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Shame opens with the protagonist Brandon (Michael Fassbender) lying in bed half-naked with one hand under the sheets. Immediately, one of those faux Confucius sayings came to mind, “Man who goes to bed with hard problem, wakes up with solution in hand.”
After reading some reviews on Shame, I had no compelling desire to watch the movie but was finally persuaded when it was put to me that: “It’ll never be screened in our part of the world, and even if it were, it’d be heavily edited.”
Aware that the main theme was about sexual addiction, my initial reaction was, “And so?” After all, I tasted and survived the 70’s first hand and besides, I had just re-read the Ming Dynasty classic erotic novel, Jinping Mei (“The Plum in the Golden Vase”); what could be so engaging about priapism that has not been said or explored?
Brandon is thirty-something of Irish descent with uncontrollable sexual urges; he masturbates compulsively – in bed, the toilet, at home and at work; he pays for sex and is always logged on to porn sites. Ruggedly handsome he is taciturn, aloof and radiates sexual energy. Popular with colleagues at work, he seems to have only one end in mind – achieving orgasm. He lives alone in his smart, neat and compact flat; his fridge is empty save for a few bottles of beer; he eats Chinese takeaway from its paper box.
Then his sister Sissy (Carrey Mulligan) moves in, disrupting his regular routine. She invites Bandon to the lounge bar where she has a gig and he turns up with his boorish boss, one of his buddies from work. Sissy’s melancholic interpretation of “New York, New York” with undertones of defeat and resignation, so different from the usual triumphant interpretation of that familiar song, brings tears to Brandon’s eyes.
His married boss makes a play for Sissy, beds her (on Brandon’s bed). When Brandon confronts Sissy, “How could you have slept with my boss? Did you not see his wedding band?” She responds limply, “We are not bad people; we just come from a bad place.”
The proximity of living together ratchets up the tension between brother and sister; one morning, Sissy barges into the bathroom as Brandon is having “an intimate moment with himself,” even as his laptop, on the kitchen counter, is hooked to a live porn site. To her offer of help, Brandon retorts, “How are you helping me? ...You come in here and you’re a weight on me…you’re just dragging me down…how are you helping me? You can’t even clean up after yourself…” And then comes the barb, “Stop playing the victim…” Poignantly, Sissy confesses her greatest fear is that he will never want to see her again and plaintively reminds him of her affection for him, “You are my brother…” This simple dialogue sums up the “goods” the siblings have on one another.
Regardless, Brandon demands that Sissy quit his apartment and life. That same evening he goes on an orgiastic binge. He talks dirty to a girl at a bar, puts his fingers up her crotch, provokes her boyfriend till he beats Brandon up; the doorman at a young peoples’ singles club denies him entry; he follows a guy into a gay club to have sex and rounds the night off with two hookers, ménage a trois.
All this while Brandon has been ignoring desperate calls from Sissy. With his “hunger” sated, on the subway home, intuitively he realises something is amiss; dashes back to the apartment to find Sissy has slit her wrists. Previous scars confirm that this is not her first attempt at suicide. Upon regaining consciousness in the hospital Sissy mouths him a term of endearment: “Shithead.”
On the street, Brandon falls on his knees and has a fit: is it an epiphany or is he venting some pent-up emotion of – pain, anger, or frustration? The last (as in the first) scene is of him eying a woman in the subway car – is he or is he not on the prowl again? Only his therapist – or priest – will know for sure.
Taxi zum klo (Taxi to the toilet) made by the late director (Rainer) Fassbinder and released just over thirty years ago in 1980 also dealt with the similar theme of sexual addiction (albeit gay). Taxi, set in pre-unification Berlin (West), seemed lighter and more palatable only because the characters involved were open and casual with their emotions; sly humour and a love interest undercut the serious subject of sexual addiction; less ambitious in scope, Fassbinder merely sought to make a passing comment on the pervasive, unfettered hedonism of the 70’s.
In those pre-AIDS days, sexual addiction had yet to be recognized as an affliction, and was seen as a personal proclivity and an expression of sexual appetite and vigour. But recently, Michael Douglas, David Duchovny, and Tiger Woods, celebrities from Hollywood and the sporting world have openly confessed their sexual addiction and sought treatment. Subsequent media interest and public attention have made this a hot topic of discussion.
