The Last Mistress

One newspaper ad for Catherine Breillat’s latest project, The Last Mistress, prominently excerpts Roger Ebert’s review: “A passionate and explicit film about sexual obsession!” As a matter of fact, the film seems neither especially explicit—at least by Breillat’s standards, whose Romance (1999), e.g., features actual on-screen sex—nor terribly passionate; rather, it has a static and almost claustrophobically flattened feel to it. (The “sexual obsession” part, however, rings true.)

The film is based on a 19th-century novel by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly and tells of a young “libertine” in 1830s Paris, Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Ait Aattou), whose plans to marry an innocent aristocratic girl are sabotaged by his ongoing association with an old mistress, La Vellini (Asia Argento)—a rather vulgar courtesan, and Spanish to boot. In an account of his troubling circumstances told in confidence to his fiancée’s sympathetic grandmother, Ryno explains that he has been cohabiting with Vellini for ten years in a tumultuous on-again off-again fashion. The backstory reveals that the attraction was initially entirely one-sided, with Ryno engaging in relentless pursuit of the object of his desire undeterred by her mockery, complete lack of encouragement, and even her then-husband’s attempt to kill him in a duel… He is near-fatally wounded in the skirmish, and this is what finally triggers Vellini’s realization (or rather, admission) that she too is consumed by passion, and can no longer live without him. A blissful period ensues after the couple elopes to Northern Africa, far away from Western civilization—and ends abruptly with the unexpected death of their love child. Vellini’s sexual neediness in the wake of this incident is what first begins to repel Ryno; henceforth the romantic relationship takes a turn for the worse, while the carnal one persists with a vengeance, right up until the present day, with little chance that a small matter like Ryno’s marriage to another woman will quash it.

The sex scenes—all between the two main characters—contain nudity, but no glimpses of genitalia; the sex itself is simulated. Much of the movie resembles a series of stagy, talky tableaux (perhaps as befits the source material), and so too the sex scenes; these tend to consist of oddly motionless intercourse in convoluted positions and, reminiscent of de Sade, occasionally feature lengthy conversations concerning sexual politics.

All this makes a real-life chicken-killing scene toward the end of the first act (presented via a medium-long shot rather than in close-up, though still rather jarring) stand out all the more. This scene takes place after the protagonist/narrator has been wounded in the aforementioned duel; he drinks the freshly slaughtered chicken’s blood, presumably to restore his vitality. As a transitional moment, in addition to coinciding with the turning of tides in the relationship between Ryno and Vellini, the killing in a way ushers in an atmosphere of unpleasantness more characteristic of Breillat’s previous work—see Romance, Fat Girl (2001)—after a relatively civil and even light-hearted opening (though it is immediately preceded by a blood-licking scene in which Vellini laps at Ryno’s open wounds in an effort to kill him via infection, quite unpleasant in its own right).

But why does this particular incident take place “for real” as opposed to being staged? The insertion of this bit of documentary death footage^[1] does provide a moment of instant, visceral drama—underscored by the method of killing, which entails the chicken’s neck being stabbed repeatedly with a knife as the bird emits prolonged croaking sounds of distress—and yet it’s not exactly used for shock value in the traditional sense. Maybe real death is a substitute for real sex here: because of its immediate physiological urgency, the slaughter may elicit in viewers the misperception that sexual activity elsewhere in the film is characterized by the same kind of raw authenticity... A curious arrangement; more typical is the exact opposite scenario: unsimulated sex used to lend authenticity to staged scenes of death and violence. (Linda Williams refers to this phenomenon as a type of “genre confusion,” which has led to violent narrative films that also contain overt sexual activity being described as far more brutal than the on-screen action bears out.^[2] One example of this is Coralie Trinh Thi and Virginie Despentes’s Baise-Moi [2000], another harsh French film about female sexuality.) Perhaps with The Last Mistress, even a brief moment of bona-fide bloodletting has led some viewers to mistakenly believe they are seeing a work rife with explicit sexual imagery.

We might therefore say the film is at once a case of the most conventional use of unsimulated animal killing on screen (i.e., creates instant drama, mirrors/foreshadows human character’s fate, etc.) and rather unusual in its real violence—fake sex reversal.

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1. See Vivian Sobchack, “Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions On Death, Representation, and Documentary,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies, Fall 1984, for further discussion, as referenced here.
   
