A child giggling uncontrollably while tearing up newspaper.
Three women engaged in a vicious fight.
A cyclist taking a header into solid concrete.
A suicide by hanging.
A cat pawing at a piano.
A dead soldier splattered with blood.
This is the parade of images that constitute the opening minute of Antonio Campos’s 2008 debut feature AFTERSCHOOL, an underseen (for reasons that may soon become apparent) terror of a film starring the young Ezra Miller as Robert, an extremely online high school freshman who – even at his isolated boarding school full of similarly disaffected youths – stands out for his complete lack of emotionality. I could write a whole separate article about this film’s indebtedness to earlier surveillance-and-estrangement auteurs like Atom Egoyan and Michael Haneke (in particular, his 1992 effort BENNY’S VIDEO) – how Campos uses different aspect ratios to simulate Robert’s screen-centric POV, or how he often sets up his shots with the speaker out of frame, or the actors weirdly bisected or off-center (another favorite Haneke trick) to reflect Robert’s fragmented psyche or blah blah blah film nerd bullshit whatever. I don’t really want to talk about all that. It’s been said. And if this is the kind of movie you seek out, you probably don’t need anyone telling you stuff like that anyway. I’d rather have a different conversation.
The bottom line is, regardless of who he was cribbing from, thirteen years ago Campos made a uniquely prescient film about the emergent concept of technological alienation – a concept which has grown exponentially in the years since, from a fringy concern for a very specific kind of “troubled” kid, into a much more mainstream problem – not just for those troubled kids who’ve since grown into adults, but for every generation growing up in their wake. By building his story around a near-literal cypher – an affectless hollow, either at the center or behind the lens of virtually every frame – Campos all but demands that the viewer step into the void where his protagonist should be, and experience his profoundly unsettling worldview firsthand.
I want to be clear up front – I am not claiming anything as alarmist or dire as “we are all Robert now.” He is, without question, an extreme case. A canary in the coalmine of society’s growing detachment from reality. Miller’s performance is something close to that of a sociopath, methodically attempting to understand empathy even while fully grasping that he lacks it (an almost impenetrable acting assignment which he executes brilliantly). In one of the only moments of honesty or self-reflection we receive on the nature of Robert’s internal motives, he confides in Mr. Virgil (a school counselor played with pitch perfect “I’m not a teacher, I’m your pal” naivete by Gary Wilmes) that his interest in violent videos, like the ones listed above, stems from a desire to find “things that seem real” – an admission which, upon subsequent viewings of AFTERSCHOOL, makes the next scene in his browsing montage that much more difficult to stomach.
After that opening series of clips, Robert lands on a site with a name so filthy I’m not going to type it here (but which remains extremely visible throughout, in the bottom corner of his screen). The clip he watches depicts a young woman in her underwear as she answers increasingly vile questions posed to her by an unseen cameraman. Though she at first tries to play off her impending entrée into the world of internet pornography with a mix of coy flirtation and bedroom-eyed bravada, the man gives her no quarter, refusing to play along or let her make light of what she’s about to do, calling her names, forcing her to directly address her parents, and eventually, reaching out from behind the camera and grabbing her by the throat. The implication is stomach-turningly clear: whatever she thought this was going to be, it’s about to be something else. There’s no way out. It’s already too late.
The subsequent sexual encounter is barely shown, and for Robert, likely doesn’t even matter. He already got what he came for. As he notes in that same scene with Mr. Virgil, he likes porn where the girl is “scared… not fake,” and by taking this disturbing content out of its usual context – the privacy of a home computer screen in a darkened (and probably locked) bedroom – and placing it in the much-more-public milieu of narrative feature film, Campos demands that his audience take stock of themselves as well: of exactly what kinds of things they like to look at on the internet, and why (I can only imagine what it was like to see this scene on the big screen in a crowded theatre, but I feel confident it incited some fast walkouts).
