Gunnar Thinks: ‘Shame’
NOTE: this is not a review, but part of a subgenre of fiction. Still, minor spoilers of not only this film but also some others are ahead if anyone is concerned.
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Somewhere in the middle of Lars Von Trier’s ‘Nymphomaniac’ — I think it was the scene in a train — I stopped the video player and got up my studying chair and went to do something else. I forgot what was next that came after leaving the study, but that moment, as I shut my laptop down — with a certainty that I can still take from the memory bank with both of my hands — I thought to myself, “what would be the point of me continuing with this experience? This is so bloody pointless”. It was one of the most visceral feelings, something similar to Michael Mann’s ‘knowingness’, where in this case I knew I truly hate on something. I hated ‘Nymphomaniac’, as it came and held hands with the sound of friction between two alloy-metal cutlery in my mind. To my close friends I boasted about watching it, and said it is a “commercial porn” piece, because of how explicit the sexual content in the film is. I just didn’t see the difference between them.
A couple of years after that experience, I stumbled upon the Carey Mulligan stretch of ‘Never Let Me Go’, ‘Drive’, ‘Shame’, ‘The Great Gatsby’, and ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’. This stretch of hers was elite, worthy of all sorts of high accolades. While I was on a stretch of this Carey Mulligan fandom that was instigated by ‘The Great Gatsby’, Steve McQueen’s ‘Shame’ was found, and after I saw it, I thought about the visceral feeling I had kept about ‘Nymphomaniac’.
‘Shame’ showed me the fine line that differentiates inspiration and instigation. The experience introduced me to the realization that the same images can lead me to two outcomes that are emotionally different. I then hypothesized that how a person as a receptor in the sinking chair responds to these things is due a massive part to what life that person has lived, to the point that the signal the brain receives guarantees a ring to a certain file in the memory bank — the memory bank is key here.
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I found that there are these frames in ‘Shame’ that took me to another place. One frame I still remember for sure is the frame of Brandon (Michael Fassbender) overlooking the view of his high-rise pad at dusk. It took me to a place I recognize very well. I paused that frame, as that sharp feeling of loneliness came; I was brought back to a place in time where I was very lonely, as I sat on a blue plastic crate at an outdoor area some time further back. I remember a massive crowd with me, but they didn’t matter. Other details of the moment have dissolved into time, but I remembered the choices following that moment that I had made in an attempt to fill in the empty spaces, the ennui. There was an apathy to my life for a good stretch, where indifference was misunderstood and misused. As soon as I recollected this apathy, suddenly, all the nudity, coitus, and expletives of ‘Shame’ had different meanings. As I watched the rest and saw more of them, I remember I thought, “oh this is not that at all; this is something else”. I did what Brandon does in the film only in different form. There is this apathetic quality in the choices and actions Brandon make throughout the film. It didn’t instigate any unwanted feelings but inspired strong contemplation and empathy, and I then realized Brandon is a ticking time bomb, a lonely character inflicted by his early experiences, shaping to become an unfortunate…well…shape.
This is that level that film can potentially go, that it can transcend all that is seen, the superficialities. Film has the potential to open up to the sublime — this is my interpretation of Burke’s “sublime” — that it can trigger a sort of horror that accompanies the descent into unknown depths of involuntary memory. In my case, I did not know I was going to relate to lonely memories I had forgotten.
This is a claim of mine, that contemplation is one level of the sublime, where it is transcendental from the obvious meaning of the images being presented on film. At this level, contradictory feelings may arise from the experience, […] depending on what you’ve seen and felt.
And, as I said about Mann having been aware of his coming to making films and all, intent is very important and it should drive the artist to proceed with caution under the caveat of intent.
Circling back to what I had mentioned earlier, I was wrong about Von Trier’s ‘Nymphomaniac’. I gave in to the nearest exit sign, saying it was rubbish. Unfortunately, even with that realization that I was wrong I still couldn’t finish it. I tried a few times after that, but that feeling I had was too overwhelming, and it stuck with me. So I left ‘Nymphomaniac’ unfinished in my study that day some odd years ago. I understand it now, though. I can now speculate that Von Trier orchestrated those explicit images of ‘Nymphomaniac’ to share something an audience may have, or hope to have. But I didn’t have it, and I couldn’t relate to it. So, it’s true that some things are just not for everybody — another cliche proven. And I believe that because of this realization regarding intent by conjecture, my “failed” experience shouldn’t diminish another’s legitimacy and artistic merit. Doing it is an artistic feat and therefore commendable on its own.
Convalescence and Well-Wishes
Gunnar D8
