Movies as diverse as Cape Fear, Something Wild, The Rookie and Bull Durham make it clear we're living in the movies' golden age of bondage, so our trusty reporter put down his own handcuffs long enough to review the classics and create the Essential Home Video Bondage Library. You're welcome.
__________________________
About 35 minutes into the 1993 leather-and-latex, legal-eagle thriller Body of Evidence, iconoclastic attorney Willem Dafoe invites himself into the upscale houseboat where his latest client, the fetching nipple-clamp specialist Madonna Ciccone, currently resides. Shortly thereafter, Dafoe finds himself securely trussed by a belt from behind, and must look on in dismay as Madonna subjects him to a protracted torture session involving a candle, its dripping contents, a bottle of champagne, and his helpless, exposed torso and genitals.
Despite all this mayhem, the viewer feels no special sympathy for Dafoe. Having agreed to defend a cokehead gold digger last seen in bed with a bound homicide victim, Dafoe has now clearly abused the attorney-client relationship by allowing Madonna to drip candle wax all over his private parts, and deserves everything he gets. In this sense, the otherwise unwatchable Body of Evidence can be interpreted as a searing indictment of our putrescent judicial system, rotten to the core with unprincipled attorneys who not only permit their clients to bind them and, what's more, torture them with red-hot candle wax, but who subsequently eat their clients out in a public parking lot directly below the corridors of justice--in clear contravention of every ethical stricture known to the profession. Perry Mason, whatever his other faults, never ate out his clients in public parking lots. And neither did Clarence Darrow.
Bondage is much on the minds of moviemakers and the viewing public these days. The enormously popular Basic Instinct opens with a scene in which a bound man is ice-picked to death by the attractive but unpredictable Sharon Stone. The most repugnant scene in the spectacularly odious Cape Fear allows Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese to fuse bondage and cannibalism in a vignette that says a lot about the current mindset of the average American, but probably says even more about the current mind-set of Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese. Bondage is also a central motif in the vastly underrated Annabella Sciorra vehicle Whispers in the Dark, in which the sprightly ingenue turns up bound and gagged in a skintight black dress, with pinioned black high heels in the air, in a memorable pose bound to adorn the walls of better prison cells, psychiatric units and filling stations everywhere for years to come.
Bondage completely dominates Pedro Almodovar's offbeat Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, in which a young locksmith, who has spent most of his life in mental institutions, attempts to win the hand of a junkie-turned-B-movie-star by tying her to a bed until she has gotten to know enough about his good points to agree to marriage. Bondage is also a central motif in one of Sean Young's many recent comeback attempts, Love Crimes, in which Sean plays a courageous district attorney who falls in love with a sadomasochistic fetishist and female abuser that she is simultaneously attempting to put away in the slammer. This is what they mean by the phrase forever young.
Can this explosion of bondage-related cinema be dismissed as a mere blip on the cultural radar screen, as an aberration that reflects nothing more than the lurid fantasies of a few degenerates such as Adrian Lyne, Madonna and whoever directed that Annabella Sciorra movie? No, for to dismiss all this sad celluloidal activity as a mere anomaly, a meaningless oddity that does not resonate beyond the borders of Hollywood, would force me to stop writing this essay right now, and that means that we'd never get to the really good jokes about Charlie Sheen and Liz Taylor. Since it has always been the assumption of this magazine that motion pictures reflect the deepest fears, aspirations and neuroses of the people who go see them, as well as those of the people who make them, we will proceed on the assumption that this avalanche of bondage movies is a subliminal expression of some dark secret that the American people are having trouble articulating. Though it should not come entirely as a surprise that America should go on a bondage jag in the age of Shannen Doherty.
To be perfectly honest, this whole S&M thing has been building for some time. Tying people up with lassos and whatnot has always been a staple of cowboy movies and private-eye flicks, but the idea of depicting sexually-oriented bondage in a graphic way did not really get going until Myra Breckinridge was released in 1970. This is the much-discussed-then, though largely-forgotten-now, film in which Raquel Welch, an appealing transsexual, straps down a young actor named Roger Herren and impales him with a dildo. Needless to say, America was so put off by the idea of a dildo-toting Welch (before Myra takes over from Myron, the Breckinridge character was played by the somewhat less muscular film critic Rex Reed) that it never allowed Herren to appear in another film, and banished Welch to James Coco and Burt Reynolds movies forever. Rex Reed, of course, went back to being Rex Reed, seeing that he was so good at it.
