and ethical act. The facets central to the characterization of Bess can be traced back across the threads of earlier representations of femininity, masochism and religion as von Trier meshes together sources that appear disparate but in fact share a similar grounding logic. Breaking the Waves is the first film in what is known as von Trier’s ‘Gold Heart’ trilogy, a set of films that subsequently included The Idiots (1998) and Dancer in the Dark. The thematic spine of these films is the exemplification of feminine goodness in the face of excessive hardship and 47

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suffering, and according to the filmmaker his inspiration for these protagonists was drawn from two primary sources. The first is a children’s book in which the heroine, Gold Heart, gives away all her possessions to others in need, including the very garments that she wears. At the other end of the spectrum von Trier cites de Sade’s novel Justine, a pornographic tale of the titular character’s incorruptible goodness despite experiences of torture and utter depravity. In von Trier’s words, the common ground within these narratives is ‘the inextinguishable and almost inhuman extremes of purity and goodness harboured in a woman’s heart’ (von Trier cited in Stevenson 2002: 90). Similarities can also be drawn between the films and the cinematic genre of melodrama which, as Doane dryly notes, draws upon the ‘obvious truths’ of femininity for its subject matter (Doane 1988: 3). Within the generic conventions of melodrama stereotypically ‘feminine’ attributes such as self-sacrifice, compassion and uncomplaining endurance are praised when found and punished when perceived to be lacking. The notion of ‘goodness’ in the Gold Heart trilogy is to some extent equatable with cultural roles normatively assigned to women, or, as Penner and Vander Stichele put it, the female characters in these films are consistently domesticated (2003: 189). Bess, despite her defiance of the wishes of her community, still adheres to the model of the dutiful wife in elevating her husband’s wellbeing above her own and accordingly is praised by a patriarchal God for her actions. Furthermore, the archetype of feminine goodness fixated upon within these traditions is not simply based upon appropriately selfless behaviour but frequently involves a proving of the self through suffering, whether depicted as corporeal, emotional or a inextricable combination of the two. Gold Heart must stand naked, shivering and exposed, Justine must endure repeated humiliations, tortures and rapes. A shared logic between the tales of Gold Heart, Justine, and Bess accords with one aspect of the Sadean philosophy more broadly: [T]he object of all the torture is to retain the capacity of being an indestructible support … the subject separates out a double of himself who is made inaccessible to destruction, so as to make it support what, borrowing a term from the realm of aesthetics, one cannot help calling the play of pain. For the space in question is the same as that in which aesthetic phenomena disport themselves, a space of freedom. And the conjunction between the play of pain and the phenomena of beauty is to be found there. (Lacan 1992: 261)

There are two pertinent and intertwined points to develop from this passage. The first relates to the Sadean fantasy which is based not upon the ideal of the complete destruction of the body or murder of the victim but rather the obverse of this, the fantasy of a subject who can be tortured forever, whose body can undergo countless and infinite sufferings without succumbing to the release of death. As Alenka Zupančič comments, the Sadean torturer is 48

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always faced with the problem that ‘the victims die too soon, with respect to the extreme suffering to which they might have been subjected’: an insurmountable obstacle emerges in that the human body can endure only so much pain, only so much suffering, before encountering the ultimate limit of death (2000: 80). The ideal subject of the Sadean fantasy and perhaps of the von Trier-esque cinematic fantasy is the indestructible subject that can suffer endlessly. Much of Breaking the Waves focuses upon the spectacle of Bess’s suffering or what Lacan would call her ‘play of pain’. Misery is piled upon her, increasing in severity and devastation as the film progresses until she finally, inevitably, reaches this ultimate limit and dies screaming Jan’s name in the final appalling irony of the belief that her suffering has been in vain and he has not been saved. It is not enough for the heroine to suffer, she must be seen to suffer, her pain must be witnessed and made visibly manifest. A further important point raised in the quoted passage from Lacan’s Ethics regards the relationship of pain to beauty and is central to the way in which he privileges aesthetics in his interpretation of de Sade. Like de Sade’s heroines, each torture that Bess undergoes causes her to become ‘more and more beautiful, or more and more “holy”’ (Zupančič 2000: 81). Beauty and goodness exist not in spite of the suffering endured, but as a result of it. De Kesel designates this the fantasy of the ‘second death’ in which the victim can endure ‘more than normal agonies’ beyond the limit of reasonable human mortality; ‘it is precisely this “perverse” logic that attributes a paradoxical beauty to the victim in the Sadean fantasy’ (2009: 233). The recent French horror Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008) depicts precisely the transcendental and inhuman implications of the Sadean indestructible subject or ‘second death’. At the core of this film is a shadowy organization who torture young women systemically and mercilessly in the belief that the experience of suffering will transform one of their victims into a martyr, a subject of ‘transfiguration’ that remains living but has the ability to see what lies beyond the barrier of death. Martyrs is almost unsurpassed in the relentlessness and visceral extremity of the suffering shown. The abuse and torture suffered by the women at the hands of the organization is horrific, but the film also focuses at length on the excessive self-mutilation perpetrated by the victims upon their own bodies as they disintegrate psychologically as well as physically. The film ends with protagonist Anna skinned alive and reaching a state of transcendent serenity and wisdom. When viewed retrospectively with knowledge of her final ordeal, the characterization of Anna accords closely to the conventions of the narratives of Christian saints and martyrs. She spends the first half of the film tending to the physical and psychological wounds of her friend Lucie and another unnamed victim, comforting and protecting, bathing and healing. However, she does not remain ‘clean’ or safe whilst they suffer. She identifies intensely with their agonies and is submerged in a world of blood, corpses and misery, recalling a story recounted by MacKendrick in 49

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which Saint Catherine drinks pus from the sores of a diseased woman in order to overcome ‘normal’ and ‘human’ reactions to bodily sensation (1999: 76). Anna’s saintly behaviour places her in the realm of abjection and horror in the company of those she tends to, with her extreme physical suffering in the second half of the film a development of this saintly persona. Her status as a beautiful and transcendent figure increases in line with the quantities of her suffering. This is the ‘indestructible support’ that Lacan speaks of, ‘a beauty surviving and resisting every violation’ (De Kesel 2009: 234). It may seem peculiar to assign the status of the beautiful to the final vision of Anna flayed, opened, almost obscene in the excruciating exposure of muscles and veins. Yet, the aesthetic of this scene demands such a reading: gone are the dark and grimy cells and the rusted metal and hunched figures of previous tortures, replaced instead with the evocation of purity and clarity. Anna appears suspended in a blaze of white light, the ‘indestructible’ subject that has gone beyond the limits of human suffering and emerged as ungendered, inhuman and transcendent. The equivalence drawn between beauty, holiness, transcendence and the spectacle of corporeal suffering is highly reminiscent of the structure found within traditional stories of the saints and martyrs, indicated of course by the title of Laugier’s film. Before moving on to explore this aspect of the presentation of goodness and sacrifice in Breaking the Waves, however, I would like to dwell a moment longer upon Zupančič’s ‘too soon’, the mortal limitations of the human body which obstruct the unending suffering of the Sadean victim. Might the fantasy that opposes these limitations not apply equally to the masochistic subject as to the Sadean one? Would the ideal masochistic scenario, too, not be enfleshed within a subject who can enjoy suffering without end, unencumbered by the physical weaknesses of the human body? ‘There is no enjoyment but the enjoyment of the body, yet if the body is to be equal to the task (or duty) of jouissance, the limits of the body have to be “transcended”’ (Zupančič 2000: 81). The masochist too may fantasize about a body that can be infinitely punished without reaching a limit, a body that can be endlessly opened and wounded without the damage done proving fatal or the flowing blood exhausting itself. Indeed, this is the fantasy presented within the sadomasochistic world of the Cenobites in the Hellraiser films which, when taken in conjunction with Martyrs suggests that the supernatural spaces and extreme corporeal violence of horror films create a particularly performative arena for the representation of Sadean and masochistic excess. From this perspective, both sadistic and masochistic desire in their embodied yet fantastical forms could be regarded as drives towards infinite suffering and thus infinite enjoyment. A crucial caveat must be maintained here, however, expressed in the question ‘whose suffering and whose enjoyment?’ The suffering subject in sadism manifests as pure signifier, a manifestation which may be regarded as an elevation to aesthetic and transcendent heights or as the reduction to an objectified vessel for a gendered 50

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formula in which the body of the female victim is unwillingly sacrificed in the service of male pleasure. The masochist covets their own suffering and orchestrates their subjective or sexual practices according to the logic of a disavowed agency and chosen submission. The character of Bess in Breaking the Waves emerges at the ambivalent and fraught intersection between these two points. Martyrdom and the Dissolution of the Flesh

Via the vicissitudes of a children’s story, von Trier’s heroines and de Sade, we arrive at the conjunction of masochism and martyrdom. Furthermore, this is the moment at which the question of self-sacrifice rises ever more prominently to the surface. There are several points of commonality that connect the aesthetics and practices of masochism with those of martyrdom, and in Breaking the Waves the body of Bess emerges as the focal point for these elements. Her place within historical and representational narratives of martyrdom and sainthood is established from the very first sequence of the film, which is modelled upon the feted trial scene from La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928), directed by the earlier Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer (it also seems probable here that von Trier, still in the early stages of his film career in 1996, was making a statement about his place within the traditions of Danish cinema). In this scene, Bess asks the elders of her religious community for their blessing to marry her beloved Jan. Throughout the trial scene, Dreyer uses extreme close-ups from a variety of different angles, focusing on Joan’s tearful face and on those of the men interrogating her, in turn emphasizing her distress and their power. The gendered aspects of this scene stand out starkly. Joan is a lone female figure amongst these dominant males, and the implicit violence apparent in their questions and gazes provides a precursor to the explicit and horrific violence that is to follow when she is condemned to burn at the stake. From a spectatorial perspective, the close-ups showing us each detail of Joan’s suffering function in two ways. Firstly, they illicit empathy from the viewer. Joan is not objectified here but is emphatically a terrified and confused subject who has been placed in an awful position of vulnerability. Yet, simultaneously and akin to de Sade’s heroines, Joan’s misery is made into a necessary spectacle that emphasizes the ‘play of pain’: her endurance of this ordeal and those that are to follow only serve to render her more saint-like and more beautiful, her narrative is only given meaning through the very fact that she suffers and that the spectator bears witness to this suffering. The focus upon tortured facial expressions can be traced back through centuries of religious art depicting martyrdom, most obviously and commonly in paintings of the crucified Christ. The establishment of an all too visible physical and spiritual pain is of the utmost importance 51

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within these images. Von Trier borrows the mise en scène from Dreyer’s sequence for Bess’s own ‘trial’ in which she must convince the elders of her love and her suitability for marriage. Although the primary emotion displayed on Bess’s face at this stage is hope as opposed to despair, the gendered division remains all too clear as she defers to the manifestation of stern and judgmental patriarchal dominance around her. At several points in the film, Bess’s exuberant and emotional demeanour is contrasted with the dour, austere mannerisms of the rest of the town and the menfolk of the town in particular, who prize restraint as the highest of attributes. Bess is constructed as ‘other’ within the community as a result of her perceived childlike nature and the flamboyance of her reactions, a status that her marriage to another outsider only cements. This is typical of the traditions of saints and martyrs for, as Penner and Vander Stichele suggest, the martyr is an alienated figure, separated from and different to those around them and connected only to God (2003: 180–181). Furthermore, and pertinent for the exploration of Bess and the classical figure of Antigone to come at the end of this chapter, Bess’s increasing isolation as the film progresses also situates her in proximity to the heroes and heroines of classical tragedy. These tragic figures always occupy a space separated from the social order around them, a status that plays an enabling role in their function as transgressors of the established limits of the Symbolic structure (Lacan 1992: 271). The representation of the character of Jackie in Red Road is similarly based upon the elements of isolation or ‘otherness’ and the centrality of suffering to sacrifice, although overall her corporeality is less demonstrative than Bess’s in keeping with the contemporary realism of the characters and settings of Arnold’s film. The opening scenes of Red Road establish Jackie’s status as detached from the rest of the world as she watches the city of Glasgow and its inhabitants via CCTV screens. There is an element of voyeurism here as Jackie repeatedly focuses upon her favourite ‘characters’ (the dog walker and his sickly hound, the love-struck cleaner and her flirtatious colleague) but this voyeurism is depicted as sympathetic rather than intrusive, with the overall effect that Jackie is portrayed as a lonely observer who watches the joys and dramas of life pass by her without participating in them directly. As the film progresses, her alienation from those around her becomes more apparent as she maintains a distance from her late husband’s family, engages in joyless sex with a colleague and cuts an awkward figure on the Red Road estate, potentially threatened by the violence and poverty in which it is mired. The thinness of her body adds further to the effect of vulnerability and alienation. At times she appears skeletal, a spectre roaming unnoticed through the city, haunted by the deaths of her kin and existing in a borderland space that is not quite dying, not quite living. The relationship that she develops with Clyde may be based upon hatred and the paradoxical movement of repulsion and attraction, but it is also depicted as the factor which draws her back into the world she has abandoned. She leaves her 52

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safe tower of screens and ventures into the spaces she has previously watched from a distance, communicating with ‘characters’ and forming bonds (of a sort) with Clyde’s friends as she pursues her obsession. Her reactions to her meetings with Clyde, although contradictory and ambiguous, are strongly visceral in a way that her encounters with others from her everyday life are not, suggesting a process of reattachment to herself and the world. Her first act of sacrifice, sex with the hated cause of her family’s death, is immersed in a combination of extreme sexual pleasure (the violent orgasm she has during the very graphic oral sex scene) and self-inflicted suffering, culminating as she hits herself in the face with a rock in order to make her accusation of rape more believable. The explicit nature of Jackie’s physical pleasure coupled with a knowledge of her disgust and subsequent self-injury make this a difficult sequence for the spectator; the enjoyment that Jackie takes in this encounter seems masochistic in the most troubling way. Although it is far less overt than its manifestation in Breaking the Waves, there are connections to be made between the narrative and imagery of Red Road and the traditions of the martyrs, and perhaps this may offer some insight into the portrayal of masochism in this scene and Jackie’s compulsions through the film as a whole. The visibility of Jackie’s suffering and the physical form that this suffering takes are again prominent as the ordeal of her sacrifice is played out through and upon her flesh. Additionally, there are certain interior scenes in which she is framed as a dark figure against a strong light source, giving the impression that she is surrounded by an aura or halo. Although not comparable to the direct referencing of Jeanne D’Arc employed by von Trier, nonetheless this effect adds to the impression of Jackie as a potential martyr in her quest for justice. Susan Sontag comments in Regarding the Pain of Others that the ‘iconography of suffering’ has a longstanding pedigree within art, seen in depictions of the Passion of Christ and Christian martyrs as well as in portrayals of classical myths (2003: 36). The mortifications of the flesh are vital to this pedigree, the tortures and deaths of these figures often occurring in the most horrific ways that reveal the body at its most vulnerable. In painting, the motifs of Christ near-naked and bleeding on the cross and Saint Sebastian filled with arrows appear repeatedly. In cinema, the imagery of Joan burning alive at the stake in Dreyer’s film finds its modern counterpart as the protagonist of Dancer in the Dark is pulled screaming to the gallows. The iconography of suffering is even apparent in the very visual nature of recent atrocities such as the Abu Ghraib photographs, which Stephen F. Eisenman argues echo ‘the motif of tortured people and tormented animals who appear to sanction their own abuse’ that is apparent throughout the Western classical tradition (2007: 16). The representation of Bess’s ordeals in Breaking the Waves draws upon a long-established system of the aesthetization of suffering and in particular the connection of this aesthetic structure with notions of morality and ‘goodness’. The mobilization of representational conventions is a 53

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strategy common to several of the films in this book, however unlike the switch in perspective in In the Cut ’s questioning take on the erotic thriller genre or the sensual reformulation of Italian gialli films in Amer, von Trier makes effective (even manipulative) use of the iconography of suffering without encouraging the spectator of the film to rethink their relationship to this imagery. Despite this, it is possible to argue that the traditional visions of martyrdom hold their own disruptive potential when considered within the wider debates about masochism with which this book engages. Sontag suggests that these visions are ‘intended to move and excite, and to instruct and exemplify’ (Sontag 2003: 36). Masochism, it has already been established, may dismantle and reconfigure normative oppositional categories such as active and passive, subject and object, perpetrator and victim. Thus, although the imagery of suffering that runs through martyrdom discourse and von Trier’s cinema certainly invokes to some extent the sadistic gaze which beholds the punished and violated (female) body as a spectacle of pleasure, the situation becomes more complex when the aspect of power is factored in to the interpretation of this imagery. Penner and Vander Stichele observe that in martyrdom, the locus of power is reversed from the oppressor to the ‘victim’, because despite the torture and suffering inflicted upon their body the martyred subject retains self-mastery and control (2003: 177–178). MacKendrick too notes the potential for a reversal of power within certain scenarios of dominance and submission, commenting that masochism must decidedly not be regarded as the eroticization of powerlessness. Rather, part of the pleasure to be derived from masochistic experience arises from the subject’s strength against the violence enacted upon it from without (1999: 103–104). Thus, while it is true that Bess suffers greatly over the course of Breaking the Waves she also experiences the eroticization of her pain as her own body becomes the vessel through which to enact her chosen practices of devotional self-sacrifice. Throughout, her body and particularly her face are the focus of close-range shots that express the commingling of suffering and erotic experience; the aesthetic style ‘quests endlessly for proximity’ (Gordon 2004: 213). The vulnerability and femininity of Bess’s body are emphasized even in the scenes of pleasure. After losing her virginity on her wedding night her white dress is marked with blood as a vivid and visceral reminder of her penetration by Jan. This blood also serves to foreshadow the blood that will later be split from her lacerated and dying body, again acting as a sign of her love for Jan and of the inextricability of love and violence within the logic of the film. Her sacrifice and masochistic desire are inscribed upon her flesh. The primacy given to physical suffering and to the prolonged torture of the ‘good’ figure is typical of visual and literary representations of the martyrs and saints and of the iconography of suffering seen through the history of Western art but here appears in a highly gendered form, dovetailing with the ideologies of feminine goodness and beauty seen in other representational traditions exemplified by 54

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the Sadean fantasy. The idealized attributes of love and faith are shown to be inextricable from the flesh of the body, lust and violence and the vision of the sacred that the film presents is irrevocably anchored in the corporeal profane. The privileged position given to pain and the wounding of the body is common to martyrdom and to masochism, however, this alone is not the most significant point of commonality. Agony shares its experiential space with heightened intensities of ecstasy. MacKendrick comments that SacherMasoch’s original writings display a devotion to the Christian saints because it was they who provided the first narratives and original imagery of the potential pleasures of specific types of suffering (MacKendrick 1999: 67). She goes on to recognize that Freud, albeit tentatively, regards some forms of religious selfdenial or asceticism and devotional self-mutilatory practices such as flogging to be forms of behaviour that stem from the same root as moral masochism (1999: 67). Thus, despite the fact that the sacred, to which martyrdom belongs, conventionally separates the mind from the temptations and pleasures of the flesh to which masochistic desire is in thrall, the connection between the two is already established in conceptual terms. Bataille’s writing on eroticism is paramount when considering this ecstatic suffering; for him, eroticism permeates the realms of human experience that escape intellectual understanding and resonate instead with the experience of a dispossession of self. Crucial here is the underlying notion of the continuity and discontinuity of being that forms Bataille’s opening gambit in Eroticism: Reproduction implies the existence of discontinuous beings … Each being is distinct from all others. His birth, his death, the events of his life may have an interest for others, but he alone is directly concerned in them. He is born alone. He dies alone. Between one being and another, there is a gulf, a discontinuity. (Bataille 2001a: 12)

This discontinuity is one essential aspect of human consciousness that each must suffer, felt as a painful and perpetually open wound that bites and alienates, a deep gulf separating every subject from those around them. These discontinuous beings that Bataille describes yearn for an end to this separation and for the elusive experience of continuity. However, the only certain and permanent way to access continuity is through death. Bataille presents death as vertiginous and terrifying, but also as hypnotic and fascinatingly alluring (Bataille 2001a: 13). His project in Eroticism is to identify and explore the cultural practices that may allow the subject, albeit temporarily, to experience the state of continuity without having to submit to the final and irretrievable void. Most notably, he explores practices around sex, violence and religious feeling, particularly looking at the imbrication and structural similarities between these cultural forms. Such experiences and practices give rise to the concept of eroticism. The most crucial 55

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aspect of erotic experience as theorized by Bataille is also, perhaps, the aspect that attends most pertinently to masochistic sexuality. Each of the examples that he discusses emphasizes that a deliberate loss of self is absolutely central to the quest for continuity: in eroticism the subject encounters ‘the disequilibrium in which the being consciously calls his own experience into question … If necessary I can say in eroticism: I am losing myself ’ (Bataille 2001a: 31). The highly ambivalent nature of erotic experience comes to the fore through this focus upon the loss of self, in distinction to the tenets of humanist doctrine that have bestowed meaning upon human existence through the envisioning of the self as unique, self-possessed and deterministic. The loss of self, entailing the subject staring into the abyss of the unknown, may be thrilling but for this very reason may also invoke fear and nausea. The phrase ‘I am losing myself ’ contains a paradox that cuts to the heart of erotic experience and to the core of masochistic sexuality. To enunciate the ‘I’ necessitates a subjective speaking position, yet simultaneously this subject is dissolving, breaking apart at the very point of enunciation and calling their own selfhood into question. To deliberately seek such a paradoxical and troubling relationship to one’s own subjectivity is regarded as perversity or even monstrosity: ‘Eroticism as seen by the objective intelligence is something monstrous’ (2001a: 37). Erotic experience comes into being as excessive because it calls into question the value of the individualistic self and the symbolic networks that support such a construction of subjectivity. Herein lies its transgressive and subversive potential, its ability to facilitate the ‘inner experience’ that refutes knowledge as a hardened and fixed status. When the subject experiences the erotic, ‘an ordered, parsimonious and shuttered reality is shaken by a plethoric disorder’ (Bataille 2001a: 104). This experience of rupture cannot be adequately understood if viewed from the humanist perspective that privileges those elements to which eroticism is opposed: the valorization of mind over body, singular self over collectivity and multiplicity and rationality over uncertainty and illogic. It is the ambivalent perversity underlying Bataille’s theory of eroticism that resonates so strongly with the paradoxical nature of masochism and martyrdom. The experiences of each are steeped in the dispossession of the self through the joint endeavours of embodied pain and pleasure. Drawing upon Bataille, Jessica Benjamin argues that eroticism must always be thought in relation to the embodied self. She observes: ‘The body stands for boundaries: discontinuity, individuality, and life. Consequently the violation of the body is a transgression between life and death … this crossing of boundaries is for Bataille the secret of all eroticism’ (Benjamin 1990: 63–64). This gives some suggestion of why the penetration or opening of the body, whether through acts of sexuality, violence or both, is essential to erotic experience. Firstly, it acts to disturb the integrity of the corporeal subject, breaking through the state of discontinuity and separation that characterizes the mundane and the everyday. 56

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Secondly, it demands an address to and awareness of the vulnerability of the human body and in doing so brings the subject a little closer to the alluring void of death. The films discussed in this chapter and others depict a type of masochistic sexuality that is frequently structured around the violation of the body in various different forms, and the desire to teeter upon the brink of the abyss of continuity. Some, such as Bess in von Trier’s film or Ana in Amer, fall foul of the precipice and ultimate assent to the void, others, such as Jackie in Red Road or Frannie in In the Cut, are fascinated by the transgressive potential of such violation not as a suicidal promise but as a temporary erotic state that allows them to continue living with the additional awareness of how close the void may actually be. The violent and sexual experiences undergone by Bess in Breaking the Waves take on a further significance in light of Bataille’s concept of eroticism. The sufferings she undergoes, including the numerous violations of her body, combine the eroticism of masochism with the eroticism that Bataille places at the heart of all religion, Christianity included. ‘Continuity is reached through experience of the divine. The divine is the essence of continuity’ (Bataille 2001a: 118). Religion and the practices of which it consists (sacrificial rituals in pre-Christianity, the act of praying and the connection with God that this implies, ceremonies centred around birth and death and so on) give access to the erotic experience of continuity as the subject ‘loses themselves’ within the larger community and beyond this, within the belief of a connection to a higher being. Bess’s ‘conversations’ with God make explicit this connection. The most famous example of this intermingling of the sensual and the sacred, the raptures of the divine, is Bernini’s statue of Saint Theresa of Avila: she reclines beneath the rays of God’s love with head thrown back and lips parted. Lacan perceives this statue as an aesthetic representation of jouissance or enjoyment (Lacan 1982: 147), in this case jouissance as the orgasmic ecstasy of the experience of transcendence, the dispossession of self and the continuous state. The representations that form part of Christian discourse in art or in the narratives that surround rituals and ceremonies (within which the stories of the saints and martyrs must be included) play a formative role in enabling the sacred to facilitate eroticism. Elsewhere, Bataille comments: ‘One reaches the states of ecstasy or of rapture only by dramatizing existence in general. The belief in a God betrayed, who loves us (to the extent that he dies for us), redeems us and saves us, played this role for a long time’ (Bataille 1988: 10). The suggestion that it is the systems of significance woven around religious practices that give them their erotic potential, as much as the practices themselves, holds no revelations. But what Bataille does here is to introduce an aesthetic dimension to eroticism and inner experience through the emphasis upon dramatization. Inevitably perhaps, this recalls one of the central poles of the Sadean philosophy outlined above: the suffering and beauty of the victim/heroine must be transformed into 57

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a spectacular display and witnessed. Similarly, Bataille suggests that in cultural practices such as religion it is the narrativization and exhibitionism of rituals that enables those watching to access eroticism. It is no coincidence that rituals of sacrifice are his chosen example to make this point: In sacrifice … The victim dies and the spectators share in what his [or her] death reveals. This is what religious historians call the element of sacredness. This sacredness is the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the creature’s discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the creature is now one. Only a spectacular killing, carried out as the solemn and collective nature of religion dictates, has the power to reveal what normally escapes notice. (Bataille 2001a: 22)

The ‘spectators’ described here assume a double role within the sacrificial ritual. They are observers of the process, but more than this, they are witnesses. Such an apparently subtle shift in terminology also implies a shift from a purely passive position to one of implication and even complicity. To be a witness entails a certain degree of participation; indeed, without this participatory element, the spectators Bataille describes would be unable to experience the sacredness and eroticism of the event. This, of course, has further implications for spectatorship when considered within a cinematic context and particularly when addressing films that feature graphic acts of sexuality and violence such as Breaking the Waves and Red Road. The consideration of key moments from Red Road assists in elaborating upon Bataille’s conceptualization of dispossession and the crucial role that this plays within erotic experience and the reconfiguration of the self. Of particular interest is the scene in which Jackie finds her way into a party at Clyde’s flat in one of the almost derelict towers of the Red Road estate, and the sex scene which follows later. Until the party, she had watched or followed Clyde from a distance but at the party she finds herself face to face with him and beyond this, dancing in close proximity in a sequence charged with peril and fear, yes, but also attraction and desire. The cause of Jackie’s obsession with Clyde is at this stage still a mystery to the spectator, and although it ultimately proves to be unrelated to sexual violence there are implications through the film that suggest her fear is rooted in just such an attack. Clyde is entangled in a world of potentially dangerous desire from his first appearance on Jackie’s CCTV screens, having sex amidst the urban decay of the city; she subsequently watches him flirting with a cafe waitress and approaching a teenage girl outside a school (later revealed to be his daughter). Such images, although far from overt, plant the seed of suggestion that this character may be a sexual predator. The weight of 58

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generic expectation is instrumental in supporting this implied reading. Across a range of representational forms (thrillers, police procedurals, horror films, as well as news reports and so on), women frequently appear in cultural imaginings as the victims of sexual violence. From this perspective, Jackie’s encounters with Clyde appear to fulfil some of the more negative tropes associated with masochistic desire: she is fascinated by her oppressor and by extension her own victimization, cast into the role of stalker as she follows him home to his den where the threat of her own destruction waits. The red tones that wash through both scenes in the flat bring with them connotations of lust and of danger, a Bataillean state of transgression as Jackie deliberately seeks out an apparently perilous situation. Her motivations are oblique and as such the film poses the strangely felt movements of desire. Whether or not Clyde is her ‘love object’ or an object of hate and fear, he remains an object of obsession and the structure of desire is the same as it circles and pursues. The sex scene between Jackie and Clyde is, in the context of masochistic self-sacrifice, the most pivotal and significant of Red Road. It weaves together extreme and visceral pleasure, simmering tension and peril (echoed by the eerie screaming of the foxes that Clyde comments upon) and an undercurrent of sadness in the losses that both characters have endured. Based upon the connotations of Clyde as a dangerous sexual predator, the intensity of Jackie’s orgasm is initially highly troubling, but is soon revealed to be the moment at which the ‘victim’ catalyses a deliberate act of vengeful self-sacrifice. That this sacrifice is enacted through the vulnerable female body accords with Bataille’s ideas about the dissolution of the self through the transgression of sexual taboo. The wavering lines between mundane existence, sex, death and mourning that are threaded throughout Arnold’s film are pulled together in this coupling as they are in Bataille’s theory: It is the common business of sacrifice to bring life and death into harmony, to give death the upsurge of life, life the momentousness and the vertigo of death opening on to the unknown. Here life is mingled with death, but simultaneously death is a sign of life, a way into the infinite. (Bataille 2001a: 91)

For Jackie, this moment provides a masochistic coalescence of selfdetermination, as she puts her plan into action, and the dissolution of the self through sexual ecstasy. It also marks a constitutive point in the trajectory of Jackie’s subjective ‘rebirth’, explicitly signalling her shift from an alienated and haunted observer in a state of arrested mourning to an engaged subject, participating actively in the world around her. The vertiginous experience of intense eroticism that her encounter with Clyde bestows enables an ‘upsurge’ further demonstrated as this process of ‘rebirth’ enters its next stage in her second sacrificial act: dropping the rape charges against Clyde in order that they 59

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might both be, as far as possible, released from the past. For Jackie, this release is symbolized through her willingness, at last, to scatter the ashes of her lost family and to reenter the social realm. Guilt and Responsibility

What sets in motion the patterns of sacrifice, violence and redemption in Red Road ? What is the catalyst in Breaking the Waves? A shared theme emerges in answer to these questions that enables a direct address to one of the abiding conceptual explanations of masochism, the understanding that it is fuelled by guilt and the desire for punishment in order to atone. Although not repeated in the films discussed in subsequent chapters, this association is presented as a possible underlying motive for the characters’ masochistic behaviour and their inclinations towards self-sacrifice in the films of von Trier and Arnold. Within the logic of these films, the potential for redemption through sacrifice (whether in this world or the next) is causally based upon the initial assumption of responsibility and guilt. In Breaking the Waves this is clear from the outset as Bess claims responsibility for Jan’s accident; it is also inextricable from the conservative Christian doctrine of original sin in which each subject is already inevitably guilty. In Red Road, however, just as the discovery of the connection between Jackie and Clyde is revealed only towards the conclusion of the narrative, the spectator can identify guilt as a possible ‘pathological’ factor for Jackie’s sacrifice only when she confesses to Clyde in their final confrontation that her last words to her husband and daughter were spoken in anger. Furthermore, it would be remiss to overlook the gender implications of this guilt. In each case the female protagonist becomes implicated in the actions of their male counterparts, resulting in the shifting of guilt and responsibility from the male subject to the female body. This alteration of emphasis is reflective of a widely apparent tradition in Western culture in visual representation and narrative forms, traceable through the cinematic trope of the femme fatale and back to the original transgressions of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis. The phenomenon of guilt as an explanation for the ‘problem’ of masochism is made explicit in Freudian theory, which posits masochistic urges and behaviour as the manifestation of a desire for punishment in order to assuage a conscious or more frequently unconscious sense of guilt. This association has subsequently remained prominent in psychoanalytic and cultural accounts. As discussed in the Introduction, in ‘The economic problem of masochism’ Freud identifies three primary forms that masochism takes: erotogenic, feminine and moral, the last of these forms arising from a sense of guilt that the subject may or may not be aware of. In moral masochism the desire for suffering may be detached from a specific love object and instead attributed to the world at large, 60

