Bestiality as ‘Healthy’ Action
Bestiality is a taboo subject that signifies towards the ‘unholy’ union of civilisation and primal nature through the lenses of sexuality. Apart from forms of hardcore porn, it has not been addressed explicitly within cinema. Krzywinska states that such a transgressive theme is “presented allegorically, metonymically or by way of suggestion” within mainstream cinema (2006, p. 140). In this paper, I shall base my analysis on the more minoriatian circuit of art house cinema to discuss how particular representations of bestiality take on the form of cultural critique. Firstly, I shall discuss Nietzsche’s ‘healthy’ perspectivism through his ambiguous affiliation with civilization as the framework of such representations. Secondly, with reference to Max Mon Amour (Oshima, 1986), I shall explain how bestiality is utilised as a catalyst towards the creative reshaping of the family. Thirdly, I shall discuss how Tropical Malady (Apichatpong, 2004) illustrates what Deleuze and Guattari refers to as ‘Becoming Animal’, which destabilises the human and animal distinction as well as any fixed subjectivities. It is my aim, to demonstrate that the theme of bestiality has been utilised symbolically, within both films discussed, in cathartic manners that resists any form of conservatism or bestial regression.
Nietzschean Complexity: Neither Human Nor Animal
“Human beings in their highest and noblest capacities are wholly nature and bear within themselves its uncanny dual character. Those abilities that are thought to be terrifying and inhuman are perhaps even the fruitful soil from which alone all humanity can grow in emotions, deeds, and works” (Nietzsche, 1976, p. 32)
Within this statement is the assumption that a form of primal nature that has been rendered taboo by civilisation is in fact the productive force of desire that propels humanity into greater possibilities. Therefore, nature is inherently intertwined with progress. Various films that portray a greater vitality and increased sexual appetite within characters that tap into a certain primal instinct have aligned itself to this principle. Krzywinska notes that in films such as The Fly (Cronenberg, 1986) and Wolf (Nichols, 1994), transforming into an animal enables a rejuvenation of “the powers of youth” and the revelation of “newfound vitality” (2006, p. 151). In relation to King Kong (Cooper & Schoedsack, 1933), Ferry celebrates its poetical and convulsive potential induced via “its monstrous eroticism” (1978. p. 107). Thus, in Surrealist fashion, he locates a rupture of reality’s constrains and a transcendence into the fantastic through the cinematic representation of bestiality.
However, Nietzsche contradicts this direct hypothesis that praises a return to nature:
“Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration… imagine indifference itself as a power—how could you live according to this indifference? Living—is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature?” (1966, p. 9)
The chaotic dynamics of nature is condemned as the antithesis of humanity. The purpose of living is to differentiate itself from the wastefulness and excesses of nature. Thus, this results in the civilization/human nature/animal binary. A conservative framework would exploit this binary and position bestiality as a threatening form of desire that has to be subdued to maintain the symbolic order. As Krzywinska states, while animal transformation does appear pleasurable, “all too soon autonomy is lost and the experience becomes a terrifying ordeal which eventually wipes out the human” (2006, p. 152).
In considering Nietzsche’s contradictory statements in relation to each other, one has to reject a simple reassertion of nature as the solution to cultural stagnancy and position nature as an inherent aspect of a ‘healthy’ framework for living. In other words, one plunges into an uncertain and dialectical relationship between man/civilisation and animal/nature. Bestiality becomes a fertile theme because it is a means in which this binary is transgressed. In approaching this transgression not simply through the sexual act, but by amplifying the dialectics between both poles of the binary, it becomes possible to analyse how bestiality acts as a catalyst towards a Nietzschean outlook. This framework shall be utilised in the two films discussed.
