ALISTAIR FOX
Film critics have recently been noticing the emergence of a cycle of indieauteur movies on sexual addiction, both in the United States and also in the United Kingdom (sometimes with financial input from European countries such as France and Germany). Indie cinema, which has become a cultural genre and cultural category in its own right, defines itself against mainstream Hollywood cinema in terms of audience expectations, textual practices and genre preferences (see Newman 2011). Being character-centered, often marked by socially engaged realism, frequently inspired by the auteur-director’s personal experience and aimed primarily at festival and art-house audiences, it has much greater freedom to explore marginal and alternative spheres than mainstream Hollywood genre films. Unsurprisingly, therefore, indie-auteur films have been a prime site for the exploration of sexual dysfunction since sex, lies, and videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989), the success of which was instrumental in fuelling the boom of independent filmmaking in the 1990s.
The cycle of sex addiction films I wish to discuss represents a continuation of this preoccupation, updated to reflect awareness of what is being experienced or perceived as a growing personal and social problem. As Tom Shone, an American film critic who writes for
The Guardian puts it: ‘For the indie-auteur sphere, the figure of the sex addict has become what the serial killer was for mainstream thrillers in the 1990s: a repeat offender, plot-driver and sensation source, drawing audiences with a mixture of curiosity, skepticism and astonishment’ (2014). Among the films that have appeared on the American circuit may be listed
I Am a Sex Addict (Caveh Zahedi, 2005),
Choke (Clark Gregg, 2008),
Thanks for Sharing (Stuart Blumberg, 2012),
Don Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, 2013) and
Welcome to New York (Abel Ferrara, 2014). To these may be added the British-made
Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011) and
Nymphomaniac (Lars von Trier, 2013), the two volumes of which were funded as a co-production involving the United Kingdom and a variety of European countries. Why should a rash of such films suddenly be appearing now, and why should they have become a preoccupation of indie-auteur filmmakers? To find an answer, one needs to take a look at the evolution of the post-World War II sexual revolution and its aftermath.
The Sexual Revolution, the Media and the Screening of Sex
The story of the sexual revolution is by now well known. Starting in the 1950s, and accelerating in the 1960s and 1970s, Western societies experienced a powerful reaction against traditional normative constraints in many spheres of life. In the domain of sexuality, this was manifest in a movement aimed at legitimising premarital and extramarital sex, promoting acceptance of homosexuality and alternative forms of sexuality and privileging the visceral pleasure to be derived from sex as a valid form of self-gratification and fulfillment (see, for example, Allyn 2001). In America, in particular, this liberation into relatively unconstrained sexuality was celebrated as consonant with the country’s neo-liberal commitment to ‘freedom’ in other areas of life, as manifest in the conflation of sexual gratification with the personal gratification derived from indulgence in consumer culture (see Radner 2010). In terms of behaviour, it produced a ‘hook-up culture’.
This cultural shift can be ascribed to the convergence of three factors: political change, leading to a ‘transformed political economy of desire’; the emergence of digital communication technology, which has transformed the consumption and production of sexual culture; and familiar economic factors, such as the profit imperative and efficiency of the market as a distribution mechanism, that has led to the ‘commercialisation’ and ‘commodification’ of sex (see McNair 2013: 4–6). The sexualised culture that has resulted has been characterised as involving
a preoccupation with sexual values, practices and identities; the proliferation of sexual texts; the emergence of new forms of sexual experience; the apparent breakdown of rules, categories and regulations designed to keep the obscene at bay; a fondness for scandals, controversies and panics around sex. (Attwood 2006: 78)
From the outset, cinema was centrally involved in what sociologist Brian McNair has described as ‘pornographication’ – ‘the colonisation of mainstream culture by texts in a variety of forms, genres, and styles which borrow from, refer to, or pastiche the styles and iconography of the pornographic’ – leading to a commensurate enlargement of ‘the pornosphere’ (the cultural space in which sexually explicit texts circulate) (2013: 36, 3). Eric Schaeffer, the editor of a recent volume on this topic, proposes that ‘a rapidly and radically sexualized media accounts for what we now think of as the sexual revolution’, owing to the fact that ‘sex was no longer a private matter that took place behind closed doors’ (2014: 3). Linda Williams has also argued that cinema, along with its extension into television, advertising and pornography, has played a crucial role in propagating the liberation of the modern individual into a desirable capacity for eroticism: when we watch sex on screen, she writes, ‘we are disciplined into new forms of socialized arousal in the company of others’ (2008: 18).
