Sasha Grey - The Juliette Society

‘Catherine, let’s talk about something else,’ he says firmly, and it’s not the answer I want.

Marcus has set, as homework, a screening of Belle de Jour , the Louis Buñuel movie that stars Catherine Deneuve.

I’ve never seen the movie before. I know nothing about it. I have no idea what to expect.

I sit down in the theater on campus and I’m not alone but, when the lights go down and the darkness closes in around me, I might as well be. This is how I like to experience movies. In a theater, in the dark, as a one-on-one communion between me and the screen. As something approaching the quiet contemplation you feel when standing in front of a great painting that awes you into silence.

I sit down to watch a movie and expect to be transported on a flight from reality into another world. I expect, at the very least, to be entertained, maybe enthralled, even appalled. The last thing I expect is to see myself up on the screen.

Bear with me, I’m not completely deluded. I know I’m not the star of this movie, even if I do share a name with the lead. I’m not even a supporting character. But somehow, some way, something about it connects with me deeply. Even if I only have one thing in common with its protagonist, a frigid, upper middle class, French housewife who harbors secret masochistic desires about sex.

Her name is Séverine. Latin for ‘stern’. Imagine going through life, your entire life, and having people decide they don’t like you even before they’ve met you. Just from hearing your name. Séverine. Severe. Stern.

Imagine lumbering a kid from birth with a name like that. You might as well call it, ‘No fun’.

No fun at all.

And it’s not as if that name doesn’t suit Catherine Deneuve’s character in Buñuel’s movie. In fact, there’s isn’t another name that suits her better because, to be honest, she isn’t a whole lot of fun. She’s icy-cold and dispossessed of every quality that could make you like her, stripped of almost everything that makes her human. Everything except her morbid fantasies of humiliation and punishment. Because you’re not meant to like her or even identify with her.

And yet, somehow I do.

Séverine. No fun. No fun at all. Married a year and she’s never let her husband fuck her. Married a year and she won’t even let him sleep in the same bed. Married a year and he hasn’t even seen her naked. Her husband; devoted, protective, dependable and so, so understanding.

Séverine. A virgin in reality, but a whore in her imagination. And it’s her imagination that leads her astray.

Remember. Plot, always subservient to character.

And Séverine, always in thrall to her desires, never in control of them, floats through the movie in a trance. Floats through her life like it’s a movie. Until a friend of her husband’s, an older man, devious and sleazy, who seems to see right through her, implants the idea in Séverine’s head that there is a place where women like her – repressed, immoral, insatiable – can fulfill their fantasies in private and maintain their reputation in public.

A brothel.

He even gives her the address. And so she visits the brothel and she’s given a new name, to disguise her identity. Something that sounds exotic. Not Séverine. Something that will entice the clients.

Belle de jour .

A cute French phrase that sounds like nonsense in English any way you cut it, which is probably why no one bothered to translate the title of the movie for the foreign market.

Belle de jour .

Literally, beauty of the day. Or, today’s beauty.

Makes me think, ‘today’s special’.

Maybe that’s how Buñuel meant it too. The woman who has everything and wants for nothing, reduced to the dish of the day on the menu in a whorehouse. Buñuel’s little joke. His little humiliation. She’s always dish of the day, every single day. The special that never ever changes, that’s not really special at all.

The only thing special about her is her beauty which, although divine and transcendent, is ultimately worthless, because the only purpose it serves is to ease her passage into whoredom, to cheapen her.

She’s liver and mashed potatoes. Every single day.

And pretty soon, in that brothel, marked-down and cheapened, Séverine submits to her desires, every single one of them; her dreams now superimposed on reality. And pretty soon, her dreams supersede her reality.

And that’s where I come in.

I’m sitting in the theater watching the movie, and I recognize myself.

I have no ambition to be a whore. Not even in secret. That’s not what I meant.

What I mean is that I recognize something inside Séverine, as unlikely as it seems, that’s also inside me; as far apart as we are in background, temperament and character, there is something that connects us.

I’m not a prude. And I’m not a masochist – at least, I don’t think I am – but Séverine’s fantasies touch a nerve. Her reality, less so.

I’m sitting in the theater and my imagination takes over. I’m watching the movie and filling in the gaps. And pretty soon I’ve lost track of where the film ends and my fantasies begin.

When the movie’s over and I emerge from the dark into the mid-afternoon sun, I feel like I’m walking a high-wire. Teetering on the edge of a precipice, struggling to maintain my balance. I’m shaking inside. I don’t know what’s happened to me. I’m so confused. I can’t work out whether I’ve been overcome by delirium or have given in to mania. I only know that I don’t want the fantasy to stop. I’ve never imagined myself being pleasured in this way, and now that I have, I want more.

I walk home in a trance, navigating on autopilot, running the scenes back in my mind. I forget where I am and I realize I’m back in the movie.

I’m underneath the sweeping branches of a pine, held there against my will by the man I adore. Restrained, beaten and brutalized on his order by two savage men, while he watches, indifferent to my suffering.

My hands are hitched together with coarse rope and hauled so high above my head that the muscles in my arms stretch and burn. My feet claw at the ground as it swings beneath me. My dress has been ripped at the seams and sags from my waist like a wilted petal. My bra hangs loose from my shoulders, the underwire clipping against the nipples and hardening them.

Leather whips bear down upon my back, biting into the flesh, one and then another in quick succession, beating out a vicious rhythm that holds me in its thrall. I hear the crack of the lash, and then… the sting. The crack. And then the sting. As inevitably as lightning follows thunder, so pleasure follows pain. The intensity ratchets up and up and up with every stroke, until both, the pleasure and the pain, are all too much to bear. Adrenaline courses through my body.

I turn a corner.

I’m not even halfway home and I’m horny as hell.

I turn another corner and I’m back in the movie, now in the brothel, preparing to be inculcated into the pleasures of criminal desire by a ruffian with a cane and gold teeth who carries himself with a rough, primal swagger.

If clothes make the man, then this man is a study in contradictions. He has fashionable patent leather Chelsea boots worn down to a dull luster and socks that are threadbare, with large, ragged holes where the heels once were. A metal signet ring inset with a huge, finely cut diamond. And those gold teeth that gleam when he bares them and push his top lip up into a sneer. His hair, his leather overcoat, his trousers, his shoes, all black as night. Everything else, mismatched and fanciful. A purple waistcoat and a loud and lurid patterned tie.