Split identification: Representations of rape in Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible and Catherine Breillat’s A ma soeur!/Fat Girl

This article critically examines rape scenes in two films of the ‘new extreme cinema’, Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002) and Catherine Breillat’s A ma sœur!/Fat Girl (2001). On the surface, Noé’s disturbing long-take rape scene is clearly designed to foster empathy with the woman’s experience and to induce a physical aversion to rape. However, a deeper examination of the scene’s ambiguous techniques reveals that they actually work to split the viewer’s identification between the rapist and the woman he attacks. One function of this split is to lead the viewer – who is presumed to be male – along an emotional path from lustful aggression towards empathic understanding. Similarly, the film also provides audiences with a transitional figure – a male character who is almost raped – as someone with whom they can identify on the way towards identifying with the female. But this male character ultimately serves as a negative example when he moves to take revenge – an act which is shown to be an extension of the rape, part of the same masculinist ideology or myth of male inviolability perpetuated through the violation of others. Furthermore, the revenge is revealed as being the male character’s denial of his own complicity in the rape and of his own participation in ‘rape culture’. The rape scene in Breillat’s A ma sœur! also induces in the viewer a split identification with the rapist and with the female subjected to attack – in this case a young girl who disturbingly seems to ‘acquiesce’ to the assault. This scene is best understood as a rape fantasy that shows how the girl has internalized oppressive notions of femininity and female sexual response. In this fantasy, it is the girl’s own subjectivity that is split between the attacker and herself as ‘willing’ victim, between the man’s sadism and her own ‘feminine’ desire to be punished. The rape fantasy could thus be seen as an acting out of the same old gender story in which the girl (or the viewer) is forced to make a choice between two polarized or untenable positions: identifying masochistically with the victim or identifying against herself with the sadistic rapist. However, this rape fantasy could also be viewed as a working through of gender stereotypes. It is possible to see the split subject of the rape fantasy not as someone who is torn between masculine sadism and feminine masochism, but instead as someone who simultaneously occupies both positions and therefore neither – as someone who occupies an undefined and unconventional space beyond sadomasochism. As recently noted by Linda Williams in Screening Sex, sex ‘is not a stable truth that cameras and microphones either “catch” or don’t catch’. Rather, when it is depicted in the cinema, sex ‘is a constructed, mediated, performed act’ (Williams 2008: 2). The same could be said of rape as shown on film: far from being simply present, it is a complex representation involving formal strategies that have ideological effects. This article critically examines rape scenes in two films of the ‘new extreme cinema’, Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002) and Catherine Breillat’s A ma sœur!/Fat Girl (2001). 1 Estelle bayon takes the term ‘physiological cinema’ from director Marco Ferreri, who used it in referring to his film La Grande Bouffe/Blow Out (1973). The most-often-noted aspect of the rape scene in Irréversible is its long duration. For an excruciatingly extended period of time, a single-take static camera watches from floor level as Alex (Monica Bellucci) is raped, with her suffering face visible in the foreground throughout. Noé has explained this duration in terms of realism: ‘I thought the time was realistic. [...] I don’t think there are many rapes that are less than 5 minutes’ (Lovell 2003). This introduction of ‘real time’ into cinematic representation creates a ‘punctuation moment’, a term that audience response researchers have used to describe ‘a challenge to the boundaries of acceptable depiction’ of an event on film (Selfe 2008). The term has interesting resonance with Roland Barthes’ ‘punctum’, the aspect of a photograph that ‘pierces’ the viewer (Barthes 1982: 26, 27), as the unbearable Real can be said to pierce the Symbolic. The ‘real time’-extended duration of the rape scene disallows a conventional distance from the event and pierces the viewer: ‘this is as close [as] one could come to empathizing with a victim without having physically experienced the assault oneself’, says Eugenie Brinkema (2004). Estelle Bayon, after describing the rape scene as ‘obligating us to undergo the suffering of the victim in all its duration’, characterizes Noé’s film as ‘physiological cinema’: ‘By implicating [the