Two Films: Part Three

Please Note

If you've jumped into this article without first reading Part One, please be aware that this four-part message contains extensive spoilers for two S&M films, Nine 1/2 Weeks and Closet Land. If you haven't seen these films and want to be surprised by their plots, don't read the following text.

It's time to talk about Closet Land. As I mentioned earlier, this movie was made by the anti-torture human-rights organization known as Amnesty International, both to communicate to others the horror of actual torture that occurs all over the world and to raise money for their cause. Alan Rickman plays the torturer, Madeleine Stowe plays the victim, and Ron Howard co-produces.

When you think about what kind of movie an organization like this is likely to make, what comes to your mind? I picture a few snippets of real videotape of people being tortured in inhuman ways or imprisoned in horrid conditions. I imagine sound recordings of these torture sessions. I picture actors reading the gruesome stories of torture victims who survived, tours of torture chambers throughout the world, and grimy black-and-white photos that depict terribly mutilated people. I imagine a few dramatizations, like they do in the 911 Emergency shows, based upon true stories.

What I don't picture is what Closet Land actually is: a strange, dreamy, surrealistic, obviously fictional tale that makes its point through metaphor rather than megagore. I don't picture the torturer and victim as two people with a prior relationship, let alone a sexually obsessive relationship. In my preconception, I don't see a torture chamber that looks like a cross between the Nine 1/2 Weeks guy's loft and a futuristic Athenian temple. I don't picture the bizarre camera angles, the echoing sounds, the arty use of mood music, all of which create an otherworldly, unreal atmosphere, and I especially don't picture a victim who, despite the intense physical and emotional trials imposed upon her, retains the serene outward composure of a madonna. Finally, I never, once, pictured a torturer who'd act like Alan Rickman does. Do I lack imagination? Or is there something awfully peculiar going on in this politically correct piece of antitorture propaganda?

It is easy to read things into a movie or a book or a work of art that aren't there, to place an interpretation on a creation that the creator never intended or expected. While many experienced creators expect exactly this result from the interaction of their work with its audience (and, in fact, joke about the sad reality that they no longer own their stories, images, or characters once they reach the public) this is less likely to be true in the case of a film, like Closet Land, that has a clear moral message to convey or an agenda to get across. Think about it: the last thing a group devoted to stopping torture would want to do is to make a hot, sexy, pro-S&M film, as that sort of work would baldly contradict their primary message: that torture is an evil that must be fought. And yet, from many people's perspectives, that's exactly what they wound up with. Maybe somewhere in that enormous gulf between what AI intended for this film and what is actually perceived are some interesting truths. Let's see what we can find out.

It's hard to describe the film's first scene in the third person, so I'm going to give you a more or less word-for-word account, until we reach a point where description means something again. Closet Land opens with nothing: a black screen, total darkness, and no sound. Then you hear some faint noises in the distance that quickly become louder: footsteps approach on stone. A door creaks open. You hear it; you don't see it. A woman's voice rings out in the darkness:

"Who are you?" (silence)

"Where are you taking me?" (silence)

"Can you remove my blindfold, please?"

(panicked) "Can you remove my blindfold, please?"

A stupid, brutal male voice that slurs its words carelessly replies: "Nothin' doin'!" You now hear two pairs of footsteps.

She: "Where are you taking me?" (louder) "Where are you taking me?"

"Shud up!" (muffled sound of a fist smashing into flesh, gasps and sobs) A heavy door opens and then closes.

Two men are now talking: you again hear the dulcet tones of "Mr. Crude," interspersed with a more cultured, educated tone.

Crude: "Tell me if you need anything else. I'm leaving in 10 minutes" (the woman is breathing heavily)

Cultured: "Let me see...no, I think I have everything."

She: "Where am I?" (her voice echoes)

Cultured (quietly): Here. (no echo)

"Who are you?" (echoes)

(silence)

"May I speak to the officer in charge, please?"

"I am the officer in charge."

"Where are you?" (echoes)

"Here, to your right."

(sound of a fist on flesh and her sharp, shuddering intake of breath)

Cultured: "I'm sorry. I meant to your left. Your left is my right, you see."

