Spanking The Monkey (1994) was the debut feature of director David O. Russell. Already I can see a bunch of you directing your cursors straight to your backwards icons. I understand. Russell is nobody's favourite person. But if you'll stay, I do have a funny personal story regarding this movie.
I first came across Spanking The Monkey (1994) in the early 2010s, when Fopp had the DVD on sale for a meagre £3. Having a keen interest in early 90s indie (and also being in the beginning stages of an academic project on the contemporary slacker archetype that unfortunately fizzled) I snapped it up. At the time, one of my favourite toys was a budget portable DVD player that I liked to bring along on long train journeys, and soon after, I went on one such journey to see my family and watched Spanking The Monkey on the way. At some point during my visit, I met up with my brother and sister-in-law, who asked me what DVD I had watched on my journey. "Spanking The Monkey", I responded, hoping that the meaning of the title would be lost on them. No such luck. They both snickered and demanded to know what kind of movie it was. "Or, do you not want to say?" I realised that they thought I'd been sitting there on that train watching a porno flick. Later that evening, my mum asked me the exact same question. I thought about lying, but instead I bit my lip and told her, bracing myself for her mortified judgement. It would be so much more embarrassing to have your mother pondering your willingness to watch dirty movies in public view than it is your siblings. "I haven't heard of that," she responded, with total nonchalance. "Is it an animated film?" It occurred to me that she didn't know what the title was a euphemism for and had assumed it was a children's movie about a monkey named Spanking, the mere suggestion of which sent me spiralling into an internal giggle fit. I mean, maybe the same creative team behind Rocko's Modern Life could have pulled off that off in a bygone era. "Not exactly," I responded. I think I told her it was a drama about a college student calling in on his family, which is entirely true, but I omitted most of the grisly specifics. I had dodged a bullet and didn't intend to tempt fate further. The film might not be pornography, but its subject matter is blue all over.
Spanking The Monkey follows Ray Aibelli (Jeremy Davies, cast off the back of his work in a Subaru commercial), a keen young MIT medical student who has journeyed to his parents' suburban home for what he assumes will be a quick stopover before moving on to a prestigious summer internship in Washington. His parents, though, have little interest in seeing him fulfil his ambitions. His mother Susan (Alberta Watson) has recently fractured her leg in a failed suicide attempt, and his father Tom (Benjamin Hendrickson) insists that Ray spend the summer caring for her and completing various other domestic chores, so that he can get back on the road and resume his occupation as a peddler of motivational videotapes. Terminally bored and mutually abandoned by the self-absorbed patriarch, mother and son slowly come together and forge an unexpected connection. By "unexpected" I of course mean incestuous. Make no mistake, Spanking The Monkey is not a feel-good tale of restoring broken relations, but a comically misanthropic study of vulnerable people making terrible decisions that all but guarantee their own destruction.
Although Spanking The Monkey picked up the Audience Award at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, getting Russell's career off to a highly auspicious start, the film now seems curiously forgotten amid Gen-X indie cinema, attaining neither the cult status of Kevin Smith's early output or the critical darlinghood of Richard Linklater's. That is a tremendous shame because, putting aside the controversies that have since befallen Russell, Davies and Watson give such beautifully compelling performances as the two malcontented leads - Ray and Susan each feel nuanced and real. And the film's examination of suburban malaise, while well-trodden territory in American cinema, scratches a unique kind of itch. For myself, its appeal has always lain in how deftly it captures that awkward transitional period when your college education has formally begun but you've yet to truly fly your parents' nest; the uncertainties of the outside world are looming, yet retreating back into a former stomping ground imposes distance, not familiarity. Summer becomes a long and tedious chasm in which your maturation is put on hold, you find you've already drifted apart from your old friends and you're eager to get back to independent living. No