The Art of Cruelty Read online

  This meatifying aspect of Sade also differentiates him from the Actionists, who regularly argued that certain forms of killing—such as Nitsch’s slaughter of three bulls during the Six-Day Play, or Muehl’s penchant for decapitating geese (as in O Sensibility, 1970, in which Muehl puts the goose’s neck stump to sexual use)—are transformed, made sacred, by their employment in ritual. As Muehl said of O Sensibility, “I became Jupiter, and [the goose] became the symbol of woman. I became the priest who would not kill it in order to devour it, but rather to carry out a kind of magic ritual with it. . . . I do not condone animal murders. I show the sentimentality and hypocrisy. With tears in their eyes they gobble up their geese! Actionism is provocation and performance, the representation of moral double standards.”

  Though my aversion to killing animals for art is likely not going anywhere fast, a meat-making instance that holds more interest for me arrives in the infamous “chicken fucking” scene of John Waters’s Pink Flamingos, during which Crackers (Danny Mills) crushes a live chicken to death between his body and Cookie Mueller’s during an unnerving sexual encounter. (“Even without their heads they were a lively nasty bunch of fowl, flopping and kicking with all their might,” Mueller recalls in her terrific memoir Walking through Water in a Pool Painted Black. “I was getting hurt for real. I’d underestimated these chickens, even while I was feeling sorry for them.”) In the years since filming Pink Flamingos, Waters has not exactly appeased any of his critics with his oft-repeated, Warholian reasoning that “we made the chicken’s life better. It got in a movie, it got fucked and it got famous.” But at least this defense makes sport of the projection taking place (i.e., we all know that the chicken likely didn’t care about getting fucked and famous, and we all know that Waters knows it too), rather than remaining seduced, a la Muehl, by the anthropocentric projection that a “magic ritual” has taken place, in which the male “became Jupiter, and [the goose] became the symbol of woman.”

  As for Waters, when asked (in 2001) whether he had ever felt the need to “pull back” from his provocations, he answered, “Would I today kill an animal in a movie? Probably not. I mean we ate them. We didn’t have craft services, then, on Pink Flamingos you had to go find something in the woods, kill it and eat it. There was no ‘lunch’ or anything.” Mueller concurs: “Later on, after we finished for the day, with the sun sinking beyond the horizon of winter’s leafless trees, we roasted all those chickens, had a big feast for the whole cast and crew. Those chickens I’d felt sorry for earlier sure were delicious.”

  Meat recurs throughout Pink Flamingos, often in hilarious ways. Who can forget the close-up shot of Raymond Marble’s genitals when he flashes a woman in a public park, revealing not just his penis but also a gnarled piece of sausage tied to it? The twinning of meats, along with the pathos of the uncomfortable-looking twine affixing them, happily renders the penis meat bound, deflated, a leftover among leftovers. (Soll niemand mein Schwanz steif machen, indeed.) Waters is just as perverse as Sade or the Actionists, but his perversity joyously extends to realms of sexuality in which the phallus is regularly downgraded to penis, a situation of meat characterized by bathos, comedy, and possibility rather than power struggles or turgid myth-making.

  AS Pink Flamingos makes clear, when the body-made-meat gets pushed to its extreme, the result can be quite funny, albeit in the darkest of fashions. (The first time I saw, in person, Bacon’s bloodiest crucifixion—a triptych Bacon reports having painted in a drunken haze—I laughed out loud. Critic Jerry Saltz, in reviewing Bacon’s 2009 centenary retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum, picked up on this humorous tone, noting that Bacon “may be the only artist sharing a name with one of his main subjects, meat.”) Much physical comedy depends on the human body’s vulnerability: slapstick, for example, makes its home here—although slapstick, by definition, takes pains to reassure the audience that no real harm is taking place. (The word “slapstick” comes from battacchio, an object used in Italian theater to produce a loud noise upon impact without hurting what it hits.) Comedy darkens when we begin to lose this reassurance, or when—as in Family Tyranny—the reassurance itself uncannily, inexplicably, ceases to reassure.

