The Confession in Closer (2004)

To continue the theme of confessions the analysis turns now to the film Closer. Centering upon the porous relationships of four main characters, the film follows the course of the adultery and lying that takes place in each. The scenes in which the affairs surface provide support for Foucault’s thesis that sexual discourse has taken on the form of confession: that confession must expose every secret and that from these secrets will emerge some sort of truth. Foucault notes, and the film affirms, that this truth and the stability it promises require more than simple confessions.

During scenes 12 and 13 Dan (Jude Law) confesses to Alice (Natalie Portman) that he has been having an affair with Anna (Julia Roberts). First recall what Foucault has written on the confession in sexual discourse.

"The west requires the nearly infinite task of telling – telling oneself and another…everything that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts which, through the body and the soul, had some affinity with sex. This scheme for transforming sex into discourse had been devised long before in an ascetic and monastic setting. The seventeenth century made it into a rule for everyone" (History 20).

Within this quotation Foucault explains how sexual discourse derives its form from the Christian confessional. Dan’s confession follows this script; the betrayed even comes to his aid in ensuring that he tells all. For Dan’s part, he appears prepared as if for an interview; honesty was obviously the primary motivation behind his answers. “Deception is brutal; I’m not pretending otherwise.” No doubt he intends to appear as conscientious by telling the truth. Alice, though she asks for details such as “Do you bring her here?” remains unimpressed by his confession. Whereas Dan expects that revelation of the truth surrounding his sexual activity will bring some sort of understanding, however painful, instead Alice’s reaction shows him that the confession brings neither truth nor stability. In this case, the incitement to discourse fails to provide the insight promised. Instead of finding satisfaction by exercising the will to knowledge, the characters find themselves as nothing more than instruments of power.



During scenes 15 and 16, the confession between Larry (Clive Owen) and Anna follows a similar path. In this case, Larry confesses that he slept with a prostitute on his business trip. Larry, the betrayer for the moment, becomes the driving force of the confession.

LARRY: I slept with someone in New York. A whore. I’m sorry.
ANNA: Why did you tell me?
LARRY: I couldn’t lie to you.
ANNA: Why not?
LARRY: Because I love you.

What has Larry gained through this disclosure? Does he feel less guilty? Is Anna pleased with his honest revelation? Only Larry is satisfied, and only somewhat.



The conversation then develops into Anna’s confession that she has been with Dan. Again Larry, now the betrayed, insists on total disclosure. Indeed, Larry insists that Anna spare no detail in explaining her extramarital sex.
LARRY: Answer the question [regarding her sexual activity]!
ANNA: Why are you doing this?
LARRY: Because I want to know.
ANNA: Why is the sex so important?
LARRY: BECAUSE I’M A FUCKING CAVEMAN!
ANNA: [She reveals all the details of her sexual relationship]
LARRY: That’s the spirit! Thank you for your honesty. Now fuck off and die.

Larry, like Kinsey’s father in the preceding film, can be seen as the embodiment of the repressive hypothesis. His obsession with sex and its discourse presumes to satisfy the will to knowledge. Knowledge he certainly obtains but to what end? As Foucault suggests, it is power that moves Larry to locate identity and truth within sex. Though such concepts typically offer comfort and stability, neither are available to any character.
The failure of Closer’s characters to benefit from sexual discourse in the form of confession upholds Foucault’s assertion that the repressive hypothesis is nothing more than a manifestation of power.

What these scene from Kinsey and Closer indicate is an understanding of Foucault’s thesis: that sexuality has become an object of discourse; that this discourse takes the form of a confession; that power exploits the will to knowledge in a way that arouses scientific discourse; that society improperly links truth and identity to this discourse. Each film offers characters themselves caught up in repressive hypothesis and shows how their misinterpretations and delusions lead them to suffering. The scientists in Kinsey and the confessors and confessants in Closer all operate with the understanding that candid sexual dialog will in some way bring them closer to the truth about themselves, their relationships and others. Though they may make strides and obtain knowledge, the scientific discourse on sex remains insufficient. Without something else, in Kinsey’s case the encounter, a void in knowledge remains. Foucault would appreciate the filmmaker’s deconstruction of the repressive hypothesis in their depiction of power’s exploitation of the will to knowledge in sexual discourse.

