Real Sex Films: The New Intimacy and Risk in Cinema

John Tulloch and Belinda Middleweek

https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190244606.001.0001
Published: 2017 Online ISBN: 9780190244644 Print ISBN: 9780190244606

CHAPTER

11 Desire, Intimacy, Transgression, and the Gaze in the

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Work of Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay 
John Tulloch, Belinda Middleweek

https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190244606.003.0013 Pages 291–312

Published: October 2017

Abstract
Chapter 11 revisits feminist screen studies notions of the lmic gaze through the simulated, high-
impact sex lms made by female directors Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay. With particular emphasis
on Arnold’s Red Road and Ramsay’s Morvern Callar, the chapter explores the work of Laura Mulvey,
Lynn Williams, Anne Kaplan, Elizabeth Grosz, Slavoj Žižek, and Elena del Rio in light of Horeck and
Kendall’s “unsayable” and Grønstad’s “unwatchable” concepts to shift emphasis from the gaze to the
role of the sensory and the a ective in extreme cinema. Overall, this chapter brings into dialogue the
concepts of desire, intimacy, and risk in feminist lm studies as part of a larger conversation
(undertaken throughout this book) about sociological theories of risk, the mapping of embodiment in
feminist geography, and interdisciplinary debates more generally.

Keywords: filmic gaze, spectatorship, a ect, embodiment, desire, intimacy, Andrea Arnold, Lynne
Ramsay, Red Road, Morvern Callar
Subject: Film
Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

How do we understand the circuits of desire and intimacy within the structural framework of risk
modernity? How do feminist lm theorists position desire and intimacy in the context of debates about
female subjectivity and identity? In this chapter we extend our discussion in chapter 9 by arguing that the
patterns and chaos of contemporary love described by risk sociologists as the outcome of “labour market
individualism” in late modernity (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1992, 8) are likely to be seen much more
widely than in real sex lms alone.

Here we spotlight two contemporary British female lmmakers, Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay, whose
work, though without the real sex inserts of most other lms discussed in this book, has in common with
them an exploration of the chaos of love and the transformation of intimacy. Through at times the use of
sexually explicit (“simulated sex”) content, their female protagonists also reveal the ways in which desire
and intimacy are continually negotiated between the self and the other, in a process Giddens describes as
the re exive life project. Therefore, in this chapter we continue to explore Giddens’s “transformation of
 intimacy” and Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s “normal chaos of love,” but through the lens of feminist lm
theory and scholarship, within our interdisciplinary objective.

Red Road

Red Road (2006) is British lm director Andrea Arnold’s rst feature-length picture and the opening
episode in a trilogy of lms emerging from Advance Party, a Scottish-Danish post-Dogme initiative to raise
the pro le of aspiring directors. The project was conceived by controversial Danish lm director Lars von

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Trier and required lmmakers to create a narrative from a list of recurring characters, though Red Road’s
“powerfully self-enclosed” story left little room for the characters’ continuance (Romney 2006).

The lm centers on security operator Jackie (Kate Dickie), who works at City Eye Control—Division E, in the
colloquially known “red road” district of high-rise housing estates in Glasgow. In the opening, darkly lit
p. 292 scenes, Jackie is positioned at her desk behind a bank of closed circuit television screens (CCTV) and
appears, if not self-isolating, then a loner who takes pleasure from watching others. Her only escape from
the parasocial relationships she develops with strangers on the screen (an old man walking his aging
bulldog, a night janitor in an empty o ce building dancing to the beat in her headphones) is a regular,
furtive exchange with a married colleague, Avery (Paul Higgins), who drives her to the countryside and
fucks her in his car. Their exchange is habitual and appears more programmatic than passionate.

In one sequence they leave red road’s poor, urban landscape for greener elds outside the city. After
momentarily stopping for co ee at a diner, they pull over by the side of the road next to a herd of cows.
There is little need for inane chatter to ll the conversational void between them, as their meeting feels
routinized, predictable. Light from the setting sun paints the car with warm, rusty tones and is a marked
contrast to Jackie’s blank, colorless face in side and rear pro le and in the re ection of the vehicle’s side
mirror as she is penetrated (see gure 11.1). Not unlike the multiple TV screens in the City Eye Control room,
we spy on Jackie as if our ngers were on the navigation pad, tilting, panning, and zooming between shots
of her still face and his naked, thrusting backside. The camera’s gaze is not a pleasurable one, and the pair’s
postcoital conversation gives some indication of their arrangement. When he nishes (and “he” appears to
be driving the act) Avery apologizes twice and then asks whether Jackie climaxed.

Avery : Did you?

Jackie : Yeah, I did.
Avery : Can never tell.
 Figure 11.1

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Jackieʼs blank, colorless face reflected in the vehicleʼs side mirror as she is penetrated

There is a clear disparity between Jackie’s perfunctory, clothed exchange in this idyllic (and otherwise
romantic) Glaswegian countryside and her intense sexual encounter with the red-haired ex-con Clyde
(Tony Curran), a man she has been surveilling on her CCTV monitors. The dissimilarity in these scenes is
important for highlighting Jackie’s developing subjectivity, though the few narrative reference points at
this stage threaten to disorient viewers. Indeed, by the time she is lying naked on the oor of Clyde’s squalid
council at, the extent of the audience’s knowledge of their relationship is potentially limited. Arnold’s
restrained and measured doses of narrative detail here and throughout the lm are not surprisingly the
reason for accusations of a deliberate obscurantism in her cinematic style (French 2006b).

But the critical reception of the explicit sex scene between Jackie and Clyde, described as “fearsomely raw”
(Leigh 2006), “erotic danger, creepily shot” (French 2006b), and “the realest sex you’ll see in a British
lm” (Romney 2006), is curious in the context of Jackie’s insensate experience with Avery in his car. That a
discourse of danger, threat, and menace emerges in critical readings of this later sequence misses entirely,
in our view, Jackie’s developing self-awareness and budding desire.

The controversial scene begins with Clyde tenderly massaging her feet and then delicately unbuttoning her
p. 293 top. Clyde cups Jackie’s breasts in his calloused hand and then fondles them before remarking, “You’re a
sexy fuckin’ bitch.” Clyde’s admiration begins dialogue-heavy foreplay that positions Jackie as an agent of
desire, in a clear departure from the earlier wordless and one-sided physical encounter with Avery. With
Clyde Jackie steers their foreplay by rst removing her top and bra and then o ering her chest to his mouth
before lying down. Light kisses along her inner thigh lead to the act of cunnilingus, which Jackie clearly
enjoys in a chorus of pants, sighs, and escalating moans (see gure 11.2). Her ensuing climax needs no
p. 294 veri cation this time around. The next moment bodies and dialogue again intermingle as Jackie implores
Clyde:

Jackie : Do you want to fuck me?

Clyde : I’ve wanted to since the rst moment I saw you.
Jackie : Say it!
Clyde : I want to fuck you.
Figure 11.2

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The act of cunnilingus that Jackie clearly enjoys in pants, sighs, and escalating

Jackie’s commanding speech is accompanied by straight-on, alternating camera shots between her and
Clyde, and their gazes are hard, intense, and purposeful. Both in dialogue and in the récit (or technical
vocabulary) of this scene it is clear Jackie is directing the course of action and deriving pleasure from its
performance. By contrast, the combination of pull-back shots and side-angle reaction shots of Jackie’s
blank facial expression in the car’s side mirror position her intercourse with Avery in a distanced and
voyeuristic aesthetic. Jackie seems to have relinquished any control over events, as evidenced in her passive,
almost fatalistic attitude toward their physical union.

