Blood, Sperm, and Tears in Extreme Cinema : A phenomenological study in hegemonic masculinity through Gaspar Noé's Love from a psychoanalytical perspective

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BLOOD,

SPERM, AND

TEARS IN

EXTREME

CINEMA:

A phenomenological study in

hegemonic masculinity through

Gaspar Noé’s Love from a

psychoanalytic perspective

ZARA LUNA HJELM

Supervisor: Marietta Radomska Examinator: Katherine Harrison

Gender Studies, LiU Master’s Programme:

Gender Studies – Intersectionality and Change

Master’s thesis, 15 ECTS credits

ISRN: LIU-TEMA G/GSIC1-A—20/019-SE

LINKÖPINGS UNIVERSITET SE-581 83 LINKÖPING, SWEDEN 013-28 10 00, www.liu.se

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ABSTRACT

This thesis will analyze how masculinity is depicted in the French-Argentinean director Gaspar Noé’s movie Love (2015), and how it is orientating and disorientating through an intersectional lens. In his films, the filmmaker often uses haptic images and sound traversing to interrogate the existence and to express a clear and abject visuality to expose the flesh. On that notion, the study will use a psychanalytic theoretical framework with hegemonic

masculinity, and a phenomenological methodology with Bertolt Brecht’s theories on theatre to examine the bodily performances of the cinematic body, the bodies of the characters on screen, and the spectator’s body to reflect on the film’s thematic, aesthetic, and ideological features. Additionally, this study will explore how the viewer embodies the self-images and memories of the characters on the screen, and how that affects the spectator.

Keywords: Love, Gaspar Noé, psychoanalysis, Brecht, homunculus, film analysis, gender,

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1. INTRODUCTION

Often films are dismissed as fantasies, or pure escapism, but could they actually just be a reflection of our own presence? And is there any possibility that they could change our societal norms, and essentially, how we perceive the world? In this thesis, I am going to explore different dynamics of the movie Love by the French-Argentinian director Gaspar Noé, to reflect on the tension between the cinematic, artificial body, and the bodies on the screen and off the screen to in order to further inspect our concept of masculinity and how it is represented in society. The intention is to analyze the film as a specimen of how films may or may not change our perception of things and teach us, as spectators, something, or if we are simply looking for an alternative dream-world to discharge our challenging realities.

AIM AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze how masculinity is depicted in the movie Love (2015) by Gaspar Noé and how it may change our perspective. Thus, I want to reflect on how

masculine norms are created and recreated through the thematic, aesthetic, and ideological elements in his work, and to discuss the tension and shared consciousness between the cinematic body, the bodies on the screen and the spectator’s body, by drawing from psychoanalysis.

⬧ What role do sex and violence have in the representation of masculine identity in Gaspar Noé’s Love?

⬧ How can an intersectional perspective shed light on how masculinity is performed in Love?

⬧ Can the film be a medium for change in our societal viewpoint on masculinity? If so, how?

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BACKGROUND

Gaspar Noé

Gaspar Noé was born on the 27th of December 1963 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is the son of the Argentinian painter and intellectual Luis Felipe Noé (who is known for his artform Otra Figuracíon1) and Nora Murphy, and the younger brother of Paula Murphy Noé. When Gaspar was four months old, the family left Argentina to avoid the tense political situation. First, they moved to New York, but four years later they moved back to Argentina, and then in 1976, they emigrated to France (Tess, 2015). In Noé’s early teens, he studied philosophy in Paris. At the age of seventeen, he attended Louis Lumiere High School to study cinema, where he graduated at nineteen. Afterward, he started working at the Faculty of Philosophy in Tolbiac. In 1985, he worked as an assistant to the Argentinian director Fernando Solanas for Solanas movie El exilio de Gardel. Shortly after that, Noé directed his first short film Tintarella di

Luna, which his father starred in. At the set of the film, his soon-to-be wife and editor, the

French-born Bosnian-Moroccan director Lucile Hadžihalilović came to visit. Two years later he was the camera operator for Hadžihalilović’s first short film La premiére mort de Nono. The couple started the company Les Cinémas de la Zone in 1991, which is still active today.

In 1991, he also started to shoot his first medium-long movie, Carne, with the French actor Philippe Nahon as the leading character. Later, in 1998, he a short safe-sex promo, Sodomites, (on the behalf of the French ministry of health) and his first featured film, the arthouse drama

Seul contre tous. In addition to the Seul contre tous’s provocative narrative, Noé established

his own style as a filmmaker. For example, the script of the film mostly consisted of the Butcher’s inner monologue spoken in voice-over, and he frequently used ‘play-cards’ to display a variety of messages. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival 1999, caused a scandal because of its ideological haziness. In 2002, he made his second featured film, the psychological thriller-drama Irreversible. Similar to his first film, it also caused a scandal at the Cannes film festival, which mainly was because of its extreme violence and the

disturbingly ten minutes long rape-scene(Polozine, u.d.).

Throughout his previous framework of the safe-sex theme, he shot two advertisements against AIDS/HIV for a public awareness campaign in 2004. Furthermore, he went to Ouagadougou, in Burkina Faso, for ten days to shoot his segment SIDA (AIDS) for the documentary 8, which followed the life of Burkainbé who had been diagnosed with HIV. The short film was a part of a movie against HIV/AIDS, which filmed in different parts of the

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world and half of the profits went to the U.N. The same year he made the pornographic short film We Fuck Alone for the project Destricted, which was a project of films that explored the intersection of art and pornography. Soon after, more than ten years after its announcement and two years of filming, the experimental drama arthouse film Enter the Void premiered in Cannes 2009. The critical response for the film was mostly positive because of its visual achievements, but it was, however, a financial failure (Mignard, 2011).

Additionally, he did a few short movies, and shot a segment, Ritual, in Cuba for the omnibus directed movie Siete días en La Habana, before announcing his next featured film; “a sexual melodrama about a boy and a girl and another girl” (Gaspar Noé in Polozine, u.d.), which were to be named Love. The film was shot entirely in Paris, on a seven pages long screenplay. As for preparation, the director asked the American actor Karl Glusman who was cast as Murphy to watch films like Don’t Look Now (1973) by Nicolas Roeg and Ai no korîda (1976) by Nagisa Ôshima (Setoodeh, 2015). Later, Glusman was joined by the Swiss model Aomi Muyock as Electra and the Danish model Klara Kristin as Omi, who both did their acting debut after meeting Noé on a cocktail party in Paris. Overall, the film was 135 minutes long and often became categorized as an erotic drama art house film because of its, in total, 12 minutes unsimulated sex scenes in 3D. The responses were mixed, but mainly negative, with a 38% rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes, 6,1/10 on IMDb, and 5.8 ratings on Metascore.

In 2018, Noé directed the psychological horror-movie Climax, depicting a French dance troupe’s after-party after a rehearsal. As the dancers are partying, they realize that someone has spiked the bowl of sangria with LSD, whereas they slowly lose their minds. The film was shot in fifteen days in an abandoned school in Paris and was mostly created on improvisation. It won the Art Cinema Award 2018 at its premiere in the Cannes film festival and further received mostly positive reviews for its visual distinctiveness and technical brilliantness. His latest work is a medium-length French metafictional drama film called Lux Æterna, starring the French actresses and models Beatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg, which screened at a Cannes in 2019. The movie is not yet released but has gotten mixed or average reviews on Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes.

