NYMPHOMANIAC: Vol 1 & 2

Volume 1

The film starts with a repetitive sound effect in the dark.  It’s finally revealed to be machinery pounded by rainfall.   After several minutes of this, we see an unmoving hand on the pavement.

The peaceful sounds of the wind and rain is taken over by loud heavy metal music on the soundtrack.  We see inside someone’s house.  The man (Stellan Skarsgård) puts on a scarf and goes on a walk.  He picks up some bait from a tackle store, then makes his way home.  He stumbles upon what is revealed to be an unconscious woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) on the ground.  He wakes her up; she is badly beaten and bloody.  He tells her to lie still and he’ll get an ambulance.  She tells him no, she doesn’t need an ambulance and if he calls for one or the police, she will leave before he can return.  He points out she is hurt and asks if she wants anything and she asks for a cup of tea and milk.  He takes her inside his home.

Inside, she drinks some tea.  He tells her he will wash her clothes; she asks him not to wash the coat.  He asks what happened and asks if she was robbed.  She says it’s her fault because she’s a bad human being.  He asks her if she wants to talk about it.  She says she doesn’t know were to start and then notices he has a fly on a fishhook, on the wall.  He tells her about fly-fishing, how the fly resembles something the fish like to eat and because it’s light, the line has to be heavy.  She asks if he fishes a lot and he says he doesn’t catch much.  He tells her he used to love a fishing book as a kid, The Complete Angler, which was a romantic Bible to him.  She then realizes she knows where to start and says she’ll have to tell him the whole, long story.

CHAPTER ONE – THE COMPLETE ANGLER

The woman explains that she discovered her bait, her cunt, as a two year old.  Five years later, she and her girl friend, “B,” lock themselves in the bathroom, take off their underwear, fill the floor with water, then slide around, rubbing themselves on the floor.  The girl’s mother (Connie Nielsen) knocks on the door and the young girls quickly mop up.  The woman says she loved her father, a doctor, very much but her mother, Katherine, was a cold bitch who always had a bad turn when she played Solitaire.  In P.E., the narrator enjoyed climbing the rope for the sensation of it hanging between her legs.  She says the only difference between her and other people is she always demanded more from the sunset, more spectacular colors when the sun hit the horizon.  In present day, she says that’s perhaps her only sin.  He asks why she’s suggesting children are sinful; she corrects him, she is not claiming children are, only her.  He says he doesn’t see sin anywhere in her story but he’s not religious; she says it’s because he doesn’t know the rest of the story and she’s not religious either.  He asks why she would take the most unsympathetic aspect of religion, the concept of sin, and let it survive beyond religion.

She continues the story.  As a young girl (10 years old), the girl casually looks up body parts in an anatomy book while her father (Christian Slater) observes.  The two go out on a walk.  He tells her a story about how the ash tree made all the other trees in the forest jealous because it was so beautiful and flawless; but in the winter, when it lost all of its leaves, the other trees noticed the ash tree’s black buds and started laughing, saying “Look, the ash tree has had its fingers in the ashes.”  She loves hearing his stories so much, she sometimes pretends she has forgotten them so he will tell them again.

In present day, the man explains the fly on the wall is called a nymph and is the early stage of an insect.  She explains that, as a young nymph, it was imperative of her to get rid of her virginity.  She knew a boy at 15 who had a moped, so therefore she considered him sophisticated.  She visits him; it is revealed to be a young Shia LaBeouf.  She asks him point blank to take her virginity.  He agrees.  Beforehand, he works on his moped and realizes it’s not working.  He requests she takes off her “knickers” and then he humps her 3 times.  We see a graphic counting to the number 3.  She is then turned over and he humps her 5 times in the ass (we see 3 + 1, then + 2, + 3, + 4, + 5, so a graphic remains on the screen 3 + 5).  They both put their clothes back on.  He struggles to get his moped to work again; she makes one quick adjustment and it starts up right away.  She has to waddle home, explaining she never forgot those two humiliating numbers – 3+5.


In present day, the man points out that those are Fibonacci numbers.  She says it hurt so bad, she swore she’d never sleep with anyone again but that didn’t last long.  A couple of years later, a teenaged Joe (Stacy Martin) is with her friend B (Sophie Kennedy Clark) and they break open B’s brother’s piggy bank and put on clothes called “fuck me now clothes.”  This is interspersed with shots of the fly (bait).   They go on a train trip without buying tickets; the one who fucks the most men by the time they reach the destination will win a bag of chocolate sweets.

The two walk past all the compartments, eyeing all the men.  In present day, the man says they were reading the river.  Most of the large fish stay sheltered from the current to save energy and to hide from the prey.  Where the fish hides entails a very complicated hierarchy.  The topography decides where the most attractive hiding spots are and the biggest fish choose the best positions.

B tells Joe to ask a lot of “Wh—“ questions to engage the men in conversation.  Joe goes into the first compartment.  A family with a man, woman, and boy are on one side; a man beside her.  She asks her first Wh—questions; “What time is it?”  The father tells her.  B walks by with her first conquest.  Joe continues, “Where do you come from?”  The son responds, “From home.”  “Who knows where the lavatory is?”  The father points out that there are lavatories in both directions.  The man besides Joe tells her he’ll show her where the lavatory is.  A shot of a fly-fisherman reeling in a fish.  The man and her have sex in the bathroom.

Joe explains that it was shockingly easy.  Eventually, B is ahead, 5 to 3.  All they had to do was look them in the eye and smile.  But suddenly, the conquests stopped.  The man explains that it happens in fishing, too – either none of the fish are feeding or they’re all feeding at the same time.  They go into feeding frenzy.  Fish most rarely bite at the beginning of a light rain because they feel safe when they swim in the stream because they can’t be seen from above.

Joe explains then it started again – a bit more slowly.  The man says, yes, fly-fishing can be done in several stages.  And if the fish stop biting, you move on to phase two.  You not only imitate an insect but an insect in trouble; you pull the line irregularly so the fish thinks it’s dealing with an easy prey.  And then let the fly drift down the river and then halfheartedly make a few jumps.

Joe goes into a compartment.  She pretends to be upset; she explains that Betsy is very ill.  The two men ask who Betsy is and she says her dwarf hamster.  In real time, Joe explains that she did have a dwarf hamster as a child but never liked it.  One man is more sympathetic than the other.  He takes her hand.  She asks him to show him the lavatory.  The man has sex with her while she looks on, uninterested.

B and Joe were running out of subjects and B is ahead on points.  They go to a first class compartment.  A train conductor asks for tickets.  Joe checks her purse and tells him she thinks she lost hers.  B says she hasn’t bought a ticket for the shitty train and it’s too slow.  He gives them a ticket that would require 8 pounds but B tears it up, along with a second one he issues.  The man in the compartment with them pays for their tickets.  The conductor leaves.  B says they’d like to be nice to him the way he has to them but he refuses her sexual advances.

The scoreboard now reads 10 for B and 6 for Joe.  B says she’ll give Joe five extra points if she can get the first class passenger in the lavatory.  The fisherman compares this to resorting to using a red wobbler when a fly has failed to work.

Joe asks the man why he brought a gift; he says it’s for his wife.  She points out he travels first class but has bought the gift from the station.  He explains that they have been trying to have a child and it has to happen now or never.  His wife just started ovulating and all signs point to maximum fertility being tonight.  So he is rushing home in attempt to get her pregnant.  Now Joe realizes why he didn’t have sex with B and her.  However, she still approaches him and tries to seduce him.  He begs her to stop but she doesn’t; she performs fellatio on him without permission and he orgasms in her mouth.  She feels no remorse for forcing him to orgasm and at the train stop later, she happily eats from the bag of chocolates.

The fisherman is impressed that oral sex because her angler.  She asks why he isn’t disgusted by her reprehensible actions.  He says the only thing she’s done is give people an experience to remember and releasing the married man from his load; if you keep the load too long, the sperm will die or degenerate.  Maybe thanks to her, the man now has a child.  She tells him she discovered her power as a woman and used it without any concern for others.  He tells her, if we have wings, not why fly?