Unlike lm reviewer Philip French’s comments about the “erotic danger” of the sexual encounter with
Clyde, there is nothing perilous about his imploring Jackie to stay the night after they have had sex. Instead
she hastily dresses and reaches for her handbag.

Clyde : You going home? It’s the middle of the night. It’s not nice ’round here. I can’t let you go.
Jackie : Can’t stop me either.
Clyde : Not quite sure I know what’s going on. Why, you married or somethin’?
Jackie : I am.
Clyde : At least let me call you a cab.
Jackie : I got the number in my phone.
Clyde : It was just a shag you wanted then, aye?
Jackie : I guess so.
Clyde : Well, go on fuck o then. See if I fucking care.

Clyde seems genuinely hurt by Jackie’s sudden indi erence and need to escape and is completely unaware of
her machinations. Earlier in the night he had con ded in Jackie about his desire to “go straight” and leave
his life of crime. Clyde also described the daughter he never sees and his being upset after hearing his ex-
wife had told her he was dead. Jackie’s sudden indi erence after they have had sex appears to take him by
surprise.

As Beck outlines, the era of risk modernity involves an “in nite number of private systems of love” (as cited
in Tulloch and Lupton 2003) that are performed in everyday actions such as the intimate negotiations
between Jackie and Clyde over the giving and receiving of pleasure. By the end of the lm, we will learn that
Jackie is a widow and that the actions of Clyde inadvertently led to the death of her husband and daughter.
This was the underpinning motive for what seems for a long time to be a revenge genre lm, though as with
Arnold’s later lm Fish Tank, the narrative retreats in its chilling denouement.
p. 295 The tender dialogue and physical touch between Jackie and Clyde and his obvious concern for her welfare
are located in the familiar, in the everyday. This is a negotiated reality of a di erent order, typical of the risk
society, in which the danger “out there” must be guarded against “in here.” The warm humanity of his
apartment is metaphorically shown in the lava lamp in Clyde’s room, which casts a red lter across their
naked bodies and whose animated, bubbling light “seems to be having orgasms” (French, The Observer,
October 29, 2006). The secure hearth is juxtaposed with, as lm reviewer Jim Emerson describes, “the late
winter/early spring landscape of Glasgow [which] resembles a post apocalyptic wasteland, littered with
trash (human and non-human) and cast-o remnants of civilization, as if in the aftermath of a terrible
storm” (Emerson 2007).

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It is inside the ex-con’s apartment, among the aging photographs of Clyde’s estranged daughter and piles
of unopened mail, that Jackie’s sexual identity is fully explored for the rst time in the narrative. She then
leaves the council at to enter the urban wilderness Clyde has warned her against. But it is Clyde, not Jackie,
who is at risk here. After her controversial sex scene with Clyde she secrets his semen- lled condom in her
handbag, hides in a bathroom, and then stu s the condom’s contents up her vagina. To legitimate her
allegations, Jackie then hits herself in the face to simulate a beating, rips her top, and phones the police to
report she has been raped. But here, too, the narrative is more complicated than a revenge movie. The
di erent genres (mystery, romance, and the quest) motivate di erent aspects of Jackie’s multiple identity,
and these are in negotiation as Jackie constructs her own narrative.

Jackie’s hasty, postcoital departure from Clyde’s apartment contrasts with her earlier exit from Avery’s car.
The inherent di erences in these scenes re ect the varying roles and identities Jackie adopts and negotiates
in her re exive life project. When Avery returns Jackie to the city he asks, “See you in two weeks?,” to which
Jackie unhesitatingly responds, “Yep.” But when they do meet for their fortnightly countryside
appointment, and note this is after Jackie has met Clyde, she is particularly unresponsive to his touch and
even turns her face away.

The “long, wordless scenes” (Bradshaw 2006b), especially between Jackie and Avery, are characteristic of a
lm that dethrones verbal language for the synesthetic (namely, touch and sight) and “communicates
through action and atmosphere rather than through words” (Romney 2006). At the beginning of the lm,
sight with all its lexical permutations—insight, foresight, and by extension, sightlessness—is Jackie’s
occupation and a central preoccupation of the lm. As the narrative unfolds, our identi cation with the
lm’s heroine may implicate the theoretical viewer in the act of surveillance; we too can sit in the
controller’s chair and scan the many characters and identities presented on-screen. The di erent ways of
seeing on- and o -screen, those wordless exchanges explored through the “intra-diegetic gaze” between
characters or objects on screen, the “extra-diegetic gaze” to an o -screen space or viewer, and the
“spectator’s gaze” between the viewer and lmic text (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996), must be considered in
the context of late modernity’s inherent risks. In a world of surveillance, to be seen is to be vulnerable, and
so Jackie feels most in control when she is installed behind a wall of CCTV monitors, gazing at the people
who populate them. At times, the lm Red Road seeks to install the bearer of the gaze (variously the
audience, the camera, and Jackie) in the seat of power.

p. 296 Even the gaze between director and audience informs the critical reading of the lm. When questioned
about the public’s response to her lms, Andrea Arnold is described as being “almost phobic about their
gaze falling on her” (Leigh 2006). Not unlike the character Jackie in Red Road, Arnold is uncomfortable
being the object of the desiring (and objectifying) gaze.

Unpacking the gaze enables us to examine Andrea Arnold’s thematic concern with illicit surveillance in the
narrative of Red Road, that preoccupation with modes of watching that are either permissive (Jackie’s
employment as a CCTV operator) or forbidden/illegal (Jackie’s stolen surveillance tapes and stalking of
characters she sees on screen). While there is a concerted focus on the gaze and all its permutations in Red
 Road, the lm’s detailed attention to Jackie’s body a ecting provides a new foundation from which to
appraise Andrea Arnold’s lms and others of the extreme cinema movement, a subject we return to later in
this chapter.

The Gaze in Feminist Film Theory

In the history of feminist lm theory much has been written about the encoding of masculine desire in
spectatorship via the operations of the psychoanalytical gaze, as well as the manufacture of aesthetic

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pleasure as a key motivator for lm production. Laura Mulvey’s seminal “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema” (1975) was one of the rst systematic attempts to explore the relationship between the spectator
and the screen in feminist terms. Mulvey argued that the spectator’s gaze is masculine and succeeds in
objectifying the screen object (i.e., woman), whose only measure of power is her enigmatic quality and “to-
be-looked-at-ness.” Since Mulvey’s provocative essay many feminist lm theorists have challenged the
essentialist terms framing so much of the debate about viewing relations (Williams 1994), some suggesting
that audiences may occupy passive and active subject positions through “double identi cation” with the
characters on-screen (de Lauretis 1984; Stacey 1992). Others have questioned assumptions made about the
gaze (primarily male) and spectator (primarily heterosexual) by exploring gay and lesbian
spectating/reading positions (Evans and Gamman 1995). For Silverman, the trope of the male gaze has been
dispensed with in arguments that the male subject is no more in possession of the gaze than his female
counterpart (Silverman 1992); still others, such as E. Ann Kaplan, have regarded as inseparable the male
gaze and its imperial power in Western patriarchal cultures (Kaplan 2012, xi).

Reading the gaze as a mode of desire in Red Road highlights a number of re ective surfaces from which the
gaze bounces and refracts between audience, subject, and object. The audience surveils Jackie in her tilt,
pan, scan, and zoom world at the same time that she surveils unwitting others on her bank of computer
screens. When she sees on her monitor a couple engaging in rough, consensual sex against a fence paling (a
scene she at rst mistakenly apprehends as rape), Jackie’s titillation can be found in her tender stroking of
the monitor’s joystick. Here desire, to borrow from Slavoj Žižek, “is experienced as a ‘transgression’ of
what is socially permitted for a moment when one is, so to speak, allowed to break the Law in the name of
the Law itself” (1992a, 225). The potential gaze of the audience, which is thus far complicit in Jackie’s desire
p. 297 (or the desire of the other), is suddenly problematized when Jackie recognizes the man on screen, whose
identitity remains hidden from the audience.