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New French Extremity

A term often associated with Gaspar Noé is New French Extremity, which was coined by the

Artforum critic James Quandt. In his essay, Flesh, and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema (2004), Quandt identified the genre as:

Images and subjects once the province of splatter films, exploitation flicks, and porn gang rapes, bashings, and slashings and blindings, hand-ons and vulvas, cannibalism, sadomasochism and incest, fucking and fisting, sluices of cum and gore – proliferate in the high-art environs of national cinema whose provocations have historically been formal, political or philosophical (Godard, Clouxot, Debord) or, at their most immoderate (Franju, Buñuel, Walerian Borowczyk, Andrzej Zulawski), at least assimilable as emanations of an artistic movement (Surrealism mostly) (Quandt, 2011).

French directors, among Gaspar Noé, that Quandt associated with New French Extremity was, inter alia, Claire Denis, François Ozon, Catherine Breillat, and Bruno Dumont, as a collection of transgressive filmmakers during the 2000s-2010s. Spreading across Europe, the expanded term was to be called The New Extremism, which included filmmakers such as the Danish director Lars von Trier and the Austrian director Michael Haneke.

Stylistically and thematically, the genera combined European art-house and horror-film with its roots from American exploitation cinema and body horror, delivered from the early Gothic literature. It also carries the echoes of French traditions of artistic and social dissent from movements such as the Enlightenment, the Revolution, Romanticism, and Surrealism. The director and film critic Jonathan Romney further in his article Le sex and Violence (2004) traced its influences back to the late 1800s and beginning of 1900s art and literature with, for example, the French philosopher Marquis de Sade, with his controversial erotic novel The 120

Days of Sodom (1904) and the French dramatist Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty2_.

Additionally, he also linked the genera to the French artist Gustave Courbet (highlighting his 1866s painting L’origine du monde) along with writers such as the Uruguayan poet Isidore Ducasse (aka Comte de Lauréamont), the French author Georges Bataille and the American author William Burroughs. Nevertheless, the genera are highly innovative in creating different modes of hyper-kineticists, austere detachment, and/or enigmatic experimentalism, e.g.

distorting tactics such as heat photography and long silences (Romney, 2004). Below the

2_{Encyclopedia Britannica describes the term as “a primitive ceremonial experience intended to liberate the}

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disturbing imagery of Extreme Cinema, it seeks to illustrate an unfiltered concept of human suffering, corporeally and socially, and the I in crisis, with the tensions of home invasion and the fear of the Other (Smith, 2011).

PREVIOUS RESEARCH/LITERATURE REVIEW

Initially, I found an article written about the aesthetics of Noé called The place of the

ominous: A reading to the esthetic bet of Gaspar Noé, towards a proposal of teaching in the Psychology3 by psychologist Francisco Acuña Sabori. The article proposed an analogy

between Noé’s featured films and fundamental attributes to create a pedagogy that includes the ominous as a prevailing element in the aesthetics. In order to accomplish that, Sabori applied the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s concept of film as a trauma, shocking depravity of our everyday lives, which integrates into our symbolic universe of ideology. Sabori concluded that the ominous in Noe’s films recreate shock, as a gateway to our perception and libidinal change into our bodies and our desires (Saborio, 2017).

Not a lot seems to have been written about Gaspar Noé, but in this section I want to map out the important text I can find, and expose the theories that have been created through his movies so far, to see what I can add to it.

To research what had been written about Noé’s early work, I read the Brazilian film analyst Mario Sergio Righetti’s M.A. thesis Expose The Body to Reveal The Flesh: From The

Sensation to The Thought in Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible4 (2017) where he examined the

so-called ‘cinematic body’ in Noe’s Irreversiblé (2002). The thesis examined the relationship and tension in the sensory and affective between the body of the screen, the cinematic body, and the spectator’s body, using inter alia the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the French psychoanalyst Felix Guattari’s transversal analysis based on Georges Bataille’s theory of spectatoriality5 and the American philosopher and feminist film theorist Laura Marks’ phenomenology on the haptic and optic visuality. The thesis also studied Noe’s Carne (1991) and Seul Contre Tous (1998) to compare it to Irreversiblé. Both Carne and Seul contre tous, Righetti argues, distinctively uses juxtaposing images of human body parts with meat- and

3_{Original title: El lugar de lo ominoso: Una lectura a la apuesta estética de Gaspar Noé, hacia una propuesta}

de enseñanza en la Psicología.

4_{Original title: EXPOR O CORPO PARA REVELAR A CARNE: Das sensações ao pensamento em Irreversível,}

de Gaspar Noé.

5_{The intimate contact between the spectator and the film as they relate to the degradation of the character in the}

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animal parts, as haptic images, to create a ‘primitive’ sensation for the viewer on an

unconscious level (Righetti, 2017, p. 78). Similarly, in Irreversiblé, bodies experiencing sex and/or violence were juxtaposed to permeate to limits between pleasure and pain, in order to narrate the feelings of disorientation and violence the characters experience, but also make the viewers feel the flesh itself as their own (Righetti, 2017, p. 132). The study mobilized a large theoretical apparatus by triangulating Noé’s early work, in which the relation between them repeats thematic and aesthetic elements: the omnipresent of one character (the butcher), the extreme violence centered around the limbic system and the director's intention to reveal the interiority, the subjectivity, of the protagonists (Righetti, 2017, p. 209).

Further, in British film theorist Jeeshan Gazi’s article Blinking and Thinking: The

Embodied Perceptions of Presence and Remembrance in Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void

(2017), the employment of the blinking eyes as a tool was studied, which Gazi argued allowed the filmmaker to “make cuts between takes whilst retaining the implied duration of the natural perception depicted” (Gazi, 2017, p. 3). Gazi used David Bordwell’s theory of the

significance of blinking in cinema, in which he points out the eyes often function as parts of the face, which creates, what American psychologist6 Paul Ekman called, a ‘facial action’ system. In using this concept, the author argued how mimetic the depiction of the movie of the first-person point of view is, and the blinks thus imply the existence of eyelids and hence also a face and so on. Gazi maintained that “the camera does not simply represent a character, but becomes in itself the character”, and thus, created a feeling of irony and uncanniness whilst shifting the camera into an “impossibly subjectivity” when the viewer watched from a third-person perspective as the main character, reminisce a memory in a non-linear mode of storytelling. Moreover, Gazi examined American psychologist David J. Bryant’s

conceptualization of space in human memory as “the self in an array of objects”, which meant “one person (the subject) looking at another person who was surrounded by objects to their six body sides” in which the subject mentally occupies the position of remembrance of his child self as the subjective camera becomes the character to create the turbulent emotional state, and thus, recreate the trauma of the main character (Gazi, 2017, p. 14).

