At the beginning of the French revenge film Irreversible, an enraged man, Marcus, barges through a homosexual S&M club, demanding that the patrons tell him where he can find a pimp called the Tapeworm. At his heels is Pierre, who urges Marcus (Vincent Cassel) to forget about the Tapeworm and visit Alex in the hospital instead. Marcus shakes off Pierre (Albert Dupontel) and finds the Tapeworm standing with a friend. He mistakes the friend for the Tapeworm and sucker punches him with a glass. In the ensuing fight, Marcus ends up pinned on his stomach, his arm snapped backwards at the elbow. As the Tapeworm’s friend unbuckles his belt and says that Marcus is going to get fucked up the ass, Pierre arrives and smashes the attacker in the head with the business end of a fire extinguisher. The camera shifts to a position above the body of the Tapeworm’s friend, and Pierre pounds his head into pulp with the fire extinguisher. While this violence goes down, the Tapeworm grins, and one of the spectators (played by the director) masturbates enthusiastically.
The scenes in Irreversible occur in reverse chronological order. Later in the film (earlier in the story), we see the assault that will send Marcus into a mad rage. His girlfriend, Alex, leaves a party and walks through an underpass where the Tapeworm is beating up a prostitute. The Tapeworm says that Alex (Monica Bellucci) is “hot for a bitch” and that her man must be a “faggot” to let her go out in such a revealing dress. (At this point, the audience recognizes that Pierre and Marcus will get the wrong guy later that night, earlier in the film.) Wanting to teach the “rich cunt” a lesson, the Tapeworm knocks her to the floor and anally rapes her. The rape, which lasts nine minutes, is shown in a continuous sequence shot from a camera placed on the floor of the tunnel, in front of the two actors. After the Tapeworm gets off, and Alex lies whimpering on the concrete, he gives her a couple of kicks to the head and smashes her face into the floor, which will leave her permanently disfigured.
At the film’s end, before the party and the rape, Alex learns that she is pregnant with Marcus’s child. She drifts off to sleep under a poster for Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony begins to play in the background. The camera cuts to an earlier scene, when Alex is in a city park, reading a book, and children are playing in a sprinkler. The image of Alex and the children, with the Seventh Symphony in the background, affirms human life more deeply than it was negated by the rape of Alex and the violence in the S&M club. The camera rises into the sky, making revolutions over the park, then cuts to a fluttering strobe effect, which fades to black and is followed by the words, “Le temps détruit tout." ("Time destroys all").
How can people take pleasure from a film in which a beautiful woman is raped and disfigured, her lover tries to take revenge but is beaten up instead, and the rapist himself goes unpunished? Irreversible, like Greek tragedies, fuses together beauty, music, and action in a way that evokes a sense of awe, a feeling of aesthetic ecstasy which is actually deepened by the horror produced by the violence and suffering depicted in the film.
According to Nietzsche, the tragedies of 5th-century B.C. Greece achieved a perfect unification of representational art and musical art. Representational art--for example, painting and epic poetry--is the domain of Apollo, the Greek god of truth, the sun, and image-making. The creation of representational art requires self-restraint, respect for limits, and moderation. It seeks to produce pleasure from beautiful forms. On the other hand, music, with intense harmony and rhythm, is the domain of Dionysus, the Greek god of fertility, wine, intoxication, and theater. Music is not concerned with just beauty. Music is a direct expression of the undifferentiated energy, the Will, that gives rises to the physical world. True music produces a state of intoxication in which people feel themselves to be part of that undifferentiated energy, and their individual biographies are submerged.
In Greek tragedies, the chorus performed music and dance that brought the spectators to the state of intoxication in which their individual identities fell away. “State and society, all divisions between one human being and another, [give] way to an overwhelming feeling of unity which [leads] men back to the heart of nature.”
While intoxicated by the music of the chorus and the action on the stage, the spectator takes masochistic pleasure from the truth that tragedy imparts--that nothing, including knowledge and virtue, can protect men from the frustration of their desires, from pain, from the dissolution of their identities, and from death. But in addition to revealing this horrible truth, the tragedy provides a metaphysical solace. The spirit of music enables the spectator to see that life as a whole is indestructibly mighty and pleasurable. The life force, expressed in music and represented by the tragic chorus, continues on eternally despite the destruction of individual men and women, the passing of generations, and the rise and fall of nations.
When the Dionysiac intoxication fades, and everyday reality returns, the spectator experiences nausea and despair from having acquired direct knowledge that pain, frustration and death are the fundamental conditions of life. Like Hamlet, the spectator finds action to be repulsive because nothing can be done to set the world to rights. Man sees only what is terrible, absurd, and futile. He believes that it would be better never to have existed.
At this moment of despair, the Apolline qualities of the tragedy--the stagecraft, metrical speech, and hero's poetic language in the face of ruin--diffuse the feeling that life is not worth living. Terrible thoughts about the horror of life are transformed into representations that man can live with. Sublime images and words temper existential despair; the comedic and the absurd discharge disgust. Because of tragedy’s Apolline beauty, and the solace provided by the knowledge that life as a whole remains deathless and indestructible despite the inevitable death of every individual, the spectator is made psychically stronger by watching the performance of a tragic work.
Irreversible produces the psychological states that Nietzsche linked with tragedy. When Pierre wallops Marcus’s antagonist with a fire extinguisher to prevent him from sodomizing Marcus, the spectator is thrilled by the sudden reversal in the antagonist’s fortunes. Marcus lies on the floor in shock, and the Tapeworm’s friend is dead, but the force of life, signified by Pierre’s violence, remains mighty and unperturbed.
When the Tapeworm rapes Alex and smashes her head into the tunnel’s concrete floor, the thrill of the fire extinguisher assault has faded, and the assault on Alex fills the viewer with nausea. This nausea, however, is gradually cured by the warmth and beauty of the second half of the film. In their apartment before the party, Alex and Marcus have a play fight and then listen to warm, infectious love music.
The revelation that Alex is pregnant reminds the viewer that life goes forward despite the destruction of Alex’s beauty, the murder of the Tapeworm’s friend, the fracturing of Marcus’s arm, and Pierre’s inevitable incarceration for murder. Her pregnancy prompts the viewer to re-evaluate the consequences of the Tapeworm’s assault. The beating robbed Alex of her beauty. She will live out her life with a disfigured face. However, there is no suggestion that the assault will result in the miscarriage of the pregnancy. As a result, the child she is carrying for Marcus may a be a vessel which protects her beauty from the Tapeworm’s violence and enables it to reappear in the future, when Alex and Marcus’s generation is replaced by its successor.
The film’s final scene unites breathtaking photography showing Alex and the children in the park with the transcendent second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. The beauty and health of this scene overwhelm the despair and nausea produced by Alex’s rape and Marcus’s failed attempt to take revenge. The sublime image of Alex reading in the park, coupled with Beethoven’s harmonies and melody, redirects the disgust produced by the grotesque violence of the first half of the film into a feeling of triumph and aesthetic bliss.
The triumph that the spectator feels at the film’s end demonstrates that violence, pain, and the futility of life must be represented for art to fully convey the glory and nobility of human existence.
