Review of Pleasure (2021)
Seen in 2022.
A Swedish woman goes to Los Angeles to start her career as an actor in porn.
On episode 499 of the Overthinking It podcast (2018-01-22), Peter Fenzel coined the term “a human centipede of Pygmalions”, connecting the Pygmalion myth to the horror movie The Human Centipede (2009). He was talking about the drama Phantom Thread (2017) but the phrase is a more apt description of Pleasure. The main character, Linnéa/Bella, receives early warning from her male coworkers about the catty competition among actors, whereupon she outclasses one colleague at a time in that competition to reach the top of the game. She betrays and abuses Joy, Bear and Ava in that order, finally assuming Ava’s black wardrobe while Ava gets Linnéa’s white wardrobe to visually indicate the end of the centipede, where Linnéa stops the car and ends the movie.
Pleasure is a work of fourth-wave feminism. Its director, Ninja Thyberg, is obviously critical of the US porn industry and the male gaze of Hollywood, but she moralizes less than A Hole in My Heart (2004). She’s open to the idea that porn can serve its nominal purpose and that women can take short-term power in it despite persistent structural inequity, so the visuals are not as repulsive as the vivisection of Human Centipede or A Hole in My Heart. Thyberg, however, is not a sex-positive feminist. She shies away from showing even simulated sex. Some of Linnéa’s experiences are repulsive, and so is her character and her industry, but Thyberg cannily blurs all the lines. Saying she’s serious, Linnéa jokes that she was raped by her father: A gutsy move in a feminist arthouse film with few comedic moments. There is no reliable indication as to why Linnéa is in the industry to begin with, implying it doesn’t matter. The human centipede of Pygmalions does matter: It implements the fourth wave’s more nuanced understanding of empowerment—even of women—as having the drawbacks of power over others in a matrix of sexism, racism and economic disparities. Unfortunately, there’s not much more to it.
References here: Louis Theroux: Forbidden America (2022).