The Portrayal of ‘Ecstatic Agony’ in Hellraiser (1987) and Martyrs (2008)
I recently rewatched the horror classic Hellraiser (1987), and as well as finding it better on the second watch, I was fascinated with its portrayal of the ‘ecstasy of agony’ or the ‘agony of ecstasy’ (which we could also call ‘ecstatic agony’). I’m currently working on a book on the subject of ecstasy, and despite this experience typically being associated with only positive states — euphoria, bliss, physical pleasure — it can also be likened to pain. Or pleasure and pain might intermingle or collapse during the experience. I’m reminded of the Spanish mystic Saint Teresa of Ávila and her ecstatic divine encounter, which she describes as follows:
I saw in his [the angel’s] hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it, even a large one. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.
Here we can note a paradoxical experience. Teresa was ‘on fire’ with love; she refers to the ‘sweetness’ of excessive pain, a pain that she did not want to disappear, despite being ‘excessive’. This spiritual pain satisfied her soul on the deepest level — it was a pain that was nonetheless characterised by ‘a caressing of love so sweet’. At the same time, the fact that Teresa felt this pain in a positive sense is not that surprising or uncommon; many kinds of pain are experienced in this way (e.g. strenuous exercise), and sensations of pain and pleasure activate many of the same neural mechanisms. Moreover, studies have shown that the facial expressions produced during pain and orgasm are virtually indistinguishable.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sculpture Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–1652) — the centrepiece of the Cornaro Chapel in Rome — portrays Ávila as if she is in a state of orgasm. Her head is tilted back, her eyes are rolled back, and her mouth is open in an expression of ecstatic pleasure. This contrasts with the ‘pain’ she describes. (It’s worth highlighting, however, that many critics have viewed Bernini’s depiction as sexualised.)
The idea of something painful being pleasurable is explored in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser and Pascal Laugier’s horror film Martyrs (2008). Examining these films can help to illustrate how spiritual experience can sometimes blur the line between pain and pleasure. Agony can turn into ecstasy. Ecstasy can be agonising. Because a key feature of mystical experiences is often paradoxicality, these experiences may be described as being both ecstatic and agonising.
Ecstatic Agony in Hellraiser
A key theme in Hellraiser is the idea of a state of mind in which pain and pleasure become indistinguishable. This is a level of experience achieved by the Cenobites: supernatural entities (who used to be human), the most iconic of them being Pinhead. People can also summon the Cenobites using the Lament Configuration, a puzzle box. When a person calls them forth, as the hedonistic character Frank does, the Cenobites inflict (or gift?) the summoner with these extreme experiences. (The connection to BDSM culture is clear; the idea of pain and pleasure becoming fused, and the look of the Cenobites, was influenced by Barker’s visits to S&M clubs.)
When Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) asks who the Cenobites are when encountering them for the first, Pinhead (Doug Bradley) replies, “Explorers in the further regions of experience. Demons to some. Angels to others.” Frank then describes the experience that the Cenobites offered him: “I thought I’d gone to the limits. I hadn’t. The Cenobites gave me an experience beyond limits. Pain and pleasure, indivisible.” This mixing of pain and pleasure, the paradoxical marriage of positive and negative feelings, bears some similarity to the concept of the sublime.
Below is an excellent video essay by Jonas Čeika, in which he analyses the film through the lens of philosopher George Bataille’s ideas on limit-experiences. These refer to experiences that reach the limit of possible experience — the greatest experiential height or depth if you will. It refers to the maximum intensity of a certain type of experience (e.g. pain or pleasure).
Bataille was inspired by poet Charles Baudelaire’s description of paradoxical experience, as can be found in poem 25 in his volume Les Fleurs du mal; here we find the line “O filthy grandeur! O sublime disgrace!”. In the limit-experience, of pain or pleasure, for instance, the quality of the experience changes: it can become paradoxical. Bataille believed in “the identity of these perfect contraries: divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror.” For Bataille, a limit-experience that reaches this blurred distinction between pain and pleasure is a sacred experience; it is a type of experience in which the ability to comprehend it breaks down.
Bataille’s view was inspired, as Čeika’s points out in his video essay, by a photograph given to him by Adrien Borel, one of the founders of the Société psychanalytique de Paris. Borel was well known for preferring to treat artists and writers, including Bataille. The latter’s musings on this photograph also tie in with the theme of ecstatic agony in Martyrs. This is no coincidence; the film was based on Bataille’s final work, The Tears of Eros.
Ecstatic Agony in Martyrs
Simon Elmer, in his PhD thesis The Colour of the Sacred: George Bataille and the Image of Sacrifice, describes the photograph that Borel gave to Bataille during their first session together:
At their first meeting, however, anticipating, and perhaps precipitating, the disturbed young librarian’s imminent arrival on his couch, Borel made the curious and in retrospect decisive gesture of giving Bataille a photograph of the execution of a young Chinese man by the torture called ‘Leng-Tch’e [cutting into pieces]’, which in French is known as the ‘cent morceaux [hundred pieces]’….
The photograph shows a young Chinese man, stripped naked and bound to a stake. His body, already thin, almost feminine, has wasted away from the cruel conditions of his imprisonment: the stomach shrunken, the hips protruding, the penis shrivelled and withdrawn into the pelvis. His arms, lashed brutally behind him, are already partially severed above the elbow. Two crude and gaping wounds have exposed his rib-cage and chest cavity, and his lower body is striped with blood. In front of him the executioner, crouched over his work, is busy trying to cut off his left leg at the knee (the heavy blade of his knife has just entered the flesh). Around these two figures a crowd jostles to witness this bloody dismemberment, their necks craned with curiosity. Nearest to the victim several mandarin officials distinguish themselves not only by their headwear but by their demeanour, which, in stark contrast to the expressions of dark fascination in the faces of the peasants behind them, brings a cold air of purpose to the proceedings. Above these onlookers, both official and curious, the young victim raises his head, and in a face drawn with agony, his eyes roll back on this scene of horror.
