Fluffy White Bathrobes
Pandora’s Box, Belle du Jour, and the seductive quality of hotels
The link made between hotels and sex follows popular thinking.‘Why is sex better in a hotel than anywhere else?’ asks the first article in my ‘sex and hotels’ Google search. Why indeed. In my online meanders I also find that ‘Sex and hotels’ is the title of an essay by English writer Geoff Dyer. From the fluffiness of white hotel bathrobes to the “horny” cleanliness of hotel rooms (that ultimately leads to their “filthiness”), Dyer describes hotels as “non-places”, in which guests are encouraged to act out their desires. What is it about hotels that activates the imagination, causing people to behave in ways which they would not elsewhere - particularly in relation to sex? For the purpose of this article, I explore hotels as they are referenced in popular culture, and analyse how the cultural representation of the hotel is, in turn, a representation of the workings of seduction.
Hotels were invented when people started to travel and needed somewhere to stay. Monasteries provided shelter to those passing through their inns. Commerce superseded Christian hospitality when trade routes opened up, bringing with them new reasons to travel and money to pay for a greater variety of experiences. Brothels targeted travellers in need of a pit stop for pleasure. I’m circling hospitality at large at this point, but I think this is useful to better understand the ‘hotel’ of today, where commerce and desire mingle with necessity. The hotel industry encompasses rooms, restaurants, spas (with their roots in Greek and Roman thermal baths), but also enables prostitution and gambling, and has done so for many years.
A room of lavish floor-to-ceiling mirrors, reflecting back only one’s own gaze, neatly replaces the otherwise judging eyes that can fall upon the guest acting out their fantasies.
Amoral activities benefit, naturally, from a hotel’s exclusivity and discretion. Dyer points out that when you check into a luxury hotel, you “surrender your identity”, by giving them your credit card or passport. This, he claims, gives you a semblance of “diplomatic immunity” from moral responsibility, a parallel universe where the gravity of established moral codes do not apply. Such a liberated atmosphere encourages you to do things from which you would normally refrain. This, combined with the hotel’s discretion, means that what happens in the hotel stays in the hotel. But what have you been freed from? Without immediately visible consequences for their actions, guests are freed from themselves. This liberation from the self is key to sexiness, giving you permission to explore being someone else in a world devoid of responsibility. A room of lavish floor-to-ceiling mirrors, reflecting back only one’s own gaze, neatly replaces the otherwise judging eyes that can fall upon the guest acting out their fantasies.
I would imagine this is why adultery in a hotel feels less naughty and inconsequential than being unfaithful at home when your spouse is on holiday. Home is full of to-do lists, marital memories and aspirations. Hotels, by contrast, are a white canvas, an empty bliss, with silky sheets and plush white towels. By enabling self-liberation in a new space, hotels create a sense of detachment from your ordinary existence, catalysing a separation between ordinary and aspirational self.
Hotels enact both disguise and reveal, in a way similar to masks. Face masks stir alter-egos by hiding identities. Someone once disclosed to me that he attended a dinner party with naked guests, and that this social dynamic worked well because everyone was masked. The important factor, apparently, is that the wearer feels as though they are incognito, even if they are stark naked. And with face being a person’s most identifiable feature, hiding it meant you could pretend being someone else. (Of course, this is laughable because a person has other identifiable features, like the sound of their voice. Could you imagine listening to the radio or a podcast and not being able to distinguish the presenter’s voice from his or her guests?)
[Severine] rarely speaks in the film, and when she does, it is quiet and measured. This makes her sexual fantasies, played out as they are for us to see, seem even louder and more shocking.
I imagine the famous find disguise particularly powerful. For example, the exclusive, invitation-only sex party in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (the location looks like someone’s private home, but it could just as well be a hotel). Or Casanova’s Venice Carnival. Being recognisable heightens the sexual equity of anonymity because it is a luxury little afforded to them. This might also be why hotel rooms are a prime catalyst for sex. They are foreign places filled with strangers.
Disguise also resolves a practical issue associated with adultery. If you are in a monogamous relationship, being found out could result in being dumped or divorced. In Luis Bunuel’s ‘Belle Du Jour’, Severine, the wife of a bourgeois doctor, fantasises about being dominated, whipped and humiliated by men, but rejects her husband’s advances until she has become a prostitute in a high-end brothel under a false name. And even then, would she dare utter her fantasies to him? Severine is presented as a well-to-do, bourgeois wife who holidays in chic ski resorts and dresses impeccably. She rarely speaks in the film, and when she does, it is quiet and measured. This makes her sexual fantasies, played out as they are for us to see, seem even louder and more shocking. As a juxtaposition of irrational images that show Severine’s unconscious desires next to her otherwise predictable day-to-day existence, Madame Anais’s brothel is a sort of sexual oasis for her where she can explore herself while remaining anonymous. Many would feel the same about hotels.
Of course, brothels outwardly sell sexual experiences, while hotels offer something ‘sexual’. Nevertheless, both represent a combination of public and private, being neither exactly. Both offer a paid-for service that satiates desires and untethers them from consequences, if temporarily. This could sound like a dream, but often ends in a nightmare. ‘Belle du Jour’ shows a woman living a double life built on deception. Her oasis is a mirage. The film ends with her husband in a wheelchair, paralysed and blind, having been shot by her jealous lover, a gangster she met at the brothel.
Did Henri unknowingly open a Pandora’s box by informing Severine of the brothel, or was Severine’s downfall inevitable because of her fantasies?
No place or disguise actually removes the consequences of one’s actions, even if they seem to. A Japanese visitor to the brothel brings a mysterious box with him that he opens with Belle de Jour. We can’t see what’s inside, but it’s a mise-en-abyme. A dream within a dream, or a nightmare within a nightmare. Like Pandora’s box, the curse begins when it is opened. A metaphor for the unconscious mind let loose, in the Freudian sense. The Eagles’ song ‘Hotel California’ has a couple of lines referring to this in relation to their metaphorical hotel, which I’ve always taken for Hollywood, the land of dreams:“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave”. The song also tells you to “bring your alibis” when you go to ‘Hotel California’. If an alibi is evidence to prove you were somewhere other than the scene of a crime, then this hotel perpetuates a double life of sin. In a similar vein, a friend of Severine and her husband’s, Henri Husson, discovers Belle de Jour at work. He was the one who told her about the brothel in the first place.
The bored bourgeois housewife who goes off-piste is a favourite topic in modern Western culture. ‘Lady Chatterley's Lover’, ‘Madame Bovary’, ‘Belle de Jour’, even ‘Desperate Housewives’ exemplify this. Did Henri unknowingly open a Pandora’s box by informing Severine of the brothel, or was Severine’s downfall inevitable because of her fantasies? Like Dyer’s hotel description, these places pretend to operate in a vacuum, offering something enormously appealing. But the stories covered here end very badly for those who transgress. Across cultural narratives, the hotel site operates as a stopping-point for reality, where fantasies are indulged only to be dismantled by real-life consequences after ‘checking out’. Seduction, like the physical space of the hotel, draws one aside and astray. And who doesn’t like being seduced!
Leonora Chance is a communications specialist working in the culture sector who also writes and curates. She has a BA in French from University College London and is based in London.