Asked to show my concern for a victim of sex addiction, I am
minded to reply with the guy who
wrote: “Would it be heartless to suggest that, in
a crisis-riddled world, this is one problem we should not spend too
much time worrying about?” Steve McQueen’s Shame — which,
as someone once said of the London Sunday Times’s
“Culture” section, seems to have been named for the thing they left
out — is a movie about sex addiction, but its hero, played by
Michael Fassbender, is not really an effective poster-boy for the
disease, if disease it be. That’s because the movie is directed at
cinéastes and not those contemplating their year-end
charitable giving. You can also tell this by the omission by the
authors — Mr. McQueen co-wrote the screenplay with Abi Morgan —
of a plot. Instead, they have focused with a laser-like intensity
on the visual correlates of its hero’s highly interesting
affliction.
Thus the film begins with a long take in which Brandon,
Mr. Fassbender’s character, very slowly rouses himself from what is
apparently meant to be a state of post-coital lassitude in a pose
which recalls that of a less discreet Mars in Botticelli’s “Mars
and Venus” — except that here there is no classical context, no
Martian back-story in armorial form, no youthful satyrs playing
with the armor — and, above all, no Venus. Instead, our
immediately subsequent but unaccustomed glimpses of Brandon in a
state of nakedness doing things that are normally done alone,
including a shot from behind of his urinating and another (picked
up from American Beauty) through the shower’s glass door
of his masturbating, are meant to stress the state of isolation his
condition may be supposed to entail. This is further reinforced by
a female voice leaving a desperate message on his answering machine
which he ignores as he goes about his morning routine.
Throughout the rest of the film, Brandon experiences his
ups and downs along with sexual encounters of various kinds and we
are left in no doubt that, whatever we may have thought beforehand,
sex addiction is definitely not a barrel of laughs. Particularly
sad is the fact that his obsession is so emotionally barren and so
isolating that he eschews intimacy even with his vulnerable and
psychologically fragile sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), who is the
voice on the answering machine and who invites herself to come and
stay with him in his Manhattan bachelor pad. But what
happens as a result either of Brandon’s sex addiction or
of his attempts to shut his sister out, emotionally if not
physically, the film does not (quite) tell us, any more than it
tells us anything about the origins either of Brandon’s mania or of
Sissy’s delicacy.
One or two things of consequence happen, perhaps, but the
consequences are omitted as Mr. McQueen’s camera draws back and
leaves its broken-off story to be completed — or not, as the case
may be — by the viewer. Brandon’s fitful attempts to break out of
his self-imposed prison into narrative, which is to say into
“relationships,” whether with his sister or with a co-worker
(Nicole Beharie) whom he takes on an awkward date (in the
non-“sex-worker” sense) are his way of trying to break his
addiction’s hold on him at the same time they are the film’s way of
apparently attempting to break into its own narrative. His
inability to make any genuinely human contact therefore becomes the
counterpart of the film’s inability or unwillingness to give us the
ending, and with it the meaning, that we want.
The result is rather similar to what Mr. McQueen attempted
in his previous film, Hunger, about the IRA hunger-striker
Bobby Sands, which also starred Mr. Fassbender. “Hunger” and
“Shame” are both human feelings wrenched from the narrative context
in which we normally experience them. In other words, there has to
be some kind of story to explain these feelings, at least in their
non-trivial manifestations. We naturally want to know why
these people are subjecting themselves to the sorts of sufferings
they do, but Mr. McQueen supplies only superficial explanations or
no explanations at all, lest these should interfere with the purity
of the emotional experience he wants to show us. In doing this, he
all but strips his characters of their humanity, making them
vessels of animal feeling in a way that is a kind of explanation of
its own. These are people in flight from their humanity. If there
were a reason for that flight, they would presumably have failed at
it.
There is something admirable about this purity, just as
there is something (presumably) still pleasurable about the sex
acts Brandon engages in with himself, with multiple women, and with
at least one man in the course of the film, though in neither case
are these things gratifying to a viewer with more than an aesthetic
interest in the movie. The best bit of the film is when Miss
Mulligan, revealing a hitherto undiscovered talent, sings Kander
and Ebb’s pop anthem “New York, New York” from the Scorsese film as
a meditative, piano-accompanied ballad, and we see a single tear
running down Brandon’s cheek. Mr. McQueen gives us the whole song,
too, and not just the payoff, rather as earlier he had eschewed the
usual cinematic coyness (which he mostly sticks to in the sex
scenes) while depicting her in the shower. It’s a brave and even
slightly shocking defiance of cinematic convention and audience
expectation, but it is a defiance, like the truncated narrative,
only for its own sake. You have to like movies too much to like
this movie or even, I would say, to consider it worth
seeing.