He leaves the room for more tea.  When he comes back, she is asleep.  She wakes up.  They introduce each other – she is Joe and he is Seligman, a name she calls fucking ridiculous.  He tells her it’s Jewish and it means “the happy one.”  She asks if he’s happy.  He says he supposes he is, even though he’s a person who cuts the nails of the right hand first.  He divides humanity into two groups – people who cut the nails of the left hand first are more lighthearted and have a tendency to enjoy life more because they go for the easiest task and save the difficulties for later.  She says she always cuts the nails on the left hand first and doesn’t think there’s a choice; go for the pleasure first and then after the left hand is done, the right hand becomes “the easiest one left” (as compared to something a chore, like he considered it).  He says he had never thought of it that way.

She notices rugelach (a Jewish cake) on a plate he brought for her and is intrigued by the fact that he is serving it with a cake fork.  Joe says pastries shouldn’t be eaten with a cake fork since it’s un-manly and feminine.  She explains that she also knew someone who ate rugelach daily with a cake fork and she needs to tell him about Jerôme.

CHAPTER TWO – JERÔME

An older Joe is seen in a montage, having sex with several different men.  One by one, she tells each of them that they had given her her first orgasm.  She explains in voiceover that B and her had started a club called The Little Flock.  A group of girls gather together and recite “Mea vulva, mea maxima vulva” while someone else plays an organ.  In present day, Seligman tells her the music is almost Satanic, using a triton, the Devil’s Interval, which was banned from music in the Middle Ages.  Joe says the Vacuum Cleaner invented it on the piano, explaining she got the nickname because she had a sort of vacuum cleaner in her cunt that could get an erection from flaccid penises.  She says the club was about “fucking and the right to be horny” but was also rebellious; they weren’t allowed to have boyfriends and couldn’t have sex with the same guy more than once.  They were fixated on combating the love-fixated society.


A girl smashes a window with a display of hearts in the window.  During a club meeting, B admits to having sex with the same guy three times and is reprimanded by Joe.  B tries to justify her relationship but Joe chastises her for using the word “relationship.”  B tells Joe she doesn’t know everything about sex and whispers that the secret ingredient to sex is love.  Joe is seen storming out.

In present day, Joe says “For me, love was just lust with jealousy added.”  She continues, “For every 100 crimes committed in the name of love, only one is committed in the name of sex.”  Joe explains she then desired a serious education.  Seligman chuckles – he envisions Joe’s form of education involving masturbating with a pointing stick at the front of a classroom, wearing pigtails and glasses, using the stick to point out Glasgow on a map and then continue to masturbate with it.

Joe tried to study medicine like her father but it was hard for her to concentrate so she dropped out of medical school.  She applies for a job as an assistant at a printing house but has not acquired any appropriate skills.  The woman interviewing her is unimpressed when Joe admits she didn’t think skills would be necessary for secretarial work.  The woman says she will discuss the possibility of her being hired with her boss, Jerôme, but doubts she has any chance.  When she comes back, she lets her know Jerôme has agreed to hire her.

She starts work the next day.  Jerôme is revealed to be an adult Shia LeBeouf (who she lost her virginity to).   It takes her a second to remember him.  He brags about his position in the office (author’s note: in a horrible British accent, yikes) and asks if she’s thought of him since they were together; she obviously hasn’t.  He explains that his uncle usually works in the private office they’re in but he’s been horribly sick so he is taking his place in the meantime.  Jerôme takes Joe on a tour, first introducing her officially to the woman who she interviewed with, Liz.

They ride in an old elevator lift.  When Joe’s back is turned, Jerôme stops the elevator.   He tries to get promiscuous with her but she pushes him away.  She says he’s not her type so he finally goes back to the control panel and turns the elevator back on; but it doesn’t move.  They both have to escape by jumping through a panel near the top.

In present day, Seligman asks why she didn’t have sex with him and she says she doesn’t know.  He supposes she got fired but she says no, if he had fired her, he would have lost.  Since she didn’t have any specific work duties, Joe spends her time at work cleaning up Jerôme’s office.  When he gets in, he is upset with her.  He has her go back outside with the breakfast she has made.  She knocks on the door and after a short while, he allows her to come in with the breakfast.  He asks her why there is no cake fork for his rugelach; she tells him she had felt it was inappropriate.

In present day, Seligman admits this is feminine but argues that a cake fork is a practical tool, somewhere between a knife and a fork so you can hold the cake in one hand and cut it with the other.  He says that the Bolsheviks in Russia, to separate the men from the boys, sent a boy inside a house before they burned it down, to make sure it had cake forks and the arson was justifiable.  Joe points out this isn’t true and Seligman laughs.

Joe begins seducing several men in the office; she tells one man he needs to wash his hands (to lead him to the bathroom).  Another, she flirts with.  She’s then seen leaving the bathroom with a third man.

Jerôme considers this a game of war.  Sometimes, he takes Joe into town just so she can hold his coat.  They argue over a parking spot she sees because he claims there isn’t enough space between cars to parallel park.  He makes an attempt to prove himself right, stopping midway due to lack of space. She talks him into letting them switch seats; she then parallel parks with ease in her first try.

At night, Joe is alone in the office, in Jerôme’s space.  She then began to feel a change inside her, desiring to be one of Jerôme’s “things,” picked up and put down again and again.  She scalds herself for seeing him in this new light.  Seligman responds, “Love is blind,” but she corrects him – “Love distorts things.  Or even worse, love is something you’d never ask for.”  The erotic is something she asked for, or even demanded from men, but idiotic love and all the dishonest that follows humiliated her.  “Erotic is about saying yes; love appeals to the lowest instincts wrapped up in lies.  How do you say yes when you mean no, and vice versa.”  Seligman points out she is defending her personality instead of simply revealing it.

In flashback, Joe takes up walking, the same path she used to walk on with her father.  She passes the ash tree, a lady with a poodle, an old man on a bench, and ends up on a little bridge overlooking a pond.  She can’t free herself from her thoughts of Jerôme and during this time, she won’t let the other men she’s having sex with touch her body with their hands and eventually stops having sex.  She finds out where Jerôme lives but never rings the doorbell.  She writes a letter expressing her feelings but it takes a month to get the courage to deliver it; on that date, she finds Jerôme’s uncle back at his desk.  He asks her for the letter and says he will get it to Jerôme; he complains about how Jerôme is traveling, having just married Liz, the woman that hired Joe.

In present day, Joe explains she was promptly fired from her job since she had no experience.  Even though he’d disappeared, she tries to keep Jerôme in her thoughts when she masturbates on a train.  She finds details in other passengers that reminds them of Jerôme – the shoes of one, the hair of another, the hands of another.  Then she pieces them together (shown as a puzzle piece) but admits that in the long run, she couldn’t hold on to the details of them.  Seligman points out that memory is ultimately remembering silhouettes and essentials which Joe doesn’t consider a bad thing.

A 10-year-old Joe is in the woods with her father, this time in winter, where the crookedness of the trees and branches stand out.  He explains that the branches are crooked from having to carry all the leaves into the sunlight, one long struggle for survival.  He calls the naked trunks “the souls of the trees,” a poetic thought that is rare for him since he prefers empirical sciences.

Now that Jerôme is gone, Joe intensifies her hunt for men.  She compares her cunt to a supermarket door that opens/closes on its own with an overtly sensitive sensor.  She experiences many different “cocks” – shown in a photomontage, grouping them accordingly, including “big black cocks” and “circumcised cocks.”  She tells Seligman that if they combined all the foreskin cut off over time, it would reach to Mars and back again.
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Joe sees a painting that reads “Mrs. H” (the other half of her name is concealed in darkness).  This leads to—

CHAPTER THREE – MRS. H

Now, in flashback, Joe has reached a sizable number of lovers and has trouble remembering who is who.  She listens to her answering machine and takes notes; since it has become impossible to keep track of the individual relationships and how to converse with them, she invents a method to decide randomly.  Using the list of callers, she rolls a dice and if it lands on one, she will be overly loving when she calls them back; if it lands on two, not quite as passionate, and so on to five, which is a complete rejection and six, which is to just ignore the call.  She then calls everyone on the pad back and leaves messages rejecting them, being loving, etc.  She realizes that this makes her completely unpredictable which drives the men wild.   To balance this stress, she looks through the herbarium she’s created (a book of plant pressings).

