Recently, I saw Shame, the movie directed by Steve McQueen, with Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan. Great movie, I definitely recommend going to see it; however, I was struck considering how much the image the media gave of it differs from what I saw on the screen. Actually, in most of the articles that I’ve read, before and after seeing the movie, there was a common concept: the movie tells the protagonist’s sexual addiction and his gradual descent into hell because of it. Of course, it is absolutely undeniable that the movie talks about sex, that it is largely, though without morbid complacency, described. However, I do not agree with those analysis when they say that sex is the engine of the story and the cause of the crisis of the protagonist. Brandon, in the movie, is a very private man, who conceals a difficult and unresolved intimacy beneath a surface of apparent normalcy. In the same way, the film is reserved, I would say reticent, in telling us his story: what we know is told fleetingly, trusting into our intuition to reconstruct the context in which its main character moves. There is a sister, Sissy, with whom we understand that Brandon share a troubled past that has deeply affected them both (We’re not bad people. We just come from a bad place, she says). Towards her, he has mixed feelings: on the one hand, he tries to provide the support of the apparent normalcy he has built for himself, on the other he avoids her, because her presence seems to conjure up with greater force the ghosts of that past he is trying to suffocate. The movie does not say what this past is, but Brandon’s reaction when he hears his sister making love in the next room might make you guess sex and abuse had some part in their childhood. Anyway, brother and sister share it, each one trying to get out of it in his own way: Brandon depriving sex of any intimacy and emotion to make it harmless, Sissy turning her anger against herself.
Arriving in New York in an attempt to find a new beginning (as she sings in the wonderful sequence at nightclub: “if I can make it there I’ll make it anywhere“), she only manages to upset both their fragile balances: seeing the limits of his choices, he tries to react but, at the beginning of a possible loving relationship, finds out he is no more able to match sex and love and loses control of the situation; at the same time, she clashes with her own fragility and inability to manage relationships and falls again into her self-destructive behaviors. Also the fact that their crisis reach their peaks nearly simultaneously, letting us understand they are not independent, makes clear that saying that the movie talks about Brandon’s sexual addiction and that it is it that leads him to a progressive self-destruction is as absurd as it would be saying it talks about Sissy’s self-defeating dependence as the reason that will induce her suicide. They are rather, in both cases, the consequences of that shared past that now, in the contingency of a cohabitation that forces them to be reflected in each other, they are no longer able to manage.
So, one could ask why has this excellent movie been presented by the media as the film about “sexual addiction” rather than the film about “self-defeating syndrome” or, as it would have been more correctly, as the portrait of two suffering souls. Frankly, I don’t think critics and journalists have not been able to correctly understand the meaning of the movie. More trivially, to me the answer seems linked to our culture, which is at the same time sex centric and sex phobic: sex is still what sells more, but also the easiest thing to demonize. Focusing on the sex affair and its degeneration, at the expense of the real roots and elements of the story, serves, on the one hand, to stimulate the curiosity of the viewer; on the other, perpetuates a vision of sex as a corruptor that betrays the director’s meaning to represent sexuality as something neutral. Actually, it’s not sex that corrupts Brandon’s life: it’s his past that corrupts the way he lives sex. Good or bad, like the other impulses of our life, sex gets its own value only within a context which define its meaning. (By Ugo Tranquillini)
ABOUT MICHAEL FASSBENDER:
Was born in Heidelberg, West Germany (now Germany) in 1977. His mother, Adele, is Irish and a native of Larne, County Antrim, and his father, Josef Fassbender, is German. According to Fassbender’s “family lore”, his mother is the great-great-niece of Michael Collins, an Irish leader during the War of Independence. When he was two years old, his parents moved to Killarney, County Kerry, Ireland, where they ran West End House, a restaurant, and where his father worked as a chef. Fassbender was brought up as a Catholic and served as an altar boy.
He attended St. Brendan’s, Killarney (The Sem) and the Drama Centre in North London. Shifting between British films and American films, Fassbender currently resides in London, UK, while making career-related visits to Los Angeles, California. Fassbender speaks conversational German, though he has stated that he needed to brush up a bit on his spoken German before filming Inglourious Basterds, as it was a bit rusty. He has also expressed interest in performing in a German language film or theater production one day.
He is known for playing Lt. Archie Hicox in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Magneto in the superhero blockbuster X-Men: First Class (2011). His other credits include the 2007 film 300, the 2009 film Fish Tank, the 2011 Jane Eyre adaptation, the 2011 David Cronenberg film A Dangerous Method, in which he plays psychologist Carl Jung, as well as the acclaimed Steve McQueen-directed movies Hunger (2008) and Shame (2011), the most recent of which won him the Best Actor award at the 2011 Venice Film Festival. He will star in the upcoming Ridley Scott film, Prometheus (2012).
