Red Shoe Diaries S01E13 “How I Met My Husband”, Aired June 26, 1993 IMDB
“How I Met” starts off like a cross between a music video and a fashion show. Mistress Miranda’s dungeon is having an exhibition, with women and men in fetish gear strutting on a catwalk while a female announcer talks about the outfits and how much they cost. The frame is “dressing for power”. “Remember, leather, rubber and steel equals power and control.” It’s very aspirational and consumerist, locating kink in a fantastic world of wealth and glamour.
Red Shoe Diaries S01E03 “You Have the Right to Remain Silent”, Aired July 14, 1992 IMDB
Zalman King, a former actor who produced Nine and a Half Weeks and a few other softcore mainstream films, created the anthology series Red Shoe Diaries which became the flagship of 1990s direct-to-cable-TV softcore erotica, free from the constraints of both the MPAA and Broadcast Standards and Practices. The framing device is that Jake (pre-X-Files David Duchovny) is haunted by the suicide of his fiancée. He found her diary and learned she was having an affair with another man. He places ads in newspapers asking women to tell him their stories of desire. The confessional mode, as an inquiry into the “truth” of female sexuality, is built into the series’ premise.
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 Idiots is a 1998 Danish black comedy/drama written and directed by Lars von Trier, shot under the rules of the Dogme 95 manifesto.
The semi-mockumentary film concerns a small group of people who pretend in public to be mentally disabled, which they call “spazzing”. They do this as an elaborate prank, as a kind of performance art, as a passive-aggressive attack on society (épater les bourgeois), and for other reasons. Rotating members of the group play “the minders”. Karen, a seemingly lost woman, is swept up in the group and stays with them.
Stoffer draws Karen into the group of “spazzers”.
George Costanza: [In a depression clinic] I should be in a place like this. I envy this woman. You get to wear slippers all day. Friends visit. They pity you. Pity is very underrated. Seinfeld, S03E02 “The Truth”
I discuss this film because it brushes up against certain expressions of masochism, particularly those that involve public roleplay and abjection. We know that Hannah Cullwick and Arthur Munby often did public roleplay, as did Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Aurora Rumelin. This connects with the kink of disability fetishism, such as the creative works of “Paracathy“, as well as certain forms of ageplay.
Strangeland is a 1998 thriller/horror film written by and starring Dee Snider (of 80s glam metal band Twisted Sister) and directed by John Pieplow. Amazon
Tokyo Decadence is a 1992 Japanese drama film, directed by Ryu Murakami and starring Miho Nikaido. (All quotations are from the English subtitles.) Amazon
Ai (Japanese for “love”) is a 22-year-old professional submissive sex worker, adrift in 1990s Japan, lacking in direction.
Ai with client.
In the very first scene, Ai is tied up and naked. Her client tells her S&M is all about trust, but then blindfolds her despite her objections. He injects her with something, also apparently without her consent. (Drug use, both giving and receiving, is a recurring motif.)
In Ai’s scenes with her clients, she is awkward and passive, as if she wandered into a stage play and doesn’t know or understand the script. Clients impress their own ideas and archetypes upon her, more like a prop in their visions. Ai’s blank-ness may actually be an asset in her line of work, having little sense of self to interfere with her client’s fantasies.
The yakuza client has Ai pose in front of the skyscraper window.
The second client Ai sees, implicitly a Yakuza gangster, asks her about herself. She says:
Ai: I’ve discovered that I have no talent whatsoever.
After a scene with the gangster and his girlfriend, Ai pulls the bondage gear off and vigorously brushes her teeth. On her way out, the gangster overpays her and says to her:
Gangster: Don’t think you’ve no talent. That’s a cop-out.
Another client wants to be strangled by Ai and another escort while receiving oral. The two women think they accidentally killed him, and are astonished when he suddenly comes back to life.
Yet another client, who initially is friendly enough, proves to be a necrophile who wants to re-enact a specific rape and murder with Ai. When he tries to strangle her, Ai finally resists. He lets her go, but demands his money back. This puts Ai on thin ice with her manager.
Ai and Saki
On a threesome assignment, Ai meets Saki, a pro-dominatrix who deftly commands their masochistic male client (and Ai too). Saki shows the kind of confidence and control Ai lacks. Saki takes Ai to her lavish home, where they hang out. Saki proves to be a serious cocaine user (she snorts, injects and smokes it).
Ai: You must be wealthy.
Saki: Not really. It’s Japan that’s wealthy. But it’s wealth without pride. It creates anxiety, which drives our men into masochism. I’ve made my living out of these men.
Saki gives Ai an unspecified drug that will allegedly give her courage. After her night with Saki, Ai goes on a journey to find her former lover who married another woman, though it’s implied he actually died.
In a post-credit scene, Ai appears on stage, dressed in a Saki-like outfit. She signs something in sign language, then dances in a far more confident way.
Ai at her manager’s office.
I wouldn’t call Ai masochistic. She doesn’t embrace her experiences, but instead seems detached, even confused. It’s different from Lucy in Sleeping Beauty (2011); Ai seems like a person who has lost her way, and looks to others for direction. She watches Saki dominating the client like a person attending a university lecture that they just don’t understand.
BDSM in Tokyo Decadence is not a means to connection or intimacy. It’s a symptom of a dysfunctional society, of men (mostly) who have too much money for their own good, paralleled by the drug use (mostly cocaine and other stimulants) and the gourmet meals. Human connection is what’s missing, and what Ai searches for.
Jade is a 1995 erotic thriller directed by William Friedkin (director of the previously discussed Cruising (1980)), and written by Joe Ezterhaus, who also penned Flashdance (1983) Basic Instinct (1992).
I Love a Man in Uniform (also released as A Man in Uniform) is a 1993 Canadian psychological drama. IMDB
Henry Adler, a bank clerk and would-be actor, witnesses a police officer be shot. He seems excited by this.
Henry auditions for a secondary role, Officer Flanagan, on a TV cop show, Crimewave. He shows an aggressive and domineering side as he pushes around a female production assistant.
NYPD Blue S04E13 “Tom and Geri”, aired January 28, 1997
Geri, a police administrative assistant, has had an un-returned crush on Detective Andy Sipowicz. (In a previous episode, S04E06, she told him she was wearing rubber underwear.) The B story of this episode is that Geri tells Sipowicz that a friend she knows, Tom, has died in bondage gear in his apartment. Sipowicz, who wants nothing to do with Geri, hands it off to his superior, who in turn delegates it to a pair of female detectives, Russell and Kirkendall. Even at this stage, Geri seems distrustful of everyone.
Roseanne was a popular sitcom in the 1990s, built around the stand up comedy of Roseanne Barr.
Roseanne’s elderly mother suffers a minor hip injury and has to move into her daughter’s house to recover, causing friction with Roseanne and her family. Bev’s friend Jake from the retirement home drops by and reveals that Bev injured herself during sex with him. Roseanne struggles with talking about sexual topics with her mother, and Bev is equally uncomfortable, after a lifetime of sexual ignorance and bad experiences. Roseanne and Bev awkwardly talk it out.
