The Art of Cruelty Read online

  A SITUATION OF MEAT

  IF, AT the very least, we are human, we must concede that humans evidence an ongoing interest in becoming, at certain times and in certain contexts, things, as much as in turning other people into things. The spectre of our eventual “becoming object”—of our (live) flesh one day turning into (dead) meat—is a shadow that accompanies us throughout our lives.

  Of course, this shadow is thicker for some than others. Certainly it was thick for Francis Bacon: “Every time I go into a butcher’s, I’m surprised that it’s not me hanging there,” he once said. It was also thick for Simone Weil, which makes her critique in “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” complicated. Weil’s protest depends on her horror at force’s capacity to turn human beings into things—either dead things (i.e., corpses, made by “force that kills”) or “things with souls” (i.e., shells of humans, made by “force that does not kill, i.e., that does not kill just yet”—“a compromise between a man and a corpse,” Weil calls the latter). Yet Weil’s theological ruminations are saturated with the desire to dispense with subjectivity altogether, and to become completely emptied out, effaced, “thing-like,” in order to get closer to God. “Once we have understood that we are nothing, the object of all our efforts is to become nothing. May God grant me to become nothing,” she wrote. “My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me.”

  When viewed through the lens of Christian theology, this complexity holds no paradox. For in Christianity, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus alchemize an otherwise brutal “situation of meat” into a scene of divine redemption—not just for Christ, but also for us if we become his followers. As Weil summarizes in Gravity and Grace, “The false God changes suffering into violence. The true God changes violence into suffering.” This is one of Christianity’s most gripping promises: that violence need not remain simply violence; it can be changed, via faith, into suffering, which, due to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, is never in vain.

  The crucifixions of Bacon stand in direct opposition to the above narrative. As John Russell has pointed out, Bacon’s crucifixions differ substantively from those of religious paintings in that Bacon has no designs on painting the crucifixion; rather, he is painting a crucifixion—which, for Bacon, is simply “a generic name for an environment in which bodily harm is done to one or more persons and one or more other persons gather to watch.” “I know for religious people, for Christians, the Crucifixion has a totally different significance,” Bacon explains. “But, as a non believer, it was just an act of man’s behaviour, a way of behaviour to another.” In short, if you remove the story of the Passion, if you remove the radiant, suffering face and body of Jesus, if you remove the specter of a miraculous Resurrection, you are left with an act of bald cruelty—a situation of meat—and some aggregate of its victims, perpetrators, witnesses, and accomplices.

  In short, what looks like meaningful, divine suffering to one person often looks like brutal, preventable violence to another. Religious convictions do not insulate against this divide; many would in fact say they cause it. To take a particularly garish example, think of Mel Gibson’s ludicrous bloodbath of a film, The Passion of the Christ (2004), which focuses about 100 of its 126 minutes on the torture, mutilation, and death of Christ’s body. “I wanted [the violence] to be shocking; and I wanted it to be extreme,” Gibson explained to Diane Sawyer in a February 16, 2004, interview, “so that [the viewers] see the enormity—the enormity of his sacrifice.” Most critics remained unconvinced—if not downright horrified—by this logic, which claims the shock and awe of surround-sound ultraviolence as a worthwhile tool for bringing young people—including young children—to Christian faith. Many churches, on the other hand, knocked themselves out to support the film, offering everything from free tickets to discussion groups to private theater rentals to ensure its wide circulation, believing that “the film presents a unique opportunity to share Christianity in a way today’s public can identify with” (as a certain Reverend John Tanner of Alabama explained).

  One of the most wicked satires of the above logic can be found in Franz Kafka’s exceptionally grim story from 1914, “In the Penal Colony.” In the story, Kafka’s officer—the operator of a torture/execution device called the Harrow—waxes rhapsodic about the glory days in the colony, when public torture and execution were a popular spectacle: “It was impossible to grant all the requests people made to be allowed to watch from up close. The commandant, in his wisdom, arranged that the children should be taken care of before all the rest. Naturally, I was always allowed to stand close by, because of my official position. Often I crouched down there with two small children in my arms, on my right and left. How we all took in the expression of transfiguration on the martyred face! How we held our cheeks in the glow of this justice, finally attained and already passing away! What times we had, my friend!” The surrounding story, as we shall later see, eviscerates the officer’s interpretation of the execution, primarily by juxtaposing such monologues against the patently revolting situation of meat at hand (a situation epitomized, perhaps, by the recurring appearance of the felt gag the prisoner in the Harrow must wear—a gag saturated with the vomit of all those previously executed in the machine).

  Bacon’s Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962) and Crucifixion (1965) offer scenes of similarly revolting (though perhaps unintentional) satire. In both paintings, the crucified figure resembles a split animal as much or more than a human, and appears upside down—“a worm crawling down the cross,” as Bacon once put it, rather than a child of God getting ready to make his ascent. (An upside-down cross is also a coarse symbol of blasphemy.) The witnesses in the paintings are decidedly modern: no weeping or cradling of the meat here—just a woman who looks like she’s passing by a bad traffic accident, two men who could be casually checking in on a brutalized detainee in their custody, and two men in fedoras who appear to be eating at a lunch counter, completely oblivious to the bloody action beside them. And then, of course, at the apex of the triangle, there’s us, looking at the meat, and at the people looking or not looking (by now, a la Mendieta, a familiar architecture).

