"Shame"

[kleenexwoman]

drworm came up from Ohio in the blinding snow to show me "Streets of Fire," cuddle the cat, cuddle with me while we watched "Community," and see "Shame" at the Main Art Theatre. We saw it for naked Michael Fassbender.

There is a great deal of naked Fassbender, if that's what you're interested in. The movie starts with a nice shot of his chest. It goes on to show us Brandon, his character, casually walking around his Ikea-esque apartment with his dick out. He is listening to a coyly desperate phone message from a woman, which he ignores in favor of masturbation. These shots have only a few seconds of nakedness each, and we're mostly treated to a lingering shot of a blank white wall. Get it? Because it's like she's talking to a wall? Clever, yeah?

The movie tends towards the polished, the modernistic, the slightly grim and understated. Brandon's apartment and office are starkly modern, his clothes monochrome; the women he fucks are all conventionally attractive and perfect. While I find this aesthetic visually unappealing, I admit that it worked perfectly with the theme of the movie: Brandon's whole life is closed-off, outwardly perfect, inwardly devoid of color or complication. He has a shallow, bro-like friendship with his boss and co-workers, and pointedly ignores calls from his colorful (borderline Manic Pixie) sister throughout the movie.

The movie focuses on the actions Brandon takes, rather than exploring his issues that lead to his stex addiction in any real depth. This makes him an emotionally ambiguous character, with a sort of Schrodinger's soul--is he troubled and self-loathing, or a well-contained sexual sociopath? We never learn why Brandon is drawn to meaningless, casual sex, and we never really find out how he feels about it--he's upset when his activities bleed through into his attempts at a normal life, but doesn't seem to be disgusted by anything else that he does. And even then, it's uncertain whether having a normal life with emotional connections with others is something he does want and cannot achieve, or whether he's just unhappy that his facade of normalcy and competence is being ripped away.

The only character he seems to care about is his sister, although he seems to view her primarily as an annoyance for most of the movie. He is disgusted by what he sees as her promiscuity and irresponsibility, character flaws which cause her to be a disruption to his carefully ordered, calculatedly hedonistic life. He also seems to resent the possiblity that any inkling of emotional investment he may have in her well-being would interfere with his sex life, although it's unclear (well, it was to me) whether it was the result of a normal familial bond, a black-sheep sibling you don't want to love, or whether he's afraid of developing sexual feelings for her; whether his escalating sexual experimentation--first with a real relationship, and then in a night of apparently unprecedented hedonism--is a way to channel and displace those feelings, or an attempt to take back his sex life.

(A note: The idea of sex addiction in the first place is arguably based on a culturally-specific idea of acceptable sexual behavior in the first place, and with that in mind, Brandon's wild night out didn't really strike the right emotional notes for me. For a character whose sex life consists of straight missionary-position sex with one woman at a time, Brandon's foray into a gay club and a threesome is a leap; to an audience familiar with more adventurous sex, it's almost laughably square, and the way the gay club is portrayed is a little homophobic. I also found the ending bizarrely moralistic.)

However, the movie is a great character sketch in its own way. The shots are long and often unforgivingly static, and scenes linger on conversations or perfectly mundane actions long after another movie would have pulled away--the scenes do not so much establish character as they establish an amazing harmony of the tension that comes from keeping a secret, and the banality of not only that secret, but the life surrounding the secret. Arguments, fights, and sexual encounters meander and are never quite resolved. The scene where Brandon goes on a date is wonderful, displaying an awkward situation that would be played up for laughs in any other movie, but here is portrayed just realistically enough to seem like an oasis of normality for Brandon.

Ultimately, "Shame" is a good movie to see if you want to see Michael Fassbender naked and don't mind feeling kind of icky about yourself for a while afterwards.