doubt that Spanking The Monkey was an astute and well-crafted debut. Ultimately, Russell's deliberately muted attitude toward the incestuous relationship, while certainly novel, might have proven too alienating for lasting appeal with viewers. It confounded critics who otherwise had a lot of praise for the film. Emanuel Levy, in Cinema of Outsiders, observes that Russell "handles the incest in an unsentimental, "responsible" manner, as if it were part of a normally painful coming of age. But it's not. The film leaves an uneasy feeling: Did it have to be about incest to precipitate Ray's maturation?" (p.207) Joshua Katzman, reviewing the film in the Chicago Reader, was more bothered by the characters' seeming indifference toward this most lurid of developments, feeling it amounted to narrative implausibility: "when Raymond wakes up the following morning, naked and lying next to his mother, the scene has a casual, hung-over quality that rings false...the gap between making out and waking up next to each other the following morning is too wide." Geoff King, in American Independent Cinema, was more amenable to Russell's undramatic approach, identifying it as part of a broader queer cinema movement in which conventional household models were subverted rather than rejected: "Incest is just one ingredient in a blackly comic mix of dysfunctional family relationships...to make it seem relatively natural, and to deny it a full melodramatic treatment, is to enter into the realm of queering the family context in which it occurs." (p.239)
There are obvious comparisons to be drawn between Russell's film and Mike Nichols' The Graduate (1967). Ray, like Ben, is fresh out of college and forced to subside in the stifling suburban world of his parents. Unlike Ben, Ray enters in with a clear plan and the drive for escaping this world, something that goes badly awry over the course of the film. We sympathise with Ray's desire to get out and make good on his ambitions, even amid the intermittent suggestions that the world beyond is likely just as bleak and screwed up as the one he's looking to flee. Russell's script incorporates a particularly mordant joke that echoes a character's infamous insistence, in Nichols' film, that "the future is plastics" - Ray explains that his personal interest is in organ transplants, but he's chosen to focus his studies on children with AIDS, because he's told that's where the future is. Meanwhile Susan, much like Mrs Robinson, is stranded in a loveless marriage, having been left to stew in endless resentment over her own long-thwarted ambitions. She too was once an aspiring medical student with a bright future ahead of her, but was forced by Tom to pack it in. It's hinted that, as with Mrs Robinson, it was the addition of a child to the equation that interfered with her plans, although unlike Mrs Robinson, Susan had aspirations of motherhood, and sacrificing her career ambitions was a compromise demanded by Tom, who did not want to shoulder any of the responsibilities of parenthood. This certainly tracks with what we see of Tom, who seems more interested in the wellbeing of his dog, a German shepherd with dental issues, than he does in either Ray or Susan. But even then, the responsibility of pet ownership has proven too much for him; the dog and its bleeding gums are also left in the hands of Ray while Tom goes out to sell more videos. (Tom has additional motives for wanting to be on the road besides his career. Whenever he calls Ray from inside a hotel room, a naked woman can always be glimpsed somewhere within the mise-en-scène.)
A contradiction emerges with Susan. She has the opportunity, through Ray, to vicariously live out her unrealised ambitions, but her attempts at commandeering his research seem geared more toward maintaining a hold on him than in enabling him to achieve what was denied her. In one scene Ray asks her to proof read an essay he has written, and they get into a pedantic discussion over the semantics of the terms "stigmatised" and "ostracised", and which is more appropriate for describing the plight of HIV positive children. She is later perturbed to learn that Ray has submitted the essay without her final approval, and that it has impressed the medical authorities in Washington so that they'd be willing to foot the bill for a professional carer in order to secure Ray as an intern. "You got what you wanted, I'm happy for you," she insists, with ill-disguised bitterness. We sense that Susan is too jealous and possessive to genuinely want to see Ray get ahead in life, and that she would be far more comfortable seeing him held back and pulled down to her own defeated level.