At this point, the convergence of erotic gazes—Jackie’s gaze and the assumed audiences’ as a token of their
solidarity with her—is ruptured in the absence of knowledge about the object (i.e., the male gure, who we
later discover is Clyde). As a result, audiences’ desire-experienced-as-transgression can become
transgression-experienced-as-loss, given that our inter-identi cation with the other (i.e., Jackie) has been
removed. Taken further, we might say that the audience transgresses, not in the voyeuristic impulse, but by
watching events they are no longer invited to identify with. This rupture might be understood in the context
of Tanya Horeck’s comments that the lm Red Road and Arnold’s work as a whole “overhauls the role of the
lm viewer, rejecting the traditionally passive, entertained onlooker, to demand instead a viscerally
engaged experiential participant” (Horeck and Kendall 2011, 171). In this crucial scene, where subject-
audience identi cation is aroused in mutual, converging desires and then severed at the realization of the
object, the question is not “what” is being desired but “how” desire is being constructed as transgressive,
secretive, and illicit in a plot line that has Jackie ultimately derive sexual pleasure from a man she knows has
killed her family.

In his work on psychoanalysis and popular culture, “Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan
through Popular Culture” (1992b), Žižek provides some insight into the screen/audience relationship and
 desire:

The fundamental point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in advance, but
something that has to be constructed—and it is precisely the role of fantasy to give the coordinates
of the subject’s desire, to specify its object, to locate the position the subject assumes in it. It is
only through fantasy that the subject is constituted as desiring: through fantasy, we learn how to
desire. (1992b, 6)

The argument made here is that through the functions of the gaze, cinema instructs for us the mode of

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desire rather than its object. The “how” to desire is determined by the Other since, as Žižek explains via
Lacan, “the subject’s desire is the desire of the other” (1992a, 224). In lm, the gaze provides a visual
platform for the searching and indecision that characterize the journey toward an imaginary desire.
Paradoxically, it is a desire continually reproduced and not ful lled, given that the cinematic object, at least
for the audience, eludes possession (Žižek 1992b, 7).

The mechanics of desire were earlier explored in the literary criticism of René Girard. Writing in Deceit,
Desire and the Novel (1976), he argues that an individual of vain disposition (vaniteux) “will desire any object
so long as he is convinced that it is already desired by another person whom he admires” (1976, 7). This
triangular nature of desire between the self/subject, the object, and the mediator (the subject’s rival) is
imitative and imaginary. It matters little whether the desire of the mediator is real or presumed, as the
intention makes the object “in nitely desirable in the eyes of the subject” and dictates the trajectory
(intensity) of desire and its object (Girard 1976, 7). For Girard, desire has the potential to be trans gurative
for the self/subject because it is an attempt at “being” the Other that takes the form of initiation into a new
life (Girard 1976, 53).

p. 298 That desire has a transformative power (Girard’s “new life’) can be found in Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s
observation that in the risk society, “the proportion of biography open to decision-making and individual
initiative is increasing” (1995, 5). Jackie’s decision to repeatedly stalk the man on her monitor, to claim rape
after their consensual sex, and to eventually drop all criminal charges against him are illustrative of a risk-
modern, self-styled, life trajectory in which the individual—guided by her desires more than the regulatory
and structural forces of the society in which she operates—carves her own life map.

Given the gaze’s early theoretical positioning in masculine forms of viewing, it is not surprising that
feminist lm theorists have looked for ways of exploring on-screen subject/object relations liberated from
their mooring in phallocentric discourse. In her reading of Jackie’s physical response to the spectacle of sex
in the CCTV control room, Tanya Horeck argues that the desiring body is emphasized at the expense of the
narrative, which fails at this point to give the identity of the man on-screen and by this token implies the
“reorganisation of the relationship between viewer and viewed, inviting a form of empathetic
spectatorship, or what Jillian Smith has referred to …as ‘observation without domination’ ” (Horeck and
Kendall 2011, 172). Focusing on female bodies enjoying and a ecting leads us to reconsider the role of
subject/object in cinematic representation through a more expansive debate about female victimization and
agency.

The emergence in contemporary feminist lm criticism of a Deleuzian-inspired “embodied spectatorship”

has as its focus bodies performing, interacting, and a ecting on screen. Embodied spectatorship counters
theories of representation that rely on the alienation of self and other in the act of seeing (as outlined in
Lacan’s mirror phase) and insists instead on an “embodied self-in-becoming (viewer) and its embodied
intercessor (the cinema)” (Marks 2000, 150–1). This kind of thinking moves us away from the visual
grammar of lm, with its objectifying gaze, toward a corporeal politics in which feeling and a ecting bodies
are potentiated. It should be noted that for all its voyeuristic fantasy and explicit depiction of oral sex, Red
Road remains a simulated or “realistic” sex lm (though aesthetically it is di cult to discern the
 di erence) and stands out here in a book about real sex lms. As Tanya Horeck highlights, the director
Arnold’s “emphasis on the sensory and the a ective aligns her with the lms of the new extremism”
(Horeck and Kendall 2011, 14–15), and it is on this basis that we include the work of Arnold and her
contemporary, Lynne Ramsay.

The Female Body as A ective Force

In “Deleuze and the Cinema of Performance,” Elena del Rio highlights the limitations of early feminist lm

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scholarship on the spectacle. Referencing the work of Mulvey and Butler in particular, del Rio “challenges
the notion of the female body as a visual, static fetish by focussing on the body’s expressive capacities and
their e ect upon oppressive structures” (cited in Horeck and Kendall 2011, 172). The body’s power to a ect
is evidenced in the transmission of force or intensity across, between, and within bodies in a transference of
energy at the site of and beyond corporeal borders. For this reason a ect studies has been called an
“empiricism of sensation,” given its encapsulation of feeling bodies and bodies feeling (Clough 2010, 224).

p. 299 Exploring a ect as “that which remains in excess of the speaking subject” (Blackman and Venn 2010, 15) is
fundamental to understanding Andrea Arnold’s lms. Indeed, the “visceral” (Bradshaw 2011) is a key
concern in Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2011), an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel in which the
adolescent bodies of Cathy Earnshaw (Shannon Beer as young Cathy) and the Afro-Carribbean slave boy
Heathcli (Solomon Glave as young Heathcli ) toss and entangle in a metaphorical mirroring of the twisted
and untamed landscape to which they are drawn. For New York Times lm reviewer A. O. Scott, the intimacy
between their characters is palpable and beyond the bounds of speech:

Ms. Arnold, who wrote the screenplay with Olivia Hetreed, depicts their sometimes rough intimacy
as a primordial state of hunger, deeper than language, reason or even sexual desire. She has a
particular knack for bringing alive the inchoate, angry urges of adolescence and for turning the
sullen faces and slack postures of young, untrained actors into frighteningly expressive
instruments. (2012)

The employment of bodies as “expressive instruments” in this lm is intimately portrayed in the largely
unspoken, physical exchanges between Cathy and Heathcli . One key scene at the beginning of the lm,
repeated at the end, depicts the young Cathy and Heathcli frolicking in the sloshy Yorkshire moors. When
Cathy slips and falls in the mud, Heathcli quickly slides his body on top of hers and, with his hands, pins
her to the ground in an adolescent performance of sexual play. Cathy responds to this interaction with a
broad smile, and the pair resume their play in the moors. Through her young actors Arnold continues
exploring the body as expressive instrument in a later scene depicting Cathy and Heathcli riding together
on horseback. Sitting behind Cathy astride the horse, the young slave boy leans into Cathy and inhales her
windswept hair. Her wanton tresses are likened in cutaway to the horse’s owing mane, and Heathcli
erotically strokes the animal’s ank as he would Cathy’s body, in another instance of the lm’s perceptual
narrowing of the human-animal border.

