Cinema, Pain and Pleasure—Consent and the Controlled Body

The idea that pain can be a pleasure is a troubling one, and yet it informs cultural practices ranging from extreme sports to BDSM (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism). This book considers how mainstream cinema borrows heavily from these cultural activities for its imagery, but typically rejects their social motivations founded on masochistic pleasure and an assertion of autonomy. Noting a shift in the late twentieth century to narratives that highlight subjection, endurance and willed-acquiescence, it probes the confluence of pain, pleasure and consent to analyse the implications of the change. Films addressed include Crash, Fight Club, Saw, Se7en and Sick. Individual chapters focus on the influence of BDSM, body modification, provocative artwork, dangerous games and torture, and collectively they offer an address of how cinema's viscerally dominated, marked and suffering body – the controlled body – destabilizes the pain/pleasure dichotomy, as well as other binaries founded on gender, sexuality and disfigurement/beauty.

STEVEN ALLEN is a lecturer in the School of Media and Film at the University of Winchester, UK. He is author of Framing Film: Cinema and the Visual Arts (co-edited with Laura Hubner, Intellect, forthcoming) as well as a number of articles on animation, British cinema history and horror cinema in international journals and edited collections.