Female Masochism in Film

Female Masochism in Film
Film Philosophy at the Margins

Series editor: Patricia MacCormack, Anglia Ruskin University, UK
Film Philosophy at the Margins picks up on the burgeoning field of film
philosophy the shift from film analysis and explication to bringing together
film with philosophy and coalesces it with films, genres and spectator theory
which have received little critical attention. These films could be defined as
marginal due to being considered marginal marginalizing representations of
violence, marginal invocations of sexuality and queer performativity, margins
of bodily modification from disability to performance art, marginal in their
abstraction of representative codes, marginal in reference to their address to
the politics of social control, spectatorship and cinematic pleasure as marginal
due to its unique status and quality, among many other interpretations of
extreme. The film philosophy which underpins the exploration of these films
is primarily Continental philosophy, rather than the more dominant field of
cognitive film philosophy, utilizing increasingly attractive philosophers for film
theory such as Deleuze, Guattari, Rancire, Foucault, Irigaray and Kristeva. The
series ultimately seeks to establish a refined and sophisticated methodology for
re-invigorating issues of alterity both in the films chosen and the means by
which Continental philosophers of difference can paradigmatically alter ways
of address and representation that lifts this kind of theory beyond analysis and
criticism to help rethink the terrain of film theory itself.

Sexuality, Ethics and Aesthetics
Ruth McPhee
Ruth McPhee 2014

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identified as the author of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
McPhee, Ruth.
Female masochism in film : sexuality, ethics and aesthetics / by Ruth McPhee.
pages cm. -- (Film philosophy at the margins)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-1316-1 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-1317-8 (ebook) -- ISBN ) 978-14724-1318-5 (epub) 1. Women in motion pictures. 2. Masochism in motion pictures. 3. Ethics
in motion pictures. 4. Motion pictures--Aesthetics. I. Title.
PN1995.9.W6M3855 2014
791.43'6522--dc23
2014003684
ISBN 9781472413161 (hbk)

ISBN 9781472413178 (ebk PDF)
ISBN 9781472413185 (ebk ePUB)
II
Contents
Acknowledgementsvii

Introduction
The Deleuzian Model and the Masochistic Contract
23
Masochism, Feminine Goodness and Sacrifice
45
Self-Mutilation and (a)signification
71
Transgressive Reconfigurations
99
Heterocosms, Spectres and the World Remade
129
Postscript
151
Bibliography155
Index165
This page has been left blank intentionally
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my extended family of McPhees and honorary McPhees, for
unfailing support emotionally and materially: Joanna McPhee, Paula McPhee,
Tim McPhee, Farah McPhee, Sarah McPhee; Katy Holliday, Jake Dyer, and all
the rest. Also thanks go to my team of proofreaders for their attentive eyes and
astute comments: Tina Kendall, Louis Bayman, Mark Blay and Emily Cooper.
Thank you to Sarah Cooper, for patience and encouragement in the early days
of this project, and special thanks to Patricia MacCormack for prodding me
into action and self-belief.
Introduction
From the mid-1990s onwards, an emergent representational tendency has
been visible across a range of otherwise contextually disparate films. These
films have in common narratives that are driven by female protagonists and
that focus upon female subjectivities, yet, beyond this broad commonality a
more specific concern surfaces in the way in which these subjectivities and
particularly the sexuality of these female characters is manifested: in terms of a
heterosexuality concentrated upon masochistic desires and experiences. These
female protagonists find their pleasure through the relinquishing of control
to the dominance of the other, placing themselves in perilous or humiliating
situations, seeking pain, opening themselves up to the assumption of passive
or submissive positions. Female masochism is portrayed in a variety of ways
in this body of films, sometimes overtly and in explicit terms and sometimes
as a more subtle undercurrent that nonetheless acts as an organizing principle
for the protagonists subjectivity and for the narrative trajectory of the film.
The masochistic desire of these characters is depicted variously as redemptive,
sacrificial, mournful, transgressive and in extreme cases as conducive to selfdestruction and annihilation. Furthermore, these thematic concerns are
frequently accompanied by an aesthetic that echoes, enhances or engages with
the vicissitudes and ambiguities of masochistic desire, and that addresses the
viewer in such a way as to catalyse a masochistic form of spectatorial experience
rooted in a combination of pleasure and unpleasure. The films included for
discussion in subsequent chapters were produced in a range of countries in
Europe, North America and Australia. As such they cannot be categorized
as entailing a movement either in the sense of resulting from a deliberate
intention on the part of the filmmakers, or in the more diffuse sense often
applied retrospectively within the popular media and academia. Indeed, several
of the films addressed here have been individually claimed for other cinematic
trends (for example the New Extremism, British realism and New French
Cinema). Just as they cannot be regarded as a coherent movement, nor can they
be easily classified as constituting a particular genre and could be designated as
belonging to several different generic models (thriller, romance, melodrama,
even, debatably, pornography). It is therefore not my intention to pigeonhole
these often very different films according to an awkwardly proclaimed label
or headline, rather, it is the very fact of the dispersive nature of this group of
films and the pervasiveness of this representational motif that suggests a timely
readdress to two areas of debate is needed: firstly, the place of heterosexuality,

female corporeal specificity and embodied desire in the sociocultural realm and
secondly, an overdue re-evaluation of the conceptualization of masochism in
discursive fields such as feminism and philosophies of sexual difference, ethical
enquiry and film studies. The project that unfolds in the following chapters
will use these texts as springboards from which to launch meditations upon
the cultural and political place of a female masochistic subject that is resolutely
embodied and actively desiring. For example Chapter 2 places Lars von Triers
Breaking the Waves (1996) and Andrea Arnolds Red Road (2006) within Western
religious and philosophical doctrines of feminine self-sacrifice, the films of
Catherine Breillat and Jane Campion demand a productive confrontation
with female corporeality, obscenity and film genre in Chapter 3 and Steven
Shainbergs film Secretary (2009) critiques and opens up the restrictive theoretical
formations that have surrounded self-harm in Chapter 4.
Although the formal strategies used by the filmmakers discussed in this
volume are disparate and often highly distinctive between themselves, a shared
concern arises with the testing of representational boundaries and taboos in
order to present challenging imagery that is rarely found within the space of
cinema, whether this imagery be sexually explicit, violent and horrifying or
bewilderingly avant-garde. Female masochism, then, has emerged as a means
of forging an aesthetic that questions, deconstructs and subverts normative
cultural frameworks surrounding female subjectivity and sexuality. It is this
process of interrogation and deconstruction that functions to germinate
the ethical potential of an exploration of female masochism culturally and
philosophically. Value-laden terminology surrounds the masochistic body and
the female body alike: these bodies are perverse and taboo, monstrous and
obscene, transgressive phenomenon that appear in the consciousness of society
to thwart or demolish any stable notions of propriety or normality in regard
to the socially situated human subject. Rosi Braidotti is one of a number of
recent theorists who have engaged with the concept of the post-human in
order to demonstrate not that the category of the human is transforming in the
late twentieth and early twenty-first century but that the very concept of the
human as expressed in the doctrines of Western Humanism has always been
flawed, mired in and constructed according to dominant discursive formations
that strive to maintain the illusion of an ideal human subject that mirrors the
entrenched positions of patriarchy, capitalism and Eurocentricity. Braidotti
neatly summarizes this position:
This Eurocentric paradigm implies the dialectics of self and other, and the
binary logic of identity and otherness as respectively the motor for and the
cultural logic of universal Humanism. Central to this universalistic posture and
its binary logic is the notion of difference as pejoration. Subjectivity is equated
2
Introduction
with consciousness, universal rationality, and self-regulating ethical behaviour,

whereas Otherness is defined as its negative and specular counterpart. In so far
as difference spells inferiority, it acquires both essentialist and lethal connotations
for people who get branded as others. (2013: 15)
Otherness is constituted by the feminine, the lower class, the non-white, the
differently abled, the non-reproductive, in short, all those subjects who have
been objectified, marginalized and oppressed and in the process categorized
as less-than-human. The refutation of the binary logic that has underpinned
Western cultural thought and fantasy forms a central strand of argumentation
running through this book, which intends to dismantle the oppositional
assumptions governing theories and representations of femininity and of
sexuality as they dovetail in the figure of the female masochistic subject, and
to contribute to the wider philosophical project of opening up a space for
the recognition of multiple subject positions, desires, and pleasures outside
the dialectic of identity and otherness. This project is a complex one and, as
the discussions and examples that unfold in the following chapters illustrate,
may encounter its own contradictions, ambiguities and discursive resistances.
Such difficulties should not be ignored amidst an impatient rush towards a
redemptive or positivistic outcome, but constitute a crucial part of any ethically
enquiring mode of philosophical writing. The question of how to commence
the current encounter with female masochism and its attendant debates is only
the first of these enquiries, and may be answered by an initial engagement with
the significance and conceptualization of masochism in theory and in culture.
Defining Masochism
Attempting to define masochism necessitates an imposing but illuminating

process that reveals much about the contested status of how this perverse
sexuality has been (mis)understood through the permutations of psychology,
and literary and aesthetic theory, and popular culture. Commencing with the last
of these arenas enables the beginnings of a genealogical excavation of the term
masochism and its social significance. Anita Phillips asserts that by the time
the twentieth century came to its conclusion masochism had to a large extent
lost its sexual origins and taken on a more generalized meaning, coming to be
considered as a kind of emotional and sexual waste-basket, a receptacle for
the odds and ends of peoples behaviour (1998: 4). She gives examples of the
type of practices that may now be labelled masochistic in colloquial parlance:
running a marathon, eating a hot curry or researching and writing a PhD (1998:
4), in brief, any undertakings that are regarded as voluntarily painful or selfpunishing. Although anecdotal, the examples given by Phillips are familiar from
3
everyday speech and are indicative of a conceptual slippage between sexual

and non-sexual understandings of the term. They are also enlightening on
their own terms because they seem to emphasize the possibility of associating
masochism with deliberation, power and subjective agency, describing activities
that involve extreme behaviours and strenuous feats of endurance, requiring
either a physical or mental testing and mastery of the self. One of the most
vital arguments to be made in this Introduction and in subsequent chapters is
that the conventional equation of masochism with passivity and submission,
apparent across disciplines such as psychoanalysis and feminism, is mistaken and
simplistic. While the examples provided by Phillips do not contain the sexual
undercurrents that are so important to the specificities of masochistic pleasure
portrayed in the films in this book, they do begin to hint at the more complex
network of connections between pain, libidinal investment and satisfaction that
are at stake. Contemporaneous to the pop culture usage that Phillips describes,
the term is used in more specific and specialized contexts and communities.
For example, in BDSM subcultures it designates a type of identity and sexual
preference, within a clinical setting it is used diagnostically according to a strict
set of criteria, and in film studies it has emerged as a means of theorizing the
pleasures of spectatorial experience. It is therefore apparent that masochism
is a concept with many possible meanings and at times little precision but, as
William I. Grossman notes, it is all the more evocative as a result: the complexity
is part of the meaning of the term itself (Grossman 1986: 387). The films and
theories to be addressed here do not always depict practices that accord with
normative conceptions of sexual acts but nonetheless they suggest the need
for a firm reestablishment of masochism within the arena of erotic experience,
whether in the form of penetrative intercourse or the mobilization of other
forms of sensual corporeality, fetishistic obsession and fantasies of devotion.
Tracing back the etymology of masochism leads to the literary origins of
the word, if not the pathology. As with sadism, the namesake of this perversion
was an author of fiction, although the moniker of Austrian writer Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch (18361895) is less widely recognized than that of the Marquis
de Sade. The terms sadism and masochism were coined, and the symptoms
thus consolidated, by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his important and influential
study of sexual pathologies, Psychopathia Sexualis, first published in 1886. KrafftEbings book was compiled and published within the context of a drive towards
the categorization of sexual perversions in the second half of the nineteenth
century, part of a body of new studies by writers such as Havelock Ellis, Albert
Moll and Iwan Bloch, authors who (amongst others) contributed to the making
of modern perversity and realigned the division between the normal and the
abnormal (Peakman 2013: 8). Sacher-Masochs best-known novel, Venus in
Furs (1870), was also published during this period and was modelled to a large
extent upon the writers own relationships. It recounts the story of Severin,
4
Introduction
a young man who beseeches his lover to act as a cruel mistress toward him,
giving him orders at all times, admonishing him and whipping him, treating
him as her plaything. Krafft-Ebing identifies Sacher-Masochs fantasies as
expressing the symptoms of a particular sexual psychopathology and describes
the distinguishing characteristic of this newly-named perversion as the desire
for unlimited subjection to the will of a person of the opposite sex with
the awakening and accompaniment of lustful feelings to the degree of orgasm
(1965: 183). Early sexological studies by Krafft-Ebing and latterly Freud, who
drew heavily on assumptions already laid out in Psychopathia Sexualis in his own
work on perversion, pioneered the use of the term masochism to designate a
manifestation of the sexual drive in which the subject finds pleasure and arousal
in situations involving their submission to a love object, physical experiences of
pain, and/or humiliation and debasement.
Krafft-Ebings contribution to the history and philosophy of masochism,
while valuable in naming and beginning to define a distinguishable and unique
modality of sexual desire and behaviour, also served to remove masochism
from the aesthetic realm associated with literature and to relocate it to the
arena of symptomatology and psychiatric diagnosis. In doing so, his account
initiated the epistemological process of conceptualizing masochism as a
perversion in contradistinction to those sexual behaviours defined as normal
and proper, giving it its significance in accordance with the binary logic of
rational identity and maligned otherness. The description of masochism laid
out in Psychopathia Sexualis acted as a keystone for Freuds theorization of this
paraphilia and provided much of the foundational thought for Freuds binary
schema of sadomasochistic sexuality, a schema that has persisted, with largely
negative ramifications, to the present day. Krafft-Ebing describes the perfect
counterpart of masochism and sadism and instigates the presumption that they
are complementary to each other both in their intrinsic characteristics and their
external manifestations (1965: 140141). Freuds studies of the topic, particularly
in early essays such as Three essays on the theory of sexuality and Instincts
and their vicissitudes perpetuate and further ingrain this oppositional matrix
into psychiatric thought and cultural consciousness, developing the pervasive
binary logic in which sadism, which takes erotic pleasure in subjugating, hurting
and dominating the other, is equated with masculinity, activity and dominance
and masochism is associated with the converse of these attributes: femininity,
passivity, submissiveness and victimization. These early Freudian texts regard
masochism as a secondary phenomenon that takes place when the aggressive
drives present in sadism are introjected within the subject themselves rather than
projected outwards onto other subjects and objects in the world. Masochism
and sadism are tied ever tighter in a conceptual dynamic that conflates these two
different perversions into one, resulting in the figure of the sadomasochistic
subject. As will become further apparent in Chapter 1, masochism has
5
struggled to escape the shadow of sadism into which it was cast by Freudian
psychoanalysis. Freud makes a peculiar and revealing statement when writing
of sadomasochism. In Three essays he writes: the most common and the
most significant of all the perversions the desire to inflict pain upon the
sexual object, and its reverse (1953: 157). Again, he is replicating a statement
found in Krafft-Ebings text in which sadism and masochism are described as
the fundamental forms of psycho-sexual perversion (1965: 142). Leo Bersani
makes explicit that what is implied by Freuds assertion, even if the psychiatrist
himself is unwilling to engage with these implications, is that within Freudian
theory cruelty is located as a key component of human sexuality; it may even be,
Bersani argues, the elusive essence of sexuality which theorists have repeatedly
shied away from as a result of its opposition to socially and culturally accepted
forms of human relations (Bersani 1986: 37). The inherence of cruelty within
human sexuality accords with the repetition of the themes of excess and
violence that run through the films to be explored in later chapters in imagery
and narratives that include violations, mutilations and even decapitations. It also
accords with the work of the theorists of sexuality that will be drawn upon in
subsequent discussions, perhaps most notably the writing of Georges Bataille
which, in both its fictional and non-fictional forms, encompasses the ambivalent
and often transgressively violent nature of embodied sexual desire. The violence
and cruelty that exist within human sexuality are frequently disavowed in social
discourse or relegated to the realm of the unthinkably perverse, however, it
often proves to be these moments of disruptive extremity that offer the most
fertile grounds for an ethical rethinking of paradigms of erotic experience and
a socioculturally embedded heterosexuality.
Freud returns to what he regards as the puzzle of masochism in later essays,
namely A child is being beaten and The economic problem of masochism. In
these works, he does begin tentatively to recognize the possibility that a primary
form of masochism exists, one that stems not from aggressive instincts toward
the other but from self-destructive instincts apparent within the self. This shift
in perspective takes place during one of the most pivotal moments in Freuds
career with the development of the theory of the death drive, a transformative
notion that is laid out in Beyond the pleasure principle. His observations on
the fort/da game in this essay (1955d: 1415), in which a child repeatedly casts
away and demands back their toy, suggests to Freud that in some cases there
may be a compulsion for the subject to repeat or seek out traumatic and painful
experiences spurred on by something beyond the drive for pleasure. Michele
Aaron notes that the fort/da game indicates the existence of the repetition
compulsion in which pleasure is not only experienced through the pain of loss,
but actually increased by it. Unpleasure thus becomes a crucial component in
the achievement of joy (Aaron 2007: 5455). Although not a line of enquiry
pursued by Freud, the fort/da game also demonstrates that the courting of
6
Introduction
unpleasure and pleasure, deferral and satisfaction, may be orchestrated by the

subject themselves rather than something to which they are subjected from
without. A crucial component of the enjoyment taken in this process is the
combination of control over the object followed by a subsequent feeling of
powerlessness once the object has been thrown away. For Freud, this leads to
the realization that the pleasure principle, Eros, must work in conjunction with
an opposing and more threatening instinct, Thanatos.
It is only with the discovery of Thanatos the death drive that Freud begins
to entertain the idea of primary masochism (1955d: 55). The combination of
cruelty and pleasure that characterizes human sexuality and, more esoterically,
the dynamics of love, is a manifestation of the encounter between Eros and
Thanatos and is a combination that finds its most overt form in masochism.
The apparent reluctance and initial bewilderment with which Freud greets
the idea of primary masochism is further reflected in title of his final paper
on the subject, The economic problem of masochism (my emphasis). Freuds
sentiments echo down through the twentieth century as theorists of masochism
remain preoccupied with the paradox that lies at its heart: the seemingly
irresolvable combination of pleasure and pain, long regarded as polarized
elements within the matrix of human experience. It is quite impossible to
liberate masochism from this paradox without first deconstructing the dualistic
and oppositional logic that provides the framework for Freudian theory
and for the institutionalized systems of Western knowledge to which Freud
belongs. As early as 1986, Grossman makes the point that masochism only
seems contradictory if pain and pleasure are taken to be opposites in the most
absolute sense (1986: 410). A simple point, and yet the Western conviction
of the aversive nature of pain remains predominant and behaviour associated
with the deliberate pursuit of pain and other sensations of displeasure is
still widely regarded as at best a puzzlement and at worst a perversion that
signifies mental disturbance and the potential for the destruction of self or
others. Pleasure and pain remain trapped within a structure that can regard
them only as opposites rather than different modes of sensation. However, it
is precisely the potential of masochism and its attendant physical and psychical
experiences to throw open or render redundant oppositional binaries that
enables it to act as a radical and ethical force. Masochistic sexuality and the
masochistic aesthetic that expresses it in formal terms demonstrates firstly,
the restrictions upon thought imposed by existing theoretical paradigms, and
secondly, the inadequacy of these paradigms for a truly ethical consideration of
any subjectivities and intersubjectivities positioned as exterior to majoritarian
norms. Consequently, one of the central argumentative strands needed for
the catalysing of masochisms potential as a disruptive and ethical modality
is a rigorous deconstruction of the pervasive oppositional binaries that still
dominate theory and cultural representation. The films to be addressed in
7
subsequent chapters are so significant because they refuse this reductive logic
and demand a reconceptualization of masochism, desire and pleasure that is
situated outside of this Freudian model, which despite many critiques of his
form of psychoanalysis has remained exceptionally persistent across a range of
disciplines through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. As the ideas
that unfold in these films and the theories that accompany them in the following
chapters demonstrate, it is not merely a question of reversing the existing
schema but of proposing an alternative and flexible philosophy of sexuality,
sensation and aesthetics that is better equipped to facilitate ethical encounters
between subjects, experiences and the cultural imaginings that mediums such
as cinema express. Brian Massumi argues in favour of a theorization of bodies
and what they can do in terms of emergence and process, rather than rigid
significations and codings that tie them into fixed positions. Approaching
bodies in this way involves the discarding of oppositional logic: Passing into
is not a binarism. Emerging is not a binarism. They are dynamic unities
(2002: 8). Massumis call for a more limber and even playful perspective that
enables the transformative and multiple processes of the body to be put into
thought without becoming fossilized resonates with the project of this book,
which posits that masochistic sexuality may be conceptualized from a radically
different perspective: not as a simply passive or reactive form of desire, but as a
complex, emergent and in-between phenomenon that throws into chaos such
oppositional definitions as subject/object, normal/abnormal, and pleasure/
pain and calls forth alternative modes of thinking about the embodied self and
the relation of this self to others.
Just as the demand for the theoretical reconfiguration that masochism calls
into being emerges from its prior position of ensnarement within the binary
web, so the beginnings of the alternative conceptual route to be plotted may
be found in the marginal and conventionally derided category of perversion.
As Julie Peakman establishes in her comprehensive cultural history of
perversion, the conceptualization of sexual behaviour in normative and nonnormative terms is hardly a modern phenomenon and can be traced back many
centuries: Sexual perversions have been termed deviant acts, abnormal
behaviour, acts against nature, unnatural acts, abominable vices and so
on (2013: 8). The emergence of the discourse of perversion that took place
in the second half of the nineteenth century consolidated these terms and
enabled the construction of a scientific body of knowledge about abnormal
sexuality, an arena within which masochism become firmly situated and which
has subsequently informed the predominantly negative aura that surrounds
masochism in existing theory. Initially, the pervasive association of masochism
with perversity may appear an obstacle that must be contextualized historically
and socioculturally in order to be dismissed as irrelevant to twenty-first century
understandings. However, studying the significance of perversity opens up
8
Introduction
many fascinating and valuable avenues of enquiry that augment the positioning
of masochism as ethically and aesthetically radical. This can only be of benefit
in challenging and rethinking the normative structures that have governed how
sexuality, gender and embodiment are perceived and represented within culture.
Furthermore, the designation of masochism as a state of psychical abnormality
and, in fact, as a mental illness persists into the twenty-first century. The World
Health Organization continues to offer an outline of diagnostic criteria for the
condition Sexual Masochism as a Sexual and Gender Identity Disorder in
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the current version being
the DSM-V, despite critiques from some quarters of psychiatric discourse (see
Krueger 2010, for a summary of these debates). The DSM-V documentation
uses the more modern term paraphilia in place of perversion, a linguistic
shift common to recent writing on the subject of non-normative sexualities and
an attempt to avoid the connotations of moral judgment that have historically
been entrenched in the word perversion. Peakman describes the term paraphilia
as used in the DSM to connote a sexual arousal in relation to a certain object,
situation or individual which is not regarded as part of normative stimuli (2013:
11). It is apparent that despite this terminological update many of the tropes
recognizable from Freudian theory are maintained in modern accounts of
paraphilias, and masochistic fantasies and behaviours continue to be associated
with pathology and deviance according to the values of the dominant.
What, then, is Freuds justification for designating masochism a perversion?
A closer examination of his Three essays on the theory of sexuality reveals
that his definition of perversity is remarkably (and notoriously) broad,
encompassing any activity that either extends anatomically beyond the genital
regions of the body or that lingers for too long over the intermediate relations
that take place en route to the normal sexual aim of genital heterosexual
penetrative intercourse (Freud 1953: 150). Such a definition of perversion is,
at best, imprecise; taking Freud at face value here would suggest that much
of human sexual behaviour entails an element of perversity, a claim that
paradoxically renders his project of defining a normal model of sexuality
rather futile. As Jacques-Alain Miller argues, the very notion of normality is
thrown into question by Freuds account because it demonstrates the fact that
subjects can seek sexual gratification outside normative forms of biological
coupling (Miller 1996b: 311). Furthermore, not only does it demonstrate that
the subject may seek gratification elsewhere, but that much of the time this
gratification is successfully found and proves to be preferable to the subject
when compared to the more restrictive pleasures (and, indeed, unpleasures)
of normativity. The second, related, point that Miller articulates is that Freud
himself presents the evidence for perversion being a primary state in his work
on infantile sexuality (Miller 1996b: 313). Just as sadism and masochism emerge
as fundamental aspects of human sexuality in Three essays on the theory of
9
sexuality, so Freud argues that children have a polymorphous sexuality which

is not limited to genital satisfaction but takes in stages such as the oral and the
anal, and in doing so he locates perversity at the centre of erotic experience.
What is regarded as perversity by the dominant is therefore a primary state
and normal sexuality is secondary and socially learned (Freud 1953: 191).
We are all, to some extent, perverse subjects; each of our bodies holds the
potential for polymorphous pleasure and the defiance of a socially prescribed
form of embodied desire. As Karmen MacKendrick puts it, whether Freud
intends to or not his theory makes clear the inherence of the perverse within
the normal (MacKendrick 1999: 7). Despite Freuds best efforts to demarcate
the hierarchical categories of normality and perversion, much of his body of
work and in particular his conceptualization of infantile sexuality demonstrates
the impossibility of this task. More recently, Nobus, drawing upon Benjamin
Karpmans work on sexual offenders (1954), suggests that the broadness
of Freuds description has led, somewhat absurdly, to the introduction of a
distinction between the oxymoronic category of normal perverts and that
of abnormal perverts, the latter engaging only in non-reproductive activities
(Nobus 2006: 7). Such a formulation indicates the arbitrariness of categories of
normality and abnormality, but sidesteps the question of why so many facets of
human sexual behaviour have been relocated to the marginal arena of perversity
and, furthermore, does not address the possibility that heterosexual genital
intercourse may entail pathologies of its own. According to the logic outlined
by Nobus, the majority of the protagonists of the films to be studied here would
be classified as normal perverts because they are also depicted as engaging
in heterosexual vaginal penetrative intercourse. Yet, they are characters whose
masochistic subjectivity inspires them to act in ways that transgress normality
and stray at times into the equally conceptually problematic area situated
precariously on the boundaries of sanity and insanity: they may be labelled selfloathing, self-destructive, mad in the desires that seem incomprehensible when
measured according to normative standards. Therefore, it is more constructive
to move away from the psychoanalytic preoccupation with labelling specific
acts as perverse or normal in themselves and instead conceptualize perversity
as a structural mode that transgresses and deviates, in the most literal sense of
the word, from dominant systems of thought, representation and action. Lisa
Downing argues that the modes of sexual fantasy and behaviour that came to
be known historically as perversions, and frequently continue to be regarded
as such, still offer a potentially fruitful area of investigation and should not
be hastily dismissed or overwritten (Downing 2006: 15960). This is not to
suggest that the many problematic assumptions tangled up with the concept
of perversion as cultural construct should remain unchallenged, but rather
that an interrogation of what is labelled perverse and who is categorized
as a pervert may offer valuable insights for ethically-focused enquiries into
10
Introduction
gender, sexuality and embodiment. For example, is perversion gendered, and if

so, how? Pertinently for this study, what is the relationship between feminine
desire and perversity, particularly in relation to fantasies and acts that deviate
from the normative model of reproductive heterosexuality? What does it
mean for an intersubjective encounter to become perverse, and what might the
ramifications of such an encounter be? To argue in favour of perversion as an
active, questioning state of being as well as a series of practices is to recognize
its disruptive potential and to acknowledge the challenges and demands that
perverse sexualities such as masochism make upon dominant and damagingly
ossified modes of thought around gender, sexuality, mental illness, and the body.
Nobus writes that if perversion is inseparable from a regulatory discursive
system of normality, then it could be argued that those theorizing and diagnosing
the condition merely pathologize, as authoritative extensions of the ruling
ideology, those behaviours that threaten the sustainability of the system, with a
view to their segregation and eradication (2006: 11). In line with Nobuss claim,
it is evident that the psychoanalytic and psychiatric definitions of perversion
and paraphilia function in accordance with two discursive regulatory systems
that have played a critical role in shaping the conceptualization of sexuality:
the religious and the economic. The tenet that reproductive heterosexual
intercourse is the only proper and acceptable form of sexuality runs parallel to
the sanctioning of sex only within wedlock by the Christian church, a demand
which although outmoded still retains an ideological hold upon the morality
and to some extent, legality of Western social systems. The legitimate and
procreative couple laid down the law (Foucault 1976: 3). The emphasis on
reproductive sexuality is further attributable to the elevation of production as
the paramount imperative of capitalist society from the seventeenth century
onward, as Foucault suggests in the first volume of his History of Sexuality,
The Will to Knowledge: At a time when labor capacity was being systematically
exploited, how could this capacity be allowed to dissipate itself in pleasurable
pursuits, except in those reduced to a minimum that enabled it to reproduce
itself ? (1976: 6). Masochism is positioned as exterior to the reproductive aim
so cherished by Western religious and politico-economic doctrines. Instead
of progressing towards the end-point of sexual pleasure and the completion
of satisfaction it thrives on scenarios of suspense and delay, eschews the
genital zones in favour of more dispersive realms of the body, or displaces
erotic experience from the human body through disavowal and fetishism (for
example, the fascination with fur garments in Sacher-Masochs Venus in Furs).
Foucault further acknowledges that as the normative model of the legitimate
couple became consolidated, so too categories of perversions multiplied, a
proliferation of abnormalities that could be studied, treated and otherwise
regulated: a distribution of points of power, hierarchized and placed opposite
to one another; pursued pleasures, that is, both sought after and searched
11
out; compartmental sexualities that are tolerated or encouraged (1976: 46).

The regulation of sexuality according to ideological tenets emphasizes the
inextricable connection that has developed over many centuries between power
and not only the practices of sex themselves but the representation of sex
and sexuality, the way it is spoken about or envisioned, who is authorized to
speak about it, what is said and what is silenced. The exploration of the sexual
body and its practices from various perspectives over the course of chapters
1 to 5 of this book, takes as a starting point the notion of the body, and in
particular the female body, as a locus within these hierarchical networks of
regulation and power and will attend to the question of, to paraphrase Foucault,
what type of power is brought to bear on the body and on sex (1976: 47). In
this context, one of the most significant aspects of masochism is the way in
which it foregrounds the question of power as an overt element of its practices,
performing and making visible the negotiations of power that lie beneath all
sexual acts. The discussion that unfolds in the following chapters will oscillate
inwards to explore how social power works upon the body, and outwards, to
question the ways in which the perverse body and its pleasures might enact
its own force upon the social realm in turn. In a more recent text that carries
echoes of Foucaults work, Lee Edelman argues that Western society in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first century still revolves around the rhetoric of what
he terms reproductive futurism, a sociopolitical agenda in which the projected
figure of the Child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged
politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention (2004: 3).
Any non-procreative sexualities or identities are ejected from the social sphere
as a result of their presumed inability to engage with or effect any politics of
future life, with this exteriorized position coming to encompass a queerness
which is figured as antithetical to the good of the social realm and is regarded
as embodying the social orders death drive: an otherness of the most extreme
form. However, Edelmans avowed project is not to reject this position of
negation in order to move towards the assimilation of queerness into the norm,
but to embrace it as an ethical stance that enables the articulation of a constant
no in response to the law of the Symbolic (2004: 5). The good embodied in
the illusionist avatar of the future Child and the ideological regulatory practices
that circle around this avatar would, in the conception of queerness that
Edelman proposes, be superseded by something I want to call better, though
it promises, in more than one sense of the word, absolutely nothing (2004: 5).
That the better that Edelman evokes remains undefined is key to its ethical
nature and reiterates Massumis delight when he asserts that philosophies of
emergence should be attentive to the potential of vagueness: Vague concepts, and
concepts of vagueness, have a crucial, and often enjoyable, role to play (2002:
13). A lack of determinacy is vital in order to avoid replacing one set of ossified
and restrictive cultural fantasies and narratives with another; the aim is not to
12
Introduction
rearrange the hierarchies by which similarity and alterity are organized but to
transform the terms of the debate altogether in ways that must remain fluid,
multiple and open to new passages of thought. The masochistic embodied
subject is located at the intersection of regulatory practices that strive to govern
sexuality and enjoyment, yes, but also physical and mental health, suffering (as
in who is expected to suffer and how, or whose suffering is socially recognized),
and vitally, gender. Pulling at one of these threads necessitates a reconfiguration
of the rest as new formations of thought and representation are coaxed or even
forced into being, and it is for this reason that masochism holds theoretical and
ethical significance beyond the relatively narrow realm of perversion.
Masochism and the Female Subject
Thus far, masochism has been expressed in general terms without particular
attendance to the question of gender. Now attention must turn to the
specificities of female masochism and the theoretically and politically fraught
figure of the female masochist. The first notable point to make about these
debates is the pronounced absence of the female figure in many nineteenth and
twentieth century accounts of this perversion. With one evident but problematic
exception, Freuds essay A child is being beaten, Krafft-Ebing and Freud
scarcely consider the possibility of masochistic desire occurring in women or
girls. In these and later psychoanalytically-influenced studies by authors such
as Theodor Reik, Gilles Deleuze and Gaylyn Studlar (to be examined further
in Chapter 1) the female masochist finds herself all but written out of theory,
a failure of articulation in line with the difficulties Western discourse has in
recognizing alterity outside the default assumption of the human subject as male.
While it is true that the impetus behind A child is being beaten results from
female patients who have described beating fantasies to Freud, his explanation
for this phenomenon is strictly contained within masculine frameworks. Kaja
Silverman observes that Freud can only account for female occurrences of this
perverse sexuality by attributing them to identification with the male subject,
and through the audacious invention of an entire stage in the fantasy sequence:
a subconscious phase that reaffirms the masochistic position as a crisis of the
male subject position and in doing so judges female sexuality by the standard
of the male (Silverman 1992: 201203). There are female patients and desires at
stake here, but they are once again overwritten by the drama of masculinity and
effectively silenced. Freuds final essay on the topic, The economic problem of
masochism, is further suggestive of the reasons for the omission of the female
masochism on her own terms, rather than those of the masculine. Here, Freud
identifies three typical forms of the pathology: erotogenic masochism, feminine
masochism and moral masochism. The first of these constitutes the basic criteria
13
of finding sexual excitement in pain and is also at the root of the other two.
Feminine masochism is described by Freud as the expression of what he terms
the feminine nature and manifests itself through the desire to be castrated and
to be passive in the sexual relationship, with further associations with infantile
behaviours through a relinquishing of control and agency (1961a: 162). Moral
masochism, which will be revisited in more detail in Chapter 2, suggests a
loosening of the sexual urges as the desire to be punished leaks into all areas
of the subjects life. It is the label and form of feminine masochism that is of
particular interest in the context of the elision of the female masochist subject,
and the reductive ramifications of Freuds dualistic theoretical pattern are again
all too apparent. When discussing feminine masochism he assumes that it is
a condition that only afflicts male subjects as an aberration. He appropriates
those attributes that are normatively regarded as feminine (submission, passivity,
lack) in his description of male masochism while simultaneously sidelining the
female subject herself. Silverman has accurately observed that Freud assumes
feminine masochism is pathological, and therefore worthy of comment, only
when it occurs in the male subject. For the female, experiences of passivity
and submission during sexual acts and within relationships more broadly are
regarded as natural parts of her subjectivity and are not, therefore, indications
of mental abnormality (Silverman 1992: 189). Silverman furthermore suggests
that this assumption pervades not only the work of Freud, but also that of
Krafft-Ebing, Reik and Deleuze (1992: 190). Deleuze can perhaps be forgiven
as his essay Coldness and cruelty focuses primarily upon the literary style of
the male masochist Sacher-Masoch and the way in which this style echoes the
formal qualities of masochism. Nonetheless, these theorists who have been so
central to the conceptualization of masochism and the psychiatric, perverse and
aesthetic discourse around it have resoundingly neglected the female masochist
and the accompanying experiences that specifically attend to or are reliant upon
the female body.
For feminist and lesbian and gay theorists the problem of masochism
took on another shade in late-twentieth century debates as the practices of
sadomasochism and bondage become a hotly contested topic in the sex wars
of feminism, with the result that attention was drawn to this paraphilia in its
most explicit form. Mandy Merck notes that during this period of fierce debate
the discourses surrounding s/m become less about specific acts and more
about wider concerns surrounding gender, power and what constitutes proper
conduct (1993: 237). These debates were fuelled by incidents such as the 1990
Spanner investigation in England in which 15 men were charged with Actual
Bodily Harm after engaging in gay s/m acts, despite these acts being consensual
and private. Eight were given prison sentences, the longest of which was four
and a half years (see Thompson 1994 for a more detailed analysis of this case).
In line with Foucaults assertion that sexuality has been the subject of regulatory
14
Introduction
discourse from a variety of angles including religious, medical and legal, during
this time the distinctions between private and public become decidedly blurred
as once again sexual practice became a hub for concerns about morality and
propriety. Pat Califia, one of the most outspoken proponents of s/m as a
valid form of sexual practice, states that the Spanner case was another incident
in which the ideology of the state shifted what had previously been private
and personal into the political arena (Califia 2000: 146). Thus, the question of
masochistic sexuality and its social, moral and political significations rose to
troubled prominence in feminist theory. Much of the pro-masochism writing
in relation to s/m communities has focused upon lesbian and gender-queer
relationships (for example Califia and Samois 1983, Califia and Sweeney 1996,
Merck 1993). These accounts regard the enactment of sadomasochistic scenes as
a space of exploration and play external to the patriarchal power dynamics that
prevail in everyday life, taking a celebratory and even redemptive view of an area
of sexuality that has historically been shadowed by the spectres of pathology
and perversion (a perspective that is, to some extent, replicated in Secretary,
as Chapter 3 will address). The possibilities that heterosexual sadomasochism
holds for the subversion of sociocultural gender dynamics has most commonly
been located in couplings that seem to reverse patriarchal power structures
through a female dominant and a male submissive (for example McClintock
1993); this succeeds in offering a more positive and constructive portrayal of
sexual preferences hitherto thought of as deviant, but continues to either ignore
female masochism or depict it from the derisive perspective of being bad for
feminism. Texts retaining a positive attitude to BDSM in general, if not to
the female masochistic position specifically, were counterbalanced in the sex
wars by feminist responses arguing strongly against sadomasochistic sex play
and in particular against the adoption of the submissive or passive role being
taken by the female subject. Collections such as Against Sadomasochism: A Radical
Feminist Analysis (Linden 1982), for example, regard masochism in women as the
perverse effect of the fantasies of patriarchal ideology functioning to normalize
the victimization and objectification of women. Louise J. Kaplans book Female
Perversions (1991) develops this premise to offer a sustained but critical study
of female masochism. Kaplans argument asserts that aberrant female sexuality
takes the form of compulsive behaviours such as self-mutilation, anorexia and
kleptomania in contrast to male perversions such as fetishism and sadism.
Downing has described Kaplans formulation as one in which perversion
manifests itself as a distorted exaggeration of the socially prescribed gender
characteristics of each sex (2006: 158). Female masochism in its overt form is
thus conceptualized negatively as an introjection of the patriarchal restrictions
placed upon women that force them into roles of passivity and subjugation,
with the actions and desires of the female masochist serving to re-inscribe the
power dynamics of a society dominated by men and phallological structures.
15
The oppositional categories set in place by Freudian theory remain intact in

these critiques: the stubborn association of masochism with a denigrated
feminine position of passivity remains and the question of what masochistic
embodied experience may mean to those who undertake it is left unexplored.
Lynda Harts work on sadomasochism and performance offers a useful rebuttal
to these critiques, in particular the emphasis that she places upon the distinction
between being and seeming. Running through Harts book Between the Body
and the Flesh is a recognition that much of the anxiety about sadomasochistic
practices and desires in theory and in society at large is related to concerns about
what is real or authentic and what is faked or pretend. When addressing
the realms of fantasy, desire and pleasure, however, it is often impossible to
draw such dualistic divisions between these realms, as Hart acknowledges. As
several of the films and theories that appear in subsequent chapters make clear,
masochism does not operate according to the ontological schema in which all
must be as it seems, or appear as it actually is. Hart argues that feminist critiques
such as those of Linden and Kaplan are locked into an assumption based upon a
visual economy in which because heterosexual female masochism looks like the
oppressive model found throughout patriarchy, it must consequently be a direct
replication of it (Hart 1998: 85). This visual economy ignores the elements of
performance and drama that are often critical within a masochistic scenario and
neglects to consider the actual physical sensations of pain and pleasure that the
subject may experience. To consider all heterosexual female masochism under
the rubric of the internalization of patriarchy is to construct a predetermined
position that leaves no space for the emergence and transgressive potentiality
of this perverse sexuality. The same formula is repeated: masochism equals
passivity equals powerlessness equals negativity. Hart argues that this results in a
cultural attitude that positions masochistic women as the most pitiable and even
despicable group amongst the range of identities apparent in modern sexual life:
they exhibit too explicitly the shameful thing that they already are (Hart 1998:
31). The residual trace of Freuds binary logic echoes through feminist critiques
of female masochism and this is a logic that means women cannot perform the
masochistic role because they are masochists (Hart 1998: 89). Male masochism,
whether conceptualized as a pathology or a role-reversing aspect of sex play,
appears as an unnatural or performed state. Female masochism is seen as
corresponding to either the facts of feminine nature or to the patriarchally
constructed norms of feminine behaviour.
The reluctance of some feminist writers to theorize masochism from a
more positive perspective is perhaps understandable, but the films explored in
later chapters demonstrate how the assumption that masochism serves only to
underline existing patriarchal power relations is based upon the mistaken binary
logic that new philosophies of subjectivity and sexuality must strive to avoid.
One of the inherent flaws apparent in feminist critiques of female masochism
16
Introduction
is that they fail to deconstruct the conceptual framework that they are opposing.
The visual economy that Hart identifies in these feminist accounts adheres
to the obsession with specularity that has permeated Western philosophy
and representation, a tendency critiqued by Luce Irigaray as a strategy of
phallologocentrism that can be observed in theories from Platos cave to Freuds
Oedipal Complex and beyond. Irigaray argues that visibility has always been
perceived as an assurance of ontological certainty within the Western patriarchal
epistemological tradition (1985b: 26). The complex, transitional and ambivalent
arrangements of power that are catalysed through masochistic encounters
defy normative understandings of the appearances of activity and passivity,
dominance and submission, and cannot be adequately understood through the
scopic tradition that Hart and Irigaray identify. Chosen submission, whether
arranged according to the fantasies and designs of the masochist herself or
of a more unpredictable and even perilous nature, cannot be equated with the
oppression of women by patriarchy. To draw such an equivalence denies the
masochist her agency and furthermore, refuses to acknowledge the commingled
physical and psychical sensations and intensities of masochism. These are after
all experiences that take place in the indeterminate space between pleasure and
pain, control and submission, interiority and exteriority. Irigaray writes:
Perhaps it is time to return to that repressed entity, the female imaginary. So
woman does not have a sex organ? She has at least two of them, but they are
not identifiable as ones. Indeed, she has many more. Her sexuality, always at
least double, goes even further: it is plural Indeed, womans pleasure does not
have to choose between clitoral activity and vaginal passivity, for example. The
pleasure of the vaginal caress does not have to be substituted for that of the
clitoral caress. They each contribute, irreplaceably, to womans pleasure. (1985b: 28)
The understanding of the fantasies, sensations and pleasures of the female

