Irréversible

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Irréversible
Review by: Mikita Brottman and David Sterritt
Film Quarterly,
Vol. 57, No. 2 (Winter 2003-2004), pp. 37-42
Published by: University of California Press
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Reviews
Irréversible
Director: Gaspar Noé. Producer: Christophe Rossignon.Writer:
Gaspar Noé. Cinematographers:Benoît Debie, Gaspar Noé.
Music: Thomas Bangalter. Studio Canal. US Distribution: Lion’s
Gate Films.
Watching the shied core
Striking the basket, sliding across the floor
Shows less and less of luck, and more and more
Of failure spreading back up the arm
Earlier and earlier, the unraised hand calm,
The apple unbitten in the palm.
—Philip Larkin, “As Bad as a Mile”
B
eginning with a failed gesture—a missed attempt
to land an apple core in a trashcan—the poet re-
alizes this was no unlucky shot. He traces his failure
back from the gesture, back up the arm itself, earlier
and earlier—to when? To the moment the thought was
formulated, or earlier? When does a failed action be-
come determined? When do elements of personality
become ingrained? When do the choices we make be-
tray a pattern? These are among the philosophical and
psychological issues explored by Gaspar Noé in Ir-
réversible, which has sparked heated controversy since
its 2002 premiere in competition at the Cannes Inter-
national Film Festival.
Noé was born in Argentina in 1963 but has lived
in France since the mid-seventies, when his father fled
their native country for political reasons. He studied
filmmaking during his late teens, then turned to phi-
losophy, although he recalls being the opposite of a
conscientious student. He entered the French film in-
dustry as an assistant director of short movies, then
made his own directorial debut in 1991 with the forty-
minute Carne, the brutal story of a misanthropic
butcher who takes revenge on the wrong man for mo-
lesting his autistic daughter and goes to prison for it.
Noé explored these characters further in his 1998 fea-
ture Seul contre tous (I Stand Alone), in which the
butcher opens up a new shop in the suburbs with his
mistress, then reunites with his daughter and con-
templates the prospect of ending their bleak lives in a
murder-suicide.
Both films caused a critical uproar, but Irréversible
went a ferocious step farther, reportedly inducing phys-
ical illness among film-festival spectators and leading
a normally unshockable Village Voice reviewer to de-
nounce it for aiming to inflict “nausea, moral indigna-
tion, and . . . epilepsy” on its viewers.
1
According to
press accounts, the Cannes premiere of Irréversible
provoked fainting and a walkout by an estimated 250
of the 2400 audience members. People were suppos-
edly nauseated not only by the film’s scenes of explicit
violence but also by the frenzied, restless camerawork
in the long opening shot. Audience members were also
apparently upset by the film’s frequent use of exple-
tives directed at homosexuals and women, and by a
lengthy scene in which the character played by Italian
actress Monica Bellucci is anally raped.
Critics in general dismissed the film at Cannes,
and many despised it, although it was better received
at the Toronto International Film Festival a few
months later. A prevailing view was exemplified by
37
The poster for the American release
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Johnathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader, where
he called Irréversible “stupid, vicious, and pretentious,
though you may find it worth checking out if you want
to experiment with your own nervous system.”
2
In
sum, Noé’s work got short shrift from critics too of-
fended by the film to seriously consider its structural
complexity.
Irréversible consists of about 13 long, apparently
unbroken shots,
3
beginning with a short prologue fea-
turing Philippe Nahon as the violent, dissolute butcher
who is the main character in Carne and Seul contre
tous. Half naked and all repugnant, the butcher is re-
hashing his sordid past with an equally unappealing
companion in his squalid Paris apartment. “Time de-
stroys all things,” he sighs, as police sirens wail be-
neath the window. Throughout the scene the camera
swirls and dives, providing us with only the most fleet-
ing, temporary moments of clarity.
