In Nymphomaniac we are told a short story on the history of a particular woman not so much battling an addiction as expressing herself uncontrollably sexually, without shame in it. The main course of the tale is told to an asexual man who rescues her from an alleyway and attempts to revive her. Such an exposition of raucous female sexuality on display, and its accompanying comfort from both parties, is telling about the historical epoch they live in. Yes, yet again this is the stage set by the Last Man, but also once more this is the live action sequence of the death spiral of Christianity. This is all to say, with each party participating in the dialogue, there is nothing perceptible to them, nothing coherent or historically transmitted, to treat sexuality as something that is beyond them.

This is most obvious with the case of the nymphomaniac, who even destroys her family because she refuses to control herself. But it also surreptitiously applies to the asexual that has spent his entire life with his nose in a book and not willing himself toward greater burdens than learning about fishing and esoteric historical trivia. There is no sustainable life between the two of them combined, compared with the silent religious majority that fills chapels and churches and temples and other houses of worship, which find a deeper sense of meaning and purpose to their animal desires. And clearly, the lack of sexual desire on the part of the asexual man is a canard, as he exposes himself to be perfectly capable of sexual function as soon as the opportunity becomes meager – in other words, within his reach.

It should not be surprising to find this critique more castigatory toward the quote man here who found no reason to bear the burden of a family, to live his being at its greatest potential. This is what we may deem to be the mortal flaw in a liberal society, where individuals en masse will choose to avoid the burdens and responsibilities their ancestors had to accept because there were no contraceptives or in his instance distractions from reality, distancing him and others like him from needing to confront truth. He is, in his meek and invisible little apartment which barely sees a shadow of sun – almost an allusion to Plato’s cave and the facade he indulges his life in – hiding from the world. This is the hallmark of the Last Man conditioned by his Christian culture’s encouragement toward meekness.

Is the claim then that in a more masculine and dominant society nymphomaniacs don’t exist to ruin families like the woman had to her own and two more on screen, with who knows how many more invisible to the cinematic lens? The feminist here is caught in a pickle, for clearly the most transparent form of female unrestraint captured in film demonstrates the incapacity for the female form to hold higher standards for mankind – this is the paragon of women’s liberation in other words, and the absurdity ought to be an embarrassment for any feminist advocacy. The tolerance of this mutilation of the progression of man toward an elevated state stems from the milquetoast of the common man who no longer has his society demand anything from him before he dies. To call them all aimless is to call the European society dead, which is a correct prognosis.

Grade: A