Abstract
Thomas Clay’s debut feature, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael (2005), combines highly stylised compositions and meticulous – at times virtuosic – camera movement with representations of extreme sexual violence that, in their graphic and visceral intensity, rival the most gut-wrenching moments of ‘French extremist’ cinema. While most film critics savaged the film, The Observer’s Phillip French was more generous. He recognised ‘poise’ in the fledgling filmmaker, though he quickly conditioned this assessment by positing that much of the film’s visual rigor was undoubtedly the result of the contributions of Theo Angelopoulos’ and Catherine Breillat’s longtime collaborator/cinematographer, Yorgos Arvantis. While French is correct that Arvantis’ bravura tracking shots assist Clay in realising his disturbing vision, his review, like many others, ultimately approaches Clay’s film through a conspicuously oblique rhetorical strategy: comparison. While by no means unusual within the discourse of film analysis, this approach seems appropriately ironic, and perhaps unavoidable, when discussing Clay’s notorious debut feature. For, as a careful close reading of the controversial film reveals, it is mediation as technological process and ontological practice that ultimately emerges as one of the film’s dominant themes, as well as Clay’s primary political and aesthetic strategy. In this sense, the ‘great ecstasy’ of the film’s title is, to appropriate a phrase from Jean Baudrillard, nothing less than the ‘ecstasy of communication’. As this essay demonstrates, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael is a startlingly accomplished and philosophically complex work that examines the plurality of intersections emerging at the very core of film spectatorship itself, namely the negotiation between text and context, image and idea.
Key Words: Thomas Clay; class; gender; rape; violence; cinematography; Stanley Kubrick; analysis; spectatorship; mediation
Widely excoriated upon its release in 2005, Thomas Clay’s debut feature, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, combines highly stylised compositions and meticulous – at times virtuosic – camera movement with representations of extreme sexual violence that, in their graphic and visceral intensity, rival the most gut–wrenching moments of ‘French extremist’ works like Coralie Trinh Thi and Virginie Despentes’ Baise–moi (2000) or Gaspar Noe’s Irréversible (2002). However, unlike these films, whose insightful critical defenders included internationally acclaimed scholars like Nicole Brenez and David Sterritt, even the more positive reflections upon The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael have been restrained at best. Writing for the Guardian, for example, Peter Bradshaw described The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael as a ‘deeply horrible and objectionable film’ in the style of ‘European extreme cinema’. [1] Similarly, in his slightly more generous review for The Observer, Phillip French quickly conditioned his recognition of the fledgling filmmaker’s ‘poise’ by noting that much of the film’s visual rigor was undoubtedly the result of the contributions of Theo Angelopoulos’ and Catherine Breillat’s longtime collaborator/cinematographer, Yorgos Arvantis. [2] In his review for Total Film, Jamie Graham, while by no means adulatory, positions Clay’s portrait of disaffected Newhaven teenagers within a cinematic tradition that includes ‘Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Haneke’s Funny Games, and Bergman’s The Virgin Spring’. [3]
While French is correct that Arvantis’ bravura tracking shots assist Clay in realising his disturbing vision, his review, like Bradshaw’s and Graham’s assessments, approaches The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael through a conspicuously oblique rhetorical strategy: comparison. While by no means unusual within the discourse of film analysis (see this essay’s opening sentence), this approach seems appropriately ironic, and perhaps ultimately unavoidable, when discussing Clay’s notorious debut feature. For, as a careful close reading of the film’s form and content reveals, it is mediation as technological process and ontological practice that ultimately emerges as one of the dominant themes within the film’s diegesis, as well as Clay’s primary political and aesthetic strategy. In this sense, the ‘great ecstasy’ of the film’s title is, to appropriate a phrase from Jean Baudrillard, nothing less than the ‘ecstasy of communication’. As this essay demonstrates, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael is a startlingly accomplished and philosophically complex work that examines the plurality of intersections emerging at the very core of film spectatorship itself, namely the negotiation between text and context, image and idea.
Few critics would argue that Clay’s film lacks its share of sensationalistic content. Indeed, the inclusion of highly disturbing and occasionally graphic depictions of physical and sexual violence – including one of the most brutal depictions of sexual assault in film history – has almost single–handedly accounted for the majority of the invectives directed towards Clay’s feature. BBC film critic Jamie Russell, for instance, claims that the violent scenes punctuating the film’s narrative lend themselves to being potentially misunderstood as ‘shock tactics’ orchestrated merely to incite spectators rather than as set pieces that provide valuable insight into why such intense conflicts could, and do, occur. Such negative receptions and ‘outright dismiss[als]’ of the film’s more extreme content unfortunately blind viewers to the work’s larger socio–political revelations. [4] ‘Shock tactics’, as theorists of visual culture like Sean Cubitt have demonstrated, can even be said to serve vital progressive purposes. By making ‘sensation an end in itself’, artists ‘challenge as radically and as deeply as possible every aspect of the audience’s physical, emotional and intellectual life’ through an aggressively immediate confrontation with ‘death, finality, the sublime, the abject, the incommunicable, and the timeless that violently compels viewers to re–acclimate themselves emotionally and haptically to the simulated world on the screen’. [5] This cinematic gesture reinforces, if only momentarily, the spectator’s awareness of the schism between the images and the ideas we impose upon them, allowing for a more active engagement with the implied logics behind the depicted acts of extreme violence. One could even go so far as to assert that reducing The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael to an inconsequential exercise in ‘transgressive cinema’ created for the purpose of offending audience sensibilities is not simply missing the forest for the trees, but deliberately cutting down all of the trees with a hatchet and then complaining that nobody ever showed you a forest in the first place.
