Cinema, Pain and Pleasure

Consent and the Controlled Body

Steven Allen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349339891, 9780230319387
• eBook ISBN: 9781137306692
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

From Tattoo to Saw, this book considers mainstream cinema's representation of the viscerally dominated and marked body. Examining a shift in the late twentieth century to narratives that highlight subjection, endurance and willed-acquiescence, it probes the confluence of pain, pleasure and consent to analyse the implications of the change.

1

Situating the Controlled Body

As a primary area of debate in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, questions regarding the conceptualization and representation of the body have been foundational not only to gender studies but also to broader, cultural, social, historical and anthropological work. Many of the films discussed in the following chapters address these very discourses, and with the controlled body being such an amorphous topic, it is imperative to examine work in allied fields to film studies to thereby afford socio-cultural rather than psycho-symbolic meanings for the texts. Key to doing so is detaching sadomasochism from the pathologized terms of sadism and masochism and reconstituting all three via lived experiences. Masochistic pleasures, which may or may not be experienced as pain, can then be interpreted as part of a conglomeration of control and acquiescence involving domination, restraint and pain play.

As sadism and masochism are foundational to psychoanalytic film analysis and its prescribed pleasures of looking, it is likewise vital to note how film studies has used the language in its construction of a sexualized theory of spectatorship, and the problems this presents for considering masochistic pleasures of the body, especially when the male chooses subjection and domination. What I set out below is the matrix of connections and contradictions of how pleasurable pain and subjugation have been theorized by academics, represented directly and indirectly by cinema, and understood by their practitioners.

Understandings of masochism

A central tenet of my argument is to discuss the representations of sadism, masochism and ‘sadomasochism’ via interpretations of BDSM and other painful or perilous pursuits by those conversant with their pleasures, for I wish to move the debate from psychoanalytic theory to the attitudes and beliefs that inform these activities. As Weinberg and Falk state: ‘The influence of such writers as Krafft-Ebing … and Sigmund Freud … may have been to obscure the social aspects of this [BDSM] behavior by defining it solely in terms of individual pathology’ (1980, 149). Moreover, as various writers note (see Beckmann 2009, 10; Langdridge and Butt 2004, 36), BDSM is still classified in such a manner in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that is produced by the American Psychiatric Association (2000). Directly engaging with notions of pain and control, and foundational to considerations of painful pleasures, BDSM requires a thorough investigation, which takes place in the following chapter. However, the predominance of a specific mode of understanding what is usually called sadomasochism, alongside medicalized notions of sadism and masochism, makes it important to appreciate where my arguments originate, and how they differ from these conceptions.

The terms sadism and masochism date back to 1885 and the first publication of psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s book Psychopathia Sexualis. Setting sadism in opposition to masochism, Krafft-Ebing derives the former from the Marquis de Sade, whose stories linked cruelty and pain with sexual pleasure. According to Krafft-Ebing, sadism is an atavistic sexual perversion organized around ‘an innate desire to humiliate, hurt, wound or even destroy others in order thereby to create sexual pleasure in one’s self’ (1998, 53). However, ‘In the civilized man of to-day … associations between lust and cruelty are found, but in a weak and rather rudimentary degree’ (1998, 54). Further, Krafft-Ebing recognizes that in ‘normal’ sexual activity lovers will ‘wrestle together “just for fun,” indulge in all sorts of horseplay’, and ‘in sexual heat will strike, bite or pinch the other’ (1998, 53). From these impulses he traces the more extreme sadism.

Categorizing a regression to the sadistic impulse as originating in ‘psychical degeneration’ (1998, 54), Krafft-Ebing believes it corresponds to a natural division of aggression and submissiveness between men and women: ‘In the intercourse of the sexes, the active or aggressive rôle belongs to man; woman remains passive, defensive’ (1998, 56). With such reasoning, Krafft-Ebing declares, ‘Woman no doubt derives pleasure from her innate coyness and the final victory of man affords her intense and refined gratification’ (1998, 54).

Through his medicalized approach, Krafft-Ebing constructs a separation whereby sadism is linked to a natural male response of aggression, whilst masochism is divorced from ‘normal’ male sexuality. Simplistically, a male sadist is merely taking things too far, whilst a male masochist is eschewing the rules. Sigmund Freud sees sadism in similar terms. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, first published in 1910,¹ Freud states: ‘The sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness – a desire to subjugate’, and it is grounded in the biological need for ‘overcoming the resistance of the sexual object’ (1953, 71). Sadism, then, is only ‘an aggressive component of the sexual instinct which has become independent and exaggerated’ (1953, 71). However, both Freud and Krafft-Ebing had to contend with case studies that revealed large numbers of male masochists.

