On "Lemon Incest," the Creepy Provocation That Launched 12-Year-Old Charlotte Gainsbourg's Career

This is the unedited version of the paper I presented at this year's Pop Conference. I've included four paragraphs cut from my presentation...which still exceeded the allotted 10 minutes. To watch the edited version, part of a panel on Speculative Selves, click here. 

I began with a 33-second-long video of eight-year-old Charlotte practicing the piano. After that, my paper began in earnest. As in this post, I ended with a more contemporary video, but I only had time to play about 30 seconds worth. Due to time constraints, I was unable to include the official and live studio versions of "Lemon Incest." I've embedded them below.    

 

Charlotte Gainsbourg, the daughter of actress Jane Birkin and musician Serge Gainsbourg, was 12 years old in 1984 when she recorded the song "Lemon Incest" with her father. It was part of Serge's multimedia project to bring her to the world's attention by way of a song he wrote, produced, and sang with her. Two years later, he followed it up with an album he wrote and produced for her in conjunction with a film he wrote, directed, produced, and co-starred in with her, both called Charlotte For Ever. 

But first came the single. The title was a play on the French words for lemon zest, "un zeste de citron." It doesn't scan in English, but in French, "lemon incest" translates as "inceste de citron." The title was designed to provoke, and it did, although the lyrics, when translated into English, dispute the idea that there was a sexual relationship between father and daughter. That made it no less controversial, because Charlotte, by way of Serge's lyrics, is still describing what that scenario could be like, even if she isn't describing what it was like, painting pictures such as "The love we'll never make together is the most beautiful, the rarest, the most disconcerting, the purest, the headiest."

Fifty-eight years old at the time, Serge mumbles the lyrics over a Chopin-gone-disco beat in a rum and nicotine-saturated rasp. By contrast, Charlotte sounds like the child that she was. Her voice is tentative, unsteady, and pitched uncomfortably high. Her father sounds relaxed, possibly even a little bored, whereas she gives the distinct impression that she'd like to be anywhere else doing anything else. 

Despite the bad press the single generated, and possibly even because of it, it was a top 10 hit in France where it spent four weeks at #2 on the singles chart. When asked about it in 2010 by Sean O'Hagan of The Observer, Charlotte said, "Fortunately, I had just gone to boarding school when the song came out. I was totally unaware of this big scandal. I was protected from it." As for the lyrics, she said, "I knew what I was talking about. But for me, it wasn't a problem. I had fun with it. Plus, there was pureness behind it. It's really the love of a father and daughter." And that’s been her line on the song for 26 years now. 

But the video tells a different story. If "Lemon Incest," title aside, describes the love of a father and daughter, the Serge-directed video warps that idea beyond recognition. It isn't selling love or affection, but rather sex. That's exactly what many videos were selling in the 1980s, but few of them featured a semi-nude father and preteen daughter miming their song in a sexually suggestive manner atop an unmade bed. Instead of bedroom furnishings, the dry ice-shrouded duo cavorts amidst marbled floors and mirrored walls as if they were the display in a museum to illicit sex. There are no cutaways to other locations or times in their lives. It's about the moment, and nothing else. At 5:08 minutes, it feels like an eternity. 

For sheer cringe-worthiness, the title track of the 1986 film, Charlotte For Ever, gives "Lemon Incest" a run for the money. It plays over the opening credits in which Serge is billed simply as Gainsbourg, while Charlotte is billed by her full name. In the song, Serge and the male backing vocalists sing the chorus, which plays more like a paeon to a dead girl than a live one, while Charlotte whispers in a wavery voice that plays like a less seductive version of the orgasmic sighing Jane Birkin contributed to her infamous 1969 duet with Serge, "Je T'aime … Moi Non Plus," which translates as "I Love You … Me Neither."

In the film, Serge plays Stan, a screenwriter, and she plays Charlotte, his estranged daughter. Charlotte believes Stan killed her mother, who died in a car accident. At this point, I should note that Serge and Jane Birkin had split up in 1980, so this is six years later. The film has no interest in his guilt or innocence--he insists it was an accident and we're meant to believe him--but the absence of a mother figure allows him to double down on themes he first established in "Lemon Incest." It's a long list: he focuses on Charlotte's derriere while she's pouring a bath, films her taking off her top while she dances in front of a mirror, has her bathe him as if he was a child, and establishes that she sleeps in the nude. His character also undresses one of her school friends, and suggests that the girl is okay with it. "You're like a creamy toffee," he tells Charlotte at one point, "Still fresh." The implication is that adult women are not. 