masochistic body as irrevocably plural will be of great value as this book
progresses, moving beyond the genital caresses identified by Irigaray (although
not excluding them) and into numerous other facets of feeling including the
varied realms of the skin, the fingers and hands, and the new openings of
the wounded body that further perplex the demarcation of inside and outside,
self and other. The female protagonists of the films explore and express these
multiple potentialities of sensation, challenging the assumption of masochism
as a rigid identity of victimhood. They are active in the sense that for the most
part, it is their decisions and desires that propel the narratives of the films
forward, and at least initially they each maintain some level of control over
the encounters that take place. That the outcomes of their libidinous urges are
sometimes ambiguous or even disastrous should be seen not as a condemnation
of the female masochistic position or a failure of masochistic desire, but instead
17
as an indication of the way in which this position has been marginalized and
misunderstood. The inadequacy of the choices available to the women depicted
in these films in their fantasy lives and sexual relationships draws attention to
the conceptual and representational failures that surround female pleasure and
embodiment in a Western sociocultural context more broadly. Furthermore,
the emergence of this tendency in recent cinema and the shared aesthetic and
ethical concern with explicitly confrontational forms and provocative themes
make clear that female masochism is a form of sexuality that should not be
ignored, even if it creates discord with what some may perceive as being the
project of feminism. A dual need is apparent for a rethinking of the imagery
and narratives brought into the world through female masochistic desire, and
for an address to the ways in which the spectator is called to respond to these
representations. The authorship of these films adds further emphasis to this
debate; almost all the cinematic texts included are female-authored to a greater
or lesser extent. The majority are both written and directed by women. Some
of the included filmmakers are internationally known (Jane Campion, Catherine
Breillat), others are on their way to becoming established independent figures
(Andrea Arnold, Marina de Van), and some are relative newcomers, as yet
receiving little attention from the mainstream media or film academics (Julia
Leigh, Hlne Cattet and Bruno Forzani). Of the three main films here directed
by male filmmakers, two are based upon source material by women writers:
Shainbergs Secretary upon the short story of the same name by Mary Gaitskill
(1989) with a screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson, and The Piano Teacher, directed
by Michael Haneke and adapted from the novel by Elfriede Jelinek (1999).
Indeed, Lars von Triers Breaking the Waves stand out as a notable exception
of an almost solely male-authored film and as Chapter 2 will argue, despite
its perhaps controversial pairing of religion and sex, follows a conventionally
established trajectory of feminine self-sacrifice that forecloses openness of
meaning in a way that many of the other films here do not.
The association of female directors with films that tackle so-called womens
issues and address the place of the female subject within wider culture is not
a recent phenomenon. Even a passing familiarity with the history of cinema
throws up numerous examples of women directors producing films about
relationships, kinship and domesticity and working within genres regarded
appropriate to these themes such as melodrama or romances in Hollywood,
independent cinema and the European art-house tradition: the melodramas
of Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino, the romantic comedies of Nora Ephron
or the politicized addresses to nationality and memory in the work of Julie
Dash and Helena Sanders-Brahms. Italian director Liliani Cavani should also be
mentioned here for her controversial film The Night Porter (1974) which provided
an early study of the ambiguous and self-destructive drives of sadomasochism
and which Teresa de Lauretis regards as sitting in troubled proximity to, if
18
Introduction
not directly categorizable as, womens cinema (de Lauretis 1976). Given the
disapprobation with which many feminist theorists have approached the topic
of female masochism, it seems particularly notable that the bulk of the recent
films that have contributed to this emergent depiction of female sexuality
have been created by women filmmakers. While it is important to avoid an
essentializing viewpoint that suggests it is impossible to find replications of
the structures of male sociocultural domination in female-authored work, the
predominance of women directors and writers here is further indicative that
fantasies of female masochism and erotic investment in these fantasies should
not be hastily dismissed as the regurgitated project of a patriarchal ideology,
even when these depictions are troubled and violent.
Each of the subsequent chapters will identify a key thematic area in
order to examine some of the commonalities between these representations
of female masochism, and in doing so will address debates around female
sexuality and corporeality in the context of aesthetics and ethics. Chapter 1
will explore Gilles Deleuzes important attempt to disengage masochism from
the discourse of psychiatric diagnosis and return it to the realm of aesthetics
through an analysis of formal qualities such as suspension, delay, fetishism and
disavowal in the essay Coldness and cruelty. In particular, Deleuze identifies
the device of the masochistic contract as being a crucial component of this
aesthetic in ensuring the fantasized tableaux of the masochist are carried out
according to their design. Deleuzes study is of particular significance for the
argument of this book for two primary reasons. Firstly, the centrality that he
gives to the contract re-situates the balance of power from the torturer to the
masochist, with the latter emerging as the active and controlling force within
the intersubjective dynamic of dominance and submission, disrupting the rigid
lines inherent within the binary logic of Freudian theory that align masochism
with victimization and weakness. The potential ramifications of this shift in
power will be further discussed through the example of The Piano Teacher,
Michael Hanekes study of polymorphous perversity and sadomasochism,
and Julia Leighs Sleeping Beauty. Secondly, the combination of the contract and
the formal emphasis in Deleuzes work means that Coldness and cruelty has
been of special interest to film theorists who have used his theory as the basis
for an analysis of the masochistic aesthetic in cinema and for the proposal
of masochism as a spectatorial model. This chapter will therefore additionally
examine the relationship between masochism and film studies by focusing upon
writers including Gaylyn Studlar and Michele Aaron. In doing so, the need will
become apparent for a new theory of masochism, ethics and aesthetics that
attends to the specificities of female experience and the disruptive potential
held by female corporeality and pleasure with regard to spectatorship and the
transgression of sociocultural norms.
19
Lars von Trier is one of the contemporary directors most strongly associated
with representations of female masochism, having produced several films that
depict a version of goodness which is predicated on a trajectory of feminine
self-sacrifice and ensconced within a wider tradition of martyrdom discourse.
Chapter 2 will examine his film Breaking the Waves, in which this model of
masochistic goodness is simultaneously idealized and sexualized as the body of
the protagonist becomes a vehicle of endurance and devotion amidst violation
and assault. Von Triers film will be juxtaposed with Andrea Arnolds Red Road,
with philosophical writings by Lacan, Bataille and Derrida, and with significant
literary characters such as de Sades Justine and Sophocless Antigone. This
conjunction of texts will enable the thinking through of the tensions between
the problematically gendered logic of sacrifice in which the feminine body
is annihilated in service of the male, and the erotic potential of a chosen
relinquishing of self as a response to the vulnerability of the other. A key theme
to be introduced in this chapter and developed in subsequent discussions is
the question of the (limited) choices that are available to the perverse female
subject within a societal order that is dominated by heteronormativity. Then,
in response to this question, enquiries into how this desiring being, marked by
alterity, may negotiate these choices and forge a new and more ethically aware
modality of intersubjectivity.
The specificity of the female body and feminine embodied experience
introduced in Chapter 2 will be further developed in chapters 3 and 4. Chapter
3 offers a reflection upon cultural representations of, and attitudes towards,
self-harm, with a focus on the prescriptive modes of meaning that have been
imposed upon the self-mutilating subject and the female self-mutilating subject
specifically. Both the material and conceptual bodies of this figure have been
trapped within discursive webs that force it to signify, variously but equally
restrictively, the self-loathing generated by a damaging patriarchy, the evidence
of the primitive and inhuman nature of the objectified girl or mental illness
and a suicidal pathology. Secretary and The Piano Teacher each combine depictions
of ritualized self-injurious behaviour with the evocation of sadomasochistic
intersubjectivity, and in doing so raise questions about the place of masochism
within discourses of self-harmful practices more broadly. To some extent, these
films remain within the pathologized networks of cultural meaning that selfmutilation and masochism have each been subjected to; however, an alternative
mode of representation may be located in Marina de Vans more avant-garde
film In My Skin. The experimental aesthetic of de Vans work, when placed in
conjunction with Julia Kristevas study of meaning-making, Revolution in Poetic
Language, indicates a move toward self-mutilation as an asignifying system that
resists normative modalities of language and communication. This asignification
catalyses a reflective ethical response in the spectator as they are prompted to
think about the wounded or scarred body anew.
20
Introduction
The importance of alternative modes of spectatorship in response to

the body continues to be a central concern in Chapter 4. Here, with the help
of feminist theorists including Irigaray and Kristeva, it will be argued that
Catherine Breillats Romance and Jane Campions In the Cut perform a process of
generic reconfiguration, simultaneously making use of and challenging tropes
from dominant modes of filmmaking that are conventionally reliant upon the
objectification and victimization of the female body for their construction
of spectatorial enjoyment (specifically, pornography and the erotic thriller).
Campion and Breillat are each known for their depictions of the vicissitudes
of female desire and the difficulties of negotiating heterosexual relationships
within Western patriarchal ideology. In the works discussed in this chapter,
the masochist aesthetic emerges as inextricably bound up with the project of
perverting normative portrayals of the female body through the development
of narratives and forms that juxtapose moments of beauty and extreme pleasure
with moments designed to provoke disgust and horror. These unpleasurable
experiences re-situate the spectator and invoke an alternative encounter
with female corporeality and desire that is antithetical to the conventions of
phallocratic visual discourse.
Chapter 5 offers some meditations upon one of the central and constitutive
components of the masochist aesthetic, the heterocosmic impulse: the desire
to remake the world according to the perverse and transgressive fantasies
and rituals of masochism. Deleuze and others have explored the heterocosm
primarily through its significance for the formal aspects of this sexuality, but
this chapter will argue that the aesthetic and ethical debates that masochism
engages with must always be thought of in relation to each other, intertwined
modes of thought rather than separate realms of experience. The experimental
imagery and haptic sensibilities of the gialli-inspired film Amer, placed alongside
philosophical approaches from theorists including Bataille, MacCormack and
Foucault, offer a fertile ground for an elaboration of how the heterocosmic
impulse might catalyse the process of rethinking the relationship between self
and other and self and world. Crucial here will be the shift from knowledge, as
rigid and regulatory practice, to thinking and thought as ongoing processes of
exploration, creativity and discovery.
Taken as a whole, the weaving together of film and theory in this book offers
its own process of engagement with alterity. Those bodies and subjectivities
that have been categorized as perverse, insane, disgusting and obscene, and
that have been restricted or silenced through the controlling structures of
phallocratic knowledge, emerge here to demand a dissolution of binary logic
through the creation of new and never-completed networks of experience,
desire, encounter.
21
Chapter 1
The Deleuzian Model and

the Masochistic Contract
The model of masochism outlined by Krafft-Ebing and developed and
cemented in theoretical and, to a large extent, popular thought by Freuds
psychoanalytic interpretation remained predominantly unchallenged until Gilles
Deleuzes intervention on the topic with the 1967 essay Le froid et le cruel,
translated into English with the title Coldness and cruelty (Deleuze 1991).
The more robust rejection of Freudian psychoanalysis that would follow in
Deleuzes collaborations with Felix Guattari was at this point in its germinal
stage. Coldness and cruelty, therefore, refutes the aspects of Freuds theories
of sadomasochism that Deleuze finds most pernicious while nonetheless
utilizing key concepts familiar from Freudian theory such as the death drive,
ego and superego. He also retains a focus on the role of infant/parent dynamics
in the formation of masochistic subjectivity, however, there is a significant
shift in emphasis from paternal law to the figure of the mother, suggesting a
subversion of the phallic basis of the symbolic order.
Deleuzes essay has two primary aims that hold particular significance for
the discussion in this book and that must be understood in conjunction with
each other. Firstly, to put forward a conceptualization of masochism that
relocates it from the arena of the pathological with its attendant connotations
of mental illness, diagnosis and clinical cure, to the realm of the aesthetic. More
accurately, to return it to the specific aesthetic form that permeates the literature
of Sacher-Masoch, a form that Deleuze regards as epitomizing the movements
and pleasures of masochistic desire and experience. Rejecting the language of
pathology, Deleuze argues that this form of sexuality is not named after the
novelist because he suffered from it but because he transformed the symptoms
and forged the beginnings of a masochist aesthetic (1991: 142). Gaylyn Studlar
comments that in Coldness and cruelty Deleuze himself performs a similar
break with previous patterns of thought, displacing focus from psychiatric and
psychoanalytic explanations and repositioning masochism in relation to formal
factors such as language, narrative structure and textual pleasure (Studlar 1988:
14). Deleuzes second intention also instigates a significant rupture with earlier
theory. He argues vociferously against the assumed complementary opposition
of masochism and sadism that is given such prominence by Krafft-Ebing,
and that becomes ever more firmly entrenched in the Freudian oppositional
matrix that posits sadism and masochism as manifestations of the same drive
differing only in aim. That this assumption has been so enduring is perhaps
unsurprising, for the intertwined nature of these paraphilias may appear not
only commonsensical but also satisfyingly neat. As Deleuze puts it: It may
seem obvious that the sadist and the masochist are destined to meet. The fact
that the one enjoys inflicting while the other enjoys suffering pain seems to be
such striking proof of their complementarity that it would be disappointing if
the encounter did not take place (1991: 40). The projection of this narrative
onto the figures of the sadist and the masochist is indicative of the same
cultural fantasies that fuel the abundance of popular representations of happy
romances and idealized relationships, visible from romantic comedies to dating
websites, the you complete me mantra that the perfect partner awaits each of
us. Such an illusion of the harmonious union between masochist and sadist
is but a slightly more unorthodox version of this fantasy and functions to
disavow the transgressive potential that masochism as perversion holds. The
enormous success of E.L. Jamess recent Fifty Shades trilogy (20112012) stands
as testament to the continuing cultural investment in this image, drawing upon
the allure of illicit forms of sexual practice while ultimately reaffirming the
heteronormative conviction that for women, the path to a happily ever after
entails monogamy, marriage and reproduction. Deleuze rejects any such neat
formulation and is insistent that instead sadism and masochism belong to entirely
separate worlds, each with its own rules, rituals and aesthetic conventions. A
genuine sadist could never tolerate a masochistic victim that willingly or, even
worse, actively and deliberately underwent their torture (1991: 40), just as the
masochist described by Deleuze requires a torturer who fits a specific model
and can be persuaded into performing their tortures in a particular ritualized
way. Studlar argues that the masochist requires pseudosadism as an act or
performance, not true sadism itself (1988: 83). This ersatz torturer does
indeed belong essentially to masochism, but without realizing it as a subject; she
incarnates instead the element of inflicting pain in an exclusively masochistic
situation (Deleuze 1991: 42).
In resolutely dissociating masochism from sadism Deleuze does much to
start dismantling the reductive binary logic that has conceptually bound this
perversion, and as a consequence his essay provides the foundation for my own
work on the radical potential of masochistic desire and pleasure. Furthermore,
this initial act of separation entails a rethinking of the accompanying assumption
that masochism is manifested as an entirely passive and submissive sexuality
in opposition to the active and dominating drives of sadism. However, this
quote also indicates the problem of objectification that arises in the model
espoused by Sacher-Masoch and Deleuze, a problem that must be addressed
and overcome in order to forge forward with a more ethically aware and open
conceptualization of masochistic subjectivity. The pivotal device for, on the one
24
hand, the theoretically enabling aspects of Deleuzes study and, on the other,
the possible problem of objectification, is the trope of the masochistic contract,
a motif that Deleuze regards as central to the structure of the aesthetic. The
contract has important connotations for intersubjectivity and the organization
of power dynamics in this perverse aesthetic form and as a result will be critical
in realigning masochism away from a simple and reductive passivity. Beyond
this, the contract as a structural device has also been influential in the discipline
of film studies as a means of conceptualizing the relationship and patterns
of libidinal investment between spectator and film and therefore has further
significance for a discussion of the excessive and transgressive images to come
in later chapters.
Deleuze draws upon Theodore Reiks Masochism in Modern Man (1941)
to highlight five elements he regards as crucial to the masochistic aesthetic,
the first four being taken directly from Reiks text and the fifth element, the
contract, standing as Deleuzes own addition. The contract will be explored in
greater depth as this chapter progresses. The initial four factors require further
discussion here as they are instrumental in the construction of the formal style
of masochistic desire and pleasure which for Deleuze is a literary concern
but for subsequent theorists, most notably Studlar, have been mapped onto
the audiovisual medium of cinema. As will become evident in the following
chapters, there are aspects of these four elements that may still be identified in
the contemporary group of films that portray female sexuality and subjectivity
as masochistic, although not without transformations and the addition of
further representative strategies and aesthetic tendencies. Reik, a former student
of Freud, addresses masochism from a psychoanalytic perspective and yet his
four basic characteristics of masochism display a latent awareness of the formal
nature of this perversion. It is this potential that enables Deleuze to rework
these characteristics into the basis for his theory of the masochist aesthetic, in
turn paving the way for scholars of visual culture to make this formalism their
focus. The four points as listed in Coldness and cruelty cited in full:
1. The special significance of fantasy, that is the form of the fantasy (the
fantasy experienced for its own sake, or the scene which is dreamed,
dramatized, ritualized and which is an indispensable element of masochism).
2. The suspense factor (the waiting, the delay, expressing the way in which
anxiety affects sexual tension and inhibits its discharge).
3. The demonstrative or, more accurately, the persuasive feature (the
particular way in which the masochist exhibits his suffering, embarrassment
and humiliation).
4. The provocative fear (the masochist aggressively demands punishment
since it resolves anxiety and allows him to enjoy the forbidden pleasure).
(Deleuze 1991: 7475)
25
The points outlined above, in addition to the device of the contract, construct
an image of masochism that is resolutely performative, even theatrical, reliant
upon a staging of desire that must necessarily take place as an intersubjective
effort between the masochist and their chosen beloved. The creation of the
masochist aesthetic is, in Deleuzes theory, orchestrated in order to enact or play
out activities and practices that have previously been part of their fantastical
imagination. The rituals that emerge through the masochistic encounter are a
means of bringing these fantasies to life and constructing the pleasures of the
dreamworld within the space of reality: the masochist needs to believe he is
dreaming even when he is not (Deleuze 1991: 72). Whereas for early sexologists
the quest for pain and submission in which the masochist indulges was regarded
as an indication of mental aberration and the accompanying fantasies a symptom
of this illness (discussed at length by Freud in A child is being beaten, 1955c),
the figure depicted in Deleuzes theory could almost be described as utopian,
an idealist attempting to shape the world in accordance with their alternative
vision of sexuality and pleasure. Coldness and cruelty takes up what Peakman
describes as the constructive nature of the love of pain and submission given
form by Sacher-Masoch (2013: 224) and in doing so elevates this perversion
to a position of creativity and artfulness. The place of fantasy, suspense and
provocation in the aesthetic and ethical debates prompted by masochistic
sexuality will be teased out in subsequent chapters for they reappear as central
concerns within the majority of the films explored. However, they take form in
ways that frequently deviate from Deleuzes model in order to reconfigure the
male masochistic position into one that is more attentive to female bodies and
subjects, and to the choices made by these subjects in an ideology dominated by
discursive practices that have systematically marginalized and oppressed female
perspectives.
Masochism and Film Theory
The space conjured up by Sacher-Masoch and analysed by Deleuze, with its

focus on fetishized objects and textures, tableaux of suspension and luxuriant
settings is strikingly visual and portrays the material world much more vividly
and tangibly than the interiors of the characters minds. It is not unsurprising,
therefore, that Studlar makes effective and careful use of the masochist aesthetic
in In the Realm of Pleasure (1988) to interpret the series of collaborations between
director Josef von Sternberg and star Marlene Dietrich in the first half of the
1930s (from The Blue Angel in 1930 to The Devil is a Woman in 1935). The use
of sexual pathologies as a model for the theorization of the often ambivalent
pleasures of cinematic spectatorship has its roots in the film theory of the
1970s, which took an avid interest in the libidinal processes invested in and
26
facilitated by the experience of spectatorship. This interest found its form

through recourse to Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis with an emphasis
placed upon the perverse pleasures of cinema viewing and concepts such
as fantasy, desire and the gaze. Tanya Krzywinska notes that the theory
of spectatorship has been sexualized from the earliest days of film analysis
(2006: 195), a tendency that is apparent in influential studies such as those by
Christian Metz and, in particular, Laura Mulvey (Metz 1982, Mulvey 1975).
Mulveys canonical article Visual pleasure and narrative cinema argues that
the primary pleasures of classical Hollywood cinema function according to the
Freudian principles of scopophilia, voyeurism and fetishism. Within the sadistic
model the spectator identifies with the typically male protagonist of the film,
vicariously experiencing a position of activity and mastery, while the female
figure on screen is presented as a passive spectacle before his gaze. The subject/
object divide is clearly articulated along gendered lines in Mulveys theory,
reflecting the rising voice of second wave feminism in the expressed concerns
about the violent processes that lead to and stem from the objectification of the
female body. Mulveys article still stands as a landmark text within the discipline
of film studies, not only for the slew of analyses it spawned as theorists found
evidence of her model in a wide variety of film genres and eras but also because
of the many writers who have offered critiques of this conceptual framework
through alternative perspectives on spectatorship. Mulvey herself returned to
the debate with a later essay, Afterthoughts, a direct response to criticisms
that her sadistic model leaves scant space for the experiences or pleasures
of the female spectator (Mulvey 1999). It was argued in the Introduction
that female masochism and particularly female heterosexual masochism has
to a large extent been a blind spot in studies of perversion and paraphilias,
overlooked or marginalized in discourses that view it as either so natural as
to be unremarkable or as a source of denigration resulting from its perceived
replication of existing oppressive power hierarchies. The female spectator
of Visual pleasure and narrative cinema and Afterthoughts is subject to a
similar process of under-theorization or pejorative perception. The suggested
positions open to her are either transvestism, in which she identifies with the
male protagonist, or masochism, an unhappy identification with the passive
and frequently punished spectacle of the female star. Mulveys view was not
untypical for the period or the discipline; when asked in 1979 to comment on
womens love for Hollywood cinema, the critic and theorist Raymond Bellour
stated, I think that a woman can love, accept, and give a positive value to these
films only from her own masochism, and from a certain sadism that she can
exercise in return on the masculine subject, within a system loaded with traps
(Bellour cited by Bergstrom 1979: 97). A critique of such perspectives aims not
to suggest that Hollywood cinema and films that closely adhere to its models
of narrative and characterization are unproblematic in terms of how they
27
represent and address women, but to make clear how entrenched traditional
modes of thought are with regard to gender and sexuality more broadly,
and masochism specifically. Evident in Mulvey and Bellours perspective on
female masochistic identification is the more or less explicit assumption that
this position is one of weakness and inferiority, to be avoided or derided. The
films discussed in subsequent chapters of this book are precisely so important
because they refute the deeply ingrained belief that the masochistic subjective
position is one of victimhood. As a group, these films portray the ambiguous
allure and fascination of masochism, the wilfully sought pleasures and pains
to which it speaks, the subversive practices of control it requires and the way
that it defies or reconfigures networks of corporeal and sociocultural power.
They open up this fertile realm of enquiry through their challenge not only to
conventional modes of spectatorship, but also to the classic canonical models
put forward in spectatorship theory. The emphasis placed upon the scopophilic
model has shifted substantially in the decades between Mulveys intervention
and the present day with studies such as Studlars playing an instrumental role
in this change of emphasis, along with other important texts such as Tanya
Modlekis The Women Who Knew Too Much, Carol J. Clovers Men, Women and
Chain Saws (1992), Steven Shaviros The Cinematic Body (1993) and more recently
Patricia MacCormacks Cinesexuality (2008). Each of these studies puts forward
the possibility of finding masochistic pleasure through identifications and
experiences that are not necessarily bound by gender, whether in the films of
Hitchcock, modern horror cinema or the Italian zombie film. Paradoxically,
the notion of the sadistic gaze provided the starting point for a selection of
theorists to put forward an oppositional position: that the fantasies, desires
and subject positions engaged with and brought into being through cinema
spectatorship are more accurately masochistic in nature.
In film theory, Studlars In the Realm of Pleasure stands as the most obvious
antecedent to the project at hand. Her transferral of the concept of the masochist
aesthetic from literature to cinema provides a significant influence and sets out
some provisional paths of investigation and debate. There are common threads
that can be followed from Sacher-Masoch, through Deleuze and Studlar and
into the more recent films that portray female masochistic subjectivity, such
as the emphasis on delay and suspension, the primacy of fantasy and the
construction of an alternative realm of desire through the heterocosmic impulse
of masochism (the drive towards the remaking of the world), and the use of
sometimes highly stylized and mannered formal content. However, the mode
of aesthetic that has developed since the mid-1990s also indicates a significant
development in regard to the explicit and excessive nature of the imagery
and themes portrayed, a gendered extremity that is predominantly connected
to the experiences of the female body. Many of the films in this book, for
example, include nudity and unconventional images of the female body, graphic
28
sex scenes, rape and violence. The ethical dimension that is so critical for an
engagement with these confrontational images and narratives is of less concern
for Studlar and consequently the relationship of the masochist aesthetic to
ethics is as yet unexplored. She does, however, address the politics of gender to
some extent through the repeated focus on Marlene Dietrich as the embodiment
of the coldness and cruelty of Deleuzes title. The von Sternberg/Dietrich
collaborations echo the narrative form of Venus in Furs in their enactment of
male masochistic desires, playing out the formula of the male protagonist and
the beautiful but punishing woman over and over. Studlar argues that her chosen
films construct a masochistic heterocosm: a space outside the real world in
which normative temporality and spatiality are suspended as an area is opened
up in which to emphasize and enact the dynamics of fantasy and desire, as well
as to elevate a maternal authority over the masculine law (Studlar 1988: 9193).
Arguably, this is the purpose of cinema more broadly; the banalities of everyday
life are pushed aside in favour of narratives focusing on unlikely romances and
improbable adventures all contained in a neat 90-minute slot. However, there is
a distinction to be made between films that strive to portray a probable world
as it is according to the dominant tropes and values of the reality in which
the film is produced, and films that actively move away from this verisimilitude
and towards something more improbable and theatrical. The type of cinema
described by Studlar uses baroque settings, fetishized costumes and hyperbolic
characterization in order to emphasize the contrasts between the normative
first world and the second world excesses of masochism (Studlar 1988: 93).
Within this context the role play and ritualized scenarios dreamed up by the
masochist are staged in order to create an alternative world that functions not in
accordance with the logic of the dominant ideological system but in line with a
logic of perversion in which temporality, spatiality and intersubjectivity operate
differently. This description of the form and function of the heterocosm
recalls Harts explanation of the indeterminate space within which the elaborate
performances of sadomasochism take place, a borderland between reality and
the phantasmagorical (Hart 1998: 9). Studlar argues that the von Sternberg/
Dietrich films construct an audiovisual version of the themes of disavowal,
suspension, fantasy, fetishism that Deleuze describes as the key components
of masochistic literatures structural form and thus enact masochistic desire and
pleasure through stylistic choices as well as plot and characterization (Studlar
1988: 97). In keeping with the psychoanalytic framework that Deleuze uses
to theorize masochism Studlar interprets Dietrich as the fetishized mother
figure whom the male child wishes to reconstruct as inseparable plenitude in
symbiosis with himself. Thus, the female (mother) figure is exalted to a position
of wholeness without need for the father, a shift in the heteronormative balance
of power that Studlar regards as threatening to and subversive of Oedipal
imperialism and the paternal law (Studlar 1988: 5152). Certainly from this
29
perspective, we can follow Studlars logic in holding up the masochist aesthetic

as positive from the position of feminist politics: male authority is overcome
and humiliated and Dietrich appears resplendent and powerful, dominant in
terms of both the mise-en-scne and the progression of the narrative (Studlar
1988: 58). The spatial organization of the screen consistently places Dietrich
at the centre of an interplay of gazes, encompassing those of the enraptured
male characters within the diegetic space and that of the spectator, positing
her as statuesque and still (Studlar 1988: 50). She becomes an embodiment
of the perfect love object depicted in Sacher-Masochs novels: the idealized
image, frozen in order that it might be apprehended in a different temporal
and spatial dreamworld outside the confines of reality (Deleuze 1991: 33).
The extraordinarily visual qualities that the masochist aesthetic entails make
it clear why film is such an apt medium for the expression of this perversion,
particularly when considered in relation to the other vital elements of suspense
and fantasy that Reik and Deleuze identify. The effects of visual stillness and
temporal disruption can be most effectively achieved when juxtaposed with the
movement and progression enabled by the medium of film.
The frozen image of the female torturess that stands out in SacherMasochs novels and von Sternbergs films, as well as taking centre stage
within the theoretical representation of Deleuze and Studlar, does perhaps
enable a reconfiguration of the established Oedipal system and therefore the
overthrowing of paternal authority in favour of maternal dominance. However,
the figure of the female beloved as manifested in the male masochistic fantasy
remains problematic. Each of these twentieth century theories is underpinned
by a structure of gender that continues to conceptualize this paraphilia in terms
similar to those of Freuds feminine masochism: a male subject who longs to
suffer at the hands of his female love object. Two important consequences
follow from this. Firstly, the female masochist is once again left unconsidered
in a model that privileges the male and provides no space for an alternative
masochistic position. There is a position made available for the female but,
and here the second problem arises, it is a place that is extremely risky and that
entails the female becoming, once again, a mirrored surface that reflects male
desires about femininity rather than allowing her any access to or articulation
of her own desires and pleasures. Such an image of the female is more easily
read into sadistic discourse as exemplified by novels such as Justine and 120
Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade. In these narratives, the female victim
is tortured by a typically male subject who takes pleasure in objectifying her
as the locus of suffering and endurance (an envisioning of the female body
that will be explored further in Chapter 2). Prior to Deleuzes theory, the
prevailing discourse surrounding masochism folded it into an overarching
sadomasochistic narrative that characterized the masochistic position as one of
vulnerability and victimhood, albeit with a male occupying the feminine role
30
of the humiliation and passivity. Deleuzes work makes it clear that just as an
ethical conundrum arises from the sadistic fantasy of domination of the other,
so a similar lack of reciprocity and recognition may arise from the masochistic
fantasy of submission at the hands of the other. The love object Wanda
in Venus in Furs, Dietrich in von Sternbergs cinema, and any other woman
cast in the role of dominant torturess risks having their own subjectivity and
humanness elided as they are called upon to represent the ideal figure: frozen
and cruel, lacking in humanity. Deleuzes writing implicitly acknowledges this
risk when he comments, The subject in masochism needs a certain essence
of masochism embodied in the nature of a woman who renounces her own
subjective masochism; he definitely has no need of another subject (1991: 43).
The masochist as described in Coldness and cruelty may overturn previous
assumptions about the loss of agency and control entailed in this perversion, but
in the process the masochist himself becomes controlling, even manipulative,
bending his female partner to the shape of his own fantasies and failing to
recognize her outside the iconic image of stillness and punishment he demands
so persuasively. The traumatic effects of the demanding objectification apparent
in male masochism are evident in the memoirs of Sacher-Masochs first wife,
Aurora von Rmelin, first published in 1907 under the moniker Wanda von
Sacher-Masoch. She writes repeatedly of the torture and torment that she
undergoes as a result of the constant pressure exerted upon her to enact his
masochistic fantasies and to embody the idealized vision of the female torturess
produced by the male. Her own pleasures and desires are denied over and over
and her sense of self begins to crumble. Upon casting Leopold and his whips
from her room, she describes her elation at escaping the proscribed narratives
that have been imposed upon her: Free! Delivered from the torment of ten
years! Finally, to belong to myself again! Never again to don a fur, never again
to hold a whip (1990: 107). That her experiences were published not under
her own name but under that of the literary figure whose shadow constantly
darkened her life is further indicative of the cultural inability to imagine female
pleasure as alternative or exterior to the male. Although it appears in such a
case that the oppositional logic of activity and passivity is reversed, the familiar
patriarchal economy that equates the male position with subjectivity and the
female position with objectivity remains intact: it is difficult for the woman to
escape her culturally posited place as mirror of male desire within the model
that Sacher-Masoch and Deleuze propose.
Subject/Object?
The problematic status of recognition in masochistic fantasies and practices is

symptomatic of the way in which they explicitly dramatize the power dynamics
31
inherent in any intersubjective encounter and particularly those found in the

frequently fraught realm of sexuality. Downing argues that the dangers of
objectification apparent in perverse sexual encounters are an exaggeration or
development of those found in more normative relationships, for any sexual
relationship entails becoming entangled in ones own potentially alarming and
ambivalent desires and fears as well as in the fantasies and anxieties of the other.
Such a process of intermingling presents a dual risk of objectification for the
subject: they may objectify their love object, constructing them according to
a fantasy of misrecognition (evoking Lacans famous statement There is no
sexual relationship), and in turn the other may objectify them (Downing 2006:
160). In the Introduction it was argued that perversions may be categorized
as normal sexual acts that become the source of compulsion or fascination,
the intermediate relations that Freud describes or to use MacKendricks more
poetic term for these always already potentially aberrant acts, the forepleasures
(MacKendrick 1999: 7). From this perspective perversion emerges as a distorted
form of normative sexuality, thus, the risks that accompany sexual life in
general also appear in convoluted and excessive form within the landscape of
perversion.
These perils are made explicit in Julia Leighs 2013 film Sleeping Beauty, which
explores in exaggerated and dramatized form the narrative of a female subject
who risks submitting herself entirely to the realm of objectification. Sleeping
Beauty is based primarily upon the short story The house of the sleeping
beauties by Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata (2004), but also draws upon
older and more classic literary sources such as the Bible and the fairy tales of
the Brothers Grimm. The disparity in source materials and pervasiveness of
the central image of the young and beautiful sleeping woman indicates that this
gendered fantasy is one that is strongly embedded in our cultural imaginings.
Kawabatas text follows an elderly man who frequents the eponymous house,
an establishment in which men pay to spend time with slumbering young
women, drugged to ensure that they will not awaken. Although the structure
of this house seems to echo the model of the brothel, it is made clear in the
story that the visiting men may not penetrate the women, either with sexual
or violent intent. The elderly protagonist spends his time with these girls not
idolizing them sexually but reminiscing and fantasizing about past loves; the girls
therefore become ciphers whose faces and bodies virtually morph into those
dictated by the male visitor. They embody the passivity which is normatively
associated with natural femininity and as such become empty and reflective
surfaces that mirror back the mans own memories and desires:
He would travel back over memories of women with whom he had had affairs.
An old love had come back tonight because the sleeping beauty had given him
the illusion that he smelled milk. Perhaps the blood on the breast of that girl
32
from long ago had made him sense in the girl tonight an odor that did not exist.
Perhaps it was a melancholy comfort for an old man to be sunk in memories of
women who would not come back from the far past, even while he fondled a
beauty who would not awaken. (Kawabata 2004: 2627)
This passage is typical of the time the man spends with the sleeping girls
and illustrates the structural place that they occupy in the story: an image of
pure and submissive beauty that catalyses the folding in of temporality on itself
in order to facilitate the self-reflection of the male protagonist. Leighs film
takes the skeleton of this concept but switches the emphasis to narrate the
story from the point of view of Lucy, one of the sleeping beauties who uses
the money she earns to pay her rent and university expenses. The underlying
theme may perhaps be one of exploitation, but the film presents this neutrally
with Lucy positioned as determined and self-aware. The change in perspective
that the film performs alters the significance of the encounter between sleeping
woman and cognizant man: the spectator witnesses and experiences Lucy as
subject in her daily life and as object for the mens own desires, insecurities
and misogynistic outbursts. She is fondled, pulled about and in one disturbing
scene burned behind the ear with a cigarette, all while sleeping and entirely
passive. The concept of idiopathic identification is of use in understanding
the structural dynamic between self and other in these scenes. Idiopathic
identification is explained by Silverman as an incorporative model in which
the self is constituted at the expense of the other who is in effect swallowed
(1992: 205). This is what unfolds in Sleeping Beauty, in which the masculine
subjectivity of those who pay to use Lucys body is manufactured through
the positioning of the female as other who cannot take an active or subjective
position of her own. However, because for the spectator these scenes only
constitute a small part of Lucys life, the distinction between the categories
of subject and object is revealed to be a matter of perspective and not of
nature.
The deconstruction of subjectification and objectification in Leighs film
is in part facilitated by the way in which Emily Browning plays the character
of Lucy. For large parts of the film she appears impenetrable and detached
from those around her, engaging in apparently random and dispassionate sexual
encounters and seldom smiling or revealing emotion. Lucy is objectified twice
over, as the passive female form at the whims of the male visitors to the house
and as a figure according with Deleuzes label coldness and cruelty. She is aloof
and disdainful, but depicted throughout as sexually alluring because of this.
This glacial demeanour thaws only when she visits her friend Birdmann, a drug
addict who towards the end of the film voluntarily takes a fatal overdose and
whom Lucy lies beside, quietly crying, as he dies. In the scenes with Birdmann
she appears more as the conventional human subject in that she is expressive,
33
warm and affected by her contact with another. The contrast developed between
the scenes in the house of sleeping beauties and Birdmanns flat further serves
to problematize the notion of an objectified female beauty and to suggest that
such a notion is culturally constructed and artificial. The proprietors of the
house comment on her flawless skin and her unique beauty, even describing her
vagina as a temple (a suggestion which Lucy quickly refutes). Her surroundings
in this house are opulent, reflecting the fantastical space of commerce that it
represents: luxuriant food, rich furnishings and silk bed sheets that pool around
Lucy, emphasizing the whiteness and smoothness of her skin. Lesley Chow
(2012) has written of the world of sexual transactions touched by magic that
the film depicts, an apt phrase to describe the dreamlike house as a place external
to the real world in its detached spatiality and frozen temporality. However,
to apply this magic to the film as a whole ignores the alternative version of
heterosexual encounters presented in the scenes with Birdmann, the moments
in which Lucy appears most at ease and indeed, happiest. They take place in his
squalid flat and present a divergent version of beauty and romance that is firmly
rooted in the realities of the visceral body. Birdmann recounts wanting to kiss
her in the past but being unable to because his tongue was furred putrid
the arsehole of the arsehole. If Lucys encounters with the male visitors
to the house of sleeping beauties are predicated upon the notion of purity
as surface and superficiality, then in contrast her relationship with Birdmann
is characterized by the recognition of the imperfection and vulnerability of
corporeal existence.
That Lucy is constructed as an object in two quite different ways is also
significant. The first is reliant on her absolute submission and relinquishing
of knowledge and control. The second, her cold and cruel demeanour, is
enacted with deliberation and appears to be a chosen and desired course.
This brings the discussion to a further point that Downing makes about
the risks of objectification within the sexual relationship and the perverse
relationship particularly. She argues that the peril of objectifying the other
while simultaneously being objectified oneself is a peril that carries with
it the potential for pleasure (2006: 160). And again, if this is the case for a
normative relationship, then the perverse encounter may be seen as a source for
an increased or more intense pleasurable compulsion. The novel part of this
statement and the part that runs contrary to many feminist critiques of female
masochism and dominant feminist ideology in general is the suggestion that the
experience of being objectified may offer a valid and authentic form of erotic
satisfaction, as opposed to an enjoyment of objectification that arises purely
from the internalization of the expected gender roles espoused by patriarchal
value systems. The recognition of this form of enjoyment is another of the
germinal ways in which masochism moves towards the dislocation of binary
logic, the illusionistic lines dividing conventional conceptions of object and
34
subject becoming increasingly blurred. Along similar lines, Sartre regards

masochism as a dramatization or exaggeration of the processes that exist
within all relationships, making overt the problematics of objectivity and (inter)
subjectivity that pervade love and the inherently conflictual dynamic between
lover and beloved. What the lover wants (or needs) from their beloved is not
to possess them as an object, but in fact to be objectified by them in order
to become the ultimate and unsurpassable object: In Love the Lover wants
to be the whole World for the beloved he is the one who assumes and
symbolizes the world; he is a this which includes all other thises. He is and
consents to be an object (2003: 389). Love, from the side of the lover, therefore
emerges as an enterprise of the self in which the beloved is used in the service
of the project of self-actualization: By seduction I aim at constituting myself
as a fullness of being and at making myself recognized as such (Sartre 2003:
394). This is a converse process of self-constitution to that which Sleeping
Beauty portrays, because seduction implies a need for recognition from the
other which is absent when one half of the encounter cannot acknowledge the
subject with their gaze or their utterances. To be regarded as an object from the
exterior position of the other is to bestow the self/lover with a sense of being
in the world. This description chimes with the design undertaken by Severin,
the masochistic protagonist of Venus in Furs, which could indeed be regarded
as a project of himself (Sartre 2003: 393). This brings us back to the structural
motif of the contract, one of the most crucial tools for the masochists project
of self-construction or self-objectification.
The Contract
The masochistic contract is a central device in Venus in Furs and famously

replicates the organization of Sacher-Masochs real-life relationships with
women. Considering the primacy given to the contract by the author in his life
and fiction it is a little perplexing that this aspect of masochistic intersubjectivity
remained largely ignored by theorists until Deleuzes essay readdressed the
formal elements used to express masochistic desire and pleasure. Deleuze
states that Sacher-Masochs work makes the contract into the primary sign
of masochism (1995: 142). However, despite looking to Sacher-Masoch when
naming the perversion, Krafft-Ebing did not regard the contract as notably
significant and it does not feature in Freuds case studies or explicatory essays.
Reiks 1941 account, Masochism in Modern Man, which in other respects offers
some fresh and insightful observations, similarly failed to give prominence to
this device. Yet, the contract is a concrete element in the establishment of the
interplay of power in this particular type of intersubjectivity, taking on a crucial
function in ensuring that being and seeming are separated and that all is not as it
35
may appear from an exterior perspective: The masochist appears to be held by

real chains, but in fact he is bound by his word alone (Deleuze 1991: 75). It
is by means of the contract that the roles of each partner are negotiated and
confirmed, and that the masochist may orchestrate events according to their
own terms in advance, a process that excludes these terms from the sexual
scene itself. Thus, the masochist acts as director of their own play, their control
assured but effectively disavowed as the enactment of their submission unfolds.
This formal device is therefore pivotal to the argument made throughout this
book that masochistic subjectivity should not be equated with powerlessness
and passivity, but is instead a position that entails pleasure through chosen
submission and mastery which, although not apparent in the acts themselves,
must be taken into account when considering masochistic subjectivity and
intersubjectivity as a whole. When the contract fulfils its function correctly it
may also act as a safeguard against the objectification of the masochists partner,
for it emphasizes the importance of a recognition that flows equally between the
pair. Focusing attention on the relevant passages from Venus in Furs illustrates
the reciprocity that is required when the contract is drawn up in the most literal
sense. Although it is certainly the case that the protagonist Severin must agree
to be his lovers slave, it is he that initially instigates their arrangement according
to his fantasies and before the contract is signed he adds his specified conditions
and clauses, making it clear that Wanda has her own duties and responsibilities
to adhere to (Sacher-Masoch 1991: 19597). Indeed, although Wanda becomes
steadily more enthusiastic about the plan she is at reluctant at first and Severin
must use all his powers of persuasion to talk her into assuming the role of
his ideal female torturer (as von Rmelins memoirs show, Sacher-Masochs
literary imagining of this eventual enthusiasm was perhaps some way from
the experience of the actual female participant). The masochistic contract is
presented in Sacher-Masochs work and in Deleuzian theory as a mechanism for
ensuring the vital aspects of reciprocity and recognition within the masochistic
scenario, thus serving as the primary signifier of the (disavowed) agency and
control of the masochistic subject and of the balance of power within such
relationships. The contract is the fulcrum around which masochistic pleasure
and desire necessarily circle, working to manifest and define the other crucial
elements of the masochistic aesthetic: fantasy, suspension, demonstration and
provocative fear. Also evident in these paragraphs is the context of tenderness
and affection within which the contract is devised. The experiences and practices
of masochistic desire are not envisioned as external to or incompatible with a
more classic vision of love, rather, Severins devotion is portrayed as enduring
love taken to its exquisitely painful limits, recalling the assertion that perverse
relations present an exaggerated and more intense version of normative
intersubjectivity. Slavoj iek has commented on the similarities between the
pathological understanding of masochism and the structure of courtly love,
36
suggesting that with the emergence of masochism as the subject of theoretical

enquiry at the end of the nineteenth century the libidinal economy underlying
the logic of courtly love was given conceptual form (1994: 89).
Significantly, several of the films featured in the following chapters echo
the emphasis and pivotal position given to the contract by Sacher-Masoch
and by Deleuze, employing devices that occupy a structurally similar position
in the narrative and form of the films. Both Breaking the Waves and Red Road
utilize the symbolism of the marriage contract in ensuring the bonds and
obligations of kinship, up to and beyond the point of death. The conditions
of employment undertaken in Secretary and Sleeping Beauty similarly serve
as initial catalysts and subsequent framing devices for unfolding events,
likewise, Maries agreement with her recalcitrant partner at the beginning of
Romance and the mutual understanding reached between the woman and man
in Anatomy of Hell could be regarded as reciprocal arrangements akin to the
more overt and tangible contract in its traditional form. The exact function
of these arrangements is contingent upon the intersecting factors of plot,
characterization and strategy of each film, however, the recurring motif may
be used to identify shared formal and conceptual concerns that relate not only
to Deleuzes theorization of masochistic subjectivity but also to the theoretical
and philosophical debates underpinning this book. Michele Aaron has made
use of the trope of the contract and the type of relationship that it entails
as a means of conceptualizing the bond between film and spectator. In line
with theorists such as Studlar and Clover, Aaron asserts that the pleasures of
cinematic spectatorship function according to the logic of masochistic desire,
however, while for these earlier writers the question of identification was
crucial, for Aaron issues of consent, reciprocity and disavowal come to the fore
around what she describes as the contractual nature of spectatorship. Central to
her argument is the idea that as viewers we come willingly to a film, even those
that feature disturbing, disgusting or horrific content. Indeed, it is often this
type of imagery that holds the most potent and strangely fascinating allure. It is
Aarons focus on the compulsion to watch extreme or disturbing imagery that
makes the perverse (un)pleasures of masochism so apt for her theory. As she
argues, both the cinematic spectator and the masochist enter deliberately into
their respective relationships while simultaneously disavowing their complicity
in this exchange of power through the donning of the mantle of passivity
and submission. Each partner within the relationship must then play their
designated role according to the contractual understanding between them
(Aaron 2007: 9091). Despite the fact that the concept of disavowal derives
from Freudian psychoanalysis, through the Deleuzian framework developed by
Aaron it suggests a possible avenue out of the deadlock created by the binary
logic so apparent not only in many accounts of masochistic sexuality but also
in some of the more pervasive classical models of spectator theory. Aarons
37
thesis is also useful because of the emphasis that she places upon the question
of ethics and cinema and the relationship drawn between ethical responsibility
and the reciprocity of cinematic spectatorship. She argues that ethical enquiry
is becoming a vital area in the domain of narrative film for several reasons,
one of which is particularly pertinent for the discussion in this and subsequent
chapters. Filmmakers are, with increasing frequency, exploiting the contractual
nature of the tacit agreement between film and viewer with a significant body
of modern films containing what she describes as unconscionable content:
themes and imagery that step outside the boundaries of accepted morality and
into areas deemed pornographic or obscene (Aaron 2007: 8889). This will
become an important question in the explorations of sexuality and corporeality
that follow. Masochistic subjectivity has been conceptualized as external to
normative moral frameworks in terms of psychiatry, religion and economics
and as such the practices and bodies associated with it are socially coded as
perverse and taboo. Therefore, the unconscionable content that Aaron speaks
of comes to occupy a prominent role in the new forms of masochist aesthetic
that have emerged since the 1990s. The failure of masochism to fit neatly into
the discursive structures of knowledge that regulate morality is one of the
crucial aspects to facilitate its opening into the field of ethical enquiry. The
images of obscenity and revulsion depicted in these films take advantage of the
contract between spectator and cinema to force a confrontation with types of
alterity normatively considered obscene or revolting (the self-mutilated body,
the profane body, the substances of the female body, the explicit sex act) and to
catalyse the process that Aaron describes: an ethics of spectatorship requires
us to think through the moralistic treatment of difference in film (2007: 113).
The ethics of spectatorship that Aaron describes resonates with the enquiries
running through this study, and shall become increasingly significant in later
chapters. Recognition, reciprocity and consent coalesce at the intersection of
the masochist aesthetic and the intensities of spectatorial experience.
The contract in its Deleuzian form functions to establish a reciprocal
intersubjective relationship based upon mutual recognition, to ensure that the
encounter proceeds according to the rituals and tableaux that constitute the
dreamworld fantasized by the masochist and to enable the masochists position
of mastery and control to be disavowed. It achieves what iek describes as
the negation of the conventional dominant subjective position through the
suspension of reality (1994: 91). The construction of female masochism in
Michael Hanekes The Piano Teacher offers an insight into what may result when
the functions of the contract fail and a crisis of misrecognition arises. The
film follows the relationship between Erika, the polymorphously perverse
piano teacher of the title who engages in self-mutilation and fantasies of
sadomasochism, and Walter, a student whose attempts to seduce her according
to his more prosaic conceptions of romance result in escalating acts of violence
38
and the disintegration of subjective integrity for both characters. In a theme

