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The homelessness problem in New York City has worsened. The
other day a homeless man was sleeping right in front of the entrance to a K Mart
on Astor Place. New Yorkers have gotten used to this and those entering the
store navigated around him they way they would a puddle on a rainy day. Another
homeless person was sleeping right outside a bank off Gramercy Park, the kind of tony neighborhood whose
residents cotton to pristine sidewalks. It’s one thing when you read reports
about the synthetic marijuana epidemic which is the scourge of homeless
encampments in poorer neighborhoods. After all homelessness is the final
rung on the food chain of disenfranchisement and the default mode for
those who can no longer find living quarters with the proceeds from welfare checks, social security and varying forms of subsistence income. But when you start to see homeless people with their filthy blankets and cardboard signs, sitting amidst cartons of
take-out food in areas filled with multi-million dollar apartments, you realize that homelessness
is metastasizing. It’s a disease that can no longer be ghettoized and is now so
out of control that no one is spared its reality. How can this occur in one of
the wealthiest cities in the world? After all New York in not Calcutta nor a
war torn city like Sana’a. Mayor de Blasio has pledged tens of millions of dollars
to remedy the problem, yet the real question is how? It used to be argued that
the growing homeless population was the result of the increase in mental
patients who could no longer be legally mandated to institutions. The
persistence of racial inequality, despite the civil rights struggles of the
60’s, is the great subject of our day. However income inequality, the theme of
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, may partly explain
the presence of so much extreme poverty in the wealthiest sectors of one of the
wealthiest societies on earth. The agglomeration of so much money in a few hands has caused the
opposite of a trickle down effect, as the affluence of the middle and professional
classes becomes tested. When small business owners strain to pay
college tuitions, which eat up a good chunk of their incomes, there’s little
incentive for the kind of increased entrepreneurship that produces more jobs.
The economic condition of American society is mirrored by our educational
system in which a tiny elite receive outsized preparation to become what Tom
Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities called “masters of the universe,” while the
rest, receiving worthless pieces of paper, from corroding and meagerly subsidized public institutions, are being prepped to join the breadlines. Unheimlichkeit is the German word for estrangement. It literally means "not at home.” It's the growing population of disenfranchised and estranged New Yorkers--some of whom were formerly part of the so-called middle class--who are now filling the ranks of the homeless and making homelessness such a pervasive fact in both our city and country’s life.
Have you ever wondered where has everyone gone or found
yourself waking up into what seems like an episode of The Twilight Zone, say "The After Hours" where the character gets off on the wrong, non-existent floor of the
department store where the mannequins all come to life, only to discover that
she herself is a mannequin on the lam. Unheimlichkeit is the feeling of
estrangement or uncanniness referred to by both Heidegger and Freud and it literally means not
feeling at home. You don’t have to be a character out of an episode of The
Twilight Zone to feel it. Simply return to a favorite spot, say a small town in
Vermont where you once vacationed on fall weekends when the kids were little or one of those
old-fashioned railroad car diners, (there’s actually one called the Chelsea Royal in Brattleboro Vermont) and say you walk in to find a whole new cast of
characters, say an upscale Relais and Chateau as opposed to the simple inn with
the friendly room clerk with the green visor who once greeted you. Say the
cozy little restaurant has been turned into an expensive outpost of some exotic
new cuisine whose portions are so refined and microscopic that they’re lost in
a sea of white china. Or let’s say you return to the 50th high
school reunion and you don’t recognize anyone, not even the girl or boyfriend,
who sheepishly tugs at your sleeve, trepidatiously enunciating your name. Is
this the creature you once undressed or undressed in front of? The house where
you literally or figuratively grew up may still be standing, but it’s occupied
by strangers. That old doorman in your parents apartment building is long dead and the
new man blocks your way as you attempt to return to the past.
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 31St. Brandon gets off at the 28th 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 21st 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.