Throughout, Serge objectifies all of the women in the film and converses with his daughter primarily about sex. Sometimes, Charlotte protests; sometimes she doesn't. Once she decides she's had enough, she insults his latest conquest before yelling, "He's mine!," kicking the woman out of their flat, and enjoying a slow dance with dad. The film ends with the two on an unmade bed, much as in the video for "Lemon Incest," as they writhe to the sax-saturated electropop. The point is that Stan has finally convinced Charlotte he didn't kill her mother, but more importantly, that they're meant to be together--forever. 

Even if they weren't related, Charlotte was only 15 at the time. By building a film around his daughter, he had the opportunity to counter "Lemon Incest" in some way, but instead, he reinforces the idea that the song wasn't merely a fluke or a provocation, but that he really wanted people to think he was sexually attracted to her, not least because he doesn't even bother to give her character a different name. Fortunately, the album he produced for her isn't quite as creepy, though the tinkly synths, rubbery bass, and hair-metal guitar solos haven't aged well and Charlotte sounds no more mature than she did on the single. Nonetheless, the solo numbers work better than the ones in which her father barges in to duet with her. 

Between the song and the film, Charlotte played another motherless character named Charlotte in Claude Miller's L'Effronte, aka The Impudent Girl. Thirteen-year-old Charlotte, who describes herself as homely, becomes entranced with a pretty blonde piano prodigy and ends up having a fling with a welder who is working on a project for the girl's manager in an attempt to get close to her. It sets the tone for the career to come as she'll often play women who aren't as pretty as they or other people would like them to be. 

Jane Birkin, who has described "Lemon Incest" as "perfectly beautiful," would go on to star in a 1988 film with Charlotte, Agnès Varda's Le Petit Amour, aka Kung-Fu Master!, in which she plays a 40-year-old single mother who falls in love with a 15-year-old boy. Varda's script sprung from an idea that Birkin brought to her. Charlotte and Lou Doillon, Jane's daughter with director Jacques Doillon, play her kids. 

Like Jonathan Glazer's Birth, it isn't a film about sex so much as the romantic feelings two age-inappropriate people can have for each other. Varda's approach is sympathetic and non-judgmental, but it's also deeply sad. It may be coincidental that Birkin would star in such a film, but the Birkin-Gainsbourg clan shared similar interests, and it's worth noting that Mathieu Demy, Varda's son with director Jacques Demy, plays the boy. As Birkin's Mary Jane tells Charlotte's Lucy, "Feelings are so important when you're 14, 15, 16." The implication is that the feelings of adult women aren't quite as important. 

Eighteen years later, Charlotte re-launched her music career with the album 5:55. As a singer, she hadn't changed much since 1984. Her vocals, much like her speaking voice, are so effervescent they practically melt into the instrumentation. She sings in English, although you can hardly tell. The lyrics, written by Pulp's Jarvis Cocker and the Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon, are hard to discern. Nigel Godrich, best known for his work with Radiohead, produced the album and Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin of Air served as composers. 

To her credit, Charlotte reintroduced herself as a musician with a charming, baroque-pop sound, though it comes across more as a collection of tasteful influences than a personal aesthetic. One of those influences, of course, was Serge Gainsbourg, maybe not lyrically or vocally, but certainly musically. "The Songs That We Sing" for instance, makes use of the same swirling melody as "Bonnie and Clyde," her father's famed duet with actress and one-time lover Brigitte Bardot. 

The next year, in 2007, Charlotte suffered a brain injury as the result of a waterskiing accident. Two years later, she issued IRM, a collaboration with Beck, who had sampled her father's "Melody Nelson" for the song "Paper Tiger" off his 2002 album Sea Change. On it, she emerges as a more confident musician who has learned to speak up in all senses of the term. Instead of whispering, she's developed a Marc Bolan-like croon that suits Beck's glam-rock backing. 