What, then, are the cultural critiques informing Thomas Clay’s The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, and how do they emerge from a comprehension of mediation as a rhetorical and socio-political practice?
The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael presents a fictional portrait of the fishing community of Newhaven, a township in which the gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ has become a nearly unbridgeable chasm. Faced with diminishing employment opportunities and restricted chances for upward mobility, the film’s eponymous teenage cellist and his friends Ben, Joe and Larry meander through a cultural landscape marked by disillusionment and despair. Additionally, although Clay’s camera mainly follows the exploits of his teen protagonists, much of Newhaven’s adult population, particularly the parents and teachers to whom we are introduced, barely mask their own despondency over their variably precarious positions within a society fueled by exploitative labour practices that create a sporadic and ultimately disposable work force to which only a select few have increasingly tenuous access.
In one of the film’s early sequences, for example, Robert’s friend Joe, having been expelled from school during what would have been his final year, visits a pub in the middle of the day. There, he meets up with his father and several of his father’s friends. The men, struggling to find consistent work in the town’s fishing industry, drink beer and complain about unfair labour practices, including their employer’s failure to provide any compensation to a new widow and her children following a fisherman’s death while at work. When Joe enquires about finding work on one of the boats, his query is met with mildly derisive laughter. ‘You’d be lucky, mate,’ one of Joe’s father’s friends flatly states. ‘There ain’t enough work to go around as it is, you know that.’
An important component in the film’s depiction of social class relations and labour alienation is the inclusion of a conspicuously wealthy couple: Jonathan Abbott, a chef and prominent television personality with a lucrative book deal, and his glamorous, newly pregnant wife, Monica. Cruising through Newhaven in expensive sports cars and estranged from the general population through their bourgeois lifestyle (pilates classes, L.A. shopping expeditions, etc.), they are seemingly oblivious to the gap between their privileged position and the daily trials and tribulations of the people with whom they occasionally interact. In a narrative detail that directly contrasts the chef’s ravenous consumerism with the plight of the exploited workers in the pub scene discussed above, Jonathan giddily celebrates his purchase of an enormous fish. ‘It was so cheap,’ he remarks, as if the actual cost of the food were ultimately reducible to the sale price rather than the physical labour and the time expended by the workers on the fishing boats. Given the chef’s inability to recognise the human labour value behind his acquisition, his wife’s subsequent remark that ‘it’s only a fish’ – a statement originally voiced to ease her husband’s disappointment at potentially having to freeze his culinary conquest – assumes a far more profound resonance.
As the exchange in the pub deftly illustrates, it is by no means ‘only a fish’; rather, it is emblematic of the very livelihood and economic (in)security of Newhaven’s residents. This is not to suggest that Clay depicts the upwardly mobile couple as monolithically antagonistic. Their prattle may seem banal and clichéd, but they are not portrayed as void of feeling. They are presented as very much in love, and although their social relations with the Newhaven community borders on the painfully naïve or the insultingly condescending, Clay is careful to avoid letting his portrait of the wealthy couple slip into dehumanising parody. The chef happily obliges when asked to speak at the high school music recital, and his wife politely resists clumsy flirtations that she sees as unwelcome and sexist intrusions upon her personal space. Indeed, if Clay had not resisted easy narrative reductionism, the notorious assault that comprises the film’s climax would fail to elicit the visceral reactions experienced by audiences.
Thus, a concentrated engagement with the aesthetics and politics of the presentation/re–presentation of violent images is crucial to understanding Thomas Clay’s ultimate project in The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, and an exploration of mediation as a discursive practice constitutes a vital first step to revealing the film’s systemic critique. Of course, as a filmmaker, Clay is well aware of the power of images and the influence that cinema can have over how people conceptualise themselves and the world in which they live. He even goes so far as to have Robert’s teacher lecture to a classroom of largely uninterested students about the more obvious – and, hence, perhaps the most pernicious – impacts of motion pictures and other technologies upon the cultural imagination:
Thomas Clay’s debut feature, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael (2005), combines highly stylised compositions and meticulous – at times virtuosic – camera movement with representations of extreme sexual violence that, in their graphic and visceral intensity, rival the most gut-wrenching moments of ‘French extremist’ cinema. While most film critics savaged the film, The Observer’s Phillip French was more generous. He recognised ‘poise’ in the fledgling filmmaker, though he quickly conditioned this assessment by positing that much of the film’s visual rigor was undoubtedly the result of the contributions of Theo Angelopoulos’ and Catherine Breillat’s longtime collaborator/cinematographer, Yorgos Arvantis. While French is correct that Arvantis’ bravura tracking shots assist Clay in realising his disturbing vision, his review, like many others, ultimately approaches Clay’s film through a conspicuously oblique rhetorical strategy: comparison. While by no means unusual within the discourse of film analysis, this approach seems appropriately ironic, and perhaps unavoidable, when discussing Clay’s notorious debut feature. For, as a careful close reading of the controversial film reveals, it is mediation as technological process and ontological practice that ultimately emerges as one of the film’s dominant themes, as well as Clay’s primary political and aesthetic strategy. In this sense, the ‘great ecstasy’ of the film’s title is, to appropriate a phrase from Jean Baudrillard, nothing less than the ‘ecstasy of communication’. As this essay demonstrates, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael is a startlingly accomplished and philosophically complex work that examines the plurality of intersections emerging at the very core of film spectatorship itself, namely the negotiation between text and context, image and idea.