Max Mon Amour: The Acceptance of Bestial Desire within the Family
Max Mon Amour is set in a bourgeois household that seems artificially held together by civil codes of conduct. Peter and Margret are both having affairs outside their marriage. However, the taboo of adultery that is still located within the concept of humanity seems to be not much of a problem to the maintenance of their family. It is absorbed into the symbolic order, reterritorialised through the couple’s refined mannerisms. However, Peter’s comfort zone is transgressed by the realisation that Margret’s lover is a chimpanzee named Max. This bestial affair corresponds to what Wartenberg conceptualises as “the unlikely film couple” that is problematic due to “its violation of a hierarchic social norm regulating the composition of romantic couples” (1999, p. 7). Peter is thrown into anxiety as his structural notions of human and animal are mended into disorder. As Creed states, Peter is confronted by the ambiguity of woman’s jouissance, which is made even more apparent through its relation with animalistic eroticism that exceeds “the male world of phallic signifiers” (2006, p. 50). In wanting to resolve this mystery, Peter threatens Margret into letting Max live with the family. Thus, bestiality that existed but floated around the margins of their family is brought within its structure.
In his integrating into the family, Max comes of as a threat with the exception of Margret and Nelson. It is within this tactic that bestial nature is associated with female desire and childhood, fields that are subjugated by phallic authority. Maria the family’s maid screams and eventually faints when Max was transported into his caged room. Subsequently she breaks out into a rash that is diagnosed as an allergy to Max. Krzywinska notes that animal transformations signify towards “the strange materiality and uncontrollable rhythms of the flesh” (2006, p. 150). In this case, the mere contact with an animal results in a rupture in the flesh that disrupts the clear image of the body. More implicit is the little scratch that Peter notices on Margret’s neck. This also increases Peter’s anxiety through its signification of the sexuality between Margret and Max. In the dinner party sequence, constant dog barking can be heard outside the compound. The guests attempt to compartmentalise these bestial signifiers into the symbolic order by categorising the dogs into their respective breeds. This is interrupted by Max’s scream, a perverse and foreign sound that catches everyone off guard. Margret then brings him out to join them for dinner. What follows is probably the most visually suggestive scene of Margret and Max’s sexual relationship. Max openly embraces and kisses Margret with an expression of sensual absorption as the guests stare in disbelief. However, their bourgeois manners prevail as they sit quietly without making any verbal assumptions. They repress the occurrence of bestiality despite its apparent presence. The contrast of bestial desire and what Rambling describes as “the inacceptability of bourgeois society (and family) to introduce any difference into its structure” result in a comical surrealist image (Volkert, 1987, par. 9). In relation to Dali’s painting ‘The Lugbrious Game’, Bataille states, “My only desire here—even if by pushing this bestial hilarity to its furthest point I must nauseate Dali—is to squeal like a pig before his canvases” (1985, p. 28). While the dinner sequence does present the potential of such a convulsion in response to a heterogeneous presence, all that follows is awkwardness, an incompatibility.
Bestiality appears to Peter as an intangible element that can only be seen in an incomplete form through the symbolism of the keyhole. Thus, it is suggested that Peter’s attempts at resolving the threat of bestiality through voyeurism. Mulvey theorised that fetishistic scopophilia, in which the object is “transform[ed] into something satisfying in itself,” is a means in which the male figure escapes from the anxiety evoked by the castrated female figure (1989, p. 21). It is uncertain whether Peter develops a fetish towards bestiality. However, it is possible to plot a casual relationship between the threat of castration and the lack of understanding of Margret’s elusive sexuality. The need to know is different from the voyeurism theorised by Mulvey because it does not reduce anxiety through a masked gaze. Rather, it goes in line with the instrumentality of the gaze within modernity. According to Foucault, the gaze:
“implies an open field, and its essential activity is of the successive order of reading; it records and totalizes; it gradually reconstitutes immanent organizations; it spreads out over a world that is already the world of language, and that is why it is spontaneously related to hearing and speech.” (1975, p.121)
Peter’s gaze is motivated by the possibility of reconstituting the subversive nature of bestiality into the symbolic order by the instrumental power of the gaze. The mechanics of the gaze is most apparent in clinical form through the zoologist who suggests to Peter that Margret and Max’s sexuality should be observed in the name of science.