Bondage then went completely underground, and did not resurface in any meaningful way until 1980, when Al Pacino got trussed and spread-eagled in the incredibly depressing, ultra-homophobic thriller Cruising. This movie, produced by a man named Jerry, is basically one long, public-service announcement: Never, ever date a man dressed like Heinrich Himmler while the police are out looking for a guy dressed like Martin Borman who recently dismembered several other guys who look remarkably like you. And if you must date other men who dress like the lead singer from Judas Priest or Lou Reed on a bad night, always check their belts for carving knives before getting into bed. You can never be too careful.
In many ways, the last 13 years have been the golden age of cinema bondage, and this had a lot to do with Ronald Reagan. Look at it this way: in an era of unprecedented financial profligacy, many Americans secretly yearned for a return to a policy of fiscal restraint. This ineffable desire for clearly defined limits manifested itself in the recurring image of Clint Eastwood--an obvious Ronald Reagan metaphor--being tied up and forced to have sex with people like Sonia Braga, an exotic, gun-toting Latina who herself serves as a metaphor for Reagan's catastrophic meddling in Central American affairs (even though she and Raul Julia were actually cast as Germans in the film The Rookie). Moreover, the fact that Braga would turn on an overhead camera and make a videotape of herself screwing the tightly bound Eastwood/Reagan reflects the voyeuristic element of the 1980s and the idiotic yuppie desire to capture every event--a child's birth, a seven-year-old's first soccer game, your mentor's first blow job--on videotape. Thus, in Clint Eastwood's videotaped sadomasochistic adventures with Sonia Braga, one can detect such resonating '80s themes as the war on the Sandinistas, the explosion of the VCR industry, the rise of MTV, the passivity of Republican males in the face of a moral onslaught from disenfranchised women from south of the border, and, of course, the American public's burgeoning interest in being tied to an armchair and fucked by a woman brandishing a razor blade.
How Raul Julia fits into all of this is anybody's guess.
Not every bondage movie made since 1980 was as sinister and claustrophobic as Tightrope or The Rookie. The playful side of handcuff fetishism was on full display in Jonathan Demme's 1986 flick Something Wild, in which downtown party girl Melanie Griffith abducts municipal bond specialist Jeff Daniels, takes him to a seedy New Jersey hotel, handcuffs him to the bed and ravishes him. Yet even here, the Reagan Era message was never very far from the surface: if you yuppie schmucks would only forget about bonds for a while, and start thinking about bondage, we could all have a lot of fun together. At least until Ray Liotta shows up.
Wholesome, life-affirming bondage was also a principal theme of Bull Durham, Ron Shelton's moving 1988 paean to minor-league baseball. Here, Susan Sarandon, a sex-crazed baseball junkie, uses bondage not so much for its crazed aphrodisiac powers as for its aesthetic ones: the only way she can get 19-year-old flamethrowers in the Carolina League to shut up and pay attention while she reads them Walt Whitman is to tie them to her bed. Actually, this is the only way anyone can get anyone to shut up and pay attention to Walt Whitman these days.
Alas, in the past couple of years, the whimsical, cheerful side of bondage has gone out of motion pictures and been supplanted by something sinister and atavistic. In Basic Instinct, bondage plays a crucial role in several murders. In Body of Evidence, the murder victim is found bound, with nipple clamps beside his bed, clearly indicating that Madonna has been in the neighborhood recently. Bondage and murder are the crucial ingredients in Whispers in the Dark, as they are in Love Crimes and Cape Fear. Only Pedro Almodovar in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! has dared to challenge the party line, adopting the politically incorrect stance that bondage, when used discreetly and tastefully, can be a very effective courting mechanism, and can even serve as an occasional stimulus to keep the pizazz in one's marriage.