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to acquaintances, enemies, even impersonal events; as Freud so memorably (and from a modern perspective, rather flippantly) says, ‘the true masochist always turns his cheek whenever he has a chance of receiving a blow’ (1961a: 165). Freud’s moral masochist cares not from which direction their punishment comes, but will seek suffering in any aspect of their life: All other masochistic sufferings carry with them the condition that they shall emanate from the loved person and shall be endured at his command. This restriction has been dropped in moral masochism. The suffering itself is what matters; whether it is decreed by someone who is loved or someone who is indifferent is of no importance. (1961a: 165)

At odds with the masochist aesthetic espoused by Deleuze, which focuses on form over ‘symptom’, Freud’s description of masochism here initially seems to more closely resemble the way in which the word is used in modern understanding, the ‘emotional and sexual waste-basket’ described by Phillips and discussed in the Introduction (1998: 4). Freud emphasizes, however, that although moral masochism may not superficially appear sexual it is nonetheless underscored by erotogenic masochism, implying an erotic drive at its heart. Jean Laplanche notes the effect of slippage in Freud’s work between sexual and nonsexual masochism and attributes it to anaclisis or propping: the idea that a sexual drive is always ‘propped up’ or supported by a nonsexual or vital function (Laplanche 1976: 87). Therefore the form of masochism described by Freud as ‘moral’ may be seen as a combination of sexual and nonsexual elements that are catalysed by a sense of guilt, becoming detached from the fixation on one specific love object and certain specific acts and acting instead as a guiding principle towards an erotic investment in punishment. The displacement of the sexual onto the conventionally nonsexual, or the process of ‘propping’, is also apparent in the ritualized practices of masochism that deviate (in the truest sense of the word) from normative sexual acts such as oral sex or vaginal intercourse to settle instead upon fetishization and performances of punishment (for example, the fabrics and whips in Venus in Furs or the corrective red pens in Secretary). Thus, although the Freudian account of moral masochism cannot be taken as an exhaustive or even entirely coherent theory, it does indicate the difficulties apparent in distinguishing between sexual and nonsexual motives and behaviours, as well as opening up the realm of the erotic to more perverse possibilities. Furthermore, it articulates an assumption about masochism that is still apparent in cultural discourse, as films such as Red Road and Breaking the Waves evidence. Both Jackie and Bess depict behaviours that accord in particular ways with the conceptual framework of Freud’s moral masochist, yet also offer a more complex portrayal of the guilty subject who attempts to ‘punish’ themselves through self-sacrificial acts that may appear nonsensical and 61

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nonsexual, but in fact accord to a perverse and libidinous logic of their own. Jackie is depicted as isolated from her friends and family, even from herself, a position of alienation that she strives to maintain. Her more conventional sexual couplings with a colleague are joyless and apparently hold no pleasure for her, but her interactions with Clyde, conversely, are highly erotically charged throughout the film. It would be erroneous to describe Clyde as a ‘love object’ in the Freudian sense, more accurately he occupies the position of the Lacanian object of desire, the objet petit a. He is the focal point of Jackie’s obsessive fascination, a compulsion that draws her ever closer to the sex scene that acts as punishment for her guilt and fulfils the responsibility of providing justice for her dead family. This act of sacrifice does prove pivotal but not quite in the way initially imagined by Jackie or the spectator. As in the Lacanian formula of desire, the figure of Clyde and what he symbolizes dissolves as she reaches him to leave not satisfaction but a lack of closure and the dissolution of the idea of revenge or punishment. The blurred anamorphic shapes resolve themselves to reveal the causal narrative that has underpinned Jackie’s actions all along, however, the next stage in this narrative of responsibility remains ambiguous and incomplete. Similarly, Bess appears to play out Freud’s concept of moral masochism, her desire turning towards any sexual object that will sufficiently fulfil the regime of self-punishment she believes will redeem her guilt for Jan’s accident. These encounters are initially shrouded in disgust, yet as she recounts her stories to Jan it becomes apparent that a further displacement is afoot and that these men act as substitutes for her initial love object, her husband. To paraphrase Freud, do these women turn their cheeks at the prospect of receiving a blow? Perhaps, but the offering up of their bodies contained in such a gesture must be understood within the wider networks of goodness and sacrifice, suffering and pleasure, that such representations of female masochism evoke. The spectre of guilt must also be considered in conjunction with the question of responsibility, heralding the essentially ethical dilemmas of how, why and for whom the subject becomes responsible. This has a specific significance for ethical action and self-sacrifice within the Christian context and in the context of intersubjectivity and responsibility more broadly. Derrida’s short text The Gift of Death acts as a useful starting point for an extrapolation of the ethical relationship of the self to the other and the responsibility that such a relationship entails. Derrida’s concern is with Western religious doctrines, and consequently ‘the other’ takes on two necessarily interrelated but distinctive meanings in this text. In places it refers to the other humans that each subject encounters in the flesh each day and that call us into responsibility via the ideological structuring of social roles and obligations. The alternative and more contextually specific meaning posits God as the other and as the omnipotent source of authority and demand. Derrida explains that within the Christian 62

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mode of thought responsibility is brought to bear through the ‘exposing of the soul to the gaze of another person, of a person as transcendent other, as an other who looks at me, but who looks without the-subject-who-says-I being able to reach that other, see her, hold her within the reach of my gaze’ (1995: 25). The Christian subject is brought into responsibility by the necessity of being in a relationship with, and responding to, this transcendent other and the fact of their permanent and unavoidable gaze. However, and crucially, this relationship and the responses that it demands are by no means reciprocal. The gaze that the subject encounters is characterized by its dissymmetry and its inherent disproportion: it ‘remains secret from me although it commands me’ (Derrida 1995: 27). This is the source of the terrifying but exhilarating trembling inherent in the Christian experience of duty and ethical obligation. We must always answer to an unknown that refuses to reveal itself to us, whose gaze we feel as a constant reminder of our responsibility but whom we can never gaze upon in return. We tremble not in the presence of one who is wholly other, but in the absence of this mysterious figure (Derrida, 1995: 56–57). This explains in part why the final shot of Breaking the Waves in which the gigantic bells ring out above land and sea feels so inadequate. The mysterium tremundum of Christian responsibility that is so important to Derrida’s theory of sacrifice, drawn from Czech philosopher Jan Patočka’s Heretical Essays on the History of Philosophy and more canonical works such as Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, is centred upon the other as absent authority. It is the inherent and constant unknowability of the other which calls into being the subject’s dutiful response. This final image undermines not only the emphasis on faith constructed through the supernaturalistic reading of the film, but the essential basis of faith itself. The purity of belief can only be sustained ‘by the very fact that it cannot be “objectivity verified”’ (Žižek 1999: 218). The bells indicate that the abyssal force of the previously unknown may begin to present itself and, in doing so, to nullify the structure of faith, the dissymmetry of the gaze and the undeniable potency of the other’s command. Derrida goes on to argue that the disproportion inherent in the relationship between self and other and the responsibility that this disproportionate encounter calls forth is inextricable from the notion of guilt. ‘This guilt is originary, like original sin. Before any fault is determined, I am guilty inasmuch as I am responsible … Guilt is inherent in responsibility because responsibility is always unequal to itself: one is never responsible enough’ (Derrida 1995: 51). Guilt emerges as a foundational result of the Christian belief in an absent but awesome other. This passage in The Gift of Death contains a terminological slippage in that it is unclear whether Derrida is referring to the subject’s responsibilities to God, or to her fellow humans. Seemingly, in both cases the subject meets the same guiltstricken stalemate: however responsible one is and however much one gives, 63

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it can never be enough. One can always be more responsible and this infinite excess is felt as the burden of guilt. Derrida’s description of God as unknowable yet demanding will sound familiar to scholars of Lacan in its resemblance to the big Other, his conceptualization of the authority of the Symbolic law. Freud’s theory suggests that the sense of guilt apparent in moral masochism may be traced back to an overactive superego, typically resulting from overly zealous parental discipline or the introjection of other social laws (Freud 1961a: 166, 169). Lacan takes this point and places it at the heart of his reconfiguration of the psychoanalytic subject. The question of moral agency comes to the fore in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Referring specifically to the concept of moral masochism, Lacan makes explicit the connections between the command of the Symbolic and the paradoxical experience of pleasure and unpleasure that characterizes masochistic desire as the command ‘affirms itself in opposition to pleasure’ yet simultaneously contains the potential to facilitate ‘pleasure in a second degree’ (Lacan 1992: 20). The Lacanian subject is perpetually and unavoidably divided as a result of the authoritarian influence of the superego, frequently acting against its own best interests as it seeks to assuage its guilt and pacify the punishing demands of the Symbolic ‘big Other’ (Miller 1996: 8–9). The big Other may be symbolized by a monotheistic God, however, although this personification is pervasive it is only one of the possible ways in which the Symbolic law is culturally manifested. Similarly to Derrida, Lacan argues that one of the most terrifying aspects of the Other lies in its unknowability. The subject seeks to fulfil what is demanded of them but can ultimately only guess what this might be. From this perspective, every subject is always already guilty as the impossible desires of the Other can never be accurately ascertained, let alone met. Zupančič states: ‘the subject is the effect of the fact that there is a cause which will never be discovered in the Other; she is the effect of the absence of this cause, the effect of lack in the Other’ (2000: 41). This throws the dilemma experienced by the subject into sharper relief by going one step further to suggest that not only are the demands of the big Other (manifested in the superego) unknowable, but in fact they do not exist at all. The lack that marks the subject and calls them into responsibility is reflective of the lack that marks the place of the other and ensures the subject’s guilt and responsibility will ‘never “run out”’ (Zupančič 2000: 148). The narratives of Bess and Jackie overtly dramatize the dilemma of the relationship between the subject and the absent presence (or present absence) of the other. For Bess a Christian God, for Jackie the ghosts of her dead husband and daughter to whom she can never apologize. In each case, the eroticization of suffering is inextricably linked to the possibility of atonement and specifically, an atonement through the sacrifice of the self in the service of the other as kin. The disparity between the outcomes of their narratives is indicative of a structural limit within the logic of self-sacrifice. This limit arises 64

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in response to the notion of self-sacrifice as substitution upon which the finale of Breaking the Waves relies. The bells tolling in the sky paradoxically prove that Bess’s faith is justified and her life (or more accurately, her death) is accepted as a substitute for Jan’s. Bess dies in his place in order that he be saved. However, such a logic ignores what Derrida, following Heidegger, calls the ‘irreplaceable singularity of the self ’ that the death of the subject entails (1995: 41). It is quite impossible, he argues, to die in the place of the other or in exchange for the other because to be mortal is to die. Furthermore it is the very fact of our mortality that affirms our place within the disproportionate relationship of responsibility. Death is the thing (perhaps the only thing) that each subject must take as their own entirely; it is only in the moment of death that the irreplaceability of the subject is conferred. ‘Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place’ (Derrida 1995: 41). This assertion points towards the limits of self-sacrifice with regard to how much it is possible for the subject to give up, or take responsibility for, in relation to the other. This is the internal limit within the logic of sacrifice. ‘I can give the other everything except immortality, except this dying for her to the extent of dying in place of her and so freeing her from her own death’ (Derrida 1995: 43). If Breaking the Waves denies and exceeds this limit within the supernaturalistic space of the film, then Red Road comes up against it in the sadness and isolation of Jackie’s haunted life. Appearing initially as an urban spectre herself she watches the countless lives of those in the city around her and experiences their narratives vicariously, watching but not, at first, participating. The tragedy that permeates Arnold’s film from the final position of revelation is the implication that Jackie would willingly offer the gift of her death in place of her daughter’s (and perhaps her husband’s too) were not the impossibility of this act of substitution all too apparent. The half-life that she does inhabit is overshadowed by the grief of being the one who remains, left behind and forced to recognize the traumatic fact that in their death her lost kin have been conferred their ‘irreplaceable singularity’. Instead the weight of responsibility leads her to a different logic of sacrifice, that of Bataillean eroticism and the relinquishing or dispossession of her body as a form of duty to her lost kin. Bess and Jackie with Antigone

The final section of this chapter will draw together the most vital streams of these debates about beauty, goodness, femininity and sacrifice as they coalesce around the tragic heroine Antigone. Antigone (c. 441 bc) was presented as the final part of Sophocles’ trilogy of Theban plays, following the better known Oedipus Rex and focusing upon the daughter of the doomed king. The character of Antigone has fascinated various philosophers of the twentieth century and 65

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the ethical conundrums raised by the play have been addressed by writers such as Heidegger, Lacan, Irigaray and Butler. Through a reading of the narratives of Bess and Jackie alongside the presentation of Antigone as a tragic and ethical beacon, this section will offer some final meditations upon the logic of sacrifice as a feminine act and its relationship to masochistic desire. A starting point for the shared conceptual space of the three female characters is the way in which each of them exists in a transitional border space that operates in the realm of mourning between life and death. This marginal status, teetering on the edge of the Bataillean abyss, bestows these women with a transgressive power, although the articulation of this power lies in their willingness to offer themselves as a sacrifice. Butler describes Antigone as ‘already in the service of death, dead while living’ (2000: 47). The narrative momentum of tragedy is dependent upon the hubristic drive of the tragic hero or heroine, thus, Antigone’s death is experienced as inevitable from the early moments of the play. For her ‘the race is already run’ (Lacan 1992: 272). What distinguishes Antigone from other tragic heroes and heroines is that she possesses the knowledge of her impending death before the event, indeed, the wilful drive towards a death which could seemingly be avoided is what gives the play its dramatic power to enthral and horrify, and is one of the aspects that has so entranced later theorists. Butler further argues that Lacan’s fascination with Antigone stems from the masochistic expression of the death drive that she encapsulates (2000: 47), and that the ‘splendour’ he detects in the character is a result of the way that she calls attention to ‘the simultaneous and irresolvable coincidence of life and death’ (2000: 49–50). Lacan’s Ethics is an appropriate place to start, for his reading of Antigone rejuvenated interest in this figure and has acted as a mediating lens for many subsequent interpretations. In the Ethics, Antigone is portrayed as paradigmatic of the ethical imperative not to give up on one’s desire but to follow it through to its absolute and seemingly irrational limits. She steadfastly insists upon her responsibility and obligation to bury the body of her treasonous brother, Polynices, despite orders from King Creon that he should be left outside to rot. Lacan asserts that in doing so she commits an ethical act that reveals the impotence of the Symbolic order (embodied by Creon), shattering it and in the process providing a radiant emblem of feminine defiance and transgression against the state. Such an act is in accordance with Lacan’s stated belief that the ‘true’ duty of the ethical subject is not to submit to the command of the superego and social law, but to ‘oppose that command’ and act instead according to the subject’s own desire, an alternative version of the ethical ‘good’ (1992: 7). This description bears more than a passing resemblance to the positivist accounts of Breaking the Waves that situate Bess as a transgressive force against the misogynistic patriarchy of her religious community (in particular those by Heath, Keefer and Linafelt and Makarushka). An apparent problem with this formulation however is that Antigone (and Bess) can only achieve 66

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this transgressive act against a patriarchal social order through the stubborn insistence upon the sacrifice of her own life. Irigaray emphasizes this point: The women’s way of achieving ethical action is forbidden them by the laws of the city. Antigone is thrust out of the city, “extradited” from the city-state, refused a home and the most elementary domestic rituals … forbidden to speak, to marry, to bear children. She is walled up in a cave on the border of the world of citizens; she may neither leave nor enter her home. Every act is forbidden her. All that she can do is to carry out the deed that king and state dare not do openly but which they collude in: she can kill herself. (1993: 107–108)

Within a phallocratic economy the possibilities for female activism are always already limited. Antigone may emerge as a splendid and transgressive figure whose defiance emphasizes the disparate notions of the ‘good’ that arise from the tension between the subject’s desire and the social law, and her actions may create a necessary rend in the fabric of the Symbolic order – but nonetheless this disruptive splendour is reliant upon the female corpse and as such Lacan’s celebration of Antigone rearticulates the obsession with the beautification of a sacrificial female subject who attains the elusive heights of the ethical act only through her singular death. As Irigaray states, Antigone ‘is still a production of a culture that has been written by men alone’ (1993: 118–119). Therefore, the question of ‘whose good?’ becomes increasingly vital. The debates raised so far in this chapter, encompassing the themes of beauty, responsibility and guilt all necessitate a particular understanding of goodness and what it means for a subject to ‘be good’ (a phrase that echoes through Breaking the Waves as Bess forges her path). Within Sophocles’s play two contradictory versions of the ‘good’ are put forward (at least). The dilemma that lies at the heart of this tragedy emerges because these versions are diametrically opposed to each other. On the one hand, Creon represents the ‘good’ according to the laws of the social order that determines ideals of morality and legality. On the other, Antigone represents what Lacan calls the ‘criminal good’ (1992: 240), motivated by her personal ethical imperative rather than a rigidly moral doctrine, an imperative that grows from her own desire and from the responsibilities of kinship. Red Road ’s Jackie faces a similar tearing between the legal good (the laws of the social order) and the duty to her family (kinship bonds) when she decides to frame Clyde for rape. This unavoidable dilemma is, as Zupančič points out, inherent within any philosophical notion of the ‘good’ more generally: Once the good comes on stage, the question necessarily arises: Whose good? … if I do not betray my brother or my neighbour, I betray my other countrymen. 67

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Who is to decide whose good is more valuable? This is the fundamental deadlock of any ethics based on the notion of the good. (2000: 55)

Such a problem has ramifications for the consideration of responsibility explored above. To whom is the subject responsible? Themselves? Their loved ones? The tenets of religion or law? Breaking the Waves and Red Road use the narratives of Bess and Jackie to stage (or to use Bataille’s word, to dramatize) the paradoxes and contradictions of ethics that arise when the subject is called into a relationship of responsibility with the other. In Red Road in particular, the conception of an absolute or objectively defined ‘good’ is shown to be erroneous; acting in an ethical way emerges instead as a process of constant negotiation and the remapping of territories that each subject must individually undertake. The subject is always responsible (and, even, always guilty) in relation to the other, but there are always multiple ways in which this responsibility may be answered. The responses of Antigone, Bess and Jackie to this conundrum of duty can be thought through in terms of the structure of the ethical act and the relation of this to the logic(s) of suicide. What defines the act? ‘The act differs from an “action” in that it radically transforms its bearer (agent). After an act, I am “not the same as before”. In the act, the subject is annihilated and subsequently reborn (or not) … The act is therefore always a “crime”, a “transgression” – of the limits of the symbolic order to which I belong’ (Zupančič 2000: 83). According to these criteria, Lacan regards Antigone’s suicide as an authentic ethical act that shatters the symbolic order and the patriarchal law personified by King Creon; the result of this Act, Lacan argues, is the creation of an anamorphic radiance that imbues the play with its striking effects of beauty: An infinitesimal fragment of image is produced on each surface … we see a series of screens superimposed; and it is as a result of these that a marvelous illusion in the form of beautiful image of the passion appears beyond the mirror, whereas something decomposed and disgusting spreads out around it. (1992: 273)

Irigaray’s perception is rather different. For her, Antigone’s suicide is a forced choice within a social order that leaves her no other possible path of responsible action; the focus is upon the ‘something decomposed and disgusting’, not the idealized image of female beauty through suffering. Suicide is ‘the only act left to her. Given that society passes – as Hegel would say – onto the side of darkness when it is a question of the right of the female to act’ (1993: 119). Antigone’s death is indicative of the phallologocentric erasure of the feminine position and therefore a symptom of a wider ethical and political failing. It cannot be genuinely transgressive because the oppressive system that created her forced 68

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choice remains unchanged. Bess’s suicidal gesture can be considered in a similar light. It is clear that the authoritarian dominance of the religious elders has negative consequences for Bess and the other women of the township, and like Antigone, the range of choices open to her is demonstrably restricted in many aspects of her life. The ending of the film creates a conflict, suggesting to some extent that Bess’s gesture be considered an act that transcends the tenets of patriarchal law and achieves an absolute modality of ‘the good’. However, ultimately the paternal law is left unchanged. Bess is dead, and Dodo, the other primary female character and only friend to offer her support within the community, is excluded from her funeral. Bess’s death may be a suicide, but it is not an ‘act’ in the Lacanian sense. Jackie’s actions allow us to see the suicidal act in a different light. Red Road, like the narrative of Antigone in Lacan’s theory, ultimately enters our perception through the aesthetic strategy of anamorphosis. The film is made up of a series of events that the spectator struggles to understand: a selection of fragments of images, lives and stories that flicker in and out of focus. An impression of meaning is given, but this meaning cannot be fully grasped until regarded from the viewpoint of Jackie’s final revelations. At this point, ‘in an “ugly and diffused” way, everything collides with one another while nonetheless succeeding in finding a unity’ (De Kesel 2009: 210). The result of this anamorphic process is an extreme shift in perspective that jolts the spectator into a new comprehension and that echoes the subjective transformation which marks Jackie’s character in the final scenes of the film. More than Bess’s self-destructive gesture, Jackie’s final sacrifice in dropping the charges against Clyde does constitute an ethical act in the sense that it radically changes her as its agent and alters the structures of significance within which her narrative is embedded. For the majority of the film’s duration, Jackie’s identity and place within the social frame is rooted in her status as a subject in mourning, clinging to the ghosts of her dead family and to the fixation on achieving justice/revenge through the punishment of Clyde. Jackie achieves an act of ‘symbolic suicide’, giving up the pathological motivation of guilt and eliminating that which ‘gave [her] being identity, status, support and meaning’ (Zupančič 2000: 84). The cinematic and theoretical narratives discussed in this chapter, when considered in conjunction with each other, articulate the intersections and permutations of masochism, sacrifice and responsibility as they are manifested in relation to the female desiring subject. The outcomes of these texts may differ in terms of the fate of the female protagonists, but each makes clear that these narratives are constructed within a sociocultural system dominated by male subjectivity and male desire. Irigaray’s words on the lesson of Antigone resonate equally strongly through the stories of Bess and Jackie, and may be usefully borne in mind through the films and explorations that take place in subsequent chapters: ‘If we are not to relive Antigone’s fate, the world of 69

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women must successfully create an ethical order and establish the conditions necessary for women’s action’ (1993: 108). The following two chapters address how this ethical order might be achieved.

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Chapter 3

Self-Mutilation and (a)signification The relationship between masochism and self-harm is multidimensional and frequently ambivalent, resistant to attempts to draw any straightforward connections between sometimes interrelated but crucially different sets of desires and acts. Masochism involves the consensual, wilful and often courted desire for the other to ‘harm’ the self and revolves around the erotic experiences to be found at the intersection of pleasure and pain or submission. The masochistic subject herself may not be carrying out these harmful acts, but as theorists such as Freud, Deleuze and Hart have argued, the desired other is primarily used as a tool within the subject’s very personal narratives of injury, punishment or self-sacrifice. The masochist is not simply a passive victim, but through the shared orchestration of their own fantasies of submission and pain begins to dissolve the binary oppositions of passivity and activity. If the masochist does retain elements of subjective agency, as I have argued thus far, it seems that masochism can firmly and unequivocally be situated broadly within the realm of ‘self-harm’, even if this takes place by proxy. Yet, already in this seemingly simple statement further lines of enquiry appear. What is the definition of ‘harm’ that is assumed here, and which factors may enable or limit this definition? What sort of harm is at stake: temporary or permanent, physical or psychical and do or should these ambiguously drawn distinctions make a difference? How (and why) do we differentiate between harm inflicted by the self-unto-the-self as an individual process, and the intersubjective scenarios of harm enacted within a sadomasochistic relationship? The theories and films discussed in this chapter facilitate an address to these questions and to others that circle around self-harm, specifically with regard to the relationship between masochistic pleasures and the visible self-mutilation of the body. Self-mutilation is representationally and conceptually fraught and the visibly self-injured body emerges as a contested site within theory and symbolic forms such as cinema. It also emerges as a distinctly gendered body, caught within the overdetermined cultural matrix of the signs and meanings of femininity, beauty and socially prescribed value. Self-inflicted cuts, scabs and burns are regarded as expressing always already culturally determined meanings, interpreted as readable ‘inscriptions’ that are compelled to articulate only a limited range of narratives. Within these discourses the self-injured body becomes a surface text or spectacle that must be read and understood according to pre-existing structures of signification. This tendency is grossly reductive and frequently

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paternalistic. Just as the labelling of masochistic subjectivity as ‘passive’ denies its complexities and multiplicities, so existing conceptualizations of self-harm often manifest themselves as forms of discursive violence against the subject that function to entrap and foreclose any individual or alternative systems of meaning. The presumed connection between masochism and self-harm is evidenced in two of the most high-profile films of recent years to take sadomasochistic heterosexual relationships as their theme, The Piano Teacher and Secretary, both of which also contain depictions of self-mutilatory acts. All the films considered in this volume address or play with the theme of female masochism in more or less explicit ways, and in The Piano Teacher and Secretary this theme is enacted through the more literal dynamics of what is typically referred to as BDSM (sexual practices involving bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism). Each of these films weaves an inextricable network of connections between masochistic desire and visceral corporeality, ritualized self-mutilation and in the case of The Piano Teacher, additional behaviours that are considered pathological or perverse within normative taxonomies (for example sadistic acts carried out by various perpetrators, a graphic rape scene and a sequence that hints at mother-daughter incest). The Piano Teacher is relentlessly bleak in tone and devoid of any relief or optimism. The final scenes depict Erika’s rape and then an act of self-injury in which she stabs herself in the shoulder with a kitchen knife before walking off to an uncertain future. Secretary is also, to some extent, a marginal film in its independent status and casting of ‘edgy’ actors such as James Spader as lawyer E. Edward Grey (associated with other films that explore perverse pleasures such as Steven Soderburgh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape and David Cronenberg’s Crash) and the then relatively unknown Maggie Gyllenhaal as his secretary Lee, an uncertain young woman recently released from institutionalization following repeated acts of self-harm. However, the tone of Secretary is much lighter than that of Haneke’s film and it ultimately plays out along the more predictable narrative trajectory of a romantic comedy drama as the ‘punishments’ meted out to Lee for typos and other secretarial mistakes become increasingly sexualized and intertwined with deepening feelings of intimacy and eventually love. As Meg Barker, Camelia Gupta and Alessandra Iantaffi note, in Secretary ‘healing BDSM is part of the familiar narrative of great romance, with Lee winning her man through her capacity to withstand painful and humiliating scenes’ (Barker et al. 2007: 206). Secretary concludes with Lee and Grey’s sadomasochistic relationship being assimilated into the heteronormative institution of marriage, albeit with the conventional scene of the happy couple leaving the church to the sound of bells and under a rain of confetti being replaced by the rather less conventional image of Spader and Gyllenhaal having enthusiastic sex while she is chained to a tree. The differing aesthetic strategies of the films further express their 72

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contrasting treatments of the themes of masochism and self-harm. The Piano Teacher is stark and resolutely monochromatic, Haneke making thorough use of his trademark static cameras to frame events in an impartial and sometimes frustratingly inaccessible way. Conversely, Secretary draws upon a wider spectrum of colours and greater range of shots to construct a rich and almost fantastical heterocosmic space. The portrayal of self-harm in each film accords broadly with typical significatory systems surrounding these practices in wider culture, but nonetheless these representations may function to pose questions about the position of the female body in discourses of illness and sanity and about the way in which the suffering of the other can be comprehended and conceptualized. Cultural Constructions of Self-harm

‘Self-harm’ as a concept is a sociocultural construct. The category of the ‘selfharmer’ has come to designate a particular type of identity that functions to designate those who enact or experience these practices as ‘other’ in accordance with wider conceptions of the body and identity such as the abject, the subaltern and the inhuman. The psychical and embodied states associated with self-harming are at once over-determined and inadequately recognized. The wounded or scarred body is regarded simultaneously as a self-evident text that speaks for itself in a presumed language of suffering, and as something to be overwritten by cultural and political discourses concerned with mental illness and the gendered body. Armando Favazza’s writing suggests the way in which the body is ‘read’ by those who witness it: The bodies of some mentally ill-self-mutilators can be thought of as a stage upon which is enacted a personal drama that reflects, in varying proportions, personal psychopathology, social stresses, and cultural myths, especially those of a religious nature. The themes of these myths are suffering, dismemberment, blood sacrifice, resurrection, rebirth, and the establishment (or reestablishment) of a new, prosperous, healthy, and amicable order. (1996: 45)

An exploration of representations and conceptualizations of self-harm reveals much about the normative ideologies that structure our understandings of suffering, sanity, addiction, corporeality and gender. For this reason, just as masochism acts as a disruptive force that troubles and disturbs the boundaries and binaries of social order, so self-harm throws into relief questions about how we approach alterity and in particular how we regard the pleasures and pains of others. It necessitates the deconstruction of existing systems of meaning that have rigidly channelled theories of self-mutilation into deterministic understandings, and ultimately demands the rethinking of the relationship 73

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between subjective experience, the body and signification. The central area of concern in this chapter is the non-suicidal forms of self-mutilation that result in visible transformations of the body through cuts, burns, scabs and scars; these are the marks that are commonly described as ‘damage’. The Piano Teacher and Secretary thematically address such deliberate acts, although their visible traces are often elided within the film space itself. Other films have presented more graphic depictions of the opening up and transforming of the body, most explicitly the French film In My Skin, directed by Marina de Van and featuring processes such as cutting, tearing, the removal of pieces of skin and autocannibalism. This chapter will conclude with an address to de Van’s film and in particular to the ethical affects of the avant-garde aesthetic that it employs. The terminology surrounding this topic may in itself be problematic and requires some clarification. The designation ‘self-harm’ is typically understood as referring to deliberate and conscious acts such as cutting or burning one’s own body superficially and more seriously, and this is the phrase most prominently used within popular culture, particularly within the United Kingdom. Gloria Babiker and Lois Arnold discuss potential difficulties of definition and suggest that ‘self-harm’ is too broad a categorization. Contrary to the general understanding of this term, in a clinical sense ‘self-harm’ may refer to a much wider range of practices that also includes suicide and perceived self-destructive behaviours such as drug use. Babiker and Arnold’s conclusion is that ‘self-mutilation’ and ‘self-injury’ are the most appropriate phrases, the former being the preferred term amongst those who engage in it and the latter most accurately describing the ‘spoiling’ of the skin or actual damage done to the body (Babiker and Arnold 1997: x). More recent accounts within psychiatry and medical discourse have also favoured the use of the term self-harm for a broader spectrum of acts, including those with suicidal intent, and self-injury or self-mutilation to refer to non-lethal but deliberately injurious acts towards one’s own person. The continuing debate around definitions of self-harmful behaviour is indicative of the perceived need to define and categorize these practices and experiences within existing frames of understanding, a compulsion that is further apparent in the frequent labels attached to those who carry out these practices. ‘Selfharmer’ and ‘cutter’ become designated subjective positions that are weighted with assumptions and serve to reiterate social constructions of otherness that reaffirm the norm, constructing a clear if illusionistic distinction between sanity and insanity and health and illness. The fascinating work of Favazza in Bodies Under Siege (1996), one of the most sustained and influential explorations of self-mutilation as a cultural phenomenon as well as a psychiatric one, offers further illumination upon how self-harm has been defined. He distinguishes between culturally accepted and/or expected types and forms that are indicative of individual cases of pathology. The former consists of practices such as tribal 74