Later in the lm, when Cathy’s monstrous older brother Hindley (Lee Shaw) brutally beats Heathcli , Cathy
licks his open wounds with a lapping tongue in an obvious sign of their intimacy, but also, as in A. O. Scott’s
observation, of the “primordial” and “inchoate” relations between them. After the beating Heathcli is
imprisoned for his insolence, and in a point-of-view shot through the narrow space between the planks of
wood in his cell door he stares into Cathy’s sympathetic eyes on the other side in a silent, erotic exchange.
These are “a ective encounters” (Horeck and Kendall 2011, 15) that prompt “the viewer [to] engage in an
intimate [way]” with the characters on screen and, unbounded by the laws of narrative (the episodic
structure of Wuthering Heights and the withholding of Clyde’s identity in Red Road), rely on the experiential
 and the sensory. With a script trimmed of bloated dialogue, the desire and intensity between Cathy and
Heathcli , which has a tactile, physical expression, might be one explanation for lm critic Mary Pols’s
observation that the lm “gets under your skin” (Pols 2012).

p. 300 Fish Tank

The a ective encounters Arnold rehearses in Red Road are later reprised in the BAFTA-award winning Fish
Tank (2009). Here Arnold’s cinematographic style is executed in the point-of-view shots of fteen-year-
old, aspiring hip-hop dancer Mia Williams, from whose perspective audiences see without being seen. Mia

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is described as having a “restless, questioning gaze” (Jennings 2009), which nds its object in a host of
characters she spies, such as a lame, tethered horse; a street kid dancing near her mother’s at in an Essex
council estate; club dancers auditioning for a strip show; and her troubled mother’s sexual encounter with
her new boyfriend, Conor O’Reily, whom Mia watches from their apartment hallway in the act of
penetration. In Mulvey’s analysis, where “woman, as object of the male’s desire and gaze becomes
spectacle” (Mulvey 1989, 21), it would be little surprise that the mutual attraction between the teenager and
Conor nds its apotheosis in dance as the ultimate self made spectacle.

But focusing on the gaze overlooks the range of a ecting bodies in Arnold’s lm, along with the multiple
identities Mia explores within the context of this new risk modernity. To the strains of Conor’s favorite
song, Bobby Womack’s “California Dreamin’,” they have sex on the couch while Joanne (Kierston Wareing),
Mia’s mother, lies in an inebriated state in the bedroom upstairs. Mia is underage, and there are issues of
morality and consent that Arnold pushes upon audiences by including this scene. But focusing on bodies as
the lm insists (rather than the objectifying power of the gaze) opens up new possibilities for female
viewing subjectivity that potentially enable us to view Mia’s sexual encounter with Conor as agentive rather
than passive. The selves Mia explores in the movements of her body—the seductive poses at the strip club
dance audition, the freestyle and spirited dancing to Eric B. and Rakim’s “Know the Ledge” in an empty
apartment she has broken into, her sexualized performance for Conor, and the reconciliatory dance with her
mother and sister to Nas’s “Life’s a Bitch” before she leaves home (see gure 11.3)—are a ective
encounters in the course of Mia’s self-styled life trajectory. Embodiment replaces here the scoping gaze.

Figure 11.3

The reconciliatory dance with Miaʼs mother and sister—an a ective encounter
 Signi cantly, in most of the simulated sex lms explored in this chapter, leading female characters
articulate through movement rather than speech, and as sensate bodies explore the potential for Giddens’s
con uent love relationships in late modernity based on emotional reciprocity, the ars erotica, and gender
equality. Not all relationships are equal or con uent (Mia and Conor’s being a case in point), but they do
o er an insight into the variations of intimacy, sexuality, and desire in simulated sex cinema.

According to Claire Johnston, the objective of feminist lm criticism is “working through” the question of
desire in lm narratives (Johnston 1973, 31). In Fish Tank, Mia and Conor’s moment of desire takes the
viewer to the precipice with the narrative steered (at rst glance) toward a conventional revenge plot not

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unlike that initially promised in Red Road. After his sexual encounter with Mia, Conor leaves Joanne and is
unaware he is being followed by her daughter. After locating him at his home in Chadwell St. Mary, Mia
confronts Conor about his unexplained departure, and he tells her they cannot see one another because Mia
is underage. Conor then drives Mia to the train station and pays for her fare home. Mia soon returns, only to
p. 301 discover Conor’s wife and daughter. Furious at the revelation of his double life, Mia seeks revenge by
coaxing Conor’s daughter Keira (Sydney Mary Nash) to the nearby Thames estuary and irts with the idea of
pushing the toddler in the choppy water below. For Arnold, revenge appears the inexorable product of desire
and its ful llment, as lm critic Tom Jennings writes:

But the refusal to relinquish desirous intensity—however inadequately articulated, developed and
negotiated—or subsume it in respectable female role prescriptions, inevitably precipitates con ict
among di cult daughters and immature mothers xed in arrested adolescence. (2007)

The conventional revenge plot does not unfold in Fish Tank (or in Red Road), and Jennings’s reference to
“desirous intensity—however inadequately articulated, developed and negotiated”—is important in the
context of the lm’s nale, in which the mealy mouthed language between mother and daughter is replaced
by the physical language of dance. For lm critic Jonathan Romney, the narrative ends “touchingly” with “a
near-wordless rapprochement, a bitterly unsentimental moment of casual intimacy” (2009). Both
Jennings’s and Romney’s descriptions (the latter employing a corporeal-based language to describe the
lm’s closing sequence) capture the importance of feeling in these moments when speech is rendered
inadequate. The “near-wordless” exchange in Fish Tank functions in the same way as the milieu of silence
p. 302 between Jay and Claire in Intimacy (chapter 1) to enhance the visceral presence of characters on-screen.
Thus, at the lm’s end the physical exchange between mother and daughter is far more meaningful than the
sparse, perfunctory dialogue would indicate.

Mia : I’m going then [as Mia watches her mother dancing to Nas’s song].
Joanne : Listening to one of your CDs.
Mia : Yeah.
Joanne : It’s alright.
Mia : Yeah, it’s Nas. He’s good. You should keep it.
Joanne : Go on then, fuck o … . What are you waiting for?

Mia responds to her mother’s cussing by joining her in the dance, mirroring her steps as they face one
another and continuing after Mia’s younger sister Tyler (Rebecca Gri ths) shares in the performance.
While desire (in this case, Mia’s desire to heal an emotional disconnect with her mother) is often
conceptualized as a void, gap, or lack, it is also possible to adopt a Deleuzian reading of desire as “the
production of action, ideas, interactions, and thence reality” (Fox and Alldred 2013, 775). Seeing desire as
productive allows space for creating, feeling, and interacting bodies, which we see in Mia and Joanne’s
mirrored dancing. As Fox and Alldred write, “Put another way, it is nothing more nor less than the capacity
of a body to a ect or be a ected: productive desire makes a ect ow in assemblages” (2013, 775). Dance
gives mother and daughter a language of intimacy as a nonverbal, nonconscious dimension of experience. If
 a ecting bodies make apparent that which remains “in excess of the speaking subject” (Blackman and Venn
2010, 15), then the verbally discordant exchange between sisters as Mia prepares to drive away underscores
this fact.