Key Words: Thomas Clay; class; gender; rape; violence; cinematography; Stanley Kubrick; analysis; spectatorship; mediation
Widely excoriated upon its release in 2005, Thomas Clay’s debut feature, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, combines highly stylised compositions and meticulous – at times virtuosic – camera movement with representations of extreme sexual violence that, in their graphic and visceral intensity, rival the most gut–wrenching moments of ‘French extremist’ works like Coralie Trinh Thi and Virginie Despentes’ Baise–moi (2000) or Gaspar Noe’s Irréversible (2002). However, unlike these films, whose insightful critical defenders included internationally acclaimed scholars like Nicole Brenez and David Sterritt, even the more positive reflections upon The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael have been restrained at best. Writing for the Guardian, for example, Peter Bradshaw described The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael as a ‘deeply horrible and objectionable film’ in the style of ‘European extreme cinema’. [1] Similarly, in his slightly more generous review for The Observer, Phillip French quickly conditioned his recognition of the fledgling filmmaker’s ‘poise’ by noting that much of the film’s visual rigor was undoubtedly the result of the contributions of Theo Angelopoulos’ and Catherine Breillat’s longtime collaborator/cinematographer, Yorgos Arvantis. [2] In his review for Total Film, Jamie Graham, while by no means adulatory, positions Clay’s portrait of disaffected Newhaven teenagers within a cinematic tradition that includes ‘Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Haneke’s Funny Games, and Bergman’s The Virgin Spring’. [3]
While French is correct that Arvantis’ bravura tracking shots assist Clay in realising his disturbing vision, his review, like Bradshaw’s and Graham’s assessments, approaches The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael through a conspicuously oblique rhetorical strategy: comparison. While by no means unusual within the discourse of film analysis (see this essay’s opening sentence), this approach seems appropriately ironic, and perhaps ultimately unavoidable, when discussing Clay’s notorious debut feature. For, as a careful close reading of the film’s form and content reveals, it is mediation as technological process and ontological practice that ultimately emerges as one of the dominant themes within the film’s diegesis, as well as Clay’s primary political and aesthetic strategy. In this sense, the ‘great ecstasy’ of the film’s title is, to appropriate a phrase from Jean Baudrillard, nothing less than the ‘ecstasy of communication’. As this essay demonstrates, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael is a startlingly accomplished and philosophically complex work that examines the plurality of intersections emerging at the very core of film spectatorship itself, namely the negotiation between text and context, image and idea.
Few critics would argue that Clay’s film lacks its share of sensationalistic content. Indeed, the inclusion of highly disturbing and occasionally graphic depictions of physical and sexual violence – including one of the most brutal depictions of sexual assault in film history – has almost single–handedly accounted for the majority of the invectives directed towards Clay’s feature. BBC film critic Jamie Russell, for instance, claims that the violent scenes punctuating the film’s narrative lend themselves to being potentially misunderstood as ‘shock tactics’ orchestrated merely to incite spectators rather than as set pieces that provide valuable insight into why such intense conflicts could, and do, occur. Such negative receptions and ‘outright dismiss[als]’ of the film’s more extreme content unfortunately blind viewers to the work’s larger socio–political revelations. [4] ‘Shock tactics’, as theorists of visual culture like Sean Cubitt have demonstrated, can even be said to serve vital progressive purposes. By making ‘sensation an end in itself’, artists ‘challenge as radically and as deeply as possible every aspect of the audience’s physical, emotional and intellectual life’ through an aggressively immediate confrontation with ‘death, finality, the sublime, the abject, the incommunicable, and the timeless that violently compels viewers to re–acclimate themselves emotionally and haptically to the simulated world on the screen’. [5] This cinematic gesture reinforces, if only momentarily, the spectator’s awareness of the schism between the images and the ideas we impose upon them, allowing for a more active engagement with the implied logics behind the depicted acts of extreme violence. One could even go so far as to assert that reducing The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael to an inconsequential exercise in ‘transgressive cinema’ created for the purpose of offending audience sensibilities is not simply missing the forest for the trees, but deliberately cutting down all of the trees with a hatchet and then complaining that nobody ever showed you a forest in the first place.
What, then, are the cultural critiques informing Thomas Clay’s The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, and how do they emerge from a comprehension of mediation as a rhetorical and socio-political practice?
The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael presents a fictional portrait of the fishing community of Newhaven, a township in which the gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ has become a nearly unbridgeable chasm. Faced with diminishing employment opportunities and restricted chances for upward mobility, the film’s eponymous teenage cellist and his friends Ben, Joe and Larry meander through a cultural landscape marked by disillusionment and despair. Additionally, although Clay’s camera mainly follows the exploits of his teen protagonists, much of Newhaven’s adult population, particularly the parents and teachers to whom we are introduced, barely mask their own despondency over their variably precarious positions within a society fueled by exploitative labour practices that create a sporadic and ultimately disposable work force to which only a select few have increasingly tenuous access.
In one of the film’s early sequences, for example, Robert’s friend Joe, having been expelled from school during what would have been his final year, visits a pub in the middle of the day. There, he meets up with his father and several of his father’s friends. The men, struggling to find consistent work in the town’s fishing industry, drink beer and complain about unfair labour practices, including their employer’s failure to provide any compensation to a new widow and her children following a fisherman’s death while at work. When Joe enquires about finding work on one of the boats, his query is met with mildly derisive laughter. ‘You’d be lucky, mate,’ one of Joe’s father’s friends flatly states. ‘There ain’t enough work to go around as it is, you know that.’