The film that follows is one all about the nature of watching. Robert begins making his own videos as part of his mandatory afterschool club, and seems to find a familiar solace in carrying the remove of a video screen around with him; a literal lens through which to view the world. I’d wager we’re still in the pocket of pre-Smartphone history where most of us knew at least one person like this growing up – that kid who got a handycam or a video phone earlier than everyone else, and just started filming everything; who captured moments as a way to be a part of them, even while remaining decidedly apart; who was always observing, always listening, always probing, and who would occasionally, when his subjects least expected it, reach out and tap on the glass (I’d also say it’s a safe bet that, while we may not all be Robert, we’re definitely all a lot closer to him on this particular front than we were back in 2008).
Within his newfound AV comfort zone, Robert starts testing boundaries, filming his teachers, his peers, and even his own fumbling flirtations with a pretty classmate (wherein he takes a half-hearted stab at mimicking the offscreen choking maneuver from his porn video). He’s not happy, exactly, but he seems to at least have a sense of purpose now; a reason to be places. And it is this reason that finds him alone in the halls, filming b-roll for an assignment, when two popular seniors – beautiful twin girls at the very top of the school’s social hierarchy – come careening out of a bathroom, screaming in agony, their noses gushing blood, and die right in front of him of an apparent drug overdose. Finally faced with something undeniably “real,” Robert doesn’t seem to know how to react. He doesn’t cry out, or even rush to help, instead carefully setting down his still-rolling camera, cautiously walking over, and gently cradling one of the girls in his arms.
Without giving too much away about the third act, the girls’ deaths, or Robert’s connection to them – however ambiguous – the tragedy forces him to become a more involved citizen of the cloistered world which he had, theretofore, largely only been observing. Even as he attempts to retreat further into his film projects, taking charge of the girls’ memorial video, we see him grow increasingly frustrated as everyone around him performs variations on a theme of grief; a grief which he neither shares nor comprehends. He is awakened one night by his roommate (and the girls’ sometime drug dealer) attacking their bunkbed in an all-consuming rage, clearly grappling with the guilt of his potential culpability. He watches the girls’ parents suffer through an emotional breakdown while trying and failing to put some kind of brave spin on their daughters’ legacies. He trains the camera on his own face in closeup, slapping himself repeatedly just to try and produce some facsimile of the miasmic pain thickening the air around him.
He knows it’s there.
He can see it.
But he still can’t feel it.
As the viewer, one gets the sense that he wants to – that it’s maybe all he really wants – but no matter what lengths he goes to, he simply can’t do it, and watching him butt up against the fourth wall of his own life again and again to no avail is both heartbreaking and chilling. He is forever condemned to the other side of the screen – able to observe, but never really understand – and only in the shocking final scene do we learn what his acceptance of that realization truly means. We may not all be Robert just yet, but a decade-and-change out from the premiere of AFTERSCHOOL, it’s a lot easier to relate to his particular Hell – that of being permanently, psychologically altered by our online lives – boxed in, checked out, and every so often, resentfully reaching out to tap on the glass.
If interminable, meaningless observation is the subject of AFTERSCHOOL, then it is the obverse – a similarly inescapable objectification – that lies at the heart of Julia Leigh’s 2011 debut SLEEPING BEAUTY. In many ways a female-centric counterweight to Campos’s film, where Robert is the quintessential, alienated loner who can’t stop watching, Lucy (an absolutely fearless Emily Browning) is the cold, distant woman on the other side of the screen – the girl who has so internalized the male gaze that she’s all but given up on ever not being watched.
Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way here as well. Leigh’s film owes a nod to David Lynch for its whole behind-closed-(Green)-doors, perversity-of-the-ruling-class vibe, as well as a tip of the beret to Catherine Breillat and her particular brand of take-no-prisoners, fuck-you feminism (especially ROMANCE and ANATOMY OF HELL). You might could even talk me into giving a shout-out to the squirmy, gynecological horror of DEAD RINGERS, what with Leigh employing a recurring motif of Lucy subjecting herself to invasive medical testing for quick cash as a visceral, visual shorthand for the disconnection she feels from her own body. Did I mention I have an actual college degree in “Film Studies”? Impressive, right? Super practical too. Got me where I am today. But that’s enough of that.