Though she recovered from her near-fatal injury, the precarious feeling of suspension between life and death stayed with her. The title is the French initialism for MRI, the scanning device with which she became obsessed. On the title track, she circles Matmos territory as she integrates its beeps into the rhythm track. It's still a collaborative effort more than a true solo work, since she only co-wrote one song, but more of her unique personality comes through.

Charlotte's acting career, meanwhile, would continue to encompass a wide variety of films, many non-confrontational in nature, but she would court controversy again with roles in Danish director Lars von Trier's Antichrist in 2009 and the two-part Nymphomaniac in 2013 (between the two, she also appeared in von Trier's less sexually-explicit Melancholia). Not counting her uncle Andrew Birkin's male-gazey 1993 adaptation of Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden, in which she plays one half of an incestuous brother-sister duo, these films would come closest to inspiring the kind of uproar that "Lemon Incest" once did. 

In Nymphomaniac, for instance, she plays a woman who claims to have become addicted to sex at the age of two, although she doesn't lose her virginity until years later. For all of the gynecological nudity, the film isn't explicitly judgmental. If anything, von Trier feels for Joe who is consumed by guilt for the harm her single-minded focus has caused. It's to an older man, Stellan Skarsgård’s professorial Seligman, that she tells her story. He believes she's too hard on herself, and since he claims to be asexual, the director eliminates the possibility of sexual tension. In true von Trier fashion, however, he takes all of the good will generated by that dynamic and throws it away in the film's final moments. Once again, a good man reveals himself as bad, although in this case, the woman emerges triumphant in best Freudian fashion. 

Off screen, Charlotte suffered the most crushing loss since the death of her father in 1991 when her half-sister, 46-year-old photographer Kate Barry, the daughter of Jane Birkin and composer John Barry, died as the result of a fall from her fourth-floor window that same year. Barry had struggled with drug and alcohol addiction since she was a teenager, and the fall was believed to be intentional, though Charlotte has expressed her doubts about those claims. The loss spurred a move from her native Paris to New York City with her partner, writer-director Yvan Attal, and their three children the following year. In the aftermath, she would begin work on the album Rest, which includes songs about both Serge and Kate. 

Although it isn't surprising that the daughter of a male musician would work with so many men, the lack of women in her discography is disappointing. Instead of working with women, however, she did something even more significant: Charlotte wrote every song on Rest, her first to include French lyrics, something she had previously avoided specifically to distinguish her work from her father's. In French, the word reste with an "e" means "stay," lending the title a double meaning. 

And this is the point, at the age of 46, that she truly becomes the author of her own narrative, though the album still features notable male guest stars, including Paul McCartney and Daft Punk's Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. She also directed the striking, B&W video for "Deadly Valentine," which features Dev Hynes of Blood Orange. 

But there's more to it than that. Just as her father introduced her to the world through a duet, she would introduce her youngest daughter to the world in a similar way. You'd think she'd have learned her lesson, but the context is entirely different as Jo, now eight years old, simply sings her ABC's over the hidden track at the end of Rest. And that's the extent of it: a kid being a kid. Something Charlotte never really got the chance to do, at least not in any kind of conventional sense. 

If she's never disavowed "Lemon Incest," to the extent that she still performs it in concert, she appears to have done everything within her power since the recording of the song to make sure that it won't be the thing for which she's best remembered. I'd like to end with Charlotte performing "Lemon Incest" in Arles, France in 2018. She turned 47 that year; she turned 49 this year. She appears relaxed, confident, and in control. In this case, she sings her father's part while synth player Paul Prier sings the part she sang as a child. It’s her song now.

Images from Wikipedia (2009's IRM and 2017's Rest, both Because Music), Amazon (1988's Le Petite Amour, Prism Entertainment home video), and Discogs (1985's "Lemon Incest" 7-inch and CD single, 1986's Charlotte For Ever full-length album, and 1986's "Charlotte Forever" 7-inch, all Philips).  

Thirty-Six Years after Its Debut: Sixteen Candles Is Still Tender and (Mostly) True

SIXTEEN CANDLES 

(John Hughes, US, 1984, 4K restoration, 92 mins) 

"They fucking forgot my birthday."

--Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald)

I was still in my teens when John Hughes' directorial debut made its first appearance. I was in college, not high school, but the film wasn't specifically directed at teenagers. It was about them, but unlike those teen films where the adults natter away nonsensically like characters from out of a Charlie Brown animated special, the adults were fully realized individuals. Nonetheless, the film wasn't especially interested in them. It was all about the teens.

For the Chicago-based Hughes, a veteran of National Lampoon and Second City, movies about adults would come later. Some would do well both critically and commercially; some would not, but they never held much interest for me. Not films about adults per se, but Hughes' films about adults, like She's Having a Baby and Planes, Trains and Automobiles (and I feel the same way about his family films, like the Home Alone series). His films about teens are not without imperfections, and some aspects haven't aged well, but he put his heart into the teen trio he made with Molly Ringwald, which began with Sixteen Candles and ended with Pretty in Pink. 

It's interesting, in retrospect, that Hughes chose a young woman to represent his thoughts about the terrors and triumphs of adolescence, but it's unlikely the films would've worked as well with male protagonists. Ringwald's Samantha Baker, in Sixteen Candles, isn't an everykid; she's very specifically female. She isn't the most popular girl at her suburban high school, but nor is she the least popular. She isn't a nerd, she isn't friendless, and she isn't unattractive, but nor is she attractive in the conventional cheerleader way. She's taller and her hair is shorter, but she's every bit as fashionable as Cher Horowitz in Clueless, albeit in a quieter, less expensive manner. In other words, she carries herself with confidence, and boys notice her--just not the one boy whose attentions she would most like to attract.

The joke, as it were, is on her. In a strictly visual--as opposed to a narrative--sense, Hughes doesn't depict Sam's auspicious 16th birthday from her point of view. Consequently, we see Jake Ryan (former model Michael Schoeffling) noticing her long before she does. She's a sophomore, and she doubts that such a handsome, popular senior would notice someone like her--especially since he has a pretty, prom queen girlfriend--but this isn't the kind of movie where he realizes at the last minute that the girl of his dreams has been right there all the time. No, he picks up a sex quiz meant for Sam's friend in which she confesses a fantasy that she's saving herself for him, and he sees her clearly for the first time. 

If she carries herself with confidence, it doesn't mean she's confident. In that sense, I suppose she is an everykid or an every-person, because it's a pretty relatable state of affairs. She even describes herself as "utterly forgettable." She isn't, of course, though Jake may never have noticed her if it wasn't for the quiz. His character is purposefully underwritten; Hughes always, always privileges Sam's hopes and fears. And she's already feeling vulnerable, because her family has forgotten her birthday while preparing for her older sister's wedding. Both sets of grandparents are in town, and so she ends up sleeping on the living room sofa. Though her house looks like a mansion from the outside, there simply aren't enough rooms for two parents, three siblings, two older couples, and a foreign exchange student. 

Jake, on the other hand, lives in a literal mansion. Hughes never once suggests that Sam likes him because he's rich, and he turns out to be something other than a snob, but in our more economically-divided era, it's a detail that's impossible to miss, not least because of Jake's red Porsche, expensive haircut, and Ralph Lauren sweater vests. His father also has a Rolls Royce and a wine cellar…which gets destroyed during a raucous party. 

If Sam and Jake got together after the quiz interception, there would be no movie, so Hughes throws every conceivable obstacle in their way. That's where the humor comes in, because Jake is a straight man in every sense of the word, but Sixteen Candles is a genuinely funny film with plenty of throwaway gags that betray Hughes' Lampoon origins, some involving up-and-coming Chicago kids John and Joan Cusack. It's also where the problems arise, but more on that later. The marketing around the film included an image of Sam and Jake sitting on either side of a birthday cake, so no one watching it could possibly have been in any doubt as to where things would end up: Sam would get the guy and the birthday recognition that had eluded her the entire time. 

