- Also Known As:
- Night Porter
- Year:
- 1973
- Country:
- Italy
- Predominant Genre:
- Drama
- Director:
- Liliana Cavani
- Best Performances:
- Dirk BOGARDE
- Gabriele FERZETTI
- Philippe LEROY
- Premiss:
- After a chance meeting, a Holocaust survivor and a Nazi officer resume their sadomasochistic relationship.
- Themes:
- Guilt
- Totalitarianism
- White supremacy
- Similar (in Plot, Theme or Style) to:
- Clockwork Orange
- Last Tango in Paris
- Lolita
- Patty Hearst
- Pawnbroker
- Story of O
- Review Format:
- DVD
[Night Porter]
Accurate and psychologically-nuanced study of White sadomasochism that effectively portrays the damage done by sexual abuse & emotional violence - as well as the Stockholm Syndrome that can result. After all, when one is plunged into destruction, one solution is to take a liking for it. To become as sadomasochistic as ones tormentors in a desperate attempt to find love in the very last place you would ever find it: A Nazi death-camp.
Sadomasochism has always been the furthest reach of the sexual experience: when sex becomes most purely sexual, that is, severed from personhood, from relationships, from love. It should not be surprising that it has become attached to Nazi symbolism in recent years. Never before was the relation of masters and slaves so consciously aestheticized. Sade had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the decor and costumes and blasphemous rites. Now there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.
Susan Sontag (born 1933), US essayist. Under the Sign of Saturn, “Fascinating Fascism” (1980; first published 1974).
The movie is also an unflinching look at the fascism that can result from the pervasive emotional-repression of Whites who, believing god is a sadist in order to both justify and to relieve their own thwarted feelings, seek to emulate god in order to become it. Whites can then believe themselves above their renounced feelings that have, apparently therefore, been made irrelevant. (This movie can also be seen as an explanation for the breakdown of marriage and the family as viable social institutions in the West.)
The performances are uneven yet, much of the corruption, moral bankruptcy and hopelessness of Nazism is effectively conjured up, along with the White morbidity of seeking love through domination. Rather than see this as neurosis, Whites try to normalize their control freakery by claiming it is universally-human rather than face the pain of becoming truly normal. Here, those who compromise with evil, create a world of euphemisms for murder; playing psychoanalytical games to avoid guilt, shame and, above all, growing up.
Copyright © 2014 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute this posting in any format; provided mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.
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