DUKE OF BURGUNDY
(2015) Dir. Peter Strickland
****
"The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility." - Georges Batailles
"Duke Duke Duke-of-Duke Duke Duke-of" - Cypress Hill
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| from Jess Franco's Succubus (1967) |
I'm a confirmed proponent of the masochistic gaze theory posited by Gaylyn Studlar and Steven Shaviro, I knew what to look for in Darionioni Nuovo tremolare Peter Strickland's Duke of Burgundy, the genesis of the story (according to his interview in the Blu-ray extra) being that Pete Tombs (of Mondo Macabro fame), commissioned the film, wanting a remake of Lorna the Exorcist (a very long awaited Jess Franco title, for those who wait for such things). Me, I've learned that like Rollin's work, the only way to enjoy Franco (for me at least) is while alone at dusk, falling asleep as the sun sets, waking up fitfully, lulled into a weird trance. In all other ways they kind of suck. Though I screened SUCCUBUS for a bunch of kids at a European horror film class, I hadn't realized just how sex drenched it is until they shifted uncomfortably at their desks. Interestingly the next class, I explained the best way to appreciate what's going on in that film (the secret to most art films) is to just presume the lead character has amnesia and doesn't want anyone to know. As everyone is always drunk and high out of their minds, and don't speak the same language, it's only natural. Take it from me, if someone I've never seen (to my knowledge) comes up to me and starts talking about somewhere I've met them but don't remember, I'm going to just play along. If a hot redhead naked under a fur comes over to my swinger apartment at four in the morning I'm not going to say "who are you and what do you want?" though I probably should...
Anyway, once I said that, and played it a second time, it all made sense---they got it, now they liked it. They got the modernist frisson. In the end that's perhaps why Fritz Lang 'got' the art of Franco, as did Welles. Because Europe in the 1960s-70s is the Capital of Amnesia and the tower of Babalon Working when a producer, actor, and director may easily have no language in common. And drugs were ubiquitous. When you can't remember how you got there, you can make a big deal about it and get ejected from the in-crowd, or just roll along and let the mannequins assemble for the sacrifice, presuming that your unbridled arrogance will convince them that you're not the designated victim. The gathered wait and kill the first one who admits they don't understand what's going on.
In the Shout Factory extras, Strickland notes that after a screening he heard bourgeois critics talking about how Duke of Burgundy'elevated the genre' and he got mad - I thought at first he was being snotty, that how dare we lump his masterwork in with Franco et al - but non, he was defending the genre, defending the films of Rollin, Franco, the slew of vampire lesbians from the 'vampire women era' of 1970-74 (begun with Hammer's Vampire Lovers and more or less over by 1974's Vampyres) Daughters of Darkness, Girl Slaves of Morgana La Fey --indignant that critics think they shouldn't be considered on the same high art level of other art films like Mr. Arkadin, Alphaville or Cries and Whispers. Hey, I get it.
I have been called onto to do the sadistic part for others, both just as verbal descriptions of bizarre maid humiliation fantasies and actual 'belt-play' or whatever the ladies at Toys in Babeland call it. But the act never works as well as the threat, the speaking of it. It's about the submission, the show, the whispered declarations of power vs. humiliation rather than the practice; which again all ascribes now to the Gaylyn Studlar masochistic film theory vs. the Laura Mulvey sadistic proprietary male gaze theory:
"Studlar uses Deleuze’s treatise of masochism as a starting point for her article. Where Mulvey views the female as having no power, in a masochist reading, the woman is powerful due to possessing what the male lacks, so pleasure is not gained by “mastery of the female but submission to her” (1985:782). This is in direct contrast to Mulvey’s view, which centres on voyeurism and fetishistic scopophilia being a defense mechanism to castration anxiety. For Studlar, there is not always a connection between looking and control and therefore the process of looking, or obtaining pleasure from looking, is not always about objectification. If the viewer is getting pleasure through identification, then there is equality between the spectator and the subject being looked-upon." (Z- Mediated Musings)
Which is funny because I thought Gayln Studlar was a man all this time. Now I doth feel foolish. I run back submissively to the search engines where I wrote her name.
Strickland understands these confusions of gaze; his film delves inwards to where the segmentation of a pupae abdomen circles into a set of winding fecund autumnal purple steps, bringing as do his post-giallo fellows, the modernist shiver of experimentalism back into narrative, letting them derail each other and making something new--neither formal/classical narrative nor avant garde/experimental, but a hybrid both invigorating and stultifying. It could easily be the story of Mulvey and Studlar forever locked in a death/love staring contest; it shakes every pair bond to the core not through any particular eroticism but for the sterile august beauty of it, the ultimate triumphs and problems with any love affair, this hermetic universe of overgrown forest-a world where men don't exist, and power and dominance and submission reins, so the lepidoptery lectures the couple attends and speaks at in this butterfly library in some alternate reality--another decade, another country--anywhere but here and now. In that sense of course it mirrors the fragmented masochistic obsessiveness of the films of Josef Von Sternberg (all those long slow meditative takes as Marlene walks around rooms, playing with this doll or that and shooting coy looks over her shoulder--as if stalling perpetually for time)--or even Bergman films like Persona (with the young boy in the experimental opening, trapped in the morgue as if reborn and tracing the blurry projection of Liv Ullman's Vertigo opening credits close-up jaw. And from there of course, I come in waving films like The Ring and The Birds and my theory about Mecha-Medusa and the Otherless Child, i.e. the merging of the screen and the eye, the speakers and the ear, in the warped reflective mirror of the dialogue between one's unconscious and conscious minds (See Taming the Tittering Tourists).
