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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".