Confess: Sexuality as Scientific Discourse

Having introduced the genealogy, the project proceeds now to an investigation of a particular genealogy: History of Sexuality, Volume One. Within this volume, Foucault introduces what was to be a six volume project on sexuality – a sexuality defined in terms of and relations to power. First, this section looks at his thesis in this first volume by exploring the repressive hypothesis, the incitement to discourse as a confession, and finally the role sex plays in identity before exposing the role of power in each of these operations. Foucault calls the repressive hypothesis the idea that “one great central mechanism destined to say no” controls human sexuality (History 12). He refers to the common notion that societies require sex to be in some way private and forbidden. Indeed, the idea that sex does not present itself as a suitable hobby or topic for discussion persists. But Foucault finds that contrary to this common understanding, that society seeks to control and limit sexuality and the discussion of sexuality, power actually elicits sexual discourse.
But more important was the multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail (18).

It is clear enough that Foucault does not see a privatization of sex, a localization of sex and discourse to the bedroom, but instead sees institutional efforts to solicit discussion. To defend this idea, he refers to several examples including the text My Secret Life, the narrative of a French farm hand and finally developments within the Christian confessional. My Secret Life describes in great detail the sexual habits and practices of its author. It seeks to leave nothing out while including even the most trivial of details. “The guiding principle for the strangest of these [sexual] practices…the fact of recounting them all, and in detail…had been lodged in the heart of modern man for over two centuries” (22). Foucault uses the work, written anonymously, as a symbol for an age in which though explicit sexual discourse appeared to be outlawed, it was also called for by society. To compliment this text, he recounts the story of a French farm hand mentioned above who paid a young girl to pleasure him. The simple man was a traveling laborer, working for food and often sleeping in barns. Yet his small sexual encounter caused a stir in France, requiring the assistance of lawyers, investigators, physicians and psychiatrists.
One can be fairly certain that during this same period the Lapcourt schoolmaster was instructing the little villagers to mind their language and not talk about these things aloud. But this was undoubtedly one of the conditions enabling the institutions of knowledge and power to overlay this bit of theater with their solemn discourse…our society…assembled around these timeless gestures, their barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children, a whole machinery for speechifying, analyzing and investigating (32).

So even as the school teacher reprimands children for discussing the sexual incident at school, other elements in the institution cannot refrain from extensive discussion. Not only that, but the psychological inquiry into the farm hand purported to offer truth.
Foucault sees similar developments within the Christian confessional.
According to the new pastoral, sex must not be named imprudently, but its aspects, its correlations, and its effects must be pursued down to their slenderest ramifications: a shadow in a daydream, an image too slowly dispelled, a badly exorcised complicity between the body’s mechanics and the mind’s complacency: everything had to be told (19).

Not only has there been an increase in sexual discourse but also the linkage of sexual discourse to confession: “This technique [confession] might have remained tied to the destiny of Christian spirituality if it had not been supported and relayed by other mechanisms. In the first place, by a ‘public interest’…a power mechanism that functioned in a way that discourse on sex…became essential” (23). At first a confession can be understood as an admission of guilt. On the one hand this implies that the action confessed is a crime. On the other, it implies that something can be gained from the admission of such an offense. In other words, confession becomes a path towards truth. When applied to sexual discourse, the model of confession convinces that when the confessant admits to the truth of his deviations he will find some sort of liberation. “The confession became one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth…Western man has become a confessing animal” (59). For Foucault, this is just the sort of activity to which the will to knowledge and power would be intrinsic to.
Of what significance is the shift of sexual discourse towards the confessional? By positing the idea that sexual discourse as a confession in some way reveals truth, it simultaneously becomes a source of identity. The truth not only of the sexual act appears but along with it comes a glimpse into the personhood of the confessor. “Between each of us and our sex, the West has placed a never-ending demand for truth…it is up to sex to tell us our truth, since sex is what holds it in darkness” (77). The truth kept secret by sex offers a connection to the very identity and being of the person. Sex therefore cannot be separated from the entirety of a person’s being and identity. According to the West, no part of a person’s composition is isolated from his sexuality.
Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected [by his sexuality]. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principles; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret which gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him (43).

Such a mentality lead to what Foucault calls a “new specification of individuals” that without explicit acknowledgement allows sexuality to permeate each part of someone’s personhood. Words describing such a relationship between sex and identity might include presence, immanence and organic. It can be seen within the text that such terms will also characterize power, which is not coincidentally the driving force behind developments in the use of sexuality.