For some, including McNair and Williams, sexualisation in the media is to be welcomed. Williams, for example, asserts that ‘the very act of screening is desirable, sensual, and erotic in its own right’ (2008: 326), and therefore to be celebrated, along with pornography. For his part, McNair has argued that the sexualisation of culture through pornography, porno chic and sexually transgressive art has been instrumental not only in driving ‘the transformation of patriarchal and heteronormative structures, as well as authoritarian governance in general’, but also in giving millions of people ‘access to sexual pleasure they would not otherwise have had’, thereby increasing the ‘stock of human happiness’ (2013: 157, 158).
Others, however, are not so sure, or else are emphatically convinced of the opposite. McNair himself notes that ‘somewhere around 2003 commentators began to identify cultural sexualisation as a major social problem’ (2013: 56), citing an article in The Guardian in which Edward Marriott identified pornography, ‘like drugs and drink’, as ‘an addictive substance’ (2003). Even earlier, Patrick Carnes had introduced the idea of sex addiction into popular culture with his groundbreaking book, Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction (1983). Since then, there has been a veritable explosion of self-help and clinical books on sexual addiction, especially since 2005, along with the highly publicised entry of celebrities such as Michael Douglas, David Duchovny and Russell Brand into clinics for sex addiction therapy.
Clearly, then, a backlash is in process, arising from a growing anxiety about sexual addiction as a dysfunction. This is reflected, for example, in the alarm expressed by the psychologist and social commentator Philip Zimbardo in The Demise of Guys (2012), who warns about the growing danger of cyber-porn addiction (see Zimbardo and Duncan 2012). The statistics Zimbardo presents, citing a University of Alberta study, are startling: in America, which is the top producer of pornographic web pages, ‘one in three boys is now considered a “heavy” porn user, with the average boy watching nearly two hours of porn every week’ (loc. 553). Zimbardo also draws attention to how addiction to Internet porn is beginning to damage the ability of young men to form healthy sexual relationships. Quoting Leonard Sax, another psychologist who has conducted a parallel study of a new crisis facing girls, he observes:
Given the choice between masturbating over online pornography and going out on a date with a real girl – that is to say, a girl who doesn’t look like a porn star and isn’t wearing lingerie – more and more young men tell me that they prefer online porn. ‘Girls online are way better looking’, one young man said to me, with no apology or embarrassment. (loc. 553)
Zimbardo’s anxiety over internet porn is merely one manifestation of a larger concern with sexual addiction more generally, defined as involving ‘people whose lives worsen in direct proportion to self-destructive patterns of sexual behaviors over which they appear to have little control’ (Weiss 2013: loc. 457).
The cycle of films in this chapter has self-evidently been generated in response to this relatively new cultural context – one in which a hyper-sexualisation of culture has given rise to sexual addiction as a dysfunctional version of sexuality that is causing concern. It might be argued that the production of these films is simply an attempt to jump on the commercial bandwagon to participate in the commodification of sex, but the content of the films themselves would argue against this. McNair defines pornography in terms of ‘its intention to sexually arouse the user through the explicit, transgressive representation of sex’ (2013: 17). Virtually without exception, the films in the sex addiction cycle are devoid of titillation; to the contrary, the compulsive sexual behaviours of the protagonists are depicted as self-destructive and destructive of relationships, humiliating and shameful, and a cause of misery and despair. They are thus very far from the joyful pleasure, self-gratification and personal satisfaction that is extolled by the likes of McNair and Williams as an outcome of healthy sexuality.
In the rest of this chapter, I shall explore in detail what these films show about the causes, dynamics and outcomes of sex addiction as this newly foregrounded phenomenon, and where their representations may be leading.
Variations of Tone and Genre
Upon inspection, the films in this cycle display such a high degree of congruence in their representation of the manifestations of sexual addiction that they can be viewed collectively as a ‘theme and variations’, to speak in musical terms. In music, a ‘theme and variations’ begins with a motif that provides the main melody, which is then followed by one or more variations of that melody, achieved by changing the music melodically, harmonically or contrapuntally. In other words, the same material returns, but it is slightly or substantially varied through an application of the principles of repetition or contrast.
