You're Not Going to Tell Anyone, Right?

Foucalt’s repressive hypothesis in the characters of Assassination Nation.

What are the effects of sexual repression? The answer seems to be hopelessly multifaceted, but Michel Foucalt in The History of Sexuality gives us our best response yet. There is no one reaction to a massive societal sexual repression. Some choose to enforce rigidly the given rules of how to govern and express sexuality, some choose to push against societal norms and embrace perversions, others are a messy combination of the two. In the 2018 film by Sam Levinson Assassination Nation, we see a clear exploration of Foucalt’s Repressive Hypothesis. Through the fallible, diverse, and multifaceted characters of Assassination Nation, we see the varied effects of sexual repression and the policing of desire and pleasure in a suburban town. In the film, we see various characters—primarily young women and older men—who each take on and express a relationship with sexual repression within a contained society that correlates almost directly with Foucalt’s thesis in the Repressive Hypothesis. We see this particularly with the following citizens of Salem: Mayor Bartlett, Lily, Lily’s principal, and Lily’s parents. In this paper, I will analyze each character listed above and their relationship with their own sexuality as well as how they were used in the film to demonstrate a facet of the Repressive Hypothesis.

            In the second section of The Repressive Hypothesis, The Perverse Implantation, Foucalt discusses the establishment of sexual norms and perversion in society saying, “Up to the end of the eighteenth century, three major explicit codes- apart from the customary regularities and constraints of opinion- governed sexual practices: canonical law, the Christian pastoral, and civil law.” This quote offers the analysis that ecclesiastical law and moral law in conjunction with “civil law” created a sexual norm in western society—the norm being a sexuality that is based in heterosexuality and procreation motivated sexual intercourse. Thus, as discussed extensively by Foucalt in History of Sexuality and summarized briefly here, establishing pleasure seeking sexual intercourse, homosexuality, transgender individuals, etc. as perverse. But these norms, while created by these three institutions long ago, must continue to be upheld by the public. The Mayor in Assassination Nation, Mayor Bartlett, is a perfect example of a sexually repressed individual as outlined by Foucalt. He occupies space as both oppressor and oppressed. During the day, he is an upstanding individual who wears suits, has a lovely wife, and perfect children, he serves his town diligently and upholds Christian, conservative morals. However, it’s discovered that by night he is a cross dressing homosexual.

As noted by one of the characters, a transgender woman named Bex, “why is it always the who are, like, against LGBTQIAA rights, that are like, trigger warning, the biggest fucking faggots.” He advocates against LGBTQ+ rights publicly, while practicing self-identified sexual deviancy in private. So, when his phone is hacked and photos of him engaging in perverse (as society has deemed it according to Foucalt) sexual behavior the town is shocked and abhorred. Foucalt writes of this reaction again in The Perverse Implantation saying, “Breaking the rules of marriage or seeking strange pleasures brought an equal measure of condemnation.” This condemnation is emphasized when Mayor Bartlett holds a town hall in front of outraged citizens. They scream and hurl insults at him, the crowd resembles that of a mob on a witch hunt in the 17th century. But what is really profound in this scene, is that Mayor Bartlett, at the end of the meeting, pulls out a gun and shoots himself in the head.

Mayor Bartlett exacts justice on himself for this deviation from sexual normativity. He held a secretive space for his sexual desires, keeping them hidden because he knew they were “wrong,” and in his public life continued to advocate for the heteronormative, pleasure lacking, sexuality deemed appropriate by the general public. So, it was natural that the final and harsh consequence of his actions would be carried out by himself. He embodied repression. He had desires for queer pleasure, knew they were wrong, fed into them anyways because pleasure is a need that can only be denied for so long, and when faced with public exposure did what he knew was right.

Upholding sexual norms does not only fall to those in power, we have seen time and time again peoples’ adverse reactions to rigid regimes. Thus, there must be common folk who also perpetuate these norms. In the film, that role fell to (while occupied by multiple side characters was most notable with,) Lily’s (the overall main character whose role in sexual repression/exploration will be discussed later) parents. Rebecca and Lawrence Coulson are the perfect example of what Foucalt defines as “a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative.” They are married with two children and live in the suburbs. The father, Lawrence, goes to work while Rebecca maintains the home. Their dialogue is polite and lacking in desire. They do not touch each other affectionately and one can infer that their sexual activity begins and ends with the conception of each of their two children.

Not only do they uphold these values within their own relationship, but they enforce these onto their daughter (I am using the word daughter rather than children here because their other child was assigned male at birth and is male identifying and thus receives a much different parenting and moral lesson around his sexuality which is another essay in itself). When confronted with the reality of their daughter’s sexuality, which deviates from marital, pleasure-less, conception based, sexuality, they condemn her for it and even throw her out of the house. Why would they do this? As Foucalt would say, “For was the transformation of sex into discourse not governed by the endeavor to expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not ammneable to the strict economy of reproduction: to say no to unproductive activities, to banish casual pleasures, to reduce or exclude practices whose object was not procreation?” They banished their daughter and along with it her sexually deviant practices. Teaching not only her but everyone around them what to do when confronted with deviant sexuality. They maintain their position here as an “economically useful and politically conservative” couple as they exact punishment onto their own child for embracing sexual pleasure.