2. Linda Williams, “Power, Pleasure, and Perversion: Sadomasochistic Film Pornography,” Representations 27 (Summer 1989), p. 42.
   

Toward an Animal-Oriented Film Theory

This blog originates from a sense of frustration with the lack of critical discourse regarding the use and representation of animals in film, TV, and other media.

In fictional contexts, animals are probably most frequently used to foreshadow or reflect the fate of human characters, or to serve some similar symbolic function. They also make convenient stand-ins for human actors on screen: While the chances of encountering a bona-fide snuff or torture film involving human participants are slim to none, animals are relatively expendable, and the nonhuman equivalent is not all that uncommon. As media theorist Vivian Sobchak observes: “A filmmaker will not be sent to jail for killing even the cutest rabbit, but he may lose his life for killing even the worst actor.”^[1]

Possibly the most infamous example of real-life animal killing in a fiction film is Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980), which features the actual on-screen slaughter of a monkey, a turtle, and a pig (among others).^[2] There are other “cannibal”-themed movies from the same era that employ similar tactics, for example, Slave of the Cannibal God a.k.a. Mountain of the Cannibal God (Sergio Martino, 1978) and Cannibal Ferox (Umberto Lenzi, 1981). Lest anyone think this type of thing is mostly confined to exploitation films, there of course many more high-brow examples as well. To name just a handful: Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1980) culminates in the ritual slaying of a water buffalo, paralleling the fate of the deranged Colonel Kurtz; in Farewell My Concubine (Kaige Chen, 1993), a turtle’s head is forcibly pulled from its shell and its throat cut to harvest blood; in Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005), a chicken is beheaded in a jarring close-up. (Curiously, at the screening I attended, there were audible gasps of horror from the audience during a later scene in which a human character meets with a violent end, but no discernible reaction to the graphic chicken killing. This appears to jibe with Sobchak’s theory that such documentary footage can be introduced in a fiction film to boost the emotional impact of subsequent events through viewers’ “extra-cinematic” awareness—whether conscious or subconscious—of the violence taking place for real.)^[3]

The list goes on and includes some very well-respected films. In fact, rather than on-screen animal abuse making a filmmaker look bad, as with the incorporation of other “real” events and actions (I am thinking especially of actual sexual activity taking place between actors), it’s almost as if employing this tactic elevates his or her standing as an artist and innovator in the eyes of certain cinephiles. Nevertheless, it’s become more and more customary over the years to stage harm inflicted on animals in film rather than to enact it for real, especially in the United States, where use of animals is generally subject to greater regulation and scrutiny than in international cinema. (In fact most of the more recent “art” films in the real-death category above are also foreign films.)

In the U.S. we have an organization charged specifically with oversight of animals on set: The American Humane Association’s Film and TV Unit (though this oversight generally takes place by invitation on the part of the studio and/or filmmakers only, and occasionally only through their concerted efforts). According to the organization’s “Guidelines for the Safe Use of Animals in Filmed Media” (last revised October 2005 and available for download here), complying means that “no animal will be killed or injured for the sake of a film production. ANIMAL is defined as all sentient creatures–including birds, fish, reptiles, and even insects.” The guidelines further clarify: “At its most fundamental level, American Humane’s role is to prevent legally defined cruelty to animal actors. In reality, the industry today is primarily composed of caring and responsible individuals.”

American Humane bestows six different ratings:

1. Outstanding (awarded to productions that comply with the organization’s guidelines in full; only these films are entitled to bear the trademark "No Animals Were Harmed” disclaimer in their end credits);
   
2. Acceptable (these films only get an “American Humane monitored the animal action” in their end credits because only a selection of scenes involving animals were monitored);
   
3. Special Circumstances (here, animals were injured or killed on set, but not through negligence on the part of the film team, or so AHA has deemed—the film will bear the same “monitored” end credit statement as in item 2.);
   
4. Unacceptable (production was not compliant with the guidelines, no end credit statement awarded);
   
5. Not Monitored: Production Compliant (the “compliant” part refers only to the registration process and subsequent paperwork here; on account of insufficient resources or scheduling conflicts, AHA representatives were not actually present on set);
   
6. Not Monitored (production did not contact AHA in order to be monitored).
   

Films may also be listed in the organization’s online index as “Believed Acceptable” or “Questionable,” depending on the extent of AHA monitoring and whatever its representatives may have heard from participants or glimpsed on set.