The camera then plunges into the street below and
makes its way into the darkest bowels of an under-
ground homosexual nightclub called The Rectum,
where two men seem violently determined to commit
murder. These men are Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and
Pierre (Albert Dupontel), and they are hunting down a
male prostitute known as Le Ténia—The Tapeworm
(Jo Prestia)—who, we later learn, has just raped and
tortured Alex (Bellucci), the current girlfriend of Mar-
cus and former lover of his pal Pierre. The furious
Marcus violently barges into room after room, disrupt-
ing scenes of anonymous sex and beating up the par-
ticipants in a long display of unrelenting violence that
momentarily pauses only when one of the aggrieved
men breaks his arm. Thinking he’s found Le Ténia, the
hitherto hesitant Pierre then savagely and methodically
smashes in his skull with a heavy fire extinguisher—
only, as we discover later, it isn’t Le Ténia at all, but a
hapless bystander who gets his brains bashed out while
Le Ténia himself watches cheerfully from the sidelines.
The camera never stops shaking, bobbing, weaving,
bouncing off walls, turning upside down, moving in
and out of focus—simultaneously showing us nothing
and showing us everything. Its movement mirrors the
chaos and violence of the situation and the characters’
wildly out-of-control states of mind.
Moving back in time—the entire narrative is told
in reverse, with each scene depicting events prior to
those just shown—we next witness Marcus harassing
an Asian taxi-driver and then a transvestite hooker as
he searches for The Rectum, while Pierre—a philoso-
phy professor—pleads with him not to be so violent.
Moving back in time again, the film shows Alex walk-
ing into a dark subway underpass and getting brutally
raped and beaten by Le Ténia. In this long scene of
violence time seems to stand still, as Alex screams for
help and reaches her hand toward the camera in a ges-
ture of desperation and futility. We then see the situa-
tion preceding the rape—a party, at which Marcus
takes dope and plays around with other girls, causing
an irritated Alex to walk home on her own.
Gradually, moving through its reverse chronology,
the film explains the reasons and motivations for the
scene in The Rectum, as the frenzied camera slowly
begins to relax and allow us to make sense of the plot.
Eventually a more natural, unobtrusive directorial style
comes into play, and we see Marcus and Pierre as calm,
pleasant young men. We watch them joking around
with Alex as the three of them take the subway to the
party, and then we observe a long romantic sequence
in which Marcus and Alex lie around in bed together,
indulging in love-play and play-fights, laughing and
kissing. The film ends with a scene in which Alex,
newly pregnant—though she has yet to discover the
fact—lies happily reading in a park surrounded by pic-
nicking families and playful children. At this point the
camera soars free of its moorings in a different way
than earlier, flying into an overhead shot and thence
into an exhilarating gyroscopic spin that turns the mise-
en-scène into a swirling hallucination of dizzying,
delirious intensity. This gives way to a stroboscopic
barrage of black-and-white frames assailing the eye
with split-second speed, and thence to a printed repe-
tition of the film’s grim motto, first articulated by the
miserable butcher in the opening sequence: “Time de-
stroys all things.” This was the film’s original work-
ing title, gleaned by Noé from Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
and it recalls a key insight of Schopenhauer as well.
“Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes
nothingness in our hands,” he wrote in 1851, “and loses
all real value.”
4
The numerous critics who readily dismissed Irré-
versible as racist, vacant, and homophobic seem to be-
lieve that the film’s kinetic camera work, transgressive
verbal and physical violence, and reverse chronology
are merely tricks and gimmicks, rather than funda-
mental signifiers of its meaning. Irréversible is not, in
fact, simply a story told backwards, but a complex
study of the nature of time. Its director is less inter-
ested in cause and effect than in the form of time it-
self. (This is part of what distinguishes Irréversible
from other “reverse chronology” narratives, such as
Harold Pinter’s 1983 Betrayal and Christopher Nolan’s
2001 Memento.) Nor is Irréversible the mere nihilistic
38
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anti-romance that some have found it to be. In fact,
Noé describes himself (perhaps a tad disingenuously)
as “very sentimental,” and Irréversible as an “intimate”
film. “The structure is all funny and the camerawork is
full of energy,” he says, “but it’s really about losing
someone you love.”
