BLOOD, SPERM, AND TEARS IN EXTREME CINEMA: DIVA
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BLOOD,
SPERM, AND
TEARS IN
EXTREME
CINEMA:
A phenomenological study in
hegemonic masculinity through
Gaspar Noé’s Love from a
psychoanalytic perspective
ZARA LUNA HJELM
Supervisor: Marietta Radomska
Examinator: Katherine Harrison
Gender Studies, LiU
Master’s Programme:
Gender Studies – Intersectionality and Change
Master’s thesis, 15 ECTS credits
ISRN: LIU-TEMA G/GSIC1-A—20/019-SE
LINKÖPINGS UNIVERSITET
SE-581 83 LINKÖPING, SWEDEN
013-28 10 00, www.liu.seABSTRACT
This thesis will analyze how masculinity is depicted in the French-Argentinean director
Gaspar Noé’s movie Love (2015), and how it is orientating and disorientating through an
intersectional lens. In his films, the filmmaker often uses haptic images and sound traversing
to interrogate the existence and to express a clear and abject visuality to expose the flesh. On
that notion, the study will use a psychanalytic theoretical framework with hegemonic
masculinity, and a phenomenological methodology with Bertolt Brecht’s theories on theatre
to examine the bodily performances of the cinematic body, the bodies of the characters on
screen, and the spectator’s body to reflect on the film’s thematic, aesthetic, and ideological
features. Additionally, this study will explore how the viewer embodies the self-images and
memories of the characters on the screen, and how that affects the spectator.
Keywords: Love, Gaspar Noé, psychoanalysis, Brecht, homunculus, film analysis, gender,
hegemonic masculinity, sexuality, body horror
1TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 3
AIM AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS.......................................................................................... 3
BACKGROUND ..................................................................................................................... 4
Gaspar Noé .................................................................................................................... 4
New French Extremity ................................................................................................... 6
PREVIOUS RESEARCH/LITERATURE REVIEW ........................................................................ 7
CHAPTER SUMMARY .................................................................................................. 11
2. METHODS AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ............................................ 12
DELIMITATIONS ................................................................................................................ 17
3. FILM ANALYSIS: THREE LAYERS OF LOVE .................................................. 19
THE SPECTATOR’S BODY: NARRATING THE GAZE ............................................. 20
THE BODIES ON SCREEN: ORIENTATING MASCULINITY ........................................ 25
THE CAMERA’S BODY: BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL ....................................................... 29
4. SUMMARY AND FINAL DISCUSSION ................................................................ 34
5. BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................... 39
6. FILMOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................... 44
21. INTRODUCTION
Often films are dismissed as fantasies, or pure escapism, but could they actually just be a
reflection of our own presence? And is there any possibility that they could change our
societal norms, and essentially, how we perceive the world? In this thesis, I am going to
explore different dynamics of the movie Love by the French-Argentinian director Gaspar Noé,
to reflect on the tension between the cinematic, artificial body, and the bodies on the screen
and off the screen to in order to further inspect our concept of masculinity and how it is
represented in society. The intention is to analyze the film as a specimen of how films may or
may not change our perception of things and teach us, as spectators, something, or if we are
simply looking for an alternative dream-world to discharge our challenging realities.
AIM AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The purpose of this thesis is to analyze how masculinity is depicted in the movie Love (2015)
by Gaspar Noé and how it may change our perspective. Thus, I want to reflect on how
masculine norms are created and recreated through the thematic, aesthetic, and ideological
elements in his work, and to discuss the tension and shared consciousness between the
cinematic body, the bodies on the screen and the spectator’s body, by drawing from
psychoanalysis.
⬧ What role do sex and violence have in the representation of masculine identity
in Gaspar Noé’s Love?
⬧ How can an intersectional perspective shed light on how masculinity is
performed in Love?
⬧ Can the film be a medium for change in our societal viewpoint on masculinity?
If so, how?
3BACKGROUND
Gaspar Noé
Gaspar Noé was born on the 27th of December 1963 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is the son
of the Argentinian painter and intellectual Luis Felipe Noé (who is known for his artform Otra
Figuracíon1) and Nora Murphy, and the younger brother of Paula Murphy Noé. When Gaspar
was four months old, the family left Argentina to avoid the tense political situation. First, they
moved to New York, but four years later they moved back to Argentina, and then in 1976,
they emigrated to France (Tess, 2015). In Noé’s early teens, he studied philosophy in Paris. At
the age of seventeen, he attended Louis Lumiere High School to study cinema, where he
graduated at nineteen. Afterward, he started working at the Faculty of Philosophy in Tolbiac.
In 1985, he worked as an assistant to the Argentinian director Fernando Solanas for Solanas
movie El exilio de Gardel. Shortly after that, Noé directed his first short film Tintarella di
Luna, which his father starred in. At the set of the film, his soon-to-be wife and editor, the
French-born Bosnian-Moroccan director Lucile Hadžihalilović came to visit. Two years later
he was the camera operator for Hadžihalilović’s first short film La premiére mort de Nono.
The couple started the company Les Cinémas de la Zone in 1991, which is still active today.
In 1991, he also started to shoot his first medium-long movie, Carne, with the French actor
Philippe Nahon as the leading character. Later, in 1998, he a short safe-sex promo, Sodomites,
(on the behalf of the French ministry of health) and his first featured film, the arthouse drama
Seul contre tous. In addition to the Seul contre tous’s provocative narrative, Noé established
his own style as a filmmaker. For example, the script of the film mostly consisted of the
Butcher’s inner monologue spoken in voice-over, and he frequently used ‘play-cards’ to
display a variety of messages. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival 1999, caused a
scandal because of its ideological haziness. In 2002, he made his second featured film, the
psychological thriller-drama Irreversible. Similar to his first film, it also caused a scandal at
the Cannes film festival, which mainly was because of its extreme violence and the
disturbingly ten minutes long rape-scene (Polozine, u.d.).
