3. A moment of affirmation; for a certain time, though a finite one, a deranged interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction): fulfillment does exist, and I shall keep on making it return: through all the meanderings of my amorous history, I shall persist in wanting to rediscover, to renew the contradiction–the contraction–of the two embraces. (Roland Barthes, The Lover’s Discourse, 105)
Framed within the dynamics of a sadomasochistic power relation, the notion of what constitutes an embrace (as opposed to a grip, hold, grasp) becomes blurred. Furthering this complication, Barthes provides an additional distinction between dual embraces: the sexual (adult) and the infantile, first introduced as intercourse and “motionless cradling” (104). As he succinctly develops parameters within which these embraces might contradict, contract, and coexist, a spectrum for modes of sensual engagement emerges, locating an opening for parsing the undulating exchanges of power and minute shifts in desire motivating a prolonged embrace in the final, fatal(istic) sex scene of Liliana Cavani’s 1974 The Night Porter.
The scene beginning 1:41:20 opens on Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), in close-up, gazing lustfully at a jar of jam: her amorous desire here transported from her torturer/ captor Maximilian Theo Aldorfer (Dirk Bogarde) onto an object of sustenance withheld from her as a condition of her captivity. After beginning to ravenously shovel the jar’s contents into her mouth, Max grabs her shoulder in immediate reprimand, initiating a physical contact which will evolve into the final visual of their mutually-achieved sexual satisfaction. Their wordless encounter continues as Max binds both of Lucia’s wrists in restraint – a visually-evident struggle as her fingers hold on desperately to the shattered remains of the jam jar – but her gaze has since shifted away from this symbolic sustenance and reignited a puzzlingly erotic and palpably mischievous desire for the reprimand of her amorous other. Her masochistic longing for discipline here might be read alongside Barthes as infantilizing, enacting a “return to the mother” through her subversive wish to surrender control. Max guides the broken glass to Lucia’s lips and presses her into the floor before reciprocating her own starved mannerisms as he wipes traces of jam from around her mouth and sucks the soil from her phallically outstretched fingers. Here, oscillating signifiers of incestuous, maternal desire signal a broader switch in the dynamics of power governing their embrace as Lucia presses her fingers into Max’s face, rolls him onto his back and assumes a position of domination.
Regardless of its legibility or perceptible finitude, this masochistic quarrel, like the rest of the couple’s exchanges documented throughout the film, constitutes an inarguably “deranged interval.” As these above-outlined flirtations with pain give way to a (fully-clothed) scene of more readily-identifiable pleasure, the constancy of Max and Lucia’s physical contact enacts a contraction, overlaying contradictory modes of connection into a union which may reach towards an instance of the amorous embrace. Illuminating the coexistence of two subjects within the lover, adult and child, Barthes’s “want [of] maternity and genitality” (104-5) is refracted, revealing a catastrophic mode of desire in the dichotomous relations of torturer/victim, captor/prisoner, holder/held. Their cheeks slide against each other, mouths agape in erotic bliss, before remnants of violent tension resurface in the assertive grasp of Lucia’s head: Max’s “whole body stiffens and convulses” (48) as he shudders in apparent orgasm, Lucia in turn releasing an ecstatic sigh as she collapses once more on top of him. In this final, post-coital “settling” we might glean an inversion of Barthes’s genital “appearance” (104) – interrupting the incestuous embrace and reintroducing the functional logic of desire – as the lovers’ “motionless cradling” signals a literal fulfillment and satisfaction (here, desire itself undergoes redefinition in our external perception, and possible pathologization, of the desired.)
Consistently conflating violence with sensuality, pain with pleasure, The Night Porter’s central “love-sick subject[s]” are presented in relation to an unparalleled historical context that leaves no question to the status of their relationship as “doomed to total destruction” (48-9). The extremity of their dual historical and interpersonal situation manifests a complex web of contradictory desires encoded within the couple’s catastrophic embrace. In its final throws, as loving chaos gives way to “loving calm” (104), the fatality of their relationship – inscribed from the film’s start – ensures the finality of fulfillment in this last embrace: as their bodies collapse into total stillness, we catch a glimpse of their inevitable annihilation in the film’s final frames.
