Caught Stealing and Obscenity Culture

I recently saw the movie Caught Stealing in theaters. The movie captures the zeitgeist in the most perverse, depressing, and irritating way. It plays on our latent desire to always want to know what would happen if the least expected comes true, if the established order is reversed.

The movie centers on a self destructive young guy who is a raging alcoholic. He is shown drinking beers for breakfast. He has what seems to be a million different bottles of liquor hidden around the house. He had been projected as a first round pick in the major league baseball draft, but before that future could unfold, he crashed his car into a pole while speeding under the influence, killing his friend. He cannot escape the trauma, as his dreams return again and again to the scene, and he falls into a cycle of self destruction. Without the ability to pause and reflect, he moves forward only by tearing his own life apart. The film shows him repeatedly humiliated and injured, each moment deepening his collapse.

We watch a young, athletic, strong, handsome man reduced to his lowest point again and again, broken down both physically and mentally. He is beaten to a pulp repeatedly, and his girlfriend, whom he wounds through his relentless self destruction, is killed by the Mafia in an attempt to send him a message. His life becomes a cycle of self destruction and the death of those close to him, a compulsive reenactment of the trauma he endured when he killed his friend while drunk driving.

Violence is ubiquitous in this film. The tension created between characters resolves very quickly, before the viewer has an opportunity to process it. The film is obscene, as Jean Baudrillard would say.

“The obscene results from media society’s insatiable need to create as much explicit content as possible and its corresponding inability to deal with the seductive and the ambiguous.”

The film embodies this logic of obscenity where nothing is withheld or left to seduction or delay. For example, both the protagonist and his soon to be girlfriend are naked within five minutes of the movie beginning. The love interest is resolved before the relationship is displayed. The screenwriters knew the audience wanted to see these two attractive people have sex and got to the point immediately, there was no need to wait in anticipation, that tension was resolved as soon as possible.

The movie continues this theme of immediate resolution throughout. Every conflict escalates to tremendous, unspeakably cruel and furious violence. Yet, there is no genuine catharsis or reconciliation.

Early in the film, we watch the protagonist beaten so brutally that he later drifts in and out of consciousness for two days, and the damage requires surgery to remove a kidney. He’s told under no circumstances can he drink again. The next day, he drinks copiously and blacks out. There are zero health consequences. Similarly, the beatings he endures do not impact his ability to run, fight, and rage. There is also the high school car crash that was said to have ended his baseball career with a devastating knee injury, yet his knee shows no weakness as he outruns cars. Violence appears emptied of consequence, leaving no scars, no limp, no trace at all..

Characters arrive in each scene with a determination to resolve any potential friction in the quickest fashion. The antagonists’ reflex to settle everything through violence only drags the conflict out, as each assault collides with the protagonist’s relentless determination to stay alive at any cost.

For the protagonist, life is taken as the highest value without question. The same man who relentlessly destroys his own existence also clings to it with extreme determination, even when that survival renders life unbearable to watch, stirring in the audience a hidden wish to see it end. Yet his death never arrives. Every other thread is brought to resolution, but the one conclusion the audience longs for is withheld, as the protagonist’s death remains unrealized.

Everything in the movie is made as gross, violent, and visible as possible. We see gruesome executions, gun fights, car crashes, clogged and leaking toilets, naked bodies post cavity search, the removal of post kidney surgery stitches with pliers, hyper charged superhuman fist fights that would kill anyone, excessive drug and alcohol abuse, aggressive self destruction, and the face of someone suffering unimaginable mental torment. Conflict and sex are unashamedly used by the director as consumable images, emptied of depth, replayed in loops of escalating violence, humiliation, and pornographic exposure.

Since every possible emotional pressure point is exploited, the movie feels unrealistic. The more the film shows us destruction, the less it feels tragic. It doesn’t make me sad, it only disturbs me deeply. Repetition deadens affect. The obscene becomes boring in an ultimate reversal. The very thing defined as that which shocks is deprived of its shock value.

The play of reversibility has always piqued our interests. It has ancient roots in traditions of ritual inversion where common folk would stage a theatrical reversal of power relations such as toppling the King. In these moments, the normal social order was suspended. Servants would play the role of masters, peasants would dress as lords, fools would be crowned in place of rulers, women might take command of men, and the sacred calendar itself would be punctuated by days of sanctioned disorder.