  “For Bacon, the worst has already happened,” writes John Berger in “Francis Bacon and Walt Disney,” an essay that makes the intentionally jarring link between Bacon paintings and Disney cartoons. Berger here argues that Bacon’s insistence on this post-ness—on this sense that all the viewer can do is stumble belatedly upon the carnage (rather than intervene, understand, participate, or prevent)—proposes that both “refusal and hope are pointless.” According to Berger, Disney cartoons have the same point, even if there “the ultimate catastrophe is always in the offing”: both pre-sent worlds, Berger says, that could be captioned There is nothing else. Given how much Berger values refusal, hope, and unforeclosed possibility, this is a serious critique.

  The problem here, it seems to me, lies in Berger’s willingness to give Bacon’s proposition such overarching power. For while the paintings may indeed propose that there is nothing else, their proposition remains just that—a momentary proffering. As one beholds them (at, say, Bacon’s 2009 centenary retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), there is wall space between each canvas, there is space to walk around the room. One can come and go, look closely and then look away, stay for a long time or simply walk on by, en route to the bathroom or gift shop. Their depiction of belatedness or mindlessness—however claustrophobic—does not necessitate our acquiescence. They are paintings; our job is to behold them. There is no need, or even invitation, to submit to their terms.

  It is true, as Berger suggests, that Bacon’s subject is not consciousness. Nor is it empathy—or at least the kind of empathy that depends on consciousness. Bacon’s crucifixions do not ask us to empathize. The victims offer up no faces shining with tortured beatitude for our spiritual contemplation. Instead we get, in Crucifixion, a central panel of a faceless, splayed pink carcass, its front two limbs taped down to the c
rucifying plane with unforgiving bandages. And yet, in looking at this painting, a fierce kind of empathy can arise. This is not the kind of empathy that stays on pause until we feel that we’ve understood the being that this meat belongs or once belonged to. We aren’t waiting around to behold the same emotions we have felt reflected back to us in its eminently human face. (In fact, in Bacon’s crucifixions, the onlookers typically have the more well-defined human faces, yet they seem more horrific than the disasters of flesh and blood in the room with them.) There is no attempt to shock us into feeling “the enormity of the sacrifice.” There is no sacrifice. We do not have to understand or get to know Bacon’s figures to feel their pain, nor do they need to represent the pitifully massacred children of God. They are animals on their way down, as are we; that’s enough.

  The figures that dominate Plath’s late poetry, on the other hand, are almost always on the rise. But as with the spirit of “Lady Lazarus,” who notoriously rises out of the ash in the poem’s final lines to “eat men like air,” their ascent is not usually very nice. Plath’s resurrected figures have an effect eerily similar to that of Bacon’s worms crawling down their crosses: they disallow the reassurances of martyrdom, rebirth, and resurrection just as brutally. But in doing so, they also reveal something else: the cruelties and complexities of resurrection, and its ties to potentially lethal forms of psychological or historical amnesia. In “Getting There,” for example, Plath’s speaker—who seems stranded somewhere between an unborn fetus and a wartime prisoner on a train bound for slaughter—is struggling to “get there”: to rise from Adam’s side, to “fly to a name, two eyes,” to arrive at the destination which she describes as a “bloodspot, / The face at the end of the flare.” She gets there—or somewhere—eventually; the poem’s last lines read, “And I, stepping from this skin / Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces // Step to you from the black car of Lethe, / Pure as a baby.” This is very bad, but one gets the sense that for this born-again—and perhaps for us, in greeting it—the worst is yet to come.

  Elsewhere, Plath’s ascensions are of a more metaphysical variety, as in “Fever 103°”: “I think I am going up, / I think I may rise— / The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I // Am a pure acetylene / Virgin / Attended by roses, // By kisses, by cherubim, / By whatever these pink things mean.” In reference to this ascent, a critic once wrote, “This is bogus spirituality, and it has its admirers, who even seem pleased that Plath did not survive it.” But I think it fairly clear from Plath’s sarcastic tone (“whatever these pink things mean”) that she means to tinge such ascents with the bogus, precisely to undercut any facile rebirth or purity typically associated with them. I, for one, am not particularly pleased that Plath did not live a long life, but I am pleased that, in the short life that she did, she managed to produce a poetry that relentlessly exposes the dangers of hoping against hope to step from amnesia (“the black car of Lethe”) to an infantile purity (“pure as a baby”).

  MANY SEE the confrontation with the body-made-meat as dramatized in splatter films as fundamental to their psychological appeal, the idea being that such films provide an entertaining, over-the-top place to encounter our primal fears about the worst possible fates of our mortal coils. Surely it’s no accident that a slaughterhouse occupies a central place in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, nor that many horror movies feature meat in their titles, as in Dead Meat, The Midnight Meat Train, Meat Grinder, and so on. (Think, too, of 2009’s terrific sci-fi horror extravaganza, District 9, which meshes a futuristic plot with a relentless, gritty obsessiveness with meat, including cannibalistic feeding frenzies, aliens obsessed with cat food, the spectacle of man-flesh-becoming-alien-flesh, egregious organ harvesting, and more.)

