by Jane Reingold, MFT

ELLE

Elle, a film by Paul Verhoeven, opens with sounds of grunting and dishes shattering against a black screen. A cat is witness to the scene unfolding, golden eyes indifferently watching before impassively sauntering away. The camera pans to tangled bodies amidst shards, a man with a ski mask stands and walks out. Michele, the protagonist, is left on the floor still and motionless — corpse-like. Is this a consensual sadomasochistic enactment orchestrated by Michele or a violent home invasion and rape? That it is the latter becomes clear, and yet Michele’s reaction is troubling: blank, affectless. Like the cat, she also impassively walks away from this violent scene as she sweeps up the shards, takes a bath, orders sushi, as if all these actions are equivalent to the rape, just another occurrence in her busy day.

The trauma is not experienced as trauma; Michele, the victim, is not a victim. She makes herself the subject rather than the object, as in the title of the film: Elle: she. She is the creator of action, not the receiver. Michele’s denial of victimhood is a tip-off that this is not the first monster she has encountered. As her past unfolds we learn that Michele is already psychically dead; she died the day her father, a mass murderer, killed their entire block. Enlisted by her father, she helped him burn their family home. A photograph captured afterwards captioned “Ash Girl”l immortalized her soot-covered body and affectless face. A documentary about her father asks what role she played as if she were an accomplice, a denial of generational difference stripping her of the reality of her victimhood.

When this documentary re-airs, trash is dumped on her by a stranger. “Scum! You and your father!” For Michele nothing is generative, but just a recapitulation of meaningless waste. She is trash, everything is trash. Later in the film she performs a sexual act over a trash can. Nothing is transformative, nothing is consensual, no one can say no. In another scene Michele lies lifeless, playing a corpse during sex with her best friend’s husband. He says, “You were fabulous. Where’d you get the idea to play dead?” This transgressive act is yet another attempt to puncture her inner deadness, a traumatized psyche reformatted to survive, to keep from fragmenting. The repetition of trauma, of violation, brings on exponential violation in Michele’s life as she violates others’ relationships. As a subject she perversely subjects herself to others.

Michele‘s company develops a game in which the protagonist is assaulted and raped by a monster and then transforms into a magical creature. Michele criticizes the developers for making the “orgasmic convulsions too timid.” As a prank, someone puts her image on the protagonist’s head and makes her the victim of this scene. Unknowingly they get it right -- Michele is entwined with this creature. She is Ash Girl, simultaneously denying and taking pleasure in violent assault and yet desperately attempting to rise from the ashes of psychic deadness.

When Michele discovers the identity of the rapist, she becomes complicit in subsequent rapes, seemingly consenting, turning the tables. He becomes ensnared by her. This futile attempt to feel alive keeps her trapped in traumatic reenactments that become increasingly more dangerous. Michele is seemingly blind to this grave danger, her perception perhaps clouded by the excitement she seeks. She is locked in a compulsive cycle where there is no learning from experience. Despite this crescendo toward violence, in the end there is some hope that something generative can happen, perhaps making “possible a state of mind in which sexual aliveness [in the context of whole object relations] and generative thinking and discourse might be experienced.” (Ogden, 1996)