Because she’s dealing with a large amount of men, there are pieces in their personalities which are hard to circumvent.  She asks one, she has labeled “H,” to leave before her next guest (another lover) will arrive.  He refuses to leave so she tells him that he has to get out because she knows he will never leave his family for her sake.  She adds that it’s not satisfying to her that she can’t have him completely and so they can’t see each other any longer.  She pushes him out, obviously not attached to him, and then prepares for her next lover to arrive.  Midway through her preparations, there is a knock on the door.  H is back; he’s left his wife and kids and has come back with a suitcase.  In the hall, Joe hears H’s wife and kids spying on her.  The wife (Uma Thurman) apologizes for intruding and says she just wanted to make sure he got there safe now that he’s made the big decision.  She asks if the children can go inside.

Mrs. H and the kids go into Joe’s apartment; the woman is complimentary of the place.  She tries to give H his car keys but he is adamant he doesn’t want to keep the car.   She demands it and then says she’ll take the bus home as will her children, who will get used to public transport.  Joe notices one of the boys is holding a pillow; Mrs. H explains that he embroidered it himself and it is a present for his dad.  Mrs. H asks if it’s okay if they call H “Daddy” here or maybe “him” or “the man.”  She originally didn’t want H to see the children anymore but figured it’s right for her (former) husband to be confronted with the little people whose lives he’s destroyed.  Mrs. H continues on, passive-aggressively.  She asks if the children can see the “whoring bed.”  She takes the kids to see “Daddy’s favorite place” and leads them into the bedroom where they all stare at Joe’s bed.  She tells the kids they should memorize the bed so they can recall it years later, in therapy.  She then says she’s being silly and suggests they all have a cup of tea.  She tells Joe that “the children’s father” likes two lumps of sugar in his tea.

Joe’s next lover arrives.  Mrs. H takes the flowers he is holding and then introduces all of her kids to the new suitor.  Mrs. H admires the ménage à trois (assuming the new lover already knows Mr. H) and admits to failing to be as broad-minded.  She tells her kids that they should ask all the questions their hearts desire and hopes that they never find themselves in such a situation again.  None of the kids have anything to say.  Mrs. H starts instead, asking how many lives Joe is able to destroy in one day – five, 50, or several hundreds.  Joe explains this is a big misunderstanding; she tells the kids she doesn’t love their father.  Mrs. H says she’s just saying that to make them feel better because if this was a joke, it would be a “joke so cruel” and nobody can be that cruel to destroy a mesh of feelings woven over 20 years.  She then tells the kids they should get away before things get too grotesque.  One of her kids runs back to hug his dad and she pulls him away, saying she wouldn’t want to give his father a guilty conscience.  Mrs. H then begins screaming, goes back and slaps her husband, and then exits the building, screaming as she goes.

Seligman asks how this episode affected Joe’s life and she says, “not at all” and “you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.”  He tells her some people blame the addict and others feel sorry for the addict; she explains that she was an addict out of lust and not out of need.  For her, nymphomaniac was callousness.  He asks how she felt during all this; she explains that sex was her constant companion yet she still felt alone.

Flashback to Joe at seven, having to have an operation with anesthesia. She is in the hospital hallway while the doctors prepare for the operation, and when she looks into the room, she feels as if she had to pass through an impenetrable gate all by herself.  It wasn’t because she missed her mom or dad but was as if she was completely alone in the universe; as if her whole body was filled with loneliness and tears.

Seligman asks if he’s not allowed to feel sorry for her.  She responds by saying, “Shall we go on?”  She sees he is reading a book which he explains is Edgar Allan Poe.  He tells her he died in the worst imaginable way, in something called delirium tremors, which occurs when a long term use of alcohol is followed by a sudden abstinence, forcing your body into hypersensitive shock.  This leads to horrifying hallucinations of rats and snakes and cockroaches coming out of the floor and worms slithering in the walls.  The entire nervous system is on high alert and you have a constant panic and paranoia and then the circulatory system fails; but the panic and horror remains until the moment of death.  Joe admits she knows what delirium is.

CHAPTER FOUR – DELIRIUM

In flashback, an adult Joe walks alone in the courtyard of a hospital (filmed in black and white).  She enters the hospital room of her sleeping father (still played by Christian Slater).  He wakes up and she tells him that her mother is not coming; he defends her, saying she fears hospitals.  Joe calls her a cowardly, stupid bitch but her father continues to defend her.

Joe asks him if he’s afraid but he says no; as a doctor, he’s seen many die and does not fear death.  He recites a quote about death, “When we are, death does not come; when death has come, we are not.”  He explains we know it’s going to happen and thus is not afraid.

At night, Joe’s dad awakes from sleep, screaming out loud.  He begins to sob.  She tries to comfort him but he is having hallucinations and doesn’t respond.  A nurse comes in later and tells Joe she will stay with her father if Joe wants to go on a walk.  Joe does, walking in the same courtyard at the beginning of the sequence.  She looks up at the trees.  Joe returns to the room with leaves from the ash tree.  She pretends to not remember the story of the ash tree in winter and so he tells her the story again.  He then begins having another attack of delirium.  The doctors struggle to subside him and force him into a straightjacket while Joe backs away, crying.  She is led out of the room by a doctor.

A sullen Joe wanders the hospital.  She finds an orderly working downstairs.  Cut to her having sex with him, desperately trying to fill a void.


Later, she is asleep on a chair in her dad’s room.  She wakes up and sees feces running down the side of his hospital bed.  She tells someone outside and two nurses and a janitor begin to clean up.  Joe’s father has soiled himself while in the straightjacket; as they clean up, they make sure he is still tied down.  He stares up at Joe with a wild look in his eyes, as if he is completely “gone.”  She watches the nurse wipe her helpless dad.

Cut to Joe having sex with someone else in the hospital.  It fails to comfort her and she ends up sobbing afterwards, eventually falling asleep.

Joe’s father is now deceased, with a rose placed on his chest.  Joe says after his death, she had no feelings left and felt “shameful. “ Her mother is in the room, too, but she quickly leaves; Joe is left alone with her father.  She goes on to explain that the shame she felt was, in seeing her dead father, she “lubricated.”

Seligman tells Joe that he knows she wants to present herself in a certain way and has a dark bias that she’s worse than anyone else but this story doesn’t add to the belief.  He tells her it’s extremely common to react sexually in a crisis; it may be shameful to her but in literature, there are many worse examples.  She seems appreciative of him saying this but doesn’t respond verbally.

He cleans her plate and when he returns, she acknowledges his cassette player.  She asks him to play what is in the machine.  He tells her it’s Bach from his organ book.  He was the master of polyphony, a European phenomenon from the Middle Ages that distinguishes that every voice is its own melody but together, in harmony.  (In other words, two or more independent melodies are sung/played simultaneously, as opposed to a monophony, which is just one voice).  Bach wrote many words for several choirs at the same time, wallowing in polyphony.  This affects the melodic expression and the harmony, also mixed up with some rather incomprehensible mystique regarding numbers, most likely based on the Fibonacci sequence – it starts with 0, 1 then adds the two numbers together so it’s 0+1 = 1, 1+1 = 2, 2+1 = 3, 2+ 3 = 5, etc.  It is all about finding out a divine methodology in art and architecture, a bit like the way triton (played on the organ in B and Joe’s club) is supposed to be a Satanic interval.  The sum of the number values for Bach’s name (B=2, A=1, C=3, H=8) equals 14, a number Bach used a lot of in his compositions.  All the numbers are also Fibonecci numbers.  The piece Seligman played has three voices – Bach’s voice, played with the pedal on the organ, a second voice played with the left hand, and a third voice played with the right hand – a cantus firmus.  Together, these three voices create the polyphony.

