Transgression in Anglo-American Cinema: Gender, Sex and the Deviant Body

By Joel Gwynne

Sexuality within mainstream Hollywood cinema features primarily in comedy or rom-com genres, where lightness of tone permits audience engagement with what would otherwise be difficult affective terrain. Focusing on marginal productions in Anglo-American contexts, this collection explores the gendered dynamics of sex and the body, particularly embodied deviations from normative cultural scripts. It explores transgressions acted through and written on the body, and the ways in which corporeality inscribes gender discourse and reflects cultural and institutional power. Films analyzed include Mysterious Skin (2004), Shame (2011), Nymphomaniac (2013), and Dallas Buyers Club (2013). Navigating queer politics, taboo fantasy, body modification, fetishism, sex addiction, and underage sex, essays problematize understandings of adult agency, childhood innocence, and healthy desire, locating sex and gender as sites of oppression, liberation, and resistance. Ultimately, this collection advocates a discussion of culturally rejected forms of love, desire and sex.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Release date: Apr 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9780231850988

Book preview

Introduction

Queering Heterosexuality in New Transgressive Cinema

JOEL GWYNNE

In its most simple definition, transgression is ‘the act of breaking a law, committing a crime or sin, doing something illegal, or otherwise acting in some manner proscribed by the various forms or institutions of Law in societies, whether secular or religious, all of which have histories and which themselves are mutable, self-translating’ (Wolfreys 2008: 3). By this definition, parking illegally is clearly transgressive, and yet any claim to political subversion and subcultural rebellion made by such an act would undoubtedly be absurd. What constitutes social transgression and legal transgression are markedly different, and it is my interest in the former that binds the chapters in this collection. The films discussed in this book concern themselves with crossing social boundaries and moving beyond convention in both narrative form and narrative function. While transgressive art such as Cedric Chambers’ The Prophet or Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography might be understood as that which sets out to consciously flaunt social and cultural mores, to violate tradition and to obfuscate boundaries, it could also be reasonably asserted that transgression can be motivated by a desire to resist oppression and to address inequality; it can be both utopian and democratising in its aims and intentions, if not its operation. The most confrontational and abrasive of films may have utopian imperatives, and as a heterosexual scholar of sexuality studies it is in this spirit that I approach cinema. I hope to find libertarian articulations of queer heterosexuality which celebrate a deviant conception of heterosexuality premised on gender fluidity, non-reproductive sex, the recognition of pleasure as a fundamental human need rather than an expendable luxury, and an understanding of heterosexuality as merely one configuration among others. My interest in taboo representation is also attentive to more practical considerations. Examining controversial images and content within cinema is important in terms of understanding media production more discursively, since it exposes the mechanisms of censorship and regulation and the limits and conventions of media forms; how they are challenged and overturned. This is not always an easy task since serious exploration of sexual taboos is often difficult to find within mainstream cinema. While sex is frequently and fleetingly an aspect of most cinematic narratives regardless of genre, sexuality as a serious subject of enquiry and exploration is almost non-existent in Hollywood.

Genre is a pertinent issue here. Caroline Ruddell has observed that in some respects horror and pornography have ‘similar modes of address and affect, in that they incite particular responses from their audiences’ (2013: 160), while other genres may move the body in less visceral and inflammatory ways. Genre is certainly significant where sexual exploration is concerned. Within mainstream cinema sexuality features primarily in comedy or rom-com genres, where lightness of tone allows audience engagement with what would otherwise, perhaps, prove to be difficult affective terrain. Independent cinema has, of course, been more willing to take sex seriously, commensurate with its status as a genre that marks itself against mainstream audience expectations and textual practices. Both critics and audiences have come to associate independent filmmaking with the empowerment of the marginalised and a defiant stance towards tradition in both culture and cinematic convention. This was, after all, one of the founding tenets of avant-garde movements such as New Queer Cinema and the films of Gregg Araki, Jennie Livingston, Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes – appropriating genres like the teen movie and documentary film, and subverting conventional linear narrative modes to provide queer alternatives to classic cinema. And yet, despite these examples, independent productions do not always demonstrate progressive views of sex. Many, in fact, gesture towards an imperceptibly reactionary understanding of sex as compulsive and usually destructive to self and others, precipitating feelings of shame, humiliation and despair. Sex is frequently understood as a problem that requires intervention, and even in films where intervention is not achieved, it is nevertheless implicitly sought through redemption. Examples of such films include Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011), Thanks for Sharing (Stuart Blumberg, 2012) and Nymphomaniac (Lars von Trier, 2013).