Margret gains agency by denying easy access to the male gaze. The communicative dynamics between Max and her that is represented as instinctual and subliminal “put into question the primacy of human language and consciousness as optimal modes of communication” (Lippit, 2000, p. 2). Peter becomes the opposite of Mulvey’s conception of the male movie star’s “more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego” (1989, p. 20). In one scene, he hires a prostitute for Max. However Max refuses to have sex with her. Thus, Max is somewhat humanised to the effect of having a complex sexual preference that denies a universally undiscerning bestial sexuality. Margret’s relationship with Max is subjectified even further away from Peter’s understanding. As Peter realises the futility of his scopophilia, he attempts to repress the presence of bestiality by instructing Margret to get rid of Max. However, she defies him by locking Nelson and herself in Max’s room. Peter’s desperation peaks as he takes out his gun, a signifier of phallic authority as well as instrumental rationality, to shoot Max. It goes haywire as Max snatches the gun from Peter; in which his unpredictable handling puts the whole family in danger. This stresses the incompatibility of phallic authority with nature, the destruction that will result when nature becomes a priori to civilisation.
After this incident, the family is reconstituted as Peter changes his attitude towards Max. He moves away from an excessive need to instrumentally place him within the symbolic order and learns to care and relate to him in an emotional level. He does this mostly without verbal expression but through actions that express his shift in paradigm. For example, with much urgency, he sends Max to the hospital where Margret is at as Max’s health deteriorates in her absence. His relationship with Margret is revitalised through this process. The family’s drive back from the hospital, in which Max parades himself at the top of the car, is represented in a celebratory mode as random onlookers cheer as they pass by. The spectator is becomes fascinated, not so much by the presence of a monkey on an automobile, but the acceptance of bestial nature into the family structure. In earlier dining sequences, Max is always seated close to Margret However, in final scene, Max is seated proportionately in-between Peter and Margret. This suggests that the family is restabilised through the neutralisation of the prior threat posed by Max. This is not achieved by its entrance into the symbolic order through the assertion of the gaze that will classify Margret’s sexuality as a psychological deviation from normality. Rather, it is enabled through the creation of a newly constituted symbolic order that is enabled by a destructive reshuffling. Bestiality is represented as a catalyst that rescues the family from structural stagnancy by facilitating a creative reshaping. As Nietzsche states, in order to create structure, one “must first be an annihilator and break values” (1968, p. 114). Nevertheless, the family is envisioned as a micro-structure in contrast to the major-structure of society that can easily override such creative changes. In Margret’s dream, she is unable to withstand the pressure asserted by the police to repress Max and chooses to kill Max with her own hands.
Tropical Malady: Becoming Animal
In Tropical Malady, things take a more chaotic turn as the dialectics of man and animal are spilled into an open field devoid of structure. There is no explicit reference to bestiality. But it suggests that the nature of sexuality is bestial through its two-part structure. The first segment follows the narrative of a soldier courting a village boy. It ends with a sequence in which the village boy licks the soldier’s hand in an animalistic manner before disappearing into the shadows. The soldier’s blank expression and the eerie tone of the mise-en-scene situate this sexual gesture as a hint towards the underpinning intensity of a primordial form of sexuality. Narrative is ruptured by an illumination of eroticism that presupposes a partial dissolution of the person as he exists in the realm of discontinuity” (Bataille, 1962, p. 17). The second segment, which is based on the myth of a shape-shifting shaman, takes place in the forest where the soldier hunts a tiger that appears in the image of the village boy. Thus, this segment parallels and deconstructs the mechanics of the soldier’s desire, revealing its bestial nature within the animal realm. The soldier takes on the role of the hunter in an attempt to dominate and contain the threatening status of sexuality, which takes on the form of a mythical creature much like a Jungian archetype that is more elementary than man as it is situated within a collective subconscious. A talking monkey tells the soldier, ‘Kill the tiger and release him into the ghost world. Or let him devour you and enter his world’. This either/or choice is reflective of the man and animal binary: it is either a repression of sexuality or an embrace that marks the dissolution of the wholesome body into the realm of unconscious desires.
However, the soldier does something quite different in the concluding sequence in which he encounters the tiger face to face. Closeups of the tiger are intercut with closeups of the soldier’s fearful yet self-reflexive expression as he narrates:
“And now, I see myself there. My mother, my father, fear, sadness.
It was all so real, they brought me to life.
Once I devoured your soul, we are neither human nor animal.”
