To be intimate and vulnerable with another involves being honest with oneself, or so the saying goes. This task is made all the more difficult by the forms of dysphoria that arise from assigned genders or pained bodies and the ways social conventions muddle our relationships to ourselves. In Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not (2018) characters work through the dissonance between their bodily experiences and what society teaches them about how their bodies should be and feel, exploring how intimacy and dysphoria are delineated along the lines of age, gender and ability.
The film follows protagonist Laura (Laura Benson) as she sets out to remedy her extreme discomfort when being touched, aided by a cast of sex workers and therapists (or really, individuals who serve as both). Trans sex worker Hanna Hoffman displays her comfort with her own body for Laura (who watches others masturbate in lieu of touching or being touched), and encourages her to feel the same way, regularly checking in with her about her feelings. Touch therapist Seani Love similarly encourages her to listen to her body, which, they deduce, often meets male desire with rage. After she begins to cry, Love asks to taste her tears, apparently a fetish of his, as well as a reminder of the male desire that she dreads, which is often indifferent to her feelings. A later flashback to her father in a hospital bed suggests that he might be to blame for her fear of being touched, but through his role as a stand-in for abusive men in general the scene points more broadly to the familiar ways in which male desire has long confused women’s relationships to their own bodies. As Lauren Berlant puts it, in a heterosexist culture women are socialised to experience desire by becoming desirable objects, confusing desire for another with a learned desire to be desired.¹
As part of Laura’s efforts to be comfortable with touch, she drops in to watch a touching workshop, which appears to be intended to address the ways in which nonnormative bodies might need to learn individualised, rather than socially-scripted, experiences of bodily pleasure and intimacy, encouraging them to feel comfortable attending to and talking about their specific needs and desires. Since many visibly disabled people comprise the workshop’s attendees, viewers are invited to assume that disability is likely to breed bodily dysphoria. Yet Laura’s intense identification with their experience suggests that dysphoria is widespread, that we are all alienated from our bodies to varying degrees. The film continually reminds us that all of us would be wise to see our bodies as unique, and to listen to our own desires and discomforts rather than obeying those of others. Heteronormative intimacy is clearly not working for Laura. And as Love tells her, “If you can’t say no, you can never really say yes.”
The environment in which the workshop takes place is clinical, though it hardly differs from Laura’s bare and colourless home. We meet Christian and Tomas, who are tasked with touching one another’s faces and then discussing the experience. When Christian notes that he can feel Tomas withdrawing from him, Tomas admits that he feels uncomfortable because Christian’s face is not like one he’s felt before. Christian has spinal muscular atrophy: he cannot always control his muscle movement, including his drooling. But out of all of the film’s ‘characters’ he is by far the most in touch with his own body. (I use the term ‘characters’ loosely because Touch Me Not occupies a space between fiction and non-fiction, and in allowing people to speak from their own unique bodily experiences, it practices what it preaches.) Christian is wise, sympathetic, and just as Hanna’s comfort with herself allows Laura to begin to relax, Christian shares his calmness with those around him. For Tomas in particular, being honest with Christian about his feelings of discomfort allows him to deal with his own issues. By being dishonest with himself about his own feelings, he has protected himself from the shame of causing unpleasantness for others.
Later, as Tomas begins to experiment with being open, his lover likens his hairlessness – a result of his alopecia universalis – to true nakedness and openness. “Learning to wear a mask (that word already embedded in the term ‘masculinity’) is the first lesson in patriarchal masculinity that a boy learns,” writes bell hooks. “He learns that his core feelings cannot be expressed if they do not conform to the acceptable behaviors sexism defines as male.”² Like many men under patriarchy, Tomas has been socialised into unfeeling, which he is working to unlearn. This is possibly why Pintilie’s film has elicited a very particular response from critics, whose dismissal of emotions often veers towards the misogynistic. Touch Me Not has been called “shallow” and “silly”, both words frequently used to write off work by and for young women.³ That Tomas’s openness ultimately ends in heartbreak might fuel interpretations that such vulnerability is naive, the stuff of foolish young girls. But this kind of vulnerability also threatens the maintenance of patriarchal power. As hooks puts it, patriarchal sexuality is “a perverse form of connection that replaces true intimacy with complex, covert layers of dominance and submission, collusion and manipulation.” Intimacy needs vulnerability, which patriarchal masculinity obviates by asserting power ab initio.
Exemplifying hooks’s point, much of the criticism is lodged against a scene set in a fetish club, where Tomas goes to follow the lover who has recently dumped him. Critics generally agree that the club scene is caricatured, calling it “unappealing and ridiculous”, neither a sexy nor nuanced representation of BDSM culture.⁴ Indeed, despite several long takes of bondage scenes, the club best serves as a setting in which the characters continue their own self-discoveries. It provides an open-minded space for a range of sexual expressions, but there are still norms (emblematised by consistent styles of dress), and anonymity is often privileged over intimacy (faces are often covered). Although by no means demonised for these practices, it’s true that the club is not painted especially flatteringly. But this is precisely the point: although concerned with alternative sexualities, the film is ultimately about honesty and vulnerability with oneself and one’s lovers. The club is not meant as the solution to their problems, but is intended to be a setting which enables exploration.
This is not to say that the spheres of the fetish club and caring intimacy can never overlap: to Tomas’s surprise, he sees Christian and his wife, Grit, at the club having sex. In the touch workshop, Christian speaks with Tomas about the fact that his penis still works ‘normally’, unlike much of his body; that he enjoys celebrating his body in a world that often tells him not to. “Suffering from”, he says, is a phrase often used to describe peoples’ relationships with their disabilities. Christian insists that he does not suffer, but that his body often brings him great pleasure (though still, he adds, it would be nice to be able to scratch his own head). Touch Me Not counters dominant ableist cinematic tropes that cast disabled people as asexual or undesirable, and instead enables Christian to speak frankly from his own experience. It also does not portray Grit as a generous inspiration for daring to love him in spite of his disability; there is no question as to why one might fall for this kind and generous personality. (It is a little infuriating, however, that Grit never speaks on screen; she is simply his beautiful and gracious lover and caretaker with long blonde hair).
The film opens and closes with a monologue from Pintilie herself: she stands in front of the camera and addresses someone dear to her with whom she has not spoken about this film, her investigation of intimacy. It would seem that this person (a subtle reference to an umbilical cord implies they are her mother) helped to raise these questions for Pintilie. Wondering why they have never spoken about the film together, she asks a question: “Was it our silent, comfortable agreement not to talk about it?”. This withholding of information created (or reflected) distance between them. At the end of the film she addresses this absent person again, telling them that before filming she had felt so sure she knew everything about intimacy, trust, desire and safety, but that now she sees how distrust, anger and fear of abandonment often work to make our longing for love unfulfillable. “Tell me how you love me, so I can understand how to love,” she asks them, reminding us that love and intimacy are deeply interdependent acts; that the love we receive deeply affects how we give love to ourselves and others.
1 Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love (New York: Punctum Books, 2012): 74. 2 bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004). 3 Peter Bradshaw, “Shallow, silly Golden Bear winner Touch Me Not is a calamity for the festival,” The Guardian February 25, 2018. 4 Jay Weissberg, “Film Review: Touch Me Not,” Variety February 23, 2018.
Emily Watlington is a 2018-9 Fulbright Scholar based in Berlin and Cambridge, Mass. She was previously the curatorial research assistant at MIT List Visual Arts Center, and her writing has appeared in publications such as Mousse and Frieze, as well as exhibition catalogs including ‘Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974-1995’.