In carnival, the grotesque body took center stage, with its functions of eating, drinking, defecating, birthing, and dying celebrated in excess. Hierarchy was laughed at, mocked, and momentarily destroyed. The high and mighty were dragged into the same materiality as the low. Kings could be parodied, priests lampooned, and the divine mocked in bawdy plays.

Rituals of inversion allowed communities to experience the reversibility of power and meaning. Nothing was absolute, not even God’s representatives. By turning the world upside down, people affirmed that the “normal order” was contingent, constructed, and vulnerable.

Kingdoms, states, and the powerful were never blind to the subversive potential of rituals of inversion. Indeed they understood a deep truth Gerry Coulter says was near to Baudrillard’s theories.

“For Baudrillard,” writes Gerry Coulter, “reversibility is important precisely because it is an ‘absolute weapon’ against determination, against such notions as progress being the inevitable result of the passage of time (history).”

Rightly seen as potentially subversive, carnivals that mocked kings and parodied priests were thus gradually policed, regulated, and stripped of their radical edge. Authorities tolerated them only as controlled outlets, moments of licensed misrule that reaffirmed order by showing that even rebellion had its proper time and place. Whenever these rituals tipped too far, they were crushed with violence. Medieval carnivals were banned or tamed into church festivals, fairs were militarized, peasant masquerades were outlawed, and political satire was censored or punished. What was once a communal recognition of the contingency of hierarchy was converted into harmless festivity, or eliminated entirely. Power could not permit the people to practice, even in play, the toppling of kings.

Today, we see the opposite. Reversal isn’t outlawed or tamed. Rather, the elite stage a ritual of inversion for us! They have presented us with a blockbuster movie with the upmost reversibility. Today’s culture is not prohibitive like yesterday’s culture. Rather, it is marked by an auto-catalytic exposure so that everything is shown, consumed, and resolved immediately. This culture of total exposure renders reversibility itself impotent.

In Caught Stealing, small individuals have more physical strength than large ones, police captains work with the mob, strong men are forced into submissive roles to survive, and numerous ethnic groups are included but are presented in shockingly stereotypical fashion. We see hierarchy overturned, bodies exposed, and social taboos transgressed, and yet nothing changes because this inversion ritual is a spectacle produced and handed to us from above, carefully packaged for our consumption. We are no longer participants in the ritual of inversion, we are passive onlookers, excited less by the reversal of expectations than by the crude excessiveness of the exposure.

The more one seeks to reveal society in an excessively explicit and systematic fashion, the further away we push it. This display of obscenity desensitizes us to the obscenity we see in daily life, such as innocent people being abducted by masked ICE gangs, children being starved to death and hospitals being blown to smithereens in Gaza, and the everyday hunger, frustration, and humiliation of poor people across our nation.

In carnival, inversion revealed that the order of things could be otherwise. Through rupture with the established order new forms of meaning could emerge. In today’s society, reversal becomes just another image, consumed alongside all the rest, absorbed into the positivity of “yes, more.” Violence, humiliation, and sex are not negations of expectations but further affirmations of the same imperative to produce, expose, and consume.

To see everything is to see nothing. Where carnival once released the community into laughter and regeneration, here inversion only deepens exhaustion.

Baudrillard’s point about reversibility being an “absolute weapon” depends on the possibility of genuine transformation, where what rules today may be mocked tomorrow and new possibilities can appear. In this film, however, reversibility collapses into simulation. This movie reveals only to consume. There is no grotesque body celebrated as a site of collective renewal, only bodies reduced to surfaces for violence and humiliation.

This superficial reversal stimulates the viewer’s perverse desire for collapse and destruction, what Freud labeled the death drive. Through an obscene film like Caught Stealing, we can approach death vicariously through the protagonist while never having to encounter its existential weight. We are pure spectators today, nothing can stir us into questioning, which is the heart of thinking itself. We do not know how to form our own opinions, nor do we want that burden. We are force fed violence and we are grateful for it. The more fucked up the better.