Indeed, Leigh’s austere color palette and frosty remove from her somber anti-heroine places her viewer in the position of observing Lucy from behind one-way glass – like a dutiful clinician running a subject through a rigorous battery of human trials – and as her story unfolds, we slowly discover that she is not so much a thrill seeker as a budding nihilist, putting herself in increasingly reckless and dangerous situations, in part for money, sure, but also out of a kind of self-immolating boredom.
An archetypal, runway-caliber beauty – petite figure, porcelain skin, a face made for makeup commercials, but with no use for makeup – it’s made clear early and often that Lucy can (and does) have sex any time she damn well feels like it. Whether it’s playing graphically lascivious hookup games with corny, middle-aged men in ritzy bars, playing (slightly) harder to get with an attractive coworker her own age, or playing house with a sickly, agoraphobic friend wasting away amid crippling alcoholism, Lucy doesn’t seem to dislike sex, necessarily, but Browning definitely brings to her all the blasé disinterest of a woman who’s been pursued, in some form or fashion, for every hour of every day since she hit puberty (if not before); a woman who’s so over trying to own it that she’s tempted to just give in and let them all have it already. Just to be rid of it. Just to be done.
It is this laissez-fare attitude that leads her to take a job at a kind of erotic, underground supper club where she serves brandy in couture lingerie to monied elderly gentlemen while other women – older, more experienced sex workers uniformly attired in black fetishwear – drape themselves about the room and attend to the men’s… other needs (in many ways they appear to be providing intentional contrast to the exquisite, alabaster doll at the center of everyone’s attention – like dark priestesses making sure the virgin sacrifice runs according to plan). For Lucy, it’s a creepy scene to be sure, but the money’s good and the danger presents as minimal. One of the men does intentionally trip her with his cane out of cruel sport, but any damage she suffers is purely psychological, and when she gets home she seems strangely exhilarated. We see her unwind with a joint and then take her lighter to one of the many hundred-dollar-bills she received for her part in the evening’s festivities, her face aglow with the wary pleasure of having found something unexpected; something new.
From there, the club’s talent scout/madame Clara (played with exacting, world-weary pragmatism by Rachael Blake) invites Lucy further into this bizarre realm of bought-and-paid-for lechery, offering even larger sums for a single night’s work. Not even work. Sleep. She is given every assurance – she will not be penetrated. Her “vagina is a temple.” All she has to do is show up, take a pill, climb into bed naked, and… just not know. “Drugs,” Clara adds, “are a form of grace.”
Naturally, Lucy takes Clara up on this lucrative opportunity without a thought (“My vagina is not a temple” she quips back), and the scenes that ensue represent some of the darkest, most primal renderings of sexism and misogyny ever committed to film. Inside the room and its veil of privacy, Leigh uses Lucy’s limp, unconscious body as a kind of blank canvas through which to explore all the different reasons that men prey on young women; all the things they take from them; all the ways in which they view them as bodies only. The ghoulish patrons of this horrific turndown service vary wildly as to what they hope to get out of it: one strokes and cuddles Lucy before crying himself to sleep. Another puts a cigarette out on her neck, and jams his fingers in her mouth while calling her every name in the book. A third moves to pick her up bodily, like a groom carrying his bride over the threshold, only to clumsily drop her on the floor (Browning, for her part, was wide awake for all of this, and both what she consented to let be done to her, and her capacity to remain convincingly limp and unaware of it while it was done, evinces a formidable artistic bravery – a true performance for the ages).