Joe explains that normally nymphomaniacs are seen as people who can’t get enough and therefore have sex with many different people; but if she’s being honest, she sees it precisely as the sum of different sexual experiences.  So in that way, she has only one lover.

CHAPTER FIVE – THE LITTLE ORGAN SCHOOL

Since the music has three voices, Joe limits herself to talking about three lovers.  The bass is easy, a man she codifies as “F.”  He has a used red car.  As she’s having sex with seven or eight men at this time, scheduling was tricky and they all had to have precise appointments.  F always got there an hour early, with flowers, and waited patiently in his car for an hour.  If she was having sex against the window and sees him, it always made her smile.  Sometimes, she would let him come in and drink coffee while she finished with her previous lover.  She appreciated that not only did he know what she wanted during sex, there was kind of a telepathy going on between them – without saying anything, he knew what she wanted and where she wanted to be touched.  His most sacred goal was her orgasm and she gave him privileges none of the others received; such as allowing him to give her a sponge bath.  “F” was the bass voice – monotone, predictable, and ritualistic but also the foundation that is so important, even if on its own, it doesn’t mean much.

We see 1/3 of the screen (the far left) as a shot of the red car and F’s sexual encounters with Joe intercut with Seligman’s foot on the organ pedal and the organ pipes, demonstrating that he is the first voice.

A knock on the door.  We now meet “G,” the only one of her lovers she had to – and wanted to – wait for.  When he finally shows up, he doesn’t immediately enter, the way a cat doesn’t when you let it in – as if once the door is open, it has all the time in the world.  But she considers him more of a jaguar or a leopard, pointing out that he moved the same way as one (we see a naked G walking intercut with a leopard walking).  They have sex; he is aggressive and in charge.  On 1/3 of the screen (the far right), we see a jaguar devouring its prey, then intercut with a naked G walking, then Seligman’s left hand playing the organ.  The far left 1/3 of the screen then shows the F montage again; meanwhile, we hear both musical notes simultaneously.  There is a black 1/3 between the two, demonstrating that there is a missing third piece of the polyphony.

Joe explains that despite her success in managing the complicated logistics of arranging up to ten daily sexual satisfactions while also having a full-time job, Joe was still praying to a certain sadness so she would try to squeeze in walks when she could.  We see her go on the same walk we’d seen earlier – past the ash tree, a woman with a poodle, a man on a bench.   This is repeated again and again, at different speeds.  She correlates this with the movements of a caged animal, as we see a lion pacing in a small cage; “basically, we are all waiting for permission to die.”

During her latest walk, Joe finds fragments scattered around on the path.  She begins to pick them up and discovers they are torn up photographs.  When she pieces them together, it’s revealed to be shots of Jerôme.

Suddenly, a hand reaches out to grab hers.  On top of the bridge overlooking the pond is Jerôme.  In present day, Seligman says there are completely unrealistic coincidences in her story; first that he hires her as a secretary by chance and then she takes a walk in a forest that is littered with photos of him and that he’s present and pulls her up to her feet.

She explains that Jerôme was there because he’d just had a fight with his wife, who was angry and tore up the photographs from their travels.  Joe tells Seligman he’ll get more out of the story by believing it than by not believing it; he admits this is true.  Cut back to B whispering to Joe that the “secret ingredient to sex is love.”

In present day, Joe admits that this ended up being the third voice of the secret ingredient.  Seligman agrees that she has created a “cantus firmus.”

Jerôme and Joe make love, graphically, in a several minute long sequence.

She tells him (voiced in present day but synched in flashback), “Fill all my holes.”

We now hear the melody again, with all three parts – a three-way split screen showing lovers F, Jerôme, and G, along with shots of the musical equivalents on the organ (foot, left hand, right hand).  The montage ends with shots of them all having sex with Joe before cutting to Seligman’s tape player cutting off and the music stopping.

Back to the sex scene with Jerôme and Joe.  She zones out and he asks her what’s wrong.  She explains that she can’t feel anything.  She repeats “I can’t feel anything” over and over, eventually breaking down crying as the film cuts to black.

The credits roll with the same heavy metal playing from the opening scene.  Scenes from “Nymphomaniac: Vol. II” are shown during the end titles .http://www.themoviespoiler.com/Spoilers/Nympho1.html

Volume 2:

This film is a continuation of “Nymphomaniac: Vol. I,” split up for length.  It does not stand alone and will not make sense without having reviewed the first part.

Young Joe (Stacy Martin) is in bed naked, eyes wide open. Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf) is now living with Joe but all of her lovers still try to contact her – knocking on the door, calling incessantly.  He answers the door.  Unplugs the phone.  Joe looks out the window to see an empty parking spot where one of her lovers usually parks.  Cut to Jerôme and Joe having sex on her bed; she is expressionless.

A current day Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) explains in narration that when she was 12, she was on a field trip in the hills.  In a flashback, we see a young Joe lying alone in fields with nature buzzing all around her.   A few classmates are gossiping nearby.   All of a sudden, she begins to shake violently and the 12-year-old Joe floats up off the ground.  She gets higher and higher and a foggy glow passes over her.  Now we see two females levitating beside her in the sky, all illuminated by the same glow – on one side is a woman with a veil; on the other is a woman holding a child.

In present day, Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) asks Joe if she’s kidding him – she had a spontaneous orgasm and had a vision of two women on either side of her?  He asks if one was holding a veil with two fingers.  He identifies one woman, from her description, as Valeria Messalina, the wife of the emperor Claudius, the most notorious nymphomaniac in history.  The other he determines was the Whore of Babylon, riding a nimrod in the form of a bull.  He says her story is like a blasphemous retelling of the Transfiguration of Jesus on the Mount, which is one of the Eastern Church’s holiest passages.  It’s when the humanity of Christ is illuminated by the divine light of eternity.  If anyone else had told him the story, he would have written it off as a blasphemous joke but Joe clearly didn’t know who she had seen in her vision.  He explains it started with a spontaneous orgasm and then (years later) she lost her ability to orgasm altogether.

We see a naked Young Joe (Stacy Martin) floating above a body of water, rotating lower and lower until she fades away – Seligman asks if it was like Wagner’s Das Rheingold (Descent into Nibelheim).  She tells him to imagine in one swoop that he’s lost all desire to read – we then see a clothed Seligman floating above a huge pile of books before fading into obscurity.

In flashback, Young Joe masturbates late at night, unsuccessfully.  She goes to the kitchen and wets a rag and pounds it against her vagina (off screen).  Jerôme awakens and comforts her as she screams.

Seligman compares this to Zeno’s paradox – she is Achilles and the tortoise is the orgasm. Because she was giving chase, she couldn’t reach satisfaction.  Joe tells him he seems like he’s not taking this very seriously – she’s telling him about the worst thing that’s ever happened to her, that within seconds, she had lost all sexual sensation and her “cunt” (how Joe refers to her vagina) went numb.  She doubts he’s even listening because whenever she tells other men about sexual experiences, it was easy to see they had gotten excited.  He says he’s gotten excited but she points out only about mathematical crap, not the story.  She then realizes he is asexual and can’t relate to her stories.  He admits he is a virgin.  He can read sexual tales – Canterbury Tales, Decameron – but only gets literary enjoyment out of it, not sexual.  He points out that because he has no preconceived notion, he’s the best judge to determine whether she’s a bad human being, as she theorizes; he doesn’t look at her through glasses colored by sexual experiences because he’s a virgin and innocent.

She notices a painting on a wall of a woman with child.  He says the woman was connected to the Eastern Church and explains that the Christian church was split up in 1054 because of differences in opinion between the Eastern Church and Western Church (Orthodox Church and Roman Catholic Church).  The painting depicts a typical Eastern Church icon – Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus while the Western Church focuses more on Jesus’ crucifixion as iconography.  He explains, “To generalize, you could say that the Western Church is the church of suffering and the Eastern Church is the church of happiness.  If you imagine a journey from Rome eastward, you’re moving away from guilt and pain towards joy and light.”  Joe points out he said he didn’t believe in God but he says the concept of religion is interesting to him, just like the concept of sex.  She decides to call the chapter – The Eastern Church and the Western Church but it won’t be about traveling east from Rome towards the light but rather the opposite (moving from joy to suffering).  So in order to keep it from being too sad, she decides to pep up the name of the chapter with an extra title.

