Shame: Self Loathing Queerness

An essay on the gay sex scene in Shame (2011) and how it holds up 10 years later. NSFW.

In the Steve McQueen film Shame, which is centred on the internal and external dysfunctions of a depressed sex addict in New York, there is a major sequence built around a close proximity to queerness. Following a particularly violent exchange in a bar where the protagonist Brandon, in a career best performance by Michael Fassbender, deliberately provokes a woman and her boyfriend by repeatedly insulting and degrading them, he stumbles around the bleak city streets looking for another place to drink and fuck before calling it a night. He’s bleeding slightly and has clear bruises on his face from the ensuing brawl in the bar and due to his earlier intoxication, is denied entry to a local nightclub by the bouncer. Brandon is desperate and horny and needs to let out a release, he has already felt the highs of violence and the bitter taste of whisky down his throat, and will do anything to fuck his ennui away.

After wandering around for a little while longer, he discovers a gay club where he is granted easy access and finds his way into the back rooms of the establishment, bearing witness to the sight of a bunch of men sucking and fucking each other to completion. Brandon is overwhelmed by the sights and sounds, the blaring music and strong lighting don’t help matters, but his main source of confusion and conflict is in the images of queerness in front of him. He identifies as straight and in every other scene in the film, his sexuality is expressed through his relationships with women, whether in a physical or emotional sense. Brandon is not comfortable with the explicit reality of gay men and gay sex, not prepared for the openness of their fucking in this crimson lit nightclub, and reluctantly dives into the scene to satisfy his animalistic needs. 

He recruits a young man from the floor of the club and takes him into these spaces, grabbing his hair and pushing him down to his crotch, taking the pleasure from him as Brandon stares into space. As he looks away from the sight of the blowjob, he stares directly into the images of queer sex, of men entangled in consensual passionate sexual embraces, of people enjoying themselves and their bodies. He witnesses the true pleasure found in these encounters and instead of succumbing and joining these men on their exploration of sex, he grunts and gets through his orgasm before quickly moving away from this space. After his brief encounter with homosexuality, Brandon immediately re-establishes his straightness and conventional ideas of masculinity to himself and the audience by engaging in a threesome with two female sex workers. He fucks them in an extended sequence of sexual bliss, filled with titillation and beautiful shots of these women’s bodies.

There is a sensuality given to this sequence that is not found in the nightclub, a sense of passion and eroticism that’s not conveyed in the scene where Brandon gets his cock sucked in the club, yet there is equal levels of melancholy to be found in both interactions. Even taken in isolation, there is no real pleasure found in the depiction of the threesome. As erotic as it’s shot, there is a distinct hollowness to Fassbender’s expressions while thrusting, an anger that’s being unleashed through his fuck. There is never real intimacy expressed between him and the two women, with their bodies often seeming like props for him to manipulate and use for his immediate pleasure. The accompanying music increases this feeling of disillusionment with the sequence. By the time both scenes have been concluded and the night is over, Brandon is alone and left with nothing but faint memories of momentary pleasure, but he doesn’t bounce back as easily as he did before. There is something tangible here about shame and regret to be found in these few minutes.

Shame has received a lot of criticism for its depictions of gay sex and queerness as an entirety. Not only is there objectification of queer women in the threesome where the two workers kissing is clearly fetishised by Brandon and the camera, but the major sequence of Brandon’s oral sex in the gay club has been accused of framing it as some form of moral low point. After so much repression and the clear fractures building up in his immaculately preserved persona, he reaches his worst moment by succumbing to the horrors of gay sex, feeling his deepest shame by debasing himself in ways he’d never thought himself capable of. McQueen’s more objectivist style of direction in his earlier works doesn’t help matters of critique as there is little room for elegance or finding any grace notes of beauty in the midst of this club, it’s too hectic and overwhelming for any passion or small gestures of communication to stand out. There is nothing but reckless hedonism here in Brandon’s eyes and that is conveyed through McQueen’s direction. Similarly to the fetishisation of lesbians in the threesome, the film is told expressly through Brandon’s perspective, with his own limitations and slanted views on male vs female queerness coming into account through the camera. 

While this is not a valid excuse against the claims against homophobia that have been made against McQueen for the framing of the nightclub sequence, it helps to understand the intent of the production and the implications of the decision to not have the camera contradict Brandon’s perceptions of the world. There is no world in which a heterosexual man such as Brandon who is clearly limited to a particular section of sexuality wouldn’t react in an overwhelmed way to the explicit sight of cocks inside men’s assholes right in front of his eyes. That is not a defence on the inclusion of this character arc, as there are plenty of ways to communicate a toxic desperation to satisfy urges that don’t involve conveying male queerness as something disgusting or debase. Similarly, it doesn’t take away from the fact that some queer women may feel uncomfortable with the way that Brandon uses these women for his sexual pleasure, whether through the ways he directly touches them or by his encouragement for them to kiss and fuck each other in front of him. 

