'Shame', the size of sex as an obsession

• Nudes that changed cinema (I) 'Ecstasy', Hedy Lamarr and the sting of the first orgasm

• Nudes that changed cinema (II) 'American Gigolo', the pain of the first penis

• Nudes that changed cinema (III) 'La trastienda', Cantudo and the mirror of Spain

• Nudes that changed cinema (IV) 'Game of tears', the wound of trans identity

• Nudes that changed cinema (V) 'Basic Instinct', an ice pick against patriarchy

maintains

in

that we have reached a point where "experience does not have access to what is different."

It would lack, precisely, the Eros that transforms it.

In his ideology, which is also a dazzling and powerfully intuitive x-ray of what surrounds us, the immediacy of the present has ended up laminating any other tense.

And all this has led to what the thinker does not hesitate to describe as

.

Narcissism in its most basic meaning, in this constant defense of the selfie, nullifies eroticism and turns the other into merchandise.

The erotic experience, as recognition of alterity and difference, ends up being completely impossible.

We are a simple mirror of ourselves sitting in front of a screen that reflects and humiliates us.

And he concludes: "The obscene in porn is not an excess of sex, but that there is no sex there."

The digital society, far from the usual moralizing discourses, what it has achieved is "the desecration of eroticism".

Are we or are we not in a shitstorm?

The expression is Han's, by the way.

Shame

exploded on screen at the 2011 Venice film festival as a revelation.

And that was so both because of its character as the perfect mirror of a good part of the anguish that consumes us and because of a perhaps irrelevant detail, but not a small one.

The easy joke, which must never be given up, turned its protagonist Michael Fassbender forever into Michael

.

The frontal nude of him with the camera looking into the eyes of his penis did not break any taboo (it was not the first), but it did oversize it.

who worked with him on

, was openly fascinated and willing to work with him (with the phallus, not the entire actor) at any time.

Since he's nice, I can't help but display on the Internet a highly psychoanalysable envy of someone else's penis ("He doesn't need clubs to play golf," he said).

And so.

Of course, all this is anecdote, but also a symptom.

Steve McQueen,

its director, confessed that the name of its protagonist, Brandon, was directly inspired by Marlon Brando from

With Bertolucci's film, Shame shares his hunger for a perfect x-ray of the twilight of what could be called the masculine condition.

But one step further, now loneliness concerns us all and everyone (of some more than others, really) is the responsibility of the failure of a society that works as a search and consumption machine (think of Tinder and associates) in which self-exploitation has become the gold standard.

at a rate subjected to acceleration and the slavery of the moment and of

.

A scene from 'Shame'.

The director says that the concept of shame has changed in a very short time, that before adult magazines were hidden in the most remote corners of newsstands and that now Google is enough to make everything visible.

The director maintains that if his previous film,

, told the story of a man, Bobby Sands (the IRA member who died of a hunger strike in prison), who is in prison and his only weapon of liberation is the mortification of body, Brandon's is the opposite narrative: that of a man who, in a situation of maximum freedom in the freest city in the world, imprisons himself in his body.

Fassbender plays an office worker who divides his time between visiting all the sex sites on the internet (which are many) and going to all the appointments that the most active city in the universe serves him (which may be even more).

And in it, she empties.

And so on until one fine day he receives a visit from his sister, who is brought to life in a no less masterful way by

At that moment, everything turns to shame (

).

The camera penetrates the bodies with a rigor and precision rarely seen.

The idea is none other than to pierce the flesh until reaching the other.

And this is nothing more than the cold feeling of abandonment.

The director's strategy consists of harassing the spectator, confronting him with his own limit of modesty and, thus, stripping him naked before the camera.

We think we see naked bodies copulating, we think we see a huge penis and, in reality, what is naked, what is immense, is precisely

While the power scheme outlined by Foucault just a few analog decades ago was based on surveillance, panoptic control and punishment;

in the current stage outlined by McQueen and the philosopher Han, psycho-politics has made observance interior.

It is we who exploit and control ourselves.

But, and this is what is relevant and gloomy,

A plot twist, without a doubt, perverse.

The director says that he was not interested in making a pornographic film.

“The idea was to transcend one's own sex.

That is the idea of ​​any artist regardless of what he speaks.

It is about making a drama without the sex, a fundamental part of the story, distracting towards itself.

That was the challenge:

Special care had to be taken in the love scenes.

Let's distinguish between love scenes and sex scenes.

Both were filmed differently because making love is so different from fucking," says McQueen.

And we believe him.

ends

and there is evidence of a loss.

After fucking, the protagonist gets out of bed and walks in a circle.

The camera stopped, free of shame and happy, in the certainty of a penis that, perhaps for the first time, is a detail and a symptom.

A great detail and a deep symptom.

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