5
It’s also about a lot more, to be sure. Part of the
significance of the film’s structure is bodily. We begin
in the realm of the anal (The Rectum)—a filthy, dark,
destructive place—in search of Le Ténia (the tape-
worm), whose violence turns out to be infectious. Alex
is anally raped in an underground passageway, and
the later conversation sequence in a rumbling subway
continues the anal motif. As the film continues, how-
ever, we find ourselves progressing—as Freud might
say—to a more “mature” realm, that of the vaginal.
Alex and Marcus make love, and when Alex tests
herself with a home pregnancy kit, she learns she is
expecting Marcus’child. The final sequence, the rapid-
fire explosion of pure black-and-white frames, may be
seen as a vision of the symbolic uterus, evoking the
moment of conception and perhaps the beginning of
life itself. The film’s journey has a Dante-esque qual-
ity—starting in the pits of Hell, continuing along the
tortuous slopes of Purgatory, and ending with an ap-
parition too blazingly delirious for human perception
to take in, much less grasp and comprehend.
Another clue to the film’s meaning is the book
Alex is seen with more than once in the movie, most
notably at the end, when she relaxes in a sunny park
surrounded by playing children. The book is J.W.
Dunne’s treatise An Experiment with Time, first pub-
lished in 1927.
6
Its appearance is not, as one critic com-
plained, merely a glib allusion to the film’s non-linear
structure. Rather, it sheds a great deal of light on the
movie’s intricate and innovative composition.
Dunne’s theories hinge on the notion that there are
multiple kinds of “time states,” beginning with the
most immediate ones that he calls “Time 1” and “Time
2.” Time 1 is the kind of time we’re accustomed to in
daily life—linear time, moving steadily forward, with
states of the external world experienced in succession.
Time 2—which coexists with Time 1—is not linear
but integrated in a kind of fourth dimension, where fu-
ture, past, and present merge together. Dunne suggests
that we experience most of our lives in Time 1—linear
time—but we can access Time 2 in various ways, in-
cluding through our dreams, when our cognitive fac-
ulties don’t concentrate so intensely on the present
moment. Dunne compares Time 2 to the “Everlasting
Now” of Eastern philosophy, and asserts that our
dreams always take place in Time 2, where future, pre-
sent, and past are experienced as superimposed rather
than separate and linear, as they appear in Time 1.
According to Dunne, states such as trances,
dreams, and hypnosis give potential access to Time 2.
Our perceptive faculties try to interpret a dream’s
events as a succession of views similar to those we ex-
perience in Time 1—so what we experience as our
dream (and recount upon waking) is an attempt to
make sense of Time 2 via the perceptual faculties we
use to operate in Time 1. Dunne’s account of the
dreamer’s experience closely resembles what the au-
dience of Irréversible undergoes, as if Noé is recreat-
ing the chronological concatenation of Time 2 as
experienced from the perspective of Time 1. In our
dreams, as Dunne describes them,
. . . nothing stays to be looked at. Everything is
in a state of flux. . . . And, because of the con-
tinual breaking down of your attempts at main-
taining a concentrated focus, the dream story
develops in a series of disconnected scenes. . . .
You are always trying to keep attention mov-
ing steadily in the direction to which you are
accustomed in your waking observation . . .
but attention relaxes, and, when you recontract
it, you find, as often as not, that it is focused on
the wrong place. . . . You start on a journey,
and find yourself abruptly at the end.