Before she arrives at that fairy tale ending, she has to resist the advances of persistent gnat Ted Farmer (Anthony Michael Hall, with whom Ringwald would reunite in The Breakfast Club). It's to Hall's credit, through a combination of crack timing and uninhibited physicality, that Ted is more of a harmless goof than a serious harasser, because he doesn't understand that when a girl says she isn't interested, it's best to leave well enough alone. In Hughes' optimistic worldview, Sam and Ted can be friends once they've come to an understanding, not least when he "bags a babe" of his own. That he ends up with the least likely romantic partner signifies the triumph of this particular nerd. In the process, though Hughes risks portraying Ted as the kind of guy who will only grow more boorish and entitled with time.  

Sam's self-obsessed sister, Ginny (Blanche Baker, Carroll Baker's daughter), who is accustomed to attracting the kind of male attention she craves, represents another obstacle to her happiness, and the distinction between the two only grows throughout the film. In Hughes' eyes, Sam, the sister with character, deserves a fulfilling romantic partnership, while Ginny's marriage to obnoxious "bohunk" Rudy (John Kapelos, another Second City alum) seems unlikely to end well. Though the wedding sequence in which Ginny arrives stoned out of her mind on muscle relaxants is meant to play as comedy, there's a sense that Hughes feels these buffoonish characters are beneath him. They're designed to make the audience laugh--and to make Sam and Jake seem sane and sensible in comparison--and that's about it. Maybe that isn't the worst thing in the world, but he doesn't extend the same courtesy to them to redeem themselves that he does to Ted. 

As for Long Duk Dong, it's possible that in 1984, Hughes felt he was being magnanimous by giving the film's sole Asian character a love interest of his own, but the relationship is also played primarily for laughs. In this case, he set the actors, Gedde Watanabe and Deborah Pollack, free to give in to their wackiest impulses. That's how they remember it, at any rate, in the joint interview included with the new Blu-ray. Pollack adds that she often stood on an apple box so that she would appear taller than her screen partner. Though Watanabe has taken numerous hits over the years for playing a character perceived as racially insensitive, he emphasizes how much fun he had making the movie, and it's still the role for which he's best known. If anyone should take a hit, it should be Hughes.

Then there's Jake's girlfriend, Caroline (Haviland Morris), another unfortunate stereotype, less for the way the actress plays her, than for the way the film treats her as a sparkly bauble to be passed from one man to another. Even nice-guy Jake jokes, "I could violate her ten different ways if I wanted to" after she passes out at his party. Like I said, he isn't exactly a comedian, but we're supposed to find her story arc amusing, since Hughes presents her as a shallow striver who gets her comeuppance only to find an unexpected happy ending--a development he would turn inside out for Weird Science in which two Frankenstein-like nerds (including Anthony Michael Hall) build their own Bride--but it mostly plays as misogynist.  

The Blu-ray's other special features include interviews with Kapelos, casting director Jackie Burch, actor-turned-director Adam Rifkin ("New Wave Nerd"), camera operator Gary Kibbe (standing in for the late Bobby Byrne), and composer Ira Newborn. There's also a video essay from Soraya Roberts, who has more critical than complimentary things to say about the film, and a 2008 featurette featuring Hall, Morris, Paul Dooley, Justin Henry, screenwriter Diablo Cody (Juno), and director Michael Lehman (Heathers). The absence of Ringwald from any of these extras is a real shame. She has spoken eloquently in The New Yorker and in other forums about her work with Hughes, specifically The Breakfast Club, but her voice is missing here. 

Some of the actors in the film, like Schoeffling and Watanabe, were in their 20s when they starred in Hughes' first feature, but Ringwald was a real-deal teenager. Her cast mates remember details about her, like the fact that her father was a talented pianist or that she was often listening to Kate Bush at the time. It left me wanting to hear more about who she was in relation to Samantha Baker, a character Hughes wrote specifically for her, and who she became because of--and perhaps even in spite of--this deceptively self-confident, romantically insecure, ultimately timeless teenage heroine.

 

The Special Edition version of Sixteen Candles is out now on Arrow Video.  

My Analyst Told Me That I Was Right Out of My Head: On Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor

POSSESSOR

(Brandon Cronenberg, UK/Canada, 2020, 103 mins)

Possessor begins as a woman named Holly (Gabrielle Graham) pokes a needle into the top of her skull. She smiles at first, and then tears begin to flow as the substance she has injected works its way into her system. The way Brandon Cronenberg moves in to capture the blood oozing from the wound confirms that he's David Cronenberg's son. If anything, the entirety of Antiviral, his directorial debut, did the same, and yet it doesn't feel as if he's copying his father so much as continuing his obsession with the body and its (mal)-

functions, particularly when it comes into contact with man-made entities. 