CHAPTER SIX – THE EASTERN AND THE WESTERN CHURCH (THE SILENT DUCK)

Young Joe’s vagina continues to be unresponsive to sex but she is still able to have fun with Jerôme. They are in a restaurant and he offers her five dollars to put a long spoon “up her cunt.”  She goes to the back bar, grabs six more spoons, and shoves them inside herself, one by one.  A few patrons take note and look on with disgust.  The waiter comes back with two ice cream sundaes; he asks if they have spoons since none are on the table.  Joe asks for some and he returns with two spoons.  They both eat their sundaes.  When they are ready to leave, the waiter comes back with Joe’s jacket.  As she puts it on, a spoon falls out of her dress.  As they continue towards the door, more and more spoons clink on the ground.


In present day, Joe points out the irony that it was during this period where she couldn’t feel any sexual pleasure that she was also experiencing domestic comfort for the first time (since Jerôme had moved in with her).   She became pregnant because she was careless about birth control pills.  She has to have a Cesarean since she still was hoping sensation would “return to her cunt”; during the operation, she hears noises from the operation ringing out in the same tune as the one from the Little Flock (determined in the last film to be a Satanic song).  She looks at the light fixture overhead and when the baby is pulled out of her, she thinks she sees the baby laughing demonically at her.

Seligman points out that Noah’s son Ham was laughing when he was born and this is another Satanic omen.  Joe names her son Marcel after Mars, the Roman god of war.  Seligman asks if maternal love lived up to her expectations but she explains, it was her who had not; maternal love wasn’t the problem.  But every time she looked in her child’s eyes, she had an unsettling feeling of having been found out.  In flashback, we see Young Joe playing cautiously with her infant baby, explaining that from her perception, her love wasn’t being returned.

A naked Jerôme and Joe have sex in their bedroom.  Even though Joe no longer feels pleasure during sex, her nymphomania doesn’t stop and she still requires Jerôme to have a lot of sex every day, which eventually becomes laborious for him.   She tells him to “fill all my holes,” a flashback to the end of the first film.

On a later date, Jerôme tells Joe that he loves her adventurous nature but he isn’t able to satisfy her the way she wants to.  He wants to continue their sex life but suggests that she should take on lovers again to help satiate her hunger.  She kisses him in response.  Later, she playfully slaps him.

Later, Joe decides to improve her concept of “fuck me now” clothes by dressing up as a piano teacher.  With some Beethoven sheet music, she is now wearing glasses, her hair in a bun, and frumpy clothes.  She stops her car in the middle of a one-way street, pops the hood, and disconnects all the spark plugs.  A male driver is stopped behind her.  She asks for his help.  Now all the men that are delayed by her halted car try to figure out how to plug the spark plugs back in correctly but there are 40,320 combinations.  This gives her time to seduce men; a huge crowd gathers around her, discussing topics like Beethoven (her sheet music) while she flirts.

Joe comes home to a waiting Jerôme and her son.  There is an awkwardness between them.  He punches something off the wall, trying to conceal his jealousy.  Later, he sits in his car, trying to calm himself down, while we hear Beethoven on the soundtrack.

In present day, Joe explains she has to jump ahead three years in the story to depict the suffering Western Church.  She tells a story about meeting “The Dangerous Men.”  Joe is now played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, our narrator.  She is walking Marcel in a stroller; she explains that Jerôme travels most of the time and when he is finally home, he spends most of his time accusing her of neglecting their son, which she figures is just a cover for his anger over her lovers.  She still does not feel sexual satisfaction.  Joe passes five African men talking in the park, in a different language.  She watches one of them from her window and decides it would turn her on to have a sexual situation in which verbal communication was impossible.  She hires a translator to go up to the man she likes and ask him if he wants to have sex with her.  He approaches the man.  The translator comes back with a note listing a time and a place.

Joe ends up at a cheap hotel.  The man she likes enters the room, along with a smaller man.  She doesn’t speak their language but she gathers “N” has brought his brother along.  Both men undress Joe, speaking to each other the whole time.  They observe her and begin to argue over who will have sex with her anally and who will have sex with her vaginally.  She finally climbs on top of the guy she likes and begins to ride him.  His brother gets upset and they argue.  The second man begins to have sex with her from behind while she is on top of his brother.  They argue again and toss Joe aside.  She sits on the bed, annoyed, while the two bicker back and forth. Joe explains to Seligman in voiceover that she later learned that performing a sandwich requires great sensitivity because the man can feel each other through the tissue.

In present day, Joe explains that the quarrel had probably started on the stairs  when one had laid claim to one of her holes “which was in conflict with his Negro brother’s interest.”  Seligman tells her not to use the word because it’s not politically correct.  Joe responds that it’s always been a mark of honor for her to call a spade a spade and “each time a word becomes prohibited, you remove a stone from the democratic foundation.  Society demonstrates its impotence in the face of the concrete problem by removing words from the language. “ Seligman tells her society would claim that political correctness is a very precise expression of democratic concern for minorities.  Joe adamantly counters that, “Society is as cowardly as the people in it who, in my opinion, are also too stupid for democracy.”  Seligman disagrees, having no doubt in the human qualities.  She explains the human qualities can be expressed in one word – hypocrisy.  They evaluate those who say right but mean wrong and mock those who say wrong but mean right.  She also adds that women who say Negros don’t turn them on are lying.  The men didn’t satisfy her but they showed her there was a world she had to explore and it would be there that she’d get her life back.

Joe goes into a waiting room in a seemingly empty building.  Two women wait silently besides her.  The door opens.  A man (Jamie Bell) exits a hallway and observes those waiting; he asks Joe who she is.  She tells him that she knows what he does and would like to be one of the women he sees.   He refuses and invites another woman in, calling her “Madame.”  A new woman enters the waiting area with flagellation scars all over her legs.  The three women sit silently.

Eventually, Madame leaves, followed by the man who refers to the new woman as Princess and reminds her he forbid her to return for five days.  Without discussion, she stands up and leaves.  He then acknowledges Joe again, telling her he doesn’t think this is for her.  He takes the remaining woman inside the hallway, leaving Joe alone in the waiting room.

Seligman asks Joe to explain the mystery of the situation.  She calls the man “K” and says his business was something she was completely against but because of her rebellious nature, she contacted him as a last desperate attempt to rehabilitate her sexuality.  Joe compares K’s violent technique to the Western Church and points out that their systematic approach of the crucifixion is of a violent and sadistic nature.

K returns to the hallway where Joe is still waiting.  He tells her that she is beginning to irritate him.  He asks her to sit completely relaxed while he hits her in the face.  K then slaps her aggressively hard.    When he moves in again, she flinches.  He hits her a second time.  She takes a moment but recovers.  He agrees to let her join but explains the rules – he doesn’t fuck her, no exception.  They have no safe word so he will not stop no matter what she says.  He tells her to bring a brown used leather riding crop – and not one from a sex shop but a real one.  Finally, he explains the third rule – she will have to wait between 2 and 6 PM if she wants to join and it will not be pre-determined when he will call her in.  She tells him her babysitter’s not reliable and she can’t leave her child.  He begins to walk away.  She tells him he doesn’t even know her name; he tells her he’s not interested and that here, she’ll be known as Fido.  He enters the hallway, leaving Joe alone again.

