SHAME by Jameson Posey

Scott, A.O. “Only One Thing on His Mind” Rev. of Shame, dir. Steve McQueen. The New York Times 1 Dec. 2011

Korfhage, Matthew. “Shame” Rev. of Shame, dir. Steve McQueen. Willamette Week 14 Dec. 2011

Bradshaw, Peter. “Shame” Rev. of Shame, dir. Steve McQueen. The Guardian 12 Jan. 2012

Theme and director’s intention

"Shame is an interesting title: Brandon feels spasms of disgust and self-pity more than shame, but the point is rather that shame lies deeply buried under all of this." - Bradshaw.

"The cruel paradox of addiction is that it transforms a source of pleasure into an inescapable, insatiable need. An abundance — an overdose — of movies and books explores the logic of this condition, mostly with respect to drugs or alcohol. “Shame,” the relentless new feature from the British artist turned filmmaker Steve McQueen, has a lot in common with films that plumb the toxic romance of the bottle or the needle. The crucial difference is that its protagonist, a handsome, youngish Manhattanite named Brandon (Michael Fassbender), is hooked on sex." - Scott.

"...the main focus and dichotomy in the movie: a constant swing between Sullivan’s clinically posh New York life and his lonely, seamy, uncontrolled sexual obsessions." - Korfhage.

Separate elements and their relationship to the whole

"McQueen uses lengthy, steady, single-camera shots—sometimes over two minutes long, an eternity in film—with the main character often motionless off to the side of the picture. In some, it seems that Fassbender has been intimidated into sadness and isolation by his own mammoth radiator or load-bearing wall. In others, it’s as if we are voyeurs at a glass-partitioned zoo where the rutting lions and tigers stubbornly refuse to take center stage." - Korfhage

"This poses a special challenge for Mr. McQueen, since there are rules, conventions and cognitive habits that limit how explicit — and how explicitly unpleasant — movie sex can be. Watching someone else take a drink or snort a line will not cause intoxication in the viewer, but watching other people get naked and squirm around together is a sure-enough turn-on to be the basis of a lucrative industry." - Scott.

"It has the same icy, unwavering stare as his previous work, Hunger, about the Irish republican hunger-striker Bobby Sands, with the same degree-zero long camera takes." - Bradshaw

Objective evaluation of the film

"Steve McQueen's film about a damaged sibling relationship, co-written with Abi Morgan, is a nightmarish, laugh-free black comedy about neurosis and dysfunction." - Bradshaw

"“Shame,” the relentless new feature from the British artist turned filmmaker Steve McQueen, has a lot in common with films that plumb the toxic romance of the bottle or the needle. The crucial difference is that its protagonist, a handsome, youngish Manhattanite named Brandon (Michael Fassbender), is hooked on sex." - Scott

"And thus, the main focus and dichotomy in the movie: a constant swing between Sullivan’s clinically posh New York life and his lonely, seamy, uncontrolled sexual obsessions." - Korfhage

Subjective evaluation of the film

"Desire and sex and beauty and success, just plain breaking your heart." - Korfhage

"Brandon and Sissy live in an underworld melodrama of fear – not so much Crime and Punishment, but Addiction and Humiliation. With tremendous performances from Fassbender and Mulligan, and such superb technique from McQueen, this is a horrible inferno." - Scott. 

"Is “Shame” the name of something Brandon does feel, or of something the filmmakers think he should feel? The movie, for all its displays of honesty (which is to say nudity), is also curiously coy. It presents Brandon for our titillation, our disapproval and perhaps our envy, but denies him access to our sympathy." - Bradshaw

The film’s level of ambition

"know, that’s the point, that Mr. McQueen wants to show how the intensity of Brandon’s need shuts him off from real intimacy, but this seems to be a foregone conclusion, the result of an elegant experiment that was rigged from the start." -Bradshaw

"And it all proceeds terribly slowly. As in Hunger, McQueen’s first movie, we are made to live through onscreen extremity in all its sometimes tedious detail. But the ugliness remains so lovely that we are not only at its mercy but wholly compelled by it." - Korfhage.

"It has the same icy, unwavering stare as his previous work, Hunger, about the Irish republican hunger-striker Bobby Sands, with the same degree-zero long camera takes." - Scott.

Words you found interesting.

"Brandon is a sex-connoisseur and sex-sociopath, a zombified version of Bret Easton Ellis's Patrick Bateman or Martin Amis's John Self."- Bradshaw.

"And the impulse to explore Brandon’s problem in some kind of narrative leaves “Shame” caught between therapeutic melodrama and melodramatic despair." - Scott

"Because, apparently, Guy Maddin had it all wrong. The saddest music in the world is actually Frank Sinatra’s egomaniacal “New York, New York” sung much too slowly, in hazy light and cocktail dress and breaking voice, by someone who’s very obviously seen the other side of it." - Korfhage

Relationship to film movements/genres/ relation to other filmmakers’ work.

"His visiting sister (Carey Mulligan), on the other hand, doesn’t know at all what she wants, hasn’t succeeded at anything and is always at loose ends, but it is she who provides the scene at the true heart of this very controlled, near tour-de-force by director McQueen." - Korfhage.

"Steve McQueen's film about a damaged sibling relationship, co-written with Abi Morgan, is a nightmarish, laugh-free black comedy about neurosis and dysfunction. It has the same icy, unwavering stare as his previous work, Hunger, about the Irish republican hunger-striker Bobby Sands, with the same degree-zero long camera takes." - Bradshaw.

"“Shame,” anchored to the treadmill of Brandon’s pathology, strips this ancient, futile wisdom of its poetry. Mr. McQueen is a tenaciously literal filmmaker, mistrusting metaphor and psychological speculation and dwelling on the facts of behavior and bodily experience. His debut feature, “Hunger,” in which Mr. Fassbender played Bobby Sands, the I.R.A. militant who starved himself to death in a British-administered prison in 1981, was an unflinching look at the corporeal consequences of political zeal. It focused less on the nature of Sands’s cause than on the effects, on his own person, of his commitment to it." - Scott.