Generating Queer Possibility in Claire Denis' Beau Travail

Generating Queer Possibility in Claire Denis’ Beau Travail

Beau Travail by Claire Denis is a elliptical, choreographic exposition of male military bodies in crisis. The militaristic order of the group crumbles when the leader, Galoup, begins to weaken his control because of his obsession with a young, handsome Legionnaire. The film is based on Billy Budd, Herman Melville’s story of the handsome sailor and his doomed innocence. Querelle, by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and based on the boock Querelle de Brest by Jean Genet, also draws inspiration from Billy Budd. While Beau Travail reveals the more tense and homoerotic relationships between the men that are festering under the surface, Querelle is completely frank in its eroticism and violence, existing as a space of uninhibited and vapid desires. These utopias of all-male, fraternal worlds have roots in the Western and Christian constructions of the patriarchal horde and the fear of, and desire to negate, the woman and the domestic. A more mainstream presence of these tropes can be seen in Fight Club, where there is the destructive, fraternal utopia created under the guise of societal subversion. In these situations, as seen through Freud’s lens explained in Marcuse’s Eros and Civilizations,  primal urges and the need to repress them in order to function through systems of work and masculine ritual are at the root of the creation and the demise of patriarchal homosocial worlds.

The literary and cinematic works analyzed in this paper deal with the displacement of homoerotic desire within patriarchal systems, resulting in failure as it is realized through killing - homicide or suicide - and suicide being a particularly common trope in queer cinema. I am interested in the asymmetry between the logic of these homosocial worlds and the confused interior worlds of the characters within them, who experience a dissociation between their desires and actions. Through its exposition of subjective experience, cinema allows for the viewer to dive underneath the surface of the systems society compulsively constructs. Thus, cinema can be a subversive force to analyze oppressive worlds and their subliminal impacts on the individual.  At the same time, however, the power of cinema may also construct these worlds and their tropes according to the systems they are in and in alignment with a more commercial, Western cinematic style that sells an ideology or that impacts and impresses an audience with what is astonishing. I am interested in the difference in authenticity between these forms of cinema that approach the trope of the patriarchal horde undermined by homoeroticism and the confused or failed individual, and what this difference in authenticity means when dealing with queerness in cinema. In particular, I will argue that queer failure is devised most authentically by Claire Denis in Beau Travail through her manifestation of the imagination and its ambiguous temporality, allowing for queer failure in suicide to be generative of possibility.

The utopic fraternal worlds created by Herman Melville have been the catalysts for queer filmic interpretations.  However, it is questionable whether or not Melville was interested in male love amongst an oppressive system, or if he was first and foremost interested in painting the inevitable demise of a utopian world and its embedded homosexual conflicts, which was more importantly a critique of American society. In the novel, Billy Budd is a loyal, quiet sailor that enthralls the other men with his beauty, though Billy remains innocent and is moreso the object of the story than a character with a voice himself, for when he is in the most trying of situations, he cannot speak and begins to stutter. Throughout the novel he is described by the narrator and from the points of view of the men as a man of pure beauty, and Claggart, the master-of-arms, praises Billy at first and then begins to condemn him for many minute problems, housing internalized angst against Billy. Claggart falsely reports to the captain, Captain Vere, that Billy is part of a mutiny. Billy punches Claggart dead out of frustration from these accusations in front of Captain Vere, who had previously had a kind and respectful relationship with Billy. Billy is found guilty for his actions and is killed by hanging. The novel ends with Captain Vere remembering Billy Budd upon his own death.

