Charlotte Raven
Body Language
It’s not often that one is moved by watching TV and I am no exception. But the other day I was, by – of all things – Bjrk’s new video. All Is Full of Love, directed by Chris Cunningham, is an intimate, affecting portrait of the sexual love between two robots.
It begins in an assembly room some time in the future. Robot one, with Bjrk’s face, is being put together by a posse of fellow automatons. When she is finished, her friend robot two arrives. They greet each other in the way people do at airports – smiling, ecstatic to be reunited. At that second you realise how seldom it is that you see that kind of emotion on the screen.
I can’t remember the last time I saw love represented as delight. In most TV and film depictions we get either breathless obsession or idealised domesticity. In the first state, excitement is depicted as a consequence of sex. The idea that romantic rapture could have any other character is never hinted at. We are left with the slightly distasteful sense of passion alienated from its object. The subtle specificity of romance is left to the people who make pop songs.
The lesbian robots don’t need to have snowball fights to prove how they feel about each other. When they embrace you can feel the warmth and tenderness, and as the music swells around them you wonder how it happened that two animated bits of metal are more successful on-screen lovers than, to pluck two names at random, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
I have not yet seen Eyes Wide Shut, but from the reports of the clip that the studio showed critics shortly after Stanley Kubrick’s death, it seems to have nothing of the same impact.
Anything that purports to be a “frank” exploration of the “dark side” of human sexuality is by definition almost bound to be a disappointment. If the word from the United States is true, cinema-goers are laughing openly at the ill-advised, pompous dialogue and general self- importance of the film. By all accounts the orgy is a hoot, as are the fantasy sequences where Kidman explores her illicit desires with a seriousness that mirrors Kubrick’s sense that he is dealing with Big Themes. But what does Eyes Wide Shut tell us about people? To what extent does it unravel the mysteries of sexuality?
If it has anything in common with other supposedly highbrow erotica, it will skirt around these questions at some length then drop them in favour of the insight that nothing can ever really be known. Certainly, this was the route favoured by Arthur Schnitzler in his book Dream Story, on which the film was based.
“As sure as I am of my sense that neither the reality of a single night nor even of a person’s entire life can be equated with the full truth of his innermost being,” says Albertine (Kidman), whose dreams about a Danish stranger helped precipitate the crisis in her marriage. Confessing her desire to her husband, Fridolin, she opens the proverbial can of worms that leads him to explore his own “innermost” fantasies. These include not sleeping with a prostitute and not getting it on with some naked woman at a masked ball. He doesn’t ever get to have sex because that might distract the reader from the author’s central insight -that nothing is ever that simple.
Poor old Fridolin. Instead of shagging, he is forced to muse. He spends the book wondering who people are, what it all means and whether he can have his cake and eat it. Wrapping up his thoughts at the end, he answers Albertine’s remark with the marvellous insight: “No dream,” he sighed quietly, “is altogether a dream.” And with that, the two were reconciled – neither wiser for their experiences nor even remotely sated. The reader feels much the same. This silly book might have been redeemed somewhat by a couple of decent sex scenes. As it is, we find ourselves surrounded by portentous sexual images which come to nothing.
It’s hard not to see the lack of sex in Dream Story as a metaphor. For this book to have been turned into a film at this moment, there must have been some sense that it would be resonant for modern audiences. And maybe it is, but not in the way that Kubrick might have imagined. The publicity for the movie makes much of Cruise and Kidman’s marriage and yet, in the film itself, they are prevented from having sex. Isn’t this the way of things?
That paradox, that we are surrounded by sexual imagery but prevented from even peeking at the reality of human experience, explains why the lesbian robots offer such an unusual take. The mendacity of erotica, which manipulates its subject matter to make it fit the wholly misguided belief that sex without love is profound, makes it ideally suited to an age which shies away from simple truths.
Like Albertine and Fridolin, we want to believe sexual desire, removed from the emotions that give it life, is enigmatic. The truth – that it is utterly banal – does not seem so acceptable. And yet, who can argue with it?
This is the central insight of pornography which, although it lies about the nature of human relations, is spot on when it comes to the embarrassing mundanity of desire. In porn, orgies take place on nylon sheets, not on the floors of vast chateaux. Although I’ve never attended one myself, I imagine this is rather closer to the reality than Schnitzler’s arid ball.
As Will Self once memorably put it, the problem with orgies is that there’s always a man on the stairs eating ham – a quote you wished you could have sent to Kubrick in the hope that it might have made him lighten up.