Examining the newly-released Finnish fetish drama and its place in the alternative realities of BDSM on screen.
In the booklet notes for the newly-released Finnish kink drama Dogs Don’t Wear Pants, Anna Bogutskaya suggests that there are three standard ways in which BDSM is represented on screen: for titillation, for laughs and as a warning of ‘deviant’ behaviour. I’d argue that there is a fourth, and this is the most common – particularly in the UK. BDSM is all too often shown as a sign of damaged individuals and ‘victims’, people driven to this twilight world of violent sex through childhood abuse or psychological problems, who – like sex workers and the wildly promiscuous in general – need saving from their broken understanding of what sex is, and just need the love of a good man or woman to get them back on the straight and narrow. Even if they think they are acting through free will and enjoying their kinks, they will soon be shown how wrong they are.
Even the films that proudly proclaim their sympathies for the BDSM scene seem to slide into cliched ideas that these people are different from the rest of us – Preaching to the Perverted, which in many ways reduces the kink scene to a Confessions… comedy without the laughs and seems to have its heart in the right place, still has a Dominatrix character (Tanya Cheex, the sort of novelty name no serious domme would even consider) as someone who rejects vanilla love and relationships, as if dominatrixes (and, presumably, submissives) live the role 24/7. Now, I know that there are some who do – and many more who pretend they do to maintain a public persona – but this is essentially just another part of the ‘othering’ of kinksters, the suggestion that some aspect of normal human emotional connection is missing from them.
Now, I’ve probably met more dommes, more subs and more of the people floating in the middle than most of you – that’s not pulling rank, just the fact that I moved in those circles for a long time and knew a lot of these people outside the cloistered world of Torture Garden or Der Putsch. I even had relationships with some. There are certainly dommes who are – in the most literal sense – psychopaths, narcissists who lack empathy or people with serious issues who simply can’t let go of the image for a second. But even those people were still fronting a public persona a lot of the time. For most people, their kink is a part of a whole rather than their entire raison d’etre. I feel like I’m potentially wandering into sticky ground here, given the expansion of identity politics these days, but my personal experience with people who were (and are) major players on the scene, famous dommes and the most compliant and masochistic subs alike, is that while their particular sexual tastes were an – maybe the – important part of their lives, it certainly wasn’t the be-all and end-all. Professional dommes still have real-life partners and families. They still enjoy ‘normal’ sex. They are, to get to the point, fully rounded individuals.
It’s this that you rarely see in fiction, because – let’s be blunt here – it’s a bit dull, and fiction is all about the drama. This is why I don’t really care about the films that get BDSM ‘wrong’ – just the ones that demonise and kink shame people. Sometimes, you want a film to create a fantasy world of fetish clubs that are not just a bunch of empty-headed fashionistas snorting coke and middle-aged men furtively wanking in the corner. Films that show fetish clubs full of exclusively beautiful people, extravagant floor shows and ultra-decadence – let’s say a Jess Franco film, cutting to the chase – might have no connection whatsoever with the real fetish world, but we all prefer fantasy to reality, even in the hyper-fantastic world of the fetish scene. Cinema is fantasy, and who actually needs reality? All we ask, surely, is not to be insulted.
It’s why the film version of The Story of O – or, perhaps even more so, the ludicrous 1984 sequel The Story of O 2 – is so much fun. It has all the realism of a Marvel superhero film, but as a wild and exotic fantasy, it works. Radley Metzger’s The Image, which is after all based on the novel by Catherine Robbe-Grillet, a real-life dominatrix – is equally glossy but perhaps comes closer to capturing the intensity of a sub-dom relationship and the role-play behind it that can switch as desired. A handful of other films capture the feel of the scene within a clearly fictional scenario – the 1994 Venus in Furs and the short La Sequence de Barres Parallèles, both written by Ian Kerkhof/Aryan Kaganof who knew a bit about this world, take a classic literary erotica approach and so exist outside reality; Tokyo Decadence and Belle De Jour manage to take a certain finger-wagging approach without offending the kinksters – at times, it feels like films about BDSM need the old-fashioned ‘square-up reel’ that placates the moralists but which everyone else ignores. A touch of tut-tutting to keep the critics from fretting about exploitation and incitement, and helps ease the film past the censors.
It would take an entire book to cover all the film and TV representations of BDSM on film (and before you ask, no – I don’t have any plans to write it), and this isn’t the place to argue why the most interesting and rounded portrayals have come in very strange places, though perhaps one day we can discuss why Melinda Clarke’s Lady Heather from assorted episodes of CSI might actually be the most important and sympathetic dominatrix in screen history, and why almost every British TV portrayal of BDSM reeks of sexual disgust and contempt, created by people who probably think of themselves as being absolutely liberal and virtuous.
Anyway: Jukka-Pekka Valepää’s curiously charming Dogs Don’t Wear Pants is the latest film (2019 – there may be subsequent examples) to explore the BDSM world and does so in a way that is perhaps best seen as a sympathetic fantasy – there’s a grounding in reality but it’s also fascinating to watch where it goes wrong, and where it perhaps accidentally gets it right.