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initiations and rituals, discussed at length by Favazza, or in a Western context customs such as ear piercing, tattooing or controlled disciplines of the body like dieting. The latter are associated not with established custom but with mental distress and here Favazza draws upon a wide variety of case studies that range from more common incidents such as cutting or sticking needles into the flesh, to more extreme cases that involve, for example, eye gouging, amputation and castration. Although the pathological forms he identifies are regarded as evidence of abnormalities, they are as enmeshed in and determined by social structures of meaning as the cultural forms. The recurrence of damage to body parts given especial significance or value within sociocultural systems (the eyes, the face, the genitals) is testament to this. Favazza’s book is important not only for the vast and disparate variety of practices explored, but also because by including culturally accepted self-injurious acts he crucially emphasizes the extent to which perceptions of normality, abnormality, sanity and insanity with regard to the body and what is done with it and to it are always socioculturally contingent, even at the seemingly finite limits of pain and damage. However, in maintaining to some extent the distinction between cultural and pathological self-mutilation he fails to move away entirely from constructions that accord with more normative ideals. We have seen in previous chapters how Freud turned his attention to what he perceived to be the ‘problem’ of masochism, a phenomenon that he initially regarded as ‘incomprehensible’ because of its apparently contradictory combining of pleasure and unpleasure (Freud 1961a: 155). Similarly, theoretical accounts of and cultural attitudes towards self-injury have typically approached it as an enigma that must be unravelled and reconstructed in a more explicable way, an unacceptable conundrum to be solved through the rational application of psychiatry and medicine or from political perspectives such as feminism. Like masochism, it appears antithetical to the values of self-preservation and pain-avoidance that are taken to be self-evident within contemporary Western frameworks. The primary drive behind the majority of existing conceptualizations has been to situate self-mutilatory practices within narratives that render them coherent within established frames of human understanding, thus sublimating the ‘problem’ of self-harm and its potential as a disruptive force into normative modes of psychical and physical activity. This urge toward the imperative to explain and control self-harm has resulted in its co-option by various fields of discourse: psychiatry, literature, feminism, the media. In most cases these discourses work to dilute or deny the visceral disorder that self-harm insists upon. This process renders the subject in question as an inhuman object that needs to be studied, explained and ‘cured’ in order to be returned to the realm of the acceptably and properly ‘human’. Selfharm has thus been compartmentalized into a narrow selection of narratives recognizable within dominant modes of discourse, each imposing a schema of 75

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signification established by psychiatrists, doctors and theorists that, however well intentioned, is restrictive and risks silencing alternative systems of creative meaning-making. Although there has been an increase in cultural depictions of self-mutilation in recent years as well as in psychiatric and medical explorations of the subject, within wider society it still retains its status as taboo and for most who practice it remains secretive and intensely personal. Favazza, for example, quotes some interesting responses to his initial transcript from both ‘laypeople’ who considered self-harm a ‘grotesque act’ (1996: xii) and from publishers who labelled the subject of his study ‘disgusting’ (1996: xv). Likewise, Marilee Strong outlines reactions of ‘horror, disgust, or bewilderment’ in those who encounter the self-harmed body (2000: xv). If responses to the mere suggestion of selfharming are vehement, reactions to the actual sight of the self-mutilated body are frequently even more extreme and are accompanied by attempts to ignore, arrest, control and explain such behaviour in order to apprehend and master it. In many cases the extremity of the reaction to the idea or sight of the wounded body with its cuts, scabs and bruises far outstrips the level of bodily damage that has actually been done. These disproportionate reactions are congruent with the overdetermination that weighs heavily on these bodies and are reflective of the lack of desire to truly engage in an ethical encounter within a social order that places the integrity and ‘wholeness’ of the human body and mind above all other concerns. Self-determination is central to humanist understandings of the subject’s place in the world. Perhaps then, a part of the consternation and horror that self-mutilation evokes may be attributed to its perceived status as intentionality and deliberation gone awry, put to transgressive use that denies and mortifies the insistence of easily definable boundaries of sanity/insanity, health/illness and pleasure/pain and that attests to the insistence of the potential openings and sensations of the body and skin. Therefore, the acts themselves and the corporeal marks that function as their persistent imprints are regarded as an affront to propriety and ‘correct’ human identity. The self-harming subject emerges as an uncanny and monstrous apparition that breaks through the skin of ‘normal’ everyday life to present the horror of the wilfully opened body. Two modalities of reaction play a part in this, distinct yet remaining irrevocably interconnected. Firstly visceral, immediate responses to the sight of damaged skin and flesh, and secondly more ‘logical’ or rational responses to the concept and causes of self-harm. The former of these may often be an involuntary reaction to the assault on the body or the prominence of the marks that are left behind. The moment in Secretary when Lee presses a boiling metal kettle to her thigh brings forth a physical response of this nature from the spectator: a wince, an indrawn breath, even the touching of a hand to one’s own thigh to ensure its integrity is preserved. This evokes the vulnerability of the self and forces a (usually unwanted) confrontation with the other who is at once familiar 76

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and recognizable, yet simultaneously disturbingly. Visceral responses to selfmutilation could not take place without a subjective identification with the body of the other as similar to our own. This process of identification contains the seeds of an ethical encounter, and yet this potential is too often shut down by attendant feelings of revulsion towards the alterity of the wounded body. The sociocultural norms that govern the body and its relation to meaning-making can be detected in more ‘intellectual’ and apparently reasoned responses to selfmutilation, but also play a constitutive role in more immediate reactions in that they structure what is excluded from experience as disgusting and aversive, as abject. Kristeva describes the encounter with abjection thus: A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A “something” that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. (1982: 2)

The wounds and scabs of the self-mutilated body, the blood and pus and ‘unnatural’ openings, exist within this border space of neither entirely self nor completely other, too much meaning and not enough meaning. As abjection it ‘disturbs identity, system, order’ (Kristeva 1982: 4) and invokes an involuntary eruption of horror, repugnance and nausea from the spectator looking on. When considering the abjected status of the self-injuring subject an emphasis also needs to be placed upon the social significance accorded to the skin, the part of the body most frequently and visibly affected. Skin plays a crucial role in the way in which the subject conceives of themselves as a distinct entity and how they make sense of their relationship with others and the external world. It is loaded with meanings pertaining to signs of identity and varying degrees of humanness measured in terms of alterity or likeness: ‘Skin is the site of encounter between the enfleshed self and society … Skin is a marked surface inscribed with texts of race, gender, sexuality, class and age’ (MacCormack 2012: 22). The mutilation of this privileged organ works to reconfigure these norms, to perversely augment or nullify them and in doing so, to catalyse a transformation in the signifying chain. If the abject defies the oppositional structures that organize the social world into self/other, centre/margin, proper/improper, then skin occupies a categorically problematic and thus potentially enabling position as a border membrane: The information provided by the surface of the skin is both endogenous and exogenous, active and passive, receptive and expressive, the only sense able to provide the “double sensation”. … the subject utilizes one part of the body 77

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to touch another, thus exhibiting the interchangeability of active and passive sensations, of those positions of subject and object, mind and body. (Grosz 1994: 35–36)

Skin, then, may maintain constraining conceptions of the subject and identity but may also function in some circumstances as a site of excessive disruption from which to challenge normative regulatory ideologies about the body. Grosz’s observation about the simultaneously outward and inward facing nature of skin serves as a reminder that the external appearance of self-injured skin, while crucial for a consideration of how it is culturally regarded, is only one aspect of this debate. For the subject themselves, the personal processes and sensations of self-mutilation play a vital role in the fluid dynamics between these practices and meaning-making. Such sensations are often focused on this border membrane and for example in the case of cutting may include, but not be limited to, a cold blade on warm skin, the emotions associated with seeing skin part and blood well up (release, relief, eroticism, aesthetic appreciation) and later the sight of scabbing and healing and the formation of a scar which changes in colour and texture as the weeks and months pass. Insofar as it is possible to link self-mutilation to the processes of signification, the meanings associated with the alteration of the skin membrane are not stable, unified or easily graspable. The various permutations of visible self-mutilation transform the social meanings of the skin and body, perhaps as a deliberate strategy, perhaps as the by-product of a more personal set of experiences. To conceive of one signifying framework that could account for the numerous sensations and attendant contextual elements (instruments used, accompanying music or locations, clothing to reveal or hide the wounds, and so on) is to remain bound to a repressive and institutionalized schema that seeks to co-opt and control any body that refuses to adhere to the standardized codes of the human. The multiplicity of meanings that surround self-harm, in the social sphere and the realm of personal experience, may be evoked through the scene in The Piano Teacher in which Erika, sitting on the side of the bath, cuts her genitals in a gesture that is presented as a habitual act of mutilation. Furthermore, this scene enacts a dovetailing of self-mutilation and masochism in its emphasis upon a key point of interconnection between the two: the importance of ritual. The ‘cultural myths’ referred to by Favazza (1996: 45), especially in the context of the religious connotations he observes (sacrifice, rebirth, and so on) are indicative of the central role that ritualized practices and systems of meaning take in ‘pathological’ self-injury and in those forms that are accepted or required in order for individuals to take their place within the social collective (such as initiation rites or cleansing rituals). For Deleuze, the ritual is a vital structural aspect of the masochist aesthetic and the fantasies that forge it. One of the purposes of the contract is to ensure that ritual will be observed correctly and 78

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repeatedly: ‘the masochist is obsessed; ritualistic activity is essential to him, since it epitomizes the world of fantasy’ (Deleuze 1991: 94). In intersubjective masochistic encounters and in more personal experiences of self-mutilation, ritual privileges specific acts, instruments, contexts and functions to imbue them with a psychical and libidinal charge that elevates simple routine to signifying narrative. In both cases, the ritual must be regarded as part of a formal aesthetic process that combines visual aspects including marks upon or cuts into the skin and the welling of blood, with other attendant multisensory elements and contexts. Ritualized behaviour is evoked in The Piano Teacher, Secretary and In My Skin. The chosen scene from Haneke’s film assists with an understanding of how the commingled aesthetic of masochism and self-mutilation might be manifested cinematically. It also begins to demonstrate how these resolutely embodied practices may enable a disruption of normative ideologies about subjectivity and may encourage (or even force) the spectator into a confrontation with an ethical rethinking of definitions of, and the complex relationship between, pain and enjoyment. Turning to this scene now, a number of indicators suggest to the viewer that Erika’s act is habitual. The precise and practiced way that she positions herself on the side of the bathtub is suggestive of repeated activity and the razor blade stored conveniently in her purse further cements this impression. The almost entirely static camera and the use of a single shot for the entire scene is typical of Haneke’s detached filmmaking technique; the lack of close-ups on Erika’s face denies the spectator the chance to ‘read’ her emotions in a conventional way and the act of cutting itself, as well as the wounded genitals, are obscured by her hands. This obstructed and restrained portrayal of self-inflicted pleasure-pain is starkly different to the astonishingly confrontational close-up of Gainsbourg’s masturbatory mutilation in Antichrist, and in fact differs drastically from the description in Jelinek’s original novel, which is a difficult passage to endure in its graphic entirety: With little information about anatomy and with even less luck, she applies the cold steel to and into her body, where she believes there ought to be a hole. The aperture gapes, terrified by the change, and blood pours out … For an instant, the two flesh halves, sliced apart, stare at each other, taken aback at this sudden gap, which wasn’t there before. (Jelinek 1999: 86–87)

Readers’ reactions to these words will of course be varied, however, these sentences seem to induce the two interconnected types of response to selfinjury put forward earlier in this chapter. Firstly the visceral and embodied response that calls upon the reader’s own experiences of pain, imagining the blade biting into flesh and perhaps clenching together one’s legs to ward off any such threat to the integrity of the body. In addition to this, we experience the conceptual horror that arises from the image of reconfigured flesh and 79

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particularly the transformation of this vulnerable and significance-laden part of the female anatomy. Haneke’s portrayal, while less graphic, is not necessarily less shocking or less evocative of the forces of violence against the body. The most disturbing visual element in this scene is the stream of blood that runs down between Erika’s legs, confirming the spectator’s suspicions about precisely what she was doing with the razor blade. The white purity of the porcelain bath is disrupted by the redness of the blood which issues like menstrual flow from between her legs (an impression heightened by her pose, which echoes that of someone inserting a tampon) in an image that plays with the juxtaposition of cleanliness, pollutants and restrictive conceptions of what constitutes normality and abnormality in regard to the rituals surrounding the female body. Imagery of one of the typical processes associated with adult femininity is drawn upon here only to be cast aside in a properly polymorphously perverse movement, echoing Kristeva’s comment on the relationship between abjection and perversion: ‘The abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them’ (1982: 15). Cinematic Self-mutilation: Typical Themes

Honing in from cultural conceptions of self-injury more broadly to cinematic representations in particular enables the further exploration of some of the most pervasive narratives and structures of signification that surround these practices and bodies. Incidences of self-mutilation in cinema have become increasingly prevalent and varied in form, from the exceptionally graphic close-up of Gainsbourg snipping off her clitoris in Antichrist to the bizarrely hilarious adverts for specially designed cutting tools in a futuristic world where self-mutilation has become endemic in Japanese horror/exploitation film Tokyo Gore Police (‘Let’s go stylish with wrist-cutting!’ squeal three Japanese schoolgirls at the camera. ‘The blood gets tastier!’). These examples are more extreme and unusual in their manifestation, but as in other films featuring self-harm such as Girl, Interrupted, Thirteen, and The Piano Teacher and Secretary, it is used a shorthand for dysfunction whether sexual pathology, individual mental illness in teenage girls, the dysfunction of an entire corrupt society or the apparently inherent madness of the female gender (von Trier once again displaying his zeal for the fetishization of suffering). A further commonality in these recent cinematic examples is that they typically reflect the wider cultural narratives about self-mutilation that have been constructed within institutional and theoretical discourse and often serve to reaffirm dominant understandings of these practices. Despite this affirmation, some of these films still indicate the potentialities for the self-injured body and particularly the masochistic self80

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injured body, to act as a site for the disruption of pre-established systems of signification and to encourage us to think our relationships to embodied alterity anew. What are these dominant narratives, and how do they manifest themselves cinematically? The first, apparent in several of the films already mentioned, is the stereotypical image of the ‘self-harmer’ as white, teenage (or at least, young) and female. This stereotype demonstrates clearly that the specifically corporeal and spectacular nature of this ‘identity’ is not neutral but caught up in a network of cultural ideas about how the female body should look, function and behave. Barbara Jane Brickman observes that although sustained studies demonstrate that those who self-injure are not just female, may be a variety of ages and ethnicities and from a variety of backgrounds, nonetheless, a ‘typical’ model of the self-harmer and specifically the ‘cutter’ has emerged within both popular culture and medical discourse. This model has proved remarkably persistent: ‘A cutter profile was created by the first confluence of psychiatric interest in a “delicate” form of self-mutilation: the delicate cutter is typically a white, adolescent girl … The white, suburban, attractive teenage girl persists as the face of self-mutilation’ (Brickman 2004: 87). ‘Delicate cutting’ is defined as superficial wounds to the skin of the body, frequently on the arms and legs, and relies on a particular notion of femininity that has been developed in psychiatry and medicine as well as in representational discourses such as art, literature and cinema, in which the feminine subject position is equated with masochism, passivity, and the infantile or primitive. This ‘delicate cutter’ is much in evidence in Western cinematic representations of self-harm, with Girl, Interrupted, Thirteen, and of course Secretary providing just a few examples. Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan also draws upon this stereotype in the portrayal of lead character Nina as mentally ill, with self-injury (albeit apparently inflicted unconsciously) one of several indications of pathology along with the implication of an eating disorder, identity crisis and a claustrophobic relationship with her mother that echoes that of Erika and her mother in The Piano Teacher. Brickman argues that this tendency is also prevalent in popular culture in television, fiction and magazines, as well as in more ‘objective’ discourses such as psychiatric literature. This ‘typical’ profile has served to privilege one particular form of self-harm, cutting, over others, whilst perpetuating medical structures that can be traced back to Charcot’s hysterics and beyond in which women and girls are situated as objects of scrutiny to be categorized and regulated by phallologocentric institutions. In fact, hysteria and self-mutilation share several common aspects in the gendering processes that they have been subjected to by psychiatric, medical and cultural discourse, and in the way in which the diagnostic criteria and treatment they ‘require’ has been a socially-embedded matter of representation and conception. Of the relationship between hysteria and gender, Elisabeth Bronfen writes, 81

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Like gender, hysteria comprises what the physician chooses, dislocates, or excludes in order to support the position he seeks to ascribe to this disorder. The persistent inability of medical professionals to find a universal, systematic definition for hysteria ultimately illustrates that hysteria can have no autonomous and original identity outside its discursive formations … Hysteria exists only insofar as it results from a given network of medical, supernatural, religious, and aesthetic discourses. (1998: 102)

Manifestations or ‘performances’ of the female body that deviate from femininity in its socially prescribed form are problematically categorized as mental illness in a non-objective scientific discourse that cannot be separated from the ideological structures within which it comes into being. Such constructions are based on the exclusion of embodied potentialities as much as they are upon the inclusion of accepted norms and values. Self-mutilation is subject to a similar process of medicalization and ideological articulation. A double movement is at work in this logos which at once constructs femininity as equivalent to pathology and an unhealthy relationship to one’s own body, as Brickman comments (2004:89), and that co-opts certain designated forms of self-harm itself as resolutely and irretrievably belonging to the realm of pathology. In the films mentioned already in this chapter, cutting is depicted as one amongst other forms of self-destructive behaviour and often, as Brickman observes about Girl, Interrupted, cutting is portrayed as the most extreme and damaging of these self-destructive practices (2004: 102). The character of Daisy in Girl, Interrupted attests to this: after leaving the asylum various signs of her mental ill health remain such as an addiction to Valium and the compulsive eating of nothing but roast chicken. However, it is the discovery that she also cuts her arms that is posed as definitive proof of her continued mental disintegration, and indeed her suicide follows in the next scene. Thirteen follows a similar logic. Through the narrative of Catherine Hardwicke’s film, the young female protagonist participates in various activities that are regarded as self-destructive and problematic such as excessive drinking, drug use and promiscuous sexual encounters (behaviours which are also classed as self-harmful within a clinical context). Whilst these activities accelerate and intensify over the course of the narrative, it is the revelation of her cutting that brings the film to its climax. Amongst these many forms of apparently harmful behaviour, it is the deliberate wounding of one’s own skin, even superficially, that is regarded as the most terrible and most obscene. My earlier comments about the social signification of skin can now be further refined to demonstrate that different social meanings are attached to different types of skin, some of which are perceived as more precious and vulnerable than others. Skin is imbued with meanings relating to its status as border membrane between self and world, interior and exterior, as 82

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the psychically invested surface of self-image and as the projected identificatory surface of the other, and the stereotype of the ‘delicate cutter’ shows clearly how these psychical investments are gendered. Brickman argues that in order to accord with cultural standards of beauty young female skin is required to appear as flawless and unmarked, with such skin coded as uniquely precious. Thus, the violation of it is regarded as particularly noteworthy and grotesque (Brickman 2004: 98). The pervasiveness of this idea is apparent at the end of Secretary as the camera pans over Lee’s near-naked body from above and in the voiceover she claims to relate to Grey the origins and catalysts for each scar. In fact, however, her skin appears remarkably unblemished and clear, suggesting that the sight of a heavily scarred young female heroine, criss-crossed with welts and scar tissue would have been a step too far, violating an unspoken rule about ‘flawless’ feminine beauty and the sorts of bodies that are perceived as deserving of being looked at and loved. The figure of the pretty, white teenage girl, often contextualized within American suburbia, is one of the most prominent and frequent depictions of self-mutilation in cinematic representation. Films such as Thirteen, Girl, Interrupted and Secretary draw upon the stereotype in which the ‘cutter’ appears initially as an aberration within the happy domestic setting, with images of pain and misery starkly juxtaposed with mundane domesticity. The early scenes of Secretary abound in these moments: Lee holding a just-boiled metal kettle to her thigh in her very average bedroom, or removing blades and iodine from a prettily decorated trinket box. The progression of these narratives usually reveal that the idealized image of suburban life is itself an illusion (Lee’s father is revealed as having drinking problems and her parents’ marriage to be disintegrating), meaning that the pathological status of the young female protagonists comes to act as the sign of wider ‘pathologies’ within the family unit as a whole. In a similar structural movement to the logic of sacrifice described in Chapter 2, societal dysfunction is channelled through the suffering female body, a body which is read purely as a signifier rather than according to any individualized or self-ascertained cultural value. This conceptual drive has also been apparent in some of the feminist writing which has attempted to theorize female self-injury, partially as a result of the tendencies that emerged in second wave feminism toward examining not only representations of the female body but the ‘body as itself a politically inscribed entity, its physiology and morphology shaped by histories and practices of containment and control’ (Bordo 1993: 21 cited in Brickman 2004: 89). While the analysis of the ways in which the female body has been regulated by phallocratic discursive structures is certainly a valuable aspect of feminist theory, the emphasis upon reading the body politically has resulted in feminism producing its own prescriptive and sometimes condemnatory accounts of self-injury that co-opt these practices and bodies into a pointed political narrative. Kaplan includes ‘Mutilations’ in 83

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her stable of Female Perversions, placing such acts within the broader context of her thesis that patriarchy gives rise to a range of self-destructive pathologies for women and arguing that these behaviours result from ‘a childhood of deprivation and trauma’ and anxieties about gender identity and the body within a male-dominated social sphere: Because the self-mutilator did not feel secure within her body in childhood, to her the expectable adolescent anxieties coalesce into an unsupportable mutilation anxiety. Her active and defiant gestures of self-mutilation are most directly a means of avoiding a passively suffered mutilation but also a method of forestalling final gender identity and denying that the illusions and hopes and dreams that made life endurable are lost forever. (Kaplan 1991: 364)

Although Kaplan allows for the possibility of self-injury as an active form of behaviour, she also conceptualizes it as entirely reactionary and overwhelmingly negative. The familiar associations are manifested again: of self-mutilation with arrested emotional development and a childlike psychical state, and with something inherently feminine and self-destructive that occludes the position of alternatively gendered or non-gendered self-mutilatory identities. Most problematically, these practices are once more funnelled into a single and closed system of understanding which denies the vast range of different experiences and meanings that may actually be involved. The assumed alignment of selfharm with the female and with stereotypical femininity is perhaps reflective of women’s sociohistorical position as less-human object to the dominant and privileged male subject, an oppositional logic that remains to a large extent within contemporary societies as women continue to be measured in relation to the idealized standards of patriarchy. Women have, therefore, long been situated in closer proximity to the abject, the primitive and the inhuman. A Möbius strip-like logic is apparent here in which the default model of the selfharmer is assumed to be female because of these existing conceptualizations of gender, whilst simultaneously the notion of self-harm gains a particular social significance through its association with the state of femaleness. It is clear that gender has a part to play in these experiences and meanings, but to focus on this aspect alone is to ignore the broader question of the ‘inhumanism’ of this particular kind of marked body. The figure of the ‘delicate cutter’ is what could be described as the more ‘realistic’ manifestation of self-mutilation in cinema, existing within a world of probable if taboo behaviour. More explicit and fantastical portrayals of self-injury can be found in horror cinema and are worth exploring further because although the characters and situations they depict are unlikely or even impossible, the same logic of monstrosity and alterity operates in both modalities of representation. Although horror cinema exaggerates and distorts, 84

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in both types of film the self-harming subject is used to signify a threatening otherness, abjection and the grotesque. To draw upon an example already mentioned in Chapter 2, the sadomasochistic entities from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, the Cenobites, exemplify the image of the terrifying and repulsive body mutilated through subjective agency and choice. These creatures are in many ways irrevocably other, their bodies perpetually open to reveal blood and flesh, modified with various metallic and torturous contraptions. And yet they are humanoid and therefore simultaneously too familiar. Indeed, in Hellbound: Hellraiser II their human origins come to light, emphasizing the notion that they represent the horror and cruelty at the heart of ourselves – and herein lies the horrifying allure that they hold, at once alien and monstrous, yet recognizable. The threatening horrific other, whether embodied in the gruesome yet tempting form of the Cenobites with their tattered flesh and exquisitely fascinating promises of torture, or the teenage girl whose wounds cut through mundane suburban existence to enact the aberrations which lie beneath, is in each case related to fears about alterity at the heart of the self: the return of the Nebenmensch complex. The crux of the revulsion evoked by these self-harming figures may be understood in light of the threat to coherent subjectivity that they represent. They are perceived as signifying a subjectivity turned against itself and in this they provide a reminder that the coherence and rationality associated with the ‘proper’ subject and the ‘correct’ type of body are illusions, cultural fantasies constructed upon the denial of alternative subject positions and oppressed bodies. Secretary: Self-mutilation and Sadomasochism

In The Piano Teacher, the relationship between Erika and Walter is founded in misrecognition and in the mismatch between his more conventional conception of romance and love, and her sadomasochistic desires, portrayed as part of a wider polymorphous sexuality. Secretary presents a more optimistic exploration of the possibilities contained within a sadomasochistic relationship, adhering to what could be called a ‘redemptive’ narrative of self-harm that is grounded in the notions of healing and recovery. As such, this film takes its place within a wider positivist or idealistic perspective on the potentialities of BDSM in which the masochistic position is one of power and agency, as well as being situated within deterministic discourses about self-mutilation and its meanings. The themes of masochism and self-mutilation are inextricably enmeshed in Secretary through the construction of a trajectory of recuperation, returning us to the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter about harm, the significance of pain and pleasure, and intersubjective experience. This film is based loosely upon a short story of the same name by Mary Gaitskill (1989), 85

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although the original source material presents a much more ambiguous and fraught version of the relationship between secretary and manager in which the desires of the former are by no means straightforward or easily apprehended. Gaitskill herself has described Shainberg’s film as ‘the Pretty Woman version of my story’ (2003), referring to its transformation into a love story-cum-coming out narrative about mutual appreciation and self-discovery, and to its new conclusion in which Grey and Lee’s unconventional desires are absorbed into the heteronormative institution of marriage. The physical sensations of the masochistic and wounded body are central to the film, for example in scenes of masturbation, spanking and self-harm, but there is simultaneously an emphasis upon how sadomasochism is compatible with a loving and monogamous relationship and in this Secretary recalls the idealism and romance of SacherMasoch’s writing. The structure of Secretary accords with one of the most pervasive cultural narratives that aims to organize self-harm and to rehabilitate it from the negativity of suicidal desire, which it has long been associated with. Smaller acts of injury may be regarded as acting as microcosms of a projected drive towards the absolute nullification of the self. Favazza states that until recently, ‘in both professional and popular thought, self-mutilation was regarded generally as a type of suicidal behaviour’ (1996: 232). This perception may have lessened within medical and psychiatric disciplines but in popular culture this association remains pervasive if not dominant, as characters such as Daisy in Girl, Interrupted attest to. The compulsive urge to connect even superficial instances of cutting that may do little or no lasting damage with the much more serious wish to end one’s life may seem peculiar given that it manifests a sort of cultural desire toward suicide, however, this explanation serves to assign a specific intention and to absorb these acts into a goal-orientated structure that whilst nihilistic, accords nonetheless with an emphasis on aim over process, the final as opposed to the immediate. The assumed future act of suicide is used to explain what may otherwise appear as random present acts of cutting (and burning, and ingesting), or as Strong states, ‘we are unable to attach an appropriate meaning to the activity of cutting and the only available meaning we grasp at may be that of suicidal behaviour’ (2000: xv). Indeed, specific types of self-injury may seem to adhere to and reaffirm this narrative, for example the flesh wounds of the ‘cutter’ seem to foretell of wrist-slashing, or the swallowing of toxins foreshadows a fatal overdose. The processual and ritualized nature of selfharming ultimately renders this suicidal narrative obsolete, but to the external (and non-‘expert’) viewer, the failure of the final and finite act to materialize only seems to exacerbate the sense of horror and incomprehension that the wounded or scarred body may evoke. Favazza observes that the activities and injuries of the ‘self-harmer’ are often regarded as more shocking, more disgusting, and more baffling even than suicide, because from an exterior point 86

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of view they may seem utterly pointless. The suicidal subject attains an ultimate point of finality: their action is goal-orientated and thus more comprehensible. The self-harming subject, however, remains ‘very much alive and able to haunt us in the flesh’ (Favazza 1996: 288–289). This description of the self-mutilated body as transgressive spectre is strikingly reminiscent of Kristeva’s description of the abject as ‘death infecting life’ (1984: 4), enhancing the argument that the embodied subjectivity the self-mutilator presents to the social world is one which threatens the integrity of the symbolic systems which determine the status of the human. An alternative to the finitude of suicide has also emerged in clinical studies and in popular culture; instead of the trajectory towards this end point, a course of ‘cure’ and recovery is plotted in which the emotional and physical pain associated with self-mutilation are contextualized as necessary elements within a positive overall schema. The self-harmer is healed, the subject is born anew. Karl Menninger in 1938 was the first to suggest self-injury as a form of self-healing and although this observation was not heeded for several decades (as Favazza notes [1996: 232]), it has gradually become another pervasive cultural understanding. Strong picks up this strand of thought to argue that self-mutilation, especially its visible forms, is now considered within psychiatry as a coping mechanism and a way for the subject to deal with their suffering and continue living: quite the opposite to the indication of suicidal desire (Strong 2000: 31). Cultural accounts that operate within this structure, including Secretary, posit self-mutilatory activities such as cutting as indicative of dysfunction and pathology, but in the sense that they demonstrate a desire for healing and represent one stage in the process of recuperation. Lee is never presented as suicidal, rather, the moments when she cuts or burns herself follow incidents of stress or confrontation. When discussing what she refers to as her ‘accident’, the slashing of her arms with a kitchen knife and the act that lead to her hospitalization, she makes it clear that this was not an attempt to end her life but rather a mistake: she inadvertently ‘cut too deep’. Later, an exchange with Grey further emphasizes the healing aspects of self-harm as, after answering a question about why she does it with ‘I don’t know’, Grey suggests his explanation: ‘Is it that sometimes the pain inside has to come to the surface, and when you see evidence of the pain inside, you finally know you’re really here. Then, when you watch the wound heal, it’s comforting. Isn’t it?’ The camera cuts to Lee’s face as he speaks and an ambiguous look creeps across her features that can perhaps best be described as startled recognition. The implication is that he has managed to articulate the instinctual, unformed thoughts behind her actions, an implication that is strengthened by her response in turn: ‘That’s a way to put it’. To some extent, this exchange reinforces the stereotypical association of self-harming identity with primitivism and the inability to enter adequately into the symbolic order: Lee cannot speak her own pain and a male figure is 87

