Samuel Rutter on Michel Houllebecq as himself

The appearance of writers on the silver screen is nothing new – think of William S Burroughs in Drugstore Cowboy or Maya Angelou who both wrote Janet Jackson’s poetic lines and played a minor character in John Singleton’s 1993 ‘hit’ Poetic Justice. At best these writers appear as a more or less romanticised version of themselves, with a few zinging one-liners, and at worst they have a non-speaking cameo in the film adaptation of their bestselling novel.

Screening at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival, The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq is an altogether different proposition. Starring the author as himself, the film purports to account for a week in 2011 when Houellebecq, supposed to be touring his novel The Map and the Territory in the Netherlands, dropped off the face of the earth entirely. While the brief disappearance of a literary novelist might not seem like much, in France it engendered a veritable media circus, with one sensationalist tabloid linking his disappearance to al-Qaeda. Director Guillaume Nicloux presents a scenario in which three hoods kidnap Houellebecq from his Paris apartment and take him to a house in the country where they proceed to ply him with cigarettes and red wine, discussing poetry, body building and mixed martial arts while they await the ransom money.

There’s a deadpan, cinéma-vérité feel to the movie reminiscent of other contemporary classics of French black comedy such as JCVD and Man Bites Dog, where there isn’t much of a plot but a lot of banter between the actors who have been cast to perfection. The trio of kidnappers are a former body builder, a martial arts fighter and a mercenary who all use their real names in the film and seem to add credibility as semi-professional actors. The star, of course, is Houellebecq himself.

For those unacquainted with the author, he is widely considered the greatest living French novelist at the same time as being one of the most reprehensible human beings in pubic life. Beginning his career by publishing poetry and a well-received study on HP Lovecraft, his first novel, Whatever, was published in 1994 and followed by Atomised in 1998 and Platform in 2001. True celebrity status arrived with The Possibility of an Island in 2005 and his literary consecration was confirmed in 2010 when he was awarded France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, for his novel The Map and the Territory. Other projects have included the publishing of his correspondence with philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy and his self-directed cinematic adaptation of The Possibility of an Island, which was roundly deemed ‘a stinker’ by critics at its debut at the Locarno International Film Festival.

Of the many charges levelled against him (and this only from what has been published in his novels) the most serious are that of deep-seated misogyny and racism – his work features graphic sexual encounters often springing from a very questionable gender dynamic in addition to a fairly rotund dismissal of the idea of a multicultural Europe. His defenders prefer to consider him not a misogynist but a misanthropist who hates men just as much as women (he once declared that most men are nothing more than ‘wriggling dicks’) and point to the philosophical engagement in his work that is sometimes clouded by the public scandal of his commentary.

And scandal has been a part of Houellebecq’s public persona for as long as he’s been a public figure. Rarely seen sober in public, he’s been known to hit on female journalists, fail to appear for interviews or conferences and, in general, neglect to ‘play the game’ the media seems to require of an author who while always literary, can also be considered a legitimate bestseller. The biggest blow-up occurred when a journalist from French magazine Lire spent an entire day in a bar with the author and left his tape recorder running. The line that made the front-page, and apparently there could have been many, was ‘la religion la plus con, c’est quand même l’islam’ that in rough translation gives the idea that Islam is the dumbest religion of them all. While the author met the public outcry with indifference, a phone call from the prime minister’s office eventually saw him laying low while the storm passed.

As a public figure Houellebecq is interesting precisely because of the gulf between his projected air of nihilistic indifference and his carefully curated media presence. He seems to have combined free-market capitalism, twenty-first century celebrity and a Balzacian concept of the novelist as social chronicler in a melange that has resulted in what can only be described as a very strong ‘personal brand’. He’s notorious for wearing a disgusting green parka year-round, toting plastic shopping bags and constantly smoking cigarettes, holding them weakly between his pinkie and ring finger. His drooping, eczema-speckled face adorns the covers of his books and his unconditional love for his pet corgi is almost mythical.

This received idea of who Houellebecq is and what he stands for is essentially what drives the film The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq. In early scenes the author apathetically signs autographs when he is recognised in the street and is seen drinking wine and smoking cigarettes in what is clearly the early morning in his Paris apartment. But it also seems that some of his more controversial traits are redressed in the film: an early dialogue between Houellebecq and a French–African woman insinuates that the latter does much more than simply ‘buy his groceries’, and after his kidnapping, the author forms a romantic attachment to a prostitute pointedly named Fatima, portrayed by a young French actress of Maghreb heritage. This is not a PR exercise, however – Houellebecq insults one of the kidnappers for being a gypsy and openly mocks the others when they try to engage him on a discussion of the literary merit of JRR Tolkien. Houellebecq-as-Houellebecq’s response when confronted by these three is telling: ‘I never said I was tolerant.’

Where does this performance sit in Houellebecq’s body of work? It seems in some ways to be a departure from his writing self. His literature has always been autobiographical, and his depressive obsession with death, which in The Possibility of an Island seemed to point inevitably towards suicide, was rather ingeniously dealt with in The Map and the Territory. His latest collection of poetry, Configuration du dernier rivage, is an as-yet untranslated work that again deals with death – with the transition towards ‘the final shore’. In the film, however, the role of Houellebecq as celebrity seems to trump that of Houellebecq as author.

It’s possible that his work might be part of a seemingly broader trend where male writers in particular seem to refract and complicate their depictions of self in fiction and their public life – recent examples could include Roberto Bolaño, JM Coetzee, Karl Ove Knausgaard or even Gerald Murnane. In an age of internet celebrity, Houellebecq appears to realise that autobiography or fiction by themselves aren’t enough – there has to be some kind of public performance of the artist. It might just be that Houellebecq’s greatest work of fiction is Michel Houellebecq himself.


Samuel Rutter is a writer and translator from Melbourne. He edits the journal Higher Arc, and is currently working on his PhD in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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Cover image for The Map and the Territory

The Map and the Territory

Michel Houellebecq

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