My disturbance with this movie stems from being given everything I want. I wanted to see how bad it could get. Just like George Carlin. Jenny Holzer captured this dynamic perfectly with her famous truism, “Protect me from what I want.” Holzer’s work warns that our desires are often complicit in our own undoing, that what we crave can also be what destroys us. The film plays directly into this, feeding the audience’s appetite for excess until the satisfaction itself becomes unsettling.

Again we should heed the words of Jean Baudrillard, who saw media culture for what it was at its core.

“Our entire culture’s natural condition is obscene: a culture of monstration, of demonstration, of productive monstrosity the culture industry’s inability to grasp the paradox that the true nature of social reality is to be found in its shrouding, not in its blatant exposure.”

This obscene spectacle culture satisfies desire as soon as it arises, and in this acceleration, our desire for reversal loses its liberating and imaginative potential. We are pleasured at the most base level: to work for nuanced pleasure is a waste of time, better to maximize simple pleasure and have a higher quantity of emotive satisfaction. Quantity is presumed to equate to quality. Yet, as I’ve written elsewhere:

Owning more things

Does not translate

Into richer human experiences.

Reversibility, in this obscene form, reveals the fragility of desire itself. The audience gets the experience of everything turned upside down, but instead of freedom they encounter repetition, exhaustion, and the hollow realization that nothing new can emerge.

How does the audience respond to this obscenity? The same way it responds to everything else, “it was mid.” In over 40,000 reviews on the movie rating app letterboxed, the average rating is 3.6 stars out of 5, firmly in the middle. We consume the forbidden, but since the forbidden has already been anticipated, it has been neutralized and cannot move us. Being force-fed everything at once, we were denied the slow process by which desire turns into meaning. The most obscene spectacle strikes us as middle of the road. If this movie was released 100 years ago there would be riots in the streets.

Ultimately, this movie reflects our zeitgeist, the spirit of our times. We are a culture that refuses to be confused. We have to get to the bottom of everything immediately, since we believe that doing so would enable us to sit in the driver’s seat of life. If we could just be on top of everything, have every mystery resolved, then we could have total control and be at peace.

Yet, such reasoning overlooks the fact that efficiency in processing inputs only enables more inputs. As we become obsessed with the speed of processing, we accelerate endlessly without reflection. We think that by going faster we are getting closer to the truth of life, but really we are only drowning in more noise.

Byung-Chul Han writes, “Meaning founds duration.” It cannot be forced or produced by rushing through everything, it only appears by staying with an activity long enough for it to matter. It comes when you give sustained attention, when you let a conversation, a task, or a relationship unfold without cutting it short. It shows itself in the time you allow something to take, and in the commitment you bring to it. We can only feel meaning when we slow down and let it reveal itself.

It is in what doesn’t show itself that we can see truth, which strikes us always as beautiful. As the poet John Keats wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

In an attempt to know what’s at the bottom of life we destroy it, like the child rips apart the butterfly to see what it’s made of. Truth is an event of appearance, something that flashes in ambiguity. When forced into visibility, it’s essence disappears. It remains a shell of itself. In tearing away the veil we lose the poetic dimension of being. Today’s anti-poetic aesthetics place value on operation alone; they are judged by how well they trigger our emotional reflexes, by how effectively they provoke reactions that function as a veil stretched over a life hollowed of meaning.

Yet it’s through this veil that we can gain genuine insight into our human condition. What matters is not the object behind the veil but the way it discloses itself in and through the covering. The raw real is never accessible to us. We only meet it through the tools we have, our bodies, our senses, and the cultural habits we inherit. This is our veil. It shapes what appears meaningful to us. If there was no veil, nothing could appear meaningful at all and we would have no way to live or to be who we are. Meaning is not something hidden deep down waiting to be uncovered. It comes through the way we are already oriented to the world. By paying attention to what shows up as meaningful, we learn about the kind of beings we are, about how we are relating to the world at that moment.

According to Walter Benjamin, Goethe’s poetry is “turned toward the interior in the veiled light refracted through multicolored panes.” Goethe returned to the veil again and again when “he was struggling for insight into beauty.” Benjamin quotes from Goethe’s Faust:

Hold tight to what of all of it is left you

The dress, don’t let it go. Demons already

Are tugging at the ends, would dearly like

To haul it away to the underworld. Hold tight.

