BLOOD, SPERM, and TEARS in EXTREME CINEMA: a Phenomenological Study in Hegemonic Masculinity Through Gaspar Noé’S Love from a Psychoanalytic Perspective
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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.se ABSTRACT 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 1 TABLE 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 2 1. 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? 3 BACKGROUND 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. 4 world 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