  Things become more uncomfortable still when the comedy is unintentional. Consider, for example, the scene from Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust epic, Schindler’s List, in which a Nazi officer unexpectedly and suddenly shoots a Jewish woman in the head at point-blank range, sending her body crumpling awkwardly to the ground. In a regrettable incident in 1994, sixty-nine students from Castlemont High School in Oakland, California, went on a Martin Luther King Day field trip to see Schindler’s List at a local movie theater. During the aforementioned scene, a group of the Castlemont students—who were mostly black and Latino—began to laugh, deeply offending other members of the audience (some of whom were apparently Holocaust survivors). The management ended up stopping the film and ejecting the students from the theater.

  As one might imagine, in the weeks that followed, the students of Castlemont suffered through a storm of accusations of anti-Semitism, cultural insensitivity, cruelty of heart, and desensitization to violence. The episode culminated in their delivery of a public apology at a televised news conference, the development of a “Holocaust curriculum” at their high school, which included visiting lectures by concentration camp survivors, and so on.

  I can’t profess to know what generated the students’ laughter, nor can I say that the subsequent conversation and measures taken were without value. What I do know, however, is that while I watched this sorry episode unfold in the media, I remembered that I had had a related reaction to this scene in the film. Its violence was utterly chilling, but its chill was laced with a discomfiting slapstick comedy, the kind that derives from watching a body go from flesh to meat in but an instant. (I imagine that for Spielberg, this effect was unplanned, whereas for someone like Quentin Tarantino, it is explicitly and repetitively conjured.) I doubt that I laughed out loud, but a certain nervous, appalled laughter was not out of the question.

  For the ever-present possibility that our bodies could be made meat in but an instant—that this precious, big-deal life we imbue with so much spirit and meaning could be extinguished at any moment by, say, a speeding car or bullet—is frightening enough that laughing in its face can at times seem an understandable response. If and when this fear becomes a commonplace, our response may become more unpredictable still. As one sixteen-year-old Castle-mont student explained to the New York Times on February 6, 1994, “We see death and violence in our community all the time. People cannot understand how numb we are toward violence.”

  THE BRILLIANT, mordant work of German artist Otto Dix may have captured the dark humor of human meat more relentlessly, and more trenchantly, than any other European artist of the twentieth century. Unlike Bacon, whose paintings deliberately eschew social or political context, Dix’s war etchings—the Der Krieg cycle of 1924—depict images of grievously wounded faces, terrifying skin grafts, putrefying corpses, and the like, which derive explicitly from Dix’s experiences as a soldier at the front in World War I. Despite their otherworldly, often cartoonish nature, the etchings remain tightly tethered to this context by documentary titles such as “Wounded Man Fleeing—Battle of the Somme, 1916,” “Wounded Soldier, Autumn 1916, Bapaume,” and “Buried Alive, January 1916, Champagne.”

  Dix’s portrayal of the horrors of war is indelible and savage. And yet, as one considers his work over the next several decades, one cannot help but notice how the grotesque, caustic vision of Der Krieg extends to everything and everyone Dix ever painted. His sensibility definitively transports all figures and faces—be they those of fellow soldiers, his family, his friends, himself, or various dancers, prostitutes, johns, criminals, and children—into the world of Dix, which is characterized by bulging, demonic eyes, foreshortened limbs, a dog-like sexuality, and—in the case of the women—larger-than-life T & A, the likes of which woul
d be at home in a cartoon by Robert Crumb.

  In short, whether the subject is trench warfare, a Weimar sex club, a crime scene, or a seriously tongue-in-cheek Madonna and Child, one of the most remarkable things about Dix is his rabid employment of caricature without a spirit of mockery. One gets the sense, in Dix, that we are all in this situation together—that our desires, injuries, genitals, faces, illnesses, bravado, and vulnerabilities may be pathetic, ugly, inglorious, and often quite terrifying. But, as Dix’s long career suggests, that is no reason not to celebrate them.