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required to imbue her actions with recognizable social meaning. From another perspective, this exchange also manages to acknowledge the multiplicity of meanings that surround the body and its pains and pleasures, for it suggests that what appears suicidal, repulsive or obscene to the majority of the world (Lee’s uncomprehending family included) may actually signify something quite different to the subject themselves. While others may focus on the act of wounding itself as the primary intention, the self may place importance upon subsequent and seemingly less dramatic corporeal experiences such as the scabbing over and closure of the wound or the formation of a bruise or scar. Therapeutic or redemptive structures such as the one charted by Shainberg’s film may appear to offer an alternative mode of understanding to that of suicidal desire, but in fact function according to a comparable of pathology and goal-oriented finality that works to reaffirm the position of a ‘proper’ human subject. At the end of the film, not only is Lee integrated successfully into the social order through the relinquishing of her status as abjected other, but the perversity of the sadomasochistic relationship that she shares with Grey is also assimilated and ‘purified’ through the institutional ritual of marriage. It is necessary in such narratives for the initial diagnosis of self-destruction to be made in order that the idealized progression from mental illness to healthy human can be tracked and the effectiveness of social institutions such as psychiatry, or in the case of Secretary love and marriage, witnessed and confirmed. Barker, Gupta and Iantaffi note that Lee’s relationship with Grey takes her from a place of isolated dysfunction to one of mental health in which she can successfully forge a career, take active roles in relationships with others and ultimately form a committed relationship (2007: 204). Sadomasochism (with the caveat that it takes place within a loving relationship) is explicitly presented as a healthier alternative to self-injury, which is something Lee must forsake altogether in order to achieve her ‘happy after ever’ (Barker et al. 2007: 212). A possible critique of the narrative trajectory and particularly the conclusion of Secretary is the suggestion that Lee has not recovered from her pathologies at all, but merely swapped self-injury at her own hands for that at the hands of another. The habitualized ritual of harm has not ceased, only been transferred, or to use the Deleuzian masochistic parlance, disavowed. This concern relates to a wider potential difficulty regarding the way that the power dynamics between the two lead characters are manifested in the film as a whole. Not only does Lee transfer her desire for self-punishment to another but to a man who is older, her employer and by implication of a higher social class. The sadomasochistic fantasies and desires that the pair harbour appear not as a reversal or subversion of the roles that they occupy in their public/professional lives, but rather a cementing of these positions. Thus, on the surface this film seems to reinscribe traditional gender and class associations of femininity as passive and subjugated and masculinity as dominant, violent and sadistic. However, it can be argued 88

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that contrary to this superficial impression, Secretary actually contains one of the most active representations of masochistic desire of all the films drawn upon in this book. The discussion of martyrdom and self-sacrifice in Chapter 2 demonstrates that submission is by no means parallel to powerlessness, while the concept of the masochistic contract shows that masochistic desire can be an actively persuasive (even, perhaps, manipulative) form of sexual desire rather than a purely passive and receptive state. The portrayal of the developing relationship between Lee and Grey takes place within this active and wilful construction of masochistic sexuality. As the narrative of the film unfolds, Lee becomes more aware of the nature of her fantasies and desires and concurrently more assertive and determined in her attempts to attract Grey. Conversely, at several points he is depicted as an anxious character and as more tentative in pursuing his desires. Hart’s assertion that seeming and being must not be considered equivalent in the movements of sadomasochistic pleasure is played out in the film and in fact their relationship is shown to be based in a reciprocal movement that has a positive effect upon both their subjectivities. In accordance with redemptive narratives of self-harm and with utopian discourses of BDSM, the portrayal of Lee in Secretary moves from alienated and subjectively fragmented to confident and determined to pursue her desire. An early sequence provides an example of the first stages of this perceived progression: the white walls and quietude of the institution she occupies at the very start of the film are in almost shocking contrast to the bright colours, loud music, animated chatter and swirling movements of the many guests at the wedding that greets her once she is taken back to her parents’ home. In the scenes following the wedding her body appears in the space of the screen as fragmented and divided, replicating the way in which she is torn between her old cutting habits and attempting to cope with a return to ‘normal’ life. After burning herself with the metal of a boiling kettle she is shown in the swimming pool as a divided and incoherent, her face and body split into parts by the water line, a visual representation of the failure of the ‘self-harmer’ as ontological category to reach the integrity demanded for access to the realm of the ‘human’, both in terms of ‘mature’ psychical processes and the denial of corporeal disturbance. This alienation from ‘humanness’ also characterizes Erika in The Piano Teacher. Throughout, Erika is set aside from other characters through the mise en scène of the film and the distinctions created between her pathological behaviour and the normality of those she encounters, emphasizing the continual mismatch between her perverse desires and Walter’s very prosaic understanding of love and sex. Significantly, despite the fact that Grey’s status as Lee’s employer seemingly gives him a position of power over her, he too is portrayed as fragmented within the mise en scène. At several points he is shown peeping around corners, whether in the doorways of his office or from behind a washing machine whilst observing Lee and her other love interest, Peter, on a 89

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date. This image brings an air of the ridiculous to Grey’s character and renders him small and anxious within the larger space of the screen as parts of his body and face are hidden from the spectator. When Grey’s ex-wife visits the office he hides in a cupboard and leaves Lee to address the situation, giving her the authority whilst he appears as infantile and submissive. These moments should not be taken as ‘out of character’ or contradictory but gain coherence when viewed within the performative economy of sadomasochism described by Hart. That both Lee and Grey display, at different times, assertiveness and timidity, dominance and submission, and fragmentation and wholeness reveals a kinship and reciprocal balance of power between them as they come to terms with their sadomasochistic desire. In terms of the representation of self-harm it is more conservative. Despite the empathic way in which it treats this topic and the identification that is encouraged with Lee in her suffering as well as in her desire, Shainberg’s film continues to portray self-injury in the context of mental illness and recovery. The final section of this chapter will explore the ideas raised by a much more experimental depiction of ‘cutting’, that found in de Van’s film In My Skin. De Van’s film employs an avant-garde aesthetic that is appropriately challenging and demands an active and committed viewing position from the spectator, disrupting spectatorial pleasure and conventional suturing techniques just as the self-mutilated body disturbs societal expectations and notions of beauty. Unlike Secretary, the final scenes of de Van’s film provide no sense of finality or closure, a refusal of resolution that better reflects the processual nature of self-injurious libidinal drives. Avant-garde Aesthetics and the Refusal of Signification

This section will address the potentialities of self-mutilatory practices, experiences and bodies as a means of overturning normative meaning and deconstructing existing systems of linguistic signification, a process with which de Van’s film engages through its reconfiguration of conventional cinematic structure. In My Skin is notable for the way that it exploits the specificity of film form in order to express and explore the subjective experiences of the protagonist Esther. The effect of this is to challenge the spectator’s assumptions about the social meanings that have been assigned to self-mutilation and to induce an ethical process of questioning responsiveness to it. A central part of this intentionally difficult portrayal is de Van’s refusal to pathologize Esther’s actions; in this, the film is exceptional in its avoidance of the prescriptive cultural narratives which are so prevalent in the other films and theoretical approaches mentioned in this chapter. The techniques used to communicate her subjective experiences are at times abstract and experimental and are combined 90

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with imagery that is frequently uncomfortable to watch and gorier than any other vision of self-injury in recent cinema (with the exception, perhaps, of the differently contextualized graphic acts in Laugier’s Martyrs). The events of the film are set in motion when Esther cuts open her leg on a piece of metal in the garden of a party she is attending, an occurrence that introduces the theme of an alienated experience of the self as she apparently experiences no pain at the time and only discovers the wound when she creates a trail of blood across the pale carpet of the bathroom. She subsequently becomes obsessed with the wounds (to the incomprehension and growing anger of her boyfriend), picking and pulling at the skin around them and deepening and widening the cuts. The first time she deliberately cuts herself is in a shadowy utility corridor of the offices in which she works. Following this, her self-inflicted wounds become more extreme and increasingly graphic in the way that they are represented as Esther variously slices her skin and removes pieces from it, tears at herself with her teeth, and drinks and smears herself with her own blood. The goriest moments take place towards the end of the film when Esther embarks upon a prolonged bout of self-mutilation in a sanguinary sequence that employs striking formal techniques such as disjointed editing, unconventional angles, split screen imagery and abrupt cuts to a black screen that echo the cuts to her own skin. The graphic nature of these images is crucial to the challenging way in which the film approaches this subject, while the shock and visceral reactions of the spectator are vital for an attempt to represent physical and emotional duress in the visual medium of cinema. Tim Palmer locates In My Skin within what he calls the French cinéma de corps, a group of films from the earliest years of the twenty-first century ‘that deal frankly and graphically with the body, and corporeal transgressions’, and which also includes, amongst others, works such as Catherine Breillat’s Romance (1999), Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001) and Gasper Noé’s Irréversible (2002) (2006: 171). Palmer argues that this group of films rejects ‘the traditionally passive, entertained onlooker, to demand instead a viscerally engaged experiential participant’ (2006: 172). The active engagement that Palmer correctly identifies as necessary when viewing In My Skin is vital for the analysis of the film in this chapter; it indicates that the relationship between film and spectator can be an intersubjective one, in which the spectator is called upon by the film to participate in the act of meaning-making. Here, In My Skin will be drawn upon in conjunction with Elaine Scarry’s study The Body in Pain and Julia Kristeva’s work on symbolic and semiotic modes of signification in Revolution in Poetic Language. The juxtaposition of these texts posits a non-deterministic and ethical understanding of embodied self-harm that avoids the prescriptive and co-opting narratives that commonly surround it and instead suggests it may act as an alternative and transgressive mode of open signification. It is clear that the connection between self-mutilatory practices and the construction of meaning is a crucial area of consideration, 91

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and equally clear that this connection is far from straightforward and often resists the spaces that social and political discourse allow for it. Insofar as it is possible to think and talk about self-harm and the processes of meaningmaking, the discussion must acknowledge the multiple types of signification involved, rather than reach for a stable and unified theory. The sensations and significations associated with cutting are plural and may be constantly shifting. To conceive of one signifying framework that strives to account for these various and ambiguous, even contradictory meanings is to remain bound by a repressive and institutionalized discursive system. In My Skin depicts the flickering interplay of meaning and sensation through the use of avant-garde cinematic techniques, challenging conventional modes of cinematic signification in order to express the asignification of the self-wounded body. This strategy becomes more pronounced as the film progresses and reaches its apex in the penultimate and final sequences: Esther’s final bloody bout of self-mutilation and the moments just preceding it. As she walks through a supermarket, the location and people around her become blurred and distorted. The images alternate between speeded up and normal time, ‘planes of colour, bright light and texture collide and juxtapose’ (Palmer 2006: 179). The audio track also shifts as the voices of the shoppers smudge into muffled and temporally confused sounds, while other noises, such as the repeated beeping of the checkouts, gain a hyper-real quality through enhancement. ‘Reality’ is thrown into question as the spectator tries to decipher what they are seeing and hearing. The scene of self-mutilation that follows employs a split-screen form, showing disparate close-ups of blood-smeared body parts as Esther cuts, intercut with blood upon the kitchen surfaces and bloodied footprints on the floor. This often abstract imagery makes it difficult for the viewer to distinguish precisely what is going on, instead creating a general montage or jigsaw of redness in a scene that could be reassembled in multiple different ways. In My Skin plays with the language of film; self-mutilation, it will now be argued, refuses the regulatory language of the dominant and inscribes a different kind of embodied meaning. The entry into language is regarded as instrumental to the processes of subjectification and as a necessity for taking one’s ‘proper’ place within the social order. The sociocultural acceptance of someone as a ‘normal’ subject with the rights, identities and intersubjectivities that this entails is to a large extent reliant upon their ability to exist within shared and thus intelligible systems of signification. In this context, these shared systems suggest to us that bodily integrity (particularly certain types of body such as the young, female and white) must be protected in all circumstances, that pain is bad, bodily fluids such as blood are improper and so on. There is also a social imperative to ‘master’ language as the privileged form of expression and communication, and as demonstrated by some of the institutionalized accounts discussed earlier in this chapter, self-mutilation is regarded as evidence of the failure to follow 92

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this imperative. The categorical identity of the ‘self-harmer’, therefore, signifies childishness, primitivism and the inability to enter into the ‘civilized’ social order. Yet, associations between self-mutilation and communicative systems of a sort remain, as suggested for example by the titles of studies by Babiker and Arnold (The Language of Injury) and Strong (A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain). Language is at stake here but not language as we commonly perceive it, instead the need emerges for a new way of thinking through the models of language and subject, one that eludes prescriptive and rigid boundaries and offers a broader understanding of how signification may be manifested and experienced. Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language provides an invaluable starting point for this project and in particular for an alternative philosophy of language in relation to corporeal and embodied experience. Kristeva argues that the codifying philosophies of language that dominate Western theoretical discourse in disciplines such as linguistics, structuralism and psychoanalysis have functioned as ossifying and possessive structures, acting as ‘agents of totality’ that withdraw the body from direct experience and repress the processual nature of subjectivity (1984: 14). The social mechanism and the way that language has been used and understood within this mechanism denies the potentialities of the generation of corporeal significance, instead privileging and normalizing the image of ‘proper’ social identity or what Kristeva describes as ‘the thinking subject, the Cartesian subject who defines his being through thought or language’ (1984: 14). This mechanism and the disciplines that manifest and perpetuate it are to be emphatically understood as ideological structures of control that limit the subject and restrict the processes of signification; this, for Kristeva, is the symbolic modality of language and constitutes one part of the signifying process. The self-harming ‘narratives’ discussed earlier in this chapter and replicated to greater or lesser extent in the films discussed, may be regarded as strategies of symbolic signification that aim to stratify the subject and their relation to their own bodies and the bodies of others within the constraints of dominant ideologies. Yet, there is more to the signifying process than this, although as Kristeva argues this alterity has infrequently been acknowledged in dominant theories. She asserts that in tandem with the symbolic mode, we must also attend to the semiotic modality of signification, expressed through the concept of the semiotic chora. The semiotic is associated in her theory with nonverbal systems of meaning-making and interpretation such as music, kinesis and gesture, systems that are experienced more immediately, less ‘rationally’ and more viscerally. Although the subject and the processes of signification that constitute subjectivity and intersubjectivity arise from the movement or dynamic between the two modalities that Kristeva identifies, symbolic language has repeatedly been privileged over the semiotic chora. This has resulted in the undermining 93

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of corporeal experience and the denial of its role in the creation of meaning (Kristeva 1984: 24). Kristeva describes the chora as: Not yet a position that represents something for someone (i.e. it is not a sign); nor is it a position that represents someone for another position (i.e. it is not yet a signifier); it is, however, generated in order to attain to this signifying position. Neither model nor copy, the chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization. (1984: 26)

The germinal and processual nature of the chora, its movement of creating, erasing and recreating meaning is what gives it its revolutionary power. Kristeva asserts that it is through the semiotic that challenges to the dominant may be articulated or manifested. The visceral experiences and resultant marks of selfmutilation can be seen to belong to the fluid modality of the semiotic chora as opposed to that of the fixed and repressive symbolic. Grosz further explains that the semiotic consists of drives in their undifferentiated and polymorphous state, in the ‘processes of dividing and organizing the body in accordance with the pleasure principle, that is, in terms of erotogenic zones’ (1989: 43). The semiotic moves towards signification but does not act as a singular sign that can be easily read or identified, instead making visible a process that is inextricable from embodiment and that opens out into a multiplicity of potential meanings, preceding and exceeding the symbolic language that strives to structure and control it. We may return here to the crucial organ of the skin, not simply as surface but as a complex landscape that acts as an interface between interior and exterior, self and world: the skin comprises ‘the articulation of orifices, erotogenic rims, cuts on the body’s surface, loci of exchange between inside and outside’ (Grosz 1994: 36). Grosz’s description here speaks to Kristeva’s semiotic chora as it maps and remaps the body in a constant and never complete process of resignification; it also recalls the modified body of self-mutilation with its cuts, ridged scars, and newly created areas of erotic investment. Wounds manifest themselves as novel and self-determined openings, bruises create new spectrums of colour, scar tissue that is devoid of feeling serves to heighten sensation when the surrounding skin is touched: these areas upon the evolving landscape of the body provide a redistribution of intensities that is not constrained by socially designated investments in specific body parts or culturally sanctioned corporeal acts. The transformation that self-mutilation enacts on the body of the subject is part of this interplay between semiotic chora and symbolic language, however, the actual sensation of pain is also crucial here. As with masochistic experience more generally, for some pain may be one of the most essential, if not the most crucial component of these practices. The predominant attitude towards pain assumes its aversive nature and this belief accounts for the bafflement 94

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with which masochism has been greeted in many areas of theory. If pain is to be sought, it must be in the context of an end point, a desired outcome such as a tattoo or piercing; the pain itself is seen as a necessary horror to be endured. A wilful inversion of Scarry’s thesis in the unsurpassed The Body in Pain is instructive in elaborating on the relationship between pain and the generation of meaning. Scarry’s starting point is a concern with how physical suffering may structure the subject’s experience of the world around them and their position within it as subject or otherwise. One of her most vital claims is that physical pain carries with it the ability to ‘utterly nullify the claims of the world’ or to ‘unmake’ the world (Scarry 1985: 33). The attention and perspective of the subject in pain shrinks inward from the expanse of their surroundings to the focused and inescapable demands of the body, and inward further still to the specific point of injury. The body becomes the world, the wound the locus of this world. Everything else proves meaningless, exterior to the senses. A crucial part of this process of ‘unmaking the world’ as symbolically understood is the capability of physical pain to dismantle language, to render the subject disarticulate in speech and in thought. If the world is created through linguistic and symbolic understanding, through the human desire to name, categorize and express, the world is unmade through the loss of these abilities. The dismantling of language results in ‘the twofold denial of the human, both the particular human being hurt and the collective human present in the products of civilization’ (Scarry 1985: 43). The context for her philosophy is the use of pain in warfare and in torture, thus the ‘dehumanization’ and nullification of the symbolic world is, in her theory, a negative and exceptionally damaging process. The enforced removal of the tortured subject’s linguistic capability by the torturer is regarded as absolutely central to the process of dehumanization inherent in this violent act. To deny a subject language is seen as denying them their subjectivity and furthermore, the very idea of civilization is threatened through the destruction of one of its most potent signifiers. Scarry’s focus on the uses of dehumanization in torture and the conflicts of war mean that she frames the loss of language within a highly negative framework, however, taking her discussion of the ‘unmaking of the world’ (which essentially equates to the unmaking of the existing symbolic and social order) in conjunction with Kristeva’s concept of semiotic signification allows for a recasting of the effects of physical pain in an alternative and potentially more revolutionary light. Self-mutilatory acts such as cutting and burning, and the pain that accompanies these acts, may emerge as practices that enable the subject to deconstruct or refuse dominant significatory systems that have left no space for the chora and its fluid, multiple forms of meaning. Simultaneously, it may be used to create new asignifying systems that take place solely on and in the body, an ongoing process of the creation and recreation of meanings that cannot be locked into any one discursive space. Grosz suggests the phrase 95

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‘body image’ may be used as a ‘third term’ to explain the mediation between the terms body and mind, and the operations and interactions that the relationship between body and mind necessarily entail (1994: 66). The subject’s body image undergoes a continuous and dynamic process of production and transformation as different areas become more or less libidinally invested dependent upon personal experiences and cultural and social values (Grosz 1994: 75). Selfinflicted pain is one of the means by which the body image is transformed. The visceral ‘body horror’ imagery of In My Skin attempts to translate Esther’s experiences to the spectator: the commingling of mind, body image and flesh. The repeated close-ups emphasize the textures of metal blade, skin and blood; the multiple wounds invite an engagement with the alternations being enacted upon the body. Grosz’s invocation of Merleau-Ponty is evocative when read in conjunction with Esther’s self-mutilation: Flesh is the term Merleau-Ponty uses to designate being, not as a plenitude, self-identity, or substance but as divergence or non-coincidence. Flesh is no longer associated with a privileged animate category of being but is being’s most elementary level. Flesh is being’s reversibility, its capacity to fold in on itself, a dual orientation inward and outward. (Grosz 1994: 100)

Flesh denies any singular or fixed meaning. It does not reassure the human subject of their coherence or bodily integrity but instead insists upon quite the opposite: the embodied subject is transformative, its surfaces undulate and morph. Skin marked by self-alteration makes this unspoken process explicit. If the definition of ‘the human’ as it stands in our social world is inherently problematic, might the deliberate infliction of physical pain upon the self-serve to ‘unmake the world’ in a more active sense, to move towards the disintegration of the rigid structures of order and meaning that have, after all, worked to codify identity and subjectivity according to an exclusionary schema? This is not to advocate or glorify self-mutilation as a specific strategy of political resistance, but to posit it as a potential site within which the subject may present a challenge to the symbolic and begin to generate meaning in a different way. A way that is entirely embodied, indifferent to or defiant of the designated uses and appearances of the flesh, and that eludes any fixed experience and interpretation. Only through the process of unmaking the world, through the ‘rupture and articulations’ of the semiotic order (Kristeva 1984: 26), might the possibility of different systems of signification and subjectivity emerge. And just as the chora catalyses a constant and never-ending process of making and remaking, over and over, so the ruptures articulated upon the skin through selfmutilation insist upon the opening up not just of the body, but of meaningmaking itself as a practice of expansion and multiplicity. The corporeality of 96

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self-mutilation materializes excess and disruption, through this calling for a dismantling and recreation of the social world and our place within it.

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Chapter 4

Transgressive Reconfigurations Previous chapters have demonstrated that a consideration of female masochism necessarily engages with vital questions of representation and with debates about the position of the female body and female desire and pleasure within wider discursive fields such as religion, literature, psychiatry and philosophy. This chapter will hone in on more specific questions about female sexuality in the context of cinematic genre and spectatorial convention through a discussion of films by two of the most successful and formidable female directors in contemporary filmmaking: Catherine Breillat and Jane Campion. Breillat has carved a position for herself at the forefront of French cinema since her debut feature A Real Young Girl (1976), and Campion has effectively straddled the mainstream/independent divide after the enormous success of The Piano (1993). Both filmmakers are known for narratives that explore the vicissitudes of female heterosexual desire, depicting the troubled power dynamics that permeate male/ female relationships and the frequently ambiguous manifestations of female sexuality and corporeality within a phallocentric culture. Pertinently, both have also been ‘accused’ within the popular media and within film scholarship of presenting damaging portrayals of female sexuality as masochistic, taken to signify self-destruction, negativity and the loss of subjective agency. In contradistinction to this, the films of Breillat and Campion are noteworthy for their strident insistence that masochistic subjectivity is more complex, an insistence that is felt through imagery and themes that are unconventional and at times deliberately provocative in their mobilization of the realms of obscenity and abjection. The films that form the basis for discussion in this chapter, Romance and In the Cut, are particularly concerned with disrupting representational conventions about the female body by challenging three interrelated norms: such bodies as erotic spectacle, as the obscene and abject other and as the victim of male violence. They do so through an engagement with cinematic forms that generically revolve around the figure of the female as object of male libidinal drives, whether through sex or violence: pornography and the erotic thriller. Through a consideration of these films it is possible to develop further a conceptualization of a new masochistic aesthetic that is based around the juxtaposition of the obscene and the beautiful, the abject and the sensual, the explicit and the hidden. From a spectatorial perspective, such an aesthetic is simultaneously traumatic and pleasurable, situating the viewer in

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a position that echoes the masochistic themes of the narratives through the evocation of transgression, extremity and eroticism. Explicit Bodies and Sexual Difference

Romance remains one of Breillat’s most well-known and keenly debated films. Its structure is comparable to pornographic films such as the Emmanuelle series, framed around the female protagonist’s journey of sexual selfdiscovery; however, in Breillat’s film the explicit sex scenes are juxtaposed with philosophical meditations on femininity and its construction within the sociocultural sphere as Marie seeks pleasure through different sexual encounters with a selection of men. In this film and the related Anatomy of Hell (2004), obscenity and extremity are used as representational strategies to disrupt the comfortable spectatorial position and to fashion an aesthetic mode based in alternative notions of the beautiful. Romance is typical of Breillat’s cinema in its exploration of the fraught nature of heterosexual relationships and the focus upon challenging dominant perceptions of female sexuality and corporeality. Masochistic desire is manifested in two of Marie’s three primary relationships within the film. Firstly, within the dynamic of her relationship with boyfriend Paul, who commences the film by declaring he no longer wishes to have any form of physical relationship with her. This dynamic is characterized by emotional suffering and power play as Paul treats her sometimes with disdain, sometimes tenderness and sometimes a cruel indifference, resulting in Marie articulating feelings of rejection, frustration and humiliation. Yet, until the very end of the film she chooses to remain within this painful situation whilst pursuing encounters with other men. The logic that structures Marie’s masochistic desire is distinct from that of previous films in this study, for Paul’s miserable treatment of her is implicated as the catalyst and fuel of her lust for other men. The second form of masochism depicted is more explicit: Marie’s forays into sadomasochism and bondage with an older man, Robert. The imagery of these scenes accords in several ways with the masochistic aesthetic outlined by Deleuze and Studlar, however, it manifests a new and distinctly contemporary dimension in its focus upon aspects of female corporeality that are typically elided or glossed over in dominant forms of representation. The portrayal of female masochism in Romance is by no means a simple one. It is impossible to claim that it offers a redemptive or idealistic narrative akin to that found in Secretary, for Marie’s encounters do not always result in pleasure or happiness. However, although she exists within an emphatically patriarchal system and the film revolves around her encounters with men her sexuality does not exist to serve this system. It is primarily she who drives and controls these encounters, further enhancing the overall argument that masochism is not simply a passive 100

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and submissive form of sexuality but may offer a position of agency and activity for the female subject, albeit a frequently troubled one as they negotiate the problems presented by a social world centred around male normativity. At the time of release, perhaps the most controversial aspect of Romance was its inclusion of non-simulated sex scenes which, coupled with the casting of Italian porn actor Rocco Siffredi as one of Marie’s lovers, instigates a debate about the relationship of the film to pornography. Specifically, the place of pornographic discourse in relation to cultural constructions of sex and pleasure, and to sex and pleasure ‘in reality’. This distinction is an important one, particularly where the female body is concerned, and it is this distinction that Breillat’s film draws attention to through its deliberate invocation of more dominant forms of pornography. A concern with categorization is evident within critical responses to the film, several of which have focused upon the question of whether or not it should be designated as pornography due to the extensive, graphic sex scenes and the inclusion of non-simulated sex acts. Emma Wilson views the inclusion of Siffredi in this film and the later Anatomy of Hell as a deliberate indication from Breillat that the films should be regarded within the realm of pornography (Wilson 2001: 152). Ruth Hottell and Lynsey Russell-Watts state that Breillat herself has been keen to claim the label of pornography for this film in order to subvert this most conventionally patriarchal form of cinema (2002: 70), and arguing along similar lines, Lisa Downing has suggested that Breillat’s appropriation of pornographic tropes functions as a commentary upon ‘the perceptions and politics of the containing culture’s sexual imaginary, by its manipulation of cinematic narratives, genre, and aesthetics’ (2004: 268). The logic behind such statements indicates that by taking an actively desiring female subject as the protagonist, Romance acts firstly as a reclamation of the genre of porn for women, and secondly to expose the conventions of sex in pornographic discourse as inadequate for the portrayal of women’s sexual desires and experiences. The representation of women in pornography has particular relevance for the theorization of masochistic subjectivity. Linda Williams has observed that to its many feminist critics, porn provides ‘spectacles of feminine victimization’ that force both the female stars of the films and the female spectator of such films into an undesirable position of masochism (Williams 1999a: 268). However, Williams warns against the reductive logic of equating masochism with victimization, and argues instead for an approach that examines how power and pleasure operate in fantasies of domination that appeal to women. Several of the sexual scenarios in Romance evoke these fantasies of domination from a perspective that does not renunciate them but locates them as part of the gamut of female pleasures. As such, the film poses questions of power, pleasure and control in their full ambivalence through the explicit, obscene and sometimes disturbing couplings within which Marie engages (and with her final murderous ‘victory’ over Paul acting as the 101

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climactic moment in this matrix). Despite debates about categorization, to definitively or even broadly classify Romance as pornography would be wilfully polemical; rather, it falls quite firmly within the traditions of French arthouse cinema and in its inclusion of ‘real’ sex is common to other films from the same period and independent context such as Baise-Moi (Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi 2000), Intimacy (Patrice Chéreau 2001) and Nine Songs (Michael Winterbottom 2004). Nonetheless, it is clear that some pornographic tropes are deliberately implanted into this ‘higher’ form of cultural product. From this perspective, Breillat’s engagement with pornography may be interpreted not as a direct criticism but instead as an attempt to utilize aspects of the cinematic mode that has focused most unabashedly upon pleasure and embodiment, female as well as male. Campion’s In the Cut uses a similar strategy in one of its most provocative scenes, in which the protagonist Frannie inadvertently witnesses a graphically portrayed act of fellatio in the basement of a bar. This sets in motion the narrative trajectory of the film as it is soon revealed the woman performing this sex act has been murdered and dismembered, and Frannie begins a potentially perilous sexual relationship with the detective investigating the case. During the course of this narrative, Frannie’s proximity to death becomes ever more claustrophobic: her sister is killed and, finally, Frannie must save herself from her own death at the killer’s hands. Despite the fellatio scene occurring only eight minutes into the duration of the story, Linda Ruth Williams has described this as its ‘prime erotic set piece’ of the film (Williams 2005: 419). In the Cut draws heavily upon the narrative and visual conventions of the erotic thriller, a genre known for including ‘soft-core’ sex scenes (in films such as Basic Instinct and Body of Evidence); however, such an explicitly shown sex act would be unusual in this generic context and is more reminiscent of hard-core pornography, despite the prosthetic nature of the organ in question. The way in which the man pulls aside the woman’s long dark hair to facilitate a clearer viewpoint, the extended close-ups of her mouth licking and sucking his penis, and her brightly-painted long fingernails are all evocative of familiar images from hard-core films and magazines. As with Romance, In the Cut could hardly be classed as pornography proper but does deliberately engage with certain pornographic tropes in order to draw attention to conventions of spectatorial pleasure and the representation of sex in popular culture. This scene serves to problematize the equation of the female body with the object of the male gaze, for in this instance it is Frannie who takes on the voyeuristic position of observer. Mary Ann Doane has suggested that in classical cinema the glasses of a bespectacled woman act as a signifier of the appropriation of the active gaze usually reserved for male characters (Doane 1992: 236). According to this reading, intellectual Frannie could be understood as taking on the active and voyeuristic gaze and in doing so reversing the normative paradigm described by Mulvey in which the male looks 102

