Lindsay Anne Hallam - Screening the Marquis de Sade: Pleasure, Pain and the Transgressive Body in Film

Pleasure, Pain and the Transgressive Body in Film

LINDSAY ANNE HALLAM

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Chapter 195

I would like to thank Antonio Traverso for his challenging arguments, thoughtful feedback and endless patience.

I am also grateful to Howard Worth and the staff of the Screen Arts Department at Curtin University for providing support, employment and, most importantly, an airconditioned office that provided much needed relief from a particularly brutal Australian summer.

Thanks to Mikel J. Koven, Xavier Mendik and Rikke Schubart for their help, encouragement and for taking time out to help someone who had no idea what they were doing!

Thank you to the Kobal Collection for allowing me access to their archive and providing permission to reproduce their material.

Special thanks to my family, especially Steve and Anne Hallam, who always supported me, no matter what strange movie I brought into the house. And finally, thanks to Liam Dunn, my partner in film geekdom.

Cinema's fascination with the depiction of the body, from its agony to its ecstasy, has been relentless since this medium's inception. In fact, the body's experience of pleasure, conflict or trauma has been the basis for the vast majority of film narratives and representations, whether mainstream or alternative. When films take this fascination with the body to explicit extremes through the graphic depiction of sex, violence, or atrocity, as viewers we are both disturbed and confronted with the realization of our own interest in the sight of the body's participation in transgressive acts.

One figure that has been continually marginalized and censored due to the transgression of bodily taboos within his work has been the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814). Sade is a significant figure in this respect, as his works have been at the center of censorship debates ever since they were written. Sade's texts explore, in detail, bodily behavior that is prohibited by law and by social taboo. What is more, Sade celebrates this behavior and accompanies his graphic descriptions with philosophical justification.

During the twentieth century, however, Sade's work began to be studied and examined by other philosophers and thinkers of the time, from psychoanalysts such as Jacques Lacan and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel to post-structuralists such as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.' It soon became apparent that in Sade's radical thinking were the means to explore the darker aspects of humanity, such as the urge to violate and transgress bodies and taboos. Due to this re-evaluation, Sade has since become a central figure in the critical revision of ideological foundations of the human subject, as he explores precisely the limits of the normative and the transgressive. Whereas before, art works which transgressed bodily norms were rejected and marginalized, scholars found that there was an inherent fascination with pushing these bodily boundaries. Thus, the transgressive body can be defined as a body representation that no longer fits into society's normative categories, and instead challenges cultural, biological and sexual norms.

Since Sade proposes a philosophy which also challenges and defies societal norms and laws, representations of the transgressive body are central to his work. That Sade chooses to express this philosophy in the form of stories, novels and plays demonstrates that fiction can be used as a philosophical tool. Thus, it can be argued that other forms of fiction, such as cinema, can also be used in this a tool to challenge and subvert social taboos and bodily norms. Cinema, not unlike literature, is fascinated with depicting the transgressive body in all its states. However, in spite of the correspondence between Sade's body representations and the transgressive bodies depicted in cinema, his philosophy has rarely been systematically applied to film analysis. For just as the bodies and actions described in Sade carry significant meanings, so too does the transgressive body in cinema. Consequently, by applying Sadean philosophy to the analysis of the transgressive body in cinema, this book will examine the boundaries of society's norms regarding sexuality and biology.

The human condition in Sade is essentially a bodily one. Indeed, Sade seems obsessed with breaking conventions and exploring the limits of the body in order to tell us something about the human condition as an embodied condition. By applying Sade's bodily-oriented philosophy to film analysis, this book provides a comprehensive discussion of the cultural significance of the transgressive bodies represented in cinema. By analyzing transgressive representations it becomes apparent that they mean more than themselves. We are, in fact, not so different from these representations: they constitute us both as bodies and as subjects. This book, it is hoped, will contribute to a deeper understanding of the cultural interest in the transgressive representation of the body, which may in turn lead to a better understanding of our nature as human subjects.

Thus, a Sadean reading of the transgressive body onscreen reveals something about the human subject that other frameworks of interpretation of cinema may that the symbolic destruction of the social order through bodily transgression is a positive and creative force derived from Sade's concept of nature. According to Sade, the subject is driven primarily by the natural bodily urges that society tries to repress through law and taboo. In Sade's works an alternative hierarchy is created in which those who follow nature's instincts for lust and aggression dominate those still under the sway of society's repression. It is nature, whose instincts and urges are felt and expressed through the body, that is exposed as the guiding force of the human subject, a force that works in opposition to external cultural influences. To transgress against these cultural taboos thus strengthens the subject's position within the Sadean natural hierarchy.

While psychoanalysis, feminism, semiotics, and post-structuralism have informed the field of film analysis for many years, using the work of Sade as a way of understanding film is still relatively new within this field. Whereas many analyses use theory to excuse and thus dilute the power of sexual and violent images, the application of Sadean philosophy to film is deliberately transgressive and confrontational, seeking to examine cinematic representations of human relations as unflinchingly as Sade did in his novels.

This book aims to be both academic and also understandable to the more casual reader. I refrain from analyzing adaptations of Sade's work, or films that present Sade's life story (with the exception of Pasolini's Salo), and instead use Sade's philosophy to analyze a wider array of films. My purpose in doing so is to develop Sadean philosophy as a form of film theory that can be applied to many films, not just those that deal directly with Sade and his works. Sade is integral to my analysis, as his philosophy provides a method of thinking that uncovers the ways in which cinema challenges bodily norms in order to suggest broader cultural and political transgressions.