Crude: "And vice-versa. Your vices are my verses and verse are vice." (he chuckles meanly)

She, firmly but with a tremble to her voice: "Remove this blindfolded and my handcuffs, please. I'm going to call my lawyer...I was dragged out of bed and..."

Cultured, quietly and reassuringly: "All right. Don't worry. We'll look into it." (to Mr. Crude) "I won't be needing you any more."

Crude: "I'm going straight to the sauna. I'm going to really need it after this shit. Bon Nuit." (sounds of heavy footsteps, receding, then silence)

She: "Where are you? Have you gone away, too?" (echoing)

"I'm here, right by your side."

(she gasps in surprise)

"Did I scare you? Sorry. Just a minute. I'll turn the lights on."

(you hear him walking away, hear a faint metallic click)

(gently) "Now let's get this blindfold off..."

(scary music begins to play)

A number of important things have been established here in the first few dark minutes. Unlike our Mistress Bottom from Nine 1/2 Weeks, this woman is not calling all the shots. In fact, she is not the least bit in charge of what is happening to her. She cannot see what is going on or who is there, but others can see her. She cannot protect herself from being hurt, and she is hurt, several times, in the first few moments of the movie.

Earlier, I suggested that the submissive-in-charge atmosphere of Nine 1/2 Weeks parallels the "play" world of dominance and submission as depicted and apparently lived out by many of the posters to ASB and other SM "Scene" regulars. In this world, the submissive, the individual who is supposed to be powerless, actually has all the control, because he has ultimate veto power and can stop anything he doesn't approve of with a word. (In fact, the woman in _Nine 1/2 Weeks didn't even need a safeword: all she did was to say, "No" firmly or angrily, and the dominant backed down immediately.)

In contrast, the atmosphere of Closet Land is one where the conventional mores (and the moral conventions) of society are trampled upon: the desires of a frightened woman who is at least as vocally aggressive as the Nine 1/2 Weeks babe are completely ignored, except when it suits her captors otherwise. Although many alt.sex.bondage posters would deny this fact, the truth is that the powerlessness of the female prisoner in Closet Land is a close approximation of the powerlessness of a slave in a real-life absolute power-exchange relationship. Note that I didn't say that the level of brutality is the same, nor even that attitudes expressed by the ones in power toward their victims are the same. It is the level of powerlessness, the level of non-control that each has over his or her life, that is similar.

What do I mean by powerlessness? Well, let's look at what we've just been shown. The woman in Closet Land cannot get up and leave whenever she wants to. She cannot walk to a phone and call her lawyer. She cannot prevent herself from being hurt, and if she were to resist her captors' demands, she would probably be punished for it. No matter how kind and loving one's dominant is, the same is true in a relationship where an actual exchange of power exists. Let's get one thing straight: master-and-slave relationships are extralegal to begin with; they are not sanctioned by the laws of most countries. Dominants in these relationships who are committed actually to owning their human property (as opposed to pretending that they own someone) not only feel no qualms about punishing a slave who disobeys their wishes but have no problem with taking additional extralegal measures, if needed, to keep their property where it belongs, in their households.

As an example, if I were ever to run away, my master has told me he would send a very good private detective after me to track me down and bring me back by force. I've asked him extensively about this: What if I were to change my name? What if I were to hide out, Dolores-Claiborne style, in a women's shelter? What if I were to go to Canada? How would you find what city I was in? He's had very good answers for all of these questions--and others. He's obviously thought about it a lot, not because I've expressed any desire to run, but because he takes his ownership of me very, very seriously. It's real, in other words, not a game or a role to him. Even if I were to run to the police and manage to get him thrown in jail, he would continue to keep track of my whereabouts through an agent and, once out of jail, renew his efforts to get his property back. There are only two escapes from such a situation. One is death, mine or his. The other involves his willingly choosing to free me.