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and the female is looked at. Sue Gillett, offering a different perspective, regards Frannie as the reactive receptacle of the vision before her, her gaze not active but vulnerable, penetrated: ‘the spectacle invades her’ (Gillett 2004: 87). I argue that although Frannie certainly appropriates a gaze of some kind, the scene is not reliant upon the simple object/subject, passive/active dynamic that both Doane and Gillett refer to. Rather, much of its erotic charge is generated through the complex interplay of gazes at stake: Frannie watching the man, him watching her watch and moving aside the obstructing hair, and the spectator occupying each of these positions as the camera switches between their viewpoints. The web of gazes constructed in this sequence of shots avoids the simple reversal of traditional roles that would result from Frannie being cast only as voyeur to this spectacle, and in this accords with the complex networks of desire, identification and spectatorship that are invoked by the film as a whole. The intermingling of explicit sex, obscenity, horror, and beauty that runs through Romance and In the Cut cannot be unpicked without addressing the crucial question of specularity and the gaze. Irigaray argues that privileging of the specular and the visible within phallologocentrism has been enormously influential in shaping Western conceptions of sexual difference in theoretical disciplines and in visual culture, affecting the style and substance of cultural forms such as painting, cinema and pornography, as well as concurrent attitudes within institutions like philosophy, education, medicine, legality and morality. Irigaray asserts that the elevation of a specular economy over other modes of encountering and making sense of the world has been fundamentally problematic because of its role in shaping the assumptive logics that construct sexual difference. Tracing the various paths of Western thought back as far as Plato’s cave, she demonstrates how such philosophies have always operated according to the status of the visible offering ontological assurance: because something can be seen, its status as being is affirmed (Irigaray 1985a: 26). The unethical ramifications of this assumption mean that the inverse is also taken as truth: if something cannot be apprehended through the specular economy its ontological status becomes suspect. As MacCormack writes, ‘Isomorphism creates a myth of “two” within a binary, refusing the specificity of the second term which is defined only through its failure to fulfil the elements of the dominant, concealing the debt the majoritarian owes to the minoritarian’ (2008: 45). One of the most pervasive examples of this isomorphic logic is the centrality accorded to the penis in Freudian psychoanalysis. The possession or nonpossession of this organ becomes the deciding factor in infantile development and the whole of the psychical life that follows; this is the phallologic of which Irigaray speaks. The penis is all too apparent in its visibility whereas the female genitals conversely are regarded as hidden, exhibiting only lack, the horrific ‘possibility of a nothing to see’ (Irigaray 1985b: 47). This sentiment is echoed by Marie in Romance in one of her most memorable lines: ‘you can’t love a face 103

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when a cunt tags along’. Within this specular isomorphic logic, the female body and female subjectivity more broadly is perceived only in terms of what it is not: it is not male, it is not acceptably visible, it is reduced to the gaping horror of the vaginal void and rendered ontologically uncertain. The primacy of the specular economy within the conceptualization of sexual difference offers some insight into two of the most familiar tropes found in pornography: the ‘money shot’ or image of male ejaculation (often over the female body) and images of women holding open their vulvas for the gaze of the camera/spectator. Taken together, these motifs act as exemplary manifestations of the obsessional status of the visible and the accompanying anxiety about what is not visible, and each of these motifs are strategically subverted or thwarted in Romance and In the Cut. The proliferation of images of male ejaculation in pornography is not only testament to the specular nature of male pleasure and phallologocentrism, but is also revealing about the representation (or rather, non-representation) of female pleasure in cinema, as Williams notes (1999b: 93). The unavoidably visual nature of the male orgasm acts as an assurance of (male) pleasure and achievement, thus, according to the ‘myth of “two”’ that denies the specificity of female pleasure this visibility is repeatedly grafted onto the female body in pornography and other genres such as the erotic thriller. The female orgasm often bears no visible trace in and of itself, rendering it a source of suspicion and anxiety within the male scopic economy. Like female genitals, the female orgasm appears only as lack, an ungraspable abyss that cannot be apprehended or mastered. In an attempt to fill this gap, to deny the abyss, porn films typically feature a plethora of women expressing their apparent ecstasy through exaggerated expressions and overstated shrieks. Irigaray has commented that the orgasm of a woman in porn is not a sign of her taking enjoyment in her own pleasure, but rather a sign of her being forcibly brought into pleasure as a demonstration and assurance of male power (1985a: 199–200). Such scenes do not represent any reality of female enjoyment but only a simulacrum based upon the visual standards of the masculine. The ‘nothing to see’ of the female body is again excluded from discursive arenas, violently shoved out by images that attempt to eclipse the difference of the female body. The second convention mentioned above, the opened vulva or ‘spread-shot’, may seem paradoxical within this context: if the female genitals are so horrific and obscene to the male gaze, why demand that they be displayed so flagrantly and frequently? Such shots can be located at the intersection of dominant regimes of specularity and the techniques of ‘confession’ that are apparent throughout modern history in institutions such as religion, medicine, psychiatry and art, and that Williams, drawing upon Foucault, identifies as prevalent within pornographical discourse. Foucault states, ‘from the Christian penance to the present day, sex was a privileged theme of confession … It is in the confession that truth and sex 104

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are joined, through the obligatory and exhaustive expression of an individual secret’ (1978: 61). The confessional mode of discourse presumes that the act of articulating or representing ones sexuality entails the revelation of ‘truths’ that would otherwise remain hidden and inaccessible, a demand that has been exercised with particular zeal upon those bodies, subjectivities and practices that do not adhere to what Foucault terms ‘heterogenous sexualities’ (1978: 61). The female ‘other’ has found herself subjected to these institutional obligations of confession, her body and sexuality feverishly probed both figuratively and physically, taken as a visual object that will reveal its elusive ‘truths’ under close and careful scrutiny. Whichever epistemic system the socially ingrained ritual of confession takes place within, it is inextricable from dynamics of regulation and control. It is ‘a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile’ (Foucault 1978: 61–62). In the context of pornographic imagery, then, conventions such as the ‘spread-shot’ must be situated in the context of the wider phallologocentric logic that functions to constrain and categorize female bodies, pleasures and desires. As Williams argues, this voyeuristic and penetrating drive towards control is normalized and made acceptable under the banner of scientific investigation, artistic endeavour or dominant moralistic values and through these techniques the female body becomes the object of male vision. Her own subjective space is limited or negated, her desires and pleasures are silenced (Williams 1999b: 45). The image of the opened vagina so common in pornography operates according to this confessional and specular logic, forcing open the ‘nothing to see’ in the constant quest to reveal an illusion of female ‘truth’. The problems inherent in the assumption of visibility providing testament and the repressive logic of the confession that are manifested in pornography are a partial aspect of the wider ethical debate surrounding the processes through which, all too often, meaning is constructed from the perspective of the privileged and powerful (and intersecting with the discourses surrounding self-harm with which Chapter 3 engages). One of the examples used by Williams to illustrate the techniques of confession in medical and psychiatric history is the (in)famous photographs taken of female hysteric patients at the Salpêtrière Hospital under Jean-Martin Charcot. These photographs recorded the contortions and convulsions of the hysterical fits of the patients and were circulated within psychiatric circles under the auspices of their usefulness as diagnostic aids, whilst simultaneously propagating the notion of feminine illness and ‘confession’ as a spectacle for the male medical gaze. Writing about these photographs, Lyotard comments, 105

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So this is what you imagine: perhaps they have a soul, perhaps they hear the question; but it is not your question and you do not hear their reply; in principle you admit that the cries, contractions, fits and hallucinations observed during the attacks are, in some sense, replies; so you give yourself three things to construct – the language they speak with their bodies, the question to which their “attacks” respond and the nature of what is questioning them. (1993: 130)

Lyotard suggests that to take upon the task of interpreting the meaning or ‘reality’ of the other is to risk speaking from an ethically problematic position that both silences and misrepresents. Foucault emphasizes that the logic of confession derives from the belief that the subject is obliged to tell the truth about their desire; Lyotard cautions that even once the confession has been made the problem of reception and interpretation remains. It is assumed that scrutinizing the bodies of these women through photographic traces will reveal something previously ‘hidden’ about their subjectivity and experiences; certainly they cannot speak to us now, but even in life it was their corporeality that was interpreted as revealing their ‘truth’, rather than their words. They do not speak through the ‘proper’ systems of language that have been approved as the means of communication by the social order, therefore significance is instead read through their bodies as objects of the institutional gaze. As Lyotard points out, there is a gaping disconnect between the question being asked of them from the deterministic standpoint of male normativity and the question being ‘answered’ by the movements and contortions of their bodies. Any ‘translation’ that issues from such a position of privilege and pre-assumed knowledge cannot adequately recognize the systems of meaning and experience within which these bodies are enmeshed. Romance offers its own ‘confessional’ in the form of Marie’s voiceover, which acts as a monologue offering meditations upon her personal desires and fantasies in addition to more widely applicable observations about cultural perceptions of the female body. Furthermore, Romance contains its own version of the ‘spread-shot’ in the unexpected image of crowning that erupts onto the screen in the last parts of the film, providing spectacular ‘evidence’ of Marie’s feminine corporeality in the context of childbirth and maternity rather than as an objectified body part presented for the voyeuristic gaze. Her rituals of confession act not to unmask a false ‘truth’ about her sexuality that can be labelled and controlled but rather to delay and dissect pleasure. As Downing has noted, ‘vision is subordinated to voice’ in the film, a shift in tone from pornographic images to philosophizing that disturbs the conventional spectacle of woman as object of the male gaze (2004: 269). At one point, Marie narrates an elaborate fantasy, her words conjuring the images that are seen by the spectator. She reclines, her upper and lower body divided by a wall. The former exists in a clinical white space, the latter in a brothel of sordid appearance in which 106

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men line up to make use of her exposed vagina. The masochistic elements of this fantasy are clear as Marie relinquishes her body to the causes of medicine and sex, two of the arenas in which the strictest controls have been issued over the female. The effect of this is to explore the possibility that whilst women may recognize the processes of objectification at work upon them through the discourses of culture, they nonetheless may retain a psychical, and indeed, sexual investment in these processes. Marie’s body may be used by the men within her fantasy, but she also uses these men for her own pleasure and to fulfil her own desires. Her ‘confessional’ therefore is lustful and demanding as well as revealing, for it is her voice which summons the spectacle of this fantasy and all it contains. Butler, following her discussion of confession in Giving an Account of Oneself, comments that the self becomes subject ‘only through an ec-static movement, one that moves me outside of myself into a sphere in which I am dispossessed of myself and constituted as a subject at the same time’ (Butler 2005: 115). Marie’s confessionals, her voiceovers and fantasies, speak from this position of simultaneous dispossession and assumption of subjectivity, female identity and embodied desire. She appears as object and subject, active and passive, exhibitionistic and voyeuristic to the extent that these artificial oppositions are rendered not simply inadequate for the explanation of human passions, but almost entirely redundant. In several of the sex scenes, Marie appears almost excessively passive, perhaps a mocking nod to the conventional division of sexual roles along gendered lines. Her words as she lies still beneath Paulo’s moving body seem to repeat this satirical mode as they replicate normative thinking about the female body: ‘I want to be a hole, a pit. The more it gapes, the more obscene it is. The more it’s me, my most intimate part, the more I surrender … I hollow myself, that’s my purity’. This echoes a criticism from Irigaray about the way the female body has been conceptualized within patriarchal discourse: the woman’s role in sex is rendered entirely passive, she is nothing but a receptacle for man’s seed (1985b: 18). However, Marie’s words do not simply reveal this tendency, but claim it as one of the constitutive elements of her sexual identity and her desire. Her assumption of this role is not an imperative, not an indication of enforced submission, but is a choice that is by no means reducible to powerlessness. The Obscene, the Abject and the Beautiful

It is evident that although Romance references several of the generic tropes associated with pornography, Breillat’s film is starkly different in its depictions of the female body and its relationship to spectatorial pleasure. Instead of providing images that arouse, it draws upon imagery of sexual difference that chimes with cultural imaginings of displeasure, aspects of the body that repel 107

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or disgust and that are typically excluded from the representational sphere. The twin areas of explicit sex and graphically portrayed bodily fluids and functions combine in this film and in Anatomy of Hell to construct dual elements of this obscenity, adding a polemical approach to theoretical debates about how certain aspects of female experience have come to be regarded as obscene and unshowable in cultural forms such as cinema. Ann Gillain has noted that Breillat’s intention is to enact a rare unveiling of those things that have previously been kept secret, the realities of female corporeality and sexuality (2003: 205). This unveiling is apparent in the close-up shots of female genitalia, vaginal fluids and menstrual blood, as well as in Marie’s observations about male opinions of women. After Paul reveals he no longer wishes to have sex with Marie, she retorts, ‘you despise me because I am a woman … I disgust you, I make you sick. You think I’m the dirtiest’. The dominant understanding of the female body that has proliferated within phallologocentric culture has been a false one based upon the logic of the same in which the difference of female desire and pleasure are elided. This has created a ‘blind spot’ in the portrayal of more realistic forms of female embodiment. Menstruation and menstrual blood provide a pertinent example of this, a specifically female experience that Breillat draws upon and that has been of particular interest to feminist philosophers of sexual difference. Attitudes towards menstrual blood in contemporary Western culture still circle around the subject with a mixture of denial and horror, advertisements for sanitary products typically use blue liquid in an attempt to sanitize the reality of blood, weary old jokes circulate about not trusting anything that bleeds for seven days and does not die. Menstrual blood is constructed either as something that requires a hygienic makeover or as something unnatural and obscene, a further indication of the horrors of sexual difference and the threatening ‘secrets’ of the female body. Irigaray has noted that although this specific type of bodily fluid was given value in the prehistoric era, this value was denied with the establishment of patriarchal order (1985b: 125–126). She comments elsewhere that while ‘blood is fine for the libertine’, menstrual blood has remained taboo (1985a: 200). This begins to hint at the multiple cultural meanings associated with this fluid, varying according to its source, its purpose, and the type of body from which it issues. For libertines such as de Sade, blood signifies the flesh of the woman enforceably ruptured by a male torturer, a necessary step towards the valorization of her saintly and inhuman suffering; as Irigaray points out, such a gendered matrix around the spilling of blood is both typical and presumed acceptable. The cultural meanings read into and emanating from blood, and the gendered nature of these meanings, continues to be apparent in various contemporary cultural forms and discursive realms. For example, the erotic thrillers and police procedurals that In the Cut is both inspired by and critical of are commonly based around the mutilated and sexually assaulted bodies of 108

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faceless female victims, a continuation of de Sade’s transgressive model become commonplace in popular culture. Or, as explored in Chapter 3, the blood of the self-harmer may be regarded from the external perspective as a signifier of weakness, the repulsive ‘otherness’ of mental illness and primitivism, although for the person themselves the meaning may be quite different. In religious sacrifice, blood plays an instrumental role in symbolizing the violence and eroticism of communal experience: ‘The external violence of sacrifice reveals the internal violence of the creature, seen as loss of blood and ejaculations’ (Bataille 2001a: 91). Notable in each of these examples is the association of the blood with an opening up of the body, a potent disturbance of the flesh apprehended as signifying spectacle. Each of the examples given here may also be described to greater or lesser extents as transgressive; however, the depiction of menstrual blood remains perhaps the most taboo, a peculiarity given its biological source and its distance from the violent acts inherent in torture and sacrifice. Why, then, has menstrual blood been accorded such a taboo status, why is it regarded as so obscene and ‘unwatchable’, to draw upon the word used in Anatomy of Hell ? Mary Douglas’s fascinating study Purity and Danger reveals that menstrual blood, and in some cases female sexuality more broadly, is commonly considered a ‘pollutant’ across a disparate range of communities and cultures, with taboos and purifying rituals apparent around women engaging in sexual intercourse, cooking and tending to crops and livestock during menstruation. One possible explanation that Douglas submits for this is the pervasive anxiety that surrounds ‘marginal states’ of being: ‘Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable’ (2002: 119). The compulsion towards stability and fixity that dominates in phallologocentrism creates an accompanying mistrust of the processual and the transformative, meaning that states such as menstruation and pregnancy are regarded as ontologically uncertain and suspect. Kristeva builds upon Douglas’s work in her study of abjection, arguing that the abject occupies a troubled place within the social order. It is simultaneously constitutive of this order, in that what is included within it is equally defined by what is excluded, yet threatening to the dominant structure because its existence draws attention to the fragility of the laws and rules that attempt to hold logic and order together (Kristeva 1982: 3–4). Kristeva identifies two categories of abject corporeal waste. The first is the excremental type, apparent in disease, decay, corpses and representing the threatening cloud of death overshadowing or infecting life (Kristeva 1982: 71). Such substances are regarded as ‘exterior’ to the systems that structure social order, they appear in our consciousness as offensive anomalies that must be banished to their proper place outside the matrices of our everyday experience. Derrida states, ‘Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place’ (1995: 41). It is not despite this double status of death as universal to all and irreplaceably singular 109

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to the self that it is excluded as abject and obscene, but precisely because of it. Death is the horrific hole within the barely controlled ‘order’ of the symbolic that cannot be apprehended or understood in its totality, it is ever present yet continuously denied through abjection and disgust. The second type of polluting substance identified by Kristeva is the menstrual type, threatening the identity of the (male) subject not from outside the social order, but from within: the figure of the woman, necessary for the effective functioning of a social group but nonetheless problematic for patriarchal communities in her marginal state of sexual difference. Following Freud’s work in Totem and Taboo, Kristeva observes that psychoanalysis regarded the incest taboo as the primary foundational law of ‘civilized’ society. From this perspective, the prohibition against the maternal body acts as a defence of the incest taboo, and the abject status accorded to menstrual blood as a symbol of the generative and maternal potential of female corporeality reinforces this prohibition. However, the associations between menstrual blood and abjection have greater significance with regard to the desired continuation of the phallocentric order. Women must necessarily be figured as obscene other in order to assert the privileging of, and dominance of, male over female (Kristeva 1982: 70). Kristeva suggests that the generative power of the female body to reproduce signifies a threat to this dominance and therefore must be denied, rejected or rendered obscene (1982: 77). Whether the polluting object in question is excremental or menstrual, the function of coding it as ‘other’ is an attempt by the dominant social structure to nullify any perceived threat to the identity of the coherent and stable (male) human figure and the discursive structures that rest upon the foundation of this fallacious image. Romance touches upon the abjection of the menstrual body and its functions as Marie ruminates on tampons and men’s disgust, her words implying that women have become alienated from their own bodies as devices like tampon applicators remove the need for any direct contact with the polluting areas of the female body. The taboo and abject status of menstruation becomes even more of a focal point in Anatomy of Hell which features two scenes that are almost unprecedented in their graphic portrayal of menstrual blood. In the first, the unnamed protagonist dissolves the liquid from her used tampon into a glass of water and toasts her male counterpart with it in the tradition of a toast between enemies. The second occurs later as the man withdraws after sex; the camera is positioned between the woman’s legs, looking directly at her vagina in a shot reminiscent of the crowning image in Romance, and blood gushes from her body. Like the shot of the birth, this moment is shocking not only because of what it depicts – the reality of red blood that is so often elided in visual representation – but also as a result of its unexpected nature. It bursts onto the screen and into the gaze of the spectator without warning, an eruption of obscenity that interrupts the more conventional and unrealistic 110

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imagery of childbirth, intercourse and the female body that dominates cultural representation. The highly visceral nature of Breillat’s cinema is also vital here. Wilson has commented that despite Breillat’s assertion of her films as philosophical, sexuality and corporeality are consistently explored in a highly sensual and tactile way within her films (Wilson 2001: 150). The chink of the glasses as the woman and man in Anatomy of Hell toast each other, the imagined taste and smell of the coppery liquid they drink, and the feel of flesh in contact with warm slippery blood: these elements combine to widen the sensory perceptions of the spectator beyond a simply visual experience. Such imagery also raises questions about the conventions of cinematic spectatorship more broadly. Considering the amount of blood spilled in many genres of film, from horror to action, westerns to thrillers, the shock and revulsion that images of menstrual blood may elicit seems superficially extraordinary; the work of Douglas and Kristeva provides a conceptual framework within which to deconstruct this paradox. The woman in Anatomy of Hell exhorts the man to ‘watch me where I am unwatchable’ and in doing so, and in forcing the spectator to watch along with him, the film channels the negative and aversive properties ascribed to the abject into a disruptive display, turning the phallocratic scopic economy against itself as the obscenity of menstrual blood is thrust into the reluctant gaze of the spectator (for a more detailed analysis of these scenes and Anatomy of Hell see McPhee 2009). The imagery of obscenity and abjection in Romance and Anatomy of Hell is central to the variation of the classical masochistic aesthetic that is developed by Breillat. This more contemporary aesthetic retains elements of the formal techniques Deleuze and Studlar describe, but reformulates them to include previously excluded aspects of female pleasure and corporeality as a central visual and tactile component. Thus, images that would conventionally be regarded as obscene are juxtaposed with moments of unexpected and striking visual beauty that draw upon the qualities of stillness and suspense Deleuze places at the heart of masochistic formalism. Marie’s intermingled delight and pain is recreated for the spectator through a viewing experience that is pleasurable yet uncomfortable, that eschews the typical signifiers of genres such as pornography or Hollywood romance, but that nonetheless creates a viewing space in which some form of pleasure can be located. Such moments of striking style are apparent from the very beginning of the film as the colour palette of whites and creams with touches of black and brown is established. Marie and Paul, dressed as always in a white that contrasts with their dark hair, sit in a cafe as he tells her he will no longer have sex with her. Within this palette exists an austere pleasure, almost clinical like the sparse white apartment and spotless bed that the couple share. However, as the pair leave the anaemic setting of the cafe they walk out into the blazing sunlight of a wide golden beach beneath a blue sky, the camera remaining still as the couple walk into the distance. The 111

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vivid colours and glowing brightness of this scene act as a dazzling moment in a film that aims to shock its viewers, but that this time is surprising in the beauty and illumination brought forth. The unusually prolonged duration of this shot is also surprising, seeming to invite the spectator to bask in this unexpected moment of serenity and visual pleasure. A similar technique is employed in Breillat’s first feature film, A Real Young Girl, in a fantasy sequence in which the young female protagonist imagines lying naked under a bright blue sky and searing sun that transforms her skin into a luminescent whiteness, as the man she desires pulls apart a worm and places the pieces of its body into her pubic hair. In Romance, the aesthetic strategy combining beauty and obscenity reaches its clearest articulation in the two scenes of sadomasochistic bondage in which an entirely submissive Marie is tied up by Robert. These scenes take place in Robert’s apartment, a darkly decorated sensual space full of rich reds and browns which, with its oriental screens and dark furnishings, is in stark contrast to Paul’s sparse, pale apartment. Before Robert begins to construct the first intricate tableau, his words make clear the emphasis of the scene (Breillat does not often deal in subtlety): ‘There has to be action, and that action isn’t between men and women. That’s too simple. It’s between beauty and ugliness’. Although he is referring to Marie and himself here, the juxtaposition made explicit in his words extends beyond a comparison of their appearances to draw together the dilemmas and contradictions of representation that have been discussed through this chapter. In the first of these scenes, Marie wears a simple white dress which is pulled up to her waist as Robert puts her hands above her head and begins to bind them with rope. Her tights are pulled down to her knees, leaving her pubic area revealed while the rest of her body remains covered. As he binds Marie more tightly, the camera remains still, focused on the scene. Robert moves around her, but Marie remains utterly motionless in a carefully constructed tableau of red, black, white and pale flesh tones that bring together the minimalist colour palette that runs through the film. Red curtains hang down on either side of the screen space with Marie seemingly suspended between them. The suspense and stillness of this image and of the camera align with the ‘frozen quality’ that Deleuze attributes to the aesthetic of Sacher-Masoch’s stories (1991: 33). Deleuze further suggests that the art of suspense apparent in the form of masochism leads to the absence of the obscene, because any potential obscenity is suspended and disavowed, displaced on to fetishistic imagery or forever deferred (1991: 34). This is a key distinction between the more ‘traditional’ masochistic aesthetic and the contemporary form developed in the films within this study, the majority of which do feature explicit and extreme imagery. Significantly, these bondage scenes do not feature conventional sexual intercourse and are thus distinguished from Marie’s other relationships. Perhaps, then, if Deleuze’s statement is taken to refer to the 112

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obscenity of the sexual act, his observation holds true here. However, the bondage scenes do feature unexpected ‘obscenity’ of another sort: that of the reality of the female body depicted outside the limiting and silencing regimes of phallogocentrism. In the first scene, described here, Marie’s pubic hair is on show, a startling example of bodily reality amidst the artistry of Robert’s work (and notably different, it should be added, to the shaved or waxed look now so typical in pornography). The insistence of female corporeality is apparent to an even greater extent in the second bondage scene, which takes place in the main room of Robert’s apartment upon a raised area of the floor resembling a stage. This time, Marie wears a striking and flamboyant red dress with black underwear; the folds of her skirt pool about her as Robert ties and chains her before tenderly gagging her with a piece of black velvet in a luxurious and intimate supersensual scene that is evocative of multiple textures (the feel of the fabrics, the cold chains) and of Marie’s pain as her limbs are bound. In the final moments of this scene, Breillat introduces the abjection that runs through the film, as a close-up between Marie’s spread legs shows Robert cutting a hole in her underwear and inserting his fingers inside her. As he pulls them out, the wetness of Marie’s vaginal mucous is shown for an extended moment, indicating her pleasure in being not only a desiring subject but also in being the object of beauty that Robert takes her for, and that she in turn perceives herself as. The striking images of Marie’s bondage are here combined with one of the aspects of female corporeality that has been constituted as obscene by the phallocentric economy that has pervaded cinematic representation and especially portrayals of sexuality. Marie’s body does not provide the conventional signifiers of pleasure familiar from porn or other normative models of sexuality, instead her facial expression remains impassive and her body refuses to provide a spectacle that would arouse or reassure. As Williams has pointed out, the woman (or more specifically, her face and body) commonly functions as the primary embodiment of pleasure in cinematic sex scenes (1999a: 269–270). Watching a sex scene without the usual signs of pleasure is an unfamiliar and thus unsettling spectatorial experience, simultaneously emphasizing the extent to which the female body has been appropriated in the service of male desire, and suggesting alternative modes of sexual pleasure outside such norms. Deleuze and Studlar both write of a coldness that is inherent to the masochistic aesthetic as they perceive it, a coldness that is found in the still, frozen imagery and the displacement of bodily obscenity onto other fetishized objects such as furs and whips. For Studlar, this coldness embodies the movement away from Eros, the life instincts, and towards Thanatos, the death instincts (1988: 126). The masochistic aesthetic found in Romance and Anatomy of Hell takes the element of beauty and stillness as a crucial component but replaces the coldness of Sacher-Masoch’s style with an emphasis on the hot workings of the body, its sticky fluids and tangible processes. The exterior sheen of surface privileged 113

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by Deleuze and central to the idealized masochistic scenario he theorizes is pulled apart in order to show the de-mystified interiority of female corporeality: supersensualism of a different order. Transgression and Disarticulation in In the Cut

The exploration of corporeality, sexual difference and representational practice outlined in this chapter so far has addressed the ways in which the heterosexual intersubjective encounter may be mired in refusals of recognition, deterministic and constraining discourse and extreme reactions such as repulsion and horror. However, it has also demonstrated that normative ideologies may be challenged through a direct mobilization of these very practices and responses, and that a reconfiguration of conventional notions of the obscene and abject may hold disruptive properties and the power to forge an alternative mode of representation that insists upon a space for the female body and female desire exterior to the scopic economy of the phallus. The next section of this chapter turns to Campion’s In the Cut in order to further theorize the potentially traumatic and disruptive relationship between self and other, and in particular, to elaborate upon the connections between this traumatic encounter and transgressive desire. Although the narrative arc of Campion’s film is modelled upon the trajectory of the erotic thriller genre, it has broad similarities with Romance in that it may be described as following a journey of sexual self-discovery for Frannie the protagonist, as she negotiates her subjective position in a culture in which representations of women are frequently saturated in sex and violence. Also akin to Romance, it explores the often highly ambivalent investment that women may have in these representations through an address to fantasies of tempestuous and brutal love. The vision of female masochism that emerges in In the Cut is a troubled one, permeated with the violent dilemmas that face the heroine but also with extreme erotic tension and pleasure. Through the tropes of the erotic thriller genre, masochistic desire becomes associated with sexual violence and violent sex; it is connected simultaneously to terror and fascination, repulsion and compulsion. And like Breillat’s films, this is achieved not only through narrative themes that revolve around the transgression or ‘safe’ or ‘normal’ sexuality, but also through the transgression of representational conventions associated with acts of sex and brutality in order to create an often extreme aesthetic form that plays with the beautiful, the explicit and the horrific. In the Cut is based upon a short novel of the same name by North American writer Susanna Moore, who also collaborated with Campion on the screenplay (Moore 1996). The story outline and urban setting could be lifted from a Joe Eszterhas script such as Jagged Edge, Basic Instinct, or Sliver, centred around a series of particularly horrific murders and a lead character who may or may 114

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not be sexually involved with the killer. The extent to which Frannie suspects that her lover Malloy may actually be the murderer, and the extent to which this functions as the catalyst for her desire, is left ambiguous; what is clearer is that Frannie is attracted to the transgressive world of sex and violence that Malloy, as a homicide detective, inhabits on a daily basis and which she, as a teacher of literature, has only encountered previously via the mediated fantasy of books. Whereas the film concludes with Frannie escaping the real killer, Malloy’s partner, the book ends with her torture and death, disconcertingly related in the first person as the killer brutalizes her in an isolated lighthouse, including an excruciating passage in which he slices off one of her nipples. Campion commented during the development of the film’s screenplay that the denouement of the book had horrified her, containing as it does the suggestion of a woman seeking her own death, and that this was an aspect of the narrative she was always determined to alter (cited in Polan 2001: 158). Consequently, the cinematic version of Frannie does not desire her own death, despite her attraction to the more ‘dangerous’ aspects of her sexuality. She is not deathbound but presented as a subject whose desire is awakened by the entrance of Malloy and his narratives of murder and sexual intrigue into her life, fantasy and reality becoming mingled as she pursues a relationship far removed from her everyday life as a teacher. For instance, Malloy shares with her the gruesome details of the violence inflicted upon the killer’s victims, and she has the opportunity to fire guns and use handcuffs. These are the typical trappings of popular thriller films and police dramas that signify not only dangerous men and excitement, but power and authority. The implication is that finally, Frannie has the chance to step inside one of the cultural fantasies that she has been teaching for so long. The alteration of the ending is a significant change that indicates the movement toward possibilities for the transgressive and masochistic female subject beyond the closed loop of the death drive manifested as either punishment or self-destruction. Frannie does not perish, but neither does the ending of the film provide her with any definitive closure as she returns to the aftermath of her sister’s death and an uncertain future with Malloy. Moore’s novel seems an appropriate source material for Campion, within whose work the ambivalences and twists of female desire are recurring themes. Her breakthrough film, The Piano, has been criticized for the valorization and aestheticization of female masochism (for example, Clover 1994, Modleski 1999) due to a narrative in which a mute woman falls in love with the man who appears to coerce her emotionally and physically. The Portrait of a Lady (1996) also depicts the story of a woman seemingly bent on a wilful route toward her own unhappiness. As this book has argued throughout, criticisms of this nature miss the essential point that the masochistic position is not necessarily one of weakness or victimization; however, what films such as The Piano, The Portrait of a Lady and In the Cut suggest is that the assumption of the actively 115

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desiring masochistic position may be a fraught and hazardous one in a world dominated by men and male desire. The representation of masochism and the implications of this for the development of an ethical relationship with the other is neither celebratory nor framed in condemnation in these films, but rather open to various constructions of meaning as well as deeply concerned with the aesthetic qualities that may be used to evoke this form of eroticism. Dana Polan has suggested that the term ‘Jane Campion’ be used not to signify a unified vision but instead a space of ‘dispersion’, a shorthand for open forces that work against unity and any coherent unfolding of an agenda (Polan 2001: 12). The notion of dispersion raised by Polan is a useful one when emphasizing the refusal to settle upon any fixed or stable meaning that is found in In the Cut as well as in The Piano and The Portrait of a Lady. As a result of their period settings, the latter two films instil an inevitable distance between the spectator and the characters and events that unfold. In the Cut, alternatively, has a modern setting and therefore engages more explicitly with current debates about the portrayal and effects of sex, violence and femininity in contemporary culture. Kathleen McHugh has noted that Campion’s films draw upon or engage with genres that are especially attentive to women’s bodies, their vulnerabilities and their dispossessing passions such as melodrama, and – in the case of In the Cut – the thriller (2007: 2). By making use of this generic material as a framework, the film poses questions about the investment, male and female, of spectatorial pleasure and fantasy in imagery of sex and violence, specifically the horrendous violence done to female bodies in a myriad of historic and contemporary artistic, literary and mass media forms (for example, the mutilated women discussed in Chapter 2 and the many police procedural television drams and crime novels that typically feature young female victims). Frannie’s fascination with Malloy stems from the same alluring and transgressive fantasies that fuel the success of these cultural creations; In the Cut plays out the question of what may unfold when these fantasies intrude too far into the subject’s everyday existence, forcing an encounter with the obscene and horrific other in all their inescapable proximity. Female masochistic desire as manifested in In the Cut is inextricably bound up with the cultural meanings and effects of taboo and transgression and their relation to enjoyment and desire. This subject returns us to Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and the interpretation of Freud’s Totem and Taboo contained therein. In order to understand the convoluted relationship between the social law and desire, Lacan retraces Freud’s steps back to the primal horde and the murder of the primal father, a patricidal act apparently designed to allow the sons access to the assumption of the father’s place and the enjoyment brought by the desired body of the primal mother.

