Meat, murder, metamorphosis the transformational ethics of François Ozon
KING'S COLLEGE, LONDON
This article argues that French filmmaker François Ozon's fantastical explorations of murder and metamorphosis provide a surprisingly ethical commentary on the tightly interwoven cultural processes of social reification and identity fetishization. Using the two early films Sitcom (1998) and Les Amants criminels (1999) as a point of departure, it claims that Ozon is essentially concerned with the different ways in which the subject appropriates alterity in his or her attempt to instigate alternative existences. Using the theories of Deleuze and Guattari on ‘deterritorialization’, those of Slavoj 
i
ek on ‘the Act’, and those of Giorgio Agamben on ‘the witness’, it will present three distinct stages of transformation at work in Ozon's films: from a seeming championing of transgressive social ‘difference’ for its own sake emerges an exploration of impossible, psychotic metamorphosis, and finally a linking of such ‘unspeakable’ change to a potentially political process of traumatic dehumanization. Real, that is, ethical, transformation in Ozon's films can come about only through the blinding perception of one's enslavement to fetishistic desire, and through the radical dismantlement of this desire and the (excessively) coherent socio-political identity it confers upon one. Ozon's demanding approach to different modes of transformation deserves close analysis at a time when increasingly rigid conceptions of social identity are again becoming dangerously allied to lazy conceptions of social change, in France and elsewhere.
1 Born in 1967, Ozon has to date released six feature-length films, Sitcom (1998), Les Amants criminels (1999), Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brûlantes (2000), Sous le sable (2001), 8 Femmes (2002) and Swimming Pool (2003); a medium length piece, Regarde la mer (1997); and numerous prize-winning shorts, including Une robe d'été (1996), La Petite mort (1995) and Victor (1993).
2 Frédéric Bonnaud's article in Les Inrockuptibles (No. 324, pp. 28–31) argues that, in his early films, Ozon ‘se conduit en cinéaste opportuniste qui tient à affirmer [...] son étiquette de provocateur patenté’ (p. 30), while 8 Femmes ‘s'annonce comme un triomphe absolu’ (p. 31), and ‘vient confirmer que François Ozon a changé de statut’ (p. 29).
3 The much-appreciated ‘radicalism’ of the novelist Michel Houellebecq and, in a different way, of the film Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001) lies in their apparently uncompromising refusal of the lack of values in the ‘anything goes’ postmodern world. Yet what they propose in its place — the apocalyptic end of ‘Man’ in Houellebecq, or the misty-eyed vision of an idealized French past in Amélie — is part of the same ethical impasse they claim to be opposing. Ozon's rejection of contemporary indifference takes a quite different path.
4 When discussing the possibilities of an ethical aspect to his work, Ozon's comments are equivocal, a situation not helped by his tendency to speak in terms of morals and didacticism rather than of ethics, a potentially more dynamic notion. Thus Ozon maintains, with regard to Les Amants criminels, that ‘Au lieu d'en faire un film à la Tavernier — didactique — j'ai opté pour quelque chose de mystérieux ... sans aucun discours moralisateur’, but in the same interview remarks that ‘je reste moral parce que je pense que mon film n'est pas complaisant’ (http://www.francois–ozon.com/ozon.int.amants.html).
5 From the Lacanian ‘Real’ to the Lyotardian ‘différend’, from the Kristevan ‘abject’ to Derridean ‘différance’, contemporary French thought remains obsessed with a domain of human existence that refuses to be represented, symbolized or spoken.
6 It is by now a truism to point out that the far right French party, the Front National (FN), has been scoring high numbers of votes thanks to the effective discursive links it has managed to establish between general national ‘insécurité’ and the presence in the community of ‘foreign’ — ‘Black’, ‘Arab’ — ‘immigrés’. See on this phenomenon Erwan Lec
ur, Un néo-populisme à la française: trente ans de FN (Paris, La Découverte, 2003).
7 The FN's dramatic 2002 success came about largely because of a general disbelief in the Left's capacity to perform its traditional function of social transformation, a disillusionment that left the FN free to take on a ‘revolutionary’ image. The apathetic voter's need to feel that he or she is somehow transgressing, provoking apparent change, is paramount. As one FN voter succinctly remarked: ‘Il faut quelqu'un qui foute le bordel’ (Libération, 20 April 2003).
8 Étienne Balibar notes that far right political discourse develops ‘a phantasy of a purification of the social body, an extirpation of the "false French", of the foreign part that is allegedly encysted within the nation’ (Balibar, trans. by Chris Turner, ‘Racism and Crisis’, from É. Balibar and I. Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class (London, Verso, 1991), p. 223).
9 As Ozon himself puts it, openly situating his work within a clear cinematic tradition: ‘Sitcom est une sorte de Théorème animalier ou zoophile ... Mais c'est vraiment une idée classique: un ange exterminateur ou un étranger pénètre dans un groupe ... sème la zizanie, transforme les personnages. C'est Boudu dans le film de Renoir ou le pédé dans Nettoyage à sec ... Dans mon film, il s'agit d'un rat’ (http://www.francois-ozon.com/ozon.int.sitcom.html).
