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Sick Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997) – Kirby Dick The outline of this documentary is stated in the title. Kirby Dick had pieced together the life of performance artist and poster boy/man for Cystic Fibrosis, Bob Flanagan. The film covers his childhood, illness, sexual kinks, performance art, relationship with his partner Sheree, and his eventual death (captured on camera). If one isolates the first part of the title … “sick”, there is a duality of meaning that pervades this work. Yes, Bob is “sick” and has been essentially dying since birth, although he has outlived anyone’s predictions. Yes, from an outsider’s viewpoint, Bob is “sick” as his inner need for, and external tolerance of, extreme pain manifests itself in levels of self-mutilation and acts of submission that can make even the solid S&M practitioners squirm. And yes, Bob is “sick” in the way he lives and shares his illness and tendencies with audiences. Specific visuals are definitely not for the squeamish. In a couple of performances Bob hammers nails through his penis into hardwood boards. The audience also witnesses Bob finally die, slowly drowning in his own fluid. For anyone who has lost friends and loved one’s to AIDS, the deathbed scene is more unsettling than the sprays of Bob’s blood during his performances. Beyond the physical acts, the emotion range of the film runs the full gamut from empathy to disgust. Bob has taken his struggle with illness and hybridized it with his extreme masochist activities and disseminated it through performance art. In any given scenario the viewer experiences a mixture of responses that are usually mutually exclusive. Bob plays with these boundaries with a style both full of shock value and humour. We are at once laughing and cringing at his words. We are at once shocked and awed by his physical acts. We are unnerved by the occupying force of his illness pain over his sexualized pain, and how illness triumphs over love in a relationship. It is an uncomfortable film to watch. However, at the end, after Bob has died, there is a sequence where Bob recites, in a laundry list rapid fire delivery, all the “reasons” he did what he did. This is layered over home movie footage of the childhood Bob was never supposed to have. It is that sequence that brings closure to the viewer’s unease, albeit a slightly unsettling sequence in itself. This bookends with a tiny segment in the beginning of the film where Bob’s parents question how it is that their developed the way he did when they were a classic model of the “typical family”. There is more in Bob’s “reasons” speech than any social-psychological model could ever hope to reveal. Watch with extreme self-reflection. Note: A dear friend of mine with similar life experiences as Bob’s, spoke of feeling alive by the “torture and punishment of your own treacherous body”. She also spoke of the one thing that caught me off guard; the deathbed scenes. Of all the imagery in the film, those were the harshest since I have been witness to that kind of death over and over again. She noted that in illness and death there is “… no mystical journey crap, no wistful looking into each other’s eyes … there’s no dignity or nobility.” She also said that this film is about forcing an incredibly uncomfortable inward stare that most people neither have the ability to make or the fortitude to withstand the outcome. Note: For an articulate analysis of our cultural response to illness, I recommend Susan Sontag’s books “Illness as a Metaphor” and “AIDS as a Metaphor”. Note: It wasn't until I started writing this that I realized the director, Kirby Dick, also directed the film "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" (2006).  |
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