Babygirl: Beyond Villain or Victim of Desire
Dark desire, angels don't fuck, Eros with a machine gun, and why repression doesn't work.
Lacan’s jouissance and no-sexual-relation
The Dark Regions of Sexual Desire
I like to attune to how I feel right after I watch a film. I think that the residual “after-movie glow” gives us a clue about the film’s aim and can open up new interpretations for what came before. Sitting in the dark theater with credits rolling, the first feeling I noticed after watching Halina Reijn’s Babygirl was disappointment. I could find no place where to locate it, since the movie delivered just what I imagined it would—a woman’s journey from faking an O to getting an O. So, why does Romy ’s (Nicole Kidman) final orgasm feel so empty? Does the film posit that all Romy gets after putting her career and marriage on the line is a genuine orgasm?
While greater acknowledgement of our fantasies and desires has the power to transform lives, the movie suggests that her status quo remains untouched. She keeps her job, her marriage, and her power. It preserves a heteronormative and neoliberal pact—the nuclear family is restored, Jacob (Antonio Banderas) forgives any and all harm, and Romy keeps her girlboss role. The only transformation we observe is that she and her husband start engaging in kinkier sex. Except for this micro-shift, her fantasy remains untouched and unexplored. During the final scenes, it is suggested that Romy imagines Samuel (Harris Dickinson) caressing a doting dog, reminiscent of her submissive performance on all fours at the hotel room during their exploratory tryst. Her access to this sexual fantasy, eyes closed as her husband fingers her from behind, allows her to enjoy—not in connection to him, but in connection to her fantasy. In some ways, she is still masturbating in a dark room by the glowing screen of her laptop.
Although it seems to be the consensus among commentators, I resist reading this ending as a triumph of communication and consent in granting access to a better orgasm or a closer relationship. Others debate whether Romy is a selfish and narcissistic villain who uses Samuel as an erotic pawn or if she is the victim of a young white man’s sexual coercion. Since her victorious orgasm was gained only after a necessary path of unabashed destruction, Romy feels more like a villain than a victim, and perhaps that is what we must grapple with. There is something villainous in all those who dare to tread the dark regions of sexual desire. To break free from the mandated sexual norm is a violent and destructive act. There is no other way to accomplish sexual self-knowing without leaving behind a trail of destruction. I do not know of any angels who fuck, just as I’ve never met someone without some psychological wound from at least one fraught sexual encounter on their journey to learn more about their sexual desire. Many have tried clearing this thorny path through education on rape prevention and consent, but since our sexual desires are not entirely known to us and so difficult to spontaneously articulate to others (without an Ikea-style instructional manual), there is always some risk involved, some unpleasurable limit that is touched and renegotiated. This is part of what makes all sexual acts potentially transgressive and exciting. We cannot predict what is to come.
This mingling of pain and pleasure is not just in the realm of sadomasochism or kink. It is part of all our experiences of pleasure, lust, desire, and the masturbation fantasies we often return to. Most studies on masturbation fantasies (I won’t cite them because you can easily find them) will list submission and dominance fantasies as some of the most common, including fantasies about being held hostage, rape, objectification, power play, and so on. In other words, there is something transgressive about all sexual fantasies and desires—We find ourselves becoming aroused by thinking of just what is prohibited for us to do.
In the realm of prohibition and lust, is Lacan’s concept of jouissance. Jouissance is the thing that makes sex freaky—the frightening, all engulfing, ecstatic and painful feeling that we find ourselves rushing toward with deadly force. It is a source of pain and pleasure, a category of overflowing life and devastating death, where we transgress by crossing the prohibitions that hold desire back into the realm of impossible satisfaction. When we cross the threshold of prohibition toward pleasure, there is an excess of pain. We can imagine that the moment of orgasm if taken out of context would appear painful to an onlooker. Jouissance is what pushes against the limit. There is only so much pleasure that we can bear before it becomes pain.