Days later, Joe leaves Marcel with a babysitter.  She finally is led into the back room with K.  She provides the riding crop.  He has Joe tie her hair up in case he needs to hit her in the face.  She asks if she should take her clothes off and he says he will tell her what to do and when.  He positions a chair and tells her to bend over it.  The chair doesn’t measure up for K so he has Joe bend over an old couch instead.  She bends over one side, on her stomach, and he ties a sort of seatbelt over her back, strapping her in.  He ties her wrists together and binds the rope to the base of the couch, then duct tapes her ankles and wraps the tape around the other end.  He pulls her skirt up and chastises her for wearing knickers.  He can’t get them around her bound legs so he cuts them off with a pair of scissors.  Joe is sobbing on the couch.  K is holding the riding crop but tells her that her ass is not high enough and he doesn’t think they can do it.  He penetrates her ass hole and there is only a small amount of lubrication; he tells her to come back on Thursday.  He adds a nametag “FIDO” on the riding crop and hangs it in a cabinet alongside three others.

Days later, Joe calls the babysitter’s answering machine and chastises her for not showing up.   She tells her she hopes she gets this message and comes as quickly as she can; she adds that Marcel is sleeping and she has to go now.  After contemplation, Joe leaves her sleeping toddler home alone so she can make her appointment with K.  He puts a phone book under her crotch to elevate her butt, then binds her again and tightens the seatbelt over her back.  He penetrates her ass hole again with his finger and is happier with the larger amount of secretion.  K tells Joe she’s going to hit her 12 times, no matter how much she screams because no one can hear her down there.  Before he strikes, she screams out.  He tells her, “That’s not how it goes.  Most people don’t scream until I hit them.”  He hits her once.  Twice.  Three times.  She whimpers.  Four times.  She is in unbearable pain.  Five times.  Six times.  Seven.  Eight.  Nine.  Ten.  Eleven.  Twelve.  She is whimpering.  He tells her, “That’s it.”  She thanks him and he tells her she’s very welcome.


In present day, Joe tells Seligman she doesn’t know where they get their sexuality from or where tendencies of that kind come from but probably a perversion in their childhood that never manifested itself before.  Seligman points out that Freud says the opposite – that there is a polymorphic perversion of a child and we use childhood to remove or diminish some of them, that a child is polymorphic and everything is sexuality in an infant.  But Joe said it was deeply bizarre to lie there and want to lie there.  Seligman points out that it lubricated an expectation for pain that she hadn’t experienced; her body prepared herself for an intercourse that she knew wouldn’t happen.  Joe describes the mood as sexual and while she twisted and turned during the whipping, she realized how clever his knots were – if she fought them, they would get tighter and as she relaxed, it seemed they did, too.  Seligman tells her about the Prusik knot, named after a mountain climber named Prusik.  His friend and him had a mountain climbing accident and his friend died; he ended up hanging at the end of a rope with no possibility of getting out since you can’t climb up a thin mountain climber’s rope.  He took the shoelaces out of his shoes and made two loops and affixed them to the rope.  And he could move these up since they weren’t under tension and he could step into them and climb the rope and save himself.  Joe tells Seligman this is one of his weakest digressions.

She continues her story – K fills a rubber glove with coins and then puts it on his hand.  He slaps Joe hard with the coin-filled glove.  After she gets naked, he tells her he’s going to give her a Christmas present but she has to do the work herself.  He ties a blood knot into a rope and tells her she needs to make nine ropes with blood knots on each.  When she has completed this, he balls up some fabric and shoves it in her mouth.

Joe returns to her apartment to find Marcel asleep safely in his crib.  She breathes a sigh of relief.

Days later, Joe is in the waiting room with two other women, checking her watch.  The three-year-old Marcel hears a snowplow outside and wakes up.  He crawls out of his crib and runs towards the balcony.  When Jerôme arrives home later, he discovers his son on the outside patio, unmonitored.

Joe and Jerôme are sitting by the fireplace.  He asks her if she’s still more fond of him than the others and wonders if she’s going to leave tonight.  She tells him no but he accuses her of lying to him.  He says if she leaves tonight, she’ll never see Marcel or himself ever again.

That night, Joe struggles with a compulsion to leave to meet with K.  Jerôme asks if she’s saying goodbye and points out she’s not a mother.  He wakes up Marcel who begins crying and reaching out to Joe.  He points out that it’s Christmas but she leaves anyway.

Joe bypasses the waiting room and walks in on K with a woman; she tells him that “Today, it is Madame who must wait.”  K asks Madame to leave.  Joe reaches out to K and kisses him but he pulls away.  He gives Joe the Christmas present he’s kept in his desk.  She unwraps it – it is a flog built with the nine pieces of rope.  She places it on a chair and bends over the couch.  She tells him, “I want your cock.”  She reaches out for K’s pants but he backs away.  He leaves her tied up to the couch for a while.  Finally, he picks up the flog and says on account of the holiday and her behavior, he’s going to give her the original Roman maximum of 40 lashes.  He begins lashing Joe across her ass several times.  She has figured out K’s knot technique so she has become able to loosen her position to move her pelvis and is able to stimulate her clitoris against the phone book he had to place under her for height.  The lashing continues as classical music plays on the soundtrack.  He finally reaches 40 and she screams out in agony; this is juxtaposed with the image of the 12-year-old Joe levitating in the air towards an ethereal glow.

Seligman predicts that when she comes home, Jerôme and her child were gone.  She confirms that she hasn’t seen Marcel since.  In anger, she throws a teacup against the wall.  Joe tells Seligman that Jerôme said he couldn’t prioritize a child into his life either so he put Marcel into a foster home.  Her only contact with her son is the £1000 she puts into his account every month.   Seligman asks what happened to the silent duck – Joe has forgotten.  One night, K had been in a good mood and said he’d introduce her to the concept of the silent duck.  K bunches up his fingers and makes his thumb like a mouth (like you would in a sock puppet), puts it in his mouth, and then puts his fist up Joe’s ass hole (unseen).  Seligman imagines hundreds of ducks quacking.


Joe notices Seligman’s mirror and asks if he’s ready for another chapter

CHAPTER SEVEN – THE MIRROR

Joe is masturbating on a toilet at work.  She begins bleeding from her clitoris after years of self-abuse.  Joe leaves the bathroom and passes several coworkers who give her dirty looks.  Her female boss has set up a meeting to discuss rumors about Joe that are going around the office – that she sees men every evening and spends long nights with them.  That she can’t be trusted and will steal everyone’s men.  Joe admits she can’t keep away from her coworkers’ men.  The boss says she’s spoken with a psychologist and her addiction can be treated in a therapy group.  She demands Joe go, even though she doesn’t want to, pointing out that this problem will persist her in any workplace.
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Joe is in the therapy group filled with women who consider themselves sex addicts.  Joe calls herself a nymphomaniac, although the moderator convinces her to use “sex addict” and that there, everyone is the same under that description.  After the meeting, Joe has stayed to talk with the moderator – Joe repeats the woman’s theory that nobody can remove their sexuality even if it’s destroying their lives.  The moderator clarifies, maybe one in a million sex addicts could live a life without sexuality and so her therapy isn’t to cure them but to remove exposure.  She suggests Joe determine what incentives she has (from expressing her nymphomania) and make it difficult to come in contact with them.  Joe needs to get rid of anything that makes her think of sex – so Joe goes home and cuts up the phone line, throws away books, gets rid of everything in the bathroom, tosses paintings, mirrors.  She even paints over a bigger mirror so she can’t see the glass, tapes newspapers over the windows so she can’t see men walking by.  Now her apartment is completely empty except for the herbarium she started as a kid (a book of plant pressings).  She flips through the pages, licking her finger to turn each page.  She begins licking her finger more sensuously and then performs fellatio on several fingers.  It becomes apparent she can get rid of everything and the nymphomania won’t disappear.

In the therapy group, Joe tells the group she hasn’t had sex for three weeks and five days.  She has brought notes to tell them how she did it.  After starting her speech, telling them that they’re all alike, she looks in a nearby mirror and sees her 10-year-old self seated in the auditorium, watching her.  The moderator asks if she wants a glass of water; she does.  Joe still cannot start her speech, constantly glancing at the 10-year-old in the mirror (who she’s betraying by denouncing her nymphomania).  The moderator asks if she’d rather share another time.  Joe looks again at the vision in the mirror, then tears up her speech and recites a new one on the fly – she tells the group they are not all alike pointing out one woman who “fucks to validated,” another who just wants to be filled up in any capacity, and the moderator isn’t empathetic but is acting like society’s morality police whose duty it is to erase Joe’s obscenity from the earth.  She explains she’s not like them – she is a nymphomaniac and loves herself for being one; she loves her cunt and her filthy, dirty lust.  Joe walks away from the shaken-up group.

