The Indiscreet Fascination of Disgust. The Aesthetics of Excess and Perversion in the Cinema of Luis Buñuel, Marco Ferreri and Peter Greenaway

It is in the conflict between repulsion and attraction, between incorporation and expulsion, and in the very iteration of these experiences that we have to trace the conditions for the possibility of disgust. In fact one of the privileged paths to the aesthetic experience of disgust can appear when pleasure and desire are oriented towards disgusting or revolting images or objects. In the aesthetics of the Enlightenment, the founding fathers of the discipline did not contemplate the possibility of a “taste for the distasteful,” thereby denying the existence of an aesthetic pleasure caused by the ambivalent attraction of the disgusting. But in twentieth-century aesthetics the landscape changed dramatically. It is definitely the cinema, more than any other medium, that has wrestled with this outrageous paradox, seeking to show the indigestible and obscene ambiguity that dwells in the feeling of disgust. In this respect, Julia Peker speaks of the “logical scandal of ambivalence,” observing that the attraction of what disgusts us is capable of creating a lacerating contradiction in our feelings, an ambiguity as insoluble as it is recurrent. What happens when we experience desire and disgust for a single “dark object,” either simultaneously or alternately?