Gabrielle #36 – An Act of Faith

The lost intro for the Nymphomaniac screening.

Apologies to anyone who came to the screening of Nymphomaniac in Soho last night expecting an intro. I was too sick to be there in person but I did record a video intro that for various reasons didn’t get played. Let it be known that I did a full beat with a raging fever for it and everything. Anyway, I’m publishing the full text below.

To me, the most significant quote in Nymphomaniac is “fill all my holes.” It’s effectively the film’s mantra. The protagonist, Joe, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, repeats it multiple times across both volumes. Joe is a nymphomaniac – and she does insist on using that term, rather than the clinical “sex addict” – and so sex is obviously the central subject of the film, but it isn't a sexy film. And to watch it as erotica, or an elaborate piece of smut, is a mistake, I think. It's better viewed as a contemplation of agency and what happens when we try to embrace it: throw ourselves off a cliff edge, or battle with its infinite contradictions? The holes Joe is talking about are both physical and existential, and she goes to increasingly extreme lengths to try to fill the existential through the physical. Whether you see her journey as a form of spiritual transcendence or self-annihilation is up to you.

Joe’s sexual encounters are abundant but rarely positive. She loses her virginity to a guy called Jerôme who leaves her, unsatisfied, to fix his moped. As a teenager she enters into a contest with her friend to see how many passengers they can sleep with on a train journey. As a young woman she falls in love, loses her orgasm, and is only able to get it back after a prolonged quest that eventually leads her into the hands of a backdoor sadist. In the process of fulfilling that quest she loses her family, ultimately choosing herself, and her own pleasure, over everything an objective onlooker would suggest she prioritise.

There are orgasms abound in the film, but they are usually the flip side of some kind of absence or lack. Sex in Nymphomaniac is occasionally pleasurable but more often painful – a disappointment, a competition, a constant source of alienation. A journey to the core of the earth that Joe often finds hollowed out, at least compared to her expectations. She speaks in a measured and half-bored tone throughout her conversations with Seligman, a highly educated bachelor who finds Joe beaten up and lying in an alleyway behind his apartment and takes her in. Their debates provide the throughline for the film as Joe recounts her life of sexual abundance to him. “Perhaps the only difference between me and other people,” she says, “was that I’ve always demanded more from the sunset.”

Nymphomaniac is the third and final installment in Lars von Trier's unofficially titled Depression Trilogy, following Antichrist and Melancholia. Like Antichrist and Melancholia, Nymphomaniac is at its heart a film about loneliness. Joe states it directly. Loneliness, she tells Seligman, has been “her constant companion.”

There are liberational thrills to be found in Joe’s lifestyle, but they tend to arise in moments of isolation. Her lust becomes a problem, most often, when it comes into contact with love – something she supposedly holds little value for, talking about it in unsentimental terms, but we should probably be suspicious of that. “For me, love was just lust with jealousy added; everything else was total nonsense,” she says dismissively, then follows up with a curious contradiction: “The secret ingredient for sex is love.” As a teenager she and her friend make a pact to embrace promiscuity deliberately as an act of warfare against society’s fixation with love. But you don't declare war on something unless it has threatened you.

There is a scene in Volume II that depicts Joe’s first orgasm. During a field trip as a young girl, she lies in the grass and looks up to the sky. She has a vision of Valeria Messalina and the Whore of Babylon looking over her as she levitates and spontaneously orgasms. Seligman finds it unbelievable, sacrilegious even – a mockery of the Transfiguration of Jesus on the Mount. She isn't aware of the parallels. That feeling though – transcendent, transformative, akin to an addict’s first high – is what Joe spends the entire film chasing. The fact that her most revolutionary experience with pleasure is so solitary is something that compounds her loneliness, confining her to a glass palace of impossible yearning. In fact, the thing that seems to get in the way of her pleasure most of all is other people.

She repeats the line – “fill all my holes” – when she reunites with Jerôme later in life. She breathes the words out in a rare moment where love and lust combine. Moments later, she enters her most prolonged period of suffering. She says it to Jerôme again at the start of Volume II, pleading this time towards the end of what we can only assume is a marathon sex sesh. “I can’t,” he says, exhausted. Implicitly we must accept here, as he already has, that no one can. There is a conflict between her longing to be full, which she has ascribed to sex, and actual the act of sex itself.

This is the central conflict of the film. In an effort to resolve it, Joe goes to rehab and starts attending sex addicts anonymous meetings. Rather than finding comfort there, she is pushed further out of society – more alone than ever. “That empathy you claim is a lie because all you are is society's morality police whose duty is to erase my obscenity from the surface of the Earth so that the bourgeoisie won't feel sick,” she tells the therapist. Then to everyone else: “I’m not like you. I am a nymphomaniac, and I love myself for being one. But above all, I love my cunt, and my filthy dirty lust.”

The sex in Nymphomaniac is compulsive and tedious – something many have cited as a criticism, in part because of von Trier’s reputation as something of a shock jock. Who would want to watch this and why? But I’d argue it’s deliberately intended to mimic how sex feels when it becomes a compulsion. Again, this isn't a film about sex – it's about everything else.

Joe’s back and forth with Seligman places sex in direct conversation with human culture, finding parallels and conflicts in episodes from religion, history, and the arts. But they're his frames of reference, and mostly his attempts to understand Joe. For the most part, they bounce off her like pennies against a wall. As film critic David Elrich writes: “the precedents [Seligman] cites are thwarted by Joe’s personal feelings of loneliness. Being reminded that she’s a small part of an epic latticework doesn’t make her feel less alone, it just gives her suffering a scale.”

Nymphomaniac can be viewed as a woman’s tireless quest to be made whole. A film that focuses on sex in excruciating detail to reveal exactly what can’t be got from it. But you can also view it as a woman’s rejection of the systems around her. A film that focuses on sex as an act of will.

The French philosopher Georges Bataille believed that a conscious individual will seek, wherever possible, to achieve moments of sovereignty by acting in ways which a system of hierarchy and purpose cannot tolerate or explain. In Nymphomaniac, Joe is an example of that conscious individual. Her name is androgynous by design, because she fucks like a man is expected to and obliterates the hierarchy of gender in the process. Seligman, a man of intellectualism, interrogates her relationship to sex by trying to apply philosophical, religious, and artistic frameworks to it, but none of them fit because, for Joe, sex is her philosophy, it's her religion, it's her art form. After abandoning SAA, Joe also abandons the world of thought and returns her salvation to her own body, concluding: “Society had no room for me, and I had no room for society.”

Bataille defines the sacred as anything that serves no purpose in the world of practice. By that definition, there is nothing more sacred than sex. Sex for its own sake, anyway. At the same time, the sacred presents an almost immediate contradiction. As soon as the sacred is conceptualised, it becomes a thing with a purpose. That happens over and over again in Nymphomaniac. Sex becomes a prohibitive force, a procreative method, a problem to be solved. After hours spent conceptualising sex in terms of its role within the wider structures around it, Joe and Seligman do come to some sort of consensus. Then, at the last minute, it is denied and rejected. Joe is returned to the street like a wild animal, purposeless and solitary, following a faith that is hers and hers alone.