Cut to Joe randomly setting a car on fire inside of a large mansion.  In present day, Seligman asks what happened.  Joe apologizes for being in a hurry to get to the last chapter.  She says she realized society had no room for her and she had no room for society and never had.  She looks around the room and cannot find an inspiration for a story heading for the next chapter.  Seligman tells her text can sometimes seem empty and she might need to change her point of view.  Things hide when they get familiar but if you look at them at another angle, they might take on new meaning.  We see a vagina rotated and it turns into an eyeball.  Joe turns her head and notices a stain on the wall from where her tea splashed against the wall.  She asks Seligman if he sees what she sees – he identifies the stain as a revolver but Joe explains that it’s a pistol because a revolver has a drum that revolves.  It becomes clear Joe is very well versed in guns – she identifies the stain as a Walther PPK automatic, which she recalls seeing in a Bond film.  Joe explains that this is definitely something she can use for her chapter heading.

CHAPTER EIGHT – THE GUN

Back to Joe setting a car on fire.  She walks away.  Joe tells Seligman she doesn’t know if she left society or it left her but she was now resorting to debt collecting (extortion) for a living.  That’s why she has burned someone’s car.

For a long time, she’s known about a man named L.  She knocks on the door and meets L (Willem Dafoe) for the first time.  He knows who she is and thinks she has excellent qualifications.  She points out that she can’t have an office job because her nymphomania conflicts with it.  He suggests that she starts her own business, with his help.  She has a great insight on a broad spectrum of men and he suggests it be capitalized on.  He needs subcontractors who can put moderate pressure on individuals with whom his clients have a bone to pick.  Basically, he wants her to extort men who owe money – but he uses the term “debt collector.  He also encourages her to dissuade perspective on whether the clients’ wishes are justified or not.

Joe’s skills with men and sex, as well as specialized skills (like learning to tie a blood knot) make her a great “debt collector.”  A man is tied to a table with his pants down.  She goes to hit him with the knot; when he flinches, she repeats what K originally told her – “This is not how it goes.  You have to wait until you’re hit.”  The next gig we see is her with two “helpers” in a very exquisite mansion, owned by a man in a suit who seems disinterested in the havoc they’re causing.  The henchmen destroy some of his things but the man doesn’t seem to care.  Joe is unable to read him sexually so she orders the henchmen to tie him to a chair.   She pulls down his pants and explains that all men come with built-in truth tellers (i.e., whether his penis becomes erect or not).  She tries various stories to see what will arouse him – stories of sado-masochism, homosexuality, etc.  He doesn’t react to anything.  So, as a last ditch effort, she tells him a story about him walking through the park and hearing something.  The man begins to get erect.  She realizes he is imagining hearing children on a playground and makes up an imaginary boy playing in the sandpit who looks at him, sits on his lap, asks if he can come home with him.  The man’s erection begins to grow.  She continues the story – “when you’re home, you can’t fight the idea of being naked together,,” etc.  The man finally agrees to pay, in order to make her stop.  He begins sobbing, ashamed.  After a moment, Joe gets on her knees and performs oral sex on the man’s erect penis.

Seligman is confused.  Joe tells him that she took pity on him for having just destroyed his life.  Nobody knew his secret, maybe not even himself.  She points out that he had succeeded in suppressing his desire and never given into it, right up until she forced it out.  He had lived a life full of denial and never hurt a soul, which she considers laudable.  Seligman can’t relate and she points out he is thinking of the five percent (of pedophiles) who hurt children; the remaining 95 percent never live out their fantasies.  She tells him to think about their suffering, given that sexuality is the strongest force in human beings.  To be born with a forbidden sexuality must be agonizing.  “The pedophile who manages to get through life with the shame of his desire while never acting on it deserves a bloody medal,” Joe tells him.   She also admits she related to the man because she identified with his loneliness for being a sexual outcast.

Some years pass and Joe’s business grows, allowing her to make higher amounts of anonymous deposits to Marcel.  L tells her her business is doing great, she completes all the jobs he gives her to perfection, and the clients have nothing but praise for her… but since she’s getting older, she has to start thinking about a successor.  He tells her the process involves finding out what parents are incarcerated, leaving a void in their child’s life, and then find out where the kid plays football (U.S. soccer) and you get involved, cheering them on, no matter how bad they are – the worse the better.  That way, Joe will take on the role of a parent until she has a loyal helper that will walk through fire for her, even do time for her.  Joe isn’t keen on the idea but L points out that at the least, she would provide parenting for a kid who would otherwise go without any.  He’s already found a suitable subject – a 15-year-old from a family of hardened criminals who has already been institutionalized.  Her mother recently died of an overdose and her dad is in prison.  She plays basketball, very badly; she’s chosen a team sport because she’s lonely.  And her right ear is slightly deformed which she’s very ashamed of and this isolates her even more and makes her an easy target for a bit of affection or empathy.

Joe has been talked into having a look and she attends a high school basketball game.  She feels repulsed by the plan but nonetheless cheers for the girl with the deformed ear, who seems very sad and vulnerable (she also is sure to keep her right ear hidden under her hair).  She calls the girl P (Mia Goth) and being around her fills her with pity and emotion and she finds herself attending each game every weekend.

After a game, P approaches Joe and thanks her for cheering for her.  Joe tells P she played really good and that she’s been improving.  Joe takes P to the same park that her dad (Christian Slater) taught her about trees having souls, when she was 10.  The ten-year-old Joe points out that the souls of the trees look like human souls and her dad agrees – they look like twisted souls, regular souls, crazy souls, all depending on the lives human beings lead.  He has found his soul tree – he shows it to her, an oak tree in the shape of a Y.  In the park, Joe tells P that she had never found her own soul tree but her dad had told her she’d know it when she sees it.

When P becomes the age of majority and Joe becomes her personal advisor, she asks P to move in with her.  In their home, Joe convinces P to put her hair up and she is comfortable enough with Joe to let her right ear be exposed.  At this time, all of Joe’s sexual activity had stopped and her groin was one big sore from her abuse that wouldn’t heal and it makes even masturbation impossible.  Joe experiences abstinence symptoms – fever and cramps.  She is in horrible pain every evening.  One night, she wakes up from sleep to get a drink of water and drops the glass.  P awakens and helps her clean up the pieces.


Seligman asks if P really loved her.  Joe says she couldn’t accept it.  P takes care of Joe while she’s resting, in pain.  P wants to see what Joe’s vagina looks like since it’s hurting her; Joe argues but P also has a deformity and wants to see.  P looks at her vagina and, off screen, notices all the bruises from years of sexual activity.  It makes her aware of how sexual Joe used to be.   P undresses and asks if Joe likes her.  Joe tells her she’s beautiful.  P begins to kiss Joe’s naked body; Joe only responds by crying.

Seligman asks if P knew what Joe did for a living (debt collecting).  Joe explains that P never asked about her work and was a very discrete person.  But one day, in the park, she asked Joe why she started coming to her basketball matches and guesses it wasn’t a coincidence.  Joe tells her she’s right and that she didn’t tell her because she didn’t want her to be upset with her.  Joe tells P that her job is illegal; P points out that no one in her family does anything legal.  Joe says a man that worked in her business suggested she become friends with P to see if she could use her in her line of work.  P tells her not to feel bad because if she hadn’t, they’d never have met.  She asks Joe if she can go to work with her on her next assignment; the two of them kiss.  P playfully begs Joe again to let her go.

Seligman explains that social inheritance is irrefutable and if anybody knew about the laws of the street (and be appropriate for extortion), it must have been P.  Joe confirms he is right.

