Shame has been making waves ever since it premiered at the Venice Film Festival, mostly for its insistence on raw sexual honesty, if ‘honesty’ is taken to mean ‘nudity.’ I’m not sure, though, that its NC-17 rating is anything other than a way to draw attention. Could this movie have been made without showing us Michael Fassbender’s penis? Frankly, yes. Though given that Shame is an exploration of sex addiction, McQueen may have known he was going to get slapped with the NC-17 anyways and figured he might as well get his money’s worth.
Regardless: the movie follows Michael Fassbender’s Brandon, a thirtysomething New Yorker working in a generic job at a nameless Manhattan corporation; Brandon attends meetings in glass-walled conference rooms where borderline-businessy terms are bandied about. Brandon’s focus in these meetings, though, is scoping out his attractive co-workers, and he spends his days at work seeking titillation via online pornography and masturbating in the bathroom. His life away from work is much the same, a succession of partners picked up in bars, prostitutes called in, porn and video chatting when neither of those is available.
The arrival of Brandon’s sister for an extended visit makes this lifestyle more complicated, and prompts some sort of existential crisis: Sissy, played by Carey Mulligan, is Brandon’s mirror image, mildly promiscuous but ultimately more grasping for affection and emotional connection. There is some unnamed trauma in their lives, hinted at in dialogue and through their behaviors, though we know nothing about their pasts except that they are from somewhere in New Jersey. Sissy, McQueen seems to suggest, demands affection to fill some void within herself. Brandon has that same void, but his solution is to distance himself from emotion and connection completely: sex is a form of alienation, and an exercise in self-loathing, a way of reducing both himself and his partners to their most objectified states. This is not pleasure but self-abuse, in every sense of the term; never has sex been made so clinical, or so repulsive.
This would all be more powerful if there were any specificity to it whatsoever, but — as in the psychological traumas explored in a different way in Martha Marcy May Marlene — the characters remain cyphers from beginning to end. Indeed, everything in this film has been reduced to a template: we don’t know what Brandon’s job is or what his history is, while his apartment is spartan and bare, empty but for his piles of porn magazines, an old record player, and a bookcase full of albums. We learn a bit more about Sissy — she is a singer, she doesn’t know how to drive, she has lived in Los Angeles for some period of time, she likes vintage clothing — but these tidbits tell us nothing about how she has become who she is.
McQueen, I am sure, would argue that there is no need for any of this, that what matters is the relationship between his characters and the pain that they undeniably feel. Yet it is precisely the relationship between Sissy and Brandon that is so opaque, and that should motivate any power that the film is to have. Their pain, we are led to believe, is the same, and this fact defines both their relationship and their compulsions. But no pain or person or relationship exists apart from its own history. We understand that their is some trauma, that, as the title suggests, Brandon and Sissy are defined by their shame, that somehow this shame is the source of the crisis that will come over both of them by the movie’s end. Without knowing how or why, though, is it any surprise that this film left me cold? We are as alienated from Brandon as he is from everyone else. We see that he is in pain, but in an abstract, studied sort of way. Any sympathy we have is distant and impersonal.
There is something here, something primal, that McQueen is trying to get at. Nonetheless, shame, his declared subject, is the most visceral, ugly, devastating emotion of them all. Alienation is a logical solution, and the one that Brandon adopts. In leaving his audience equally removed, though, McQueen denies us the opportunity to feel, as well as see, Brandon’s pain. To me, that means that it only accomplishes half of what it needs to.
CORRECTION, 12/13, 2:45PM: In the original posting of this review I referred to the Carey Mulligan character as ‘Marianne,’ which one disgruntled reader rightly pointed out was in fact the name of the film’s other speaking female character. The character’s correct name is ‘Sissy,’ as it now appears in the review.