Carl Jung had this insight that, “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” Seen in this light, we are left wondering what bad things (“from a bad place”) could have had happened to Brandon and Sissy for them to act the way they do; we want to know what drives Brandon to seek intimacy through sex; and as for Sissy – is affirming self-worth the cause of her continual quest for attention? At one time or another, all of us would have partaken of substances or indulged in activities in order to bring relief from pain, boredom or some other condition. The essence (and the danger) of addiction is that the habitual use of these substances or activities end up with them controlling or consuming us.
Obsession with sex is not really that different from being hooked on computer games, which in our cyber and consumerist age have joined compulsive shopping, smoking, gambling, and alcoholism on the list of popular and common addictions.
Food and sex are primal human urges and whether conscious or not, director McQueen uses food and how we eat as an allegory on sex, and by extension, intimacy. On a dinner date with a woman from his office, Brandon is awkward; they eat disinterestedly without much gusto and part company with a chaste peck on the cheek. Later, when he tries to bed her in a hotel room he is unable to rise to the occasion though he has no problem with another woman. (Is the director suggesting table manners can be a good gauge for performance in the sack?) We are not sure whether the woman Brandon finally beds is a hooker or some hot chick he has slept with before; probably the former because he does not appear to be the type who returns calls.
The close connection between food, sex and intimacy (in all their various forms and combinations) is a theme that has been visited and explored in such iconic films like, La Grande Bouffe in the 70’s, Babette’s Feast in the 80’s and in the 90’s Like water for chocolate. As these movies articulate, the intimacy between people sharing food and those having sex is different only in degree but not in kind; one set of activity could be done publicly with company, the other normally should be in private; food is a topic we discuss with relish, while sex is, shall we say, a more delicate subject. Eating is a most pleasurable activity for babies but when we grow older, as the hormones start kicking in, sex tends to displace food as the more pleasurable activity; while age is no guarantee of maturity, the desire for food stays with us from infancy to grave.
The ancient Romans at their eating orgies used to induce vomiting so that they could get right back to their feasting couches. Telling in today’s world, bulimia is an eating disorder usually found among young people from rich and privileged backgrounds. Social and pleasurable, eating has its dysfunctional aspect. At one end of the spectrum is anorexia – the denial of food; at the other is gluttony – an over-indulgence of food. Either way, no real pleasure is obtained through eating or food. In a world of abundance, the problem is not where the next meal is coming from but having to decide which banquet table to feast on. However, despite the presence of so much food we can still remain malnourished as the food we take may not be necessarily nutritious or good for us. All this talk about food and eating can just as easily be applied to sex.
It is worth noting that McQueen’s previous (and only other) film is Hunger, based on the life of the IRA Bobby Sands (also played by Michael Fassbender), who organized and mounted a hunger strike in a Northern Ireland prison. The title of McQueen’s current film, Shame, puzzles me; the main actors might have exhibited loss of self-respect for falling short of their own expectations, but I do not detect shame on their part – unless it is the shame of being exposed as the shallow and self-absorbed people that they are. Everyone has, at one time or another, encountered “bad things from a bad place,” but as we all know, what really matters is how we deal with them (bad things) as we find our way out of there (bad place).
Michael Fassbender has turned in a marvellous performance as a haunted and helpless man struggling with his inner demons; his eyes simultaneously express a wide range of emotions that encompass disdain, defiance, and defeat – projecting pride, wilfulness and fear. Shame would have lacked the emotional depth without Carrey Mulligan in her role as the vulnerable sister whose extreme need for attention rivals that of her brother’s sexual addiction. The siblings may hold the answers to their mutually unresolved, painful and dark (implied) past, which frankly by the end of the movie we are ready to throw in the towel and sigh – “I really don’t give a toss.”
At times distressing, even painfully tedious to watch, Shame, with its full-frontal assault and indictment on modern society, made a visceral impact on me that lasted days, which, I vouch, had nothing to do with Michael Fassbender’s taut, wiry body (not gym bought) and his impressive dander (well fluffed) – physical attributes sure to make him the talk of the town and propel him to stardom.
* The Scholar is a baby-boomer who likes to look at life from a phiiosophical, intellectual bent.