Framed within the dynamics of a sadomasochistic power relation, the notion of what constitutes an embrace (as opposed to a grip, hold, grasp) becomes blurred. Furthering this complication, Barthes provides an additional distinction between dual embraces: the sexual (adult) and the infantile, first introduced as intercourse and “motionless cradling” (104). As he succinctly develops parameters within which these embraces might contradict, contract, and coexist, a spectrum for modes of sensual engagement emerges, locating an opening for parsing the undulating exchanges of power and minute shifts in desire motivating a prolonged embrace in the final, fatal(istic) sex scene of Liliana Cavani’s 1974 The Night Porter.
The scene beginning 1:41:20 opens on Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), in close-up, gazing lustfully at a jar of jam: her amorous desire here transported from her torturer/ captor Maximilian Theo Aldorfer (Dirk Bogarde) onto an object of sustenance withheld from her as a condition of her captivity. After beginning to ravenously shovel the jar’s contents into her mouth, Max grabs her shoulder in immediate reprimand, initiating a physical contact which will evolve into the final visual of their mutually-achieved sexual satisfaction. Their wordless encounter continues as Max binds both of Lucia’s wrists in restraint – a visually-evident struggle as her fingers hold on desperately to the shattered remains of the jam jar – but her gaze has since shifted away from this symbolic sustenance and reignited a puzzlingly erotic and palpably mischievous desire for the reprimand of her amorous other. Her masochistic longing for discipline here might be read alongside Barthes as infantilizing, enacting a “return to the mother” through her subversive wish to surrender control. Max guides the broken glass to Lucia’s lips and presses her into the floor before reciprocating her own starved mannerisms as he wipes traces of jam from around her mouth and sucks the soil from her phallically outstretched fingers. Here, oscillating signifiers of incestuous, maternal desire signal a broader switch in the dynamics of power governing their embrace as Lucia presses her fingers into Max’s face, rolls him onto his back and assumes a position of domination.
Regardless of its legibility or perceptible finitude, this masochistic quarrel, like the rest of the couple’s exchanges documented throughout the film, constitutes an inarguably “deranged interval.” As these above-outlined flirtations with pain give way to a (fully-clothed) scene of more readily-identifiable pleasure, the constancy of Max and Lucia’s physical contact enacts a contraction, overlaying contradictory modes of connection into a union which may reach towards an instance of the amorous embrace. Illuminating the coexistence of two subjects within the lover, adult and child, Barthes’s “want [of] maternity and genitality” (104-5) is refracted, revealing a catastrophic mode of desire in the dichotomous relations of torturer/victim, captor/prisoner, holder/held. Their cheeks slide against each other, mouths agape in erotic bliss, before remnants of violent tension resurface in the assertive grasp of Lucia’s head: Max’s “whole body stiffens and convulses” (48) as he shudders in apparent orgasm, Lucia in turn releasing an ecstatic sigh as she collapses once more on top of him. In this final, post-coital “settling” we might glean an inversion of Barthes’s genital “appearance” (104) – interrupting the incestuous embrace and reintroducing the functional logic of desire – as the lovers’ “motionless cradling” signals a literal fulfillment and satisfaction (here, desire itself undergoes redefinition in our external perception, and possible pathologization, of the desired.)
Consistently conflating violence with sensuality, pain with pleasure, The Night Porter’s central “love-sick subject[s]” are presented in relation to an unparalleled historical context that leaves no question to the status of their relationship as “doomed to total destruction” (48-9). The extremity of their dual historical and interpersonal situation manifests a complex web of contradictory desires encoded within the couple’s catastrophic embrace. In its final throws, as loving chaos gives way to “loving calm” (104), the fatality of their relationship – inscribed from the film’s start – ensures the finality of fulfillment in this last embrace: as their bodies collapse into total stillness, we catch a glimpse of their inevitable annihilation in the film’s final frames.