Today’s newsletter explores themes from our recent Film Night. The movie we studied together is Shame, and the recording of our round-table discussion is further down in this post. But first: one of my major take-aways from re-watching the film.
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After the initial after-work drinks where Brandon upstages his boss to seduce the blonde Elizabeth, David invites Brandon again for drinks. David, I sense, is something of a shame-brother, who sees Brandon as an ally as he tries to sleep around behind his wife’s back.
Brandon suffers a lapse in judgment, though, inviting David to the upscale bar where his sister is singing. But after seeing his disaster with Elizabeth the day before, and the lurid way David hits on the host then the waitress, I guess Brandon feels he has nothing to fear.
When Sissy sings, however, she steals the room. We are graced by transcendent beauty, right in the midst of the film. Why do I say that Sissy’s singing is not just beautiful, but transcendentally so? Did you experience that? Or was it just another tripped-out jazz rendition they play in such snooty bars?
I’ll affirm right here that this version of New York, New York was an expertly-gilded piece of transcendental magic. The piano is unexpected, discordant—it shatters the mind’s expectations—draws in fresh ears, puzzles them, arrests them. The whole rendition causes an eerie in-breath: we cannot fully exhale until it’s over. As such, we enter a state of quiet rapture, contemplation, deep questioning. In the midst of all this, the piano escalates upwards and then downwards like an intruder on a staircase, we never know quite how it’ll turn, and then, the accompaniment’s taken out—it’s just Sissy’s raw, broken voice, and it’s a voice that cuts to the chest-bone like a northwesterly January wind. When I focus on what’s happening inside me as I watch this scene, I realise I’m held stasis, cannot breathe, transfixed on the tone.
In tantric breathing practices, it is the gap between the in-breath and the out-breath that affords us a view onto the divine—and we practice locks, or bandhas, that freeze us in place, so we might extend our baited breath. In tantric aesthetics, a work of beauty that causes a prologued statis between in-breath and out-breath (and it has long been said in the West that art makes one gasp; it leaves one breathless) is a gift that returns us to God. The sublime—the space beyond the mental—abides in the spaces between each of Sissy’s syllables: Shame hints to us that it’s here, paused, between the utterances of the broken little sister, the thing that can guide Brandon back home.
‘I want to be a part of it…’
But sublime beauty alone rarely cuts a man in two. Here, Sissy sings to the relative, to the family trauma of Brandon and her. They were Irish, they immigrated to New York in the midst of a painful childhood, and what I imagine about their lives is that they always sought belonging in America, and still haven’t found their place.
So we see a tear in Brandon’s eye. This builds empathy for Brandon—and, by contrast, sets up antipathy for his boss. Brandon’s redemption is that he’s able to be touched by beauty, while his boss simply seeks to objectivise it; to possess it for a tawdry night and never call beauty back. If Brandon’s lost in sexual addiction, the boss has something more sinister.
‘What did you think?’ Sissy asks the guys as she joins them.
Brandon resembles a young boy now: is he transported to the crushed dreams his more innocent self once held? As Sissy sits down, Brandon’s hollowed out. He can barely be with the emotions he feels; he cannot express to her what happened to him, inside. Who could? ‘Yeah, it was transcendental beauty, Sissy. You sang from the Gods, straight to my sacred wound.’ Only an Amorati could speak such drivel!
Nonetheless, it’s the first crack in Brandon’s shell.
This is, in plain view, the quality that Zan’s been speaking to for years… that in the midst of tremendous brokenness lies tremendous beauty. That there’s no family situation so messed up that something in the offspring can’t be redeeming, sublime. This is the most important note of them all.
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In contrast, as Sissy finishes her number and comes over to their table, David perks up: ‘bravo, she’s good’, making sure to applaud her performance clear and loud. You might even watch the scene back and notice how he does this. It’s culturally normal to be effusive in one’s bravo, but while Brandon is touched to his core, it’s as if David hijacks the moment in shouting bravo, suffocating the beauty once more. It’s a disrespectful, impolite, and inappropriate response—David steals attention away from the hush that beauty calls for, and he brings the group awareness to his subtly aggressive ways of taking up space.
Remember, David’s a letch, a cheat, hiding in nice guy clothes. But while we might say that Brandon is ultra-perceptive and Sigma, David is somewhat Alpha, and brashly performs his status. And when the chance arises, he’s good enough a conversationalist to shunt his agenda over the line.
With Brandon broken open and his power somewhat collapsed, David hits on Sissy. Sissy, as we shall see, is something of a love-addict, and since she’s dying for male attention she likes this. You might even like David as he flirts with her—you might identify with his method of seduction. But don’t forget what’s under the surface: beneath the cheap celebration: I find you fascinating!; beneath the empty promise of teaching her how to drive, after David sleeps with Sissy—in Brandon’s bed—he will never call her again.
Let’s order champagne!
But that was always the plan for a night with Brandon: an easy lay wherever it can be found! But when the easy lay is your sister… what does that then say about you?
Just as Brandon’s shell cracks open, humiliation seeps in. People say kill the ego! But the unraveling of an ego is nothing easy at all…
There’s nothing like a side-dish of humiliation to help a man stew in his shame. What was it like for you to watch this?
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A couple of scenes later, his boss now gone from his apartment, Brandon explodes at Sissy in rage. It won’t be the last time.
We’ll explore the relationship between shame and anger in the next email. As well as male counter-dependency, the freedom fetish, and how trauma can split siblings in perfectly-patterned halves.
As I reflect on the cruelty of this passage of the film on Brandon, how hard he was hit in the transcendental gonads, it has me wonder something about the sublime…
… does our closeness to It make our failings sting that much harder?
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Film Night, November ’24 | The Recording
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Thanks to all those who joined me for Sunday’s Film Night on Shame.
This is an awesome community, and you created a brilliant atmosphere of curiosity, rigour, warm regard, good humour.
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You can also catch the tail-end of our discussion on the member’s platform.
After every Film Night, people ask: how can I go deeper into this theme?
In terms of movies themselves, there are a couple of interesting resources. Check out: Don Jon (2013). Not such a dramatic film as Shame, but it takes you deeper into the territory of compulsion, projection and real connection.
Then, the antivenom: Don Juan deMarco (1994). Johnny Depp’s perfect Lover Archetype is admitted to a psychiatric ward, for his delusions about beauty and love. This movie is an essential antidote to films like Shame, showing us the positive, life-giving effects of the lover’s heart… in a world that wants to psychologise and squeeze the romance out of almost everyone and everything.
Note for viewing: this is not a story about Don Juan—it’s the story of the Marlon Brando character, a story about you, the dried-out King in need of an infusion. In the end, seduction is not just about pathology: it’s a gift from the hear that we offer the world—it has reasons beyond triumph or compulsion or the take. Modern society doesn’t know to discern the two.
Now if you really want to strap in and explore the terrain of attraction and intimacy with me over the next four months, then come join us for the Hidden Sides Film Masterclass — Season #2!
This is the latest version of the Mastery course I have offered through Ars Amorata for almost a decade. As soon as you join, you get all of Season #1: 8 deep movie explorations, deepening your insight about the psyche, seduction, and attraction.
Then, on December 1st, we begin Season #2, and you can be part of the live group. In Season #2 we go further into the human psyche when it comes to intimate relationships.
Imagine the insights you had from Sanctuary and Shame, then having another 16 movies to take you to the heart of a whole host of other characters, romances, feelings, and relationship dynamics.
So consider joining a tight-knit group of around 30-40 men, exploring these themes, from December to April next year.
Find out more, and enroll, here.
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