The policing of childhood sexuality in the film Assassination Nation does not begin and end with Lily’s parents, however. Principal Turrell, the principal of Lily’s school, takes his own role enforcing sexual norms—as well as having them imposed upon him. There is a scene early in the film in which Lily is sent to the principal’s office for drawing multiple nude women in her art class. He proceeds to lecture her about how this is inappropriate and too sexual—the drawings sometimes included women pleasuring themselves. Here we have a male authority figure directly policing a young women’s experience of her own sexuality as well as categorizing a nude female body as inappropriate (Lily’s response to this is certainly of note and will be addressed later). Foucalt talks about this policing of pleasure saying, “The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and, on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it.” In this quote, he is making a really unique argument. That in dictating who gets to feel what kind of pleasure and doing so via a governing body or authority figure, we are in effect creating new forms of pleasure. Principal Turrell here experiences this pleasure of governing, of exacting power, and the students at his school experience the pleasure of secrecy. Of cultivating experiences, sexual or otherwise, in the shadows and operating against norms. Furthermore, as the story begins to unravel the entire town takes part in this pleasure of exacting power. They condemn their children, friends, neighbors, coworkers, everyone as their various sexual discrepencies come to light. While, one can infer, maintaining the form of secret pleasure they imbibe in behind closed doors. The pleasure of condemnation is strangely uniquely in this town.

But perhaps what is most notable about Principal Turrell as a character, is what he experiences when he is the victim of a hack. His search history, text messages, photos, everything really, are released. There are adverse reactions to his porn searches (the fact he is looking at porn with women in it is itself an example of sexual repression as he is acting at school as someone enforcing and maintaining sexual norms, limiting displays of female pleasure, while succumbing to his desire for pleasure at home), but what the town begins to focus on and mobilize against is the fact that he has a photo of his six-year-old daughter in the bath tub. Multiple people in the town of Salem are enraged by the discovery of these photos. They claim that Principal Turrell is a child molester. This is a perfect example of Foucalts thoughts around childhood sexuality, particularly his remarks “Educators and doctors combatted children’s onanism like an epidemic that needed to be eradicated. What this actually entailed, throughout this whole secular campaign that mobilized the adult world around the sexuality of children, was using these tenuous pleasures as a prop, constituting them as secrets (that is, forcing them into hiding so as to make possible their discovery) tracing them back to their source, tracking them from their origins to their effects, searching out everything that might cause them or enable them to exist.” Here what Foucalt is saying is that in chasing down every instance of childhood sexuality, adults have created a hypersexualized sphere for young children in which their sexuality is only allowed to dwell there. There is no room in society for safe and healthy childhood sexual development because it has been demonized and children have pushed to only reside in victimhood. The incident with Principal Turrell demonstrates that perfectly. He is merely photographing his daughter whom he cares for deeply out of parental love and affection. Nothing sexual is happening in these images but the public is pushing on them a sexual assumption. The nature of the nude female body must be inherently sexual, as Turrell made clear in his interaction with Lily.

We must now move to the unique experience of our protagonist, Lily. Much of the events in this film surround Lily and her sexuality. She is the force working against sexual normativity and in conjunction with an empowered female sexuality. She is everything that the Repressive Hypothesis seeks to repress. She takes sexual photos of herself for her own pleasure and to pleasure her partner as well as participates in premarital, pleasure-seeking sex with her boyfriend. She actively fights against the authority figures pushing sexual norms. We see this in the office with principal Terrell where she says, “What’s extreme? The drawings or the fact that there are five billion naked selfies online? I mean, I was asked to draw from life. And this is life. —all your looking at is the nudity. But this isn’t about that, this isn’t about the sex, or the porn or being naked.” She then continues to discuss the rigid standards of beauty enforced on women and explains that while these images may be considered explicit or extreme, they are reality and they are not about sex. This challenges Foucalt’s defined sexual norms. She again pushes back on these sexual authority figures when talking to her parents about Principal Turrell and the nude images of his daughter on his phone. Her dad says he wasn’t comfortable seeing her naked after the age of 3 to which she replies “Why?” and he pushes on that it is because she’s his daughter. Lily presses further questioning if she is his daughter, why would it be awkward for him to see her naked. What underlying connotation is there that would make a father being around his nude daughter wrong? She even blatantly says “Nudity is not inherently sexual. And it’s the same thing with these photos, they’re not sexual. It’s you guys that are making them sexual.” Of course, her parents shut down her argument immediately, they must as the enforcers of economically useful and pleasure-less sexuality, and Lily is left othered, ostracized from her family.

The final straw for Lily’s parents in when they discover that their daughter has been fulfilling her sexual urges and engaging in an affair with a local married man. Her parents quite literally drag her from the house kicking and screaming. This is her parents’ way of cementing their role as enforcers and Lily the martyr for pleasure. Lily is consistently beaten, talked down to, lectured, humiliated, blamed, and almost murdered throughout this whole film. Her character is representative of deviant sexuality as whole and the rest of the films characters mobilization around her is the condemnation predicted by Foucalt that falls on anyone straying from sexual norms.

The connections between Foucalt and the towns people of Assassination Nation are varied and in excess. Within the confines of a 5-7-page paper I can just barely begin to scratch the surface. But overall, you can appreciate that the film Assassination Nation is riddled with connections to The Repressive Hypothesis and its characters each play a role in the societal discourse surrounding sexuality, pleasure, and desire. And as a piece of media, it asks it’s audience where you lie in the battle for pleasurable mainstream sexuality. Enforcer or martyr? What do you do behind closed doors? What would happen if someone walked in?

References

“The Repressive Hypothesis.” The History of Sexuality: Introduction, by Michel Foucault, vol. 1, Vintage Books, 1988, pp. 15–36.

Assassination Nation. Dir. Sam Levinson. Neon, Refinery29, AGBO, 2018. Film.