7
An Experiment with Time has been in and out of
print sporadically since 1934, and Dunne’s contribu-
tions to space-time metaphysics have not been em-
braced by the scientific community. Like that of
renegade philosopher Charles Fort, his work has been
taken up not by the academy but by dilettantes and
dabblers, kitchen mystics and bedroom psychics—and
an occasional artist like Noé, whose Irréversible en-
acts a similar kind of experiment. “You want to hyp-
notize with a movie,” Noé says. “The hypnosis either
takes you somewhere or it doesn’t. You’re in a trance
or you’re not. . . . If the hypnosis works well, the au-
dience will get into your dream.”
Looked at from another important perspective, the
narrative of Noé’s film seems characterized by a be-
lief in human helplessness in the face of a future that
is as unchangeable as it is unavoidable, since—as
Dunne suggests—it is already present. Irréversible
abounds in signs and omens of what is to come, al-
though these always have an elusive quality. For ex-
ample, certain moments in the film’s first, more violent
scenes are later replayed in an affectionate context,
39
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suggesting some of the many complicated connections
between what we call “romantic love” and the brutal-
ity of rape and violence. Le Ténia’s brutal treatment
of Alex, including the way he spits disgustedly into her
face after raping her, is echoed by the friendly play-
fighting between Marcus and Alex, during which Mar-
cus lightly sputters saliva into Alex’s face as a joke.
8
When she first wakes up on the morning of the horri-
ble events, moreover, Alex recalls having a strange
nightmare about being trapped inside a red tunnel that
then broke around her; although she pays little atten-
tion to her dream, it is a clear presentiment of what is
to happen that night. Marcus, similarly, is unable to
feel his arm when he wakes up—a premonition of his
arm being violently broken in the Rectum nightclub. “I
want to fuck you in the ass,” he tells Alex teasingly a
little later, a line clearly anticipating Alex’s violent anal
rape. The banter that Marcus, Pierre, and Alex engage
in on the subway is all about Alex’s sexuality, and, in
the conversation’s emphasis on ways of bringing a
sexual partner to orgasm, about instrumental, power-
oriented approaches to sexuality in general. In the bleak
narrative of Irréversible, banter, play-fighting, and real
violence are all enmeshed with one another; all are
continually present. Only human perception interprets
one as distinct from another. A sense of imminent cat-
astrophe, as well as the helplessness of humanity, per-
vades all the “romantic” scenes involving Marcus,
Alex, and Pierre, however casually these are presented.
In some respects, these aspects of Irréversible re-
flect Noé’s conception of the film as an exercise in the
meanings and mechanisms of memory. “You experi-
ence things in a linear way,” he explains, “but when
you reconstruct them with your mind, they’re not lin-
ear any more. Your remembrance of your own past is
not linear. It’s just emotions, and moments, and they’re
in a chronological disorder. If you want to
write a diary of what you did—say, three
years ago—it will take you a long time to re-
member in which order the events took place.
You just remember faces, moments, doors,
rooms.”
On other levels—including its nonlinear
ordering of single-take sequences that in
themselves are linear—the movie is also an
elaborate puzzle that spectators are invited
to solve as they watch it. “It’s linear, and it’s
not linear,” Noé says. “There was an article
in France where the writer said it was [like]
a Rubik’s Cube; you could take it to pieces
and put it together [another] way. . . . It’s like
a game. I think that after the third scene, peo-
ple understand the rules of the game, and they want to
play with you and try to understand it. You could do
something [even] more complex, but that would get
people lost.”
More profoundly, Irréversible is influenced by
Dunne’s sense of the past and future as states that are
constantly with us in the present, and to this extent the
movie is philosophically inflected as much by fatalism
as by nihilism. Noé’s characters are powerless to con-
trol any aspect of their future; all are predestined from
the outset to a fate from which they cannot escape—a
fate that is irreversible.