A similar study regarding the aesthetic in Enter the Void was discussed in the literature and film studies scholar Adina Sorian’s article Mediale Selbstreflexion und des Laansche Reale in

Gaspar Noé’s ENTER THE VOID (2018). The article applied the French psychoanalyst

Jacques Lacan’s theory of “the Real”, “the Imaginary” and “the Symbolic” as three of the

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structural determinations of the physics. Sorian also focused on two modes of formalist representation, as cinematic implementations of the Real, which is referred to as the Real gaze7 and the auditory dimension which is referred to as acousmatic music8. Visually, the Real gaze served to visualize the ontology of seeing and the relationship between the viewer and the visual object. Sorian argued that to bring a sense of self-reflection, the film used the so-called afterimage9 effect and the stroboscopic effect10 to create a physiological-cognitive basis of coherent visions whilst the visions themselves are inaccessible. Similarly, the author claimed, the acousmatic were also self-reflective, because it had the function of hearing the ontology and associate the relationship between the recipient and the auditory object,

examining the physiological and cognitive foundation of an audiovisual film (Sorian, 2018). In contrast to the previous studies mentioned, the M.A. thesis Gaspar Noé’s Enter the

Void: Raumaufsichten und wegweisende Perspektiven in Subkulturen by Amelio August

Nicotera focused more on the narrative of the film. The thesis highlighted the movie’s depiction of hallucination, reincarnation, relationships between siblings, obsessions, rituals, traumas, transcendence, birth, death, and intoxication withing the narrative, approaching it from three interpretations. Firstly, Nicotera interpreted the movie as a visualization of the Tibetan The Book of the Dead. Secondly, the author interpreted it as it was told, in a linear manner, where there is no clear line between reality (i.e. the protagonist’s flashbacks, and his imagination). Here, Nicotera argued that the main character was having a trip throughout the whole film, and survives, instead of dying, which the first scenes in the film suggested. The last interpretation indicated that the whole film dissolved as fragments and that the narrative constantly changed and was therefore not reliable (Nicotera, 2013, p. 79). All in all, it offered interesting perspectives on the film and abstract storytelling as such.

Because Love did not receive outstandingly good critique, I was not surprised that I only found reviews on it. The most interesting review was Sexe, arte et dépression, by

Jean-Philippe Gravel. In the review, the author essentially compared the movie to other films about sex but claimed that Noé’s film was about love and depression. Gravel argued that the

melancholic became a paradox in the film with it is with its explicit sexual content because it is two taboo subjects. He also compares Love to porn and contended that Noé brought out the element of pornography that searched to provoke the affect of regret in symbiosis with erotic

7_{Here: “Realen Blick”}

8_{Here: “Akusmatischen Musik”}

9_{An image that appears in our sight after the period of exposure to the original image.}

10_{An optical phenomenon causing a cyclically moving object to appear slow-moving, or stationary when viewed}

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syndromes. In contrast to pornography, which is a deeply conservative genre where nothing is permitted, the reminiscence of the sexual acts in Love is uncoordinated and “natural”, and the audience does not know what will happen next. He wrote that: “On the screen, the bodies in ecstasy and trances are visible, but the story unfolds limbs as phantom limbs, sensuousness pleasures as memories, and sensuality and desires as memories of desires that time is about to take away”11_{(Gravel, 2016, p. 45).}

Lastly, I was looking for studies regarding Climax, whereas I found Paolo Pérez López’s article Francia en una secuencia: acerca de Climax, de Gaspar Noé. Here, the author used the Decuoage and Cluster-models by the French film analyst Raymond Bellour and the American film analyst Constance Penley to analyze a dance sequence in the movie as a representation of France to see how youths are represented in the main sequence, and what relation it has to the main culture portrayed based on Bloom’s taxonomy12_{. Accordingly,}

López presented a chart of the twenty-two characters and their gender and race; whereas there were nine men, two white and seven black men, and thirteen women, eight of the women were white and five of them were black, thus, half of the dancers was Afro-European. Lopéz also categorized people in queer, not queer, and both, mainly by studying their dance style with the history of the dance styles. He also drew parallels to the VHS’s and books which were presented at the beginning of the film, as a denotative and connotative form of

communication, using Roland Barthes's theory of the rhetoric of the image. Finally, he came to six conclusions: (1) freestyle was the predominant style of dancing, (2) physical contact mostly occurred when the characters were dancing in mixed groups, (3) when the characters were dancing in a group they were more provocative and intimate, (4) there was no group with only queer men, (5) only queer men and women danced sexy, (6) non-queer men had physical contact with mixed groups in mixed groups, (7) the main character, Selva (Sofia Botticelli), represented equality, (8) the black community represented fraternity, (9) the character Psyche (Thea Carla Schott) represented freedom, (10) Psyche, Selva and the black community together represented the French motto “liberté, égalité, fraternité” and the Tricolore, which was in the background of the sequence. By analyzing this one segment, Lopéz manages to highlight the political elements of the film and put it in a context in which it might not have been meant for at the beginning, but is essential for the symbiosis of arts

11_{Original quote : « À l’écran, les transports des corps sont visibles, mais le récit souligne que les membres sont}

des membres fantômes, que les voluptés sont des souvenirs de voluptés et les désirs, des souvenirs de désirs que le temps s’apprête à emporter. »

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survival (Pérez López, 2019). Even if López's study highlights intersectional identities, there has not been a particular study of masculinity in Noé’s films.

SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS

Initially, I will present the methods and theoretical framework I am going to apply in my analysis. Next, I am shortly going to introduce the movie Love, which I will study. Then, I am going to analyze the spectator’s body by using a mix of theories about the gaze, which I will present in the next chapter. Here, I will also present a detailed outline of the film to guide the reader in further segments of my analysis. After that, I will shift my focus to the bodies of the characters on the screen, mainly Murphy’s way of orientating and disorientating himself to the societal norms of (hegemonic) masculinity and by being looked at, using phenomenology and masculinity theories. In the next segment, I will talk about the film as a play, using Brechtian theories, to further evaluate its influences and deeper meaning in, especially, shaping different forms of masculinity. Lastly, I conclude and discuss my results.

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2. METHODS AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

In this chapter, I will present the methods and theoretical framework in which I will apply to my analyses. Initially, I will present Bertolt Brecht’s theories and practices of Epic theatre, which I will use to analyze the techniques used in the film. Further, I am going to present the methodology I will use, phenomenology, which I will combine with different aspects of the theory of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity. Lastly, I will introduce psychoanalytic theories applied to film, specifying the gaze and the spectator.13

Because Noé’s work is inspired filmmakers who have been inspired by the German theatre practitioner and playwriter Bertolt Brecht’s theater techniques (e.g. the French director Jean-Luc Godard) (Ross, 2016), I will analyze Love with a Brechtian theoretical approach. A key understanding of his theories suggested that a theater should not cause the spectator to emotionally identify with the characters or action but provoke a rational self-reflection. According to him “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it”. One of his most famous principles was the Verfremdungseffekt14 which he described as "stripping the event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about them” (Brecht quoted in Brooker, 1994, p. 191). In his notion, drama should be pedagogic, not simply entertaining, but as an arena for human interaction and communication to make the spectator think and make a stand. The technique of the alienation effect involved ‘breaking the fourth wall’ (i.e. the wall between the audience and the actors) to involve the audience in the play whilst at the same time let them know that what they are seeing is fiction in which he, for instance, used play cards and/or tableaux. Within the narrative, the actors often reminded the viewer that they were watching a story by telling them what was going to happen before it happened, or/and the actors broke in

character, consequently, the audience would not get as emotionally involved (Steer, 1968). Epic theatre aims to (1) stage an accurate representation of human beings, (2) to reveal the social factors that influence human action, behavior and thought, (3) to portray the world (i.e. the stage) as changeable, and (4) to criticize human behavior, actor and thought as ‘natural’, and to articulate the Marxist contradictions15 properly. The method for doing so is to use firstly, as mention, to make the familiar unfamiliar. For example, the Brechtian theatre should

13_{Starting with Brecht and finalizing with psychoanalysis is the reverse order in which I will analyze, but I want}

to present them in this order because here, the subjects touch upon each other.