that recurs through the films in this book, perverse desires find themselves
in conflict with restrictive conceptions of heterosexuality as expressed in
normative narratives about what constitutes love, courtship and sexual relations.
The phallocratic context of these cultural narratives must be acknowledged
and the question posed whether the female masochistic subject faces greater
resistance than her male counterpart when attempting to orchestrate fantasies
and corporeal experiences that deviate from the roles assigned to the feminine
by the logic of the patriarchy. Luce Irigaray writes, Feminine pleasure has to
remain inarticulate in language, in its own language, if it is not to threaten the
underpinnings of logical operations. And so what is most strictly forbidden to
women today is that they should attempt to express their own pleasure (1985b:
77). In Hanekes film, Erikas attempts to articulate her hitherto hidden and
intensely personal pleasures are met initially with disgust and later with the
subsuming of chosen submission beneath violent coercion as male logic strives
to establish itself once again and Walter rapes Erika in the penultimate scene
of the film.
The item that plays the part of the contract in The Piano Teacher is another
form of document: a letter written to Walter by Erika outlining her most fervent
but previously unspoken wishes. The importance of this letter is signalled from
its first appearance: Erika places it upon the piano top (another signifier of the
growing bonds between her and Walter) where the camera lingers over it, pale
and portentous against the black surface. In an echo of Severins demands for
punishment from his beloved Wanda, Erikas letter contains detailed instructions
of the violence and humiliations she wishes Walter to subject her to:
Tighten my bonds Adjust the belt by at least two or three holes. The tighter
the better. Then, gag me with some stockings I will have ready. Stuff them in
so hard that Im incapable of making any sound. Next, take off the blindfold,
please, and sit down on my face and punch me in the stomach to force me to
thrust my tongue in your behind.
Such explicit instructions provide a shock not only to Walter but to the
spectator of the film: what is put on paper is too traumatic to be pronounced
in direct speech: her innermost fantasy itself (iek 2002: 20). This traumatic
affect is consolidated by an extended shot of Erikas face gazing directly into
the camera once this passage from the letter has been read out loud. It is a
look that does not broker identification but, on the contrary, issues a challenge
to the viewer: can our definitions of sexuality and pleasure acknowledge and
accommodate these perverse demands? Alas, Walters prosaic notions of
romance and sex cannot and the trajectory traces the disintegration of Erikas
39
subjectivity as, following the refusal of her polymorphous pleasures by the

ideologies of masculine heteronormativity, her sense of self begins to fragment.
Jessica Benjamin has argued that masochistic sexuality is rooted in the
subjects internal conflict between the desire for autonomy and the desire for
the recognition of the other. The successful encounter would thus entail the
necessity of the recognizing as well as being recognized by the other (Benjamin
1990: 23), a situation that the contract strives to establish. Benjamin explores
this idea through recourse to Pauline Rages tale of masochistic love, The Story
of O (Rage 1965), arguing that in this novel the conflict felt by the female
protagonist is resolved through a total renunciation of the self as she invites
the transgression of her subjective and corporeal boundaries, resulting in the
consequent loss of her own subjectivity (Benjamin 1990: 5558). Erika, like O,
establishes a connection with Walter through the letter as contract, an attempt
to garner his recognition and to negotiate the ideal masochistic encounter of
disavowed control as played out in her fantasies. However, recognition fails
and crumbles instead into incomprehension and disgust: the direct display of
her fantasy radically changes her status in his eyes, transforming a fascinating
love object into a repulsive entity he is unable to endure (iek 2002: 21). The
process of Walter reading the letter aloud foreshadows the way in which Erika
is dispossessed of her own fantasies, which are traumatically and horrifically
misappropriated by Walter in the rape scene. Some interpretations of Hanekes
film have suggested that the rape scene represents a genuine attempt by
Walter to fulfil the role that Erika has assigned him, with Frances Restuccia
calling it the rape scene and Nina Hutchison going so far as to describe
the act as mock-raping (Restuccia 2004, Hutchison 2003). Hutchison suggests,
not unproblematically, that to read the scene as a rape is to blindly follow
entrenched gender stereotypes regarding the feminine position as passive and
submissive, and the masculine one as active and dominant; instead, she argues,
Erika succeeds in reversing these roles and manipulating Walter into placing her
in the position of power. While Hutchisons attempts to dismantle the binds
of gender binaries are to be admired, this interpretation seems to misread the
process of Erikas fragmentation that is traced through the trajectory of the
film and fails to account for the horror that the rape invokes in the spectator.
Additionally, there is a glaring mistake evident in such an interpretation: the
equation of masochistic corporeal pleasures with the act of vaginal penetration.
Erikas letter makes no mention of such an act, indeed, the only penetration that
occurs in the passage that Walter reads pertains to Erikas tongue and his anus.
The formula of normal sex that has been reiterated over and over in Western
discourse overwrites the deviant practices that the masochist covets. The extent
to which Walter is in control in this scene is ambiguous, for his subjectivity is
also thrown into chaos as the film progresses, but it is clear that this rape is
40
most certainly a rape which does not occur in accordance with Erikas fantasies
or compliance and over which she exercises no control.
Apparent in both films explored in this chapter, but particularly in The Piano
Teacher, is the ethical conundrum that the self faces when entering into the
intersubjective dynamic, with the masochistic relationship dramatizing in overt
form the cruelties, vulnerabilities and responsibilities that are inherent in any
meeting between self and other. The significance of responsibility as it pertains
to masochism will be examined further in Chapter 2, thus, here I will focus
for a moment upon the problematic convulsions of cruelty and vulnerability.
If, as Aaron emphasizes, one of the most vital questions for ethical enquiry
concerns the response of the self to difference, then the reactions of Walter
(and the cinematic spectator) to the radical otherness of Erikas desires is of
paramount importance. The intersubjective encounter arises as an inherently
traumatic event that evokes in the subject extreme anxiety and even fear, and
this is precisely the difficulty contemplated first by Freud and later by Lacan
in regard to the ethical entreaty love thy neighbour as thyself (Freud 1961b,
Lacan 1992). The ramifications of this phrase are illuminating in regard to
the treatment of alterity in Hanekes film, in addition to assisting with the
consideration of the ambivalent feelings that mark the self/other dynamic
more broadly. Lacans exploration of the commandment love thy neighbour
as thyself provides two starting points. The first of these concerns the
relationship between the self and the other, and the second the relationship of
this to jouissance. Before following these paths of enquiry directly it is necessary
to return, as Lacan does, to Freud and specifically to Freuds texts Project for
a scientific psychology and Civilization and its discontents. Freud identifies
the concept of loving thy neighbour as thyself as one of the oldest and most
ideal demands of civilized society, a demand that predates Christianity but
finds its Biblical intonation in Leviticus. Freud also observes, however, that this
seemingly simple demand solicits feelings of incomprehension and resentment
in the subject: why should we behave in this way? What good will it do us? But
above all, how shall we manage to act like this? (Freud 1961b: 10910). This line
of questioning suggests that it is a struggle for the subject to assume a generous
and open position in relation to the other, reaffirming Bersanis declaration,
discussed in the Introduction, that cruelty takes a central role within human
subjectivity. On this occasion Freud is aware of the radical theory he is putting
forward and thus attempts to explain the revulsion that the subject feels when
confronted with the figure of the nebenmensch or neighbour. One initial and
rather unconvincing explanation he offers is that the subjects love is precious
and would lose its meaning if doled out indiscriminately (Freud 1961b: 110).
This, perhaps, may account for the reluctance felt by the subject, but not for
the creeping dread. Addressing this aspect of Freuds work, Joan Copjec states
that the question of ethics in the psychoanalytic context stems not from the
41
impulse to found our happiness in the happiness of all, but in the horrified
recoil from this impulse (Copjec 1995: 88). This seems, superficially, a rather
extraordinary claim. Why should the subject find the idea of loving the other
so difficult to comprehend and so challenging to put into practice? Copjec
argues that this is because the other, the neighbour we are faced with, appears
to us not as benign or good but as aggressive and malevolent, unworthy of
the love we have to bestow. They emerge into our consciousness as a malign
figure willing to commit terrible cruelty upon us in the quest for the accrual of
their own pleasure or violent jouissance (Copjec 1995: 92). Once again, however,
this explanation is inadequate. Why does the neighbour appear to us thusly,
what is our rationale for assuming this malignancy and desire to cause harm?
The subject faced with the entreaty love thy neighbour presumes hostility and
aggression in the other because they recognize it within themselves. As Freud
observes, the cultivation of too close a proximity tempts out and reveals the
violence at the heart of the human subject (Freud 1961b: 111). This begins
to untangle part of the complicated knot that ties together ethics, selfhood
and alterity. The existence of the other who confronts us calls out the cruelty
at the heart of our self; their very presence acts as an invitation to hurt and
humiliate them, to abuse and exploit them in the service of our own pleasures
and enjoyment a very similar situation to that which is played out in The Piano
Teacher as Walter finds himself in close proximity to an otherness he had never
envisioned. The anxiety raised by the figure of the other is, therefore, a fear
of the self or more precisely the fear of the otherness that resides within the
self but that is constantly being tempered and restricted by symbolic discourse.
Freuds theorization of this paradoxical dilemma is given name in the concept
of the Nebenmensch complex, a concept that expresses the contradictory and
ambiguous feelings of the subject for the other. They appear as love object
but also hated enemy, attractive yet revolting, simultaneously comparable and
incomparable to the self (Freud cited in Critchley 1999: 208209). The ethical
encounter is rooted in trauma and ambivalence, not simply a matter of treat
others well but of loving the neighbour as thyself, a return to the very core of
the subjects own fraught identity and sometimes violent impulses.
Lacan elaborates on this paradoxical movement in his identification of
two primary aspects to the Nebenmensch complex. Firstly, the other stands over
and against the subject as the incomprehensible Thing (das Ding), baffling and
threatening, the element that is initially isolated by the subject in his experience
of the Nebenmensch as being by its very nature alien (Lacan 1992: 5152). Yet
despite this, it also offers the possibility of recognition, of understanding
and being understood in its capacity of similarity to the self. Inherent in this
relationship is a contradictory movement of beside yet alike, separation and
identity (Lacan 1992: 51). As the representations and sociopolitical debates
that run through the following chapters demonstrate, the challenges of opening
42
up new networks of engagement often revolve around the fraught identities

and identifications that are inherent within any relationship between self and
other (or indeed, between self and self). The anxieties made apparent in the
Nebenmensch complex highlight some of the difficulties that may be encountered
when one subject comes up against the desires of another. As will become
increasingly apparent, the likelihood of confronting such anxieties about the
threat to the self from alterity is significant when the alterity in question is female
masochism. This subjective position, this body, has been othered from multiple
angles: the female body is abjected and her pleasures silenced; the body in pain
is incomprehensible and the deliberate quest for unpleasure pathological. And
yet, as Lacan (perhaps unintentionally) implies with his acknowledgement of
the possibility of recognition, a path out of the cruelty and misrecognition that
has marked the place of the female masochist in sociocultural discourse may
be envisaged. The cinematic texts and debates to follow address this possibility
without flinching from the ambiguities and conundrums that such a path entails.
43
Chapter 2
Masochism, Feminine
Goodness and Sacrifice
One of the most pervasive tropes to have emerged in representational forms
that portray a specifically female masochistic subjectivity has been that of
feminine self-sacrifice. Cinematically, this has been most notable in genres such
as the melodrama, as discussed in Mary Ann Doanes studies of spectatorship
and the womans film (1988, 1992), but it is also apparent in wider cultural
discourses that associate femininity with a drive towards self-sacrifice, often
operating in the service of dedication to male partners or other causes typically
regarded as existing within the female sphere such as family and domesticity.
This chapter will explore the meanings and structures of sacrifice in the context
of philosophical questions of goodness, guilt, religion and martyrdom, and
of mourning, forgiveness and subjective rebirth in relation to Lars von Triers
Breaking the Waves (1996) and Andrea Arnolds Red Road (2006). Notably,
both films frame the possibilities of ethical self-sacrifice within the sphere
of sexuality, with graphically portrayed sexual acts providing the means for
the female protagonist to sacrifice herself, thus forging a strong connection
between sacrifice and masochistic erotic experience. The logics and outcomes
of these acts differ from film to film, however, and their implications for ethical
subjectivity are consequently distinct.
Breaking the Waves follows Bess, a highly religious young woman living in an
austere and traditional Christian community on the Scottish coast. The narrative
of the film is set in motion when Bess marries an outsider, Jan, a worker on an
oil rig. Bess struggles with his absence on the rig and prays for his return; return
he does, but following an accident which leaves him paralyzed and ill. Bess
becomes convinced that her taking other lovers will lead to Jans recovery, a
belief that ultimately results in her visiting a man she knows is likely to mortally
harm her. Seemingly miraculously, Besss death coincides with Jans recovery.
The process of sacrifice presented in Breaking the Waves begins as a very reluctant
Bess starts to have sex with other men after Jan persuades her this will make
him happy (whether this is also an act of sacrifice on Jans part to try to force
Bess into a full life, or whether, as one of the other characters claims, he is sick
in the head, is never made clear); it finishes with her knowingly giving up her
life for his in an act of self-destruction akin to assisted suicide. The imagery and
language associated with the character of Bess, along with the religious context
of the story, situates her firmly within the realm of martyrdom discourse, a
representational tradition that manifests self-sacrifice in its most extreme form
and that will be explored in more depth shortly. Red Road is a very different
film in terms of narrative, style and context. Arnolds film is set in the urban
streets of Glasgow, particularly around the deprived area of the Red Road flats
(demolition of these towers began in 2012 and is due for completion by 2017).
The protagonist here is Jackie, a CCTV security operator who one day spies a
familiar face on one of her screens. The audience is left in ignorance of the
source of Jackies increasing obsession with this man, Clyde, as she progresses
from watching him via the CCTV screens, to following him around the Red Road
area, to seducing him in a highly ambiguous sequence of events in which her
motives and feelings remain largely enigmatic from the spectators perspective.
Following a graphic sex scene, she frames Clyde for rape. It is only now, as the
film reaches its conclusion, that the audience discovers Clyde was sent to prison
for killing Jackies young daughter and husband in a drug-driving accident, and
her obsession stems from horror at his early release. There are two sacrificial
acts performed by Jackie within the narrative of Red Road, albeit much subtler
than Besss explicit suicide in Breaking the Waves. Firstly she must have sex with
Clyde in order to accuse him of rape and secure a more lasting justice for her
family, an experience that can clearly be read as a self-sacrificial act in which
disgust and sexual pleasure are mingled in a masochistic process of fascination
and repulsion. This is a pivotal scene that engages with the problematics of
obligation and duty in relation to kinship structures, specifically the dilemma
of to whom the subject must answer when attempting to act in an ethical way
(themselves? their family? social law?). Jackies second sacrifice occurs in the act
of dropping the charges against Clyde and instead confronting him herself in
a scene that, whilst distressing and inconclusive, appears to herald a subjective
rebirth for Jackie as she moves forward with the grieving process and with her
life.
Suffering and Beauty
Lars von Trier, the Danish director of Breaking the Waves, has emerged in recent
years as a controversial auteur and as one of the darlings of contemporary
cinema scholarship. The thematic content of Breaking the Waves (religion, sex,
death) is typically provocative and the imagery no less so as scenes of explicit
and uncomfortable sexuality are woven together with violence against the
female body. Such violence occurs throughout von Triers work, from the heartwrenching execution of Bjrk by hanging at the end of Dancer in the Dark (2000),
through the repeated rapes of the heroine in Dogville (2003) and perhaps most
infamously the close-up shot of a masturbating Charlotte Gainsbourg cutting
46
off her own clitoris with a pair of scissors in Antichrist (2009). Such imagery and
narrative content have resulted in accusations of misogyny as well as in rapturous
praise for his bold and uncompromising filmmaking. Responses to Breaking the
Waves within the discipline of film studies have been no less polarized. Besss
final act of suicidal self-sacrifice has proved crucial to interpretations of the
film, which fall broadly into two camps: the film provides a positive outcome
with the finale demonstrating the power of feminine goodness and morality
to exceed and transgress patriarchal power structures (see for example Keefer
and Linafelt 1999, Makarushka 1998, Heath 1998), or the film is negative in its
portrayal of female subjectivity and sexuality with Besss death acting as the final
valorisation of a damaging female masochism and drive towards self-destruction
in the name of male salvation (see for example Faber 2003, Penner and Vander
Stichele 2003). In part, these polemical responses stem from the unstable nature
of the film itself. It contains deliberate ambiguities and even encourages directly
oppositional readings through its formal style and narrative structure. Stephen
Heath identifies two possible but contradictory interpretations of Breaking the
Waves which are simultaneously promoted. A naturalistic reading in which a
nave girl is destroyed by her religious faith and her love, and a supernaturalistic
reading in which Besss self-abasement and ultimate act of suicidal sacrifice
does actually lead to the miraculous recovery of her husband (Heath 1998: 94).
As a result of the tension between these concurrent narratives, two oppositional
spectatorial positions are required, as Suzy Gordon suggests, critical distance
and unmitigated faith (2004: 209). The final scene of the film appears to reward
this faith with the much-discussed image of enormous bells tolling in the sky,
seemingly celebrating and confirming Besss sacrifice and affirming her status
as morally good. The discussion of von Triers film presented in this chapter
is not intended to assume a position on one side of this debate or the other
but rather to explore what the character of Bess and her final act may suggest
about the traditions of feminine goodness within cultural discourse, with
particular focus upon the centrality of the female body and female suffering.
Suffice it to say that strongly critical readings of Breaking the Waves tend to repeat
the entrenched associations of female masochism with negativity, misogyny
and straightforward self-destruction, while positivist interpretations may
overstate, sometimes drastically, the potentiality of Besss gesture as a genuinely
transgressive and ethical act.
The facets central to the characterization of Bess can be traced back across
the threads of earlier representations of femininity, masochism and religion
as von Trier meshes together sources that appear disparate but in fact share a
similar grounding logic. Breaking the Waves is the first film in what is known as
von Triers Gold Heart trilogy, a set of films that subsequently included The
Idiots (1998) and Dancer in the Dark. The thematic spine of these films is the
exemplification of feminine goodness in the face of excessive hardship and
47
suffering, and according to the filmmaker his inspiration for these protagonists
was drawn from two primary sources. The first is a childrens book in which the
heroine, Gold Heart, gives away all her possessions to others in need, including
the very garments that she wears. At the other end of the spectrum von Trier cites
de Sades novel Justine, a pornographic tale of the titular characters incorruptible
goodness despite experiences of torture and utter depravity. In von Triers
words, the common ground within these narratives is the inextinguishable
and almost inhuman extremes of purity and goodness harboured in a womans
heart (von Trier cited in Stevenson 2002: 90). Similarities can also be drawn
between the films and the cinematic genre of melodrama which, as Doane
dryly notes, draws upon the obvious truths of femininity for its subject matter
(Doane 1988: 3). Within the generic conventions of melodrama stereotypically
feminine attributes such as self-sacrifice, compassion and uncomplaining
endurance are praised when found and punished when perceived to be lacking.
The notion of goodness in the Gold Heart trilogy is to some extent equatable
with cultural roles normatively assigned to women, or, as Penner and Vander
Stichele put it, the female characters in these films are consistently domesticated
(2003: 189). Bess, despite her defiance of the wishes of her community, still
adheres to the model of the dutiful wife in elevating her husbands wellbeing above her own and accordingly is praised by a patriarchal God for her
actions. Furthermore, the archetype of feminine goodness fixated upon within
these traditions is not simply based upon appropriately selfless behaviour but
frequently involves a proving of the self through suffering, whether depicted as
corporeal, emotional or a inextricable combination of the two. Gold Heart must
stand naked, shivering and exposed, Justine must endure repeated humiliations,
tortures and rapes. A shared logic between the tales of Gold Heart, Justine, and
Bess accords with one aspect of the Sadean philosophy more broadly:
[T]he object of all the torture is to retain the capacity of being an indestructible
support the subject separates out a double of himself who is made inaccessible
to destruction, so as to make it support what, borrowing a term from the realm
of aesthetics, one cannot help calling the play of pain. For the space in question
is the same as that in which aesthetic phenomena disport themselves, a space of
freedom. And the conjunction between the play of pain and the phenomena of
beauty is to be found there. (Lacan 1992: 261)
There are two pertinent and intertwined points to develop from this
passage. The first relates to the Sadean fantasy which is based not upon the
ideal of the complete destruction of the body or murder of the victim but
rather the obverse of this, the fantasy of a subject who can be tortured forever,
whose body can undergo countless and infinite sufferings without succumbing
to the release of death. As Alenka Zupani comments, the Sadean torturer is
48
always faced with the problem that the victims die too soon, with respect to the
extreme suffering to which they might have been subjected: an insurmountable
obstacle emerges in that the human body can endure only so much pain, only
so much suffering, before encountering the ultimate limit of death (2000: 80).
The ideal subject of the Sadean fantasy and perhaps of the von Trier-esque
cinematic fantasy is the indestructible subject that can suffer endlessly. Much of
Breaking the Waves focuses upon the spectacle of Besss suffering or what Lacan
would call her play of pain. Misery is piled upon her, increasing in severity
and devastation as the film progresses until she finally, inevitably, reaches this
ultimate limit and dies screaming Jans name in the final appalling irony of the
belief that her suffering has been in vain and he has not been saved. It is not
enough for the heroine to suffer, she must be seen to suffer, her pain must be
witnessed and made visibly manifest.
A further important point raised in the quoted passage from Lacans Ethics
regards the relationship of pain to beauty and is central to the way in which he
privileges aesthetics in his interpretation of de Sade. Like de Sades heroines, each
torture that Bess undergoes causes her to become more and more beautiful,
or more and more holy (Zupani 2000: 81). Beauty and goodness exist not
in spite of the suffering endured, but as a result of it. De Kesel designates this
the fantasy of the second death in which the victim can endure more than
normal agonies beyond the limit of reasonable human mortality; it is precisely
this perverse logic that attributes a paradoxical beauty to the victim in the
Sadean fantasy (2009: 233). The recent French horror Martyrs (Pascal Laugier,
2008) depicts precisely the transcendental and inhuman implications of the
Sadean indestructible subject or second death. At the core of this film is a
shadowy organization who torture young women systemically and mercilessly
in the belief that the experience of suffering will transform one of their victims
into a martyr, a subject of transfiguration that remains living but has the ability
to see what lies beyond the barrier of death. Martyrs is almost unsurpassed in
the relentlessness and visceral extremity of the suffering shown. The abuse and
torture suffered by the women at the hands of the organization is horrific, but
the film also focuses at length on the excessive self-mutilation perpetrated by
the victims upon their own bodies as they disintegrate psychologically as well
as physically. The film ends with protagonist Anna skinned alive and reaching a
state of transcendent serenity and wisdom. When viewed retrospectively with
knowledge of her final ordeal, the characterization of Anna accords closely to
the conventions of the narratives of Christian saints and martyrs. She spends
the first half of the film tending to the physical and psychological wounds
of her friend Lucie and another unnamed victim, comforting and protecting,
bathing and healing. However, she does not remain clean or safe whilst they
suffer. She identifies intensely with their agonies and is submerged in a world
of blood, corpses and misery, recalling a story recounted by MacKendrick in
49
which Saint Catherine drinks pus from the sores of a diseased woman in order
to overcome normal and human reactions to bodily sensation (1999: 76).
Annas saintly behaviour places her in the realm of abjection and horror in
the company of those she tends to, with her extreme physical suffering in the
second half of the film a development of this saintly persona. Her status as a
beautiful and transcendent figure increases in line with the quantities of her
suffering. This is the indestructible support that Lacan speaks of, a beauty
surviving and resisting every violation (De Kesel 2009: 234). It may seem
peculiar to assign the status of the beautiful to the final vision of Anna flayed,
opened, almost obscene in the excruciating exposure of muscles and veins. Yet,
the aesthetic of this scene demands such a reading: gone are the dark and grimy
cells and the rusted metal and hunched figures of previous tortures, replaced
instead with the evocation of purity and clarity. Anna appears suspended in a
blaze of white light, the indestructible subject that has gone beyond the limits
of human suffering and emerged as ungendered, inhuman and transcendent.
The equivalence drawn between beauty, holiness, transcendence and the
spectacle of corporeal suffering is highly reminiscent of the structure found
within traditional stories of the saints and martyrs, indicated of course by the title
of Laugiers film. Before moving on to explore this aspect of the presentation
of goodness and sacrifice in Breaking the Waves, however, I would like to dwell
a moment longer upon Zupanis too soon, the mortal limitations of the
human body which obstruct the unending suffering of the Sadean victim. Might
the fantasy that opposes these limitations not apply equally to the masochistic
subject as to the Sadean one? Would the ideal masochistic scenario, too, not be
enfleshed within a subject who can enjoy suffering without end, unencumbered
by the physical weaknesses of the human body? There is no enjoyment but the
enjoyment of the body, yet if the body is to be equal to the task (or duty) of
jouissance, the limits of the body have to be transcended (Zupani 2000: 81).
The masochist too may fantasize about a body that can be infinitely punished
without reaching a limit, a body that can be endlessly opened and wounded
without the damage done proving fatal or the flowing blood exhausting itself.
Indeed, this is the fantasy presented within the sadomasochistic world of
the Cenobites in the Hellraiser films which, when taken in conjunction with
Martyrs suggests that the supernatural spaces and extreme corporeal violence
of horror films create a particularly performative arena for the representation
of Sadean and masochistic excess. From this perspective, both sadistic and
masochistic desire in their embodied yet fantastical forms could be regarded as
drives towards infinite suffering and thus infinite enjoyment. A crucial caveat
must be maintained here, however, expressed in the question whose suffering
and whose enjoyment? The suffering subject in sadism manifests as pure
signifier, a manifestation which may be regarded as an elevation to aesthetic and
transcendent heights or as the reduction to an objectified vessel for a gendered
50
formula in which the body of the female victim is unwillingly sacrificed in

the service of male pleasure. The masochist covets their own suffering and
orchestrates their subjective or sexual practices according to the logic of a
disavowed agency and chosen submission. The character of Bess in Breaking
the Waves emerges at the ambivalent and fraught intersection between these two
points.
Martyrdom and the Dissolution of the Flesh
Via the vicissitudes of a childrens story, von Triers heroines and de Sade, we
arrive at the conjunction of masochism and martyrdom. Furthermore, this is the
moment at which the question of self-sacrifice rises ever more prominently to
the surface. There are several points of commonality that connect the aesthetics
and practices of masochism with those of martyrdom, and in Breaking the Waves
the body of Bess emerges as the focal point for these elements. Her place
within historical and representational narratives of martyrdom and sainthood
is established from the very first sequence of the film, which is modelled upon
the feted trial scene from La Passion de Jeanne dArc (1928), directed by the earlier
Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer (it also seems probable here that von
Trier, still in the early stages of his film career in 1996, was making a statement
about his place within the traditions of Danish cinema). In this scene, Bess
asks the elders of her religious community for their blessing to marry her
beloved Jan. Throughout the trial scene, Dreyer uses extreme close-ups from a
variety of different angles, focusing on Joans tearful face and on those of the
men interrogating her, in turn emphasizing her distress and their power. The
gendered aspects of this scene stand out starkly. Joan is a lone female figure
amongst these dominant males, and the implicit violence apparent in their
questions and gazes provides a precursor to the explicit and horrific violence
that is to follow when she is condemned to burn at the stake. From a spectatorial
perspective, the close-ups showing us each detail of Joans suffering function
in two ways. Firstly, they illicit empathy from the viewer. Joan is not objectified
here but is emphatically a terrified and confused subject who has been placed
in an awful position of vulnerability. Yet, simultaneously and akin to de Sades
heroines, Joans misery is made into a necessary spectacle that emphasizes the
play of pain: her endurance of this ordeal and those that are to follow only
serve to render her more saint-like and more beautiful, her narrative is only
given meaning through the very fact that she suffers and that the spectator
bears witness to this suffering. The focus upon tortured facial expressions can
be traced back through centuries of religious art depicting martyrdom, most
obviously and commonly in paintings of the crucified Christ. The establishment
of an all too visible physical and spiritual pain is of the utmost importance
51
within these images. Von Trier borrows the mise en scne from Dreyers sequence
for Besss own trial in which she must convince the elders of her love and her
suitability for marriage. Although the primary emotion displayed on Besss face
at this stage is hope as opposed to despair, the gendered division remains all
too clear as she defers to the manifestation of stern and judgmental patriarchal
dominance around her. At several points in the film, Besss exuberant and
emotional demeanour is contrasted with the dour, austere mannerisms of the
rest of the town and the menfolk of the town in particular, who prize restraint as
the highest of attributes. Bess is constructed as other within the community as
a result of her perceived childlike nature and the flamboyance of her reactions,
a status that her marriage to another outsider only cements. This is typical of
the traditions of saints and martyrs for, as Penner and Vander Stichele suggest,
the martyr is an alienated figure, separated from and different to those around
them and connected only to God (2003: 180181). Furthermore, and pertinent
for the exploration of Bess and the classical figure of Antigone to come at
the end of this chapter, Besss increasing isolation as the film progresses also
situates her in proximity to the heroes and heroines of classical tragedy. These
tragic figures always occupy a space separated from the social order around
them, a status that plays an enabling role in their function as transgressors of
the established limits of the Symbolic structure (Lacan 1992: 271).
The representation of the character of Jackie in Red Road is similarly based
upon the elements of isolation or otherness and the centrality of suffering
to sacrifice, although overall her corporeality is less demonstrative than Besss
in keeping with the contemporary realism of the characters and settings of
Arnolds film. The opening scenes of Red Road establish Jackies status as
detached from the rest of the world as she watches the city of Glasgow and its
inhabitants via CCTV screens. There is an element of voyeurism here as Jackie
repeatedly focuses upon her favourite characters (the dog walker and his sickly
hound, the love-struck cleaner and her flirtatious colleague) but this voyeurism
is depicted as sympathetic rather than intrusive, with the overall effect that
Jackie is portrayed as a lonely observer who watches the joys and dramas of life
pass by her without participating in them directly. As the film progresses, her
alienation from those around her becomes more apparent as she maintains a
distance from her late husbands family, engages in joyless sex with a colleague
and cuts an awkward figure on the Red Road estate, potentially threatened by the
violence and poverty in which it is mired. The thinness of her body adds further
to the effect of vulnerability and alienation. At times she appears skeletal, a
spectre roaming unnoticed through the city, haunted by the deaths of her kin
and existing in a borderland space that is not quite dying, not quite living. The
relationship that she develops with Clyde may be based upon hatred and the
paradoxical movement of repulsion and attraction, but it is also depicted as the
factor which draws her back into the world she has abandoned. She leaves her
52
safe tower of screens and ventures into the spaces she has previously watched
from a distance, communicating with characters and forming bonds (of a sort)
with Clydes friends as she pursues her obsession. Her reactions to her meetings
with Clyde, although contradictory and ambiguous, are strongly visceral in a
way that her encounters with others from her everyday life are not, suggesting
a process of reattachment to herself and the world. Her first act of sacrifice,
sex with the hated cause of her familys death, is immersed in a combination
of extreme sexual pleasure (the violent orgasm she has during the very graphic
oral sex scene) and self-inflicted suffering, culminating as she hits herself in
the face with a rock in order to make her accusation of rape more believable.
The explicit nature of Jackies physical pleasure coupled with a knowledge of
her disgust and subsequent self-injury make this a difficult sequence for the
spectator; the enjoyment that Jackie takes in this encounter seems masochistic
in the most troubling way. Although it is far less overt than its manifestation in
Breaking the Waves, there are connections to be made between the narrative and
imagery of Red Road and the traditions of the martyrs, and perhaps this may
offer some insight into the portrayal of masochism in this scene and Jackies
compulsions through the film as a whole. The visibility of Jackies suffering and
the physical form that this suffering takes are again prominent as the ordeal of
her sacrifice is played out through and upon her flesh. Additionally, there are
certain interior scenes in which she is framed as a dark figure against a strong
light source, giving the impression that she is surrounded by an aura or halo.
Although not comparable to the direct referencing of Jeanne DArc employed by
von Trier, nonetheless this effect adds to the impression of Jackie as a potential
martyr in her quest for justice.
Susan Sontag comments in Regarding the Pain of Others that the iconography
of suffering has a longstanding pedigree within art, seen in depictions of the
Passion of Christ and Christian martyrs as well as in portrayals of classical myths
(2003: 36). The mortifications of the flesh are vital to this pedigree, the tortures
and deaths of these figures often occurring in the most horrific ways that reveal
the body at its most vulnerable. In painting, the motifs of Christ near-naked and
bleeding on the cross and Saint Sebastian filled with arrows appear repeatedly. In
cinema, the imagery of Joan burning alive at the stake in Dreyers film finds its
modern counterpart as the protagonist of Dancer in the Dark is pulled screaming
to the gallows. The iconography of suffering is even apparent in the very visual
nature of recent atrocities such as the Abu Ghraib photographs, which Stephen
F. Eisenman argues echo the motif of tortured people and tormented animals
who appear to sanction their own abuse that is apparent throughout the Western
classical tradition (2007: 16). The representation of Besss ordeals in Breaking the
Waves draws upon a long-established system of the aesthetization of suffering
and in particular the connection of this aesthetic structure with notions of
morality and goodness. The mobilization of representational conventions is a
53
strategy common to several of the films in this book, however unlike the switch
in perspective in In the Cuts questioning take on the erotic thriller genre or the
sensual reformulation of Italian gialli films in Amer, von Trier makes effective
(even manipulative) use of the iconography of suffering without encouraging
the spectator of the film to rethink their relationship to this imagery. Despite
this, it is possible to argue that the traditional visions of martyrdom hold their
own disruptive potential when considered within the wider debates about
masochism with which this book engages. Sontag suggests that these visions
are intended to move and excite, and to instruct and exemplify (Sontag 2003:
36). Masochism, it has already been established, may dismantle and reconfigure
normative oppositional categories such as active and passive, subject and
object, perpetrator and victim. Thus, although the imagery of suffering that
runs through martyrdom discourse and von Triers cinema certainly invokes to
some extent the sadistic gaze which beholds the punished and violated (female)
body as a spectacle of pleasure, the situation becomes more complex when the
aspect of power is factored in to the interpretation of this imagery.
Penner and Vander Stichele observe that in martyrdom, the locus of power
is reversed from the oppressor to the victim, because despite the torture and
suffering inflicted upon their body the martyred subject retains self-mastery and
control (2003: 177178). MacKendrick too notes the potential for a reversal of
power within certain scenarios of dominance and submission, commenting that
masochism must decidedly not be regarded as the eroticization of powerlessness.
Rather, part of the pleasure to be derived from masochistic experience arises
from the subjects strength against the violence enacted upon it from without
(1999: 103104). Thus, while it is true that Bess suffers greatly over the course
of Breaking the Waves she also experiences the eroticization of her pain as her
own body becomes the vessel through which to enact her chosen practices of
devotional self-sacrifice. Throughout, her body and particularly her face are the
focus of close-range shots that express the commingling of suffering and erotic
experience; the aesthetic style quests endlessly for proximity (Gordon 2004:
213). The vulnerability and femininity of Besss body are emphasized even in
the scenes of pleasure. After losing her virginity on her wedding night her white
dress is marked with blood as a vivid and visceral reminder of her penetration
by Jan. This blood also serves to foreshadow the blood that will later be split
from her lacerated and dying body, again acting as a sign of her love for Jan
and of the inextricability of love and violence within the logic of the film.
Her sacrifice and masochistic desire are inscribed upon her flesh. The primacy
given to physical suffering and to the prolonged torture of the good figure is
typical of visual and literary representations of the martyrs and saints and of
the iconography of suffering seen through the history of Western art but here
appears in a highly gendered form, dovetailing with the ideologies of feminine
goodness and beauty seen in other representational traditions exemplified by
54
the Sadean fantasy. The idealized attributes of love and faith are shown to be
inextricable from the flesh of the body, lust and violence and the vision of the
sacred that the film presents is irrevocably anchored in the corporeal profane.
The privileged position given to pain and the wounding of the body is
common to martyrdom and to masochism, however, this alone is not the
most significant point of commonality. Agony shares its experiential space
with heightened intensities of ecstasy. MacKendrick comments that SacherMasochs original writings display a devotion to the Christian saints because it
was they who provided the first narratives and original imagery of the potential
pleasures of specific types of suffering (MacKendrick 1999: 67). She goes on
to recognize that Freud, albeit tentatively, regards some forms of religious selfdenial or asceticism and devotional self-mutilatory practices such as flogging
to be forms of behaviour that stem from the same root as moral masochism
(1999: 67). Thus, despite the fact that the sacred, to which martyrdom belongs,
conventionally separates the mind from the temptations and pleasures of the
flesh to which masochistic desire is in thrall, the connection between the two
is already established in conceptual terms. Batailles writing on eroticism is
paramount when considering this ecstatic suffering; for him, eroticism permeates
the realms of human experience that escape intellectual understanding and
resonate instead with the experience of a dispossession of self. Crucial here is
the underlying notion of the continuity and discontinuity of being that forms
Batailles opening gambit in Eroticism:
Reproduction implies the existence of discontinuous beings Each being is
distinct from all others. His birth, his death, the events of his life may have an
interest for others, but he alone is directly concerned in them. He is born alone.
He dies alone. Between one being and another, there is a gulf, a discontinuity.
(Bataille 2001a: 12)
This discontinuity is one essential aspect of human consciousness that each

must suffer, felt as a painful and perpetually open wound that bites and alienates, a
deep gulf separating every subject from those around them. These discontinuous
beings that Bataille describes yearn for an end to this separation and for the
elusive experience of continuity. However, the only certain and permanent way
to access continuity is through death. Bataille presents death as vertiginous and
terrifying, but also as hypnotic and fascinatingly alluring (Bataille 2001a: 13).
His project in Eroticism is to identify and explore the cultural practices that
may allow the subject, albeit temporarily, to experience the state of continuity
without having to submit to the final and irretrievable void. Most notably, he
explores practices around sex, violence and religious feeling, particularly looking
at the imbrication and structural similarities between these cultural forms. Such
experiences and practices give rise to the concept of eroticism. The most crucial
55
aspect of erotic experience as theorized by Bataille is also, perhaps, the aspect

that attends most pertinently to masochistic sexuality. Each of the examples
that he discusses emphasizes that a deliberate loss of self is absolutely central to
the quest for continuity: in eroticism the subject encounters the disequilibrium
in which the being consciously calls his own experience into question If
necessary I can say in eroticism: I am losing myself (Bataille 2001a: 31). The
highly ambivalent nature of erotic experience comes to the fore through this
focus upon the loss of self, in distinction to the tenets of humanist doctrine
that have bestowed meaning upon human existence through the envisioning of
the self as unique, self-possessed and deterministic. The loss of self, entailing
the subject staring into the abyss of the unknown, may be thrilling but for
this very reason may also invoke fear and nausea. The phrase I am losing
myself contains a paradox that cuts to the heart of erotic experience and to
the core of masochistic sexuality. To enunciate the I necessitates a subjective
speaking position, yet simultaneously this subject is dissolving, breaking apart
at the very point of enunciation and calling their own selfhood into question.
To deliberately seek such a paradoxical and troubling relationship to ones own
subjectivity is regarded as perversity or even monstrosity: Eroticism as seen by
the objective intelligence is something monstrous (2001a: 37). Erotic experience
comes into being as excessive because it calls into question the value of the
individualistic self and the symbolic networks that support such a construction
of subjectivity. Herein lies its transgressive and subversive potential, its ability
to facilitate the inner experience that refutes knowledge as a hardened and
fixed status. When the subject experiences the erotic, an ordered, parsimonious
and shuttered reality is shaken by a plethoric disorder (Bataille 2001a: 104).
This experience of rupture cannot be adequately understood if viewed from
the humanist perspective that privileges those elements to which eroticism is
opposed: the valorization of mind over body, singular self over collectivity
and multiplicity and rationality over uncertainty and illogic. It is the ambivalent
perversity underlying Batailles theory of eroticism that resonates so strongly
with the paradoxical nature of masochism and martyrdom. The experiences of
each are steeped in the dispossession of the self through the joint endeavours
of embodied pain and pleasure.
Drawing upon Bataille, Jessica Benjamin argues that eroticism must always
be thought in relation to the embodied self. She observes: The body stands for
boundaries: discontinuity, individuality, and life. Consequently the violation of
the body is a transgression between life and death this crossing of boundaries
is for Bataille the secret of all eroticism (Benjamin 1990: 6364). This gives some
suggestion of why the penetration or opening of the body, whether through
acts of sexuality, violence or both, is essential to erotic experience. Firstly, it acts
to disturb the integrity of the corporeal subject, breaking through the state of
discontinuity and separation that characterizes the mundane and the everyday.
56
Secondly, it demands an address to and awareness of the vulnerability of the

human body and in doing so brings the subject a little closer to the alluring
void of death. The films discussed in this chapter and others depict a type of
masochistic sexuality that is frequently structured around the violation of the
body in various different forms, and the desire to teeter upon the brink of the
abyss of continuity. Some, such as Bess in von Triers film or Ana in Amer, fall
foul of the precipice and ultimate assent to the void, others, such as Jackie in
Red Road or Frannie in In the Cut, are fascinated by the transgressive potential
of such violation not as a suicidal promise but as a temporary erotic state that
allows them to continue living with the additional awareness of how close the
void may actually be.
The violent and sexual experiences undergone by Bess in Breaking the Waves
take on a further significance in light of Batailles concept of eroticism. The
sufferings she undergoes, including the numerous violations of her body,
combine the eroticism of masochism with the eroticism that Bataille places at
the heart of all religion, Christianity included. Continuity is reached through
experience of the divine. The divine is the essence of continuity (Bataille
2001a: 118). Religion and the practices of which it consists (sacrificial rituals
in pre-Christianity, the act of praying and the connection with God that this
implies, ceremonies centred around birth and death and so on) give access
to the erotic experience of continuity as the subject loses themselves within
the larger community and beyond this, within the belief of a connection to a
higher being. Besss conversations with God make explicit this connection.
The most famous example of this intermingling of the sensual and the sacred,
the raptures of the divine, is Berninis statue of Saint Theresa of Avila: she
reclines beneath the rays of Gods love with head thrown back and lips parted.
Lacan perceives this statue as an aesthetic representation of jouissance or
enjoyment (Lacan 1982: 147), in this case jouissance as the orgasmic ecstasy of
the experience of transcendence, the dispossession of self and the continuous
state. The representations that form part of Christian discourse in art or in the
narratives that surround rituals and ceremonies (within which the stories of the
saints and martyrs must be included) play a formative role in enabling the sacred
to facilitate eroticism. Elsewhere, Bataille comments: One reaches the states of
ecstasy or of rapture only by dramatizing existence in general. The belief in a
God betrayed, who loves us (to the extent that he dies for us), redeems us and
saves us, played this role for a long time (Bataille 1988: 10). The suggestion that
it is the systems of significance woven around religious practices that give them
their erotic potential, as much as the practices themselves, holds no revelations.
But what Bataille does here is to introduce an aesthetic dimension to eroticism
and inner experience through the emphasis upon dramatization. Inevitably
perhaps, this recalls one of the central poles of the Sadean philosophy outlined
above: the suffering and beauty of the victim/heroine must be transformed into
57
a spectacular display and witnessed. Similarly, Bataille suggests that in cultural