Violent brutality and romantic affection are closely
connected in Irréversible, but not in the sense that one
causes or leads to the other. The connections simply
exist: this hellish state is just the way things are. Hu-
mans, through their own efforts, cannot save themselves
from their fate, which, in the case of Alex, Marcus,
Pierre, and a number of other characters, including
Alex’s unborn child, is destruction and disaster. Any at-
tempt to save oneself from this disaster is futile, and
yet people like Alex and Marcus continue to delude
themselves that the future is in their hands. This is a
key reason for the reverse chronology of the film, which
Noé sees not as a drama but as a tragedy in the fullest
sense of the term. “In a drama,” he says, “dramatic
things happen, and in a tragedy, they unfold. In a tragedy
you cannot change events. In the way [Irréversible] is
told, the characters cannot change their future, because
you’ve already seen what’s going to happen next. So
all you can ask is, ‘What happened before?’ ”
According to scholar Daniel Wojcik, fatalism, ni-
hilism, and powerlessness are the trinity of secular
apocalyptic thought.
9
The content and structure of
Irréversible closely resemble those of the traditional
apocalyptic narrative, in which perceived threats, so-
40
Albert Dupontel as Pierre, Monica Bellucci as Alex,
and Vincent Cassel as Marcus
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cial turmoil, and anomalous occurrences are interpreted
as signs that foretell imminent worldly destruction. The
effects of Noé’s apocalypse may be limited to a small
handful of characters, but its larger implications are
inescapable—chief among them, that the social and
cultural rituals human beings have developed to per-
petuate the concept of “civilization” are meaningless
acts of denial and repression. Noé describes Ir-
réversible as a poignant drama about “losing someone
you love,” but the narrative clearly has ramifications far
beyond what he idiosyncratically owns up to.
The literal meaning of “apocalypse” is “an un-
veiling,” usually in the sense of an unveiling of a state
of affairs that has been present all along. Often, in
apocalyptic narratives, what is unveiled is the future,
which turns out to have its roots in the present mo-
ment. As philosopher and theologian Martin Buber
notes, in apocalyptic thought “everything is pre-deter-
mined, all human decisions are only sham struggles.”
10
This is certainly true of Irréversible, which is inflected
by a strong mood of secular eschatology, using scenes
of apocalyptic violence as metaphors for contempo-
rary Angst. In Irréversible, rituals and institutions like
romantic love, marriage, the family, and friendship are
revealed to be no more than vacant shams, and we are
left with a resulting sense of anomie, disorientation,
lawlessness, and chaos.
In this sense, the narrative of Irréversible can be re-
garded as a synecdoche for twentieth-century thought,
which has been characterized by the breakdown of pre-
vious meaning systems and subsequent feelings of dis-
illusionment, apathy, and anxiety. In the past century as
in previous ages, tragedies, disasters, uncertainty, and
threat have led people to attribute causality to exter-
nal factors, whether God’s will, the devil, fate, the
government, one’s parents, an Axis of Evil, or the con-
figuration of the planets at birth. In Irréversible, how-
ever, Noé instinctively suggests that in the twenty-first
century we can no longer attribute violence and disas-
ter to any cause outside the brutal nature of humanity
itself. In his apocalyptic scenario, worldly destruction
is considered immanent in human nature rather than
externally prescribed, fulfilled by the actions and char-
acter of human beings rather than determined by out-
side forces. This is a chief reason for the film’s
unbridled eruptions of misogynistic and homophobic
hate. Noé isn’t merely toying with current cultural
taboos. He’s unmasking strains of inchoate revulsion
and anarchic rage that surge through the allegedly
civilized discourses of modernity with no less feral
viciousness than they possess in the most lawless
and barbaric instances of human existence. All that’s
different in modernity is the degree of repression and
dissimulation with which rage and revulsion are dis-
guised. And in Noé’s view such camouflage is the
worst enemy of all—concealing truths of human in-
stinct and impulse that are as unshakable as they are
grim, and encouraging humanity’s woeful urge to dis-
avow its own realities by cowering within hard, hyp-
ocritical shells of numbness and denial. It is this
existential deadness that Irréversible assails, using the
most radical resources Noé can muster to distress, dis-
orient, and alarm an audience accustomed to movies as
a narcotizing pleasure, not a galvanizing journey into
its own most desperately hidden truths.
