Tasting Embarrassment, or, Liking Leo

I want to embark on a self-conscious exploration of encountering white stardom.

To my mind, the white star is objectified as someone else and for someone else, and yet, through affective, bodily interpellations, the white star can trouble the minoritarian subject into an embarrassing relationship.

Lately, I've been thinking about my relationship to white cinema, that is, films by white authors predominantly featuring white actors. J. Reid Miller, Richard T. Rodríguez, and Celine Parreñas Shimizu write compellingly that in this historical moment: "whiteness is totally unwatchable."1 I am ready for this imperative for new representation, and yet, for myself, I query the use of "totally."  Despite encouragement to look elsewhere toward a racial mise-en-scène, I still feel obliged to better understand my fascinations with watching whiteness as a spectatorial Other. Toward this end, I am thinking about "someone else's object" as a potential "bad object" insofar as this object produces an alluring frustration for its excluded and rejected minoritarian subject. I was recently confronted by such thoughts when I excitedly went to the theater to see Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019), this past summer's buzzy horror flick. In some ways Aster's film is an indictment of the anthropological impulse to exalt Northern European folk exoticism through a burning solar illumination on its cruelty. Hence, in the realm of bad objects (or by virtue of being "unwatchably white"), Midsommar might be a relatively benign indulgence of white spectacle. But, can whiteness critique itself in the realm of cinema?

In White, Richard Dyer illustrates how "the photographic media and, a fortiori, movie lighting assume, privilege, and construct whiteness," while photography of non-white people "is typically construed as a problem."2 Whiteness is co-produced by cinema, and specifically through lighting; cinema is engineered such that it spectacularizes white bodies as light. Because of the celebrated, virtuous, indexical, and aesthetic significations of white/light, and because the cinematic apparatus was built around the normality of white people, the capture of whiteness on screen compels us to associate truth with clarity — and clarity, transparency, and translucence with whiteness. Through this racialized understanding of the apparatus, white cinema, as "someone else's object," produces problems for the minoritarian critic's enjoyment. Here, I offer a few illustrative confessions.

After watching Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019), I found myself at the behest of Leonardo DiCaprio's charisma — again!3 Although I found the film irritatingly petulant, not least because it delights repeatedly in the film's white protagonists triumphantly throwing Asian bodies (Bruce Lee and Nancy Kwan) to the ground, I enjoyed DiCaprio's performance as a has-been B-list actor whose refusal to relinquish his pride ends in the histrionic redemption and historical revisionism with which Tarantino's recent works are obsessed.

I have always been vulnerable to images of DiCaprio suffering and crying onscreen. He is a superb face scruncher who has made me tear up on many occasions. (I applaud anyone who remains dry-eyed during Titanic.) Nevertheless, I realize I am being repeatedly interpellated into an ideological scene of which I, and other non-white spectators, are not the social beneficiary, against my better judgement.

Fig. 1: A YouTube montage from 2016 entitled "History of Leonardo DiCaprio suffering in movies" with nearly two million views indicates to me that I am not alone in deriving enjoyment from DiCaprio's simulated woes.

When DiCaprio's character Rick Dalton cries in gratitude to a young actress who tells him that he's the best actor she has ever seen, my eyes start burning, and I know that I am dutifully, if begrudgingly, responding to the imperative to Enjoy! Lacanians and Žižekians observe that the state, a superegoic institution, does not prohibit jouissance but rather demands it as a means with which to govern enjoyment and convince us that we must be happy.4 Notwithstanding any objections concerning the "universality" of this moment, it is also true that I must be susceptible to a kind of irrecuperable over-identification with white masculine fragility; consequently, I watch, and my body laments the decline of the white cowboy. At this thought, I am confronted by an aversion that might be called embarrassment.

What is this embarrassment? Embarrassment in this case arises from the disparity between knowing that the film is currying pathos for white male paranoiac victimization and my inability to resist, and instead, Enjoy! Embarrassment "tends to stem from social slip-ups, and we rarely experience it outside a social context," according to the American Psychological Association.5 Unlike shame, there is something humorous in embarrassment. Embarrassment has playback value, and the one embarrassed will often offer up the story as an anecdote accompanied by laughter at themselves. This laughter is about "complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary," Henri Bergson observes.6 Embarrassed laughter offers up a moment for collective confession and complicity, like right now, in my own social slip-up of liking Leo and admitting it to you here.

In contrast to embarrassment, shame concerns moral transgression and is often suppressed or cached away within the psyche. Steve McQueen's Shame (2011), with its heavy, humorless portrayal of a sex- and porn-addicted corporate executive played by Michael Fassbender, is a useful example. Fassbender's Brandon does all he can to avoid being outed for his sexual proclivities, a sentiment that I, as a viewer, am positioned to share. Meanwhile, in Once Upon a Time, my embarrassment arises from a recognition of aesthetic, rather than moral transgression, and when Brad Pitt takes off his shirt while fixing a TV antenna, it only makes matters worse.

[Cue laughter?]

As I well up upon seeing Leo cry, our shared tears demonstrate a communal leakiness between bodies that can be understood through aesthesis, or sensual and sensuous perception. Because my enjoyment of Leo's tears — pleasingly well-lit and framed in close-up — constitutes an aesthetic transgression (he is, remember, "someone else's object"), I become aware of a socio-politico-academic transgression. My enjoyment of DiCaprio comes with the admission price of supporting a work that openly expresses hostility toward others, especially the Asian American other of which I'm a part — which makes it "bad."