Krafft-Ebing defines masochism as being ‘controlled by the idea of being completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite sex; of being treated by this person as by a master, humiliated and abused’ (1998, 86). The word itself, like sadism, is derived from literature, being extrapolated from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch who ‘made this perversion … the substratum of his writings’ (Krafft-Ebing 1998, 87). In spite of borrowing from his work, Krafft-Ebing is unable to accept the sadistic women Sacher-Masoch described, women such as Wanda in Venus in Furs, first published in 1870, who declares:

a diabolical curiosity has taken hold of me; … I have a dreadful desire to see you tremble under my whip, to see you suffer, to hear at last your moans and screams, your cries for mercy, while I go on whipping you without pity, until you lose consciousness. (Sacher-Masoch 1989, 186–7)

Krafft-Ebing’s reticence to accept female sadism conforms to the heterosexist gender divide he places on aggression. His opinion was carried forward into much of the later work on sadism and masochism. These discourses weigh heavily on the controlled body, shaping the representations directly and inviting challenges to them.

Freud concluded ‘a sadist is always at the same time a masochist’ (1953, 73). Similarly, Havelock Ellis disputes the distinction, stating sadism and masochism ‘may be regarded as complementary emotional states; they cannot be regarded as opposed states’ (1983, 33). His view pre-empted more recent studies of participants in BDSM activities: Andreas Spengler finds ‘Most sadomasochists, heterosexuals as well as homosexuals, alternate between these [active/passive, sadist/masochist] roles’ (1977, 66); G. W. Levi Kamel in his study of leathersex (gay BDSM) discovers ‘the most exciting S [top] has also served as an M [bottom], and the best M is capable of the S role’ (Kamel 1983a, 171); and Beckmann describes it thus: ‘Within the Scene the words: “A good top has to be a bottom first” constitute the “Golden Rule” of consensual “SM” and are known to most practitioners’ (2009, 116). Such flexibility in actual experiences of domination and pleasurable pain contradict the prevalent theoretical accounts that define most depictions of the controlled body. With the gendering of sadism and masochism also persisting, so too has the reliance on psychoanalytical theories; it is these structures that film studies has employed when considering spectatorial identification.

Laura Mulvey, in her influential article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), endorses such gendering for cinema. Using Lacanian concepts and setting out three looking structures of cinema (the camera, the characters and the spectators), Mulvey argues that the gaze in Classical Cinema is structured for male pleasures. Key to the analysis is the suggestion of scopophilic pleasures of watching female bodies and narcissistic pleasures of identification with the male protagonists. Further, Mulvey argues that the male characters are active, whilst female characters are defined by their ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ (1975, 11); the male gaze is consequently seen as sadistic, with the associated pleasures of domination.

Mulvey’s reading of spectatorial pleasures is problematic for the representations of the controlled body, as is the emphasis on sadism. Other theorists have explored cinema via masochistic structures. Typifying the dominant psychoanalytical approach, Kaja Silverman in ‘Masochism and Subjectivity’ (1980) interprets Freud’s account of his grandson’s fort/da game and Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, and examines the belief that pleasure is founded on repeating those painful moments of separation and loss that form subjectivity.² Instead of seeing loss being mastered linguistically, and a pleasure deriving from that, Silverman posits ‘it is the pleasure of passivity, of subject-ion’ that is produced (1980, 3). From such an interpretation Silverman reads Il portiere di notte/The Night Porter (1973) as expressing male masochism, and asserting the oscillation between active and passive roles.

Using the work by Gilles Deleuze (1989) on de Sade and Sacher-Masoch, Gaylyn Studlar, in ‘Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema’ (1984), applies the notion of the masochistic fantasy (based upon agreement and the assumption of the childlike state of being controlled) to the spectatorial position. Through being associated with a pre-genital stage of identification and desire, this concept of masochism dispenses with gender divisions, and invites a consideration of viewing pleasures based not on mastery of the gaze but submission to it.

