Perverse Afterlives: The Melville Effect in Leos Carax and Claire Denis

Abstract: The queerly perverse elements running throughout Melville’s canon have served as inspiration for a number of contemporary artists, including two avant-garde French filmmakers, Leos Carax and Claire Denis. In Carax’s Pola X —which transports Pierre ’s incestuous family romance to a 1990s France beset by urban terrorists—the blurring of the lines between Carax and Melville, film and book, and auteur and protagonist, renders the film a porous artwork whose messy overflow evokes Freud’s description of the repressed instincts seeking subsidiary channels of perverse desire to fill. In Denis’s Beau Travail —in which the all-male shipboard world of Billy Budd is recreated among French Legionnaires stationed in East Africa—the Claggart character becomes the focus for a powerful eruption the polymorphous perverse expressed in nearly wordless cinematic lyricism; his increasing acts of sadism, frustrated voyeurism, obsessive fixation on discipline, and delusional projections culminate in the collapse of Eros and Thanatos in a final act of mind-blowing cinematic jouissance. Both films participate in what I call the contemporary Melville Effect, an efflorescence of creative projects inspired by Melville that rivals in number and intensity the early-twentieth-century Melville revival among scholars.