Unscheduled and then rebroadcast this week on the Arte channel, the documentary “The City of Men” returns to a neighborhood in Vitry-sur-Seine where, in October 2002, Sohane, a 17-year-old girl, was burned alive in a garbage shed. Cathy Sanchez’s patient work immerses us in the heart of one of those neighborhoods that seems governed by disconcertingly violent masculine laws. A particularly dark universe, whose description gradually evokes a growing sense of unease in the viewer, coupled with an inexorable feeling of revolt. Let’s examine, from a psychoanalytical point of view, the multiple articulations of a counter-transferential process—let’s beware of it!—of formidable intensity.
The ideological archaism: Rather driven by instinctive reactivity than oriented towards symbolization, the words drawn from the most radical oppositions. Aware of their effects, the speakers repeat at will provocatively crafted words, the only indication of an individualization of discourse. A trademark. A vocabulary stamp of belonging.
The prohibition of speech: Silence becomes an implicit rule. A district “omertà,” barely chipped away by the encounter’s call. At the beginning of the documentary, a young man threatens a woman with physical assault as she addresses the camera about the October 2002 event. Subsequently, another blames the press for the conviction of Sohane’s murderer. The word neither designates nor contains anymore. Communication is mostly gestural—see the highly ritualized greeting codes among the young—and speaking to the outside, at the risk of indiscreet listening, transgresses a boundary. It breaks a territorial pact. It is betrayal.
The obsessive primacy of male sexuality: the ultimate norm. “Perforating” the woman confines—reassuringly, in the face of affects perceived as devaluating—the sexual relationship to violent penetration. Physical power is associated with athletic performance: one thinks of archery and the target, a paradigmatic metaphor of the active’s victory over passivity. The most astonishing moment of the documentary mentions homosexuality among some boys in the neighborhood: proof of their inherent anxiety on this topic, those young people asked about this sexual orientation in others express—a point the journalist notes—a hyperreaction of disgust. A near-physical repulsion towards a peer who dares to recognize an “other within himself,” disturbing the elemental classification of gender. Girls must therefore hide, conceal any assertion of femininity, explains the filmmaker. The documentary features a masculine-looking girl with the evocative nickname “buddy.” She is well-regarded on the streets. In the presence of the camera, however, a young “metrosexual” is tolerated by his peers.
The solidarity of the group over the state structure: the discipline of brothers prevails over the law of the father, to plagiarize Freud. The program shows none! The “primitive horde” dictates its demands. Let us update Freud’s principle of endogamy: when the wisest of them do not “stay home,” girls—the sisters of other boys in the neighborhood!—undergo the “trips,” those collective rapes in building basements.
The ambiguous confusion of family roles. The equation seems simple: absent father, omnipotence of the elder brother. It is especially the endorsement of this role by the mother that denotes an ambivalence. Displaying her desire for substitution, the mother prides herself on her eldest’s preeminence and places him in an unconscious husband role. The mother enjoys the “Real” of this submission, which consecrates a femininity as iconic as it is unassailable. Pubescent girls will have to wait.
Islam as an “ersatz” identity: Clichés of Islam—we should question why it is “the” religion of the neighborhoods—provide the rudiments of identity foundations. Taken as a global concept, the religion becomes a purely structuring framework, a rite devoid of spiritual vitality, responsible for indicating behavioral landmarks in detail under the threat of internal collapse.
The omnipresence of the death drive: The assassination of Sohane is mentioned by a young person, without affect, without emotion, without regret. Psychiatry is sometimes moved by less than this. The banality of evil? Death is consubstantial with the human being: destined to die one day, seems to say one of Cathy Sanchez’s interviewees. Atemporality—today or later, it doesn’t matter—signs the morbid raptus of the psyche by this component of the unconscious. It testifies to the refusal to enter Heraclitus’s great river of life. A denial of civilization in motion, a study subject to which Balzac—a name nonetheless given to this neighborhood—dedicated a significant part of his work.
