Exploitation for Peace?

I was watching this film recently where a mad scientist ,who has already been jailed for murdering the colleagues who laughed at his attempts to create an invisibility serum, breaks out of jail and, under an alias, gets a job teaching science in a high school. Of course, he perfects his serum and uses his newly acquired power of invisibility to spy on various nubile female students (all of whom look at least twenty five) in the locker rooms and showers. Which I felt was the most realistic aspect of the film because, let’s face it, we’d all be tempted, wouldn’t we? Oh come on – you know you would. It doesn’t matter how enlightened and liberal you claim to be, how much a ‘new man’ and down with women’s issues you think you are, given the opportunity to ogle some bare breasts, buttocks etc, without fear of detection, retribution or judgement, you’d take it. For, at heart, we’re all voyeurs: face it, most of modern popular entertainment – film, TV, even social media – are based around the idea of living vicariously through observing the lives of others. Don’t believe me? Just look at the rise of so called ‘reality TV’, surely the most nakedly voyeuristic form of entertainment.

But would you go any further, like the character in the film? Would you be tempted to cop an invisible feel, a quick grope or a phantom slapping of the buttocks? You wouldn’t even have to be invisible in a girls’ locker room or showers – it might be on a crowded bus or train. If no-one could see you, would you risk a grope? Because that’s the point at which you cross the line from the creepy thrills of voyeurism to sexual assault. Obviously, the overwhelming majority of people wouldn’t. That’s the point of fantasies, no matter how dark and transgressive they are, we don’t act on them – we don’t have to as we’ve already satisfied them in our heads. Moreover, just because you might have these sorts of thoughts and fantasies doesn’t mean that they, in any way, define who we are – rape fantasies are very common amongst men, but not only are most men not rapists, they’d certainly never consider raping anyone in real life.

But to get back to the point, no matter how deep we bury them, no matter how much we ‘civilise’ ourselves, certain primal urges lie deep in all of us, just waiting for some opportunity to express themselves, without fear of retribution. The urge to look, to watch others, is one of the most basic of these – doubtless derived from our ancestors’ time as hunters, looking for prey while simultaneously trying to assess potential threats. Combined with human curiosity, we end up with voyeuristic urge. (Of course, the irony is that if you were invisible, then you wouldn’t actually be able to look at anything, let alone naked women – human sight is based around the ability of light to enter the eye and be registered by the receptors there, where it is translated into nerve impulses which are sent to the brain, (a crude explanation. I know, but adequate for our purposes). To achieve invisibility in the way usually depicted in fiction, then light would have to pass through you completely, so it wouldn’t be caught by the receptors in the eye, rendering you blind. So, in reality, the invisible maniac of the movie would have been blundering around, feeling his way by touch. Or grope).

But that’s one of the things that I love about the sort of low budget exploitation films I tend to watch – they don’t flinch from showing humanity at its basest and absolute worst, tapping into our darkest and most deeply buried prejudices and urges. They are our darkest fantasies writ large on the screen – by realising them in fictional form, rather than encouraging people to copy them, as the moralists would claim, they relieve us of the need to enact them in or heads. On the other hand, they can also have a cathartic effect in enabling us as viewers to confront those ideas and impulses in ourselves. Whether we like it or not, even those of us who like to consider ourselves liberal and enlightened still, in the deepest recesses of our psyches, harbour these disturbing feelings and urges. Unfortunately, we seem to be living in age when we are meant to simply suppress these dark and disturbing thoughts, instead of confronting them, examining them in order to properly understand their irrationality and lack of worth. Because it is only by bringing these things into the open and talking rationally about them, that we’re ever going to get anywhere close to resolving the issues that surround them.

So, there you have it: the key to solving all of society’s problems lies in watching trashy exploitation movies. Sure, they’re frequently crude and nasty, often lacking in any true artistic merit, but they are, more often than not, very entertaining. Lacking the pretensions, (not to mention budgets), of mainstream studio pictures, they are far more direct in their approach, focusing on the action, rather than worrying about satisfying the right demographics and focus groups. Their approach to the issues they encompass – race, sex, violence etc – is likewise far more immediate and in your face. Obviously, most of these movies were made in the sixties, seventies and eighties and, well, we did things differently back then. The majority of us, I hope, can put them into their historical context and appreciate that they reflect the mores of their era, even if we wouldn’t approve of these attitudes now. So yeah, I can see how wrong these movies can be, particularly in respect to stuff like the treatment and sexual objectification of women, but they are also just cheap films and it is perfectly possible to enjoy them on that level. Plus, as I’ve said, watching them could result in a far safer society. So, if you truly believe in peace, equality and social justice, watch more trash.

Doc Sleaze