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Return To ShopHe bravely made a movie about women’s sexual addiction, which caused countless controversies-Season 2
Season 2 、 Try everything and break everything
Adler believed that “women are faced with a choice between maintaining their autonomy and becoming masculine, or finding their own happiness in the submission of love… Pregnancy compensates women and gives them back a new autonomy.”
[5] However, for Beauvoir, this is a confusing view of women’s “passive sexuality” because it is based on the male perspective of sexual desire as impulse and energy. “For woman, the real problem is to refuse these escapes, and as a transcendent self-realization, the problem is what possibilities the male attitude and the female attitude open to her.” [6]
The contradiction between the uncontrollability of love and open sexual behavior led Joy to embark on a path towards transcendent self-realization after Jerome left. She sought more possibilities in sexual behavior and relationships, and tried to get closer to herself through these possibilities.
At the end of the first part of the film, Joey reunites with his love interest Jerome, but when he tries to combine love with sex, he loses the feeling/pleasure of sexual behavior.
Such a dramatic setting undoubtedly demonstrates the complexity of the issue the director wants to explore – if sex placed under love is legitimate and noble, then when the sexual feelings belonging to the only love object are deprived, what behavior is the correct solution? Maintaining the fidelity of marriage and love is obviously the solution that best conforms to sexual morality and social norms.
Jerome and Joey demonstrated another solution to this situation. Jerome and Joey lived a sexless marriage. Jerome asked Joey to find other men to release her desires, but even with the consent of patriarchy and the maintenance of love, Jerome would still be jealous and angry because Joey went to bed with other men. This was Jerome’s instinctive reaction as a man who was deeply trapped in the patriarchal structure and felt that his male status was threatened.
This was not the case with Joy. Even though she experimented with marriage and motherhood, and admitted that she enjoyed “the comfort and security and peaceful feeling of family” during that time, she still dismissed the fidelity of sexual behavior and its reproductive significance.
In the chapter on civilized sexual morality and modern unrest in his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud wrote: “The original purpose of human sexual instinct was not procreation, but the desire for a certain kind of pleasure… We call this stage anto-erotism… It then developed into object love and then into genital union.” Corresponding to the history of the sexual instinct, we can also divide the development of culture into three stages. In the first stage, various sexual behaviors that did not lead to procreation were freely practiced. In the second stage, all other methods of sexual satisfaction, except those that could achieve procreation, were suppressed. Then, in the third stage, only legitimate procreation could be the goal of sex.
For Joy, the reproductive significance of sex was negated. She voluntarily stopped taking birth control pills and chose to have a child. However, her motivation was “to regain the feeling in her vagina and to have a cesarean section.”
For Joy, the vagina isn’t a passage for childbirth, but an organ for pleasure. Childbirth isn’t about fulfilling the instinct for reproduction, but about restoring the possibility of sexual pleasure. Entering into traditional structures ultimately comes down to a personal, experimental adventure.
The attempt was still unsuccessful. Late at night, Jerome returned home to find Joey had left the child home alone while he went to a BDSM club to get pleasure, nearly causing the child to fall to his death. Later, when Joey returned home, Jerome asked her, “Do you love me?” and she replied, “Yes.” But when Jerome said, “If you leave tonight, you’ll never see me and the child again,” Joey wept and said goodbye to Jerome and the child before leaving.
The attempt at family, marriage, love, and motherhood was broken in this act of leaving, which was also a resistance of Joy to the obstruction of possibilities. She actually put herself into the social structure to try out the possibilities of tradition, and tried to innovate it when entering the tradition, while at the same time hoping to integrate her sexual freedom and pursuit of desire into the social structure.
But in the film, von Trier did not give the possibility of realizing this intertwined “entry, innovation and integration”.
This kind of attempt and breaking is also reflected in Joey and her adopted daughter and successor P. After Joey worked as a debt collector, she was introduced by her boss to P, a troubled girl from a criminal family with a deformed ear, and became P’s guardian.
The kissing and caressing scenes between P and Joey clearly establish their homosexual relationship. However, beyond homosexuality, the relationship between P and Joey holds a more complex meaning. They serve as mirror images of each other, as symbols of Joey’s youth, and as a profound mother-daughter relationship.
P, with his deformed ears, comes from a troubled family and doesn’t fit in with the crowd. In a sense of alienation, P becomes a mirror image of Joey. During the kissing and caressing scene mentioned above, P asks Joey to see her body, but she refuses, citing her own scars. P’s response is, “What’s the big deal? My ears are deformed, too.”
This unfinished sexual scene and P’s words not only clearly indicate the similarity between Joey and P as aliens, but also the camera adopts a tilted symmetrical composition to emphasize this mirror image when P and Joey caress each other.
At the same time, as a young woman, P took the initiative in this sexual relationship and presented the sex with P in the “woman on top” position. This is almost a reproduction of the sex scenes of young Joey that the film spent a lot of time to show in the previous section, with the initiative and the woman on top position being exactly the same.
The mother-daughter relationship is almost self-evident. Joy serves as P’s guardian and mentor, teaching her the rules of life and debt collection, regulating her unruly behavior, and waiting for P to return home like a mother. A more convincing contrast is that while waiting for P, Joy, bored and nervous, starts playing Solitaire, a card game that Joy herself mentioned in the first part of the film and that she hated her mother.
The breaking of this complex and ambiguous relationship was also inevitable. Joey tried more possibilities in this relationship. It was even in this relationship that she truly experienced the feeling of being a mother and immersed herself in the meaning structure of mother-daughter as a woman.
But this time, the destructive power comes more from P, the initiator, just as the destructive power before all came from Joey himself, the initiator. The daughter will eventually betray and break away from the mother.
P gets together with Jerome, Joey’s former lover and a debt collector. Jerome beats Joey up before leaving, and both his former lover and current lover leave Joey. Same-sex love as a subjective practice cannot be smoothly realized.
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