Siblings, sex, and shame: The film Shame (2011)

ABSTRACT

Shame is a hidden emotion. The organs of shame are the eyes; when we feel ashamed, we want to hide, not be seen. In the film Shame, the director Steve McQueen lingers on and explores the dynamics of shame hidden behind sex addiction. I argue that shame is the underlying cause of the sex addiction here, while there is also a vicious cycle, as addiction invariably turns into a new source of shame. The focus on the phenomenology of shame, in the here and now of the film, reveals two siblings struggling with threats of vulnerability, neediness, helplessness, and unlovability. One sibling presents a meticulously neat appearance, and his mask-like face functions as an invulnerable armor against shame, while the other sibling has no armor against her neediness and helplessness. We witness the vicissitudes of their shame and are left wondering whether their encounter, which ends in a suicide attempt and in the unravelling of defensive enactments, leads to a possibility of transformation and internal change. The director ends the film abruptly and inconclusively, sending us back into it to review and search nachträglich for clues to the outcome.

KEYWORDS:

• Shame
• addiction
• incest

Notes

1 The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein showed that the meaning and use of concepts are shaped by overlapping resemblances, family resemblances, not by common properties. Members of families resemble one another, but are not identical; they share no one common property. When the meaning of a concept, such as shame, is explained according to the logic of family resemblances, the classical view of necessary and sufficient conditions for its correct use is supplanted by “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing, sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities in detail” (Wittgenstein 1958, 32e).