Dreama Walker reduced to sitting naked in the backroom with nothing but an apron to cover herself up with, not even knowing how much worse it's about to get for her.
If you thought the torture scenes in Zero Dark Thirty (2012) were rough to swallow, once you turn on compliance make sure you have an air sickness bag nearby. Here are a few reasons why, and they may be double standards, but those exist for a reason too. 1, the torture occurring in this dark indie sleeper hit are occurring in your very own back yard and not in a black sight somewhere not on a map in the middle east. 2. They are occurring to a woman, basically a girl barely out of her teens rather than some nameless affiliate of the Taliban. Here's the plot and I'll try to avoid spoiler alerts when I can.
In the beginning of the film Becky (Dreama Walker) was just another 19 year old girl working a part time job at a fast food restaurant.
based on more actual occurrences we would like to admit, the film takes place mostly in a low-level fast food restaurant where a mysterious caller phones in telling the easily manipulated manager that he's with the police and a woman who matches the description for a young thin blonde, which of course could be anybody was caught on surveillance stealing money from a customer. She is then subjected to increasingly degrading and dehumanizing tasks, most of which involve forced sexual activity on another. After the mysterious caller is realized to be a prankster, basically the manager who has forced this poor employee to such horrors is beside herself and can't ever recover for how she was manipulated into doing something like that to an innocent person.
Anne Dowd, the Fast food restaurant manager being asked not only to perform a strip search without a supervising witness but to comply with things much worse.
his film cuts immediately to the bone. It tugs at our most vulnerable heart strings, as do most things when we see innocent people punished and dehumanized in such cruel ways, and what's more difficult to believe is that this happens basically all the time all over rural America where people don't even think twice to ask proof of law enforcement such as a badge or a search and seizure warrant. It's cinema verite style makes it even more difficult to take in, but that much more relevant and important. Not only is Dreama Walker brilliant as the innocent victim in all of this, but the star is Anne Dowd, who is actually perhaps the bigger victim as she gets blindly conned into subjecting one of her employees to such horrors. This is a vital film for everyone to see, not only because of the daring exposé on something that has been rather glamorized in our culture, case and point 'Fifty Shades of Grey'. Sometimes it's good to take a deep breath and look at the darker side of sadomasochism, and this is just the film to do that.
Kink has come a long way...the first of many puns in this blog post.
Have we ever taken a turn for the masochistic of late. And I love it. Usually it required one locking up all doors and windows and ordering a channel only your most perverted friends had even heard of or going to a dingy warehouse with ziploc sandwich bags tied around your hands to pick out the right ball-gag which you would then proceed to lock in a steel safe in your basement until all of your neighbors were all away on a groupon cruise to the Mediterranean. Now you walk into a Walmart or a Von's and first thing on the shelf in front of you are copies of 'Fifty Shades of Grey'. Right next to it? Furry handcuffs.
Now,
kink is manifest in the more sophisticated class, with better
engineered instruments and a general polished, nuanced aesthetic that
appeals to more of a general public rather than just a cult fad.
Polo gear stores are struggling to keep riding crops on their shelves and the elderly ma & pa-type owners can't understand why they are selling those dang riding crops and nothing else. Here's a hint, it's not for polo tournaments, grandad.
And now Hollywood is getting in on all of the sado-masochistic action and popping that last taboo right into our 'vanilla' consciousness (no pun intended). Sundance premiered a film back in January called Compliance (2012), which for months was the talk of the town, and is slated for limited release this August. It stars Dreama Walker from Don't Trust the B---- in Apt 23 fame. It concerns a lowly fast-food employee around 19, who is tricked into some kind of sick masochistic scheme wherein her coworkers are coerced by an anonymous presence over the phone claiming to be the police to strip search her, and make her do generally degrading sexual acts all under the guise that she is guilty of stealing money from another co-worker.
Dreama Walker in Compliance (2012) one of the most highly anticipated films of the year.