Another picture with which comparisons seem apt is David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), as "Russell has set up his world as a "normal" suburban community, then caused all sorts of bizarre things to happen. While circumstances aren't taken to David Lynch extremes, one has a sense that the director of Blue Velvet would appreciate what Russell has done with his canvas here." What is notable about Russell's suburbia is how eerily empty it initially seems, as if Ray and his mother are the only people in the vicinity, abandoned not only by Tom but by the wider universe. There is a long stretch in the first act of the film in which the only other occupant seen is Toni Peck (Carla Gallo), a high school student who becomes Ray's romantic interest and an inevitable target of Susan's jealousy (she accurately but ironically advises Ray that Toni is too young for him). Eventually Ray's old friend Nicky (Matthew Puckett) shows his face, along with a couple of cronies (Nicky is, incidentally, that contemporary slacker archetype I alluded to earlier). In one of the film's subtlest moves, it is not until Ray has engaged in sexual intercourse with his mother that a fuller suburban community outside of Ray's family and a scant handful of peers begins to emerge. As he flees the house in his underwear to avoid being seen by his Aunt Helen (Judette Jones) in his mother's bedroom (a sly variation on the old routine whereby a young lover flees the scene of the transgression to evade an overprotective parent), he is casually approached by a postal carrier (Carmine Paolini) who clearly thinks nothing of his undressed state. An imposing neighbour (Neil Connie Wallace) later appears to advise Ray and Susan that the dog has gotten loose. We end up in a doctor's waiting room where Susan exchanges pleasantries with acquaintance Fran Gibson (Lleana Stratton), there with her own subjugated son (Jed Resnik), who is afforded no dialogue and belittled by his mother for his love of grunge music. Superficially, this sudden appearance of a hitherto absent community might suggest a broadening of Ray's horizons and his induction into the adult world. What it really signals is the descending of a fresh layer of entrapment, now that Ray has crossed a line into a situation that is all the more desperate and stifling. The neuroses and insufferableness of the entire adult set have come raining down upon him. His first instinct is to rebel against it, undermining Mrs Gibson's authority by calling her by her first name and reciting a ribald anecdote suggesting a correlation between shoe size and penis length (Sideshow Bob would be flattered, I'm sure), potentially as an expression of solidarity with her silent son, whose broken arm comically echoes Ray's own inability to perform the titular act (see below).
Compared to Lynch's suburbia, there are no swarms of ravenous bugs seen creeping below the ostensibly immaculate grasses. Instead, an omnipresent undercurrent of distastefulness is suggested through another means, one that is not made overt within the script itself, but that Russell expresses more explicitly in the DVD commentary - which is to say the film's queasy relationship with food, and the persistent subconscious reminders of what that food is fated to become. In particular, the sequence that precedes Ray's sexual intercourse with Susan involves the two of them sharing an emotional connection by throwing cheese around the bedroom. The cheese has been forced on them by Aunt Helen, who has been invited to the house (very much against the wishes of her brother) to care for Susan before the hired nurse arrives, and who waffles on a lot about the nutritional value of cheese and pineapple (and about the brilliant things her own children are up to). Hence, their throwing of the cheese is an outlet for their mutual irritation with Helen...and maybe something a whole lot ickier. According to Russell, he went with cheese because it functions as such a perfect shorthand for shit. He makes the wry observation that cheese both smells like shit and feels like shit. When his characters throw cheese at the television, they are in effect throwing their own faeces (like monkeys?) in order to illustrate their entry into territory that is messy, ill-advised and apt to necessitate a ton of awkward cleansing. It is not just cheese subjected to scatological fixation. An early montage depicting Ray's efforts to tend to Susan juxtaposes his bringing her bowlfuls of soup (which go uneaten) with him emptying the contents of her bedpan down the toilet. Eventually he coaxes her into sampling a spoonful of soup, which is immediately followed by her demanding to forgo the bedpan and be carried to the bathroom. Food in general in the picture is associated with disorder, contamination and waste. A sequence where Helen is seen slicing a pineapple incorporates a shot of her discarding the unwanted outer fragments into the trash can. Interspersed amid the sequence depicting Ray's disastrous attempted seduction of Toni are shots of the dog raiding an unattended bag of groceries and devouring its contents; as Ray and Toni later return home, soured by the experience, the dog bears the telltale remnants of ill-gotten cream upon its snout. Just as today's culinary indulgences are destined to become tomorrow's stomach gas and diarrhoea, so too are today's hopes, desires and impulses destined to become tomorrow's regrets and ingredients for self-loathing.
This preoccupation with waste and contamination also prompts the characters to keep finding their way back into the bathroom, which the film positions as the natural centre of the household (more important than the bedroom where the fateful love making occurs). Its purpose is paradoxical, a place of cleansing but in which filth also comes spilling out. It is a recurring stage for the preliminary sexual tension between Ray and Susan; while assisting his mother with showering, Ray is made to confront her naked physique and makes the discovery that she has a birth mark shaped like a shopping cart. It is also where Ray goes in a futile attempt to purge himself of his impure impulses. He is seen showering right after a sequence in which he sensually applies ointment to his mother's leg, and later after they have performed the forbidden deed, with Ray scrubbing himself so furiously that he makes his skin red. This is motivated, it seems, less by disgust at his incestuous actions than by frustration with the knock-on consequences - after sleeping with his mother, Ray misses his train to Washington and drives away Helen, jeopardizing his internship. Throughout the film, Ray ritualistically retreats to the bathroom with the aim of channelling private frustrations, a privilege that is continually denied him (by the dog, of all characters).
