Rancid, abrasive, unbearable, revolting, and also ramshackle, tarantulabit and overexcited, slipshod, putrid, and enough to drive you off the rails—all of these are to be taken of course as positive judgments of this kind of cinema. It’s the perfect blend, designed to stimulate and scandalize: sex is fine, violence is okay, too, but sex and violence together are as excessive as they are exciting—sex as interchangeable with death.
But why talk about the movies here? Not because they offer bad examples and pernicious encouragements, no: but rather because that is the way the ideational machinery of cinema functions. If cinema is the art that reveals the most massive disproportion between the possibilities it offers and its actual achievements, as Buñuel claimed, the same grievous and grotesque disproportion can be found in sex, where there is a yawning gulf between our fantasies and the reality we experience, and in some cases perhaps it’s better that way, since the unbridled nature of those fantasies might do serious harm to those who embody them. It might be a very bad thing, in other words, for the two planes to meet in reality. If fantasies became reality, they would unleash the monsters of Forbidden Planet. Foolish, trivial, and violent as is the erotic imagination, sex is a coagulant within which lie curdled the most frantic and bizarre impulses. While at first glance it might seem that everything comes down to the rutting frenzy to fuck, or to be fucked, inside that frenzy there is rarely hidden an exclusively sexual desire—something that can be placated in the elementary gymnastics of coitus. Most of the time, sex instead acts as a language, used to express other desires and fears. To simplify them and render them easier to communicate, even if they thus become even more mysterious. Every language at once renders manifest its object and masks it, veils it.
AT AGE SIXTEEN OR SEVENTEEN, Lodoli, Arbus, and I went to the independent movie house to see Viva la Muerte, El Topo, and Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales. Night Train Murders had just come out, which the Corriere della Sera panned as a film of “low slaughterhouse cinema,” though it’s now considered a classic of the Rape and Revenge genre: addled druggies on a train who rape and murder, only to encounter their nemesis.
In those same years, the most prolific director of sexploitation cinema, revered by connoisseurs as a maestro, Jesús Franco, was producing such films as:
Intimate Diary of a Nymphomaniac
The Erotic Exploits of Maciste in Atlantis
Pleasure for Three (very loosely based on the Marquis de Sade’s
Philosophy in the Bedroom)
Who Raped Linda?
The Devil’s Possessed, or, variant title, Sexy Diabolic Story
The Girl with the Shining Sex
Barbed Wire Dolls, or, variant titles, Women’s Prison and Caged Women
No fewer than three films are based to some extent on the CR/M: Roma, l’altra faccia della violenza (Rome: The Other Side of Violence) by Marino Gerolami, I violenti di Roma bene (Violence for Kicks) by Sergio Grieco and Massimo Felisatti, and I ragazzi della Roma violenta (no English title) by Renato Savino. I was able to see only one of them.
In the end, everything crumbles and swirls back into pornography. Sex is the door through which we enter, it is also the door we leave by: between those doors is the world. Nothing matters except as a mode of transit. The frenzy is to cross through, penetrate, contaminate, and then dissolve. No one is interested in sex per se, it’s used as a bypass, a transcendence, some use it to get as close as possible to the truth, others to death, if death is the only truth, the only throughline of life, and therefore, in the most exacting terms, it’s not even death, it can’t be, since death doesn’t exist, it can’t be experienced in the first person, and in fact all these serial killers are seeking in vain to feel it, they make a great effort by killing other people, an effort to sample a little piece of death—that magic mushroom, that magical potion—only it turns out that killing isn’t the same as dying, no, it’s far simpler than dying, far more illusory, repetitive, it immediately becomes addictive. Killing teaches you nothing, after the first murder, all the others will be a steady diminuendo. They quickly plunge into the prose of the everyday. Sex is a shortcut that sooner or later is abandoned because it’s monotonous, not very exciting. Even rape, which represents a distillation of pure violence, in its perfect blend of brutal appropriation, humiliation, and pleasure, even rape is soon downgraded to the rank of a pastime, a half-solved crossword puzzle, a leisure-time activity for those with nothing better to do, for doormen sitting in their lobby booths. Far more erotic is, to put it bluntly, death. The paroxysmal violence of the erotic act ends up eradicating any further desire, if not the desire for death: but, however crude, eroticism succumbs in the presence of the corpse and, like alcohol, cruelty is transformed from exciting to depressive. Eros is a coward, it cuts and runs when it catches a whiff of the stench of death.
IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS, rape is an act of extreme realism. Exactly like murder, which can be vindicated as a demonstration of an individual’s mortality, carried out for the benefit of the naïve and the incredulous who refuse to take it into consideration. The victims learn their lesson at the exact instant it becomes of no use to them, as they’re dying, much like what happens to Martin Eden in the novel by Jack London, with its spectacular finale. Open your eyes, poor fool, and then shut them for all time. That is why you will find a philosophical vein in certain murderers; in their delirium, wisdom; an aura glows all around their dirty work; they’re convinced that they possess a certain depth of knowledge due to their familiarity with death, and that they are, as it were, more honest than many others, the only truly honest ones, since they are willing to reveal the negative roots of life by brusquely accelerating the natural end of its process. What are you complaining about? After all, you have to die, sooner or later, don’t you? So die! Die now! Without all this blathering about it. Go ahead . . . make my day! (Eastwood). Such hypocrisy or naïveté, to hear murderers tell it, in those who cling at all costs to life. Those who refuse to accept dying. As R.L. must have done, shortsighted young woman that she was. A famous and aristocratic murderer of the Renaissance, as he was butchering his adversary with the help of a paid assassin, complained that this man simply wouldn’t let himself be killed. He urged his victim, for the love of courtesy, to cease his foolish resistance. Often a murderer works meticulously, with great diligence, like a pupil completing an assignment. He is the head of the class, when it comes to death. And if death is the only indisputable truth . . . the only irrefutable fact . . . then clearly the murderer has secured a solid A in philosophy. Ah, the fatal sheen that certain interviews with murderers take on, the aura that surrounds them . . .
In rape, a very simple message is being transmitted. It’s directed at women. It asks them to have nothing more than a crumb of common sense, and honesty about themselves. Women, be sincere. Recognize once and for all that you are all so many stupid whores, admit it’s true. You know it perfectly well, no one has to tell you. And you know that the fate written for you from time out of mind is to be subjugated and mistreated. A rapist just demands that the filthy phrases a lover whispers to his woman to excite her as he penetrates her should be respected as absolute dictates of the law, and he loses patience if his victim persists in denying that unmistakable fact. He beats her and he tortures her if she resists, but not because she’s resisting him, because she’s resisting a general principle, a fact of nature that is taken for granted; in fact, if you follow this point of view, then you might say that the woman isn’t resisting her rapist, she’s resisting herself.
Rapists and serial killers consider themselves, after a fashion, educators, extreme pedagogues, who are imparting lessons to recalcitrant young coeds. To emancipate them from their ignorance or rather from their coquettish naïveté, that is their mission with respect to these women. “You’ll see, you’ll like it,” while the victim is pinned down by both arms, legs spread, the same kind of promise or encouragement that sports instructors or teachers of musical instruments give their beginning students:
dismay and mortification or even suffering are obligatory steps along the way in any apprenticeship. The lesson must be reiterated very firmly. Women necessarily have to like it. There are no two ways about it. The subordination of a woman lies is this sort of obligation to enjoyment. If she seems to be refusing in her words and her gestures, then you must appeal to her unconfessable desire. She wants it, she’s always wanted it. In English: She’s gotta have it. And if she doesn’t, that hardly matters.
The rape is to a certain extent demanded by the woman herself, the brutality accepted as part of a role-playing game, feminine sexuality viewed as insatiable, hence guilty by definition.
