TWO FILMS ABOUT SADO MASOChISM

Two Films about Sado-Masochism: Who’s you’re favourite Martinet? by cobrunstrom We don't have a regular baby sitter do we don't get to see real films, 2D films, until long after all the clever people have already had their say.   I didn't get to see Whiplash, or Birdman, or Imitation Game until a few days ago when I flew to Los Angeles and back. Whiplash is a very taut and very entertaining meditation on sado-masochism.  Simmons, as jazz band leader Fletcher is one of the greatest drill sergeants ever to appear on screen. R.Lee Ermey from Full Metal Jacket has a more restricted register of expression - something which is not his fault but which is implicit in the role he's playing. Ermey, of course, really was a drill sergeant, and knows enough never to break the ingrained discipline of his staccato professional identity.   Simmons, on the other hand, is able to build rather more tension ahead of his outbursts since he can offer soft-spoken geniality to punctuate the suddenness of his outrage.  At one point he offers avuncular encouragement to a young boy who has just started piano lessons by saying "would you like to play in my band some day" just a semi-quaver before bursting in on his actual band whom he addresses simply as "cocksuckers". Both films provoke a version of the same question.  How does an older man dominate a collection of much younger men?  Well, by telling those young men that they are nothing in themselves, by telling them that they are works in process, on a road to becoming something better.  Eventually, the more you inflict punishment, the more they will compete to absorb it.  Competition to get into Fletcher's band is intense - the more extreme the punishment, the better the musician you must be. R. Lee Ermey's drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket is blown to pieces half way through the film (a strange diptych of a narrative which loses energy in its second half).  The jazz band leader survives.  If the test of maturity, the test of "becoming something" is a test of how much punishment you can absorb then the martinet will not be quicker to deal out punishment than the discipline is to absorb it.  In Whiplash, Fletcher and his tutee Neiman are locked in a kind of combat whereby Neiman can defeat his nemesis by embracing every form of pain that being offered. Furthermore, this kind of formative sado-masochism is generationally self replicating.  Fletcher reminisces about the horrors that Charlie Parker experienced during his tutelage.  One can be sure that Fletcher himself was brutalised himself, as was Sergeant Harman as played by Ermey.  The cruelty, once absorbed has to be passed on to a new generation, because otherwise the cruelty would have been wasted.  If there's one thing worse than being brutalised when one is young and vulnerable, it seems, it is feeling that all that brutalisation was stupid and unnecessary.  Brutality has to count for something.  Apparently. Hence the expression "it didn't do me any harm" when referring to corporeal discipline.  The "any harm" rarely discusses the compulsive need to "pay it forward". And now that I've finished this, I discover that Peter Bradshaw has already made the Whiplash-Full Metal Jacket comparison.  Bradshaw is just about the sharpest and most hilarious film reviewer I know.  Ah me.