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All the mystery is in that act. It is designed to hide something, namely, that not only does the murder of the father not open the path to jouissance that the presence of the father was supposed to prohibit, but it, in fact, strengthens the prohibition. The whole problem is there; that’s where, in fact as well as in theory, the fault lies. Although the obstacle is removed as a result of the murder, jouissance is still prohibited; not only that, but prohibition is reinforced. (1992: 176)

The primal father, the apparent blockage to enjoyment, is dead. Yet, the incest taboo remains and enjoyment is still denied. The power held by the father was an illusion all along, or as Lacan puts it, ‘he has always been dead … he has never been the father except in the mythology of the son’ (1992: 177). That the Law remains in place despite the removal of the perceived obstacle to enjoyment reveals something about the purpose of the Law and more about the nature of desire: desire needs a prohibiting Law to constitute and fuel it, or, there can be no enjoyment through transgression without the obstructive force of the taboo. ‘Transgression in the direction of jouissance only takes place if it is supported by the oppositional principle, by the forms of the Law’ (Lacan 1992: 177). This structural relationship also characterizes the nature of sin, which is accorded its ‘excessive, hyperbolic’ status only as a result of the commandments that work so hard to assert their powers of prohibition (Lacan 1992: 84). Lacan’s reading appears to construct the relationship between transgression and taboo as a constitutive binary in which transgression is only possible as a result of the prohibitions of the Law, while simultaneously the social order is strengthened through the exclusion of (and potential punishment of) certain practices and peoples. This formulation, as MacCormack notes, has been one of the prominent criticisms that has resulted in the devaluation of transgression as a revolutionary tactic. Transgression is regarded by some critics only as ‘a reactive force [that] fails to be independent of those regimes which limit desire’ (MacCormack 2012: 103). That transgression and taboo serve to give each other significance within the social economy is undeniable and certainly in some instances transgression seems to be locked into a dialectical system in which it only ever serves to reinforce those taboos it defies, implying a curtailing or even denial of its genuinely radical power. However, to suggest that transgression and taboo bestow each other with some modicum of their respective significance is not to categorically state that their only significance emerges from this intertwined place within the social sphere. One route out of this deadlock may be through the surplus factor of excess as a structural inevitability and necessity of transgression. Transgressive behaviour, practices, or imagery signify a ‘too much’ or a ‘too far’, a characteristic that at once entails their problematic cultural status and their revolutionary potential. Bataille’s fascinating and evocative book Eroticism, touched on already in Chapter 2, sheds further light on the excessive ‘too far’ of the realm of the transgressive. 117

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Sexuality and violence are the two realms of human behaviour and experience that hold the most transgressive potential and in line with Lacan’s assertions, Bataille suggests that the fundamental taboos shared by otherwise disparate cultures are those against death and against practices and substances associated with reproduction (2001a: 55). The taboo against death originates not simply with the repulsion at the notion of crossing across the borders of life into death, but the threatening knowledge that life and death are part of the same inevitable and uncontrollable process. Horror at death is linked not only with the annihilation of the individual but also with the decay that sends the dead flesh back into the general ferment of life … Spontaneous physical revulsion keeps alive in some indirect fashion at least the consciousness that the terrifying face of death, its stinking putrefaction, are to be identified with the sickening primary condition of life. (Bataille 2001a: 55–56)

Bataille’s conceptualization of the disgust and anxiety aroused by transgressive phenomenon is structurally comparable to Kristeva’s notion of abjection: the repulsive cadaver stained with the violation of death and the threat of contagion to the self that beholds it, a subject who otherwise ‘condemns it and shuts it out’ (Bataille 2001a: 55). The types of abjection identified by Kristeva, the excremental and the menstrual, are for Bataille connected by the cultural belief that they represent an essential violence that disrupts the borders of the self. Of menstrual blood he says, ‘These discharges are thought of as manifestations of internal violence; blood in itself is a symbol of violence. The menstrual discharge is further associated with sexual activity and the accompanying suggestion of degradation: degradation is one of the effects of violence’ (2001a: 54). The passages quoted from Bataille here are indicative of the web of connections that weave through his work between death, violence, sexuality and erotic experience. It is this web which In the Cut also draws upon as Frannie moves between the ruptures and raptures of fascination and repulsion, arousal and fear, and it is from the synaptic sparks that leap from these connections that the vital element of excess emerges. A sexuality that does not adhere to the prescriptive heterosexual norms that have dominated a Western culture built upon the tenets of industrialism and capitalism encapsulates the excessive character of transgressive desire; within this context pleasure is regarded as non-productive and therefore wasteful: the ‘wrong sort of sex’ (Krzywinska 2006: 23). The continuity called forth by the violation of the body and the dislocation of the autonomous subject, whether through sex or violence, entail a similar experience of eroticism in which the boundaries of self are dissolved and the social limits which state ‘too much’ are ignored. Such a rupture serves not to strengthen the symbolic Law by opposing it, but to weaken it through a dismissal of its existence. Krywinska states, ‘pleasure is so close to ruinous 118

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waste that we refer to the moment of climax as “the little death”. Consequently anything that suggests erotic excess always implies disorder’ (2006: 23). The chaotic disruption inherent in Bataille’s erotic experiences of violation takes us several steps further than the cyclical dialectic of prohibition and transgression described above. MacCormack suggests that ‘perversion is … the multiplicity at the very heart of desire that dissipates and redistributes the body’s intensities’ (2005). The taboos in Eroticism and Bataille’s fictional works like Story of the Eye appear as flimsy bonds that are all too easily broken by the multiplying processes of perversity, giving merely the illusion of social control in the face of the swirling abyss of what lies not exactly beyond the social structure, but rather within its very heart. It is this vertiginous feeling of going too far, past the boundaries of order and normality, that tips eroticism into the order of obscenity, a term Bataille describes as ‘our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognized and stable individuality’ (2001a: 17–18). The explicit images of female corporeality in Romance and Anatomy of Hell evoke the ‘too far’ of the obscene side of transgression in their provocative flouting of representational convention and the engagement with taboos surrounding the menstrual body; however, the trajectory of In the Cut makes perceptible the obscenity entailed by the dispossession of self as the film traces the destabilization of Frannie’s subjectivity and ability to make coherent sense out of the world in which she exists. The thematic structure and the imagery of the film call forth a doubled movement as Frannie descends into a subterranean world (the ‘underground’ of the city she first glimpses in the basement fellatio scene) that simultaneously rises up to rupture the mundanity of her everyday life with explicit sensuality and horrific brutality. Her repeated journeys on the subway system act as a motif of the overlapping experiences of seen and unseen and surface and depth; through the process of transgressing the codes of the ‘overground’ world through the attempted realization of her masochistic fantasies her reality and the orders of literature and representation begin to blur, the dissolution of boundaries given cinematic form. Introducing Eroticism, Colin MacCabe comments that the world of ‘work and reason’ creates ‘as its necessary counterpart the world of sex and death’ (2001: x). In the Cut layers these worlds neatly only to illustrate the illusionistic quality of the barriers that separate them. The relationship that develops between Frannie and Malloy is a key component of the dissolution of the borders between reality and fantasy, surface and subterranean, mundanity and obscenity. Her encounters with him are saturated with the transgressive allure of the prohibited act and with the eroticism of potential violence. Their first meeting takes place in her apartment in the course of a routine investigation into the murder of a woman in her area (subsequently revealed to be the same woman that Frannie spied upon in the bar basement). Interconnecting elements are layered through the imagery and 119

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language of this scene to create an effect of attraction, peril, fascination and violence that works within the structures of transgressive and masochistic desire. Almost immediately, a sexual overtone is introduced to the scene as Frannie’s answerphone plays a message from a former lover, John Graham, referring to their past sexual relationship; this introduces a heightened if awkward intimacy between Frannie and Detective Malloy. Graham is subsequently shown to be watching Frannie from the garden, increasing the sense of potential danger and presenting Frannie as the object of an intrusive and malignant gaze. Such shots run throughout the film and have been appropriately dubbed ‘paranoid framings’ by McHugh (2007: 134). In these moments, the camera watches the female characters through windows, across roads or partially obscured by parts of the urban landscape such as traffic and lampposts, a mode of framing that refers to the point-of-view shots often used to evoke the killer’s perspective in slasher or thriller films. However, in In the Cut these ‘paranoid framings’ are seldom attributed to a single or identifiable source and as such the threat of potential violence towards the female characters remains more general, an all-pervasive malignancy against the women of this city. The implication that Malloy is involved in the city’s dark ‘underworld’ comes as Frannie spies a tattoo of the ace of spades on his wrist, the same tattoo sported by the man receiving fellatio in the basement. This provides a possible narrative link between him and the murdered woman, anchors him in a seedy, even sordid realm of carnal conduct and suggests a prior sexual bond between Frannie and Malloy, intensified by his enquiry ‘do I know you from someplace?’ Before he departs, she asks exactly what happened to the woman in a conversation that draws together several of the thematic threads that run through this encounter. As she questions him she appears repulsed yet fascinated by the murderous horror that has unexpectedly entered her world, a twinned experience of feeling that the film as a whole carries forward. Bataille writes, ‘Men are swayed by two simultaneous emotions: they are driven away by terror and drawn by an awed fascination. Taboo and transgression reflect these two contradictory urges. The taboo would forbid the transgression but the fascination compels it’ (2001a: 68). The movement of desire evoked by In the Cut functions according to the (il)logic Bataille describes. In answer to Frannie’s compulsive curiosity Malloy responds that the murdered woman has been ‘disarticulated’, an incongruously poetic word to describe the process of pulling or cutting apart the body at its joints. Indeed, Frannie writes this word on his business card after his departure and pins it amongst the other snippets of poetry that adorn her noticeboard, reflecting a love of words that she refers to as ‘a passion’. The unusual term ‘disarticulated’ has a doubled significance in accordance with the two thematic contexts evoked in this scene: firstly, to break apart the body, and secondly, to break apart language through the process of its disruption. Although in each case violence of a sort is effected, it may be possible to find a more constructive 120

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path in the disarticulation of language that resonates with the rupturing potential of transgression and with the reconfiguration of normative meaning that the films discussed in this chapter strategically enact. A fruitful connection emerges here through Patrick ffrench’s book The Cut/ Reading Bataille’s Histoire de l’oeil, in which the word ‘disarticulation’ is used to describe the structural form of Bataille’s writing in his short novel Story of the Eye (1999: 14). The commonality of language between the title and terminology used by ffrench and Campion’s film is indicative of the shared themes and aesthetic techniques utilized by writer and filmmaker. ffrench observes a ‘transgressive displacement’ at work in Bataille’s novel, a metonymic movement across the textural surface of the work that generates associative meanings through a chain of signification (1999: 3). To quote Barthes, this chain works thusly: The Eye seems to be the matrix of a run of objects that are like different “stations” of the oracular metaphor. The first variation is that of the eye and the egg … Once posited as constants, whiteness and roundness open the way to fresh metaphorical extensions … from the cat’s saucer of milk to the puttingout of Granero’s eye and the castration of the bull. (2001: 121)

It is, in part, through this displacement and association that the disarticulation and rearticulation of meaning is rendered. The evocation (and subsequent dislocation) of generic convention and the use of linguistic play in In the Cut develops a similar effect in which associative meanings flicker across systems of significance, building connections between sexuality, violence and pleasure, and their construction in cultural forms. Malloy refers to his penis as his ‘joint’ or says that he likes sex ‘in the cut’ as Frannie straddles him, creating an unavoidable echo with the notion of the dismembered women as dehumanized joints of meat, cut open and displayed in their fleshy redness. Building on the connectivities between sexual relationships and violence, McHugh has suggested that the film disarticulates the romantic myth of true love and the ‘happy ever after’ of marriage as the expected aim of a woman’s life, embodied in Pauline’s idealism (naivety?) and her subsequent terrible destruction (2007: 123). The killer’s signature mark of placing an engagement ring on the fingers of his victims indeed links the institution of marriage with the objectification and devastation of women, but this falls within a wider project of challenging cultural beliefs about what female subjectivity entails and the different identities and paths that are open to the female subject in a world saturated with images and narratives of female reliance and victimhood. Pornography, the erotic thriller, the romance: representational systems that offer superficially different identities for women, but all operating according to the same logic. In the Cut attempts to disarticulate these entrenched narratives while simultaneously acknowledging 121

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that female libidinal investment in the fantasies they evoke may be very real. Furthermore, it illustrates the difficulties of finding viable alternatives that may be accessed in the economy of heterosexuality. ffrench argues that Story of the Eye contains descriptive imagery of extreme violence that serves to create an aggressive affect against the body of the reader, most notably passages describing assaults upon the eye which associatively assail the vision of the reader (ffrench 1999: 4). The interpretation of Bataille’s writing as attacking the eye suggests an affinity with the possibilities of cinematic representation to disturb and transgress normative modes of understanding through the unexpected use of obscene or excessive imagery and the reconfiguration of generic conventions. Indeed, ffrench attributes the seductive powers of Bataille’s novel in part to the way in which the eye is made the privileged organ of desire, an observation that clearly draws a strong parallel with the experience of spectatorship. As well as seduction, herein also lies the transgression of Bataille’s text, ffrench suggests, as desire through vision and its symbolic organ, the eye, is mobilized only to be violently dislocated and tipped into horror (1999: 2). The transgressive imperative of ‘too far’ is once again apparent in the excessive modality of desire that swirls into being in the space between the obscenities of the text and the affect induced (perhaps forcibly) in the experience of the reader/spectator. The peculiarly ‘cinematic’ nature of Bataille’s work in Story of the Eye does not escape ffrench’s attention; as he observes, avant-garde cinema is full of images of aggression against vision (1999: 1). ffrench is referring here to literal imagery such as the famous sequence in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou in which a razor is drawn across a woman’s eye, slitting it open and releasing the viscous fluids from within; yet, as I have argued, the obscene and transgressive imagery in Romance and Anatomy of Hell performs its own attack on the processes of scopic desire that have dominated cinematic representation. The transgressive disruption found in In the Cut functions according to a different mode to either Un Chien Andalou or Breillat’s films, but bears some resemblance to the aesthetic structures that ffrench identifies in Bataille’s novella. Where Moore’s source novel contains explicit and detailed descriptions of violence done to the body, for example the final pages recounting Frannie’s lacerating demise (1996: 258–267), the film carefully avoids showing any direct violence (in contradistinction to the graphic sex scenes) as all the murders take place off screen and only their aftermaths are shown. One of the effects of this is that it becomes impossible for the spectator to invest libidinally in the act of killing per se, and instead they are positioned as witnesses to the chaos and misery that follows (Pauline’s death is an exemplary instance of this, as the final section of this chapter shall explore). As in Breillat’s cinema, what emerges is a formal style that embeds the horrifying consequences of murder in this dirty urban landscape within a striking and at times beautiful 122

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overall formal aesthetic. The use of light and shadow and muted colour used to portray Frannie and Pauline finds their beauty, despite the emphasis given to their status as ‘ordinary’ women and their obvious weariness and sadness. The opening shots of the film show Pauline walking in the garden under a fall of petals, a more conventionally romantic image revealed as illusion when viewed retrospectively from the perspective of her grisly end; or the scene in which Frannie masturbates, rich tones turning her body to gold in the sepia light. Again a conventionally ‘erotic’ scene thwarted as her leg cramps and she swears in frustration: a rebuttal of the end-fixated sexuality embodied in the ‘money shot’ of pornography. Instead of direct images of violence, Campion employs her own technique of disarticulation or rupture, using drastic cuts and rapid editing in order to convey the traumatic and lacerating impact of violence. For example, the second murder victim is found in a laundrette and as the forensic unit remove and examine pieces of limbs and flesh the camera cuts quickly between different angles and between colour and black and white footage, disorienting the viewer and creating a fragmentary effect that replicates the disarticulated body parts of the victim. This technique is used to greatest and most distressing effect in the scene in which Frannie discovers her beloved sister’s severed head. Following the horrific realization of the contents of the bag there is a moment of complete blackness and silence as the imagery of the film breaks down entirely in its own moment of trauma and disarticulation. It is to this sequence that I shall now turn, the pivotal scenes in which Frannie’s eroticized masochistic fantasies of the subterranean world of sex and violence become too proximate and too obscene, beginning to disintegrate in a mass of blood and chaos. ‘It’s here in the circle’

Frannie encounters male violence at several points through the film: she is attacked in the street by an anonymous assailant, pinned to her bed by her student Cornelius Webb when she refuses his advances and stalked by her former lover John Graham before the final and climactic struggle with the serial killer Rodriguez at the end of the film. The overall effect of these encounters is to cement a depiction of male violence against women as systematic and endemic, something that is implicit in many male/female interactions and the greater or lesser struggles and negotiations for power that these interactions entail. The perspective of the spectator is aligned closely with Frannie’s throughout (she appears in almost every scene), giving a highly subjective and personal experience of the serial killer/thriller narrative. This is brought to the fore in the distressing scene in which Frannie discovers the decapitated head of her sister and friend Pauline, another of Rodriguez’s victims and the first who is 123

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not anonymous to Frannie or to us. This sequence is one of the most powerful of the film not only in its horror but in the highly effective way in which it conveys the experience of Frannie’s shock and grief to the spectator. Up until this moment, the underground world that she has entered has primarily been a source of fascination and titillation, fulfilling the transgressive fantasies of her character and mobilizing the spectatorial pleasures associated with sex, violence and suspense that the erotic thriller genre plays with to such popular effect. The realization of Pauline’s murder brings the economy of violence into shocking perspective, a paradigm shift that relocates Frannie from a safe(r) position outside the drama of the killings to a terrifyingly proximate situation, or, as articulated by one of the poems that she reads on the subway, ‘It’s off in the distance. It came into the room. It’s here in the circle’. If the basement fellatio is the ‘erotic set piece’ of the film and the event that catalyses Frannie’s sexual explorations into the underworld of the city, then the discovery of Pauline’s death is the moment at which the accompanying violence breaks into the domestic sphere. This converse conceptual movement is given form as Frannie ascends the stairs to her sister’s apartment, accompanied by a deceptively lively song from the bar below, a reversal of her descent into the bar basement in the earlier scene. Pauline’s apartment is dark and the camera watches from a distance as Frannie looks around. It is only when she finds a lock of hair that the shot changes to a close framing. Horribly the hair is still attached to a clump of scalp, murky in the shadows of the room but still all too discernible. This lack of clarity serves to align the viewer with Frannie’s disbelieving perspective as confusion begins to transform into shock and fear. Gillett suggests that the piece of red scalp, the lump of hair and skin, is so disturbing because it appears as a trace of Pauline’s body trying to resist the forces tearing it apart, representing the absence of this young woman’s life in the space that was once entirely hers (Gillet 2004a). It acts as an embodiment of the excremental abject, reminding us that the human body is nothing but meat: flesh, blood and bone revealed in all their fragility and vulnerability. This version of Pauline has lost its status as subject and is reduced to disarticulated parts of her lost life. The music fades as Frannie begins to walk towards the bathroom. Despite the revelry downstairs for the moment she is completely alone in this stifling and claustrophobic space as the bar scene continues to echo. She is once again in a space that the killer has made his own, annexed off from the rest of the social world, however, this time the scene is not one of erotic spectacle but of death. As she pauses to open the double doors of the bathroom she appears as a silhouette against the bright white steam that issues forth, a final moment of peace and arresting beauty before she enters the circle and her world is irrevocably altered. The camera pans through the room to show the spectator what Frannie sees, horrendous amounts of blood smeared on surfaces and running down walls, before moving tentatively towards a plastic bag in the sink. And yet, the gaze of the camera does not 124

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focus squarely upon this bag, instead moving towards it and around it before shying away, unable to look directly at the horror it finds there in a replication of Frannie’s own aversion. She twitches aside a corner of the bag and one dead eye stares out, a visible manifestation of Bataille’s ‘terrifying face of death’. The screen cuts to black and Frannie’s gasps and cries fade into silence, a prolonged moment of audiovisual asignification creating a complete break in the fabric of the film that resonates with the inadequacy of representation to articulate her grief and pain. The space of the film is restored to an image of Frannie sitting on the bathroom floor clutching the bag in her lap, a posture that echoes an earlier scene in the apartment in which Frannie strokes Pauline’s hair as they discuss her dreams of romance and marriage. Again the drastic and indelible sense of loss is emphasized: ‘Pauline’ the subject is gone and only meat is left behind. McHugh has noted that the erotic thriller is a genre normally dependent upon the death of a woman for its pleasures (2007: 132), but in Pauline’s death there is only horror and unutterable sadness. The moments directly preceding and following the black screen epitomize the gulf between this cultural convention and Campion’s take upon the genre, with the spectator’s own investment in the generic imagery of murdered women highlighted and the reality of the violence and tragedy behind it revealed. Subsequent shots in this sequence mirror Frannie’s incomprehension as the camera slides from one thing to another in a disorienting whirl that renders it difficult to gain any objective perspective, a slightly askew point of view that permeates the film from this scene onwards as her sense of reality disintegrates and her conception of what is possible and bearable is pushed past its limits. The loss of an objective viewpoint in the bathroom scene can also be attributed to its status as the moment at which Frannie first encounters the excessive, hungry jouissance of the other in its full horrific proximity as her fantasies of transgression start to crumble. Žižek has argued that far from being oppositional arenas, fantasy and reality are necessarily imbricated and reliant upon each other for their sustainability, with fantasy operating ‘on the side’ of reality as a guard against the unrepresentable void of the Real (Žižek 1997: 66). Up until the moment that Frannie discovers Pauline’s head, her masochistic fantasies centred upon perilous sex and the transgression of taboos have been sustaining her idealized version of reality. As Žižek comments, ‘the gap that separates beauty from ugliness is … the very gap that separates reality from the Real: what constitutes reality is the minimum of idealization the subject needs in order to be able to sustain the horror of the Real’ (1997: 66). Frannie’s gruesome discovery of Pauline’s death through the ugliness and decay of blood, hair and flesh creates a forcible break from her own fantasies and from the fantasies of female victimization that pervade popular culture, shoving her violently towards the final encounter with the malignant and misogynistic force represented by Rodriguez in the lighthouse. 125

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Overlapping with my own concerns in this chapter, Gillett’s sensitive readings of Campion’s films (2004a, 2004b) demonstrate a concern with situating the director’s work in relation to cultural signs and narratives. Within this context, a particularly fertile line of enquiry for the consideration of representations of sexual difference is the connection that she makes between the imagery of In the Cut and the mythical figure of Medusa. Gillet argues that the woman in the basement evokes this monstrous gorgon with her sucking mouth, long green talons and wild hair, and further that this figure is indicative of a wider deployment of castration anxiety in the film’s plot and imagery (Gillett 2004b: 89–90). Developing this idea enables further commentary on the doubling or reversal that is constructed between the fellatio scene and Frannie’s discovery of Pauline’s death. The decapitation to which Pauline is subjected recalls the slaying of Medusa by Perseus in Greek mythology, her head placed in a bag by a mirror which further references the themes of reflection so central to this classical narrative. In The Severed Head Kristeva muses upon the symbolism of Medusa as dangerous and obscene femininity: Anthropologists and art historians have not failed to point out that this slimy head, surrounded by coiled snake hair, evokes the female sexual organ – the maternal vulva that terrifies the young boy if he happens to “eye it”. … Female vulva, Medusa’s head is a slimy, swollen, sticky eye, a black hole, its immobile iris surrounded by ragged lips, folds, pubic hair. (2012: 29)

This accords with Gillett’s observation that the film invokes the anxieties arising from the ‘lack’ of the female genitalia. Sexual difference is personified in the figure of Medusa, who in her powerful and obscene monstrosity represents the suspicion, fear and hatred that surrounds the female body in the dominant masculine order. She is ‘the sticky, slimy ab-ject’ (Kristeva 2012: 31) that repulses and, vitally, that threatens the established role of the female within the logic of patriarchy. As a result of her transgressive nature, however, Medusa also finds herself threatened in turn by the social systems that work according to this logic: she takes her place within mythic and folkloric representations that hinge upon ‘the complicated relationship between monstrous female sexuality and female sexual vulnerability’ (Miller 2013: 324). As the earlier sections of this chapter argued, the primary function of the woman within phallologocentrism consists of providing a reflecting surface of otherness in which the masculine norm may read their (illusionistic) stable identity and coherence. The woman as mirror loses the specificities of her body and her desires; her abjected ‘nature’ must be hidden or ejected. From this perspective, Rodriguez embodies the violent forces of the phallologocentric sociocultural order, neutralizing the perceived threat presented by femininity through brutal elimination. The Medusa myth 126

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both reiterates and reconfigures the themes of the abusive male gaze and the reflected image, as Kristeva expresses so beautifully: The ancient imagination granted it a scopic power that stems from its ability to petrify, that is, to paralyze, to render catatonic, to turn into a corpse, to kill by the magic of the gaze alone. Could this be an inversion of the human gaze that wants, precisely, to capture the horror of the other, to freeze it, to eliminate it? Does Medusa return the caustic, decapitating look, with maleficence added, that the man, the fierce hero, turned on her? Who is looking at whom? Who is killing whom? Repetition, reflection. (2012: 30)

Medusa’s ability to turn to stone all who look upon her reverses the specular discourses that have nullified the female subject, with the effect that instead it is the male who is ossified into an unchangeable and static object. Despite the gorgon’s unfortunate end, defeated by a symptomatic male appropriation of the mirror image, the Medusa myth complicates the structures of looking and in doing so returns us to the basement scene at the beginning of the film which finds its own mirroring in Pauline’s death: Frannie’s eyes simultaneously active and reactive, caught within an interplay of different gazes as she watches the pleasures of the shadowy figures and consequently finds her own desires catalysed by the transgressive realms of violence and sex. Rodriguez may slay this nameless faceless woman and Frannie’s beloved sister, the film’s ‘Medusa’ figures, but in altering the ending of the book Campion enables a further counterstrike against the violently patriarchal discursive systems which have entrapped both these women and Frannie too. Frannie’s emasculation of Malloy, leaving him handcuffed and helpless, and killing of Rodriguez, acts as a point of disruption within the established conceptual order as she overturns the generic stereotypes of the female victim or damsel in distress, sidestepping the roles that have been culturally assigned to her. That her return to Malloy may be only temporary is of no consequence; it is a return that indicates that the parameters of the power dynamics that permeate all relationships have the potential to be shifted.

