As American Beauty deals with visualized and thematic pleasure by giving us “beauty” in both sexualized and desexualized forms, and Ripley makes us feel like a voyeur alongside its protagonist – the audience is in a position of judgment. Cringing is an involuntary judgment that happens at the level of the body before there is time for rational or intellectual understanding. Our bodies are embarrassed for us. This visceral form of judgment is impossible without emotional identification.
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I wish you’d get out of my clothes.
“Every time I see this, I cringe,” a friend remarks as we watch the scene where Tom (Matt Damon) tries on Dickie’s (Jude Law) clothes in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). Cringe is a new favorite word. I hear it constantly: on the internet, from friends, from strangers. A lack of success in one’s social or sexual life is deemed so pathetic that it makes those who observe it embarrassed, too. We find many things embarrassing these days: a bad joke, an unrequited love, an exposed lie, or a failed escapade in public. We find displays of emotion immature. We find misplaced confidence humiliating. We feel as if those who are lacking – in beauty, in coolness, in sexual prowess – affront our sensibilities. We prefer not to know about other people’s insecurities. We prefer not to know about that one time they spilled coffee down the front of their trousers. It’s cringe.
Cringing is primarily physical. It is an automated mode of embarrassment that occurs at our most visceral levels. The awkward body, the disgusted body, becomes uncomfortably present. It contorts, shrinks, retracts. Cringing is, crucially, not voluntary. For a moment, we lose ownership over our bodies. We recoil. We react, despite ourselves.
But what is it about other people’s failures that affects us? It is almost as if we take ownership of someone else’s actions. That could be me, we think. Or, perhaps: that is me. Oh no, it isn’t! Whew. It isn’t. Someone’s caught with their pants around their ankles, and it isn’t me.
We cringe at things that are unfashionable, inappropriate, or improper. We cringe at what we pity. In films such as Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) and Sam Mendes’s American Beauty (1999), shame defines our complex feelings of identification. These films are tragedies for the consumer age, in which the protagonists consistently “embarrass” us, inspiring discomfort, disgust, or secondhand embarrassment. These stories do not offer scope for nobility, nor do they seek to inspire any in their audience. Yet still these non-cathartic feelings call to attention our humanity in a range of ways. They force us to confront our social experiences of shame, vulnerability, insecurity, and empathy.
Embarrassment is not a noble feeling. It is a feeling that Sianne Ngai describes, in her book Ugly Feelings, as “explicitly amoral and non-cathartic, offering no satisfactions of virtue, nor any therapeutic release.” Ngai’s examination recognizes the opportunities for empathy hidden in “ugly feelings” as I do now. But I disagree with Ngai’s conviction that “disgust and envy, which are not immoral but amoral […] block sympathetic identification.” Rather, experiencing these films can inspire emotions that are non-cathartic and non-therapeutic, while still eliciting productive effects of empathy.
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“What a lame-o,” Jane Burnham (Thora Gray) introduces her father (Kevin Spacey) in a grainy video that prefaces American Beauty. “Somebody really should put him out of his misery.”
American Beauty is Lester’s story: the process by which he learns to love himself and rebel against his picture-perfect American life. The film traces his journey to a self-discovery prompted by his lust for a teenage girl. The term embarrassing dogs Lester’s wake. “He’s just too embarrassing to live,” Jane explains to Ricky (Wes Bentley). Later, commenting on Angela’s absence, she protests: “I’ve been too embarrassed to bring her over. Because of you!” Jane experiences, so to speak, secondhand embarrassment on her father’s behalf. Embarrassing denotes not only awkwardness but also humiliation and incompetence. More than a description of emotion, it is a marker of social inadequacy. “Can he be any more pathetic?” Jane spits, accompanied by Angela’s amused yet pitying remark: “I think he and your mother have not had sex in a long time.” Concerning Angela (Mena Suvari), Lester is pathetic because he behaves in ways that are socially inappropriate. In short, he’d make you cringe.
In The Talented Mr. Ripley, it’s not only Dickie’s clothes that Tom longs to own. The materials of Dickie’s clothes are more than just linen, leather, silk, or cashmere. They are skin-deep surfaces of desire. They represent the material essence of an affluence that Tom can smell, caress, or crumple. Tom’s “pathetic” qualities emerge out of his inability to distinguish between the ownership of material goods and sexual ownership. Above all, Tom wants Dickie. He wishes for Dickie’s confident, self-possessed body to replace his own ungainly one. Tom is an “imposter,” a “mooch,” a “fake,” and a “nobody.” When Dickie mocks Tom – “You can be a leech . . . you give me the creeps” – we remember that giving someone the creeps is, perhaps, similar to making someone cringe. Small gestures of physical discomfort become modes of judgment.