  PRECARIOUSNESS

  IN On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry argues that our first response to beauty, and by extension, to vulnerability (the link comes from beauty’s fleetingness), is to protect it, to cherish it. My dance student’s response was to hurl heavy objects at it. Sometimes, as we have seen, when faced with the radical vulnerability of another’s body or soul, one might feel inclined to laugh at it (the recipe for much cruel humor, in art as in life). The schizoid nature of these responses reminds me of a child who plucks a beetle from the dirt, makes it a home in a dish, gives it a name, then squishes it to death, then cries because it’s dead.

  One means of understanding this volatile back and forth is provided by philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who proposes that the perceived precariousness of an Other simultaneously provokes in us the urge to protect him and the temptation to kill him. For Levinas, the negotiation of these two opposing impulses—rather than the abolition of the latter—provides the foundation for ethical behavior.

  This makes sense to me. But, as Judith Butler has noted, it also skips over an important question—namely, why would it be that apprehending an Other’s precariousness would tempt me to kill him?

  There are several ways of addressing this question. Pop psychology would likely have it that the precariousness of an Other reminds us of our own precariousness—a precariousness we may wish to disavow or deny out of fear, out of a (doomed) desire to be invincible, immortal. Feminists might add that since our fundamental precariousness has been feminized (as vulnerability, as weakness), a misogynistic ideology would naturally demand its suppression, abjection, or defeat. This latter version of events may help to explain the rage that can ensue when any given woman is revealed not to belong to something that could be called the “weaker sex.” For when women cease to be the repositories of human vulnerability, the radical precariousness in which we all share jumps into focus and becomes everyone’s burden to bear.

  Many have not found, do not find, this burden bearable. This is too bad, especially if (as Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor have put it) the very definition of kindness is “the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself.” The whiff of cruelty is in the air.

  SINCE THE birth of the form, novelists have had a long love affair with the female heroine—specifically, with creating a likable, strong character who then gets smacked down by the prehensile tail of her vulnerability. The Victorian era featured a multitude of magnificent novels—often written by women—starring feisty heroines who get batted around by the cruel forces of finance and fate (George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and so on). Then, in 1880, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady arrived.

  The founding germ of the novel, according to James, was his involuntary apprehension of a character—a particularly bright and engaging young woman who, like the “frail vessels” of George Eliot, would become one of those specimens of small “female fry” in literature who somehow “insist on mattering.” Portrait introduces us to this woman in the form of Isabel Archer, arguably one of the most likable heroines in Anglo-American literature. After apprehending her character, James said his next job was to decide on the novel’s driving question, which was, “What will she ‘do’?” James saw the rest of the novel as charged with constructing a set of “right relations” in which to let both his character and this question loose.

  Unsurprisingly, the question of “What will she ‘do’? ” soon boils down to “Whom will she marry?” The drama of the first half of Portrait, like that of most Victorian novels, circulates around Isabel’s marital options. Portrait differs from these, however, in that Isabel is a fiercely independent American woman of means living in both the United States and Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. She therefore has an unprecedented sense of agency—not to mention a range of potential spouses—of more promising nature than is customarily allotted to small “female fry.” Nonetheless, Isabel notoriously chooses quite badly—worse, even, than Dorothea Brooke’s appalling commitment to the infirm, bitter Casaubon in Eliot’s Middlemarch. For Isabel chooses a husband (Gilbert Osmond) who hates her, and who holds her unhappiness as his life’s primary objective.

  For the second half of the novel, Isabel is up against the difficult task of sifting through a maze of feelings and thoughts that she once took to be facts, or at least sound reflections of facts, but that now appear to be delusions by which she somehow duped herself into her miserable situation. “It was impossible to pretend that she had not acted with her eyes open; if ever a girl was a free agent she had been,” James writes. “There had been no plot, no snare; she had looked and considered and chosen.” In Portrait’s justly famous “Chapter 42”—which arguably invents “stream of consciousness” as a literary form—Isabel uses every ounce of lucidity she’s got to cut through her self-deceptions, about Osmond and herself. She discovers, in the end, that her error was, in a sense, one of misinterpretation: “she had not read him right . . . she had mistaken a part for the whole.” Learning to read well, for James, is no academic matter. A life’s happiness can depend on it.

