Joe (Nymphomaniac)

Joe is a self-diagnosed nymphomaniac.

Volume I
She beaten up and lying in the alleyway behind his apartment. He takes her back to his home and, over tea, listens intently as Joe recounts the eventful story of her libidinous life. Seligman, a highly-educated but cloistered man, connects and analyzes Joe's stories with what he has read about.

Joe opens her story by talking about her precocious sexual fascination during her early childhood. Her father (Christian Slater) is a tree-loving doctor whom she adores while her mother (Connie Nielsen) is, as Joe describes her, "a cold bitch". In adolescence (Stacy Martin), she loses her virginity to an arbitrary young man named Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf). This first encounter, which ends with Jerôme casually leaving her to fix his moped, leaves her disappointed, while Seligman observes that the combination of the number of times Jerôme penetrated her, three times vaginally and five times anally, resembles the Fibonacci sequence.

Several years later, Joe engages in a contest with her friend B (Sophie Kennedy Clark) during a train journey; whichever of the two women has sex with the most passengers by the train's arrival at the station wins a bag of chocolate sweets. After having sex in the toilet with several of the men she comes across, Joe wins by performing a blow job on a passenger in a first class car, S (Jens Albinus). S is a married man who resists both her and B's advances, but ultimately Joe forces herself on him. Joe tells Seligman her encounter with S is the first of many terrible things she's done, but he waves off her accusation.

Joe talks about her first experiences with actual love, something she dismisses as "lust with jealousy added." Joe takes on more lovers as she, B, and several friends create a club, "The Little Flock", dedicated to liberating themselves from society's fixation on love. Joe eventually leaves after all the other members end up developing serious attachments to their conquests. As a young adult, Joe drops out of medical school and finds work as a secretary at a printing company. Her first employer is none other than Jerôme. While sexual intentions are clearly on his mind, she finds herself avoiding his advances and sleeping with other co-workers, frustrating him. When Joe finally realizes she has developed feelings for Jerôme, she writes him a letter. However, she is too late as he has left along with his uncle's jealous secretary Liz (Felicity Gilbert), who was fully aware of Joe's feelings. She is immediately fired by his uncle (Jesper Christensen), the actual owner of the company, for her lack of experience and goes back to indulging her nymphomania, despite a yearning for Jerôme.

Joe inadvertently causes conflict that makes him leave his wife for her. The distressed Mrs. H (Uma Thurman) arrives and demonizes both of them in front of her children, though Joe states in the present that this barely affected her. The situation then becomes more awkward as Joe's next lover, A (Cyron Melville), arrives at the house and finds himself in the middle of Mrs. H's mental breakdown. The family finally leaves, but not before Mrs. H verbally lacerates Joe, slaps her now ex-husband and leaves the apartment wailing.

Joe of the last time she saw her father. She is the only one to visit him in the hospital as he dies of cancer. Joe’s father asks her not to slander her mother, who is afraid of hospitals, for not being by his side, explaining they said their goodbyes. Joe is a firsthand witness as her father deteriorates into fits of violent spasms, paranoid delusions and screams for his wife. To take her mind off her father’s suffering, Joe has sexual intercourse with several people at the hospital. When he finally dies, Joe becomes sexually aroused, with a drop of vaginal fluid running down her thigh as she stands in front of the body, and becomes numb with depression.

Volume II
Joe becomes annoyed with Seligman, accusing him of overlooking the severity of her lost sexuality to focus on the allegorical before realizing he can't relate to her stories. He goes on to confirm his asexuality and virginity, but assures her his lack of bias and "innocence" makes him the best man to listen to her story. She becomes inspired to tell him another portion of her life after noticing a Rublev-styled icon of the Virgin Mary and a discussion about the differences between the Eastern Church ("the church of happiness") and the Western Church ("the church of suffering").

Joe reminisces about a field trip as a young girl that suggests she had a vision of Valeria Messalina and the Whore of Babylon looking over her as she levitates and spontaneously has her first orgasm, which shocks Seligman as he explains her orgasm is a mockery of the Transfiguration of Jesus on the Mount. Returning to where she left off in "The Little Organ School", Joe falls into a crisis upon losing her ability to achieve sexual pleasure, though she does find a different sort of pleasure in her time with Jerôme. When the two conceive a baby together, Marcel, Jerôme struggles to keep up with her sexual needs and allows her to see other men. This is shown to be detrimental later, however, as he becomes jealous of her endeavors.