Both Tom Ripley and Lester Burnham are seen as socially inadequate or deplorable. Lester is a sexually frustrated man who discovers his idealized American life to be hollow. Tom is a poor middle-class pianist whose sense of self is hollow, shifting his personality and behavior to fit in with those whom he desires. Both men go on to harbor “indecent” fantasies – whether it be Lester’s sexual imaginings about a teenage girl or Tom’s yearning to “become” Dickie as the ultimate means of possessing the man who does not return his love. Lester rises from a helpless passivity into a form of prosperous agency before this growth is stunted by his violent death. Tom flirts with prosperity as he subsumes desired identities before at last obliterating his own humanity in an act of violence.
Above all, these two characters are inappropriate. Lester’s fantasies about an underage girl distress our moral sensibilities and violate the limits of what is socially and ethically acceptable. Tom’s fumbling attempts at “becoming” Dickie, if only vicariously, are considered shameful. While these films make us cringe with depictions of improper desires, it is worth noting that impropriety does not only mean indecency but also not belonging to oneself. The word proper, whose etymology is traced to the Old French propre, can mean “belonging exclusively to one person, private, personal.”
After all: to what extent can either man be held accountable for desiring? They cannot choose what they desire. Their desires seem almost like external factors that “take over” the will of the protagonists. Still, the audience’s judgment is palpable. In conversation with Peter, Tom muses abstractly on a similar kind of self-justification: “Whatever you do, however terrible, however hurtful, it all makes sense, doesn’t it, in your head?” Tom’s lack of “propriety” implies a kind of deniability.
As we came to value privacy in relation to pleasure, masturbation represented the diabolical extreme of these values. In his book A Cultural History of Masturbation, Thomas Laqueur describes it as a “selfish act of imagination,” a form of “uncontrolled privacy.” Watching these films, in many ways, feels like an experience of uncontrolled privacy. Our inability to directly access the characters” thoughts makes our trespass on their actions feel incidental. The characters are not narrating their private moments in voice-overs or soliloquies: we feel, rather, as if we are catching them in the act. In observing their fantasies, we feel our own privacy being violated. Cringing feeds into this mode of discovery where we feel caught out by the very same characters we are catching out.
As both films are concerned with boundaries and control, there is an inherent anxiety surrounding a loss of control in sexual desire. We fidget. We look away. This loss of control – over one’s sexual impulse, one’s moral accountability – makes us cringe. It makes us uncomfortable as if we cannot help but imagine the transgression as our own.
* * *
Both protagonists are embarrassed by their physical bodies and seek to overcome this shame. For Lester, in American Beauty, this involves training for body strength. As he strips naked in the garage, he cringes – there’s simply no other word for it – at the image of himself in the glass’s reflection. When neighbors ask why he is exercising, Lester cheerfully responds: “I want to look good naked.”
For Tom, in Ripley, this desire involves assuming the identity of the object of his lust. Tom sees his own body as a disappearing object, replaced by alternate parts assimilated from Dickie’s identity. Throughout Ripley, Minghella interweaves snapshots of marble torsos and shoulders into the montages that depict the Italian landscape: tortured, bending statues, foreshadowing the finely sculpted bust with which Tom smashes Freddie’s skull. As the trio first meet on the beach, bare skin and torsos in full view, Dickie remarks on Tom’s skin color as a comment on his wealth. This imprint of wealth on one’s physical body refers back more to the blurring boundaries – physical and social – between overlapping modes of ownership.
Exposed skin incites action in American Beauty. Lester constructs fantasy after fantasy of a sexualized Angela even though her nakedness is never revealed. During their embrace in the garage, Frank Fitts grabs a handful of Lester’s shoulder and twists, his fingers kneading skin as if it were clay he could mold into some desirous shape. In the frame, Lester’s naked body is exposed, yet it is Colonel Fitts’s body that ends up embarrassed: an attempt at a sexual encounter fails as Lester rejects his advances.
The most open display of nakedness in American Beauty takes place in a wordless yet painfully vulnerable sequence in which Lester’s daughter Jane stands in front of the mirror, removes her shirt, and unclips her bra. She stands with her breasts in full view as Ricky films her with his camera. The film’s perspective shifts between the two windows, oscillating between Jane’s reflection, her actual image, and the eye of Ricky’s camera. The intimate voyeurism offers a deeply uncomfortable – yet somehow completely desexualized – view of Jane’s body. She metamorphoses from a girl governed by self-doubt to a self-possessed person who confronts and defies the watchful gazes of multiple parties: Ricky, Ricky’s camera, the window glass’s reflection, and the audience’s gaze. This moment of desexualized gazing contrasts against Lester’s sexualized mode of looking at Angela. To Sam Mendes, acts of looking are ways of exposing – or overcoming – insecurity.