It is no longer the goddess – you have lost her –

But is divine.

As Byung-Chul Han understands this to mean,

“It is the dress that is divine. The veil is essential to beauty, so beauty cannot be undressed or unveiled. This impossibility of unveiling is the very nature of beauty.”

Our veil is our medium of truth. To rip it away is not to find essence, it is to destroy it. Caught Stealing, the quintessentially obscene film that it is, is caught in this trap. In simulating violence, sex, humiliation, and gore it plumbs the depths of reality. It is enacting the compulsion to strip away mystery in the name of clarity, only to arrive at a world hollowed out of meaning. The hyper visibility of violence and gore is no coincidence; it is to be expected of a culture that is running from a genuine existential encounter with the prospect of death. Han is illuminating here:

“The specifically human form of aggression, violence, is closely connected to the awareness of death, which is exclusively human. The economy of violence is ruled by a logic of accumulation. The more violence you exert, the more powerful you feel. Accumulated killing power [Tötungsgewalt] produces a feeling of growth, force, power [Macht] – of invulnerability and immortality. The narcissistic enjoyment human beings take in sadistic violence is based on just this increase in power. Killing protects against death. By killing, you arrest death. An increase in killing power means a reduction in death. The nuclear arms race also mirrors this capitalist economy of violence. Accumulating killing capacity is imagined as a way of accumulating a survival capacity.”

Violence is a distorted form of self-preservation, an attempt to secure life by exerting control over death.Yet, for life to feel meaningful, something must have higher priority than staying alive for the sole purpose of not being dead. Bare life is obscene, it strikes me as arrogance and cowardice. You have to be willing to die for something. But die for what? Meaning arises in the willingness to lose life for something beyond oneself, but crucially, this does not mean lose it for the Ideals of (as opposed to lived experiences of) “Justice”, “Love”, “Truth”, “Beauty”, or “Community.” Nietzsche had no patience for such Idealist martyrs:

Every great crime against culture for the last four centuries lies on their conscience. And always for the same reason, always owing to their bottomless cowardice in the face of reality, which is also cowardice in the face of truth always owing to the love of falsehood which has become almost instinctive in them — in short, ‘idealism.’

All the ideals and all the sources of earthly power, wealth, and the fulfillment of desire cannot plug the void at the heart of the human condition.

So again, what should we die for? Our only answer is to follow the zen masters. Life gains meaning not by transcending death but by attuning to the moment, for life breathes in the moment and freezes in settled interpretation. Interpretation is unceasing, it must be lived with.

We have to be like the soldiers in Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist who were ready for death at any moment because they knew they could not live authentically if they were worried about avoiding death. If it comes, then it is time to die.

The camel driver, though, seemed not to be very concerned with the threat of war. “I’m alive,” he said to the boy, as they ate a bunch of dates one night, with no fires and no moon. “When I’m eating, that’s all I think about. If I’m on the march, I just concentrate on marching. If I have to fight, it will be just as good a day to die as any other. “Because I don’t live in either my past or my future. I’m interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you’ll be a happy man. You’ll see that there is life in the desert, that there are stars in the heavens, and that tribesmen fight because they are part of the human race. Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we’re living right now.”

Two nights later, as he was getting ready to bed down, the boy looked for the star they followed every night. He thought that the horizon was a bit lower than it had been, because he seemed to see stars on the desert itself. “It’s the oasis,” said the camel driver. “Well, why don’t we go there right now?” the boy asked. “Because we have to sleep.”

Life’s meaning does not arise from ideals, nor from survival alone, but from living each moment as it comes, without trying to tear the veil away and without trying to accelerate life’s pace and beat truth to the spot. The obscene spectacle repudiates such patience. It rips the veil as quick as possible, leaving us disturbed, drained, empty, and, profitably, hungry for more. Truth can only be seen in light’s refractions through a veil. This is the play of presence and concealment in which life appears. To live authentically is to respect the veil, since it is only through it that we can approach the light and not be blinded.

Truth is always felt aesthetically.

Peter S. Baron (http://www.petersbaron.com)  is the author of If Only We Knew: How Ignorance Creates and Amplifies the Greatest Risks Facing Society.