Mirror sex

on Alan Hollinghurst's "The Folding Star"

Early on in Alan Hollinghurst’s 1994 novel, The Folding Star, Englishman Edward Manners picks up Moroccan Cherif—“but born in Paris and uncircumcised,” Edward notes—and brings him back to the Flemish boardinghouse where he’s staying. Their first sexual encounter begins with some shyness. With Cherif seated on his lap, Edward is glad his lover can’t see him “gaping and heavy-hearted with praise” for the young man so newly cruised. But when Edward looks around Cherif’s shoulder, both men appear in the full-length mirror against the wall.

Our eyes met there, but [Cherif] was a little bothered by that intimacy. Then, as I was climbing to the end, he got right off me and stood on the floor. I scrambled up too, confused for a moment by my own reflection in the glass, as if without my specs the image needed to be blinked back into focus, or as if a sixth sense revealed a face within my face, ghostly features caught in the very silvering of the mirror. Cherif took a half-step forward, and fell against the glass with flattened palms. A sequence of sounds emerged from it, or from a distance beyond it; and then for a couple of seconds we saw ourselves dematerialise and a perspective open up within — a shuttered room with stacks of chairs, lit from the side by an opening and closing door. Cherif was sighing and laughing quietly, and sat down again on the bed while I pulled on my trousers, hopping and treading on the legs.

I’m taken with this scene, with the way Hollinghurst vacillates between sex and real life, discomfort and pleasure, the uncanny and the evident; between one man and another, strangers who call each other “friend.” Feeling both romanced and creeped out, I read this final graf several times over, certain I’d overlooked the turn of phrase or crucial conjunction that would unlock the specific sensation that Hollinghurst intended for me to experience. But no matter how many times I returned, that sensation evaded me. Why couldn’t I land it? What was I missing?

I’ve never liked mirror sex. Like Cherif, I’m put off by the looking glass’s capacity to double (quadruple?) intimacy. I don’t find my own face and body erotic, either, though I’m charmed by those who do. But willing as I am to indulge them, I see something sinister in this mirror sex business: it induces not just familiarity, but performativity, too, in the sense of reinscription, self-discipline, and doing as being. Now me, I get my rocks off different. To each their own, I suppose.

Unlike the ambiguous scene between Edward and Cherif, cinema’s mirror sex correlates so strongly with dirty, kinky, non-domicile fucking that this very short list of movies featuring it (taken from an informal Twitter poll I ran this morning) is uniformly horny and violent: Black Swan, American Psycho, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Eyes Wide Shut, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Show Girls, Basic Instinct¹. In this context, the mirror, particularly when located in an unusual place (anchored to the ceiling, amplifying a hotel or VIP room, walling a carnival funhouse), communicates cheapness, degradation, and transactionality. With its medieval trick of the light, it creates space surrounding and beyond the marriage bed, putting those inside at risk of contamination, infiltration, corruption. Even if you’re able to otherwise maintain the normalness of your sex in the presence of the mirror, its false multiplication perverts your pleasures. If there’s just two of you, you’ve created a group; if you’re alone, you become Narcissus.

It occurs to me that perhaps I’ve superimposed my distrust of mirror sex onto Hollinghurst’s novel, thwarting his intentions, if he had any when he wrote the above scene, with my own bias. Does this make me a bad reader? I don’t think so. But maybe it does suggest that I could stand to be a little more open-minded.

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1. Isn’t there one in In the Realm of the Senses? I can neither remember nor confirm.