There is certainly a grey area to be found in this turning point of Shame, one of understanding and of queasiness, of textural appreciation and moral disgust. Yes, it is “problematic” to depict male queerness as a backdrop for a straight man’s moral crisis about his own sexuality and to convey the downfall of his measured facade. It is “problematic” to showcase his sex with two women as an immediate response to re-establish his masculinity to himself and in part, the audience. It is something that could easily put off an audience member and in a way that I would understand and respect, especially since to my knowledge, McQueen and Fassbender are not queer men. 

However, the reason why I wanted to write about these scenes, the gay club one in particular, is something quite simple. The gay club sequence in Shame is my favourite part of the film and one of my favourite scenes of any film released in the 2010s. It’s a sequence I’ve thought about for nearly a decade of my life, one that has resonated with me as a quiet kid who had yet to watch gay porn for the first time, and one that resonates with me now as someone who has had sex with other men and frequently contemplates the nature of my bisexuality. For better or for worse, my experience with queer sex and male queerness as a whole isn’t dissimilar to Brandon’s in Shame. I came out at 14, the same age I first became sexually active. I lost my virginity at 15 and first had sex with a man at the age of 16. I have been openly bisexual for years and have frequently talked about my taste in men and appreciation for their physical forms since I first publicly spoke about it.

Yet, I have never felt truly at home with my bisexuality. Even though I am proud about it, it has never encompassed my existence in the way that it has for many of my fellow queer men. I have never been in a long term relationship with a man, have never been to a gay club and have only infrequently used apps like Grindr for a hook-up or two. I have often felt distanced and unwanted in queer spaces, not due to anyone’s personal issues with me, but because of my own specific tastes and anxieties. I don’t have many things in common with large segments of my community and in my dating life, there is only one person I’ve dated for longer than a month that hasn’t been a woman. My experience of queer love and embrace is similar to Brandon’s, it is borderline nonexistent, constantly on the edge of my peripheral but never close enough to embrace. I have gotten head in ways like Brandon has, staring off into space, focused only on the minimal physical pleasure and getting their orgasm over with so I can go home. 

When I think about my own sexual experiences with other men, I often think about the momentary satisfaction of feeling their bodies around me, how it felt to be on top of them, the power that rushed through my veins to be in charge of another man for a night. Then, when they’d left or I had, there was a feeling of emptiness and I went to bed feeling unfulfilled. This was the same with women as I require extra emotional intimacy to truly enjoy sex but with women, I’ve had plenty of emotional intimacy alongside sexual. With men, I’ve mostly felt distance, sex as pure sensation and experimentation instead of a mutual embrace. Even now, as a monogamous partner in a long term relationship with a woman, the lack of true physical intimacy I’ve experienced with another man is something I think about occasionally. Not as a desire but as something that keeps me wondering what I might have experienced if I’d opened my heart up a little more to a man. If I’d chosen to kiss him instead of pushing his face down, if I’d stayed to cuddle a little longer instead of putting my clothes on, if I’d tried to embrace the community further and find some love within instead of falling into brief relationships with women that I knew wouldn’t last. 

Looking at Shame’s exploration of queerness, I don’t see the shots of the other men as something that McQueen is condemning, I see them as the desperate clamouring for intimacy that Brandon is unable to achieve. He looks at these people and sees full pleasure, complete acceptance within each other’s bodies, willingly surrendering themselves to the sensations and passions of gay sex. He stares at a distance, knowing that as hard as he might try, this interaction will never ever be more than just one more orgasm to feel guilty about. The following sequence of establishing his masculinity through the most explicit depiction of sex with women in the film is so crucial to this narrative thread, as he doesn’t know what else to reckon with following his experiment with queerness. I think everyone’s first experience with gay sex or arousal towards the same gender is met with something conflicting, something that’s as shameful as it is intoxicating. When I first felt real sexual attraction to men, I tested myself by looking at the women I was most attracted to, I wanted to see if they still elicited feelings from me when I looked at them. While they did, the creeping feelings of my additional desires towards the male form continued to increase as well. 

