The critical consensus declaring Shame to be a classic is to be welcomed, but it comes at the expense of an elementary error about the film. Almost every critic has reduced it to a film “about” a sex addict, as if there is no more to it than that. But sex addiction is not the cause of Brandon Sullivan’s problems. It is a symptom of them, one of many symptoms, the one with the most obvious cinematic potential, but the film is still “about” much more. Indeed, it is about nothing less than the failure of liberal democracy, with its deification of individual rights, to address the fundamental problem of human loneliness.
This can be extrapolated from the film without even looking at the sex scenes. The extraordinary opening sequence, with its sparse dialogue and the unbearable pathos of its symphonic backdrop, mostly takes place in Brandon’s New York bachelor pad, a place as horrifying as any dungeon, showing us from the outset that we have sat down to a horror film. There is a fridge and a tiny kitchenette, a sofa and a flat screen television. The bedroom is functional and unadorned. Only a record player and a few LPs (one of which, Chic’s ‘I Want Your Love’, will be deployed to tremendous effect in a later scene) point to the kindness of the main protagonist, a kindness that Michael Fassbender manages to maintain despite the (largely masochistic) horror of the acts he participates in.
Next there is the ride to work. Sullivan travels alone through the New York subway, searching out a married woman who might be vulnerable to his unquestionable physical charm. She is dressed elaborately, perhaps too elaborately, as if they have made too much effort. A randy bachelor pursuing a married woman is a bit of a cliché, something a group of men might joke about at a stag night, and yet McQueen manages to extract so much out of these scenes. There is a loneliness in the woman’s eyes and in her apparent eagerness to meet Sullivan’s gaze, at least until they go too far and she takes flight.
Sullivan arrives at work, a banal office building. There are no shots of the exterior, no attempts to establish its presence at the heart of the metropolis. New York has rarely looked so banal on the big screen. McQueen is not seduced by the Big Apple; its glorious history is of no interest to him. Even Sullivan’s precise job is unclear, although we learn that he is good at it (at least when he’s not watching porn on the office computers). The secretary fancies him, his boss is fascinated by him, and he remains indifferent. He is not motivated by his work, but nor is he alienated by it. Sullivan is not a subversive in the making. There is no sign whatsoever that he has any desire to break out of the straitjacket of his atomised existence.
Except, perhaps, when he goes on a date with the secretary, Marianne, a buxom and pretty Brooklynite. This is one of the most disconcerting scenes in the film (and there are plenty of those), certainly much more disconcerting than the sex scenes, and here I felt that McQueen could have dwelt a little longer, much like he did (to record effect) with Bobby Sands and the priest in Hunger. As in the rest of the film, the dialogue is impressively, embarrassingly banal. I squirmed as Sullivan argued against the importance of relationships, while Marianne patiently rebuts him with clichés of her own, albeit clichés that might have been useful, had Sullivan been willing to listen. “You have to commit,” she says, even though the irony seems to be that he’d like to be capable of a serious relationship with her, while she – as we see the next morning – is perfectly happy to fuck his brains out. The banality of this dialogue is reflected elsewhere, most notably during an office night out after the team have “nailed” a big deal. Sullivan’s boss leads the way with excruciating chat-up lines, while Sullivan hovers in the background, kind, patient, friendly, and then proceeds to fuck his boss’s target for the night, a beautiful and dynamic blonde, under a grimy bridge.
In some respects, Sullivan is like something out of a Bret Easton-Ellis or a Michel Houellebecq novel, but perhaps more frightening, because he’s more immediately recognisable. His dilemmas are not those of a mere sex addict. His torments are mostly hidden, to be visualised only in his tragic sister’s outbursts, but they are surely torments that have touched most of us who have grown up in the modern world, with its emphasis on our rights and choices, but without any effective guidance as to how to make it through. Sullivan is not just a sex addict, he’s an everyman.