Several photographs of this event (not for the faint-hearted) were reproduced in The Tears of Eros. (Leng-Tch’e is more commonly written as lingchi, also translated as ‘slow slicing’ or ‘death by a thousand cuts’ — it is a dark aspect of China’s imperial past.) Bataille was impressed by George Dumas’ text Pleasure and Pain, and Elmer observes the following about Bataille’s many references to and meditations on the photograph given to him by Borel:
Bataille would almost mimic the objective and scientific vocabulary of Dumas’s description, and in particular its vocabulary of reversal (‘révulsé’, ‘remontées, ‘relevée’), as if to mark the moment when this account of the passage of a victim of torture to his death — so perversely illustrated, so equivocally recorded — fails: a point where, after the intoxication of agony, there is only the ‘unclassifiable’, the ‘paradoxical’, the ‘inexplicable’, the ‘unimaginable’…. Like Dumas, Bataille located this point in the face of this victim, who, even at the ‘extreme’ of his suffering, ‘seems to smile’.
Bataille’s fascination with this image of the victim of lingchi — who to him appeared to be in a state of ecstasy — is mirrored in Martyrs. The film follows Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï) on a quest to seek revenge against the people who abducted and tortured her as a child in a disused slaughterhouse. After her escape, she was placed in an orphanage. The film follows, too, the story of Lucie’s friend Anna (Morjana Alaoui), also a victim of abuse. The two became inseparable friends at the same orphanage.
Lucie exacts her retribution, killing a family in their home, who she believed were involved in her torture as a child. She calls Anna, who then makes her to the family home, and when she arrives, she is horrified by the carnage on display. Lucie then finds herself being attacked by a disfigured, demonic woman (a recurring experience for her), but Anna only sees Lucie hurting herself. The demonic woman resembles the victim that Lucie left behind at the slaughterhouse as a child, so she can be seen as the manifestation of Lucie’s guilt. Lucie then runs outside and kills herself by slitting her throat. The true horror (beyond sheer violence) unfolds after this.
Anna discovers a secret passageway in the house, which leads to a subterranean chamber containing photographs of torture victims (which focus on their expressions). One of these is the very same photograph that Bataille was given and became fascinated with. Anna also finds a living torture victim, proving that Lucie was right about the family. The film’s plot is only revealed at roughly the hour mark, at which time we see the family home occupied by what appears to be a cult of wealthy and prominent men and women. They kill the living torture victim and capture Anna. The motivation of the group is explained to Anna by their leader, identified only as Mademoiselle. She explains that they belong to a secret society that wants to discover the secrets of the afterlife — and they do so by creating ‘martyrs’ (thus revealing why the film has its title).
The group creates so-called martyrs by capturing young women and torturing them systematically; they believe that this will result in transcendent insight into the world beyond this one. (They choose women because, as Mademoiselle believes, “women are more sensitive for a transformation.”) This is reminiscent of Bataille’s musings on the photograph of the victim of lingchi — a victim who also suffered methodical torture and inflictions of suffering, who has an experience beyond any ordinary, profane experience. Mademoiselle says they have only so far created ‘victims’, who have not achieved ‘martyrdom’ (they accepted their pain but were unable to speak). But the group is determined to create true martyrs, who accept their suffering and reveal their visions of the afterlife.
Anna is tied to a chair in the passageway — where the photographs on display are — when Mademoiselle is explaining the basis of the secret society to Anna. Mademoiselle notes, “Martyrs are rare”. She continues: “A martyr, that’s something else…A martyr is an exceptional being…. We burden it with all the evil of the world, and he transcends himself.” She then shows the photograph of lingchi, the same one Bataille possessed, to Anna, which was taken in 1912. Mademoiselle refers to the victim as “she” (although it was a man). In showing Anna this photo, and the others we see in the passageway, she draws attention to their eyes. “Look at her eyes”, “look at their eyes,” she says. She too seems to be fascinated, or obsessed, as Bataille was.
Anna is the latest subject, or ‘martyr in training’. After a period of being brutally beaten and degraded, she is told she has progressed more than any other subject; she has made it to the ‘final stage’. She is flayed alive. She survives the ordeal and reportedly enters an ecstatic state. Mademoiselle visits her, eager to learn her secrets. We see Anna whisper something into her ear (but we can’t hear what she says). Members of the society gather at the house to pay respects to Anna and her martyrdom. We never learn what her insight into the afterlife was, but whatever it was, it drove Mademoiselle to kill herself (and she did so without disclosing what she was told to the others).
An intertitle at the end of the film tells us that ‘martyr’ is Greek for ‘witness’. The last shot of the film is Anna lying catatonic on a table, appearing to see something in the distance. It’s as if she has gained rarefied vision, seeing what so few people have seen — a divine reality. I couldn’t help but be fascinated by this notion, perhaps in the way that Bataille was.
The mingling of ecstasy and agony in Martyrs, as well as in Bataille’s philosophy and Hellraiser, is a fascinating subject for religious/supernatural horror. But it also raises questions about if, to what extent, or in which contexts pain and pleasure can be cleanly distinguished. The division between these two states is not always so clear, which invites us further to question whether we can demarcate certain experiences as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. Human experience, in many instances, is much messier than this simple framing. This consideration is not meant to glorify pain, only to bring into focus certain types of experiences that are paradoxical or counterintuitive — it is this aspect that makes them fascinating and ripe for philosophical analysis.
Originally published at https://www.samwoolfe.com on December 9, 2024.
