Abstract
This chapter takes Fat Girl as a case study to demonstrate more closely the claims of Chap. 4. After assessing the film’s unique brand of pornography, this chapter turns to horror and theorizes why this genre has significance for the director: Breillat is not a director of horror, but is a director of the “horrible.” The close reading in the chapter carefully re-evaluates and reworks Linda Williams’s approach to the body genres and more carefully articulates the value of psychoanalytic theory for her body genres by including aspects of the phenomenological approach. The remaining sections bring a revamped theory of the horror genre to bear on Modleski’s assessment of the genre. These sections builds upon and expands the definition of horror and demonstrates why classical conceptions of horror are insufficient for understanding the conclusion of Fat Girl. With the work on pornography and horror, the author stresses the link between psychoanalytic interpretations of film and spectatorship and the haptic cinematic experience, a theoretical bridging formulated more significantly in Chap. 7.
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. Willemen ([1980] 2006: 58–59) for and the lack of narrative momentum of the similarities between musicals and pornography.
- 2.
Cf. Williams (1999: 126–128) for the details on this list of sexual numbers.
- 3.
Frances Ferguson had argued (2004) that pornography is evaluated within a particular context. While many interpretations are possible for Breillat’s films, the abundance of references to the haptic and tactile give a certain validation to this view and further, to the prominence of phenomenological film theory in the 21st century.
- 4.
Breillat takes a cue from François Ozon , who similarly refuses conversational exchanges and replaces them with sexual acts: “for me, these are moments when characters no longer project their discourse, but reveal themselves through their bodies” (Palmer 2011: 62, quoting Ozon). On extreme cinema and the lack of narrative momentum, see Beugnet (2007: 15); Palmer (2011: 60); Kerner and Knapp (2016). While I agree in part with these scholars’ assessment of the lack of narrative momentum in extreme films, my close readings demonstrate that extreme cinema has extremely rich narratives.
- 5.
Cf. Williams (2008: 188, 214–215), for the similarities between Last Tango in Paris and In the Realm of the Senses.
- 6.
Fernando argues from every angle: sex is not a big deal; all the girls do it; if she does not have sex with him, he will find it elsewhere; he is aroused and should not have to get himself off into the trash bin; he loves her; and, as mentioned, the back way does not count. On children and sexuality, the author and artist Kate Millet observes (1984: 221): “There is a predatory energy even in courting, when what is courted is youth – the helplessness, the vulnerability, the innocence, the ignorance. The prey can be tripped, caught, seduced, tricked, talking into it, and beguiled, like a pocket picked by a thief. There is an exercise of power linked with what used to be called gallantry.”
- 7.
There is no question about the rape despite (male) critics’ attempts to suggest the ambiguity: for instance, Hilderbrand (n.d.), who writes, “[Fernando] essentially rapes Elena.”
- 8.
Beauvoir writes (1989: 393): “Women who were defiant and unbending with a lover have been transformed by a wedding ring – happy, flattered, with clear conscience, all their inhibitions gone.” For a more detailed analysis of Elena’s engagement ring, see Keesey (2009: 48–49).
- 9.
- 10.
This is how Mulvey ([1975] 2009: 714, italics mine) describes the experience of cinema itself: “[T]he extreme contrast between the darkness of the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation. Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screen and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world.”
- 11.
In the year 2000 the Adult Film Association of America stated that a film is only pornography if it contains a money shot (Cornell 2000: 5).
- 12.
“Trent Film Society Presents: Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl ”, Thursday, October 4, 2012, Artspace, Peterborough, ON.
- 13.
Echoing the position Mulvey outlines, Breillat states (2011b), “You have to combine freedom of movement with enormously precise choreography, and emotion must be present as well.”
- 14.
- 15.
Aurélien Ferenczi (Wilson 2001: 155) observes , then asks: “One of the film’s motivating forces is undoubtedly provocation. But what if, paradoxically, Romance didn’t go far enough? [… T]he film is quickly reduced to a series of scenes which we’ve seen before now and then, such as an attempt at fellatio or a condom being put on, et cetera. A sort of catalogue, exhaustive but hackneyed, of what can be shown on screen without crossing the boundary dividing ‘normal’ cinema from porn.”
- 16.
Kerner and Knapp (2016: 52–53) define torture porn as a subgenre of horror which consists of American films such as Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005) and Saw (James Wan, 2004). The torture porn cycle “violently returns the horror genre to the body and forces us, as viewers, to face our physical essence during a time in which technologies seem to disconnect us from it.” See Kerner (2015) for a book-length treatment of the cycle.
- 17.
Brinkema (2006c: 159): “you are not wrong to think that the clear fluid on her thighs reminds you of another.”
- 18.
A second ending was shot, but it does not have the same intensity. Anaïs is being attended to by a doctor in his office; he has just examined her, and he asks why she did not tell the police about the rape . She delivers the same line as in the final cut.
- 19.
On Final Girl theory, see Clover ([1987] 2011).
- 20.
This is the “typically French” position Martin Barker (2010) finds in his research of British audiences on French film—according to Brits, the French are cynical and pessimistic about love. On the challenges associated with theorizing rape and seduction in Breillat’s films, see Wheatley (2010).
- 21.
Cf. Laplanche and Pontalis (1986: 19, 32n40). Phantasy is the unconscious memory or “mental processes” such as a repressed trauma or originary structure of sexuality (sexual difference, etc.). Fantasy is at the level of the conscious or subliminal: a daydream, for instance.
- 22.
Breillat’s penchant for the imaginary, I would argue, began with her first feature. A Real Young Girl’s Bataillean heroine spends more time in her imaginary world than in one connected to and dependent on others. Her love interest, most explicitly, is frequently seen striking poses like a model: dripping water across his chest, elegantly smoking a cigarette, etc.
- 23.
See the rest of Russell-Watts’s essay for a critique of Breillat’s “marginalized males,” their processes of sexuation, and how the divergent male leads in Romance are ultimately productive for rethinking one-dimensional accounts of masculinity .
- 24.
- 25.
Cf. Laplanche and Pontalis (1986: 18–19). Consider the role of sound from a psychoanalytic perspective as well: a sound, if Coulthard and Haneke are correct, can equally serve as that signifier, that noise of a childhood trauma rekindled.
- 26.
Thus the recent turn in art cinema to a slowness of narrative, cuts, dialogue, and action. In the second chapter, on Carlos Reygadas’s Post Tenebras Lux (2013), I provide an account of this recent cinematic trend, and how it functions to convey a certain type of reality.
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Bordun, T. (2017). Horrible Pornography: Fat Girl (À Ma Soeur!, 2001). In: Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65894-0_5
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