In the sex addiction movies, this theme-and-variation principle is apparent in the range of genres, tones and moods that are used variously to address the central problem – or ‘theme’ – and in the relative extent to which each film focuses on the causes relative to the effects. To generalise, one can say that whereas the films in the American cycle are predominantly comic, or, at the very least, mix elements of comedy with more serious elements, those produced in Europe tend to be unrelievedly grim and harrowing. In other words, there is a continuum along which all the films under discussion can be ranged, depending upon the relative disposition of tone, narrative perspective and story arc in each.
At one end of this continuum, one can situate I Am a Sex Addict and Don Jon, both of which are consistently light-hearted in tone, and comedic in their outcomes. In each, following a series of promiscuous encounters that provide the protagonist with no lasting satisfaction, the hero masters his sex addiction (to a greater or lesser degree) and is rewarded with the love of a woman who not only understands him, but also has a beneficial, ameliorating effect on him. As far as filmic techniques are concerned, both of these films maintain their comic tone by interposing a distance between the spectator and the action to maintain a degree of evaluative detachment. Both films use a voice-over delivered by the protagonist, and both broach the fourth wall by having the hero directly address the spectator.
Fig. 1: Caveh (Caveh Zahedi) addresses the spectator in I Am a Sex Addict (2005).
Caveh Zahedi in I Am a Sex Addict goes still further by presenting himself explicitly, and without overt fictionalisation, as the main character (he appears in the film under his own name) and by including extra-diegetic inserts (such as cartoons) and real-life footage into the depiction of past episodes – which has the effect of emphasising the constructed nature of the fictive reenactment. This ensures that it remains situated at an affective remove from the spectator, who implicitly is invited to share the more discriminating perspective of the older and wiser character in present time.
At the other end of the spectrum is Nymphomaniac, with its scenes of sadomasochism, physical violence and crime, eventuating in murder, and Shame, a film which, while stopping short of the biological destruction of its main characters, concludes with the attempted suicide of the hero’s sister and the abjection of the hero himself, who ends up in a state of extreme degradation, grief and despair. Thus, whereas the comic films are given an upwards narrative arc, the arc in the latter two films moves relentlessly in a downwards direction, making use of close-up shots rather than distancing techniques, so that the spectator is compelled to confront the full horror of what is taking place with a high degree of immersive intensity that deprives him or her of any reassurance to be gained through the interpolation of light relief.
In between these two extreme poles, the other three films occupy a middle ground that is best described as that of ‘comedy-drama’ – although the relative proportions in each individual film differ, along with the effects of the combination. In Choke, even though Clark Gregg, like Zahedi and Gordon-Levitt, uses an ironic, facetious voice-over as a device to establish some degree of comic detachment, in between the scenes in which this comic perspective is uppermost, he interposes flashbacks that recreate episodes in the traumatic childhood of Victor (Sam Rock-well), the film’s protagonist, exploiting a mode of high seriousness in order to show that there are disturbing psychological reasons for Victor’s sexual addiction that have their roots in his past. Furthermore, Gregg depicts, in present time, the distressing dementia of Victor’s mother, Ida (Angelica Huston), who is now effectually incarcerated in a hospital for the mentally ill.
Similarly, in
Thanks for Sharing, Stuart Blumberg, while he includes a character, Neil (Josh Gad), a backsliding trickster who functions like a comic clown, he also incorporates other plot lines – especially that involving Mike (Tim Robbins), an older addict – that exemplify how destructive the effects of addiction can be on other members of the family, even in the case of those who believe that they have recovered.
Yet another variation in the relative deployment of comic, as against dramatic, elements can be seen in Welcome to New York, which, as Peter Labuza observes, is sometimes as ‘absurdly funny’ as it is ‘horrifying’ (2014). Welcome to New York differs from the other mixed-genre films, however, in that the audience laughs at Devereaux (Gérard Depardieu), the arrogant, self-entitling protagonist (based on the real-life Dominique Kahn-Strauss), rather than with him, as is the case with Victor and Neil. Abel Ferrara, the director, ensures that the spectator maintains a satiric distance from the fiction by commencing the film with a non-diegetic prologue consisting of an interview with Gérard Depardieu in which the actor describes his own personal inability to feel close to the character he is about to assume. Then, when the film successively undergoes a series of generic transformations, as it moves from being a softcore fiction at the beginning (in scenes showing Devereaux’s sex parties and exploitation of prostitutes) into a crime procedural (once Devereaux is arrested on a charge of rape) and finally into a chamber drama (once his wife Simone [Jacqueline Bisset] enters the scene) (see Furtado 2014), the humour disappears completely. In Ferrara’s grim film, the broaching of the fourth wall, the two occasions when Devereaux addresses the camera directly, serves not to humanise him in the eyes of the spectator, but to induce revulsion: as when this brute, defiant in his lack of remorse, directly says to the audience, ‘Fuck you all!’ – thus intensifying the spectator’s sense of alienation.