Throughout his previous framework of the safe-sex theme, he shot two advertisements
against AIDS/HIV for a public awareness campaign in 2004. Furthermore, he went to
Ouagadougou, in Burkina Faso, for ten days to shoot his segment SIDA (AIDS) for the
documentary 8, which followed the life of Burkainbé who had been diagnosed with HIV. The
short film was a part of a movie against HIV/AIDS, which filmed in different parts of the
1
An art movement that was a part of the neo-figurative movement in Latin America during the 1960s.
4world and half of the profits went to the U.N. The same year he made the pornographic short
film We Fuck Alone for the project Destricted, which was a project of films that explored the
intersection of art and pornography. Soon after, more than ten years after its announcement
and two years of filming, the experimental drama arthouse film Enter the Void premiered in
Cannes 2009. The critical response for the film was mostly positive because of its visual
achievements, but it was, however, a financial failure (Mignard, 2011).
Additionally, he did a few short movies, and shot a segment, Ritual, in Cuba for the
omnibus directed movie Siete días en La Habana, before announcing his next featured film;
“a sexual melodrama about a boy and a girl and another girl” (Gaspar Noé in Polozine, u.d.),
which were to be named Love. The film was shot entirely in Paris, on a seven pages long
screenplay. As for preparation, the director asked the American actor Karl Glusman who was
cast as Murphy to watch films like Don’t Look Now (1973) by Nicolas Roeg and Ai no korîda
(1976) by Nagisa Ôshima (Setoodeh, 2015). Later, Glusman was joined by the Swiss model
Aomi Muyock as Electra and the Danish model Klara Kristin as Omi, who both did their
acting debut after meeting Noé on a cocktail party in Paris. Overall, the film was 135 minutes
long and often became categorized as an erotic drama art house film because of its, in total, 12
minutes unsimulated sex scenes in 3D. The responses were mixed, but mainly negative, with a
38% rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes, 6,1/10 on IMDb, and 5.8 ratings on Metascore.
In 2018, Noé directed the psychological horror-movie Climax, depicting a French dance
troupe’s after-party after a rehearsal. As the dancers are partying, they realize that someone
has spiked the bowl of sangria with LSD, whereas they slowly lose their minds. The film was
shot in fifteen days in an abandoned school in Paris and was mostly created on improvisation.
It won the Art Cinema Award 2018 at its premiere in the Cannes film festival and further
received mostly positive reviews for its visual distinctiveness and technical brilliantness.
His latest work is a medium-length French metafictional drama film called Lux Æterna,
starring the French actresses and models Beatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg, which
screened at a Cannes in 2019. The movie is not yet released but has gotten mixed or average
reviews on Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes.
5New French Extremity
A term often associated with Gaspar Noé is New French Extremity, which was coined by the
Artforum critic James Quandt. In his essay, Flesh, and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent
French Cinema (2004), Quandt identified the genre as:
Images and subjects once the province of splatter films, exploitation flicks, and porn gang rapes,
bashings, and slashings and blindings, hand-ons and vulvas, cannibalism, sadomasochism and
incest, fucking and fisting, sluices of cum and gore – proliferate in the high-art environs of
national cinema whose provocations have historically been formal, political or philosophical
(Godard, Clouxot, Debord) or, at their most immoderate (Franju, Buñuel, Walerian Borowczyk,
Andrzej Zulawski), at least assimilable as emanations of an artistic movement (Surrealism
mostly) (Quandt, 2011).
French directors, among Gaspar Noé, that Quandt associated with New French Extremity was,
inter alia, Claire Denis, François Ozon, Catherine Breillat, and Bruno Dumont, as a collection
of transgressive filmmakers during the 2000s-2010s. Spreading across Europe, the expanded
term was to be called The New Extremism, which included filmmakers such as the Danish
director Lars von Trier and the Austrian director Michael Haneke.
Stylistically and thematically, the genera combined European art-house and horror-film
with its roots from American exploitation cinema and body horror, delivered from the early
Gothic literature. It also carries the echoes of French traditions of artistic and social dissent
from movements such as the Enlightenment, the Revolution, Romanticism, and Surrealism.
The director and film critic Jonathan Romney further in his article Le sex and Violence (2004)
traced its influences back to the late 1800s and beginning of 1900s art and literature with, for
example, the French philosopher Marquis de Sade, with his controversial erotic novel The 120
Days of Sodom (1904) and the French dramatist Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty2.
Additionally, he also linked the genera to the French artist Gustave Courbet (highlighting his
1866s painting L’origine du monde) along with writers such as the Uruguayan poet Isidore
Ducasse (aka Comte de Lauréamont), the French author Georges Bataille and the American
author William Burroughs. Nevertheless, the genera are highly innovative in creating different
modes of hyper-kineticists, austere detachment, and/or enigmatic experimentalism, e.g.
distorting tactics such as heat photography and long silences (Romney, 2004). Below the
2
Encyclopedia Britannica describes the term as “a primitive ceremonial experience intended to liberate the
human subconscious and reveal man to himself”.
6disturbing imagery of Extreme Cinema, it seeks to illustrate an unfiltered concept of human
suffering, corporeally and socially, and the I in crisis, with the tensions of home invasion and
the fear of the Other (Smith, 2011).
PREVIOUS RESEARCH/LITERATURE REVIEW
Initially, I found an article written about the aesthetics of Noé called The place of the
ominous: A reading to the esthetic bet of Gaspar Noé, towards a proposal of teaching in the
Psychology3 by psychologist Francisco Acuña Sabori. The article proposed an analogy
between Noé’s featured films and fundamental attributes to create a pedagogy that includes
the ominous as a prevailing element in the aesthetics. In order to accomplish that, Sabori
applied the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s concept of film as a trauma, shocking
depravity of our everyday lives, which integrates into our symbolic universe of ideology.
