Shame (2011)

In Steve McQueen's films, suffering, human tormenting, is perceived from a clinical point of view - the clinical not preventing the films from working their way through graphical details. - - From this description, it is probably quite clear that I find McQueens cinematic approach deeply problematic, and perhaps even morally shady. One coud perhaps say that his films evoke a neutralized concept of empathy, empathy being reduced to a dissective process of understanding and observing other people's minds - rather than understanding having moral connotations, and being enmeshed in complicated questions about responsibility: what does it mean to see/look/catch sight of something? It is as if such worries are sidestepped by McQueen's clinical camera. The point of the films I have seen seem to be a project of revelation: the dark patches of the human soul are to be penetrated. The ideal appears to be not to flinch, to stare directly at the suffering at hand.

A pair of siblings are the two major characters in Shame. The sister is a nerve-wreck of a person. She crashes in her brother's bachelor's pad - which he hates. He is addicted to sex and trying to hid his addiction. The films tracks his obsessions, along with his quest for normalcy, by focusing on his stormy and sexually tense relation with his sister. And well, then there's his sleazeball boss who is just as bad as he is - just as sociopathic. Along the way, we do indeed see these characters react to each other's difficulties and problems, but all of these reactions are fuelled with shame, humiliation or rancour. As a viewer I, too, react with shame and an uncomfortable feeling that I have seen something I shouldn't have - a feeling that, I assume, is precisely what McQueen is aiming for. To make the viewer complicit in the characters' humiliation. Even though the perspective of this film, what it is trying to do to you, is problematic, it must be admitted that McQueen knows how to compose detached, steely images. Michael Fassbender - who else - is the perfect match for the scary leading role.

The big problem with Shame is that it goes nowhere. It stares - blindly at the misery it has reduced the world to.