In the cinematic imagination of the West, incest is represented in three ways: First, as if it were "the food of the Gods," to borrow and slightly bend an expression popularized by Zimbabwe's once brilliant but now fallen President Canaan Banana. (After he had his way with one of his drugged bodyguards, he zipped up his pants and said, "We [the gods] have helped ourselves.") This kind of incest is accessed by the super-rich, whose desires and passions are inhumanly large. Second, incest for those who are in what Maxim Gorky once described as "the lower depths." These types of transgressors are subhuman, penniless, and very weak-minded. Third, incest as the cause of death and destruction for those who live in the center of the social universe.

Otto Preminger's 1958 film Bonjour Tristesse, which is set on the French Riviera, is an excellent example of the first type of incest--glamorous incest. The movie is about a spoiled 17-year-old teenager (Jean Seberg) who is obsessed with her sensual playboy father (David Niven). Fleshy Seberg spends her sunny days frolicking with her fleshy father, her father's sunburned and Swedish playmate (Mylene Demongeot), and a male nymph who lives next door. When all these lovers aren't fucking/frolicking, they are sleeping, swimming, drinking, and eating enormous silver fish. No fruits are forbidden in this decadent world--between the essential elements of water and sun, everything is possible.

The ordinary, intellectual, moral humans who come into close contact with these impossible Gods are burned by the fire of their superhuman desires. This is what happens to Deborah Kerr, the older woman who attempts to bring the father's and daughter's sexually unbridled ways to an end. But she can't handle the heat of these lovers and so like Icarus falls to her death in the sea. Indeed, the realm of glamorous incest is beyond the grasp of generalizers or moralizers, "creatures of society" who can only marvel at "[the] children of Venus" from a safe distance.

Venus is the planet of incest--glamorous incest. Incestuous Venusians exist on a hot, erotic world where giant flesh-eating plants rise up to the purple clouds. This is the home of Satan, but not Satan as the ugly "lord of the flies" that inspires incest in the lower depths. Rather, this is Satan as Lucifer, the "majestic monster"--the fiery angel who fell from Paradise. Venusian sex is always beautiful, abnormally beautiful, and takes place in beautiful places like a villa on the French Riviera, or a secret garden with "fleurs du mal," poisonous apples, and hissing serpents.

The other type of incest in our cinematic imagination--the incest practiced by the sorts who say things like, "Them panties. Take 'um off...."--takes place at the edge of civilization, in the most unglamorous spaces: either the creaking floors of a shotgun shack or in the middle of a dark, ominous forest, with lots of mud, dead leaves, and sleazy banjo-playing eavesdroppers. These are the evil woods! The woods where the "dusk creeps," as Zora Neale Hurston put in "Spunk," or "[T]he pines where the sun don't ever shine," as the folksinger Lead Belly put in "Where Did You Sleep Last Night (Black Girl)."

John Boorman's 1972 film Deliverance is the greatest cinematic representation of the kind of landscape or territory (banjo territory!) where beastlike incest thrives.

The reason why the poor have such easy access to incest is they exist outside of the law, the law being a part of the superstructure that is determined by the economic base (or "productive force," to use a Marxian term). In a word, they are outside of the network and circulation of capital, and so have no obligations to its legitimating institutions: church, army, schools, morals.

But the middle class, who in Deliverance take the form of businessmen, are embedded in and ruled by the economic order. And if they leave the circle, the stable core of capital and debt, to venture out into the dark lands of incest, they risk the total destruction of their productive family unit. This is what happens in Tim Roth's harrowing The War Zone (1999). The father (Ray Winstone), who is a fleshy businessman, decides to do what the beasts of the forests or the gods in the garden do--have sex with his daughter (Lara Belmont), and the consequences are horrific! The institutions of law and order come down hard on his small family and destroy it completely. The message of the film is very clear: If your are in the middle class, stay away from incest, obey the rules, pay your debts.

If, by chance, a small gap opens and permits a son and mother to fuck without jeopardizing the integrity of the family structure, as is the case with David O. Russell's Spanking the Money (1994), how drab it is! In Spanking the Monkey, the father (Benjamin Hendrickson) is still functional, still paying debts, while his neglected wife (Alberta Watson) and horny son (Jeremy Davies) are having a midsummer affair. But their fucking and frolicking are not the poisonous apples of the rich or the wild, boarish pleasures of the poor, but something akin to a vapid carrot. The mother in Spanking the Monkey even has a broken leg, and is utterly graceless when resting on her bed--indeed, given the chance, middle-class incest can only be lame and dull.

So, this is the structure of incest in the cinematic imagination: We have the horrible hicks of Deliverance below and the brilliant beings of Bonjour Tristesse above, and nothing but misery and boredom for those who exist between these evil worlds.