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Bad Trips: Spiritual Agonies and Ecstasies in the Films of Gaspar Noé

2023; The MIT Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/pajj_a_00661

1537-9477

Julia Sirmons,

French Historical and Cultural Studies

“I was raised atheist … I really have a problem with people who talk of God or life after death,” says Gaspar Noé, one of contemporary cinema’s great provocateurs.1 It’s an unsurprising comment from the director, known for his unsparing look at meaningless violence, dark impulses, and the emptiness of life. Yet the comment belies the recurrence of spiritual themes and schemas in his work. Noé’s filmography is an ongoing spiritual quest that is aware of, and even desires, its own futility. An atheist-seeker, he is fascinated with faiths he does not share, and looks, both forensically and sensually, at their praxes and manifestations. Through the lenses of different spiritual traditions, he explores the agonies and ecstasies of the human body and tests the camera’s abilities to capture them. His cinema—notoriously, relentlessly carnal—pushes bodies to extremes. These extremities test spiritual promises of altered states and exposes the dark side of seeking transcendence. Yet even in his dark and cynical moments, Noé still uses spirituality as a pretext for a strong visceral engagement with a “something more” that lies beyond normal human perception. The contortions of body and the pulsations of animate flesh express the duality of an intense present and a shimmering, liminal presence.Noé first came to international attention in 2002 with his second full-length film, Irréversible. A rape-revenge narrative told in reverse order, it became infamous for its inventive plot structure and the rape scene—a sequence that lasts over nine minutes and contains only one “invisible” cut. This brutal depiction of a violation of the female body is entwined with the film’s fatalistic world view; the relationship between the female body, philosophy and spiritual experience perspectives, and spiritual experience is question to which Noé would return. With Irréversible, Noé secured his place in a group of French filmmakers whose style was dubbed “the New French Extremity” by Artforum critic James Quandt—other “extremists” included Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Patrice Chéreau, Leos Carax, and Virginie Despentes.2 In intense depictions of sex, drugs, and violence, the members of the New French Extremity sought to augment cinematic realism with assaults on the senses. For Noé, such aggressive and confrontational experimentations with cinematic form are often a search for the spiritual.Noé’s first explicit explorations of spirituality seek transcendence through Eastern spiritual practices. Yet his characters can never fully divest themselves from a Western world view. Enter the Void (2009) is inspired by the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the bardo, an in-between state that occurs after death and before reincarnation into a new life. The film follows Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a small-time drug dealer who is killed in a bust gone bad, as he revisits his life and sees what happens after his death. For Oscar, who is on hallucinogens when he dies, death is the “big trip.”Much of Enter the Void presents spirituality as a literally disembodied experience, one which entwines vaguely Buddhist notions of detachment with the modern Western spirituality of Freudian analysis. The film is entirely shot with a first-person camera, so the spectator only sees the back of Oscar’s head. As Oscar revisits his childhood from this perspective, spiritual and cinematic ways of seeing overlap. It’s almost as if the spectator is sitting behind Oscar in a movie theatre, watching the formative moments of his life. We see him playing with his naked mother in the bath, watch her as she breastfeeds Oscar’s sister Linda, and see her corpse when she is killed in a car crash. As Oscar relives the infantile paradise of his mother’s nurturing, and then the trauma of her death, the Buddhist voyage through the bardo melds with kind of psychoanalytic processing. In one episode, young Oscar walks in on his parents having sex, witnessing the Freudian “primal scene.” Enter the Void’s meta-cinematic perspective on the mother’s body accords with psychoanalytic interpretations of what film theorists have called the cinematic “apparatus” (the position of the spectator in the movie theater) as a kind of Freudian scenario and therapeutic mechanism. Eastern precepts lead toward the modern Western spirituality of psychoanalysis.Enter the Void also uses female bodies as conduits for spiritual experiences. They become shapes of light and movement that direct Oscar’s voyage. As his sister Linda dances at a strip club, Oscar hovers above the neon-lit platform where she gyrates and undulates. Her body becomes a pulsating abstraction, creating patterns in a sea of light, guiding his hallucinogenic perception. In the film’s literal and figurative climax, Oscar is reborn via a collective outburst of sexual energy. He floats above couples having sex in different rooms of a Japanese “love hotel.” It’s porno spirituality: a promise of orgiastic transcendence through a neon feast for the eyes. The couples and threesomes emanate neon light. As we watch from above, the rote actions and positions of coupling become strange abstract patterns with a ritualistic quality. Yet, in addition to this utopian vision of bodies spiritually bound by sexual energy, Oscar’s rebirth also relies on a quasi-Freudian “resolution” of his familial trauma. As Linda has sex with Oscar’s friend Alex, Oscar enters Linda’s body—his spiritual journey literally uses her body as a channel. From inside Linda’s body, we see Alex’s penis penetrating, and then ejaculating in, Linda’s