In the article, “Flesh in the Word: Billy Budd, Sailor, Compulsory Homosociality, and the Uses of Queer Desire,” David Green writes that Melville  is concerned with the creation of privileged same-sex spaces, and homosexualilty is an instigating cause for conflict within these spaces. However, this inclusion of suggestions of homosexuality by Melville does not mean it was Melville’s project to paint a homosexual experience. Instead, Melville’s theme of the utopian male world in his works functions as a critique on American life as a “system that breeds enmity,” thus a critique on the compulsion of a patriarchal society to continuously construct and destroy itself. Green regards Billy as a sexual inviolate - “a Christlike fetish” that provides a figure for good and evil to battle themselves out on, and in this way, he is the object for displaced urges in a same-sex male world.  For Green, Billy causes male utopia in his desirability, but in Billy’s sexual unavailability, he catalyzes this utopia’s demise. Green states, “Billy Budd is not primarily about the eradication of gay life but about the unceasing repetition of the creation of utopian same-sex spaces that are–to put it in Sedgwickian terms–fueled by homosocial desire not limited to but inclusive of homosexual desires.” As well Green states, “Billy Budd allows men to revel in the pleasurable potentialities of homoerotic desires that are temporarily extinguished along with him–with the provided reassurance that, once the next Handsome Sailor comes along, those desires will once again be inflamed.” Melville’s project is concerned with the continuing regeneration of homosocial utopian spaces and the complications of repressed desires embedded in them. However, because of Billy’s symbolic, objectified character, it remains questionable whether or not there is authenticity painted in male love in face of a oppressive system, or if the story is moreso interested in male-bonding as a vapid and “pathological” yet inherent component of this regenerating, doomed system.

This regeneration of the patriarchal horde as described by Sigmund Freud is laid out by Herbert Marcuse in his book Eros and Civilization. While the utopic male worlds of Billy Budd, as well as that of Beau Travail, Querelle, and Fight Club, can be seen  through the lens of Freud’s Oedipal system, the goal of this paper is to utilize aspects of Marcuse’s writing to illuminate differents modes of cinematic storytelling, rather than reduce these stories to the inner logic of Freudian system itself.  And, that being said, the films that most interestingly paint the ambiguity and potency of queer experience within these systems are the films that do not strictly abide by the rules of the Freudian Oedipal complex and its doomed nature. Marcuse explains that the patriarchal civilization forms through the transference of primal desires into order and work through the domination of the father, who is the one that controls the woman - the mother.  The desire for the mother, and the guilt that forms because of these desires that disobey the father and the order, create the most deep-seated fear of the woman and initiate the desire for all-male worlds. These worlds displace the fear of the mother onto the father, which instigates a desire to kill the father and follow up with the another system of order and domination by a male of the next generation, commencing the regeneration of a patriarchal system. In the situation of utopic male world of Billy Budd that excludes women in pursuit of pure male order, repressed desires displace themselves onto the object of Billy - who represents male perfection but is equally feminine in his innocence and allure. For Claggart, there is a fear of these desires and a need to destroy Billy, in order to continue the order of the ship and to maintain a stable relationship with authority - or the father figure - which is embodied by Vere.

While Melville’s work is interested in the regeneration of utopic male systems, Fassbinder’s work, Querelle, is an abstraction of this utopian system into a fantasy world where homoerotic desires are made uninhibited. By anchoring itself in straightforward, violent, gay sex scenes and by bringing gay sex to the forefront of the plot, the film negates the trope that homosexuality brims under the surface. Thus Querelle is an important film that was part of the beginning of the New Queer Cinema. In Querelle, the trope of the handsome sailor within the  structure of masculine work and order is exaggerated and made futile, as the mis en scene feels and looks like a fake theater set and is static and bereft of any real work, or forward-moving productivity on the ship. The male sailors seem to be standing eternally on fake display of a ship, looking sexually inviting as they are gazed upon by the leader of the ship, who watches them from across a window, housing repressed desires for them that he speaks of into a tape recorder.  Querelle, the handsome sailor of this story, is far from innocent, as the film follows his story through blatant narcissism and engagement in violent gay sex and killing, eventually leading to his demise in a hellish orange-hued void.

