I got a tweet the other day, from Zander Vyne, asking if I’d seen the rape scene in ‘Irreversible.” I hadn’t, so I watched it. Before you rush out to watch the movie, let me warn you, it is about as disturbing as film ever gets and I am unconvinced of its value.
Yes, I understand the reverse narrative structure of the film is a discourse on the payoff of sex and violence in cinema. Yes, I understand that the studied and realistic way the scene was filmed could be seen as a challenge to films that portray rape as bearable, palatable, even titillating. I get all that. But at the end of the day, I had to ask myself what I knew or what questions I had after seeing the movie that I did not have before. The answer was: nothing.
I wanted to consider the fictionalization / dramatization of abjection and whether it has much value as a mode of communication. There is a quartet of four films that, taken in pairs, intrigues me as to this issue.
Like “Irreversible,” Lars Von Trier’s “Antichrist” is also spectacularly violent and sexually explicit (for non-porn). In “Irreversible” two men set out to take revenge for the rape and savage beating of a woman they both love. In “Antichrist” a husband and wife work through the tragedy of the death of their young son, for which they are, to some extent, to blame. They both contain, as their subject matter, excruciating human experiences. In both cases, the remedy adds phenomenally to the trauma. As a narrative journey, it’s no different from Romeo and Juliette or Hamlet or Oedipus. Tragedy piled on top of tragedy.
Both films set out to disturb their audiences, but to what purpose? The truth is that catastrophe often breeds more of itself. This sad, human truth is played out every night on the evening news. What purpose is served by dramatizing a disturbing but woefully common occurrence?
I’m not suggesting fictional narratives need to be parables. There are superficial parables to be taken from both films. Revenge is almost never as satisfying as you think it will be, it never restores what you’ve lost and almost always diminishes your own humanity. Toddlers require almost constant supervision. If you’re a mental health professional, never attempt to treat the people you love.
I found both films excruciating to watch, but for me, the difference in narrative value between “Irreversible” and “Antichrist” has to do with the more complex questions I’m left with. For me, just being left with the reflection that the world contains some awful people who do awful things isn’t enough. Nor is the recursive notion that telling a story in reverse gives it more redeeming value. It’s not enough. However, “Antichrist” left me pondering a few things: why do we find sex the ‘unforgivable’ distraction? Why is it that, on the order of excuses for inattention, it seems the most despicable? Why do we valorize and assume maternal love above all others? Why does maternal child abuse seem so much more horrific, unfathomable, indecipherable?
I’m not suggesting that ‘Antichrist’ is even close to perfect (or even justified in its excesses). It is a very peculiar film that reflects Von Trier’s own odd thinking on a literal embodied connection between sex, reproduction, motherhood, etc. And towards the end, it gets annoyingly mythological and hyperbolic. To my mind, Von Trier could have exercised significantly more critical self-editing. Nonetheless, I was left, after the disturbing experience of seeing the film, with some compelling ideas to think about and I’m not sure I would have thought about them quite as deeply had the film been less disturbing.
Similarly, I have recently seen “Twelve Years A Slave” and have been pondering my reaction to it in relation to “Beloved.” I don’t want to debate production values. “Twelve Years” is an incredibly well shot, impeccably acted film. The violence in the film, although not on the order of either of the two films discussed earlier, is profoundly disturbing to anyone with any an iota of morality. I can’t make a call on whether it is excessive, but the person I was viewing the movie with decided he couldn’t watch any more of it about halfway through. The violence is graphic and realistic, as is the unrelenting barbarism.
“Beloved” didn’t have the same budget and was not as well made. It’s now showing its age and some people have, I think unfairly, disparaged Oprah Winfrey’s performance and suggested that her enthusiasm to champion the visual retelling of Toni Morrison’s book of the same name, blinded her to some critical considerations. The film is reasonably faithful to the story structure of the novel, although it lacks the poetics of the language Morrison was writing in, and does attempt to iron out the lack of linearity in the storytelling.