An important component in the film’s depiction of social class relations and labour alienation is the inclusion of a conspicuously wealthy couple: Jonathan Abbott, a chef and prominent television personality with a lucrative book deal, and his glamorous, newly pregnant wife, Monica. Cruising through Newhaven in expensive sports cars and estranged from the general population through their bourgeois lifestyle (pilates classes, L.A. shopping expeditions, etc.), they are seemingly oblivious to the gap between their privileged position and the daily trials and tribulations of the people with whom they occasionally interact. In a narrative detail that directly contrasts the chef’s ravenous consumerism with the plight of the exploited workers in the pub scene discussed above, Jonathan giddily celebrates his purchase of an enormous fish. ‘It was so cheap,’ he remarks, as if the actual cost of the food were ultimately reducible to the sale price rather than the physical labour and the time expended by the workers on the fishing boats. Given the chef’s inability to recognise the human labour value behind his acquisition, his wife’s subsequent remark that ‘it’s only a fish’ – a statement originally voiced to ease her husband’s disappointment at potentially having to freeze his culinary conquest – assumes a far more profound resonance.
As the exchange in the pub deftly illustrates, it is by no means ‘only a fish’; rather, it is emblematic of the very livelihood and economic (in)security of Newhaven’s residents. This is not to suggest that Clay depicts the upwardly mobile couple as monolithically antagonistic. Their prattle may seem banal and clichéd, but they are not portrayed as void of feeling. They are presented as very much in love, and although their social relations with the Newhaven community borders on the painfully naïve or the insultingly condescending, Clay is careful to avoid letting his portrait of the wealthy couple slip into dehumanising parody. The chef happily obliges when asked to speak at the high school music recital, and his wife politely resists clumsy flirtations that she sees as unwelcome and sexist intrusions upon her personal space. Indeed, if Clay had not resisted easy narrative reductionism, the notorious assault that comprises the film’s climax would fail to elicit the visceral reactions experienced by audiences.
Thus, a concentrated engagement with the aesthetics and politics of the presentation/re–presentation of violent images is crucial to understanding Thomas Clay’s ultimate project in The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, and an exploration of mediation as a discursive practice constitutes a vital first step to revealing the film’s systemic critique. Of course, as a filmmaker, Clay is well aware of the power of images and the influence that cinema can have over how people conceptualise themselves and the world in which they live. He even goes so far as to have Robert’s teacher lecture to a classroom of largely uninterested students about the more obvious – and, hence, perhaps the most pernicious – impacts of motion pictures and other technologies upon the cultural imagination:
There is no such thing in the media as objective reality. Now, think of all of the films we’ve looked at today. Lifeboat, Le Corbeau, Saving Private Ryan, Come and See… Now the point is all these films deal with the Second World War, but each gives us a different version, a different interpretation. Now it’s different because it’s filtered through the perception and ideology of its creator… This doesn’t just apply to fiction. It applies to all forms of media: newspapers, broadcasting, documentary filmmaking… The media is media because it mediates between you and the reality it seeks to represent.
The curriculum Robert’s teacher espouses begs viewers to consider the efficacy of one of the more (stereo)typical and short-sighted neoliberal responses to mass media’s perceived coercive potential. Specifically, by asking his students to ealizati that the media functions as a mechanism for furthering subjective agendas, Robert’s teacher fails to consider how the ealization he wants his class to make is itself an integral component of a culture’s ideology, of the society’s ‘imaginary relationship…to their real conditions of existence’. [6] In other words, if, as Marx posits, ideology is a kind of ‘distorted conception’ comprised of what people do when they don’t know that they are doing it, then the lesson Robert’s teacher endeavors to impart fails in that it doesn’t go far enough in its consideration of how ideas, beliefs, and prejudices circulate. [7] As Todd McGowan notes in The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan, ‘[o]ne does not resist ideology through the act of becoming conscious’. [8] Rather, ‘consciousness is itself a mode of inserting oneself into ideology and avoiding one’s unconscious desire. Ideology operates not only in unconscious ways, but also through the illusion of consciousness itself – namely, the assumption of mastery implicit in consciousness with vision that allows us not to see the role of the gaze in structuring our vision.’ [9]
Robert’s teacher further perpetuates this ‘illusion of mastery’ through his coordination of the class project: a collaborative student-produced video that replicates conventional war films while using local landmarks and monuments to Great Britain’s former military supremacy as convenient (if unconvincing) settings and props. Removed from any significant connection with the historical moment they are charged to recreate, the students’ performances vacillate between rote utterances inflected by anachronistic colloquialisms, and melodramatic pronouncements that foreground the clichéd content of many World War II films. Rather than contextualising the students’ work in relation to his previous explanation of mediation and ideology, or even locating the politics of the 1930s and 1940s in relation to the news reports of the US-led invasion of Iraq that fills virtually every television screen we see in The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, the teacher rushes the students from scene to scene in an effort to get the assignment finished as quickly as possible.
