Dear Annette,

I saw a young poodle, jet black, on my usual hike and it was bouncing, bouncing, bouncing – the brisk arrival of autumn making the squirrels extra-frisky and demanding of its attention, excited barks – it couldn’t stop itself from bouncing. A dour bulldog, its companion, was unimpressed by any of it.

Amelie von Wulffen’s text “Under the Poodle’s Skin” remains a bracing mode d’emploi for the deplorable moment. (You wrote that you can no longer abide the word, deplorable, shellacked as it is by Hillary Clinton’s explosive – and yet totally accurate – use of it, but I’ve come to like its poisonous residue.) Atrocity carries on, already has been carried on. Several genocides, mass starvations, ongoing war at Germany’s doorstep, everywhere various hateful phobias weaponized. What is it Giorgio Agamben writes? Something about how it’s not the city but the concentration camp that is the paradigmatic biopolitics of the West (although would it really be just the West?). I find it hilarious that you and TZK could peg me as “romantic.” Adorable. I’m not the one feeling the need to imagine the dropping of a nuclear device. The atrocity abundance seems secure.

Nevertheless, I agree with so much of von Wulffen’s pursuit of what she calls “Panic Realism,” how her “urgent need to paint pictures of houseplants, a glass of water, the view from the window or one’s own face emerge from a general sense of being under threat,” and her view was clarified by the arrival of a text from Larry Johnson, a picture of a heavily highlighted page from Esther Leslie’s 2000 book Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism – strange kismet. In a letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1928, Benjamin “insists that Aktualität is the obverse of the eternal in history, and is endlessly more significant for historical, political and cultural research. […] He wants to engage in the world as he finds it.” Benjamin proposes (Leslie continues, rousingly) “taking seriously the clutter of material existence, and wants expressly to analyze the commodity trash of mass production, scrutinizing what his friend Siegfried Kracauer called “inconspicuous surface-level expressions” which, “by virtue of their unconscious nature, provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things.” An attitude informed by Aktualität grabs quotidian objects whose very insignificance and “unconscious nature” warrant their indexical relationship to social truth and social lies.”

So consider the recent craze (already over?) for Labubus, a cutified exteriorization of psychic pain, of a 1930s destitution (the etymological roots of boo-boo hark back to the Great Depression), daily life so impoverished that many glamorize a (national) devolution via a personal baby baublehood; or the recent cursive signage bedazzling logge of the White House in “solid” gold, total gilt in lieu of actual guilt, however reminiscent, as some have noted, of a branch of The Cheesecake Factory, is also there so that our increasingly senile leader doesn’t lose his bearings. The Oval Office – You Are Here!

I spent the last few weeks watching all the films of Catherine Breillat in chronological order, preparation for my friend Christine Pichini’s impressive translation of I Only Believe in Myself, a book-length conversation between the filmmaker and Murielle Joudet that was published in France in 2023. A daunting artist, Breillat is a demanding, thrilling interlocutor. “Balls aren’t cerebral hemispheres. I’m not feminine, but feminist, and I like artistic violence: Saint Anthony pierced by arrows always inspired me. It’s magnificent. Beauty ought to be cruel and frightening.”

Begin at the beginning: The real young girl in Breillat’s Une vraie jeune fille (1975) is named Alice Bonnard. There really is something in a name and in a woman thinking, and not only thinking, and thinking in proximity to “good” art, however that might be construed, if certain off-piste erotic pursuits and actions (desire?) operate in the vicinity of thought – nonromantically. Viscosity is Alice’s dominion, her wonderland. Vomit, spit, piss, vaginal juices, sperm, earwax, sweat, menstrual flow, bathroom-floor splatter, all the quasi-stickies of bodily fluidity preoccupy her – not to mention smears of jam and butter, spills of coffee or tea, soup, the warm goo of freshly bled chicken innards, slick of just-laid eggs cracked open, etc. – and become, like the red ink in which she writes her vigilant diary with a communion pen, her medium. Only with such discharge could she possibly convey her galactic dissatisfaction (key to Breillat’s feminism – and mine) with the givens (of shame, of intimacy). Call Alice Bonnard’s skeptical écriture a retort to Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément’s La jeune née, published the same year as Breillat’s first film. Alice’s disdain for various simplicities, dullnesses – uninterrogated rallies of the doxa – trespass every sense of propre: the proper, the clean, propriety. Like Marthe de Méligny’s baths and Pierre Bonnard’s oils in burning hues, Alice’s wet research engenders a hoptic (haptic + optic) drive. Alice wouldn’t ask for or need Marthe’s or Pierre’s permission to remind anyone who might wonder that Bonnard rhymes with connard, an energy which should resonate in – to the point of undoing – any notion of bon art.

