Review by Beatrice On 03-May-2023
Linnéa comes from Sweden, where she thinks everyone is crazy, to enter the porn world of Los Angeles with the name Bella Cherry.
She is nineteen years old, loves posting explicit photos on social media, and begins her journey by sharing an apartment with other girls provided by an agent.
Beautiful, inexperienced, and extremely sensual, she doesn't know how to navigate, and her naivety is quick to show.
However, she raises the stakes and wants to become a Spiegler Girl, the most famous porn star in the hands of the horrendous American talent agent of one of the best adult film industry agencies.
The escalating game presented with each new shoot, such as introducing violence, severely destabilizes her ambitions.
Signing documents every time that explicitly state her identity and consent does not guarantee any protection: the girl can say STOP when she can or make gestures to indicate that she can't continue... but the manipulative blackmail exercised by the seemingly kind and understanding crew places all the responsibilities and resulting financial damage solely on her.
Choosing to engage in violent sexual acts means subjecting oneself to humiliations, dominance, degradation, and rapes so severe that they completely eliminate one's will and pose a serious risk to physical health.
"Double interracial anal" is not a cocktail!
This is the message of Thyberg, to make us reflect on the concept of consent:
How conscious of a choice is it to pursue that career?
How many levels of awareness are there?
From which socio-economic-cultural manipulation do the girls and boys who choose this profession derive?
Are men and boys in porn also slaves to a market that always wants them to be virile, erect, dominant, violent, fearless, and rapists, and therefore humiliated in turn?
Like paid sex, the pornography portrayed by Thyberg, through the endlessly melancholic, greedy, unconscious, disturbed, and disturbing gaze of the protagonist, goes like this...
How much do you want me to compensate you for your financial contribution that would buy what your life hasn't been able to achieve? If you want, I can also sell you the humiliation that, as a good masochist, you would like to subject yourself to, obeying the orders that I, behind your own and others', should give you. All this makes me suspect that, deep down, what you want to buy is not sex, but power over another human being, which you are even willing to degrade yourself for.
(U. Galimberti, Le cose dell'amore)
Bella Cherry represents the human sacrifice demanded by the discourse of capitalism, that discourse of a market that reduces the law to its own pleasure; a law without law where any signature, guarantee, or consent is useless...
The fierce and cruel hypocrisy of the porn business, where the predominantly patriarchal male buyer gets aroused only through the degradation of the female opponent, as taught by the manosphere communities, proceeds without hesitation to raise or rather lower the level of performance.
Thyberg, after a short film on the same theme, focuses with style on a phenomenon that is so unfamiliar because it is rather impenetrable and little studied. "The male perspective for a male viewer," the director argues, "always places the woman as the sexual object at the center of the frame," for which, however, no pleasure is anticipated... although it is extensively acted.
In our "emancipated" societies, where rivers of money flow, the idea of "sexual freedom" must also prevail, but in order to guarantee it to men, it must revolve around the theme of women's "choice," leading them more hypocritically towards economic and psychological slavery.
Just as Emmanuelle Bercot's gaze in Student Services did not spare the images and experiences of the protagonist, Ninja Thyberg's gaze in Pleasure is harsh and merciless: the pornographic indulgences that the film allows, however, are devoid of any voyeuristic surrender; the often disturbing and analytical shots are intersected by the Confutatis in C minor, a musical attempt to confer sanctity on the sacrifice of Bella Cherry's body, even when cruelty rages among women themselves.
All this is not to be attributed, as Freud would have it, to "natural female masochism" but to that mechanism of adaptation that is easy to recognize in every oppressed group, whose members, if they do not cooperate in their own oppression, internalize the hatred and contempt of their oppressor, and end up being punished and ultimately perishing. This perverse mechanism should draw our full attention. It is known not only to prostitutes (or porn stars) but also to devoted and faithful wives.
(U. Galimberti, Le cose dell'amore)
Pleasure has the virtue of making us reflect on all this: the dictate of the market, the discourse of voluntary servitude, the issue of choice and consciousness itself...
The feminine character, and the ideal of femininity on which it is modeled, are products of the male-dominated society. The image of undistorted nature only arises in deformation as an antithesis to it. Where it pretends to be human, male society educates women in its own corrective and reveals, through this limitation, its face of ruthless master.
The feminine character is the mold, the negative of domination: and therefore just as bad. What the bourgeoisie - in their ideological blindness - call nature is nothing more than the scar of a social mutilation. (......)
The lie does not consist solely in the fact that nature is affirmed only where it is tolerated and framed within the system: but what, in civilization, appears as nature is, in reality, the opposite of nature: it is pure and simple objectification. (......)
He (Nietzsche) made the fatal mistake of saying "the female" when speaking of women. Hence the wicked advice not to forget the whip: when the woman is already the result of the whip! The true liberation of nature would be the end of its artificial fabrication. The glorification of the feminine character implies the humiliation of anyone who possesses it.
03-May-2023 by Beatrice