Sabori concluded that the ominous in Noe’s films recreate shock, as a gateway to our
perception and libidinal change into our bodies and our desires (Saborio, 2017).
Not a lot seems to have been written about Gaspar Noé, but in this section I want to map
out the important text I can find, and expose the theories that have been created through his
movies so far, to see what I can add to it.
To research what had been written about Noé’s early work, I read the Brazilian film analyst
Mario Sergio Righetti’s M.A. thesis Expose The Body to Reveal The Flesh: From The
Sensation to The Thought in Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible4 (2017) where he examined the so-
called ‘cinematic body’ in Noe’s Irreversiblé (2002). The thesis examined the relationship
and tension in the sensory and affective between the body of the screen, the cinematic body,
and the spectator’s body, using inter alia the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the
French psychoanalyst Felix Guattari’s transversal analysis based on Georges Bataille’s theory
of spectatoriality5 and the American philosopher and feminist film theorist Laura Marks’
phenomenology on the haptic and optic visuality. The thesis also studied Noe’s Carne (1991)
and Seul Contre Tous (1998) to compare it to Irreversiblé. Both Carne and Seul contre tous,
Righetti argues, distinctively uses juxtaposing images of human body parts with meat- and
3
Original title: El lugar de lo ominoso: Una lectura a la apuesta estética de Gaspar Noé, hacia una propuesta
de enseñanza en la Psicología.
4
Original title: EXPOR O CORPO PARA REVELAR A CARNE: Das sensações ao pensamento em Irreversível,
de Gaspar Noé.
5
The intimate contact between the spectator and the film as they relate to the degradation of the character in the
contemporary cinema of the body.
7animal parts, as haptic images, to create a ‘primitive’ sensation for the viewer on an
unconscious level (Righetti, 2017, p. 78). Similarly, in Irreversiblé, bodies experiencing sex
and/or violence were juxtaposed to permeate to limits between pleasure and pain, in order to
narrate the feelings of disorientation and violence the characters experience, but also make the
viewers feel the flesh itself as their own (Righetti, 2017, p. 132). The study mobilized a large
theoretical apparatus by triangulating Noé’s early work, in which the relation between them
repeats thematic and aesthetic elements: the omnipresent of one character (the butcher), the
extreme violence centered around the limbic system and the director's intention to reveal the
interiority, the subjectivity, of the protagonists (Righetti, 2017, p. 209).
Further, in British film theorist Jeeshan Gazi’s article Blinking and Thinking: The
Embodied Perceptions of Presence and Remembrance in Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void
(2017), the employment of the blinking eyes as a tool was studied, which Gazi argued allowed
the filmmaker to “make cuts between takes whilst retaining the implied duration of the natural
perception depicted” (Gazi, 2017, p. 3). Gazi used David Bordwell’s theory of the
significance of blinking in cinema, in which he points out the eyes often function as parts of
the face, which creates, what American psychologist6 Paul Ekman called, a ‘facial action’
system. In using this concept, the author argued how mimetic the depiction of the movie of
the first-person point of view is, and the blinks thus imply the existence of eyelids and hence
also a face and so on. Gazi maintained that “the camera does not simply represent a character,
but becomes in itself the character”, and thus, created a feeling of irony and uncanniness
whilst shifting the camera into an “impossibly subjectivity” when the viewer watched from a
third-person perspective as the main character, reminisce a memory in a non-linear mode of
storytelling. Moreover, Gazi examined American psychologist David J. Bryant’s
conceptualization of space in human memory as “the self in an array of objects”, which meant
“one person (the subject) looking at another person who was surrounded by objects to their
six body sides” in which the subject mentally occupies the position of remembrance of his
child self as the subjective camera becomes the character to create the turbulent emotional
state, and thus, recreate the trauma of the main character (Gazi, 2017, p. 14).
A similar study regarding the aesthetic in Enter the Void was discussed in the literature and
film studies scholar Adina Sorian’s article Mediale Selbstreflexion und des Laansche Reale in
Gaspar Noé’s ENTER THE VOID (2018). The article applied the French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan’s theory of “the Real”, “the Imaginary” and “the Symbolic” as three of the
6
Mostly known as a pioneer in studying micro-expressions.
8structural determinations of the physics. Sorian also focused on two modes of formalist
representation, as cinematic implementations of the Real, which is referred to as the Real
gaze7 and the auditory dimension which is referred to as acousmatic music8. Visually, the
Real gaze served to visualize the ontology of seeing and the relationship between the viewer
and the visual object. Sorian argued that to bring a sense of self-reflection, the film used the
so-called afterimage9 effect and the stroboscopic effect10 to create a physiological-cognitive
basis of coherent visions whilst the visions themselves are inaccessible. Similarly, the author
claimed, the acousmatic were also self-reflective, because it had the function of hearing the
ontology and associate the relationship between the recipient and the auditory object,
examining the physiological and cognitive foundation of an audiovisual film (Sorian, 2018).
In contrast to the previous studies mentioned, the M.A. thesis Gaspar Noé’s Enter the
Void: Raumaufsichten und wegweisende Perspektiven in Subkulturen by Amelio August
Nicotera focused more on the narrative of the film. The thesis highlighted the movie’s
depiction of hallucination, reincarnation, relationships between siblings, obsessions, rituals,
traumas, transcendence, birth, death, and intoxication withing the narrative, approaching it
from three interpretations. Firstly, Nicotera interpreted the movie as a visualization of the
Tibetan The Book of the Dead. Secondly, the author interpreted it as it was told, in a linear
manner, where there is no clear line between reality (i.e. the protagonist’s flashbacks, and his
imagination). Here, Nicotera argued that the main character was having a trip throughout the
whole film, and survives, instead of dying, which the first scenes in the film suggested. The
last interpretation indicated that the whole film dissolved as fragments and that the narrative
constantly changed and was therefore not reliable (Nicotera, 2013, p. 79). All in all, it offered
interesting perspectives on the film and abstract storytelling as such.
