Dis/liking disgust: the revulsion experience at the movies

Abstract

Disgust is a frequent and often powerful part of the cinematic experience – from horror movies and teenage comedies to fantasy films and art-house pictures. This paper aims in three directions: (a) it sheds light on the structure of the cinematic disgust experience; (b) it points out aesthetic strategies that provoke disgust effectively; (c) it tries to identify what aesthetic functions disgust might have. In the first part I argue that the revulsion experience implies the obtrusive closeness of a disgusting filmic object (or act) and a peculiar constriction of the viewer's lived body. Both characteristics can lead to aversive reactions like looking away or moaning, which in turn have a relieving quality since they enable a more appropriate aesthetic distance and an expansion of the lived body. Looking at Pasolini's Salò and the teenage comedy National Lampoon's Van Wilder, I subsequently show how disgust can be produced and intensified aesthetically: through the choice of potent disgusting objects, the use of close-ups as well as the involvement with characters via somatic empathy and sympathy. The paper ends with a discussion of the main functions of disgust: pleasure and provocation.

Keywords:

• aesthetics of disgust
• cinéma vomitif
• phenomenology
• synaesthesia
• Pasolini's Salò
• National Lampoon's Van Wilder

Acknowledgements

This paper is part of a series of articles in which I deal with strong lived-body experiences such as the cinematic shock and weeping at the movies (see references). I would like to thank Tarja Laine, Wanda Strauven, and Vivian Sobchack for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

^1. The aspect of phenomenological closeness is also present in Walter Benjamin's famous formula of the film's ‘tactile’ quality that ‘periodically assail[s] the spectator’ (1968, 238). In our context it might be interesting to note that at this point in his text Benjamin draws a tight connection to the Dadaist work of art with its ‘obscenities’ and ‘waste products of language’ whose foremost requirement was to cause a ‘scandal’ and to ‘outrage the public’. For Benjamin, the Dadaist work of art functioned like an ‘instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality.’ As such, it resembles the film in general – and, we might add, disgusting scenes more specifically (1968, 237, 238).

^2. As phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels notes: ‘The oculocentrism of a certain occidental tradition relies on a misconception of the view which equates seeing with the seen’ (1999, 127, my translation). Similarly, Erwin Straus points out: ‘In seeing, too, we not only experience the seen but also ourselves as someone who sees’ (1956, 393, my translation). While in the phenomenological tradition it was Erwin Straus who underscored the affective (or ‘pathic’) aspect of all sense modalities most vigorously, in film studies Laura Marks reminded us that instances of visuality mark a continuum between the distant and the embodied, the optical and the haptic (Marks, 2000, 132).

^3. Against the analytical tendencies of the natural sciences, which presume that the singular is the primary and therefore dissociate what we in fact experience as unified, phenomenological film theory holds that the sense organs of the human body are not functionally independent – a centralizing self always synthesizes the empirically discrete perceptions (Sobchack 2004). The concept of synaesthesia is therefore at the heart of our disgust experience at the movies. Although I cannot touch Freddy Krueger's revolting skin directly; although the smell of faeces in Salò remains vague; although I am not able to taste the flavour of the parasites crawling out of the characters' mouths in Cronenberg's Shivers (1975), I nevertheless have a partially fulfilled sensory experience of disgusting touch, smell, and taste. The multisensory quality of the film's disgusting object is, of course, modified and restrained in comparison to the real thing. Each sense provides a specific access to the world, and they are transposable into each other's domain only within certain limits (Sobchack 2004, 72).

^4. For the communicative function and pleasurable potential of screaming in moments of shock (or ‘startle’), see Hanich, Forthcoming. For the non-communicativeness of weeping (not crying!) at the movies, see Hanich, 2008.

^5. The outward tendency of laughing or giggling is, by the way, the reason why splatter movies can easily move from humour to disgust and back again. Think of horror films like Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy or Peter Jackson's Braindead (1992). It also helps to explain the possibility of combining disgust and humour in comedies like There's Something About Mary or National Lampoon's Van Wilder, of which I have more to say at the end of the paper.

^6. In her monograph on Pasolini, Naomi Greene argues that the director was ‘impelled by a desire to be scandalous’: ‘Pasolini's decision to set Sade's novel in Fascist Italy – like the very choice of Les 120 Journées de Sodome – reflected nothing less than a desire to fashion one of the most extremist, perhaps the most extremist, films ever made’ (1990, 207).