vagina. Spirituality manifests in a quasi-incestuous, medico-pornographic venture into the body’s interior. The film ends with a baby’s-eye view of a breast, suggesting that Oscar has been reborn to his own mother. Tunneling in and tunneling out of the female body “resolves” the incestuous family ties and primal psychological trauma. Noé’s promiscuous experimentations with cinematic form affirm the connection between Buddhism and Freudianism.Noé’s fascination with (and skepticism of) drugs as a gateway to spirituality also informs his 2018 film Climax. The film becomes a horrific burlesque of the Eastern-influenced practice of rave dancing—a modern, secular form of spiritual expression. Rave culture asserts that spiritual experiences occur via communal bodily movement and drug-induced empathetic bonding. Set in 1996—rave’s heyday—Climax follows a troupe of young dancers rehearsing in an abandoned building. The giddy atmosphere turns terrifying when somebody spikes a bowl of sangria with a hallucinogen. Panic and intoxication amplify interpersonal tensions, ending in violence and death. As the drugged dancers writhe in agony on the floor, the message “life is a collective impossibility” appears on the screen. If ecstasy-fueled raves are said to produce euphoric one-ness (a goal loosely derived from Eastern spirituality), this collective “bad trip” makes possessed bodies battle for expurgation and survival.For Climax’s young troupe, movement, as it is in rave dancing, is a spiritual experience enhanced by drugs. Dancing, they say, makes you “feel free”: there is “no judgment, just us, our bodies and sensations.” In rehearsals, the spiritual desire for unity combats the “collective impossibility” of the troupe’s interpersonal dynamics. These tensions are mapped out bodily. Their choreography mixes rave moves with those of two other important dance trends of the 90s: break dancing and voguing. Rote, clipped arm movements, performed low to the ground, evoke the rave moves of “directing traffic,” which facilitates bodily flow and togetherness. The troupe encircles soloists or small groups, before reabsorbing them into a gyrating mass. Noé shoots much of the dancing from a bird’s-eye view, marrying Enter the Void’s disembodied perspective and the spectacular style of Busby Berkeley, the legendary director of early sound musicals. Once again, a spiritual desire for one-ness manifests as a meta-cinematic spirituality, where spectacular bodily movement marries spiritual bonding with visual pleasure.Dance’s unifying potential dissolves when the dancers stop rehearsing and talk in smaller groups, revealing tensions beneath the troupe’s superficial camaraderie. In these extended, sometimes banal scenes, we absorb Noé’s skepticism of rave’s credo of “Peace, Unity, Love, Respect.” Once the drug takes hold of the terrified dancers, the jerks and spasms of their bodies suggest demonic possession. As the camera tracks their desperate meanderings, we see fun-house mirror versions of their choreography. Angular virtuosity is twisted into pain and torture. At Climax’s own climax, members of the troupe writhe on the dance floor. As in any arty, contemporary horror film, there are flashes of tortured mouths, flailing limbs, and dancers too far gone to do anything but convulse and tremble. In its teetering focus on bodies in extremis, Climax reaches a sensory-motor breakdown. Writing of Irréversible, film scholar Eugenie Brinkema argues that such breakdowns indicate profound loneliness.3 Here, too, it emphasizes an essential solitude that makes collectivity impossible. Noé’s shifting visual style depicts bodily movement as both exaltation and damnation.Convulsive bodies recur, this time as manifestations of Christian ecstasies and martyrdom, in Noé’s Lux Æterna (2019). Here he returns to Irréversible and Enter the Void’s questions about the female body’s function as a conduit for cinematic spirituality. With Lux Æterna, a short “meta-film” presented in split screen, Noé fully focuses on how actresses are degraded, choreographed, and galvanized in a pursuit of cinematic ecstasies.Early in the film, we read a quote from Dostoevsky about the ecstatic properties of the epileptic fit, which is sometimes posited as the cause of the visions of saints and mystics. Lux Æterna, which follows the making of a film about witch burning, references an incident that occurred during the shooting of Day of Wrath, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1943 masterpiece about a witch hunt. While filming a scene in which a woman is burned, Dreyer left an actress, Anna Svierkier, tied to a wooden ladder during a break in shooting. On the screen, Svierkier’s very real pain and dripping sweat are viscerally palpable. It suggests that cinematic transcendence can be had through capturing the “real” suffering of the body, particularly the female body.As in Irréversible and Enter the Void, the spiritual is grounded in the actress’s body, and it can be alchemically released by pushing her body to extremes. The first segment of Lux Æterna is an improvised conversation between actors Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg, playing themselves. Dalle, who is purportedly directing this film within the film, describes a spiritual “groove” that can happen during the communal act of filmmaking—one that comes with the uncomfortable cost of the actress as suffering martyr. She tells a disturbing story of previously filming a witch-burning scene, where she was naked “in front of two thousand men.” She calls it the worst experience of her life. Despite this, Dalle believes in filmmaking as a spiritual transcendence: “When you don’t question,” she says, “something totally unlikely happens, you can’t explain it. … The guy [presumably the director] takes you on his trip.”In the final sequence of Lux Æterna, which depicts the filming of a witch burning, the