Because Love did not receive outstandingly good critique, I was not surprised that I only
found reviews on it. The most interesting review was Sexe, arte et dépression, by Jean-
Philippe Gravel. In the review, the author essentially compared the movie to other films about
sex but claimed that Noé’s film was about love and depression. Gravel argued that the
melancholic became a paradox in the film with it is with its explicit sexual content because it
is two taboo subjects. He also compares Love to porn and contended that Noé brought out the
element of pornography that searched to provoke the affect of regret in symbiosis with erotic
7
Here: “Realen Blick”
8
Here: “Akusmatischen Musik”
9
An image that appears in our sight after the period of exposure to the original image.
10
An optical phenomenon causing a cyclically moving object to appear slow-moving, or stationary when viewed
in e.g. a series of short or instantaneous samples as distinct from a continuous view.
9syndromes. In contrast to pornography, which is a deeply conservative genre where nothing is
permitted, the reminiscence of the sexual acts in Love is uncoordinated and “natural”, and the
audience does not know what will happen next. He wrote that: “On the screen, the bodies in
ecstasy and trances are visible, but the story unfolds limbs as phantom limbs, sensuousness
pleasures as memories, and sensuality and desires as memories of desires that time is about to
take away”11 (Gravel, 2016, p. 45).
Lastly, I was looking for studies regarding Climax, whereas I found Paolo Pérez López’s
article Francia en una secuencia: acerca de Climax, de Gaspar Noé. Here, the author used
the Decuoage and Cluster-models by the French film analyst Raymond Bellour and the
American film analyst Constance Penley to analyze a dance sequence in the movie as a
representation of France to see how youths are represented in the main sequence, and what
relation it has to the main culture portrayed based on Bloom’s taxonomy12. Accordingly,
López presented a chart of the twenty-two characters and their gender and race; whereas there
were nine men, two white and seven black men, and thirteen women, eight of the women
were white and five of them were black, thus, half of the dancers was Afro-European. Lopéz
also categorized people in queer, not queer, and both, mainly by studying their dance style
with the history of the dance styles. He also drew parallels to the VHS’s and books which
were presented at the beginning of the film, as a denotative and connotative form of
communication, using Roland Barthes's theory of the rhetoric of the image. Finally, he came
to six conclusions: (1) freestyle was the predominant style of dancing, (2) physical contact
mostly occurred when the characters were dancing in mixed groups, (3) when the characters
were dancing in a group they were more provocative and intimate, (4) there was no group
with only queer men, (5) only queer men and women danced sexy, (6) non-queer men had
physical contact with mixed groups in mixed groups, (7) the main character, Selva (Sofia
Botticelli), represented equality, (8) the black community represented fraternity, (9) the
character Psyche (Thea Carla Schott) represented freedom, (10) Psyche, Selva and the black
community together represented the French motto “liberté, égalité, fraternité” and the
Tricolore, which was in the background of the sequence. By analyzing this one segment,
Lopéz manages to highlight the political elements of the film and put it in a context in which
it might not have been meant for at the beginning, but is essential for the symbiosis of arts
11
Original quote : « À l’écran, les transports des corps sont visibles, mais le récit souligne que les membres sont
des membres fantômes, que les voluptés sont des souvenirs de voluptés et les désirs, des souvenirs de désirs que
le temps s’apprête à emporter. »
12
Named after the American educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom.
10survival (Pérez López, 2019). Even if López's study highlights intersectional identities, there
has not been a particular study of masculinity in Noé’s films.
SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS
Initially, I will present the methods and theoretical framework I am going to apply in my
analysis. Next, I am shortly going to introduce the movie Love, which I will study. Then, I am
going to analyze the spectator’s body by using a mix of theories about the gaze, which I will
present in the next chapter. Here, I will also present a detailed outline of the film to guide the
reader in further segments of my analysis. After that, I will shift my focus to the bodies of the
characters on the screen, mainly Murphy’s way of orientating and disorientating himself to
the societal norms of (hegemonic) masculinity and by being looked at, using phenomenology
and masculinity theories. In the next segment, I will talk about the film as a play, using
Brechtian theories, to further evaluate its influences and deeper meaning in, especially,
shaping different forms of masculinity. Lastly, I conclude and discuss my results.
112. METHODS AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
In this chapter, I will present the methods and theoretical framework in which I will apply to
my analyses. Initially, I will present Bertolt Brecht’s theories and practices of Epic theatre,
which I will use to analyze the techniques used in the film. Further, I am going to present the
methodology I will use, phenomenology, which I will combine with different aspects of the
theory of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity. Lastly, I will introduce
psychoanalytic theories applied to film, specifying the gaze and the spectator.13
Because Noé’s work is inspired filmmakers who have been inspired by the German theatre
practitioner and playwriter Bertolt Brecht’s theater techniques (e.g. the French director Jean-
Luc Godard) (Ross, 2016), I will analyze Love with a Brechtian theoretical approach. A key
understanding of his theories suggested that a theater should not cause the spectator to
emotionally identify with the characters or action but provoke a rational self-reflection.
According to him “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it”.
One of his most famous principles was the Verfremdungseffekt14 which he described as
"stripping the event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of
astonishment and curiosity about them” (Brecht quoted in Brooker, 1994, p. 191). In his
notion, drama should be pedagogic, not simply entertaining, but as an arena for human
interaction and communication to make the spectator think and make a stand. The technique
of the alienation effect involved ‘breaking the fourth wall’ (i.e. the wall between the audience
and the actors) to involve the audience in the play whilst at the same time let them know that
what they are seeing is fiction in which he, for instance, used play cards and/or tableaux.
