21.11.1996

Power play

Tom Ball reviews Fetishes, directed by Nick Broomfield

One definite plus about Fetishes is that director Nick Broomfield appears less on screen than he does in the previous documentaries he has made (Heidi Fleiss, Tracking down Maggie, Monster in a box).

Maybe Nick’s uncharacteristic bashfulness is due to the topic of this film (shown at the London Film Festival, but with no UK distributor as yet). He and his small crew spent several months at a central New York sado-masochistic establishment staffed by numerous ‘mistresses’, filming them interacting with a largely male clientele and commenting direct to camera about their work.

Fetishes is implacably banal, though less trite than it might have been. It becomes clear that sexual intercourse with a mistress is definitely not on offer, especially so since the customers, paying $1,000 per lunchtime session, are there precisely and only in order to submit to a dominatrix - which submission provides the full sexual satisfaction they seek. Most clients end each session with self-masturbation, though for his own reasons Nick coyly declines to include any sight of this.

While what the mistresses do defines them as sex workers, they are not prostitutes. Some see their future with husband and children; others seem quite comfortable combining white collar jobs, including on Wall Street, with evenings providing these skilled services to subservient clients.

This is not role-playing for amateurs or dilettantes, after all.

Interestingly though, the few clients prepared to talk, either straight to camera or away from it, suggest that their desires to be physically ‘maltreated’ or verbally abused derive from early negative experiences with parents - either abuse or emotional neglect. Whether they wanted to be beaten on bare buttocks, locked in cages, led naked on all fours like a dog, or tied up in a rubber suit with restriction of the air supply - all these men’s development of sexuality had been set early in their lives. Here they can revisit their sites of pleasure without remit.

The clients in Fetishes do indulge themselves expensively. That enables them to avoid the seedier establishments that Nick investigated before choosing this one, establishments that offer sexual Fetishes plus prostitution in the ‘massage parlour’ mould. Here the clients, often captains of industry imagining themselves masters of their (capitalist) universes, can playfully reverse the power relations they know and love.

However, all it takes is for them to utter the ‘safe word’ they have been given and whatever pain or abuse they are experiencing comes to an abrupt end: they are still in control, after all.

Tom Ball