Circles of Fire

"The three films show an increasing willingness to express the subjectivity of women on the screen — each young woman pursues her desires and is not simply a passive temptress waiting to be captured. They think of how to please themselves, not just their men. But a frustration with social institutions, particularly marriage and motherhood that still do not accommodate women’s desires and creative potential are evident. Consumer culture is deadening for all: In Twilight, ever-flowing money is a compensation for emptiness, while in A Dangerous Method, Jung’s allegiance to the kingdom of wealth is sterile and limiting. But it is Von Trier’s film that speaks most clearly to why these expressions of women, sex, and death are so popular just now in this era of late capitalism. We are experiencing fearsome global dislocations, vampiric financial forces, and distorted social and economic systems that are killing our nurturing, loving instincts. Climate change and the destruction of our Earth feel much like a slow-moving asteroid on its way. The death drive is perennial, but when a society seems to hover on the eve of destruction, the “Eves” of destruction we see in these films — monstrous mothers, suicidal brides, young women pondering pain and death — emerge to speak our well-founded anxieties. They signal that just now, the death drive is very strong. We’ll have to be damned creative to avoid the destruction."

Women, Sex and Death — From Vampires to Psychoanalysis | Culture | AlterNet

The lovely Lynn Parramore, one of my many brilliant colleagues, writes up some of her thoughts on Twilight, Melancholia, and A Dangerous Method and gets my little head going.

I was just dropping an email to another of my brilliant colleagues, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, about some stuff she’s been talking about on her Tumblr. And thinking about being an Adult Goth (yeah, Gang Gang Dance did the song) and desire, sex, fear, all of it.

So I put on some Peter Murphy and I’m sorting out those thoughts. 

Last night I caught myself doing that thing I do where I take my feelings and try to drown them in the bathtub, choke them down and sit on them, pretend they don’t exist until I’ve had a good night’s sleep, whatever I can do to stop being this monster-thing that feels and wants too much.

I don’t think that’s an uncommon feeling, especially among women. We have a deeply fraught relationship with wanting—as Lynn points out in her piece, vampire stories took off among women in the 19th century, amid massive repression, and when every sexual encounter meant possible pregnancy and every pregnancy meant possible death, which Twilight: Breaking Dawn illustrates perfectly (maybe intentionally, maybe not?). 

In this week of our so-called progressive president deciding that us ladies don’t get to make decisions with our own bodies and minds (especially if we’re teenagers!) I have to return to my argument with so many about the Twilight books: I trust women and girls and folks who might not identify as women but might get pregnant anyway. I trust them to read trashy fiction and not mistake it for real life, and I trust them to be able to take a morning-after pill. Even if the rest of the world doesn’t.

The battle over Plan B shows how far we have come and how far we haven’t at the same time. So does my struggle with admitting my feelings. I’m 31, in my apartment in Brooklyn where my only roommate is a spoiled dog, where I pay all the bills and can choose whether to bring a boy home to fuck or not. Yet I still feel, weirdly, like I need permission to have those feelings, and I still socially need permission to get many types of birth control. 

I don’t think the two are unrelated.

And Lynn, with her discussion of Melancholia, points out the emptiness of the desires we are allowed to have within late capitalism—you can want things but not people, not love. You can want a career and a marriage but what if those things don’t fulfill you?

Is wanting death the only thing left?

I was a teenage goth girl (oh, how many times have I used that line), externalizing my depression in black clothes and layers of eyeliner and writing some really bad poetry and obsessing over Anne Rice vampire books and The Crow (the comic and the movie) and the Sandman comics.

And the music, this spooky spooky music made by deepvoiced men that bashed and crashed weird instruments or noninstruments and I found this deeply expressive and right. 

I theatrically lost my virginity in a dorm room my freshman year in college to a sweet skinny spooky boy with dyed-black hair that he later let me bleach back to its natural blonde, he had double-piercings in some of the usual places (tongue, nipples) and I never told him it was my first time but I did put on a white slipdress because I had a flair for the dramatic in those days (who’m I kidding, those days aren’t over). We put on Skinny Puppy which is no kind of sex music but does make for a good joke to tell current boys in my life to gauge their reaction. 