Through its frank representation of gay sex, Querelle allows for queer relations between men to be seen, yet these relations are heightened and exist in an ostracized, static space, speaking to the inability to integrate themselves into an articulate social space or sexuality. This space is also a subversive space created through the post-modern, critical gaze of Fassbinder and most notably through his use of lighting, set design, and choreography, which paint queer experience as abject in a heteronormative work. The constant orange hue creates unnatural shadows in what feels to be an artificial space stuck between night and day and that extends even to the interior shots and to the streets, keeping the characters at all times suspended. Claire Henry explains in her article “The Betrayals of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle” that Richard Misek argued  Fassbinder’s negation of white light is a subversive, queer act:

“...white light onscreen is not a neutral process of representation: white light became (and remains) the dominant and supposedly ‘natural’ colour temperature. Analogous to the way queer literature and film challenge heteronormativity representational power in constructing certain morals, behaviours, and relationships as normal, natural, and invisible, Fassbinder ‘queers’ the invisible ideology of white light.”

The choreography of Querelle is particularly interesting in its surreal, gestural embodiment of the conflicting impulses for violence, desire, and love in the characters, and in this way, the choreography makes these contrasting emotions that make up male worlds clear and visceral. For example, when Querelle sees his brother, who looks exactly like him and in a way represents the reflection of his narcissism, they sustain a long hug and punch each other gesturally during the hug. Through a post-modern gestural choreographic form, this movement embodies a conflicting situation of love and hatred in sexual desire, thus making the film aware of itself and its themes and tropes.

Fight Club similarly exists in a fantastical world that is painted through consistent color-hued lighting and that follows a demise into a hellish space, yet Querelle has the power of queer subversion in its conceptual, self-referential framework. In Fight Club, queer experience is negated in order for the main character to continue to live, which for him means to ultimately choose heterosexuality in order not to finally fail, making this film aligned with Western, normative expectations for success. In Fight Club, the main character, who is unnamed but played by the actor Edward Norton, seeks meaning and feeling in his numb, insomnia-ridden office-bound life by forming Fight Club with the object of his obsession, Tyler Durden.  Fight Club is a secluded all-male space, where men fight one another in order to feel something, stripping away a need for societal acceptance and capitalist significance in order to feel a more spiritual connection to one another and to life itself. However, the narrator begins to lose his hold on Fight Club when he notices Durden building relations and plans with the other men of the tribe - other apostles in this way, as Durden has this Christlike figure similar to that of Billy Budd and Querelle. And when Durden has sexual relations with another woman, Marla Singer, anxiety broods in the main character. Because of his fear of losing Durden and his loss of grasp on Fight Club, the main character sets out to kill  Durden. The narrator is pushed to instead kill himself, which nonetheless allows him to kill of Durden, who suddenly appears all along to have been a figment of his imagination, thus functioning as the fabrication of his desire to have a dominative, beautiful presence but his masculine insecurity preventing his true embodiment of this. Following his false suicide, Marla comes to this site of the killing, and she holds the main character’s hand in the last image.

Fight Club represents a similar system in its formation as an all-male utopia created in a space that is devoid of women, and it is specifically characterized by  hopes for an anti-capitalist revolution. Yet, there is an agenda nonetheless to foster and then hide and negate the homoeroticism of the film - to build the narrator and his homosexual tendencies almost ot the point of failure, and then to allow the audience to bask in a  compulsory, celebratory heterosexual success in the reward of the ending. At the point where the narrator's homoerotic obsession becomes consequential, the film trivializes the existence of his object of desire, which becomes a psychological manifestation, thus neglecting the importance and value of male love. The structure of Fight Club is in accordance with Western structures of narratives that travel through conflict and allow for resolution and a reward for the main character, notably for the main character to find a singular, romantic other of the opposite sex. In order for the main character not to experience failure, and in order for the audience to have the pleasure of the character’s success through a strange and unjustified plot twist, we see the main character succeed by having a woman placed by his side.