Both “Twelve Years” and “Beloved” take an unflinching look at the realities of slavery. They both set out, like many of the best stories dramatizing historical fact, to inform through the experience of an individual. There is a certain justifiable pressure on any potential audience member to suffer through the relentlessly disturbing scenes in both films in order to honour the truth of that history. And yet, to what end?
Perhaps I overestimate people’s imaginative capacities. But I once had occasion to visit the sub-basement of a recently closed old prison. It was more than 100 years old, and they had these stone isolation cells in the basement with nothing but a rusting link set into the floor and a bucket in a corner. I knew, without a doubt, that every possible violent, degrading, dehumanizing act that could be done, had been done to the people held in those cells. I didn’t need a movie or even a story to tell me this. I just knew. Unbridled power always results in barbarity. Always. It is a fact of human nature that some of us will, given no limits, indulge in whatever level of cruelty we can get away with.
For all its incredible cinematography, its brilliant acting, and its scenes of violence and degradation, “Twelve Years” did not tell me anything I did not already know. It served me up almost two hours of dreadful tragedy, but informed me of nothing. It left me with no lingering and complex questions.
“Beloved” on the other hand, not only did the job of serving history, but it also left me pondering universal questions that were broader than that particular piece of history. How do individuals with horrendous pasts tell themselves their own story? What happens to love or familial bonds when they are so completely out of your control? Who are you when you do not own yourself? What constitutes a violation of the spirit?
These questions, like the questions I was left with after “Antichrist” go far beyond the telling of a single, tragic event. Even beyond the experience of one group of people in one time, in one place. It is not that those histories don’t deserve to be honoured in accurate storytelling. But their relevance as more than historic artifacts or contemporary revisitation gives them a lasting and universal value. I think they serve to force a personalization, an ownership of those issues, which transcends the brittle idea of an individual or a group having the ownership of certain tragedies.
I believe in the value of disturbing narratives. I don’t require happy endings or some gratifying redemption in every story. But there is a profound difference between a story that says ‘this is my pain, witness it’ and one that says ‘this is our pain, understand it.’
I haven’t seen “Twelve Years a Slave” yet but I agree with what you say about Beloved and it remains one of my favorite narratives for precisely those reasons.
Especially with regards to slavery in America, I’ve always wondered if there would be any value in concurrently exploring the lives and histories of those who inflict barbarism. I feel that there are a lot of questions to be asked/answered in that regard. I am a white person from south Alabama and have witnessed a sort of inherited violence which doesn’t seem to have been curtailed except maybe in the most recent generation (likely due to the influence of mass media, ironically).
I think we need to confront these sorts of things free of the Anglocentric marketing tactics to which most people have been subjected. If we really wanted to understand violence, we’d need to do a more thorough exploration of the source. I hate to say it, but I think we are lacking an honest perpetrator narrative.
Please don’t think I am in any way downplaying the need to understand how violence affects victims, but speaking as a victim myself, I have begun to wonder about the perpetrator’s motives. What goes wrong in a person or system to cause this sort of thing? We could slap a “The Patriarchy” sticker on it and call it a day, but it is clearly much more complex.
I feel like this has been explored in many WWII narratives, but not so much with slavery in the American south. I think we’re taught the economic reasons. Perhaps the issue lies with the fact that many of the perpetrators in this narrative occupy the similar or equivalent social positions that they did 200+ years ago. It’s not something a lot of people talk about, but many of the plantation homes in the south are still inhabited by descendants of the original families who lived there. What does this say about us?
Yes, it’s really about Joyce’s statement that he sought to find the universal in the particular. He was writing about different aspects of the human mind, but the principle is applicable here.
Antichrist is intolerably bleak. I found it rather dispiriting afterwards. But you don’t go to LVT for lighthearted tales of ordinary blandness.
Having only viewed bits and pieces of these films, I can only comment on what I saw, and that is to say that the scenes from Antichrist and Irreversible set out to demystify and deglamorize violence.
Takashi Miike uses similar methods, but he leaves it to the audience to imagine the darker, grittier, gratuity of violence.