No small part of Alice’s dissatisfaction, Breillat’s: the world of men and the daddy’s girls who keep it spinning. “Men kill us because women verbalize much better than they do, and say things that they can’t bear to hear. They kill us to make us stop talking. In the film [Perfect Love (1996)], [the male protagonist] murders laughter. To kill laughter, you need five hundred stab wounds, not two, not three. Laughter is inextinguishable.” Despite this, Parfait amour! To avoid the “mediocre realism to get the truth of the scene” the filmmaker “always oppose[s] reality, which is factual, to truth, which is mythic.”

Nonromantically, Breillat notes that “an image has to have a certain violence.” In other words: “cinema is carnivorous and cannibalistic. It isn’t moral, but that’s the way it is.” If I had time I’d run down Paul de Man’s “Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater” (1984) an enthralling, damning essay, one of the most searching ever written on representation, even if de Man was, to put it mildly, complicated. (Oh, let me pony up: He was, at the least, collaborationist-adjacent and grossly antisemitic in his early writings, and he hid this fact for most of his life, but his writings are some of the most relentless examinations of such compromised and/or complicit existential conditions ever written, and they situate how the aesthetic participates in such vexed paradox. “Aesthetic education,” de Man concludes, “by no means fails; it succeeds all too well, to the point of hiding the violence that makes it possible.”

I was going to leave it there and, via the female lead in the daunting Romance (1999) referring to the “pulsating bird” of a man’s tumescence, segue to a particular strangeness – if that’s the word – of men in Breillat’s films, but then, noting the new paragraph that starts immediately after that “possible,” I felt I had to quote a little more from de Man: “But one should avoid the pathos of an imagery of bodily mutilation and not forget that we are dealing with textual modes [and, in Breillat, cinematic ones], not with the historical and political systems that are their correlate. The disarticulation produced by tropes is primarily a disarticulation of meaning; it attacks semantic units such as words and sentences.”

Romance is, in many ways, as Breillat faced during her final editing, “glacial and intransigent.” Good. She’s blunt about one of her chosen artistic media: “Basically, a film is very prosaic, very pathetic. A series of small realistic actions, libidinous and stupid. And then, throwing a camera in front of people to film them, a priori, has no chance of working. But when it does work, suddenly, it’s dazzling.” That suddenly: It’s the possibility that something, despite all, might still, dazzlingly, move us. She delineates the tension between writing and filming: “The screenplay is clear, but then human flesh intrudes and makes everything much more complex.”

As I neared the end of my Breillat film festival I began to wonder if, for her, all men are gay (whatever gay means anymore). Many of her male protagonists are teased and/or accused – often most bluntly by the women who are in love with them – of being gay. The dudes can’t abide it. Not that their “gayness” isn’t also a figure for the irreconcilable difference(s) between men and women, that chasm, a vast churning ocean of irreconcilability. Breillat freely admits that she doesn’t “fundamentally understand men.” She continues: “I only understand them if I put myself in their skin, if I say ‘I.’ I’m very autistic when it comes to men.” Some of this peculiar insight into a primal homosexuality, if that’s what to call it, might have to do with the overwhelming physical beauty of her actors: Hiram Keller, Joe Dallesandro, Rocco Siffredi, Fu’ad Aït Aattou, David Chausse, Kool Shen, and Samuel Kircher, to name only my favorites. Society can only handle so much physical beauty in men before gay rumor circulates. (This is, of course, further complicated, although it’s not that complicated, by the narcissism of many actors, who will bed the most attentive, regardless of gender.)

“Before being a plumber or a writer or a taxi-driver or a man out of work or a journalist, men are above all men, whether heterosexual or homosexual,” Marguerite Duras states in her crucial La vie matérielle. “The difference is that some remind you of it as soon as they meet you and others a bit later. It takes a lot to love men. A lot – a lot. A lot of loving just to love them. Without that, it isn’t possible, you can’t stand them.”