14_{Also called the alienation effect or the v-effect.}

15_{In the German philosopher, economist a socialist revolutionary Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism,}

contradiction is the concept of an opposition of social forces, stemming from class conflict, economic crisis and eventually, revolution.

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use figures, not characters, meaning that the behavior of the people on stage was not fixed, but fluid, constantly reminding the viewer that it was fiction. Another method used in Epic theatre was gestus, which was to make the actors imply their physical gestures and attitude in their speech (i.e. to reveal not only their feelings without having to spell them out but their age, class, and other contexts). Similarly, a play should evaluate its performed material, that is, that the director, actors, and the set-designer are conscious of the different points in history which produce different values, behaviors, and opinions to contrast different behaviors between the past and the presence. This was what Brecht called grund-gestus, or historization. The structure of the Brechtian method began with the construction of the fable16, which leads to

arrangements17, and then the actors developed a fundamental gestus for their figures,

followed by inductive rehearsal18, which leads to a diverse range of haltung19 (Barnett, 2014).

Other techniques used in Brechtian theatre is one actor having multiple roles, or split roles (i.e. two actors sharing the same character), using a minimalistic number of actors, as well as the set and the props. Regarding songs and dancing, Epic theater often explored the contrast to steer away from reality (e.g. a dark scene with up-tempo music). Lastly, humor20_{was an}

important element in epic theatre, and to make people laugh in order to break the fourth wall and make the audience more participant.

As a method, I will use film phenomenology, drawing from Laura Marks and British-American scholar Sara Ahmed, and their Merleau-Pontian roots. In 1964, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that phenomenology is “an attempt to make us

see the bond between subject and the world, between subject and others, rather than to explain

it as the classical philosophies did by resorting to the absolute spirit” and that “the movies are peculiarly suited to make manifest the union of mind and body, mind and world, and the expression of one in another” (Merleau-Ponty quoted in Ferencz-Flatz & Hanich, 2016, p. 4). On this notion, the American media theorist Vivian Sobchack argued that film is “a

philosophical exemplar of ‘intentionality’ making manifest the directed and irreducible correlation of subject consciousness (evidenced by the camera’s projected and visible

choice-16_{A three-layered analysis of the plot of the play; firstly, the event portrayed in the story and the social}

interactions between the characters, the causality of their behavior and the historical materialism. Secondly, the plot from a formal and semiotic perspective, and lastly, the embodiment and the attitudes that the play appears to embody and articulate.

17_{The symbolic placement of actors on stage, to clearly show the relationships between the figures to the}

audience. Thus, the actors proceed from a social not a psychological starting point.

18_{Revealing to the audience what is going to happen, so they are not developing emotional relations to the}

figures.

19_{The German word for attitude or posture, to be seen in combinations with Gestus.} 20_{Referred to by Brecht as “Spass”, i.e. the German word for “fun” or “joke”.}

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making movements of attention) and its objects (whether ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’)” (Ferencz-Flatz & Hanich, 2016, p. 5). Hence, cinema acts as a reflection of the world, which manifests in certain characteristics of the human experience. Furthermore, Marks created the notion of the feminine phenomenological experience, drawing from ideas by the formalist art historian Alois Rigel, by distinguishing between the optical and haptic vision. Marks claimed that the optical visuality is the spectator’s distant overviewing position, which can objectively distinct and isolated can be understood as seeing objects and “control” the picture. Haptic visuality, on the other hand, was located at the other end of the polar continuum and were “more inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze than gaze” (Ferencz-Flatz & Hanich, 2016, p. 34). Moreover, as Merleau-Ponty noted, it is the spatial forms and distances that are not interactions between pointed objective spaces, but between the points and our bodies. On this notion, Ahmed claimed that the body provides perspective. She argued that the body is a starting point in which we orientate ourselves and inhabit space, and further apprehend the world; “In order to become orientated, you might suppose that we must first experience disorientation” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 5). When we are orientated, we might not even notice that we are orientated: we might not even think “to think” about this point. Moreover, she reasoned that sexual orientation is a different way of being orientated and facing the world, whereas queer ways mobilize the body’s relationship to space. The emotions that we encounter moves us toward and away from objects and others entailing ‘affective forms of (re)orientation’. Queer bodies are facing the ‘wrong’ direction and pay attention to the

‘inappropriate’ other and ‘deviant’ objects. In cinema, queer sensibility can express tactility a contact with itself repeatedly within a heteronormative culture, which therefore articulate queer tendencies and thus, bend the norms(Ahmed, 2006, p. 5). Moreover, to think of the intersection of gender we should think in terms of: “(1) what people (and their bodies) are; (2) what people do; (3) what relationships and inequalities they make; (4) what meanings all these are given; (5) what social effect and ideas interrelated with other ways of identifying and categorizing people, for example in racialized relationships and categories of analysis” (Holland & Ramazanoglu, 2002, p. 5).

To position the figures on the screen, I will observe how the issue of power relations connected to class, ability, ethnicity, sexuality, age, gender, and gender performance

correlates, to critically reflect past monotoned groups (Hankivsky, 2014, p. 2). Here, I am will draw from the Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell’s and American sociologist James Messerschmidt’s theory of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity, to analyze how masculine traits, in correlation to sexuality and socioeconomic status, legitimizes and

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justifies men to maintain power within social institutions (i.e. state, education, and even in the family). The concept is rooted in Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s term

‘hegemony’, which was used to understand the stabilization of class relation, and Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. Connell and Messerschmidt also noted that an important feature of hegemonic masculinity is toxicity, which “constructs masculine power from the direct experience of women rather than from the structural basis of women’s subordination” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Here, the authors drew from the

Norwegian social psychologist Harriet Holter’s differentiation between patriarchy, “as the long-term structure of the subordination of women”, and gender, “as a specific system exchange that arose in the context of modern capitalism”. They stressed that it is an error to deduce relations of masculinity hierarchies from the direct exercise of personal power of men over women, and suggests that we must also see to the factors of the institutionalized gender equalities, the role of cultural constitutions, and the interplay of gender dynamics regarding race, class, and religion (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 839). Furthermore, Connell claimed that more powerful men will achieve their masculinity in different ways and context from less powerful males (e.g. businessmen who express their power through control in the workplace), and less successful men who express power through violence at home.

Messerschmidt then argued that white working-class men are less likely to be successful in education, thus, their masculinity is constructed around anti-social behavior. He further suggested that working-class men with less opportunity of achieving academic success, seek to assert their masculinity in e.g. organized criminal activities and that middle-class men, who have the means to accomplish hegemonic masculinity, often use other crimes to express masculinity, such as white-collar crime (i.e. nonviolent crimes committed for financial gain) (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 833).