The object is to aggravate the viewer by cheating the viewer out of the implied outcome.
The implied outcome might be a beautiful rape scene, or a glorious slaughter of the villain…but, what the audience gets is an uncompromising look into the ugliness of their own expectations.
Such movies force introspection and analysis of the collective….as well as the personal….human psyche.
I agree with you about the first. I don’t think they all succeed in doing that. Certainly, Irreversible did not do that for me. Perhaps I’m just not that mystified about violence. I’ve seen it up close and personal – appalling violence. I know what it looks like. And I’m pretty sure, after the first scene in Irreversible, no one is expecting a ‘beautiful rape scene,’ if there is such a thing, so I doubt anyone is cheated out of that particular implied outcome.
Perhaps my expectations of ugliness don’t surprise me. In life or in film. But in life, I don’t expect it to mean anything. In fictional narrative, I demand something for my emotional investment. Otherwise, it’s just as nonsensical as the evening news.
I found this an interesting, measured post, and I appreciate your sharing it. One reason (for all of the aforementioned) is that I have almost invariably avoided watching artistic work that includes violence, especially sexual violence, due to the personal triggers and profound psychological disturbance I have experienced in doing so. That is, the degrees of such have seemed to me to supersede the kind of contemplative value I may derive from such witnessing (as you describe here) for me personally at this time.
In the past, this resulted in a mostly unconsciously-driven anger in me that such things were even portrayed and that people watched them. A process has since taken place in me that has resulted in my understanding the degree of personal unconsciousness and reactivity represented in this anger (as opposed to objective understanding, which of course I thought it was, as we often do if/when unconscious motivations are acting in us). Thus, my point in making this comment is that while I still defer to what it feels okay in my own personal process for me to subject myself to in relation to perceived value I may derive from it, I appreciate reading a (what I found) grounded, thoughtful account of what some may find productive in witnessing subject matter as you discuss above. Indeed, the kinds of universal questions to which you allude and their connection to human action and historic tragedy seem profoundly worth considering to me, and I can see how disturbance, as I interpret your describing it here, could elicit or even demand contemplation of them. Thank you.
Robin, I appreciate your invocation of questions around the perpetration of violence and its motivations. I see particular phenomena and considerations as very relevant to this and do wish we as a species would examine it more carefully and closely. I see this as also alluded to a bit in RG’s post in the mention that revenge almost never feels as satisfying as one (or a part of oneself) suspects it will and that catastrophe may seem to breed more of itself. As I personally see it, the tendency to write people off as “criminals,” “animals,” “monsters,” etc., when they perpetrate violence, while perhaps understandable as an immediate reaction, does not seem the most helpful approach. What it does, it seems to me, is help a part of our unconscious feel better, as if to say, “Thank goodness I’m not like them. They’re so very separate from me. I will just write them off as perfectly different from me and go back to feeling okay about myself” (even when, ironically, sometimes judgement comes most fervently to the very degree that we unconsciously don’t feel okay about ourselves). The perspective in me is that ultimately we are not separate, and any aggression or violence we commit, we are invariably doing to ourselves as well. This acutely affects how I see the phenomenon of violence, as well as the best ways to curtail it.
I have probably seemed to go on quite long enough here! I just wanted to say I appreciate your sharing, RG, and thank you also to the commentors before me for what I found also interesting sharings of perspectives.
I appreciate your sharing your feelings on this, and I’m glad to see it generated a lot of discussion. I have to admit to having a very bad initial reaction to watching Irreversible, because it did set off a very particular flashback for me, but I got over that, and watched the whole thing. Mostly because I really wanted to see if, in the end, the demand for an audience to ‘suffer through it’ had any insightful payoff. For me it didn’t. For others, perhaps it does.
I don’t have a problem with tolerating high levels of discomfort when watching or reading fictional/semi-fictional works as long as I feel I’ve gained some insight in recompense. When I honestly feel I’ve had my sensibilities assaulted for nothing, it makes me angry.