Page - 97 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

97 Lazarus’s necropolitical afterlife it may be correct that, as Rosalind Galt argues, Bowie’s film “per- formances are most resonant when his oddity centers a queerly disoriented textual system” and that his “success as an actor comes in some measure from his ability to select directors who could harness and amplify these qualities,” one should not jump to the conclusion that “another crucial aspect of his queer per- formance [is]: his play with sadomasochistic erotics” (Galt 2018, 131). Productions of Lazarus vary considerably in this regard, with Leipzig’s featuring the most graphic sadomasochistic erot- ics thus far. But Vienna’s would seem to be alone in taking the position that the suffering and violent taking of life in Lazarus have nothing to do with masochism but are solely a matter of sadism. It is tempting, for example, to stage Newton’s household assistant Elly as masochistic. She is stuck in an unfulfilling mar- riage and undergoes an identity crisis in which she feels she is being taken over by Newton’s desire for his old love, Mary Lou. But rather than following her husband off stage after telling him, “[y]ou need someone easier. Someone better,” as the script calls for — it reads “ZACH leaves — ELLY follows” (Bowie and Walsh 2017, 53) — , the Viennese Elly, played by Isabella Knöll, does an Ibsenesque Nora and goes her own way. This feminist-inspired rejection of masochism is in keep- ing with Nancy J. Holland’s explicating of what Gilles Deleuze has to say to battered women. Building on Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty, Holland spells out the gendered implications of uncoupling masochism from sadism theoretically by showing “how the three themes of consent, pleasure, and victimization are interwoven in the traditional account of what is called sado- masochism” (Holland 1993, 16). In these traditional accounts, Freud’s and Sartre’s in particular, “the tacit assumption” is “that the subject of this discourse is always male and that, by exten- sion, those involved are equal partners” (ibid., 19). Such an as- sumption, which one notes applies to the powerful, white, male characters Bowie plays in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and Labyrinth that Galt analyzes, “allows theory to ignore consent descriptively and to assume it normatively, that is, to see all vic- timization here as voluntary and limited” (ibid., 19). Rather than