spectator] physically rather than merely intellectually, verbally, cinema as a physical discourse makes one feel, really’ (Bayon 2007: 81, 124, 127). And what we are meant to feel is repulsed by rape. In contrast to the ambiguous/ambivalent depiction of rape in a film like Straw Dogs (1971), Noé has said that ‘In my case, it’s much clearer. You have this innocent woman and this terrible monster’ (Gabbey 2005: 41). Noé’s mode of representation is designed to induce a physical aversion to rape, making his film an example of what B. Ruby Rich has called ‘“conversion cinema”: films that attempt to horrify or shock the spectator into ethics’ (Horeck 2004: 96). To ‘feel violated’, the viewer must empathize with the woman’s experience. Before the rape, as Alex walks down into the underpass tunnel where the assault will occur, the camera maintains a position behind her, moving with her as she walks and seeing what she sees. Once the rape begins, the camera holds its floor-level position much as Alex is pinned to the floor by her attacker, and Alex’s suffering face is constantly in frame as an emotional point of contact for the viewer. As Noé explains, ‘The rape is seen from the victim’s point of view’ (Magill 2002): ‘you identify with Monica [playing Alex], because at the beginning of the scene you’re behind her back’ (Gabbey 2005: 42), and ‘because the camera is following her from the back, and is put on the floor, like she’s stuck to the floor, you are in her head’ (Magill 2002). However, the camera could also be experienced as stalking Alex as it follows her down into the tunnel, especially given that the camera remains some distance behind her and is thus not positioned for the kind of over-the-shoulder shot that would more fully suture us into her perspective. This idea that Alex is being eyed by a stalker is reinforced by a feeling of pervasive danger that makes us fear an impending assault: Alex is alone on the streets at night, wearing only a skimpy party dress, and the film’s reverse chronology has already revealed her bloodied body on a stretcher so that we know she will soon be subjected to a vicious attack. Of course, even if the camera has in a sense adopted a stalker’s visual perspective, it could be argued that this only increases our emotional identification with Alex. As Sarah Projansky points out, filmic ‘texts that provide the spectator with an attacker’s point of view do not necessarily equate the spectator with the villain. Rather, the representation of the attacker’s visual point of view provides the spectator with more knowledge than the vulnerable woman in the text, using suspense to create anxiety for and identification with her’ (Projansky 2001: 216). 2 Sarah Projansky here follows Carol J. Clover, who in Men, Women, and Chain Saws (1992) was among the first to complicate our understanding of modes of viewer identification in modern horror and rape-revenge films. Noé’s ‘stalking camera’ does make us fear for Alex, but it is too simple to say that it does not also get us to identify with the stalker. In his DVD audio commentary, Noé points out that one effect of the camera’s following Alex from behind is that her face is not revealed for some time (in fact, not until just before the rape). Noé says that, knowing how much the fans of Monica Bellucci were desirous of seeing her face, he wanted to keep them in suspense. So the viewer here is also positioned as a fan following a beautiful actress and being tantalized, having to wait and wait to see her face. And this actress who is being followed is wearing an extraordinarily revealing dress – ‘the sexiest dress we could find for her’, according to Noé (Tang 2003). 3 Thus, as the camera follows Alex, the viewer’s identification is split between the stalker and Alex, torn between lusting after her and fearing for her. When the rapist actually confronts Alex in the tunnel, leering at her in her revealing dress and raising his phallic knife, the identificatory tension within the viewer reaches a crisis provoked by the living presence of an actual stalker-figure. Faced with a clear choice, the viewer must emphatically resist the temptation to identify with the stalker/rapist. It is for this reason that Noé brings an end to the camera’s ambivalent movement – lustful versus empathetic – and attempts to ground it for good in empathy with Alex: In the case of Alex, I did [operate] the camera myself. I was [following, circling, and] preceding her, and then suddenly I put the camera on the ground, and I just couldn’t move it again. I would have felt ashamed of shaking the camera above her. That would be like sharing the rapist’s point of view. (Magill 2002) Also, I would have felt like getting horny, which I didn’t want. I’m part of the male club, I 3 It is interesting to note that, before making Irréversible, Noé had wanted to make a non-violent but sexually explicit