Within the narrative, the actors often reminded the viewer that they were watching a story by
telling them what was going to happen before it happened, or/and the actors broke in
character, consequently, the audience would not get as emotionally involved (Steer, 1968).
Epic theatre aims to (1) stage an accurate representation of human beings, (2) to reveal the
social factors that influence human action, behavior and thought, (3) to portray the world (i.e.
the stage) as changeable, and (4) to criticize human behavior, actor and thought as ‘natural’,
and to articulate the Marxist contradictions15 properly. The method for doing so is to use
firstly, as mention, to make the familiar unfamiliar. For example, the Brechtian theatre should
13
Starting with Brecht and finalizing with psychoanalysis is the reverse order in which I will analyze, but I want
to present them in this order because here, the subjects touch upon each other.
14
Also called the alienation effect or the v-effect.
15
In the German philosopher, economist a socialist revolutionary Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism,
contradiction is the concept of an opposition of social forces, stemming from class conflict, economic crisis and
eventually, revolution.
12use figures, not characters, meaning that the behavior of the people on stage was not fixed, but
fluid, constantly reminding the viewer that it was fiction. Another method used in Epic theatre
was gestus, which was to make the actors imply their physical gestures and attitude in their
speech (i.e. to reveal not only their feelings without having to spell them out but their age,
class, and other contexts). Similarly, a play should evaluate its performed material, that is, that
the director, actors, and the set-designer are conscious of the different points in history which
produce different values, behaviors, and opinions to contrast different behaviors between the
past and the presence. This was what Brecht called grund-gestus, or historization. The
structure of the Brechtian method began with the construction of the fable16, which leads to
arrangements17, and then the actors developed a fundamental gestus for their figures,
followed by inductive rehearsal18, which leads to a diverse range of haltung19 (Barnett, 2014).
Other techniques used in Brechtian theatre is one actor having multiple roles, or split roles
(i.e. two actors sharing the same character), using a minimalistic number of actors, as well as
the set and the props. Regarding songs and dancing, Epic theater often explored the contrast to
steer away from reality (e.g. a dark scene with up-tempo music). Lastly, humor20 was an
important element in epic theatre, and to make people laugh in order to break the fourth wall
and make the audience more participant.
As a method, I will use film phenomenology, drawing from Laura Marks and British-
American scholar Sara Ahmed, and their Merleau-Pontian roots. In 1964, the French
philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that phenomenology is “an attempt to make us
see the bond between subject and the world, between subject and others, rather than to explain
it as the classical philosophies did by resorting to the absolute spirit” and that “the movies are
peculiarly suited to make manifest the union of mind and body, mind and world, and the
expression of one in another” (Merleau-Ponty quoted in Ferencz-Flatz & Hanich, 2016, p. 4).
On this notion, the American media theorist Vivian Sobchack argued that film is “a
philosophical exemplar of ‘intentionality’ making manifest the directed and irreducible
correlation of subject consciousness (evidenced by the camera’s projected and visible choice-
16
A three-layered analysis of the plot of the play; firstly, the event portrayed in the story and the social
interactions between the characters, the causality of their behavior and the historical materialism. Secondly, the
plot from a formal and semiotic perspective, and lastly, the embodiment and the attitudes that the play appears to
embody and articulate.
17
The symbolic placement of actors on stage, to clearly show the relationships between the figures to the
audience. Thus, the actors proceed from a social not a psychological starting point.
18
Revealing to the audience what is going to happen, so they are not developing emotional relations to the
figures.
19
The German word for attitude or posture, to be seen in combinations with Gestus.
20
Referred to by Brecht as “Spass”, i.e. the German word for “fun” or “joke”.
13making movements of attention) and its objects (whether ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’)” (Ferencz-
Flatz & Hanich, 2016, p. 5). Hence, cinema acts as a reflection of the world, which manifests
in certain characteristics of the human experience. Furthermore, Marks created the notion of
the feminine phenomenological experience, drawing from ideas by the formalist art historian
Alois Rigel, by distinguishing between the optical and haptic vision. Marks claimed that the
optical visuality is the spectator’s distant overviewing position, which can objectively distinct
and isolated can be understood as seeing objects and “control” the picture. Haptic visuality,
on the other hand, was located at the other end of the polar continuum and were “more
inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze than gaze” (Ferencz-Flatz & Hanich,
2016, p. 34). Moreover, as Merleau-Ponty noted, it is the spatial forms and distances that are
not interactions between pointed objective spaces, but between the points and our bodies. On
this notion, Ahmed claimed that the body provides perspective. She argued that the body is a
starting point in which we orientate ourselves and inhabit space, and further apprehend the
world; “In order to become orientated, you might suppose that we must first experience
disorientation” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 5). When we are orientated, we might not even notice that
we are orientated: we might not even think “to think” about this point. Moreover, she
reasoned that sexual orientation is a different way of being orientated and facing the world,
whereas queer ways mobilize the body’s relationship to space. The emotions that we
encounter moves us toward and away from objects and others entailing ‘affective forms of
(re)orientation’. Queer bodies are facing the ‘wrong’ direction and pay attention to the
‘inappropriate’ other and ‘deviant’ objects. In cinema, queer sensibility can express tactility a
contact with itself repeatedly within a heteronormative culture, which therefore articulate
queer tendencies and thus, bend the norms (Ahmed, 2006, p. 5). Moreover, to think of the
intersection of gender we should think in terms of: “(1) what people (and their bodies) are; (2)
what people do; (3) what relationships and inequalities they make; (4) what meanings all
these are given; (5) what social effect and ideas interrelated with other ways of identifying
and categorizing people, for example in racialized relationships and categories of analysis”
(Holland & Ramazanoglu, 2002, p. 5).
