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Showing posts with label rape. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rape. Show all posts
Friday, February 15, 2013
Friday, February 15, 2013
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In 1961 psychologist Stanley Milgram devised an experiment to measure willingness to obey authority. The volunteers for the experiment were asked to quiz a person hooked up to an electro-shock generator. Every time the person being questioned answered incorrectly, the volunteer would be instructed to give them an electric shock, increasing in voltage for every question they got wrong. A third person, a scientist, kept instructing the volunteer to shock the subject, even as the volunteer feebly protested. As the shocks increased in voltage, the subject began to scream in pain, or bang on the walls. If the volunteer wanted to halt the experiment, the scientist ‘running’ the experiment would verbally prod them saying phrases like “The experiment requires that you continue” or “You have no other choice, you must go on.”
If the volunteer subject repeatedly stated his desire to end the experiment, then after four verbal prods the experiment was halted. If they chose to continue, the experiment ended with the volunteer administering a massive 450v shock three times in succession, with no response from the subject, who the volunteer could expect to assume they have killed. Milgram and his colleagues expected a tiny percentage of volunteers to progress beyond 300v shocks, yet to their surprise 65% of the subjects administered the final ‘fatal’ shocks. These volunteers were barbers, telephone workers, salespeople and businessmen, ordinary people who were apparently prepared to kill on command for $4.00 (plus 50c carfare).
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| Dreama Walker as Becky |
It’s impossible not to think of the Milgram experiments during Compliance, a film that shows us men and women meekly submitting to assumed authority and sexually abusing a teenage girl. The film is set in a generic KFC/McDonalds-alike fast food restaurant called ‘ChickWich’. In the middle of a busy day the manager, Sandra (Ann Dowd) receives a phonecall from a man identifying himself as Officer Daniels. He explains that one of her employees has been accused of stealing from a customer, and gives her a vague physical description. Sandra identifies this ‘thief’ as Becky (Dreama Walker), and summons her to the managers office. The vast majority of the rest of the film takes place in this office, as, under telephone instruction from 'Officer Daniels', employees and friends strip, humiliate, sexually abuse and rape Becky.
Of course, 'Officer Daniels', isn't a police officer at all. The whole thing is an impossibly cruel prank phone call, a term that barely seems able to cover the scope of what happens. As you watch these fast-food workers abandon first their autonomy and then their morality you begin to wonder just how moronic these people are. The call begins plausibly, but by the time you’ve been instructed to bend a naked, crying teenage girl over your knee and spank her surely - surely - you’d think something was up?
The apparent stupidity of these characters is immensely frustrating, but you have to watch this with the knowledge that all of this really happened. The first image of the film is: “INSPIRED BY TRUE EVENTS”. The white on black text takes up the entire screen, as if to impress the truthfulness of the film upon us from the very beginning. That the film rigorously sticks to the facts is key to what makes Compliance worth watching, and more importantly, means you’re able to watch it without feeling like you're getting prurient voyeuristic thrills.
I wasn’t particularly looking forward to seeing this film. I was already familiar with the incident it dramatises, and having done some cursory research I was worried it was going to be uncomfortably exploitational. I got an email prior to the press screening informing me to “please note that this film contains scenes of forced nudity, sexual manipulation and implied sexual violence. I wouldn’t recommend it for a Valentine’s Day date movie.” I reckon I’ve got a pretty high tolerance for watching disturbing films, but frankly, the idea of sitting through what sounded like a 90 minute rape scene on Valentine’s Day didn’t exactly fill my heart with joy.
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| Ann Dowd as Sandra |
Fortunately, Compliance treats its subject matter with careful sensitivity. Dreama Walker’s Becky is an attractive woman, but watching her shivering and naked under cold fluorescent light makes you feel guilty for not looking away. The humiliations she endures are never framed to arouse; they focus on hands pressed against greasy floors, her tear-streaked cheeks or the cardboard boxes of branded condiments around her.
To some degree it’s arguable that Zobel has shot the film to make us identify with Becky. I think it’s a little more complicated than that. It’s easy to forget that ‘Officer Daniels’ never sees what’s happening, he’s left to imagine everything, constantly asking for descriptions. The audience becomes his eyes, dispassionately observing the events. Most of the characters in this film are so blindly moronic in their devotion to authority that’s it’s difficult to sympathise with them. Worryingly I even found myself getting a little frustrated at the passivity of the victim. All of this leads to ‘Officer Daniels’ being the only person who knows as much as we do, making the audience queasily complicit in his crime.