Where does Movieline stand on the issue of bondage in the cinema? Although it is a magazine published in Los Angeles, and although this article is being written by someone who spends a lot of time in Greenwich Village, our feelings about bondage are pretty much the same as those of people in Oklahoma City or Dubuque: whatever gets you through the night, be it branding irons, accommodating steers or leather masks, is fine with us. Hey, we're not here to make value judgments. Besides, Hollywood wouldn't be making all these rope-'em-and-ream-'em blockbusters if the public weren't interested in the subject matter, and in this sense we tend to look at these films not so much as diversions as instructional manuals for the uninitiated. Never been chained to a tow truck while a female talk-show host goes down on you? Rent Body Chemistry II and see if this automotive bondage stuff gets you off. Ever wonder what it would be like to have candle wax sprinkled all over your nuts? Rent Body of Evidence and see for yourself whether this is your scene. Never been chained and held down by a bunch of guys dressed like the Gestapo while a complete stranger fist-fucks you in the middle of a crowded Greenwich Village bar? We cannot recommend Cruising too highly.
We issue only one warning before passing along our capsule summaries of must-sees in the Home Video Bondage Library. If you're a conflicted female who is seriously considering the possibility of having your lover tie you to a chair and rip off your clothes with a pair of scissors the way Patrick Bergin does to Sean Young in Love Crimes, remember: proceed with extreme caution when using Sean Young, or characters played by Sean Young, as role models. And for the guys, let's just leave it at this: A society where men have to be warned about letting women like Madonna tie them up is a society that is in deep, deep trouble.
We earnestly hope that this is not that society.
BOUND FOR GLORY: THE ESSENTIAL HOME VIDEO BONDAGE LIBRARY
American Gigolo (1980): Although charismatic hustler Richard Gere is never actually seen on camera using handcuffs to pinion one of his female customers' hands behind her back, the handcuffs are in evidence after the woman is later found bound, bludgeoned, raped and dead. Gere, quite understandably, is accused of the murder. One reason the police may suspect him of being the killer is those cute little bondage booties that he uses to hang from the ceiling while he is working out every morning.
American Gigolo is thus the first domestically produced movie to shine the spotlight on the shadowy world of self-imposed foot restraint--though hopefully not the last.
Basic Instinct (1992): Sharon Stone ties a man to his bedpost and stabs him repeatedly with an ice pick, then beats the rap by noting that she has just written a book about tying a man to a bedpost and stabbing him repeatedly with an ice pick, and cunningly maintains that only an idiot would write a book about tying a man to a bedpost and stabbing him repeatedly with an ice pick if she were then going to go out and tie a man to a bedpost and stab him repeatedly with an ice pick. Michael Douglas is so impressed by her airtight defense that he has an affair with her and lets her kill his sometime girlfriend, who was kind of kinky herself. Screenplay by the unbelievably brilliant, highly principled Joe Eszterhas.
Body of Evidence (1993): Having lied to her lawyer, ruined his reputation as an attorney, tied his arms behind him, tortured him with scalding candle wax, and forced him to go down on her in a parking lot beneath the courthouse where she is on trial for murder, Madonna acts surprised when he turns the tables and chains her to a bed so he can screw her from behind. Hey, Madonna, what goes around, comes around. And a pointer for the guys: Although Madonna appears to drip scalding candle wax all over Dafoe's private parts, it is not all that clear from the subsequent footage that she then gives him the blow job he is obviously expecting. This proves, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Madonna has no concept of fair play. My advice to anyone contemplating a similar experiment is to make clear to your female partner, from the very outset, that if she's not going to give you the blow job after you let her sear your nuts with scalding wax, then the whole deal is off.
Bull Durham (1988): The film that ripped the lid off that whole sordid minor-league-baseball-and-bondage nether world, making it clear to the public why Triple-A ball players spend so much time down in the bushes before finally getting called up to The Show. In a stretch, Susan Sarandon plays an amiable slut who lives in a pigsty and likes to fuck guys young enough to be her sons. Any similarity to White Palace is purely accidental.
