Stress Position at the Vancity Theatre

Very interesting film opening next Friday, March 23rd, at the Vancity Theatre: Stress Position. Not quite sure what to make of it. In a way, it's a shame I'm getting to it too late, because an interview with the director would be a natural, since I have more questions about the film than opinions. But interviews are too much work to take on unpaid, which is what this would be at this point; if Mr. Bond wants to respond to any of what follows, the comments section is there for him...

For example, one question I might have is, is any percentage of Stress Position real? Initially, the film presents as a "bet" between two friends, the film's co-director (UBC filmmaker AJ Bond) and its lead actor David Amito, "playing" themselves. The film's set up has them challenging each other, saying they can withstand Guantanamo Bay-style tortures (no severe pain or serious injury, but a lot of discomfort, fear, and mindfuckery), inflicted by the other, for one week, in a very expensively-designed, somewhat science-fiction-y torture chamber. Amito goes first, and for awhile, the film maintains the illusion that it is exactly what it claims. It's all likened to reality TV, and at at least one Vancouver personality, director Mina Shum, appears as herself, lending a sense that what we're seeing is real.

Certainly some of Bond's actions and Amito's reactions do have a certain unscripted rawness to them. However, as the plot grows ever thicker, it becomes almost impossible to maintain any level of belief about the film's authenticity; it seems clear that the whole experience is an exercise in faked reality - a scripted, manufactured attempt to seem unscripted and authentic. As with the film Catfish, there's simply too much narrative cohesion for it to be otherwise. All of which is fine with me - the film itself raises questions about its own authenticity, encourages you to approach it not from the point of view of trust and faith ("this is really real") but skepticism ("a big part of this might be fake"), but it still raises other questions...

...such as the issue of queer content. I was initially kind of irritated that the press materials for the film and the description at the Vancity Theatre hadn't pointed to it as a possible feature for an article in, say, Xtra West, since, having no reason to believe it had queer content, I didn't realize that Xtra could be a potential home for a feature for it. As things were, I didn't think to pitch it at them until it was too late for me to do anything with it. Imagine my surprise when it's announced at the outset of the film that AJ Bond is gay, and when his tortures of Amito - whom he accuses of homophobia - take on an explicitly homoerotic cast, with him stripping and kissing a bound Amito as the cameras roll? (None of that's a spoiler, really - it looms from the outset of the film, as they set up their rather kinky male-male game, not unlike a game between boys where they tie each other up and tickle each other until one or the other cries uncle - but undertaken here between adults, with an adult level of sophistication and cruelty, and something larger than crying uncle at stake). How is it that no one out there thought to point any of that out? It left me kind of grumpy for awhile, watching a potentially cool writing assignment and concomitant paycheque not materialize, thinking about what a cool article I could have written if I had only known...

...but by the end of the film, I understood why the film was not pitched in those terms - as being of interest to a queer audience. It may still be, but not in an uncomplicated way. This becomes a spoiler, so those with a real interest in seeing the film should probably tune out of this paragraph and come back to the next. The punchline of the film, AJ Bond's confession when he is finally broken, the climax of the movie, the point of the exercise, is the revelation that he doesn't think he is gay. If the film is, as it appears, a scripted and structured experience, this then raises huge questions about what we have seen. Is AJ Bond, the filmmaker, actually gay? Because that would be one thing - a gay man scripting and structuring a film (or if we buy into the premise, setting up a "real" experience of torture and intrusion) to get at his doubts about his own homosexuality. It would be quite another thing for a straight man to make a film where he plays a man who presents as gay but is really kidding himself, because what he really is, for instance, is a straight sadist in love with making people uncomfortable, who has found an ideal venue for that in adopting a pretext of homosexuality. If so - if Bond really is that straight kinky sadist - it means at the very least that he probably has a long and successful career in cinema ahead of him, since that seems like an ideal personality type for a filmmaker, but if not - if even that "level" of authenticity is not "really real," and the whole exercise, including the character Bond is playing, is a work of fiction - what exactly is the politic of that, in terms of the queer community? Is Bond saying that some people who present as gay aren't really, but are just weirdos trying to piss other people off? 

I mean, maybe so, but that stops seeming something appropriate to pitch at a gay and lesbian paper, at the very least. It becomes politically a bit more complicated...

Leaving aside the question of what's authentic in the film, there's also a different question, about the relationship to reality. The film deals throughout with enhanced interrogation, but in the end, it seems far more about the mindgame between these two men, the obsession with cracking people to reveal their authentic selves, or about the entire idea of "authenticity" in psychology and social life (and cinema), than it is about torture, or Gitmo, or Abu Ghraib. Initially when watching the film, when contemplating it as a potential article, I had several exciting flashes for questions I could ask: about the uses of homoeroticism in Abu Ghraib as an implement of torture, for instance. The further you get into the film, the less these things seem relevant, but there's still an inescapable resonance against real-world phenomenon, and this is where the film makes what appears to be its one kind of unforgivable mistake. This occurs when Bond says in passing that at one point that some people withstood torture in Guantanamo Bay for five years - framing the observation in the past tense.

Of course, there are multiple things wrong with that statement, which seem to reveal a certain inexcusable carelessness about the subject matter. For instance, as of March 2014, there were still 154 people imprisoned at Guantanamo. The number may have changed somewhat since then - maybe one or two have committed suicide, say, or starved to death on a hunger strike (which I suppose still counts as a form of suicide) - but by no means is Gitmo something of the past. Not sure exactly who these 154 people are - it's not like there's a "who's who at Guantanamo" website you can turn to - but at least potentially, some of them could have been there since 2002: twelve years in Guantanamo Bay, and maybe another year or two to come before the camp actually gets closed, if, in fact, it ever does. They may never get out alive, and if they die by suicide or self-starvation or so forth, or by any other means by which people have died at Guantanamo, I don't think you can actually say they withstood the experience, can you? The prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are people, who remain vanished from public discourse, on the very edge of being forgotten and abandoned, who may well still be being subject to methods of enhanced interrogation, while outrage about Gitmo dwindles and people simply forget that it still exists and privileged white filmmakers make movies that treat torture and confinement as the stuff of kinky, entertaining mindgames, with no bearing on the present political reality at all... That one flippant line of dialogue bugged me more than anything else in the movie.

That said, while Stress Position may not be the most socially responsible movie on the block, it's definitely not dull. It has some provocative psychology, interesting sets, a compelling electronica score... I'm not sure how I feel about it ultimately, because I'm not really sure what it is, but people who enjoy kinky weird mindgames, in film or in life, may still find it an entertaining experience. Supporters of Vancouver film might want to check it out on that principle alone...