Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011)

(Shame is an important film to Christian and me.)


First, spoiler alert: not even a generous view of Michael Fassbender's (famed) penduluming semi-flaccidity can rescue Shame from being the most un-erotic film (tangentially) about sex. To be sure, for the casual porn viewer, there are scenes here to which you can jack off (with satisfying results), but at the end of it, your libido would have undergone the most rigorous examination it had ever had the misfortune of going through. And in its wake: shame.

Or should there be? The film seems to be adamant in its distant, almost clinical treatment of sexual addiction, taking great pains to show that it is complex (it doesn't only happen to hideous pariahs), that the "normal people" against which it is premised is as precarious a classification as the fiction of our everyday performances. In fact, left on his own, Brandon (Fassbender) would have lived through life a happy, functional man: filling his office hard drive with porn, jacking off every chance he gets, and fucking with whores like they're going to be contraband tomorrow. Chances are, Brandon's last breathe is going to coincide with the stirring convulsion of orgasm. Show me a luckier man. Hmm? Show me. Absent any moralizing gaze or institutional expectations, anyone will be hardpressed to ascribe any inherent tragedy in such a life.

"I want your love. I want your love." Weh.

But childhood has a way of sneaking up on you. Enter his sister Sissy (Carrie Mulligan), whose presence we first encounter as a languid voice trapped in Brandon's answering machine, one which he readily, habitually switches off. When she finally materializes inside Brandon's cold, sterile bachelor's pad, he senses an intruder (with a penchant for 70s disco music) and grabs a baseball bat. He finds Sissy bathing in the comfort room, a hitherto private space where much of the film's pivotal sequences will occur. The anthem that scores their first encounter is almost, well, naked in its point:


(These diegetic commentaries litter the film. Early on, as Brandon stares absentmindedly during a meeting, his boss rattles off, "I find you disgusting. I find you inconsolable," while quoting "cynics" for a marketing pitch. In the immortal words of Dr. Tope, there you go.)

Cum face, in porn parlance.

The narrative will eventually hint at an unhappy, perhaps abusive childhood for the two. In a message to Brandon before another suicide attempt, Sissy's recorded voice reminds him that they are not "bad people," they just came from a "bad place," while the screen explodes with a cacophony of bouncing flesh - Brandon's and two prostitutes' - in a rumbunctious bout of sad, desperate lovemaking. Cut to Brandon's face, broken, on the verge of a breakdown, in so much pain.


Sissy's most naked long shot, meanwhile, finds her fully clothed and onstage, singing a slow, gut-wrenching version of the typically exuberant New York, New York. There's no escaping the vulnerability and nostalgia in Sissy's voice, successfully communicating, to my mind, a lifetime's worth of ache. Toward the end, when the shot cuts to Brandon's face as he tries to blink back tears, it is clear that she is talking to him, that New York, where the film is set, is as much a place where they now find themselves in as a place, really, of escape.

Not Cubao.

This private language, at times unarticulated, would peek in between the cussing and seeming disregard, the cariño brutal school of lovin'. On the night she first arrives, he finds her discarded boa and sniffs it. While waiting for the train in the subway, he plays around with her "vintage" hat and admonishes her to stop, quite literally, teetering on the edge. Finally, the level of nudity this relationship endures suggests a kind of superlative, if not uneasy, intimacy.

And so we realize, as we ought to, when dealing with addictions, that these people are damaged, that they have wounds that they are constantly dousing with the balm of sex, for Brandon, and love, for Sissy. This is psychology at its most simplistic, but it is also the tightrope on which Shame's rationale rests, and attempts to cross. The nuance here comes in the acting of both Fassbender and Mulligan, in the liminal vacuum that their childhoods have left, in their respective attempts to confront it.


This  sequence, for instance, caps off Brandon's downward spiral, an unraveling that came - that indeed was pushed - by a thwarted attempt at a "normal" sex life, when he purged his pad of all pornography and went out with a co-worker. From harmless masturbation and business-like arrangements with whores, he sheds all manner of subtlety and tries to pick up a woman with lewd language. He even finds himself in a gay club (a dangerous trick, however, correlating the space with the final alarming straw).

He discovers Sissy's suicide attempt the morning after his sex binge, a punctuation that shakes his previously unflinching foundation. The level of control Brandon has over things at this point has been a contentious topic for Christian and me. It's true that he drops to the ground in a heap of sobs, a scene that rings with absolutely no triumphalist note; that the ending mirrors the opening, pointing toward a cyclic incarnation of events; that Shame successfully explains why there ought to be no Shame, for people have reasons and there is nothing that requires them to explain themselves.


I would've ended the film at a more ambiguous point, but it seems as if Shame wishes to be decisive, about pain and our powerlessness in its wake. There is an accounting here of reasons and stories: from the resonance of childhood to an adult claim at goodness. For Brandon at least, to demand correction at this point is not only futile and unfair, it would  negate all his attempts at humanity, at living, which in itself is a strike at the sad, debilitating incapacity, and reason enough to not feel shame.