In Shame, his response to his sexual experiment is purely defensive, he’s angry and wants to showcase that he’s not a filthy queer like those men in the club. He wants to embrace other forms of touch instead of anything related to that nightclub, he wants to never think about himself in the same vicinity as a queer person again, just as an attractive man who can satisfy attractive women. It’s a piece of self loathing that can be really hurtful to watch, but one that can provide some form of catharsis as well, and it perfectly sets up the rest of Brandon’s arc in the third act as he sheds his previous demeanour. Sometimes I still hate myself for not embracing romance in my engagement with men or for my own approach to sex when I was underage and desperate for physical validation. When I get low and need to experience more emotionally violent and damaged artistic expression, Shame is usually the film I spend time thinking about.

The film’s continuously complicated relationship with sex and intimacy, mainly the only real emotional connections that Brandon has being with his sister and a woman that he can’t get it up with, hold less personal resonance as I grow older and more comfortable with letting partners into my heart. While I still invest deeply in the melancholy on display and recognise it as something that has tangible resonance throughout my lifetime, the greatest strength of Shame as an entirety is how it uses the overarching themes of melancholy as a build-up to this rushing feeling of brutal physical honesty. The whole film is built around the sudden feeling of letting go, descending into those urges and reconciling with the pieces that you have left in the morning. Shame could have linked the sequence of initial violence, the desperate embrace of homosexuality and the re-affirmation of heterosexuality in a way that’s more civilised and thoughtful, one that goes against the abrasiveness of the content. If McQueen was a queer filmmaker, this would have likely been better handled than it is in its current form. Currently, it exists as eternally problematic, fetishistic and exploitative even with the consistent narrative progression of Brandon’s arc. 

It makes sense that a lot of people in the community don’t like it. But for me, that abrasiveness, the rough edges, the unrestricted and dirty expressions of pure animalistic passion was what drew me to finding sexual pleasure in queer spaces. That raw expression of masculine energy, so much pent up horniness and desire that you can’t stop yourself from fucking your lover in a cum stained bathroom. It captures the visceral textures of what lead me to try out apps like Grindr and go for casual sexual experiences in my mid-teens, while also conveying the emptiness that comes from the wrong fuck, the wrong person. It is problematic, it maybe shouldn’t have been included at all, but when I think of the single sequence that has affected my life, Shame’s dalliance in the nightclub is one of the first that comes to mind.

While I’m comfortable with myself and my experiences and have come a long way since those early days of empty sexual desire, there will always be a slight distance from me and my peers, something that’s supposed to bond us together that’s just absent. Maybe that distance is why Shame still means something all these years later. When I was a kid, it was pure fascination, something I’d never seen before. Now it’s something I’ve seen a thousand times in a thousand different ways but it still manages to enthrall me, to make me feel passion, anger and loathing in ways I still struggle to articulate. It will always mean something to me. By the end of the film, it’s unclear whether or not Brandon will get caught in this pattern again or if he even wants to change. There are hints that his life experiences will seek him towards trying to find long term emotional stability but there is an equal possibility of him embracing the casualness of sexual embrace forever. It doesn’t really matter what happens to Brandon after the film, who he fucks and why. For me, it reminds me of what I want from the future and what I regret missing out on. 

The final shot is a crossroads and it reminds me of the one I took on my own, to try and find someone to spend my life with, even if it meant more pain and heartbreak on the way there. Is the film homophobic? I don’t know. Maybe it is, that’s for someone else to decide. But what Shame does right and what it does better than anything else is understanding how truly lonely it can feel to not experience euphoria after your first queer experience. The feeling of enlightenment that’s supposed to be there, that maybe will be there under other circumstances, but just isn’t in these ones. There is a brutal unflinching honesty to Brandon’s gaze and the feeling of not knowing what else to do but fuck someone else and try to get rid of the pain. It is a bleak and pessimistic portrayal of queer experimentation, but one that provided resonance to me as a kid with no idea of his sexuality and one that provides guidance as an adult who is proud to be queer, even if I haven’t ended up being the bisexual I once thought I might become. That sort of ruthless clarity is all I can really ask for with a movie.

Recommendations

Been a while since I did these but these are the five best things I’ve seen recently.

Ted Lasso Season 1

I don’t watch much contemporary TV, my brain works better with cinema than it ever has television and so much of the current landscape just doesn’t appeal to me in the slightest. Even the content that does look appealing usually takes me an eon to get to due to the amount of movies I watch and the other artforms like wrestling and music that I prioritise above TV, so my taste in contemporary television isn’t as refined as I’d like it to be. Thankfully I made an exception and checked out the first season of Ted Lasso due to my re-embrace of football in the last few months and my love for Jason Sudeikis. While it doesn’t completely alter the wheel or radically change the expectations for heartfelt sitcoms, it is a work of unrelenting kindness and compassion, one that truly fleshes out all of its major characters and achieves some of the most emotional moments I’ve experienced in anything since the beginning of the pandemic. There is a scene near the end of the season that is such a breathtaking gesture of kindness that it reduced me to an unrelenting fit of tears. It won’t be for people who are inclined completely towards nihilism in television but for anyone that needs a heartfelt testament to the power of connection, I can’t recommend it enough. You can sign up for a free Apple TV trial to access it, it’s only 10 half an hour episodes if you haven’t seen it.