practices such as religion it is the narrativization and exhibitionism of rituals
that enables those watching to access eroticism. It is no coincidence that rituals
of sacrifice are his chosen example to make this point:
In sacrifice The victim dies and the spectators share in what his [or her] death
reveals. This is what religious historians call the element of sacredness. This
sacredness is the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous
being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the
creatures discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in
the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the creature
is now one. Only a spectacular killing, carried out as the solemn and collective
nature of religion dictates, has the power to reveal what normally escapes notice.
(Bataille 2001a: 22)
The spectators described here assume a double role within the sacrificial
ritual. They are observers of the process, but more than this, they are witnesses.
Such an apparently subtle shift in terminology also implies a shift from a purely
passive position to one of implication and even complicity. To be a witness
entails a certain degree of participation; indeed, without this participatory
element, the spectators Bataille describes would be unable to experience the
sacredness and eroticism of the event. This, of course, has further implications
for spectatorship when considered within a cinematic context and particularly
when addressing films that feature graphic acts of sexuality and violence such
as Breaking the Waves and Red Road.
The consideration of key moments from Red Road assists in elaborating
upon Batailles conceptualization of dispossession and the crucial role that this
plays within erotic experience and the reconfiguration of the self. Of particular
interest is the scene in which Jackie finds her way into a party at Clydes flat in
one of the almost derelict towers of the Red Road estate, and the sex scene
which follows later. Until the party, she had watched or followed Clyde from
a distance but at the party she finds herself face to face with him and beyond
this, dancing in close proximity in a sequence charged with peril and fear, yes,
but also attraction and desire. The cause of Jackies obsession with Clyde is
at this stage still a mystery to the spectator, and although it ultimately proves
to be unrelated to sexual violence there are implications through the film that
suggest her fear is rooted in just such an attack. Clyde is entangled in a world of
potentially dangerous desire from his first appearance on Jackies CCTV screens,
having sex amidst the urban decay of the city; she subsequently watches him
flirting with a cafe waitress and approaching a teenage girl outside a school (later
revealed to be his daughter). Such images, although far from overt, plant the
seed of suggestion that this character may be a sexual predator. The weight of
58
generic expectation is instrumental in supporting this implied reading. Across

a range of representational forms (thrillers, police procedurals, horror films, as
well as news reports and so on), women frequently appear in cultural imaginings
as the victims of sexual violence. From this perspective, Jackies encounters
with Clyde appear to fulfil some of the more negative tropes associated with
masochistic desire: she is fascinated by her oppressor and by extension her own
victimization, cast into the role of stalker as she follows him home to his den
where the threat of her own destruction waits. The red tones that wash through
both scenes in the flat bring with them connotations of lust and of danger, a
Bataillean state of transgression as Jackie deliberately seeks out an apparently
perilous situation. Her motivations are oblique and as such the film poses the
strangely felt movements of desire. Whether or not Clyde is her love object or
an object of hate and fear, he remains an object of obsession and the structure
of desire is the same as it circles and pursues.
The sex scene between Jackie and Clyde is, in the context of masochistic
self-sacrifice, the most pivotal and significant of Red Road. It weaves together
extreme and visceral pleasure, simmering tension and peril (echoed by the
eerie screaming of the foxes that Clyde comments upon) and an undercurrent
of sadness in the losses that both characters have endured. Based upon the
connotations of Clyde as a dangerous sexual predator, the intensity of Jackies
orgasm is initially highly troubling, but is soon revealed to be the moment at
which the victim catalyses a deliberate act of vengeful self-sacrifice. That this
sacrifice is enacted through the vulnerable female body accords with Batailles
ideas about the dissolution of the self through the transgression of sexual taboo.
The wavering lines between mundane existence, sex, death and mourning that
are threaded throughout Arnolds film are pulled together in this coupling as
they are in Batailles theory:
It is the common business of sacrifice to bring life and death into harmony, to
give death the upsurge of life, life the momentousness and the vertigo of death
opening on to the unknown. Here life is mingled with death, but simultaneously
death is a sign of life, a way into the infinite. (Bataille 2001a: 91)
For Jackie, this moment provides a masochistic coalescence of selfdetermination, as she puts her plan into action, and the dissolution of the
self through sexual ecstasy. It also marks a constitutive point in the trajectory
of Jackies subjective rebirth, explicitly signalling her shift from an alienated
and haunted observer in a state of arrested mourning to an engaged subject,
participating actively in the world around her. The vertiginous experience of
intense eroticism that her encounter with Clyde bestows enables an upsurge
further demonstrated as this process of rebirth enters its next stage in her
second sacrificial act: dropping the rape charges against Clyde in order that they
59
might both be, as far as possible, released from the past. For Jackie, this release
is symbolized through her willingness, at last, to scatter the ashes of her lost
family and to reenter the social realm.
Guilt and Responsibility
What sets in motion the patterns of sacrifice, violence and redemption in Red
Road? What is the catalyst in Breaking the Waves? A shared theme emerges in
answer to these questions that enables a direct address to one of the abiding
conceptual explanations of masochism, the understanding that it is fuelled by
guilt and the desire for punishment in order to atone. Although not repeated
in the films discussed in subsequent chapters, this association is presented as
a possible underlying motive for the characters masochistic behaviour and
their inclinations towards self-sacrifice in the films of von Trier and Arnold.
Within the logic of these films, the potential for redemption through sacrifice
(whether in this world or the next) is causally based upon the initial assumption
of responsibility and guilt. In Breaking the Waves this is clear from the outset
as Bess claims responsibility for Jans accident; it is also inextricable from the
conservative Christian doctrine of original sin in which each subject is already
inevitably guilty. In Red Road, however, just as the discovery of the connection
between Jackie and Clyde is revealed only towards the conclusion of the
narrative, the spectator can identify guilt as a possible pathological factor for
Jackies sacrifice only when she confesses to Clyde in their final confrontation
that her last words to her husband and daughter were spoken in anger.
Furthermore, it would be remiss to overlook the gender implications of this
guilt. In each case the female protagonist becomes implicated in the actions of
their male counterparts, resulting in the shifting of guilt and responsibility from
the male subject to the female body. This alteration of emphasis is reflective
of a widely apparent tradition in Western culture in visual representation and
narrative forms, traceable through the cinematic trope of the femme fatale and
back to the original transgressions of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis.
The phenomenon of guilt as an explanation for the problem of masochism
is made explicit in Freudian theory, which posits masochistic urges and
behaviour as the manifestation of a desire for punishment in order to assuage a
conscious or more frequently unconscious sense of guilt. This association has
subsequently remained prominent in psychoanalytic and cultural accounts. As
discussed in the Introduction, in The economic problem of masochism Freud
identifies three primary forms that masochism takes: erotogenic, feminine and
moral, the last of these forms arising from a sense of guilt that the subject may
or may not be aware of. In moral masochism the desire for suffering may be
detached from a specific love object and instead attributed to the world at large,
60
to acquaintances, enemies, even impersonal events; as Freud so memorably

(and from a modern perspective, rather flippantly) says, the true masochist
always turns his cheek whenever he has a chance of receiving a blow (1961a:
165). Freuds moral masochist cares not from which direction their punishment
comes, but will seek suffering in any aspect of their life:
All other masochistic sufferings carry with them the condition that they shall
emanate from the loved person and shall be endured at his command. This
restriction has been dropped in moral masochism. The suffering itself is what
matters; whether it is decreed by someone who is loved or someone who is
indifferent is of no importance. (1961a: 165)
At odds with the masochist aesthetic espoused by Deleuze, which focuses

on form over symptom, Freuds description of masochism here initially
seems to more closely resemble the way in which the word is used in modern
understanding, the emotional and sexual waste-basket described by Phillips
and discussed in the Introduction (1998: 4). Freud emphasizes, however, that
although moral masochism may not superficially appear sexual it is nonetheless
underscored by erotogenic masochism, implying an erotic drive at its heart.
Jean Laplanche notes the effect of slippage in Freuds work between sexual and
nonsexual masochism and attributes it to anaclisis or propping: the idea that a
sexual drive is always propped up or supported by a nonsexual or vital function
(Laplanche 1976: 87). Therefore the form of masochism described by Freud as
moral may be seen as a combination of sexual and nonsexual elements that
are catalysed by a sense of guilt, becoming detached from the fixation on one
specific love object and certain specific acts and acting instead as a guiding
principle towards an erotic investment in punishment. The displacement of
the sexual onto the conventionally nonsexual, or the process of propping,
is also apparent in the ritualized practices of masochism that deviate (in the
truest sense of the word) from normative sexual acts such as oral sex or vaginal
intercourse to settle instead upon fetishization and performances of punishment
(for example, the fabrics and whips in Venus in Furs or the corrective red pens
in Secretary). Thus, although the Freudian account of moral masochism cannot
be taken as an exhaustive or even entirely coherent theory, it does indicate the
difficulties apparent in distinguishing between sexual and nonsexual motives
and behaviours, as well as opening up the realm of the erotic to more perverse
possibilities. Furthermore, it articulates an assumption about masochism that
is still apparent in cultural discourse, as films such as Red Road and Breaking
the Waves evidence. Both Jackie and Bess depict behaviours that accord in
particular ways with the conceptual framework of Freuds moral masochist,
yet also offer a more complex portrayal of the guilty subject who attempts to
punish themselves through self-sacrificial acts that may appear nonsensical and
61
nonsexual, but in fact accord to a perverse and libidinous logic of their own.
Jackie is depicted as isolated from her friends and family, even from herself,
a position of alienation that she strives to maintain. Her more conventional
sexual couplings with a colleague are joyless and apparently hold no pleasure
for her, but her interactions with Clyde, conversely, are highly erotically charged
throughout the film. It would be erroneous to describe Clyde as a love object
in the Freudian sense, more accurately he occupies the position of the Lacanian
object of desire, the objet petit a. He is the focal point of Jackies obsessive
fascination, a compulsion that draws her ever closer to the sex scene that acts
as punishment for her guilt and fulfils the responsibility of providing justice
for her dead family. This act of sacrifice does prove pivotal but not quite in the
way initially imagined by Jackie or the spectator. As in the Lacanian formula of
desire, the figure of Clyde and what he symbolizes dissolves as she reaches him
to leave not satisfaction but a lack of closure and the dissolution of the idea
of revenge or punishment. The blurred anamorphic shapes resolve themselves
to reveal the causal narrative that has underpinned Jackies actions all along,
however, the next stage in this narrative of responsibility remains ambiguous
and incomplete. Similarly, Bess appears to play out Freuds concept of moral
masochism, her desire turning towards any sexual object that will sufficiently
fulfil the regime of self-punishment she believes will redeem her guilt for Jans
accident. These encounters are initially shrouded in disgust, yet as she recounts
her stories to Jan it becomes apparent that a further displacement is afoot
and that these men act as substitutes for her initial love object, her husband.
To paraphrase Freud, do these women turn their cheeks at the prospect of
receiving a blow? Perhaps, but the offering up of their bodies contained in
such a gesture must be understood within the wider networks of goodness and
sacrifice, suffering and pleasure, that such representations of female masochism
evoke.
The spectre of guilt must also be considered in conjunction with the
question of responsibility, heralding the essentially ethical dilemmas of how,
why and for whom the subject becomes responsible. This has a specific
significance for ethical action and self-sacrifice within the Christian context and
in the context of intersubjectivity and responsibility more broadly. Derridas
short text The Gift of Death acts as a useful starting point for an extrapolation of
the ethical relationship of the self to the other and the responsibility that such
a relationship entails. Derridas concern is with Western religious doctrines, and
consequently the other takes on two necessarily interrelated but distinctive
meanings in this text. In places it refers to the other humans that each subject
encounters in the flesh each day and that call us into responsibility via the
ideological structuring of social roles and obligations. The alternative and more
contextually specific meaning posits God as the other and as the omnipotent
source of authority and demand. Derrida explains that within the Christian
62
mode of thought responsibility is brought to bear through the exposing of

the soul to the gaze of another person, of a person as transcendent other, as
an other who looks at me, but who looks without the-subject-who-says-I being
able to reach that other, see her, hold her within the reach of my gaze (1995:
25). The Christian subject is brought into responsibility by the necessity of
being in a relationship with, and responding to, this transcendent other and
the fact of their permanent and unavoidable gaze. However, and crucially, this
relationship and the responses that it demands are by no means reciprocal.
The gaze that the subject encounters is characterized by its dissymmetry and
its inherent disproportion: it remains secret from me although it commands
me (Derrida 1995: 27). This is the source of the terrifying but exhilarating
trembling inherent in the Christian experience of duty and ethical obligation.
We must always answer to an unknown that refuses to reveal itself to us,
whose gaze we feel as a constant reminder of our responsibility but whom we
can never gaze upon in return. We tremble not in the presence of one who
is wholly other, but in the absence of this mysterious figure (Derrida, 1995:
5657). This explains in part why the final shot of Breaking the Waves in which
the gigantic bells ring out above land and sea feels so inadequate. The mysterium
tremundum of Christian responsibility that is so important to Derridas theory
of sacrifice, drawn from Czech philosopher Jan Patokas Heretical Essays on
the History of Philosophy and more canonical works such as Kierkegaards Fear
and Trembling, is centred upon the other as absent authority. It is the inherent
and constant unknowability of the other which calls into being the subjects
dutiful response. This final image undermines not only the emphasis on faith
constructed through the supernaturalistic reading of the film, but the essential
basis of faith itself. The purity of belief can only be sustained by the very fact
that it cannot be objectivity verified (iek 1999: 218). The bells indicate
that the abyssal force of the previously unknown may begin to present itself
and, in doing so, to nullify the structure of faith, the dissymmetry of the
gaze and the undeniable potency of the others command. Derrida goes on
to argue that the disproportion inherent in the relationship between self and
other and the responsibility that this disproportionate encounter calls forth is
inextricable from the notion of guilt. This guilt is originary, like original sin.
Before any fault is determined, I am guilty inasmuch as I am responsible
Guilt is inherent in responsibility because responsibility is always unequal to
itself: one is never responsible enough (Derrida 1995: 51). Guilt emerges as
a foundational result of the Christian belief in an absent but awesome other.
This passage in The Gift of Death contains a terminological slippage in that it is
unclear whether Derrida is referring to the subjects responsibilities to God, or
to her fellow humans. Seemingly, in both cases the subject meets the same guiltstricken stalemate: however responsible one is and however much one gives,
63
it can never be enough. One can always be more responsible and this infinite
excess is felt as the burden of guilt.
Derridas description of God as unknowable yet demanding will sound familiar
to scholars of Lacan in its resemblance to the big Other, his conceptualization
of the authority of the Symbolic law. Freuds theory suggests that the sense
of guilt apparent in moral masochism may be traced back to an overactive
superego, typically resulting from overly zealous parental discipline or the
introjection of other social laws (Freud 1961a: 166, 169). Lacan takes this point
and places it at the heart of his reconfiguration of the psychoanalytic subject.
The question of moral agency comes to the fore in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.
Referring specifically to the concept of moral masochism, Lacan makes explicit
the connections between the command of the Symbolic and the paradoxical
experience of pleasure and unpleasure that characterizes masochistic desire
as the command affirms itself in opposition to pleasure yet simultaneously
contains the potential to facilitate pleasure in a second degree (Lacan 1992: 20).
The Lacanian subject is perpetually and unavoidably divided as a result of the
authoritarian influence of the superego, frequently acting against its own best
interests as it seeks to assuage its guilt and pacify the punishing demands of the
Symbolic big Other (Miller 1996: 89). The big Other may be symbolized by a
monotheistic God, however, although this personification is pervasive it is only
one of the possible ways in which the Symbolic law is culturally manifested.
Similarly to Derrida, Lacan argues that one of the most terrifying aspects of the
Other lies in its unknowability. The subject seeks to fulfil what is demanded of
them but can ultimately only guess what this might be. From this perspective,
every subject is always already guilty as the impossible desires of the Other
can never be accurately ascertained, let alone met. Zupani states: the subject
is the effect of the fact that there is a cause which will never be discovered in
the Other; she is the effect of the absence of this cause, the effect of lack in
the Other (2000: 41). This throws the dilemma experienced by the subject
into sharper relief by going one step further to suggest that not only are the
demands of the big Other (manifested in the superego) unknowable, but in
fact they do not exist at all. The lack that marks the subject and calls them into
responsibility is reflective of the lack that marks the place of the other and
ensures the subjects guilt and responsibility will never run out (Zupani
2000: 148). The narratives of Bess and Jackie overtly dramatize the dilemma
of the relationship between the subject and the absent presence (or present
absence) of the other. For Bess a Christian God, for Jackie the ghosts of her
dead husband and daughter to whom she can never apologize. In each case, the
eroticization of suffering is inextricably linked to the possibility of atonement
and specifically, an atonement through the sacrifice of the self in the service
of the other as kin. The disparity between the outcomes of their narratives is
indicative of a structural limit within the logic of self-sacrifice. This limit arises
64
in response to the notion of self-sacrifice as substitution upon which the finale

of Breaking the Waves relies. The bells tolling in the sky paradoxically prove that
Besss faith is justified and her life (or more accurately, her death) is accepted as
a substitute for Jans. Bess dies in his place in order that he be saved. However,
such a logic ignores what Derrida, following Heidegger, calls the irreplaceable
singularity of the self that the death of the subject entails (1995: 41). It is quite
impossible, he argues, to die in the place of the other or in exchange for the other
because to be mortal is to die. Furthermore it is the very fact of our mortality
that affirms our place within the disproportionate relationship of responsibility.
Death is the thing (perhaps the only thing) that each subject must take as their
own entirely; it is only in the moment of death that the irreplaceability of the
subject is conferred. Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo
or confront in my place (Derrida 1995: 41). This assertion points towards the
limits of self-sacrifice with regard to how much it is possible for the subject to
give up, or take responsibility for, in relation to the other. This is the internal
limit within the logic of sacrifice. I can give the other everything except
immortality, except this dying for her to the extent of dying in place of her and
so freeing her from her own death (Derrida 1995: 43). If Breaking the Waves
denies and exceeds this limit within the supernaturalistic space of the film, then
Red Road comes up against it in the sadness and isolation of Jackies haunted
life. Appearing initially as an urban spectre herself she watches the countless
lives of those in the city around her and experiences their narratives vicariously,
watching but not, at first, participating. The tragedy that permeates Arnolds
film from the final position of revelation is the implication that Jackie would
willingly offer the gift of her death in place of her daughters (and perhaps her
husbands too) were not the impossibility of this act of substitution all too
apparent. The half-life that she does inhabit is overshadowed by the grief of
being the one who remains, left behind and forced to recognize the traumatic
fact that in their death her lost kin have been conferred their irreplaceable
singularity. Instead the weight of responsibility leads her to a different logic of
sacrifice, that of Bataillean eroticism and the relinquishing or dispossession of
her body as a form of duty to her lost kin.
Bess and Jackie with Antigone
The final section of this chapter will draw together the most vital streams of
these debates about beauty, goodness, femininity and sacrifice as they coalesce
around the tragic heroine Antigone. Antigone (c. 441 bc) was presented as the
final part of Sophocles trilogy of Theban plays, following the better known
Oedipus Rex and focusing upon the daughter of the doomed king. The character
of Antigone has fascinated various philosophers of the twentieth century and
65
the ethical conundrums raised by the play have been addressed by writers such
as Heidegger, Lacan, Irigaray and Butler. Through a reading of the narratives
of Bess and Jackie alongside the presentation of Antigone as a tragic and ethical
beacon, this section will offer some final meditations upon the logic of sacrifice
as a feminine act and its relationship to masochistic desire. A starting point for
the shared conceptual space of the three female characters is the way in which
each of them exists in a transitional border space that operates in the realm of
mourning between life and death. This marginal status, teetering on the edge of
the Bataillean abyss, bestows these women with a transgressive power, although
the articulation of this power lies in their willingness to offer themselves as a
sacrifice. Butler describes Antigone as already in the service of death, dead
while living (2000: 47). The narrative momentum of tragedy is dependent
upon the hubristic drive of the tragic hero or heroine, thus, Antigones death is
experienced as inevitable from the early moments of the play. For her the race
is already run (Lacan 1992: 272). What distinguishes Antigone from other tragic
heroes and heroines is that she possesses the knowledge of her impending death
before the event, indeed, the wilful drive towards a death which could seemingly
be avoided is what gives the play its dramatic power to enthral and horrify, and
is one of the aspects that has so entranced later theorists. Butler further argues
that Lacans fascination with Antigone stems from the masochistic expression
of the death drive that she encapsulates (2000: 47), and that the splendour
he detects in the character is a result of the way that she calls attention to the
simultaneous and irresolvable coincidence of life and death (2000: 4950).
Lacans Ethics is an appropriate place to start, for his reading of Antigone
rejuvenated interest in this figure and has acted as a mediating lens for many
subsequent interpretations. In the Ethics, Antigone is portrayed as paradigmatic
of the ethical imperative not to give up on ones desire but to follow it through
to its absolute and seemingly irrational limits. She steadfastly insists upon her
responsibility and obligation to bury the body of her treasonous brother,
Polynices, despite orders from King Creon that he should be left outside to
rot. Lacan asserts that in doing so she commits an ethical act that reveals the
impotence of the Symbolic order (embodied by Creon), shattering it and in the
process providing a radiant emblem of feminine defiance and transgression
against the state. Such an act is in accordance with Lacans stated belief that
the true duty of the ethical subject is not to submit to the command of
the superego and social law, but to oppose that command and act instead
according to the subjects own desire, an alternative version of the ethical
good (1992: 7). This description bears more than a passing resemblance to the
positivist accounts of Breaking the Waves that situate Bess as a transgressive force
against the misogynistic patriarchy of her religious community (in particular
those by Heath, Keefer and Linafelt and Makarushka). An apparent problem
with this formulation however is that Antigone (and Bess) can only achieve
66
this transgressive act against a patriarchal social order through the stubborn
insistence upon the sacrifice of her own life. Irigaray emphasizes this point:
The womens way of achieving ethical action is forbidden them by the laws
of the city. Antigone is thrust out of the city, extradited from the city-state,
refused a home and the most elementary domestic rituals forbidden to speak,
to marry, to bear children. She is walled up in a cave on the border of the world
of citizens; she may neither leave nor enter her home. Every act is forbidden
her. All that she can do is to carry out the deed that king and state dare not do
openly but which they collude in: she can kill herself. (1993: 107108)
Within a phallocratic economy the possibilities for female activism are always
already limited. Antigone may emerge as a splendid and transgressive figure
whose defiance emphasizes the disparate notions of the good that arise from
the tension between the subjects desire and the social law, and her actions may
create a necessary rend in the fabric of the Symbolic order but nonetheless
this disruptive splendour is reliant upon the female corpse and as such Lacans
celebration of Antigone rearticulates the obsession with the beautification of a
sacrificial female subject who attains the elusive heights of the ethical act only
through her singular death. As Irigaray states, Antigone is still a production
of a culture that has been written by men alone (1993: 118119). Therefore,
the question of whose good? becomes increasingly vital. The debates raised
so far in this chapter, encompassing the themes of beauty, responsibility and
guilt all necessitate a particular understanding of goodness and what it means
for a subject to be good (a phrase that echoes through Breaking the Waves as
Bess forges her path). Within Sophocless play two contradictory versions of
the good are put forward (at least). The dilemma that lies at the heart of this
tragedy emerges because these versions are diametrically opposed to each other.
On the one hand, Creon represents the good according to the laws of the social
order that determines ideals of morality and legality. On the other, Antigone
represents what Lacan calls the criminal good (1992: 240), motivated by her
personal ethical imperative rather than a rigidly moral doctrine, an imperative
that grows from her own desire and from the responsibilities of kinship. Red
Roads Jackie faces a similar tearing between the legal good (the laws of the
social order) and the duty to her family (kinship bonds) when she decides to
frame Clyde for rape.
This unavoidable dilemma is, as Zupani points out, inherent within any
philosophical notion of the good more generally:
Once the good comes on stage, the question necessarily arises: Whose good?
if I do not betray my brother or my neighbour, I betray my other countrymen.
67
Who is to decide whose good is more valuable? This is the fundamental deadlock
of any ethics based on the notion of the good. (2000: 55)
Such a problem has ramifications for the consideration of responsibility

explored above. To whom is the subject responsible? Themselves? Their loved
ones? The tenets of religion or law? Breaking the Waves and Red Road use the
narratives of Bess and Jackie to stage (or to use Batailles word, to dramatize)
the paradoxes and contradictions of ethics that arise when the subject is called
into a relationship of responsibility with the other. In Red Road in particular,
the conception of an absolute or objectively defined good is shown to be
erroneous; acting in an ethical way emerges instead as a process of constant
negotiation and the remapping of territories that each subject must individually
undertake. The subject is always responsible (and, even, always guilty) in relation
to the other, but there are always multiple ways in which this responsibility may
be answered. The responses of Antigone, Bess and Jackie to this conundrum
of duty can be thought through in terms of the structure of the ethical act and
the relation of this to the logic(s) of suicide. What defines the act? The act
differs from an action in that it radically transforms its bearer (agent). After
an act, I am not the same as before. In the act, the subject is annihilated
and subsequently reborn (or not) The act is therefore always a crime,
a transgression of the limits of the symbolic order to which I belong
(Zupani 2000: 83). According to these criteria, Lacan regards Antigones
suicide as an authentic ethical act that shatters the symbolic order and the
patriarchal law personified by King Creon; the result of this Act, Lacan argues,
is the creation of an anamorphic radiance that imbues the play with its striking
effects of beauty:
An infinitesimal fragment of image is produced on each surface we see a
series of screens superimposed; and it is as a result of these that a marvelous
illusion in the form of beautiful image of the passion appears beyond the
mirror, whereas something decomposed and disgusting spreads out around it.
(1992: 273)
Irigarays perception is rather different. For her, Antigones suicide is a forced

choice within a social order that leaves her no other possible path of responsible
action; the focus is upon the something decomposed and disgusting, not the
idealized image of female beauty through suffering. Suicide is the only act left to
her. Given that society passes as Hegel would say onto the side of darkness
when it is a question of the right of the female to act (1993: 119). Antigones
death is indicative of the phallologocentric erasure of the feminine position
and therefore a symptom of a wider ethical and political failing. It cannot be
genuinely transgressive because the oppressive system that created her forced
68
choice remains unchanged. Besss suicidal gesture can be considered in a similar

light. It is clear that the authoritarian dominance of the religious elders has
negative consequences for Bess and the other women of the township, and
like Antigone, the range of choices open to her is demonstrably restricted in
many aspects of her life. The ending of the film creates a conflict, suggesting to
some extent that Besss gesture be considered an act that transcends the tenets
of patriarchal law and achieves an absolute modality of the good. However,
ultimately the paternal law is left unchanged. Bess is dead, and Dodo, the
other primary female character and only friend to offer her support within the
community, is excluded from her funeral. Besss death may be a suicide, but it is
not an act in the Lacanian sense.
Jackies actions allow us to see the suicidal act in a different light. Red Road,
like the narrative of Antigone in Lacans theory, ultimately enters our perception
through the aesthetic strategy of anamorphosis. The film is made up of a series
of events that the spectator struggles to understand: a selection of fragments
of images, lives and stories that flicker in and out of focus. An impression of
meaning is given, but this meaning cannot be fully grasped until regarded from
the viewpoint of Jackies final revelations. At this point, in an ugly and diffused
way, everything collides with one another while nonetheless succeeding in
finding a unity (De Kesel 2009: 210). The result of this anamorphic process is
an extreme shift in perspective that jolts the spectator into a new comprehension
and that echoes the subjective transformation which marks Jackies character in
the final scenes of the film. More than Besss self-destructive gesture, Jackies
final sacrifice in dropping the charges against Clyde does constitute an ethical
act in the sense that it radically changes her as its agent and alters the structures
of significance within which her narrative is embedded. For the majority of the
films duration, Jackies identity and place within the social frame is rooted in
her status as a subject in mourning, clinging to the ghosts of her dead family
and to the fixation on achieving justice/revenge through the punishment of
Clyde. Jackie achieves an act of symbolic suicide, giving up the pathological
motivation of guilt and eliminating that which gave [her] being identity, status,
support and meaning (Zupani 2000: 84).
The cinematic and theoretical narratives discussed in this chapter, when
considered in conjunction with each other, articulate the intersections and
permutations of masochism, sacrifice and responsibility as they are manifested
in relation to the female desiring subject. The outcomes of these texts may
differ in terms of the fate of the female protagonists, but each makes clear that
these narratives are constructed within a sociocultural system dominated by
male subjectivity and male desire. Irigarays words on the lesson of Antigone
resonate equally strongly through the stories of Bess and Jackie, and may be
usefully borne in mind through the films and explorations that take place in
subsequent chapters: If we are not to relive Antigones fate, the world of
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women must successfully create an ethical order and establish the conditions
necessary for womens action (1993: 108). The following two chapters address
how this ethical order might be achieved.
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Chapter 3

The relationship between masochism and self-harm is multidimensional
and frequently ambivalent, resistant to attempts to draw any straightforward
connections between sometimes interrelated but crucially different sets
of desires and acts. Masochism involves the consensual, wilful and often
courted desire for the other to harm the self and revolves around the erotic
experiences to be found at the intersection of pleasure and pain or submission.
The masochistic subject herself may not be carrying out these harmful acts, but
as theorists such as Freud, Deleuze and Hart have argued, the desired other is
primarily used as a tool within the subjects very personal narratives of injury,
punishment or self-sacrifice. The masochist is not simply a passive victim, but
through the shared orchestration of their own fantasies of submission and
pain begins to dissolve the binary oppositions of passivity and activity. If the
masochist does retain elements of subjective agency, as I have argued thus
far, it seems that masochism can firmly and unequivocally be situated broadly
within the realm of self-harm, even if this takes place by proxy. Yet, already
in this seemingly simple statement further lines of enquiry appear. What is the
definition of harm that is assumed here, and which factors may enable or limit
this definition? What sort of harm is at stake: temporary or permanent, physical
or psychical and do or should these ambiguously drawn distinctions make a
difference? How (and why) do we differentiate between harm inflicted by the
self-unto-the-self as an individual process, and the intersubjective scenarios of
harm enacted within a sadomasochistic relationship? The theories and films
discussed in this chapter facilitate an address to these questions and to others
that circle around self-harm, specifically with regard to the relationship between
masochistic pleasures and the visible self-mutilation of the body. Self-mutilation
is representationally and conceptually fraught and the visibly self-injured
body emerges as a contested site within theory and symbolic forms such as
cinema. It also emerges as a distinctly gendered body, caught within the overdetermined cultural matrix of the signs and meanings of femininity, beauty
and socially prescribed value. Self-inflicted cuts, scabs and burns are regarded
as expressing always already culturally determined meanings, interpreted as
readable inscriptions that are compelled to articulate only a limited range of
narratives. Within these discourses the self-injured body becomes a surface
text or spectacle that must be read and understood according to pre-existing
structures of signification. This tendency is grossly reductive and frequently
paternalistic. Just as the labelling of masochistic subjectivity as passive denies

its complexities and multiplicities, so existing conceptualizations of self-harm
often manifest themselves as forms of discursive violence against the subject
that function to entrap and foreclose any individual or alternative systems of
meaning.
The presumed connection between masochism and self-harm is evidenced
in two of the most high-profile films of recent years to take sadomasochistic
heterosexual relationships as their theme, The Piano Teacher and Secretary, both of
which also contain depictions of self-mutilatory acts. All the films considered
in this volume address or play with the theme of female masochism in more
or less explicit ways, and in The Piano Teacher and Secretary this theme is enacted
through the more literal dynamics of what is typically referred to as BDSM
(sexual practices involving bondage and discipline, dominance and submission,
and sadism and masochism). Each of these films weaves an inextricable network
of connections between masochistic desire and visceral corporeality, ritualized
self-mutilation and in the case of The Piano Teacher, additional behaviours that are
considered pathological or perverse within normative taxonomies (for example
sadistic acts carried out by various perpetrators, a graphic rape scene and a
sequence that hints at mother-daughter incest). The Piano Teacher is relentlessly
bleak in tone and devoid of any relief or optimism. The final scenes depict
Erikas rape and then an act of self-injury in which she stabs herself in the
shoulder with a kitchen knife before walking off to an uncertain future. Secretary
is also, to some extent, a marginal film in its independent status and casting
of edgy actors such as James Spader as lawyer E. Edward Grey (associated
with other films that explore perverse pleasures such as Steven Soderburghs
Sex, Lies and Videotape and David Cronenbergs Crash) and the then relatively
unknown Maggie Gyllenhaal as his secretary Lee, an uncertain young woman
recently released from institutionalization following repeated acts of self-harm.
However, the tone of Secretary is much lighter than that of Hanekes film and
it ultimately plays out along the more predictable narrative trajectory of a
romantic comedy drama as the punishments meted out to Lee for typos and
other secretarial mistakes become increasingly sexualized and intertwined with
deepening feelings of intimacy and eventually love. As Meg Barker, Camelia
Gupta and Alessandra Iantaffi note, in Secretary healing BDSM is part of the
familiar narrative of great romance, with Lee winning her man through her
capacity to withstand painful and humiliating scenes (Barker et al. 2007: 206).
Secretary concludes with Lee and Greys sadomasochistic relationship being
assimilated into the heteronormative institution of marriage, albeit with the
conventional scene of the happy couple leaving the church to the sound of
bells and under a rain of confetti being replaced by the rather less conventional
image of Spader and Gyllenhaal having enthusiastic sex while she is chained
to a tree. The differing aesthetic strategies of the films further express their
72
contrasting treatments of the themes of masochism and self-harm. The Piano

Teacher is stark and resolutely monochromatic, Haneke making thorough use
of his trademark static cameras to frame events in an impartial and sometimes
frustratingly inaccessible way. Conversely, Secretary draws upon a wider spectrum
of colours and greater range of shots to construct a rich and almost fantastical
heterocosmic space. The portrayal of self-harm in each film accords broadly
with typical significatory systems surrounding these practices in wider culture,
but nonetheless these representations may function to pose questions about the
position of the female body in discourses of illness and sanity and about the way
in which the suffering of the other can be comprehended and conceptualized.
Cultural Constructions of Self-harm
Self-harm as a concept is a sociocultural construct. The category of the selfharmer has come to designate a particular type of identity that functions to
designate those who enact or experience these practices as other in accordance
with wider conceptions of the body and identity such as the abject, the
subaltern and the inhuman. The psychical and embodied states associated with
self-harming are at once over-determined and inadequately recognized. The
wounded or scarred body is regarded simultaneously as a self-evident text that
speaks for itself in a presumed language of suffering, and as something to be
overwritten by cultural and political discourses concerned with mental illness
and the gendered body. Armando Favazzas writing suggests the way in which
the body is read by those who witness it:
The bodies of some mentally ill-self-mutilators can be thought of as a stage
upon which is enacted a personal drama that reflects, in varying proportions,
personal psychopathology, social stresses, and cultural myths, especially those
of a religious nature. The themes of these myths are suffering, dismemberment,
blood sacrifice, resurrection, rebirth, and the establishment (or reestablishment)
of a new, prosperous, healthy, and amicable order. (1996: 45)
An exploration of representations and conceptualizations of self-harm

reveals much about the normative ideologies that structure our understandings
of suffering, sanity, addiction, corporeality and gender. For this reason, just as
masochism acts as a disruptive force that troubles and disturbs the boundaries
and binaries of social order, so self-harm throws into relief questions about how
we approach alterity and in particular how we regard the pleasures and pains
of others. It necessitates the deconstruction of existing systems of meaning
that have rigidly channelled theories of self-mutilation into deterministic
understandings, and ultimately demands the rethinking of the relationship
73
between subjective experience, the body and signification. The central area
of concern in this chapter is the non-suicidal forms of self-mutilation that
result in visible transformations of the body through cuts, burns, scabs and
scars; these are the marks that are commonly described as damage. The Piano
Teacher and Secretary thematically address such deliberate acts, although their
visible traces are often elided within the film space itself. Other films have
presented more graphic depictions of the opening up and transforming of the
body, most explicitly the French film In My Skin, directed by Marina de Van
and featuring processes such as cutting, tearing, the removal of pieces of skin
and autocannibalism. This chapter will conclude with an address to de Vans
film and in particular to the ethical affects of the avant-garde aesthetic that it
employs.
The terminology surrounding this topic may in itself be problematic and
requires some clarification. The designation self-harm is typically understood
as referring to deliberate and conscious acts such as cutting or burning ones own
body superficially and more seriously, and this is the phrase most prominently used
within popular culture, particularly within the United Kingdom. Gloria Babiker
and Lois Arnold discuss potential difficulties of definition and suggest that
self-harm is too broad a categorization. Contrary to the general understanding
of this term, in a clinical sense self-harm may refer to a much wider range of
practices that also includes suicide and perceived self-destructive behaviours
such as drug use. Babiker and Arnolds conclusion is that self-mutilation and
self-injury are the most appropriate phrases, the former being the preferred
term amongst those who engage in it and the latter most accurately describing
the spoiling of the skin or actual damage done to the body (Babiker and
Arnold 1997: x). More recent accounts within psychiatry and medical discourse
have also favoured the use of the term self-harm for a broader spectrum of
acts, including those with suicidal intent, and self-injury or self-mutilation to
refer to non-lethal but deliberately injurious acts towards ones own person. The
continuing debate around definitions of self-harmful behaviour is indicative
of the perceived need to define and categorize these practices and experiences
within existing frames of understanding, a compulsion that is further apparent
in the frequent labels attached to those who carry out these practices. Selfharmer and cutter become designated subjective positions that are weighted
with assumptions and serve to reiterate social constructions of otherness that
reaffirm the norm, constructing a clear if illusionistic distinction between sanity
and insanity and health and illness. The fascinating work of Favazza in Bodies
Under Siege (1996), one of the most sustained and influential explorations of
self-mutilation as a cultural phenomenon as well as a psychiatric one, offers
further illumination upon how self-harm has been defined. He distinguishes
between culturally accepted and/or expected types and forms that are indicative
of individual cases of pathology. The former consists of practices such as tribal
74
initiations and rituals, discussed at length by Favazza, or in a Western context

customs such as ear piercing, tattooing or controlled disciplines of the body
like dieting. The latter are associated not with established custom but with
mental distress and here Favazza draws upon a wide variety of case studies that
range from more common incidents such as cutting or sticking needles into the
flesh, to more extreme cases that involve, for example, eye gouging, amputation
and castration. Although the pathological forms he identifies are regarded as
evidence of abnormalities, they are as enmeshed in and determined by social
structures of meaning as the cultural forms. The recurrence of damage to body
parts given especial significance or value within sociocultural systems (the eyes,
the face, the genitals) is testament to this. Favazzas book is important not only
for the vast and disparate variety of practices explored, but also because by
including culturally accepted self-injurious acts he crucially emphasizes the
extent to which perceptions of normality, abnormality, sanity and insanity with
regard to the body and what is done with it and to it are always socioculturally
contingent, even at the seemingly finite limits of pain and damage. However,
in maintaining to some extent the distinction between cultural and pathological
self-mutilation he fails to move away entirely from constructions that accord
with more normative ideals.
We have seen in previous chapters how Freud turned his attention to
what he perceived to be the problem of masochism, a phenomenon that he
initially regarded as incomprehensible because of its apparently contradictory
combining of pleasure and unpleasure (Freud 1961a: 155). Similarly, theoretical
accounts of and cultural attitudes towards self-injury have typically approached
it as an enigma that must be unravelled and reconstructed in a more explicable
way, an unacceptable conundrum to be solved through the rational application
of psychiatry and medicine or from political perspectives such as feminism.
Like masochism, it appears antithetical to the values of self-preservation
and pain-avoidance that are taken to be self-evident within contemporary
Western frameworks. The primary drive behind the majority of existing
conceptualizations has been to situate self-mutilatory practices within narratives
that render them coherent within established frames of human understanding,
thus sublimating the problem of self-harm and its potential as a disruptive
force into normative modes of psychical and physical activity. This urge toward
the imperative to explain and control self-harm has resulted in its co-option
by various fields of discourse: psychiatry, literature, feminism, the media.
In most cases these discourses work to dilute or deny the visceral disorder
that self-harm insists upon. This process renders the subject in question as
an inhuman object that needs to be studied, explained and cured in order
to be returned to the realm of the acceptably and properly human. Selfharm has thus been compartmentalized into a narrow selection of narratives
recognizable within dominant modes of discourse, each imposing a schema of
75
signification established by psychiatrists, doctors and theorists that, however

well intentioned, is restrictive and risks silencing alternative systems of creative
meaning-making.
Although there has been an increase in cultural depictions of self-mutilation
in recent years as well as in psychiatric and medical explorations of the subject,
within wider society it still retains its status as taboo and for most who practice
it remains secretive and intensely personal. Favazza, for example, quotes
some interesting responses to his initial transcript from both laypeople who
considered self-harm a grotesque act (1996: xii) and from publishers who
labelled the subject of his study disgusting (1996: xv). Likewise, Marilee Strong
outlines reactions of horror, disgust, or bewilderment in those who encounter
the self-harmed body (2000: xv). If responses to the mere suggestion of selfharming are vehement, reactions to the actual sight of the self-mutilated body
are frequently even more extreme and are accompanied by attempts to ignore,
arrest, control and explain such behaviour in order to apprehend and master it.
In many cases the extremity of the reaction to the idea or sight of the wounded
body with its cuts, scabs and bruises far outstrips the level of bodily damage that
has actually been done. These disproportionate reactions are congruent with
the overdetermination that weighs heavily on these bodies and are reflective of
the lack of desire to truly engage in an ethical encounter within a social order
that places the integrity and wholeness of the human body and mind above
all other concerns. Self-determination is central to humanist understandings of
the subjects place in the world. Perhaps then, a part of the consternation and
horror that self-mutilation evokes may be attributed to its perceived status as
intentionality and deliberation gone awry, put to transgressive use that denies
and mortifies the insistence of easily definable boundaries of sanity/insanity,
health/illness and pleasure/pain and that attests to the insistence of the potential
openings and sensations of the body and skin. Therefore, the acts themselves
and the corporeal marks that function as their persistent imprints are regarded
as an affront to propriety and correct human identity. The self-harming subject
emerges as an uncanny and monstrous apparition that breaks through the skin
of normal everyday life to present the horror of the wilfully opened body.
Two modalities of reaction play a part in this, distinct yet remaining irrevocably
interconnected. Firstly visceral, immediate responses to the sight of damaged
skin and flesh, and secondly more logical or rational responses to the concept
and causes of self-harm. The former of these may often be an involuntary
reaction to the assault on the body or the prominence of the marks that are
left behind. The moment in Secretary when Lee presses a boiling metal kettle to
her thigh brings forth a physical response of this nature from the spectator: a
wince, an indrawn breath, even the touching of a hand to ones own thigh to
ensure its integrity is preserved. This evokes the vulnerability of the self and
forces a (usually unwanted) confrontation with the other who is at once familiar
76
and recognizable, yet simultaneously disturbingly. Visceral responses to selfmutilation could not take place without a subjective identification with the body
of the other as similar to our own. This process of identification contains the
seeds of an ethical encounter, and yet this potential is too often shut down by
attendant feelings of revulsion towards the alterity of the wounded body. The
sociocultural norms that govern the body and its relation to meaning-making
can be detected in more intellectual and apparently reasoned responses to selfmutilation, but also play a constitutive role in more immediate reactions in that
they structure what is excluded from experience as disgusting and aversive, as
abject. Kristeva describes the encounter with abjection thus:
A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might
have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate,
loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A something that I
do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is
nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. (1982: 2)
The wounds and scabs of the self-mutilated body, the blood and pus and
unnatural openings, exist within this border space of neither entirely self nor
completely other, too much meaning and not enough meaning. As abjection it
disturbs identity, system, order (Kristeva 1982: 4) and invokes an involuntary
eruption of horror, repugnance and nausea from the spectator looking on.
When considering the abjected status of the self-injuring subject an emphasis
also needs to be placed upon the social significance accorded to the skin, the
part of the body most frequently and visibly affected. Skin plays a crucial role
in the way in which the subject conceives of themselves as a distinct entity and
how they make sense of their relationship with others and the external world.
It is loaded with meanings pertaining to signs of identity and varying degrees
of humanness measured in terms of alterity or likeness: Skin is the site of
encounter between the enfleshed self and society Skin is a marked surface
inscribed with texts of race, gender, sexuality, class and age (MacCormack
2012: 22). The mutilation of this privileged organ works to reconfigure these
norms, to perversely augment or nullify them and in doing so, to catalyse a
transformation in the signifying chain.
If the abject defies the oppositional structures that organize the social
world into self/other, centre/margin, proper/improper, then skin occupies a
categorically problematic and thus potentially enabling position as a border
membrane:
The information provided by the surface of the skin is both endogenous and
exogenous, active and passive, receptive and expressive, the only sense able to
provide the double sensation. the subject utilizes one part of the body
77
to touch another, thus exhibiting the interchangeability of active and passive

sensations, of those positions of subject and object, mind and body. (Grosz
1994: 3536)
Skin, then, may maintain constraining conceptions of the subject and