Undoubtedly, one reason for the adoption of a comic mode in the majority of American sex addiction films is a concern to create a movie with potential crossover appeal – on the model of films like
Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007) and
My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Joel Zwick, 2002) that ended up being very successful at the box office. In general, serious films on this topic have not done well, in contrast to those which have tapped into popular comedic genres. Von Trier’s
Nymphomaniac garnered a mere $785,896 in the USA for Volume I, and even less ($327,167) for Volume II, whereas Gordon-Levitt’s
Don Jon achieved $24,477,704 – partly because it poured its representation of sex addiction elements into a conventional rom-com mold, enhanced by the pulling power of Scarlett Johansson in the lead female role, and partly because the director changed the film’s title, which had originally been
Don Jon’s Addiction when screened at the Sundance Festival, simply to
Don Jon, which had the effect of appearing to align it with the popular ‘slacker-striver’ genre represented by such hits as
Knocked Up (Judd Apatow, 2007), which accrued a domestic box office take of $148,768,917.
1There is a further reason for the choice of comedy, however, which is summed up in comments made by Clark Gregg, the director of Choke. It was precisely the comic treatment that drew him to Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, upon which the film is based, in the first place:
If you kind of describe what goes on for the people [in the film], it makes you want to put a bullet in your head, yet when you read it, it’s screamingly funny, and there’s a reason why it’s funny – that there’s something very cathartic about going in to those places and finding the humour in it, that you’re able to look at these things in a way that doesn’t make you give up hope, but which allows you to absorb something in a way that perhaps is digestible and meaningful.
2For Gregg, therefore, the choice of a comic mode was essential to the achievement of the kind of response to the movie that he hoped to elicit, which was one of compassionate understanding of a sort that could facilitate the functioning of the film as a regenerative instrument.
With films at the more serious end of the continuum, a functional relationship is equally apparent between genre, tone and mood on one hand, and the evaluative perspective the spectator is invited to share with the filmmaker, on the other. We can clearly see this in the case of Welcome to New York. Instead of inviting the spectator to experience catharsis through empathic identification with the protagonist, the satiric mode of the film ensures that the spectator will remain aligned with the critical perspective of the filmmaker. Ferrara has been candid about the nature of his own personal relationship to the film. Making films, he says, ‘is my personal therapy’ (in Shoard 2014). His concern in Welcome to New York is to address the protagonist’s ‘addictive nature’: ‘The self-destruction, the destruction he does to his family, the destruction he does to his life, where it gets him’, and the fact that ‘he doesn’t see it’ because ‘he’s not confronting himself’. Devereaux’s problem is one that Ferrara himself has shared: ‘Have I been where this guy’s been? Yes.’ The difference, though, is that whereas Devereaux, his fictive alter ego, asserts that ‘no one wants to be saved’, Ferrara, for his part, says: ‘Well, let him speak for himself, because I do! I got news for you. I want to be saved and I’m trying to be saved’ (in Kasman 2014). On the basis of these comments, one can infer the function of the comic-satiric-dramatic mode Ferrara has chosen: it is designed to enable the projection of a shadow-self that the filmmaker would like to feel he has repudiated, and would like the spectator, sharing his recoil, to abhor. The film has thus been designed to function as an instrument for protective self-reinforcement and self-assertion to bolster a rejection of the mindset within which the protagonist, Devereaux, is shown to be stuck – in contradistinction to the filmmaker who has created him.
Manifestations of Dysfunction
Even though the sex addiction films display a range of tones and generic choices, they all share one constant theme: that sexual addiction is involuntary, involves compulsive repetition, withdrawal and cravings, and is harmful to the individual who suffers from it. Between them, these films expose the dynamics of sex addiction with almost clinical precision. The compulsive nature of the disease is vividly exemplified in the behaviours of all of the addicted fictive protagonists. Several of them are shown compulsively masturbating, often in inappropriate places: Brandon in the toilets at work; Neil in
Thanks for Sharing on a subway train (in the form of frottage) and, most extremely, Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who, even after having sex with a real girl, is shown on two occasions getting out of bed in order to masturbate to porn on his computer. Manifesting a different impulse, Caveh (Caveh Zahedi) is depicted as having an obsession with prostitutes – an obsession that leads to the failure of two earlier marriages.