To position the figures on the screen, I will observe how the issue of power relations
connected to class, ability, ethnicity, sexuality, age, gender, and gender performance
correlates, to critically reflect past monotoned groups (Hankivsky, 2014, p. 2). Here, I am will
draw from the Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell’s and American sociologist James
Messerschmidt’s theory of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity, to analyze
how masculine traits, in correlation to sexuality and socioeconomic status, legitimizes and
14justifies men to maintain power within social institutions (i.e. state, education, and even in the
family). The concept is rooted in Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s term
‘hegemony’, which was used to understand the stabilization of class relation, and Austrian
neurologist Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. Connell and Messerschmidt also noted that an
important feature of hegemonic masculinity is toxicity, which “constructs masculine power
from the direct experience of women rather than from the structural basis of women’s
subordination” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Here, the authors drew from the
Norwegian social psychologist Harriet Holter’s differentiation between patriarchy, “as the
long-term structure of the subordination of women”, and gender, “as a specific system
exchange that arose in the context of modern capitalism”. They stressed that it is an error to
deduce relations of masculinity hierarchies from the direct exercise of personal power of men
over women, and suggests that we must also see to the factors of the institutionalized gender
equalities, the role of cultural constitutions, and the interplay of gender dynamics regarding
race, class, and religion (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 839). Furthermore, Connell
claimed that more powerful men will achieve their masculinity in different ways and context
from less powerful males (e.g. businessmen who express their power through control in the
workplace), and less successful men who express power through violence at home.
Messerschmidt then argued that white working-class men are less likely to be successful in
education, thus, their masculinity is constructed around anti-social behavior. He further
suggested that working-class men with less opportunity of achieving academic success, seek
to assert their masculinity in e.g. organized criminal activities and that middle-class men, who
have the means to accomplish hegemonic masculinity, often use other crimes to express
masculinity, such as white-collar crime (i.e. nonviolent crimes committed for financial gain)
(Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 833).
From a psychoanalytic perspective, Freud initially argued that masculinity and femininity
were the opposite of each other preceded by other pairs of opposites, such as phallic and
castrated, or active and passive. Thus, femininity was something that appeared after puberty,
and that femininity is equated with being deprived of the phallus. In his studies, he examined
the interactions between parent and child, which further encouraged the research regarding the
early development of femininity and masculinity. The American clinical psychologist Michael
J. Diamond claims that today’s more complex gender identity paradigm untangles gender
from sex and sexuality, and therefore masculine identity must distinguish from the biological
sex, gender identity, and sexual gender preference. Traditionally, boys and men with fragile
self-images are, within the clinical sphere, rationalized by having ‘too much’ or ‘too little’
15masculinity. If they have too little masculinity they are seen as passive and non-‘phallic’
people under the influence of the Oedipus-complex, and if they’re too masculine they
defensively counter identified from their mother, evidently heighten the concept of phallic
narcissism. Hence, according to Diamond, masculinity is originally forged from the infant’s
earlier desires, to be his mother and his father. Diamond further suggested that this happens
several times throughout life and that by modifying the relation between the phallic and the
genitals of the masculine, many men will be able to achieve a new form of masculinity, by
constantly identifying and disidentifying (Diamond, 2006).
On the notion of the phallic, I will rather see it as a womb, which was suggested by the
Israeli-born French artist and philosopher Bracha L. Ettinger in her book The Matrixial Gaze
(1985). She developed the Matrixial Theory of Trans-subjectivity which stemmed from, not
only the Freudian, but also the Lacanian concept of the phallic gaze, but contrast to them,
Ettinger suggests that it has the shape of a uterus, which shifts the theory’s concepts of
‘desire’ and ‘unconscious’. Thus, the transgressive encounter between I and non-I, she
argued, is grounded in the womb, and enlarges the subjectivity. In her notion, the womb and
the pre-natal phase are references to the Real, which the Imaginary Matrix corresponds to.
Ettinger described it as “[…] a conaissance – a transformational knowledge of being born
together with the other whereby each individual becomes sub-subject in subjectivity that
surpasses her personal limit, and whereby an Other might become for me not only a sign of
my archaic m/Other but also an occasion for transformation” (Ettinger, 2006, p. 222). In the
following sense, she established a feminine gaze by also offering a female subjective position,
rather than an object, whilst also deconstruct the structure of the subject itself. Regarding the
gaze, I will also draw from the French film theorist Christian Metz, who is best known for
applying the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics into film, and the British
feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, who interrogated the male gaze on the female body on
screen. First, with a structuralist approach, Metz tried to create a theoretical and
methodological grasp of the symbolic in cinema21. In his psychoanalytical phase during the
late 1970s, he created the concept of the ‘imaginary signifier’ and the distinction between
‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ identification by applying Saussure’s semiology with concepts
from Lacan’s mirror stage into film theory (Metz, 1975). In his essay, The Imaginary Signifier
(1975) he suggested that cinema is a mirror, which has the ability to depict an imperfect
reflection of the real and at the same time dig into one’s unconsciousness. Thus, the spectator
21
What he referred to as ”La machine cinéma”.