identity but may also function in some circumstances as a site of excessive
disruption from which to challenge normative regulatory ideologies about the
body. Groszs observation about the simultaneously outward and inward facing
nature of skin serves as a reminder that the external appearance of self-injured
skin, while crucial for a consideration of how it is culturally regarded, is only
one aspect of this debate. For the subject themselves, the personal processes
and sensations of self-mutilation play a vital role in the fluid dynamics between
these practices and meaning-making. Such sensations are often focused on this
border membrane and for example in the case of cutting may include, but not
be limited to, a cold blade on warm skin, the emotions associated with seeing
skin part and blood well up (release, relief, eroticism, aesthetic appreciation)
and later the sight of scabbing and healing and the formation of a scar which
changes in colour and texture as the weeks and months pass. Insofar as it is
possible to link self-mutilation to the processes of signification, the meanings
associated with the alteration of the skin membrane are not stable, unified or
easily graspable. The various permutations of visible self-mutilation transform
the social meanings of the skin and body, perhaps as a deliberate strategy,
perhaps as the by-product of a more personal set of experiences. To conceive
of one signifying framework that could account for the numerous sensations
and attendant contextual elements (instruments used, accompanying music or
locations, clothing to reveal or hide the wounds, and so on) is to remain bound
to a repressive and institutionalized schema that seeks to co-opt and control any
body that refuses to adhere to the standardized codes of the human.
The multiplicity of meanings that surround self-harm, in the social sphere
and the realm of personal experience, may be evoked through the scene in The
Piano Teacher in which Erika, sitting on the side of the bath, cuts her genitals
in a gesture that is presented as a habitual act of mutilation. Furthermore, this
scene enacts a dovetailing of self-mutilation and masochism in its emphasis
upon a key point of interconnection between the two: the importance of ritual.
The cultural myths referred to by Favazza (1996: 45), especially in the context
of the religious connotations he observes (sacrifice, rebirth, and so on) are
indicative of the central role that ritualized practices and systems of meaning
take in pathological self-injury and in those forms that are accepted or required
in order for individuals to take their place within the social collective (such as
initiation rites or cleansing rituals). For Deleuze, the ritual is a vital structural
aspect of the masochist aesthetic and the fantasies that forge it. One of the
purposes of the contract is to ensure that ritual will be observed correctly and
78
repeatedly: the masochist is obsessed; ritualistic activity is essential to him,

since it epitomizes the world of fantasy (Deleuze 1991: 94). In intersubjective
masochistic encounters and in more personal experiences of self-mutilation,
ritual privileges specific acts, instruments, contexts and functions to imbue them
with a psychical and libidinal charge that elevates simple routine to signifying
narrative. In both cases, the ritual must be regarded as part of a formal aesthetic
process that combines visual aspects including marks upon or cuts into the
skin and the welling of blood, with other attendant multisensory elements and
contexts. Ritualized behaviour is evoked in The Piano Teacher, Secretary and In
My Skin. The chosen scene from Hanekes film assists with an understanding
of how the commingled aesthetic of masochism and self-mutilation might be
manifested cinematically. It also begins to demonstrate how these resolutely
embodied practices may enable a disruption of normative ideologies about
subjectivity and may encourage (or even force) the spectator into a confrontation
with an ethical rethinking of definitions of, and the complex relationship
between, pain and enjoyment. Turning to this scene now, a number of indicators
suggest to the viewer that Erikas act is habitual. The precise and practiced way
that she positions herself on the side of the bathtub is suggestive of repeated
activity and the razor blade stored conveniently in her purse further cements
this impression. The almost entirely static camera and the use of a single shot
for the entire scene is typical of Hanekes detached filmmaking technique; the
lack of close-ups on Erikas face denies the spectator the chance to read her
emotions in a conventional way and the act of cutting itself, as well as the
wounded genitals, are obscured by her hands. This obstructed and restrained
portrayal of self-inflicted pleasure-pain is starkly different to the astonishingly
confrontational close-up of Gainsbourgs masturbatory mutilation in Antichrist,
and in fact differs drastically from the description in Jelineks original novel,
which is a difficult passage to endure in its graphic entirety:
With little information about anatomy and with even less luck, she applies the
cold steel to and into her body, where she believes there ought to be a hole. The
aperture gapes, terrified by the change, and blood pours out For an instant,
the two flesh halves, sliced apart, stare at each other, taken aback at this sudden
gap, which wasnt there before. (Jelinek 1999: 8687)
Readers reactions to these words will of course be varied, however, these

sentences seem to induce the two interconnected types of response to selfinjury put forward earlier in this chapter. Firstly the visceral and embodied
response that calls upon the readers own experiences of pain, imagining the
blade biting into flesh and perhaps clenching together ones legs to ward off
any such threat to the integrity of the body. In addition to this, we experience
the conceptual horror that arises from the image of reconfigured flesh and
79
particularly the transformation of this vulnerable and significance-laden part of

the female anatomy. Hanekes portrayal, while less graphic, is not necessarily less
shocking or less evocative of the forces of violence against the body. The most
disturbing visual element in this scene is the stream of blood that runs down
between Erikas legs, confirming the spectators suspicions about precisely what
she was doing with the razor blade. The white purity of the porcelain bath is
disrupted by the redness of the blood which issues like menstrual flow from
between her legs (an impression heightened by her pose, which echoes that of
someone inserting a tampon) in an image that plays with the juxtaposition of
cleanliness, pollutants and restrictive conceptions of what constitutes normality
and abnormality in regard to the rituals surrounding the female body. Imagery of
one of the typical processes associated with adult femininity is drawn upon here
only to be cast aside in a properly polymorphously perverse movement, echoing
Kristevas comment on the relationship between abjection and perversion: The
abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule,
or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage
of them, the better to deny them (1982: 15).
Cinematic Self-mutilation: Typical Themes
Honing in from cultural conceptions of self-injury more broadly to cinematic

representations in particular enables the further exploration of some of the
most pervasive narratives and structures of signification that surround these
practices and bodies. Incidences of self-mutilation in cinema have become
increasingly prevalent and varied in form, from the exceptionally graphic
close-up of Gainsbourg snipping off her clitoris in Antichrist to the bizarrely
hilarious adverts for specially designed cutting tools in a futuristic world where
self-mutilation has become endemic in Japanese horror/exploitation film Tokyo
Gore Police (Lets go stylish with wrist-cutting! squeal three Japanese schoolgirls
at the camera. The blood gets tastier!). These examples are more extreme
and unusual in their manifestation, but as in other films featuring self-harm
such as Girl, Interrupted, Thirteen, and The Piano Teacher and Secretary, it is used a
shorthand for dysfunction whether sexual pathology, individual mental illness
in teenage girls, the dysfunction of an entire corrupt society or the apparently
inherent madness of the female gender (von Trier once again displaying his
zeal for the fetishization of suffering). A further commonality in these recent
cinematic examples is that they typically reflect the wider cultural narratives
about self-mutilation that have been constructed within institutional and
theoretical discourse and often serve to reaffirm dominant understandings of
these practices. Despite this affirmation, some of these films still indicate the
potentialities for the self-injured body and particularly the masochistic self80
injured body, to act as a site for the disruption of pre-established systems of

signification and to encourage us to think our relationships to embodied alterity
anew.
What are these dominant narratives, and how do they manifest themselves
cinematically? The first, apparent in several of the films already mentioned,
is the stereotypical image of the self-harmer as white, teenage (or at least,
young) and female. This stereotype demonstrates clearly that the specifically
corporeal and spectacular nature of this identity is not neutral but caught up
in a network of cultural ideas about how the female body should look, function
and behave. Barbara Jane Brickman observes that although sustained studies
demonstrate that those who self-injure are not just female, may be a variety of
ages and ethnicities and from a variety of backgrounds, nonetheless, a typical
model of the self-harmer and specifically the cutter has emerged within both
popular culture and medical discourse. This model has proved remarkably
persistent: A cutter profile was created by the first confluence of psychiatric
interest in a delicate form of self-mutilation: the delicate cutter is typically a
white, adolescent girl The white, suburban, attractive teenage girl persists as
the face of self-mutilation (Brickman 2004: 87). Delicate cutting is defined as
superficial wounds to the skin of the body, frequently on the arms and legs, and
relies on a particular notion of femininity that has been developed in psychiatry
and medicine as well as in representational discourses such as art, literature
and cinema, in which the feminine subject position is equated with masochism,
passivity, and the infantile or primitive. This delicate cutter is much in evidence
in Western cinematic representations of self-harm, with Girl, Interrupted, Thirteen,
and of course Secretary providing just a few examples. Darren Aronofskys Black
Swan also draws upon this stereotype in the portrayal of lead character Nina
as mentally ill, with self-injury (albeit apparently inflicted unconsciously) one
of several indications of pathology along with the implication of an eating
disorder, identity crisis and a claustrophobic relationship with her mother that
echoes that of Erika and her mother in The Piano Teacher. Brickman argues
that this tendency is also prevalent in popular culture in television, fiction and
magazines, as well as in more objective discourses such as psychiatric literature.
This typical profile has served to privilege one particular form of self-harm,
cutting, over others, whilst perpetuating medical structures that can be traced
back to Charcots hysterics and beyond in which women and girls are situated
as objects of scrutiny to be categorized and regulated by phallologocentric
institutions. In fact, hysteria and self-mutilation share several common aspects
in the gendering processes that they have been subjected to by psychiatric,
medical and cultural discourse, and in the way in which the diagnostic criteria and
treatment they require has been a socially-embedded matter of representation
and conception. Of the relationship between hysteria and gender, Elisabeth
Bronfen writes,
81
Like gender, hysteria comprises what the physician chooses, dislocates, or

excludes in order to support the position he seeks to ascribe to this disorder.
The persistent inability of medical professionals to find a universal, systematic
definition for hysteria ultimately illustrates that hysteria can have no autonomous
and original identity outside its discursive formations Hysteria exists only
insofar as it results from a given network of medical, supernatural, religious, and
aesthetic discourses. (1998: 102)
Manifestations or performances of the female body that deviate from

femininity in its socially prescribed form are problematically categorized as
mental illness in a non-objective scientific discourse that cannot be separated
from the ideological structures within which it comes into being. Such
constructions are based on the exclusion of embodied potentialities as much
as they are upon the inclusion of accepted norms and values. Self-mutilation
is subject to a similar process of medicalization and ideological articulation. A
double movement is at work in this logos which at once constructs femininity
as equivalent to pathology and an unhealthy relationship to ones own body,
as Brickman comments (2004:89), and that co-opts certain designated forms
of self-harm itself as resolutely and irretrievably belonging to the realm of
pathology.
In the films mentioned already in this chapter, cutting is depicted as one
amongst other forms of self-destructive behaviour and often, as Brickman
observes about Girl, Interrupted, cutting is portrayed as the most extreme and
damaging of these self-destructive practices (2004: 102). The character of Daisy
in Girl, Interrupted attests to this: after leaving the asylum various signs of her
mental ill health remain such as an addiction to Valium and the compulsive eating
of nothing but roast chicken. However, it is the discovery that she also cuts her
arms that is posed as definitive proof of her continued mental disintegration,
and indeed her suicide follows in the next scene. Thirteen follows a similar
logic. Through the narrative of Catherine Hardwickes film, the young female
protagonist participates in various activities that are regarded as self-destructive
and problematic such as excessive drinking, drug use and promiscuous sexual
encounters (behaviours which are also classed as self-harmful within a clinical
context). Whilst these activities accelerate and intensify over the course of the
narrative, it is the revelation of her cutting that brings the film to its climax.
Amongst these many forms of apparently harmful behaviour, it is the deliberate
wounding of ones own skin, even superficially, that is regarded as the most
terrible and most obscene. My earlier comments about the social signification
of skin can now be further refined to demonstrate that different social meanings
are attached to different types of skin, some of which are perceived as more
precious and vulnerable than others. Skin is imbued with meanings relating to
its status as border membrane between self and world, interior and exterior, as
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the psychically invested surface of self-image and as the projected identificatory

surface of the other, and the stereotype of the delicate cutter shows clearly
how these psychical investments are gendered. Brickman argues that in order
to accord with cultural standards of beauty young female skin is required to
appear as flawless and unmarked, with such skin coded as uniquely precious.
Thus, the violation of it is regarded as particularly noteworthy and grotesque
(Brickman 2004: 98). The pervasiveness of this idea is apparent at the end of
Secretary as the camera pans over Lees near-naked body from above and in the
voiceover she claims to relate to Grey the origins and catalysts for each scar. In
fact, however, her skin appears remarkably unblemished and clear, suggesting
that the sight of a heavily scarred young female heroine, criss-crossed with
welts and scar tissue would have been a step too far, violating an unspoken rule
about flawless feminine beauty and the sorts of bodies that are perceived as
deserving of being looked at and loved.
The figure of the pretty, white teenage girl, often contextualized within
American suburbia, is one of the most prominent and frequent depictions
of self-mutilation in cinematic representation. Films such as Thirteen, Girl,
Interrupted and Secretary draw upon the stereotype in which the cutter appears
initially as an aberration within the happy domestic setting, with images of pain
and misery starkly juxtaposed with mundane domesticity. The early scenes of
Secretary abound in these moments: Lee holding a just-boiled metal kettle to
her thigh in her very average bedroom, or removing blades and iodine from
a prettily decorated trinket box. The progression of these narratives usually
reveal that the idealized image of suburban life is itself an illusion (Lees
father is revealed as having drinking problems and her parents marriage to
be disintegrating), meaning that the pathological status of the young female
protagonists comes to act as the sign of wider pathologies within the family
unit as a whole. In a similar structural movement to the logic of sacrifice
described in Chapter 2, societal dysfunction is channelled through the suffering
female body, a body which is read purely as a signifier rather than according
to any individualized or self-ascertained cultural value. This conceptual drive
has also been apparent in some of the feminist writing which has attempted to
theorize female self-injury, partially as a result of the tendencies that emerged
in second wave feminism toward examining not only representations of the
female body but the body as itself a politically inscribed entity, its physiology
and morphology shaped by histories and practices of containment and control
(Bordo 1993: 21 cited in Brickman 2004: 89). While the analysis of the ways in
which the female body has been regulated by phallocratic discursive structures
is certainly a valuable aspect of feminist theory, the emphasis upon reading the
body politically has resulted in feminism producing its own prescriptive and
sometimes condemnatory accounts of self-injury that co-opt these practices
and bodies into a pointed political narrative. Kaplan includes Mutilations in
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her stable of Female Perversions, placing such acts within the broader context of
her thesis that patriarchy gives rise to a range of self-destructive pathologies
for women and arguing that these behaviours result from a childhood of
deprivation and trauma and anxieties about gender identity and the body within
a male-dominated social sphere:
Because the self-mutilator did not feel secure within her body in childhood,
to her the expectable adolescent anxieties coalesce into an unsupportable
mutilation anxiety. Her active and defiant gestures of self-mutilation are most
directly a means of avoiding a passively suffered mutilation but also a method
of forestalling final gender identity and denying that the illusions and hopes and
dreams that made life endurable are lost forever. (Kaplan 1991: 364)
Although Kaplan allows for the possibility of self-injury as an active form of

behaviour, she also conceptualizes it as entirely reactionary and overwhelmingly
negative. The familiar associations are manifested again: of self-mutilation
with arrested emotional development and a childlike psychical state, and with
something inherently feminine and self-destructive that occludes the position
of alternatively gendered or non-gendered self-mutilatory identities. Most
problematically, these practices are once more funnelled into a single and closed
system of understanding which denies the vast range of different experiences
and meanings that may actually be involved. The assumed alignment of selfharm with the female and with stereotypical femininity is perhaps reflective
of womens sociohistorical position as less-human object to the dominant and
privileged male subject, an oppositional logic that remains to a large extent
within contemporary societies as women continue to be measured in relation
to the idealized standards of patriarchy. Women have, therefore, long been
situated in closer proximity to the abject, the primitive and the inhuman. A
Mbius strip-like logic is apparent here in which the default model of the selfharmer is assumed to be female because of these existing conceptualizations of
gender, whilst simultaneously the notion of self-harm gains a particular social
significance through its association with the state of femaleness. It is clear that
gender has a part to play in these experiences and meanings, but to focus on
this aspect alone is to ignore the broader question of the inhumanism of this
particular kind of marked body.
The figure of the delicate cutter is what could be described as the more
realistic manifestation of self-mutilation in cinema, existing within a world
of probable if taboo behaviour. More explicit and fantastical portrayals of
self-injury can be found in horror cinema and are worth exploring further
because although the characters and situations they depict are unlikely or
even impossible, the same logic of monstrosity and alterity operates in both
modalities of representation. Although horror cinema exaggerates and distorts,
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in both types of film the self-harming subject is used to signify a threatening

otherness, abjection and the grotesque. To draw upon an example already
mentioned in Chapter 2, the sadomasochistic entities from Clive Barkers
Hellraiser, the Cenobites, exemplify the image of the terrifying and repulsive
body mutilated through subjective agency and choice. These creatures are in
many ways irrevocably other, their bodies perpetually open to reveal blood and
flesh, modified with various metallic and torturous contraptions. And yet they
are humanoid and therefore simultaneously too familiar. Indeed, in Hellbound:
Hellraiser II their human origins come to light, emphasizing the notion that they
represent the horror and cruelty at the heart of ourselves and herein lies the
horrifying allure that they hold, at once alien and monstrous, yet recognizable.
The threatening horrific other, whether embodied in the gruesome yet tempting
form of the Cenobites with their tattered flesh and exquisitely fascinating
promises of torture, or the teenage girl whose wounds cut through mundane
suburban existence to enact the aberrations which lie beneath, is in each
case related to fears about alterity at the heart of the self: the return of the
Nebenmensch complex. The crux of the revulsion evoked by these self-harming
figures may be understood in light of the threat to coherent subjectivity that
they represent. They are perceived as signifying a subjectivity turned against
itself and in this they provide a reminder that the coherence and rationality
associated with the proper subject and the correct type of body are illusions,
cultural fantasies constructed upon the denial of alternative subject positions
and oppressed bodies.
Secretary: Self-mutilation and Sadomasochism
In The Piano Teacher, the relationship between Erika and Walter is founded in
misrecognition and in the mismatch between his more conventional conception
of romance and love, and her sadomasochistic desires, portrayed as part of a
wider polymorphous sexuality. Secretary presents a more optimistic exploration
of the possibilities contained within a sadomasochistic relationship, adhering
to what could be called a redemptive narrative of self-harm that is grounded
in the notions of healing and recovery. As such, this film takes its place within
a wider positivist or idealistic perspective on the potentialities of BDSM in
which the masochistic position is one of power and agency, as well as being
situated within deterministic discourses about self-mutilation and its meanings.
The themes of masochism and self-mutilation are inextricably enmeshed in
Secretary through the construction of a trajectory of recuperation, returning
us to the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter about harm, the
significance of pain and pleasure, and intersubjective experience. This film is
based loosely upon a short story of the same name by Mary Gaitskill (1989),
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although the original source material presents a much more ambiguous and
fraught version of the relationship between secretary and manager in which the
desires of the former are by no means straightforward or easily apprehended.
Gaitskill herself has described Shainbergs film as the Pretty Woman version of
my story (2003), referring to its transformation into a love story-cum-coming
out narrative about mutual appreciation and self-discovery, and to its new
conclusion in which Grey and Lees unconventional desires are absorbed into
the heteronormative institution of marriage. The physical sensations of the
masochistic and wounded body are central to the film, for example in scenes of
masturbation, spanking and self-harm, but there is simultaneously an emphasis
upon how sadomasochism is compatible with a loving and monogamous
relationship and in this Secretary recalls the idealism and romance of SacherMasochs writing.
The structure of Secretary accords with one of the most pervasive cultural
narratives that aims to organize self-harm and to rehabilitate it from the
negativity of suicidal desire, which it has long been associated with. Smaller acts
of injury may be regarded as acting as microcosms of a projected drive towards
the absolute nullification of the self. Favazza states that until recently, in both
professional and popular thought, self-mutilation was regarded generally as
a type of suicidal behaviour (1996: 232). This perception may have lessened
within medical and psychiatric disciplines but in popular culture this association
remains pervasive if not dominant, as characters such as Daisy in Girl, Interrupted
attest to. The compulsive urge to connect even superficial instances of cutting
that may do little or no lasting damage with the much more serious wish to
end ones life may seem peculiar given that it manifests a sort of cultural desire
toward suicide, however, this explanation serves to assign a specific intention
and to absorb these acts into a goal-orientated structure that whilst nihilistic,
accords nonetheless with an emphasis on aim over process, the final as opposed
to the immediate. The assumed future act of suicide is used to explain what
may otherwise appear as random present acts of cutting (and burning, and
ingesting), or as Strong states, we are unable to attach an appropriate meaning
to the activity of cutting and the only available meaning we grasp at may be
that of suicidal behaviour (2000: xv). Indeed, specific types of self-injury may
seem to adhere to and reaffirm this narrative, for example the flesh wounds
of the cutter seem to foretell of wrist-slashing, or the swallowing of toxins
foreshadows a fatal overdose. The processual and ritualized nature of selfharming ultimately renders this suicidal narrative obsolete, but to the external
(and non-expert) viewer, the failure of the final and finite act to materialize
only seems to exacerbate the sense of horror and incomprehension that the
wounded or scarred body may evoke. Favazza observes that the activities
and injuries of the self-harmer are often regarded as more shocking, more
disgusting, and more baffling even than suicide, because from an exterior point
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of view they may seem utterly pointless. The suicidal subject attains an ultimate
point of finality: their action is goal-orientated and thus more comprehensible.
The self-harming subject, however, remains very much alive and able to haunt
us in the flesh (Favazza 1996: 288289). This description of the self-mutilated
body as transgressive spectre is strikingly reminiscent of Kristevas description
of the abject as death infecting life (1984: 4), enhancing the argument that
the embodied subjectivity the self-mutilator presents to the social world is one
which threatens the integrity of the symbolic systems which determine the
status of the human.
An alternative to the finitude of suicide has also emerged in clinical studies
and in popular culture; instead of the trajectory towards this end point, a
course of cure and recovery is plotted in which the emotional and physical
pain associated with self-mutilation are contextualized as necessary elements
within a positive overall schema. The self-harmer is healed, the subject is
born anew. Karl Menninger in 1938 was the first to suggest self-injury as a
form of self-healing and although this observation was not heeded for several
decades (as Favazza notes [1996: 232]), it has gradually become another
pervasive cultural understanding. Strong picks up this strand of thought to
argue that self-mutilation, especially its visible forms, is now considered within
psychiatry as a coping mechanism and a way for the subject to deal with their
suffering and continue living: quite the opposite to the indication of suicidal
desire (Strong 2000: 31). Cultural accounts that operate within this structure,
including Secretary, posit self-mutilatory activities such as cutting as indicative
of dysfunction and pathology, but in the sense that they demonstrate a desire
for healing and represent one stage in the process of recuperation. Lee is never
presented as suicidal, rather, the moments when she cuts or burns herself follow
incidents of stress or confrontation. When discussing what she refers to as her
accident, the slashing of her arms with a kitchen knife and the act that lead to
her hospitalization, she makes it clear that this was not an attempt to end her life
but rather a mistake: she inadvertently cut too deep. Later, an exchange with
Grey further emphasizes the healing aspects of self-harm as, after answering a
question about why she does it with I dont know, Grey suggests his explanation:
Is it that sometimes the pain inside has to come to the surface, and when you
see evidence of the pain inside, you finally know youre really here. Then, when
you watch the wound heal, its comforting. Isnt it? The camera cuts to Lees
face as he speaks and an ambiguous look creeps across her features that can
perhaps best be described as startled recognition. The implication is that he has
managed to articulate the instinctual, unformed thoughts behind her actions,
an implication that is strengthened by her response in turn: Thats a way to
put it. To some extent, this exchange reinforces the stereotypical association
of self-harming identity with primitivism and the inability to enter adequately
into the symbolic order: Lee cannot speak her own pain and a male figure is
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required to imbue her actions with recognizable social meaning. From another
perspective, this exchange also manages to acknowledge the multiplicity of
meanings that surround the body and its pains and pleasures, for it suggests
that what appears suicidal, repulsive or obscene to the majority of the world
(Lees uncomprehending family included) may actually signify something
quite different to the subject themselves. While others may focus on the act
of wounding itself as the primary intention, the self may place importance
upon subsequent and seemingly less dramatic corporeal experiences such as the
scabbing over and closure of the wound or the formation of a bruise or scar.
Therapeutic or redemptive structures such as the one charted by Shainbergs
film may appear to offer an alternative mode of understanding to that of
suicidal desire, but in fact function according to a comparable of pathology and
goal-oriented finality that works to reaffirm the position of a proper human
subject. At the end of the film, not only is Lee integrated successfully into
the social order through the relinquishing of her status as abjected other, but
the perversity of the sadomasochistic relationship that she shares with Grey is
also assimilated and purified through the institutional ritual of marriage. It is
necessary in such narratives for the initial diagnosis of self-destruction to be
made in order that the idealized progression from mental illness to healthy human
can be tracked and the effectiveness of social institutions such as psychiatry, or
in the case of Secretary love and marriage, witnessed and confirmed. Barker,
Gupta and Iantaffi note that Lees relationship with Grey takes her from a place
of isolated dysfunction to one of mental health in which she can successfully
forge a career, take active roles in relationships with others and ultimately form
a committed relationship (2007: 204). Sadomasochism (with the caveat that it
takes place within a loving relationship) is explicitly presented as a healthier
alternative to self-injury, which is something Lee must forsake altogether in
order to achieve her happy after ever (Barker et al. 2007: 212).
A possible critique of the narrative trajectory and particularly the conclusion
of Secretary is the suggestion that Lee has not recovered from her pathologies
at all, but merely swapped self-injury at her own hands for that at the hands of
another. The habitualized ritual of harm has not ceased, only been transferred,
or to use the Deleuzian masochistic parlance, disavowed. This concern relates to
a wider potential difficulty regarding the way that the power dynamics between
the two lead characters are manifested in the film as a whole. Not only does Lee
transfer her desire for self-punishment to another but to a man who is older,
her employer and by implication of a higher social class. The sadomasochistic
fantasies and desires that the pair harbour appear not as a reversal or subversion
of the roles that they occupy in their public/professional lives, but rather a
cementing of these positions. Thus, on the surface this film seems to reinscribe
traditional gender and class associations of femininity as passive and subjugated
and masculinity as dominant, violent and sadistic. However, it can be argued
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that contrary to this superficial impression, Secretary actually contains one of

the most active representations of masochistic desire of all the films drawn
upon in this book. The discussion of martyrdom and self-sacrifice in Chapter
2 demonstrates that submission is by no means parallel to powerlessness,
while the concept of the masochistic contract shows that masochistic desire
can be an actively persuasive (even, perhaps, manipulative) form of sexual
desire rather than a purely passive and receptive state. The portrayal of the
developing relationship between Lee and Grey takes place within this active
and wilful construction of masochistic sexuality. As the narrative of the film
unfolds, Lee becomes more aware of the nature of her fantasies and desires
and concurrently more assertive and determined in her attempts to attract Grey.
Conversely, at several points he is depicted as an anxious character and as more
tentative in pursuing his desires. Harts assertion that seeming and being must
not be considered equivalent in the movements of sadomasochistic pleasure
is played out in the film and in fact their relationship is shown to be based in
a reciprocal movement that has a positive effect upon both their subjectivities.
In accordance with redemptive narratives of self-harm and with utopian
discourses of BDSM, the portrayal of Lee in Secretary moves from alienated
and subjectively fragmented to confident and determined to pursue her desire.
An early sequence provides an example of the first stages of this perceived
progression: the white walls and quietude of the institution she occupies at
the very start of the film are in almost shocking contrast to the bright colours,
loud music, animated chatter and swirling movements of the many guests at
the wedding that greets her once she is taken back to her parents home. In
the scenes following the wedding her body appears in the space of the screen
as fragmented and divided, replicating the way in which she is torn between
her old cutting habits and attempting to cope with a return to normal life.
After burning herself with the metal of a boiling kettle she is shown in the
swimming pool as a divided and incoherent, her face and body split into parts
by the water line, a visual representation of the failure of the self-harmer as
ontological category to reach the integrity demanded for access to the realm
of the human, both in terms of mature psychical processes and the denial
of corporeal disturbance. This alienation from humanness also characterizes
Erika in The Piano Teacher. Throughout, Erika is set aside from other characters
through the mise en scne of the film and the distinctions created between her
pathological behaviour and the normality of those she encounters, emphasizing
the continual mismatch between her perverse desires and Walters very prosaic
understanding of love and sex. Significantly, despite the fact that Greys status
as Lees employer seemingly gives him a position of power over her, he too is
portrayed as fragmented within the mise en scne. At several points he is shown
peeping around corners, whether in the doorways of his office or from behind
a washing machine whilst observing Lee and her other love interest, Peter, on a
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date. This image brings an air of the ridiculous to Greys character and renders
him small and anxious within the larger space of the screen as parts of his body
and face are hidden from the spectator. When Greys ex-wife visits the office
he hides in a cupboard and leaves Lee to address the situation, giving her the
authority whilst he appears as infantile and submissive. These moments should
not be taken as out of character or contradictory but gain coherence when
viewed within the performative economy of sadomasochism described by Hart.
That both Lee and Grey display, at different times, assertiveness and timidity,
dominance and submission, and fragmentation and wholeness reveals a kinship
and reciprocal balance of power between them as they come to terms with
their sadomasochistic desire. In terms of the representation of self-harm it is
more conservative. Despite the empathic way in which it treats this topic and
the identification that is encouraged with Lee in her suffering as well as in her
desire, Shainbergs film continues to portray self-injury in the context of mental
illness and recovery.
The final section of this chapter will explore the ideas raised by a much
more experimental depiction of cutting, that found in de Vans film In My Skin.
De Vans film employs an avant-garde aesthetic that is appropriately challenging
and demands an active and committed viewing position from the spectator,
disrupting spectatorial pleasure and conventional suturing techniques just as the
self-mutilated body disturbs societal expectations and notions of beauty. Unlike
Secretary, the final scenes of de Vans film provide no sense of finality or closure,
a refusal of resolution that better reflects the processual nature of self-injurious
libidinal drives.
Avant-garde Aesthetics and the Refusal of Signification
This section will address the potentialities of self-mutilatory practices,

experiences and bodies as a means of overturning normative meaning and
deconstructing existing systems of linguistic signification, a process with which
de Vans film engages through its reconfiguration of conventional cinematic
structure. In My Skin is notable for the way that it exploits the specificity of
film form in order to express and explore the subjective experiences of the
protagonist Esther. The effect of this is to challenge the spectators assumptions
about the social meanings that have been assigned to self-mutilation and to
induce an ethical process of questioning responsiveness to it. A central part of
this intentionally difficult portrayal is de Vans refusal to pathologize Esthers
actions; in this, the film is exceptional in its avoidance of the prescriptive
cultural narratives which are so prevalent in the other films and theoretical
approaches mentioned in this chapter. The techniques used to communicate her
subjective experiences are at times abstract and experimental and are combined
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with imagery that is frequently uncomfortable to watch and gorier than any
other vision of self-injury in recent cinema (with the exception, perhaps, of
the differently contextualized graphic acts in Laugiers Martyrs). The events of
the film are set in motion when Esther cuts open her leg on a piece of metal in
the garden of a party she is attending, an occurrence that introduces the theme
of an alienated experience of the self as she apparently experiences no pain at
the time and only discovers the wound when she creates a trail of blood across
the pale carpet of the bathroom. She subsequently becomes obsessed with the
wounds (to the incomprehension and growing anger of her boyfriend), picking
and pulling at the skin around them and deepening and widening the cuts. The
first time she deliberately cuts herself is in a shadowy utility corridor of the
offices in which she works. Following this, her self-inflicted wounds become
more extreme and increasingly graphic in the way that they are represented
as Esther variously slices her skin and removes pieces from it, tears at herself
with her teeth, and drinks and smears herself with her own blood. The goriest
moments take place towards the end of the film when Esther embarks upon
a prolonged bout of self-mutilation in a sanguinary sequence that employs
striking formal techniques such as disjointed editing, unconventional angles,
split screen imagery and abrupt cuts to a black screen that echo the cuts to her
own skin. The graphic nature of these images is crucial to the challenging way
in which the film approaches this subject, while the shock and visceral reactions
of the spectator are vital for an attempt to represent physical and emotional
duress in the visual medium of cinema. Tim Palmer locates In My Skin within
what he calls the French cinma de corps, a group of films from the earliest years
of the twenty-first century that deal frankly and graphically with the body, and
corporeal transgressions, and which also includes, amongst others, works such
as Catherine Breillats Romance (1999), Claire Deniss Trouble Every Day (2001)
and Gasper Nos Irrversible (2002) (2006: 171). Palmer argues that this group of
films rejects the traditionally passive, entertained onlooker, to demand instead a
viscerally engaged experiential participant (2006: 172). The active engagement
that Palmer correctly identifies as necessary when viewing In My Skin is vital for
the analysis of the film in this chapter; it indicates that the relationship between
film and spectator can be an intersubjective one, in which the spectator is called
upon by the film to participate in the act of meaning-making.
Here, In My Skin will be drawn upon in conjunction with Elaine Scarrys
study The Body in Pain and Julia Kristevas work on symbolic and semiotic modes
of signification in Revolution in Poetic Language. The juxtaposition of these texts
posits a non-deterministic and ethical understanding of embodied self-harm
that avoids the prescriptive and co-opting narratives that commonly surround
it and instead suggests it may act as an alternative and transgressive mode
of open signification. It is clear that the connection between self-mutilatory
practices and the construction of meaning is a crucial area of consideration,
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and equally clear that this connection is far from straightforward and often
resists the spaces that social and political discourse allow for it. Insofar as it
is possible to think and talk about self-harm and the processes of meaningmaking, the discussion must acknowledge the multiple types of signification
involved, rather than reach for a stable and unified theory. The sensations
and significations associated with cutting are plural and may be constantly
shifting. To conceive of one signifying framework that strives to account for
these various and ambiguous, even contradictory meanings is to remain bound
by a repressive and institutionalized discursive system. In My Skin depicts the
flickering interplay of meaning and sensation through the use of avant-garde
cinematic techniques, challenging conventional modes of cinematic signification
in order to express the asignification of the self-wounded body. This strategy
becomes more pronounced as the film progresses and reaches its apex in the
penultimate and final sequences: Esthers final bloody bout of self-mutilation
and the moments just preceding it. As she walks through a supermarket, the
location and people around her become blurred and distorted. The images
alternate between speeded up and normal time, planes of colour, bright light
and texture collide and juxtapose (Palmer 2006: 179). The audio track also shifts
as the voices of the shoppers smudge into muffled and temporally confused
sounds, while other noises, such as the repeated beeping of the checkouts, gain
a hyper-real quality through enhancement. Reality is thrown into question as
the spectator tries to decipher what they are seeing and hearing. The scene
of self-mutilation that follows employs a split-screen form, showing disparate
close-ups of blood-smeared body parts as Esther cuts, intercut with blood upon
the kitchen surfaces and bloodied footprints on the floor. This often abstract
imagery makes it difficult for the viewer to distinguish precisely what is going
on, instead creating a general montage or jigsaw of redness in a scene that could
be reassembled in multiple different ways. In My Skin plays with the language of
film; self-mutilation, it will now be argued, refuses the regulatory language of
the dominant and inscribes a different kind of embodied meaning.
The entry into language is regarded as instrumental to the processes of
subjectification and as a necessity for taking ones proper place within the
social order. The sociocultural acceptance of someone as a normal subject
with the rights, identities and intersubjectivities that this entails is to a large
extent reliant upon their ability to exist within shared and thus intelligible
systems of signification. In this context, these shared systems suggest to us that
bodily integrity (particularly certain types of body such as the young, female
and white) must be protected in all circumstances, that pain is bad, bodily fluids
such as blood are improper and so on. There is also a social imperative to
master language as the privileged form of expression and communication,
and as demonstrated by some of the institutionalized accounts discussed earlier
in this chapter, self-mutilation is regarded as evidence of the failure to follow
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this imperative. The categorical identity of the self-harmer, therefore, signifies

childishness, primitivism and the inability to enter into the civilized social
order. Yet, associations between self-mutilation and communicative systems of
a sort remain, as suggested for example by the titles of studies by Babiker and
Arnold (The Language of Injury) and Strong (A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation
and the Language of Pain). Language is at stake here but not language as we
commonly perceive it, instead the need emerges for a new way of thinking
through the models of language and subject, one that eludes prescriptive and
rigid boundaries and offers a broader understanding of how signification may
be manifested and experienced. Kristevas Revolution in Poetic Language provides
an invaluable starting point for this project and in particular for an alternative
philosophy of language in relation to corporeal and embodied experience.
Kristeva argues that the codifying philosophies of language that dominate
Western theoretical discourse in disciplines such as linguistics, structuralism and
psychoanalysis have functioned as ossifying and possessive structures, acting as
agents of totality that withdraw the body from direct experience and repress
the processual nature of subjectivity (1984: 14). The social mechanism and the
way that language has been used and understood within this mechanism denies
the potentialities of the generation of corporeal significance, instead privileging
and normalizing the image of proper social identity or what Kristeva describes
as the thinking subject, the Cartesian subject who defines his being through
thought or language (1984: 14). This mechanism and the disciplines that manifest
and perpetuate it are to be emphatically understood as ideological structures of
control that limit the subject and restrict the processes of signification; this, for
Kristeva, is the symbolic modality of language and constitutes one part of the
signifying process. The self-harming narratives discussed earlier in this chapter
and replicated to greater or lesser extent in the films discussed, may be regarded
as strategies of symbolic signification that aim to stratify the subject and their
relation to their own bodies and the bodies of others within the constraints of
dominant ideologies.
Yet, there is more to the signifying process than this, although as Kristeva
argues this alterity has infrequently been acknowledged in dominant theories.
She asserts that in tandem with the symbolic mode, we must also attend to
the semiotic modality of signification, expressed through the concept of the
semiotic chora. The semiotic is associated in her theory with nonverbal systems
of meaning-making and interpretation such as music, kinesis and gesture,
systems that are experienced more immediately, less rationally and more
viscerally. Although the subject and the processes of signification that constitute
subjectivity and intersubjectivity arise from the movement or dynamic between
the two modalities that Kristeva identifies, symbolic language has repeatedly
been privileged over the semiotic chora. This has resulted in the undermining
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of corporeal experience and the denial of its role in the creation of meaning
(Kristeva 1984: 24). Kristeva describes the chora as:
Not yet a position that represents something for someone (i.e. it is not a sign);
nor is it a position that represents someone for another position (i.e. it is not yet
a signifier); it is, however, generated in order to attain to this signifying position.
Neither model nor copy, the chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus
specularization. (1984: 26)
The germinal and processual nature of the chora, its movement of creating,
erasing and recreating meaning is what gives it its revolutionary power. Kristeva
asserts that it is through the semiotic that challenges to the dominant may be
articulated or manifested. The visceral experiences and resultant marks of selfmutilation can be seen to belong to the fluid modality of the semiotic chora as
opposed to that of the fixed and repressive symbolic. Grosz further explains
that the semiotic consists of drives in their undifferentiated and polymorphous
state, in the processes of dividing and organizing the body in accordance with
the pleasure principle, that is, in terms of erotogenic zones (1989: 43). The
semiotic moves towards signification but does not act as a singular sign that can
be easily read or identified, instead making visible a process that is inextricable
from embodiment and that opens out into a multiplicity of potential meanings,
preceding and exceeding the symbolic language that strives to structure and
control it. We may return here to the crucial organ of the skin, not simply as
surface but as a complex landscape that acts as an interface between interior
and exterior, self and world: the skin comprises the articulation of orifices,
erotogenic rims, cuts on the bodys surface, loci of exchange between inside
and outside (Grosz 1994: 36). Groszs description here speaks to Kristevas
semiotic chora as it maps and remaps the body in a constant and never complete
process of resignification; it also recalls the modified body of self-mutilation
with its cuts, ridged scars, and newly created areas of erotic investment.
Wounds manifest themselves as novel and self-determined openings, bruises
create new spectrums of colour, scar tissue that is devoid of feeling serves to
heighten sensation when the surrounding skin is touched: these areas upon
the evolving landscape of the body provide a redistribution of intensities that
is not constrained by socially designated investments in specific body parts or
culturally sanctioned corporeal acts.
The transformation that self-mutilation enacts on the body of the subject is
part of this interplay between semiotic chora and symbolic language, however,
the actual sensation of pain is also crucial here. As with masochistic experience
more generally, for some pain may be one of the most essential, if not the
most crucial component of these practices. The predominant attitude towards
pain assumes its aversive nature and this belief accounts for the bafflement
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with which masochism has been greeted in many areas of theory. If pain is
to be sought, it must be in the context of an end point, a desired outcome
such as a tattoo or piercing; the pain itself is seen as a necessary horror to be
endured. A wilful inversion of Scarrys thesis in the unsurpassed The Body in Pain
is instructive in elaborating on the relationship between pain and the generation
of meaning. Scarrys starting point is a concern with how physical suffering may
structure the subjects experience of the world around them and their position
within it as subject or otherwise. One of her most vital claims is that physical
pain carries with it the ability to utterly nullify the claims of the world or to
unmake the world (Scarry 1985: 33). The attention and perspective of the
subject in pain shrinks inward from the expanse of their surroundings to the
focused and inescapable demands of the body, and inward further still to the
specific point of injury. The body becomes the world, the wound the locus
of this world. Everything else proves meaningless, exterior to the senses. A
crucial part of this process of unmaking the world as symbolically understood
is the capability of physical pain to dismantle language, to render the subject
disarticulate in speech and in thought. If the world is created through linguistic
and symbolic understanding, through the human desire to name, categorize
and express, the world is unmade through the loss of these abilities. The
dismantling of language results in the twofold denial of the human, both the
particular human being hurt and the collective human present in the products
of civilization (Scarry 1985: 43). The context for her philosophy is the use of
pain in warfare and in torture, thus the dehumanization and nullification of
the symbolic world is, in her theory, a negative and exceptionally damaging
process. The enforced removal of the tortured subjects linguistic capability by
the torturer is regarded as absolutely central to the process of dehumanization
inherent in this violent act. To deny a subject language is seen as denying them
their subjectivity and furthermore, the very idea of civilization is threatened
through the destruction of one of its most potent signifiers.
Scarrys focus on the uses of dehumanization in torture and the conflicts
of war mean that she frames the loss of language within a highly negative
framework, however, taking her discussion of the unmaking of the world
(which essentially equates to the unmaking of the existing symbolic and social
order) in conjunction with Kristevas concept of semiotic signification allows
for a recasting of the effects of physical pain in an alternative and potentially
more revolutionary light. Self-mutilatory acts such as cutting and burning, and
the pain that accompanies these acts, may emerge as practices that enable the
subject to deconstruct or refuse dominant significatory systems that have left
no space for the chora and its fluid, multiple forms of meaning. Simultaneously,
it may be used to create new asignifying systems that take place solely on and
in the body, an ongoing process of the creation and recreation of meanings
that cannot be locked into any one discursive space. Grosz suggests the phrase
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body image may be used as a third term to explain the mediation between the
terms body and mind, and the operations and interactions that the relationship
between body and mind necessarily entail (1994: 66). The subjects body image
undergoes a continuous and dynamic process of production and transformation
as different areas become more or less libidinally invested dependent upon
personal experiences and cultural and social values (Grosz 1994: 75). Selfinflicted pain is one of the means by which the body image is transformed.
The visceral body horror imagery of In My Skin attempts to translate Esthers
experiences to the spectator: the commingling of mind, body image and flesh.
The repeated close-ups emphasize the textures of metal blade, skin and blood;
the multiple wounds invite an engagement with the alternations being enacted
upon the body. Groszs invocation of Merleau-Ponty is evocative when read in
conjunction with Esthers self-mutilation:
Flesh is the term Merleau-Ponty uses to designate being, not as a plenitude,
self-identity, or substance but as divergence or non-coincidence. Flesh is no
longer associated with a privileged animate category of being but is beings most
elementary level. Flesh is beings reversibility, its capacity to fold in on itself, a
dual orientation inward and outward. (Grosz 1994: 100)
Flesh denies any singular or fixed meaning. It does not reassure the human
subject of their coherence or bodily integrity but instead insists upon quite
the opposite: the embodied subject is transformative, its surfaces undulate and
morph. Skin marked by self-alteration makes this unspoken process explicit.
If the definition of the human as it stands in our social world is inherently
problematic, might the deliberate infliction of physical pain upon the self-serve
to unmake the world in a more active sense, to move towards the disintegration
of the rigid structures of order and meaning that have, after all, worked to
codify identity and subjectivity according to an exclusionary schema? This
is not to advocate or glorify self-mutilation as a specific strategy of political
resistance, but to posit it as a potential site within which the subject may present
a challenge to the symbolic and begin to generate meaning in a different way.
A way that is entirely embodied, indifferent to or defiant of the designated
uses and appearances of the flesh, and that eludes any fixed experience and
interpretation. Only through the process of unmaking the world, through the
rupture and articulations of the semiotic order (Kristeva 1984: 26), might the
possibility of different systems of signification and subjectivity emerge. And
just as the chora catalyses a constant and never-ending process of making and
remaking, over and over, so the ruptures articulated upon the skin through selfmutilation insist upon the opening up not just of the body, but of meaningmaking itself as a practice of expansion and multiplicity. The corporeality of
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self-mutilation materializes excess and disruption, through this calling for a