It is my intention to eventually circle back to the question posed by Levy. Did it have to be about incest to precipitate Ray's maturation? To answer that question, we first have to consider the purpose of the other sexual act that takes narrative centre stage, and from which the picture derives its lurid title. Ray wants to masturbate, but finds it impossible at his parents' house. There is a running gag that whenever he goes into the bathroom to enjoy a private moment, the dog appears at the door, scratching and whining. The dog comes to anticipate his movements so thoroughly that at one point Ray enters the bathroom to find his four-legged nemesis already sitting there in wait for him. There's a hint of absurdist humor in the implication that the dog somehow knows what Ray is up to and is deliberately blocking him, making the creature an obvious extension of his parents' suffocating behaviours. But the dog has something of a dual role, also representing those aspects of Ray's seemingly focussed life that could get out of hand should he let down his guard, hence its own indulgences in forbidden activity whenever Ray makes a move on Toni. In the third act, when Ray has really lost the plot, the dog absconds into the wilderness for a few days. Tom makes an unexpected return home, needing to collect some sample tapes, and he and Ray go out looking for the dog. Ray comes close to finally opening up to his father, who gestures that he is willing to lend a listening to ear to his son's anxieties, only for the dog, right on cue, to choose this exact moment to make a reappearance, reclaiming Tom's attentions and once again shutting down Ray's attempt at self-expression.
In one scene, coming right after his failed attempts to wash away his guilt over his arousal in applying ointment to his mother's leg, Ray's masturbation is disrupted not by the dog, but by the unwelcome arrival of Nicky, who announces himself by calling to Ray in a high-pitched, distinctively dog-like manner. Nicky provides our title drop, accurately supposing that Ray has been "spanking the monkey" (or at least attempting to) and taking this, inaccurately, as a sign that Ray has nothing better to do with his time. Masturbation, as per Russell's film, is not the act of an idle hand becoming the Devil's plaything, but a matter of taking one's destiny into one's own hands. Self-abuse equals self-care, self-determination, self-preservation. There is a dichotomy between spanking the monkey, the outlet Ray desperately seeks but is perpetually denied, and his submission to his incestuous impulses, a move that serves to further entangle him in his mother's fatally neurotic web. To masturbate, to relieve your sexual tensions on entirely your own terms, is to take the sensible route. Susan advises Ray to always use a condom, reminding him "these are dangerous times", but (even with AIDS reportedly being the future) STDs are not the danger facing Ray throughout the picture. Intimacy with any other person, and whatever chaos they might unleash, entails some amount of risk, but incestuous intimacy represents the reddest, hottest danger zone of all. It had to be incest, really, because it is the single act that mutually debases mother and son, making them complicit in and fully alert to one another's transgressions. If any act could ensure that Ray and Susan are going down together, with Ray fated to never escape his mother's clutches, incest is it.
The dualling acts of incest and masturbation are finally conflated at the end of the film, when Ray reaches his lowest ebb. Tom, shortly before setting out on the road again, has dropped the ultimate bombshell, that he is no longer in a position to pay for Ray's tuition fees. In addition to missing his internship, Ray won't even be able to return to college once the summer is over. He is now stranded in his parents' world, potentially forever (Tom seems intent on reshaping Ray in his own image, by taking him under his wing as a videotape salesman, an option that is just as unpalatable to Ray as the thought of ending up like his mother). Seeing no other way out, Ray attempts to hang himself in the bathroom, but this is foiled by Susan (echoing all those thwarted attempts at masturbation), leading to another sexually charged moment between the two. Ray responds by attempting to strangle his mother, channelling his pent-up frustrations and taking his fate into his own hands by eliminating the source of his anguish (a move that would conversely seal his total debasement, from deviant to killer). He is, however, unable to go through with it and releases her, shortly before Nicky appears at the window and asks Ray what he is doing. "Choking my mother", Ray admits. Nicky emits a nervous laugh but seems generally unflustered, possibly mistaking this for yet another masturbation euphemism - and indeed, it sounds deliberately reminiscent of an especially cliched one (again evoking an act of violence against an animal), choking the chicken.
