Brenda Atkinson crossfire
While the idea of woman-hatred is commonplace and spans most cultures, hatred of men is generally considered the narrow preserve of embittered radical lesbians and the odd feminist. On the surface of things, director Catherine BreillatOs controversial and infinitely subversive film Romance demands that equivalent term, misandry: the message it conveys about men is that theyOre irrecuperably narcissistic and shallow, misogynistic to a man, whatever their more subtle shades of pretence. But itOs also about much more. Having initially decided not to see Romance, I caved in after reading David MacfarlaneOs article in this newspaper (OFlaccid reviews reveal male myopiaO), in which he accuses the clutch of male critics who have reviewed the film locally of Ohostility, insensitivity, and indifferenceO to what he regards as an OexhilaratingO film and a powerful contribution to current gender debate. MacfarlaneOs somewhat self-consciously chivalrous plea, delivered at the conclusion of his article OLet women now be heard, pleaseO is amusingly trapped in its own double-bind (a man begging men to give women voice regarding the film). But the challenge was too delicious to resist, because Macfarlane has a point: the male critics who have slammed or casually dismissed the film have in interesting ways effectively closed off debate regarding its merits and interest. IOd hazard that most people who have read these reviews are going to see the film for what erotic titillation it might offer, although that couldnOt be more beside the point. So what is the point? There are many, but what all critics seem to have missed is that Romance is only the most recent instance of an established history and to some extent even a genre of French intellectual and cultural production that is powerfully steeped in traditional and feminist psychoanalytic theory. What this particular aspect of that theory is concerned with is not only the impossibility of symbolic union of the sexes (Sigmund FreudOs notorious question OWhat does woman want?O; his philosophical successor Jacques LacanOs famously opaque statement: OThere is no relation [between the sexes]O), but with a Western cultural phenomenon that goes back as far as PlatoOs Symposium: we human beings are tormented by a split, a profound sense of loss, that defines and undermines our very identities. The further complication of gender (for Plato, the singular hermaphrodite cruelly cut in half by the angry gods) emphasises that nagging sense of incompletion. And the further accident of which gender even more painfully underlines the dilemma to be designated female is to be symbolically assigned the status of lack: a hole, an orifice-wound that threatens in sex, is ever-suggestive of castration, and which in child-birth becomes explicitly monstrous. Desire and loss embodied in the body of a woman.
At one point in Romance, Marie, the primally un(ful)filled heroine, discourses internally on this conundrum while she is being fucked from behind by an enormous cock that is for her incidentally attached to a man. The desire that drives her sexual exploits, she confides, is a desire to fully experience herself as pure hole, a depthless purity that also smacks of annihilation. She wants to consume, she must, to keep the sense of lack at bay. Of course her sense of lack catalysed in terms of the filmOs narrative by her boyfriendOs uncompromising sexual indifference is about more than sex, the act, but is profoundly about sexuality and the cultural capital it accords the bearer. The fulfilment of desire requires more. In the film, as in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, that OmoreO can only be achieved by declaring ownership, through childbirth, of that symbolic capital. The child is the substitute for the penis (symbolically the phallus), and so by having a child, a woman can have both. Not accidentally, the moment at which BreillatOs sexually insatiable character gives birth in the film also marks its literally shattering climax: we see, at full-screen, a babyOs head squeezing from an enormously enlarged vagina; briefly, almost subliminally, itOs intercut with an explosion elsewhere that will also finally release Marie from her longing. Our final view of her, radiant, baby in arms, is of a woman finally if perhaps not permanently released from her gnawing sense of emptiness and self-loathing.
Romance is not easy to watch, but itOs truly fascinating in that, while explicitly referencing the work of Freud, Lacan, Georges Bataille, Pauline Reage and many others, it never sits emphatically on the side of any particular gender theory, but plays with the infinite complexity of sexual subjectivity all the time. Male viewers might well dislike the toxic propositions of its studied pace, and conveniently dismiss the film as vacuous, ponderous, and so on. Most women, I suspect, will dislike and even detest it for its representation of femininity as masochistic, even death-driven: in these politically correct times, women are after all strong and admirable beings, a view given currency by much feminist activism and New Age earth-mother type affirmations. The neurosis of Ally McBeal is an aberration.
Of course, the social equality of women is to be desired and fought for. But what this good fight so often loses sight of is our psycho-sexual complexity, with all its vulnerabilities and idiosyncrasies. Breillat demands that we look at them way out of our comfort zones.