Steve McQueen’s last feature film, Hunger (2008) about a hunger strike, displayed his video artist roots and could not be called a hugely accessible film. Despite it’s brilliance, it required work from the audience (which is no bad thing). In Shame, McQueen relinquishes none of his style, but manages to create a far more accessible film about a far more difficult topic, the dark and unsexy side of sex addiction.
Shame’s protagonist, Brandon, is an outside successfully masquerading as in insider in a successful New York company. However the masquerade is slipping. To communicate Brandon’s difficulty in penetrating the world of his contemporaries, McQueen constantly films him at the edge of the screen, sometimes even splitting his body in half. As Brandon struggles to feel that his sex addiction isn’t the life ruining habit he knows it is, McQueen, through his mise-en-scene, tells us he’s an outside. This framing allows us to understand the open ending. Before the dramatic ending, Brandon is filmed walking straight down the middle of the screen telling us that he has at last been able to accept his addiction and his desperation. Therefore, when Brandon the sexual predator of the opening scene sees the same woman he flirts with at the start again, his sexual confidence is replaced by what appears a disgust at himself now his realisation is concrete.
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