Introduction
In mainstream movies, sex is often gauzy and romantic, filmed in soft focus with candles and acoustic guitars strumming softly in the background. In pornography, sex is cheerful and uncomplicated, an elaborate display that is more about performance than emotional content. In movies, we don't often see what's ugly about sex.
With violence, too, there are certain rules that even extreme directors follow. In horror movies, the violence is often so grotesque that it bears very little relevance to violence in our own lives, and generally the characters are so thin that we don't much care when they exit the scene. Even Quentin Tarantino and David Cronnenberg, two directors who use gore outside of the context of horror, don't linger too long on the horrifying—just a few seconds of a explicit violence in Eastern Promises or Hitler being shot multiple times in the face in Inglorius Basterds are enough to make the films "graphic".
Gaspar Noe's Irreversible doesn't give the viewer a frame in which to understand the intense and sickening violence that happens in the first 40 minutes of the film. It's not a genre-crossing romp and revenge flick like Inglorious Basterds, and it doesn't have the overlay of crime-drama that Eastern Promises has. The violence in Irreversible is so extreme, and so gut-wrenching, that the viewer feels for the actors.
Irreversible and the Backwards Story
Irreversible is told backwards. The viewer is dropped into the scene just after all hell has broken loose, and so the choice of woozy, spinning camerawork adds to the viewer's disorientation—the movie is designed to make the viewer sick. We begin with Marcus (Vincent Cassel ), followed by his protesting friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel ), rampaging through a sex club in search of a pimp called "Le Tenia". The camera can hardly keep up with Marcus, who seems to have gone berserk in the Norse sense of the word—he hurls men aside and pushes through the club as though filled with a supernatural strength. The sex club scenes are almost unbearably tense—it's clear something truly awful will happen, and when it does, it's even more awful (and brutal, and realistic) than the viewer could imagine.
From this point, the movie moves backwards and we begin to learn exactly why Marcus is searching for Le Tenia--he has raped Marcus' girlfriend, Alex. As Marcus punches his way through the club, threatens a transgendered prostitute, and throws a taxi-driver out of his own cab, he seems like the most dangerous person in the film—he's animal-like and beyond reason, as his friend Pierre says over and over again, though he never leaves Marcus' side. Although Irreversible is technically a revenge film, it's not a revenge fantasy. The revenge here has made Marcus into a monster.
When Irreversible first came out, one reviewer called it "art-house pornography". I find it hard to believe that anyone finds an excruciating, ten-minute rape scene--filmed with no cuts in a red-walled tunnel sexy. Some claimed that the film proves that Noe is a misogynist by setting up Alex's rape by making her wear a slip of a dress with nothing underneath. This, too, is complicated by the actual movie. Her rapist seems motivated by disgust and anger at her beauty and her privilege (he calls her "stuck up"). She had simply stumbled into the wrong place at the wrong time, and the responsibility is put on the perpetrator and not Alex herself.
The brutality of rape is something people aren't often forced to experience in a movie, and the fear that Alex experiences throughout this scene is palpable. At one point, the viewer sees a figure begin to walk into the tunnel and then quickly leave when they see what's happening to Alex. The scene is terrifying—the idea that a woman could be raped in such a public, yet isolated place, and that bystanders wouldn't come to her aid, seems just awful enough to be true. This is certainly not a scene for the faint of heart, but it does something that I think realistic violence in a film can do—it sensitizes the viewer to the actual horror of an experience.
As we go backward and meet Alex, Pierre, and Marcus before the rape, the viewer begins to know them as people. Alex and Marcus seem to be a fairly new couple. Pierre is Marcus' friend and Alex's former lover who Marcus "stole" from Pierre. In the last hyper-saturated scenes, warmly lit and casually acted (most of the lines were improvised), I found myself forgetting that the movie was moving backwards. Maybe everything will be ok, I'd think for a moment, fooled by the warm lights in the scenes between Cassell and Bellucci and the friendly-yet-charged conversation between the three of them on the metro train on the way to a party. The characters seem so poignantly unaware of what's going to happen to them, and so sure that they know how the night will end, as we all are every time we step out the door.
Tragedy and Irreversible
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzche tries to find a "pessimism of strength" in how Greek tragedy to focuses on everything in human life that is "frightful, evil, a riddle, destructive, and fatal". Irreversible is about almost everything destructive—vengeance, rape, murder, misogyny, homophobia, and a general lack of concern for the suffering of other human beings. I don't know how to reconcile the scenes of horror and human suffering with later (or, chronologically, earlier) scenes of lightness and warmth, but I'm glad that this movie forces me to try.
Sources:
- IMDB
- The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzche
Letitia Trent - I am a writer, teacher, and avid reader. I graduated from the Ohio State University Creative Writing Program and have published my work in ...
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