Tyler : Bitch … I hate you [Tyler and Mia lovingly embrace].

Mia : I hate you too.

Regardless of the dialogue, this is a shared moment of intimacy between sisters and points to the necessity
of watching, not as a mode of control or visual mastery as the gaze implies, but for the appreciation of the

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sensory and a ective.

The manifold expressions of intimacy, desire, and pleasure explored in Fish Tank, Red Road, and Wuthering
Heights reveal what bodies can and cannot do but also represent the body as process, becoming, and in ux
rather than a static, xed, immutable object tied to inexorable meanings and life purposes. Mia’s sexual
encounters with Conor and her boyfriend Billy in Fish Tank, Heathcli and Cathy’s nascent sexual
experimentation in the windswept moors of Wuthering Heights, and the new bodily awareness Jackie
demonstrates in Red Road when she appraises her naked self in the bathroom mirror after slow dancing with
Clyde in his apartment all articulate the “open character of self-identity and the re exive nature of the
body” (Giddens 1992, 30) that is characteristic of a restructuring of intimacy in late modernity. This is to say
that the body in modern societies is “the domain of sexuality” but also becomes, writes Giddens, “a visible
carrier of self- identity and is increasingly integrated into life-style decisions which an individual makes”
(1992, 31). The body then is an important vehicle in Giddens’s argument about the restructuring of intimacy
in the risk society.

p. 303 In sociological approaches to sexuality, Giddens’s re exively constructed individual is enmeshed with
another “new form of belonging” that is central to the wider shifts taking place in late modernity. For
Je rey Weeks the “sexual citizen” both emerges from and mirrors “the remaking of the self and the
multiplicity and diversity of possible identities that characterize the late, or post-, modern world” (1998,
35). Our task in the late modern world is to cohere these hybrid self-identities or “disparate potential
belongings” through continual self-invention (Weeks 1998, 45). As a product of new patterns of intimacy
the sexual citizen heralds new ways of speaking about and de ning the body, the erotic, and intimate life
(Weeks 1998, 39).

However, it should be noted that perspectives on the restructuring of intimacy in late modernity are not
solely the domain of risk sociology. Within feminist lm studies a revision of intimacy has led to its
theorization as a mode of control of women that can only be overcome through violence and its
spectacularization on-screen. As Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn point out, “if sex deals so often with
violence, it is to suggest how intimacy is too often a site of social constraint for women which has to be
transgressed” (Grosz and Probyn 2002, 219). Giddens acknowledges the oppressive potential of intimacy in
his seminal work on the subject, though he makes the distinction between the “demand for constant
emotional closeness” and the more utopian “transactional negotiation of personal ties by equals” made
possible in a con uent love relationship (Giddens 1992, 3). For Grosz and Probyn, however, displays of
sexualized violence, often the mainstay of extreme cinema, challenge intimacy as a limiting, interpersonal
terrain for women. In their overt and graphic displays of female-enacted violence, lms such as the crime
thriller Baise-Moi (literally “Fuck me” in French), revenge horror ick I Spit on Your Grave (2010), and
cannibalistic Trouble Every Day (2002) alert our attention to the ways in which the destruction of pleasure
may thwart the constraining forces of intimacy understood as a male-gendered construct.

According to Mariah Larsson, lms of the extreme cinema movement are able to “avert the corruption of
the gaze” (2011, 148) by destroying the potential for visual pleasure altogether. As her case study she
explores Swedish director Lukas Moodysson’s A Hole in My Heart (2004), a lm The Guardian’s critic Xan
 Brooks called “a crush of gynaecological close-ups” (Brooks 2005) and Slant Magazine’s Ed Gonzalez
decried as a “non-stop spectacle of unmitigated repulsiveness” (Gonzalez 2005). The lm traces the
making of an amateur porn lm in a cramped Stockholm apartment while the director’s nerdy teenage son
makes robots in another room. Larsson suggests that by employing “highly disturbing events,” graphic and
detailed imagery (including in one scene graphic footage of labial reduction surgery), lms of this type
thwart attempts by the audience to derive enjoyment from the spectacle.

Allowing space in the viewer/viewed relationship for “observation without domination” amounts to a new
putative feminist politics that, in a reading of Giddens’s The Transformation of Intimacy, might dissolve

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masculine on-screen power by shrinking the phallus inside the penis, thus removing the organ’s
symbolization of male domination and privilege (Giddens 1992, 200). Moreover, extending female sexual
equality to an o -screen space implies, as Graham Hendrick writes, an overcoming of the age-old
distinction between the virtuous and the de led or woman of suspect morals (cited in Giddens 1992, 83).

p. 304 And what of the functioning of the gaze in this pleasure-stripped cinéastic scenario? If the gaze evokes
desire and desire is embedded in a patriarchal power structure, what happens when visual pleasure is
problematized by hyperviolent or hypersexualized representations that render a lm “unwatchable?”
According to Asbjørn Grønstad, in the work of leading extreme cinema directors Michael Haneke, Catherine
Breillat, Bruno Dumont, and Lars von Trier we nd a self-conscious commitment to destroying cinematic
pleasure that “compel[s] us to rethink the notions of spectatorship, desire and ethics” (2011, 193). In this
regard we are called to question theoretically the rough and ready assumptions surrounding viewership
(namely, the cinematic pleasure principle) as a consequence of emerging artistic expressions. For Grønstad,
“unwatchable” lms not only reference their occlusive existence—their unsuitability as spectacle—but
also, in director Catherine Breillat’s own terms, encompass “that which in or despite its sheer visibility
eludes visual representation” (Grønstad 2011, 193). Paradoxically, the power of such graphic, confronting
imagery lies in its antirepresentational logic. Therefore we should be sensitive to the unwatchable, the
repellent, and the abhorrent as an aesthetic mode to better understand the e ects of cinema and the nexus
between subject and audience (Grønstad 2011, 194).

The subject-audience nexus to which Grønstad refers operates at the level of the body and signals the
various ways that audiences experience lm. As we discuss in chapter 4 with reference to the work of Martin
Barker, “real” audiences are multisensual, are materially located in the world, and carry with them a range
of lived experiences—“prior knowledges, hopes, fears and expectations”—when viewing a lm (Barker
2011, 109). In our own social audience study, and in keeping with the galvanizing and mutual extension
principles of this book, we heeded Barker’s call to collect “good grounded evidence” of real rather than
imagined audiences by screening Blue Is the Warmest Colour, with its “graphic, confronting imagery” of
lesbian sex. In doing so we found that our study participants used their own personal experiences to
interpret and negotiate the meaning of intimacy and desire found in Kechiche’s lm, which tells us
something about “the place and role of arousal in meaning-making” (Barker 2011, 108). In particular,
Adèle’s risky sexual experimentation—“risky” for the transgression of heteronormative boundaries in a
French high school, where Adèle is taunted for being a lesbian who “eats pussy”—is a liminal crossing of
worlds that some of our subject participants identi ed with in anecdotes about their bisexuality (Jonathon
kissing thirteen people of mixed gender in one night), experiences of lesbian sex (Hannah repudiating the
lm’s inauthentic depiction of Adèle and Emma’s lovemaking), and feelings about intimacy (Ava’s
description that “intimacy is what hurts when it’s gone”). As these examples illustrate, the focus group
participants drew on their own a ective encounters with risk-taking vis-à-vis the lm.