The depiction of the class project affords Clay the opportunity to make valuable observations. The first of these transpires when Robert and a fellow student clash over the placement of the school’s video camera and, consequently, the composition of a single shot. Frustrated by his classmate’s criticism of his arrangement, Robert lashes out violently, knocking the camera and tripod to the ground, and beating his peer so viciously that he has to be physically pulled off of his bloodied classmate and restrained. This attack, though clearly an overreaction on Robert’s part, comes as little surprise given an earlier scene in which the introverted, seemingly sensitive cellist is verbally chastised by a group of fellow students. ‘Keep your filthy eyes to yourself, Robert Carmichael,’ a young woman sneers when she catches him looking at her as she passes; adding, in an aside that takes on a chillingly ironic connotation given Robert’s character arc, ‘he’s such a rapist’. An awkward, marginalised teenager, Robert absorbs the verbal assault with a disquieting indifference, a response that allows for a plurality of potential readings of his character, including that he may morph into one of cinema’s more resilient dramatic tropes – the figurative walking time-bomb. In addition, Robert’s violent eruption during this class project conforms to the logic informing many of the film’s violent scenes: repressed anger and gender-based insecurities manifest themselves in what is, on the surface at any rate, an apparently unrelated moment of frustration. The altercation is nothing more than a struggle for representation, a violent contestation between two males vying for control of vision/the image in a culture in which economic crisis has led to widespread class and gender alienation.
Furthermore, the collaborative class project, like the school recital at which Robert displays his musical talent before embarking on a night of rape and murder, posits insufficiently reflective art as an inadequate response to the cultural inequities inherent within the contemporary social relations. The performance at the recital, while technically proficient and aesthetically pleasing, apparently lacks any significant meaning for either the students (absurdly touted as ‘stars of the future’) or the audience. With dour expressions and rigid postures, the students robotically ‘go through the motions’ before an audience that shifts uncomfortably in rows of folding chairs, laughs politely at even the lamest gestures toward humour, and applauds at the appropriate moments. Perhaps the most telling detail is the inclusion of Jonathan Abbott as the guest of honour, a distinction that, by the chef’s own admission, is questionable given his lack of musical knowledge. ‘So why am I here?” he enquires. As he freely admits, he ‘played the violin…badly’, giving up ‘after grade three’. The answer to his question is simple: the decision to invite ‘television’s favourite chef’ to provide the program’s commencement is based solely on his social status as a celebrity.
Like the student video project Robert disrupts with his violent outburst, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael draws upon multiple cinematic texts for inspiration. However, in the case of Clay’s film, three instances of self-conscious intertextuality illuminate cinema’s potential for advancing a sustained social critique by ‘draw[ing] the viewer’s attention to his or her relation to the screen in order to make him or her “realize” the social relations that are being portrayed’. [10] Of the films Clay’s feature references, Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Full Metal Jacket (1987) are at once the most obvious and the most vital. An extended oblique tracking shot past an extensive array of parked cars recalls the famous absurd traffic jam from Godard’s skewering treatise against bourgeois consumption run amuck, while the aggressive use of the chef’s fish as a sexually suggestive instrument of torture echoes a similar sequence preceding Weekend’s climactic cannibal feast. In addition, in a visual strategy in-keeping with, but by no means as overt as, the Brechtian distantiation techniques deployed by Godard, Thomas Clay constructs his work so that sequences structured around sublimely elegant cinematography vie with graphic and prolonged representations of extreme brutality. The resulting juxtapositions jolt the viewer, frustrating any possibility of maintaining a comfortable distance from the film’s action. As a result, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael compels spectators to re-acclimate themselves to the subject matter and their assumptions regarding the central character’s motivations.
It is here, as well, that Clay’s film intersects most productively with Stanley Kubrick’s more rigidly formalist and politically sardonic cinematic exercises. In spite of its notorious ‘excesses’, Clay’s mise-en-scène is always carefully considered, meticulously constructed, deliberately edited, and precisely paced. Consider, for instance, the so–called ‘blue room’ sequence, which encapsulates many of the text’s most important themes and motifs while exposing the works’ – and, by extension, cinema’s – artifice. After popping pills and smoking dope at the local playground, Robert, Ben, Joe, a girl named Charlotte, and Joe’s drug–dealer cousin, Larry, drop by an apartment in which a small group of young people are gathered, getting high and listening to one of the tenants mixing house music on a pair of turntables. In an unbroken tracking shot, the camera meanders throughout the apartment’s main living space; eventually, it travels about the perimeter of the room’s blue walls, periodically coursing in towards the middle of the room to capture simple yet illuminating actions – Robert purchasing half a gram of coke, Charlotte slowly slipping into a state of semi-consciousness as Joe and Larry loom lasciviously. Approximately halfway through the sequence/long take, Joe, Larry, and a third male abscond to the bedroom with Charlotte, whom they subsequently rape. The assault occurs off screen, behind a door that soon comes to occupy the centre of the shot. To screen right we see the young man mixing music behind his turntables, to screen left we see Robert and Ben reclining in chairs and watching as a news program on a small colour television delivers updates on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government. What follows is a brilliant combination of cinematography and sound design. The lighting in the room shifts dramatically. What at first seemed a close approximation to ambient and motivated lighting gives way to spotlights illuminating the actors on either side of the bedroom door as the camera dollies further and further back until it becomes obvious that it occupies a geographical location far beyond where the room’s ‘fourth wall’ was earlier shown to be. We are now clearly witnessing an event transpiring on a set in a studio; any pretense towards verisimilitude has been thoroughly abandoned. As the camera dollies back, an artful if harrowing mélange of three distinct sounds coalesce to complete the scene: the pop rhythm of the dance music (DJ Hixxy’s rave anthem, ‘Toyland’) “originating” from the turntables, Charlotte’s screams of pain and terror as she is sexually assaulted somewhere beyond the bedroom door, and soundbites from British Prime Minister Tony Blair espousing plans for a ‘post-conflict’ Iraq, which includes an ‘oil for food’ program. The scene concludes as the young man mixing the music kicks out the rapists (and Robert) for making too much noise and then stands beside his roommate at the open bedroom door, with Charlotte’s desperate sobbing now the only audible sound.