dismantling and recreation of the social world and our place within it.
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Chapter 4
Previous chapters have demonstrated that a consideration of female masochism
necessarily engages with vital questions of representation and with debates
about the position of the female body and female desire and pleasure within
wider discursive fields such as religion, literature, psychiatry and philosophy.
This chapter will hone in on more specific questions about female sexuality in
the context of cinematic genre and spectatorial convention through a discussion
of films by two of the most successful and formidable female directors in
contemporary filmmaking: Catherine Breillat and Jane Campion. Breillat has
carved a position for herself at the forefront of French cinema since her debut
feature A Real Young Girl (1976), and Campion has effectively straddled the
mainstream/independent divide after the enormous success of The Piano (1993).
Both filmmakers are known for narratives that explore the vicissitudes of female
heterosexual desire, depicting the troubled power dynamics that permeate male/
female relationships and the frequently ambiguous manifestations of female
sexuality and corporeality within a phallocentric culture. Pertinently, both
have also been accused within the popular media and within film scholarship
of presenting damaging portrayals of female sexuality as masochistic, taken
to signify self-destruction, negativity and the loss of subjective agency. In
contradistinction to this, the films of Breillat and Campion are noteworthy
for their strident insistence that masochistic subjectivity is more complex, an
insistence that is felt through imagery and themes that are unconventional
and at times deliberately provocative in their mobilization of the realms of
obscenity and abjection. The films that form the basis for discussion in this
chapter, Romance and In the Cut, are particularly concerned with disrupting
representational conventions about the female body by challenging three
interrelated norms: such bodies as erotic spectacle, as the obscene and abject
other and as the victim of male violence. They do so through an engagement
with cinematic forms that generically revolve around the figure of the female as
object of male libidinal drives, whether through sex or violence: pornography
and the erotic thriller. Through a consideration of these films it is possible to
develop further a conceptualization of a new masochistic aesthetic that is based
around the juxtaposition of the obscene and the beautiful, the abject and the
sensual, the explicit and the hidden. From a spectatorial perspective, such an
aesthetic is simultaneously traumatic and pleasurable, situating the viewer in
a position that echoes the masochistic themes of the narratives through the
evocation of transgression, extremity and eroticism.
Explicit Bodies and Sexual Difference
Romance remains one of Breillats most well-known and keenly debated films.
Its structure is comparable to pornographic films such as the Emmanuelle
series, framed around the female protagonists journey of sexual selfdiscovery; however, in Breillats film the explicit sex scenes are juxtaposed with
philosophical meditations on femininity and its construction within the sociocultural sphere as Marie seeks pleasure through different sexual encounters
with a selection of men. In this film and the related Anatomy of Hell (2004),
obscenity and extremity are used as representational strategies to disrupt the
comfortable spectatorial position and to fashion an aesthetic mode based in
alternative notions of the beautiful. Romance is typical of Breillats cinema in its
exploration of the fraught nature of heterosexual relationships and the focus
upon challenging dominant perceptions of female sexuality and corporeality.
Masochistic desire is manifested in two of Maries three primary relationships
within the film. Firstly, within the dynamic of her relationship with boyfriend
Paul, who commences the film by declaring he no longer wishes to have any form
of physical relationship with her. This dynamic is characterized by emotional
suffering and power play as Paul treats her sometimes with disdain, sometimes
tenderness and sometimes a cruel indifference, resulting in Marie articulating
feelings of rejection, frustration and humiliation. Yet, until the very end of
the film she chooses to remain within this painful situation whilst pursuing
encounters with other men. The logic that structures Maries masochistic
desire is distinct from that of previous films in this study, for Pauls miserable
treatment of her is implicated as the catalyst and fuel of her lust for other
men. The second form of masochism depicted is more explicit: Maries forays
into sadomasochism and bondage with an older man, Robert. The imagery of
these scenes accords in several ways with the masochistic aesthetic outlined by
Deleuze and Studlar, however, it manifests a new and distinctly contemporary
dimension in its focus upon aspects of female corporeality that are typically
elided or glossed over in dominant forms of representation. The portrayal of
female masochism in Romance is by no means a simple one. It is impossible to
claim that it offers a redemptive or idealistic narrative akin to that found in
Secretary, for Maries encounters do not always result in pleasure or happiness.
However, although she exists within an emphatically patriarchal system and the
film revolves around her encounters with men her sexuality does not exist to
serve this system. It is primarily she who drives and controls these encounters,
further enhancing the overall argument that masochism is not simply a passive
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and submissive form of sexuality but may offer a position of agency and activity
for the female subject, albeit a frequently troubled one as they negotiate the
problems presented by a social world centred around male normativity.
At the time of release, perhaps the most controversial aspect of Romance
was its inclusion of non-simulated sex scenes which, coupled with the casting
of Italian porn actor Rocco Siffredi as one of Maries lovers, instigates a debate
about the relationship of the film to pornography. Specifically, the place of
pornographic discourse in relation to cultural constructions of sex and
pleasure, and to sex and pleasure in reality. This distinction is an important
one, particularly where the female body is concerned, and it is this distinction
that Breillats film draws attention to through its deliberate invocation of more
dominant forms of pornography. A concern with categorization is evident
within critical responses to the film, several of which have focused upon
the question of whether or not it should be designated as pornography due
to the extensive, graphic sex scenes and the inclusion of non-simulated sex
acts. Emma Wilson views the inclusion of Siffredi in this film and the later
Anatomy of Hell as a deliberate indication from Breillat that the films should be
regarded within the realm of pornography (Wilson 2001: 152). Ruth Hottell
and Lynsey Russell-Watts state that Breillat herself has been keen to claim the
label of pornography for this film in order to subvert this most conventionally
patriarchal form of cinema (2002: 70), and arguing along similar lines, Lisa
Downing has suggested that Breillats appropriation of pornographic tropes
functions as a commentary upon the perceptions and politics of the containing
cultures sexual imaginary, by its manipulation of cinematic narratives, genre,
and aesthetics (2004: 268). The logic behind such statements indicates that by
taking an actively desiring female subject as the protagonist, Romance acts firstly
as a reclamation of the genre of porn for women, and secondly to expose the
conventions of sex in pornographic discourse as inadequate for the portrayal
of womens sexual desires and experiences. The representation of women
in pornography has particular relevance for the theorization of masochistic
subjectivity. Linda Williams has observed that to its many feminist critics, porn
provides spectacles of feminine victimization that force both the female stars
of the films and the female spectator of such films into an undesirable position
of masochism (Williams 1999a: 268). However, Williams warns against the
reductive logic of equating masochism with victimization, and argues instead
for an approach that examines how power and pleasure operate in fantasies of
domination that appeal to women. Several of the sexual scenarios in Romance
evoke these fantasies of domination from a perspective that does not renunciate
them but locates them as part of the gamut of female pleasures. As such, the
film poses questions of power, pleasure and control in their full ambivalence
through the explicit, obscene and sometimes disturbing couplings within which
Marie engages (and with her final murderous victory over Paul acting as the
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climactic moment in this matrix). Despite debates about categorization, to

definitively or even broadly classify Romance as pornography would be wilfully
polemical; rather, it falls quite firmly within the traditions of French arthouse
cinema and in its inclusion of real sex is common to other films from the same
period and independent context such as Baise-Moi (Virginie Despentes and
Coralie Trinh Thi 2000), Intimacy (Patrice Chreau 2001) and Nine Songs (Michael
Winterbottom 2004). Nonetheless, it is clear that some pornographic tropes
are deliberately implanted into this higher form of cultural product. From this
perspective, Breillats engagement with pornography may be interpreted not as
a direct criticism but instead as an attempt to utilize aspects of the cinematic
mode that has focused most unabashedly upon pleasure and embodiment,
female as well as male.
Campions In the Cut uses a similar strategy in one of its most provocative
scenes, in which the protagonist Frannie inadvertently witnesses a graphically
portrayed act of fellatio in the basement of a bar. This sets in motion the
narrative trajectory of the film as it is soon revealed the woman performing this
sex act has been murdered and dismembered, and Frannie begins a potentially
perilous sexual relationship with the detective investigating the case. During
the course of this narrative, Frannies proximity to death becomes ever more
claustrophobic: her sister is killed and, finally, Frannie must save herself from
her own death at the killers hands. Despite the fellatio scene occurring only eight
minutes into the duration of the story, Linda Ruth Williams has described this
as its prime erotic set piece of the film (Williams 2005: 419). In the Cut draws
heavily upon the narrative and visual conventions of the erotic thriller, a genre
known for including soft-core sex scenes (in films such as Basic Instinct and
Body of Evidence); however, such an explicitly shown sex act would be unusual in
this generic context and is more reminiscent of hard-core pornography, despite
the prosthetic nature of the organ in question. The way in which the man pulls
aside the womans long dark hair to facilitate a clearer viewpoint, the extended
close-ups of her mouth licking and sucking his penis, and her brightly-painted
long fingernails are all evocative of familiar images from hard-core films and
magazines. As with Romance, In the Cut could hardly be classed as pornography
proper but does deliberately engage with certain pornographic tropes in order
to draw attention to conventions of spectatorial pleasure and the representation
of sex in popular culture. This scene serves to problematize the equation of
the female body with the object of the male gaze, for in this instance it is
Frannie who takes on the voyeuristic position of observer. Mary Ann Doane
has suggested that in classical cinema the glasses of a bespectacled woman act
as a signifier of the appropriation of the active gaze usually reserved for male
characters (Doane 1992: 236). According to this reading, intellectual Frannie
could be understood as taking on the active and voyeuristic gaze and in doing so
reversing the normative paradigm described by Mulvey in which the male looks
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and the female is looked at. Sue Gillett, offering a different perspective, regards
Frannie as the reactive receptacle of the vision before her, her gaze not active but
vulnerable, penetrated: the spectacle invades her (Gillett 2004: 87). I argue that
although Frannie certainly appropriates a gaze of some kind, the scene is not
reliant upon the simple object/subject, passive/active dynamic that both Doane
and Gillett refer to. Rather, much of its erotic charge is generated through the
complex interplay of gazes at stake: Frannie watching the man, him watching
her watch and moving aside the obstructing hair, and the spectator occupying
each of these positions as the camera switches between their viewpoints. The
web of gazes constructed in this sequence of shots avoids the simple reversal
of traditional roles that would result from Frannie being cast only as voyeur
to this spectacle, and in this accords with the complex networks of desire,
identification and spectatorship that are invoked by the film as a whole.
The intermingling of explicit sex, obscenity, horror, and beauty that runs
through Romance and In the Cut cannot be unpicked without addressing the
crucial question of specularity and the gaze. Irigaray argues that privileging of
the specular and the visible within phallologocentrism has been enormously
influential in shaping Western conceptions of sexual difference in theoretical
disciplines and in visual culture, affecting the style and substance of cultural
forms such as painting, cinema and pornography, as well as concurrent attitudes
within institutions like philosophy, education, medicine, legality and morality.
Irigaray asserts that the elevation of a specular economy over other modes
of encountering and making sense of the world has been fundamentally
problematic because of its role in shaping the assumptive logics that construct
sexual difference. Tracing the various paths of Western thought back as far as
Platos cave, she demonstrates how such philosophies have always operated
according to the status of the visible offering ontological assurance: because
something can be seen, its status as being is affirmed (Irigaray 1985a: 26). The
unethical ramifications of this assumption mean that the inverse is also taken
as truth: if something cannot be apprehended through the specular economy
its ontological status becomes suspect. As MacCormack writes, Isomorphism
creates a myth of two within a binary, refusing the specificity of the second
term which is defined only through its failure to fulfil the elements of the
dominant, concealing the debt the majoritarian owes to the minoritarian (2008:
45). One of the most pervasive examples of this isomorphic logic is the centrality
accorded to the penis in Freudian psychoanalysis. The possession or nonpossession of this organ becomes the deciding factor in infantile development
and the whole of the psychical life that follows; this is the phallologic of which
Irigaray speaks. The penis is all too apparent in its visibility whereas the female
genitals conversely are regarded as hidden, exhibiting only lack, the horrific
possibility of a nothing to see (Irigaray 1985b: 47). This sentiment is echoed
by Marie in Romance in one of her most memorable lines: you cant love a face
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when a cunt tags along. Within this specular isomorphic logic, the female body
and female subjectivity more broadly is perceived only in terms of what it is
not: it is not male, it is not acceptably visible, it is reduced to the gaping horror
of the vaginal void and rendered ontologically uncertain.
The primacy of the specular economy within the conceptualization of
sexual difference offers some insight into two of the most familiar tropes
found in pornography: the money shot or image of male ejaculation (often
over the female body) and images of women holding open their vulvas for the
gaze of the camera/spectator. Taken together, these motifs act as exemplary
manifestations of the obsessional status of the visible and the accompanying
anxiety about what is not visible, and each of these motifs are strategically
subverted or thwarted in Romance and In the Cut. The proliferation of images
of male ejaculation in pornography is not only testament to the specular
nature of male pleasure and phallologocentrism, but is also revealing about the
representation (or rather, non-representation) of female pleasure in cinema, as
Williams notes (1999b: 93). The unavoidably visual nature of the male orgasm
acts as an assurance of (male) pleasure and achievement, thus, according to
the myth of two that denies the specificity of female pleasure this visibility
is repeatedly grafted onto the female body in pornography and other genres
such as the erotic thriller. The female orgasm often bears no visible trace in
and of itself, rendering it a source of suspicion and anxiety within the male
scopic economy. Like female genitals, the female orgasm appears only as lack,
an ungraspable abyss that cannot be apprehended or mastered. In an attempt
to fill this gap, to deny the abyss, porn films typically feature a plethora of
women expressing their apparent ecstasy through exaggerated expressions and
overstated shrieks. Irigaray has commented that the orgasm of a woman in
porn is not a sign of her taking enjoyment in her own pleasure, but rather
a sign of her being forcibly brought into pleasure as a demonstration and
assurance of male power (1985a: 199200). Such scenes do not represent
any reality of female enjoyment but only a simulacrum based upon the visual
standards of the masculine. The nothing to see of the female body is again
excluded from discursive arenas, violently shoved out by images that attempt to
eclipse the difference of the female body. The second convention mentioned
above, the opened vulva or spread-shot, may seem paradoxical within this
context: if the female genitals are so horrific and obscene to the male gaze,
why demand that they be displayed so flagrantly and frequently? Such shots
can be located at the intersection of dominant regimes of specularity and the
techniques of confession that are apparent throughout modern history in
institutions such as religion, medicine, psychiatry and art, and that Williams,
drawing upon Foucault, identifies as prevalent within pornographical discourse.
Foucault states, from the Christian penance to the present day, sex was a
privileged theme of confession It is in the confession that truth and sex
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are joined, through the obligatory and exhaustive expression of an individual

secret (1978: 61). The confessional mode of discourse presumes that the act
of articulating or representing ones sexuality entails the revelation of truths
that would otherwise remain hidden and inaccessible, a demand that has been
exercised with particular zeal upon those bodies, subjectivities and practices
that do not adhere to what Foucault terms heterogenous sexualities (1978: 61).
The female other has found herself subjected to these institutional obligations
of confession, her body and sexuality feverishly probed both figuratively and
physically, taken as a visual object that will reveal its elusive truths under close
and careful scrutiny. Whichever epistemic system the socially ingrained ritual
of confession takes place within, it is inextricable from dynamics of regulation
and control. It is a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does
not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not
simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes
and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console,
and reconcile (Foucault 1978: 6162). In the context of pornographic imagery,
then, conventions such as the spread-shot must be situated in the context
of the wider phallologocentric logic that functions to constrain and categorize
female bodies, pleasures and desires. As Williams argues, this voyeuristic and
penetrating drive towards control is normalized and made acceptable under
the banner of scientific investigation, artistic endeavour or dominant moralistic
values and through these techniques the female body becomes the object of
male vision. Her own subjective space is limited or negated, her desires and
pleasures are silenced (Williams 1999b: 45). The image of the opened vagina so
common in pornography operates according to this confessional and specular
logic, forcing open the nothing to see in the constant quest to reveal an illusion
of female truth.
The problems inherent in the assumption of visibility providing testament
and the repressive logic of the confession that are manifested in pornography
are a partial aspect of the wider ethical debate surrounding the processes
through which, all too often, meaning is constructed from the perspective of
the privileged and powerful (and intersecting with the discourses surrounding
self-harm with which Chapter 3 engages). One of the examples used by
Williams to illustrate the techniques of confession in medical and psychiatric
history is the (in)famous photographs taken of female hysteric patients at the
Salptrire Hospital under Jean-Martin Charcot. These photographs recorded
the contortions and convulsions of the hysterical fits of the patients and were
circulated within psychiatric circles under the auspices of their usefulness as
diagnostic aids, whilst simultaneously propagating the notion of feminine
illness and confession as a spectacle for the male medical gaze. Writing about
these photographs, Lyotard comments,
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So this is what you imagine: perhaps they have a soul, perhaps they hear the
question; but it is not your question and you do not hear their reply; in principle
you admit that the cries, contractions, fits and hallucinations observed during
the attacks are, in some sense, replies; so you give yourself three things to
construct the language they speak with their bodies, the question to which
their attacks respond and the nature of what is questioning them. (1993: 130)
Lyotard suggests that to take upon the task of interpreting the meaning or
reality of the other is to risk speaking from an ethically problematic position
that both silences and misrepresents. Foucault emphasizes that the logic of
confession derives from the belief that the subject is obliged to tell the truth
about their desire; Lyotard cautions that even once the confession has been
made the problem of reception and interpretation remains. It is assumed that
scrutinizing the bodies of these women through photographic traces will reveal
something previously hidden about their subjectivity and experiences; certainly
they cannot speak to us now, but even in life it was their corporeality that was
interpreted as revealing their truth, rather than their words. They do not speak
through the proper systems of language that have been approved as the means
of communication by the social order, therefore significance is instead read
through their bodies as objects of the institutional gaze. As Lyotard points
out, there is a gaping disconnect between the question being asked of them
from the deterministic standpoint of male normativity and the question being
answered by the movements and contortions of their bodies. Any translation
that issues from such a position of privilege and pre-assumed knowledge
cannot adequately recognize the systems of meaning and experience within
which these bodies are enmeshed.
Romance offers its own confessional in the form of Maries voiceover,
which acts as a monologue offering meditations upon her personal desires
and fantasies in addition to more widely applicable observations about cultural
perceptions of the female body. Furthermore, Romance contains its own version
of the spread-shot in the unexpected image of crowning that erupts onto the
screen in the last parts of the film, providing spectacular evidence of Maries
feminine corporeality in the context of childbirth and maternity rather than
as an objectified body part presented for the voyeuristic gaze. Her rituals of
confession act not to unmask a false truth about her sexuality that can be
labelled and controlled but rather to delay and dissect pleasure. As Downing
has noted, vision is subordinated to voice in the film, a shift in tone from
pornographic images to philosophizing that disturbs the conventional spectacle
of woman as object of the male gaze (2004: 269). At one point, Marie narrates an
elaborate fantasy, her words conjuring the images that are seen by the spectator.
She reclines, her upper and lower body divided by a wall. The former exists
in a clinical white space, the latter in a brothel of sordid appearance in which
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men line up to make use of her exposed vagina. The masochistic elements of
this fantasy are clear as Marie relinquishes her body to the causes of medicine
and sex, two of the arenas in which the strictest controls have been issued over
the female. The effect of this is to explore the possibility that whilst women
may recognize the processes of objectification at work upon them through
the discourses of culture, they nonetheless may retain a psychical, and indeed,
sexual investment in these processes. Maries body may be used by the men
within her fantasy, but she also uses these men for her own pleasure and to fulfil
her own desires. Her confessional therefore is lustful and demanding as well as
revealing, for it is her voice which summons the spectacle of this fantasy and all
it contains. Butler, following her discussion of confession in Giving an Account
of Oneself, comments that the self becomes subject only through an ec-static
movement, one that moves me outside of myself into a sphere in which I am
dispossessed of myself and constituted as a subject at the same time (Butler
2005: 115). Maries confessionals, her voiceovers and fantasies, speak from
this position of simultaneous dispossession and assumption of subjectivity,
female identity and embodied desire. She appears as object and subject, active
and passive, exhibitionistic and voyeuristic to the extent that these artificial
oppositions are rendered not simply inadequate for the explanation of human
passions, but almost entirely redundant. In several of the sex scenes, Marie
appears almost excessively passive, perhaps a mocking nod to the conventional
division of sexual roles along gendered lines. Her words as she lies still beneath
Paulos moving body seem to repeat this satirical mode as they replicate
normative thinking about the female body: I want to be a hole, a pit. The more
it gapes, the more obscene it is. The more its me, my most intimate part, the
more I surrender I hollow myself, thats my purity. This echoes a criticism
from Irigaray about the way the female body has been conceptualized within
patriarchal discourse: the womans role in sex is rendered entirely passive, she is
nothing but a receptacle for mans seed (1985b: 18). However, Maries words do
not simply reveal this tendency, but claim it as one of the constitutive elements
of her sexual identity and her desire. Her assumption of this role is not an
imperative, not an indication of enforced submission, but is a choice that is by
no means reducible to powerlessness.
The Obscene, the Abject and the Beautiful
It is evident that although Romance references several of the generic tropes

associated with pornography, Breillats film is starkly different in its depictions
of the female body and its relationship to spectatorial pleasure. Instead of
providing images that arouse, it draws upon imagery of sexual difference that
chimes with cultural imaginings of displeasure, aspects of the body that repel
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or disgust and that are typically excluded from the representational sphere. The
twin areas of explicit sex and graphically portrayed bodily fluids and functions
combine in this film and in Anatomy of Hell to construct dual elements of
this obscenity, adding a polemical approach to theoretical debates about how
certain aspects of female experience have come to be regarded as obscene
and unshowable in cultural forms such as cinema. Ann Gillain has noted
that Breillats intention is to enact a rare unveiling of those things that have
previously been kept secret, the realities of female corporeality and sexuality
(2003: 205). This unveiling is apparent in the close-up shots of female genitalia,
vaginal fluids and menstrual blood, as well as in Maries observations about
male opinions of women. After Paul reveals he no longer wishes to have sex
with Marie, she retorts, you despise me because I am a woman I disgust you,
I make you sick. You think Im the dirtiest. The dominant understanding of
the female body that has proliferated within phallologocentric culture has been
a false one based upon the logic of the same in which the difference of female
desire and pleasure are elided. This has created a blind spot in the portrayal of
more realistic forms of female embodiment.
Menstruation and menstrual blood provide a pertinent example of this, a
specifically female experience that Breillat draws upon and that has been of
particular interest to feminist philosophers of sexual difference. Attitudes
towards menstrual blood in contemporary Western culture still circle around
the subject with a mixture of denial and horror, advertisements for sanitary
products typically use blue liquid in an attempt to sanitize the reality of blood,
weary old jokes circulate about not trusting anything that bleeds for seven
days and does not die. Menstrual blood is constructed either as something that
requires a hygienic makeover or as something unnatural and obscene, a further
indication of the horrors of sexual difference and the threatening secrets of
the female body. Irigaray has noted that although this specific type of bodily
fluid was given value in the prehistoric era, this value was denied with the
establishment of patriarchal order (1985b: 125126). She comments elsewhere
that while blood is fine for the libertine, menstrual blood has remained taboo
(1985a: 200). This begins to hint at the multiple cultural meanings associated
with this fluid, varying according to its source, its purpose, and the type of body
from which it issues. For libertines such as de Sade, blood signifies the flesh of
the woman enforceably ruptured by a male torturer, a necessary step towards the
valorization of her saintly and inhuman suffering; as Irigaray points out, such
a gendered matrix around the spilling of blood is both typical and presumed
acceptable. The cultural meanings read into and emanating from blood, and
the gendered nature of these meanings, continues to be apparent in various
contemporary cultural forms and discursive realms. For example, the erotic
thrillers and police procedurals that In the Cut is both inspired by and critical
of are commonly based around the mutilated and sexually assaulted bodies of
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faceless female victims, a continuation of de Sades transgressive model become

commonplace in popular culture. Or, as explored in Chapter 3, the blood of
the self-harmer may be regarded from the external perspective as a signifier of
weakness, the repulsive otherness of mental illness and primitivism, although
for the person themselves the meaning may be quite different. In religious
sacrifice, blood plays an instrumental role in symbolizing the violence and
eroticism of communal experience: The external violence of sacrifice reveals
the internal violence of the creature, seen as loss of blood and ejaculations
(Bataille 2001a: 91). Notable in each of these examples is the association of
the blood with an opening up of the body, a potent disturbance of the flesh
apprehended as signifying spectacle. Each of the examples given here may also
be described to greater or lesser extents as transgressive; however, the depiction
of menstrual blood remains perhaps the most taboo, a peculiarity given its
biological source and its distance from the violent acts inherent in torture and
sacrifice. Why, then, has menstrual blood been accorded such a taboo status, why
is it regarded as so obscene and unwatchable, to draw upon the word used in
Anatomy of Hell? Mary Douglass fascinating study Purity and Danger reveals that
menstrual blood, and in some cases female sexuality more broadly, is commonly
considered a pollutant across a disparate range of communities and cultures,
with taboos and purifying rituals apparent around women engaging in sexual
intercourse, cooking and tending to crops and livestock during menstruation.
One possible explanation that Douglas submits for this is the pervasive anxiety
that surrounds marginal states of being: Danger lies in transitional states,
simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable
(2002: 119). The compulsion towards stability and fixity that dominates in
phallologocentrism creates an accompanying mistrust of the processual and
the transformative, meaning that states such as menstruation and pregnancy are
regarded as ontologically uncertain and suspect.
Kristeva builds upon Douglass work in her study of abjection, arguing that
the abject occupies a troubled place within the social order. It is simultaneously
constitutive of this order, in that what is included within it is equally defined by
what is excluded, yet threatening to the dominant structure because its existence
draws attention to the fragility of the laws and rules that attempt to hold logic
and order together (Kristeva 1982: 34). Kristeva identifies two categories of
abject corporeal waste. The first is the excremental type, apparent in disease,
decay, corpses and representing the threatening cloud of death overshadowing
or infecting life (Kristeva 1982: 71). Such substances are regarded as exterior
to the systems that structure social order, they appear in our consciousness as
offensive anomalies that must be banished to their proper place outside the
matrices of our everyday experience. Derrida states, Death is very much that
which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place (1995: 41). It is not
despite this double status of death as universal to all and irreplaceably singular
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to the self that it is excluded as abject and obscene, but precisely because of it.
Death is the horrific hole within the barely controlled order of the symbolic
that cannot be apprehended or understood in its totality, it is ever present
yet continuously denied through abjection and disgust. The second type of
polluting substance identified by Kristeva is the menstrual type, threatening
the identity of the (male) subject not from outside the social order, but from
within: the figure of the woman, necessary for the effective functioning of a
social group but nonetheless problematic for patriarchal communities in her
marginal state of sexual difference. Following Freuds work in Totem and Taboo,
Kristeva observes that psychoanalysis regarded the incest taboo as the primary
foundational law of civilized society. From this perspective, the prohibition
against the maternal body acts as a defence of the incest taboo, and the abject
status accorded to menstrual blood as a symbol of the generative and maternal
potential of female corporeality reinforces this prohibition. However, the
associations between menstrual blood and abjection have greater significance
with regard to the desired continuation of the phallocentric order. Women must
necessarily be figured as obscene other in order to assert the privileging of, and
dominance of, male over female (Kristeva 1982: 70). Kristeva suggests that
the generative power of the female body to reproduce signifies a threat to this
dominance and therefore must be denied, rejected or rendered obscene (1982:
77). Whether the polluting object in question is excremental or menstrual, the
function of coding it as other is an attempt by the dominant social structure
to nullify any perceived threat to the identity of the coherent and stable (male)
human figure and the discursive structures that rest upon the foundation of this
fallacious image.
Romance touches upon the abjection of the menstrual body and its functions
as Marie ruminates on tampons and mens disgust, her words implying that
women have become alienated from their own bodies as devices like tampon
applicators remove the need for any direct contact with the polluting areas of
the female body. The taboo and abject status of menstruation becomes even
more of a focal point in Anatomy of Hell which features two scenes that are
almost unprecedented in their graphic portrayal of menstrual blood. In the
first, the unnamed protagonist dissolves the liquid from her used tampon into
a glass of water and toasts her male counterpart with it in the tradition of a
toast between enemies. The second occurs later as the man withdraws after
sex; the camera is positioned between the womans legs, looking directly at
her vagina in a shot reminiscent of the crowning image in Romance, and blood
gushes from her body. Like the shot of the birth, this moment is shocking
not only because of what it depicts the reality of red blood that is so often
elided in visual representation but also as a result of its unexpected nature.
It bursts onto the screen and into the gaze of the spectator without warning,
an eruption of obscenity that interrupts the more conventional and unrealistic
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imagery of childbirth, intercourse and the female body that dominates cultural
representation. The highly visceral nature of Breillats cinema is also vital
here. Wilson has commented that despite Breillats assertion of her films as
philosophical, sexuality and corporeality are consistently explored in a highly
sensual and tactile way within her films (Wilson 2001: 150). The chink of
the glasses as the woman and man in Anatomy of Hell toast each other, the
imagined taste and smell of the coppery liquid they drink, and the feel of flesh
in contact with warm slippery blood: these elements combine to widen the
sensory perceptions of the spectator beyond a simply visual experience. Such
imagery also raises questions about the conventions of cinematic spectatorship
more broadly. Considering the amount of blood spilled in many genres of
film, from horror to action, westerns to thrillers, the shock and revulsion that
images of menstrual blood may elicit seems superficially extraordinary; the
work of Douglas and Kristeva provides a conceptual framework within which
to deconstruct this paradox. The woman in Anatomy of Hell exhorts the man to
watch me where I am unwatchable and in doing so, and in forcing the spectator
to watch along with him, the film channels the negative and aversive properties
ascribed to the abject into a disruptive display, turning the phallocratic scopic
economy against itself as the obscenity of menstrual blood is thrust into the
reluctant gaze of the spectator (for a more detailed analysis of these scenes and
Anatomy of Hell see McPhee 2009).
The imagery of obscenity and abjection in Romance and Anatomy of Hell is
central to the variation of the classical masochistic aesthetic that is developed
by Breillat. This more contemporary aesthetic retains elements of the formal
techniques Deleuze and Studlar describe, but reformulates them to include
previously excluded aspects of female pleasure and corporeality as a central
visual and tactile component. Thus, images that would conventionally be
regarded as obscene are juxtaposed with moments of unexpected and striking
visual beauty that draw upon the qualities of stillness and suspense Deleuze
places at the heart of masochistic formalism. Maries intermingled delight
and pain is recreated for the spectator through a viewing experience that is
pleasurable yet uncomfortable, that eschews the typical signifiers of genres such
as pornography or Hollywood romance, but that nonetheless creates a viewing
space in which some form of pleasure can be located. Such moments of striking
style are apparent from the very beginning of the film as the colour palette of
whites and creams with touches of black and brown is established. Marie and
Paul, dressed as always in a white that contrasts with their dark hair, sit in a cafe
as he tells her he will no longer have sex with her. Within this palette exists an
austere pleasure, almost clinical like the sparse white apartment and spotless
bed that the couple share. However, as the pair leave the anaemic setting of the
cafe they walk out into the blazing sunlight of a wide golden beach beneath a
blue sky, the camera remaining still as the couple walk into the distance. The
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vivid colours and glowing brightness of this scene act as a dazzling moment in
a film that aims to shock its viewers, but that this time is surprising in the beauty
and illumination brought forth. The unusually prolonged duration of this shot
is also surprising, seeming to invite the spectator to bask in this unexpected
moment of serenity and visual pleasure. A similar technique is employed in
Breillats first feature film, A Real Young Girl, in a fantasy sequence in which
the young female protagonist imagines lying naked under a bright blue sky and
searing sun that transforms her skin into a luminescent whiteness, as the man
she desires pulls apart a worm and places the pieces of its body into her pubic
hair.
In Romance, the aesthetic strategy combining beauty and obscenity reaches
its clearest articulation in the two scenes of sadomasochistic bondage in
which an entirely submissive Marie is tied up by Robert. These scenes take
place in Roberts apartment, a darkly decorated sensual space full of rich reds
and browns which, with its oriental screens and dark furnishings, is in stark
contrast to Pauls sparse, pale apartment. Before Robert begins to construct the
first intricate tableau, his words make clear the emphasis of the scene (Breillat
does not often deal in subtlety): There has to be action, and that action isnt
between men and women. Thats too simple. Its between beauty and ugliness.
Although he is referring to Marie and himself here, the juxtaposition made
explicit in his words extends beyond a comparison of their appearances to
draw together the dilemmas and contradictions of representation that have
been discussed through this chapter. In the first of these scenes, Marie wears
a simple white dress which is pulled up to her waist as Robert puts her hands
above her head and begins to bind them with rope. Her tights are pulled down
to her knees, leaving her pubic area revealed while the rest of her body remains
covered. As he binds Marie more tightly, the camera remains still, focused on
the scene. Robert moves around her, but Marie remains utterly motionless in
a carefully constructed tableau of red, black, white and pale flesh tones that
bring together the minimalist colour palette that runs through the film. Red
curtains hang down on either side of the screen space with Marie seemingly
suspended between them. The suspense and stillness of this image and of the
camera align with the frozen quality that Deleuze attributes to the aesthetic
of Sacher-Masochs stories (1991: 33). Deleuze further suggests that the art
of suspense apparent in the form of masochism leads to the absence of the
obscene, because any potential obscenity is suspended and disavowed, displaced
on to fetishistic imagery or forever deferred (1991: 34). This is a key distinction
between the more traditional masochistic aesthetic and the contemporary
form developed in the films within this study, the majority of which do feature
explicit and extreme imagery. Significantly, these bondage scenes do not feature
conventional sexual intercourse and are thus distinguished from Maries other
relationships. Perhaps, then, if Deleuzes statement is taken to refer to the
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obscenity of the sexual act, his observation holds true here. However, the
bondage scenes do feature unexpected obscenity of another sort: that of the
reality of the female body depicted outside the limiting and silencing regimes
of phallogocentrism. In the first scene, described here, Maries pubic hair is on
show, a startling example of bodily reality amidst the artistry of Roberts work
(and notably different, it should be added, to the shaved or waxed look now so
typical in pornography). The insistence of female corporeality is apparent to
an even greater extent in the second bondage scene, which takes place in the
main room of Roberts apartment upon a raised area of the floor resembling
a stage. This time, Marie wears a striking and flamboyant red dress with black
underwear; the folds of her skirt pool about her as Robert ties and chains her
before tenderly gagging her with a piece of black velvet in a luxurious and
intimate supersensual scene that is evocative of multiple textures (the feel of
the fabrics, the cold chains) and of Maries pain as her limbs are bound. In the
final moments of this scene, Breillat introduces the abjection that runs through
the film, as a close-up between Maries spread legs shows Robert cutting a hole
in her underwear and inserting his fingers inside her. As he pulls them out, the
wetness of Maries vaginal mucous is shown for an extended moment, indicating
her pleasure in being not only a desiring subject but also in being the object of
beauty that Robert takes her for, and that she in turn perceives herself as. The
striking images of Maries bondage are here combined with one of the aspects
of female corporeality that has been constituted as obscene by the phallocentric
economy that has pervaded cinematic representation and especially portrayals
of sexuality. Maries body does not provide the conventional signifiers of
pleasure familiar from porn or other normative models of sexuality, instead her
facial expression remains impassive and her body refuses to provide a spectacle
that would arouse or reassure. As Williams has pointed out, the woman (or
more specifically, her face and body) commonly functions as the primary
embodiment of pleasure in cinematic sex scenes (1999a: 269270). Watching
a sex scene without the usual signs of pleasure is an unfamiliar and thus
unsettling spectatorial experience, simultaneously emphasizing the extent to
which the female body has been appropriated in the service of male desire, and
suggesting alternative modes of sexual pleasure outside such norms. Deleuze
and Studlar both write of a coldness that is inherent to the masochistic aesthetic
as they perceive it, a coldness that is found in the still, frozen imagery and the
displacement of bodily obscenity onto other fetishized objects such as furs
and whips. For Studlar, this coldness embodies the movement away from Eros,
the life instincts, and towards Thanatos, the death instincts (1988: 126). The
masochistic aesthetic found in Romance and Anatomy of Hell takes the element
of beauty and stillness as a crucial component but replaces the coldness of
Sacher-Masochs style with an emphasis on the hot workings of the body, its
sticky fluids and tangible processes. The exterior sheen of surface privileged
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by Deleuze and central to the idealized masochistic scenario he theorizes is

pulled apart in order to show the de-mystified interiority of female corporeality:
supersensualism of a different order.
Transgression and Disarticulation in In the Cut
The exploration of corporeality, sexual difference and representational practice

outlined in this chapter so far has addressed the ways in which the heterosexual
intersubjective encounter may be mired in refusals of recognition, deterministic
and constraining discourse and extreme reactions such as repulsion and
horror. However, it has also demonstrated that normative ideologies may be
challenged through a direct mobilization of these very practices and responses,
and that a reconfiguration of conventional notions of the obscene and abject
may hold disruptive properties and the power to forge an alternative mode
of representation that insists upon a space for the female body and female
desire exterior to the scopic economy of the phallus. The next section of this
chapter turns to Campions In the Cut in order to further theorize the potentially
traumatic and disruptive relationship between self and other, and in particular,
to elaborate upon the connections between this traumatic encounter and
transgressive desire. Although the narrative arc of Campions film is modelled
upon the trajectory of the erotic thriller genre, it has broad similarities with
Romance in that it may be described as following a journey of sexual self-discovery
for Frannie the protagonist, as she negotiates her subjective position in a culture
in which representations of women are frequently saturated in sex and violence.
Also akin to Romance, it explores the often highly ambivalent investment that
women may have in these representations through an address to fantasies of
tempestuous and brutal love. The vision of female masochism that emerges
in In the Cut is a troubled one, permeated with the violent dilemmas that face
the heroine but also with extreme erotic tension and pleasure. Through the
tropes of the erotic thriller genre, masochistic desire becomes associated with
sexual violence and violent sex; it is connected simultaneously to terror and
fascination, repulsion and compulsion. And like Breillats films, this is achieved
not only through narrative themes that revolve around the transgression or safe
or normal sexuality, but also through the transgression of representational
conventions associated with acts of sex and brutality in order to create an often
extreme aesthetic form that plays with the beautiful, the explicit and the horrific.
In the Cut is based upon a short novel of the same name by North American
writer Susanna Moore, who also collaborated with Campion on the screenplay
(Moore 1996). The story outline and urban setting could be lifted from a Joe
Eszterhas script such as Jagged Edge, Basic Instinct, or Sliver, centred around a
series of particularly horrific murders and a lead character who may or may
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not be sexually involved with the killer. The extent to which Frannie suspects
that her lover Malloy may actually be the murderer, and the extent to which
this functions as the catalyst for her desire, is left ambiguous; what is clearer
is that Frannie is attracted to the transgressive world of sex and violence that
Malloy, as a homicide detective, inhabits on a daily basis and which she, as a
teacher of literature, has only encountered previously via the mediated fantasy
of books. Whereas the film concludes with Frannie escaping the real killer,
Malloys partner, the book ends with her torture and death, disconcertingly
related in the first person as the killer brutalizes her in an isolated lighthouse,
including an excruciating passage in which he slices off one of her nipples.
Campion commented during the development of the films screenplay that the
denouement of the book had horrified her, containing as it does the suggestion
of a woman seeking her own death, and that this was an aspect of the narrative
she was always determined to alter (cited in Polan 2001: 158). Consequently,
the cinematic version of Frannie does not desire her own death, despite her
attraction to the more dangerous aspects of her sexuality. She is not deathbound but presented as a subject whose desire is awakened by the entrance of
Malloy and his narratives of murder and sexual intrigue into her life, fantasy
and reality becoming mingled as she pursues a relationship far removed
from her everyday life as a teacher. For instance, Malloy shares with her the
gruesome details of the violence inflicted upon the killers victims, and she has
the opportunity to fire guns and use handcuffs. These are the typical trappings
of popular thriller films and police dramas that signify not only dangerous
men and excitement, but power and authority. The implication is that finally,
Frannie has the chance to step inside one of the cultural fantasies that she
has been teaching for so long. The alteration of the ending is a significant
change that indicates the movement toward possibilities for the transgressive
and masochistic female subject beyond the closed loop of the death drive
manifested as either punishment or self-destruction. Frannie does not perish,
but neither does the ending of the film provide her with any definitive closure
as she returns to the aftermath of her sisters death and an uncertain future
with Malloy. Moores novel seems an appropriate source material for Campion,
within whose work the ambivalences and twists of female desire are recurring
themes. Her breakthrough film, The Piano, has been criticized for the valorization
and aestheticization of female masochism (for example, Clover 1994, Modleski
1999) due to a narrative in which a mute woman falls in love with the man who
appears to coerce her emotionally and physically. The Portrait of a Lady (1996)
also depicts the story of a woman seemingly bent on a wilful route toward
her own unhappiness. As this book has argued throughout, criticisms of this
nature miss the essential point that the masochistic position is not necessarily
one of weakness or victimization; however, what films such as The Piano, The
Portrait of a Lady and In the Cut suggest is that the assumption of the actively
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desiring masochistic position may be a fraught and hazardous one in a world

dominated by men and male desire. The representation of masochism and the
implications of this for the development of an ethical relationship with the
other is neither celebratory nor framed in condemnation in these films, but
rather open to various constructions of meaning as well as deeply concerned
with the aesthetic qualities that may be used to evoke this form of eroticism.
Dana Polan has suggested that the term Jane Campion be used not to signify
a unified vision but instead a space of dispersion, a shorthand for open forces
that work against unity and any coherent unfolding of an agenda (Polan 2001:
12). The notion of dispersion raised by Polan is a useful one when emphasizing
the refusal to settle upon any fixed or stable meaning that is found in In the
Cut as well as in The Piano and The Portrait of a Lady. As a result of their period
settings, the latter two films instil an inevitable distance between the spectator
and the characters and events that unfold. In the Cut, alternatively, has a modern
setting and therefore engages more explicitly with current debates about the
portrayal and effects of sex, violence and femininity in contemporary culture.
Kathleen McHugh has noted that Campions films draw upon or engage with
genres that are especially attentive to womens bodies, their vulnerabilities and
their dispossessing passions such as melodrama, and in the case of In the Cut
the thriller (2007: 2). By making use of this generic material as a framework,
the film poses questions about the investment, male and female, of spectatorial
pleasure and fantasy in imagery of sex and violence, specifically the horrendous
violence done to female bodies in a myriad of historic and contemporary
artistic, literary and mass media forms (for example, the mutilated women
discussed in Chapter 2 and the many police procedural television drams and
crime novels that typically feature young female victims). Frannies fascination
with Malloy stems from the same alluring and transgressive fantasies that fuel
the success of these cultural creations; In the Cut plays out the question of what
may unfold when these fantasies intrude too far into the subjects everyday
existence, forcing an encounter with the obscene and horrific other in all their
inescapable proximity.
Female masochistic desire as manifested in In the Cut is inextricably bound
up with the cultural meanings and effects of taboo and transgression and their
relation to enjoyment and desire. This subject returns us to Lacans The Ethics
of Psychoanalysis and the interpretation of Freuds Totem and Taboo contained
therein. In order to understand the convoluted relationship between the social
law and desire, Lacan retraces Freuds steps back to the primal horde and the
murder of the primal father, a patricidal act apparently designed to allow the
sons access to the assumption of the fathers place and the enjoyment brought
by the desired body of the primal mother.
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All the mystery is in that act. It is designed to hide something, namely, that not
only does the murder of the father not open the path to jouissance that the
presence of the father was supposed to prohibit, but it, in fact, strengthens
the prohibition. The whole problem is there; thats where, in fact as well as in
theory, the fault lies. Although the obstacle is removed as a result of the murder,
jouissance is still prohibited; not only that, but prohibition is reinforced. (1992: 176)
The primal father, the apparent blockage to enjoyment, is dead. Yet, the
incest taboo remains and enjoyment is still denied. The power held by the father
was an illusion all along, or as Lacan puts it, he has always been dead he
has never been the father except in the mythology of the son (1992: 177).
That the Law remains in place despite the removal of the perceived obstacle to
enjoyment reveals something about the purpose of the Law and more about
the nature of desire: desire needs a prohibiting Law to constitute and fuel it,
or, there can be no enjoyment through transgression without the obstructive
force of the taboo. Transgression in the direction of jouissance only takes
place if it is supported by the oppositional principle, by the forms of the Law
(Lacan 1992: 177). This structural relationship also characterizes the nature
of sin, which is accorded its excessive, hyperbolic status only as a result of
the commandments that work so hard to assert their powers of prohibition
(Lacan 1992: 84). Lacans reading appears to construct the relationship between
transgression and taboo as a constitutive binary in which transgression is only
possible as a result of the prohibitions of the Law, while simultaneously the
social order is strengthened through the exclusion of (and potential punishment
of) certain practices and peoples. This formulation, as MacCormack notes, has
been one of the prominent criticisms that has resulted in the devaluation of
transgression as a revolutionary tactic. Transgression is regarded by some critics
only as a reactive force [that] fails to be independent of those regimes which
limit desire (MacCormack 2012: 103). That transgression and taboo serve
to give each other significance within the social economy is undeniable and
certainly in some instances transgression seems to be locked into a dialectical
system in which it only ever serves to reinforce those taboos it defies, implying
a curtailing or even denial of its genuinely radical power. However, to suggest
that transgression and taboo bestow each other with some modicum of their
respective significance is not to categorically state that their only significance
emerges from this intertwined place within the social sphere. One route out
of this deadlock may be through the surplus factor of excess as a structural
inevitability and necessity of transgression. Transgressive behaviour, practices,
or imagery signify a too much or a too far, a characteristic that at once entails
their problematic cultural status and their revolutionary potential. Batailles
fascinating and evocative book Eroticism, touched on already in Chapter 2,
sheds further light on the excessive too far of the realm of the transgressive.
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Sexuality and violence are the two realms of human behaviour and experience
that hold the most transgressive potential and in line with Lacans assertions,
Bataille suggests that the fundamental taboos shared by otherwise disparate
cultures are those against death and against practices and substances associated
with reproduction (2001a: 55). The taboo against death originates not simply
with the repulsion at the notion of crossing across the borders of life into
death, but the threatening knowledge that life and death are part of the same
inevitable and uncontrollable process.
Horror at death is linked not only with the annihilation of the individual but also
with the decay that sends the dead flesh back into the general ferment of life
Spontaneous physical revulsion keeps alive in some indirect fashion at least the
consciousness that the terrifying face of death, its stinking putrefaction, are to
be identified with the sickening primary condition of life. (Bataille 2001a: 5556)
Batailles conceptualization of the disgust and anxiety aroused by transgressive