  Pornographic films are also often called “meat movies”—not on account of any dead meat per se, but on account of their insistent, intense focus on particular body parts (i.e., the parts involved in fucking), a focus that can have the effect of parsing the body into isolated chunks of meat, stripped of human subjectivity. (At times, the rhetoric between the two genres meets up, as in the term “fresh meat vixen,” a term sometimes used to refer to the female stars of horror films.) As the infamous June 1978 cover of Hustler made clear, straight pornography has a long and fraught history of “making meat” of women (the cover features a woman being fed into a meat grinder, her legs sticking out the top, alongside a quotation by Larry Flynt which reads, “We will no longer hang women up like pieces of meat”—implying, one can only suppose, that from now on Hustler will grind them).

  The meat-making aspect of pornography is regularly denounced by certain feminists and moralists as woman-hating, soul-sucking, and home-wrecking (at least for straight folks; the souls and homes of queers are presumably too damned to merit much concern). Books such as Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat and The Pornography of Meat take the argument further, in their effort to link up realms of sexual, economic, and ecological injustice. The advent of Internet porn has only hastened the charges, in that the Internet has made porn not only ubiquitous but also predatory: it tracks you down as much as you track it down, and even the most vanilla user is only ever about three clicks away from seeing a ten-year-old boy giving someone a blow job, or a woman being penetrated by a horse. (And don’t forget to watch out for those decoys from Perverted Justice!)

  Be all this as it may. But we miss something crucial about the meat-making of porn if we focus only on its most addictive, alienating, and misogynistic aspects. For ecstasy—as we are constantly being reminded—literally means being beside oneself, which means standing slightly apart from one’s body and slightly apart from one’s mind. From which vantage point, one might experience one’s body—and perhaps even one’s consciousness—as things. The transcendent parts of this smash-up are not typically captured on film; likely they are not capturable. Pornography leaves us, instead, with the spectacle of the meat.

  Using camera work that can have more in common with laparoscopic surgery than with cinema, hard-core porn knocks itself out to get supranaturally close to the body’s capacities for contact and penetration. The closer you go—that is, the more hard core it gets—the more abstract it becomes. And the more abstract it becomes, the deeper the mystery of why it works—why watching close-ups of throbbing pink body parts moving in and around each other instantly turns most of us on. “That is porn’s greatest strength, its almost mystical dimension,” Virginie Despentes observes.

  Of course, not all “thingness” is created equal, and one has to live enough of one’s life not as a thing to know the difference. (This may explain, in part, why the meat-making of gay male porn doesn’t produce the same species of anxiety as that of straight porn: since men—or white men, at any rate—don’t have the same historical relation to objectification as do women, their meat-making doesn’t immediately threaten to come off as a cruel redundancy.) Even a literary masterpiece of masochism such as Pauline Réage’s Story of O depends on the subjectivity of its protagonist to stay vital: the novel is compelling all the way through O’s self-aware transformation into a thing, but once she asks Sir Stephen for death and is extinguished, the tension goes slack; the dream, as it were, has died. The Marquis de Sade solved this problem by allowing himself an endless supply of victims to be corrupted, frigged, tortured, and killed, but in doing so, he tipped his writing into comedy.

  He also tipped it into tedium. Indeed, one of the most fascinating things about Sade’s writing is its immense capacity to shock, and its equally immense capacity to bore. Such a coexistence is typical of pornography, but the sheer volume of Sade’s work—combined with his habit of inserting a fifty-page diatribe about French politics into the middle of an orgy—gives this coexistence a whole new meaning. But perhaps the most profound tedium in Sade lies not in his penchant for voluminous or digressive discourse, but in his preference for meat over flesh. As Angela Carter puts it in The Sadeian Woman, “It is a mistake to think that the
substance of which [Sade’s] actors are made is flesh. There is nothing alive or sensual about them. Sade is a great puritan and will disinfect of sensuality anything he can lay his hands on; therefore he writes about sexual relations in terms of butchery and meat.”

  Sade’s penchant for meat—like Bacon’s—stems in part from his intense atheism. He is wholly against transubstantiation. In its place, you will find mechanistically executed penetration, cannibalism, necrophagy, coprophagia, and the like. This meatifying aspect of Sade differentiates him from many other transgressive pornographers, including Georges Bataille, whose blasphemy is always suffused by a mystical interest in the flesh made sacred (as is clear in the ritualistic sex-murders of clergy in Bataille’s pornographic classic, Story of the Eye). As Sontag puts it in Regarding the Pain of Others, Bataille “links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation—a view which could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime.” (Bacon’s crucifixions are a good visual aid for the latter, save for the fact that they provoke no consequent impulse for correction, for justice.) Bataille’s interest in sacrifice differs profoundly, however, from Christianity’s (and Gibson’s), in that Bataille thought the introduction of God, salvation, and purgation to the event denied the act’s most sacred attributes: transgression, sadism, profanity, impurity, and the death of God.