This discourse creates an imaginary knot without taking into consideration the form. The pornographic are the “poorly taken” pictures, the ugly, the obscene, explicit scenes approaching natural orifices and shameless demonstrations of what’s missing.
“The concept of lack from Lacanian discourse suggested that the woman’s body is fetishized in film because it produces anxiety in the male viewer, to whom the female body represents castration.” (Gabbard, 2001)
Shame, precisely, is this passion that connects the imaginary knot and keeps a distance between what’s public and private. Distance that’s there, maybe just in appearance, tossed up in the pornographic. [1]
A part object discourse, which is visibly common in a pornographic scene; a shot of a woman moaning, another shot of a penis penetrating the vagina, another penis ejaculating.
Every mock up is epically created reaching a supposed pleasure. The woman that is staring directly to the camera while opening her legs is mimicking the audience’s gaze.
“The Lacanian approach to film criticism centers on how the perspective of the camera creates a “gaze” on the events of the film’s narrative.” (Gabbard, 2001)
The sexual organs of the actors show much more character than their own faces, the relaxed veins of their penises speak of integrity of a hard working heart, but in their faces there’s vaguely any content.
Does pornography care about aesthetics?
Does beauty have the same meaning in all films?
A film that captures a societal shock is Bertolucci’s ”Last Tango in Paris”; This so called “artsy porn” captures both indecent and elegant styles at the same time making them dance together the same way as the tango; an invitation to let loose in this wave of seduction and yearning.
What’s essential in this movie is how the experience is structured; simply an anonymous and clandestine affair that is approachable to any spectator. This erotic encounter is always aimed at transgressing given everyday identities. [2]
The pathetic side of the pornographic discourse is that the subject keeps enunciating his next move while at the same time disappears in his narrative.
Showing “everything”, the pornographic discourse just demonstrates the divorce between narrative, the act and the utopic corporeal unity. In porn there needs to be three; There, in that room, the lovers are in this almost epistemic relationship where the Other’s gaze is placed.
What’s revealed isn’t the sexual relationship - this doesn’t mean that couples don’t have sex- but the encounter with the other sex that certifies the irrepresentable of the sexual relationship.
This is what porn-o-graphy provides, it doesn’t limit itself by showing the sexual act, doesn’t stop by just installing these scopic devices, but shows, in reality, the absence of complementarity.
Two people in a bedroom dancing or having sex isn’t porn. This is erotism or intersubjective relationship. It’s precisely the introduction of this Other- a third- the gaze, that makes the pleasure itself innocent, private and without interruptions always impossible.
Sex by itself is an exhibitionist act because it relies on the gaze of the Other, sex is pornographic.
Back to the movie, we see in what way the uncovering of the scenes of penetration feeds the ghostly side of Paul generating questions of what does it mean to be a man. On the other side, a woman, placed in a position of desire, exhibits her own castration, a microscopic look of the receptor that will decide the meaning.
This movie is born in a state of unbalance; surrounded by excess, filmed by a director that exposes mistrust (who knows more about cinematographic critique than poetic images); for some incomprehensible reason Bertolucci gave us this hint about imperfect beauty.
Last Tango tells the story about two loners in a city that will never be the one of love. Paris creates pain, Paul the despair and Jeanne the body; filming with pornographic treachery intimate acts of love and a savage rape, penetrating into the hidden and occult of two people that believe in being acknowledged.
Jeanne searches for a father that can tell her stories, while he vomits all his truths about the world; she is waiting to be asked to dance while he forces her through the dance floor; she wishes for a goodnight kiss while he covers her ass with butter and, above all, Jeanne loving him and him corresponding.
Stroller argues that:
The overall structure of erotic excitement … is similar in most everyone, (that) it is not (hostile) dynamics that differentiate perversions from the lesser perversions, those states that others call normal or normative behavior, but whether the erotic excitement brings one toward or away from sustained intimacy with another person. (Stoller, 1985, pp. vii-viii)
This film is full of dichotomies; male and female, life and death, America and France, but the interesting part is that these don’t seem to contradict each other, but work as complementary forces, despite the chemistry and friction between two characters whose identities and desire connect.
Being humiliated is a strong factor in perversion and also the core of excitement in general. A man that desexualizes women, acts with hostility and desires to harm is more characteristic of the sexual fantasies and practices of his gender, since “perversion” as well as actual and fantasized sexual violence, abuse, and rape, seem more widespread among men than women. [3]
Paul’s cruelty may not be justified and perhaps it is exactly what attracted Jeanne in the first place (she is the one who first looks at him at the beginning of the film- very rare in cinema for a woman to give the “gaze”.) His hatred and desire to humiliate Jeanne seeks revenge and triumph over his own supposed childhood traumas, forming the basic fantasy script in perversion and pornography. [4]
Mostly all scenes in the film are emotionally charged, very provocative and give the spectator a wide range of feelings.
Paul never asks Jeanne a direct question but constantly frames her into his next move while assaulting her, humiliating her and pushing her over the edge.
Her desire is formed through idealizing Paul while alienating herself, choosing a submissive-masochistic role and borrowing his subjectivity.[5]
Bertolucci simultaneously mocks and mourns the human yearning for love and companionship. This film is a requiem for unreturned love and a testament to the tendency of humans to refuge love with lust when trapped in a mixture of depression, displeasure and sorrow.
Bertolucci’s purpose is not to praise carnality as a virtue or to despise it as a vice, but to use it as an instrument to accredit the actual existence of a dark, ugly, and bestial side of humanity, which is so often repressed and hypocritically denied in similar works on the subject.
Sadomasochistic role-play reflects the growing social significance of the ability to change roles and to tolerate conflicts in roles. This desire to harm leads us to differentiate “perverse” from “non-perverse” sexuality, but not according to the gender of the object in relation to the self. [6]
The use of the characters are sort of an uncanny medium to immerse into unexplored areas of human psyche while projecting them as objects of desire, disgust and depravity. The “asymmetry” in desire, its intertwining with a spectrum of dominance and submission, starts to show its defensive features and symptomatic nature.
We are being showed the dynamics of the inner self being corrupted because of the cultural influence. How love is a code for “using”; an a-ddiction, Paul becomes the man who uses Jeanne and then shows his hidden vulnerability, also shoes how common miser is in all western societies, nice cinematographic sets and gloomy atmospheres reflect the human unconscious.
The human being is a cultural magnet, we understand ourselves through culture and either destroys or fortifies the self.
Embrace our Madness.
References.
Gabbard, G. (2001), Introduction. Psychoanalysis and Film. G. Gabbard, ed. New York: Karnac Books. pp. 1-16.
Gabbard, G. (2001), Introduction. Psychoanalysis and Film. G. Gabbard, ed. New York: Karnac Books. pp. 1-16.
Chodorow, N.J. (1992), Heterosexuality as a compromise formation: reflections on the psychoanalytic theory of sexual development. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 15:267-304.
Woltersdorff, V. (2011), Paradoxes of precarious sexualities: sexual subcultures under neo-liberalism. Cultural Studies, 25(2):164-182.
Dines, G. (1997), Pornography: The production and consumption of inequality. Routledge. Great Britain.
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