Fig. 2: Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) masturbates to Internet porn in Don Jon (2013).
All of these addicts are portrayed as engaging in excessive risk-taking: Neil films up his boss’s skirt, which causes him to lose his job; Caveh masturbates in a confessional; Victor has sex in the toilet of an airplane; Devereaux, believing in the impunity that his wealth and political power gives him, recklessly forces himself on a hotel maid and a young female journalist, in spite of their protests; and Brandon (Michael Fassbender) in Shame audaciously and insolently caresses the vagina of a woman while her boyfriend is sitting next to them in a bar, which leads to him being savagely beaten.
To make matters worse, these films depict a pattern of intensifying escalation in the compulsion that drives its victims. Caveh finds that the more he indulges his fixation on having sex with prostitutes, the more powerful his urge to do it becomes. Brandon, discovering that his sexual activities involve a law of diminishing returns, escalates them from masturbation, to one night stands, to the use of prostitutes, to sex in public view, to engaging in a threesome, to indulging in gay sex in a club – all in a search for visceral pleasure that he hopes will be sufficiently powerful to supply the numbing of mind and emotions that he is seeking. Generally, these protagonists resort to sex as a response to their problems: Brandon’s most extreme encounters occur after he has problems at work, and when he discovers his sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), with her wrists slashed; Adam (Mark Ruffalo) in Thanks for Sharing falls off the wagon when he breaks up with Phoebe (Gwyneth Paltrow), after five years of sobriety; Victor takes refuge in Internet porn when Paige (Kelley Macdonald) breaks up with him, and hires himself out as a gigolo, determined to ‘reclaim [his] booth at the café of diminished expectations’, by doing ‘what Jesus would not do’.
Almost all these heroes suffer from an intimacy disorder when they meet a woman whom they like at a personal level. In
Choke, when Victor finally has a chance to make love to the girl to whom he is attracted – Paige Marshall, whom he thinks is a doctor, but who is really a patient in the mental hospital that cares for his demented mother – he is unable to maintain an erection, confessing, ‘I think maybe I can’t fuck you because I want to like you’. Later in the movie he explains: ‘I have sex with strangers because I’m incapable of doing it with someone I actually like…I kept myself numb for so long that now I want to feel something, I can’t.’ Similarly, Adam, in
Thanks for Sharing, is reluctant to have sex with Phoebe in an inverse ratio to the deepening of their emotional relationship. When, after having tried to instigate love-making, only to have her advances rejected, Phoebe complains that she feels he is ‘pulling away’, Adam explains that sex, for him, was a ‘secretive chase’ for such a long time that now it is hard for him ‘to connect with something that’s a lot more intimate and real’. Brandon, too, suffers erectile dysfunction when he tries to make love to a woman for whom he has genuine feelings. For these men, addictive sex has become a substitute for intimacy, being used as a drug or antidepressant to avoid feelings of loss and grief that derive from other, deeper causes.
This similarity between sex and other forms of drugs is underlined in several of these films by the fact that certain characters have suffered from them in combination. Chief among these is Mike in Thanks for Sharing, an older mentor in the twelve-step programme for sex addicts, who has been sober from alcohol addiction for fifteen years. Caveh, too, comes to realise that his sexaholism is merely a mirror image of the alcoholism from which Devin (Amanda Henderson), one of his girlfriends, suffers.
Generally, then, there is a remarkable concordance between the films in this sex addiction cycle: all of them show their protagonists facing the danger of a downwards spiral capable of leading them to self-destruction unless they can find some way of arresting and reversing it.
The Ascription of Causes for Addiction
While not all of the films in this sex addiction cycle ascribe causes to the dysfunctions they depict, several of them do – specifically, by establishing a link between a past marked by childhood trauma and the compulsive behaviours and suffering of the protagonists in the present.