I find such cinematic vulnerability difficult to resist. I have similar feelings of embarrassment when I watch women engage in what I call "orgasmic" performances. These are the perpetually turned-on, trembling, on-the-brink-of-breakdown exteriorizations that beckon a bodily response, best described by Linda Williams as "ecstatic excesses."7 When Kimberly Peirce, the director of Boys Don't Cry (1999), decided to direct a remake of Brian de Palma's 1976 Carrie, I, like many, was skeptical but curious. After watching Chloë Grace Moretz erotically quiver, open-mouthed, throughout, I wondered whether my embarrassment was a result of the film's shamefully suppressed queer subtext, pathologized as horrific, or whether it was induced by Moretz's weird softcore expressions, facial overreactions that recall a tragic Monroe-esque porosity.8 Peirce's capture of these looks, often in close-up, in conjunction with other horror techniques such as the use of an overpowering stinger chord at a gory moment, made me nervously embarrassed; adrenal levels spiked and my heart raced. But I couldn't look away.

Fig. 2: Chloë Grace Moretz's orgasmic performances in Carrie (Kimberly Peirce, 2013) induces nervous embarrassment.

The embarrassing aesthetic transgression is radical porosity. (Moretz's open mouth; Leo's leaky eyes.) The porosity demands empathy, forged through Moretz's tremulous body. However, here I am compelled to pause with Saidiya V. Hartman's criticism of empathy, as that which "fails to expand the space of the other but merely places the self in its stead."9 This "too-easy intimacy" slips into ethical engagement only if and when the self can imagine being someone else. Although Hartman's formulation derives from slavery and its legacies, thinking about empathy as self-centered serves as a useful reminder for the interpellated minoritarian spectator in regards to their encounter with someone else's object.10 Off-scene or obscene in white cinema, we can still locate ourselves in objects not "for us" by practicing another mode of consumption. That is, although we are excluded from such pictures, we can have the nerve to insist upon rituals of possession, tourism, consumption, and finally, of elimination.

Someone I love recently reminded me that "we expel what we consume." That is, don't let love become all-consuming, or you will hasten its passage. With regard to objects that are not ours to consume, can or should we apply an accelerationist logic? Can we eat the introjected bad object, if only to demonstrate that we can eliminate it?

Can I like/love/enjoy Leonard DiCaprio and Chloë Grace Moretz to death —

— even if only through symbolic abjection?

Just as with Once Upon a Time, Carrie's ideology is difficult for a minoritarian critic, not only because it spectacularizes and eroticizes white victimization, but also because it offers its pleasures in murderous retaliation as a mode of violent feminine empowered redress.11 Can the embarrassment I feel at such fraught delights create critical — even campy — distance?

If camp is about the degree of artifice, then it can also be regarded as temperature. That is, the heat of embarrassment indicates that I might "relish, rather than judge, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of 'character,'" as Susan Sontag advises.12 As I explore in my forthcoming book, sexual temperature or "hotness" signals the boundaries of toleration. Similar to the heat of sexual arousal, the heat of embarrassment signals that we are at the threshold of self, at the wishful doorstep of "someone else," just as vasodilation is the body's attempt to maintain self-regulation in the presence of foreign substances.

As Summer notes in her recent essay on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, embarrassment exposes one's earnest, even if mistaken, attempts to show one's appropriate self (amid a multiplicity of selves) at the right place at the right time.13 In this sense, my embarrassment at DiCaprio and Moretz reveals my earnest investments and hyper-sympathetic nervous pleasure in (white) Hollywood. If nothing else, perhaps this embarrassment can enable an ethics pro tempore whereby, against empathy, I defer substituting myself in the other's stead, experience corporeal affinity through distance, and gain a sense of humor about difference — even if by a small degree.

Relishing the awkward allows us to enjoy (and Enjoy!) the punctum's sting in someone else's object, to find the worthy in the cringe, and to seek out other ways of consuming what might otherwise be, at first blush, too hot, which is also to say, too embarrassing. If we induce what Kyla Wazana Tompkins calls "racial indigestion" in order to love someone else's object to symbolic abjection, perhaps the embarrassment with which we ingest white stardom seasons our consumption and brings out new flavors of Enjoy(ment)!14

In other words, as I taste Leo's tears, intermingled with my own, my self-conscious embarrassment announces itself as a kind of ethics pro tempore. As we can only taste something that is already in the process of disappearing, of being consumed, this aesthetic transgression is an ephemeral act of savoring loss. Indeed, embarrassment does not signal identification, rather its impossibility.

This radical porosity and leaky exchange, then, is about dissolution, both as liquefaction in our fluid exchanges — of tears, saliva, and spit — and as a splintering of affinity. That is, even as I draw close and envelop Leo and Moretz in order to "eat the Other" (to invoke bell hooks), I am also engaging in its destruction and its eventual elimination. 15 After all, we break apart our food when we chew it, and we cannot expel something unless we consume it first.

We might then think of embarrassment as the taste of whiteness — a flavor at the disposal of minoritarian spectators with regards to white cinema. If that is the case, it is not the "unwatchability" of whiteness, but rather its (un)palatability that for me creates such dimensions of fraught enjoyment and complex palettes. Such moments of embarrassed dis/pleasure enable us to consider an ethics of abjection. Thinking with and through embarrassment may even lead us to tasting without embarrassment — but then again, I'm not sure we really want to.

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My thanks to Summer Kim Lee, William Brown, and Dan Sinykin for their wonderful edits, suggestions, and lively conversations.

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Mila Zuo is an assistant professor of cinema and media studies in the Department of Theatre and Film at UBC. Her forthcoming book focuses on the affective world-making of global Chinese women film stars, and her research can be found in Women & Performance, Feminist Media Histories journal, Celebrity Studies journal, and others. In addition to her scholarly work, Zuo is a film and video-maker whose work has screened at numerous international film festivals.

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