Flowers of Shanghai

A subscriber of mine requested a full piece on this film (I will get to it extensively I promise!) so I’ll be brief here but Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1998 masterpiece is currently the best film I’ve seen for the first time in 2021, one that completely sneaks up on you with its violent melancholy and stunningly complex character dynamics. It’s rare to see images this evocative, colourful and bleakly beautiful in any work of cinema. I find it quite difficult to articulate my feelings on so that future essay will need some time to come to fruition but Tony Leung’s performance is one of the greatest I’ve ever seen in a film and the main theme made me well up a little every time it played. It’s coming to UK Criterion in June so it’ll finally have a home video release in my country, it is more than worth a blind buy if you’ve yet to see it.

The Annihilation of Fish

Charles Burnett is one of the greatest American filmmakers to ever live. In a less racist world, he’d have had one of the most legendary and famous careers in the Western canon, having full creative freedom to bring whatever projects he desired to live. Unfortunately, Burnett has never found the true acclaim he deserves as an artist and every one of his feature films deserves far more recognition than they get. Besides The Last Picture Show, Killer of Sheep is my favourite American feature film of the 1970s, and My Brother’s Wedding should be taught in film schools across the world as what can be achieved as an independent filmmaker. The Annihilation of Fish is his most underrated film from those I’ve seen, barely accessible (but thankfully free on YouTube in a low quality but perfectly watchable video) and completely ignored by critics of the time and those looking back upon his career today. Even with Burnett getting some recognition by platforms like the Criterion Channel, The Annihilation of Fish remains an undiscovered treasure. It should be seen by as many people as possible as it is one of the most romantic, kind and profound works about mental illness I’ve ever seen. While Burnett doesn’t strive for accuracy in depicting the conditions of his protagonists, he commits completely to their worldviews and beliefs, refusing to laugh at them or exploit them for misery porn. Instead, this is a warm hearted and kind romance about learning to love, even with a mental illness and a lifetime of grief upon your shoulders. It has career best performances from all three leads (Jones, Redgrave and Kidder) and is something that you owe yourself to check out.

John Cena vs The Rock - WrestleMania 28

This is a rewatch but something that’s worth bringing up. While wrestling purists have often dismissed these two powerhouses’ original match as mere spectacle and built completely around the hype of their showdown instead of wrestling acumen, it is one of the most beautiful examples of what wrestling at its biggest can be. This match still feels like the biggest thing in the universe even after almost 10 years. It is barebones narratively, following the simplest template and narrative thread, going through its structure with no major tweaks to the formula. Yet, it is one of the most perfect examples of the WWE main event there is, completely excelling in the slow build which allows the crowd to take in every second of the monumental clash they’re witnessing, nailing the middle stretch of submission sequences and battles for dominance, before truly taking the audience to another level with the exchange of big moves and earth-shattering near-falls. While many main event matches today follow this formula but with longer stretches of boredom, more flips and less narrative attention (Kota Ibushi vs Will Ospreay) The Rock and John Cena completely justify their structure by nailing not only every step of the procedures but the sheer aura required to make it flourish. For me and many members of my generation, this has the impact and meaning of The Rock/Hogan match from Mania 18, a work that doesn’t need the greatest physical wrestling or most nuanced storytelling in the world to succeed. Sometimes all you need is to watch two seemingly unstoppable gods fight.

UpUpDownDown Uno #53: Sudden, Sudden Death

For the last year, 4 professional wrestlers, Xavier Woods, Cesaro, Tyler Breeze and Adam Cole have been playing online UNO to kill time every week in the midst of the pandemic. What started as a silly but amusing distraction for the men has morphed into a 50+ episode saga of ridiculous rules, endless catchphrases, frequent plot twists and utterly tremendous reactions to +4 cards. These men have supernatural chemistry with each other and all have such distinct personalities that come out fully over the course of the series, with their conversations always provoking multiple major laughs per episode. Episode 53 is their masterpiece, an incredibly long and exceptionally funny descent into the ways in which these friends will cause each other sincere pain. It is difficult to recommend the 53rd episode of online UNO to people since it’s the kind of thing that sounds insane but there has been no consistent entertainment quite like this series for me during this last year, and if you’re going to give one episode a shot, it should be this one. Hopefully it’ll make you laugh.