In the context of risk, intimacy, and desire, the act of transgression plays a key role in the study of real sex
lms, not least because it de nes the boundaries between the self and the other. As a concept, transgression
was explored in the 1960s by Michel Foucault in “A Preface to Transgression” which, originally published as
Hommage à Georges Bataille (1963), built on Bataille’s notion of erotic transgression as a liberating force (see
 also Bataille’s Story of the Eye [2001]). Foucault explored transgression as a play between crossings and
p. 305 thresholds of what is permissible: “the limit” and its “transgression” bear a contiguous existence that is
under threat of annihilation at the moment the line is crossed. Foucault calls this a transgressive spiral
because

transgression incessantly crosses and recrosses a line which closes up behind it in a wave of
extremely short duration, and thus it is made to return once more right to the horizon of the
uncrossable. (1977, 34)

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Foucault’s spiral articulates the ceaseless redrawing of boundaries on which transgression relies when
limits are exceeded. Since Foucault, the concept of transgression has grown in prominence in the domain of
cultural criticism, where it is variously explored in the carnivalesque, symbolic inversion, and the
overturning of routines and hierarchies (Bakhtin 1981; Fiske 1987; Stallybrass and White 1986; Dollimore
1991; Lupton 1999, 2013). The vertiginous spiral of increasing sensory shock that is implied in Foucault’s
rendering of transgression is the subtext to Amos Vogel’s groundbreaking study Film as a Subversive Art
(1974; 2005). Vogel explores transgression in lm in the use of taboo images of “climactic moments of life”
such as real sex, birth, and death (1974, 201). He attributes the visual taboo or “hard-core” images evident
in hundreds of international lms produced between the 1950s and 1970s to changing social mores and a
shift in sensibility “from prohibition to permissiveness as regards nudity” (Vogel 1974, 202). Films once
con ned to underground art houses because of their confrontational imagery and nudity entered
mainstream cinema in the 1950s; a decade later pubic hair rst appeared in cinema following court rulings
in Denmark and the United States (Vogel 1974, 203). For Vogel, viewing “taboo images” is a transgressive
experience because audiences become complicit in the act on screen:

As we watch scenes of death, intercourse or birth in reverential abandon, our utter silence is
witness to the thrilling guilt of the voyeur/transgressor (to see what one has no right to see),
coupled with fear of punishment. How delicious when it does not come and the forbidden act or
image can continue to be viewed! (1974, 201)

Where risk and transgression collide in the cinematic experience is for Vogel the moment at which the
image threatens to overwhelm the viewer: “When confronted by visual taboos, however—such as real sex or
death—we immediately feel an element of risk and primordial danger, as if the image could touch, indeed,
engulf us within its own reality” (1974, 195). The threat of self-e acement in the viewer’s sensorial
communion with lm was evident in the focus group in Jonathon’s “intense” (at times both embracing and
rejecting) response to Blue Is the Warmest Colour: “I’m physically experiencing this [ lm] but I’m also
emotionally sort of going through it with them [the characters] and I think that was the most intense part of
it.”

For focus group participant Ava the way in which the lm conjured her own sexual encounters gave her a
new interpretive repertoire: “I just thought about my own experiences with the rst time I was exploring
someone’s body who I really liked and I thought that [the lead actors] did that really well.”

p. 306 Through the focus group study we can “better understand the e ects of cinema” on audiences and are
prompted to reconsider outdated ideas about spectatorship by exploring in real sex and simulated sex lms
such as Blue Is the Warmest Colour the body’s ability to articulate that which cannot be said, namely Horeck
and Kendall’s “unsayable” (2011, 195), Breillat’s unrepresentable, and Grønstad’s “unwatchable.” The
protracted and graphic sex scenes between Adèle and Emma in Blue Is the Warmest Colour; the long, painful
bondage scenes between pleasure-seeking Joe and her sadist K in Nymph()maniac; David’s brutal and
frenzied stabbing of his lover Katia in Twentynine Palms; Erika’s bloodletting during her implied labial self-
mutilation in the Piano Teacher; and Morvern Callar’s bloody dismemberment of her dead lover in the
couple’s bathroom are characteristic of a new sensibility in screen viewing, a rethinking of the trope of
 looking that implores us to reconsider outmoded assumptions about spectatorship, about relations between
the self and other and spectator and screen, as in social audience analyses of lm (see chapter 4).

In Arnold’s lm Wuthering Heights, the “unwatchable” is explored in the torture and abuse of animals. The
wrinkled, pink bodies of plucked geese, the squeals of hanging puppies, and the bulging eyeballs of
famished fowl in the “Wuthering Heights” estate assault the viewers’ senses and di er in degree rather
than kind from the explicit violence in icted on humans in lms of the extreme cinema movement. Indeed,
the e ect of such animal cruelty is heightened by the lm’s obvious exploration of la bête humaine or the
human beast in the vengeful sadism of Hindley and in the young Heathcli ’s lodging in stables with the

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Earnshaw family’s horses. Horeck and Kendall remind us that these confronting and provocative
expressions, “help us to rethink cinema as that which is played out on our bodies, and which constructs an
appeal to a ect, emotion and, indeed, the intellect” (2011, 8). This is not to deny the importance of the gaze
and the complex operations of desire it presupposes, but to focus on the role of the sensory and the a ective
in extreme cinema. Discussions of this kind lead to ethical re ections on how we endure painful images and
whether our spectatorship amounts to complicity in the events they portray (Grønstad 2011, 202). This is a
moral thread Judith Butler follows in emphasizing the need for an alternative gaze at the contemporary
global violence of sexuality, torture, and warfare. For Butler what she calls the state’s embedding of the
camera gaze (as at Abu Ghraib) must be replaced by a di erent desire where the Other’s life is seen as
precarious and grievable. The call for a “gaze of grievability” for others can be likened to Susan Sontag’s the
“pain of others” (see Tulloch and Blood 2012). In its explicit depicitions of on-screen violence and/or sex
extreme cinema enables us to rethink how we de ne intimacy and its traditional embedding in oppressive
patriarchal structures. One lm that prompts such a rethink is Morvern Callar (2002).

Morvern Callar
Violence continues after death in Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (2002), in which the corpse of the titular
character’s boyfriend becomes, contradictorally, both the site of violence and a metaphor for enduring
intimacy. The lm begins with what appears as an erotic sequence. The camera tracks twenty-one-year-old
Scottish supermarket clerk and orphan Morvern Callar (Samantha Morton) as she gently and intimately
p. 307 strokes the naked back of a young man lying next to her (see gure 11.4). A swathe of red light from a
ickering Christmas tree nearby locates the viewer in time and, in the revelation that follows, heightens the
pathos surrounding her intimate gesture.

Figure 11.4

The tactile, slow, deliberate movements of Morvernʼs hands along her loverʼs body—an aesthetic provocation
 The sequence is raw in its elision of extra-diegetic music and sound to focus our attention instead on the
tactile, slow, and deliberate movements of Morvern’s hands along her lover’s body. Emphasis on the
sensory and a ective in these moments, the delicate lines of skin and bone, the tautness of muscle and
eshy folds along the lover’s torso, becomes an aesthetic provocation as we cross to the man’s blood-
soaked wrists. This is the rst indication of violence having been committed, and the realization ruptures
what might otherwise appear to be a scene of postcoital intimacy between lovers.