In the next scene, Holly has changed her hairstyle from cornrows to a sleek, asymmetrical bob. She proceeds to enter an elevator with several other attractive young hostesses all clad in sky blue and white track suits. She then exits the elevator, walks up a set of gilded stairs, enters a banquet hall, strides to the bar, and plunges a knife, over and over again, into the ample belly of a middle-aged businessman. The result is a disgusting, bloody mess. Not to give too much away, but she doesn't make it out of the hall alive.

Cronenberg then shifts to pale, blonde Tasya "Taz" Vos (Andrea Riseborough looking almost nothing like her brunette Mandy character), "the star performer," as handler Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh, star of David Cronenberg's eXistenZ) describes her, of a Minority Report-like assassination-for-hire organization. Taz was controlling Holly's consciousness when the hostess killed a man in cold blood. 

After her exit interview, she returns to her husband (Rossif Sutherland, Donald Sutherland's son) and child (Gage Graham-Arbuthnot). On the news, she catches a report about the murder, but doesn't say a word. Husband and son have no idea they live with an assassin. But they do know that the increasingly preoccupied Taz has been slipping away from them.

At their next meeting, Girder fills Taz in on Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott, born to play a patsy-turned-psycho), her next method-acting assignment. Taz studies up on him, figures out what makes him tick, and then takes control of his brain. Cronenberg depicts this Star Trek-meets-Freaky Friday process by way of nifty, in-camera effects (among his many credits, cinema-

tographer Karim Hussain has shot episodes of Hannibal). When Colin wakes up the next day, he looks the same, but he's actually Taz (her body remains in the research institute). He tries to act as if nothing has changed, but his fiancé, Ava (Tuppence Middleton), notes, "You're acting strange today." 

Colin goes off to work at his spectacularly dull job as part of a surveillance unit in a data-mining firm overseen by Ava's CEO father, John Parse (Sean Bean at his Beaniest). As at home, he tries to act like the old Colin, but something isn't quite right. His mind keeps short-circuiting. He's Colin one minute and Taz the next. No one can see what's going on, but he can feel it--and we can see it (this is where the melty-face imagery from the poster comes in). The malfunction follows him home where he and Ava prepare to attend a party at her father's mansion. Colin's target: her disapproving dad. 

All the while, the voice in his ear tells him what to do and how to do it, like a Mission Impossible operative. Once again, a disgusting bloody mess ensues. Then the short-circuiting kicks in again. After Colin takes care of business, Taz attempts to return to her body. It didn't work the way it was supposed to with Holly, and it doesn't work the way it's supposed to with Colin either. Fate took Holly out of the picture, but Taz remains stuck in Colin's body. The longer it goes on, the more harm he could cause, and the more likely she is to suffer permanent brain damage. 

In the end, Possessor is a slasher film in the guise of sci-fi horror. As with John Woo's Face/Off, Cronenberg depicts technology that doesn't yet exist, and possibly never will, but when you look past the genre trappings, he's essentially depicting schizophrenia. There's a point at which Colin argues with Taz, and suddenly, the scenario seems less fantastical than before. That's life for some people. The impossibility of two separate individuals sharing one brain only leads to more bloodshed than Taz had intended. Let's just say Colin takes his murderous assignment and runs with it.

For the most part, the actors make the unbelievable believable. As written, Taz is a little opaque, but Colin make up for it with the force of his anger. When Taz takes control of his brain to force him to kill, she taps into resentment that was already there, which is possibly why he doesn't just aim to kill, but to torture and maim along the way. Colin represents an extension of Abbott's work in James White and It Comes at Night where decency and danger commingle, and it isn't always possible to predict which side of his persona will win out in the end. The tragedy of Possessor is that Colin never fully becomes Taz. He knows what he's doing, but he doesn't know how to stop it. She doesn't either. But Brandon Cronenberg does.  

Possessor opens in theaters and drive-ins on Friday. Digital and VOD TBA.