Cape Fear (1991): Attention, female shoppers. There is a longhaired, heavily tattooed psychopath on the loose who is going around trying to pick up girls by telling them that he just got out of a maximum-security prison in rural Georgia. If you absolutely, positively must go to a seedy motel with a Harvey Keitel look-alike who has more tattoos than the entire Southern California chapter of the Hell's Angels, do not, repeat, do not allow this individual to handcuff your wrists behind your back, as he may subsequently bite a huge chunk of flesh out of your face and pummel you into a coma.
Keep up the good work, Marty.
Cruising (1980): Scant seconds before undercover cop Al Pacino is sodomized or beaten or garroted or something by the leather freak he has just picked up at a West Village bar where everybody likes to dress up as a plainclothes cop, what seems like 400 cops break into the meatpacking district motel room where he lies, bound and naked, and rescue him. If you decide to go to a meat-packing-district motel room with a leather freak you've just picked up at a bar where everybody likes to impersonate cops, and let him tie your hands behind your back so he can ream you with his night stick, don't expect 400 cops to show up and bail you out if things get ugly.
I still can't believe that this movie was produced by a guy named Jerry.
The Lair of the White Worm (1988): Catherine Oxenberg, stripped to prim panties and matching brassiere, is roped, bound and tied at the mouth of a yawning abyss from whose bowels a hideous creature that looks like a cross between the Loch Ness monster and Julian Sands appears, clearly intending her no good. The film is directed by Ken Russell and takes place in rural England, where they're really into this kind of thing.
Love Crimes (1992): In addition to the scene where a handcuffed Sean Young has her clothes sliced off by the man she is trying to prosecute, this fascinating picture contains a sequence in which Sean attempts to kill Patrick Bergin with a butcher knife, fails, and receives a sound, long-overdue spanking for her misdeed. Yes, girls, attempted murder is a spanking offense, and if you should ever find yourself trapped in a deserted cabin with a psychopath like Patrick Bergin, don't try killing him with a butcher knife unless you are willing to run the risk of old-fashioned corporal punishment. P.S.: After the spanking, Young apologizes to Bergin and admits that she was wrong to try to murder him.
Myra Breckinridge (1970): Only if you must.
9 1/2 Weeks (1986): Incredibly, this movie doesn't contain any authentic bondage footage, just a bit of blindfolding, plus Mickey's riding-crop number. But because it, like Blue Velvet and Sea of Love, seems like a movie that has a lot of bondage in it, your video library would seem incomplete without it. Moreover, Movieline fervently endorses the credo of this film: if you must choose between an aging, self-effacing painter living somewhere in the wilds of New England and a guy like Mickey Rourke, choose the painter every time. Curiosity killed the cat, though not before Dennis Hopper got to spend the night with it.
The Rookie (1990): Sonia Braga ties up Clint Eastwood (a cop investigating a series of suspicious auto heists), then turns on an overhead video unit to record her activities, rips open his shirt, and makes love to him while clutching a razor blade. Clint seems relatively nonplussed by the whole thing; women like Sonia Braga are a dime a dozen. Braga's remarkably athletic performance is matched by that of Charlie Sheen, Eastwood's sidekick, who single-handedly destroys what appears to be one of Los Angeles's many gay, Mexican, S&M, cock-fighting, biker bars. Meanwhile, Raul Julia, clad in white socks and a white jumpsuit that make him look like a plump, balding, Latino Michael Jackson, tries to keep a low profile, hoping that this film won't wreck his reputation back at New York's Shakespeare in the Park.
Something Wild (1986): A little something for everyone. First, Jeff Daniels is handcuffed to a bed by Melanie Griffith, then he gets handcuffed to a bathroom drainpipe by Ray Liotta, and then he tries to garrote Liotta with the itinerant, multi-purpose handcuffs. The effervescent, multi-cultural soundtrack by David Byrne, John Cale, Laurie Anderson and the Feelies keeps this peppy little number about good-natured sexual high jinks bouncing along at a jaunty pace. Well, at least until Ray Liotta shows up.
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990): Bondage in espanol. Antonio Banderas, the central character in this film, continually binds and gags uncooperative captive Victoria Abril while he goes out into the streets looking for painkillers to relieve her nagging toothache. Cunning intertwining of sadomasochistic and orthodontic themes demonstrates why Almodovar is in a class by himself, and doesn't have to use his first name in the movie credits, unlike, say, Ephron or Harlin or Spielberg.
