SHAME: Pain is beautiful

There is nothing “scandalous” in “Shame”. Nothing prude, no audiovisual Viagra of any kind.

As “Shame” talks about Thanatos, rather than about Eros.
It does not follow love, it does vow death.
And it shows just how much wish for death does exist in that obsession of love (and of sex, of flesh, of climax, of pleasure…)…., in the wishes and obsessions that dominate our society.

The title is to remind us the biblical meaning of sex - as shame, in the process of losing one’s innocence.
The one for which its progenitors – according to the catholic faith- will be kicked out of the Terrestrial Paradise.

Steve McQueen, the Director, has defined the film as an enquiry on the sex addiction.




Brandon – in his thirties, rich and gorgeous- is the prisoner of his own sexual compulsion. He is an elegant professional in a perfect physical shape.

Yet underneath this perfect picture he nests a compulsive and solitary sex addict. He lives for sex.
He is not a joyful Don Giovanni, though: stimulated by cheap porn that fills up his computer or by chance encounters, Brandon practices a sort of mortuary sex, consumed without joy.
For him, sex is an action to effectuate with maximum efficiency.





It is efficiency that has turned him into a very successful professional; efficiency is what turned his apartment into a very well oiled machine, where everything functions, where nothing is misplaced, and where his sexual behavior must also be extremely efficient.

During his sex acts his partners are just objects to be paid, as they execute well aimed orders.
Or then there is just someone who agrees for a quickie after dinner, in a dark corner of the city streets.
It is a behavior that comes from far…

Would it be from an exaggerated fear of confronting women? We do not know.
Brandon disappears at the bathroom masturbating even during working hours. Or he incessantly follows erotic chats (with the help of technique, masturbation has become even virtual).

Giving pleasure has become to him unbearable. He unleashes himself into exaggerated nocturnal trips, in order to tire up and avoid to think about it.
McQueen offers also an artful threesome sex scene where the effects of vagueness are preventing it from looking vulgar.

If we consider “Shame” to be a documentary, we have to recognize its high formal achievement and the very sharp choice of the main actor, a handsome and striking Fassbender in a state of grace, with a body that rules over the sex scenes.

But “Shame” is rather a sort of prison movie.
Just that here prison exists in Brandon’s head and it is filled with sex, naked bodies, out of control impulses and ferociously chasen coituses.


The climax never offers him the requited pleasure, though. He lives those moments at the border of a terrible pain, a nameless and solitary suffering that plunges him nearer to Death than to Love.
A broken evolution that intertwines with the broken body and soul of his sister.

Her character, Sissy, played by Carey Mulligan, is a sort of singer with high sensibility, reinventing in a blues version “New York, New York” (in fact the only moment of authentic seduction in this film).
How could she be so blind as to look for help near a person so bluntly insensitive?
And especially how could she be as deluded by her unfortunate choice as to cut her veins?
The vivid red of her blood shines a light of death over the imperial grey of the film…


The very dangerous border between fraternal behavior and the shadows of incest is never really explained, but repeatedly whispered...
It is violently suggested, though, here and then, as the tip of an iceberg, by several looks, or gestures, or through the framing of the two, often filmed from behind, or by very intense fragments of dialogue such as: “..We aren’t really bad, we just come from a very uggly place”...

The void of significants makes us believe it is all about the tragedy of the relationships between men and women. Would then the sexphobia of the Bible be triumphing after two thousand years?...

And what about the other women? Young women who excite him in the subway; sex workers that come home during the short lapses of time between two masturbations…

The only woman that is really drown to him, moved by a genuine interest in his persona, a work colleague, will have to bear the lack of success of a bad sex and the shame of disappearing as fast as possible.
Ashamed by an aborted sex act that is instead appreciated by the spectator, given that Brandon had made an effort with her, to the point of caring for her too much as to get violent…

With a painfull, desperate and sublime New York as a background, McQueen directs a sort of pain that has the smell and the taste of sex, a realistic kind of sex that becomes narrative, meaningfull and able to tell the story of the encounter between Eros and Thanatos. The two forces of Life, that explode on the face of Fassbender, deformed by orgasm, at the border of life and death, of pain and pleasure.

Giulia DOBRE

February 2012/July 2012