Beau Travail by Claire Denis presents the utopic fraternal world of the French military testing itself against the harsh landscapes of Africa. Like Fight Club, Beau Travail (both films from the year 1999) bases its patriarchal systems of order in unproductive yet erotically charged physical relationships. While this physicality fosters homoeroticism between the men, also like Fight Club, the men are unaware of their subliminal desires for one another, and this dissociation causes their demise. Despite their similarities in tropes, Beau Travail is entirely different in form from Fight Club, and allows for potency in its temporal ambiguity, creating alternative dynamics of failure and negating any need for an ending or a resolution that Fight Club forces upon us. In Beau Travail, a disconnect grows between Galoup’s, unconscious and conscious existence and in his awareness of his queer desires and their consequences. Yet, in his demise - his ultimate ostracization from the group -  queer experience and immersion is allowed for in the moment of suicide, or in the moment of questioning suicide, which creates euphoria in Galoup’s final separation from dominant heteronormative order. When considering Fassbinder, Querelle creates an ostracized space away from dominant order, a space that does not integrate into an articulate norm and thus queers itself through stylistic choices, yet the male love relations are nonetheless vapid in this space. However, in Fassbinder’s, In a Year with 13 Moons, which Fassbinder journeys into the main character’s queer failure throughout the entire film, Fassbinder reveals queer suicide as a something generative of empowered subjectivity - when society is so oppressive that an individual must find self-affirmation through their death. In Beau Travail and A Year With 13 Moons, there is a potent sense of authenticity in the failure of the queer characters, and this authenticity is created through a sense of possibility structured in cinematic subjective experience.

In Claire Denis’ Beau Travail, time is structured cyclically and also in multiple spaces of the conscious and unconscious, which provides a complex insight into Galoup’s personal and subjective experience and his dissociation from this experience. The story follows Galoup’s reflections on his past mistakes when in control of the French group of Legionnaires. The film simultaneously traverses dynamic scenes of training, camaraderie, and competition between the men against a desert landscape, thus allowing the narrative to be carried through the body and not so much through dialogue. Looking back on his experience, Galoup touches lightly on the cause of his failure, recalling his need to destroy the young Legionniare. However, the audience is able to analyze the more  subliminal causes of his failure through the dynamic choreographic scenes that are charged with eroticism, such as scenes where the men battle against one another with a charged gaze into one another’s eyes, and when they urgently embrace over and over as a component of physical training. Galoup, who is under the authority of Forestier, embodies a more complex interpretation of Melville’s Claggart, as he recalls his admiration for the authority figure Forestier (representative of Captain Vere) and a need to impress him. Galoup’s jovial relationship with his men is destabilized when a young Gilles Sentain enters the group, the handsome Legionnaire (the Billy Budd of this story). Sentain’s effortless charm and youthful beauty cause anxiety in Galoup. As Galoup pushes Sentain physically in one-on-one competitions, homosexual desires in Galoup become clear to the viewer, yet through his voiceover, it is clear that Galoup neglected to acknowledge his desire.

Galoup recalls that he brought the group of Legionnaires to a remote area to build camp there, so that he could deal with the situation with Sentain away from civilization, marking the desire to shut out others, namely the women the men engage with, and create a homosocial utopia that he can control.  Galoup finds his opportunity to destroy Sentain after Sentain strikes Galoup when Galoup condemns Sentain’s gesture to help another soldier. As a punishment, Galoup drops Sentain in the middle of the desert and sends him on a mission to find his way back, though having secretly destroyed Sentain’s compass. Sentain collapses in the salt of the desert, and does not return to the group, but is picked up by a group of African men and women - with his fate unknown. It is presumed by Foreister that Galoup took unnecessary measures against Sentain and that his motivations were out of line, so Galoup is sent back to France and feels devoid of any meaning left in life, as the Legionnaires provided his only purpose. However, this notion that the Legionnaires provided purpose is strange to the viewer, as the men appeared to have engaged in disciplinary, physical rituals that did not have any productive value beyond their remote group to the area they were in or to the French Legion. Thus, there is a sense in which Galoup’s belief of his worth is different than the kind of worth he actually had in the Legion, or what kind of worth the Legion had itself. Instead, what is most significant in the film is the male relations formed through the cinematography, and though Galoup may not be aware enough to analyze these relations, the viewer feels the complications of male love most potently in their beauty and tragedy.

