The pleasure principle: art, films and games that know how to indulge
An old self-indulgent sot lets it all hang out in The Drunken Silenus Supported By Satyrs, painted in the Antwerp studio of Peter Paul Rubens in about 1620. An abundance of naked, fatty flesh proves his unabashed passion for food, drink and pleasure as he reaches for some grapes and lets his great mass fall back into the arms of his friends. He is Silenus, the companion and tutor of the wine god Bacchus in ancient myth. The exuberant, buttery richness of this painting, perhaps designed by Rubens and painted by his student Anthony van Dyck, has a north-European festive atmosphere that makes the viewer think of Shakespeare’s Falstaff or a boozy Father Christmas. Come and join the wild parade. Jonathan Jones
* ** Film
No movie is more passionately – indeed, psychopathically – about indulgence than La Grande Bouffe, or Blow Out, set in Paris, from 1973. And no film could be more procedurally indulgent, or require more indulgence from its audience. Director and co-writer Marco Ferreri set out to create a satire of western prosperity, consumerism, male smugness and self-pity, and gave us a surreal happening, a crazy festival of despair, a cult classic of revulsion. Four well-to-do middle-aged men, played by Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret and Ugo Toganazzi, gather in a handsome townhouse for a spectacular feast to equal the last days of Rome, complete with fine wines and prostituées (these men did not say travailleuses du sexe). But they have one end in view: to eat themselves to death. Their indulgence goes beyond pleasure to pure horror and a yearning for self-annihilation. Peter Bradshaw
* * * Music
If you’re looking for songs that emanate sexual indulgence and romantic gluttony, there is no shortage of ditties in Britney Jean Spears’s impeccable pop arsenal that tap into the desire for an extravagantly good time. There is something about Gimme More, though – the dark gem of her 2007 album Blackout – that feels particularly cocksure, setting her trademark breathy vocal to slippery pole-dance EDM. “Cameras are flashin’ / While we’re dirty dancin’… They keep watching, keep watching / Feels like the crowd is saying / Gimme, gimme more”. From an artist who knows all too well the pressures of trying to deliver to insatiable public expectation, the slightly sinister double meaning only adds to the song’s feeling of urgency, seeking escape in the shadows of excess. Jenessa Williams
* * * Books
“What could violate social convention more than women coming together to indulge their hunger and take up space?” There’s more than one way to answer that question, but that doesn’t detract from the impact of Lara Williams’s smart debut novel, Supper Club. Nor from the fun of her descriptions of an all-female heavy dining society, who cram down calories, squeeze hunks of steak through their fingers, dance on the furniture, take their tops off, take MDMA, throw food, throw up – and then clean up and do it all again. Williams’s wit is as caustic as acid reflux, but she aids digestion with accompanying helpings of thoughtful compassion. This becomes a novel about the “bottomless, yearning hunger” of sadness, as well as about debauchery. It turns out there are some voids that just can’t be filled – even with heroic quantities of meat, drink and drugs. Sam Jordison
*** Games
A game such as World of Warcraft is built to indulge the player: here’s an unconquerably enormous power fan
tasy, stuffed with thousands of hours’ worth of entertainment for you to luxuriate in however you like. You can gorge yourself on a game like that. But a game such as Red Dead Redemption 2 is purpose-built to indulge its developers’ perfectionism. Rockstar’s dramatic, fastidious western is an exercise in excess, the product of untold hours of human labour and hundreds of millions of dollars, all in the service of creating the most believable digital world ever conceived. The insides of drawers, grime on guns and sweat on horses are all ridiculously, indulgently modelled, true to life where possible. And, although outlaw protagonist Arthur Morgan’s life is pretty rough and ready, when you draw a bath at an inn or order an era-appropriate, beautifully presented meal at the saloon, he gets the odd moment of indulgence, too.