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Chapter 5

Heterocosms, Spectres and the World Remade In this final chapter, elements of the masochist aesthetic that have been peripheral to discussions so far will move to a more prominent position. Specifically: fantasy and the heterocosmic impulse, the necessity of thinking the spectator of these often difficult images in terms of embodiment, and the relationship of these aspects to the Bataillian ethos of inner experience and philosophical thought. The primary film called upon to catalyse these explorations will be Amer, written and directed by Belgian pair Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani and released in 2009. The distorted images and hallucinatory colour, Goblin-esque soundtrack and themes of desire and death place this film in the lineage of Italian gialli cinema by directors such Mario Bava, in addition to the mystery thrillers of Dario Argento (for example, Suspiria and Deep Red ). These earlier cinematic tropes and forms are used as a broad framework within which to create a portrayal of female subjectivity, desire and fantasy that is expressed through an avant-garde and tactile aesthetic. Dialogue and plot are minimal and the unconventional structure consists of three sections held together by central character Ana. Each section depicts a sequence from, in turn, her childhood, her teenage years, and her adult life and death – an end ambiguously portrayed as perhaps real, perhaps fantasy within the space of the film. Amer can also be located in relation to female masochistic subjectivity and the films addressed in previous chapters, particularly with regard to its transgressive cinematic form and evocation of a Bataillian erotic continuity through the allure of the perilously sensual. The notion of Ana as a masochistic character is not explicitly foregrounded for, indeed, the enigmatic strategies of the film mean that nothing can be certain apart from the movement of the images themselves. Instead, the suggestion of masochistic desire emerges over the duration of the film through Ana’s embodied and highly sensual experiences which are pleasurable, painful, at times disturbing, but always erotically charged. A consideration of the aesthetic of Amer requires further attention be given to the question of spectatorship and masochism in the context of the potential for masochistic forms and themes to generate an ethical and open mode of film viewing. MacCormack’s concept of ‘cinemasochism’ from her book Cinesexuality provides an evocative starting point for these connections:

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Cinemasochism describes the grace of openness to images. Cinemasochism asks not what the image means but what it does. Particularly in images that push the affect of the image to its extreme – from horrifying to abstract images – submission to the image beyond comprehension takes the viewer outside of film’s metonymy, meaning, and time, toward the kind of spatial ecstasy forged within the folding of the image with embodied spectatorship. (2008: 41)

To some extent, this can be conceived of as a development of the debates explored in Chapter 4. Breillat’s cinema, it was argued, constructs the spectatorial experience in terms of an oscillation between unpleasure and (sometimes surprising) pleasure, while In the Cut provides a brief glance of a ‘disarticulated’ or disjointed expression of cinematic language. Amer, largely freed from the constraints of plot, characterization and verisimilitude, is able to take these aesthetic and ethical techniques further and in doing so shifts the spectator’s cinematic encounter into the realm of the ‘submission to the image’ that MacCormack refers to. Through the visceral and tactile sensations with which the film is imbued, the viewer is opened up to the shifting processes of affect and fantasy and to their own cinemasochistic experience. Fantasy and the Heterocosmic Impulse

The centrality of fantasy in masochistic sexuality is something agreed on in the majority of theoretical accounts, whether Freudian psychoanalysis or more recent writings that approach the paraphilia from cultural perspectives or in the context of its aesthetic qualities. As suggested in the Introduction, Freud’s essay ‘A child is being beaten’ was inspired by the descriptions of fantasies related to the psychoanalyst by female patients. His interpretation of these fantasies is heavily reliant upon the permutations of identification that take place within the psychic realm, enabling Freud to (contentiously) explain female masochistic desire through the prism of male identity and development. Elaborating upon Freud’s work, Laplanche suggests that of all the perversions, masochism has an expressly privileged relationship to the fantasy realm, something he attributes to the reflexive quality of masochism. This is a somewhat problematic declaration as it is based upon Freud’s earlier explanation of masochism as a secondary phenomenon that occurs when the aggressive drives of sadism turn away from external targets and inward upon the subject themselves. It is the movement of internalization that gives rise to ‘the very moment of fantasmization’ (Laplanche 1976: 102). Within the Freudian perspective upon masochism the reliance upon, and obsession with, the spectres invoked in fantasy are regarded as pathological distortions of what is an inherent and vital part of human sexuality in its ‘normal’ form. Despite the shortcomings of Freud’s approach, it is clear that 130

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the masochist’s overdeveloped fascination with the world of fantasy has long been remarked upon and is well established in theoretical terms. As suggested in Chapter 1 Reik and subsequently Deleuze posit fantasy as absolutely crucial with regard to the organization of masochism as a formal mode of experience and practice. The ‘scene which is dreamed, dramatized, ritualized’ (Deleuze 1991: 74) functions as the foundational element for the additional core aesthetic aspects such as the contract, the fetish and the masochistic performance. Fantasy binds these devices together and gives them narrative shape, situating them within a flexible but broadly definable spatial and temporal arena of existence. The staging of the sexual fantasy as a key structural component of the masochistic subjective experience is indicated in several films in this study; Romance, In the Cut and Secretary all feature distinct fantasy sequences. In Secretary and In the Cut the spectator witnesses the daydreams that accompany Lee and Frannie masturbating and in both cases these enact erotic narratives connecting these women with their chosen male love objects. Romance includes Marie’s hospital/ brothel fantasy as discussed in the previous chapter, however, Ruth A. Hottel and Lynsey Russell-Watts argue that the significance of fantasy in Breillat’s film extends beyond this to more excessive levels. They suggest that not only should the overtly imagined scene be taken as a phantasmagorical staging of desire, but that each of Marie’s sexual activities in the film could be interpreted as the portrayal of a different category of female fantasy, with the men acting only as ‘props’ or ‘backdrops’ for her explorations. Paul is the long-term partner, Paulo represents the desire for non-committal sex with a stereotypically masculine partner and Robert provides experimentation with s/m and bondage. Even the rape scene, suggest Hottel and Russell-Watts, could be read in this context, as could the death that Marie engineers for Paul. They argue that this chimes with the film’s realignment of spectatorial pleasure from the masculine to the feminine (2002: 71–72). Whether this seems a convincing argument or not, it is clear that in Romance as well as in Secretary and In the Cut the female protagonists are depicted as actively desiring subjects who choreograph fantasies tailor-made to their own urges. The explicit visualization of their erotic inner experiences typically precedes the actual sex scenes that take place later in the narratives, emphasizing the idea that these women make use of their fantasies to catalyse a process of ‘overspilling’ in which narratives are transferred from the psychic realm to reality. To borrow a phrase that Catherine Wheatley (2006) uses to describe The Piano Teacher, these films embody the notion of ‘the masochistic fantasy made flesh’. The moments of fantasy depicted in these films, and the connections between fantasy and masochism more broadly, have further significance for the centrality of intersubjectivity to this paraphilia. Grosz argues that the realm of the Imaginary, to which fantasy belongs, is governed by the relations of self and other and is thus an intrinsically intersubjective space (1990: 42). The 131

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masochistic scenario, rooted in dream, is always an encounter between plural positions. Most commonly, as is the case in the majority of the films discussed so far, this takes place between two subjects or the masochistic subject and their love object. It may be an encounter that occurs only in the inner mind, but nonetheless involves an imagined other in which the masochist invests their desires and pleasures. Or, we may think of the masochistic encounter in terms of cinema: the process of cinemasochism that MacCormack describes or the contractual affiliation discussed by Aaron and invoked in Chapter 1. The spectator enters into a consensual and volitional relationship with the film that is unfolding before them, submitting themselves to the potentially horrific or baffling images that dance before their eyes. Both masochism and spectatorship bring into being and are thereafter reliant upon the libidinal encounter between self and other, and upon the creation of a form of communication that necessitates a fantastical investment in the exchange of pleasure and power. To watch is a negotiative practice in which the spectator speaks to images by experiencing them through a self that speaks to itself – what do I think, how do I understand these images, how am I desiring? … the image returns our speech to us to the extent it challenges our openness to see and to experience pleasure – and therefore ourselves – differently. (MacCormack 2008: 51)

MacCormack argues that the practice of cinematic spectatorship is communicative and mediative and as such catalyses a state of self-reflection, particularly when the images at stake are unfamiliar and not easily assimilated into a pre-existent understanding of the world. This, in turn, instigates a change in the spectator’s perception of themselves and the plurality of otherness in its many forms with which they come into contact. The arguments made in previous encounters have demonstrated how this transformative process may function in invocations of perverse pleasure: suffering, the wounded body, sexual difference and explicit bodies and acts. These representations call forth repeated encounters with alterity that compel a thinking and rethinking of the categories of self and identity. The primacy of fantasy and the recreation of a fantasy world that masochism strives towards is encapsulated in the concept of the heterocosmic impulse. This impulse can (as suggested in Chapter 1) be described in its simplest form as a desire to recreate the sociocultural realm as dominated by the regulatory systems of heteronormativity, and the subject’s place within it, according to the principles and pleasures of masochistic desire. Silverman, drawing on ‘Coldness and cruelty’, explains that the demonstrative elements of role play and masquerade that constitute the masochist’s experience of sexuality extend to ‘include the person inflicting the pain or humiliation as well, and indeed the entire “scene” of the erotic adventure, in effect remaking the world’ (1992: 132

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208–209). The aspects of disavowal, suspense, fetish and ritual that are assured through the device of the contract are the building blocks of this fantasized realm: ‘Reality … is affected not by negation but by a disavowal that transposes it into fantasy’ (Deleuze 1991: 72). The masochist does not refuse reality per se, but seeks to transform it through the construction and exploration of alternative forms, narratives and intersubjective relationships into an ‘ideal’ image of what the world might be. Masochism therefore holds the seeds of the power to act as a catalyst for the deconstruction and subsequent reconfiguration of our encounters with ourselves and others, an ethical potential left largely explored by Deleuze and Studlar who focus instead upon the function that this remaking of the world plays in relation to the form and spectacle of masochism. Silverman, in contrast, does acknowledge the possibility of transformation within the heterocosmic impulse, enquiring, ‘The crucial question to ask here is whether the heterocosmic impulse exhausts itself altogether in the boudoir, or whether the “play” spills over into social intercourse as well, contaminating the properties of gender, class, and race’ (1992: 209). This is a vital question. It could be argued that the alternative worlds of the masochistic scenario simply serve to detach the protagonists from a society that labels them perverse and protect them within an insulated bubble while heteronormative regulatory practices and denials of alterity continue unabated elsewhere. In this situation, the idealistic structures of the heterocosm would be isolated, supplanting nothing and ‘contaminating’ nothing. This is a point alluded to by Sontag in her discussion of the pornographic literature of writers such as Sacher-Masoch, de Sade, Bataille and Réage. Referring to the latter’s Story of O, Sontag comments upon the ‘stock type of pornographic trash’ and ‘anachronistic settings’ that it relies upon (2001: 97). The settings that she describes are familiar from Venus in Furs and more recent cultural texts: ‘that conveniently isolated château, luxuriously furnished and lavishly staffed with servants, in which a clique of rich men congregate and to which women are brought as virtual slaves to be the objects, shared in common, of the men’s brutal and inventive lusts’ (2001: 97–98). This description is highly reminiscent of Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty, and indeed Sontag identifies in pornographic literature a similar problematic of objectification to that which is emphasized in Leigh’s film. In such cases it is difficult to see how the spaces of perversion could provide the possibility of an ethical restructuring; however, these emplacements are arguably not representative of the heterocosmic impulse but merely depict exaggerated replications of the dominant structure that exists in society as a whole. Silverman argues that the masochistic drive specifically (found in texts such as Venus in Furs), rather than the pornographic or perverse as a more general urge, hold the power to overturn one fundamental aspect of the symbolic order: within the masochistic narrative, the paternal law (or Law of the Father, or logic of the phallus) is denied and superseded by the female figure of maternal authority. This begins to move 133

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towards the way in which the heterocosm may perform a political function. Silverman’s subsequent analysis remains within the Freudian conceptual model and for this reason she ultimately concludes that masochism is forever caught within the identifications of familial relations, always as much a product of the symbolic order as a reaction against it (1992: 213). It is important to observe here, however, that Silverman is basing her understanding of the heterocosm and its radical potential upon ‘feminine masochism’ as manifested in male patients; as the previous chapters of this book have argued, female masochism must necessarily operate and be conceived of within the terms of a different framework that facilitates a range of previously unthought aesthetic practices and subjective positions. Female masochism is positioned as both ‘exterior’ to theorization and as transgressive in regard to the cinematic imagery that it has inspired in recent years. This suggests that the female manifestation of this perversion may be better placed than the male to mobilize a heterocosmic impulse which overspills from fantasy and ‘the boudoir’ into the interactions and negotiations of the social world. The masochistic heterocosm requires a specific type of setting within which the dynamic of pleasure and pain must take place: ‘it is a mistake to treat the pleasure-pain complex as a raw material able intrinsically to lend itself to any transformation’ (Deleuze 1991: 71). Rather, this complex must be organized within a framework containing specific temporal elements of delay and suspense in combination with the aesthetic elements associated with fetishism and fantasy. Studlar argues that the combination of these formal aspects functions in the von Sternberg and Dietrich collaborations to create the basis for a masochistic heterocosm, a space outside the ‘real world’ in which normal spatiality and temporality are suspended and an arena is opened up in which desire and fantasy are the primary and privileged components. She notes the ‘dreamlike quality of von Sternberg’s films, their emphasis on feeling and fantasy, their paradoxical mise en scène and curiously disjointed narratives’ (Studlar 1988: 99). Returning briefly to Secretary provides an example of how the masochistic heterocosm may be represented as a performative and fantastical place within more conventional cinematic narratives, in addition to being suggestive of some of the crucial aesthetic strategies that the hetercosmic impulse entails. This film constructs an ambiguous temporality and a liminal spatiality in order to create an ‘in-between’ realm in which the sadomasochistic desires and fantasies of the protagonist Lee and her employer and love object E. Edward Grey can be played out. There are few signifiers of any specific historical context, or rather, there are mixed signifiers that indicate different time periods. Although the domestic scenes in Lee’s home could be contemporary, they are also reminiscent of earlier cultural representations of suburbia and could be situated anywhen in the last three or four decades. Grey’s office, too, is ahistorical and temporally enigmatic: although 134

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some elements suggest a twenty-first century setting, Lee uses an old-fashioned typewriter and there is scant evidence of recent technology. This office space also accords closely with the concept of ‘supersensualism’, a term that Sacher-Masoch used to label his preoccupation with the artistic qualities he regarded as inherent to his influences and rituals (Deleuze 1991: 69). This concept is not only central to the construction of the heterocosmic realm but will be of import when considering how Amer addresses the spectator through synesthesia, a process described by Laura U. Marks as the ‘translation of qualities from one sense modality to another’ (2002: xi). In Sacher-Masoch’s literary works, the images of suspended bodies, arrested movement and cruel, beautiful women play an instrumental role, and yet, supersensualism suggests that the other senses may be equally as important within the realm of masochistic sexuality. Touch and the textures with which skin and flesh connect take on a fetishized function in stories such as Venus in Furs ‘with its mystical play of flesh, fur, and mirror’ (Deleuze 1991: 69). To draw upon a typical passage in this most well-known story by Sacher-Masoch: “There is a green ribbon on my bedside table”, said Wanda, as I laid her on the couch. “Bring it to me, and also bring the whip”. I flew upstairs and down again and, kneeling before my sovereign lady, presented the two objects to her. She made me tie her heavy hair charged with electricity into a large chignon which I fastened with the velvet ribbon. I then had to prepare her bath and this I did very clumsily, for my hands and feet refused to obey me. From time to time I felt compelled to glance at my beauty, as though some magical force were driving me. At the sight of her lying on the red velvet cushions, her precious body peeping out between the folds of sable, I realized how powerfully sensuality and lust are aroused by flesh that is only partially revealed.

This passage details the beautiful appearance of Wanda’s body and face, certainly, but more evocative here is the emphasis upon texture and physical sensation. The specific feel of Wanda’s hair, the velvet cushions and voluptuous sable and the hot water and steam of the bath all speak to experiences that are reliant more on texture and the proximate intensities of the skin than the capabilities of vision. This passage engages with senses beyond the purely ocular, imbuing each object with heavy significance and weaving together an overall impression of supersensual experience. Also evident here is the formal element of waiting or suspense that Deleuze identifies as so crucial to the masochist aesthetic. Wanda’s whip is juxtaposed with the soft velvet ribbon and brings the promise of the violence and pain to come after the pleasurable sensations described in this paragraph. The aesthetic of Secretary, specifically in the interior 135

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spaces of Grey’s offices, recalls Sacher-Masoch’s supersensualism. The carved wooden screens and stone statues, the orchids that Grey lovingly cultivates, the textiles of the furnishings and the red colour scheme: all are set within the dark winding corridors and chambers of a building seemingly larger inside than out and are strongly expressive of other senses beyond the visual. They call forth experiences of touch and smell that not only set this spatiality aside from the exterior world (the ‘normative first world’, to use Studlar’s phrase), but that assist in communicating to the spectator the phenomenal sensualism of the couple’s desires through synesthetic translation. When watching Secretary, the smooth cool stone of the statues becomes almost tangible, the spectator imagines running her hands across the dark textured wood of the screens. The delicate smell of the orchids hanging in the air lends an exotic aroma that forms a multisensory backdrop to the interactions that take place there. Sounds are also emphasized in this film, from the clacking of Lee’s typewriter to the sharp thwack of Grey’s hand against her bottom in the spanking scene. The supersensual settings of the corridors and rooms of Grey’s office, where the majority of the interactions between he and Lee take place, play a primary role in the construction of the masochistic heterocosm. These areas are constructed as an ‘in-between’ space, a world in which the rules of the external social realm do not apply. Thus, perverse activities take place as Lee crawls along the floor, or masturbates in the toilets, or eats food out of Grey’s hand. When Lee first approaches this space, she is dressed in a purple cape and surrounded by greenery, reminiscent of a Little Red Riding Hood character about to enter an otherworldly and unknown realm. The sultry score by Angelo Badalamenti, best known for his frequent collaborations with David Lynch and Paul Schrader and for the creation of fantastical, dreamlike soundscapes, adds to this sense of an intensely private, alternative space. The office scenes are also constructed as ‘other’ through their contrast with the apparent banality of Lee’s domestic life: the offices are a separate place in which the couple’s sadomasochistic desires might be played out uninterrupted. The entry of others into this space, such as Grey’s ex-wife or Lee’s boyfriend Peter, is framed as a terrible intrusion of ‘reality’ into dreamland, just as Lee’s appearance at Grey’s apartment following her father’s heart attack seems an overstepping of the boundaries of their fantasy life. The question of spatiality is so important here because, as with all other aspects of human social life, the way that spaces are used and the functions that they perform are strictly regulated within matrices of power and control. In his essay ‘Different spaces’, Foucault terms social spaces and the mental and physical states of experience associated with them as ‘emplacements’ and argues that they operate within the ideologies of knowledge and belief that are invested with authority at any given point in history. Majoritarian emplacements, like dominant conceptions of sexuality, provide scant space for unorthodox subjectivities and 136

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practices. However, just as heteronormativity produces perverse sexualities as its counterpart, so the construction of normative emplacements necessitates alternative spaces on the boundaries of the social to contain what is culturally excluded. Foucault identifies two types of emplacements which are at variance from the spaces of normativity: utopias, which are imaginary ‘perfect’ spaces and thus fundamentally unreal, and heterotopias, which are ‘sorts of actually realized utopias’ that may function to represent, contest or even reverse the experience of temporality, spatiality and subjectivity found in broader social emplacements (1998: 178). It is in these borderlands that the ethical and political significance of the masochistic heterocosm begins to emerge. Foucault suggests that late twentieth century heterotopias are to be found in spaces/places such as mental institutions and prisons, cemeteries, and significantly for the project of this chapter and masochistic sexuality, cinemas. The relationship between utopias and heterotopias is a complex one that Foucault describes thus: Between these utopias and these utterly different emplacements, these heterotopias, there must be a kind of mixed, intermediate experience, that would be the mirror. The mirror is a utopia after all, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror I see myself where I am not, in an unreal space that opens up virtually behind the surface … it is also a heterotopia in that the mirror really exists, in that it has a sort of return effect on the place that I occupy. (1998: 179)

The description of the ‘return effect’ of the mirror image suggests that the subjectivities, behaviours and experiences associated with heterotopic emplacements, although situated in the marginal gaps of society, may have the potential to influence or alter the parameters of the regulatory systems that have constructed them as other. One of the most radical implications of the heterotopia can be attributed to the way in which it enables a multiplicity and fluidity of perspectives that remain separate and singular in normative space: ‘The heterotopia has the ability to juxtapose in a single real place several emplacements that are incompatible in themselves’ (Foucault 1998: 181). The heterotopia therefore contains the promise of the recognition of various types of difference articulated simultaneously. Positions and voices that are silenced in majoritarian social space and discourse find an arena in which they can co-exist with more normative structures and with other forms of alterity. Foucault’s inclusion of the cinema as a heterotopic emplacement expresses a recognition that the function of film is a not simply escapism but that it may, as MacCormack has argued, serve to provide fantastical versions of the world that offer a ‘return effect’ on the spectating subject. Thus, the masochistic heterocosm functions as a liminal space between reality and desiring fantasy as a drive that is simultaneously active and submissive, with cinematic representations that draw upon the masochistic aesthetic performing 137

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this heterocosmic place through the specific aesthetic strategies facilitated by the medium. Hart, commenting upon performance and theatricality in relation to masochistic sexuality, suggests that it should be understood as taking place within an inherently traumatic spatiality. Strictly, performance (and masochism) cannot be defined as taking place either on stage or in the stalls but instead is constructed in the void between the two and in the commingling of fantasy and desire that occurs within this gap. In order to enter this space and to effectively engender the performance/fantasy, the subject must step into this potentially traumatic void, trusting that the other will be there to meet them (Hart 1998: 9). A film like Amer, which this chapter will now address directly, manifests this abyssal and traumatic ‘in-between’ experience: on the one hand requiring the spectator to relinquish themselves to the images on screen, and on the other calling forth an active engagement with this peculiar imagery that moves away from or refuses conventional systems of cinematic signification. Above all, it activates an embodied mode of spectatorship in which meaning is created in the space between the flickering shapes on screen and the viewer’s synesthetic capacity. The forms and pleasures of masochistic sexuality strive towards a reconfiguration of the world outside the restrictions of heteronormativity, a temporally and spatially distinct realm that, in certain instances, holds the potential for an ethically engaged rethinking of dominant paradigms of subjectivity. The crucial lesson of the heterocosm, therefore, is that aesthetics and ethics need to be conceptualized in conjunction with each other, an assertion that Amer illustrates. Cattet and Forzani’s film does not pose explicitly ethical questions about personal morality and responsibility within the diegetic space as films such as Breaking the Waves, Red Road and In the Cut do. Rather, as a more extreme version of the challenging representational strategies used in, for example, In My Skin and Romance, the particular cinematic form that it presents necessitates a different mode of viewing that disorientates and relocates the viewer in a (potentially) more ethical way. MacCormack states, ‘Masochistic pleasures of horror images are an obvious example of forsaking the power to look for submission to the affects produced by what is seen. Similarly, avantgarde cinema requires a submission to images that disputes their reliance on deference to signification’ (2008: 44). MacCormack refers here to the gruesome spectacles of horror cinema, culturally coded as disgusting: the gore-stained and rotting flesh that pervades the zombie films of Lucio Fulci, for example, or the severed limbs and blood in Dario Argento’s films. However, as argued in Chapter 4 the visceral images of female corporeality in Breillat’s cinema are constructed as equally horrifying and obscene within the social realm, carrying their own significations of abjection and transgression. Amer does not contain such graphic material but instead utilizes avant-garde techniques such as fragmented images, extreme distorting close-ups and enhanced or altered 138

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colours throughout to engender a relationship between spectator and screen that deviates from those of more straightforward narrative cinema. If Secretary fences off a distinct locality within its space in which to stage heterocosmic desire, in Amer the entire realm of the film becomes a masochistic heterocosm in which time and space operate according to alternative rules and the boundaries between reality and fantasy are increasingly indistinct. Ana’s inner world is projected outward onto the space of the screen: sometimes paranoid, sometimes sexual, constantly multisensory and always appealing to a Bataillian ethos of eroticism. Amer and Inner Experience

Through its highly stylized visuals and manipulated auditory effects, Amer provides a fine example of the fantastical and erotic drives that constitute the heterocosmic impulse. Scenes are played out through rich and evocative imagery of characters that are in turn monstrous and sexualized, and settings that juxtapose the gothic castles and winding forest pathways of classic horror with sun-drenched sea and townscapes. Overall the effect is comparable to Barthes insistence on the forms expressed by ‘the poet’s imagination’. Commenting upon Bataille’s Story of the Eye, Barthes states: The poet’s imagination … is improbable; a poem is something that could never happen under any circumstances – except, that is, in the shadowy or burning realm of fantasy, which by that very token it alone can indicate. The novel proceeds by chance combinations of real elements, the poem by precise and complete exploration of virtual elements. (2001: 120)

The scenarios described in Story of the Eye are outlandish, expressing not probable situations but characters and events that embody ‘a kind of essence of make-believe’ (Barthes 2001: 120) that finds its sexual and violent form through metonymy and metaphor. In the previous chapter it was suggested that Campion’s In the Cut utilizes some comparable aesthetic methods to create a transgressive network of language, explicit sex and brutalized bodies. Amer is even more suggestive of how Barthes’s notion of the poem and the poetic imagination might find a home within the audiovisual territories of cinema. The imagery is often abstract and verging on the inexplicable, the palette and sound hallucinatory, the narrative disjointed and unclear: here the ‘burning realm of fantasy’ of which Barthes speaks is given filmic form. Amer is also remarkable in its tactility, or to use the parlance of masochism, its supersensualism. The spectator of this film is presented with a range of sensory experiences that engage with modalities beyond the visible, thus encouraging a mode of 139

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spectatorship that creates meaning through the embodied perception and visceral responses of the viewer. Studies of material culture in recent years have seen the advocation of a move away from the established tendency to privilege the specular over the tactile, echoing Irigaray’s critique that the Western logos has been based upon the phallocratic obsession with the visible. Laura U. Marks, one of the most prominent writers on haptic sensibilities in material culture, argues that a social hierarchy of the senses has long been apparent with the ‘distance senses’ elevated above the ‘proximal senses’ in a range of discursive fields: ‘In Western philosophy, in which only the distance senses are vehicles of knowledge, and Western aesthetics, in which only vision and hearing can be vehicles of beauty’ (2013: 144). Once again a primary question arises about the ways in which we, as human subjects, construct meaning out of the vast range of signals that we receive, and again it is clear that dominant systems of signification and knowledge have largely functioned to restrict these meanings and perceptions within a limited frame of possibilities. Foucault’s notion of the episteme is illuminating here: what I am attempting to bring to light is the epistemological field, the episteme in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its rational value or to its objective forms, grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility. (2002: xxiii–xxiv)

The episteme is the manifestation of systems of knowledge and meaning within an ideological field that regulates and limits what may be considered possible or ‘true’ in any sociohistorical period; the episteme reaches into all areas of discourse whether it be the study of the representational arts or more ‘objective’ disciplines such as science and medicine. The challenge for philosophers and theorists is to increase what can be articulated within these conditions of possibility, to instigate a flexibility and multiplicity of understanding that is not bound by epistemic prejudice. As discussed in Chapter 4, Irigaray argues that for much of Western history this conception of ‘truth’ has worked in tandem with the phallologocentric economy of the specular which has privileged sight over touch and seeing over tactility. This ‘logic of the same’ has neglected or silenced female experiences, which, Irigaray argues, are less reliant upon vision and more upon tactility. Describing the feminine ‘style’ in contrast to that of the phallic order, she observes: … this “style”, or “writing”, of women tends to put the torch to fetish words, proper terms, well-constructed forms. This “style” does not privilege sight; instead, it takes each figure back to its source, which is among other things tactile. 140

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It comes back in touch with itself in that origin without ever constituting in it, constituting itself in it, as some sort of unity … Its “style” resists and explodes every firmly established form, figure, idea or concept. (1985b: 79)

It is apparent, therefore, that the process of challenging the ocularcentric paradigm in material culture must be accompanied by new approaches to understanding and representing the specificities of female experience and pleasures in ways that firstly, question and reveal the epistemic processes at work in the construction of knowledge and truth and secondly, to forge alternatives in philosophy and in symbolic forms such as cinema. The privileging of sight espoused by the logos of Western thought has been strongly felt in the study of film, understandably perhaps given the visual qualities of the medium and the developmental narrative tracing it back through photography to other plastic arts such as painting that strive to represent the world. However, the turn towards haptic theory in recent years is indicative of the increasingly perception that sight must be conceived of in relation to the other senses. Or, to phrase this slightly differently, that to focus upon the significations constructed through vision alone is to ignore or deny a large part of the way in which we actually experience film spectatorship. Considering the opening moments of Campion’s The Piano, Sobchack suggests that this is a film which requires an understanding of cinema reception that is based in the embodied responses of the spectator. ‘My eyes did not “see” anything meaningful and experienced an almost blindness at the same time that my tactile sense of being in the world through my fingers grasped the image’s sense in a way that my forestalled or baffled vision could not’ (Sobchack 2004: 64). The multisensory nature of cinematic experience has already been noted in earlier chapters; the visceral reactions to the images of self-harm in Secretary and In My Skin demonstrate embodied responses, as does the mobilization of disgust as a perverse strategy in Breillat’s works. However, while the imagery of Lee holding a kettle to her thigh, Esther slicing her flesh or the fluids of the female body in Anatomy of Hell and Romance evoke and replicate the corporeal experiences of the spectator and certainly benefit from an approach which regards vision as being embedded in the proximal senses, these shots can still be understood or ‘read’ (albeit in a simplistic form) based upon their visual properties only. Sobchack is referring to a modality in which the specular is no longer the privileged mode of perception, a type of cinematic imagining in which ‘the cultural hegemony of vision is overthrown’ (2004: 64). Amer contains several sequences, some of which will be discussed below, that rely upon a synesthetic reading of what Marks terms the ‘skin of the film’: this refers to the way that ‘film signifies through its materiality, through a contact between perceiver and object represented’ (2000: xi). Images – and in Amer, it should be added, sounds 141

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– ‘call upon memories of the senses’ in order to translate audiovisual perception into embodied experiences of touch, smell and taste (Marks 2000: xi). Cattet and Forzani’s film may initially appear to be a peculiar example of haptic cinema, for from the outset it seems obsessed with vision and the construction of desire and anxiety through the gaze. This is expressed in the first section through the image of the eye and point of view shots attributable to young Ana’s perspective. The first object that appears on screen as the title sequence plays is an eye in close-up, followed by more images of single or paired eyes looking into the camera and out at the spectator. After the titles, early shots of the film proper develop this theme, gradually constructing a layered web of gazes between Ana and her parents, her grandmother and even her apparently dead grandfather, whose corpse opens its eyes to stare at her in one of the many moments in the film in which fantasy and reality become interchangeable. Ana is shown repeatedly peeping through keyholes and around doors. She is caught up within a network in which she both looks and is looked at, spies and is spied upon. The first section is imbued with a mood of paranoia, depicting Ana as a child in a large shadowy house of enigmatic figures and strange rituals. In addition to referencing gialli cinema, this section also draws upon conventions of Gothic horror, particularly its evocation of ‘the connections between seeing and the threats posed by what is seen’ (Landy 200: 357). Throughout these early scenes, looking is associated with curiosity and the propulsion of self through the world, yet simultaneously with anxiety and the confusion of self-identity. Furthermore, the focus on the eye and the gaze is disrupted by constant references to, and invocations of, other sensorial modes of perception. The strategic use of close-ups serve to continually emphasize tactility, calling into play the memories of the spectators own sensate corporeality: a belt buckle shaped like two clasped hands, a gelatinous plate of unidentifiable food, burning incense, water-sodden fabric and the crystals of glass that grind into Ana’s elbows and chin as she hides beneath her grandfather’s bed. The audio track in this and later sections is heightened so that each sound (wheezing breath, footsteps, the fluttering of a bird’s wing) is enhanced with a greater intensity. Sound, along with taste, smell and particularly touch, ‘overtakes’ vision as the primary mode of signification because vision is blurred, distorted, indecipherable. The eye itself comes to be experienced in its tactile form, an organ of desire but one that is resolutely embedded in the sensations of the skin and flesh. Marks writes of haptic visuality: ‘vision itself can be tactile, as though one were touching a film with one’s eyes’ (2000: xi). In Amer, the shots of eyes peering through keyholes, in particular, are imbued with a materiality and even a vulnerability that goes beyond the status of the eye as symbolic bearer of the look. The tangibility of these orbs recalls Bataille’s description of the disembodied eye of the defiled priest in Story of the Eye: ‘The caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the 142

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sensation is so bizarre that it has something of a rooster’s horrible crowing’ (2001b: 66). What Amer evokes through its constant reference to the eye and the processes of sight combined with other sensory experiences is precisely the limitations of vision. People, spaces and objects are seen by Ana through keyholes that offer a restricted line of sight, or through fabrics that render figures spectral and indistinct. Vision cannot be relied upon to give a complete or coherent impression of the world. The emphasis upon the inadequacy of sight alone is transferred from Ana to the spectator, who shares in her limited perspective and in her anxieties about what can and, perhaps more importantly, cannot be seen. A masochistic oscillation is depicted here between agency and the possession of the libidinally invested gaze, and anxiety about perceived threats to the self. This paradoxical movement is overtly expressed in the film’s version of the ‘primal scene’ in which Ana, in her forays around the house, stumbles upon her parents having sex. Fantasies or rituals inspired by the dynamics of the primal scene are amongst the most common in the repertoire of masochism, including for example the ‘symbolic enactment of primal scene experiences, such as the oedipal triangle in the form of a ménage a trois, in which the masochistic subject is forced to witness sexual relations between his love object and a rival as a precondition for sexual intercourse and gratification’ (Kernberg 2000: 24). Indeed, Severin is subjected to such exquisite misery through Wanda’s relationship with ‘the Greek’ in Venus in Furs, most notably as the Greek whips him as his beloved Wanda watches on: The sensation of being whipped before the eyes of a woman one adores by a successful rival is quite indescribable; I was dying of shame and despair. What was most humiliating was that I felt a wild and supersensual pleasure in my pitiful situation, lashed by Apollo’s whip and mocked by the cruel laughter of my Venus. (Sacher-Masoch 1991: 268)

The recurrence of fantasies related to the primal scene in masochism is unsurprising given the conjunction of eroticism and shame with which it is associated. Ana spying upon her parents having sex instigates one of the most experimental sequences of the film as her gaze literally fragments, her eye dividing and replicating in the space of the screen to the sound of shattering glass. Close-ups of her parents’ faces in blue, green and red against a black background move across the screen; the sound of dripping water echoes. Her father’s hand, for a short time, appears to be throttling her mother in a redwashed head shot seen from above. In a classic evoking of the identifications, jealousies and desires that the primal scene contains, the setup of this image of sexual violence is replicated moments later in an image of Ana laying against 143

