Trois Femmes

Three of Guido Crepax’s heroines

Emmanuelle, Bianca and Venus in Furs by Guido Crepax

The comics artist Guido Crepax was, on the evidence of these stories, possessed of an unusual mind. I won’t say it was a complex mind. He had some ideas that were surreal and strange. But his mind and his art each followed known contours.

In adapting the novel Emmanuelle, he chose to make it quite straightforwardly about sexual exploration and taking pleasure in everything and everyone who might be cross paths on one’s way. In Bianca, the character is just that — a blank. She’s endlessly defined by other people, put through strange tests by other people, told that she must do this and must to that for reasons that are never clear and never explained; and she is a character who is badly mistreated. Crepax’s Venus in Furs is another adaptation: this one unlike the novel in one respect: it’s significantly more explicit. But it’s like the novel in another — namely, the idea of male subjection, male humiliation. In that, Crepax communicates much of the same atmosphere of the original, in his own particular way.

Of these three, Emmanuelle has the least depth. Our heroine simply goes through the world engaged in a very open-ended, very hippie-ish journey of self-discovery. That her method of self-discovery is sex and not really drugs (although she does dabble) is not important. It doesn’t have much effect on the story. Emmanuelle meets people — mostly men, sometimes women — on planes, in hotels, in far-flung countries that look like Burma, and gets to know them better, you might say, in a variety of scenarios.

Some of these are mystery men and women. Older and more deviously experienced, or young and intriguing.

A few of the locations where these assignations happen are interesting enough. I like the Indo-Chinese swamp forest that appears in one of Emmanuelle’s stories; I like the depictions Crepax supplies of animals and their environs. But readers looking for substance will be left without it. Emmanuelle is not a real character; she has no fears, no real goals. She wants to have a good time, but even that is hazy and vague. More of than not, she’s simply doing nothing and is seduced into a new world, a new set of ultimately quite indistinguishable scenarios. One of two interesting moments aside, this work is not one readers are apt to remember.

Bianca, meanwhile, readers probably will remember, but only for its combination, of course, of sex and completely inexplicable violence. Bianca is a young woman who is endlessly pulled in more than one direction. She moves between scenarios with the ease fictional characters have. For instance, she may be in the middle of the desert, and is seemingly saved from expiring, only to find herself transmuted into the belly of a whale. Once, she is in Odesa in 1905. There is never a reason for why Bianca appears to teleport around, from schoolroom to scientific laboratory engaged in animal testing, to a historical panorama.

The only constant, it seems, is Bianca’s being badly mistreated.

And she is mistreated. Authority figures do with her almost as they will. The tie her up, they beat her. She must carry them on her back as if she were a mule. She is endlessly attacked by lab animals, by children armed with leather whips, by needles that pierce her skin. She’s eaten by a whale. She is tattooed, and yet the marks on her never seem to last.

Bianca moves around via her dreams, which always conclude with being forced into wakefulness by some change in her situation. Is she to be put into a dentist’s strange contraption today? Or will she be taught deportment by a sadistic Victorian schoolmarm and a gaggle of assistants?

I found Bianca, for all its arch surrealism, disturbing and unwelcome. Our heroine is so mistreated, put through a parade of endless horrors, seemingly for no reason at all. There is no purpose to her suffering, just as there is no plot that describes and defines her fate. It’s all for nothing. Every whipping, every petty humiliation. It’s all for nothing, except for the assumed enjoyment of readers — which I must say I did not share.

Venus in Furs is a shorter story but it is more artistically expansive. It depicts the relationship between a man — is he a servant? is he a husband? — and the object of his obsessive attention. She is a grand lady; he is nothing, a worm, vermin. And she has him so completely in her thrall that he must stare at her through the keyhole, must demean himself to spend time with her. Follow her instructions, no matter what they may be, all the while nursing his jealousy of her, his unwillingness for her to talk to other men, to have fun without him, to think of anyone except him.

And, like so much fiction of this sort, there’s the ultimate fiction, the ultimate improbability. Because masochism is actually narcissism, in some cases, and especially for this character. He accepts being treated like nothing and marginalised but only because it seems to mean that the object of his affection is endlessly thinking of him. Is planning bizarre little games expressly to humiliate him. Is bringing home other men explicitly to rouse his envy. Is doing all of this with an eye to him and for — well, can we even say it? — his benefit. It’s all about him, really, not really about her.

So far, so ordinary, insofar as sadomasochistic fiction is common enough.

The style of Crepax’s art in Venus in Furs, is better than it is in the other two stories. It is just as stark and spindly as his other illustration. It resembles the product of his other black lines, but somehow less busy, less overcrowded, with a little more style and poise. Emmanuelle is, for all its supposed eroticism, quite sharp and angular and even unpleasant to look at in places. Very like things that were considered erotic in the 1970s seem to me, born more than twenty years later.

Meanwhile, the creativity of Bianca is limited by the extent to which the same things seem to happen again and again, and sometimes the panels are so full of particular features — an apparatus, a piece of clothing — that they cease to show anything at all. I feel very strongly that Bianca herself deserves better than the treatment she is afforded. She seems to do nothing at all to deserve it. Nothing at all.

A guy on YouTube once described Brian De Palma as ‘like Hitchcock, if he were even more of a perv.’ Reading these stories, I wonder if Crepax, who was once considered an artist most exemplifying the Swinging Sixties, might better be described as the chronicler of the Sixties who was most perverse — in every meaning that world contains.