There’s a school of thought that would read Pillion’s ending as a positive sentiment, in which a man who blunders his way into the BDSM scene finally discovers his boundaries and directs himself toward everlasting love. That school of thought belongs to maniacal men who dwell in shadows. Or it ought to. Because this sentiment is born of a series of assumptions clipped onto queer cinema, and indeed to the notion of representation in general. If an underrepresented, misunderstood practice is depicted with any sensitivity, one must assume that the representation is, by its nature, positive.
The criticism of Pillion is currently bound up with words like “empowerment” and “actualization,” but let us briefly slalom through the plot. Colin (Harry Melling) is lonesome; he is bored of the meek, ugly men that he — being a meek and ugly man — must make do with. He encounters Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), a man built of Scandinavian iron. This man is the absolute in beauty and masculine prowess. Colin wishes to engage this man in a romantic relationship. Ray is unwilling: Ray would prefer to recruit Colin into his fantasy of mastery and slavery. At no point do we assume that Colin actively pursues enslavement — his “aptitude for devotion” is rather a representation of what he is willing to sacrifice in the name of absolute beauty and masculine prowess. Colin is not the perfect slave: late in the film he revolts, attempting to share Ray’s bed. The next day, a gust of mercy. Ray allows Colin one “day off”; Colin can enact his romantic fantasies. Holding hands, catching a movie, picnic in the park. That is Colin’s picture of satisfaction. The next day Ray leaves: Ray is telling Colin they do not belong to the same world.
And yet the ending, that pseudo-empowerment, depicts Colin figuring out an alternative way. He will return to the realm of social-sexual slavery, but with one condition: he is allowed one day off a week. Is this an expression of a newly minted sexuality, or instead the absolute maximum compromise of which Colin is capable? A sexually inexperienced sprig who has slipped into an inferiority-fascination; a slave who thinks slavery must be noble — it is the only way such a man as he could see such fine rooms. Do we celebrate the slave who has negotiated a day off, or pity the slave who believes that he has tricked his master into a genuine romance? What do we make of this representation of queer sexuality, in which Colin’s “journey of discovery” seems in so many ways to precipitate misery, rejection, and isolation? The final ignominy appears in the ending, by which point it appears Colin believes he has taken control, by relinquishing every day but one.
If queer cinema is a genre that advocates for queerness, then we are forced to paper over this seeming despair. Colin’s mistake is in being uneducated; he is operating in zones of virtue, but does not know the rules or the limitations. We must see the leatherbound bikers as righteous men who happen to fantasize about violent, sexual dominion over lesser dweebs. Holiness dwells in this conjoining of lock and key. But what if representation does not equal advocacy? The mind darts to other filmmakers on the purlieus of queer cinema. Terence Davies is the first. While much of his cinema is premised on and directed by Davies’ sexuality, it sits uncomfortably with any sort of “queer canon.” This is because Davies’ primary association with his sexuality is shame and regret. He claims that his brief childhood happiness ended with the discovery of his attraction; while he certainly did not oppose homosexuality, he undoubtedly might have preferred if it had nothing to do with him. The incisive critic might needle this definition: of course, says the critic, Mr. Davies only came to dislike his sexuality because he was born into a world that rejected it. It is not his being gay, but the world he could not bear. Would that he had been born into a more perfect world, he might have made jollier pictures. This incisive critic is not entirely wrong, but risks missing the point: Davies does not make films in which the world can redeem his sexuality, and he does not describe the problem of his sexuality exclusively in the manner that the heteronorms treat it. Indeed, homophobia only occasionally features in Davies’ cinema. Rather, Davies appears not merely to regret a world that cannot accept his unchoosing preference, but rather the cultural texture that preference must take on.
This is evident in Benediction, Davies’ final film. Here he depicts the only glimpse of real gay romance in his entire filmography: the putative relationship between Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Here is tenderness, fealty, and an almost sexless desire. But this relationship is warshred; Owen is killed and Sassoon scattered by the rearrangement of European borders. Sassoon later pursues his sexual preference in earnest, but is lost completely of that gentle, heart-drawn feeling. He falls into the lap of Ivor Novello, and then a revolving door of captious men. If his suppressed sexuality is first (re)awakened by Owen, it is then debauched by Novello’s train: while Sassoon is initially put out by Novello’s promiscuity, he later engages in a similar tendency himself, with rakes of an even less hospitable nature. One of Sassoon’s lovers catches him in the act, to which Sassoon is speechless. Glen, the lover, responds: “There’s nothing to say. It’s one of the ‘inconveniences’ of the shadow life we lead.” The shadow life — it is exactly that. All those social watchdogs set to critique the roundelay of heterosexuality — those bold notions of marriage, of bigamy and fidelity — they have no jurisdiction in the already-outlawed underworld of the homosexual. In being outside of the mainstream, in being fraught by definition, a certain degree of unchecked masculine conquest defines the field. Sassoon becomes hollowed out by these petty love affairs, without any clear mode for overcoming them. (Which is not to say it cannot be done: Novello himself, master of that domain, has figured himself an inviolable “life partner.”) Finally, he relinquishes this part of himself: he marries a woman he does not love, and he swears himself to a God he does not believe in. He grasps at these pillars of conspicuous, moral certitude — regardless of their truth.
