A Use as Well as a Delight:
A Materialist Critique of Representations of Underage Sex in Film BY GRIFFIN VICTORIA REED | Saint Louis University
ABSTRACT The politicization of art has become acutely contested in the wake of the #MeToo movement, with calls abounding to “separate the artist from the art.” This impulse towards compartmentalization, though well-intentioned, nevertheless reflects a persistent strain of liberal modernism that allows creative work to perpetuate harmful narratives with no basis in reality, and allows audiences to ignore their own discursive permeability. In this paper, I explore this insistence on art’s distance from materiality, examining in particular one uniquely problematic narrative lineage as it plays out in two separate works of art: that of adult sex with minors as portrayed in Eric Rohmer’s film Le genou de Claire and Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name. Despite the differences in their production, and despite the latter film’s insistence on emotionality against its predecessor’s deliberate affective flatness, both works deploy aesthetic loveliness and exaggerated tone as a means of obscuring the dangers in their depictions of desire. Ultimately, the two works together create and uphold a self-contained, inaccurate semiotics of underage sex, a framing whose emphasis on affluent, Eurocentric whiteness influences political and cultural attitudes towards predatory sexual behaviour today seen most ominously in QAnon’s projected attempts to “save the children.”
Recently on Twitter, author Vanessa Angélica Villareal announced that she could not sleep. It was October 29, 2020, just five days before the “election of a lifetime,” as so many journalists and pundits were labeling it, and Villareal was responding to a tweet posing the following question: “How do you approach teaching problematic writers like Junot Diaz, DFW [David Foster Wallace], Nick Flynn, Sherman Alexie, and even lesser-known writers about whom you’ve heard upsetting accts [accounts] of abuse? Do you eliminate their work from syllabi altogether? Do you take Barthes’ death-of-the-author approach?” Villareal, in her insomnia, answers: Let’s unpack one of the most misunderstood and misused concepts in literary theory: this is not what ‘death of the author’ means. In fact, this usage is the exact opposite of what Barthes intended to critique having lived through WWII: propaganda and capitalism… ‘Death of the author’ does not mean ‘read abusers bc authors don’t matter, look at how good the writing is.’ ‘Death of the author’ shows us how abusers, bigots, and demagogues control the narrative through authority and language, and gives us the critical agency to dismantle it. (Twitter)
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Vol.06, No.01 | Spring 2021
The political or intentional nature of art seems to be more acutely contested than ever, post-#MeToo, post-election of a president-rapist, and yet so much of the cultural and historical production of the West has yet to be folded into the kind of critique that considers the material, rather than the mimetic, qualities of creative work. Indeed, it seems that our contemporary relationship to art is still mediated through a modernist understanding of its distance from us, and from reality; “a radical separation of art from the social (and individual) circumstances in which it is produced and enjoyed” (Mattick 1). Numerous thinkers have pushed back against the tendency towards “radical separation,” and perhaps this continued materialist resistance evokes, in itself, the persistence of modernism in artistic reception. In the early 20th century, György Lukács posited form as the element distinguishing art as “a rounded totality of being” reacting to modernism as it happened around him; in the mid-century, Raymond Williams provided a criticism of the social immanence imposed by mimetic representation, while Peter Burger’s theory of the avant-garde identified the “autonomy” of art, its prevailing status as a zone detached from life; and in the 21st century, picking up the critical torch, Jacques Rancière’s notion of the “esthetic regime” censures the modernist lens that has endured even as more