The adult world is an appalling, hypocritical mess, but Russell is likewise not romantic about the adolescent world Ray is in the process of leaving behind. For as much youthful idealism as Ray himself might exude, his attempts at relating to his peers are as fused with awkwardness and mortification as you would expect from kids of his age bracket. His pursuit of Toni is just as ill-fated from the outset as his sexual entanglement with his mother, and I suspect will be even more discomforting to some sensibilities. We see the situation from Ray's perspective, in which Toni is presented as an infuriating tease who insists that she is wanting sex but hastily withdraws her consent when Ray advances, culminating in an incident where Ray pins her down and ignores her as she tells him to stop (he is subsequently shocked when she accuses him of trying to rape her). The reality is, as Susan points out (however hypocritically), that Toni is too young, and her confusion and indecisiveness on the matter is understandable. Her wavering belief that she is ready is later linked to parental misguidance. When we meet Toni's psychiatrist father (Richard Husson), he calmly asserts that he has spoken to Toni about sex and is confident that she knows what she is doing (she blatantly doesn't). Meanwhile, time spent with Nicky and his cronies presents an entrapment unto itself, in which the metaphorical shit being flung about are vulgar barbs and empty masculine posturing. Nicky has aspirations of majoring in English literature, but clearly lacks Ray's drive to find a place in the adult realm. When asked if he'd be interested in a teaching career, he scoffs and declines to explain what he would like to do, as if it were an irrelevant question; we sense that he'd be happy to sit about smoking weed in a state of post-adolescent indolence forever. His companions, Curtis (Zak Orth) and Joel (Josh Weinstein - no, not that one) are boorish and obnoxious, as exemplified by their reaction to seeing a herd of deer dart into their path on a nocturnal drive. One of them shouts out, "10 points for Bambi!", inadvertently evoking popular culture's starkest instance of a son's maturation being precipitated by the traumatic elimination of the mother.
In spite of Ray's momentary flirtation with matricide, Susan survives the picture. Ray, on the other hand, is required to go through a metaphorical death and rebirth in order to find a route out of his predicament. It is an act of cleansing more punishing than his previous attempts to scrub himself clean in the shower. On his second night out with Nicky, Joel and Curtis, Ray breaks away from the group and throws himself off a cliff into a body of water below. Unable to locate Ray in the aftermath, Nicky and the others run off to get help; after a fade-out, we see that Ray has made it out of the water unharmed and is intent on wandering away undetected. By dawn Ray has reached a roadside, where he hitches a ride out of town with a trucker (John Schmerling). The trucker, noting Ray's bedraggled state, asks what happened to him, and Ray responds by producing the picture's punchline. "I fell into an old quarry", he states, presumably alluding to more than just his cliff-jumping experience the night before. In spite of that defiant leap of faith, Ray's exit has none of the high adrenalin triumph (however fleeting) of Ben and Elaine's escape from their parents' clutches in The Graduate. Rather, it more closely anticipates the ending of Ghost World (2001), where Enid's departure on the phantom bus has been alternately interpreted as either a successful escape into the wider world or a final definitive sinking into despair. We are left with similarly mixed feelings at the end of Spanking, unsure if Ray's act of courage (or else recklessness) has liberated him, enabling him to move on to something better, or if, having cast himself off from everything (family, identity and future prospects), he's subjected himself to a figurative demise, with no scope but to wander the earth as that most desolate of figures, the spectral hitch-hiker. Compared to Terry Zwigoff's film, Russell's leaves us with a closing crumb of comfort, in the form of the sympathy Ray receives from the trucker, who asks him if he'll be alright (suggesting that perhaps there is value in leaning on others after all, even if it is the kindness of strangers winning out over the kinship of friends and family). Ray nods, assuring the viewer that, no matter what lies ahead, he is a survivor. All the same, we might be troubled by that final image, which shows the truck driving past a "Do Not Pass" sign - obviously, the instruction being conveyed there is to not pass other vehicles, but within context it's difficult not to read it as a signal that Ray is slipping over another potentially hazardous boundary. It takes us back to the beginning of Ray's story when, during his journey with his father to the family home, they passed an airport sign reading "Terminal", indicating that some form of death, whether literal or figurative, lay up ahead. How we interpret the "Do Not Pass Sign" might depend on whose authority we are inclined to project onto it. Has Ray transcended the limitations imposed on him by the cold and insipid world he leaves behind, or is he about to discover a whole new terrain of hardship that lies beyond? Ultimately, he has to live in the same world as the rest of us.
No comments:
Post a Comment