  In a nasty (if dated) 1972 piece excoriating the “women’s movement,” Joan Didion scoffs at feminist readers who would skip over Isabel’s status as a “free agent” and interpret her demise as a casualty of patriarchy. For feminists, Didion says, “Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady need no longer be the victim of her own idealism. She could be, instead, a victim of a sexist society, a woman who had ‘internalized the conventional definition of a wife.’ ” Jeer as Didion might, the fact remains that Portrait also bends over backward to show us how Isabel has “internalized the conventional definition of a wife”—not only for herself, but also for her husband’s daughter, whom she considers marrying off “as you would put a letter in the post-office” in order to please her horrible mate. Further, Isabel eventually discovers that there was indeed a plot, or a snare: her marriage was fixed behind her back to provide cover—and funds—for her husband’s illegitimate daughter. By the novel’s end, Isabel is no longer ruing the results of her actions as a “free agent,” but rather standing face to face with “the dry staring fact that she had been an applied handled hung-up tool.”

  The genius of Portrait is that it allows both versions of events—Isabel as “free agent,” Isabel as “hung-up tool”—to be true. After all, it is not only cruel but also inaccurate to insist that people are the sole authors of their lives; to tell them so is, as Phillips has said, one means of punishing them. And yet another profound way of punishing people is to insist that they have no capacity to author their lives whatsoever. We live, with Isabel, in the balance.

  THIS SUSPENSION is an interesting place. But be wary of the many male authors and auteurs who nail their empowered female heroines into this spot for sport. One of the most renowned practitioners of this formula is Dogma filmmaker Lars von Trier, whose “Golden Heart” trilogy provides ample opportunity to contemplate—should one be in the mood—its machinery.

  The first film of the trilogy—and the most insidious to my mind (though 2000’s Dancer in the Dark is up there)—is Breaking the Waves (1996). Breaking the Waves showcases the indestructible “goodness” of the lead female character, Bess (Emily Watson), as she moves from newlywed naif to bereft wife to sexual adventurer to prostitute to victim of a fatal sexual torture. S
he undertakes all this to please her husband, Jan (Stellan Skarsgård), who has been paralyzed and rendered impotent in an oil rig accident shortly after their wedding. Jan consequently encourages her, from his hospital bed, to engage in sexual transgressions and report on them to him. These transgressions build toward a brutal sexual encounter with two sailors that leaves Bess sliced up, facially disfigured, and screaming in agony on an emergency room table, where she eventually expires. To add to the horror, we never see what transpires on the boat with her rapist/murderers; we see only her entering the boat, then entering the ER in a pool of blood. The viewer is thus left to fill in the gaps of whatever forms of sexual torture might have caused such unbearable, fatal suffering.

  All through the film, Bess’s “sacrifices” to her husband have been figured as Christ-like, and as she dies in the ER, Jan miraculously rises from his hospital bed and begins to walk. As church bells ring over the ocean in the film’s parting shot, announcing the glory of Bess’s ultimate sacrifice and its redemptive effect on Jan, I sat in the dark theater, probably not unlike many viewers, feeling distraught to the point of destroyed. Then, as the first wave of emotion lifted, I felt angry. Then I felt disgusted. Finally, I felt bored. The brutal emotional impact of Bess’s suffering aims to undo the viewer so profoundly that the film’s final message—that her sexual torture serves as a necessary, redemptive good for the male, and further, that there is sublimity to be found in such a scenario—almost slips down the gullet whole. But who can truly swallow it? Von Trier’s cruelty does not lie in any capacity to strip away cant or delusion, but rather in an ability to construct malignant, ultimately conventional fictions that masquerade as parables of profundity, or as protests against the cruelties of the man’s world in which we must inevitably live and suffer.