This is a collection of essays which focuses on the ‘problem’ of sex, the gendered dynamics of sex and the body and particularly its deviation from normative cultural and gendered scripts. It works to understand the ways in which corporeality inscribes not only gender discourse but also reflects culture more discursively. In charting the manner in which, for example, bodies refuse to legitimise male power, many of the chapters in this book queer and problematise our cultural understandings of gender boundaries and what constitutes ‘healthy’ sex/sexual identity. Quite frequently, the contributions serve to illustrate how cinema renders the body as a cultural artefact which should be read pluralistically as a site of both gender and political subversion. The chapters figure the transgressive body in a number of ways. While all explore the depiction of the eroticised body in some form, many examine those which are seldom depicted on the cinema screen, particular the naked bodies of men, older women and those in states of extreme weight loss or gain. Eva Krainitzki’s chapter on Notes on a Scandal (Richard Eyre, 2006) draws our attention to the erotic, disruptive potential of ageing femininity, suggesting that if mainstream cinema perpetuates the shame of ageing in its preoccupation with the desirable bodies of young women, then transgressive cinema refuses to define the ageing female body as unwatchable, unsettling the structures of heteronormative desire. Alison Garden’s on Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008) navigates the hypermasculinity of the stripped male form under duress, codified for scopophilic pleasure; while Tom Steward’s chapter on Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999), The Machinist (Brad Anderson, 2004) and Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallee, 2013) positions the underweight male body as not only a subversion of hegemonic masculinity, but also a product and rejection of late capitalism and its excesses. Moving away from the adult body and focusing our gaze upon the stripped child, other chapters are interested in disrupting received cultural understanding of childhood sexual agency, and the power dynamics between children and adults. Amy C. Chambers’ analysis of Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, 2004) demonstrates how film positions abuse as sexual enlightenment, while her examination of Hayley in Hard Candy (David Slade, 2005) illustrates the agentic liminality of teen girls, moving between maturity and innocence. Both of these films join others, such as L.I.E. (2001), Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004) and The Woodsman (Nicole Kassell, 2004), offering contentious representations of relationships between adults and their ‘victims’. Such films provocatively challenge binary constructions of child and child abuser, confront the presumption that children cannot experience sexual desire except as trauma, and advocate a wider discussion of culturally rejected forms of taboo love, desire and sex.

This book hopes to extend the growing body of scholarship on sexuality, gender and the non-normative body in contemporary cinema. Treading similar thematic and conceptual terrain as Robin Griffiths’ British Queer Cinema (2006) and Nick Rees-Roberts’ French Queer Cinema (2014) and Darren Kerr and Donna Peberdy’s Tainted Love: Screening Sexual Perversities (2016) the chapters that follow seek to broaden our discussion of sexual transgression by encompassing gay sexuality but also focusing on queer heterosexuality. The chapters are divided into two sections. The first, ‘Extreme Bodies, Extreme Desire’, examines the body in states of pathology and excess; bodies suffering from extreme and compulsive sexual desire and those under extreme forms of physical duress. Exploring the former, and noting the emergence of a cycle of indie-auteur movies on sexual addiction both in the UK and the US, Alistair Fox’s chapter locates this phenomenon as a consequence of the sexual revolution and, in more immediate terms, the ‘pornographication’ of the media. Through an examination of I Am a Sex Addict (Caveh Zahedi, 2005), Choke (Clark Gregg, 2008), Shame, Thanks for Sharing, Don Jon (2013), Nymphomaniac and Welcome to New York (Abel Ferrara, 2014), this chapter studies what these films reveal about the causes, dynamics and outcomes of sex addiction as this newly foregrounded phenomenon, and speculates on where their representations may be leading.

