S and M

I dreamt there was a club of members who were paid to do s and m and they were complaining about how little they were being paid. And when I awoke I remembered a documentary I watched entitled, Pleasure for Sale (2008), about prostitutes in a legal brothel, nicknamed the Chicken Ranch in Nevada.

The approach is sympathetic, intimate and revealing, telling the stories of new and veteran, broken or comfortable working women in the ranch.

Chyna's inner conflict strikes me in particular as she tries to reconcile her dignity and autonomy with the extremes of her trade. It explores perhaps the oldest of conflicts; whether in destroying ourselves, we are at our most free. Chyna allows herself to be spanked so hard she can't sit, she hangs herself by the skin of her back to a hook and justifies the experience with reclaiming herself. Retaliating from having been gang raped does she reclaim herself by going the furthest she can in self-punishment/experiment? Or is it all a loss if the most part of it is attributable to the rape at all?

Angelina Jolie in an interview on the Actor's Studio said this about self-destruction. That never again would she think of it after having seen so much of the suffering in the world. "I thought I knew pain."

I think this is always the simplest of remedies when faced with the option of self-destruction; to see a life more wrecked, a life more bleak.

Genre: documentary
Directors: Harry and Joe Gantz

[For a film treatise of sado-masochism, watch Ma Mere (2004)]