I always open a can of worms when I talk about the hardcore reality of extreme powerlessness, because many individuals unthinkingly assume that this obviously means that I and others like me are being unhappily held against our wills. So, let's deal with what is really going on in my situation, before anyone else jumps to foolish conclusions. First of all, I am not running anywhere, not now, not ever. Unlike the victim in Closet Land, I have no desire to escape from my situation. In fact, I love (with a passion whose fierceness is often frightening to contemplate) being exactly where I am and exactly what I am. Obviously, neither I nor my master, both intelligent, experienced, and perceptive individuals, would have gotten deeply involved with the other if we were not both certain that this relationship is exactly what each of us (not just one of us) needs with all of our hearts and souls. While my relationship is not consensual now, while I am in effect my owner's prisoner and have no say in what happens to me (unless he grants it), I did initially choose this situation of imprisonment for myself knowing full well what I was getting into. No one forced me at gunpoint to become a slave. No one manipulated me or tricked me into it. I was a mature woman when I made the decision, with numerous vanilla relationships--including a 12-year marriage--behind me. I was not some ditzy little collegiate airhead following the call of the genitalia. For crying out loud, I actively and extremely aggressively love this life. Were I a brainwashed zombie or someone's dishrag-doormat, I strongly doubt I'd be able to write about it so passionately and eloquently. I have never, in almost a decade of slavery, regretted my original decision. Whether you believe it or not (and you must admit, your beliefs are rather immaterial in this case), I never will.

What's this? Do I hear the pitter-patter of little intellects running hither and thither, trying their best to come up with the most appropriate commonplace to reject my extensive experience with? Do I hear, once again, for the hundred-millionth-billionth time, that dire warning bubbling up in some smug, sneering, ignorant little throat: "Don't be so sure, Sweetie. People change, you know!" Well, yes; people often do. But just as often, it seems, they don't. Individuals who like to spout "people change" at you, as if it were some sort of magic mantra, tend to be of two types. Either they are so immature that their personalities and lives still seem to consist of one unending perpetual change (more commonly known as the maturing process), or they're one of those sad souls of any age who've never managed to acquire (or, in some extreme cases, even encounter) a stable, consistent, mature adult personality. These two types of people have a very difficult time believing that everybody else isn't also changing all the time. Stability, whether physical, emotional, or mental, has not been a part of their personal experience so they assume, rather stupidly and with no evidence to support it, that everybody else has just as scattered a personality and as just as transient attitudes as they have. It's always seemed a little queer to me that so many of these of people end up posting copiously and often obsessively to ASB and to other newsgroups. Is there something about online communications that irresistibly attracts the perpetually immature?

When you have wanted something passionately since your first conscious memories and finally, after nearly three long decades, obtained it and become gloriously, wonderfully, ecstatically fulfilled as a result, and when that fulfillment, over the years, just grows and grows and grows rather than diminishing or getting old, just how likely do you think it is that a prosaic platitude like "people change" is going to apply in your specific situation? Tell you what: since one trite banality always deserves another, I'll just respond to this "people change" business with what I've already related to hundreds of people since the inception of my slavery: "time will tell." Catch up with me in a decade, or two decades if you prefer, and see if I've fulfilled the hoary old vulgarity that "people change."

Back to our story. In spite of this rather dark and terrifying beginning, things seem to be looking up. The moronic asshole who brought our heroine to this place has just left, and the more intelligent and definitely nicer-sounding gentleman, the one who hasn't hit her (although he did seem to joke about it in an offbeat sort of way) has, thank god, offered to remove her blindfold.

We hear sounds of cloth being untied and then... white, blinding white, slowly resolving into a room. In front of her appears a man's angular, cruel-featured face. He appears to be carefully and coldly scrutinizing her. She blinks to clear her vision as he retreats to stand behind a strange-looking chair with straps hanging off the edges. Straightbacked and short, it looks like as if it's woven of a dark rattan, but it could also be metal. The room which holds the chair is large and darkly futuristic, with huge gray Cornithian pillars growing like trees every five or six feet out of the starkly black and white tiled floor. The windowless walls are dark and bare, made of some sort of grey cloudy stone. A large clear space in the center of the room contains two chairs and a desk, which from the side looks like an inverted pyramid, with three metal rings extruding at regular intervals from the sides of its upturned base. Strange white stripes circle the ceiling; closed metal shelves recessed in the walls circle the floor around its edges. A pair of heavy stone doors with large round knobs are placed in two corners of the room. Each door in a pair faces a different wall. Like standard double doors, they meet, but in the corner, where the walls touch. The room is unreal, like something you might see in a museum or a house built for a millionaire by a modernistic architect. It's unnerving, beautiful, and darkly foreboding all at the same time. Its simple but threatening design suggests that there are awful secrets hidden here: within a drawer, behind a pillar, just out of sight.