16initially identifies with the camera as Omni-seeing (primary identification) and the narrator-
eye becomes a surrogate-eye; “I am what I see, and the eye, becomes the I”. Secondary, he
argued, that the spectator identifies with the fictive characters on the screen (secondary
identification), which he insinuated happens by other characters looking at one another, and
therefore, bringing us closer. As the invisible character, the spectator sees through the
characters on screen, and they see themselves not seeing them (Metz, 1975). Additionally, in
Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), she developed a theory on how
women were used as objects for masculine desire in film. Mulvey mainly adapted Freud’s
concepts of scopophilia as one of three drives in sexuality that exists external from the
erogenous zones, in which Freud often utilized his theory of children’s voyeuristic activities
and desires to acknowledge the forbidden as an important stage of creating an identity. In
adopting Freud’s theory, Mulvey reasoned that the viewer is fixed in perversion, and their
only satisfaction lies in watching another objectified person. She argued that film seeks to
satisfy a primitive desire for voyeurism and thus, develop the narcissistic aspects of
scopophilia that feeds on the curiosity to identify the self with a human face, a human body
and a relation between the human spectacle and its surroundings, as a “long love affair or
despair between the image and the self-image” (Mulvey, 1975, p. 840). Through cinema, she
also claimed that the female spectator did not only identify with the female passivity, which
often is portrayed but argued that they also adopted the masculine identity. Here, she created
the notion of a ‘trans-identity’ by highlighting that “the pre-oedipal and phallic fantasy of
omnipotence that for girls is equally active for boys”. From a Freudian point of view, to gain
‘proper’ femininity, women must participate in the active aspects of their femininity, in which
Mulvey hypothesized that the female viewers convey the masculinization of the spectator’s
position because it signifies a pleasurable aspect of their sexuality, thus, she claims that the
female audiences remain “restless in [her] transvestite clothes” (Mulvey, 1990).
DELIMITATIONS
Mainly the perspective on masculinity will center around white Western culture, which I think
is important to address since the gender norms in various parts of the world are different. I
also want to acknowledge that intersectionality originally was created to point out modes of
oppression (e.g. how Black women are oppressed by both sexism and racism), but in this
thesis, I will use it to study the portrayal of overlapping privileges and how this reflects on
society. There is also a lot of technical aspects in making a movie (e.g. how it has been filmed
17and edited), but I will not go into that, nor the production of the movie in itself. Lastly, I want
to mention that the film carries a lot of elements from both the filmmaker Gaspar Noé and the
New French Extremity, though I will not make any deeper connection between the auteur or
the genres as such, but rather focus on the theories and methods I previously mentioned.
183. FILM ANALYSIS: THREE LAYERS OF LOVE
In this chapter, I will analyze three layers of the movie Love. Initially, I am going to examine
the spectator’s role and the gaze in watching the movie by mainly using psychoanalytical
theories. Here, I will also provide a detailed description of the movie, which will make it
easier to follow in the upcoming analyzes. Secondly, I will examine the orientation of gender
in the film with phenomenology, and the concepts are drawn from hegemonic masculinity and
emphasized femininity. Lastly, I will examine the film as an Epic play with Brechtian
theories, and as a stadium for human interaction and communication to make the spectator
think and make a stand. With these three different modes of analysis, I want to create various
aspects of watching the film and tie it into one to create and recreate meaning to it in a similar
way described by Richard Altman:
Every screen moment is caught up in a multidimensional loom, in which several elements –
foreground and background, shot scale and lightning, mise en scéne and editing, dialogue, and
music – are woven together into a multidimensionally reversible fabric. With each new
juxtaposition, new connections are made, and concepts are reinforced or relegated to storage,
potentially leading to that magic moment of conceptual reframing when the spectator-weaver
presses on the pedal, raising some threads while lowering other and thus initiating a new series of
juxtapositions and reframings (Altman, 1999, p. 136).
Shortly described, Love is about the American film student, Murphy (Karl Glusman), who
lives in an apartment with his partner, Omi (Klara Kristin), and their child Gaspar. Set in the
city of Paris, the non-linear narrative begins with Murphy getting a phone call from his ex-
girlfriend Electra’s mother, which causes him to reminisce on his previous relationship with
her and how he ended up with Omi. As it turns out, Electra’s (Aomi Muyock) and Murphy’s
relationship were at the breaking point when they met Omi, who they had a no-strings-
attached threesome with. Later, Murphy had sex with Omi behind Electra’s back, which
culminated with a broken condom, and Omi got pregnant. Her pregnancy ended his
passionate, and partly toxic, relationship with Electra, and made him start a traditional
conjugal family life with Omi. As the memories of Electra is juxtaposed with the present, the
spectator is invited to go deeper into Murphy’s nostalgic subconsciousness.
19THE SPECTATOR’S BODY: NARRATING THE GAZE
In this section, I will retell the story in detail with a psychoanalytic approach to creating an
interactive dialogue with the figures on screen from the perspective of the spectator by using
Metz’s and Mulvey’s psychoanalytic film theories of the gaze, which seeks to analyze the
viewer’s identification with the camera, and the viewer’s identification with the (often male)
protagonist and their relation to the female bodies onscreen. Additionally, I will also use
Ettinger’s notion of The Matrixial Gaze. About Ettinger’s theory, art historian Griselda
Pollock wrote that:
[The matrixial gaze]emerges by a simultaneous reversal of with-in and with-out (and does not
represent the eternal inside), by a transgression of border links manifested in the contract with-
in/out and artwork by transcendence of the subject-object interval which is not a fusion, since it
based on a-priori shareability indifference (Pollock, 1996).
In this section, the technique will also be discussed with, for example, Gazi’s notion of
blinking because it is an important element in Noé’s filmmaking and thus creating a form of
transcendent consciousness.
Initially, in the first scene of the film, we are invited as spectators into a bedroom with two
lovers – a man and a woman – sexually pleasuring each other’s exposed genitals, whilst
Bach’s Goldberg Variations are playing in the background. The bodies in trance are softly
positioned in a harmonious composition, illuminated by the room’s natural lighting and the
bright sheets. As the gaze lies upon the bodies, closely, yet distance, the spectators become
voyeurs – scopophilic children with the desire to acknowledge the forbidden – but in shock by
the realness of the raw sex scene, which seeks to cause us to confront our own sexual desires
(Mulvey, 1990).
