Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist is a 1997 documentary by Kirby Dick about the titular Bob Flanagan, an artist with cystic fibrosis and, unusually, lived into his 40s. Flanagan combined his performance art and artworks with his BDSM practice, including being the slave of his mistress and wife, Sheree Rose.
(Most of the Celluloid Dungeon project is about fiction films, but I will explore a few documentaries along the way.)
The film documents the last few months of Flanagan’s life, up to and including his death, combined with films and videos of his performances and his home movies from childhood. We meet his parents and brother, see him as an ordinary-looking kid, then his degeneration until he looks like, well, a dying man.
Flanagan knew early on that he had a fatal disease that killed most patients in their 20s. For him, every day is borrowed time, albeit one filled with pain and discomfort. He illustrates this by modifying a “visible man” model so that its mouth constantly produces mucus from the lungs, its anus constantly dribbles feces, and its penis constantly emits semen. His body is out of his control, barely managed with drugs and painkillers and surgery and oxygen feeds.
The hook of this documentary is probably the juxtaposition of Flanagan’s life of chronic pain and his voluntary embrace of pain through BDSM and body modification, as well as his submission to Rose. We see him hang upside down, suspend weights from his scrotum, and hammer a nail through his own penis. I could do a lot of armchair psychoanalyzing about Flanagan’s life and how he experiences pain, but I hesitate for fear of leaping to a conclusion.
Secretary, for instance, depends on the naive, poorly-considered idea that Lee’s compulsive self-cutting can somehow be replaced or cured by her BDSM relationship with Mr. Grey, as if the two experiences are equivalent. I think that grossly oversimplifies both experiences, and misleads viewers.
In the case of Sick, one might assume that Flanagan’s masochistic practices serve as a form of pain management, that experiencing self-directed pain helps him cope with his involuntary pain. But that could be too simplistic. It could also be an attempt to distract himself, or just a stubborn assertion of hedonism in the face of mortality. If you know you’re going to die young, why not pursue pleasure?
From another angle, Sick shouldn’t be taken as an attempt to normalize or rationalize BDSM by making it the solution to Flanagan’s problem. One of his performance pieces is a series of “Because…” statements about BDSM, which include “Because it feels good”. His masochism is an integral part of his identity, which does not need to be justified or explained.
I am reluctant to call Sick the cliche of “inspiring”, but it’s certainly a memorable portrait of a unique individual.