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| Set designers! There are other colours than blue and orange! |
But it’s the restaurant manager Sandra that becomes the most complex character. Expertly played by Ann Dowd, she embodies much of what Compliance is trying to tell us about the dangers of submitting to authority. In most circumstances she’d seem perfectly nice, if a little dull, but her critical flaw is the notion that being polite and pleasant is enough to get through life and that questioning authority is inherently a bad thing. In the rigid hierarchy of fast food this mindset works well. At the start of the film we see her pointedly telling her staff that they need to stick to ChickWich operating procedure to make it through the day. Worryingly, we also catch her shooting annoyed looks at Becky, raising the disturbing point that at least subconsciously she wants to see this girl being taken down a peg.
As the abuse gets worse, Sandra’s position becomes more entrenched. She strips a clearly distressed Becky, apologising to her all the while but never once considering that she could just not strip her. She willingly deludes herself into believing that leaving a naked Becky alone with a man she barely knows is the sensible thing to do. In the disturbing epilogue to the film we see Sandra being interviewed about her complicity in Becky’s abuse. She considers herself absolved of responsibility, slipping into easy, mindless small-talk to try and deflect questioning away from disturbing questions. Clearly she has learned nothing.
It’s incredibly tempting to condemn Sandra outright(and, by extension, the real woman she’s based on), but what both this film and the Milgram experiment demonstrates is that a desire to submit to authority is a very human trait, one that to some degree is present in all of us. What Milgram realised, and what the events of Compliance demonstrate, are that when ‘normal’ individuals feel they have surrendered responsibility for their actions to an authority figure, they can be made to do the most monstrous things. Though Compliance may be almost documentarian in its rigorous approach, the restaurant setting also serves as a neat microcosm for society as a whole. Sandra is a perfect example of someone who has completely surrendered herself to a series of stacked systems; the franchise rules for operating her restaurant; the wider corporate environment of fast food and the justice system. Her decisions are not her own: she doesn’t think about her actions, she just follows set procedure. And as the film effectively demonstrates, when someone exploits their knowledge of those procedures and systems of authority, they can get Sandra, or anyone for that matter, to do almost anything.
Despite my misgivings going in I quickly began to, if not enjoy, then appreciate Compliance. It’s coolly and intelligently directed, making excellent use of what I assume is a relatively limited budget. There’s too much blue and orange in the set, prop and costume design but aside from that the film conjures up a believable corporate environment from thin air. All the performances are great, a few bordering on brilliant. The sense of tension and dread once the phone rings rivals anything I’ve seen lately, and the film just about sustains it throughout its perfect, concise 90 minute running time. It’s not a movie for everyone, but as an expose of the dark side of normality it’s succeeds brilliantly.
So, go and see it. No, really, go and see it when it comes out. You’d better do what I say or I’m going to have to call in my superior. You’ve got two choices here; go and see it, or there’ll be trouble. And you don’t want trouble right? Of course not, you’re a good person. So go and see it. Trust me.
****/*****
‘Compliance’ is released 22 March 2013
Friday, January 4, 2013
Friday, January 4, 2013
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As Alex and his droogs first make their way onto the stage you'd be forgiven for having some reservations. Kubrick's iconic film lingers in the mind, and at first glance these guys look a little stage-y. They're lithe, twirling about the stage with the precise, mannered movements of a dancer. As they launch into a tightly choreographed dance-fight against Billyboy's gang my concerns grew. Everything looked a little fey, over mannered. Where was the blood, the pleasure in inflicting pain - the ultraviolence?
Soon after, someone's being raped with a broken bottle, and you begin to appreciate the raw power and and muscularity of the production, directed by Alexandra Spencer-Jones. This is helped, in large part by the gobsmackingly amazing performance of Martin McCreadie as Alex. Up until this point I'd assumed that it was almost impossible to play Alex as anything other than a spin on Malcolm McDowell . But McCreadie manages to encapsulate not only a genuinely threatening physical presence, but also a loveable impishness that shines through even when he's committing the most sadistic scenes of violence.
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| Martin McCreadie as Alex |
It's a difficult task finding the balance in Alex. He's our protagonist and much of the play's latter half relies on us having at least some sympathy with his plight, but then how are we to come to love a vicious little git "whose principle interests are rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven"? McCreadie's Alex, even in his most despicable moments, still somehow manages to keep a shred of charm. So when we see him bent double in pain, every muscle straining, sweat pouring down his face as he undergoes the Ludovico technique our sympathies remain with him. Sure he's a psychopath, but Alex makes a kind of sense as a reaction to his environment, a world of grotesque caricatures and the worst kinds of little-Englanders.
In some regards, McCreadie's Alex is more threatening and effective than McDowell's purely because you're in the same room as him. The Soho Theatre is not a particularly big space, and during his monologues Alex speaks directly to us. When he glares up at us with those
black-rimmed eyes, his body tense and coiled you feel a little involuntary
thrill of fear, rather than being separated from us by both a cinema screen and
40 years here is Alex DeLarge standing in front of you and it’s utterly
magnetic.
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| The Ludovico Technique |
The rest of the cast acquit themselves similarly well. They constantly change roles, as Alex's droogs they're petulant, sinuous and overtly sexual in a spidery way. I was surprised at how funny this adaptation was; many of these minor roles are played in an extremely exaggerated manner, at times approaching a sort of warped pantomime. While the play dips more and more into the absurd after Alex has been institutionalised, it never detracts from the more serious themes.
This adaptation brings the homoerotic elements of the text to the fore, intertwining them with the violence that Alex inflicts upon those around him. It's an overtly gay adaptation, featuring an all-male cast of buff men who spend an inordinate amount of time topless and sweaty. Everyone on stage is beautiful, something accentuated by the sharp makeup, styled hair and costumes seem designed to show off the actors muscles as they fight and fuck their way through the text. The play is so effective in making these homoerotic elements work that when we get to the scene where the success of Alex's aversion therapy is tested, the artfully posing man they send in is equally and obviously as valid an object of desire for Alex as any woman might be.
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| Magic Alex |
This cocktail of homoeroticism, violence and sadomasochism is more reminiscent of Andy Warhol's adaptation of 'A Clockwork Orange': 'Vinyl' than anything Kubrick came up with. In Warhol's (incredibly loose) adaptation we see our young protagonist stripped to the waist and whipped while forced to watch violent movies that are described to us rather than shown directly. This play uses a similar device, describing horrific imagery to us rather than showing it directly. It's a clever device, one which forces us to become complicit in the Ludovico technique. As the cast recite graphic descriptions of atrocities we cannot help but visualise them ourselves, creating our own miniature horrorshows far worse than anything they could reasonably get away with on stage.
This production keeps things relevant, and when the text fortuitously references young people rioting in London, it neatly links us to a modern equivalent of Alex's behaviour. Watching disaffected, masked youths smashing in the windows of high street shops and taking what they want is utterly terrifying, but on a symbolic level it's a kind of catharsis The text of 'A Clockwork Orange' is in no danger of entirely losing its edge, but tapping into this modern mixture of fear and anarchistic thrills helps make 'A Clockwork Orange' seem less fantastic and more contemporary.
Another similarity to Warhol's 'Vinyl' is a great pop soundtrack, something that helps anchor this production in the modern day; for example, rather than a violent beating being soundtracked to 'Singin' in the Rain', we get 'Standing in the Way of Control' by Gossip. Later we get scenes set to the Scissor Sisters and Placebo. It adds a level of recognisably camp deviance to proceedings, these are things a modern audience can readily identify with, dragging us further into the world this staging of 'A Clockwork Orange' creates.
So if this production is so desperate to bring 'A Clockwork Orange' into the modern day, what does it actually have to say about modern youth? I don't think there is a convincing modern analogue for the Ludovico technique, but the notion of a government happy to employ those who enjoy inflicting violence rings true. After Alex's release he bumps into his former droogs, now gainfully employed as policemen. As they sadistically kick Alex in the guts it brings to mind the self righteous uniformed killers of Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson.
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| Milk+ |
This production uses the original (and somewhat more optimistic) ending of the book. We see an older Alex with a new trio of droogs (all ominously wearing hoodies), but we see that he's begun to outgrow his taste for violence. The text rejects forcing a morality upon others, and shows us that a greater sense of maturity naturally leads to a decline in desire for violence. He introduces us to his new partner and seems genuinely in love, ready to move towards a tentatively brighter future. As a epilogue I've always felt it was a bit unnecessary. Seeing a grown-up, matured Alex makes him seem a bit neutered, as if his impulses and actions were 'merely' growing pains. I prefer the implication at the end of the US version of the book and Kubrick's film, that Alex is less an expression of teenage angst and more something endemic to humanity, a dark, violent thing that lurks on the edges of our collective consciousness.
It's a tremendous production, one of the most compelling I've seen on stage in a long time. It sustains a fast-paced, muscular intensity throughout, and the overtly erotic elements create a compelling link between sexual urges and to the desire to inflict violence. The whole thing is held together by a god-damn amazing performance by Martin McCreadie, who brings Alex DeLarge to terrifying life in front of our eyes. If it goes on tour, make sure to go and see it as it's finishing up in the Soho Theatre tomorrow.
'A Clockwork Orange' is on 4th and 5th of January at The Soho Theatre, London, returns only.
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