“Filth” and the Real

And yet another engagement with the Real, and let’s talk gender while we’re at it. I been talking a lot of Lacan in my critiques because Lacan is a profoundly useful analyst for understanding our world today. Recently saw the Jon S. Baird’s film Filth starring James McAvoy based on the novel by Irvine Welsh and it seemed to fit well into the web of ideas I’ve been working. In my “Thoughts on Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Evolution (2015) and castration anxiety” it was all about imaginary Reals, postgenderism and symbolic castrations, then I discussed Spike Lee’s Oldboy remake in “Revenge well-done (Oldboy 2013 remake critique)“, the imaginary Real and how it relates with the symbolic. This time I want to discuss “love” and “hate”, their proximity with Lacan’s real, symbolic, and imaginary, and talk more about the sexualization/socialization of the male gender and how it all relates.

Filth – in this film symbolizes either a kind of excess or the product of the excessive, that which transgresses neutrality (enjoyment); what Lacan calls jouissance (enjoyment) is a deadly excess beyond pleasure, which is by definition moderate. 

In a nutshell, Filth is the story of Bruce Robertson (McAvoy), a Detective Sergeant living in Edinburgh Scotland who displays sociopathic, schizophrenic and bipolar tendencies. He is a scheming, manipulative, misanthropic bully who spends his free time indulging in drugs, alcohol, abusive sexual relationships, and vindictive plots he hatches to inconvenience his enemies, which includes just about everyone he knows. He regularly bullies and exploits his only friend, the mild-mannered Clifford Blades (Jamie Bell), a member of Robertson’s masonic lodge whose wife, Bunty, he repeatedly prank calls and asks for phone sex. Ultimately Robertson is in a constant, and painful quest for object petit a whether it be the promotion over his coworkers, or the sexual gaze of a female, he can never stop, as he can never reach what object a has hidden.

“Only winners are more attractive to the opposite sex Bruce ay? Like our successful friend here the tape-worm yes?” – Bruce’s superego

Bruce’s superego is heavily present throughout his ludicrous adventures. He talks directly to that “King of the sky castle” which appears to him in hallucinations as his therapist. “You are filth” shouts the superego, reminding him of the looming shadow of his dead brother, and abusive father. As Lacan suggests in On Feminine Sexuality: The Seminar, Book XX the superego is the imperative of jouissance and jouissance fuels this films subtext. Here are two definitions of jouissance according to Lacan:

1. Jouissance as an excess of life (Seminar VII, 18th May 1960)
2. Jouissance as an enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle (Seminar X, 23rd January 1963)

Bruce’s “jouissance drive” towards the Real brings him closer and closer to the pain he’s desperately trying to avoid. Robertson is a maniac so dead set on evading “the heart”, the “Real” of love, he has enthralled himself in a desperate quest for the “filthy flesh”. Lacan situates love between the imaginary and symbolic registers; imaginary because the subject loves what they imagine to be the other and symbolic because the subject incorporates that imagined other into the greater order society establishes through language. Hate on the other hand exists between the symbolic and the Real. Love only becomes relevant in this story because of it’s direct connection to hate, as the very root from which this prickled weed grows. Lacan described hate as “inflicted love“, what happens when the object’s imaginary support collapses, and brings the subject into an uncomfortable confrontation with the Real. Hate is not the opposite of love but rather an extension of love into the Real, a mulch of fallen roses if you will. His hate is not directed at an external other but rather at himself and the world he destroys as he destroys himself. He doesn’t hate his child or wife who left him, he loves them, and turns the hate inward out of a deep sense of guilt, but then back out towards the world unable to manage the absence (of love, personified by wife and child).

Sex becomes Bruce’s narcissistic escape, masking the terrifying void and feeding his self-centered ego, ironically maintaining the cycle of guilt once his corroded imaginary “masculine power” dissipates. As soon as love enters the picture, Bruce finds away to avoid “her”. His exploits are Bad Lieutenant to the next level. Rather than approach sex as a Don Juan (the slave according to Lacan), who’s appeal comes from the seeming lack of need to fill the void, Bruce is full of emptiness and narcissistic desire. A true castrated subject; an extreme masculine. I found this particularly interesting in light of the trend I’ve noticed in general dual gender sexualization; where as women tend to escape the body into emotions, men escape emotions into the body. Current prevailing constructions of gender within the symbolic render the male as an emotional cripple so to speak. Women face biological limitations, and sufferings such as monthly cycles and child births, while men die a million deaths, unable to express emotional intimacy socially and therefore confined to grow hard and coarse, to suffer in solitary. This is the anti-substance of fragile masculinity, the “lack” that bred a devil.

As Diana Rabinovich suggests in Don Juan as Slave, women lack nothing in the Real, “…the relation between the lack involved in castration and desire, is not a necessary knot for women. He (Lacan) goes on to characterize man’s anxiety as related to the possibility of “not being able to” [ne pas pouvoir].” The masculine subject within the contemporary symbolic realm is trapped in a system of compensation for what is missing. What some call “fragile masculinity” is actually an excess in the masculine. The chauvinistic male fears gays because gays reveal something of themselves which they must deny to maintain their “entirety”. The “feminine” accepts the void where as the terrified masculine subject runs over the void and back around it. The gentlemen outside of the strip club Bruce attends have a rather enlightening discussion reflecting this combination of homophobic misogyny and masculine aggression which ends up incorporating something of an ironic homosexuality. It would seem the absolute of the “masculine” is a heteronorm of hidden homosexuality, specifically that of gay men, that aspect of masculine subjectivity which must remain hidden. The secret is that in every male subject there is a woman. The very creation of the castrated subject is constituted by an experience of lack which assumes an Other has an object lacking in the subject (the ‘phallus’ within castration logic), this very assumption creating the rift within the subject which draws him towards an object which contains nothing in it to fill that empty space.

