Shame is a ridiculous and insulting movie. It’s supposed to be about sexual addiction, but it’s really not – if it was, they would have made it at least somewhat realistic, and they would have written some dialog so you could understand the problems and issues related to such an addiction. Instead, we are shown a lot of different sexual activity, all with grandiosely negative connotations, and we are fed a highly manipulative and unconvincing storyline about how sex is bad and corrupting, and implying women are (by their very nature) complicit in this. It’s a sick piece of trash.

Michael Fassbender’s character is an undiscriminated mishmash of sexual acts. He jacks off at home, he jacks off at work, he looks at porn at home, he looks at porn at work, he does live-video sex at home, he uses hookers, he stalks women on the subway and chases them, he sexually harasses women at work, he gropes women in public, and he picks up women in bars and has empty sex with them. He even snorts coke so he can “go all night” with his hookers. And the film’s clear message is that these various sexual activities keep him from loving his sister, and from loving the average-looking and rather dull African American woman from his work, who asks him on a date.

Where do I even begin with this nonsense? The idea that a guy whacking off in his own house is dysfunctional is something right out of a 1950’s Catholic school! And his whacking off in the bathroom at work might be distasteful and illegal, but one can argue that he’s not hurting anyone. The portrayal of his porn habits is similarly silly. These filmmakers have him hiding skin-mags all over his apartment – apparently they are unaware that no one has bought a “skin-mag” for over a decade, because now it’s all free on the internet. They have him with a work computer chock-full of porn despite the fact that he shares a tiny office, and when he gets caught he quite ridiculously suffers no professional or legal ramifications, which conveniently frees him to experience more of the “private shame” these filmmakers are pushing. When his sister opens his home laptop and finds a live video-chat link to some bimbo, she gets a look on her face like she just found little girls chopped up in his freezer. 

So basically, his private sex life is like something out of the reactionary, paranoid fantasies of a couple of sexually repressed and religiously warped parents. But his public habits tell a completely contradictory story. This guy hires really expensive and gorgeous hookers, occasionally two at a time, and fucks them with a confidence and flamboyance not usually associated with little boys who hide skin-mags. He is a star-player at his high paying job, with good social relationships with his co-workers. And most importantly, he is smooth and adroit at picking up attractive professional women and getting them to happily do all kinds of sordid things with him. In his public life, he’s having a blast!

This is where the film really becomes confused and offensive: in its portrayal of normal women relative to his sexual habits. He stares at women on the subway like a lunatic rapist, and they get all hot and bothered, smiling back at him. He picks up young women in bars, drives them to areas of New York City where they would confidently expect to be murdered, and has wild-ass sex with them, with their full and enthusiastic participation. He walks up to a woman in a bar and starts fingering her right in front of her boyfriend, and the woman is totally into it; he then describes to the boyfriend all the extreme sex he’s going to later inflict on the guy’s girl, and while the guy is not very happy, the girl is clearly ambivalent.

And after a bizarre and sexless first date with the rather homely African American woman, he dramatically throws out all his skin-mags, and the next day he attacks her in the coffee room at work. What does she do? Instead of slapping his face and getting him fired, she gets sexually turned on (yeah, right!) and immediately accompanies him to The Standard in the middle of the work day, to have sex with him. Then, when he tries to mount her “missionary” – presumably to prove to himself he can be “normal” – he suddenly can’t get it up, and acts embarrassed. What does she do then? She leaves in disgust.

What kind of world are these filmmakers living in? In their portrayal of reality, the line between porn women, video women, hooker women, and normal yuppie women is weirdly non-existent. The normal women in this film apparently like to be harassed, groped, stalked and banged like whores by complete strangers. Thus his sexual habits are not a problem that interferes with his life in any way. Even his sexual failure with the African American woman is depicted as a strangely ambiguous event – maybe if he had just bent her over she would have been fine with him.

In fact, the only real “problem” in this film is his disconnection with his sister (who incidentally is also a raging sex-slut, like all the other women in the film.) So in the end, the message of this film runs something like this: His inability to discipline his sexual thoughts to a suitably Christian level of purity, and thereby resist the evil temptations of Woman, is wrecking his sense of family values. These filmmakers are like far-right religious whack-jobs who admire the sexual mores of Iran.

If you are thinking about watching this film, I’d watch For a Good Time Call … instead. Yes, it’s a silly comedy, but it’s a much more truthful and constructive depiction of human sexuality, and a much less warped depiction of women. Watching Shame is downright unhealthy.