Although it’s undoubtedly comforting to many viewers to see the American Humane Association’s seal of approval in the end credits, it’s been suggested that the organization is overly lenient and unreliable in its ratings, beholden to the studios and the Screen Actors’ Guild. As per a 2001 exposé published in the Los Angeles Times: “Since 1980, a clause in the Screen Actors Guild contract with producers has granted sole authority for monitoring the treatment of animals in movies, television shows, commercials and music videos to the AHA's Film and TV Unit. … But the unit, the interviews and internal documents show, lacks any meaningful enforcement power under the SAG contract, depends on major studios to pay for its operations and is rife with conflicts of interest. … The AHA's authority has been further eroded by the increasing number of productions filmed in foreign countries, most of which are not subject to the SAG contact [sic].” An animal welfare activist is quoted in the same piece as describing the AHA as "nothing more than a public relations firm for Hollywood animal trainers and the studios." (See Ralph Frammolino and James Bates, “Questions Raised About Group That Watches Out for Animals in Movies”, archived here.)^[4]

While it obviously seems more immediately significant to animal welfare concerns that an animal appearing on screen be safe from actual bodily harm, representation itself is also a relevant topic to pursue for further discussion—especially representation of animals in harm’s way or in an otherwise dubious light. As we are concerned with depictions of women, people of color, the LGBT community, and other historically disenfranchised persons, so should we begin to be concerned with representations of animals, rather than succumb to the usual speciesist trappings. (Perhaps there is a better term to indicate animal-averse sentiment in this particular context, though I’m not sure what this would be… zoophobia?) This type of scrutiny does not in any way constitute a call for censorship, nor a disavowal of other valid aspects of a filmmaker’s achievement (in the same way that the ground-breaking character of canonical works like The Jazz Singer or Birth of a Nation isn’t negated because we now recognize their undeniably racist content and therefore no longer unhesitatingly embrace these films). But while freedom of artistic expression is tremendously important, we also shouldn’t shy away from questioning what we see, and it is our job as thinking filmgoers to at least every so often bring these issues to the forefront of critical discourse.

It’s been predicted by some—including Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006)—that gradually, the fluctuating moral “zeitgeist” (at least in the Western industrialized world, which is a vague enough term) will facilitate a change in status of non-human animals from ultimate outgroup to individuals worthy of ethical consideration, as has happened with human outgroups throughout history.^[5] Ethicist Peter Singer presents a similar idea with his theory of the “expanding circle” (adapted from W. H. Lecky). Perhaps eventually it will seem less outlandish and more a matter of course to consider the role of animals in film and other entertainment in a semi-serious manner. The (currently somewhat broadly defined) field of animal studies is still an emerging discipline, but there is no reason its newfound tenets can’t cross-pollinate fruitfully with film and media studies. I would even suggest that, in the manner of queer or feminist film theory, it’s time to try and forge the beginnings of an animal-oriented film theory.

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1. Sobchack was talking about Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), in which the actual death of a rabbit, used “in the service of the narrative and for the fiction,” “violently, abruptly, punctuates narrative space with documentary space”. Vivian Sobchack, “Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions On Death, Representation, and Documentary,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies, Fall 1984, 293.
   
2. Here is a vegetarian fan’s conflicted take on the cult film: http://www.vegblog.org/archive/2006/01/11/wrestling-with-cannibal-holocaust/.
   
3. Sobchack, “Inscribing Ethical Space,” 293.
   
4. Incidentally, the LA Times was sued by AHA over these findings:
   http://tolkien-movies.com/words/2001/01-27-01c.shtml. The prominent example cited in this context is mistreatment of horses on the set of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (Peter Jackson, 2001–2003). As per the Times article, “Despite receiving dozens of e-mails since October alleging mistreatment on the set of ‘Lord of the Rings,’ AHA officials did not contact or initiate a meeting with New Line executives until mid-January. [Director of the AHA's Film and TV Unit Gini] Barrett said the AHA is stretched too thin to look into the non-SAG production—among Hollywood's most expensive projects ever. Nevertheless, Barrett said that none of the three ‘Lord of the Ring’ films will receive the association's endorsement, since no AHA monitor was invited to the set.”
   
5. I was introduced to the notion of animals as the outermost of outgroups by Scott Plous in his Social Psychology class, Spring 1995, at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT.