masochism – The History of BDSM

Mary Gaitskill’s “Minority Report”, 30 years after “Secretary”

Apr 112024

Mary Gaitskill’s short story “Secretary” (previously discussed) was first published in 1988, then was eventually adapted into the 2002 film Secretary. I’ve already discussed the differences between the script by Erin Cressida Wilson and the film directed by Steven Shainberg, so there’s a kind of family tree connecting the story and the movie.

Gaitskill herself has described the film as “the Pretty Woman version of my story.” (Gaitskill, Mary. “Victims and Losers: A Love Story; Thoughts on the Movie Secretary” Somebody With a Little Hammer: Essays, Pantheon Books: New York, 2017) Last year, the New Yorker magazine published (March 27, 2023) Gaitskill’s follow-up story “Minority Report”. It tells the story of Debby and her life after her encounter with “the lawyer,” now given the name of Ned Johnson.

“Minority Report” is less a sequel than a retelling of the same event from Debby’s changed perspective as a woman in her 50s, and her difficulty in understanding and expressing her experience. The title explicitly comes from the Steven Spielberg film of the same name, in which precognitive people experience flashes of future events while kept in a sedated state, and a team of detectives have to interpret these scattered, impressionistic glimpses of possible crimes and decide what to do.

Secretary: the script, by Erin Cressida Wilson: The Celluloid Dungeon

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Apr 092024

Secretary (2002) has taken up a disproportionate amount of time in researching and writing The Celluloid Dungeon. I already knew there were a lot of differences between Mary Gaitskill’s original short story and the finished film directed by Steven Shainberg, but I’ve since learned there were significant differences between Erin Cressida Wilson’s script and the finished product. (See Ariel Schudson’s “Secretary and Adaptation: the Telephone theory”) Thanks to inter-library loan, I’ve borrowed a copy of the script book, which also includes essays by Wilson and others.

Lipstick (1976): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Nov 132023

Lipstick is a 1976 rape revenge drama.

The first two acts are a straightforward drama. Chris McCormick, a famous model known for sexually provocative pictorials, agrees to meet with the music teacher, Gordon Stuart, of her teen sister, Kathy. Gordon, angered by Chris’ indifference to him and the glamour of her lifestyle, assaults and rapes her in her apartment, including tying her to her bed. Kathy briefly witnesses the end of this.

TammyJo & Peter discuss Punish Me! (2006): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Oct 102023

TammyJo and I discuss Punish Me! in-depth.

R100 (2013): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Sep 262023

R100 is a 2013 Japanese absurdist comedy. A depressed man enters a contract to be assaulted by dominatrixes in random places at random times.

It starts off relatively realistically. Katayama is a depressed furniture salesman dealing with raising his young son while his wife has been in a coma for years. He visits a company known only as “Bondage”. The host has him sit on a merry-go-round and view dominatrixes. The offer is a one-year contract during which different dominatrixes will assault him unpredictably. Katayama agrees.

Nymphomaniac Vol.2 (2013): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Aug 082023

Nymphomaniac Volume 2 is the second part of notorious director Lars von Trier’s 2013 film about a woman with sexual compulsion.

The framing story is that Seligman, an elderly academic, finds a beaten women in an alley near his apartment, and takes her home. She says her name is Joe, and when Seligman asks her how she ended up in his alley, she says she would have to tell him her entire life story. Over one night, Joe tells Seligman her biography in search of sexual pleasure, with frequent asides from both of them on topics ranging from techniques of fly fishing to the history of religious art. This dialog also acts as a kind of trial, with Joe prosecuting herself as a bad person who deserved her mistreatment, and Seligman defending her decisions and her worth as a person.

Story of O (1975): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Feb 142022

Story of O (1975), dir. Just Jaeckin

[Note: all English quotes are from the English dub.]

The relaxation of film censorship in the 1960s and 1970s, both in the US and abroad, created an interesting period in mainstream films were much more daring in terms of sexuality and violence, while some porn films had bigger budgets and higher production values to play in mainstream theatres and reach a larger audience. Naturally, someone would try to adapt arguably the most famous novel about BDSM to the big screen, Histoire d’O by “Pauline Reage” (aka Anne Desclos), published 1954.

Billions, season 5B: The Celluloid Dungeon

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Dec 122021

Shooting of season 5 of Billions was interrupted by COVID, and the second half of the season didn’t air until 2021. Of the various plot threads picked up, the only one that concerns us is Chuck’s sex life. We last saw him involved with the sexually adventurous Cat, but as of S05E08 “Copenhagen”, it’s over.

Chuck: “I liked it. Of course I liked it. Give me pistachio ice cream, I’ll eat it and smile, as Diamond David Lee Roth would say. But it was uncomfortable. Just too many limbs. Too many questions. Oh, what to do? Give me rum raisin, on the other hand, I’ll inhale the whole point and root around the fridge to find another one. Then that’s what I was missing.”
Other guy: “Cat seems pretty liberated. Have you broached the subject of what you really want?”
Chuck: “As you said, she’s smart and she’s sensitive and she saw, she saw that it would never work, not all the for me, not without, you know… [clicks tongue] And so she said something along the lines of, ‘We’ll always have Paris.’ Only the words she used were harsher, and all about wasting her time.”

Earlier seasons of Billions made Chuck’s masochism a major part of both his personality and his relationship with Wendy. Now it’s been demoted to the same importance as his taste in ice cream. Apart from snide comments from other people, Chuck’s sex life doesn’t come up again.

Note that trailers for season 6 suggest that Chuck will continue to practice kink and he may even see Troy the pro-domme again.

Bitter Moon (1992): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Sep 182021

Mimi (Emmanuelle Seigner) meets Nigel (Hugh Grant) in the company of her husband Oscar (Peter Coyote)

Bitter Moon (IMDB) is a 1992 erotic/romance film, directed by the notorious Roman Polanski, based on the novel Lunes de Fiel by Pascal Bruckner

Nigel goes on an ocean cruise with his wife, Fiona, where he becomes fascinated by a beautiful, mysterious woman named Mimi. Her husband, a paraplegic would-be writer named Oscar, demands that Nigel listen to his story of his obsessive love with Mimi before Nigel has an affair with her. Like another tale of twisted love, Nabokov’s Lolita, we shouldn’t take the narrator at face value. Mimi privately tells Nigel: “You musn’t believe all he says. He’s a sick man. He imagines things.”

In Oscar’s story, he is a self-consciously literary archetype, an independently wealthy young American living in Paris to become a writer. On a bus trip, he becomes smitten with Mimi, a young French woman.

Mimi is a cipher, with almost nothing more to her than being a beautiful French dancer, at least in Oscar’s telling. The early stages of their romance go from sweetly romantic to an adolescent’s idea of eroticism.

Oscar: (to Nigel) “I’m only going into such detail to show you how completely enslaved I was, body and soul, by this creature whose dangerous charms have made such an impression on you.”

Dogs Don’t Wear Pants (2019): The Celluloid Dungeon

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Jun 242021

Dogs Don’t Wear Pants (Koirat eivät käytä housuja) (IMDB) is a 2019 Finnish drama, directed by J.-P. Valkeapää and co-written by the director and Juhana Lumme, based on a story by Lumme.

A depressed widower finds relief in breath control sessions with a pro dominatrix.

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A Lover's Pinch: A Cultural History of Sadomasochism