Friday 10 June 2011

Humanity Through Excess

Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls

A group of films in the last couple of decades have highlighted the perturbing underbelly of entertainment businesses through super-saturating and adrenalising their most loved qualities.

They offer a more concentrated version of our dreams, fantasies and desires. They place them under a microscope and, by doing so, push them gently to absurdity. They show us potential presents and plausible futures where what is now deemed excess will be the accepted norm.

Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven 1995), Demonlover (Olivier Assayas 2002) and Gamer (Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor 2009) take what we want from unrestrained entertainment (power, unlimited possibility, freedom for expression and exploration) shake it up and hand it back to us fizzing.

It is critical that what we are shown remains recognisable and believable for the exaggeration to work. If they do, they can sicken us as they thrill us. It is a fine line to tread, here finely trodden. We could compare them to the similarly brash They Live (John Carpenter), whose vision of a world under complete government control is too far removed and too jokey (purposely I’m sure) to make us stop and think.

The three films in question are, in different ways, about the commodification of people. They are about the image becoming untethered from its origin – the real. They are about a chosen profession (striptease vaudeville), a particular field (animated pornography) and a certain trend (video games becoming more ‘realistic’ and immersive) in which people give themselves to, or are lost within, an amoral web. We find that people are no less disposable or controllable than icons and avatars; exploiting, being exploited and allowing oneself to be exploited.

There is a sliding scale of agency for the human protagonists that moves from control to complicity, acquiescence and, finally, enslavement. Backstage politics and back-stabbing in Showgirls; power over pornography rights and over others in Demonlover; a struggle to keep one’s body and soul from the puppet hands of a grand game player/designer in Gamer. These are the battles that allow a climb or a fall.

These films say that the virtual or the escapist can change our attitude to the real. Everything is a representation of something else; an echo on a new plane. The image can replace the real. The problem with increased game realism is not that it will appear like real life but that real life will seem just like the game. These films play on the two meanings of the word “object” – something that is acted upon (1) can become a mere thing (2).

Only in Gamer does the main character gain leverage and is able and willing to extricate themselves from the milieu. Tillman is able to turn off the network that allows his brain to be at someone else’s fingerprints (for the purposes of a deadly video game with real live people controlled) and free the world.

In Showgirls Nomi witnesses bitchiness, selfishness, inhumanity and rape on the Las Vegas strip (expose yourself to get a place on the strip) yet, despite seeking revenge for the last, stays in the feverishly glamorous and seedy world. For her the exterior image is what matters : on the billboards, pumped pink and shiny through neon tube veins. Once she has conquered Vegas as the star of the show "Goddess", she emerges from her chrysalis to take the road to even greater stardom. The final image of a road sign directing her to Hollywood is an awfully dispiriting one, a kick in the guts to "A Star is Born" cliches.

In Demonlover Diane, no longer an executive playing with chips, becomes the slave to a teenage gamer, the victim of the next level of play: interactive sexualised torture. Skin pores, the pupils of eyes are reduced to pixels. It’s different when you are porn’s pawn and not its pimp.

These films imply that it is hard to get out of the system when hidden compulsions can dictate one’s ‘decisions’. Circumstances can make decisions compulsions. Tillman’s wife in Gamer has allowed herself to be controlled in a live game called “Society” to gain money. There, in society, she is more often than not subjected to violent sex. What more should we expect : she is an attractive woman at a man's mercy. Nomi, the face of Showgirls, is practically “forced” to step on others and turn a blind eye to degrading practice in order to reach her perfectly reasonable aspirations. Money, desperation and low self-esteem lead these people to market places where hierarchies, and we, as the drivers of the market, hold them and weigh down on them.

 Gamer - A teenage boy controls a real man with real bullets

These films use fun, or the style of high-end low "trash" to percolate our defences. They exaggerate and extrapolate. Ultimately shown 21st Century’s possible destinations, the journey that had seemed so pleasurable sours and hollows, collapsing in on itself.

By the end we wonder what violent games, and our control over things that look like us, may do to us. We wonder how human images, that can be twisted and deleted, may alter us irrevocably. We wonder why people ‘willingly’ offer themselves up to exploitation and what it may mean to sit by spurring the flesh fair on. We think how the quest for fame at all costs may be anything but a sign of aspiration or a beacon of inspiration.

The direction in which our moral compass is set, or the extent to which we separate what is within the cinema from what is without, will determine the nature of the films. I believe that they rely on us to follow the path from excitement and titillation to disgust and disquiet. They can be seen purely, and perfectly legitimately, as an indulgent taste of the forbidden but they work best as efforts to bring together image and reality, fiction and reality, to show us what we may not want to see. They bring the distant viewer and player face to face with the consequences of his actions. Is this what you want? Then have it.

Lest we be reminded : the experiences and memories that we bring into the theatre mean nothing can ever truly be ‘just a film’.

Some critics may call those films that show people degraded “degrading” as if depiction can only condone. They may also call them “sick” for even touching upon such potentially sickening subjects. They call them “sexy” just because there is sex or nudity, without looking at how or why. They call them “guilty pleasures” but they do not appreciate or specify that the guilt is not at the quality of the production (they are superbly put together) but at the increasingly self-conscious pleasure we may derive from the troublesome things that occur on-screen. The films' high-mindedness is (necessarily) camouflaged.

Showgirls, Demonlover and Gamer manage to both celebrate themselves and question themselves. 

