Bataille’s Tragedy

By Lucas Marques

A scene from the film Pillion

There are films that confront us with the uncomfortable truth that love is often a negotiation of forbidden territories. Director Harry Lighton’s Pillion operates within this twilight zone. By narrating the relationship between Colin (Harry Melling), a submissive man, and Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), his dominant figure, the work transcends sexual orientation to reach an ontological discussion: the quest for the annihilation of the self through the other.

The film functions as an intervention that assaults the viewer’s sanitized morality, forcing us to face fetish not as a deviation, but as a language of absolute surrender. For philosopher Georges Bataille, eroticism is the "approbation of life up to the point of death." Colin, in accepting submission, seeks what the philosopher would call transgression: the breaking of the barriers of individuality to reach a state of continuity with his partner.

A scene from the film Pillion

However, the conflict arises when the "purity" of submission is contaminated by romantic affection. When Colin begins to want "something more," he breaks the contract of the fetish, which demands depersonalization. Ray’s disappearance—upon realizing that the "object" of his desire has become a "subject" who loves him—is the apex of Bataillien tragedy: the loss of the sovereignty of desire in the face of the vulnerability of love.

A scene from the film Pillion

The film introduces a third, castrating element: the mother’s gaze. It is through the imposition of maternal judgment that Colin’s desire enters a crisis. In psychoanalysis, the mother is the first mirror of the norm; when she labels her son’s pleasure as something unacceptable, she plants the seed of dissatisfaction. The protagonist does not seek "something more" out of an organic need, but as an attempt to validate his desire before the Social Law. This maternal gaze echoes the judgment of the public, which classifies the relationship as pathological. Lighton films this social pressure as a suffocating atmosphere where private pleasure is constantly violated by public perception.

A scene from the film Pillion

Pillion is a work about isolation. The title, referring to a passenger seat on a motorcycle, is the perfect metaphor: being together, following the same path, but always remaining behind, surrendered to the control of the one who leads. The film’s pain lies in the realization that the moment we attempt to humanize fetish with conventional love, the spell is broken. Harry Lighton delivers a dense, melancholic piece of cinema that reminds us that the freedom of desire carries a price not every heart is willing to pay: the total abandonment of the self.