Perversion the Social Relation

Exotic Rituals and Family Values 109law and a lover desirous of another rendezvous. Thus, Thomas's singlesexual encounter, mediated and indeed distanced initially through theexchange of tickets and money and through the script he almost follows,ends up subjecting him to the complicated intimacy he appears to havebeen avoiding in his otherwise isolated existence. Thomas's insistent privacyis further undermined, of course, when Francis's investigation ofhis books makes him vulnerable to blackmail.The other young man in the film, bitter, obsessed, jealous, and angryEric, is revealed in flashbacks of his first encounter with Christina(searching the field with her) to have been a sweet if aimless sort ofdrifter, ambitious to make something of himself and yet worried abouthis future, fearfully confessing to Christina the way his days just goby. He further confides his fear that he will lose anything he values, aprophecy borne out in his loss of Christina and in his continued presenceat the club, which presence preserves his relation to Christina onlyas something lost. Christina seems to have intuited as much in her earliestconversation with Eric: when he expressed his fear that everyone hecares about will "slip away" from him, Christina replies, "Maybe youwant them to slip away."In an early exchange between Christina and Zoë, when the latter hadworried about Eric's remaining at the club, Christina had stated somewhatcontemptuously, "Zoë, not all of us have the luxury of decidingwhat to do with our lives." But what the film consistently depicts is thatthe characters who make up this small community have, consciouslyor not, produced the particular scripts calculated both to maintain andmanage their relation to the traumatic losses they have suffered. Theirlives have not simply been given to them by some ruling authority. Theabsence of Zoë's father emphasizes the nonexistence of any "official"functioning father in the entire narrative, because the paternal functionis precisely what has failed in this world: what "everybody knows" isthat real fathers are dead, wounded, lost, deluded, or criminal. The onlyauthorized figure of the law—Francis as tax auditor—turns his powerover Thomas to the service of his own desperate coping strategies. Eventhe customs officer retrieves the smuggled eggs only accidentally and hasno intention of subjecting Thomas to any further penalty for his crime.Clearly, the club, through its staging and facilitation of perverse rituals,provides a much needed context for and even fraternity of similarlysuffering people. Because the symbolic order has so clearly failed these