Brandon himself seems to have been projected from the non-places which he inhabits. He is to post-crash Manhattan what Patrick Bateman (in American Psycho) was to boomtime New York: the city’s psychopathology rendered no longer as perversely humorous extravagance but as dour furtiveness, its traces to be found not in a mutilated corpse but on a soiled hard drive. Superficial charm covers over a terrifying nullity, and you suspect that Brandon’s sex addiction covers over a deeper impulse to flee from that central nothingness. The film is called Shame but shame is conspicuously lacking from it emotional palette, which is as subdued as the architecture on which McQueen’s camera lingers.
read more | Mark Fisher, Non-film: Steve McQueen's Shame | Film Quarterly
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