In The Cinematic Body (1993), Steven Shaviro also harnesses a Deleuzian perspective, challenging what he sees as the negative psychoanalytic models that centre on sexuality. Celebrating the power of the cinematic image (and aural component) to affect the spectator, he suggests that this is the masochistic pleasure of cinema, arguing that ‘What inspires the cinematic spectator is a passion for that very loss of control, that abjection, fragmentation, and subversion of self-identity that psychoanalytic theory so dubiously classifies under the rubrics of lack and castration’ (1993, 57). In other words, the very pleasures of cinema are about losing control, a feature Tanya Krzywinska has compared with the submissive’s experience of being acted upon in a BDSM scenario (2006, 195).

Feminist analysis has largely concentrated on the sadistic gaze of the male spectator or on ascertaining the relationship between the punishment of the female body and the female spectator (for example, L. Williams 1984). Carol Clover (1992) instead employs psychoanalytic theory, whilst gendering the slasher film killer and the ‘Final Girl’ that overcomes it, to argue the male gaze must contain an element of masochism through identification with the potential victim. Peter Hutchings (1993) also deduces male spectators partake in masochistic pleasures when empathizing with the disempowered male victims of maternal monsters. Both writers raise concerns regarding stable identification, and recognize the importance of masochistic pleasure for the spectator. Similar issues arise in respect of the controlled body, where spectatorial pleasure frequently lies in images of suffering, but with the potential for even greater masochistic identification when the protagonist is seen as somehow finding pleasure in that pain. Part of my project is therefore to examine what fears and delights the controlled body might speak of.

Whilst at times the gendering of the controlled body is subsidiary to other factors, the dominated male body poses significant interpretive issues because of the traditional conception of masculinity via its relationship to empowerment and rejection of masochism. Under the direct influence of feminist, gay and lesbian, and race studies, the representations of masculinity/masculinities have undergone scrutiny, both theoretically and via changes in portrayals. The latter explicitly coincides with the depictions of the controlled body, which frequently react with male stereotypes, foregrounding latent male masochism to suggest its necessity in the formation of masculinity; the former has resulted in numerous studies of the cinematic looking relations in respect of men (Cohan and Hark 1993; Jeffords 1993; Kirkham and Thumim 1993; P. Lehman 2001, 2007; Fouz-Hernández 2009) as well as analysis of wider encodings of masculinity (see Chapman and Rutherford 1988; Nixon 1996; Whitehead 2002). It has also prompted reappraisals of Mulvey’s (1975) seminal work, especially the binary assumption of active male/passive female.

Mulvey’s assertion that the male ‘cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification’ (1975, 12) has been contested by many. Steve Neale (1983) argues for narcissistic identification between the male spectator and the male body on the screen, but that the erotic component of the gaze is masked as the scene takes on ritualized and fetishistic elements. Richard Dyer (1982) asserts the male pin-up body is also objectified, but overcomes the female-associated passivity by straining and engaging in ‘masculine’ pursuits. The controlled and restrained body can be interpreted via such abjurations; however, I will assert that under certain conditions, the avowal of eroticized male suffering overwhelms the disavowal and rejoices in the passivity in spite of narrative content.

Kenneth MacKinnon concludes that male objectification is not new, but has become more apparent via ‘an equal-opportunities policy as regards the commodification of the sexes’ (1997, 191). However, as part of his study (see also MacKinnon 1999), MacKinnon demonstrates an ongoing disavowal, with spectators displacing onto other viewers personal gratification from seeing the male body. Paul Smith, in ‘Eastwood Bound’ (1993), also insists that homoeroticism is denied, with masochism negated within the conventional narrative by the protagonist’s eventual triumphal empowerment. More progressively, Jeffrey A. Brown (2002) sees the necessity of both sadism and masochism in depicting a unified masculinity. Interpreting the spectacular torment of numerous Mel Gibson characters, he suggests they need to suffer, whilst their resistance to pain confirms Gibson’s authentic manliness and asserts his status as a heterosexual sex symbol. In other words, suffering and powerlessness are important masculine traits, but any pleasure derived from them is beaten back.

The two notions of disavowed eroticism and the active (controlling) male are evidently central to masculinity in mainstream cinema, and are charged with repelling latent homoeroticism. Critics recognize the instabilities in these positions and means to read around (or against) them, but also stress their enduring presence in narratives. What follows is a redefining of these debates, to explore not how homoerotic but masochistic pleasures are held in check. Doing so will facilitate an analysis of the challenges posed by male protagonists that embrace or seek out subjection and going beyond the limits of their control.