Structurally, the ‘blue room’ sequence is an accomplishment, fusing form and content to evoke meaning. The spotlighted areas accentuate the mise-en-scène’s overtly formalist symmetry, effectively dividing the frame into thirds, with the bedroom door in the centre of the shot impeding a visual apprehension of the assault so chillingly evoked by Charlotte’s piercing screams. By combining the screams, the voices on the televised news report, and the throbbing dance music, the sound design coalesces into a kind of dialectical aural montage that links the literal rape occurring behind the bedroom door with the figurative, if all too real, rape of Iraq by the US-led coalition forces. It is here that Clay advances his most incisive critique of violence in both its most explicit, as well as its most treacherously subtle, dimensions. In each instance, human beings are reduced to objects, but the inclusion of footage of Tony Blair advocating a ‘post-conflict’ ‘oil for food’ program takes the connection between the ‘local’ and ‘global’ atrocities one vital step further. Specifically, it reveals the violence that lurks, often unrecognised, beneath the pretenses of civilisation. It is, after all, the imperialist cultural, economic and military aggression against Iraq that created the humanitarian crisis that the ‘oil for food’ program is intended to address through a coercive, exploitative exercise masquerading as charitable cultural exchange.
As well, by integrating (or mixing) the dance music, the girl’s screams and the news report’s level tone in a manner that allows the disparate sounds to complement, rather than conflict with, one another, Clay illuminates the extent to which Robert and his friends are removed, emotionally and politically, from both the immediate trauma of a fellow classmate suffering, and the mediated anguish of a populace experienced exclusively through the filter of a mediating technology like television. The result is a disturbing scene, but it is a scene deliberately orchestrated to disturb. In other words, it is a scene constructed to disrupt conventional viewing pleasures for the purpose of interrogating the processes through which people understand actual or imagined violence, especially when their own material reality is conditioned by an increasing sense of alienation from a larger historical continuity.
For the vast majority of the population of Newhaven in The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, the sun has long since set on the British Empire. Wars are either reimagined nostalgically or presented in a series of flickering images originating in a distant time and place made increasingly (in)accessible through a process of mediation that obfuscates far more than it clarifies through a discourse of easily digestible and ambiguous words and phrases like ‘terrorist’, ‘Osama’, and ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’. It is perhaps fitting, then, that the lyrics to the music being mixed during the ‘blue room’ sequence expresses the romantic desire to be transported ‘together… soul to soul’ to a magical ‘promised land’. Thus, despite the array of war films mentioned by Robert’s teacher, that with which The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael has the most in common with is Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. In their aesthetic and critical sensibilities, both films deploy narrative strategies intended to prevent audiences from succumbing to the illusion that what they are witnessing is in any way intended as representational reality. Rather, Kubrick and Clay create cinematic experiences that allow for more expansive, self-conscious critiques of the motivation for, and the proliferation of, psychological and physical violence in a culture dominated by images, including motion pictures. While Full Metal Jacket achieves these ends largely through the use of direct address, a strategy that Thomas Clay avoids, the debt that The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael owes to Kubrick’s postmodern riff on war (and war movies) is most apparent in a comparison of the long shots with which the respective films end. As Robert, Joe, and Ben walk into the sunrise after an extended bout of carnage, the reference to Kubrick’s weary soldiers marching off into the flaming sunset while singing the theme from The Mickey Mouse Club (another idealised ‘promised land’ of unfettered capitalist consumption) is hard to overlook.
The influence of Kubrick upon Clay is further evidenced when one considers the lengthy homage to A Clockwork Orange that dominates much of The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael’s final fifteen minutes. Fueled by a plethora of chemicals and motivated by a combination of envy, rage and a virulent despair over the steady realisation that the economic divisions that define Newhaven’s social hierarchy are in all likelihood far too wide to overcome. Robert, Joe and Ben wage a three-person class war on the local signifiers of unattainable wealth, chef Abbott and his glamorous wife, Monica. ‘Do you think you’re ever going to own a car like that?’ Joe asks, gesturing towards Monica’s Porsche when Ben and Robert initially balk at his plan to break into the wealthy couple’s secluded residence and rob them. ‘Cunts like this have been ripping you off since the day you were fucking born. To them we’re just a spot on the fucking windscreen just waitin’ to get wiped off.’ Like Alex and his ‘droogs’ in Kubrick’s screen adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ dystopian vision of an England populated by disenfranchised youth and precariously teetering on the brink of totalitarianism, Robert, Joe and Ben take the wealthy couple by surprise, their yearning to merely flee with money and jewels giving way to baser desires for power in the face of their own powerlessness.
Cinematographically, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael closely approximates the visual grammar at work in Kubrick’s depiction of Alex and company’s memorable attack on the subversive writer and his wife, a particularly unsettling sequence that contributed to A Clockwork Orange being taken out of circulation Great Britain and that reintroduced the song, ‘Singin’ In the Rain’ to a new generation of film-goers. Jonathan and Monica Abbott are physically dragged through their home, and Monica is raped by each of the intruders in full view of her husband, who, like the writer in Kubrick’s film, is bound, gagged and forced to watch. At one point early in the prolonged sexual assault, Clay places the camera at floor level, strategically recalling the low angle photography Kubrick deploys as the writer is forced to ‘viddy well’ the surprise intruders abusing his wife. However, unlike Kubrick’s low-angle shots, which are established – through shot–reverse shot editing – as conforming in part to the beaten writer’s POV, Clay’s camera placement reveals both Monica (in the foreground) and the battered, trussed-up chef (in the background). Thus, while Kubrick aligns his viewers’ perspective with that of the assaulted writer, Clay locates the audience as both victim, in that our angle of vision approximates – albeit in reverse – Jonathan’s, and voyeur, in that the spectator’s gaze is definitely not intended as an absolute surrogate for the sightline of a character compelled against his will to watch what he does not want to see.
