The prize for the Grand malaise of the week is attributed without a shadow of a doubt to the trailer of the porn film starring the French author Michel Houellebecq.
For those who missed this news, remember that the writer was invited by a collective of filmmakers from the Netherlands, KIRAC (Keeping It Real Art Critics), to take part in a pornographic short film of which he is the center of attention.
How did one of the most prominent authors of his time end up in this mess? It all goes back to the honeymoon that Michel Houellebecq and his wife, Qianyun Lysis Li, were to spend in Morocco. The caring wife had been planning this trip for a month. In particular, she had planned to offer “pretty prostitutes” to her husband.
But the latter found himself with his dick between his two legs when the trip was canceled due to a terrorist threat.
Never mind ! Houellebecq has plenty of friends ready to help him. Stefan Ruitenbeek, director of art films and member of KIRAC, then told him to come to Amsterdam, because he knew “lots of girls” who would agree to sleep with him “out of curiosity”. There was, however, a condition to this invitation: that the antics be filmed.
In no time, Houellebecq and his wife accepted this proposal. With the roles of novelist, actor, director, singer, poet and essayist, the winner of the 2010 Goncourt Prize (The map and the territory) now adds that of porn actor.
I confess that at first I thought it was a hoax. But when I watched the trailer for the film, which will be available from March 11, I understood that this project was serious. And that it raised a host of questions in me.
In the movie KIRAC 27 (it’s the 27the collective film), which we do not know if it is fiction or docureality, it is about the arrival of the director’s first child and the apprehensions that this causes in him. What is Houellebecq doing in there? And how did this idea come about?
Ruitenbeek and Houellebecq, who have been corresponding since 2019, have agreed to a meeting in Paris. The author did not show up, but Lysis Houellebecq came. She explained that her husband was depressed and the only thing that made him happy was sleeping with a lot of women.
This is how the idea for this film took shape. The shooting, which took place in Amsterdam and Paris, lasted six days (let’s say that we are far from Dunes orAvatar). In all, Houellebecq slept with four women. The director was impressed with his performance.
“In bed, he is very good, he fucks like crazy, he is really manly with women, said Ruitenbeek in an interview with Vice. I thought he was going to cum in three minutes, but he fucked for hours. He’s a real guy. »
There are a ton of ways to view this stunt from Michel Houellebecq. First, there is the idea of a daring artistic performance that hides a message of greater significance than one might think. Also in this interview with ViceStefan Ruitenbeek shares the link he establishes between this man “who has become immortal thanks to his books” and this “old body that will soon die”.
“Even though her body is near the end of its life, it begs for sex, to be touched, for orgasms and for happiness. You can be the greatest author of literature, you can make history, but in the end you remain this little body, this little piece of flesh that won’t live very long. This film is therefore about intimacy, love and what it means to be a depressed 66-year-old man. »
According to Ruitenbeek, the author of Elementary particles and D’Annihilate was not interested in the question of sex in this experiment. What mattered to him was “the meaning of this performance”.
But others could see in this project the opportunity to judiciously place a screen on the recent excesses of the author recognized for his controversial positions. During a river discussion with Michel Onfray published at the end of November in the journal Popular Front, Michel Houellebecq said some deeply shocking things about Muslims: “The wish of the native French population, as they say, is not that Muslims assimilate, but that they stop stealing from them and attack. Or else, another solution, that they go away. »
The Great Mosque of Paris has decided to file a complaint against the writer. But rector Chems-Eddine Hafiz finally decided to withdraw his complaint after a six-hour meeting with the author of Submission. Houellebecq acknowledged that “the relevant paragraphs are ambiguous” And undertook to review them in a forthcoming book.
But on January 13, the Union of French Mosques decided to file a complaint against the author, Michel Onfray and the director of the magazine. Houellebecq is not at the end of his troubles.
And then, I can’t help but see in this case a wonderful example of the insatiable thirst of some to want to hold the upper hand. We live in a world where the gaze of others is a hard drug. We want to be noticed, recognized, admired, loved for who we are. Or what we are not.
Does Michel Houellebecq really need to be filmed having sex with women when he sells his novels by the hundreds of thousands of copies? What do you do after that to draw attention to yourself? Because you have to know that this game is a spiral.
In any case, we can say that Michel Houellebecq assumes his own contradictions. He who denounces remarkably well the decadence of the West that we are witnessing demonstrates that he is also the perfect incarnation of it.