The controlled body destabilizes regardless of gender too, for the desire and pursuit of restraint, subjugation and pain retain a counterintuitive formulation because of how masochism has been theorized. For this reason, I am not exclusively concerned with male masochism, but how control is inscribed on the body and how the potential pleasures of painful submission are articulated. Mary Douglas, in Purity and Danger (1991), seeks to account for the origins of beliefs concerning rituals, forbidden social activities and notions of uncleanliness of the body. Douglas rejects the misapprehension that body rituals should be interpreted differently:

Public rituals may express public concerns when they use inanimate door posts or animal sacrifices: but public rituals enacted on the human body are taken to express personal and private concerns. There is no possible justification for this shift of interpretation just because the rituals work upon human flesh. (1991, 115)

Further, Douglas declares ‘Psychological explanations cannot of their nature account for what is culturally distinctive’ (1991, 121). Similarly, I contend that for the study of the controlled body in contemporary cinema, a dependence on psychoanalysis is not appropriate; instead, we need to focus on the (sub)cultural meanings attached to domination, submission and other painful pleasures, and relate these to the broader society.

By examining the rituals and practices of control and subjection that define masochistic pleasures for their participants, it is possible to rethink the associated sexualized pain so that it is replaced by notions of disciplined domination of your body by oneself or another. BDSM as a physical pursuit can thus be transformed into a paradoxical but transgressive pleasure (MacKendrick 1999) and a (body) political enterprise (Merck 1993; B. Thompson 1994). It is as social acts that we must consider the deeds and feats that inspire the cinematic controlled body, as this will reveal what is represented and what is withheld in respect of structures, meanings and roles explored.

In ‘Maid to Order: Commercial S/M and Gender Power’ (1993), Anne McClintock dispels the myth that sadism infuses consensual BDSM and exposes the ritualized basis upon which BDSM is acted and policed. Read alongside Weinberg and Kamel’s edited collection S and M: Studies in Sadomasochism (1983b), which contains an empirical study (Spengler 1977) and a frame analysis perspective (Weinberg 1978), which sees human interaction being ‘framed’ by social definitions that provide specific contextual significance to behaviour, it is possible to determine BDSM as a meaningful cultural practice. Others have found BDSM to be a controlled and rational activity (Weinberg and Falk 1980; Kamel 1983a; Lee 1983), whilst Hart and Dale contend that BDSM is ‘less a polarized expression of a master’s power over a slave than a mutual exchange of power’ (1997, 345). The significance is that if BDSM embodies these values and interpretations, what happens to them when cinema depicts it, or commensurate actions that feature a body that is willingly dominated wounded, marked and submissive?

Mainstream cinema, subterfuge and BDSM

The dominated body has been integral to both the narrative and spectacle of countless films throughout cinema’s history. Many films I would categorize as interpretable via the structures and tropes of BDSM appear in George De Coulteray’s book Sadism in the Movies (1965). The question therefore arises as to how the controlled body, as depicted in a mainstream film that is characterized by a narrative of sadistic torture or domination, can be interpreted via BDSM, a pursuit defined by consent not oppression. My reasoning is based on three strands of argument: textual, intertextual and audience appropriation.

In respect of the textual, we need to explore some examples. Francis (John Kerr) being forcibly tied beneath a swinging axe in The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) magnificently illustrates the sadistic inclination of Nicholas (Vincent Price). Francis shows no pleasure before, during or after the event. But the overwhelming spectacle, fusing psychedelic splashes of colour with the incessant swinging of the blade, intoxicates the spectator via its aestheticized suffering of the body. The imagery far exceeds narrative motivation, rejoicing in the subjection.

To offer another example, the elaborate methods of planned death employed in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) include being placed between two slowly advancing blocks of spikes, and being strapped to a plank gradually descending into a pit of crocodiles. In the former, the propensity for a BDSM reading is enlivened by the straining body exuding sensuality. Such excess of staged dominance can prompt a text ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Situating the Controlled Body
• 2 Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission, and Sadomasochism (BDSM) at the Movies
• 3 Body Modification: Beauty and the Pleasures of the Modifiable Flesh
• 4 Aestheticized Pain and the Artistic Serial Killer
• 5 Playing with Control
• 6 Choosing Torture Instead of Submission
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Television Programmes
• Index