Remaining on the topic of compulsive sexuality, Mark Featherstone’s chapter navigates the image of the transgressive, hyper-sexualised body in three recent films: Shame, Nymphomaniac and Thanatomorphose (Eric Falardeau, 2012). In analysing these texts, Featherstone suggests that Anglo-American culture has, since the late twentieth century, transmuted into a sadistic, ‘carnographic’ space, as testified by films such as Nymphomaniac in which Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character, Joe, seeks to replace emotional connection with the pursuit of sexual non-relations, culminating in psychological collapse. Likewise, in Shame, the central character, Brandon, is a sex addict who consumes hardcore porn on screen, hires prostitutes and works his way through an endless chain of one night stands with a relentlessness suggestive of Freud’s concept of the death drive. Finally, the author explores the body horror of Thanatomorphose in order to show how the transgressive, drive-based body eventually consumes itself in a carnographic orgy that is representative of the state of Western culture in its contemporary neo-liberal phase.

Moving away from sexual compulsion, the other chapters in this section are concerned with examining bodies under conditions of physical duress. Beginning with the topic of feederism – a practice that eroticises both the act of excessive feeding/eating and subsequent gaining of body fat – Niall Richardson’s chapter considers its representation in the horror film Feed (Brett Leonard, 2006), and argues that while it may appear to be interested in investigating the psycho-sexual dynamics of feederism, it instead codes the excessive fat of the feedee as the most horrific visual element of the text. In this respect, the film fails to offer a nuanced consideration of a transgressive psycho-sexual activity, and instead acts as a vehicle to articulate contemporary fat-phobia.

If Feed fails to politicise non-normative desire and the eroticisation of the extreme body, then Alison Garden’s chapter on Hunger can be positioned as a useful counterpoint. Dramatising the 1981 Long Kesh/Maze hunger strike, Garden asserts that the film exposes a complex nexus of cultural ideas about gender and the transgressive body within an Irish colonial context. The film’s visual vocabulary, she argues, with its focus on somatic suffering, moments of male nudity and lingering shots over disembodied male body parts, inverts the filmic language of the male gaze often used to police and objectify the female body. The chapter suggests that the unclothed male body unsettles the scopophilic pleasures associated with traditional Hollywood cinema, and that by presenting his male leads as eroticised in the first sections of the film, and passively suffering by the conclusion of the film, director Steve McQueen feminises the bodies of these paramilitary prisoners. Garden persuasively argues that the film’s gender ‘transgression’ is thus complexly wrought; Hunger does not sustain genuinely subversive gender politics and McQueen’s appropriation of the feminine works only to absolve his male subjects of their violent pasts.

Tom Steward’s chapter also analyses the suffering, starving male body. Noting that several high-profile male film actors have lost an unhealthy amount of weight in preparation for roles and appeared underweight onscreen, Steward turns his attention to Edward Norton and Brad Pitt in Fight Club, Christian Bale in The Machinist and Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club. He argues that these bodily transformations transgress cultural discourses of male health and beauty, and yet invest the actors with greater cultural standing and celebration. The chapter explores the social transgressions of the actors’ weight loss and evaluates how effective, and yet unhealthy, weight loss manifests itself in the actors’ portrayals of their characters’ social transgressions, demonstrating how these stars’ acts of bodily transgression enhanced their status in the film establishment and acting community.

Turning away from the malnourished body, but remaining on the topic of how gender transgression is an embodied practice, Alice Haylett Bryan focuses on two North American independent films which feature female protagonists carrying out surgical procedures in contemporary interpretations of the mad-doctor horror subgenre: Excision (Richard Bates Jr, 2012) and American Mary (Jen and Sylvia Soska, 2012). This chapter makes a case for the potential of these films to challenge issues of control and heteronormativity in contemporary sex and society, arguing that the depiction of women as surgeons in these works allows for a dissection of white, male, middle-class values. It examines what occurs when women pick up the surgical scalpel and begin to penetrate instead of being penetrated, asking whether this act still operates within a hetero-normative structural logic, or whether it allows for a potential queer interpretation of the penetrating female protagonist. Building on the work of Jack Halberstam, the chapter surveys the representation of violence, control and desire in these films, and asks whether the actions of these women could be seen to present a fissure in the patriarchal heterosexual system.