split screen recalls a triptych. Gainsbourg is in the center, evoking Christ’s position in iconography of the crucifixion. Colored strobe lights seemed incite the “trip” of an experience of an epileptic episode and its transcendent qualities. We see only flashes of the “witches” movements: crying, gyrating and quivering are caught in abstract, discrete lines. As the lights flash, Gainsbourg momentarily disappears from the frame, and the pike to which she was tied transforms into a crucifix. It’s a kind of transubstantiation, In keeping with the film’s title, which is the name of the incantation performed during communion in a Catholic mass. This spiritual climax, combining Catholic imagery and the sensory assault of the split screen and the strobe lighting, is both phenomenologically and intellectually uncomfortable. We eventually learn that some of this “trip” has been orchestrated by the film-within-a-film’s (male) cinematographer, who is seeking to replace the mercurial Dalle as the film’s director. This leaves the spectator in a morally ambiguous position—have we just witnessed something spiritual, or just one man’s ego trip? Does cinematic spirituality always come via exploiting the material human (female) body, and is it worth the cost? The film’s ending, which displays a quote from surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel (“Thank God I’m an atheist!”), only underscores this proactive ambiguity.The combination of split-screen and Christian imagery recurs in Vortex (2021), a brutally forensic depiction of the end of life which prods at notions of faith and atheism. Vortex, which follows the slow decline of an elderly, long-married couple, evinces the stark kind of atheism that results from looking at aging and death with an unflinching eye.As in Enter the Void, Noé focuses on cinema and psychoanalysis as a secular form of Western spirituality. Vortex follows a long-married couple, known only as “The Mother” and “The Father.” Mother (Françoise Lebrun) used to be a psychiatrist, while Father (played by horror auteur Dario Argento) is writing a book about cinema. As we follow Mother and Father through their daily lives, the split screen visualizes the fundamental solitariness of human existence, which is intensified as the cruelty of aging strains the bonds of coupledom.The film opens with Mother and Father in bed. Mother gets up and turns on the radio, where a speaker argues that grieving is the transition between the “objective, external” bond with the living to the “subjective, internal” bond with the dead. Mother heads to the corner store, and as her confusion mounts, we realize she has dementia and is lost. Much of Mother’s life is mostly a series of such pathetic moments—wandering repeatedly through a tightly circumscribed world, alternating beatific saintliness and flustered confusion.Mother and Father’s paths diverge. Mother shuffles around the house, clinging to touchstones of her old life. Father works on his book, watches movies, and tries to rekindle his relationship with his old mistress. Each side of the screen is shot in a vérité style, but the split screen sometimes flirts with Christian iconography, with the look of a diptych. The spectator’s eye moves geometrically, mapping Mother and Father’s movements, noting where they meet and separate, and where they mirror each other, suggesting the possibility of some bond that still connects them in this process of transition between the objective and the subjective.The split screen’s fractured images create an uncomfortable, disorienting doubling in the scenes where Mother and Father’s son, Stéphane (Alex Lutz), comes to visit, trying to provide help and mediate the situation. These scenes focus on the psychic burden of the caregiver, which doesn’t bring out the best in people. The split screen shows the growing separation of Mother and Father, but also the divided loyalty and mediating role of their son. There are rare moments of tenderness—when the whole family is having a conversation about Mother’s future, Father extends his hands to Mother and they travel across the split screen: “What can I do?” As he holds her hands, “I’ll do it, tell me.”Noé doesn’t find any spiritual solace in the process of death and dying in it—we are all fundamentally alone. When Father has a heart attack in the middle of the night, he writhes in agony on one side of the screen while the other shows Mother asleep in their bed. Yet, combined with stark images of aloneness—overhead shots of Mother and Father in the morgue—are moments of contact between separated or fractured bodies. When Father dies in the hospital, the fractured frames show Stéphane crawling into Mother’s lap, in a pose that evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà. The mother’s body is the source of comfort in the caesura of a spiritual voyage. This image of Christ in the period between crucifixion and resurrection is a flickering recall of Christianity as the West’s dominant ideology. The unconscious actions of the living and the dying reflect these culturally ingrained remnants of spirituality, even if one does not believe in it per se.In Noé’s oeuvre, the (im)possible potential of spirituality emerges in perverse, explosive experiences, and then recurs in the unconscious poses of everyday life in extremis. In these films, spirituality ebbs and flows in human experience, and this dynamic comes alive due to Noé’s radical, “extreme” experimentation with cinematic form. His means of defying the norms of realist cinema produce a style of extremity. The body is pushed to extremes in a reckless pursuit of spirituality that sometimes leads to no more than shallow attempts at “self-help.” But if we look at Noé’s filmography as a worship of the agonies and ecstasies to be found in experimenting with cinematic forms and traditions, then sublimity is never too far out f reach.