Paradise Lost? Sex, Negativity and Toxic Symbiosis in Ulrich Seidl’s <i>Paradies: Liebe</i> and <i>Paradies: Glaube</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article leans on the dialogic exchange between Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman in Sex, or the Unbearable (2013) as a theoretical springboard for a reading of two of Ulrich Seidl’s Paradies trilogy films — Paradies: Liebe (2012) and Paradies: Glaube (2012) — to consider the role sex plays as a site of relationality in both. In connecting sex and the unbearable, Berlant and Edelman suggest that sex has both anchoring and disrupting properties. Bearing this duality in mind, I focus on the two middle-aged, female protagonists we encounter in the films, respectively a sex tourist and a sexually repressed Catholic proselytizer. I propose that through their experiences the films stage encounters with the unbearable. However, the unbearable is not connected to the depiction of sex per se; rather, it emerges from the various relational bonds between the protagonists. Advancing the notion of toxic symbiosis, I argue that relationality in Seidl’s films is ambiguous: it can be beneficial for the characters and yet it is also a sign of their exploitation. Relationality thus troubles the reproduction of a social order that is steeped in a normative understanding of (corporeal) relations as constructive, supportive and worthwhile. Sex in Seidl’s films is divorced from hegemonic meaning-making, underscoring resistance to totality, independence and control in scenes of relationality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".