From a psychoanalytic perspective, Freud initially argued that masculinity and femininity were the opposite of each other preceded by other pairs of opposites, such as phallic and castrated, or active and passive. Thus, femininity was something that appeared after puberty, and that femininity is equated with being deprived of the phallus. In his studies, he examined the interactions between parent and child, which further encouraged the research regarding the early development of femininity and masculinity. The American clinical psychologist Michael J. Diamond claims that today’s more complex gender identity paradigm untangles gender from sex and sexuality, and therefore masculine identity must distinguish from the biological sex, gender identity, and sexual gender preference. Traditionally, boys and men with fragile self-images are, within the clinical sphere, rationalized by having ‘too much’ or ‘too little’

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masculinity. If they have too little masculinity they are seen as passive and non-‘phallic’ people under the influence of the Oedipus-complex, and if they’re too masculine they defensively counter identified from their mother, evidently heighten the concept of phallic narcissism. Hence, according to Diamond, masculinity is originally forged from the infant’s earlier desires, to be his mother and his father. Diamond further suggested that this happens several times throughout life and that by modifying the relation between the phallic and the genitals of the masculine, many men will be able to achieve a new form of masculinity, by constantly identifying and disidentifying (Diamond, 2006).

On the notion of the phallic, I will rather see it as a womb, which was suggested by the Israeli-born French artist and philosopher Bracha L. Ettinger in her book The Matrixial Gaze (1985). She developed the Matrixial Theory of Trans-subjectivity which stemmed from, not only the Freudian, but also the Lacanian concept of the phallic gaze, but contrast to them, Ettinger suggests that it has the shape of a uterus, which shifts the theory’s concepts of ‘desire’ and ‘unconscious’. Thus, the transgressive encounter between I and non-I, she argued, is grounded in the womb, and enlarges the subjectivity. In her notion, the womb and the pre-natal phase are references to the Real, which the Imaginary Matrix corresponds to. Ettinger described it as “[…] a conaissance – a transformational knowledge of being born together with the other whereby each individual becomes sub-subject in subjectivity that surpasses her personal limit, and whereby an Other might become for me not only a sign of my archaic m/Other but also an occasion for transformation”(Ettinger, 2006, p. 222). In the following sense, she established a feminine gaze by also offering a female subjective position, rather than an object, whilst also deconstruct the structure of the subject itself. Regarding the gaze, I will also draw from the French film theorist Christian Metz, who is best known for applying the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics into film, and the British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, who interrogated the male gaze on the female body on screen. First, with a structuralist approach, Metz tried to create a theoretical and

methodological grasp of the symbolic in cinema21. In his psychoanalytical phase during the late 1970s, he created the concept of the ‘imaginary signifier’ and the distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ identification by applying Saussure’s semiology with concepts from Lacan’s mirror stage into film theory (Metz, 1975). In his essay, The Imaginary Signifier (1975) he suggested that cinema is a mirror, which has the ability to depict an imperfect reflection of the real and at the same time dig into one’s unconsciousness. Thus, the spectator

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initially identifies with the camera as Omni-seeing (primary identification) and the narrator-eye becomes a surrogate-narrator-eye; “I am what I see, and the narrator-eye, becomes the I”. Secondary, he argued, that the spectator identifies with the fictive characters on the screen (secondary identification), which he insinuated happens by other characters looking at one another, and therefore, bringing us closer. As the invisible character, the spectator sees through the

characters on screen, and they see themselves not seeing them (Metz, 1975). Additionally, in Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), she developed a theory on how women were used as objects for masculine desire in film. Mulvey mainly adapted Freud’s concepts of scopophilia as one of three drives in sexuality that exists external from the erogenous zones, in which Freud often utilized his theory of children’s voyeuristic activities and desires to acknowledge the forbidden as an important stage of creating an identity. In adopting Freud’s theory, Mulvey reasoned that the viewer is fixed in perversion, and their only satisfaction lies in watching another objectified person. She argued that film seeks to satisfy a primitive desire for voyeurism and thus, develop the narcissistic aspects of

scopophilia that feeds on the curiosity to identify the self with a human face, a human body and a relation between the human spectacle and its surroundings, as a “long love affair or despair between the image and the self-image” (Mulvey, 1975, p. 840). Through cinema, she also claimed that the female spectator did not only identify with the female passivity, which often is portrayed but argued that they also adopted the masculine identity. Here, she created the notion of a ‘trans-identity’ by highlighting that “the pre-oedipal and phallic fantasy of omnipotence that for girls is equally active for boys”. From a Freudian point of view, to gain ‘proper’ femininity, women must participate in the active aspects of their femininity, in which Mulvey hypothesized that the female viewers convey the masculinization of the spectator’s position because it signifies a pleasurable aspect of their sexuality, thus, she claims that the female audiences remain “restless in [her] transvestite clothes”(Mulvey, 1990).

DELIMITATIONS

Mainly the perspective on masculinity will center around white Western culture, which I think is important to address since the gender norms in various parts of the world are different. I also want to acknowledge that intersectionality originally was created to point out modes of oppression (e.g. how Black women are oppressed by both sexism and racism), but in this thesis, I will use it to study the portrayal of overlapping privileges and how this reflects on society. There is also a lot of technical aspects in making a movie (e.g. how it has been filmed

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and edited), but I will not go into that, nor the production of the movie in itself. Lastly, I want to mention that the film carries a lot of elements from both the filmmaker Gaspar Noé and the

New French Extremity, though I will not make any deeper connection between the auteur or

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3. FILM ANALYSIS: THREE LAYERS OF LOVE

In this chapter, I will analyze three layers of the movie Love. Initially, I am going to examine the spectator’s role and the gaze in watching the movie by mainly using psychoanalytical theories. Here, I will also provide a detailed description of the movie, which will make it easier to follow in the upcoming analyzes. Secondly, I will examine the orientation of gender in the film with phenomenology, and the concepts are drawn from hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity. Lastly, I will examine the film as an Epic play with Brechtian

theories, and as a stadium for human interaction and communication to make the spectator think and make a stand. With these three different modes of analysis, I want to create various aspects of watching the film and tie it into one to create and recreate meaning to it in a similar way described by Richard Altman:

Every screen moment is caught up in a multidimensional loom, in which several elements – foreground and background, shot scale and lightning, mise en scéne and editing, dialogue, and music – are woven together into a multidimensionally reversible fabric. With each new juxtaposition, new connections are made, and concepts are reinforced or relegated to storage, potentially leading to that magic moment of conceptual reframing when the spectator-weaver presses on the pedal, raising some threads while lowering other and thus initiating a new series of juxtapositions and reframings (Altman, 1999, p. 136).

