Before Shame, a trailer ran for Cronenberg's upcoming A Dangerous Method. Michael Fassbender stars in both movies and in the latter he plays Carl Jung to Viggo Mortenson's Sigmund Freud. This is a quiet, historical piece so there's no CGI or complex stunts. Still, I think it would be hard to suspend belief. Really? The two giants of early psychoanalysis were this elegant? And by elegant I mean sexy. Of course, drama arises when Jung falls for one of his disturbed patients. There's a tension between Jung's objective role as a scientist and his desires as a man. There's a tension between the clinical and the feeling. In a different way during Shame, I felt a similar tension.
Brandon (Fassbender) is incapable of emotional connection. His apartment, with its brushed metal washroom fixtures and the jars of protein powder, recalls American Psycho, another story about the isolation of the New York man. On Brandon's bookshelf, Delillo's Underworld leans against McCarthy's Blood Meridian while Henry James is one nook up. Brandon's also got a pretty hefty record collection. We watch him, one evening after work, throw on some classical and eat cold leftover-Chinese. Glenn Gould plays as Brandon watches, hand-on-chin like that Rodin, some porn on his laptop. Brandon may be impotent, but only emotionally. He frequents prostitutes. Both his bedroom and hall closets contain boxes of glossy-paged porn. At work, the IT department discovers exactly-why his computer has a virus. "Do you think it was your intern?" Brandon's boss asks. "A really sick fuck to spend all day on that." Calling Brandon a sick-fuck would be a bit judgmental, but probably not totally wrong. Funny thing is is that Brandon's sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), is actually the weirdo sibling. So when she comes and crashes on Brandon's couch, hilarity does not ensue.
Brandon makes a good living, but not a spectacular one. He takes the subway to work so he's not one of those special New Yorkers who can afford both a car and a parking spot. Even with this just pretty-good lifestyle, he can have anything he wants, sexually. His prostitutes come in all colors: black, white, Asian. "Slowly," he tells the black one as she takes off her underwear. She does slow but Brandon keeps his eyes on her face which is above the frame and unseen to us. While I've never dabbled in the world of prostitution, I do know a little about the hours that can be lost on the internet. There, a guy could google anything he can imagine or hasn't yet imagined. One hour becomes two becomes three as said guy tries (and usually fails) to find something better than what he'd found in the first five minutes. A tyranny of choice. In one live video feed, the models even call Brandon by his first name and ask him what he wants. Likely, even, that Brandon chooses his prostitutes via website. In Paying For It, cartoonist Chester Brown describes a service called The Toronto Escort Review Board where johns post reviews online. Shame works on a macro-level and examines sex in a post-internet world. You can get anything you want, the movie says, but watch out because it could get joyless.
FYI: I don't have the internet in my apartment.
The movie works best, though, when it's about Brandon, specifically. Fassbender is so good. He manages, while playing a man who's emotionally retarded, to inject some warmth into this fairly dry piece. There are moments, vivid snatches if you will, of Brandon's vulnerability. The movie opens with an overhead shot of Brandon in bed, his blue sheets covering his nasty bits. He's already awake and staring at the ceiling when his alarm starts buzzing. For a half-moment, Brandon narrows his eyes. He grimaces. There's a sadness in this gesture as he becomes aware of a new morning. Brandon, naturally, thrusts this feeling aside through his morning routine: he listens to his voicemail, ignoring the female voice that asks him to pick up; without lifting the seat, he pisses and although his back is to us, we see the hard stream between his legs; he jerks off in the shower.
And there's no place for sadness at his office, a place of Red Bull and boardrooms with glass walls. Brandon's boss has framed artwork by his children on the wall behind his desk. There's an orchid there, too. We never learn what exactly Brandon does, though there is mention of big deals and accounts. One morning, Brandon and his boss have a successful meeting and shake hands victoriously with the people they've successfully wooed. This is a movie caricature of 9-to-5 life. Most of Brandon's sex feels like caricature, too. The one-nighter he has with a business-suited woman in a highway underpass. There's graffiti, the word 'Fuck' in white paint. Then there's the hotel-room where Brandon goes at a girl from behind, presses her naked front against the window. All this sex belongs in a movie or in the mind's eye of a guy who watches a lot of Bang Bus.
There are a few scenes of sex that feel, in contrast, real and vivid. In one such instance, Brandon cowers in the corner of his living room as he listens to what's going on in his bedroom between his boss and his sister. The walls are thin and it's not a huge apartment. It starts with a "It's hot in here" proceeds to a "stop talking" and then to some moans. Brandon kicks off his shoes and puts on some track pants. He slams the closet door loudly so they can hear, but his sister only giggles. He's out and jogging hard to Madison Square Garden. It's a wonderful panning shot as Brandon runs under construction scaffolding and past storefronts covered for the night by metal gates. Of course, some classical on his headphones and on the soundtrack.
There's nothing more real-shit than your sister having sex. Earlier in the night, Brandon had taken his boss to Sissy's gig at a jazz club. She sings a cover of New York New York. "If you make it there," she sings, "you can make it anywhere." She's a mess and she has, herself, not made it in New York. Most of the sequence has Sissy in extreme close-up, her eyes mostly looking somewhere to her right. There's a cut to where she's looking, to Brandon. His right eye wells and a tear sneaks down his cheek. "We aren't bad people," Sissy says on one of the voicemails she leaves her brother. "We just come from a bad place." Shame misses the opportunity, however, to examine who Brandon really is and what kind of bad he comes from. There's a tension between Shame using Brandon as an archetype of unfeeling 30-somethings and Fassbender portraying Brandon as a man genuinely sad and pained. There's not enough of the latter. Shame is, in this sense, sort of a cock-tease: it hints at what Brandon's about, but doesn't penetrate him far enough.