The second section of this book, ‘Adolescence, Ageing and Queer Agency’, is particularly interested in the polarised periods of youth and old age, and how cinema may be engaged in a process of queering these categories. The queering of childhood is especially significant not least because, as Henry Jenkins asserts, our culture imagines it as a ‘utopian space, separate from adult cares and worries, free from sexuality, outside social divisions, closer to nature and the primitive world, more fluid in its identity and its access to the realms of imagination, beyond historical change, more just, pure, and innocent, and in the end, waiting to be corrupted or protected by adults’ (1998: 3–4). Jenkins goes on to assert that this conception of childhood ‘dips freely in the politics of nostalgia’ (1998: 4). Films which are invested in a ‘politics of nostalgia’ characteristically refuse to challenge the mythology of childhood innocence, and in order to appreciate the agency inherent in transgressive depictions of childhood in independent filmmaking, it is important to begin with an analysis of mainstream cinema.

In his chapter on Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River (2003), Vulcan Volkan Demirkan-Martin asserts that through the figure of child abuse victim Dave Boyle, homosexuality, paedophilia and child abuse are extravagantly conflated in ways which position both Dave and his abusers as monsters. Relating Dave’s monstrosity to the pollution represented by the cellar in which the rape takes place, this chapter defines the space of the cellar as a symbolic space of exclusion. In so doing, Mystic River can be read as typical of a mainstream film which parallels the construction of paedophiles and victims in mass journalism – as inflexibly positioned in the categories of ‘monsters’ and ‘victims’. In this way, the film shores up cultural understandings of childhood as a space to be protected.

Likewise, in my chapter on Thirteen (Catherine Hardwicke, 2003) and Trust (David Schwimmer, 2010), I focus on the manner in which these films appear to be invested in problematising childhood, only to reify notions of childhood innocence and, in doing so, strip their teen protagonists of agency. While ostensibly offering ‘edgy’ representations of girlhood, I argue that these films emphasise the role of parents in protecting children from harm, rendering their depiction of childhood conventional. Furthermore, in attempting to understand the causes of teen transgression, complex cultural and interpersonal determinants such as poverty, familial conditions, curiosity and, perhaps most importantly, desire, give way to a simplistic commitment to the all-encompassing power of the mass media and commodities.

In contrast to these chapters, Amy C. Chambers and Arnau Roig-Mora focus on films which problematise normative depictions of childhood and adolescence. In her chapter on Mysterious Skin, Hard Candy and Little Children (Todd Field, 2006), Chambers highlights how these films can be read as part of cycle of independent films which challenge perceptions of paedophilia by subverting the traditional cinematic discourse of ‘monstrous’ paedophiles and ‘innocent’ child victims. Her chapter analyses how previously under or entirely un-represented figures are given visibility through cinematic form and style. Both children and paedophiles are given a voice that allows for an exploration of the complexities of their character that extends beyond monstrosity and innocence. Paedophiles are presented as sympathetic, caring, broken and even as victims, and children are active figures often with burgeoning sexual awareness. These complex meditations upon child sexuality and agency, and adult culpability are, Chambers argues, indebted to their independent production context that allows for these films’ controversial moral ambiguity. Similarly, in complicating the identity of the queer teenager against heteronormative depictions, Arnau Roig-Mora examines the cinema of Gregg Araki, focusing primarily on his trilogy Totally Fucked Up (1993), The Doom Generation (1995) and Nowhere (1997), but also Kaboom (2010). By following queer teenagers into the new century, the chapter shows how Araki denounces their precarious situation and the structural violence exerted on their queer bodies, as well as how he succeeds in giving a space to minority sexualities often underrepresented in the media.