This is the story of Juha (Pekka Strang), a heart surgeon who loses his wife in a drowning accident, almost dying himself in an attempt to rescue her. In a moment of cinematic contrivance (though I haven’t been to Helsinki tattoo and piercing studios, so perhaps they really are neon-lit affairs with dominatrix dungeons out back) he meets professional dominatrix Mona (Krista Kosonen), who is all sorts of intense and awakens something in him – namely that if he is strangled, he goes into an oxygen-starved fantasy where he reunites with his wife. he books sessions with her, but can never quite reach the desired point – her pesky habit of lifting the plastic bag from over his face as he loses consciousness brings him back to the reality that he is desperate to escape. How far he will go in his efforts to find happiness through auto-asphyxiation, and how will his relationship with Mona develop? Well, that’s the question, and it’s one that develops in a way that does not seem too unlikely. We might quibble at how quickly the pair seem to fall for each other, because presumably, Mona sees a lot of clients and frankly, Juha doesn’t seem that much of a catch – at times, he’s little more than an obsessive stalker.
“She’s wearing cheap PVC” scoffed Mrs R when Mona first appeared on screen, and yes – her fetish wear is decidedly Ann Summers. Yet there’s something strangely authentic about this. There are plenty of jobbing pro-dommes – for a while in the 1990s, it seemed that almost every woman who visited Torture Garden once got it into her head to become Mistress something-or-other for fun and profit – and there is all-too-often a curious desire from both client and dominatrix for them to wear ‘the gear’ as if the leather and latex make the whole experience more authentic. Dressing up at fetish clubs makes sense because it helps keep out the tourists (or at least forces them to make some sort of effort and expenditure), but for private sessions, it seems an odd requirement. In any case, I suspect cheap PVC is not an unusual thing to find in these circumstances, especially where the spilling of various messy fluids might be involved – why risk ruining your good stuff? Save that for nights out.
Similarly, the scenes that take place in the fetish club seem hilarious – everyone appears to be dancing to a different tune (this is one of those movies in thrall to 1980s electronica that is unconvincingly recreated for the score), the punters look a decidedly unglamorous bunch and it all seems very prosaic. Which, of course, is exactly what most clubs (not just fetish clubs) outside the big names are like. Nightclub scenes in movies are notoriously terrible, almost always seeming to have been filmed, designed and choreographed by people who have never been on a night out in their lives – but usually, it’s because they try too hard. Accurately capturing the ordinariness of the average provincial fetish club may or may not be an accident, but it’s strangely refreshing.
There are moments in the film that still raise my suspicions, though. Mona seems a little too close to the damaged soul cliché in places (to say where would be to give too much away) and I’m probably missing why this was necessary. More to the point, there’s still the inference that a taste for kinky sex is somehow connected to trauma and emotional loss – Juha is, after all, trying to deal with his wife’s death through auto-erotic asphyxiation. It would be refreshing to see a film like this where the central characters are rounded, functional people who just enjoy non-vanilla sex, but that might be asking too much – we need our narratives to have a dramatic journey, after all. To be fair, this film seems more sympathetic and more realistic than most – we see a glimpse of Mona’s real life and an understanding that this is, ultimately, role-play. If I spot problems in a story like this, it’s probably because I am looking for them.
In parts, the film reminded me of Barbet Schroeder’s Maitresse, the 1976 film that explored the BDSM world and played with ideas of victim and saviour as Gerard Depardieu tries to save dominatrix Bulle Ogier from herself, only to finally realise that it is he who needs rescuing from his dull existence. Both films have a certain voyage of discovery at their heart, and both feature a developing relationship where someone’s hidden desires are exposed. Notably, while Dogs Don’t Wear Pants has caused some faint-hearted critics to gasp at its explicitness, it’s a rather tame affair compared to the film made almost five decades earlier; the asphyxiation is intense but oddly non-sexual – Juha is looking to go to another place in his mind, not get a hard-on. There’s little nudity and the supposedly graphic moments that have had some critics jibbering are mild simulations – no one is really pissed on, despite what you might have been led to think. Perhaps this is an artistic choice: the shock impact of graphic sex has been supposedly diminished in a world of online porn, though you only have to see the giggling, shocked and disapproving reactions to nudity from many people to know that if anything, we are more prudish than ever – if anything, porn has simply removed sex and nudity from the mainstream and into a ghetto. Perhaps the film is a more accurate portrayal of the sub-dom world where the sub is naked but the domme is fully-clothed; perhaps, also, it is the product of a #metoo world where sex scenes and nudity are frowned upon and Directors UK – the association of film and TV directors in Britain – has suggested that a return to the restrictions of the Hayes Code would be a jolly good thing.
In the current age of suspicion, accusation and general reckoning, BDSM is probably more problematic than ever. While, on the one hand, it allows for more powerful female sexuality to be explored and offers the ideal opportunity for nudity-free, non-intimate sex scenes; on the other, it is all too often reinterpreted as sexual violence and the power structures involved can be easily, maliciously misinterpreted. At the very least, I doubt we’ll be seeing male-dom narratives any time soon.
BDSM remains the form of consensual adult sexual expression that it’s okay to demonise. RadFem politicians continue to push to effectively make it illegal in the name of protecting women from abuse and murder, as cynical and malicious a correlation as when homophobes claimed that all gay men were paedophiles. It remains either the butt of jokes or something that you can probably lose your job over if your private life is exposed, and you might even go to prison if someone decides that your kinky activities cross the line into assault – the consent of your partner be damned. In this world, any film that doesn’t portray kinksters as absolute monsters and emotionally broken people is welcome. I’m not sure that Dogs Don’t Wear Pants is quite that film, but the quiet normality and liberation that the story ultimately shows can do no harm.
DAVID FLINT
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