The second most common phrase in a rape is: “You asked for it.”
THE EDUCATIONAL ASPECT OUGHT to be confirmed by the enjoyment that the victim displays after the initial constraint. In the schema of certain medieval ballads, a knight errant sees a farm girl in a field, takes advantage of her, first with words and then by force, possesses her, in spite of her cries and objections, then trots off on his horse as the farm girl showers him with thanks. The ingratitude of the victim who instead, afterward, continues to complain and sob must be further punished.
Western culture has been constructed on the foundation of these songs and poems.
Pleasure in submission. Sex is the context in which disproportion is most appreciated. Equal treatment gives no one any excitement. In bed, what dominates is the perverse pleasure of asymmetry. In rape, that becomes total. Thus reduced and simplified, the sex act reveals its intrusive roots, its effect of subjugation. As is so often the case with exceptions that prove the rule, the extreme case of rape casts light on relations between the sexes. It is from exceptional edge cases that we can best obtain a rule, best identify a tendency.
And so, in every relationship between male and female, between any male and any female, rape is present. Even where there has been no coercion; even where there is love and tenderness, there is rape. Rape is the simplified paradigm of relations between the sexes, its energy-saving mode, its substantial diagram, and it lies at the foundation of every relationship, of every act of intercourse, not necessarily brutal ones. The violation of the innermost, hidden essence of an individual nevertheless takes place during the sex act, and if it doesn’t, the act is in vain, if a fissure isn’t opened, if there isn’t an existential leak, a calling into question of the very life of those involved, then nothing has actually happened.
RAPE THUS BECOMES THE RECEPTACLE for all kinds of violence; the funnel down which abuses of various kinds flow, conveyed and transformed into sex. For that matter, already at the time, and even more nowadays, sex is the most widespread currency, legal tender, the planetary language, the golden equivalent used to measure all communications and every human interaction. Sex for Money, Money for Sex, Sex for Food, etc. It is becoming the substitute for money, which in its turn was the substitute for everything else. Consider the sexualization of society, work, images, food, clothing, free time, religion, and all our nonsexual desires.
In rape, pleasure is nothing but power, but power at this point has no way to manifest itself, except through pleasure. It is forced to communicate this way. If it is unable to express itself by cutting someone’s head off, then power will give itself sheen and luster by eroticizing itself.
And so we live in a society of rape. Hostility, rapacity, and power find a sexual manifestation. Sex is a language, not a thing. It’s a way of wanting, not the object of that desire. Any drive can be interpreted through sex: whether it’s a drive for revenge, a claim of ownership, an exhibitionistic impulse, a yearning for identity. Boys rape their female classmates and film it on their cell phones. Freedom understood as the faculty to do harm. Liberty = crime. A full realization of ourselves can take place only if we are willing to abuse others, bend them to our will, and are capable of doing so. The self fully coincides with power. (Only a prig like Nietzsche could manage never once to mention sex, that is to say, one of its most obvious manifestations, in the six hundred incandescent pages of Wille zur Macht, or Will to Power.)
SOMEONE HAS GONE to the trouble of listing the array of situations in which a woman’s violent sexual subordination is depicted or propagandized. When a woman is viewed as an object or as merchandise; when she is depicted as a slave, forced to satisfy all requests; when she takes pleasure in her own humiliation; when she is tied up, wounded, or mutilated in order to give her pleasure or to give pleasure to others; when parts or sections of her body are isolated and displayed as if they were independent of her as a person; when she is penetrated by objects and animals; or placed in a degrading setting and insulted, tortured, dirtied, cut and made to bleed, in order to arouse excitement.