In other words, it's a most delightful-looking dungeon, if you like that sort of thing. Amnesty International definitely does not like that sort of thing, so what they're doing with such an elaborate, unrealistic, and beautiful torture chamber in their movie is not immediately clear. Surely the rooms in which most of the truly evil acts are carried out in the world are bland and windowless with pale green walls, or in huts with stained dirt floors, or filthy concrete cells. So why not depict these things? Why the pillars, why the three-dimensional chessboard floor, why the reverse-pyramid desk and those unusual doors? Anyway, this room is, until the very end of the film, the only place we see in Closet Land. Everything that doesn't happen in the prisoner's imagination happens here.

The man scrapes the chair slightly to the side, to indicate that the woman should sit there. Seeming oblivious to her strange surroundings, she, with an expectant look on her face, approaches the man and holds out her handcuffed wrists. She is wearing a simple, sleeveless nightgown, white and childish. Her long, dark hair is pulled back from her face in a loose braid. Her bare face, with its apparent lack of makeup, is childlike. Her feet are bare. The man standing behind the chair, in contrast, is dressed to the nines in an elegant double-breasted dark gray suit, tie, expensive shoes. With his slightly long hair he far more resembles an 80s' yuppie than the government bureaucrat he's actually playing. His appearance is intimidatingly corporate and highlights the embarrassing inappropriateness of her simple sleep attire. He unlocks her cuffs, and she sits in the chair he holds out for her. He then sits down across from her, behind the strange desk.

She (a little disoriented): "Why..why was I brought here? Which day is it?"

He: "The next day...uh, night actually."

(she looks surprised at this, shocked even)

"I was uh...brought here last night? I think it was last night. Sometimes it seems like two nights back, two weeks even."

"No, they brought you here last night."

"Are you the officer in charge?"

"Uh hum."

Emboldened by his quiet, calm attitude, she launches into a bitter complaint about what her abductors have done to her: "They came for me in the middle of the night, dragged me from my bed, held a gun to my head, handcuffed me, blindfolded me and gagged me. They then slapped me, spat on me, pulled my hair, twisted my arms, and pinched my legs, then left me standing in a narrow cold room no bigger than a... (dread creeps into her voice) ...closet." As the movie goes on, you learn that this last action has special significance for her.

As she's explaining this, the images which accompany her descriptions show us that she is not telling a complete story: there are hands fondling her, at her breasts, and sliding up her legs under her nightgown.

"They had no warrant for my arrest. I've been denied access to my lawyer and to anyone outside. Why am I here?"

The man puts on wire-rimmed reading glasses, removes a file stamped "Confidential" from the neat black briefcase sitting on the desk, and begins to read it.

"It says here you are a writer of children's fiction." (he pauses and spreads his hands wide) "Do you do any other kind of writing?"

"Like what?"

"Political, for instance."

(she shakes her head and smiles slightly) "I'm really quite ignorant about politics."

"Good. I mean, it's better to have no ideas than to have half-baked ones, eh? Um, are you a member of any underground group...or anything?"

"No."

"Are your stories political?"

(amused outrage) "I write for seven year olds_."

"Sooo.... children make the best receptacles for propaganda. You can do anything with a child, as long as you play with him. (quickly) Who said that?"

If you're watching this movie for the first time, it's important to note the references made to children. Later, you'll see he is not just making idle conversation.

"Bismark," she replies, wonderingly, with a slight smile, and he looks pleased.

She: "This is ridiculous!"

"Well... maybe we made a mistake... doesn't happen often, but sometimes after they've had too much to drink, they took a wrong turn."

