Rogueish
01/21/12
Thinking further about Mark’s review of Shame, he’s right to point out the representation of New York as non-place, but this doesn’t strike me as very interesting in itself, nor does the film manage to say much of interest about non-places. It did remind me, though, of a much more interesting set of images of non-places, Larry Sultan’s series of photographs The Valley, about which I wrote some years ago.
In the words of Foucault, sex is boring
12/17/11
Steve McQueen’s Shame is a porn film with slightly less explicit sex. I mean that structurally: all the woman in the film (with one partial exception) are, as in porn fantasy, immediately compliant and sexually available, and the sex scenes all have the stylized, athletic look of porn. It’s possible that this is intentional, and the film is representing the world as it appears to its sex-addict protagonist, Brandon. But the pornographic superficiality extends beyond the sex scenes themselves; the presentation of Brandon’s boss’s incompetent attempts to chat-up women are as broad as a Saturday Night Live sketch, and the romantic chatter on Brandon’s attempted date is equally trite. So if the superficiality of the film is intentional, it’s difficult to see what it represents except that the world itself is superficial; and that is, itself, a rather superficial message. The film seems to be structured around a division between the anonymous sex that Brandon has, and the genuine human connection he wants but is incapable of, both sides of which are presented simplistically - and the division is what enables this oversimplification.
Sex is boring because it is a cypher: the word “sex” doesn’t signify anything determinate. This or that particular sexual encounter may be boring or interesting depending on its specific determinations; but it’s just those determinations that are missing from Shame.