As for the men, regardless of what they do, the takeaway is the same: they are grotesque simulacra of patriarchal privilege and capitalist greed, for whom Lucy represents that ineffable “something” to which they feel entitled, but can’t quite buy, and by depicting them both at their most vulnerable, and their most depraved, Leigh finds a daring new avenue through which to subvert the male gaze – to turn it around, and make it say “look! Look at what monsters you all are!” For despite the painterly, soft-focus allure of Lucy’s naked body, these scenes are decidedly not pornographic (though there are surely men out there who will get off on them). Instead, much like the video that opens AFTERSCHOOL, there is something uglier, and more profoundly damaging at play; a kind of rape of the spirit. And it’s this, perhaps, which brings us back around to the ideas that really connect these two disturbing little films, and make them so enduringly relevant to our world today.
I can’t claim to know how pervasive Robert’s preferred brand of pornography was back in 2008 – though AFTERSCHOOL does seem to present it as the kind of thing he has to actively seek out in the darker, seedier corners of the online world – but by the time Netflix’s much-ballyhooed documentary HOT GIRLS WANTED debuted in 2015, such proclivities had become so mainstream as to be almost passè. For all that film’s harrowing revelations about the endless cycle of abuse and exploitation that is the amateur porn industry, the image that’s stuck with me the longest is one of a computer screen, scrolling through page after page of a so-called “facial abuse” site, wherein a man, much like the one in Robert’s video, has uploaded hundreds of clips of hundreds of young women, all of whom he’s subjected to a nearly identical scenario of degrading sexual violence. The sheer volume says it all. This is content that a lot of men are looking for, and that requires little more than a tripod, a spare room, and a misogynistic mean streak for other men to create in perpetuity. Furthermore, the film makes it bracingly clear that just because these scenes are scripted, doesn’t mean they’re not real, or that they don’t hurt. And much more than the sex, the hurt is the thing.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that porn has been trending downward pretty much since its inception, with the extreme forever forging inroads toward the middle, and thus pressing legitimate sadists into thinking up even more abhorrent extremes. But porn is porn is porn, and like any other addictive substance, it has a way of insidiously upping users’ tolerances. For every guy out there looking for this kind of content, there are three more who are just stumbling into it – not craven so much as curious; not “into it” so much as not wanting to judge; to think about what it means; to be the guy who says enough is enough; this is disgusting; this is wrong. The internet has made the most disturbing content in existence so readily available that institutions like the MPAA and the FCC have become practically obsolete. Things that still aren’t permitted in even the hardest-R-rated films or TV-MAturest HBO dramas can be found at the stroke of a key online. Multiple generations have now grown up with this stuff at their fingertips. It has changed us. Even my earlier decision in this very article to not print the name of Robert’s porn site feels laughably puritanical in the face of it. Like there’s anything I could spare you from that you haven’t already seen; that you don’t already know.
There is a relevant term in botany for this, scotophilia, which is used to describe varieties of plants that physically seek out shade – that actually grow toward the darkness – and it’s something I think about often when considering the trajectory of the world’s evolving viewing habits. Not so unlike porn, serious film and television have been striving too, for decades now, toward a darker, grittier kind of realism. Scorsese begat Tarantino begat the Safdie brothers. NYPD Blue begat The Shield begat The Wire. As a nation of critics, one of our favorite things to shout at our various and sundry screens is “that would never happen!” Believability is our chief benchmark for quality. Like Robert, we’re all looking for those little moments of truth. Likewise, Lucy comes to feel so dissociated from her own body and behavior, that she conspires to hide a camera in the room where her blackout sessions take place, determined to get a forbidden look at herself and exactly what it is she signed up for – the resigned, perpetual object finally seeing what she looks like from the other side. Even though she can probably guess at what’s going on – and imagine even worse – like so much of what we experience here in our screen-filled 21st century reality, if she can’t see it for herself, then it doesn’t quite feel real.