Consequently, Clay ups the ontological ante in this homage to Kubrick’s infamous meditation on violence’s scopophilic allure. Through a mise-en-scène explicitly arranged to portray violence as paradoxically unpleasant (it causes physical pain to the recipient) and visually compelling (we are, after all, voluntarily watching it), Clay appeals to his audience’s prurient instincts even as he raises the spectre of their complicity in the tacit acceptance and mass consumption of media(ted) violence. In this sense, Clay’s strategy visually echoes the sentiments of the film critic Serge Daney who, in his famous essay on the social and political implications of aestheticized violence, writes: ‘To Lacan’s formula “Do you want to watch? Then watch this[,]” there was already the response of “Has it been recorded? Well then I have to watch it,” even and especially when “it” was painful, intolerable, or completely invisible.’ [11] Through his homage to A Clockwork Orange, then, Clay uses overt intertextuality (between two films/artifacts within a popular mode of mediation) to mediate/convey to his audience a meta-cinematic reflection of the very economies of mediation that inform the proliferation of violence in its most conspicuous and inconspicuous forms. In a patently filmic moment that functions in large part through the play of artifice that has long pervaded the history of cinema, Clay accomplishes a task that Colin MacCabe, in his discussion of ‘realism’ in cinema, understands as an imperative for filmmakers:
The filmmaker must draw the viewer’s attention to his or her relation to the screen in order to make him or her ‘realize’ the social relations which are being portrayed. Inversely, one could say that it is in the ‘strangeness’ of the social relations displayed which draws the viewer’s attention to the fact of watching a film. It is at the moment that an identification is broken, becomes difficult to hold, that we grasp in one and the same moment both the relations that determine that identity and our relation to its representation. [12]
Clay’s film by turns allows audiences to forget that they are watching a film and reminds them of the medium’s artifice, forging and breaking ‘identification’ in ways that require us to realign our ‘social relation’ to the images on the screen.
The vicious rape and murder of Monica Abbott likewise furthers the economic and political critique suffusing virtually every frame of The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael. If, as I suggest above, we understand Robert, Joe and Ben’s attack upon the celebrity chef and his pregnant wife as a kind of class war in miniature, with the teenagers’ actions motivated by an awareness of the insurmountable social and economic inequities slowly evaporating their hopes for a better future, then the events that transpire in the Abbott home are clearly intended as far more than mere ‘shock tactics’ mobilised to sell tickets and generate hype. The violent acts portrayed may indeed be considered ‘extreme’ when compared to the content of most contemporary films, but a closer reading of these brutal actions reveals a strikingly nuanced deliberation upon the politics of violence in late capitalist culture.
Consider, for example, three movements within the larger symphony of violence enacted during this notorious sequence. In the first of these, after Joe and Ben have each raped Monica, Robert stands above the chef’s traumatised wife. His expression is deliberately ambiguous. Is he excited? Bored? Numb? Clay cross-cuts between a medium close-up of Robert from a slightly low angle and an extreme high-angle close-up, presumably from Robert’s POV, of Monica prone upon her living room carpet, breathing laboriously. The lack of matching shots in this cross-cutting eradicates Monica’s gaze from the scenario, thus aligning the audience’s view so that it approximates a perspective akin to that of one of the perpetrators; or, at the very least, positions the spectator within the role of a witness who is ultimately complicit in the violence occurring on screen through the very act of spectatorship. Soon after Robert disrobes and mounts Monica, Joe, who from the film’s earliest scenes is established as the most aggressive and domineering of the trio, pushes Robert off Monika and proceeds to rape her again. This action, similar to that of an alpha dog maintaining supremacy within its pack, illustrates one of the best-acknowledged traits of individuals participating in a cultural and political economy predicated upon the importance of economic status and social stratification. In his exploration of the role of violence and desire in contemporary capitalist culture, Slavoj Žižek makes the following claim when investigating how capitalism compels people obsessively (and subconsciously) to desire not only what they don’t have, but also what they already possess and yet see other’s trying to obtain:
The problem with human desire is that, as Lacan put it, it is always ‘desire of the Other’ in all senses of that term: desire for the Other, desire to be desired by the Other, and especially desire for what the Other desires. This last makes envy, which includes resentment, constitutive components of human desire… [13]
It is this ‘envy’ and ‘resentment’ that motivates Joe to advocate breaking into the Abbott residence in the first place, and it is these ‘constitutive components of human desire’ that drive him to usurp Robert the moment he notices that Robert is empowering himself, and potentially enjoying himself, at the expense of Monica and the class difference she symbolises for many of Newhaven’s residents.