Another interruption follows in a blinking computer monitor with the instruction “Read Me,” which as the
narrative unfolds is reminiscent of the “Drink Me” and “Eat Me” exhortations guiding a ctional Alice on

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her journey through a wonderland of in nite possibilities. In this lm, as in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, the
boundaries of fantasy and reality are often blurred by a plot line that sees Morvern transform from an
impoverished supermarket clerk into a traveling and in-demand author. The “Read Me” electronic note is
the last dying wish of Morvern’s boyfriend before his presumed suicide. It instructs Morvern to send the
manuscript of his unpublished novel to a series of publishers. Like Alice, Morvern’s own rabbit hole appears
when she deletes her boyfriend’s name from the front page of the book (the title of which we are never
permitted to see) and inserts her own. At this moment, and in a paraphrasing of Barthesian literary
criticism, we see the emergence of the reader-as-author (Morvern) at the death of the author, since “by
signing her name to his novel, Morvern is sending a message beyond the grave: I will not clean up this mess
and nish your life for you [the boyfriend]. She will begin to live her own” (Ebert 2003). Ultimately Morvern
enacts a literal and metaphorical reclaiming of the title of “author” of her own life narrative.

p. 308 Declaring authorship of the manuscript is the rst step in Morvern’s new life trajectory, in which she
explores multiple selves: the author, the hedonist, and the existentialist. Using funds from her boyfriend’s
publishing advance and funeral savings, Morvern and her friend Lannah ee their bleak, shing port town
in Glasgow for a package holiday in Ibiza, Spain, where Morvern’s masquerade as author and hedonist is
captured symbolically by cinematographer Alwin Küchler in a series of sweeping orange and red ltered
landscapes.

If violence and the “visceral aesthetic”—characteristics of extreme cinema according to Beugnet (2011, 40)
—are at this stage part of Morvern’s cunning ruse to steal her boyfriend’s posthumous fame and fortune,
then such expressions soon reach a far more overt display in the narrative. Tired of living around her
boyfriend’s splayed corpse on the kitchen oor, Morvern drags his body to the bath and dismembers his
limbs. The blood splatter on the shower curtain is intertextual and symbolic: it recalls the ambiguous nal
scene in Trouble Every Day (2001)—an extreme cinema lm released the year before Ramsay’s—and
symbolically wrenches Morvern’s present and former selves to create multiple on-screen identities. From
this moment onward she wears the color red like a charm or amulet of the “femme castratrice” (Creed 1993,
122) that, in its symbolization of castration/death, opens up new possibilities for intimacy with her dead
lover beyond the grave; outside the normative; and as Giddens (1992) writes, beyond the constraining
bounds of nineteenth-century idealized notions of intimacy.

Indeed, the color red plays as important a function in this lm as it does in Ramsay’s later work We Need to
Talk About Kevin (2011), based on Lionel Shriver’s book of the same name, published in 2003. This
production, which Ramsay described as a “psychological horror lm” (Olsen 2012), traces a fractious
mother-son relationship to its murderous conclusion in a school shooting massacre. Like Morvern Callar the
lm reverberates with red (in typical Ramsayan fashion, color has a sound as well as a sight), most notably
in the opening scene, in which the body of mother Eva Katchadourian (Tilda Swinton) is awash with crushed
tomatoes as part of a Spanish local festival. Then there are scenes memorable for their red paint splatter,
blinking red numerals on an alarm clock, and rows of tomato soup cans on a supermarket shelf. Similarly, in
Morvern Callar red hues punctuate the narrative in Morvern’s clothing (confounding any expectation of her
mourning the loss of her lover by wearing the customary funereal color black) via her red scarf, red top, red
g-string, red ngernails and toenails, and red bandana. As the lm unfolds these everyday objects resemble,
 in Creed’s (1993) terms of analysis, the wound of Freud’s threatening, bleeding castratrice, whose
unstaunched ow drips in and out of frame.

Carmine references also symbolize Morvern’s enduring connection with a dead lover she seems unable to let
go, even to the extent of living around his splayed corpse in the living room and kitchen before disposing of
the remains. This reading is supported by the lm’s closing sequence depicting Morvern, somewhat
detached from other noisy partygoers on a nightclub dance oor, swaying to the Mamas and Papas’ lyrical
anthem, “Dedicated to the One I Love.” Her compulsive desire to be the author of the book seems, according
to the lyrics and narrative timing of this song, a justi able attempt to ensure an enduring intimacy with her

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p. 309 dead lover—a risk to the becoming of self, since intimacy in this scenario is a one-sided projection with a
lover who cannot reciprocate and therefore remains idealized and untested.

Unlike the introspective female leads Jackie, Mia, and Cathy in Arnold’s cinema, who alternately seek
vengeance and redemption as the narratives unfold, Ramsay’s Morvern is impetuous and ignorant of
consquences. In Spain, as in her hometown seaside port, Morvern drifts rudderless between sexual and
social encounters, local and foreign landscapes, and strange and familiar circumstances. Film critic Philip
French highlights Morvern’s psycho-spatial aimlessness in his review of the lm:

What makes Morvern tick? How is she developing? Where does Ramsay think she’s going? The idea
of jail for embezzlement and disposing of a body does not trouble her. Rather, some sort of
spiritual or existential journey is fuzzily suggested. (2002)

Becoming “is always a dynamic process that never stands still” (Blackman and Venn 2010, 21), so it’s
important that in the last scene at the nightclub Morvern appears to be moving forward, sideways, and
through the party crowd in a physical representation of her journey (through space but also potentially
inward). As Morvern’s body slowly navigates through the crowd, the camera holds her face in close-up and
red lter with alternate ashes of strobe light and darkness mirroring the electro-disco environment. In its
symbolic treatment the sequence of images here may deny us any narrative closure and leave us with only a
sense of movement and transition.

Even though it is possible to read a icker of introspection in Morvern’s blank, wide-eyed expressions, her
lack of guilt or seeming regret positions her in the role of detached observer of events. In an ontological
sense Morvern is the ultimate existentialist—she never su ers a crisis or pang of remorse—and yet “she is
always becoming” in a Sartrean sense. As Peter Bradshaw describes in his review of the lm, she “sees
everything with a forensic gaze: not cold exactly, but coloured with an unfathomable emotion that lies
somewhere between amused receptiveness, detachment and a erce determination to survive at all costs”
(2002). Indeed, Morvern is a survivor, and despite her guile and lack of introspection, she exists as
unmolded clay in the process of formation.

The notion of the self as process, continually remade or “becoming,” which can be traced in the work of
Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay, is explored in risk sociology, as it is in feminist and queer critiques. In
the writings of leading sociologists, the concept of risk (not unlike desire) involves paradox in its
materiality/nonmateriality existence. For Joost Van Loon, risk has a di erent kind of presence because it is
projected: “The essence of risk, however, is time, as it marks a future projected onto the (extended)
presence through anticipation” (2002, 61). Similarly, the projection of “the femme” or gure of woman, as
Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote, has no origin but is socially constructed as “a term in process” which
“as an ongoing discursive practice … is open to reinvention and resigni cation” (Butler 1990, 33). The
notion of a self in process is key to understanding Morvern Callar, though her solipsism prevents her from
achieving intimacy with either her naïve friend Lannah or her nameless fucks in Glasgow and Spain. The
only intimate connection she seems able to forge is with her lover beyond the grave. To this extent Morvern
p. 310 is living her connection with “Him,” as he is referred to in the novel on which the lm is based,
 experientially by extending his presence in color (the persistence of red), in physical movement, and across
space.

