When Sex is all There Is

SHAME, directed by the other famous British McQueen (Steve, the not dead one), is an NC-17 rated indie-drama released this weekend in theaters after doing the festival rounds this year, during which it was honored with the various awards and recognitions that are customarily bequeathed onto the latest critical darlings; awards doled out at times indiscriminately, like a West Virginian trailer park mom going at her daughters' school cloths with the brand spanking new Bedazzler she requested, and received, for Christmas. But unlike a movie such as PRECIOUS, which perniciously gathers and maintains it's award momentum through sheer white/liberal guilt, SHAME deserves at least some of its recognition.

Coyly framing the life of a man who can't stop jerking off at work, and banging women after work, McQueen beguiles us to consider our own transgressions--perhaps not as numerous or flagrant as the film's Brandon (a role performed by two stars, both up-and-cummin, Michael Fassbender and his wang), but transgressions still. As they say, let he who is without sin throw the first Palm d'Or. SHAME is uncomfortable in a good way, because while we can surely censure Brandon for his actions, and while we recognize the pain and alienation that underlie his behavior, we can't quite outwardly castigate his entire existence. We feel sorry for him, yes, but in the process envy him -- he is, surely, the playboy many of us wish we could be, even briefly at night, tucked into bed with a box of Kleenex safely on our nightstand. And isn't is a bit sweet when he offers his sister juice or makes small talk with a colleague on their first date? Is there a normal guy somewhere underneath all this?

Granted, there is an inclination to fault SHAME for it’s meandering brand of plotting, distinct lack of focused energy, and something of a narrative fizzle -- the movie just sort of happens, you aren't delivered anywhere, and we end pretty much where we began. And while it could be said that this is a bit underplotted or simplistic, I'd counter that any slightness within SHAME’s storyline fits well the striations of the film’s overall theme – for truly, and importantly, there really is no story to tell. Brandon’s addiction chains him to circles and circles of pleasureless pleasure, but doesn’t leave room for the very stuff of high drama – the emergence of a True Love, the Heartbreak of Losing Her, the Glory of Her Return. There is no magic in sex, when sex is all there is. Similarly, the little we know about Brandon (born in Ireland, “from” New Jersey, successful, wealthy, neat) is all we really need to know—he is merely a cipher for his addiction, which is clearly the star of the show. Without a doubt SHAME's greatest strength is McQueen's tremendous restraint as a filmmaker and screenwriter, providing only the specific bleeps of information we need to hang on but allowing the muddiness of this Rorschach to retain its projective attributes. Scenes are long and laborious, meticulous unhurried, probably to the point of annoyance for the casual film-goer (and to at least one of the people I attended the film with). When a long tracking shot follows Brandon on a midnight jog through midtown Manhattan, the scene ends without consequence--no furtive sexual encounters, no mugging, no suicidal running-into traffic (to just imagine a few of the more bathetic Hollywood scenarios we may expect to transpire during something like this). You may wonder "what's the point" but a scene like that turns out to be my favorite in the film. In exposing the tiredness and lulls in Brandon's life as flagrantly as it exposes his sexual energy and dick, I realize how little sex means when that is all there is. He's not running-from or running-towards anything in a half-baked psychoanalytically emotional sense, because there is nothing else at all. At least that's how it worked for me.

Despite this meritorious restraint, the shame of SHAME is that its faux-enlightened disengagement from morality, its refusal to judge, comes off as more of a trick of the indie-film-as-essay and less a stance of the filmmaker. Not that films need to be political, but this film takes pains to be almost caustically neutral. Where is the titular shame anyway?--is it Brandon's when he's crying in the rain? Is it ours when we see him debase himself to--God Lord!--is that a gay club he is going to?? Is that anal sex they are having?? Are those...Lesbians?!?!?! Or is the shame his sister, intoning the "bad place" she and Brandon come from while the movie intimates, just barely, that maybe their sibling relationship isn't quite "right"? Donde estas, Shame?

It would be quite a trick if McQueen had the shamelessness to pull it off. Instead even in such an ethical vacuum, story creeps in to restrain such unwieldy emotional intangible into the digestive biscuit of filmic trope. First married woman, then his friend's women, then gays, then threesomes...it surely will go on and on. But by mounting his 'crimes' in such an arch and fabricated way, McQueen creates a pat narrative bridge even in a film where he shuns such easy connections. We don't need to see Brandon crying or his sister with slashed wrists, because if the film does anything it provides us with enough information about how these characters feel "deep down"--the suicidal bits and all the crying seem both redundant and overstated, ironically cheapening the depth of the characters' despair. Maybe it's a good act break, but why does SHAME need acts at all?

I suppose that's sort of an anti-film conclusion--film as entertainment, film as art. But SHAME for me was a human study that is refreshingly antihuman, we are a tangle of insecurities after all, and probably not much more than that. David Cronenberg reaches for the same straws with his psychobabble (and by my estimation, horrible) film A DANGEROUS METHOD, also out now. But, as always, SHAME proves actions speak louder than words (Sorry, Sigmund). It would be a real shame, but maybe there just is no escape from our addictions--maybe it's just who we are? If so, that would be the scariest thing of all.