phenomenon is structurally comparable to Kristevas notion of abjection: the
repulsive cadaver stained with the violation of death and the threat of contagion
to the self that beholds it, a subject who otherwise condemns it and shuts
it out (Bataille 2001a: 55). The types of abjection identified by Kristeva, the
excremental and the menstrual, are for Bataille connected by the cultural belief
that they represent an essential violence that disrupts the borders of the self.
Of menstrual blood he says, These discharges are thought of as manifestations
of internal violence; blood in itself is a symbol of violence. The menstrual
discharge is further associated with sexual activity and the accompanying
suggestion of degradation: degradation is one of the effects of violence
(2001a: 54). The passages quoted from Bataille here are indicative of the web
of connections that weave through his work between death, violence, sexuality
and erotic experience. It is this web which In the Cut also draws upon as Frannie
moves between the ruptures and raptures of fascination and repulsion, arousal
and fear, and it is from the synaptic sparks that leap from these connections
that the vital element of excess emerges. A sexuality that does not adhere to
the prescriptive heterosexual norms that have dominated a Western culture
built upon the tenets of industrialism and capitalism encapsulates the excessive
character of transgressive desire; within this context pleasure is regarded as
non-productive and therefore wasteful: the wrong sort of sex (Krzywinska
2006: 23). The continuity called forth by the violation of the body and the
dislocation of the autonomous subject, whether through sex or violence, entail
a similar experience of eroticism in which the boundaries of self are dissolved
and the social limits which state too much are ignored. Such a rupture serves
not to strengthen the symbolic Law by opposing it, but to weaken it through
a dismissal of its existence. Krywinska states, pleasure is so close to ruinous
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waste that we refer to the moment of climax as the little death. Consequently
anything that suggests erotic excess always implies disorder (2006: 23).
The chaotic disruption inherent in Batailles erotic experiences of violation
takes us several steps further than the cyclical dialectic of prohibition and
transgression described above. MacCormack suggests that perversion is the
multiplicity at the very heart of desire that dissipates and redistributes the bodys
intensities (2005). The taboos in Eroticism and Batailles fictional works like Story
of the Eye appear as flimsy bonds that are all too easily broken by the multiplying
processes of perversity, giving merely the illusion of social control in the face
of the swirling abyss of what lies not exactly beyond the social structure, but
rather within its very heart. It is this vertiginous feeling of going too far, past
the boundaries of order and normality, that tips eroticism into the order of
obscenity, a term Bataille describes as our name for the uneasiness which
upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession
of a recognized and stable individuality (2001a: 1718). The explicit images of
female corporeality in Romance and Anatomy of Hell evoke the too far of the
obscene side of transgression in their provocative flouting of representational
convention and the engagement with taboos surrounding the menstrual body;
however, the trajectory of In the Cut makes perceptible the obscenity entailed
by the dispossession of self as the film traces the destabilization of Frannies
subjectivity and ability to make coherent sense out of the world in which she
exists. The thematic structure and the imagery of the film call forth a doubled
movement as Frannie descends into a subterranean world (the underground
of the city she first glimpses in the basement fellatio scene) that simultaneously
rises up to rupture the mundanity of her everyday life with explicit sensuality and
horrific brutality. Her repeated journeys on the subway system act as a motif of
the overlapping experiences of seen and unseen and surface and depth; through
the process of transgressing the codes of the overground world through the
attempted realization of her masochistic fantasies her reality and the orders
of literature and representation begin to blur, the dissolution of boundaries
given cinematic form. Introducing Eroticism, Colin MacCabe comments that
the world of work and reason creates as its necessary counterpart the world
of sex and death (2001: x). In the Cut layers these worlds neatly only to illustrate
the illusionistic quality of the barriers that separate them.
The relationship that develops between Frannie and Malloy is a key
component of the dissolution of the borders between reality and fantasy,
surface and subterranean, mundanity and obscenity. Her encounters with him
are saturated with the transgressive allure of the prohibited act and with the
eroticism of potential violence. Their first meeting takes place in her apartment
in the course of a routine investigation into the murder of a woman in her area
(subsequently revealed to be the same woman that Frannie spied upon in the
bar basement). Interconnecting elements are layered through the imagery and
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language of this scene to create an effect of attraction, peril, fascination and

violence that works within the structures of transgressive and masochistic desire.
Almost immediately, a sexual overtone is introduced to the scene as Frannies
answerphone plays a message from a former lover, John Graham, referring to
their past sexual relationship; this introduces a heightened if awkward intimacy
between Frannie and Detective Malloy. Graham is subsequently shown to be
watching Frannie from the garden, increasing the sense of potential danger
and presenting Frannie as the object of an intrusive and malignant gaze. Such
shots run throughout the film and have been appropriately dubbed paranoid
framings by McHugh (2007: 134). In these moments, the camera watches the
female characters through windows, across roads or partially obscured by parts
of the urban landscape such as traffic and lampposts, a mode of framing that
refers to the point-of-view shots often used to evoke the killers perspective
in slasher or thriller films. However, in In the Cut these paranoid framings
are seldom attributed to a single or identifiable source and as such the threat
of potential violence towards the female characters remains more general,
an all-pervasive malignancy against the women of this city. The implication
that Malloy is involved in the citys dark underworld comes as Frannie spies
a tattoo of the ace of spades on his wrist, the same tattoo sported by the
man receiving fellatio in the basement. This provides a possible narrative link
between him and the murdered woman, anchors him in a seedy, even sordid
realm of carnal conduct and suggests a prior sexual bond between Frannie and
Malloy, intensified by his enquiry do I know you from someplace? Before he
departs, she asks exactly what happened to the woman in a conversation that
draws together several of the thematic threads that run through this encounter.
As she questions him she appears repulsed yet fascinated by the murderous
horror that has unexpectedly entered her world, a twinned experience of feeling
that the film as a whole carries forward. Bataille writes, Men are swayed by two
simultaneous emotions: they are driven away by terror and drawn by an awed
fascination. Taboo and transgression reflect these two contradictory urges. The
taboo would forbid the transgression but the fascination compels it (2001a:
68). The movement of desire evoked by In the Cut functions according to the
(il)logic Bataille describes. In answer to Frannies compulsive curiosity Malloy
responds that the murdered woman has been disarticulated, an incongruously
poetic word to describe the process of pulling or cutting apart the body at its
joints. Indeed, Frannie writes this word on his business card after his departure
and pins it amongst the other snippets of poetry that adorn her noticeboard,
reflecting a love of words that she refers to as a passion. The unusual term
disarticulated has a doubled significance in accordance with the two thematic
contexts evoked in this scene: firstly, to break apart the body, and secondly, to
break apart language through the process of its disruption. Although in each
case violence of a sort is effected, it may be possible to find a more constructive
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path in the disarticulation of language that resonates with the rupturing potential
of transgression and with the reconfiguration of normative meaning that the
films discussed in this chapter strategically enact.
A fruitful connection emerges here through Patrick ffrenchs book The Cut/
Reading Batailles Histoire de loeil, in which the word disarticulation is used to
describe the structural form of Batailles writing in his short novel Story of the
Eye (1999: 14). The commonality of language between the title and terminology
used by ffrench and Campions film is indicative of the shared themes and
aesthetic techniques utilized by writer and filmmaker. ffrench observes a
transgressive displacement at work in Batailles novel, a metonymic movement
across the textural surface of the work that generates associative meanings
through a chain of signification (1999: 3). To quote Barthes, this chain works
thusly:
The Eye seems to be the matrix of a run of objects that are like different
stations of the oracular metaphor. The first variation is that of the eye and
the egg Once posited as constants, whiteness and roundness open the way to
fresh metaphorical extensions from the cats saucer of milk to the puttingout of Graneros eye and the castration of the bull. (2001: 121)
It is, in part, through this displacement and association that the disarticulation
and rearticulation of meaning is rendered. The evocation (and subsequent
dislocation) of generic convention and the use of linguistic play in In the Cut
develops a similar effect in which associative meanings flicker across systems
of significance, building connections between sexuality, violence and pleasure,
and their construction in cultural forms. Malloy refers to his penis as his
joint or says that he likes sex in the cut as Frannie straddles him, creating an
unavoidable echo with the notion of the dismembered women as dehumanized
joints of meat, cut open and displayed in their fleshy redness. Building on
the connectivities between sexual relationships and violence, McHugh has
suggested that the film disarticulates the romantic myth of true love and the
happy ever after of marriage as the expected aim of a womans life, embodied
in Paulines idealism (naivety?) and her subsequent terrible destruction (2007:
123). The killers signature mark of placing an engagement ring on the fingers
of his victims indeed links the institution of marriage with the objectification
and devastation of women, but this falls within a wider project of challenging
cultural beliefs about what female subjectivity entails and the different identities
and paths that are open to the female subject in a world saturated with images and
narratives of female reliance and victimhood. Pornography, the erotic thriller,
the romance: representational systems that offer superficially different identities
for women, but all operating according to the same logic. In the Cut attempts to
disarticulate these entrenched narratives while simultaneously acknowledging
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that female libidinal investment in the fantasies they evoke may be very real.
Furthermore, it illustrates the difficulties of finding viable alternatives that may
be accessed in the economy of heterosexuality.
ffrench argues that Story of the Eye contains descriptive imagery of
extreme violence that serves to create an aggressive affect against the body
of the reader, most notably passages describing assaults upon the eye which
associatively assail the vision of the reader (ffrench 1999: 4). The interpretation
of Batailles writing as attacking the eye suggests an affinity with the possibilities
of cinematic representation to disturb and transgress normative modes of
understanding through the unexpected use of obscene or excessive imagery
and the reconfiguration of generic conventions. Indeed, ffrench attributes the
seductive powers of Batailles novel in part to the way in which the eye is made
the privileged organ of desire, an observation that clearly draws a strong parallel
with the experience of spectatorship. As well as seduction, herein also lies the
transgression of Batailles text, ffrench suggests, as desire through vision and
its symbolic organ, the eye, is mobilized only to be violently dislocated and
tipped into horror (1999: 2). The transgressive imperative of too far is once
again apparent in the excessive modality of desire that swirls into being in
the space between the obscenities of the text and the affect induced (perhaps
forcibly) in the experience of the reader/spectator. The peculiarly cinematic
nature of Batailles work in Story of the Eye does not escape ffrenchs attention;
as he observes, avant-garde cinema is full of images of aggression against
vision (1999: 1). ffrench is referring here to literal imagery such as the famous
sequence in Luis Buuel and Salvador Dalis Un Chien Andalou in which a razor
is drawn across a womans eye, slitting it open and releasing the viscous fluids
from within; yet, as I have argued, the obscene and transgressive imagery in
Romance and Anatomy of Hell performs its own attack on the processes of scopic
desire that have dominated cinematic representation.
The transgressive disruption found in In the Cut functions according to a
different mode to either Un Chien Andalou or Breillats films, but bears some
resemblance to the aesthetic structures that ffrench identifies in Batailles
novella. Where Moores source novel contains explicit and detailed descriptions
of violence done to the body, for example the final pages recounting Frannies
lacerating demise (1996: 258267), the film carefully avoids showing any direct
violence (in contradistinction to the graphic sex scenes) as all the murders
take place off screen and only their aftermaths are shown. One of the effects
of this is that it becomes impossible for the spectator to invest libidinally in
the act of killing per se, and instead they are positioned as witnesses to the
chaos and misery that follows (Paulines death is an exemplary instance of
this, as the final section of this chapter shall explore). As in Breillats cinema,
what emerges is a formal style that embeds the horrifying consequences of
murder in this dirty urban landscape within a striking and at times beautiful
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overall formal aesthetic. The use of light and shadow and muted colour used
to portray Frannie and Pauline finds their beauty, despite the emphasis given
to their status as ordinary women and their obvious weariness and sadness.
The opening shots of the film show Pauline walking in the garden under a
fall of petals, a more conventionally romantic image revealed as illusion when
viewed retrospectively from the perspective of her grisly end; or the scene in
which Frannie masturbates, rich tones turning her body to gold in the sepia
light. Again a conventionally erotic scene thwarted as her leg cramps and she
swears in frustration: a rebuttal of the end-fixated sexuality embodied in the
money shot of pornography. Instead of direct images of violence, Campion
employs her own technique of disarticulation or rupture, using drastic cuts
and rapid editing in order to convey the traumatic and lacerating impact of
violence. For example, the second murder victim is found in a laundrette and
as the forensic unit remove and examine pieces of limbs and flesh the camera
cuts quickly between different angles and between colour and black and white
footage, disorienting the viewer and creating a fragmentary effect that replicates
the disarticulated body parts of the victim. This technique is used to greatest
and most distressing effect in the scene in which Frannie discovers her beloved
sisters severed head. Following the horrific realization of the contents of the
bag there is a moment of complete blackness and silence as the imagery of the
film breaks down entirely in its own moment of trauma and disarticulation. It
is to this sequence that I shall now turn, the pivotal scenes in which Frannies
eroticized masochistic fantasies of the subterranean world of sex and violence
become too proximate and too obscene, beginning to disintegrate in a mass of
blood and chaos.
Its here in the circle
Frannie encounters male violence at several points through the film: she is
attacked in the street by an anonymous assailant, pinned to her bed by her
student Cornelius Webb when she refuses his advances and stalked by her former
lover John Graham before the final and climactic struggle with the serial killer
Rodriguez at the end of the film. The overall effect of these encounters is to
cement a depiction of male violence against women as systematic and endemic,
something that is implicit in many male/female interactions and the greater
or lesser struggles and negotiations for power that these interactions entail.
The perspective of the spectator is aligned closely with Frannies throughout
(she appears in almost every scene), giving a highly subjective and personal
experience of the serial killer/thriller narrative. This is brought to the fore in
the distressing scene in which Frannie discovers the decapitated head of her
sister and friend Pauline, another of Rodriguezs victims and the first who is
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not anonymous to Frannie or to us. This sequence is one of the most powerful
of the film not only in its horror but in the highly effective way in which it
conveys the experience of Frannies shock and grief to the spectator. Up until
this moment, the underground world that she has entered has primarily been a
source of fascination and titillation, fulfilling the transgressive fantasies of her
character and mobilizing the spectatorial pleasures associated with sex, violence
and suspense that the erotic thriller genre plays with to such popular effect. The
realization of Paulines murder brings the economy of violence into shocking
perspective, a paradigm shift that relocates Frannie from a safe(r) position outside
the drama of the killings to a terrifyingly proximate situation, or, as articulated
by one of the poems that she reads on the subway, Its off in the distance. It
came into the room. Its here in the circle. If the basement fellatio is the erotic
set piece of the film and the event that catalyses Frannies sexual explorations
into the underworld of the city, then the discovery of Paulines death is the
moment at which the accompanying violence breaks into the domestic sphere.
This converse conceptual movement is given form as Frannie ascends the stairs
to her sisters apartment, accompanied by a deceptively lively song from the
bar below, a reversal of her descent into the bar basement in the earlier scene.
Paulines apartment is dark and the camera watches from a distance as Frannie
looks around. It is only when she finds a lock of hair that the shot changes to
a close framing. Horribly the hair is still attached to a clump of scalp, murky in
the shadows of the room but still all too discernible. This lack of clarity serves
to align the viewer with Frannies disbelieving perspective as confusion begins
to transform into shock and fear. Gillett suggests that the piece of red scalp, the
lump of hair and skin, is so disturbing because it appears as a trace of Paulines
body trying to resist the forces tearing it apart, representing the absence of this
young womans life in the space that was once entirely hers (Gillet 2004a). It
acts as an embodiment of the excremental abject, reminding us that the human
body is nothing but meat: flesh, blood and bone revealed in all their fragility and
vulnerability. This version of Pauline has lost its status as subject and is reduced
to disarticulated parts of her lost life. The music fades as Frannie begins to
walk towards the bathroom. Despite the revelry downstairs for the moment
she is completely alone in this stifling and claustrophobic space as the bar scene
continues to echo. She is once again in a space that the killer has made his own,
annexed off from the rest of the social world, however, this time the scene is
not one of erotic spectacle but of death. As she pauses to open the double
doors of the bathroom she appears as a silhouette against the bright white
steam that issues forth, a final moment of peace and arresting beauty before she
enters the circle and her world is irrevocably altered. The camera pans through
the room to show the spectator what Frannie sees, horrendous amounts of
blood smeared on surfaces and running down walls, before moving tentatively
towards a plastic bag in the sink. And yet, the gaze of the camera does not
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focus squarely upon this bag, instead moving towards it and around it before
shying away, unable to look directly at the horror it finds there in a replication
of Frannies own aversion. She twitches aside a corner of the bag and one dead
eye stares out, a visible manifestation of Batailles terrifying face of death. The
screen cuts to black and Frannies gasps and cries fade into silence, a prolonged
moment of audiovisual asignification creating a complete break in the fabric of
the film that resonates with the inadequacy of representation to articulate her
grief and pain.
The space of the film is restored to an image of Frannie sitting on the
bathroom floor clutching the bag in her lap, a posture that echoes an earlier
scene in the apartment in which Frannie strokes Paulines hair as they discuss
her dreams of romance and marriage. Again the drastic and indelible sense of
loss is emphasized: Pauline the subject is gone and only meat is left behind.
McHugh has noted that the erotic thriller is a genre normally dependent upon
the death of a woman for its pleasures (2007: 132), but in Paulines death there
is only horror and unutterable sadness. The moments directly preceding and
following the black screen epitomize the gulf between this cultural convention
and Campions take upon the genre, with the spectators own investment in the
generic imagery of murdered women highlighted and the reality of the violence
and tragedy behind it revealed. Subsequent shots in this sequence mirror
Frannies incomprehension as the camera slides from one thing to another in
a disorienting whirl that renders it difficult to gain any objective perspective, a
slightly askew point of view that permeates the film from this scene onwards
as her sense of reality disintegrates and her conception of what is possible
and bearable is pushed past its limits. The loss of an objective viewpoint in
the bathroom scene can also be attributed to its status as the moment at which
Frannie first encounters the excessive, hungry jouissance of the other in its
full horrific proximity as her fantasies of transgression start to crumble. iek
has argued that far from being oppositional arenas, fantasy and reality are
necessarily imbricated and reliant upon each other for their sustainability, with
fantasy operating on the side of reality as a guard against the unrepresentable
void of the Real (iek 1997: 66). Up until the moment that Frannie discovers
Paulines head, her masochistic fantasies centred upon perilous sex and the
transgression of taboos have been sustaining her idealized version of reality.
As iek comments, the gap that separates beauty from ugliness is the very
gap that separates reality from the Real: what constitutes reality is the minimum
of idealization the subject needs in order to be able to sustain the horror of
the Real (1997: 66). Frannies gruesome discovery of Paulines death through
the ugliness and decay of blood, hair and flesh creates a forcible break from
her own fantasies and from the fantasies of female victimization that pervade
popular culture, shoving her violently towards the final encounter with the
malignant and misogynistic force represented by Rodriguez in the lighthouse.
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Overlapping with my own concerns in this chapter, Gilletts sensitive readings

of Campions films (2004a, 2004b) demonstrate a concern with situating the
directors work in relation to cultural signs and narratives. Within this context,
a particularly fertile line of enquiry for the consideration of representations
of sexual difference is the connection that she makes between the imagery
of In the Cut and the mythical figure of Medusa. Gillet argues that the woman
in the basement evokes this monstrous gorgon with her sucking mouth, long
green talons and wild hair, and further that this figure is indicative of a wider
deployment of castration anxiety in the films plot and imagery (Gillett 2004b:
8990). Developing this idea enables further commentary on the doubling or
reversal that is constructed between the fellatio scene and Frannies discovery
of Paulines death. The decapitation to which Pauline is subjected recalls the
slaying of Medusa by Perseus in Greek mythology, her head placed in a bag by
a mirror which further references the themes of reflection so central to this
classical narrative. In The Severed Head Kristeva muses upon the symbolism of
Medusa as dangerous and obscene femininity:
Anthropologists and art historians have not failed to point out that this slimy
head, surrounded by coiled snake hair, evokes the female sexual organ the
maternal vulva that terrifies the young boy if he happens to eye it. Female
vulva, Medusas head is a slimy, swollen, sticky eye, a black hole, its immobile iris
surrounded by ragged lips, folds, pubic hair. (2012: 29)
This accords with Gilletts observation that the film invokes the anxieties
arising from the lack of the female genitalia. Sexual difference is personified in
the figure of Medusa, who in her powerful and obscene monstrosity represents
the suspicion, fear and hatred that surrounds the female body in the dominant
masculine order. She is the sticky, slimy ab-ject (Kristeva 2012: 31) that repulses
and, vitally, that threatens the established role of the female within the logic of
patriarchy. As a result of her transgressive nature, however, Medusa also finds
herself threatened in turn by the social systems that work according to this logic:
she takes her place within mythic and folkloric representations that hinge upon
the complicated relationship between monstrous female sexuality and female
sexual vulnerability (Miller 2013: 324). As the earlier sections of this chapter
argued, the primary function of the woman within phallologocentrism consists
of providing a reflecting surface of otherness in which the masculine norm may
read their (illusionistic) stable identity and coherence. The woman as mirror
loses the specificities of her body and her desires; her abjected nature must
be hidden or ejected. From this perspective, Rodriguez embodies the violent
forces of the phallologocentric sociocultural order, neutralizing the perceived
threat presented by femininity through brutal elimination. The Medusa myth
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both reiterates and reconfigures the themes of the abusive male gaze and the
reflected image, as Kristeva expresses so beautifully:
The ancient imagination granted it a scopic power that stems from its ability to
petrify, that is, to paralyze, to render catatonic, to turn into a corpse, to kill by
the magic of the gaze alone. Could this be an inversion of the human gaze that
wants, precisely, to capture the horror of the other, to freeze it, to eliminate it?
Does Medusa return the caustic, decapitating look, with maleficence added, that
the man, the fierce hero, turned on her? Who is looking at whom? Who is killing
whom? Repetition, reflection. (2012: 30)
Medusas ability to turn to stone all who look upon her reverses the specular
discourses that have nullified the female subject, with the effect that instead
it is the male who is ossified into an unchangeable and static object. Despite
the gorgons unfortunate end, defeated by a symptomatic male appropriation
of the mirror image, the Medusa myth complicates the structures of looking
and in doing so returns us to the basement scene at the beginning of the film
which finds its own mirroring in Paulines death: Frannies eyes simultaneously
active and reactive, caught within an interplay of different gazes as she watches
the pleasures of the shadowy figures and consequently finds her own desires
catalysed by the transgressive realms of violence and sex. Rodriguez may slay
this nameless faceless woman and Frannies beloved sister, the films Medusa
figures, but in altering the ending of the book Campion enables a further
counterstrike against the violently patriarchal discursive systems which have
entrapped both these women and Frannie too. Frannies emasculation of
Malloy, leaving him handcuffed and helpless, and killing of Rodriguez, acts as
a point of disruption within the established conceptual order as she overturns
the generic stereotypes of the female victim or damsel in distress, sidestepping
the roles that have been culturally assigned to her. That her return to Malloy
may be only temporary is of no consequence; it is a return that indicates that
the parameters of the power dynamics that permeate all relationships have the
potential to be shifted.
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Chapter 5
Heterocosms, Spectres and

the World Remade
In this final chapter, elements of the masochist aesthetic that have been peripheral
to discussions so far will move to a more prominent position. Specifically:
fantasy and the heterocosmic impulse, the necessity of thinking the spectator
of these often difficult images in terms of embodiment, and the relationship
of these aspects to the Bataillian ethos of inner experience and philosophical
thought. The primary film called upon to catalyse these explorations will be
Amer, written and directed by Belgian pair Hlne Cattet and Bruno Forzani and
released in 2009. The distorted images and hallucinatory colour, Goblin-esque
soundtrack and themes of desire and death place this film in the lineage of
Italian gialli cinema by directors such Mario Bava, in addition to the mystery
thrillers of Dario Argento (for example, Suspiria and Deep Red). These earlier
cinematic tropes and forms are used as a broad framework within which to
create a portrayal of female subjectivity, desire and fantasy that is expressed
through an avant-garde and tactile aesthetic. Dialogue and plot are minimal and
the unconventional structure consists of three sections held together by central
character Ana. Each section depicts a sequence from, in turn, her childhood,
her teenage years, and her adult life and death an end ambiguously portrayed
as perhaps real, perhaps fantasy within the space of the film. Amer can also be
located in relation to female masochistic subjectivity and the films addressed
in previous chapters, particularly with regard to its transgressive cinematic
form and evocation of a Bataillian erotic continuity through the allure of the
perilously sensual. The notion of Ana as a masochistic character is not explicitly
foregrounded for, indeed, the enigmatic strategies of the film mean that nothing
can be certain apart from the movement of the images themselves. Instead, the
suggestion of masochistic desire emerges over the duration of the film through
Anas embodied and highly sensual experiences which are pleasurable, painful, at
times disturbing, but always erotically charged. A consideration of the aesthetic
of Amer requires further attention be given to the question of spectatorship and
masochism in the context of the potential for masochistic forms and themes
to generate an ethical and open mode of film viewing. MacCormacks concept
of cinemasochism from her book Cinesexuality provides an evocative starting
point for these connections:
Cinemasochism describes the grace of openness to images. Cinemasochism

asks not what the image means but what it does. Particularly in images that
push the affect of the image to its extreme from horrifying to abstract images
submission to the image beyond comprehension takes the viewer outside of
films metonymy, meaning, and time, toward the kind of spatial ecstasy forged
within the folding of the image with embodied spectatorship. (2008: 41)
To some extent, this can be conceived of as a development of the

debates explored in Chapter 4. Breillats cinema, it was argued, constructs
the spectatorial experience in terms of an oscillation between unpleasure and
(sometimes surprising) pleasure, while In the Cut provides a brief glance of a
disarticulated or disjointed expression of cinematic language. Amer, largely
freed from the constraints of plot, characterization and verisimilitude, is able
to take these aesthetic and ethical techniques further and in doing so shifts the
spectators cinematic encounter into the realm of the submission to the image
that MacCormack refers to. Through the visceral and tactile sensations with
which the film is imbued, the viewer is opened up to the shifting processes of
affect and fantasy and to their own cinemasochistic experience.
Fantasy and the Heterocosmic Impulse
The centrality of fantasy in masochistic sexuality is something agreed on in

the majority of theoretical accounts, whether Freudian psychoanalysis or more
recent writings that approach the paraphilia from cultural perspectives or in the
context of its aesthetic qualities. As suggested in the Introduction, Freuds essay
A child is being beaten was inspired by the descriptions of fantasies related to
the psychoanalyst by female patients. His interpretation of these fantasies is
heavily reliant upon the permutations of identification that take place within
the psychic realm, enabling Freud to (contentiously) explain female masochistic
desire through the prism of male identity and development. Elaborating upon
Freuds work, Laplanche suggests that of all the perversions, masochism has an
expressly privileged relationship to the fantasy realm, something he attributes to
the reflexive quality of masochism. This is a somewhat problematic declaration
as it is based upon Freuds earlier explanation of masochism as a secondary
phenomenon that occurs when the aggressive drives of sadism turn away from
external targets and inward upon the subject themselves. It is the movement of
internalization that gives rise to the very moment of fantasmization (Laplanche
1976: 102). Within the Freudian perspective upon masochism the reliance upon,
and obsession with, the spectres invoked in fantasy are regarded as pathological
distortions of what is an inherent and vital part of human sexuality in its
normal form. Despite the shortcomings of Freuds approach, it is clear that
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the masochists overdeveloped fascination with the world of fantasy has long
been remarked upon and is well established in theoretical terms. As suggested in
Chapter 1 Reik and subsequently Deleuze posit fantasy as absolutely crucial with
regard to the organization of masochism as a formal mode of experience and
practice. The scene which is dreamed, dramatized, ritualized (Deleuze 1991: 74)
functions as the foundational element for the additional core aesthetic aspects
such as the contract, the fetish and the masochistic performance. Fantasy binds
these devices together and gives them narrative shape, situating them within
a flexible but broadly definable spatial and temporal arena of existence. The
staging of the sexual fantasy as a key structural component of the masochistic
subjective experience is indicated in several films in this study; Romance, In the
Cut and Secretary all feature distinct fantasy sequences. In Secretary and In the
Cut the spectator witnesses the daydreams that accompany Lee and Frannie
masturbating and in both cases these enact erotic narratives connecting these
women with their chosen male love objects. Romance includes Maries hospital/
brothel fantasy as discussed in the previous chapter, however, Ruth A. Hottel
and Lynsey Russell-Watts argue that the significance of fantasy in Breillats film
extends beyond this to more excessive levels. They suggest that not only should
the overtly imagined scene be taken as a phantasmagorical staging of desire,
but that each of Maries sexual activities in the film could be interpreted as the
portrayal of a different category of female fantasy, with the men acting only as
props or backdrops for her explorations. Paul is the long-term partner, Paulo
represents the desire for non-committal sex with a stereotypically masculine
partner and Robert provides experimentation with s/m and bondage. Even
the rape scene, suggest Hottel and Russell-Watts, could be read in this context,
as could the death that Marie engineers for Paul. They argue that this chimes
with the films realignment of spectatorial pleasure from the masculine to the
feminine (2002: 7172). Whether this seems a convincing argument or not, it is
clear that in Romance as well as in Secretary and In the Cut the female protagonists
are depicted as actively desiring subjects who choreograph fantasies tailor-made
to their own urges. The explicit visualization of their erotic inner experiences
typically precedes the actual sex scenes that take place later in the narratives,
emphasizing the idea that these women make use of their fantasies to catalyse
a process of overspilling in which narratives are transferred from the psychic
realm to reality. To borrow a phrase that Catherine Wheatley (2006) uses to
describe The Piano Teacher, these films embody the notion of the masochistic
fantasy made flesh.
The moments of fantasy depicted in these films, and the connections
between fantasy and masochism more broadly, have further significance for
the centrality of intersubjectivity to this paraphilia. Grosz argues that the realm
of the Imaginary, to which fantasy belongs, is governed by the relations of
self and other and is thus an intrinsically intersubjective space (1990: 42). The
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masochistic scenario, rooted in dream, is always an encounter between plural

positions. Most commonly, as is the case in the majority of the films discussed
so far, this takes place between two subjects or the masochistic subject and
their love object. It may be an encounter that occurs only in the inner mind,
but nonetheless involves an imagined other in which the masochist invests
their desires and pleasures. Or, we may think of the masochistic encounter in
terms of cinema: the process of cinemasochism that MacCormack describes
or the contractual affiliation discussed by Aaron and invoked in Chapter 1. The
spectator enters into a consensual and volitional relationship with the film that
is unfolding before them, submitting themselves to the potentially horrific or
baffling images that dance before their eyes. Both masochism and spectatorship
bring into being and are thereafter reliant upon the libidinal encounter between
self and other, and upon the creation of a form of communication that
necessitates a fantastical investment in the exchange of pleasure and power.
To watch is a negotiative practice in which the spectator speaks to images by
experiencing them through a self that speaks to itself what do I think, how do
I understand these images, how am I desiring? the image returns our speech
to us to the extent it challenges our openness to see and to experience pleasure
and therefore ourselves differently. (MacCormack 2008: 51)
MacCormack argues that the practice of cinematic spectatorship is

communicative and mediative and as such catalyses a state of self-reflection,
particularly when the images at stake are unfamiliar and not easily assimilated
into a pre-existent understanding of the world. This, in turn, instigates a change
in the spectators perception of themselves and the plurality of otherness in
its many forms with which they come into contact. The arguments made in
previous encounters have demonstrated how this transformative process may
function in invocations of perverse pleasure: suffering, the wounded body,
sexual difference and explicit bodies and acts. These representations call forth
repeated encounters with alterity that compel a thinking and rethinking of the
categories of self and identity.
The primacy of fantasy and the recreation of a fantasy world that masochism
strives towards is encapsulated in the concept of the heterocosmic impulse.
This impulse can (as suggested in Chapter 1) be described in its simplest form
as a desire to recreate the sociocultural realm as dominated by the regulatory
systems of heteronormativity, and the subjects place within it, according to
the principles and pleasures of masochistic desire. Silverman, drawing on
Coldness and cruelty, explains that the demonstrative elements of role play
and masquerade that constitute the masochists experience of sexuality extend
to include the person inflicting the pain or humiliation as well, and indeed the
entire scene of the erotic adventure, in effect remaking the world (1992:
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208209). The aspects of disavowal, suspense, fetish and ritual that are assured
through the device of the contract are the building blocks of this fantasized
realm: Reality is affected not by negation but by a disavowal that transposes
it into fantasy (Deleuze 1991: 72). The masochist does not refuse reality per se,
but seeks to transform it through the construction and exploration of alternative
forms, narratives and intersubjective relationships into an ideal image of what
the world might be. Masochism therefore holds the seeds of the power to act
as a catalyst for the deconstruction and subsequent reconfiguration of our
encounters with ourselves and others, an ethical potential left largely explored
by Deleuze and Studlar who focus instead upon the function that this remaking
of the world plays in relation to the form and spectacle of masochism.
Silverman, in contrast, does acknowledge the possibility of transformation
within the heterocosmic impulse, enquiring, The crucial question to ask here is
whether the heterocosmic impulse exhausts itself altogether in the boudoir, or
whether the play spills over into social intercourse as well, contaminating the
properties of gender, class, and race (1992: 209). This is a vital question. It could
be argued that the alternative worlds of the masochistic scenario simply serve
to detach the protagonists from a society that labels them perverse and protect
them within an insulated bubble while heteronormative regulatory practices and
denials of alterity continue unabated elsewhere. In this situation, the idealistic
structures of the heterocosm would be isolated, supplanting nothing and
contaminating nothing. This is a point alluded to by Sontag in her discussion
of the pornographic literature of writers such as Sacher-Masoch, de Sade,
Bataille and Rage. Referring to the latters Story of O, Sontag comments upon
the stock type of pornographic trash and anachronistic settings that it relies
upon (2001: 97). The settings that she describes are familiar from Venus in Furs
and more recent cultural texts: that conveniently isolated chteau, luxuriously
furnished and lavishly staffed with servants, in which a clique of rich men
congregate and to which women are brought as virtual slaves to be the objects,
shared in common, of the mens brutal and inventive lusts (2001: 9798). This
description is highly reminiscent of Leighs Sleeping Beauty, and indeed Sontag
identifies in pornographic literature a similar problematic of objectification
to that which is emphasized in Leighs film. In such cases it is difficult to
see how the spaces of perversion could provide the possibility of an ethical
restructuring; however, these emplacements are arguably not representative of
the heterocosmic impulse but merely depict exaggerated replications of the
dominant structure that exists in society as a whole. Silverman argues that the
masochistic drive specifically (found in texts such as Venus in Furs), rather than
the pornographic or perverse as a more general urge, hold the power to overturn
one fundamental aspect of the symbolic order: within the masochistic narrative,
the paternal law (or Law of the Father, or logic of the phallus) is denied and
superseded by the female figure of maternal authority. This begins to move
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towards the way in which the heterocosm may perform a political function.
Silvermans subsequent analysis remains within the Freudian conceptual model
and for this reason she ultimately concludes that masochism is forever caught
within the identifications of familial relations, always as much a product of the
symbolic order as a reaction against it (1992: 213). It is important to observe
here, however, that Silverman is basing her understanding of the heterocosm
and its radical potential upon feminine masochism as manifested in male
patients; as the previous chapters of this book have argued, female masochism
must necessarily operate and be conceived of within the terms of a different
framework that facilitates a range of previously unthought aesthetic practices
and subjective positions. Female masochism is positioned as both exterior
to theorization and as transgressive in regard to the cinematic imagery that
it has inspired in recent years. This suggests that the female manifestation of
this perversion may be better placed than the male to mobilize a heterocosmic
impulse which overspills from fantasy and the boudoir into the interactions
and negotiations of the social world.
The masochistic heterocosm requires a specific type of setting within which
the dynamic of pleasure and pain must take place: it is a mistake to treat the
pleasure-pain complex as a raw material able intrinsically to lend itself to any
transformation (Deleuze 1991: 71). Rather, this complex must be organized
within a framework containing specific temporal elements of delay and suspense
in combination with the aesthetic elements associated with fetishism and fantasy.
Studlar argues that the combination of these formal aspects functions in the
von Sternberg and Dietrich collaborations to create the basis for a masochistic
heterocosm, a space outside the real world in which normal spatiality and
temporality are suspended and an arena is opened up in which desire and fantasy
are the primary and privileged components. She notes the dreamlike quality of
von Sternbergs films, their emphasis on feeling and fantasy, their paradoxical
mise en scne and curiously disjointed narratives (Studlar 1988: 99). Returning
briefly to Secretary provides an example of how the masochistic heterocosm may
be represented as a performative and fantastical place within more conventional
cinematic narratives, in addition to being suggestive of some of the crucial
aesthetic strategies that the hetercosmic impulse entails. This film constructs an
ambiguous temporality and a liminal spatiality in order to create an in-between
realm in which the sadomasochistic desires and fantasies of the protagonist Lee
and her employer and love object E. Edward Grey can be played out. There
are few signifiers of any specific historical context, or rather, there are mixed
signifiers that indicate different time periods. Although the domestic scenes in
Lees home could be contemporary, they are also reminiscent of earlier cultural
representations of suburbia and could be situated anywhen in the last three or
four decades. Greys office, too, is ahistorical and temporally enigmatic: although
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some elements suggest a twenty-first century setting, Lee uses an old-fashioned

typewriter and there is scant evidence of recent technology.
This office space also accords closely with the concept of supersensualism,
a term that Sacher-Masoch used to label his preoccupation with the artistic
qualities he regarded as inherent to his influences and rituals (Deleuze 1991:
69). This concept is not only central to the construction of the heterocosmic
realm but will be of import when considering how Amer addresses the spectator
through synesthesia, a process described by Laura U. Marks as the translation
of qualities from one sense modality to another (2002: xi). In Sacher-Masochs
literary works, the images of suspended bodies, arrested movement and cruel,
beautiful women play an instrumental role, and yet, supersensualism suggests
that the other senses may be equally as important within the realm of masochistic
sexuality. Touch and the textures with which skin and flesh connect take on a
fetishized function in stories such as Venus in Furs with its mystical play of
flesh, fur, and mirror (Deleuze 1991: 69). To draw upon a typical passage in this
most well-known story by Sacher-Masoch:
There is a green ribbon on my bedside table, said Wanda, as I laid her on the
couch. Bring it to me, and also bring the whip.
I flew upstairs and down again and, kneeling before my sovereign lady, presented
the two objects to her. She made me tie her heavy hair charged with electricity
into a large chignon which I fastened with the velvet ribbon. I then had to
prepare her bath and this I did very clumsily, for my hands and feet refused to
obey me. From time to time I felt compelled to glance at my beauty, as though
some magical force were driving me. At the sight of her lying on the red velvet
cushions, her precious body peeping out between the folds of sable, I realized
how powerfully sensuality and lust are aroused by flesh that is only partially
revealed.
This passage details the beautiful appearance of Wandas body and face,
certainly, but more evocative here is the emphasis upon texture and physical
sensation. The specific feel of Wandas hair, the velvet cushions and voluptuous
sable and the hot water and steam of the bath all speak to experiences that
are reliant more on texture and the proximate intensities of the skin than the
capabilities of vision. This passage engages with senses beyond the purely ocular,
imbuing each object with heavy significance and weaving together an overall
impression of supersensual experience. Also evident here is the formal element
of waiting or suspense that Deleuze identifies as so crucial to the masochist
aesthetic. Wandas whip is juxtaposed with the soft velvet ribbon and brings
the promise of the violence and pain to come after the pleasurable sensations
described in this paragraph. The aesthetic of Secretary, specifically in the interior
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spaces of Greys offices, recalls Sacher-Masochs supersensualism. The carved

wooden screens and stone statues, the orchids that Grey lovingly cultivates,
the textiles of the furnishings and the red colour scheme: all are set within
the dark winding corridors and chambers of a building seemingly larger inside
than out and are strongly expressive of other senses beyond the visual. They
call forth experiences of touch and smell that not only set this spatiality aside
from the exterior world (the normative first world, to use Studlars phrase),
but that assist in communicating to the spectator the phenomenal sensualism
of the couples desires through synesthetic translation. When watching Secretary,
the smooth cool stone of the statues becomes almost tangible, the spectator
imagines running her hands across the dark textured wood of the screens.
The delicate smell of the orchids hanging in the air lends an exotic aroma that
forms a multisensory backdrop to the interactions that take place there. Sounds
are also emphasized in this film, from the clacking of Lees typewriter to the
sharp thwack of Greys hand against her bottom in the spanking scene. The
supersensual settings of the corridors and rooms of Greys office, where the
majority of the interactions between he and Lee take place, play a primary role
in the construction of the masochistic heterocosm. These areas are constructed
as an in-between space, a world in which the rules of the external social realm
do not apply. Thus, perverse activities take place as Lee crawls along the floor,
or masturbates in the toilets, or eats food out of Greys hand. When Lee first
approaches this space, she is dressed in a purple cape and surrounded by
greenery, reminiscent of a Little Red Riding Hood character about to enter
an otherworldly and unknown realm. The sultry score by Angelo Badalamenti,
best known for his frequent collaborations with David Lynch and Paul Schrader
and for the creation of fantastical, dreamlike soundscapes, adds to this sense of
an intensely private, alternative space. The office scenes are also constructed as
other through their contrast with the apparent banality of Lees domestic life:
the offices are a separate place in which the couples sadomasochistic desires
might be played out uninterrupted. The entry of others into this space, such
as Greys ex-wife or Lees boyfriend Peter, is framed as a terrible intrusion of
reality into dreamland, just as Lees appearance at Greys apartment following
her fathers heart attack seems an overstepping of the boundaries of their
fantasy life.
The question of spatiality is so important here because, as with all other
aspects of human social life, the way that spaces are used and the functions that
they perform are strictly regulated within matrices of power and control. In his
essay Different spaces, Foucault terms social spaces and the mental and physical
states of experience associated with them as emplacements and argues that they
operate within the ideologies of knowledge and belief that are invested with
authority at any given point in history. Majoritarian emplacements, like dominant
conceptions of sexuality, provide scant space for unorthodox subjectivities and
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practices. However, just as heteronormativity produces perverse sexualities as