For her trouble, SLEEPING BEAUTY leaves her at loose ends, lost in a fit of anguished, feral screams. Sitting naked beside Clara – here a stone-faced avatar of the fatalist endgame Lucy’s only been playing at up til now – she makes for another haunting closing image of a protagonist trapped by the insurmountable nature of her biological circumstances. She will always be an object of desire. Someone will always want to watch. Just as Robert can never find a way in, she will never find a way out. Even with video evidence, she has no recourse. As the women of HOT GIRLS WANTED learn all too well, the scary, catch-22 flipside of “pics or it didn’t happen” turns out to be something along the lines of “if you film it, it’s not illegal.” It’s not trafficking, it’s pornography. It’s not rape, it’s roleplay. I mean, she took the drugs, right? She took the money, right? We’re sitting here watching it on the internet for free, right? So it must be ok, right? This is what she agreed to. This is what she wanted. This is what she deserves. Right?
In closing, with all this in mind, I want to consider another wave of videos, not altogether dissimilar from the one that began this article:
The assassination of John F. Kennedy.
DEEP THROAT.
Police attacking civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
FACES OF DEATH.
The Rodney King beating.
GIRLS GONE WILD.
The Columbine massacre.
When Animals Attack.
The planes hitting the Twin Towers on 9/11.
Unpoliceable revenge porn.
The murder of George Floyd.
Just think about that last example for a minute. We’ve all been cooped up in our houses for over a year now. During that time, we sat and watched together as a man was murdered – most of us probably several times over – and then continued to watch as our actual, IRL criminal justice system spent the better part of that year – nearly eleven months – confirming that what we all saw with our own eyes was, in fact, what really happened. We all watched that with baited breath too. We really weren’t sure how it would play out. We all knew what we saw, but still, it felt like a 50/50 proposition, at best. They got it right (this time), and documentaries and dramatizations are sure to follow (likely sooner than any of us wants), but that’s the world we live in now. Absolutely everything is fodder for the content mill, and the longer we stare at our screens, the blurrier the lines get. Truly, after a year like 2020, who among us isn’t questioning the nature of reality a bit?
These images, and countless others like them, constitute a ballooning backlog of collective trauma that we, as Americans, and perhaps just humans living in a digital age, have absorbed together. We don’t have to Google them to remember what they look like (ok, maybe FACES OF DEATH). But the others, on some level, we just know. We’ll see them always, in our minds’ eyes, because even as our smartphones and social media apps continue their tireless work of turning all of humanity into a perpetually filming Foucaultian iPanopticon – bringing each of us a little closer to the glassed-off alienation of that one kid we all knew in high school – a little closer to Robert and Lucy – these are the moments that still pass muster; the kinds of things that, even as we daily parse our newsfeeds for any sign of partisan spin or troll-y misinformation, cynically questioning the most basic tenets of our supposedly shared reality, still “seem real.” By engaging with them, we concede that objective reality still exists, and is oftentimes extremely fucked up and in need of real, collective, ethical reform. By exploring them through art, we maybe help each other make sense of them; maybe help each other cope and effect change; maybe help each other not feel so alone.
Maybe. It’s just a theory though. I question it all the time. You absolutely should too.
Do violent movies help violent people subvert their urges, or do they just help them train?
Does rapey porn give would-be rapists an outlet, or does it just give them ideas?
I honestly and sincerely do not know, and neither AFTERSCHOOL nor SLEEPING BEAUTY offers any easy answers. The truth however, as with most things, probably lies somewhere in the middle. One person’s warning label is another person’s how-to guide. Treating any group as a bloc is almost always a fool’s errand. Consenting adults. Freedom of expression. Etc. Etc. Etc. By the same token, I might ask, does transgressive cinema really help me understand the ugliness of the world, or does it just make me more desensitized to it? More a part of it? I don’t know that either. But I like to think the fact that these two films still make me physically queasy, even all these years later, is a good thing. Conversely, the fact that they tend to make me want more of the same, is maybe not. But there it is. I like things prickly. The pricklier the better. I like thinking about this stuff, and writing about it. I hope to do a lot more. For good or ill, maybe we’re all a little scotophilic.
Thanks for Reading,
David Fitzgerald
Spot on!