Hearing Carry Over

I Find You Inconsolable

2011 was the year of no feelings. NYMag exposed the raw nerves of pornalia with the full Ridgemont High treatment. Frank Ocean wrote an r&b black comedy and called it Novacane. Abel Tesfaye and a circle of Ativan’d party sluts had it all in an empire of dirt. Joe Buck had a fun night. Ryan Gosling drove. Men who were not Drake got suddenly madly vocal about the true extent of their dissociative tendencies. Women, on the other hand, didn’t need to say anything, because they’ve been saying that shit for years.

Even though the new year dropped before I got to see it, Shame feels like the way 2011 should end. Our co-most relevant actor lets it all hang literally out and finds himself bewildered by the awkwardness of a plausible sex scene. IRL and in movies, I sometimes wonder how they block those. My arm goes how? Your mouth goes where? This is why the best sex scene ever in a movie was the one from Boogie Nights, co-directed by Dirk Diggler. Half the time these positions with another person are illogical, and we are right to feel ashamed.

I was afraid to watch Shame because I was afraid I might like it, as it were. Like Nate Fisher going to a sex-addict group out of earnest curiosity, I thought it might apply. W/o going into specifics, if my emotional life were a convention at the Radisson, people would have a habit of not pre-registering and then having to pay full price. It’s not their fault, and all manner of half-ironic self-diagnosis from Asperger’s to adult ADD to Pete Campbell sociopathology hasn’t made me a better boyfriend or doubles partner.

In the movie, Michael Fassbender is kind of the Steve Jobs of sex. He’s not really interesting personally or intellectually and even though he has a copy of The Greatest American Novel on his dismally modern shelf he is in possession of only one discussible gift, and I don’t mean a big swinging dick. Which he’s got, by the way. Brandon, as he’s called as though there aren’t enough Bret Easton Ellis vibes already, has discovered there is no sexual door he can’t or won’t open, and it doesn’t matter if he’s a good lover technically or not. All he has is unlimited access.

Brandon’s sex addiction is undiagnosed, because officially there is no such thing, and it exists mostly off-script. The movie is almost all nadir but if you didn’t already know the premise you wouldn’t necessarily know this guy has a problem. Which is why the movie’s important: what the internet did is give everyone a sexual security clearance and we’re all up to our pleasure centers in classified documents. Most of the time Brandon isn’t a monster, he’s intensely relatable. He is a victim of access, and that’s the one thing money doesn’t have to buy anymore.

James Badge Dale, as Brandon’s douchebag boss, finds his, Brandon’s, hard drive overflowing with porn. “Hos sluts anal double anal interracial facial penetration creampie I don’t even know what that is” is the perfect aria he delivers. In a movie where the dialogue’s pretty scarce, there’s your fucking eulogy. Brandon is for all intents and purposes dead, and he didn’t feel a thing. It was over before he knew it.

Seen at an angle, Dale’s foil character is more instructive than Fassbender’s lead. He only knows how to talk to women by complimenting them way over the top. Trying to buy tequila shots with Genius Of Love on the s/t or insisting Carey Mulligan is too Carey Mulligan-y to use public transit, he comes off way less respectful of women than Brandon, not to mention way more of a predator. Another reason Brandon’s such a weird patient; he doesn’t look sick compared to that guy everybody knows who hits on every girl walking by, confident the hint of desperation is not perceptible. But the everlasting weirdness of addicts is that they’re all essentially killing themselves with cure.

In Brandon’s case he gets with people without really trying; he has so thoroughly breached what Neil Gaiman called the threshold of desire that it wouldn’t even occur to him to put forth much actual effort, to hit on someone who wasn’t a hooker or a webcam slut. Call me a freak but there’s something nice about saving yourself in this way.