P is now working alongside Joe and the two henchmen.  But she takes an overly aggressive approach to the “victim,” threatening him with a gun, forcing Joe to yell at her.  Later, Joe tells P they don’t use violence and demands the gun.  P tells her guns aren’t dangerous if used correctly and that she wasn’t going to shoot someone because then they’d have gotten no money out of him.  Joe still demands the gun and P hands it over.  Joe loads a magazine.   When she returns to P, she is pouting and says Joe is evil.

In a weird coincidence, Joe and P go to a debtor’s house – and sees a name on the door – Jerôme Morris.  Taken aback, Joe suggests P do this one alone.  She tells P to make sure nothing is destroyed and nobody is hurt; she should just show herself and offer him a reasonable payment plan.  P rings the bell and enters the house with the two henchmen (because a good 15 years have passed, Jerôme is now played by an older actor, not Shia LaBeouf).  Joe no longer knows if she still feels love for Jerôme but she definitely experiences a feeling that is far stronger than she would have liked.

Joe walks home through the same alley where Seligman first discovered her; she had learned the shortest route from Jerôme’s house to her place is the alley.  Later that night, P comes home and tells her it went brilliantly and that he made a reasonable payment plan.  Joe asks how he looked and P responds, “scared.”  Joe asks how old he looked and she says, “I don’t know… ancient.”  P plants kisses on Joe’s neck, then gets naked and jumps into bed with her.

Jerôme was to pay off his debt in six payments.  Every time P goes to his house to collect, Joe is nervous (that they’ll become sexually involved) and is restless until P returns.  She even begins playing Solitaire, just like her mother did, in order to make the hours pass.  Each night, she’s less assured of P coming home than the night before; she is beginning to feel jealousy and doesn’t know if it’s the fear of sharing or the fear of losing.  But this unworthy feeling she hadn’t felt her whole life (since she used to live a life with sex void of love) was now creeping up on her.

The evening P was to collect the final payment, she doesn’t kiss Joe goodbye.  This makes Joe suspicious, especially when hours and hours go by.  She lays in bed, expecting P to arrive every time she sees a car light in her window.  Finally, Joe walks to Jerôme’s house.  She sees the two henchmen asleep in a car parked out front.  Through the window, she sees a naked P drinking from a wine bottle.  Jerôme creeps up behind her in an embrace.  The two wander out of sight.

Joe walks home, having made the decision to flee since she can’t stay in this town with P and Jerôme so close by.  She begins to head south (because north would require her to turn around and face the town she is abandoning); she has an impulse to climb a large hill that she passes.  When she gets to the top, she sees a large deformed oak tree completely alone – her soul tree.

Joe explains that it’s said to be difficult to take a person’s life but for her, it seemed more difficult not to.  She continues, “For a human being, killing is the most natural thing in the world; we’re created for it.”  In the flashback, Joe takes the gun she has confiscated from P out of the closet.  She crosses back through the alleyway – and is stopped short when she hears Jerôme laughing.  She rushes back to find Jerôme and P horsing around in the alley.  They begin kissing.  Jerôme then walks right past Joe who points her gun and pulls the trigger – but it fails to go off.  She tries again but it still simply clicks.  There is a moment when Jerôme realizes that she has attempted to kill him.  Joe stands silently, left alone with the awkwardness of having been unsuccessful.  After some time, Jerôme decks Joe hard in the face, so she collapses on the ground.  P watches on, silently.  Without any discussion, Jerôme continues to kick and punch Joe.  He turns and looks back at P who responds by pulling down her pants and getting on top of a trashcan.  Jerôme approaches and penetrates her – three times vaginally (we see it written as 1 + 2 + 3, just like when Jerôme took Joe’s virginity) and then five times anally (like in the first film, shown on the screen as 3 + 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).  Now we see 3 + 5 on the screen over Joe laying hurt on the ground; the special numerical sequence that tied her to the only man she ever had romantic feelings towards.  P saunters over to Joe on the ground and urinates on her.  P walks away.  Jerôme observes Joe a little longer, sympathetically, and then follows.  He is out of earshot but Joe says, “Fill all my holes please” (what she had said to Jerôme when they first moved in together).

The story has gone full circle since this was the condition and location Seligman discovered Joe in.  In present day, Joe tells Seligman she still doesn’t know why the gun didn’t work.  She had checked to make sure there were bullets in the magazine and she’d taken off the safety; it simply malfunctioned just like Bond’s Beretta (hinting again that she is well versed on guns).  Seligman points out that you can’t shoot a Walther PPK until you rack the gun; you pull and release the sliding mechanism.  P hadn’t done it because she had no intention of shooting the man during her first assignment.  He also pointed out that from Bond films, it must be apparent that you have to rack an automatic pistol.  Joe admits he’s right and that she’s seen it in films a thousand times (hinting that she knew subconsciously that she wasn’t going to kill Jerôme and should feel less guilty).

Seligman notes that it’s morning and the sun is rising.  Joe looks out the window; Seligman tells her he can never figure out where it comes from (because his window looks out onto an enclosed alleyway, leaving only a sliver of sunlight).  Joe says it’s beautiful and stares at the spot of sun in the darkness.

Cut to a shot of a sunset.  Seligman reminds her (and us) that in the beginning, Joe had said her only sin was that she asked more of the sunset.  He expresses that this must mean she asks more from life than is good for her.  We see a montage of Joe as a child rubbing against the bathroom tiles, looking up an anatomy book at 10 years old, approaching Jerôme to take her virginity as a young teen.  Seligman tells her she was a human being and a woman demanding her rights.  He points out that if two men had walked down a train looking for women (like she and B did as teens), nobody would have raised an eyebrow.  Or if a man had led the sexual life she had.  Or how banal the story of Mrs. H would be if Joe was a man and her conquest was a woman.  Seligman explains that when a man leaves his children for desire, we accept it as a shrug but as a woman, she had to take on a burden of guilt that could never alleviated.  And all in all, all the blame and guilt piled up over the years became too much for her and she reacted aggressively, almost like a man (lighting cars on fire, etc.), and she fought back against the gender that had been oppressing and mutilating and killing her and billions of women.  She points out she wanted to kill a human being – flash back to her kissing Jerôme as a young adult, romantically.  He points out she didn’t kill him; she points out this was only because of a chance event.  He says he’d call it subconscious resistance; the veil of forgetfulness draped itself over her knowledge of how to rack a gun.

Joe says she’s too tired to debate.  Seligman suggests she lies down and she does.  Before she sleeps, she lets Seligman know that, by letting her tell her story, he put her at ease; she adds that, at this moment, her addiction is very clear to her and she’s come to the conclusion that even if only one in a million can succeed in mentally and bodily ridding themselves of their sexuality, it is now her goal.  Seligman asks her if it’s a life worth living; she tells him it’s the only way she can live.  She says, “I will start up against all odds just like a deformed tree on a hill.  I will master all my stubbornness, my strength, my masculine aggression.”  Joe also thanks Seligman for being her newest, and maybe first, friend.  She says she’s happy the shot didn’t go off and make her a murderer.  She then asks Seligman to leave so she can sleep.  He says he’ll make sure she isn’t disturbed.

They say goodnight to each other and he shuts the door.  Joe turns off the light and rolls over to sleep.  Moments later, Seligman returns into the darkened room.  He walks curiously over to the sleeping Joe.  It is revealed Seligman is not wearing pants (although he has on a shirt).  He touches his penis and walks over to Joe, preparing to penetrate her.  She sits up in bed, noticing what he’s doing.  She tells him “no!” and grabs the gun, racking immediately.   The screen turns to black and we hear him tell her, “But you fucked thousands of men.”  A gunshot is heard.  In darkness, we hear Joe put her clothes on and hurriedly rush from the room.  Loud footsteps reverberate down the corridor.


Charlotte Gainsbourg’s cover of the ‘60s rock song, “Hey Joe” plays over the credits; the song starts with the line “Hey, Joe, where you gonna go with that gun in your hand?” and is about someone on the run after shooting someone (his wife).  This might explain why the character was given a name with the masculine spelling of Joe.  http://www.themoviespoiler.com/Spoilers/Nympho2.html