The branch of apocalyptic thought most clearly
evoked by Irréversible is “unconditional apocalypti-
cism”
11
: the belief that history is predetermined and
unalterable (or, as Dunne would describe it, perpetually
present); the world is irredeemable by human effort,
and its cataclysmic destruction is therefore inevitable.
Some writers and scholars attribute the strand of un-
conditional apocalypticism in twentieth-century
thought to the development of nuclear warheads and
the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the in-
vention of the bomb, there was a sense that humanity
could not reverse its inevitable path to destruction, that
scientists had created an uncontrollable weapon that
would ultimately destroy the world. “The bomb,” ac-
cording to Alfred Kazin, “gave the shape of life, inner
and outer, an irreversible change; a sense of fateful-
ness would now lie on all things.”
12
What the bomb symbolized to earlier writers and
scholars is represented in Irréversible by human na-
ture in and of itself. Noé’s apocalyptic vision presents
us with an infernal, chaotic society cursed by violence,
fear, paranoia, and a sense of fatalism that time can
only make worse. “For the world is Hell,” as Schopen-
hauer articulated this grim insight a century and a half
earlier, “and men are on the one hand the tormented
souls and on the other the devils in it.”
13
The veil has
been lifted, and what it reveals is death-in-life, and life-
in-death.
Mikita Brottman is professor of language and literature
at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her books include
Offensive Films,Hollywood Hex, and the edited collection Car
Crash Culture.She writes frequently for scholarly,mainstream,
and underground publications.
David Sterritt is film critic of The Christian Science Monitor,
professor of theater and film at Long Island University, and
co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Cinema
and Interdisciplinary Interpretation.His books include Mad
to Be Saved:The Beats, the ’50s, and Film and The Films of Jean-
Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible.
41
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42
Notes
1. J. Hoberman, “All or Nothing at the Cannes Film Festi-
val,” Village Voice, June 5-12, 2002. <http://www.vil-
lagevoice.com/issues/0223/hoberman2.php>
2. Quoted in Metacritic.com, “What the critics are saying:”
<http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/irreversible/>
3. In fact there are invisible cuts within some of these shots,
and some visual details were digitally added in postpro-
duction.
4. Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, sel. and trans.
R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1970), 51.
5. Interview with Gaspar Noé at the Toronto International
Film Festival on September 12, 2002, conducted by David
Sterritt and including questions provided by Mikita
Brottman. All quotes from Noé are taken from this inter-
view.
6. J.W. Dunne, An Experiment With Time (Charlottesville:
Hampton Roads Publishing, 2001).
7. Ibid., 104.
8. Interestingly, Vincent Cassell and Monica Bellucci—who
were married to each other during production of Ir-
réversible—filed for divorce not long after the film’s re-
lease, in summer 2002.
9. Daniel Wojcik, The End of the World as We Know It: Faith,
Fatalism and Apocalypse in America (New York: New
York University Press, 1997), 201.
10. Martin Buber, Pointing the Way: Collected Essays, ed. and
trans. Maurice Freedman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1957), 201.
11. See Wojcik, End of the World as We Know It, 209.
12. Alfred Kazin, “Awaiting the crack of doom,” New York
Times Book Review, May 1, 1988: 1.
13. Schopenhauer, 48.
Abstract
Mikita Brottman and David Sterritt: Irréversible.
This essay reviews Gaspar Noé’s controversial 2002 film Ir-
réversible, considering key philosophical and psychological is-
sues it explores. The authors argue that the film’s reverse
chronology is not a mere gimmick but is essential to its struc-
tural complexity and indicative of apocalyptic implications that
make it a provocative study of the nature of time.
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