The second movement takes place when Robert, shoved aside by the domineering Joe, acknowledges that he once again has been assigned a subordinate position within a social hierarchy that disturbingly parallels the larger cultural logics reinforcing widening class differences within capitalist nations generally, and the community of Newhaven specifically. Like the town’s exploited labourers, Robert becomes increasingly aware of his social impotence. His response, enacted through a series of grotesque mediations, leads directly to the sequence’s third movement, in which Thomas Clay substitutes stock footage of World War II battles in the place of a literal representation of physical aggression. Enraged to the point of psychosis, Robert desperately struggles to reassert a semblance of individual power by grabbing a wine bottle and, after ordering Joe and Ben to hold Monica Abbott’s legs apart, drops to his knees and repeatedly plunges the bottle’s neck into her vagina. Still not satisfied, Robert smashes the bottle on the floor and grabs a small sword–like object hanging decorously on the living room wall. As Robert stares contemplatively at the phallic blade, Joe and Ben react with obvious, if fleeting, trepidation. ‘Oh man, Robert…I don’t know,’ Ben says before he, like Joe, ultimately obeys Robert’s command to ‘pull her fucking legs apart!’ In a visual strategy reminiscent of Pier Paolo Passolini’s decision to lens many of the most sadistic sequences in Salo o le 120 giornate de Sodoma (1975) in long shot, Clay frames the violation that follows in an extreme high angle shot reminiscent of surveillance footage if the camera were mounted near the ceiling of one of the room’s furthest corners.
As Robert thrusts his arms forward, the blade–like object arcing downward towards its target, Clay cuts to a short montage of World War II footage. Exploding bombs hurtle debris towards an ashen sky; a burning fighter jet spins out of control. The stock footage culminates with a well–known medium close up of Winston Churchill smiling as he bites down on a cigar and holds up two fingers in a gesture of victory. By punctuating the film’s most brutal moment with filmic reminders of Britain’s lost glory, Clay temporarily removes his viewers from the visceral immediacy of the attack on the Abbotts to further advance the film’s consideration of the extent to which the social conditions informing human relations result from a significant, sustained connection to a comprehensible historical past. In keeping with the depiction of the class project and the repeated presence of television broadcasts of the most recent invasion of Iraq, Clay deploys these scratchy black and white images of Britain’s former military glory to engage with the theme of an increasingly expansive – and potentially destructive – ahistoricism. For the characters in Clay’s film, the understanding of one’s position within a larger historical, national or communal continuum resides almost exclusively in a system of mediated images bereft of context – a series of visual signifiers that circulate without even the remotest pretext of adhering to a coherent or meaningful system of signification.
Furthermore, this moment of extreme phallic violence culminates a theme of masculinity as a fragile construct imagined to be collapsing within a culture informed by both economic precarity and vast income disparity. In the roomy confines of the Abbott’s fashionable home, class and gender anxieties collide in a brutal display of ultra-violent, hyper-masculine aggression. In forcing the trussed-up husband to witness his wife’s rape and murder, class rage finds its release through a battle for male dominance that apexes in the most extreme form of misogynist objectification possible – the reduction of a female human being to an object to be used and ultimately destroyed in a panicked display of male sexual dominance/hyper-potency.
Importantly, Clay follows this notorious sequence with a brief scene depicting several police officers discovering the corpse of the young woman assaulted in the ‘blue room’ scene. A shot–reverse shot edit reveals the young woman’s body: a slit wrist at the end of an outstretched arm. Brief even in relation to the shots that precede and follow it, this cut away from the nightmare unfolding at the Abbott residence, rather than removing us from the aftermath of a grotesquely violent scene, further underscores the destructive consequences of male aggression and sexual violence by begging the viewer to consider both assaults as not only linked narratively, but ultimately as variations on a very disturbing theme.
Finally, as Joe repeatedly stabs the utterly drained and heart-broken Jonathan and leaves him to bleed out onto the floor, the back of the chef’s head beating an involuntary staccato rhythm against the edge of his designer coffee table, it becomes clear that there will be no retribution for this attack, no revenge. The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael concludes with the dawning of a new day that promises to be every bit as bleak and hopeless as the one before it. Consequently, the ‘Great Ecstasy’ of the title proves to be an ironic one at best. There is no orgasmic bliss, no spiritual or philosophical transcendence. In keeping with the effects of the synthetic party drug of the same name, this ‘Ecstasy’, like religion and mass media, is yet another illusion, another quick fix, another opiate for the masses.
Footnotes
- Bradshaw, P. (2006) ‘The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael’, The Guardian, October 20, 2006, para 1, https://www.guardian.co.uk/film/movie/ 106258/great.ecstasy.of.robert.carmichael [accessed 28 July 2021].
- French, P. (2006) ‘The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael’, The Observer, October 22, 2006, para 2, https://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2006/ 0ct/22/horror.drama [accessed 28 July 2021].
- Graham, J. (2006) ‘The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael – Film Review’, Total Film, para 2, https://www.totalfilm.com/cinema_reviews/the_great_ecstasy_of_robert_ carmichael [accessed 27 July 2021].
- Russell, J. (2006) ‘The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael’, BBC, 15 October, https://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2006/10/16/the_great_ecstasy_of_robert_carmichael_2006_review.shtml [accessed 18 May 2021].
- Cubitt, S. (2005) The Cinematic Effect. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 358.
- Althusser, L. (1971) Lenin and the Philosophers. New York: Monthly Press Review, 162.
- Marx, K. and Engles, F. (1976) The German Ideology. Moscow: Progressive Publishers, 50–1.
- McGowan, T. (2007) The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan. Albany: State University of New York Press, 13.
- McGowan, 13.
- MacCabe, C. (1980) Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 92.
- Daney, S. (2007) Postcards from the Cinema. Oxford and New York: Berg.
- MacCabe, 92.
- Žižek, S. (2008) Violence. New York: Picador, 87.