Several years later to no success, Joe's sexual endeavors become increasingly adventurous by engaging in a tryst with a pair of African brothers, that turns into a botched threesome; the frustration to reclaim her orgasm culminates in visits to K (Jamie Bell), a sadist who violently assaults women seeking his company. The more she visits him, the more neglectful she becomes in her domestic duties. On Christmas, after stopping an unattended Marcel who has wandered out an opened door onto a snowy balcony from coming into any harm, Jerôme forces her to choose between the family and K. She picks the latter and, after receiving an especially brutal beating from K with a cat o' nine tails that allows her to climax again, takes a path of loneliness away from her one and only possibility of a normal life. Marcel is sent to live in a foster home because Jerôme has no room in his life for him.

Joe concludes the story, to keep it from ending on an unhappy note, with the first time K introduced her to "the Silent Duck", which leaves Seligman surprised and impressed at K's talents.

Joe jumps ahead in time. Several years later, Joe has regained pleasure, but her genitalia are left with some irreversible damage due to a lifetime of sexual activity mixed with K's brutality. Her habits are known around her new office, prompting the boss to demand she attend sex addiction therapy under the threat of losing her current and any future jobs she takes.

When asked why she refused to attend therapy, Joe talks about becoming pregnant after leaving Jerôme and Marcel. Joe forcibly asks her doctor to abort the 11-week pregnancy immediately, but he insists she speak to a counselor first. The visit to the psychologist (Caroline Goodall) ends disastrously due to Joe's attitude towards the situation. She decides to take matters into her own hands and perform the abortion on herself. Using the knowledge she had retained from medical school, Joe aborts the fetus with the use of several household implements and a wire hanger. Back in the present, Joe and Seligman get into a very heated argument regarding Joe's actions, abortion rights in general and Seligman's potential hypocrisy in supporting them while wanting to know nothing about how the actual procedure is performed. This scene can be seen only on the Director's Cut edition.

Joe reluctantly attends the meetings and, after ridding her apartment of almost everything in it, attempts sobriety. During one meeting three weeks later, she sees a reflection of her younger self in the mirror, harshly insults every member of the group, including the therapist, and proclaims pride in her sexuality before walking out.

Joe tells Seligman she isn't sure where to conclude her story as she's used every item from around his room to help inspire each "chapter". After a suggestion from him, she notices how the stain from a cup of tea she had earlier thrown in anger looks like a Walther PPK, the same kind of gun her favorite literary character James Bond uses, and knows exactly how and where to end her story.

Joe turns to organized crime and becomes a debt collector, utilizing her extensive knowledge of men, sex and sadomasochism. She reminisces about a memorable house call to a man (Jean-Marc Barr) who she initially finds sexually unreadable. She ties him to a chair, strips him and attempts to provoke him with every sexual scenario she can think of. Upon further interrogation, Joe gleans that he is a deeply closeted pedophile. She takes pity on him and fellates him. Joe explains to Seligman how she feels deep compassion for people born with a forbidden sexuality. She strongly identifies with the man's loneliness and status as a sexual outcast, and applauds him for going through life without acting on his aberrant desires.

Joe's superior, L (Willem Dafoe), recommends that she grooms an apprentice and suggests P (Mia Goth), the 15-year-old daughter of criminals. Joe is initially repulsed by the idea, but ends up sympathizing with the girl in question. P is a vulnerable, lonely, emotionally damaged young girl who quickly latches herself onto Joe. The two of them click and form a special connection. Joe opens her heart to P and eventually invites her to move into her home. Over time, Joe and P's relationship develops a sexual dimension, leading to romance. As P seems to mature, Joe hesitantly decides to teach her young female lover the ropes of her trade.

During one round of debt collection, Joe notices that they are at a house belonging to Jerôme (now played by Michaël Pas) and, to make sure she is not seen, tells P to perform her first solo job. This proves to be a mistake as Joe eventually discovers P is having an affair with Jerôme. After finding her "soul tree" in a failed attempt to leave town, Joe waits for Jerôme and P in the alley between his home and her apartment and pulls a gun she confiscated from P earlier on him. When she pulls the trigger, she forgets to rack the pistol. Jerôme viciously beats Joe and then has sex with P right in front of her, thrusting into P in exactly the same way he once took her virginity. P urinates on her before leaving her as she was at the beginning of the film.

In the present, Seligman suggests how the circumstances of Joe's life might have been due to differences in gender representation; all of the stigma, guilt and shame she felt for her actions made her fight back aggressively "like a man", ultimately "forgetting" to rack the gun because her human worth wouldn't allow her to kill someone, even Jerôme. Joe, who has until this moment been playing devil's advocate to Seligman's assumptions, finally feels at peace, having unburdened her story. She says she is too tired to go on and asks to go to sleep.

As Joe begins to drift off, Seligman silently returns. He climbs into the bed with his pants off and attempts to rape her. Joe wakes up and, realizing what Seligman is doing, reaches for and racks the gun. Seligman protests and attempts to justify his behavior, but Joe shoots him, grabs her things, and flees the apartment.