The famous Schaubühne, one of Berlin’s long-standing and popular theaters opened “The Life of Vernon Subutex 1” as part of the Berlin pilot project “Perspektive Kultur” (the cultural perspective) on June 4. It shows the premiere of Virginie Despentes’ “The Life of Vernon Subutex 1” in a production by Thomas Ostermeier. After several postponements, the show can finally be presented as part of the “Perspektive Kultur”. Follow-up performances started June 9. Tickets for the premiere went on sale May 31, and for follow-up events June 2. Now that theaters and cultural institutions have largely reopened, the Schaubühne has decided to play through the summer rather than closing for the theater vacations, as is usually the case.
In our SLEEK issue #67, we actually sat down with the artist. Here’s what she had to say:
The name ‘Despentes’ fits like a glove. A boxing glove that is. She named herself after a neighbourhood in Lyon where she lived for a few years: Pentes de la Croix-Rousse. ‘Des Pentes’ can be translated as cliffs, a deep descent. Her narratives, too, are a descent into the foul, into ruin, into the human soul that is fighting for survival. Raw, brutal, without pity. She has survived numerous times. She survived rape at 17, while she was hitchhiking. She, who came late to punk, a squatter, a prostitute, a record sales person, a porn film critic, a writer, a director. She was, and is – most of all – a feminist.
“This drug washes up arrogant, talkative, self-involved assholes, but we would never have been able to complete Baise-Moi without the coke.”
Virginie Despentes wrote her first novel at age 23, Baise-Moi (1993). Try paraphrasing that one: ‘Fuck me!’. In it, we find incredible violence, gruesome sex, murder, killings and taboo breakers. Not everyone can stomach that much flesh and blood. Nine publishing houses rejected her, but the tenth one dared to print it. In collaboration with former pornstar Coralie Trinh Thi, the book was adapted for the screen in 2000. In one interview, she mentions they were high on cocaine for three quarters of the shoot. “This drug washes up arrogant, talkative, self-involved assholes, but we would never have been able to complete Baise-Moi without the coke.” She would have felt too sensitive without the drug. Sensitivity doesn’t gel with barbarism. At the time when Baise-moi was supposed to premier in France, it caused a national wave of moralistic panic. It was banned. She doesn’t understand why you can’t show penetration in films. “Male films and stories are always about violence.
Women’s movies and books are often about shopping, sipping coffee and lots of tears wasted over some guy.” Despentes is not a writer everyone can agree on. For some, her writing features too much sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. To them, she’s a man-hating, bitter and decidedly annoying anti-heroine. Others revere her as a socio-critic wonder woman, a mouthpiece for all those who experienced violence at the hands of men. Her courage became a major contributing factor for the #metoo movement in France. King Kong-Theory (2006), a collection of essays, also fuelled debates on feminism, pornography, rape and sex work in a significant way. Whatever, approval was never her goal anyway. For a while it was nice to feel as if you were loved and accepted: “But if you are loved all the time, you’re dead.” It is not a writer’s job to be loved, she told The New York Times this year. However, after her fictional trilogy Vernon Subutex (2006– 2009), she was loved the world over. Vernon Subutex won countless awards and critics compared her to the great writer of the 19th century, Honoré de Balzac.
From 2016 until this year, Despentes even sat in the jury for the Goncourt Prize, France’s most coveted literary award (she resigned in order to spend more time writing). At 35, she fell in love with a woman for the first time. Shortly afterwards, she came out. A year later she moved to Barcelona with her new partner, the philosopher and trans activist Paul B. Preciado. Despentes disposed of all her female outfits the day she began to make a living as an author. “In a masculine society, stimulating people other than those I am close with only leads to stress.”
Vernon Subutex is the first time she hasn’t written from a female perspective. There aren’t any explicit sex scenes either. Her male lead, Vernon Subutex, is an anti-hero, someone who moves in downward spirals, who goes from record store owner to hobo, who perishes at the periphery of society. The novels make Bukowski look like a trip to the day spa. It is up to the readers to decide how they want to interpret the narrative. Despentes doesn’t censor, nor does she educate. “There’s always a reason why humans think the way they do.” Vernon Subutex is an intelligent social drama and fascinating panorama of social dysfunction.
“But if you are loved all the time, you’re dead.”
In May this year, Berlin’s Schaubühne theatre had hoped to stage a dramatisation of the novels. Directed by Thomas Ostermeier and starring Joachim Meyerhoff as Subutex, the production was dealt a double blow when two rounds of covid restrictions in Germany halted the performance in spring as well as the postponed show in November. Ostermeier has a weakness for difficult plays: “Vernon wanders along the edges of pop culture, glamour and social media, a world the audience will recognise. It’s a world that claims that anyone willing to fight hard can make it, and make a killing doing so. That is a lie.”
At 30, Despentes decided to quit that two-faced alcohol. She wanted to know what kind of writer she would be, if she made it to old age. Today, at 51, she says her anger and anxiety are not the same. She still sports a Motörhead t-shirt and the identical tattoo that her much-revered Lemmy Killmeister once had as well. She was thinking out loud recently, in a video interview, when in her characteristically flippant manner, she remarked that, after 10 novels and two movies, she’d finally figured out what the reason for her writing was. She didn’t have the impression that she wrote from the same place most authors around her operated from, she said. Only she knew the place. It is untouchable.
© Alexandre Isard/Paris Match/Contour by Getty Images