Then it cuts to an ancient painting that illustrates an energy stream floating in-between the tiger and a human in a respectful kneeling position. The soldier’s narration continues, “Monster, I give u my spirit my flesh and my memories.” Thus, it becomes unclear whether it is the monster or soldier that performs the ‘devouring’. Rather it seems to be a reciprocal effect in which the soldier’s submission allows him access to the monster’s soul, resulting in an entity that transcends the conceptual boundaries of what constitutes as human and animal
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “Becoming Animal”, in which the human interacts with an animal other towards the formation of ever-shifting entities, is a helpful way to understand this ambiguous phenomenon. In this process, “there is no longer man or animal, since each deterritorializes the other, in a conjunction of flow, in a continuum of reversible intensities” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986, p. 22). Thus, both parties engage in a transformational process that breaks up the conceptual boundaries of the single entity. There is no animal becoming man, as it is the subjectivity of man that is in need of decentring. As such, the human’s kneeling position in the painting represents the soldier’s acquiescence to the becoming. The energy stream that is released signifies towards the immanent processes at work. The becoming is not an arrest of humanity into bestial nature, as the tiger does not absorb the energy stream. Rather, it is in constant flux in-between both parties.
Creed suggests that becoming animal is a way of understanding the metamorphosis of man to wolf in cinematic representations (2005, p. 137). In Tropical Malady, the process of becoming animal is represented in a less apparent and crude manner. An intensive mood of heightened sensitivity is constructed through the meditative pace of the sequence and soldier’s concentrated expression. The processes of becoming animal are occurring in molecular levels, much like the immanent energy stream. This is also suggested when the soldier’s narration concludes, “Every drop of my blood sings our song, a song of happiness. There, do you hear it?” The camera pans slowly through the forest trees to the ambient sounds of bustling wind before cutting to black. The molecular exchange of particles within the becoming occurs within the micro makeup of a drop of blood. Deleuze and Guattari state, “What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes” (2008, p. 262). It is impossible to show the product of becoming, as there is no finality to it. Thus, the film moves away from both subjects and pans into the openness of the forest.
In this essay I analysed the representations of bestiality within Max Mon Amour and Tropical Malady. In Max Mon Amour, bestiality appears as a threatening element within the bourgeois family. Its excessive nature disrupts Peter’s phallic authority. He attempts to assimilate bestiality into the symbolic order through the instrumentality of the classifying gaze. However, as he learns to relate to Max in an emotional level, the family unit restructures itself into a new order. Seen in this light, Bestiality becomes a catalyst towards the creative destruction of the stagnancy of the bourgeois family that enables a more communicative order to emerge. In Tropical Malady, the human subject engages in the process of becoming through an interaction with an animal other. The binary of human and animal collapses into the productive process of becoming that frees desire towards creative potentials. Thus, both films represent bestiality as a means to communicate a Nietzschean dialectic between human and animal. These are ‘healthy’ actions in the sense that it shakes of the fantasy and economy of a fixed, stable form of humanity.
References
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Bataille, George. (1985). “The ‘Lugubrious Game’”. in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 24-30.
Creed, Barbara. (2005). Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Creed, Barbara. (2006). A Darwinian Love Story: Max Mon Amour and the Zoocentric Perspective in Film. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 20(1), 45-60.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1986). Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari. F. (2008). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum.
Ferry, Jean. (1978). “Concerning King Kong”. in Hammond, P. (ed.). The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema. London: British Film Institute. 105-108.
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Krzywinksa, Tanya. (2006). “The Beast Within: Animal Transformation and Bestiality & Bondage”. in Sex and the Cinema. London & New York: Wallflower. 139-159.
Lippit, A. M. (2000). Electric Animal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mulvey, Laura. (1989). “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. in Visual and Other Pleasures. London: MacMillan. 14-26.
Nietzsche, F. (1966). Beyond Good and Evil. New York: Vintage Books.
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Volkert, Andreas. (1987). The innocence of Desire: Charlotte Rampling in Koln/Germany. Retrieved 3 Nov, 2008. From http://users.belgacom.net/bn579857/5-interviews_0001.html
Wartenberg, T. E. (1999). “The Subversive Potential of the Unlikely Film Couple”. in Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as Social Criticism. Boulder: Westview Press. 1-18.
Filmography
Fly, The David Cronenberg, 1986
King Kong, Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933
Max Mon Amour, Nagisa Oshima, 1986
Tropical Malady, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004
Wolf, Mike Nichols, 1994