film with Monica Bellucci, but they decided against it for fear that it would incite a crazed fan to attack Bellucci on the street (Schaller 2007: 61). know what we are. Physically, it was something I couldn’t do. (Morrow 2003) Noé locks down the camera, training it resolutely on Alex’s suffering face, in a very physical attempt to prevent himself from a shameful identification with the rapist’s eye-roving lust. For one viewer at least, as conveyed on an Internet message board, Noé’s effort to definitively resolve the tension between identifying with the male rapist and identifying with the female sufferer seems to have had the desired effect: I think that the genius of Irreversible’s rape is that at first it appears as a kind of rape fantasy with the camera swooshing around Bellucci in her very sexy dress before coming to rest totally leaving the rape fantasists with nothing left to find sexy. Just a poor woman, on the floor, in a great deal of pain and discomfort while they are forced to stay and watch for another few minutes. [...] I must admit that I have a somewhat sadistic streak in me and was initially aroused by the first 30 seconds of the rape. But then it just kept going. And going. By the end I just wanted it to stop. I wasn’t turned on, just horrified that I’d felt that way. (Selfe 2008) Other viewers, however, seem less able to make the transition from lust to empathy, perhaps because they are not willing to renounce – or acknowledge – their identification with the rapist or because identifying with a woman’s suffering is something they find unbearable. ‘I think that, partly, they are jealous [lusting after a woman they can’t have]’, Noé says about such viewers, adding: Monica is so famous in France – she’s like our national muse. I notice sometimes, in cinemas in Paris, when there’s a group of kids in from the suburbs, they get furious during the rape scene. Maybe they have a thing for Monica – and I wonder if it’s those who have thought about rape that quit the theatre at that moment. (Morrow 2003) Noé believes that mostly it is ‘Male dominants [who] have problems identifying with a woman who’s raped’ (Tang 2003), and so Noé provides this audience with a transitional figure (Marcus) – a male character who is almost raped – as someone with whom they can identify on the way towards identifying with the female (Alex). For some male viewers, though, this transitional strategy seems to backfire, for the attempted rape of a man so threatens their masculinity that they then find it even harder to identify with a female rape victim. Noé says: I think that having the male lead almost raped at the beginning, feminises the male audience to a degree that they find challenging. And so, when they are then projected into the mind of a woman being raped, they can’t cope. (Morrow 2003) Significantly, Noé’s rape scene shows that rape itself is often a male defence against feminization, an attempt ‘to reinforce sexual difference through violability’, as Tanya Horeck (2004: 112) describes it. The rapist repudiates any sense of inferiority or lack and violently projects it onto his victim, whether this be in terms of gender, sexuality, class or looks. Gender: during the anal rape inflicted on Alex, the rapist – his hyperphallic nickname is Le Ténia (The Tapeworm) – pumps himself up by reducing her to a hole (‘I’m gonna blast your ass!’ ‘I’m opening up your ass real good!’ ‘You hole, you cunt!’). Sexuality: the rapist demeans his rival’s manhood (‘a fag’) and praises his own prowess (‘Your old man fuck your ass? [...] I’m gonna fuck your ass like no one has ever fucked it!’). Class and looks: the rapist, a street pimp with a broken nose, tries to empower himself by depriving Alex of her beauty and class privilege (‘Fucking rich bitch! The world’s your due because you’re beautiful, right? Well, I’m gonna fix your face!’). One of the most telling moments in the rapist’s verbal onslaught occurs when he repeatedly orders her to ‘Call me “Daddy”!’ – words that were specifically inserted so that ‘maybe the 4 The gender ambiguity of the name ‘Alex’ is also part of this transition: when they first hear that someone named Alex has been raped, viewers may assume it is a man before finding out that Alex is a woman. viewer wonders if he [the rapist]’s been raped himself’, according to Noé (Torneo 2003). It is the man who cannot bear violation who becomes a violator, he who cannot withstand violence in any other way than by projecting it outward onto others. When Alex’s boyfriend Marcus first sees her violated body on an ambulance stretcher, he is traumatized by the sight. The fact that he is struck dumb, immobilized and nearly moved to tears suggests that his initial response is empathy with her suffering. But, goaded by some other men who claim that only ‘pussies’ don’t take revenge, Marcus has soon repudiated any ‘feminine