(incredulous) "They took a wrong turn?"

He closes the folder. "My sincere apologies. You may leave." (scary music starts to play)

She stares at him, gets up, and walks toward one set of closed doors in a corner of the room, then looks back at him questioningly. He pushes something on the edge of the desk, and a door in the opposite corner of the room slides open with a grinding sound. She turns around, walks toward the open door. As she passes the desk, he turns to watch her go, then starts to play with an expensive-looking pen. The tempo of the music picks up, and, just as she reaches the opening, he suggests:

"Maybe you should wait... (she pauses)

"...for the official apology."

She's almost at the door but turns slowly and asks, "What's that?"

He: (beginning to write something on a pad) "It's a letter from the head of this department apologizing for our mistake."

"How long will that take?"

"No time at all."

(angry) "You interrogated me like a common criminal, knowing full well you owed me an apology?"

"It's procedure. We can never be too sure."

She glances back at the open door indecisively, then seems to make up her mind. She walks back to the desk, and as she does, the door slides neatly shut behind her. Sitting back down in the rattan chair and rubbing her arms, she doesn't notice. He stares at her, then quickly removes his suit jacket and shoves it across the desk. He's wearing white suspenders over a white shirt, over a very thin, almost emaciated, frame. At her look of surprise at this gesture he says, "No, no--I insist. I'm used to this place." He leaves the jacket on the desk, and after a moment she takes it angrily and puts it over her shoulders. As she pulls it on, he very abruptly removes a sleek silver thermos from his briefcase and pours some liquid into its metal cup. He sets the metal cup down on her side of the desk, next to the open metal handcuffs. As she takes it, he sits back, crosses his arms over his chest, and says jovially, "I last saw you about two years ago, I think. Signing autographs at the...Third Street Bookstore...I forgot what its..."

She interrupts angrily: "Sorry, but I'm not really in the mood for conversation. You think an apology letter's enough? I'm going to press charges...against him, especially."

It's interesting to note how clothing has been used in this scene. As soon as the interrogator removes his coat, he seems less severe, less threatening,and he begins to act more relaxed and casual. As soon as she has the jacket around her shoulders, covering her bare arms and thin nightdress, she becomes much more aggressive. Being the clever interrogator that he is, he immediately uses her new-found assertiveness against her. Leaning forward, in disapproving surprise, he says:

"You're going to press what against whom?"

She stares hard at him, suddenly frightened. "I said I'm going... I'm going to make a complaint against him. The one that was here. I didn't get to see him, but I know his voice."

He picks up his pen: "What did it sound like?" Obviously referring to Mr. Crude, she says, "A choked gutter."

(He's scribbling) "...man...with a voice...like a choked gutter." The camera angle changes to peek over his shoulder, and we see that as he is saying this, the man is doing nothing but doodling. While we couldn't be absolutely certain before, we now know that he is toying with her. "What did he do?" he inquires, curious. She drinks from the cup, refuses to answer.

"Did he rape you?" (the question manages to come out sounding both concerned and slightly lecherous)

"No."

"He just... fondled you. Is that it?"

"Yes."

"That's strange...none of our female prisoners have made that complaint. Our men don't do that... they're strictly professional."

"I'm not lying!"

"I'm sure you're not, but maybe you imagined it."

"No!"

A slightly annoyed tone drifts into his voice: "After one day in prison, you were ranting and raving about being here for two weeks. It's why you're such a good writer. Imagination."

"No! I have his nailmarks all o-..."

He quickly interrupts: "May I see them?"

(a long, incredulous pause)

"Let a doctor examine me."

Suddenly he is professional-sounding again: "All right. Don't worry. We'll look into it." He picks up the thermos and leans over the desk toward her: "Some more broth?" She holds out her cup, and he pours. "It's got rum in it," he says with a slight smile. He sits down, closing the thermos with a satisfied precision that seems to say, "I've got you exactly where I want you." He then leans back in his chair, looking at her with a pleased and caring expression on his face. "Warms you up, doesn't it?" As she sips the broth, he takes a book out of his briefcase and begins to read. Acknowledging that with a slight frown, she queries:

"Listen... I... how long will the letter be?"

