Towards a ‘Perverse’ Brechtianism

In 1990, Thomas Elsaesser wrote that Brechtian aesthetics are toothless in a hyperreal image culture. Thirty years on, this essay reworks the notion of distanciation by asking: what if we cannot decide whether the unnatural behavior of characters on screen is the product of Brechtian alienation or of the character’s own perversion, but rather is caused by both (and therefore neither)? To chart the transition between orthodox and “perverse” Brechtianisms, this essay compares a film by a director whose melodramas are often read as examples of Brechtian cinema, Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955), and a film by a contemporary director whose work is often misread as the very thing it satirizes, Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2016). This essay argues that, in the absence of a world “out there” to represent, the techniques of Brecht become perverse, a Sadean laboratory for the rehearsal of illicit forms of pleasure.