“No one can hate you more than I do”: The perverse interplay of life and death drives in Roman Polanski’s film Bitter Moon

ABSTRACT

In this paper, the authors explore the depiction of perversion and the associated interplay of life and death drives in Roman Polanski’s 1992 film Bitter Moon. To begin with, a theoretical discussion is presented regarding perverse organizations of mastery and sadomasochism. Perversion is viewed as an expression of the death drive under erotic disguise, in which the destructive fingerprint of the death drive is revealed at every stage, having as its ultimate purpose the destruction of the other. Based on these theoretical insights a dialogue is developed with Polanski’s film, which brings to life the theory of sadomasochistic relations through the multidimensional aesthetic medium of cinema. It is shown how Polanski’s cinematic oeuvre conveys the essence of the difficult and complex experience of perverse relations, where the life and death drives and their transformations are manifested. The portrayal of the sadomasochistic relations in this film contributes to the experiential knowledge with which the authors promote insight that would potentially enrich the clinical work with patients with perverse organizations.

KEYWORDS:

• Perversion
• sadomasochism
• life and death drives
• eros and thanatos
• psychoanalysis and film
• interdisciplinary studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This echoes Hegel’s discussion of the master and the slave (Hegel and Inwood 2018, 72–94).

2 The severity of the threat determines the level of psychopathology. According to Meltzer (1973), the pathology scale is as follows: normal—obsessive—perverse—psychotic.

3 As is the case in Woody Allen’s film Zelig (1983), and as in Dana Amir’s book On the Lyricism of the Mind: Psychoanalysis and Literature (2015).

4 This is an example of what Eric Brenman (1985) calls narrow-mindedness, which leaves no manoeuvring space and eventually leads necessarily to cruelty.

5 “In the personality where life instincts predominate, pride becomes self-respect, where death instincts predominate, pride becomes arrogance” (Bion 1958, 144).

6 This calls to mind the theme of the film The Night Porter (1974) and the book Passage Through the Red Sea by Zofia Romanowicz (1962).