These films depict sexual fantasies that are, ultimately, about control. Lester’s image of Angela is defined by the limits and boundaries that contain a small, insular image of lust. Even in his rose-infested hallucinations, her body is always covered, teasing the promise of nakedness through speculation. The montage of repeated movements – a door opening, a slow tilt of the head – portrays a sequence of lascivious, yet unfulfilled, sexual temptation. The montage replays the clip of a hand moving forward: always advancing but never rewarded. At last, Lester touches Angela’s face in a moment of tenderness that rejects her humanity: “You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.” He does not pretend that Angela is anything more than a symbol, an embodiment of the youth and vivacity he longs to repossess. In his lust for an imaginary Angela, he conflates the desire to possess her sexually with the desire to become what she embodies. Both are forms of ownership.
Looking is ownership. In Ripley, Tom exemplifies this pleasure. As he watches Dickie climb out of the bathtub, the two men are surrounded by reflections. The lamplight makes the entire scene hazy, sensual. A rippling outline of Tom’s reflection in the bathwater is splashed apart by Dickie’s movement. Tom’s eyes trace Dickie’s naked body in the full-length mirror; he retracts his gaze sharply when Dickie notices him watching. Tom only dares to acknowledge his desire in fragments of mirrored images, through indirect forms of looking. Mirrors expose Tom. He manipulates them, and is manipulated by them. They allow him to visually enjoy Dickie but deny him the ownership he craves. Like Lester, Tom’s fulfillment comes from wishing to become the object of his desire as the ultimate mode of ownership. Tom’s attachment to Dickie’s clothes and rings reflects the objectification of the man he desires, associating a fetishistic pleasure with objects that can be owned. The target for Dickie’s sexualized teasing ranges from people to material goods: “I could fuck this ice box, I love it so much.” Tom longs to assume Dickie’s identity – and, by extension, Dickie’s clothes, Dickie’s wealth, Dickie’s confidence, and Dickie’s sexual prowess. Tom learns what he should want by observing what Dickie has.
Privacy is eroded as we witness Tom observing Dickie and Marge on the boat. Overlapping lines of sight as the perspective oscillates between Freddie (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who observes Tom, and Tom, whose body is positioned in an awkward turn as he looks into the boat’s compartment. In the mirror, he sees a pair of moving legs intertwined as Dickie and Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow) are intimate. (Painful images are often revealed to Tom in mirrors, as if he can – through indirect looking – deny an aspect of their authenticity.) Tom’s half-turned body is made small as Freddie’s shoulder occupies half the frame. The camera flits between Freddie’s scorn, a close-up of Tom’s expressionless gaze, and a pair of underwear slowly sliding down Marge’s ankle. The recurring xylophone tune haunts the background, a touch of eerie innocence during a deeply uncomfortable scene of voyeurism and envy. In such, the audience find themselves in a similar position as Tom. Just as Tom finds himself violating the privacy of his acquaintances, we trespass on the painful privacy of his embarrassment.
As Tom parades around the bedroom wearing Dickie’s clothes in Dickie’s absence, he performs a fetishistic pleasure in which he takes on the identity of the man he desires. The camera angle is deceptive. A close-up of Tom’s joyous face bobs in and out of view. His winding movements contrast sharply against his earlier clumsy posture; here, Tom sheds his shyness like a snake shedding its skin. He bends down to admire himself in the mirror, poised, arching his back. The charismatic discomfort of this scene arises from the lack of self-consciousness in Tom’s body language: Tom is utterly certain that he is not being watched.
Dickie’s intrusion comes, abruptly, in the mirror: his reflection appears before his actual person. Dickie’s voice, disgusted – “What are you doing?” – wrenches us vulgarly out of Tom’s fantasy. The cold politeness of his tone – “I wish you’d get out of my clothes” – intensifies the discomfort of the interaction. The interruption of this little fantasy pains us, embarrasses us. We cringe. We want to stop looking.
The film’s editing averts from showing us the immediate confrontation of Tom’s embarrassment: the scene blinks sharply, transitioning into a close-up view of the spinning record player, as if to preserve the last of Tom’s dignity, before transitioning back to depict Tom’s body shielded behind the mirror that houses Dickie’s furious reflection. In this case, the camera cringes. What follows is a grotesque image: only Tom’s face is visible above the mirror, floating, superimposed above a full-length contour of Dickie’s standing figure, as if Tom has “become” the mirror that subsumes the other man’s body. In the face of Tom’s cowering awkwardness, the mirror – usually a device for exposure and truth – becomes almost a shield, a kindness. It distracts and deflects.