IN A CERTAIN SENSE, in the QT it was as if we were in the Middle Ages. A battlemented, turreted citadel, protected behind its walls, an elite of professionals, merchants, and functionaries with a narrow mind-set, who fear above all other things disorder and any intemperance that might come to disturb the smooth functioning of their businesses. Well-concealed secrets, quiet living. And young people without many distractions. Once school is over or after the hours of study preparing for the ponderous exams for medical school or the department of engineering or law school, with snacks and glasses of milk laid out by the housekeeper, there’s almost nothing to do in the quarter, “no form of organization capable of martialing the energy of the strutting young studs, therefore condemned to find their amusements with vulgar pranks, narcotics, and girl chasing.” Then there was political militancy, which back then took the form of ideological sessions or paramilitary activities such as patrolling, standing sentinel, security forces, demonstrations, boxing. More than a release of energy, it’s useful for winding up the spring. Sports and physical activity are concentrated in the confines of small cellar gymnasiums, where you build up your muscles just to feel them pulsate with the effort.
If morality is severe, then you violate it in order to let off your repressed energy; if it is permissive, then everything seems to be permitted. It is therefore “peaceful living” itself that generates its opposite, it’s the river flowing quietly that produces whirlpools in which you can drown. Boredom. There is nothing more fertile than boredom. Brilliant discoveries, masterpieces, demented undertakings, and crimes all spring from boredom. Self-harm and waste.
In one of those films based on the CR/M, the protagonists, who are described as “pampered brats with a Jaguar in search of prey,” are chatting in boredom at Bar Tortuga, across from Giulio Cesare High School. The café of the Fascists.
“We need to do something . . .”
“. . . always the same faces . . .”
“. . . always the same things . . .!”
I watched it on DVD on Christmas Day. The next day, St. Stephen’s Day, I watched Non violentate Jennifer (literally, Don’t Rape Jennifer), whose original English title was I Spit on Your Grave. The titles of many seventies films are negative imperatives: Non aprite quella porta (Don’t Open That Door, the Italian title of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti (You Mustn’t Defile the Sleep of the Dead, English title, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie), and Non si sevizia un paperino (Don’t Torture a Duckling) . . . which is the most enigmatic title of them all, especially because, where’s the duckling, in the movie? Who’s the duckling?
I Spit on Your Grave is one noteworthy and very crude movie. Jennifer is raped repeatedly by a gang of four lowlifes, one of whom is actually retarded, but she survives the rapes and torture and takes her revenge by seducing them and then murdering them one by one, first of all the village idiot, perhaps the least guilty, who is hanged by the young woman as he is in the throes of making love with her and just as he is having an orgasm, for what may be the first time in his life. His moans of pleasure are transformed into a death rattle when the rope lifts him up and leaves him hanging from a tree.
During one showing of the movie in America, someone in the audience called out: “That was a good one!” after the
girl’s first rape. Upon the second rape, “That’ll show her!” and, after the third: “I’ve seen some good ones, but this is the best.” When the other three men try to make the retarded man rape Jennifer, too, there were shouts of encouragement from the audience.
“There is no reason to see this movie except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering,” wrote a reviewer.
The viewing public (male, but not only) has a dormant criminal mind. Depictions of abuse reawaken it.
UNDER THE STRICTURES of a repressive morality, a man lives in a state of permanent sexual misery. This much is clear. But actually, things go even worse with a liberated man. He winds up becoming indentured to his own freedoms, the inclinations that were once censored, the proliferating attractions, the law of desire that demands satisfaction; slave to the countless possibilities that his liberated life now offers him, and which in the absence of inhibitions he is in some sense obliged to take advantage of, otherwise he’s just a miserable loser. He must necessarily find fulfillment, and that means taking advantage of every opportunity, offered or imagined, making the most, exploiting—that’s the imperative of the free world. Perennially stunned by the variety of erotic supply, if he suffered when his instincts were repressed, now that they no longer are, he howls in pain, caught in a vise grip of unbridled yet unsatiated desires. Individualism and consumer ideology mean just one thing for him: the whole world is his to fuck. So it’s up to him to fuck it.
The Catholic School Page 100