In her analysis of the “structural transformations of subjectivity” postmodern Deleuzian feminist Rosi
Braidotti writes that woman’s desire is “not to know who we are,” but “what, at last, we want to become”
(2002, 2). The notion of the self as “becoming” is for Braidotti an opportunity to look beyond the dualism of
male/female and self/other binaries and toward a “female corporeal reality” that articulates “a complex,
heterogeneous, non-unitary entity” (2002, 72). Morvern Callar is the nomadic, un xed, multicentered
female subject of which Braidotti writes. Her foreign travels, multiple and secret identities (as supermarket

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clerk, acclaimed author, alleged murderer or at the very least, disposer of corpse), sexual and social
experimentation, and potential for self-re ection begin when she authors, in a literal sense, her boyfriend’s
narrative, and in a metaphorical sense and “against the odds,” her own life story. Marie in Romance, like
Morvern, is in the process of “becoming,” through her search for con uent love with Paul and then her
older colleague Robert; through casual and risky sex with strangers to plug her gaping “holes”; and nally
through maternal ful llment in the birth of a child, whose wayward father (Paul) she murders by gassing
him in his own home.

In the case of Morvern, the shortage of roles available to an orphaned supermarket clerk in a working-class
milieu provides the social context of the lm. That Morvern rewrites her role in this social context, and the
lm denies any kind of resolution at its close, both point toward a reading of Morvern as a work-in-process.
When the lm ends with Morvern moving through the dance party crowd to the Mamas and the Papas’
song, there is a lingering sense her story will continue beyond endings, surpassing both the lm frame and
her boyfriend’s death. While it is important not to elide their philosophical di erences or varying approach
toward the risk-modern subject, considering Braidotti’s theory of the “structural transformations of
subjectivity” in the context of Giddens’s structural “transformation of intimacy” provides a socio-feminist
perspective on changing epistemologies of self in late modernity.

Ratcatcher
Before Morvern Callar, director Lynne Ramsay explored the importance of bodies “becoming” and a ecting
within dynamic socio-spatial processes in her debut feature lm Ratcatcher (1999). Set in Glasgow’s
blighted council ats during the 1973 garbage strike, the narrative follows twelve-year-old James (William
Eadie) in his relationships with family and friends (particularly the teenager Margaret Ann, played by
Leanne Mullen) as he struggles to manage his guilt after inadvertently drowning his friend Ryan Quinn
(Thomas McTaggart) in a nearby canal. At times the lm is bleak. The mise en scène of a mostly wet,
garbage-strewn landscape populated by rats and mice seems to re ect the psychic outlook of its human
residents, who are presented with limited life opportunities, the lingering specter of death (Quinn’s
drowning), domestic abuse (the physical assault of James’s mother by his father), and the possibility of rape
(the frequent sexual abuse of Margaret Anne by a local gang).

p. 311 Still Ramsay o ers hope in breakout fantasies that punctuate an otherwise “realistic” narrative, including
James’s excursions to the newly built housing estate in the elds out of town and a ballooning mouse who
ies into outer space to populate an intergalactic colony. Like the vermin looking for an escape from the
fetid canals and rotting refuse, the characters in this lm nd solace and importantly a shared intimacy in
their a ective encounters. Ma (Mandy Matthews), dancing with her children to The Chordettes’ “Lollipop”
at the impromptu party she has held to celebrate her husband’s award for bravery, is one instance of bodies
a ecting through dance. Another is after James’s father Pa (Tommy Flanagan) slaps his wife across the face,
when their intimate slow dancing to Nancy Sinatra’s “Something Stupid Like I Love You” reveals an
intimacy that is expressed in touch, the transference of feeling, and the interactions between bodies. For
New York Times lm critic Elvis Mitchell, the lm’s intimate moments trans x the viewer:
 Although Ratcatcher irts with misery, and its palette is principally a series of glum earth tones
with an occasional vivid splash of color, the immensely talented Ms. Ramsay provides an intimacy
that is completely mesmerizing. Rarely has physical wretchedness been rendered with such
delicacy. (2000)

The “physical wretchedness” that Ramsay treats with such “delicacy” could be the result of her exposure of
the characters’ vulnerability. For instance, Margaret Anne urinates in front of James in the bathroom and
they decide to share a tub and bed together (though they do not have sex). This allows a lm with an
otherwise dismal set of social circumstances to explore intimacy in its manifold, sometimes contradictory,

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and mostly transformative guises. And as we have seen in the lms of Arnold and Ramsay analyzed here,
intimacy can be found simultaneously and paradoxically in the course of speech and beyond the realms of
dialogue, in the act of sex and in auto-erotic acts (through one’s own physical touch), and in dancing with
other bodies or dancing alone. Indeed, the intimate relationships in Arnold’s and Ramsay’s work seem to
exemplify Beck’s view that “intimate relationships are the site of profound insecurity at the same time as
they hold out the promise of ontological security” (Tulloch and Lupton 2003, 53).

Conclusion

The purpose of this chapter has been to analyze the simulated sex lms of contemporary British female
lmmakers Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay to put in dialogue the concepts of desire and intimacy in
feminist lm studies as part of a larger conversation (undertaken throughout this book) about sociological
theories of risk and interdisciplinarity. Desire has been principally understood through the operations of the
gaze, and we have spotlighted here the work of a number of writers in the eld of feminist lm studies for
their critical stance in this area of cinematic representation as well as the binary relations (male/female,
subject/object) explored therein. We have applied the psychoanalytic approaches of Lacan and Žižek to
p. 312 theories of spectatorship and, through a discussion of the writings of Grønstad, Probyn, and Grosz,
explored the consequences for intimacy when graphic and confrontational images render a lm
“unwatchable,” “unsayable,” and/or “unrepresentable.” The notion of transgression is relevant here, as
risk-taking involves the crossing of boundaries between Self and Other in the pursuit of self-improvement.

We have also argued here and in chapter 4 (part 1) via Martin Barker and our own preliminary social
audience study that real audiences negotiate meaning through a ective encounters with lmic texts. In the
focus group screening of Blue Is the Warmest Colour the concept of risk in transgression that was played out
in lm through Adèle’s physical encounters was part of her re exive self-project, which the study
participants viewed through their own personal experiences of intimacy, desire, and risk.

In addition, in keeping with the rainbow scholarship and bridging methodology of this book, we have
surveyed the new theoretical territory charted in recent Deleuzian-inspired feminist analyses focusing on
the body as a ective force in lm. Here, spotlighting the potential of bodies to a ect rather than the gaze as
a mostly male (see Mulvey and Berger 1990) instrument of power provides another view on women’s agency
in realistic sex cinema and challenges conventional understandings of the relationship between subject,
object, and audiences.

We have also considered desire as materially positive in the frame of Deleuze and Braidotti rather than as a
lack (in the Lacanian sense), to explore more comprehensively the power of a ecting bodies and the
intimacies they forge. Our mapping of the sociological and feminist theorizations of the subject via
Giddens’s “structural transformation of intimacy” and Braidotti’s “structural transformations of
subjectivity” have enabled us to trace the re exive biographies of self narrated in the work of two British
lmmakers as well as the spectacle of desire and intimacy they o er audiences.
The reason for our concerted focus on two female lm directors and their leading female characters in this
chapter is that, as Giddens observes, “women have prepared the way for an expansion of the domain of
intimacy in their role as the emotional revolutionaries of modernity” (1992, 130). By contrast, because of
their historical self-positioning in the public domain, men have been largely excluded from this
transformation (Giddens 1992, 67). This is not to suggest that men are incapable of intimacy (on the
contrary, Giddens cautions against the well worn assumption that women are more emotionally intuitive
than men) or that male directors and male characters are beyond the analytical reaches of this book (earlier
chapters have attested to this fact). It is simply intended to shift our focus onto the work of two female lm
directors whose gender, according to Giddens, places them at the forefront of this transformation of

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intimacy and whose representations, we believe, o er an insight into the emotional narrative of self. The
discussions in this chapter have largely taken place in the context of the risk society, in which the modern
subject (as a self-made and self-directed individual operating within and against social structures) is in
continual ux and in the process of becoming.