Programme Note: Shame
Please note that this article contains spoilers.
Situated against the backdrop of 21st Century western attitudes toward sexual conduct, Steve McQueen’s second feature, Shame (2011), is a bold film to make. Focusing on the life of a young and wealthy sex addict living in New York City, it’s fully possible that many could dismiss the concept with a degree of cynicism; money, freedom and sex in perpetual flow – isn’t that the dream of many a modern man?
It’s certainly a sentiment that Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbender) would likely toast to if prompted by a colleague over drinks. Painted as every inch the present-day yuppie, he is a picture of fixed regime, balanced in perfect equilibrium with persistent vice. From his slicked hair to his sparse yet functional apartment, everything of Brandon’s persona is suggestive of a man in control. With his material life so well adjusted, he requires little in the way of thought; his needs are tactile and within reach, whether it’s cold beer from the fridge, or the needle on his record player.
Yet just as Brandon’s efficiency is granted through physicality, so too are his most recurrent indulgences, existing likewise as purely habitual urges. If he exits one segment of a revolving door as a woman enters another, instinct will turn his head to assess her buttocks before continuing. Similarly, when a girl in Brandon’s office is shown talking on the phone, the focus is not on her words, but on the visual – as the camera lingers on her made-up lips, Brandon’s priorities are made clear. Later, he will make one of his daily trips to the men’s room in order to express them further.
This relationship between sex and routine is one expressed perfectly by the film’s opening montage. As the strings of Harry Escott’s score follow us into Brandon’s home, they are kept in time by a consistent ticking – steady as the beat of a metronome. Lying in his bed, Brandon’s eyes seem pensive for a moment, before he rises, opens the curtains and performs a nude circuit of his living quarters. As he moves past his telephone, his finger reaches out and the answer machine begins its playback; a female voice pleads for his attention, but Brandon walks on, uninterested in her request. Soon afterwards, we see him open the front door to an unnamed woman; he hasn’t bothered to dress and she turns down his offer of a drink. It’s exactly how Brandon wants it to be – the contact is there, but a connection is not.
With his own emotions fully internalised, the last thing Brandon would desire is the company of an extrovert; a disturbance to his need for control. Yet from the moment his sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), makes her unannounced entrance – infiltrating the clean lines of Brandon’s apartment to play Chic’s ‘I Want Your Love’ on his stereo – it’s clear that his life about to gain a demanding presence. With McQueen and his co-writer Abi Morgan choosing to avoid detailed discussion of the siblings’ upbringing, the film uses characterisation, rather than flashback, to provide a sense of their past. Whilst Sissy struggles with an innate need to vocalise her feelings (she is both the recurrent voice on Brandon’s answer-phone and a lounge singer by trade), Brandon chooses to purge himself in different way. Indeed, as Sissy sits in one room, sobbing on the phone as her relationship dissolves, Brandon remains on the other side of the door, watching pornography on his laptop.
McQueen’s background in visual art ensures that he is fully aware of the power of such imagery. His first feature, Hunger (2008), which starred Fassbender as Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands, was so low on dialogue that its opening and closing acts could have played just as effectively in a gallery as they did in the cinema. But just as that film reached its thematic crescendo during a remarkable, one take conversation scene, so too does Shame – this time on two occasions. With these uncut shots allowing for a stark sense of reality rarely seen onscreen, the exchanges perfectly encapsulate the divide between Brandon and those trying to communicate with him. ‘I’m helping you,’ Sissy cries in one scene, attempting to find some symbiosis in their opposing outlooks. ‘You’re a dependency,’ he retorts, identifying a parasite where others could see a friend.
It serves as a mirror to a dinner date Brandon attends with a colleague (Nicole Beharie) earlier in the film. ‘Why are we here if we don’t matter to each other?’ she questions during a discussion about marriage. When Brandon replies by pointing out the number of couples that sit in silence with each other, she suggests a connection beyond the need for words. He suggests boredom. Yet as the date evolves into an unexpected success, it leads Brandon to uncharted territory – a sexual encounter where he is, in McQueen’s words, ‘sharing; not taking.’[i] It does not end comfortably. How do you accept mutuality when all you know is fantasy?
Far from living any form of masculine dream, then, Brandon is portrayed as a prisoner to his own promiscuity; a man not so much in control of his desires, as he is bound to them. His character compares less with Casanova, and more with Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 novel American Psycho and Mary Harron’s film of the same name (2000). With both characters living an upper class lifestyle where conformity is vital to success, each uses a veneer to hide what separates him from his peers. Indeed, though it’s true that a sex addict is hardly a sociopath, when Brandon’s mask begins to slip, it becomes clear that his affliction is no less self-destructive. As the shot frames tightly around Brandon’s face during the film’s final bedroom scene, the self-loathing behind his eyes is powerfully evident. It may be a film about sex, but Shame is anything but sexy.
Patrick Harley
Freelance film journalist
January 2012
[i] Steve McQueen, speaking after the BAFTA Scotland screening of Shame, Grosvenor Cinema, Glasgow, 11 December 2011.
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