In
I Am a Sex Addict, Caveh acknowledges the lasting impact on him of his parents’ dysfunctional relationship. When he was eight years old, he reveals, his mother discovered that her husband was unfaithful, and took the boy with her when she confronted the former at the scene of one his assignations. When they subsequently divorced, leaving Caveh feeling unloved, he came to the conclusion that sex had been responsible, and began to hate his father. Elaborating upon this episode in a subsequent interview, Zahedi confesses that ‘I knew it was “bad” and I felt I had to do the opposite of that’, particularly given that his parents were both Iranian, and observants of a very strict religion. Paradoxically, however, he discovered that despite his awareness of the ‘sinfulness’ of illicit sex, he found himself irresistibly drawn toward it: ‘It turns me on, to think that I’m sinning: to transgress’ (in Hundley 1996). In the movie, this thrill of transgression associated with illicit sex is represented in a number of episodes: for example, when Caveh reveals how he masturbated in a confessional because it appealed to his ‘sense of transgression’, or when he is ‘turned on’ during an encounter with a prostitute who says ‘rape me!’ – ‘It was suddenly as if I had no choice’. Caveh’s prostitute fetish and transgressive acting-out suggest that his addiction arises from an unconscious desire to reunite with his father – by replicating the illicit behaviour that he viewed as responsible for his abandonment in the first place. Caveh’s sexual addiction is thus presented simultaneously as an attempt to numb the pain of loss, and also as an attempt to restore the lost relationship.
In Choke, it is the mother, rather than a father, who is identified as being at the root cause of the hero’s problems. Victor’s mother, having stolen him as baby from a stroller, is constantly on the run from the law, periodically in prison, and therefore unable to provide the growing boy with the security and stability he needs. Furthermore, she spousifies him to a degree that amounts to emotional incest, as we are shown in one flashback in which she forces young Victor (Jonah Bobo) to say: ‘I’m yours forever and ever!’ The effect on the adult Victor is twofold: on one hand, this maternal invasion leaves him fearful of any form of intimacy with a woman; on the other, it renders him completely dependent on her, leaving him unable to cope with the realisation that she is going to die. His response is to take refuge in depersonalised sex acts, as he explains in a voice-over at the beginning of the film, as he is about to have furtive sex in a public washroom:
Sex addicts become literally dependent on the rush of constant sex. Orgasms release endorphins, endorphins kill pain. I’m all for that.
I’m not thinking about that now, because at any moment I won’t have a problem in the world – no bills, no stupid job, no crazy mother – all I’m going to feel is perfect, beautiful, nothing!
Victor’s other way of dealing with the pain of narcissistic deprivation is to pretend to have choking spells in restaurants. Ostensibly, his motive is to gull rich patrons into ‘saving’ him, so that they feel sufficiently invested in his wellbeing to continue supplying him with gifts and money. A deeper, unconscious motive is revealed, however, in a flashback that shows the first occasion when, as a boy, he choked, for real. His mother, having told young Victor that he could not go to a park to play, given that they needed to hurry to make the State line, urges him to hurry up and eat his hot dog, whereupon he chokes. His mother’s anxious concern, as she gathers him in her arms, gives him a feeling of security that is lacking at other moments in his life, and it is this childlike security that he is attempting to regain, as an adult, by choking to gain the attention of older diners: ‘Before you know it, you’re their child, you belong to them. You see this, this is my favorite part.’ Significantly, Victor is only able to start on the road to recovery when Ida, in a fleeting moment of lucidity shortly before she dies, recognises that Victor’s inability to reciprocate Paige’s love derives from his excessive attachment to her, and tells him that he needs to ‘break up’ with her, his own mother, ‘now’.
Other films focus on further causes of sexual addiction – the effect of media images and societal expectations on the way we see the world and ourselves, both of which impinge upon the formation of a healthy sense of identity and self-worth. The prime exemplar of this syndrome is Jon in Don Jon. As Gordon-Levitt explains:
Both the Jon character and the Barbara character are people who are very intent on fitting into the conventional idea of what a masculine man is supposed to be and what a feminine woman is supposed to be. They are both very concerned with their looks and they put a lot of effort into their looks. They use their looks to get what they want, and are disappointed with life because if you are so busy trying to fit yourself into a mold, you’re going to miss what’s actually beautiful about life, which is what makes people unique, not what makes everybody the same. (In Minow 2013)
Jon and Barbara (Scarlett Johansson) exemplify the painful truth of this observation. Jon chooses Barbara because she looks most like the stereotypical sexy beauties displayed through the media – but the reality of sex with her disappoints him because it does not live up to what he sees on his pornographic websites. Similarly, Barbara ridicules Jon for cleaning his own apartment, because it does not conform to her romantic image of what a lover should be like – ‘it’s not sexy’. Jon’s response to his disappointment is to seek compensation in the intense pleasure he derives from masturbating to Internet porn: ‘For the next few minutes, all the bullshit fades away, and the only thing in the world is those tits, that ass, the blowjob, the cowboy, the dog, the money shot…I just fuckin’ lose myself.’
