Une sale histoire
“If there’s no pleasure without trouble, then there’s no work without pride”: to illustrate that sentiment – which can be understood as concerning the relationship between desire and work, where these are linked by processes of sublimation and the revelation of the sublime such processes make possible – in a story about the struggle of a man to fight back against the tendency towards the “domestication of the vagina”, but where that struggle is itself more like a compulsion, and therefore that against which one must also struggle, is to really try and say something about how desire and drive do not form an opposition, but are a question of the différance of the former from the latter, a compositional swirl of tendency and counter-tendency, where the fact that the man leaks without being hard is a kind of physiological sign that what is at stake is an endosomatic tendency, yet one that absolutely cannot be reduced to something merely “natural”.
The attempt to say that women deny or fail to understand or reject this story is also interesting: is the suggestion being made here that women are too quick to assume that the male fixation on sexuality boils down to the “act”, whereas masculine sexuality is perhaps always, to some degree at least, or very often, decentred from that act? I’m not absolutely sure, but I’m also not at all sure that it accurately reflects Eustache’s intention to say that the film is his “most systematic skewering of the male ego and the cultural power it represents” (O’Donoghue, 2024): to reduce the issues discussed in the film to questions of “cultural power” seems like a way of reducing them to something safe and familiar – to perform another kind of domestication…of the film itself. Moreover, to put forward such an interpretation, that the film amounts to a critique of the “male ego”, almost seems like a masculine form of hysteria, wanting to confess the shame of being male, the better to repress the truth that there is no pure virtue to which this pure sin could be opposed – in this way, what seems like an admission of shame would in fact be a strategy founded in repressed guilt.
However that stands, one cannot deny that this filmmaker possessed the courage to approach material and questions that are almost always avoided, or not even perceived as questions.
The attempt to say that women deny or fail to understand or reject this story is also interesting: is the suggestion being made here that women are too quick to assume that the male fixation on sexuality boils down to the “act”, whereas masculine sexuality is perhaps always, to some degree at least, or very often, decentred from that act? I’m not absolutely sure, but I’m also not at all sure that it accurately reflects Eustache’s intention to say that the film is his “most systematic skewering of the male ego and the cultural power it represents” (O’Donoghue, 2024): to reduce the issues discussed in the film to questions of “cultural power” seems like a way of reducing them to something safe and familiar – to perform another kind of domestication…of the film itself. Moreover, to put forward such an interpretation, that the film amounts to a critique of the “male ego”, almost seems like a masculine form of hysteria, wanting to confess the shame of being male, the better to repress the truth that there is no pure virtue to which this pure sin could be opposed – in this way, what seems like an admission of shame would in fact be a strategy founded in repressed guilt.
However that stands, one cannot deny that this filmmaker possessed the courage to approach material and questions that are almost always avoided, or not even perceived as questions.
Mini Review: “If there’s no pleasure without trouble, then there’s no work without pride”: to illustrate that sentiment in a story about the struggle of a man to fight back against the tendency towards the “domestication of the vagina”, but where that struggle is itself more like a compulsion, and therefore that against which one must also struggle, is to really try and say something about how desire and drive do not form an opposition, but are a question of the différance of the former from the latter.
