A Dramatically Ironic Look At Today's Culture Steve McQueen's Shame is a brave, and originally cultured look into masculinity and humanity at its' worse.
Living in New York City, a place where 'cynicism is turning into all,' Michael Fassbender plays Brandon, a full-time employee and sex addict, whose living is for the most part comfortable, and almost entirely led by leisure, until his sister, Cissy, played by Carey Mulligan, comes to pay him an unexpected visit.
On a surface level McQueen takes us to the streets of New York City, while in the same vain exploiting its' landscape for all of its cool grey and blue undertones, which is basically what makes for an illuminating look at this concrete jungle. Even from the highest floor of whatever room Brandon is occupying, all of the cities' industrial beauty that McQueen is capturing through his eyes is something Brandon sees as simple everyday stuff. Brandon would rather be searching for cheap thrills on his laptop.
The first way I think most people would expect a story line dealing with an addiction to sex is down a road of some sort of intervention imposed on Brandon's character by all of his external influences; family, co-workers, actual love interests, but McQueen kept everything, from the time these characters are living in, to the environment in mind, and with that said everyone Brandon knows is just as jaded as he is.
While Brandon plays an accessory to most of his bosses' affairs, he also does his best to ignore how much his sister suffers a longing for people that just do not love her. Brandon doesn't wear his problems as openly as everyone else and all of these elements within his relationships is what stockpiles this story with a very cerebral sense of dramatic irony.
Another thing that deserves a second look is the heavily criticized and jaded sibling relationship Brandon has with his sister that pretty much makes up the entire heart of Shame's unyielding plot.
Where most siblings would slam any door immediately after finding their nude brother or sister on the other side, Brandon and Cissy would square up to argue their differences, and this led a lot of critics to the allusion of an incestuous relationship between them, though I don't think that is what McQueen meant to allude to at all. McQueen tested the waters of American cinema with this rare portrayal of a sibling relationship to show the level of comfort these siblings had with one another, and by the criticism and branding of an NC-17 rating, American cinema failed at showing McQueen how much they understand different cultures.
With all of the cinematic and dramatically well-drawn out ironic elements in Shame McQueen is showing audiences how blurred the division between right and wrong is in our culture today. And in the end our existence is still justified by what I think is the movies tag line, said by Mulligan: 'We are not bad people. We just come from a bad place'