Although in Welcome to New York, Devereaux’s sexual activities take a far more sinister turn, the underlying pressures that motivate them are depicted as being generically similar in kind, even though they are situated in another class and social sphere. Seeking to evade responsibility for the ‘little disease’ – a euphemism for his sex addiction – that has got him into trouble, Devereaux locates the blame with his wife, for wanting to make him conform to her ‘plans’. Those plans include her ambition to have him become President of France, with the assistance of her enormous wealth. The gap between her aspirations for him (and, by extension, her) and his ability to fulfill them eventuates in his telling her, with extreme bitterness, that she has succeeded in making him ‘hate’ himself. Nevertheless, Ferrara, while recognising the part such pressures might have played in damaging Devereaux’s sense of self, does not allow them to exculpate him, owing to the fact that Devereaux remains obstinately perverse:
I’m not defending the guy, I see his suffering and I feel for it, but you come and gotta make the attempt. He’s got to feel, Devereaux’s got to come back to the world. Otherwise, where is he? He’s railing against God, he’s railing against his mother, he’s railing against his wife, he’s railing against the world. It’s all this fucking drunkin’ shit, man, it’s really bullshit. He’s in pain, he’s in agony, the guy ends in agony, and for what, for what? Pursuit of what? (In Kasman 2014)
In Ferrara’s view, there is no absolution to be gained from remaining in denial or disavowal, even if the expectations of others are partially to blame.
The Prospects: Salvation, Damnation or Limbo?
As far as the prospects of recovery for these fictional sex addicts are concerned, the films once again range themselves along a continuum – one that is not unrelated to the choice of genre, tone and mood.
The most optimistic is
Don Jon, in which a solution is clearly in sight. Jon, after reaching a low point when he tries to stop masturbating to porn, but finds he is unable to do so, is rescued by an older woman who functions like a guardian angel, Esther (Julianne Moore), whom he meets when he goes back to school. She instructs him that if he wants to lose himself – an effect he tries to get from porn – he needs to ‘lose’ himself in another person, ‘and she has to lose herself in you’. Instead of being one-sided, she explains, it is a two-way thing. When Esther reveals that the reason she cries is because her husband and son died fourteen months earlier, Jon begins to connect with her at a personal, human level, so that when they make love, Jon experiences an intensity of feeling that is a revelation for him. The effect on him is transformative: he no longer puts junk in his hair, no longer kindles with road rage when he drives his car, and when he goes to the gym, instead of going to the weights room to build a shredded, muscular body, chooses instead to join in a game of basketball with other young men. Jon is thus able to break out of his old cycle, turning his back on porn – as a consequence of which he finds that ‘all the bullshit does fade away’, as his relationship with Esther develops, and they become ‘lost together in each other’. In Gordon-Levitt’s vision, therefore, relational sex is presented as the alternative to, and remedy for, the impersonal sex that constitutes sexual addiction.
I Am a Sex Addict, Choke and Thanks for Sharing are much more ambivalent. In all three cases, their respective heroes, after reaching a low point similar to that which Jon in Don Jon encounters, decide to attend a twelve-step programme for sex addicts. Caveh, after he has broken down and cried at one such meeting, is eventually able to stop having sex with prostitutes and gets married again. He relapses, however, and his second wife divorces him. When the film ends, he is in the process of marrying his third wife, Mandy, with whom he has been in a relationship for seven years. Will he relapse again? The film concludes without any prediction of the future outcome.
In
Choke, Victor arrives at the same low point after his inability to reciprocate the love of Paige, and, like Jon and Caveh, joins a support group for recovering sex addicts. Although his condition ameliorates to a certain degree, Victor confesses at the end of the movie that he ‘didn’t leave the circuit entirely behind’. Indeed, the closing shot shows him engaged in sex with Paige in an aircraft’s toilet, which suggests a desire to retain the best of both worlds by combining relational sex with a sense of transgression. On the other hand, any doubts we may have about Victor are offset by the presence of Denny (Brad William Henke), who, much earlier than his friend, has been able to form a genuine relationship with a former stripper named Cherry Daiquiri (Gillian Jacobs) – whose real name, he discovers, is actually Beth. The presence of this couple suggests the possibility of achieving a recovery that is much more lasting and substantial.
Fig. 3: Mike (Tim Robbins) and Adam (Mark Ruffalo) attend a twelve-step programme in Thanks for Sharing (2012).