The ending scene in Beau Travail, by Claire Denis, is the moment in which the regrettable events in Galoup’s life collapse into a potent, ecstatic eternal return, lifting the burden of linear, consequential events off of Galoup’s character and allowing for a queer immersion. Though it is clear in Galoup that he laments his mistake as he contemplates suicide, Claire Denis’ cinematic constructions allow his failure to erupt into eternity, resisting what we might expect the end of a Western narrative movie to give us - a resolution, an answer, or a conclusion. The scene begins with a sequence of medium wide shots of Galoup making his bed in a methodological, militaristic, way, as if he is still acting in accordance with the rules and codes of the military. He is almost entirely in the frame, and the camera slightly follows his movements but remains quite stationary on the medium wide angle. After finishing making the bed, Galoup sits down and contemplates for a moment. He recalls being with the Legionnaires as the film cuts to a wide take of all of the Legionnaires, standing, smiling, and posing for the camera. Though this is a standard and conventional way of showing a character reflect on their past, it is a strange choice for Denis to make, because the audience has never seen anything like this moment. Throughout the entire film, the men have been in physical, mobile, at times violent, and at times homoerotic choreographic relationships with one another. Before this we had never seen the men stand upright and still with one another, and we have not seen the instance of this photograph. This is the most clear cue for the viewer that Galoup had been imagining his relationship with the Legionnaires to be completely different than it was, or what the audience was allowed to see - which was relationships between military men as dynamic, loving, violent, and tense with sexuality. Galoup remembers his experience as orderly and civil, which confirms that Galoup considered his relationship to the other men differently than what he unconsciously desired.

Following this memory, Galoup picks up a gun and lays down with it on his chest. The scene cuts to a handheld, lower shot that has significantly different style - it is shaky and out of focus, which destabilizes Galoup’s orderly, stable awareness and allows the audience to experience the instability of the experience of recalling the past. There is a cut to the gun as he places it on his heart, and the camera travels up to his arm. There is a J cut, bringing in Corona’s “Rhythm of the Night,” a premonition of what could be Galoups final dance. The film then cuts to Galoup in a nightclub, though it looks like the club he was in in Africa, there is nonetheless a sense in which he could have denied the suicide and chosen dance in France, or that he could have simply chosen life, or that this could be the afterlife, or perhaps he reflects on his life and remember moments in which he was truly with himself in the most powerful of ways - when he was dancing. It is however, unnecessary to think of any of these possibilities as one more valid than another, which is exemplary of Denis’ power to not give the audience an answer or a reward following Galoups pains, but instead to allow viewer feels a potent sense of resolution, without understanding it. Questions of life and death are inexplicable, and that there is no solution to failure in life but to feel the inexplicable weight of existence in dance. Galoup, with a controlled coolness, explodes into dance, and in its most ecstatic moment, the film cuts to the credits, crediting Denis Lavant, and then the rest of the men in the film. As this scene, and the entire film, up into this moment, has created asymmetry between the men as they believe what they are and stand for and what they are under the surface, the credits are especially powerful. This all-male world destined to destruction had been directed, shot, and edited by all women, allowing for a radical female gaze on masculinity and its relation to expectations of orderliness and productiveness in civilization, and the destruction and failure of these.

The question of the trope of  queer suicide has a significant presence in the film, In a Year with 13 Moons, by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and suicide as constructed by Fassbinder is useful when analyzing the potentiality for queer failure in suicide in Beau Travail. In In the Year with 13 Moons, Elvira, a trans-woman who experiences failure in love and life aspirations,  visits the places of her past, which are charged with violence, destruction, sexual repression, and unreciprocated love - including the orphanage where she grew up, and a scene in the slaughterhouse where she worked, which is incredibly disturbing in its frank slaughtering of cows oozing with blood, coupled with Elvira’s desperate and pathetic cries for love. Elvira goes to meet Anton, who is the man Elvira loved in the past, that caused her to transition into being a woman so that he might accept her. Anton is also the leader of his own primal horde of men of sorts. Anton’s male rituals  are in a strange way similar to those in Beau Travail in that they are seemingly ridiculous to the viewer though important to the men in the pursuit of their choreographic unison, though far different than Beau Travail is Fassbinder’s use of hyperbole and comedy.  