I don't see a fear of castration at all - but a longing for same, which underwrites my own theory that explains heterosexual male's fascination with an all female or matriarchal world (ala Persona, The Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay) that does not somehow 'include' the male figures in the film or allow a projection of oneself into the narrative (trapped outside looking in perhaps, like that boy with the glasses in Persona) or as a mute, manipulatable servant (Girl Slaves..., Don't Deliver Us from Evil). If they somehow get a toe hold, it's only as an outmaneuvered future blood sacrifice ala Daughters of Darkness, the Blood-Spattered Bride, The Velvet Vampire, Girly and Vampyres. It is quite the opposite of pornography as far erotica ---for the male fantasy doesn't last beyond the point of le petit mort (99% of men instantly stop watching an XXX movie the moment they've 'finished' and prefer to completely forget about it). The lesbian erotic scene goes on and on, stopping time in its fairy tale tracks, the fairie bower's chthonic overgrowth ensnaring all chances for narrative phallic linearity
The lesbian fantasias of Franco and Rollin on the other hand aren't really meant for that, more a reverie that perhaps draws on some mild arousal the way Antonioni draws on beauty, or Fellini on pageantry or Welles on Welles -- as a thing fulfilling in and of itself that precludes egoic attachment. The sexuality of Fellini is, as in his best work-8 1/2 and La Dolce Vita-exposed as infantile narcissism, Antonioni's beauty is like Horatio worries Hamlet's father's ghost is, a trickster leading people to dangerous corners that they cannot return from, and Welles' balloon is inevitably punctured. These are not the orgasm moments, the money shots, in the films, but reminders that epiphanies of that nature are short and cheap and life grinds on, oblivious. The trick with a reverie cinema like the best late 60s-early 70s Franco, Rollin is that this egoic puncturing never happens nor needs to - if a male character shows up who fancies himself the rescuer of the scene, he's peripheral - we're invited to scorn him even as he 'solves' things, the matriarchal nonlinear experimentalism of the hermetic female fairy bower, the enchantments spell, is the fantasy of our total reunion with the mother -- being so young you're a baby, surrounded by gigantic adoring women, hearing their conversations as strange enigmatic words you do not understand, learning only the ebb and flow of one's needs and mom's availability. You don't identify yourself as separate from her and therefore are 'female' regardless of gender - the need to differentiate and establish oneself as male and separate from mom is traumatizing initiation these films undo. Their drawback is just this lack of dramatic ark of initiation and journey --the butterfly motif in the film is an ultimate irony - the caterpillar becomes a butterfly and flies off and dies, but the ones here are, row after row, preserved- the life cycle interrupted at its peak moment from the safety of an eternally warm cocoon.
I remember this because as a child and being never very coordinated or confident on the kickball field (and hence always picked last for teams, a daily humiliation). When my parents' friends go together and brought all us kids together, I longed more than anything to just be a fly on the wall in the girls' areas, to hang out and do Colorforms or whatever while the boys played outside. When some mom didn't approve, those moms tended to have the more terrible children, wild obnoxious dirty foul-mouthed boys that aggravated my delicate nerves, and therefore because their boys where vile monsters all boys were vile monsters! (whoa, I hit a pocket of anger remembering that) while girls were pretty and sweet, and I was enthralled. I adored all my female babysitters, like they were giant idols; there were these three cool female cousins who coddled me all through my infancy, and then --boom, they weren't around anymore. And that affected me totally. I longed for those giant cute girls (relative to my size) and I didn't feel it again until stumbling on the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park (see my first film Erich Kuersten: A Poet's Journey)
In this amniotic state I didn't need to exist, or get affection, or conquer or any other phallic arc of 'girls circle penetration.' - Of course this came back to haunt me later as I was often paralyzed when it came to busting the first move, afraid the girls I fancied would flutter away with some spiel about how 'I thought we were just friends.' Duke of Burgundy in a way operates on the same principle. The one hot sex scene is merely spoken, everyone all under the sheets, with the mistress struggling to keep her partner supplied with her custom-tailored erotic dom-sub fantasia. But again there's no ego formed, which is why the film is so boring but that's part of the masochistic current, the Warholian love of boredom which is the result of undoing the need for ego and therefore yang energy and therefore a narrative arc--that's the Batailles freedom that comes with servility, the love of repetition and ritual (as in the repetitive alchemical rites in Anger's films). The oceanic experience that masochistic gaze in cinema duplicates, and which the practice of masochism admits from the beginning is hopelessly unattainable so has to start from scratch and work backwards to obtain as distinct a dream recollection as possible.