I will not put aside the war — the war shattered a certain moral standing in King and Country, for which the Catholic God has frequently been an alternative. But in marrying Hester, Sassoon completes his total alienation from his sexuality. And not, in the context of the film, explicitly because of outside interference, but rather the manner in which that shadow world conducted itself. Introducing Benediction as the final film in the BFI’s recent retrospective, CEO Ben Roberts decided to plug (the BFI-produced) Pillion, by expressing how glad Davies might have been to see it made, and to see the world depicted in it. So far from the repression of Benediction: in Pillion there is an explicit openness to a different kind of being. But I suspect Davies would not have found it pleasant; I suspect he would have found it terrifying. Here, alive today, is that same shadow life. An underworld that persists beyond the ken of mainstream society, in which hypermasculine masters whip these sensitive blips — blips who remind one of Wilfred Owen’s depiction in Benediction — into the shape of their desire. Colin’s real, conventional personality is subsumed by sexual extremity; he and Sassoon desire the same thing, and neither get it. Both ultimately betray their inner tendency to submit to a notion they do not believe. In Benediction we remain long enough with Sassoon to see the sorry end. A beached man, outside of love, peering ever backward. But what if his marriage to Hester had been the end? The tone might pretend at jubilance; the tone would equal the ending of Pillion.
The Davies orbit flings me across the stellar highway; I land beside Kenneth Anger. Benediction indicates Colin, but Scorpio Rising indicates Ray. Because while Colin is our perspective character, we must wonder at Ray’s motivation and his tendency. He is, of course, participating in a pre-existing culture, and he is regimentally inclined to the notion of consent. But there are many iterations of this culture. Anger’s is the most extreme. Here we encounter an edition of homosexuality that completely eliminates the feminine presence. It is a world dominated by leather-bound bikers, by ultra-masculine thugs who glory in the naked skull and the embossed swastika. Violence begets conquest begets sex begets violence. The weak will be pulverized, and Elvis will sing. These men decorate themselves, they adonize, big tough men tying up their belts, their braces, polishing their bikes: all that effortless Mensch is here layered on as though in front of a vanity. The show is soon to start.
Any such commitment to bright metal and leather jackets must lead to Adolf Hitler; any aestheticism of absolute will to power in well-cut jackets points Naziward. And with it the death drive, the Totenkopf, James Dean, Marlon Brando — Jesus Christ! Jesus up there on the cross! All dead together, the motorbike a psychopomp — so often the wagon of death — these men rushing toward each other in violent pleasures knowing, on impact, that they are torn-up metal. The worship of the skull, the naked skull, seems in its way the ultimate conquest, the ultimate, absurd, extreme end of the totally and singularly masculine. In Kenneth Anger we meet with a breed of representation; it is a fearsome thing, and here as much a social reality as it is the catalyzing of a certain kind of man with a certain kind of predilection. The heterosexual fantasy must be attenuated by the feminine, if reluctantly — but in posing the motorcade of gay Nazi bikers, Anger circumvents this requirement entirely. And we must think to Ray, who may possess a sensitivity, and a humanity, far outside of Anger’s crude poetry. He nonetheless mingles with this aesthetic creed: the notion of domination, with the notion of biker masculinity, and moreover the inheritance of power. He is strong, and wealthy (we might surmise), and certainly he is beautiful. He is ordered and iron. This is his fantasy: but one cannot be the master without a slave.
This idea is the primary subject of Pillion. It is a film about slaves and slavemasters. About men who are willing to subject themselves, and, more horrendously, men who are willing to subject others. Colin’s final compromise is in fact his naked desire. He begins the film as a conventional man looking for conventional love. He wants to desire and be desired. There is nothing in his life more lovely than an ordinary date around Bromley. No part of his fantasy involves brutality or slavery. That is a price he is willing to pay, but it is a cost not an accoutrement. Colin has an especial fascination with beauty and stature. His willingness to debase himself is not solely to experience love, but to experience the love of a Great Man, or a Beautiful Man, or an Übermensch. To partake in Beauty is, after all, a serious consideration in romance, and it is true that men and women will subject themselves to social arrangements that they are uncomfortable with as a kind of compromise with Beauty. For the slavemaster, the conscious is quieted by the apparently consensual nature of the arrangement. Colin is not kept by force; he is free to depart any time he wishes.
Perhaps this forgets the nature of tyranny, in which physical violence is only the thin edge of a considerable wedge. Colin is trapped by his fealty to Beauty and his fealty to Love. He, being inferior — being a self-identified Untermensch — cannot willingly abandon this single chance at total happiness. Like the most unfortunate participants in extreme sexual subcultures, it would appear that Colin considers it a route — a beginning — to the God-anointed normalcy of marriage, house, kids. We even see Ray’s discomfort on realizing this fact; his slave is not his slave for the right reasons. Therefore, following the slave revolt, Ray simulates for Colin a day of freedom. An act of clemency, insofar as it is designed to show Colin that the other world does exist, and he should seek it out. Colin, being wimpish and feeble, only works up the courage to ask for one day of the reality he wants, accepting that in the others he will (very literally) lick the boot of his oppressor. There is a dreadful mood at the bottom of Pillion, upon which a more tender relationship is sketched out: these pillars of masculinity who can only satisfy themselves with a metal superiority over the miserable or timid. Perhaps there are those out there who possess a legitimate and full-bodied perversity, who are a subject-people who look out for kings, and autocrats, and line managers. The sadness of this film is that Colin is not one of them. His only access to the Love and Beauty he desires is contrary to his nature. But he will persist, and onward ride the Nazi bikers
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