In the wide shot that ends The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tom Ripley’s visibility comes to us in reflections. The mirrors spin in time with the boat’s rocking. This time, the camera stays focused on Tom as his reflection weaves in and out of view, marking a sight of tragic pity in kaleidoscopic pieces. The mirrors are evasive. They imply a lack of propriety, a deniability of the narrative’s dread, just as the film can only bear to communicate Peter’s murder in the sounds of a fading voice-over. Can Tom acknowledge what he has done? The mirrors take pity on Tom. They know that he has destroyed a profoundly precious love, a love that he did not know how to accept – and that in doing so, he loses what is left of his humanity. Tom’s silhouette is rendered to us in fragments, as if the camera deflects and denies holistic depiction. He cannot bring himself to own this shame, this horror. Tom’s savage loathing for himself means that he will never again have the courage to confront his own reflection in its entirety.
To cringe at something is to look away from, to deny, to avert one’s gaze. Yet in doing so, we respond to it more than ever. We give the unseen subject power over ourselves, enhancing its power to shame us. Yet its effects are not so simple. To cringe is to insult – to express our disgust – yet cringing can also be a mode of kindness if we look away to preserve the last of someone’s dignity by offering them privacy. In both films, the camera communicates pity through a retraction of visibility. It leaves the most excruciatingly vulnerable of facial expressions unseen. Just as cringing is a physical folding of the body – a contortion, a “turning away’ – the camera replicates this motion through retractions of visibility.
American Beauty dignifies its characters by endowing them with unexpected moments of privacy. When Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper) misinterprets Lester’s pity as a form of sexual interest, the kiss is depicted with a shot behind Fitts’s shoulder, leaving us the sight of Lester’s surprise but denying us the image of Fitts’s hunger and longing. When Lester encounters Angela in the living room at the film’s climax, she appears painfully small: disheveled, her makeup smudged. The careful strip of lighting casts a neat shadow onto the wall behind her, doubling her figure – for Angela always appears “doubled” to us as we struggle to separate her authentic self from the voluptuous object constructed by Lester’s fantasies.
As the two undress, Angela confesses that she has no experience with sex. Her promiscuousness was a deliberate image cultivated to conceal her crippling insecurity. Although her breasts are visible, Angela’s small, slender body appears childlike and fragile. For the first time, her body – and our view of her – is desexualized. Angela is “pathetic” in both senses of the word: her shame is palpable, having revealed an aspect of her identity to be a false impression. Yet she also commands an incredible pathos, a harrowing sincerity that communicates the extent of her confusion and vulnerability. Here is my body without its covering, her wide eyes tell us. Here is my failing, my nudity. I have given my all to hide what I find deeply shameful, and vulnerable, about myself. Here it is.
Her pathos moves Lester entirely out of his position as the lustful observer and forces him to acknowledge her humanity. After indulging in fantasy after fantasy without consummation, the literal sight of Angela naked awakens a shyness that is almost pity. Our visual accessibility to her nakedness is denied immediately as Lester offers her a blanket. As the camera “turns away” here, its gaze is kind.
Do we live, now, in a society that finds vulnerability shameful? Would this world still give us the chance to take off our clothes and confess I feel ashamed, to ask to be seen? To make others cringe is to be pathetic. But what does it really mean to be pathetic? In theological contexts, pathos is suffering, feeling, passion. In the context of art criticism, pathos is the ability to evoke sadness or sympathy. Pathetic refers to a subject’s capacity to arouse compassion through vulnerability. But we are no longer a society that values vulnerability. Colloquial usage of the term in the late twentieth and twenty-first century marks pathetic as a derogatory term: it is now used in humiliation, to deem something ridiculous or contemptible. To be pathetic, now, means to possess a humiliating quality of inadequacy. It invites a form of secondhand embarrassment that involves more contempt than compassion. Both films revel in the shame that comes from seeing and being seen, and in doing so, transform our experiences of empathy.
As American Beauty deals with visualized and thematic pleasure by giving us “beauty” in both sexualized and desexualized forms, and Ripley makes us feel like a voyeur alongside its protagonist – the audience is in a position of judgment. Cringing is an involuntary judgment that happens at the level of the body before there is time for rational or intellectual understanding. Our bodies are embarrassed for us. This visceral form of judgment is impossible without emotional identification.
Cringing demonstrates that it is possible – indeed, necessary – for us to identify and empathize with something we find shameful. At heart, cringing is about when to stop looking. It is about when, and where, we retract our gaze. If the act of looking is a form of ownership – if we can “own” the image of someone else’s embarrassment in our minds – then cringing also retracts ownership. When we cringe, we preserve privacy.
When we cringe, we implicitly protect someone else’s dignity.
When we cringe, it is possible that we are also giving someone – and ourselves – a moment of compassion. Let me wait, we think, and I’ll look back once you’ve covered, or composed, yourself. I’ll let you have sole ownership of your vulnerability – for we are nothing without the ownership of our emotions, our desires, our shames. We are nothing if we do not own, and own up to, who we are.
References
Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press, 2005.
Thomas Walter Laqueur. Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. Zone Books, 2003.