Before seeing Anton, Elvira encounters a man about to hang himself. Elvira remarks that she had tried to do the same thing before when a certain person “forced her into oblivion” (Anton), but that in that moment her life was changed, and she states, “my ego was forced to learn to put up with me to bear the unbearable.” The man hanging himself speaks of an affirmative way to see suicide, that is not condemnation. He remarks that it would be “a great misunderstanding to see suicide as a negation.” He states, “the negation of the will to exist is a bold affirmation of the will since it means renouncing not life's sufferings but its joys.” And “the suicide wants life and simply rejects the conditions under which he experiences it.” When Elvira later commits suicide, she is able to bring together her loved ones in a way that she could not have done in her living life, as all of these characters crowd around and listen to, and are in this way invited into, her subjective experience, though they may not have been on amicable terms when Elvira was alive. In the book, Suicide, Simon Critchley explains the problems with Albert Camus’ rejection of suicide in favor of choosing absurd creation. Critchley notes the possibility of absurd creation through suicide as an autonomous, human act, which especially manifests through the creativity of suicide notes. Why is it necessary that absurd creation be an act of choosing life and instead not an act of choosing death? Critchley explains that, like Camus’ notion of absurd creation, in a person’s writing of a suicide note: “by marking and explaining the decision to end a life, they endlessly outlive it.” And this agency in the creation of a suicide note is a way for Elvira to reclaim her autonomy and her voice in an oppressive world that continues to reject and violate her. Critchley states, “And so death becomes life, just as from the moment of birth, life is already a process of dying. And now negation all at once becomes something, even if good for nothing. Logic and dialectic fail in tragicomic agreement. What counts is the option of the subject.”

While it is important to consider the autonomy of the subject in suicide and to question Western Christian condemnations of the act of suicide itself, and Elvira’s suicide through subjective writing is a powerful reclaiming of her failure, suicide, for Critchley, is nonetheless not the answer to life’s problems. For it is just death and shortcomings that awaits all people at the end of their lives, as spoken by the man who hangs himself in In A Year With 13 Moons. And thus, life’s meaning and the constant unreciprocated pursuit of it as a question should be given up entirely, which allows for existence, and queer existence, to just be - in its melancholy and also in its ecstasy. And it is this coupling of diverging, intense experiences one has of life and of disorienting failures in life that Beau Travail paints so powerfully through Galoup’s experience. Critchley references Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse - that even in life’s most confusing, unforgiving moments, there are moments when, life stands still, as Mrs. Ramsay remarked when seeing the subtle, ephemeral light fall so profoundly through her window. And if we let go of the burden to give ourselves meaning, we can notice these everyday miracles Woolf speaks of. Critchley states,

When life stands still here and we face the endless, shifting, indifferent grey brown sea, when we hold ourselves open out into that indifference tenderly, without pining, self-pitying, complaining or expecting some reward or glittering prize, then we might have become, just for that moment, something that has endured and will endure, someone who can find some sort of sufficiency: right here, right now.

In Beau Travail, even in inevitable destruction and failure, or failure of the individual to understand what is meaningful, or what was true in their life, the inexplicable weight of life remains, and in this weight, and in Galoup’s final moments dancing, life stands still. This weight and its ambiguity is something we all share, and that we all confront on a day to day basis. The film holds its power in this inexplicable, existential weight undermining the justification for a logic to a patriarchal horde and making the film more importantly about what it is to be human and to feel simultaneously regret and joy,  hopelessness and profundity, meaning and nothingness, failure and ecstasy, confusion and clarity. And what is it to be human if it is not to experience failure? And also, what is it to be human if it is not to contemplate suicide, and to constantly find ways in which there must be daily moments of ephemeral potency so to not commit suicide? In Beau Travail, what is so strong is that there is a negation of a need for justification to life or of a definitive statement on desire to be made by Galoup, but Beau Travail ends with the space between,  which expresses itself through the body and its mysterious power. For, though Galoup may have been unaware of it, embodiment - his expression through the body - carried him through his life with the Legionnaires, and, in his last moments, the inexplicable and unknowable but powerful potential of his body remains.