The excess of what is masculine is built on an interpretation of the imminent realities around us. For Lacan, the driving-force behind the creation of the ego at the mirror stage was the prior experience of the phantasy of the fragmented body experienced when the infant is separated from the mother. The imaginary is what allows the subject to fill up the blanks so that the perceived lack of wholeness is repaired, and the subject becomes whole once again within the imaginary, to go on and build a symbolic structure to sustain reality.

This film is filled with male juvenility, and brilliant in it’s deconstruction. The masculine subject in it’s most extreme interpretation is in a word, extra. The addition of course to hide the lack. The tempo of the film bleeds of masculine drive which goes beyond itself. Beneath the externality of the masculine there is fear and desperation. Bruce is afraid of being real, as in to see the Real, and accept it’s presence, the “void” of Kabbalah, that emptiness at the origin of our disaster which drives existence towards “love”. For Bruce this is the real Real, overwhelming in it’s self denial.

Bruce’s greatest rival is Amanda Drummond (Imogen Poots), the acting Detective Investigator and leading officer for the promotion. He regularly refers to her in a a rude and condescending manor conveying an offensive sexist bigotry. Behind his arrogance however there is his fear again nagging and she knows it, she’s empowered by it. Amanda’s character is very important in this context, as she represents his arch nemesis. She’s an intelligent, and professional colleague, “liberal” and also a woman, who is able to succeed despite her sex. She has all the traits Bruce lacks, and most of all, she is humane. She actually can care for other individuals, and still be strong and accomplish. She subverts him with her role, overcoming his aggression and excess with poise, intelligence, and most importantly “heart” (love). And this is how she breaks Bruce down. As Jung suggests, “Whenever life proceeds one-sidedly in any given direction, the self-regulation of the organism produces in the unconscious an accumulation of all those factors which play too small a part in the individual’s conscious existence.” In Bruce’s case, the “feminine'” becomes the shadow. When a man curtails or represses his feminine shadow (anima) suppressing it from his identity, the anima comes back to haunt him in monstrous/obscene feminine figures in which he is not able to recognize himself, and the man experiences them as brutal foreign intrusions, aka “imaginary Reals” (Zizek).

For Bruce and Amanda the ultimate showdown comes when Amanda catches Bruce in the ladies room (how poetic) and confesses to worrying about his mental health which he of course must make into a fantasy of her lusting after him. She counters cleverly calling him out on his tendency to prey on women’s desperations to boost his own “shattered ego“. He transforms her rejection into her being a lesbian. Her next counter is talk of her boyfriend, and his larger “endowment” (literal phallus), calling Bruce out for his “photocopy enlargement techniques“. Here’s where things almost get ugly as he explodes and grabs her pinning her up against the wall, nearly to the point of physical violence, the ultimate act of impotence, when one no longer has the words (symbolic). The lack hath never been more obvious. Finally he gets a hold of himself and breaks down before her, confessing that his family had left him and that he can’t remember why. Only moments later this moment of vulnerability is broken by the intrusion of another hallucination, that of a witch in place of Amanda’s face. The imaginary Real exposes itself now that he comes so close to the real Real. His broken heart reminds him of the void so he lashes out. Later he has a hallucination of the Nazi fascist Hitler himself during sex, evidence of his psychosis spilling over.

“I’m in charge. I’m in charge of me… I’m in charge of this investigation, and don’t you ever fucking forget that.” – Bruce Robertson

No one ever has object a, and that’s the trick. When you actually attain the object, it’s revealed to be empty of that which you seek (wholeness, completeness ect). The substance will continue to allude you. The ex-wife of his daydreams is the “object petite a”. The film is the excess of jouissance, the tale of broken “realities”, warning you to be careful with that symbolic real, you could break it. Everyone in Bruce’s world is both an enemy and an much needed companion. Each of his coworkers, cops in competition for another object a of status. Such hierarchal systems exploit our drives, relying on and benefiting off our rivalries and antagonisms. There’s plenty more there to discuss about the cultural structures which thrive on such toxic social relations however I’ll leave that for another post. To conclude this critique, I’ll ask you to recall Bruce spiraling completely out of control by the end of the film, dressing in drag trying to as he says “Keep her close” to him. He finally sees his ex and child at the supermarket with presumably her new husband just before running into the only people he shows any genuine warmth or compassion for at that same market, a widow named Mary (Joanne Froggatt) and her young son, the child of a man whom Robertson tries and fails to resuscitate after he suffers a heart attack in the street. For Bruce Mary represents his own wife and that imaginary wholeness he perceives in the object. Wholeness in phallocentric terms is something hard, and imovable, however if one cannot relate with the softness of compassion for self (nurture), how can one empathise with the other? The softness of femininity and hardness of the masculine must not be exclusive or incontaminable, that was “his” logic, and his end was self-destructive.