Shame

What jumps out about Shame is that NC-17 rating.

You don’t get the NC-17 for violence. You only get it for sex.

Extreme sex.

So it was with great eagerness I waited for the movie to begin. I was about to see material that people under seventeen simply could not handle.

As a deeply serious and mature person, I knew I could handle whatever sexual abominations the movie presented, and furthermore I could discern the artistic intent of said abominations, probably coming away with some very trenchant insights into the human condition. Oh yeah, I could handle the NC-17.

But boy was I curious to know what envelope was getting pushed.

I knew the movie dealt with a sex addict played by the arthouse version of Ryan Gosling, 2011’s hottest serious actor, Michael Fassbender.

I also knew the movie co-starred Carey Mulligan, the arthouse version of Emma Stone, as Fassbender’s equally screwed up sister.

Incest was certainly in play. Heck, with sex addiction, almost anything was in play. I was giddy as the curtain raised on the film.

In the first scene we meet Fassbender’s character on a crowded subway train. He spies an attractive woman sitting opposite him. He also spies the equally attractive diamond on her fourth finger. Undaunted, he gives her the smoldering, unwavering stare of the primeval hunter.

The woman tries to ignore him, but he’s so damn handsome, and his gaze is so intense and unapologetic, she gets into a hot little exchange of googly-eyes.

Then the train arrives at her stop. She gets off with a crush of other commuters. Fassbender leaps off the train to follow her, though this is not his stop. He trails her through the crowded station, but quickly loses sight of her. Despite his best tracking efforts… she’s gone.

He gets back onto the train, defeated and unfulfilled.

Welcome to his world.

Shame is a character study, and, happily, the character being studied is a pretty interesting guy. Not because he’s smart, or deep, or talented, or unusual. He’s none of these things. He can’t even keep up a decent conversation on a date.

But he’s an extremely well-drawn specimen of homo urbanicus modernicus. He’s got a good job – the nature of which is wisely left generic – aren’t all jobs generic these days? – he’s got a good apartment and a good wardrobe, and because he’s super-handsome and because he’s a smooth, instinctive sexual shark, he does extremely well with the ladies.

But of course it’s not enough.

It’s not enough because he lives in the modern world, which means his life is a howling void of meaningless ennui.

(I know, life turns into a howling void in almost any era – Thoreau certainly appreciated this fact – but Shame approaches the universal through a very current specificity which, again, is wise.)

Fassbender fills the void with his sex addiction. This means he’s hitting on every attractive woman around him, all the time.

All.

The.

Time.

When he’s not having sex with someone he picked up, he’s having sex with a prostitute. He hires them so often he gets discount cards like at a frozen yogurt shop.

And when he’s not doing that, he’s masturbating to internet porn.

You could say the guy’s got a real problem.

What I like about the movie is that it’s not really about sex addiction. Movies that are about what they’re about are superficial and boring. Instead, Shame is about that ennui, that sense of purposelessness, that afflicts many/most of us. Its real cause is Fassbender’s inability to create emotional relationships. He’s deeply, desperately alone in life, which helps explain that manic drive toward sexual connection. It’s all he has.

Enter his sister.

She comes to live with him, having bailed on the latest of a string of loser boyfriends. Fassbender’s exasperated by her presence, and they end up in a subtle kind of war with each other, but the two are a lot alike. They are both sad, they are both alone, and they are each other’s best hope of having a meaningful relationship in life. Or of learning how to have it with others.

So of course they alienate each other as much as possible.

Shame is a smart and perceptive film, but given its subject matter and reputation, what’s surprising is how conventional it is. Replace sex addiction with Asperger’s or alcoholism and we’ve seen this movie a hundred times. Before the film began I was ready to be scandalized. By the time it ended I had long stopped fearing/hoping for novel forms of perversity. Instead I appreciated Shame for the honest, simple film about human beings that it is. I’m almost tempted to call it sweet.

So where the heck did that NC-17 come from?!

It’s the sheer volume of sex in the movie. Maybe twenty percent of the running time is a sex scene.

Think about that.

Nearly twenty percent of the running time is a sex scene.

Which is unconventional and daring, I suppose, but as every savvy modernist knows, it’s not the quantity of the sex that matters, it’s the quality.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 81/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 84/100