The final chapter in this section moves away from childhood and adolescence, and instead considers how transgression manifests itself in the depiction of ageing womanhood. This chapter considers Barbara Covett (Judi Dench) in Notes on a Scandal, taking an age/ing studies approach to queer transgression. In the tradition of feminist and queer appropriations of stereotypical portrayals of non-normative female sexuality, such as the older predatory lesbian, it proposes an alternative reading of abject-ageing characters, inviting viewers to identify moments of resistance where normativity is unsettled by queer desire and/or a refusal to age appropriately. Employing Halberstam’s concept of ‘queer failure’, this chapter challenges the notion of ‘unsuccessful’ ageing, casting Barbara as purposefully disgraceful, queer and, thus, transgressive of normative structures.

Bibliography

Griffiths, R. (2006) British Queer Cinema. London: Routledge.

Jenkins, H. (1998) ‘Introduction: Childhood Innocence and other Modern Myths’, in H. Jenkins (ed.) The Children’s Culture Reader. New York, NY: New York University Press, 1–40.

Kerr, D. and D. Peberdy (2016) Tainted Love: Screening Sexual Perversities. London: I.B. Tauris.

Rees-Roberts, N. (2014) French Queer Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Ruddell, C. (2013) ‘Cutting Edge: Violence and Body Horror in Anime’ in F. Attwood, V. Campbell, I.Q. Hunter and S. Lockyer (eds) Controversial Images: Media Representations on the Edge. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 157–69.

Wolfreys, J. (2008) Transgression: Identity, Space, Time. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

PART I

EXTREME BODIES, EXTREME DESIRES

Chapter 1

The New Anglo-American Cinema of Sexual Addiction

ALISTAIR FOX

Film critics have recently been noticing the emergence of a cycle of indieauteur movies on sexual addiction, both in the United States and also in the United Kingdom (sometimes with financial input from European countries such as France and Germany). Indie cinema, which has become a cultural genre and cultural category in its own right, defines itself against mainstream Hollywood cinema in terms of audience expectations, textual practices and genre preferences (see Newman 2011). Being character-centered, often marked by socially engaged realism, frequently inspired by the auteur-director’s personal experience and aimed primarily at festival and art-house audiences, it has much greater freedom to explore marginal and alternative spheres than mainstream Hollywood genre films. Unsurprisingly, therefore, indie-auteur films have been a prime site for the exploration of sexual dysfunction since sex, lies, and videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989), the success of which was instrumental in fuelling the boom of independent filmmaking in the 1990s.

The cycle of sex addiction films I wish to discuss represents a continuation of this preoccupation, updated to reflect awareness of what is being experienced or perceived as a growing personal and social problem. As Tom Shone, an American film critic who writes for The Guardian puts it: ‘For the indie-auteur sphere, the figure of the sex addict has become what the serial killer was for mainstream thrillers in the 1990s: a repeat offender, plot-driver and sensation source, drawing audiences with a mixture of curiosity, skepticism and astonishment’ (2014). Among the films that have appeared on the American circuit may be listed I Am a Sex Addict (Caveh Zahedi, 2005), Choke (Clark Gregg, 2008), Thanks for Sharing (Stuart Blumberg, 2012), Don Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, 2013) and Welcome to New York (Abel Ferrara, 2014). To these may be added the British-made Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011) and Nymphomaniac (Lars von Trier, 2013), the two volumes of which were funded as a co-production involving the United Kingdom and a variety of European countries. Why should a rash of such films suddenly be appearing now, and why should they have become a preoccupation of indie-auteur filmmakers? To find an answer, one needs to take a look at the evolution of the post-World War II sexual revolution and its aftermath.

The Sexual Revolution, the Media and the Screening of Sex

The story of the sexual revolution is by now well known. Starting in the 1950s, and accelerating in the 1960s and 1970s, Western societies experienced a powerful reaction against traditional normative constraints in many spheres of life. In the domain of sexuality, this was manifest in a movement aimed at legitimising premarital and extramarital sex, promoting acceptance of homosexuality and alternative forms of sexuality and privileging the visceral pleasure to be derived from sex as a valid form of self-gratification and fulfillment (see, for example, Allyn 2001). In America, in particular, this liberation into relatively unconstrained sexuality was celebrated as consonant with the country’s neo-liberal commitment to ‘freedom’ in other areas of life, as manifest in the conflation of sexual gratification with the personal gratification derived from indulgence in consumer culture (see Radner 2010). In terms of behaviour, it produced a ‘hook-up culture’.

