FLESH

Steve McQueen

Over the weekend I watched two sets of films.  One set was two works by Steve McQueen: “Hunger” and “Shame”.  The other was three ingenious vids about African lions, tigers, and elephants by David Attenborough, filmed by little autonomous (like R2D2) and camouflaged cameras:  “Stump cam, Tusk cam, Dung Cam, Plop Cam, Float Cam.”  Only the elephants even noticed them.  One carried a Plop Cam (it looks like an elephant turd) around for a while, causing it to be renamed “Ellie Cam.”

McQueen, when I looked him up, was quite startling.  He’s not the actor.  London-born, he’s from Caribbean stock -- very large and very black.  But his first fame was from art and design work.  These films are extremely beautiful, loaded with closeups against soft blue backgrounds, they hold on and hold on until you are imprinted with the faces.  There aren’t many characters.  One of them, Fassbender, appears in both, but in completely different roles: one is a corporation sex addict and the other is a known person, Bobby Sands, an IRA leader who starved himself to death to demand better treatment.  Two different appetites, one portrayed with all the glitz of corporation fantasy, the other total abject misery from opposing appetite.  Both about bodies, presented in starkly beautiful nudity.  

Michael Fassbender

Fassbender makes this possible, both because he is naturally a handsome man which signals to some people that he must be sexy and because he was willing to lose so much weight (down to 125 pounds) that surely his health was in danger.  This is the sort of thing admired in Hollywood, a demonstration of self-discipline that almost mocks Sands.

These are extremes of human physicality that demonstrate how much mind can control body, but also how much body can control an imprinted mind where thought is frozen.  These are issues crucial to social well-being, but they are so painful that they aren’t often confronted.

In fact, looking for relief, I turned to the animals.  “Stump cam” and “Tusk cam” are carried by elephants so as to get close to the big cats without scaring them off or endangering the photographer.  “Dung Cam” and “Plop Cam” are necessarily at ground level so that we see everything through a palisade of elephant legs and undersides: sex, nursing, eating, rolling in the mud.  

Baby elephants smile!

The mystery of trunks!  Attenborough knows his audience loves babies of all kinds, but we don’t see any elephants, lions or tigers actually being born -- just very soon after, when they are still sightless and staggering and then over a period of time.  One of the most charming moments is a baby elephant playing with his own trunk which is still unmanageable.  It’s about like a potato in a long stocking, so he flings it around enjoying the feeling of what gravity does to it.  Soon we see the cameras as little creatures themselves.  But they are not flesh.  Nor do the animals ever seem like robots.

We know that our planet has slowly (by our time sense anyway) found structure in mud, complexified into ever more complex molecules until there were one-celled animals, accumulated into eucaryotes, evolved into plants and then animals who, being animated, got up and walked off.  Well, slithered, plodded.  This meant they confronted situations that required reactions which became thinking, “whole body thinking,” meaning taking in stimuli and putting out movement, controlled by a dashboard in the skull.  That is, life is a continuum and it is still extending in all directions.  Evolution proceeds by experimentation, which we call mutation sometimes and other times "learning."

The big cats do what cats do best: kill, eat, defecate, have babies, and go back to killing.  Or maybe sleeping.  The elephants are more complex and even more social than lions.  At one point we see an elephant laying its trunk along the ground to pick up vibrations sent by other elephants far away.  To explore “Dung Cam”, not just using its trunk, an elephant puts its big flat foot on top of the vibrating little machine which is armored enough not to try to escape.  We see the elephants gently groping the remains of a dead elephant.  Their emotions are clearly strong and specific.  We do not see derangement or neuroticism.  Attenborough emphasizes how much the adults watch out for the little ones and the vigorous interplay among the younglings.

The brother and sister in “Shame” have been seriously twisted but we don’t know by what.  We don’t even know what their relationship was like as children, though it’s clear that it was traumatic and needy enough to push them towards incest.  The social taboo on incest is created by the need to guard against in-breeding, which is on the one hand a scientifically defensible problem, and also the need to prevent families from emotionally spiraling in on themselves, going in smaller and smaller circles until they self-destruct.  Yet sexual desire for siblings -- when the sibs are privileged or otherwise protected from taboos -- is expressed in royal marriages from Neolithic Egypt to contemporary Europe.  Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

The argument in “Shame” is that a happy normal person will be attractive to a sex addict until the moment of consummation -- then the addict is shut down.  In this film racial taboos mean nothing.  Being black is an indicator of emotional warmth and normality, though no guarantee of a happy marriage.  So this is not about race nor about marriage except that the married boss is as much a sex addict as the Fassbender character he supervises, and has no insight into himself at all.  In fact, he seems to be tuned to the ownership and humiliation dimension of sexual adventuring.  The Fassbender character just wants to submerge himself in erotic feeling.  The glass corporation is inhuman, unfeeling, exposing.

It’s clear that this is not an indictment of men.  The women offer themselves willingly -- on subways, in bars -- they willingly go off to unknown places with men they just met.  The whores seem the most sensible and in-control people.  In this film the men get beat up, but not the women.

So this is about two people who crave intimacy but are emotionally blank, empty.  Not just that, but also they block anything that would lead to real feeling, except maybe the sister’s desire to die.  Why does the culture object to her getting that?  What would have been a successful “intervention” in the lives of these two seductive needy people?

In “Hunger,” the priest (who is a familiar BBC stalwart, Rory Mullan) sits down with Gerry to talk him out of what the priest sees as suicide by hunger.  Gerry insists that it is murder, being imposed on him by the denial of human rights.  By this time we are intimate through violence and degradation, and therefore willing to forget that the camera is stock still, there is no violence, the only movement is the steady ascension of writhing cigarette smoke and the progress of the argument.  

When Gerry is almost to the end of his life, futile compassion in the form of a pristine white sheepskin under his bedsores and the presence of his mother are almost obscene in their pretense.  The priest does not come.

We are animals.  Our dashboards cannot shut that off.  The entanglements of emotion and culture can be shut down by extreme trauma.  If deprived enough it is almost impossible to remain thoughtful.  One reaction is to lock onto an idea so completely that it creates a trajectory as clearly as a bullet.  The point of that is to make the others, who can still think, to actually do it.