Thus, jouissance is always too much and it never arrives. We fear and worship it at its feet. We want it but when we find ourselves getting there, we realize it exists in an impossible horizon—as it should or it might destroy us. Yet we gravitate toward that sweet destruction like moths to a flame. To return to the film, we can see how jouissance makes both villains and victims out of all who dare traverse the threshold of taboos into a sexual knowing. Romy takes the plunge finds her jouissance in the pain and pleasure that can exist not only because of Samuel’s part in it, but also because of the prohibition that is placed by her husband. Not just her husband’s prohibition, but other taboos involving her career, her gender performance, the obligation of motherhood, etc. One might even wonder if she feels more satisfied by the prohibitions themselves (that she gets to transgress or not) than by her sexual exploration with Samuel.
Bad Sex — Eros with a Machine Gun
On her way to discover what she wants, Romy stumbles through stilted interactions with an equally awkward partner. Samuel’s sexually suggestive comments are off-beat and come across as sexually-autistic. Like the cupid tattoo on his ribcage, Samuel is like Eros with a machine gun—he is more forceful than he is seductive. He seems oblivious to the risks he is taking when he tells Romy during his mentorship interview that she seems as if she wants to be told what to do. I wonder if the statement is meant to come across as bold or stupid—although these are not mutually exclusive. Romy reacts to him with unease at first, then compliance in an awkward seduction. Samuel’s provocation makes Romy lose her balance and she steps toward him to find her footing again. Likewise, when commanded by Samuel to take off her clothes as she stood in a corner of their clandestine hotel room, Romy refuses and the lovers renegotiate the terms of the encounter. On another night, when Samuel tells her to take off her panties and spread her legs on the hotel room couch, Romy hesitates and yet stiffly submits. The tenor of these scenes is awkward and staggered, and as a viewer, I attuned to my own feelings of profound cringe. It is a familiar feeling—of stumbling through early sexual exploration and finding ones footing. It was sweet to see this process enacted with painful honesty—I wish that it were even more cringe/vulnerable than it was.
These awkward scenes illustrate that bad sex is important. For Romy, not knowing is what led her into the dark woods to learn something. Of course, I am not referring here to traumatic sex or to unconsensual sex, but to experiences in which people consent precisely to the possibility of goodness and the emergence of badness which is not easily warded off, or is perhaps part of the process of finding the creative, new, surprising part of sex that is just beyond the cringe, the bad, the not so great limit. Bad sex is just sex when we do not know all the dance moves yet. It means having to learn something that is not yet mastered, and sex never becomes something to master. If it were, then it would be predictable and boring. It would mean we get to learn nothing new about the sexual partner or about ourselves.
The film illustrates just what bad sex can and cannot do—sex can brings us closer to ourselves. It puts us in touch with our fantasies, lust, and pleasure—and more often than not—also with our deepest insecurities, pains, and shame. In the process of learning how to fuck, people make mistakes that emotionally (or physically) harm self and others. I have never met a woman who has not felt at least once dehumanized or unwillingly objectified during a regrettable sexual encounter. In fact, this is a common experience for people of all genders. Meanwhile, men often report dissociating during sex because of anxiety or enduring an ego wound because of a perceived sexual failure or humiliation. Of course, this is not limited to gender. At the risk of sounding cynical, I suggest that this is a realistic part of the psycho-sexual landscape for people who do not know or who are just beginning to have sex and learn about their sex-wants and limits. Like all developmental milestones, one endures these moments of growth while overcoming anxiety and fear of the dangerous unknown. We cannot come out of a sexual practice unscathed and we learn in time that we can survive this kind of hurt and learn how to make sex more pleasurable according to our unique needs.