There's no question about it, the biggest 'It' thing is BDSM, and everyone is trying their hand at it. 20/20 recently did a retrospective on how marriages were saved by 'Fifty Shades of Grey'. Couples started trying kink in the bedroom and it brought back all the heat, and made everyone pregnant. That's right, there's apparently a new baby boom looming and we have one person to thank for that; E. L. James, who took Twilight fanfiction and not only made it the highest selling book of all time, but generated a serious pop-culture fad that looks like it's going to stick around for a while...again, no pun intended.
Sexual trends have always carried significant weight in pop-culture, but then usually receded back into the norm, or what E. L. James describes as 'vanilla sex'; you know that boring kind of sex where you're in missionary just staring at each other, wondering if you want pasta or chicken for dinner, looking at the dog and mutually rolling your eyes, and counting down the seconds before you can start faking an orgasm. Kink has been around forever and the day. When I was 20, I went to the Red Vic in the Haight district in San Francisco to watch a series called The Good Old Naughty Days.
This retrospective even has its own wikipedia page check it out.
It was 10 or so 'blue films'. For those of you not in the know, a 'blue film' is what people used to call pornography, they also called them 'stag films'. Anyway these films were probably dirtier than anything I've seen with starring Sasha Grey these days. They had to do with things like nuns, plates, people on leashes, and so on and so forth. Did I mention these films were from 1895 - 1911? I didn't? Well that's rather important. People were basically making pornographic films for as long as people had been making films. That's right, while the
Georges Méliès was shooting A Trip to the Moon (1902), there were people shooting two women dressed as nuns licking each others nipples.
A still from one of the films in The Good Old Naughty Days series. These films were initially intended to be seen in French brothels as costumers waited for their prostitutes to get ready.
Kink kind of stayed in the background as American culture grew more mundane and compliant (no more puns intended!), but had a huge resurgence with the influx of fetish magazines in the 40's and Bettie Page who reinvented fetish culture particularly accessory fetishes like leather boots, lace-ups, stilettos, dark make-up, fishnet stalkings, and vinyl underwear.
Bettie Page in Teaser Girl in High Heels (1950) a cult short wearing her now infamous fetish gear.
In the 60's, the big thing was wife-swapping and orgies. Films were made about that as well such as Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (1969) starring Elliot Gould (I know, gross), Natalie Wood, and Diane Cannon. And now, it just so happens that the new fad in sex is to be tied down to a four-box bed and being whipped within an inch of your life...and liking it.
All Hollywood has to do now is catch up. Compliance (2012) is a gritty independent drama about sexual innocence lost through senseless and reckless violence, but with casting of Christian Grey being the hottest topic of conversation on the interwebs, and directors like Cronenberg still working with those themes, this might be the sex fad that's here to stay.
Cronenberg, who was always at the vanguard of strange sex, (which by the way is also the name of a hotly rated TV show at the moment), has released two films in the last two years about that very topic. One about spank-happy Sabina Spielrein, a pupil and sexual partner of Carl Jung, played immeasurably badly by Kiera Knightly - A Dangerous Method (2011). The other is the highly anticipated Cosmopolis (2012) about a billionaire playboy who has a lot of kinky sex in his limo while the world destroys itself around him, starring Robert Pattinson, the influence for the character of Christian Grey in the E. L. James series. How appropriate.
Still from Cronenberg's Cosmopolis (2012) which could be directly out of 'Fifty Shades of Grey' as far as I'm concerned. Robert Pattinson with Sarah Gadon, two people that could not be better cast as Christian and Anastasia respectively.
No longer is BDSM something only porn producers have to worry about. It's taken over basically all media outlets. From television to films, to the ads in Vogue to literature. If you're still thinking about writing the great American novel or re-booting the tale of Snow-White, maybe it's time to turn off the life-support and get with the times. The general consensus seems to be: Tie me up, America.