The ending is the same either way. Death is just the exiting the cinema the same way birth is coming in. Either way, the cinema is the same with or without you, the film playing never changes. And its that element of inert sameness which works to make Duke of Burgundy both boring and art (like any Brakhage film); the realization of this timeless endless repetition, as only fellow post-giallo filmmakers like Helena and Bruno understand in the modern era (as in the endless variations of the same scene in The Strange Colour of your Body's Tears). It is this inert eroticism that fuses Studlar's masochistic gaze to the kind of Jungian ego annihilation that allows for complete freedom, exorcism of the libidinal desires that formulate the structure of the differentiated self.
I repeat, therefore I was. It is the only way to be sure.
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| The Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay (1971) |
I don't see a fear of castration at all - but a longing for same, which underwrites my own theory that explains heterosexual male's fascination with an all female or matriarchal world (ala Persona, The Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay) that does not somehow 'include' the male figures in the film or allow a projection of oneself into the narrative (trapped outside looking in perhaps, like that boy with the glasses in Persona) or as a mute, manipulatable servant (Girl Slaves..., Don't Deliver Us from Evil). If they somehow get a toe hold, it's only as an outmaneuvered future blood sacrifice ala Daughters of Darkness, the Blood-Spattered Bride, The Velvet Vampire, Girly and Vampyres. It is quite the opposite of pornography as far erotica ---for the male fantasy doesn't last beyond the point of le petit mort (99% of men instantly stop watching an XXX movie the moment they've 'finished' and prefer to completely forget about it). The lesbian erotic scene goes on and on, stopping time in its fairy tale tracks, the fairie bower's chthonic overgrowth ensnaring all chances for narrative phallic linearity
 |
| Vampyres (1974) |
The lesbian fantasias of Franco and Rollin on the other hand aren't really meant for that, more a reverie that perhaps draws on some mild arousal the way Antonioni draws on beauty, or Fellini on pageantry or Welles on Welles -- as a thing fulfilling in and of itself that precludes egoic attachment. The sexuality of Fellini is, as in his best work-8 1/2 and La Dolce Vita-exposed as infantile narcissism, Antonioni's beauty is like Horatio worries Hamlet's father's ghost is, a trickster leading people to dangerous corners that they cannot return from, and Welles' balloon is inevitably punctured. These are not the orgasm moments, the money shots, in the films, but reminders that epiphanies of that nature are short and cheap and life grinds on, oblivious. The trick with a reverie cinema like the best late 60s-early 70s Franco, Rollin is that this egoic puncturing never happens nor needs to - if a male character shows up who fancies himself the rescuer of the scene, he's peripheral - we're invited to scorn him even as he 'solves' things, the matriarchal nonlinear experimentalism of the hermetic female fairy bower, the enchantments spell, is the fantasy of our total reunion with the mother -- being so young you're a baby, surrounded by gigantic adoring women, hearing their conversations as strange enigmatic words you do not understand, learning only the ebb and flow of one's needs and mom's availability. You don't identify yourself as separate from her and therefore are 'female' regardless of gender - the need to differentiate and establish oneself as male and separate from mom is traumatizing initiation these films undo. Their drawback is just this lack of dramatic ark of initiation and journey --the butterfly motif in the film is an ultimate irony - the caterpillar becomes a butterfly and flies off and dies, but the ones here are, row after row, preserved- the life cycle interrupted at its peak moment from the safety of an eternally warm cocoon.
 |
| My favorite game to play with babysitters in the 70s |
I remember this because as a child and being never very coordinated or confident on the kickball field (and hence always picked last for teams, a daily humiliation). When my parents' friends go together and brought all us kids together, I longed more than anything to just be a fly on the wall in the girls' areas, to hang out and do Colorforms or whatever while the boys played outside. When some mom didn't approve, those moms tended to have the more terrible children, wild obnoxious dirty foul-mouthed boys that aggravated my delicate nerves, and therefore because their boys where vile monsters all boys were vile monsters! (whoa, I hit a pocket of anger remembering that) while girls were pretty and sweet, and I was enthralled. I adored all my female babysitters, like they were giant idols; there were these three cool female cousins who coddled me all through my infancy, and then --boom, they weren't around anymore. And that affected me totally. I longed for those giant cute girls (relative to my size) and I didn't feel it again until stumbling on the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park (see my first film Erich Kuersten: A Poet's Journey)
 |
| Just the right size |
The ending is the same either way. Death is just the exiting the cinema the same way birth is coming in. Either way, the cinema is the same with or without you, the film playing never changes. And its that element of inert sameness which works to make Duke of Burgundy both boring and art (like any Brakhage film); the realization of this timeless endless repetition, as only fellow post-giallo filmmakers like Helena and Bruno understand in the modern era (as in the endless variations of the same scene in The Strange Colour of your Body's Tears). It is this inert eroticism that fuses Studlar's masochistic gaze to the kind of Jungian ego annihilation that allows for complete freedom, exorcism of the libidinal desires that formulate the structure of the differentiated self.
I repeat, therefore I was. It is the only way to be sure.