"What letter?"

"The apol-" (she stops herself suddenly, realization beginning to dawn) "The apology letter."

"Oh, that!" He gives her a rather mischievous stare, walks quickly over to a wall, and pulls open one of the ground-level metal drawers. It holds files on one side and a pile of plain white envelopes on the other. He pulls an envelope off the top of the pile, brings it over to her, and sets it on the desk with a satisfied, "There!" She opens it and starts to read.

"You had it all along?"

"Yes."

"What game are you playing?"

(slightly amused) "I'm not playing games."

"But you kept me here waiting for it!"

"Now you're imagining things again. You decided to wait. Didn't I tell you I had the letter?"

Our woman is right. This is a beautiful example of what is known as a mind game. Dominants play these games all the time, to amuse themselves (and sometimes their submissives). But to be effective, mind games require that the person playing the game has genuine power over the person being played with. Someone can't mess with your mind very well if you know more about the situation than he does, or if you're wilier than he is, or if you are not in a situation which forces you to play his game, whether you get it or not. Our victim has less power than her interrogator primarily because she is being held as a prisoner inside this fortress of an intelligence organization. She also lacks knowledge about interrogation techniques in general and her situation in particular. She is more tired than he, more disoriented and confused, on much more unfamiliar ground, and frightened because of the subtle threat of physical force that hangs over her. In other words, she's an extremely easy mark, mind-game-wise. And to say he takes advantage of this situation is an understatement.

She reads on, obviously disgusted by the content. "Oh, this is a mess! Drunken soldiers! Hallucinating senior officers!" He leans forward across the desk, and his voice has suddenly become very menacing: "You really should watch what you're saying." She stares at him, suddenly frightened. "The walls have ears." The camera backs very quickly away from her, making her look as if she is receding backward down a long tunnel. She looks more and more panicked as this happens. Suddenly, she leaps up, letting the jacket drop to the floor, and makes a rush for the formerly open door, banging hard on it when she realizes it is closed.

Before we go on, did you notice the nurturing behavior our interrogator exhibited just a moment ago? The proffered jacket and the cup of broth? In this movie, we suspect that it has a more nefarious motivation than that of our boy's in Nine 1/2 Weeks, but what the two behaviors have in common is that a person who is assuming a position of power is, for whatever reason, caring for and giving sustenance to an individual in his charge, an individual with less power. Again, it is a parental image, and it conveys a clear idea of who is in control.

"Open the door, open the door! I have the apology letter. Open it, please!"

The man walks around the desk, and as he does, he throws his coat violently at her. It hits her belly and slides to the floor. He then places one hand on the back of her chair; the other goes on his hip. One leg is crossed behind the other. From this stance of complete confidence, he says dryly: "You might as well stay warm. It could be a long time for you."

"I must call my lawyer! I must call my lawyer!"

She hears someone far away whistling a melancholy but somehow cheering tune and, momentarily distracted, wonders out load "Who's that?" The whistler will return throughout the film. He is used as something that makes her happy and thus fills her with new resolve whenever her hope is fading. An obvious Amnesty International touch.

Her captor responds to her wonderment at the whistling with a question of his own: "Why didn't you leave... when you could?" The room echoes dramatically with these last three words.

This unusual question must be examined from a couple of perspectives. Let's take it at face value, first. Earlier, the door was open, she was at the door, she could have walked out, but she didn't. Why? She'd been terrorized, sexually molested, beaten, humiliated, forced to stand for long hours, blindfolded. She'd gotten some idea that the people behind all this weren't exactly to be trusted. So what made her venture back into the lion's den when freedom was a short step away? Just to obtain a trivial piece of paper that would soothe her outrage? Could she really be that stupid and trusting?