weakness’ and converted his empathy to macho rage. Galvanized by vengeance, with his face a hardened mask and his mouth spewing vicious epithets, Marcus invades the red tunnel-like spaces of the club called The Rectum to attack the rapist, much as the rapist invaded the red tunnel underpass and anally raped Alex. Marcus’s revenge thus becomes an extension of the rape, not an antidote to it but a spreading of its sickness. The revenge is part of the same masculinist ideology that led to the rape, a myth of male inviolability perpetuated through the violation of others. And, when a man (not the rapist) whom Marcus attacks attempts to rape him, Marcus’ friend Pierre bashes the man’s face in, much as the rapist had destroyed Alex’s face.When Noé talks about his film’s critique of revenge, he refers to the fact that the vengeance is inflicted on the wrong man and that the violence gets out of control and leads to murder. But the film’s deeper critique lies in showing how the avenger is the rapist’s double, repeating the violation, caught up in the same pathology. 5 In his rage to find the rapist, Marcus also brutalizes a prostitute named La Concha, committing violence against a woman much as the rapist had done against Alex. La Concha is strongly linked to Alex, for the rapist had actually first roughed up La Concha in the underpass before assaulting Alex. Marcus’ brutality thus repeats and extends the rapist’s attack on La Concha. Also, Marcus believes at first that a man named Guillermo Nuñez committed the rape, and Marcus roughs up La Concha in an attempt to find out the whereabouts of Guillermo. But La Concha turns out to be Guillermo, a (transvestite) male. Marcus’ violence towards a woman (La Concha) is thus conflated with his vengeance against a man (Guillermo) – once again showing Marcus’ revenge to be a doubling of the original violation. 6 The fact that a red fire extinguisher is used to do the battering makes this assault even more connotative of rape. Marcus’ revenge is also a denial of his complicity in the rape – and here I mean much more than the fact that his boorish behaviour at a party drove Alex out into the night alone and unprotected by a paternalistic male. By casting himself in the role of Alex’s avenger, Marcus refuses to take responsibility for the extent to which he has participated in ‘rape culture’, a social formation that ‘encourages male sexual aggression’, that sees ‘violence [...] as sexy and sexuality as violent’ (Buchwald et al. 2005: xi), and that condones the sexual objectification of women through uninvited gazing, remarks, touching or groping. Noé draws an extended parallel between Marcus’ behaviour and that of the rapist, showing how Marcus’ acts are merely steps along a continuum that leads from sexual objectification to rape. At the party, much to Alex’s disgust, Marcus leers at, comments on and fondles women indiscriminately as though they were all there for his consumption. He also snorts coke, much as the rapist inhales poppers. When Marcus is alone in the apartment with Alex, he says that he stole her from her former boyfriend, while she protests that she is not an object and that she decides whom to be with. Marcus steals money from her purse (the way the rapist/pimp does from his prostitutes), ‘playfully’ spits in her face (the rapist too will spit at her) and gropes and grips her from behind, telling her that ‘I wanna fuck you in the ass.’ This comment ‘makes you think that also Marcus is a potential rapist’, says Noé (Sterritt 2007: 308). But this is a realization about himself that Marcus refuses to confront. When he and Alex wake up in bed together after falling asleep following sex, Marcus holds his hand over her mouth (the way the rapist will silence her later) just as she is trying to tell him about her dream of a red tunnel that gets broken – a premonition of the anal rape, but also an insight and warning about Marcus’ character, about the nightmarish sexual assault that his daytime aggression is headed towards becoming. ‘I think they 7 There is thus another sense in which Marcus identifies ‘the wrong man’ as the rapist: Marcus himself is at least complicit in the crime. It is interesting to compare Marcus to the Butcher, a recurring character in Noé’s films. In Carne (1991), the Butcher’s daughter is molested and the Butcher takes revenge on the wrong man. In Seul contre tous/I Stand Alone (1998), the Butcher himself molests – or imagines molesting – his own daughter. And at the beginning of Irreversible, the Butcher says that he has spent time in prison for that crime. could have escaped it [their fate, but] people don’t even read the signs around them’, says Noé (Sterritt 2007: 309, 308). Instead of heeding the warning of the broken tunnel and empathizing with Alex, Marcus becomes a sexual aggressor at the party, which leads to the violence of the rape and of