The following scene is depicting the man from the scene before, Murphy, who is now
sleeping next to another woman, Omi, whilst waking up to the sound of his phone ringing and
a baby crying in the distance. The spectators are now invited to his intimate thoughts by
hearing his monologues, which reveals to us that he was partying the night before and that he
still feels high, filthy, and disgusting. As he walks around the apartment, he refers to his life
as nightmarish, in contrast to the wonderful dream he had. Now, he is waking up next to a
woman he is not in love with, which causes him to feel trapped and disorientated in a bleak
life, and the only joy in his life is his son, Gaspar. The voicemail he got was from his ex-
girlfriend Electra’s mother Nora, who is worried about her missing daughter. She reveals that
20she has not heard from in months and seemed to would have suicidal tendencies the last time
they spoke, and as for Murphy, it has been two years since he last saw her. The image shifts
into a memory of himself in the dark in his bedroom years before the present. He gets up and
faces the room, whilst the camera is positioned at the back of his head, causing the spectator
‘to become’ him. In his memory, he calls Nora to ask about Electra, only to be yelled at,
because he has “ruined everything”. Back in the present, he is having breakfast with his
family. Still, the viewer has only heard his resentful thoughts, but he has not said anything
yet. Omi complains about him being fat, in which he thinks that she is bitter, indicating that
she is not happy with him either. Then, she looks at her son and says: “Do you know how
babies like you come to this world?” The memory of their son being conceived is displayed.
Followed the sequence of Omi telling Murphy that she is pregnant. A memory of Electra
lying in bed with him is shortly portrayed. Back in the presence, Omi is now asking who was
on the phone, but he is hesitant to tell her. He tells her about the phone call he got, in which
she responds: “You take care of your past, and I will take care of our future”.
The more other people interact with Murphy, the closer it brings the spectators to identify
with him as our reflection. Thus, the camera becomes our artificial I and Murphy become our
second identity, but his present body seems only to be an empty shell, whereas his identity is
left inside his memories (Metz, 1975).
He walks over to his shelf picks up a VHS case where he has been hiding opium and
another memory is displayed, depicting the moment when Electra gave him the drugs. The
imagery shifts back to his apartment a few years back, as we go into a melancholic state. The
viewer is now re-experiencing the moment when Murphy tells Electra that he has impregnated
Omi. Electra spits in his face and leaves. He haunts her down at a club, and then to her place,
where they violently scream at each other. For the spectator, this is the first real introduction
to Electra, but what they do not know is that it is the last time Murphy saw her.
As memories occur more frequently, the image of Electra becomes more real, and the
blinking-technique (“blackout jump-cuts”) happens repeatedly to orientate the spectator to a
first-person perspective (Gazi, 2017). The camera body and the spectator’s bodies become as
one, and Murphy becomes one with the spectators, causing his present to shift into an
‘impossible subjectivity’ of him watching himself22 (Ettinger, 2006).
After a sex scene with Electra and Murphy, he asks her what her ultimate fantasy is, in
which she responds: “To have sex with another woman”. Shortly after, a young and blond
22
In the Lacanian notion it is called object petit a (‘a’ stands for ‘autre’, i.e. other) and emphasizes the fetishized
phantasy of the desiring the so called other.
21Danish girl, Omi, moves into their building. The couple invites her to go out to eat, where
they chat, and, significantly, she reveals that she is against abortion – that she is “pro-life” as
she explains it – because she did not feel wanted by her parents. Murphy replies that he is pro-
choice. Electra mostly stays silent, which indicates that the memory displayed is his
unconsciousness, reducing her as a passive participant in filling his ‘womb’ of the creation of
the ‘I’, because when she becomes active, that is when she separates from him as the non-I
(Ettinger, 2006, p. 146). Additionally, as I have argued, the spectators as Murphy is re-
experiencing his memory, and thus, that Electra seems quiet is because he remembers it that
way. Remembering conversations is highly selective, and one participant's social influence in
a conversation can affect memory (Hirst & Echerhoff, 2012). In this case, Omi is new and
exciting, and therefore Murphy takes more interest in listening to her and recalling the
moment when she told him that she is pro-life has a significant meaning to him.
After the dinner, the three of them go to a club, and then they end up having a threesome in
Murphy’s bed to the tunes of Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain. Like the second sex scene, the
viewer is invited to the bedroom, with the camera displayed from above in dim light. The
spectator has almost forgotten about everyday life; that Murphy’s still in his bedroom, living
with Omi and their child. The portrayal of both Electra and Omi in these sequences is passive
but filled with romanticism, which indicates that it is a fantasy, where both Electra and Omi
are his objects of desire. Omi reveals that she is young and appears to be free-spirited, whilst
Electra seems to be the reflection of himself as the m/Other he, in his reminiscing, has not yet
separated from (Ettinger, 2006). This also puts the spectators in Murphy’s male gaze,
orientating himself as a heterosexual man by desiring what these two European women
represent, rather than who they are (Mulvey, 1990).
The reflection of his fantasy shatters when the imagery flashes back to the apartment,
where he desperate replies to Nora’s voice message in an attempt to bring Electra back in his
life. The blinking-technique occurs frequently in his present, blurring the line of what is real
and not. As the camera moves away from the subject, he seems to see himself from a distance,
whereas he says to himself: “I’m a loser. Yeah, just a dick. A dick has no brain. A dick has
only one purpose: To fuck. I fucked it all up. Yeah, I’m good at one thing: Fucking things
up”. His inner monologue creates more substance to the narrative and involvement to the
spectators, but Murphy’s inner conflict also inflicts a distance to the spectators by creating a
Kafkaesque feeling of shame, which makes him hard to identify with.
As he lays stoned on opium in his bed, he yet again reminisces on his child being
conceived. The memory is juxtaposed with the memories of him and Electra talking about
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