Like the characters in I Am a Sex Addict and Choke, those in Thanks for Sharing enter a twelve-step programme. When the film commences, they are already attending meetings, which means that the story can focus on their efforts to maintain sobriety and develop a life for themselves that excludes compulsively addictive sex.
What the film shows, however, is the precariousness of that sobriety. The main character, Adam, does relapse, when the love relationship he is trying to develop appears to fail because of his fear of intimacy. Although Phoebe, his girlfriend, gives him a second chance, he has to begin the process of regaining sobriety all over again. Mike teeters on the verge of a relapse, but is saved by a telephone call informing him that his son Danny (Patrick Fugit), whom he has wronged, has been badly injured in a car accident. Neil is similarly threatened with a relapse when he finds his bike stolen, prompting him to re-enter the forbidden subway – the site of his frottage – but saves himself at the last minute by running to the apartment of Adam, his sponsor. All of these characters are presented as needing support at a personal level, in addition to that provided by the twelve-step group. As the movie ends, a song is heard which encapsulates the message: ‘Brothers in arms, in each others’ arms’, they go their separate ways, to continue the struggle.
The remaining three films are much more pessimistic. In Shame, Brandon and Sissy, who suffers from a love addiction that is a corollary to her brother’s sex addiction, appear locked into a vicious spiral from which there appears to be no exit. Sissy slashes her wrists, and the film concludes with Brandon encountering on a subway train the same girl he tried to seduce at the beginning. This time, she is wearing an engagement ring, which shows that she has been able to move on, whereas Brandon is left trapped in his despair as the train enters (symbolically) a dark tunnel. No explanation is given as to why he is trapped in this addicted condition; the closest we get is Sissy’s observation that ‘We’re not bad people. We just come from a bad place.’
Welcome to New York and Nymphomaniac are even more pessimistic. Devereaux in the former is so desensitised that he ‘feels nothing’, and is incapable of feeling guilt or remorse. He refuses to believe that people ‘can be saved’ – the poor will remain poor – and he, personally, unlike Brandon, does not want to be saved. He is completely stuck in his addiction, and accepts the fact he is so. In Nymphomaniac, the heroine, Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), attempts to find a solution by attending a sex addicts anonymous group – but only at the prompting of her boss, after being threatened with the loss of her job. After three weeks, however, she drops out of the group, and ends up being savagely beaten, nearly losing her life, and committing murder as an act of rage born of despair.
As a group, then, these sex addiction films present a range of possibilities, but whereas their presentation of the problem is remarkably congruent, there is no such congruence concerning their sense of a solution, or even whether any solution is even possible.
It is too soon to say whether the concern that prompted this wave of sex addiction films has already exhausted itself, being a momentary blip on the sonar radar, or whether the impulse to make such film will expand and resonate to a greater extent. Even though sex addiction has frequently been explored in gay literature – as, for example, in John Rechy’s Numbers (1967) – there has, as yet, been no comparable cinematic exploration of the issue as a problem in queer culture – although the appearance of films like I Want Your Love (Travis Mathews, 2012), which portrays a desire for intimacy as well as impersonal visceral sex, may be the precursor for such a movement.
There are signs, too, that even though the films I have discussed are not part of general ‘pornographication’ of culture identified by McNair, the film industry may be about to jump on the bandwagon in order to mine the sex addiction theme precisely for its titillating, and hence box-office potential. The latest sex addiction film to be announced is Addicted (Bille Woodruff, 2014), made by CodeBlack Entertainment, an American entertainment conglomerate founded and run by the African-American entrepreneur Jeff Clanagan to facilitate positive presentations of African-Americans in film – a company that has a strategic business alliance with 20th Century Fox. Based on a novel by Zane, the author of erotic fiction novels, Addicted has all the hallmarks of a ‘sexploitation movie’: it is cast in the form of an erotic thriller, with the addiction theme providing a pretext for soft-core scenes of sexual titillation enacted by highly eroticised actors, while the ‘thriller’ element licenses the inclusion of gratuitous violence and sensational plot surprises.
Does the appropriation of sex addiction cinema for purposes of erotic arousal and sensation, rather than for the exploration of issues of serious concern, mark the end of the epochal impulse that produced the cycle of films discussed in this essay? In other words, is the genre about to become absorbed into mainstream filmmaking without having been developed into the realisation of a greater potential? Or is it the case, to the contrary, that the topic is about to be taken up by other groups, in other domains? Only time will tell.
Notes
Bibliography
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