its counterpart, so the construction of normative emplacements necessitates
alternative spaces on the boundaries of the social to contain what is culturally
excluded. Foucault identifies two types of emplacements which are at variance
from the spaces of normativity: utopias, which are imaginary perfect spaces
and thus fundamentally unreal, and heterotopias, which are sorts of actually
realized utopias that may function to represent, contest or even reverse the
experience of temporality, spatiality and subjectivity found in broader social
emplacements (1998: 178). It is in these borderlands that the ethical and political
significance of the masochistic heterocosm begins to emerge. Foucault suggests
that late twentieth century heterotopias are to be found in spaces/places such
as mental institutions and prisons, cemeteries, and significantly for the project
of this chapter and masochistic sexuality, cinemas. The relationship between
utopias and heterotopias is a complex one that Foucault describes thus:
Between these utopias and these utterly different emplacements, these
heterotopias, there must be a kind of mixed, intermediate experience, that
would be the mirror. The mirror is a utopia after all, since it is a placeless place.
In the mirror I see myself where I am not, in an unreal space that opens up
virtually behind the surface it is also a heterotopia in that the mirror really
exists, in that it has a sort of return effect on the place that I occupy. (1998: 179)
The description of the return effect of the mirror image suggests that
the subjectivities, behaviours and experiences associated with heterotopic
emplacements, although situated in the marginal gaps of society, may have
the potential to influence or alter the parameters of the regulatory systems
that have constructed them as other. One of the most radical implications of
the heterotopia can be attributed to the way in which it enables a multiplicity
and fluidity of perspectives that remain separate and singular in normative
space: The heterotopia has the ability to juxtapose in a single real place several
emplacements that are incompatible in themselves (Foucault 1998: 181). The
heterotopia therefore contains the promise of the recognition of various
types of difference articulated simultaneously. Positions and voices that are
silenced in majoritarian social space and discourse find an arena in which they
can co-exist with more normative structures and with other forms of alterity.
Foucaults inclusion of the cinema as a heterotopic emplacement expresses a
recognition that the function of film is a not simply escapism but that it may, as
MacCormack has argued, serve to provide fantastical versions of the world that
offer a return effect on the spectating subject.
Thus, the masochistic heterocosm functions as a liminal space between reality
and desiring fantasy as a drive that is simultaneously active and submissive, with
cinematic representations that draw upon the masochistic aesthetic performing
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this heterocosmic place through the specific aesthetic strategies facilitated by

the medium. Hart, commenting upon performance and theatricality in relation
to masochistic sexuality, suggests that it should be understood as taking place
within an inherently traumatic spatiality. Strictly, performance (and masochism)
cannot be defined as taking place either on stage or in the stalls but instead is
constructed in the void between the two and in the commingling of fantasy and
desire that occurs within this gap. In order to enter this space and to effectively
engender the performance/fantasy, the subject must step into this potentially
traumatic void, trusting that the other will be there to meet them (Hart 1998:
9). A film like Amer, which this chapter will now address directly, manifests this
abyssal and traumatic in-between experience: on the one hand requiring the
spectator to relinquish themselves to the images on screen, and on the other
calling forth an active engagement with this peculiar imagery that moves away
from or refuses conventional systems of cinematic signification. Above all, it
activates an embodied mode of spectatorship in which meaning is created in
the space between the flickering shapes on screen and the viewers synesthetic
capacity. The forms and pleasures of masochistic sexuality strive towards a
reconfiguration of the world outside the restrictions of heteronormativity,
a temporally and spatially distinct realm that, in certain instances, holds the
potential for an ethically engaged rethinking of dominant paradigms of
subjectivity.
The crucial lesson of the heterocosm, therefore, is that aesthetics and
ethics need to be conceptualized in conjunction with each other, an assertion
that Amer illustrates. Cattet and Forzanis film does not pose explicitly ethical
questions about personal morality and responsibility within the diegetic space
as films such as Breaking the Waves, Red Road and In the Cut do. Rather, as a
more extreme version of the challenging representational strategies used in, for
example, In My Skin and Romance, the particular cinematic form that it presents
necessitates a different mode of viewing that disorientates and relocates the
viewer in a (potentially) more ethical way. MacCormack states, Masochistic
pleasures of horror images are an obvious example of forsaking the power to
look for submission to the affects produced by what is seen. Similarly, avantgarde cinema requires a submission to images that disputes their reliance on
deference to signification (2008: 44). MacCormack refers here to the gruesome
spectacles of horror cinema, culturally coded as disgusting: the gore-stained
and rotting flesh that pervades the zombie films of Lucio Fulci, for example,
or the severed limbs and blood in Dario Argentos films. However, as argued
in Chapter 4 the visceral images of female corporeality in Breillats cinema
are constructed as equally horrifying and obscene within the social realm,
carrying their own significations of abjection and transgression. Amer does not
contain such graphic material but instead utilizes avant-garde techniques such
as fragmented images, extreme distorting close-ups and enhanced or altered
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colours throughout to engender a relationship between spectator and screen

that deviates from those of more straightforward narrative cinema. If Secretary
fences off a distinct locality within its space in which to stage heterocosmic
desire, in Amer the entire realm of the film becomes a masochistic heterocosm
in which time and space operate according to alternative rules and the
boundaries between reality and fantasy are increasingly indistinct. Anas inner
world is projected outward onto the space of the screen: sometimes paranoid,
sometimes sexual, constantly multisensory and always appealing to a Bataillian
ethos of eroticism.
Amer and Inner Experience
Through its highly stylized visuals and manipulated auditory effects, Amer
provides a fine example of the fantastical and erotic drives that constitute the
heterocosmic impulse. Scenes are played out through rich and evocative imagery
of characters that are in turn monstrous and sexualized, and settings that
juxtapose the gothic castles and winding forest pathways of classic horror with
sun-drenched sea and townscapes. Overall the effect is comparable to Barthes
insistence on the forms expressed by the poets imagination. Commenting
upon Batailles Story of the Eye, Barthes states:
The poets imagination is improbable; a poem is something that could never
happen under any circumstances except, that is, in the shadowy or burning
realm of fantasy, which by that very token it alone can indicate. The novel
proceeds by chance combinations of real elements, the poem by precise and
complete exploration of virtual elements. (2001: 120)
The scenarios described in Story of the Eye are outlandish, expressing not
probable situations but characters and events that embody a kind of essence
of make-believe (Barthes 2001: 120) that finds its sexual and violent form
through metonymy and metaphor. In the previous chapter it was suggested
that Campions In the Cut utilizes some comparable aesthetic methods to create
a transgressive network of language, explicit sex and brutalized bodies. Amer
is even more suggestive of how Barthess notion of the poem and the poetic
imagination might find a home within the audiovisual territories of cinema. The
imagery is often abstract and verging on the inexplicable, the palette and sound
hallucinatory, the narrative disjointed and unclear: here the burning realm of
fantasy of which Barthes speaks is given filmic form. Amer is also remarkable
in its tactility, or to use the parlance of masochism, its supersensualism.
The spectator of this film is presented with a range of sensory experiences
that engage with modalities beyond the visible, thus encouraging a mode of
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spectatorship that creates meaning through the embodied perception and

visceral responses of the viewer.
Studies of material culture in recent years have seen the advocation of a
move away from the established tendency to privilege the specular over the
tactile, echoing Irigarays critique that the Western logos has been based upon
the phallocratic obsession with the visible. Laura U. Marks, one of the most
prominent writers on haptic sensibilities in material culture, argues that a social
hierarchy of the senses has long been apparent with the distance senses
elevated above the proximal senses in a range of discursive fields: In Western
philosophy, in which only the distance senses are vehicles of knowledge, and
Western aesthetics, in which only vision and hearing can be vehicles of beauty
(2013: 144). Once again a primary question arises about the ways in which we,
as human subjects, construct meaning out of the vast range of signals that
we receive, and again it is clear that dominant systems of signification and
knowledge have largely functioned to restrict these meanings and perceptions
within a limited frame of possibilities. Foucaults notion of the episteme is
illuminating here:
what I am attempting to bring to light is the epistemological field, the episteme
in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its
rational value or to its objective forms, grounds its positivity and thereby
manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that
of its conditions of possibility. (2002: xxiiixxiv)
The episteme is the manifestation of systems of knowledge and meaning

within an ideological field that regulates and limits what may be considered
possible or true in any sociohistorical period; the episteme reaches into all areas of
discourse whether it be the study of the representational arts or more objective
disciplines such as science and medicine. The challenge for philosophers and
theorists is to increase what can be articulated within these conditions of
possibility, to instigate a flexibility and multiplicity of understanding that is not
bound by epistemic prejudice. As discussed in Chapter 4, Irigaray argues that
for much of Western history this conception of truth has worked in tandem
with the phallologocentric economy of the specular which has privileged sight
over touch and seeing over tactility. This logic of the same has neglected or
silenced female experiences, which, Irigaray argues, are less reliant upon vision
and more upon tactility. Describing the feminine style in contrast to that of the
phallic order, she observes:
this style, or writing, of women tends to put the torch to fetish words,
proper terms, well-constructed forms. This style does not privilege sight;
instead, it takes each figure back to its source, which is among other things tactile.
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It comes back in touch with itself in that origin without ever constituting in it,
constituting itself in it, as some sort of unity Its style resists and explodes
every firmly established form, figure, idea or concept. (1985b: 79)
It is apparent, therefore, that the process of challenging the ocularcentric

paradigm in material culture must be accompanied by new approaches to
understanding and representing the specificities of female experience and
pleasures in ways that firstly, question and reveal the epistemic processes at work
in the construction of knowledge and truth and secondly, to forge alternatives
in philosophy and in symbolic forms such as cinema.
The privileging of sight espoused by the logos of Western thought has
been strongly felt in the study of film, understandably perhaps given the visual
qualities of the medium and the developmental narrative tracing it back through
photography to other plastic arts such as painting that strive to represent the
world. However, the turn towards haptic theory in recent years is indicative
of the increasingly perception that sight must be conceived of in relation to
the other senses. Or, to phrase this slightly differently, that to focus upon the
significations constructed through vision alone is to ignore or deny a large part
of the way in which we actually experience film spectatorship. Considering
the opening moments of Campions The Piano, Sobchack suggests that this
is a film which requires an understanding of cinema reception that is based
in the embodied responses of the spectator. My eyes did not see anything
meaningful and experienced an almost blindness at the same time that my
tactile sense of being in the world through my fingers grasped the images sense in
a way that my forestalled or baffled vision could not (Sobchack 2004: 64). The
multisensory nature of cinematic experience has already been noted in earlier
chapters; the visceral reactions to the images of self-harm in Secretary and In My
Skin demonstrate embodied responses, as does the mobilization of disgust as a
perverse strategy in Breillats works. However, while the imagery of Lee holding
a kettle to her thigh, Esther slicing her flesh or the fluids of the female body
in Anatomy of Hell and Romance evoke and replicate the corporeal experiences
of the spectator and certainly benefit from an approach which regards vision
as being embedded in the proximal senses, these shots can still be understood
or read (albeit in a simplistic form) based upon their visual properties only.
Sobchack is referring to a modality in which the specular is no longer the
privileged mode of perception, a type of cinematic imagining in which the
cultural hegemony of vision is overthrown (2004: 64). Amer contains several
sequences, some of which will be discussed below, that rely upon a synesthetic
reading of what Marks terms the skin of the film: this refers to the way that
film signifies through its materiality, through a contact between perceiver and
object represented (2000: xi). Images and in Amer, it should be added, sounds
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call upon memories of the senses in order to translate audiovisual perception

into embodied experiences of touch, smell and taste (Marks 2000: xi).
Cattet and Forzanis film may initially appear to be a peculiar example
of haptic cinema, for from the outset it seems obsessed with vision and the
construction of desire and anxiety through the gaze. This is expressed in the
first section through the image of the eye and point of view shots attributable
to young Anas perspective. The first object that appears on screen as the title
sequence plays is an eye in close-up, followed by more images of single or
paired eyes looking into the camera and out at the spectator. After the titles,
early shots of the film proper develop this theme, gradually constructing a
layered web of gazes between Ana and her parents, her grandmother and even
her apparently dead grandfather, whose corpse opens its eyes to stare at her
in one of the many moments in the film in which fantasy and reality become
interchangeable. Ana is shown repeatedly peeping through keyholes and
around doors. She is caught up within a network in which she both looks and
is looked at, spies and is spied upon. The first section is imbued with a mood
of paranoia, depicting Ana as a child in a large shadowy house of enigmatic
figures and strange rituals. In addition to referencing gialli cinema, this section
also draws upon conventions of Gothic horror, particularly its evocation of
the connections between seeing and the threats posed by what is seen (Landy
200: 357). Throughout these early scenes, looking is associated with curiosity
and the propulsion of self through the world, yet simultaneously with anxiety
and the confusion of self-identity. Furthermore, the focus on the eye and the
gaze is disrupted by constant references to, and invocations of, other sensorial
modes of perception. The strategic use of close-ups serve to continually
emphasize tactility, calling into play the memories of the spectators own
sensate corporeality: a belt buckle shaped like two clasped hands, a gelatinous
plate of unidentifiable food, burning incense, water-sodden fabric and the
crystals of glass that grind into Anas elbows and chin as she hides beneath her
grandfathers bed. The audio track in this and later sections is heightened so
that each sound (wheezing breath, footsteps, the fluttering of a birds wing) is
enhanced with a greater intensity. Sound, along with taste, smell and particularly
touch, overtakes vision as the primary mode of signification because vision is
blurred, distorted, indecipherable. The eye itself comes to be experienced in
its tactile form, an organ of desire but one that is resolutely embedded in the
sensations of the skin and flesh. Marks writes of haptic visuality: vision itself
can be tactile, as though one were touching a film with ones eyes (2000: xi).
In Amer, the shots of eyes peering through keyholes, in particular, are imbued
with a materiality and even a vulnerability that goes beyond the status of the
eye as symbolic bearer of the look. The tangibility of these orbs recalls Batailles
description of the disembodied eye of the defiled priest in Story of the Eye: The
caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the
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sensation is so bizarre that it has something of a roosters horrible crowing

(2001b: 66). What Amer evokes through its constant reference to the eye and
the processes of sight combined with other sensory experiences is precisely
the limitations of vision. People, spaces and objects are seen by Ana through
keyholes that offer a restricted line of sight, or through fabrics that render
figures spectral and indistinct. Vision cannot be relied upon to give a complete
or coherent impression of the world. The emphasis upon the inadequacy of
sight alone is transferred from Ana to the spectator, who shares in her limited
perspective and in her anxieties about what can and, perhaps more importantly,
cannot be seen.
A masochistic oscillation is depicted here between agency and the possession
of the libidinally invested gaze, and anxiety about perceived threats to the self.
This paradoxical movement is overtly expressed in the films version of the
primal scene in which Ana, in her forays around the house, stumbles upon her
parents having sex. Fantasies or rituals inspired by the dynamics of the primal
scene are amongst the most common in the repertoire of masochism, including
for example the symbolic enactment of primal scene experiences, such as
the oedipal triangle in the form of a mnage a trois, in which the masochistic
subject is forced to witness sexual relations between his love object and a rival
as a precondition for sexual intercourse and gratification (Kernberg 2000:
24). Indeed, Severin is subjected to such exquisite misery through Wandas
relationship with the Greek in Venus in Furs, most notably as the Greek whips
him as his beloved Wanda watches on:
The sensation of being whipped before the eyes of a woman one adores by a
successful rival is quite indescribable; I was dying of shame and despair.
What was most humiliating was that I felt a wild and supersensual pleasure in
my pitiful situation, lashed by Apollos whip and mocked by the cruel laughter
of my Venus. (Sacher-Masoch 1991: 268)
The recurrence of fantasies related to the primal scene in masochism is

unsurprising given the conjunction of eroticism and shame with which it is
associated. Ana spying upon her parents having sex instigates one of the most
experimental sequences of the film as her gaze literally fragments, her eye
dividing and replicating in the space of the screen to the sound of shattering
glass. Close-ups of her parents faces in blue, green and red against a black
background move across the screen; the sound of dripping water echoes. Her
fathers hand, for a short time, appears to be throttling her mother in a redwashed head shot seen from above. In a classic evoking of the identifications,
jealousies and desires that the primal scene contains, the setup of this image of
sexual violence is replicated moments later in an image of Ana laying against
143
her own pillow, her dark hair sprawled around her head as her mothers was
moments before. In the final images of the first section of the films tripartite
structure, Anas body and face appear distorted, being stretched back and forth
as the skin of the film is pulled and contracted. A hand strokes a breast, a mouth
gasps, feet contort. The aesthetic of these moments is closer to experimental
art than narrative cinema and is particularly reminiscent of video artist Chris
Cunninghams installation Flex (2000), in which a naked couple alternately
copulate and beat each other within a black void, culminating in a flash of light
that seems to dissolve their contorted bodies. After some moments, it becomes
apparent that Ana has morphed into her teenage self. In a further surrealistic
touch, an ant crawls from her navel.
It is clear that in these sequences and in the film as a whole, the inner
world of Ana is envisaged as an often incoherent assemblage of multisensorial
experiences, half-recalled memories and spectral familial figures that range
from the desired and desiring (her parents) to the monstrous and horrifying
(her grandparents). A theory of sight alone is inadequate for the processes of
meaning-making with which this film engages, as Sobchacks work on carnal
cinema argues:
We need to alter the binary and bifurcated structures of the film experience
suggested by previous formulations and, instead, posit the film viewers lived
body as a carnal third term that grounds and mediates experience and language,
subjective vision and objective image both differentiating and unifying them
in reversible (or chiasmatic) processes of perception and expression. (Sobchack
2004: 60)
The embodied state of the spectator is heavily implicated throughout Amer.

Chapter 1 introduced the concept of idiopathic identification in which the subject
swallows the other through the identificatory process. The haptic aesthetic
of Cattet and Forzanis film utilizes a different mode: that of heteropathic
identification as Ana becomes the spectators other. This subscribes to an
exteriorizing logic and locates the self at the site of the other. In heteropathic
identification one lives, suffers, and experiences pleasure through the other
(Silverman 1992: 205). The first scene of the films third section illustrates
how heteropathic identification functions in the cinemasochistic relationship
between film and viewer. It begins with extreme close-ups of skin, close enough
to reveal tiny hair and pores, and to obscure any knowledge of which specific
body part is being shown. Once again, the enhanced audio track emphasizes the
sound of breathing. The collection of skin shots implies that when the camera
pans out the image shown will be a sex scene, and yet, when we are given access
to a wider view it transpires the location is a crowded train. Retrospectively, the
skin and hair can be made sense of in terms of the spectators own memories
144
of claustrophobic journeys and hot bodies pressed against each other. This
haptic sensibility continues as the sequence progresses: Anas taxi driver pulls
on his leather gloves, her heavy trunk is hauled into the boot of the car, she
gasps as her naked leg touches the hot surface of the seats. Each of these
moments recalls a specific type of sense memory. As such, viewer perception
bypasses an intellectual or rational spectatorial experience and instead the body
is addressed directly. We feel the resistance and squeak of the leather over our
hands, the weight of the trunk, the sharp and surprising sensation of heat.
Having established a heteropathic or cinemasochistic connection between film
and spectator, Amer toys with the dissolution of boundaries between fantasy
and reality as Ana imagines her dress ripping apart at the seams, under the
watchful eyes of the driver, and being whipped away in the hot breeze.
The alternative modes of signification that Amer brings into being recalls
Deleuzes observations about the use of language in Sacher-Masoch and de
Sades novels: pornological literature is aimed above all at confronting language
with its own limits, with what is in a sense a non-language (1991: 22). Their
writing defines a counterpart to the ordinarily described world in order to
articulate the violence and sexual excesses that most description cannot or will
not express. The eroticism of their literature holds up a perverse mirror to
the history of world and the social realm in its current state (Deleuze 1991:
3738). The recreation of a heterocosmic realm of existence in Amer is largely
dependent upon the way that the film manages to convey Anas very material
and embodied experiences of the world around her in conjunction with, and
often as inextricable from, her inner or psychic realm. This refutes the notion of
an objectively defined truth as something that can be identified from a position
of detachment and rationality and instead suggests that reality may be multiple
and fragmented but no less intensely felt for that. Anas fantastical modes
of experience become reality and thus reality itself is thrown into question,
revealed as an illusionistic construction that can be altered and recreated: the
remaking of the world so essential to the masochistic dreamer and to the
philosopher of alterity who wishes to dismantle the damaging structures of the
social order and rebuild them anew. In order to open up the self to the potential
of the alternative worlds offered by the masochistic heterocosm, whether
enacted overtly or hinted at like the tantalizing images of a world glimpsed
through lace, we need to relinquish the firm grasp on knowledge that Western
theory has so resolutely sought. Bataille states in Inner Experience, He who
already knows cannot go beyond a known horizon (1988: 3). The heterocosmic
impulse requires at least the questioning of the world as it currently exists, and
more drastically calls for the dismantling of this world and its stratified claims
to knowledge and truth. Knowledge in this context cannot be extricated from
the arrogant assumption that one can master the world, its experiences and its
objects, through a totalizing process of apprehension with an end point that is
145
both fixed and attainable. The result of such (over) confidence is that which
Bataille calls dogmatic servitude: an unthinking adherence to one perspective
or system that necessarily involves the foreclosure of other modes of thought
or realms of experience. Instead of a concluding moment at which we can say I
know, he argues that instead we should strive for a processual guiding principle
of non-knowledge (1988: 3).
Only through non-knowledge and the lack of certainty and freedom from
dogma that it entails may one open up the world and the encounters with other
subjects and objects that take place within it. Bataille makes it clear that escaping
or refuting a state of knowledge is no easy thing and comes not without pain,
for the elevation of knowledge and certainty to highly valued attributes is deeply
ingrained within the institutions, disciplines and representations of human
society. The process of inner experience takes place in fever and anguish
(Bataille, 1988: 4), yet this anguish is necessary in order to achieve an ethical
openness that allows for the discovery and consideration of other perspectives.
The resonances between masochism and its heterocosm project of remaking
the world, and Batailles philosophy of inner experience, arise clearly at the
conjunction of ethics and aesthetics, pleasure and unpleasure, agency and
loss. The loss of knowledge and of certainty creates a necessary void within
which the creative project of exploration and thought may be begun: Thought
is the beyond (MacCormack 2008: 58). Thought is the abyss within which
the philosopher-spectator relinquishes themselves in order to imagine and
experience themselves anew.
Spectrality and the Structures of Return
The final section in this chapter will further explore the encounter with alterity
and attendant disruption of self through Derridas conception of spectrality.
This also coincides with the structure of loss evoked above; the spectre acts
as a reminder of the process of loss and as (in)tangible evidence that from
the abyss of loss something may rise again. The tripartite structure of Amer
constitutes a process of repetition and return, evoking the ritualistic temporality
of masochistic desire and the heterocosmic, semiotic movement of erasure and
recreation. However, repetition in this film does not simply represent replication
or reiteration but is envisaged as a confrontation with alterity that catalyses a
rethinking of the self and a consequential transformation in perspective. The
figure of the spectre or revenant (the returned) that Derrida makes his focus is
a source of anxiety for the living subject, for it brings with it uncertainty about
ontological status and reveals the impossibility of totalizing knowledge:
146
It is something that one does not know, precisely, and one does not know if
precisely it is, if it exists, if it responds to a name and corresponds to an essence.
One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this
non-present present, this being there of an absent or departed one no longer
belongs to knowledge. (Derrida 1994: 6)
Amer operates within the realm of the spectral because it questions the
status of knowledge and truth through an avant-garde aesthetic that throws us
into a position of uncertainty about reality, fantasy and identity. But from this
chaotic non-knowledge renewed intensities of thought may emerge. Therefore,
spectrality may be seen as another modality that catalyses ethical negotiation
and different ways of thinking alterity and the self, connecting with the inner
experience that is so crucial in Amer and in Batailles theories of eroticism and
philosophy. It is through the very impossibility of adequately naming spectres
that these figures animate an awareness of the crucial debates about power
that must be intrinsic to any consideration of self/other relations. To name an
other is to fix them within an already prepared epistemic matrix of value and
morality, and in doing so to assume a position of mastery and control over
them. The spectre is someone other that we will not hasten to determine as
self, subject, person, consciousness, spirit, and so forth (Derrida 1994: 7). It
disturbs the hidden and too frequently unspoken humanist drive to categorize
and through categorization, to subjugate. The revenant can be thought of not
just as the figure of return but as a place of philosophical and representational
reconsideration where aesthetics and ethics coalesce, a feature that it shares
with the emplacements of the masochistic heterocosm.
The deployment of repeated locations and returning formal motifs allows
Cattet and Forzanis film to construct its own procedures of spectrality. An
adult Ana returns to the now empty house (or is it?) and grounds that she ran
through and peered into as a child, retracing her passage around the rooms and
corridors. The suggestion that the house may not, in fact, be empty is indicative
of Anas status as a haunted subject situated within a loop of ritual and desire.
Again, the influence of Argento is apparent as Marcias Landys comment on
Deep Red shows: What becomes important is the large and ancient house, which
has been a site of mystery, secrecy, and violence, and the narrative turns on the
quest of a character to return to the scene of the crime and, by extension, to
bring the audience to confront the return of the past (2000: 357). The middle
section of Amer with its sun-drenched exterior sequences and buoyant music, is
bookended by Anas explorations of the dark Gothic mansion in the early years
and final moments of her life. Anas taxi ride from the train station, discussed
above, indicates before her return to the house that the distinctions between
reality and fantasy have lost their conventional dynamics of meaning. Anas
inner experiences, which the spectator vicariously shares through the structures
147
of heteropathic identification and synesthetic sensory perception, and those

of the real world are merged: all reality becomes her reality and her reality
encapsulates all. The result of this is that the paranoia which pervades the first
scenes of the film rises up once again but in a more intense and excessive
form. It becomes futile to try to distinguish truth from artifice or the symbolic
from the imaginary as the spectator is positioned in the abyss of spectral nonknowledge, a masochistic location of anxiety, pleasure, submission to the image
and dissolution of the self.
The gothic tradition of the uncanny is also drawn upon in Amer as part of
the fabric of spectrality. Nicholas Royle states that it is impossible to think
about the uncanny without a sense of ghostliness, a sense of strangeness
given to dissolving all assurances about the identity of a self (2003: 16). The
uncanny marks the peculiar conjunction of familiarity and non-familiarity and
is characterized by the encounter with something recognizable and yet alien. It
is this worrying aspect of proximity that renders the uncanny more unsettling
for the subject than something that appears in the consciousness as irretrievably
other, entirely separate from the self. The most uncanny figure in Amer is
the grandfather, apparently dead (or so her mother says) but alive in Anas
fantasies and ready to rear from the shadows to grab her with a bony hand.
His monstrousness is exaggerated in the form of wrinkled skin, beady eyes and
hooked features in order that the spectator sees him not as he really is, but
viewed through the heteropathic prism of Anas inner world. Royle explores
various experiences and cultural practices which may give rise to the prickly,
nauseous manifestation of uncanniness, but the one of most relevance in the
context of Amer and spectrality is the uncanny sensation of dj vu. The structure
of dj vu closely resembles that of the revenant; each entails a movement of
repetition in which the returned element simultaneously lacks a constitutive
part of what it once had, and has gained a weird extra something that cannot quite
be articulated. Royle explains that dj vu entails a logic that cannot be confined
but rather operates as a kind of dangerous supplement before and beyond
anything else, dj vu just is the experience of a supplement the experience of
a supplement without origin, a disturbance of any sense of familiar ground
(2003: 178). The uncanny supplement that the returned moment (or object,
or figure) of dj vu gains functions as a perverse and transgressive excess:
something which cannot be controlled by normative systems of signification.
Thus, like masochistic sexuality, the uncanny experience of dj vu operates in
a paradoxical and excessive space between conventionally oppositional poles,
perversely binding together previously contradictory practices and concepts
and forcing vital changes in perspective: a trembling of the I in the very
intimacy of its bearing witness (Royle 2003: 177). Derrida envisages a politics
that can account for the place of the spectral within sociocultural interactions
and thought when he suggests that we need to learn to live with ghosts, in the
148
upkeep, the conversation, the company, the companionship, in the commerce

without commerce of ghosts. To live otherwise, and better. No, not better,
but more justly (1994: xviiixix). Akin to many of the theorists engaging
with ethical approaches to subjectivity and difference, his language displays a
heterocosmic impulse of its own.
149
Postscript
Masochism has been theorized in the chapters of this book not only as a
trajectory of sexual intensity, but as a modality of subjectivity that must be
philosophically thought in terms of the two interconnected realms of aesthetics
and ethics. In the imbrication of masochism, ethics and aesthetics a number
of crucial debates arise that relate not only to sexuality but to the theorization
and representation of sexual difference and the morphology of the body,
mental illness and pathology, and the normative sociocultural narratives
that surround heterosexual relationships. The exploration of recent films
from Europe and North America alongside theoretical approaches including
continental philosophy, psychoanalysis and cinema studies has questioned the
ways in which specifically female masochistic subjectivity engages with and
furthers these debates, pushing conceptual and representational boundaries
through imagery and narratives of the pleasures and pains of the masochistic
body. One of the intentions of this book has been to articulate subjective
positions and embodied identities that had previously been silenced or erased
from discourse. Through this process of (re)articulation, it emerges that the
foundational logic within which masochism and its accompanying themes have
been theoretically situated is partial and flawed, needing reconfiguration from
various angles in order to progress towards new ground. The restrictively rigid
binary oppositions that have dominated these debates must be deconstructed
and recreated more openly and with an attentive awareness to the possibilities
of the fluid and the multiple. Normality/abnormality, fantasy/reality, sanity/
insanity, beauty/obscenity, agency/dispossession and of course pleasure/
pain all are thrown into disarray by the corporeal pleasures and desiring
drives of the female masochistic subject and her encounters with others and
with the sociocultural sphere. In their place arises a move toward processes
of signification (and asignification) which are open and always aware of the
ethical encounter with alterity in its plural and shifting forms. Bataille states
that the things that we know become dead objects (1988: 4) and that we
reach ecstasy by a contestation of knowledge (1988: 12). The desires, pleasures
and unpleasures with which the female masochist engages are, as this book
has offered, frequently as fraught with ambivalence and difficulty as they are
commingled with enjoyment; whatever configuration they take, however, they
demand that the dead objects of earlier theory be swept away in order to clear
the path towards ecstatic thought.
Masochism has been castigated and denigrated for its apparently nonsensical
contradictions, and yet it is these very paradoxical elements which act as perverse
catalysts. Such contradictions do not simply act in defiance of the borders and
limits of the social order but turn them against themselves, distorting them
through exaggeration and resistance. Perversion functions as a mode of
corruption in that it is linked to an acknowledgement of and participation in
the structures of power and prohibition it seeks to transgress (Mey 2007: 36).
To call upon corruption in this context is not to evoke its negative connotations
of dishonesty and amorality; instead it may be thought of in its purely structural
form, as an aesthetic phenomenon that forces a change in the processes of
significance. A corrupted file or photograph irrevocably alters the meanings of
image and language, necessitating a new relationship between sign and perceiver.
I have argued that the films in this study posit the importance of a reconfigured
dynamic of spectatorship. Of course, this dynamic is more properly described
as a range of dynamics operating according to their own specificities in each
film; however, an underlying pattern can be identified in which spectatorship
is based upon the dual experiences of active thinking and rethinking, and the
dispossession of self through images of beauty and extremity, obscenity and
sensuality. In Chapter 2 the concept of anamorphosis was explored in relation
to tragedy and ethics. De Kesel writes that in anamorphosis
it is not so much my accidental, one-off glance that is caught but the
entire protocol of sight I have passed through. The fact that, in order to get
through the chaotic play of colour, I must first find the right angle that allows
me to recognize something, belongs to the strategy of the image itself and
contributes to what I see. (2009: 245)
The anamorphic image requires a change in perspective that may bring about
a paradigm shift in our perception, revealing beauty where only ugliness was seen
before, or illuminating meaning out of chaos. Corruption implies a different
kind of alteration in perception: not the revelation of something that was there
all along, but a more fundamental transformation that brings us into contact
with new territories of subjectivity, desire and thought. The female masochist
as embodiment of this perverse corruption requires the articulation of the
unspoken and the unwatchable, whether it be female corporeal experiences and
pleasures, the suffering of the other or fantasies of paranoia and eroticism. It
also requires the mobilization of new configurations of desire, pain, fantasy
and pleasure in such a way that the unfamiliar can be recognized without being
assimilated or territorialized. Bataille announces that I can henceforth not
conceive of my life, if not pinned to the extreme limit of the possible (1988: 38).
The films and ideas explored in this book may not absolutely reach this limit but
they move towards it in the spirit of ethical negotiation and Bataillian thought;
152
Postscript
they begin to map out potential pathways and fertile areas of investigation. The
extreme limit of the possible assumes laughter, ecstasy, terrified approach
towards death; assumes error, nausea, unceasing agitation of the possible and
the impossible (Bataille 1988: 39).
Foucault states that the task of analysing ones sexual desire is always more
important than analysing any other kind of sin (Foucault 2000: 223). One of
the most vital lessons from Foucaults work is that sexuality and desire are
always inextricably enmeshed within a vast network of other sociohistorical
factors: technologies of control and regulation; temporalities and emplacements
(heterotopian or otherwise); epistemes of health, madness and discipline.
Masochism, particularly as it finds its aesthetic and ethical structures through
the female body, occurs at the conjunction of many of these trajectories. A key
thread of argumentation in the preceding chapters has been to argue that the
rituals and fantasies of masochism narrativize and make explicit many of the
processes of negotiation common to all relationships, displaying the oscillation
between loss of self and assertion of self in overt narrativized form. Masochism,
like cinema, works as a communicative strategy and, while it may be erroneous
to describe it as taking a strictly linguistic form, the bodies and passions of
masochism certainly find their shape through their own systems of signification
and asignification. Foucault, beautifully, writes, the language of sexuality has
lifted us into the night where God is absent (1998: 70). The masochist aesthetic,
in conjunction with its tendency towards ethical enquiry, invites the self (and
the spectator) to enter into an intersubjective, communicative and consensual
encounter through dialogue and shared affect.
The image of the masochistic subject as hub, or more aptly and sensorially,
as vital organ, assists in illustrating its significance within wider discursive
schemas of power, gender, embodiment and even love. And of philosophy:
the rethinking and recreation of the world through non-knowledge, creative
representation and the opening up of multiple realms of difference. There are
many potential pathways leading from the explorations in this book; instead of
selecting just one or two and foreclosing the many, a quote from Irigaray may
act as a gateway to these potentialities of thought:
Love is thus an intermediary between pairs of opposites: poverty/plenty,
ignorance/wisdom, ugliness/beauty, dirtiness/cleanliness, death/life, and so on.
And this would be inscribed in his nature given his genealogy and the date of
his conception. And love is a philosopher and a philosophy. Philosophy is not
a formal learning, fixed and rigid, abstracted from all feeling. It is a quest for
love, love of beauty, love of wisdom, which is one of the most beautiful things.
(1993: 24)
153
To philosophize is to open up the realm of the beautiful to alterity and to the

nowhere and everywhere position of between that characterizes thought, love
and the permutations of masochism. The between dissolves the boundaries
that have shored up and preserved the hierarchical systems of mastery and
control that have dominated writing and representation about sexuality and
female experience. From within the indefinable space of the between, the
fascinating and vertiginous potentiality of the masochistic heterocosm arises
and with it the project of remaking the world.
154
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Filmography
Amer / Bitter (dir. Hlne Cattet and Bruno Forzani, 2009).

Anatomy of Hell / Anatomie d Lenfer (dir. Catherine Breillat, 2004).
Antichrist (dir. Lars von Trier, 2009).
Baise-Moi (dir. Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000).
Basic Instinct (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1992).
Black Swan (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2010).
The Blue Angel (dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1930).
Body of Evidence (dir. Uli Edel, 1993).
Breaking the Waves (dir. Lars von Trier, 1996).
Un Chien Andalou (dir. Luis Buuel, 1929).
Crash (dir. David Cronenberg, 1996).
Dancer in the Dark (dir. Lars von Trier, 2000).
Deep Red / Profondo Rosso (dir. Dario Argento, 1975).
The Devil is a Woman (dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1935).
Dogville (dir. Lars von Trier, 2003).
Flex (dir. Chris Cunningham, 2000).
In My Skin / Dans Ma Peau (dir. Marina de Van, 2004).
Girl, Interrupted (dir. James Mangold, 2000).
Hellraiser (dir. Clive Barker, 1987).
Hellbound: Hellraiser II (dir. Tony Randel, 1989).
In the Cut (dir. Jane Campion, 2003).
The Idiots / Idioterne (dir. Lars von Trier, 1998).
Intimacy (dir. Patrice Chreau, 2001).
162
Bibliography
Irreversible (dir. Gasper No, 2002).

Jagged Edge (dir. Richard Marquand, 1985).
Letter from an Unknown Woman (dir. Max Ophls, 1948).
Martyrs (dir. Pascal Laugier, 2008).
The Night Porter / Il Portiere di Notte (dir. Liliana Cavani, 1974).
Nine Songs (dir. Michael Winterbottom, 2004).
The Passion of Joan of Arc / La Passion de Jeanne dArc (dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928).
The Piano (dir. Jane Campion, 1993).
A Real Young Girl / Une Vraie Jeune Fille (dir. Catherine Breillat, 1976).
Red Road (dir. Andrea Arnold, 2006).
Romance (dir. Catherine Breillat, 1999).
The Scarlet Empress (dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1934).
Secretary (dir. Steven Shainberg, 2003).
Sex, Lies, and Videotape (dir. Steven Soderbergh, 1989).
Sleeping Beauty (dir. Julia Leigh, 2011).
Sliver (dir. Phillip Noyce, 1993).
Suspiria (dir. Dario Argento, 1977).
Thirteen (dir. Catherine Hardwicke, 2003).
Tokyo Gore Police (dir. Yoshihiro Nishimura, 2008).
Trouble Every Day (dir. Claire Denis, 2001).
163
Index
Aaron, Michele 6, 19, 378, 132

abjection 50, 77, 80, 85, 87, 99,
10913, 118, 124, 126
Amer 129, 13949
Anatomy of Hell 37, 100101, 10811,
119, 122, 141
Antichrist 467, 7980
Antigone 52, 6570
Babiker, Gloria and Lois Arnold 74,
93
Barker, Meg, Camel Gupta and
Alessandra Iantaffi 72, 88
Barthes, Roland 121, 139
Bataille, Georges 6, 55, 60, 656, 109,
11723, 125, 133, 139, 142,
1457, 1513
BDSM 4, 15, 72, 85, 89
beauty and the beautiful 324, 4651,
68, 83, 10714, 1223, 135
Bellour, Raymond 278
Benjamin, Jessica 40, 567
Bersani, Leo 6, 41
blood 4950, 54, 7780, 912,
10811, 118, 1235; see also
menstruation
Bordo, Susan 83
Braidotti, Rosi 2
Breaking the Waves 2, 18, 20, 37, 4570
Brickman, Barbara Jane 813
Bronfen, Elisabeth 812
Butler, Judith 66, 107
Califia, Pat 15
Chow, Lesley 34
Clover, Carol J. 28, 37, 115
Copjec, Joan 412
Critchley, Simon 42
Dancer in the Dark 467, 53
De Kesel, Marc 4950, 69, 152
de Lauretis, Teresa 1819
de Sade, Marquis 30, 4851, 133;
see also sadism, Sadean fantasy
death drive 67, 12, 47, 66, 113, 115;
see also Thanatos
Deleuze, Gilles 1314, 19, 21, 2337,
61, 789, 11114, 1315, 145
Derrida, Jacques 625, 10910,
1469
Doane, Mary Ann 45, 48, 1023
Douglas, Mary 10911
Downing, Lisa 10, 15, 32, 34, 101,
106
Edelman, Lee 12
Eisenman, Stephen F. 53
Eros 7, 94, 113; see also pleasure
principle
Erotic thrillers 21, 99, 102, 104,
1089, 11416, 1212, 1245
ethical act 6670
eyes 75, 1212, 1257, 1413
extremity and extremism 6, 289,
378, 4850, 100, 122, 130
Faber, Alyda 47
fantasy 16, 2536, 3941, 4850,
789, 1067, 112, 11519,
125, 13039, 145
Favazza, Armando 738, 867
fetishism 11, 15, 19, 267, 29, 61,
11213, 1335
ffrench, Patrick 1212
Foucault, Michel 1112, 1415,
1046, 1367, 140, 153
Freud, Sigmund 510, 1314, 1617,
23, 26, 30, 35, 413, 55, 6064,
75, 103, 11617, 130
Gaitskill, Mary 18, 856
Gillain, Anne 108
Gillett, Sue 103, 124, 126
Girl, Interrupted 8083
Gordon, Suzy 47, 54
Grosz, Elizabeth 778, 946, 111
guilt 6070
Jelinek, Elfriede 18, 7980; see also

Piano Teacher, The (novel)
jouissance 412, 50, 57, 11617, 125
Justine 20, 30, 489; see also Sadean
fantasy
Kaplan, Louise J. 1516, 834
Karpman, Benjamin 10
Kawabata, Yasunari 323
Keefer, Kyle 46, 66
Kernberg, Otto F. 143
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 46,
1314, 23, 35
Kristeva, Julia 2021, 77, 80, 87,
916, 10911, 118, 1267; see
also abjection; semiotic chora
Krueger, Richard B. 9
Krzywinska, Tanya 27, 11819
Lacan, Jacques 27, 32, 413, 4852,
57, 62, 64, 6670, 11618
Landy, Marcia 142, 147
Laplanche, Jean 61, 130
Linafelt, Tod 47, 66
Linden, Robin Ruth 1516
Lyotard, Jean-Franois 1056
haptics 14042, 1445

Hart, Lynda 1617, 29, 8990, 138
Heath, Stephen 47, 66
Hellraiser 50, 85
heterocosmic impulse 21, 289, 73,
13039, 1457
Hottel, Ruth A. 101, 131
Humanism 23, 56, 76, 84, 96, 147
Hutchison, Nina 40
hysteria 812
MacCabe, Colin 119

MacCormack, Patricia 28, 77, 103,
117, 119, 12930, 132, 1378,
146
MacKendrick, Karmen 10, 32,
4950, 545
Makarushka, Irena S.M. 47, 66
Marks, Laura U. 135, 140, 1412
martyrdom 46, 5057
Martyrs 4950, 91
masochistic contract 19, 246, 3540,
789, 89, 1323
Massumi, Brian 8, 1213
McClintock, Anne 15
McHugh, Kathleen 116, 12021, 125
In My Skin 20, 9097, 141

In the Cut (film) 21, 57, 99, 1024,
11427, 131
In the Cut (novel) 11415, 122
inner experience 567, 1312,
13946; see also Bataille,
Georges
Irigaray, Luce 17, 39, 6670, 1034,
1078, 14041, 1534
166
INDEX
McPhee, Ruth 111

Medusa 1267
Menninger, Karl 87
menstruation 80, 10811, 11819
Merck, Mandy 1415
Metz, Christian 27
Mey, Kerstin 152
Miller, Jacques-Alain 910, 64
Miller, Sarah Alison 126
Modleski, Tania 115
Moore, Susan 11415, 122; see also
In the Cut (novel)
Mulvey, Laura 278, 1023
pornography 38, 100107, 111, 113,

1213, 133, 145
rape 40, 41, 46, 48, 72, 131
Rage, Pauline 40, 133
Real Young Girl, A 112
Red Road 37, 46, 523, 5762, 65,
6870
Reik, Theodor 1314, 25, 35
reproduction 24, 55, 118
Restuccia, Frances 40
Romance 37, 91, 99114, 131
Royle, Nicholas 148
Russell-Watts, Lynsey 101, 131
Nebenmensch complex 413, 85

Night Porter, The 1819
Nobus, Dany 1819
obscenity 38, 100, 10714, 119
Palmer, Tim 912
Passion of Joan of Arc, The 512
Peakman, Julie 4, 89, 26
Penner, Todd 478, 52, 54
performance 16, 246, 29, 61, 82, 90,
131, 1348
perversion 415, 20, 27, 29, 324, 39,
612, 72, 80, 834, 119, 133,
141, 145, 152
Phallologocentrism and phallocracy
17, 21, 39, 689, 813,
10314, 14041
Phillips, Anita 34, 61
Piano, The 116, 141
Piano Teacher, The (film) 3842, 723,
78, 80, 85, 89
Piano Teacher, The (novel) 18, 79;
see also Jelinek, Elfriede
pleasure principle 67, 94; see also
Eros
Polan, Dana 11516
167
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von 45,

11, 14, 236, 3031, 357, 55,
11213, 133, 135, 143, 145
Sacher-Masoch, Wanda von 31
sacrifice 458, 524, 5870, 73, 78,
109
Sadean fantasy 4850, 545; see also
de Sade, Marquis
sadism 46, 15, 234, 27, 4850, 130;
see also de Sade, Marquis
sadomasochism 56, 1418, 2931,
38, 50, 72, 8590, 100, 112,
1346
Sartre, Jean-Paul 35
Scarry, Elaine 95
Secretary (film) 20, 37, 7290, 131,
1346
Secretary (short story) 856; see also
Gaitskill, Mary
semiotic chora 916
Silverman, Kaja 1314, 33, 1324,
144
Sleeping Beauty 325, 37, 133
Sobchack, Vivian 141, 144
Sontag, Susan 534, 133
spectres and spectrality 87, 1469
specularity 23, 17, 94, 1036, 127,

14041
Stevenson, Jack 48
Strong, Marilee 76, 867, 93
Studlar, Gaylyn 13, 2330, 11113,
1334
suicide 689, 74, 82, 867
supersensualism 11314, 1356, 143
Sweeney, Robin 15
Vander Stichele, Caroline 478, 52,

54
Venus in Furs 11, 2931, 356,
133, 135, 143; see also
SacherMasoch, Leopold von
Wheatley, Catherine 131
Williams, Linda 101, 1045, 113
Williams, Linda Ruth 102
Wilson, Emma 101, 111
Thanatos 7, 113; see also death drive

Thompson, Bill 14
iek, Slavoj 3640, 63, 125

Zupani, Alenka 4850, 64, 679
uncanny 84, 1489
168

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Film Philosophy at the Margins