Shortly described, Love is about the American film student, Murphy (Karl Glusman), who lives in an apartment with his partner, Omi (Klara Kristin), and their child Gaspar. Set in the city of Paris, the non-linear narrative begins with Murphy getting a phone call from his ex-girlfriend Electra’s mother, which causes him to reminisce on his previous relationship with her and how he ended up with Omi. As it turns out, Electra’s (Aomi Muyock) and Murphy’s relationship were at the breaking point when they met Omi, who they had a no-strings-attached threesome with. Later, Murphy had sex with Omi behind Electra’s back, which culminated with a broken condom, and Omi got pregnant. Her pregnancy ended his passionate, and partly toxic, relationship with Electra, and made him start a traditional conjugal family life with Omi. As the memories of Electra is juxtaposed with the present, the spectator is invited to go deeper into Murphy’s nostalgic subconsciousness.

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THE SPECTATOR’S BODY: NARRATING THE GAZE

In this section, I will retell the story in detail with a psychoanalytic approach to creating an interactive dialogue with the figures on screen from the perspective of the spectator by using Metz’s and Mulvey’s psychoanalytic film theories of the gaze, which seeks to analyze the viewer’s identification with the camera, and the viewer’s identification with the (often male) protagonist and their relation to the female bodies onscreen. Additionally, I will also use Ettinger’s notion of The Matrixial Gaze. About Ettinger’s theory, art historian Griselda Pollock wrote that:

[The matrixial gaze]emerges by a simultaneous reversal of with-in and with-out (and does not represent the eternal inside), by a transgression of border links manifested in the contract with-in/out and artwork by transcendence of the subject-object interval which is not a fusion, since it based on a-priori shareability indifference (Pollock, 1996).

In this section, the technique will also be discussed with, for example, Gazi’s notion of blinking because it is an important element in Noé’s filmmaking and thus creating a form of transcendent consciousness.

Initially, in the first scene of the film, we are invited as spectators into a bedroom with two lovers – a man and a woman – sexually pleasuring each other’s exposed genitals, whilst Bach’s Goldberg Variations are playing in the background. The bodies in trance are softly positioned in a harmonious composition, illuminated by the room’s natural lighting and the bright sheets. As the gaze lies upon the bodies, closely, yet distance, the spectators become voyeurs – scopophilic children with the desire to acknowledge the forbidden – but in shock by the realness of the raw sex scene, which seeks to cause us to confront our own sexual desires (Mulvey, 1990).

The following scene is depicting the man from the scene before, Murphy, who is now sleeping next to another woman, Omi, whilst waking up to the sound of his phone ringing and a baby crying in the distance. The spectators are now invited to his intimate thoughts by hearing his monologues, which reveals to us that he was partying the night before and that he still feels high, filthy, and disgusting. As he walks around the apartment, he refers to his life as nightmarish, in contrast to the wonderful dream he had. Now, he is waking up next to a woman he is not in love with, which causes him to feel trapped and disorientated in a bleak life, and the only joy in his life is his son, Gaspar. The voicemail he got was from his ex-girlfriend Electra’s mother Nora, who is worried about her missing daughter. She reveals that

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she has not heard from in months and seemed to would have suicidal tendencies the last time they spoke, and as for Murphy, it has been two years since he last saw her. The image shifts into a memory of himself in the dark in his bedroom years before the present. He gets up and faces the room, whilst the camera is positioned at the back of his head, causing the spectator ‘to become’ him. In his memory, he calls Nora to ask about Electra, only to be yelled at, because he has “ruined everything”. Back in the present, he is having breakfast with his family. Still, the viewer has only heard his resentful thoughts, but he has not said anything yet. Omi complains about him being fat, in which he thinks that she is bitter, indicating that she is not happy with him either. Then, she looks at her son and says: “Do you know how babies like you come to this world?” The memory of their son being conceived is displayed. Followed the sequence of Omi telling Murphy that she is pregnant. A memory of Electra lying in bed with him is shortly portrayed. Back in the presence, Omi is now asking who was on the phone, but he is hesitant to tell her. He tells her about the phone call he got, in which she responds: “You take care of your past, and I will take care of our future”.

The more other people interact with Murphy, the closer it brings the spectators to identify with him as our reflection. Thus, the camera becomes our artificial I and Murphy become our second identity, but his present body seems only to be an empty shell, whereas his identity is left inside his memories (Metz, 1975).

He walks over to his shelf picks up a VHS case where he has been hiding opium and another memory is displayed, depicting the moment when Electra gave him the drugs. The imagery shifts back to his apartment a few years back, as we go into a melancholic state. The viewer is now re-experiencing the moment when Murphy tells Electra that he has impregnated Omi. Electra spits in his face and leaves. He haunts her down at a club, and then to her place, where they violently scream at each other. For the spectator, this is the first real introduction to Electra, but what they do not know is that it is the last time Murphy saw her.

As memories occur more frequently, the image of Electra becomes more real, and the blinking-technique (“blackout jump-cuts”) happens repeatedly to orientate the spectator to a first-person perspective (Gazi, 2017). The camera body and the spectator’s bodies become as one, and Murphy becomes one with the spectators, causing his present to shift into an

‘impossible subjectivity’ of him watching himself22_{(Ettinger, 2006).}

After a sex scene with Electra and Murphy, he asks her what her ultimate fantasy is, in which she responds: “To have sex with another woman”. Shortly after, a young and blond

22_{In the Lacanian notion it is called object petit a (‘a’ stands for ‘autre’, i.e. other) and emphasizes the fetishized}

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Danish girl, Omi, moves into their building. The couple invites her to go out to eat, where they chat, and, significantly, she reveals that she is against abortion – that she is “pro-life” as she explains it – because she did not feel wanted by her parents. Murphy replies that he is pro-choice. Electra mostly stays silent, which indicates that the memory displayed is his

unconsciousness, reducing her as a passive participant in filling his ‘womb’ of the creation of the ‘I’, because when she becomes active, that is when she separates from him as the non-I (Ettinger, 2006, p. 146). Additionally, as I have argued, the spectators as Murphy is re-experiencing his memory, and thus, that Electra seems quiet is because he remembers it that way. Remembering conversations is highly selective, and one participant's social influence in a conversation can affect memory (Hirst & Echerhoff, 2012). In this case, Omi is new and exciting, and therefore Murphy takes more interest in listening to her and recalling the moment when she told him that she is pro-life has a significant meaning to him.

After the dinner, the three of them go to a club, and then they end up having a threesome in Murphy’s bed to the tunes of Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain. Like the second sex scene, the viewer is invited to the bedroom, with the camera displayed from above in dim light. The spectator has almost forgotten about everyday life; that Murphy’s still in his bedroom, living with Omi and their child. The portrayal of both Electra and Omi in these sequences is passive but filled with romanticism, which indicates that it is a fantasy, where both Electra and Omi are his objects of desire. Omi reveals that she is young and appears to be free-spirited, whilst Electra seems to be the reflection of himself as the m/Other he, in his reminiscing, has not yet separated from (Ettinger, 2006). This also puts the spectators in Murphy’s male gaze,

orientating himself as a heterosexual man by desiring what these two European women represent, rather than who they are (Mulvey, 1990).