They use the staples of lavish and lurid storytelling (what could be referred to as ‘Exploitation cinema’) to both royally entertain and subtly satisfy a vital aspect of much Exploitation Cinema : a mirror and commentary on emerging social trends (cf. George A Romero's zombie films). They are almost completely guileless, a lesson without a professor, satire (of megalomaniacs, C-list wannabes and Hollywood rags to riches conventions?) with barely a wink. In other words, straightforward not snarky, and never condescending.

Yes, these are films that really are studies of exploitation. Maximalist, outrageous, in-your-face, balls-to-the-wall films with a profoundly human(ist) bent.

Demonlover - Waiting to be abused by an unseen player

12 comments:

  1. Interesting in how the pornographic, real or staged, can have an expressionistic quality to it. That kind of racy material almost seems to demand some kind of bigger than life emotional content to drive it, to pish it to even further histrionic heights. And at the same time, melodrama itself feels a bit more deserved if paired with the extremity of sexuality, giving some kind of sensual satisfaction for all the soap operatics.

    There's also a potential for the politically transgressive in this stuff- hell one could say there's something downright revolutionary about any halfway erotic work, as sexuality is always among the first stuff to be banned in any conservative society. Orwell himself outlined how a dictatorial society would seek to heavily police, and even seek to outlaw and destroy the need for human sexuality and love, seeing it as a threat to the state as competition for the affections and emotional attention of their citizens (there can only be love for Big Brother). The best works tend to be the ones that consciously pair the sexually and the politically subversive- Verhoven and Asayas fit this based on their bodu of work, but for me the master of this sort of thing is Cronenberg.

    Great study, Stephen.

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  2. Thanks Bob.

    You make some very good points about melodrama and the extreme and about the sexual and the subversive. I hadn't thought of Cronenberg but I don't remember his films having the same heart.

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  3. W00t. Simply, one of your very best. Haven't seen any of the tree, although I've read strong defenses for all of them. This is a brilliant dissection of the subversiveness of these films (having the cake AND eating it). Reminds me of what Altman did with films like MASH, BUFFALO BILL etc.

    Again Stephen,when you put up your "200 posts" post, this one will be on my favorites list (if you don't top it continuously that is!).

    Cheers!

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  4. Many thanks JAFB.

    "...having the cake AND eating it"

    Yes! That phrase didn't come to mind. I still haven't seen Buffalo Bill. Your analysis of it is waiting for me once I have.

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  5. "Showgirls, Demonlover and Gamer manage to both celebrate themselves and question themselves.

    They use the staples of lavish and lurid storytelling (what could be referred to as ‘Exploitation cinema’) to both royally entertain and subtly satisfy a vital aspect of much Exploitation Cinema : a mirror and commentary on emerging social trends (cf. George A Romero's zombie films). They are almost completely guileless, a lesson without a professor, satire (of megalomaniacs, C-list wannabes and Hollywood rags to riches conventions) with barely a wink. In other words, straightforward not snarky, not condescending."

    Brilliant stuff here, and one of the more thought-provoking and challenging posts I've read in a long time. The above contentions are especially fascinating. I am wondering if you'd include the likes of Todd Solandz here.

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  6. Thank you very much Sam.

    I actually haven't seen any of Solondz's films yet.

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  7. I watched Gamer not more than a month ago on TV, and these were pretty much my thoughts, except not as articulate (I would have probably called it satire and left it at that).

    This description brings to mind a much-maligned TV series called Gossip Girl (well, the first two seasons, after that it just got plain ridiculous). I'm not sure if it exactly works with humanity through excess, but it definitely comes close to it.
    It takes spoilt scheming rich kids and very empathetically plays around with them.
    I could talk about this for a long time, but this guy says it much better.

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  8. Thanks Ronak, and thanks for the link on Gossip Girl.

    I haven't seen any of it but maybe now, when it's next on, I'll have a look.

    It's hard to know how to define these films and this approach. I don't think I could quite pin it down. Satire is generally seen as snide and destructive. If these films are satire than it is of a mischievous but constructive kind.

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  9. "Satire is generally seen as snide and destructive. If these films are satire than it is of a mischievous but constructive kind."

    So true. I once told a friend that after watching Gossip Girl I had decided that I didn't have time for satire that didn't treat the satirised as humans in their own right, and he was clueless as to what I meant.

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  10. "...that didn't treat the satirised as humans in their own right, and he was clueless as to what I meant."

    Yes, if you don't recognise a certain humanity in your 'target' then there is little point to the satire - it's too harsh, too distant and too abstract.

    Correction: 'THEN it is of a mischievous but constructive kind"

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  11. Rather brilliant observations here, which I suspect I'll return to on future occasions when I feel the need to articulate something I'm thinking or feeling. Especially cogent:

    "These films say that the virtual or the escapist can change our attitude to the real. Everything is a representation of something else; an echo on a new plane. The image can replace the real. The problem with increased game realism is not that it will appear like real life but that real life will seem just like the game. These films play on the two meanings of the word “object” – something that is acted upon (1) can become a mere thing (2)."

    And:

    "The direction in which our moral compass is set, or the extent to which we separate what is within the cinema from what is without, will determine the nature of the films. I believe that they rely on us to follow the path from excitement and titillation to disgust and disquiet. They can be seen purely, and perfectly legitimately, as an indulgent taste of the forbidden but they work best as efforts to bring together image and reality, fiction and reality, to show us what we may not want to see. They bring the distant viewer and player face to face with the consequences of his actions. Is this what you want? Then have it."

    Really sums up thoughts I've had as well, but in a particularly specific and pointed way. Well-done.

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  12. Thanks very much, Joel.

    I wasn't sure I would be able to articulate the nature of these films. I'm glad you like it.

    Have you seen these particular films? Are there any other films that you've seen that would fit the same bill?

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