Fassbender first played the part of Burton “Pat” Christenson in Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg’s award-winning Band of Brothers. He played the character of Azazeal in both series of Hex on Sky One and he also starred as the main character in the music video for the song “Blind Pilots”, by the British band The Cooper Temple Clause. In the video, he plays the part of a man on a stag night with his friends, only to slowly transform into a goat due to wearing a cowbell necklace. He played the part of Jonathan Harker in a 10-part radio serialization of Dracula produced by BBC Northern Ireland and broadcast in the Book at Bedtime series between 24 November and 5 December 2003.
He was also seen in early 2004 in a Guinness television commercial, The Quarrel, playing a man who swims across the ocean from Ireland to apologize personally to his brother in New York. During the 2006 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Fassbender played Michael Collins in Allegiance, a play by Mary Kenny based on the meeting between Winston Churchill and Collins, of whom Fassbender’s mother is a great-niece. In addition, he produced, directed and starred in the stage version of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, along with his production company. He appeared in Angel (UK title: The Real Life of Angel Deverell), about the rise and fall of an eccentric young British writer (played by Romola Garai) in the early 20th century.
Fassbender plays her love interest and average painter Esmé. The drama – the first English-language effort by French director François Ozon and based on the novel by Elizabeth Taylor – was premiered on 17 February 2007 at the Berlin International Film Festival and on 14 March 2007 in Paris. He then made a brief appearance in Wedding Belles as Barney, speaking with a Scottish accent. Fassbender first broke into American mainstream consciousness with a memorable role as Stelios in the 2006 film 300 directed by Zack Snyder.
In preparation for his role as Provisional Irish Republican Army prisoner Bobby Sands in Steve McQueen’s 2008 film Hunger, Fassbender underwent a crash diet that restricted him to 600 calories a day. He received the British Independent Film Award for his performance. One year after his success at the Cannes Film Festival with Hunger, he appeared in two films. First was Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, in which he played the British officer Lieutenant Archie Hicox. The other film was Fish Tank directed by Andrea Arnold. Both were critically acclaimed and Fassbender’s work in them also well received.
Starting a period when his “star status has risen exponentially” according to one observer, in 2010, Fassbender appeared in Jonah Hex and filmed Haywire, (previously titled Knockout.). He also portrayed Quintus Dias in Neil Marshall’s War-Thriller-Drama film Centurion. and was cast as ‘Richard Wirth’ in the Joel Schumacher film Blood Creek alongside Dominic Purcell. Joel Schumacher signed to direct Blood Creek, the horror movie for Gold Circle and Lionsgate. The story centers on a West Virginia man who comes to terms with his moral qualms and helps his brother wipe out a family that had been protecting a Nazi occultist and who had kept his brother captive for him to feed off for years. Fassbender played Edward Rochester in the 2011 film Jane Eyre, featuring Mia Wasikowska in the title role, with Cary Fukunaga directing.
Fassbender portrayed Magneto in the superhero blockbuster X-Men: First Class, the prequel to X-Men. Set in 1962, it focused on the friendship between Charles Xavier (played by James McAvoy) and Magneto and the origin of their groups, the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Mutants. The film was released on 3 June 2011 to general acclaim and financial success and promoted Fassbender to being more of a popular movie star. In 2011, Fassbender starred in A Dangerous Method by director David Cronenberg, playing Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist Carl Jung, and in Shame, as a man in his ’30s struggling with his sex addiction. Shame reunited him with director Steve McQueen, and premiered at the 2011 Venice Film Festival, where Fassbender won a Volpi Cup best actor award for his portrayal of Brandon. A Dangerous Method was also shown at Venice. Fassbender was nominated for a Golden Globe in 2012 for his portrayal of Brandon in Shame, but eventually lost out to George Clooney.
Fassbender will star in Prometheus, directed by Ridley Scott, and co-starring Noomi Rapace. He will play an android named David in the film, scheduled for release on June 8, 2012. Due to a schedule conflict, Fassbender had to pull out of negotiations to work with Oscar-winning director, Danny Boyle, in his new film, Trance. Also he will be seen in movie theatres playing Paul in Haywire by Steven Soderbergh, an international action/thriller film. Fassbender has signed on to star in actor Brendan Gleeson’s directorial debut of At Swim-Two-Birds, a film adaptation of Irish author Flann O’Brien’s novel. Another project has been announced to add to Michael’s developing filming schedule for 2012, he will team up for a third time with Hunger and Shame director Steve McQueen, to co-star in a yet to be determined role, with Chiwetel Ejiofor, portraying Solomon Northup, in Twelve Years A Slave. In 2013, Fassbender is set to take on the role of Harry Flashman in a film adaptation of the books by George MacDonald Fraser. For more information visit also the links below.
www.michael-fassbender.net
www.michaelfassbender.org
www.michael-fassbender.us
www.michaelfassbender.tumblr.com