There is no sexual relation
I am reminded of Lacan’s controversial phrase: there is no such thing as a sexual relation. Some translate relation as rapport, and this makes more sense to me. Others translate his maxim as “There is no relation between the sexes.” In other words, men and women do not have biological or natural ways of relating to one another, but there is always a mediator in language (the Other) that intervenes and shapes the encounter. Thus “straight” sex, gender, and everything in between the sexes is normative and determined by culture—gender is not natural. It also suggests that in the sexual encounter there are never only two people in perfect symmetric union in bed together who are mystically attuned to one another in harmonious reciprocal dialogue (it may feel this way sometimes, but bear with me). There is a third involved—whether the third is constituted by a sexual fantasy that objectifies a partner, in the shape of social pressures that determine what role each person feels they need to fill, in the private rivalries or competitive thoughts that we keep to ourselves in the midst of love making, in all that is not communicated and can never be put into words about sex, in all we do not even know about ourselves and may never know that remains incommunicable. In these absences, there is a gap that cannot be bridged by the sex act. This isn’t to suggest a painful loneliness, but simply to bring forward the beautiful paradox of what it means to be alone and to be alone together—to be able to be together with others even when there is something that cannot be entirely reciprocated or communicated.
For Romy, having sex and reaching an orgasm was not the point. Sex needed to be folded into a fantasy in order for her to come alive in it. Sex with her husband, as gentle, consensual, and loving as it was—could not hit the spot. She sought more, something to match a longing that she could not understand or put into words. Her fantasy took the shape of power-play, degradation, age-transgression, and adultery. Maybe in order for her to feel authentic, something of this fantasy needed to come into her sex life. It is possible that this fantasy sustained something that brought her closer to her self, something that spoke to her identity as a woman, especially a white woman in a scrutinized position of power, to something significant in her past, to what it means to be a sexual being. However, this is for us to speculate, since Reijn provides us with no clear way to interpret the origins of her kinks. It is probably best we don’t know why Romy lusts in the way she does, since so often kinks and sexual transgressions are conceptualized as a pathological result of trauma, rather than as constitutive of every erotic fantasy. However, we see how her sexual wants are her own—she only happens to find an apt counterpart to her fantasy in Samuel’s inverse fantasy. In other words, he matches her freak.
Beyond Villain or Victim
In the realm of sex, what goes beyond being a villain or a victim of desire? If we interpret Romy as a villain only, it suggests she had full knowledge and control over her fantasy and the direction it took. She was in the driver’s seat and should have stopped the events from unfolding before an indiscretion took place. If she is a victim, it means that she was at the whims of her unconscious, acting as an automaton directed by forces unknown to her, as a revolt on the mandated repression of her sexual wants. Because everything in her life conspired to punish her sexual wants, she had no choice but to feel overcome by a daemon that took over and directed her actions. She was at the whims of desire.
Neither option seems sufficient to explain Romy’s complex situation, as she inhabits both places at once. She is in charge and she has no control. She is an agent of her desire and she is along for the ride. She knows what she wants and she has no clue. Samuel ask her why she would show up at the hotel room if she didn’t want to have sex. She comes up with the excuse that she wanted to tell him to stop bothering her, but every action that followed her statement proves the opposite. It’s a beautiful example why repression doesn’t work. No matter how hard we try to push away our forbidden wishes, they will always find a way to reemerge. In fact, the harder we push them away, the stronger they rebound.
If Romy is a victim, she is a victim of herself and of a process that emerges from just being a person in the world that punishes people for their wants. If she is a villian, it is out of a necessary revolution that threatens to destroy every oppressive law that keeps her wants locked away—including the law of marriage, the law of the chaste mother, the law of a capitalist patriarchy that conjures the frigid lady-ceo. In her masturbation fantasies, Romy gets to break all the laws she wants. In reality, she keeps all the laws over her life in place. To return to the disappointment I sat with in the movie theater, the film suggests that Romy does not find a way out of the structures that keep her desire repressed. Maybe she finds a way inside—a way into her body, her eros, her relationship—but not a way outside of the structures that bind her. The reward of a good orgasm is a momentary reprieve in an otherwise frustrating and disappointing situation. And yet—who are we to judge?
Sources
I like to use Dylan Evans’ An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis to crosscheck my definitions of jouissance and the non-sexual-rapport. I’m also reading What is Sex by Alenka Zupančič which is amazing, Lacan’s Feminine Sexuality as edited by Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, and anything by Avgi Saketopoulou on consent and gender to grapple with the ideas I presented here. I’m using less quotes because I am finding it more fun to write this way, but I suggest you check these sources out.