Tightrope (1984): Clint Eastwood plays a cop who likes to tie up trashy women, which becomes a bit of a problem when he is ordered to track down an ex-cop who likes to tie up trashy women and then murder them. Clint further complicates things by unwisely leaving his necktie behind at the home of a hooker, which later turns up at the scene of a murder; Clint's ties are so tacky that they can be easily traced directly to Woolworth's. The movie briefly flirts with the idea of Genevieve Bujold in handcuffs--Bujold in bondage--then wisely backs away, perhaps because that would really get Michael Medved on the warpath about declining community standards and the tragic eclipse of our national moral code. Tightrope is also memorable for its crackling dialogue, typified by this exchange in which a luscious little bimbo pickup teases Eastwood about his exotic sexual predilections:
Bimbo: "You hang out with the wrong kinds of people."
Clint: "What kind would you suggest I hang out with?"
Bimbo: "Someone who's more up your alley."
Clint: "Maybe I'll take you up on that sometime."
Bimbo: "And do what?"
Clint: "Take you ... bowling."
Bimbo: "I don't like bowling."
Clint: "Neither do I."
Shortly after this exchange, Eastwood handcuffs the cuddly little muffin, smears his naked body from head to toe with an unidentified unguent, and makes love to her from behind. Obviously, the conversation embodied some weird form of New Orleans sexual code or deviant shorthand. Let's not get into it.
Whispers in the Dark (1992): Psychiatrist Annabella Sciorra develops odd yearnings for a female patient who likes to be tied up and taken from behind by a guy who is also dating Annabella Sciorra. The patient, who gets off by stripping to her underwear in front of her psychiatrist, is also the object of sadomasochistic fantasies by Sciorra's other patient, a rapist/artist who is having a SoHo exhibition of his sadomasochistic canvases. Sciorra starts to feel uncomfortable around these people, wondering if she's in the right line of work, and when her exhibitionist client turns up strangled, she begins to suspect that the killer may be her own boyfriend--the very guy who the dead patient fantasized about being raped by--but the police think it's actually the artist, because of those telltale paintings of chained women with their stomachs eviscerated, which is sort of a dead giveaway. But no, the killer turns out to be Alan Alda, a fellow shrink who breaks a wine bottle across wife Jill Clayburgh's face, perhaps in retaliation for movies like An Unmarried Woman and Luna.
X, Y and Zee (1972): An unbelievably bad Carnaby Street era film in which Michael Caine, still going with that Ipcress File look, ties up a jubilantly porky Liz Taylor and forces her to go over the monthly bills with him. Liz, who alternates between threat-to-public-safety orange miniskirts and demented hats that make her look like the world's oldest, pudgiest Dutch Master (can one say Dutch Mistress?), is tied up immediately after popping into the den attired in a pewter pantsuit and a perky little black hat that, with her heavily mascaraed eyelids, give her the appearance of a Bolivian Avon Lady. Though Caine ostensibly ties her up for pragmatic, family-finance reasons, they inevitably end up in bed, presumably because Caine, like any red-blooded male, is incapable of resisting the advances of Liz Taylor--the world's most glamorous woman--in that neo-Andean getup. A movie that literally has to be seen to be believed.
In closing, a couple of important points. Cruising opens with a disclaimer informing viewers that the events depicted in the film are not meant to be indictments of the homosexual community, but merely reflect the tastes of a microscopic, deviant subculture within that community. If the motion picture industry had any class whatsoever, it would go back and add a disclaimer before the opening credits of X, Y and Zee apprising viewers that the events depicted in the film were not an indictment of corpulent, middle-aged, heterosexual women, most of whom have the good sense not to appear in public dressed in orange miniskirts or hats that make them look like refugees from an Incan fat farm. This is the behavior of a small, deviant subculture of the chubby, heterosexual community who really ought to be tied to armchairs in dark rooms and left there for good.
_______________
Joe Queenan wrote "Seeing Red" for the December 1993 Movieline.