This cultural shift can be ascribed to the convergence of three factors: political change, leading to a ‘transformed political economy of desire’; the emergence of digital communication technology, which has transformed the consumption and production of sexual culture; and familiar economic factors, such as the profit imperative and efficiency of the market as a distribution mechanism, that has led to the ‘commercialisation’ and ‘commodification’ of sex (see McNair 2013: 4–6). The sexualised culture that has resulted has been characterised as involving

a preoccupation with sexual values, practices and identities; the proliferation of sexual texts; the emergence of new forms of sexual experience; the apparent breakdown of rules, categories and regulations designed to keep the obscene at bay; a fondness for scandals, controversies and panics around sex. (Attwood 2006: 78)

From the outset, cinema was centrally involved in what sociologist Brian McNair has described as ‘pornographication’ – ‘the colonisation of mainstream culture by texts in a variety of forms, genres, and styles which borrow from, refer to, or pastiche the styles and iconography of the pornographic’ – leading to a commensurate enlargement of ‘the pornosphere’ (the cultural space in which sexually explicit texts circulate) (2013: 36, 3). Eric Schaeffer, the editor of a recent volume on this topic, proposes that ‘a rapidly and radically sexualized media accounts for what we now think of as the sexual revolution’, owing to the fact that ‘sex was no longer a private matter that took place behind closed doors’ (2014: 3). Linda Williams has also argued that cinema, along with its extension into television, advertising and pornography, has played a crucial role in propagating the liberation of the modern individual into a desirable capacity for eroticism: when we watch sex on screen, she writes, ‘we are disciplined into new forms of socialized arousal in the company of others’ (2008: 18).

For some, including McNair and Williams, sexualisation in the media is to be welcomed. Williams, for example, asserts that ‘the very act of screening is desirable, sensual, and erotic in its own right’ (2008: 326), and therefore to be celebrated, along with pornography. For his part, McNair has argued that the sexualisation of culture through pornography, porno chic and sexually transgressive art has been instrumental not only in driving ‘the transformation of patriarchal and heteronormative structures, as well as authoritarian governance in general’, but also in giving millions of people ‘access to sexual pleasure they would not otherwise have had’, thereby increasing the ‘stock of human happiness’ (2013: 157, 158).

Others, however, are not so sure, or else are emphatically convinced of the opposite. McNair himself notes that ‘somewhere around 2003 commentators began to identify cultural sexualisation as a major social problem’ (2013: 56), citing an article in The Guardian in which Edward Marriott identified pornography, ‘like drugs and drink’, as ‘an addictive substance’ (2003). Even earlier, Patrick Carnes had introduced the idea of sex addiction into popular culture with his groundbreaking book, Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction (1983). Since then, there has been a veritable explosion of self-help and clinical books on sexual addiction, especially since 2005, along with the highly publicised entry of celebrities such as Michael Douglas, David Duchovny and Russell Brand into clinics for sex addiction therapy.

Clearly, then, a backlash is in process, arising from a growing anxiety about sexual addiction as a dysfunction. This is reflected, for example, in the alarm expressed by the psychologist and social commentator Philip Zimbardo in The Demise of Guys (2012), who warns about the growing danger of cyber-porn addiction (see Zimbardo and Duncan 2012). The statistics Zimbardo presents, citing a University of Alberta study, are startling: in America, which is the top producer of pornographic web pages, ‘one in three boys is now considered a heavy porn user, with the average boy watching nearly two hours of porn every week’ (loc. 553). Zimbardo also draws attention to how addiction to Internet porn is beginning to damage the ability of young men to form healthy sexual relationships. Quoting Leonard Sax, another psychologist who has conducted a parallel study of a new crisis facing girls, he observes:

Given the choice between masturbating over online pornography and going out on a date with a real