One of the arguments running through the recent postings of Junk for Code is that the aesthetic has a critical edge in relation to the world of utility through its connection to the body, sexuality and passion. I have used French high culture to illustrate this shock, violence and menace with Catherine Breillat's Romance, the work of Bataille, and Balthus. I would also include Catherine Breillat's latter film A ma soeur, (For My Sister). Breillat disturbs.
Trevor over at philosophical conversations has some comments on Catherine Breillat's films.
Apart from the films of Catherine Breillat I have been using the French work of the 1930s as illustrations of aesthetic shock.
Is the aesthetic still shocking and violent today? Or has it been domesticated? Literature has pretty much died, with novel now a dead narrative form. People with faith in literature keep on looking for the buzz and excitement in contemporary fiction and fail to find it. Narrative fiction has become an aid to going to sleep at night. Better than counting sheep apparently.
Something is happening in fim though. In Australian films, such as Teesh and Trude, we have an exploration of the emotional wasteland of our damaged lives that transgress the squalid domesticity of kitchen-sink drama.
What shocks even more are films, such as Thirteen. This depicts the lives of teenage girls in a world where their minds and emotions are shaped by modern consumerism: — MTV, teen magazines, fashion and the need to fit into the brutal and exclusively teenage world around them. The shock can be seen in the reactions expressed in this review.
The review interprets Thirteen to be an antidote to two other forms of representation of teen life in popular culture. These are Hollywood and rap music.
"Thirteen is a sobering antidote to the glossy, vacuous visions of female teen life that are coming from the major Hollywood studios at the moment ... which show that you can be empowered as a woman as long as you’re as thin and as beautiful or that being a successful young woman today means being able to look good in Gucci....Contrast these almost criminally unrealistic images of the path to womanhood coming from Hollywood with those coming from rap music, pervasive on MTV, where young women are routinely depicted as sexualised “bitches” who deserve to be abused and prostituted."
As this review notes numbers of young affluent suburban girls in the States are endangering themselves with aberrant and self-destructive behaviour, eating disorders, alcohol and drug abuse, self-mutilation and sexual acting-out. Many young teenage girls from wealthy middle-class homes are turning to prostitution for affirmation, excitement and money. Their anger, meanness and wildness transgresses teen angst or rebellion.
There is a difference between the 1930s and now. Then it was mean (Balthus and Klossowski) representing women's sexuality and sexual desires for other men. Today it is women expressing women's sexual life and desires. And it is disturbing.
The aesthetic can still shock.