I think that Amnesty International's point here, if they have one at all, is to show that this woman is responding like most watchers of the movie would: this unconsciously creates in the viewer a rapport with and sympathy for her. Many members of the middle class of a country not used to toltalitarian practices would also respond to this treatment with anger, even outrage, an ignorance of the seriousness of their situations, and naive threats to "report" the perpetrators to the authorities. The movie, with its darkly sumptuous set, its careful attention to detail, and its utter refusal to depict violence clearly or in any realistic fashion, is probably meant to appeal to the aesthetic of people most likely to make Amnesty International contributions: American middle- or upper-middle-class liberals. A lot of the weirdness and the incongruity of the scenes' lack of connection with real life can be explained by the fact that the movie is stroking upper-middle-class liberal sensibilities. In the set, it's giving them something that they'll watch because it's attractive; in the victim, someone they can identify with. "This could very well be you," seems to be one of the movie's primary messages. But not all of the weirdness can be explained away by a yuppie aesthetic.

Now let's dig under the surface of the question just a bit. If this were a real oppressive government doing a real kidnapping of an intellectual considered dangerous to the state, how likely do you think it would be that its representative would say that she could leave in this way? Or, if the government is not entirely toltalitarian at this stage (as her angry, unafraid responses and demands for due legal process seem to suggest it isn't), why would it offer her freedom (and risk her making a big fuss about her imprisonment to the press) only to see if a promise to redress her injury with an apology letter would lure her back? Do they want to force her to realize--once it is too late--that she is solely responsible for all that is to come? Why use such an imaginative and highly sophisticated piece of mental sadism on a person who seems, from the naive way in which she acts, to be manipulable by much simpler forms of coercion? While there are always people involved in the eliciting of information from others who thoroughly enjoy their jobs and who are capable of great creativity, these people, if they work for a state, must contain their talents within the main directives: to obtain information as quickly as possible and perhaps turn the informant into an ally. That is their primary job, after all, and whether they do it with great relish or with a matter-of-fact professionalism, they are, in their work, as much prisoners of procedure, of getting the results that their superiors want, as their victims are prisoners of them. All other personal desires and goals for their victims must be sublimated into the primary goals of their government. From this perspective, our interrogator seems, so far, to have been rather frivolous, spending his time inefficiently in self-amusement. He's having way too much fun and producing far too few results with it.

For these reasons, this scene strikes me as so unreal, so unlike what an actual interrogation situation, whether crude or sophisticated, would probably entail given her personality, that I feel free to wonder if perhaps someone, somewhere wanted you to get the idea that she freely chose what is to come. I like to think that perhaps our girl didn't leave when she could because she was irrepressibly drawn to something in that room. She didn't leave, perhaps, because a part of her didn't want to.

Now of course I don't really believe that anyone who participated in this movie consciously intended to promote as emotionally sophisticated and kinky a concept as willing imprisonment and torture (a.k.a. consensual nonconsensuality). It's just something I find enjoyable to believe. And given what we learn later of the relationship between captor and captive, this question remains one of the unexplained oddities of this film, one of many little things that make you ask, "Why, given Amnesty International's position on imprisonment and torture, did they choose to portray it in this peculiar, unrealistic way?"

Whatever Amnesty International's motivations, this scene does have an interesting parallel in real-life power relationships. The only way the power exchange can work is if someone is really in control, really has all the power. In Nine 1/2 Weeks we saw that you cannot really be in control of someone if that person always has the ability to take the control back any time she pleases. But that's exactly what happens in the common "play" relationships you hear described on S&M newsgroups all the time. I'm talking about a situation in which the submissive claims to be continually, at every moment, freely making a "gift" of her submission to the dominant. The flip side of such a gift is, of course, that it can also be withdrawn at any minute. And the reality is that the gift is often withdrawn as soon as the "submissive" becomes frightened of, worried about, or displeased with something the dominant is doing. This is called topping from the bottom, and for someone with deep and genuine submissive feelings who has come to terms with these feelings, this sort of situation, along with its secret knowledge that you, the sub, are always ultimately in charge, is anathema. It is the last thing a submissive wants, because it makes her feel--surprise--unsubmissive! One way two people who really want to exchange power avoid a situation in which they both are living a lie is by having the submissive consent to nonconsent. The submissive agrees to give up all her power once, and only once, to the dominant. From that point on, the only way she will ever get it back is when, or more likely if, her dominant decides to give it back.

End of Part Three

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