Some films are made. They are made with hard labor and
technical innovation. Some films are born. They are born out of imagination and
passion for cinema. Some just happen. It’s not that they lack innovation; they too
cultivate imagination and passion, both of supreme order. They involve a lot of
hard work. But in the final instance, when we see them, finished and all prepped
up, dangling in the air so as to enter the vision of the audience, nothing else
matters. No consideration, no thinking or speculation come to mind other than
the plain fact of their existence.
Are they the proverbial pure cinema? An act of creation that
perforates the synthetic texture of the medium? Being a homeschooled cynic, I
can’t allow myself to corroborate such naïveté. Perhaps these films are like
dreams that escape analysis. Perhaps they are like stones, which cannot be
turned. We watch these films with the disturbed innocence of a pubertal child.
We don’t understand them, and never should we try, but we have a faint notion
of what’s going on. And don’t tell me you don’t like it.
Shame. That’s the
name of the film that happened to me the other day. It’s about a man in his
thirties, living in New York and clinically addicted to sex, all types of sex, with
others and himself. He rides subway, flirts with women, goes to office,
downloads porn, eats takeaway food, has sex with prostitutes, takes a dump, and
masturbates. His is a bare life strumming to the gushing monotony of secluded
indulgence. The man is alone in his orgasms, alone and frowning, perhaps
irritated, ashamed.
One day he returns home to find his sister waiting. She
wants to stay at his apartment for a few days – not a comfortable arrangement
for a compulsive masturbator. She is a singer at a local jazz club. He visits the
club with his boss to listen her perform. The boss, married and looking for a
vacation, gets all over her in a taxi. He sits next to them, listens to them
making out, moaning and whispering; his face remains stern. They reach home.
The sister retires to his bedroom with the boss. Evicted from his paradise, he
gets out of the apartment and jogs through the empty sidewalks of the city that
never sleeps.
He goes on a date with a beautiful woman from the office.
They rent a hotel room. He can’t get an erection. She leaves. He hires a
prostitute and gets it. He enters her against a floor-to-ceiling window
overlooking the city. In a long shot, their shadow in unison hangs over the
urban traffic of the day.
He tells his sister to leave the apartment. They have a
fight. He goes out and drinks alone in a pub. A young girl approaches. He
flirts with her in a shamelessly direct language. Her boyfriend beats him up.
He wipes his face and follows another man to a gay club. The man goes down on
him; his face remains bruised and merciless. Next time he has brutal sex with
two women, penetrates them from all possible angles, assimilates with them into
a singularity of copulative gyration. His organ moves like a piston, back and
forth, efficient, impassive.
He returns home to find his sister in a pool of blood. She
has cut her wrists. He admits her in a hospital and sits next to her bed for
sometime. He takes the subway. On the train, a woman smiles at him – a knowing
smile. He keeps looking at her. The trains stops. The woman is about to get off.
He keeps looking. Will he or will he not follow her? Or better, will he or will
he not follow himself?
Shame is the most
naked film I have seen in years. Its nakedness presumes a set of contradictory
sensibilities. It is alive yet cold, tactile yet distant, enquiring yet
indifferent. All these contradictions are foregrounded in the big close-ups
that inflate the visual universe of the man and his surroundings. It is a
well-shot film, but that’s not the point. A few minutes into the narrative, the
issues of quality control become redundant.
It opens with a top shot of the man in his bed; he is lying on his back, staring at the ceiling: a vacant gaze. The alarm rings. He waits for something – something more – to happen. It doesn’t. He gets up, all naked, and leaves the frame. The camera doesn’t move. It focuses on the bed, now empty, with wrinkled bed sheet and scattered pillows. The window blinds rattle open to let the morning light in. The name of the film – SHAME – in bold letters appears on the screen and stays there for a while, as if the letters themselves are now lazing on the bed.
The emptiness of the man’s gaze is supplemented by the
emptiness of the bed, and then it is followed by a word, a coded description of
his sexual afterthought. The man embodies his bedroom, its privacy, its
darkness and secrets, its restricted homeliness. He carries it within himself
to everywhere he goes: office, clubs, hotel rooms, whorehouses, everywhere he
can seek pleasure and doom.
Shame does a brilliant job by blurring the difference between the man and his habitation. Even New York, the city he lives in, becomes a cave of his self-gratification, a giant bedroom with zebra lines and traffic signals. Take, for example, the scene of him jogging on the streets at midnight. It is a painstakingly long scene. The camera follows his every step; it runs along with him, smoothly and with compassion. He crosses the shadowy corners, stops at the signals, passes by the reluctantly open shops; the camera stays awake with him, observing, caring for him.
The scene reminds me of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, another film about a man with strong sexual guilt looking for redemption in the dark alleys of urban neurosis. In both films, when the camera tracks the moving objects – the yellow cab in Taxi Driver and the late night jogger in Shame – the tedious, unending travels along the long stretches of empty streets resemble the routine movements of a hand around one’s own member. Futile and effective at the same time, the masturbatory impulse of the man adds to the guilt and shame of his demand for seclusion in physical intimacy.
Yet the film is forgiving to his nakedness, oscillating between sympathy and empathy, looking at his face with awe and wonder. It never leaves him, in no condition, in no distress or dilemma. His being is concentrated in his face, its lack of expression and pain. In matters of crisis, in his most vulnerable nervousness, he turns his face away from us, but still we sense the intensity with which he exercises his sadomasochistic charm.
Just before the final showdown with his sister, we find the
man watching cartoon on TV. The camera is fixed behind him; we can see the back
of his head. His sister enters the room, sits next to him in a cordial mood,
and he, perhaps betraying his rationale, reciprocates.
They initiate a conversation. One word leads to another, and the man asks her to take her own responsibility. “I am trying,” she replies. “Actions count, not words,” he retaliates. He calls her a burden, a dependency. She snaps at him about his sex life. “Whatever,” he says, and leaves the room. All the time, the cartoon plays in the background, out of focus, like a dizzy commentary, a limping metaphor.
In a lesser film more interested in quick resolutions, the
cartoon would be properly visible, most probably at the end of the scene, when
the girl is left alone by her brother to rot in the coldness of irreconcilability.
It would be the easiest way to enhance her desolation: by contrasting it with
the comic relief of animated slapstick.
Shame does just the opposite. By keeping the cartoon out of focus till the very end, it protrudes the irony of human suffering. The cartoon in the background is a synecdoche of the showdown; its incompleteness reinforces the conclusive nature of the clash. It is a point of no return, an emotional cul-de-sac, from where only the dead may dare resurface.
Is this a caution tale then, the film? A tutorial on the ethical consequences of full frontal nudity? A lesson in the requirement of social and familial bonding? A Judeo-Christian spanking of the sexual renegade? I don’t know. In the most enigmatic turn of events, the man is serviced by another man, both bathed in crimson light. Is this a violation? A purgatorial rite? A reference to Pasolini’s Theorem, where sex is the only way to god, revolution, and miracles? I don’t know. Perhaps nothing of the above. Perhaps everything and more. The film never speaks; and it speaks.
[Iman Mitra is my most ancient filmy co-conspirator, a friend for all seasons, an opener of doors, and surely, generations ago, he was a Satyr. Officially, he is completing a doctoral dissertation on (roughly) the emergence and development of Nineteenth century political economy as a discourse. I plan to make him a co-author of this blog, but that will entail a number of existential, political and strategical objections to be overcome!]
