Law & Order Special Victims Unit S13E22: The Celluloid Dungeon

 Celluloid Dungeon  No Responses »
Jun 122020
 

Episode S13E22 “Strange Beauty”, aired May 16, 2012 IMDB

A kidnapped young woman turns up dead with an amputated leg, which leads the detectives into the body modification subculture. 

Body modification is not the same thing as BDSM, though obviously there is considerable overlap of the two subcultures. The episode of SVU that focuses on body modification deploys a lot of the same tropes as episodes of procedural dramas that focus on BDSM. 

Detective Rollins happens to see a woman, Nina, being abducted into a taxi cab. Nina’s mother talks about her distress at seeing her daughter’s extensive tattoos and piercings, which she said started with an octopus tattoo on her ankle. 

That’s when a woman’s severed leg with an octopus tattoo turns up in a canal, which leads to another reported severed leg from years ago. The former owner of that leg is a drug-addicted street sex worker who was paid $25,000 by an unidentified john to amputate her leg. 

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Assorted links roundup

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Mar 152016
 
  • An article (part 1, part 2, part 3) on a body modifications blog covered an alleged Victorian fad for nipple piercing. The source is letters published in correspondence columns in magazines, which as we have seen in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine and others, are questionable to say the least. They’re more indicative of interest and fantasies than actual practice.
  • Jahsonic’s list of sadism and masochism in mainstream film brought me to Senses of Cinema’s article “Whips and Bodies: The Sadean Cinematic text” by Lindsay Hallam, on the influence of Sade’s work on film. “It was Surrealist Luis Buñuel who first introduced Sade into the cinematic realm. In the 1930 film L’Âge d’or, Buñuel chose to end his tale of erotic passion with a scene taken from Sade’s novel The 120 Days of Sodom. The scene takes place after the male protagonist has been betrayed by the woman he loves – that is, normal, heterosexual romance has failed. In fact, as the intertitles state, it is at “that moment” of betrayal that “the survivors of the Chateau de Selliny were coming out, to go back to Paris”. The intertitles further explain that: “Four well known and utter scoundrels had locked themselves up in an impregnable castle for 120 days to celebrate the most brutal of orgies”.”
  • Another short history of bondage imagery in mainstream film and history, mostly damsel-in-distress-type stuff.
  • Conspiracy theorist and professional crank Alex Jones was inspired by the debut of Caitlin Jenner to spit out this bizarre claim about the transabled sub-sub-culture: “Or they like to get shot,” Jones said, “With .357 magnums through up under the chest, but missing the heart to blow a huge shrapnel hole in the back, and those are real sexy supposedly… This is the new big push and you’re not cool enough to understand how wonderful it is to be shot with a .357 magnum or how cool the bullet holes are… It’ll become sanctified. It’ll become a religion.”
  • The contract Leopold von Sacher-Masoch had with Fanny Pistor, compared to the contract from Venus in Furs.
  • Bitch Media covers the history of anti-abuse activism in BDSM, specifically the conflict over Fetlife’s policy against accusing people of abuse.
  • A short, anonymous history of Numa Shozo’s masochistic novel Yapoo the Human Animal.
  • Annalspornographie has a three-part article (part 1, part 2, part 3) on the life and work of the Marquis de Sade, including some vintage images.