Shame

The devil lies in the details, but also in two long sequences in Steve McQueen’s Shame. The details are the facts of the film’s central character’s existence. Brandon (Michael Fassbender) lives in nameless high rise, one of those glass boxes that populate the tonier parts of Manhattan. It could be Chelsea or Noho or Soho; in this case the address is 9 West 31^St.  Brandon gets off at the 28^th Street stop of the R. He also listens to vinyl, has a volume of collected excerpts from Henry James on his otherwise spare bookshelves and comes home to find his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) naked in the shower.  Brandon works in a modern office and has problems with his computer which is infected with all kinds of porn. He also likes fleeting encounters, has problems with relationships and has to push his sister out of bed, though she doesn’t exhibit any conscious desire to consummate their relationship. The two long sequences take place on a train where he exchanges meaningful glances with a young woman and in a bar where the camera focuses on Sissy singing “New York, New York”.  Back in l969 Rip Torn starred in a film called Coming Apart  that was remarkably similar to Shame, taking place in a l969 version of the high rise apartment Brandon occupies (in the later case the  locale was Kips Bay) which was also the site of compulsive and often hostile couplings. Fassbender is reminiscent of the young Rip Torn in the seductiveness of his sullenness and violence. Shame  has been trumpeted as a film about compulsive sex, but it's really about solitude. It’s a 21^st century version of  Strindberg in which relationships are absent and violence is simply unleashed on the self. Brandon steps into his existence like an alien, a creature from outer space landing on earth or an earthling landing on a strange planet. There's a temptation to look at the source of Brandon’s problem as incest or sex sites, but these are really just symptoms. Ironically though the film is full of sex and has an NC-17 rating, you would be better off employing an existentialist than a Freudian in looking for answers to what makes this Sammy run. Drive is unleashed to quench uncomfortable affects and yet the character seems to be suffering from a sense of what Heidegger defined as Unheimlichkeit The word literally means not-being-at-home, what common folk call alienation. Freud actually used Unheimlichkeit to refer to a sense of the uncanny which he associated with anxiety, but it’s an anxiety at being that Shame portrays rather than the kind of anxiety that has its root in some permutation of the Oedipus Complex.

Through a Glass Darkly

Ingmar Bergman was a student of August Strindberg. Jenny Worton’s adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s classic Through A Glass Darkly, presented by the Atlantic Theater Company, makes a great movie into what feels like a Strindberg play. The play is remarkably faithful to the movie, with all of the keynote scenes appearing like signposts: the return of the mediocre novelist (Chris Sarandon) with sad, last-minute presents (a shaver, gloves, watch) purchased at the airport; the discovery by the novelist’s daughter of his diary, in which she reads, in reference to her own madness, “observe its process and her descent;” the culminating scene of incest. Carey Mulligan, the young British actress who received much praise for her work in The Seagull on Broadway and in the 2009 film, An Education, plays the disturbed young woman, emphasizing both her withdrawal and a countervailing sexuality that blurs the boundaries between herself and others. Art, madness and God (the title derives from Corinthians) are the prevailing themes of the film, and it was Bergman’s brilliance to defy any of the facile connections among the varying set pieces having to do with the desire for greatness, schizophrenia and the search for meaning in a world where God appears only as a hallucination. The play, like the movie, is a series of missed connections in which the tragedy lies in helplessness and isolation, with no revelation explaining or solving anything. Unlike the movie, however, the play falls short in its rather clichéd depiction of Karin’s illness through swishy sounding voices. But why turn the movie into a play in the first place? However admirable the homage to a masterpiece, it’s all-too-obvious that the current production is overshadowed by the film. The Oedipal overtones, as they relate to competing works of art in two different media, might have amused Bergman who divided his time between theater and film.