10 Bonnaud describes it in his article on Ozon as a ‘jeu de massacre adolescent [...] plutôt moins drôle que la plupart des variés sitcoms télévisuelles [...] la caricature la plus éhontée [...] une pure et simple mécanique vidée de toute substance’ (Les Inrockuptibles, no. 324, pp. 30–1).
11 See Deleuze's and Guattari's two Capitalisme et Schizophrénie volumes: L'Anti-Oedipe (Paris, Minuit, 1972) and Mille Plateaux (Paris, Minuit, 1980), particularly the chapter ‘1730 — Devenir-Intense, Devenir-Animal, Devenir-Imperceptible’ in the latter.
12 For a clear illustration, in context, of the concept of ‘déterritorialisation’, see Deleuze's and Guattari's Kafka: pour une littérature mineure (Paris, Minuit, 1975).
13 See the section on ‘The Three Fathers’ in iek, The Ticklish Subject (London, Verso, 1999) and Lacan's Séminaire Livre VII: L'Éthique de la psychanalyse (Paris, Seuil, 1986), particularly the section on ‘La jouissance de la transgression’.
14 Here it is theories of self-stylization and ‘performativity’ such as those contained in the work of (late) Foucault (the last two volumes of his Histoire de la sexualité) and Judith Butler (for example, Gender Trouble (New York, Routledge, 1999)) that iek criticizes.
15 iek repeats the same question of how we might conceive of ‘a collective political act breaking out of this vicious circle of the System which generates its superego excess [...] a revolutionary violence which no longer relies on the superego obscenity’ (Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings by Lenin (London, Verso, 2002), p. 257), without, however, providing concrete suggestions as to how such a transition might be achieved.
16 Lacan repeatedly asks the question of how the subject who has traversed the radical fantasy can possibly experience the unrepresentable phenomenon he calls the ‘drive’. Alenka Zupan
i, in her Ethics of the Real (London, Verso, 2000) and iek frequently take up the challenge to approach this ‘unapproachable’ psychic space but, like Lacan himself, constantly fall back on fictional situations of deathliness, horror or madness (Sophocles, Sade, David Lynch) in order to do so.
17 In this sense they behave in accordance with the stipulations of philosopher Alain Badiou, who, in such works as L'Être et l'événement (Paris, Seuil, 1988) explores the necessity of fidelity to the Event that radically disrupts life as it has been known before.
18 Of Les Amant criminels, ‘Ce fut un carnage: éreintement unanime de la part de la presse et désastre commercial’, says Bonnaud (Les Inrockuptibles, no. 324, p. 30), before adding that ‘[E]ncore plus faible, Les Amants criminels accentue les défauts de Sitcom’ (p. 31).
19 Tournier's critical analysis of the ogre trope in French literature, in which he mentions important recurring characteristics (preoccupation with digestion, cannibalism, extra sense of smell, pederasty, disdain for female prey...), reveals Ozon's creation as having much in common with the ogres of old. See Tournier, Le Vent Paraclet (Paris, Gallimard, 1977), pp. 116–225.
20 The ‘successful’ Ozonian ethical trajectory can be traced in many of his other films, from the early short Victor to the most recent feature Swimming Pool. More pessimistically, Regarde la mer and Sous le sable show the protagonist either failing to come to terms with the nameless horror with which she is confronted or else simply not surviving its violence.
21 If Saïd is, legally speaking, as French as both Luc and Alice, his name, his socio-economic background, his accent, and his friends all carefully mark him as a ‘foreigner’ in the context of much popular and political discourse within France, which continues to insist on the ‘ethnic’ particularity of those Frenchmen and women now designated as rebeu (of Maghrebi descent), and on their fundamental difference from the ‘general’ French population (a concept that in itself remains shadowy). Maurice T. Maschino puts it simply: ‘Non, les Français-musulmans ne sont pas des Français comme les autres [...] s'appelle-t-on Ahmed Ben Mohamed, on est français-musulman, et c'est une tare’ (Maschino, Êtes-vous un vrai Français? (Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1988), pp. 28–29).
22 See iek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (London, Routledge, 2001), pp. 123–28. Tournier notes that the ogre figure in art is always, in any case, anal in his orientations: ‘Il relève du type anal, et non pas du type phallique, comme le montrent ses deux grands avatars littéraires Gargantua et Pantagruel... C'est l'homme des fesses et de l'anus’ (Tournier, Le Vent Paraclet, p. 118). Ozon's sodomizing ogre is no exception to this tradition.
23 See Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press, 1998), and his Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. by Heller-Roazen (New York, Zone Books, 1999).
24 Muselmann was the name given in Auschwitz to those inmates who had passed into so total a state of mental, emotional and physical fatigue as to be little more than living corpses.
25 It is clearly worth considering the characters' trajectory in terms of René Girard's arguments in Mensonge romantique et verité romanesque (Paris, Grasset, 1961). For Ozon as for Girard, there is a sharp distinction to be drawn between a necessarily violent attachment to self, position and phallic imitation — mimetic desire — and an ‘enlightened’ psyche that no longer needs to copy existing models of power for the sake of its own internal coherence.