In the midst of Barbe bleue (2009), one of Breillat’s two extraordinary fairy-tale films …

Hold on. I just have to say: Her fairy tales are so amazing. She retells Sleeping Beauty as a story about puberty – and not through Sleeping Beauty’s dormancy but her dreaming! A century of dreaming! I mean. Sigh. So utterly brilliant. Made on a shoestring.

Breillat films an encounter between two young girls, sisters (no filmmaker has had more to say about the complex profundity of sororal love-hate), have this exchange, with the younger rapscallion (Breillat’s namesake) interrupting their game-playing in the midst of Charles Perrault’s barbarous accounting:

Catherine: Now I’ll really explain it to you.

Marie-Anne: Hmm.

Catherine: Marriage is two people who love each other.

Marie-Anne: Hmm.

Catherine: One day, they want to become homosexuals.

Marie-Anne: (Head falling into her hand in exasperation): [Sigh.]

Catherine: (Beaming) But, yes, that’s true!

Marie-Anne: Homosexual is when two boys or two girls love each other. Of the same sex. Stop talking about that.

Catherine: No, homosexual is when they’re in love. (Lovey-doveyingly) Mmmmm … Ohhh …

In this response to your letter, I’ve already quoted a text from Larry quoting Benjamin and Hofmannsthal’s correspondence, and now Christine Pichini just texted me about Breillat’s scene between Marie-Anne and Catherine: “… the fairy tale’s interweaving of (sexual) violence and childhood seems even more in line with CB’s understanding of the world than adult sadism – she read Sade as an adolescent, but herself says that she hasn’t even moved past that stage – that refusal to “mature” into the constrictions and narrowing-down of adulthood defines her. The kids acting in this clip thrill me and the idea that homosexuality is a kind of pure love is so totally fantastic.”

You’re a mother of a teenage son. Agnes Martin exists in close proximity to Luis’s Lambos, even if she’s not driving one. This simultaneity, often brutal, has always been the case, even if so many would prefer not to look at it that way. In terms of the two limbs you posit, Leg A and Leg B, most of us aren’t hopping around only on one or the other. The exigencies of this moment require that at least two things, often contradictory things, be held, be thought through, at the same time – and and and, not either/or. Breillat gets at these contradictions in so many ways in I Only Believe in Myself, even if seemingly mundane: “I love eating scenes. I love how people ingest things into the body, wolf them down without any sort of embarrassment. I don’t understand how it can be an ordinary thing, when it’s essentially animalistic and totally indecent.”

I can’t imagine raising a son right now. Men are appalling – I say this as a man (not my only incarnation, but still) – and human existence is, essentially, animalistic and totally indecent. Except when it’s not.

I’ll leave you with one of the astonishing scenes from Breillat’s most recent film, L’été dernier (2023), illicit, magnificent. As Breillat describes it: “Moving from the close-up of Léa [Drucker] in tears to the close-up of Samuel [Kircher]’s head between her legs was an impossible cut.” Samuel Kircher, 17, in his first professional acting role, his “languid body, like a white, mute eel, a prisoner behind aquarium glass,” comes to size his stepmother up as erotic prey, although she can more than hold her own. When he lifts his head up from eating her out, he’s proud of how sex with his stepmother, his technique, is improving, and stepmom agrees. Filming the extraordinary scene, Breillat yells at Drucker: “You’re dying, you’re dying! Die! I don’t want to hear another breath!” The self-described “monster” (but aren’t we all?) continues: “She died, and it was absolutely beautiful. There had to be nothing left, only a sort of block of solitude abandoned to my gaze. She tensed up as if she had had a nightmare. She came without offering herself. That’s obviously Marnie.” It’s not only Alfred Hitchcock’s eponymous conflictive principal, it’s also Caravaggio. As Breillat states very early in I Only Believe in Myself: “I didn’t want her to look ugly. And I thought of Caravaggio’s Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, which I looked at all night on the internet; actually, you can’t tell if she is in ecstasy or if she’s dying.”

So, I’d argue, Nicolas Poussin’s there, too. Et in arcadia ego. Our friend Anna informs me that in the German translation of André Félibien’s famous interpretation this shade is particularly explicit, as death is found amidst bliss, “daß der Tod inmitten der Glückseligkeit anzutreffen ist.”