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her own pillow, her dark hair sprawled around her head as her mother’s was moments before. In the final images of the first section of the film’s tripartite structure, Ana’s body and face appear distorted, being stretched back and forth as the skin of the film is pulled and contracted. A hand strokes a breast, a mouth gasps, feet contort. The aesthetic of these moments is closer to experimental art than narrative cinema and is particularly reminiscent of video artist Chris Cunningham’s installation Flex (2000), in which a naked couple alternately copulate and beat each other within a black void, culminating in a flash of light that seems to dissolve their contorted bodies. After some moments, it becomes apparent that Ana has morphed into her teenage self. In a further surrealistic touch, an ant crawls from her navel. It is clear that in these sequences and in the film as a whole, the ‘inner world’ of Ana is envisaged as an often incoherent assemblage of multisensorial experiences, half-recalled memories and spectral familial figures that range from the desired and desiring (her parents) to the monstrous and horrifying (her grandparents). A theory of sight alone is inadequate for the processes of meaning-making with which this film engages, as Sobchack’s work on carnal cinema argues: We need to alter the binary and bifurcated structures of the film experience suggested by previous formulations and, instead, posit the film viewer’s lived body as a carnal “third term” that grounds and mediates experience and language, subjective vision and objective image – both differentiating and unifying them in reversible (or chiasmatic) processes of perception and expression. (Sobchack 2004: 60)

The embodied state of the spectator is heavily implicated throughout Amer. Chapter 1 introduced the concept of idiopathic identification in which the subject ‘swallows’ the other through the identificatory process. The haptic aesthetic of Cattet and Forzani’s film utilizes a different mode: that of heteropathic identification as Ana becomes the spectator’s other. This ‘subscribes to an exteriorizing logic and locates the self at the site of the other. In heteropathic identification one lives, suffers, and experiences pleasure through the other’ (Silverman 1992: 205). The first scene of the film’s third section illustrates how heteropathic identification functions in the cinemasochistic relationship between film and viewer. It begins with extreme close-ups of skin, close enough to reveal tiny hair and pores, and to obscure any knowledge of which specific body part is being shown. Once again, the enhanced audio track emphasizes the sound of breathing. The collection of skin shots implies that when the camera pans out the image shown will be a sex scene, and yet, when we are given access to a wider view it transpires the location is a crowded train. Retrospectively, the skin and hair can be made sense of in terms of the spectator’s own memories 144

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of claustrophobic journeys and hot bodies pressed against each other. This haptic sensibility continues as the sequence progresses: Ana’s taxi driver pulls on his leather gloves, her heavy trunk is hauled into the boot of the car, she gasps as her naked leg touches the hot surface of the seats. Each of these moments recalls a specific type of sense memory. As such, viewer perception bypasses an ‘intellectual’ or rational spectatorial experience and instead the body is addressed directly. We ‘feel’ the resistance and squeak of the leather over our hands, the weight of the trunk, the sharp and surprising sensation of heat. Having established a heteropathic or cinemasochistic connection between film and spectator, Amer toys with the dissolution of boundaries between fantasy and reality as Ana imagines her dress ripping apart at the seams, under the watchful eyes of the driver, and being whipped away in the hot breeze. The alternative modes of signification that Amer brings into being recalls Deleuze’s observations about the use of language in Sacher-Masoch and de Sade’s novels: ‘pornological literature is aimed above all at confronting language with its own limits, with what is in a sense a “non-language”’ (1991: 22). Their writing defines a counterpart to the ordinarily described world in order to articulate the violence and sexual excesses that most description cannot or will not express. The eroticism of their literature holds up a ‘perverse mirror’ to the history of world and the social realm in its current state (Deleuze 1991: 37–38). The recreation of a heterocosmic realm of existence in Amer is largely dependent upon the way that the film manages to convey Ana’s very material and embodied experiences of the world around her in conjunction with, and often as inextricable from, her inner or psychic realm. This refutes the notion of an objectively defined ‘truth’ as something that can be identified from a position of detachment and rationality and instead suggests that reality may be multiple and fragmented but no less intensely felt for that. Ana’s fantastical modes of experience become reality and thus ‘reality’ itself is thrown into question, revealed as an illusionistic construction that can be altered and recreated: the remaking of the world so essential to the masochistic dreamer and to the philosopher of alterity who wishes to dismantle the damaging structures of the social order and rebuild them anew. In order to open up the self to the potential of the alternative worlds offered by the masochistic heterocosm, whether enacted overtly or hinted at like the tantalizing images of a world glimpsed through lace, we need to relinquish the firm grasp on knowledge that Western theory has so resolutely sought. Bataille states in Inner Experience, ‘He who already knows cannot go beyond a known horizon’ (1988: 3). The heterocosmic impulse requires at least the questioning of the world as it currently exists, and more drastically calls for the dismantling of this world and its stratified claims to knowledge and truth. Knowledge in this context cannot be extricated from the arrogant assumption that one can master the world, its experiences and its objects, through a totalizing process of apprehension with an end point that is 145

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both fixed and attainable. The result of such (over) confidence is that which Bataille calls ‘dogmatic servitude’: an unthinking adherence to one perspective or system that necessarily involves the foreclosure of other modes of thought or realms of experience. Instead of a concluding moment at which we can say ‘I know’, he argues that instead we should strive for a processual guiding principle of ‘non-knowledge’ (1988: 3). Only through ‘non-knowledge’ and the lack of certainty and freedom from dogma that it entails may one open up the world and the encounters with other subjects and objects that take place within it. Bataille makes it clear that escaping or refuting a state of knowledge is no easy thing and comes not without pain, for the elevation of knowledge and certainty to highly valued attributes is deeply ingrained within the institutions, disciplines and representations of human society. The process of inner experience takes place ‘in fever and anguish’ (Bataille, 1988: 4), yet this anguish is necessary in order to achieve an ethical openness that allows for the discovery and consideration of other perspectives. The resonances between masochism and its heterocosm project of remaking the world, and Bataille’s philosophy of inner experience, arise clearly at the conjunction of ethics and aesthetics, pleasure and unpleasure, agency and loss. The loss of knowledge and of certainty creates a necessary void within which the creative project of exploration and thought may be begun: ‘Thought is the beyond’ (MacCormack 2008: 58). Thought is the abyss within which the philosopher-spectator relinquishes themselves in order to imagine and experience themselves anew. Spectrality and the Structures of Return

The final section in this chapter will further explore the encounter with alterity and attendant disruption of self through Derrida’s conception of spectrality. This also coincides with the structure of loss evoked above; the spectre acts as a reminder of the process of loss and as (in)tangible evidence that from the abyss of loss something may rise again. The tripartite structure of Amer constitutes a process of repetition and return, evoking the ritualistic temporality of masochistic desire and the heterocosmic, semiotic movement of erasure and recreation. However, repetition in this film does not simply represent replication or reiteration but is envisaged as a confrontation with alterity that catalyses a rethinking of the self and a consequential transformation in perspective. The figure of the spectre or revenant (the returned) that Derrida makes his focus is a source of anxiety for the living subject, for it brings with it uncertainty about ontological status and reveals the impossibility of totalizing knowledge:

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It is something that one does not know, precisely, and one does not know if precisely it is, if it exists, if it responds to a name and corresponds to an essence. One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this non-present present, this being there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge. (Derrida 1994: 6)

Amer operates within the realm of the spectral because it questions the status of knowledge and truth through an avant-garde aesthetic that throws us into a position of uncertainty about reality, fantasy and identity. But from this chaotic non-knowledge renewed intensities of thought may emerge. Therefore, spectrality may be seen as another modality that catalyses ethical negotiation and different ways of thinking alterity and the self, connecting with the ‘inner experience’ that is so crucial in Amer and in Bataille’s theories of eroticism and philosophy. It is through the very impossibility of adequately naming spectres that these figures animate an awareness of the crucial debates about power that must be intrinsic to any consideration of self/other relations. To name an other is to fix them within an already prepared epistemic matrix of value and morality, and in doing so to assume a position of mastery and control over them. The spectre is ‘someone other that we will not hasten to determine as self, subject, person, consciousness, spirit, and so forth’ (Derrida 1994: 7). It disturbs the hidden and too frequently unspoken humanist drive to categorize and through categorization, to subjugate. The revenant can be thought of not just as the figure of return but as a place of philosophical and representational reconsideration where aesthetics and ethics coalesce, a feature that it shares with the emplacements of the masochistic heterocosm. The deployment of repeated locations and returning formal motifs allows Cattet and Forzani’s film to construct its own procedures of spectrality. An adult Ana returns to the now empty house (or is it?) and grounds that she ran through and peered into as a child, retracing her passage around the rooms and corridors. The suggestion that the house may not, in fact, be empty is indicative of Ana’s status as a haunted subject situated within a loop of ritual and desire. Again, the influence of Argento is apparent as Marcia’s Landy’s comment on Deep Red shows: ‘What becomes important is the large and ancient house, which has been a site of mystery, secrecy, and violence, and the narrative turns on the quest of a character to return to the “scene of the crime” and, by extension, to bring the audience to confront the return of the past’ (2000: 357). The middle section of Amer with its sun-drenched exterior sequences and buoyant music, is bookended by Ana’s explorations of the dark Gothic mansion in the early years and final moments of her life. Ana’s taxi ride from the train station, discussed above, indicates before her return to the house that the distinctions between reality and fantasy have lost their conventional dynamics of meaning. Ana’s inner experiences, which the spectator vicariously shares through the structures 147

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of heteropathic identification and synesthetic sensory perception, and those of the ‘real world’ are merged: all reality becomes her reality and her reality encapsulates all. The result of this is that the paranoia which pervades the first scenes of the film rises up once again but in a more intense and excessive form. It becomes futile to try to distinguish truth from artifice or the symbolic from the imaginary as the spectator is positioned in the abyss of spectral nonknowledge, a masochistic location of anxiety, pleasure, submission to the image and dissolution of the self. The gothic tradition of the uncanny is also drawn upon in Amer as part of the fabric of spectrality. Nicholas Royle states that it is ‘impossible to think about the uncanny without a sense of ghostliness, a sense of strangeness given to dissolving all assurances about the identity of a self ’ (2003: 16). The uncanny marks the peculiar conjunction of familiarity and non-familiarity and is characterized by the encounter with something recognizable and yet alien. It is this worrying aspect of proximity that renders the uncanny more unsettling for the subject than something that appears in the consciousness as irretrievably other, entirely separate from the self. The most uncanny figure in Amer is the grandfather, apparently dead (or so her mother says) but alive in Ana’s fantasies and ready to rear from the shadows to grab her with a bony hand. His monstrousness is exaggerated in the form of wrinkled skin, beady eyes and hooked features in order that the spectator sees him not as he ‘really is’, but viewed through the heteropathic prism of Ana’s inner world. Royle explores various experiences and cultural practices which may give rise to the prickly, nauseous manifestation of uncanniness, but the one of most relevance in the context of Amer and spectrality is the uncanny sensation of déjà vu. The structure of déjà vu closely resembles that of the revenant; each entails a movement of repetition in which the returned element simultaneously lacks a constitutive part of what it once had, and has gained a weird extra something that cannot quite be articulated. Royle explains that déjà vu ‘entails a logic that cannot be confined but rather operates as a kind of dangerous supplement … before and beyond anything else, déjà vu just is the experience of a supplement … the experience of a supplement without origin, a disturbance of any sense of “familiar ground”’ (2003: 178). The uncanny supplement that the returned moment (or object, or figure) of déjà vu gains functions as a perverse and transgressive excess: something which cannot be controlled by normative systems of signification. Thus, like masochistic sexuality, the uncanny experience of déjà vu operates in a paradoxical and excessive space between conventionally oppositional poles, perversely binding together previously contradictory practices and concepts and forcing vital changes in perspective: ‘a trembling of the “I” in the very intimacy of its bearing witness’ (Royle 2003: 177). Derrida envisages a politics that can account for the place of the spectral within sociocultural interactions and thought when he suggests that we need ‘to learn to live with ghosts, in the 148

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upkeep, the conversation, the company, the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts. To live otherwise, and better. No, not better, but more justly’ (1994: xviii–xix). Akin to many of the theorists engaging with ethical approaches to subjectivity and difference, his language displays a heterocosmic impulse of its own.

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Postscript Masochism has been theorized in the chapters of this book not only as a trajectory of sexual intensity, but as a modality of subjectivity that must be philosophically thought in terms of the two interconnected realms of aesthetics and ethics. In the imbrication of masochism, ethics and aesthetics a number of crucial debates arise that relate not only to sexuality but to the theorization and representation of sexual difference and the morphology of the body, mental illness and pathology, and the normative sociocultural narratives that surround heterosexual relationships. The exploration of recent films from Europe and North America alongside theoretical approaches including continental philosophy, psychoanalysis and cinema studies has questioned the ways in which specifically female masochistic subjectivity engages with and furthers these debates, pushing conceptual and representational boundaries through imagery and narratives of the pleasures and pains of the masochistic body. One of the intentions of this book has been to articulate subjective positions and embodied identities that had previously been silenced or erased from discourse. Through this process of (re)articulation, it emerges that the foundational logic within which masochism and its accompanying themes have been theoretically situated is partial and flawed, needing reconfiguration from various angles in order to progress towards new ground. The restrictively rigid binary oppositions that have dominated these debates must be deconstructed and recreated more openly and with an attentive awareness to the possibilities of the fluid and the multiple. Normality/abnormality, fantasy/reality, sanity/ insanity, beauty/obscenity, agency/dispossession and of course pleasure/ pain – all are thrown into disarray by the corporeal pleasures and desiring drives of the female masochistic subject and her encounters with others and with the sociocultural sphere. In their place arises a move toward processes of signification (and asignification) which are open and always aware of the ethical encounter with alterity in its plural and shifting forms. Bataille states that the things that we ‘know’ become ‘dead objects’ (1988: 4) and that ‘we reach ecstasy by a contestation of knowledge’ (1988: 12). The desires, pleasures and unpleasures with which the female masochist engages are, as this book has offered, frequently as fraught with ambivalence and difficulty as they are commingled with enjoyment; whatever configuration they take, however, they demand that the dead objects of earlier theory be swept away in order to clear the path towards ecstatic thought.

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Masochism has been castigated and denigrated for its apparently nonsensical contradictions, and yet it is these very paradoxical elements which act as perverse catalysts. Such contradictions do not simply act in defiance of the borders and limits of the social order but turn them against themselves, distorting them through exaggeration and resistance. Perversion functions as a mode of corruption in that it ‘is linked to an acknowledgement of and participation in the structures of power and prohibition it seeks to transgress’ (Mey 2007: 36). To call upon corruption in this context is not to evoke its negative connotations of dishonesty and amorality; instead it may be thought of in its purely structural form, as an aesthetic phenomenon that forces a change in the processes of significance. A corrupted file or photograph irrevocably alters the meanings of image and language, necessitating a new relationship between sign and perceiver. I have argued that the films in this study posit the importance of a reconfigured dynamic of spectatorship. Of course, this dynamic is more properly described as a range of dynamics operating according to their own specificities in each film; however, an underlying pattern can be identified in which spectatorship is based upon the dual experiences of active thinking and rethinking, and the dispossession of self through images of beauty and extremity, obscenity and sensuality. In Chapter 2 the concept of anamorphosis was explored in relation to tragedy and ethics. De Kesel writes that in anamorphosis … it is not so much my accidental, one-off glance that is caught … but the entire “protocol of sight” I have passed through. The fact that, in order to get through the chaotic play of colour, I must first find the right angle that allows me to recognize something, belongs to the strategy of the image itself and contributes to what I see. (2009: 245)

The anamorphic image requires a change in perspective that may bring about a paradigm shift in our perception, revealing beauty where only ugliness was seen before, or illuminating meaning out of chaos. Corruption implies a different kind of alteration in perception: not the revelation of something that was there all along, but a more fundamental transformation that brings us into contact with new territories of subjectivity, desire and thought. The ‘female masochist’ as embodiment of this perverse corruption requires the articulation of the unspoken and the unwatchable, whether it be female corporeal experiences and pleasures, the suffering of the other or fantasies of paranoia and eroticism. It also requires the mobilization of new configurations of desire, pain, fantasy and pleasure in such a way that the unfamiliar can be recognized without being assimilated or territorialized. Bataille announces that ‘I can henceforth not conceive of my life, if not pinned to the extreme limit of the “possible” ’ (1988: 38). The films and ideas explored in this book may not absolutely reach this limit but they move towards it in the spirit of ethical negotiation and Bataillian thought; 152

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they begin to map out potential pathways and fertile areas of investigation. ‘The extreme limit of the “possible” assumes laughter, ecstasy, terrified approach towards death; assumes error, nausea, unceasing agitation of the “possible” and the impossible’ (Bataille 1988: 39). Foucault states that ‘the task of analysing one’s sexual desire is always more important than analysing any other kind of sin’ (Foucault 2000: 223). One of the most vital lessons from Foucault’s work is that sexuality and desire are always inextricably enmeshed within a vast network of other sociohistorical factors: technologies of control and regulation; temporalities and emplacements (heterotopian or otherwise); epistemes of health, madness and discipline. Masochism, particularly as it finds its aesthetic and ethical structures through the female body, occurs at the conjunction of many of these trajectories. A key thread of argumentation in the preceding chapters has been to argue that the rituals and fantasies of masochism narrativize and make explicit many of the processes of negotiation common to all relationships, displaying the oscillation between loss of self and assertion of self in overt narrativized form. Masochism, like cinema, works as a communicative strategy and, while it may be erroneous to describe it as taking a strictly linguistic form, the bodies and passions of masochism certainly find their shape through their own systems of signification and asignification. Foucault, beautifully, writes, ‘the language of sexuality has lifted us into the night where God is absent’ (1998: 70). The masochist aesthetic, in conjunction with its tendency towards ethical enquiry, invites the self (and the spectator) to enter into an intersubjective, communicative and consensual encounter through dialogue and shared affect. The image of the masochistic subject as hub, or more aptly and sensorially, as vital organ, assists in illustrating its significance within wider discursive schemas of power, gender, embodiment and even love. And of philosophy: the rethinking and recreation of the world through non-knowledge, creative representation and the opening up of multiple realms of difference. There are many potential pathways leading from the explorations in this book; instead of selecting just one or two and foreclosing the many, a quote from Irigaray may act as a ‘gateway’ to these potentialities of thought: Love is thus an intermediary between pairs of opposites: poverty/plenty, ignorance/wisdom, ugliness/beauty, dirtiness/cleanliness, death/life, and so on. And this would be inscribed in his nature given his genealogy and the date of his conception. And love is a philosopher and a philosophy. Philosophy is not a formal learning, fixed and rigid, abstracted from all feeling. It is a quest for love, love of beauty, love of wisdom, which is one of the most beautiful things. (1993: 24)

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To philosophize is to open up the realm of the beautiful to alterity and to the nowhere and everywhere position of ‘between’ that characterizes thought, love and the permutations of masochism. The between dissolves the boundaries that have shored up and preserved the hierarchical systems of mastery and control that have dominated writing and representation about sexuality and female experience. From within the indefinable space of the between, the fascinating and vertiginous potentiality of the masochistic heterocosm arises and with it the project of remaking the world.

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Williams, L. 1999b. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible. Berkeley: University of California Press. Williams, L.R. 1995. The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wilson, E. 2001. Deforming femininity: Catherine Breillat’s Romance, in France on Film: Reflections on Popular French Cinema, edited by L. Mazdon. London: Wallflower Press, 145–157. Žižek, S. 1994. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality. London: Verso. Žižek, S. 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso. Žižek, S. 1999. Death and the maiden, in The Žižek Reader, edited by E. Wright and E. Wright. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 206–221. Žižek, S. 2001. On Belief. London: Routledge. Žižek, S. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso. Zupančič, A. 2000. Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan. London: Verso. Filmography

Amer / Bitter (dir. Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, 2009). Anatomy of Hell / Anatomie d L’enfer (dir. Catherine Breillat, 2004). Antichrist (dir. Lars von Trier, 2009). Baise-Moi (dir. Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000). Basic Instinct (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1992). Black Swan (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2010). The Blue Angel (dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1930). Body of Evidence (dir. Uli Edel, 1993). Breaking the Waves (dir. Lars von Trier, 1996). Un Chien Andalou (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1929). Crash (dir. David Cronenberg, 1996). Dancer in the Dark (dir. Lars von Trier, 2000). Deep Red / Profondo Rosso (dir. Dario Argento, 1975). The Devil is a Woman (dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1935). Dogville (dir. Lars von Trier, 2003). Flex (dir. Chris Cunningham, 2000). In My Skin / Dans Ma Peau (dir. Marina de Van, 2004). Girl, Interrupted (dir. James Mangold, 2000). Hellraiser (dir. Clive Barker, 1987). Hellbound: Hellraiser II (dir. Tony Randel, 1989). In the Cut (dir. Jane Campion, 2003). The Idiots / Idioterne (dir. Lars von Trier, 1998). Intimacy (dir. Patrice Chéreau, 2001). 162

Bibliography

Irreversible (dir. Gasper Noé, 2002). Jagged Edge (dir. Richard Marquand, 1985). Letter from an Unknown Woman (dir. Max Ophüls, 1948). Martyrs (dir. Pascal Laugier, 2008). The Night Porter / Il Portiere di Notte (dir. Liliana Cavani, 1974). Nine Songs (dir. Michael Winterbottom, 2004). The Passion of Joan of Arc / La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928). The Piano (dir. Jane Campion, 1993). A Real Young Girl / Une Vraie Jeune Fille (dir. Catherine Breillat, 1976). Red Road (dir. Andrea Arnold, 2006). Romance (dir. Catherine Breillat, 1999). The Scarlet Empress (dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1934). Secretary (dir. Steven Shainberg, 2003). Sex, Lies, and Videotape (dir. Steven Soderbergh, 1989). Sleeping Beauty (dir. Julia Leigh, 2011). Sliver (dir. Phillip Noyce, 1993). Suspiria (dir. Dario Argento, 1977). Thirteen (dir. Catherine Hardwicke, 2003). Tokyo Gore Police (dir. Yoshihiro Nishimura, 2008). Trouble Every Day (dir. Claire Denis, 2001).

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Index

Aaron, Michele 6, 19, 37–8, 132 abjection 50, 77, 80, 85, 87, 99, 109–13, 118, 124, 126 Amer 129, 139–49 Anatomy of Hell 37, 100–101, 108–11, 119, 122, 141 Antichrist 46–7, 79–80 Antigone 52, 65–70 Babiker, Gloria and Lois Arnold 74, 93 Barker, Meg, Camel Gupta and Alessandra Iantaffi 72, 88 Barthes, Roland 121, 139 Bataille, Georges 6, 55, 60, 65–6, 109, 117–23, 125, 133, 139, 142, 145–7, 151–3 BDSM 4, 15, 72, 85, 89 beauty and the beautiful 32–4, 46–51, 68, 83, 107–14, 122–3, 135 Bellour, Raymond 27–8 Benjamin, Jessica 40, 56–7 Bersani, Leo 6, 41 blood 49–50, 54, 77–80, 91–2, 108–11, 118, 123–5; see also menstruation Bordo, Susan 83 Braidotti, Rosi 2 Breaking the Waves 2, 18, 20, 37, 45–70 Brickman, Barbara Jane 81–3 Bronfen, Elisabeth 81–2 Butler, Judith 66, 107

Califia, Pat 15 Chow, Lesley 34 Clover, Carol J. 28, 37, 115 Copjec, Joan 41–2 Critchley, Simon 42 Dancer in the Dark 46–7, 53 De Kesel, Marc 49–50, 69, 152 de Lauretis, Teresa 18–19 de Sade, Marquis 30, 48–51, 133; see also sadism, Sadean fantasy death drive 6–7, 12, 47, 66, 113, 115; see also Thanatos Deleuze, Gilles 13–14, 19, 21, 23–37, 61, 78–9, 111–14, 131–5, 145 Derrida, Jacques 62–5, 109–10, 146–9 Doane, Mary Ann 45, 48, 102–3 Douglas, Mary 109–11 Downing, Lisa 10, 15, 32, 34, 101, 106 Edelman, Lee 12 Eisenman, Stephen F. 53 Eros 7, 94, 113; see also pleasure principle Erotic thrillers 21, 99, 102, 104, 108–9, 114–16, 121–2, 124–5 ethical act 66–70 eyes 75, 121–2, 125–7, 141–3 extremity and extremism 6, 28–9, 37–8, 48–50, 100, 122, 130

Female Masochism in Film

Faber, Alyda 47 fantasy 16, 25–36, 39–41, 48–50, 78–9, 106–7, 112, 115–19, 125, 130–39, 145 Favazza, Armando 73–8, 86–7 fetishism 11, 15, 19, 26–7, 29, 61, 112–13, 133–5 ffrench, Patrick 121–2 Foucault, Michel 11–12, 14–15, 104–6, 136–7, 140, 153 Freud, Sigmund 5–10, 13–14, 16–17, 23, 26, 30, 35, 41–3, 55, 60–64, 75, 103, 116–17, 130 Gaitskill, Mary 18, 85–6 Gillain, Anne 108 Gillett, Sue 103, 124, 126 Girl, Interrupted 80–83 Gordon, Suzy 47, 54 Grosz, Elizabeth 77–8, 94–6, 111 guilt 60–70

Jelinek, Elfriede 18, 79–80; see also Piano Teacher, The (novel) jouissance 41–2, 50, 57, 116–17, 125 Justine 20, 30, 48–9; see also Sadean fantasy Kaplan, Louise J. 15–16, 83–4 Karpman, Benjamin 10 Kawabata, Yasunari 32–3 Keefer, Kyle 46, 66 Kernberg, Otto F. 143 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 4–6, 13–14, 23, 35 Kristeva, Julia 20–21, 77, 80, 87, 91–6, 109–11, 118, 126–7; see also abjection; semiotic chora Krueger, Richard B. 9 Krzywinska, Tanya 27, 118–19 Lacan, Jacques 27, 32, 41–3, 48–52, 57, 62, 64, 66–70, 116–18 Landy, Marcia 142, 147 Laplanche, Jean 61, 130 Linafelt, Tod 47, 66 Linden, Robin Ruth 15–16 Lyotard, Jean-François 105–6

haptics 140–42, 144–5 Hart, Lynda 16–17, 29, 89–90, 138 Heath, Stephen 47, 66 Hellraiser 50, 85 heterocosmic impulse 21, 28–9, 73, 130–39, 145–7 Hottel, Ruth A. 101, 131 Humanism 2–3, 56, 76, 84, 96, 147 Hutchison, Nina 40 hysteria 81–2

MacCabe, Colin 119 MacCormack, Patricia 28, 77, 103, 117, 119, 129–30, 132, 137–8, 146 MacKendrick, Karmen 10, 32, 49–50, 54–5 Makarushka, Irena S.M. 47, 66 Marks, Laura U. 135, 140, 141–2 martyrdom 46, 50–57 Martyrs 49–50, 91 masochistic contract 19, 24–6, 35–40, 78–9, 89, 132–3 Massumi, Brian 8, 12–13 McClintock, Anne 15 McHugh, Kathleen 116, 120–21, 125

In My Skin 20, 90–97, 141 In the Cut (film) 21, 57, 99, 102–4, 114–27, 131 In the Cut (novel) 114–15, 122 inner experience 56–7, 131–2, 139–46; see also Bataille, Georges Irigaray, Luce 17, 39, 66–70, 103–4, 107–8, 140–41, 153–4 166

INDEX

McPhee, Ruth 111 Medusa 126–7 Menninger, Karl 87 menstruation 80, 108–11, 118–19 Merck, Mandy 14–15 Metz, Christian 27 Mey, Kerstin 152 Miller, Jacques-Alain 9–10, 64 Miller, Sarah Alison 126 Modleski, Tania 115 Moore, Susan 114–15, 122; see also In the Cut (novel) Mulvey, Laura 27–8, 102–3

pornography 38, 100–107, 111, 113, 121–3, 133, 145 rape 40, 41, 46, 48, 72, 131 Réage, Pauline 40, 133 Real Young Girl, A 112 Red Road 37, 46, 52–3, 57–62, 65, 68–70 Reik, Theodor 13–14, 25, 35 reproduction 24, 55, 118 Restuccia, Frances 40 Romance 37, 91, 99–114, 131 Royle, Nicholas 148 Russell-Watts, Lynsey 101, 131

Nebenmensch complex 41–3, 85 Night Porter, The 18–19 Nobus, Dany 18–19 obscenity 38, 100, 107–14, 119 Palmer, Tim 91–2 Passion of Joan of Arc, The 51–2 Peakman, Julie 4, 8–9, 26 Penner, Todd 47–8, 52, 54 performance 16, 24–6, 29, 61, 82, 90, 131, 134–8 perversion 4–15, 20, 27, 29, 32–4, 39, 61–2, 72, 80, 83–4, 119, 133, 141, 145, 152 Phallologocentrism and phallocracy 17, 21, 39, 68–9, 81–3, 103–14, 140–41 Phillips, Anita 3–4, 61 Piano, The 116, 141 Piano Teacher, The (film) 38–42, 72–3, 78, 80, 85, 89 Piano Teacher, The (novel) 18, 79; see also Jelinek, Elfriede pleasure principle 6–7, 94; see also Eros Polan, Dana 115–16 167

Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von 4–5, 11, 14, 23–6, 30–31, 35–7, 55, 112–13, 133, 135, 143, 145 Sacher-Masoch, Wanda von 31 sacrifice 45–8, 52–4, 58–70, 73, 78, 109 Sadean fantasy 48–50, 54–5; see also de Sade, Marquis sadism 4–6, 15, 23–4, 27, 48–50, 130; see also de Sade, Marquis sadomasochism 5–6, 14–18, 29–31, 38, 50, 72, 85–90, 100, 112, 134–6 Sartre, Jean-Paul 35 Scarry, Elaine 95 Secretary (film) 20, 37, 72–90, 131, 134–6 Secretary (short story) 85–6; see also Gaitskill, Mary semiotic chora 91–6 Silverman, Kaja 13–14, 33, 132–4, 144 Sleeping Beauty 32–5, 37, 133 Sobchack, Vivian 141, 144 Sontag, Susan 53–4, 133 spectres and spectrality 87, 146–9

Female Masochism in Film

specularity 2–3, 17, 94, 103–6, 127, 140–41 Stevenson, Jack 48 Strong, Marilee 76, 86–7, 93 Studlar, Gaylyn 13, 23–30, 111–13, 133–4 suicide 68–9, 74, 82, 86–7 supersensualism 113–14, 135–6, 143 Sweeney, Robin 15

Vander Stichele, Caroline 47–8, 52, 54 Venus in Furs 11, 29–31, 35–6, 133, 135, 143; see also Sacher‑Masoch, Leopold von Wheatley, Catherine 131 Williams, Linda 101, 104–5, 113 Williams, Linda Ruth 102 Wilson, Emma 101, 111

Thanatos 7, 113; see also death drive Thompson, Bill 14

Žižek, Slavoj 36–40, 63, 125 Zupančič, Alenka 48–50, 64, 67–9

uncanny 84, 148–9

168