The reflection of his fantasy shatters when the imagery flashes back to the apartment, where he desperate replies to Nora’s voice message in an attempt to bring Electra back in his life. The blinking-technique occurs frequently in his present, blurring the line of what is real and not. As the camera moves away from the subject, he seems to see himself from a distance, whereas he says to himself: “I’m a loser. Yeah, just a dick. A dick has no brain. A dick has only one purpose: To fuck. I fucked it all up. Yeah, I’m good at one thing: Fucking things up”. His inner monologue creates more substance to the narrative and involvement to the spectators, but Murphy’s inner conflict also inflicts a distance to the spectators by creating a Kafkaesque feeling of shame, which makes him hard to identify with.

As he lays stoned on opium in his bed, he yet again reminisces on his child being conceived. The memory is juxtaposed with the memories of him and Electra talking about

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baby names, and when Omi was pregnant. The more stoned he gets, the more he misses Electra. Without her, he seems to only be a shadow as he separates his notion of self from her, as the m/Other, by constantly identifying and disidentifying (Ettinger, 2006). With the

inability to let go, he wants to see her face again. He brings out a stereoscope from another VHS-case and says: “Love is strange. I feel like a junkie” to highlight the parallels of the drug and love, but also to cinema as a substance. Looking into the stereoscope, he watches the images he took of Electra when they were happy. From a first-person perspective, the spectators are voyeurs looking at his nude photos of her painting and being wrapped in the French flag.

In the present, he now tries to call Noé’s art gallery and uncovers that she had personal issues. The image of her perfection starts to break, and a new segment of the film implicitly starts. The viewer follows Murphy deeper down the rabbit hole, which goes from being pleasurable, into being painful. The camera follows the couple walking around in a park in Paris, where they discuss the essence of life which Murphy argues is “Blood, sperm, and tears”. He reveals that this is what he wants to portray in his films as an upcoming director and Electra recites her favorite poem to paint dreamlike pictures of them and their time together, which continues in the next scene when they are sitting at a café and talks about having children. Electra shares her past and exposes that she does not have a strong

relationship with her parents and that her father is conservative, which is why she would not want to introduce Murphy to him. Here, the spectator is invited to their most intimate

moments, not only in bed, but to the meaningful conversations they had about life and death, the future, and the past. Electra asks Murphy about his ex-girlfriend, and we are taken on another memory lane of him lying in the bed with his ex-girlfriend, Lucile, in which he swears to love her forever. In a way, it shows his love for love itself. He is a child craving love, but as Electra repeatedly tells him; that he does not seem to know what love means.

The fantasy shatters piece by piece. First, at Electra’s ex-boyfriend Noé’s white-cube art gallery. At the gallery, Noé and Electra walk away alone for a while, which makes Murphy extremely jealous. As the final calm before the storm, the couple goes back to the apartment and discusses that in order to stay together forever and become the best couple that ever lived, they will give each other ultimate freedom. From the scenes when Murphy’s photographing her, we back in the present, where Murphy now is getting more desperate and tries to call his old friend Julio, who is now in rehab, to find out where Electra is without success. As the imagery becomes darker, Murphy experiences the first time he met Electra’s mother, which gives a new perspective on Electra’s addiction to drugs. Being introduced to people from their

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past creates a cluster that surrounds the couple and the spectators are given a glimpse into how they are seen by others (Ahmed, 2006). The initially romantic illusion becomes a nihilistic reality. Because of their drug addiction, they seem alienated from the rest of the world, and Electra constantly seems to crave more, which brings us closer to Murphy. In the next scene, they run out of cocaine and in desperation decides to seek out Murphy’s ex-girlfriend who, with a shaman, arranges spiritual journeys on ayahuasca. A segment of Murphy observing Electra cutting her hair is displayed, and a new segment of the movie starts.

In the next sequence, the couple is at a party. Similar to the scene with Omi, Electra passively observes whilst Murphy talks to another girl:

MURPHY: *Gesturing toward Electra* She doesn’t care, she’s heard this a million times before.

GIRL: Yeah, I like it. MURPHY: You like it? GIRL: Yeah.

MURPHY: Why? Why haven’t we seen this in cinema? GIRL: Yeah. Right, I agree.

MURPHY: I’m sentimental. We should be like babies. ELECTRA: Are you an actress? *Pointing toward the girl* GIRL: Yeah, I agree with you.

MURPHY: You’re an actress? GIRL: Yeah.

MURPHY: What’s your name? GIRL: Paula.

MURPHY: Lola?

PAULA: Yeah, Paula, I’m French but I love to speak English. MURPHY: Yeah well it’s very good. What’s the best thing in life? PAULA: Love!

MURPHY: Love…And then after that? PAULA: Sex! *laughter*

MURPHY: Yes, and then you combine the two, and sex while you’re in love. That’s the best thing.

The illusion of Murphy’s and Electra’s loving relationship breaks as Murphy follows Paula into the bathroom to have sex, and Electra reveals that she has been cheating on him with Noé a week earlier. As at the beginning of the film, Murphy and Electra violently scream at each

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other, maliciously, to essentially hurt the other’s most inner desire (e.g. Murphy tells Electra that she will never be a good artist and will never be a good mother to her children). At this moment, Murphy’s womb of reminiscence brutally confrontations his own subjectivity, whereas Electra, the non-I, conflicts with the I, his memory of himself (Ettinger, 2006, p. 218). The fight ends with them breaking up, which is followed by an aggressive sex scene in the dark with a hard techno song playing in the background.

Later, Electra has a vernissage at Noé’s gallery. Murphy gets drunk and confronts Noé by hitting him in the head with a bottle. He gets arrested, and images of him and his vivid visions of Noé and Electra having sex are juxtaposed. Further, when Murphy is arguing with the police at the station, the spectator’s vision, the artificial I, is starting to ‘blink’ again, slowly waking us up. Then, because Electra then rejects him, he calls up Paula, but cannot have sex with her, which causes him to call Electra instead and they get back together. The imagery, dialogues, and sex scenes become dark and violent, and the couple starts to seek pleasure together with other people outside of their home, e.g. at a sex club, with a prostitute, and lastly with Omi, to suck out the last drop of their broken relationship. As they walk through a cemetery in Paris, they reflect on their relationship and decides to take a break, then the vision shifts to the memory when they first met. The memories become a loop, unleashed from time, as a metaphor for life and death.

In the end, Electra and Murphy are in the shower together and talking about her death. The imagery is juxtaposed with yet another image of him being in the apartment making calls, in which he is starting to realize that she is not coming back. The scenery shifts and he cries together with his son, which also seems to be a reflection of his inner child, in the shower, and tells him that he is sorry. Vividly, his son, Gaspar, turns into Electra as they tell each other that they will love each other until the end, blurring the identities of the two of them.

THE BODIES ON SCREEN: ORIENTATING MASCULINITY

In this section, I will examine the figure’s orientation of gender and sexuality on the screen by using phenomenology and hegemonic masculinity (and emphasized femininity). Here, I will pick out scenes from the film, which I find most relevant for the character to orient

themselves. Firstly, I am going to apply Ahmed’s theory in orientation to the bodies, together with Ramazanoglu’s and Holland’s methods to think of the intersection of gender.