I joke that I had kinky sex before I had vanilla sex—we played with handcuffs and giving orders and I made him kiss my boots and ask for permission. I had to be in control as I stage-managed our sex life. 

No giving in, there. 

I remember my college roommate thought I was terrifying and was freaked out when I went to a fetish party, laced into a corset (I was a virgin at the time). Kink and spookiness were layers you had to get through to get to me. Or maybe they were the way I knew how to balance sadness and fear while becoming an adult, learning how to have adult desires. 

I think Twilight works like that for young girls—it stage-manages safely all the terrifying reality of sex and sexuality and wanting, even if the ending is ferociously unsatisfying, the payoff not worth it. 

Now I’m an adult and I’m still wrestling with those desires, though, and I’ve learned that the scariest thing isn’t the sex and even the risk of pregnancy or disease (and oh, another time I’ll tell you about the terror of AIDS I had for so long around sex, OK? Promise).

The scariest thing, the real risk, is other people. The scariest thing, to some degree, is those desires that go way beyond sex. 

The movie that really hits that spot isn’t in Lynn’s piece but I was just talking with her about it and I haven’t really written about it at all in the week since I’ve seen it—Shame, in which the delicious Michael Fassbender does the impossible and turns multiple sex scenes into a spectacle of boredom and compulsion rather than eroticism. 

Most people have framed the film as one about “sex addiction” but I don’t think that at all. In fact, I turned to Andrea as we left the theater and said “Well I think it’s about capitalism.” 

Fassbender’s character is nearly completely incapable of any human relationship beyond a transactional fuck. Sometimes the sex literally comes after a transaction with sex workers, other times he’s picking up strangers in a bar. 

Which is contrasted with a date and then a trip to a hotel room with a beautiful coworker, after which (SPOILER) he cannot consummate the act. He can’t get an erection, and he promptly does that thing that I presume a lot of people who have semi-regular sex with men have experienced—he retreats. And this woman, who’s the only one in the film who’s expressed genuine interest in him as a person, the only one who has tried to connect with him on an emotional level even though he’s told her fairly frankly that he’s got massive baggage, she just leaves.

I told Andrea and Lynn (separately) that I just don’t buy that. Women especially are too used to soothing men and too aware of the hypervaluation of The Phallus and The Almighty Erection, and this woman in this film has shown her deep interest in him as a person as well as attraction to him. Would she really just leave?

(I’m projecting. Some. But we never really see what the women in this movie WANT. Common in film, I know, but still.)

Fassbender’s character is clearly not just terrified but incapable of crossing the lines between sex and emotion. And thus we wind up instead with the de-eroticized sex that he keeps having, sex as status symbol (taking a woman his boss wanted), sex as transaction, masturbation as tension relief. Sex as anything but connection.

We’re never quite told what the relationship is with his sister that we’re teased is the root of his problems (and hers, but once again her desires are never at the center). On one hand I want to know and on the other hand I think the not-knowing the specifics does in a way implicate all of us in his pathologies. 

I used the structures of kink to keep my first sexual encounters from being too scary, too real. The trappings of physical pain to keep out the feelings that were the things seriously terrifying me.

Later, the second time I fell in love, I had horrible nightmares and anxiety attacks about death. 

I realize that I’ve just rambled all my thoughts about sex and death and pain and love here, that I haven’t come to any conclusions, but that’s not what this blog is for anyway. It’s for me to maybe figure out some things. 

And what I’m really trying to figure out, what I will no doubt be trying to figure out til the end of my days, is what is so terrifying about certain desires that admitting them, that even fulfilling them, feels like death? Feels like obliteration? 

And they are so common, so common they’re cliche now, wanting, needing connection. Or maybe they’re created cliche by a culture that exists to sell us things. 

The things you can’t buy and can’t control are death to a fucked-up system, for sure. But it’s also deeper than that. It’s a physical thing, that fear, a visceral thing. It’s terrifying to try to get beyond the trappings you put on sex and the roles you force it into, to let go, truly naked, and face what’s coming, admit that you have no control and you could feel everything and you could feel nothing and you don’t know which is scarier. 

To admit that maybe what you want is that obliteration of self—that’s dangerous stuff. 

Wow. Keep writing, keep yearning. The world needs both right now, more than ever.

(via champagnecandy)