Additionally, I will theorize, especially, Murphy’s identity as a man with Connell and Messerschmidt's theory on hegemonic masculinity, in order to analyze the essence of the

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character and how he is confronted by the western societal norms. According to Connell, the definition of a man who fits the stereotype of hegemonic masculinity is a typical middle-classed, white, heterosexual, and able-bodied man. If a man does not fit in this box, they are seen as Other. In addition to this, the man must also be brave, strong, physically attractive, and he should also have power and use it to ‘get a girl’. The hegemonic man is also taught that they need to use their power to help the girl (i.e. slay a dragon or bring a make a poor girl rich) and show their dominance, in which they are encouraged to use violence and aggression to become a hero and slay the evil, rather than show emotions like sadness or fear (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005).

Starting at the beginning of the film, in Murphy’s inner monologue he is using traditionally masculine rhetoric as an edgeworker (Lyng, 2005, p. 104), where he aggressively informs us that he carelessly partied last night, drank excessively and took a lot of drugs. He then picks up his son from his bed and anxiously thinks that he thinks he is filthy, whereas he gives him to his mother. Murphy seems to see himself as a hero, a good and empathic man that is cursed under Murphy’s law and that he is therefore not responsible for his own failures (e.g. not becoming a successful director and impregnate up a girl who was not his girlfriend), and creates an identity as a ‘fuck-up’. With the memories of his past relationship juxtaposed, he resentfully expresses that Omi has occupied his space and identity and that he has nothing left except for the son. He says that: “There is nothing for me here, except this little guy” and further expresses that he hopes that “she [Omi] doesn’t turn him [their son] gay”. Here, he exposes that he has conformed to the societal norms of a hegemonic man and role as the father in a conjugal family by consciously living in bad faith where he is not his true self and knows that he wants a different life (Sartre, 1993, p. 44). Moreover, by hoping that their son will not become gay, he also wishes him to conform to these norms and continue the

traditions of the hegemonic man. Heterosexuality is a fundamental base of hegemonic masculinity, which traditionally suggests that the child will receive a masculine impact from his father (Diamond, 2006, p. 1101). The concept of heterosexuality as a foundation of hegemonic masculinity, or rather homophobia, is called Inclusive masculinity (Anderson & McCormack, 2018), which Murphy later conforms to when he argues with Julio that he should stay away from his girlfriend (as if she was his property), and he graphically threatens that he is going to “Fuck him so hard in the ass”. Hence, he wants to use sex as a form of aggressive domination, to ‘feminize’ Julio, which disorientating the male victim and is an effective approach in policing and positioning subordinate masculinities (Connell &

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ensure that he is behaving in a masculine and heterosexual fashion, to not be seen as Other (Pheonix, 2013).

Similarly, Murphy is taking on an aggressive male position of jealousy when he meets Electra’s ex-boyfriend, Noé. It seems that it is not only he feels possessive of Electra, but also because Noé is more successful than him, which adds a layer of class-status. Thus, Noé is much older and the owner of an art gallery in Paris, whereas Murphy is a young American film student. Murphy’s envy culminates at Electra’s vernissage when he hits Noé in the head with a bottle. In the gallery, he already feels threatened by Noé, and the notion that she had cheated on him, but also, he seems to feel alien in an unfamiliar environment, which

heightens his reaction of being othered. Besides everything that has happened, the vernissage takes place in a bourgeoisie art gallery, where he does not know the social codes or the language, which, as a lower-class white man, and additionally immigrated, causes him to act violently to express his masculinity (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 834).

After the incident, he repeatedly says that “I’m the man” and that he “protected his

woman”, which indicated that he now thinks of himself as a hero. Additionally, at the station, he asks the police to understand him because he was “robbed of his woman”, in which the police later choose to help him. Later, when the couple walks from the police station in the morning, he claims that he liked the police because “men understand each other in ways that women never could comprehend”. Then, Electra reveals that the police asked inappropriate things about her sexuality, which, in a way, tells us that Murphy actually ‘saved’ her from the wrong man and only to protected himself in the situation. The narrative that a girl gets in trouble and that a man saves her is emphasized in many tales, e.g. in Disney-films, which reinforces the idea that a man must always be a hero to get the girl from a very young age (Hibbeler, 2009). Moreover, Murphy constantly refers to Electra as “princess”, which both indicates that he is patronizing her and/or that he puts her on a pedestal. In addition to that, she seems to have a higher class-status than him judging by her occupation, her ex-boyfriend, and her parents. She also tells him that she would not introduce him to her father, and when he meets her properly dressed and well-mannered mother, she pushes the notion that he is going to be successful towards them. In a way, she seems to use him, a lower-class non-mannered artist, to break free from a restricted bourgeoise culture. The fantasy that of a lower- or middle-class man being involved with an upper-class woman has a tradition of being a fetish and exploitation of the proletariat, but here, it is not coated with romanticism but depicted in raw realism. Murphy is no hero and Electra is no damsel in distress, they are simply humans who tried to fit into the expectations but constantly fails.

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The portrayal of both Electra and Omi are quite passive, and they are, in a way, contrasted characters, much like the Madonna and the whore (Diamond, 2006, p. 1117), or Adam’s Eve and Lilith. Even from the first scene, we are meant to get the impression that Electra is the other woman, Lilith (who was created at the same time as Adam by God). The story goes that she wanted to be his equal, and he could not control her, so she escaped. Then God created Eve to be Adam’s wife, and the legend tells that the snake that seduced Eve was Lilith. Thus, Omi is an Eve-like woman, being both pure and young (in a modern and liberated way), who later becomes the Madonna or the mother.

Moreover, instead of confronting his emotions, he seeks validation by calling up Paula for sex, but he cannot go through with it because he is heartbroken. She tells him that he is being irrational and that: “If you fall in love, really, you are the loser”, which is an example of how society teaches us to see men as emotionless, rational, and hypersexual (Bierema, 2009). In his fragile state of mind, he calls Electra and has sex with her instead, which allows him to reconfirm his sexuality and therefore uses Electra to orientate himself as heterosexual and for his reach towards hegemonic masculinity. As the intimacy between Electra and Murphy escalates, and the love fades, they try to find new ways to experience their sexuality and stay together (Ahmed, 2006). For example, by advice from the police he talked to earlier, in which the police argued that Murphy should get rid of his American way of possessiveness, they go to an underground sex club, which triggers their relationship to get even worse and he

becomes jealous by seeing her having sex with another woman (even if he himself also did that). This causes Electra to suggest that he should have sex with a transwoman, to “even things out”. When he tries to go through with it, his masculinity is challenged the most throughout the whole film, and an alarm symbolically goes off in the streets below the apartment. Here, he becomes disorientated by being attracted to the ‘wrong’ gender, which heightens the identity crisis he is already in and by societal norms, leaning toward queerness (Ahmed, 2006, p. 544). Eventually, he goes through with it and makes Electra promise not to tell anyone about it because he feels ashamed of it because according to society’s norms, for him being attracted to anyone other than gender than cis-gendered women, emasculates him, whilst being with two women at the same time or watching two women, makes him even more masculine (Anderson & McCormack, 2018). In the last scene, Murphy breaks down and cries in his bathtub with Gaspar juxtaposed with the fading image of the past and allowing himself to not to fit in the masculine role of not caring nor crying.

Blood, Sperm, and Tears in Extreme Cinema : A phenomenological study in hegemonic masculinity through Gaspar Noé&apos;s Love from a psychoanalytical perspective