adjusting to life
by
Douglas Messerli
Atom Egoyan (screenwriter and director) The Adjuster / 1991
On paper the plot of Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s 4th feature film, The Adjuster (1991) sounds like the most perversely surreal movie ever made, an complete artifice that requires, more than simply its audiences’ suspension of belief, a complete immersion into a sexual planet that includes everything from the worst of what is imaginable in porn films and the most outlandish of voyeuristic and exhibitionist fantasies, to romantic straight and gay liaisons performed by one seemingly nice guy insurance adjuster. To actually attempt to describe the narrative is a little bit like trying to outline a mad mix of cinematic and literary works that one might encounter in the library of Dr. Alfred Charles Kinsey—which is perhaps why no film critic I read has done it very successfully, often confusing and misinterpreting what eventually is revealed as being pretty straight forward, even if totally unbelievable, after Egoyan’s rather clear presentation.
Let me give it a try. Hera Render (Arsinée
Khanjian) works for the Canadian Censor Board, daily reviewing all porn films
which they rate with an extensive list of categories from A through H. It might
help if I—following the details of the film provided by a new censor just
entering his
A.
Graphic
or prolonged scene of violence, torture, crime, cruelty,
horror, or human degradation.
B.
The
depiction of physical abuse or humiliation of human beings
for purposes of
sexual gratification or as pleasing to the victim.
C.
A
person who is or is intended to represent a person under the
age
of 16 and appears
1.
nude
or partially nude in a sexually suggestive content or text
2.
in
a scene of sexually explicit activity.
D. Explicit and gratuitous depiction of urination, defecation, or vomiting
H. A scene where an animal is abused in the making of the film.
We’re never told why E and F do not exist,
or if they do what they represent. And, to be fair, I do not know if there has
anything at all to do with the real Canadian Censor Board. The offices, filled
with overflowing bins of pornographic magazines and fliers which a staff of
numerous others to attend to them, seems like something out of a sexual science
fiction film in the manner of Roger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968).
Hera is clearly a very competent and
committed worker, except for the fact that she inexplicably films the porno
works she watches. When the genial and personable Head Censor (David Hemblen)
is alerted to her possible infraction, she reveals that she does it not for her
own enjoyment but to share her workday duties with her sister Seta (Rose
Sarkisyan), who lives with her and her husband and watches the films all over
again each evening, often with Hera’s young son Simon in the same room with
her. She and Hera are close and have shared their every experience with one
another throughout their lives.
One day on the subway Hera encounters a
drunken derelict, an overweight disheveled being who at one point falls to the
subway floor. While she passively watches another woman goes over to the drunk
and sits next to him, slowly lifting up her skirt and guiding his hand to her
crotch as he publicly masturbates her, she obviously fully enjoying the act.
These two, we soon discover are a wealthy married couple, Bubba (Maury Charykin) and Mimi (Gabrielle Rose) who, other than throwing lavish dinner parties, spend most of their lives planning outlandish sexual events that fulfill Bubba’s voyeuristic desires while Mimi is able to exhibit her lusty pleasures in the most public of ways possible.
For their next adventure, Bubba hires an entire
football team along with their stadium so that Mimi can live out her
cheerleader fantasies by having sex with each and every member from tight end down
the line to guard, center, and quarterback.
But even earlier in the film we have seen
Bubba scouting out a place for a new “shoot,” the strange suburban development in
which only four large homes were built among many empty acres, only one of them
having been sold and inhabited before the developers ran out of money.
In that isolated house lives Hera, Seta,
and Simon with this strange trio’s father, Noah Render (Elias Koteas), a
good-looking and apparently mildly tempered insurance adjustor.
From the evidence in the very first
scene, we sense that Noah and Hera’s relationship is not a terribly close one, particularly
since in the dark Hera seems to be moaning and shaking from some nightmare vision
as Noah quietly rises to dress, having been called out to a house fire which he
must investigate. He telephones her on his way to to fire just to check up, but
she seems unappreciative for him having awakened her.
What we soon discover is that Noah’s job
seems to consist primarily of him showing up to burning households to meet the
owners whose whole lives have just gone up in flames. He asks them for photographs
and complete descriptions of their every destroyed possession, but goes far
beyond what the company might require by gently consoling them, often using the
company mantra “You may not feel it, but you're in a state of shock.” To help
them find their way back into the “real” world, Noah not only attempt to jog
their memories in order to replace what they have lost, but offers most of his
clients his own body, making love to beings who are temporarily without
anything else in their lives.
At the local motel where he puts up
most of his suffering customers he is known as a hero, not only by the motel’s
operators and service workers whom he has helped to keep in business and
employed but by his grateful insurance holders to whom he has provided new hope
both mentally and physically. A bit like the beautiful family visitor of Pier
Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), this more everyday angel offers the customers,
apparently both female and male, young and old, far more than they might have
imagined when signing up for their policies.
If we see Noah in bed with one of his
newest female clients, we also witness those who are still waiting for the company
payment seeking out his reassurances and caresses—at one point an older man
holding Noah’s hand and kissing it like a mafia Godfather, and by the end of
the film his most recent client, a photogenic Hispanic man named Matthew (Raoul
Trujillo), laid out naked on the motel bed, having just had sex with the always
ready-to-please adjuster. Through the film Egoyan represents him with a bow and
arrow, a man playing cupid to his own self.
The clever movie-goer probably has
already perceived that all of these figures, each in their own way, are different
kinds of adjusters. Through her coding and the cuts her ratings result in Hera
is adjusting what those addicted to pornographic sex can see and enjoy. Through
their enactment of fantasies and later film-making Bubba and Mimi transform the
sexual imagination into something closer to “real” life enactments; while Noah
not only adjusts for the financial loss of the grievers’ previous possessions but
helps them socially and sexually to readjust to life itself.
Yet
it is their very differences in the way they affect people’s existence that
explains the final ending of this “theorem/theory” film, a work which the
director himself described as being about "about believable people doing
believable things in an unbelievable way."
Hera, her sister, and her son live in a kind of passive world where
images represent real actions for good or bad. Pornography is pernicious not
just because it represents “violence, torture, crime, cruelty, horror, and human
degradation” along with abuse of adults, children, and animals, but because it
replaces real human action with representations of them. If nothing else, the
real actions at least involve living beings and their bodies which is why even
the representation of these acts are so atrocious. But for Hera the body does
not even exist. We recognize that her and Noah’s relationship is empty,
replaced as it has become by her observation of the most vicious visions of
what human relationships consist.
Mimi and Bubba bring those pornography
fantasies to life, nudging them, if nothing else, a bit closer to reality. The
last great “performance” which they plan involves the lonely Render house
itself, which they have rented out to the couple so they “play house” with a gathering
of pre-teen boys celebrating a birthday party at which the scantily-clad Mimi
apparently intends to introduce them to the pleasures of female sex. But this
realization of mass child abuse is finally, at least if Bubba has his way, to
be their final act.
Having
rent out their house for what he believes is a regular film shoot, Noah makes
the mistake of putting up his own family in the motel which serves as his
workplace. Slowly it dawns on Hera and Seta both what precisely is going on
when Noah visits his clients. And as Noah sits beside the bed where he has just
fucked Matthew, we notice in the background his wife, sister-in-law, and son,
with packed bags, getting into a taxi—obviously to take them all away from the far-too-real
sexual activities in which Noah is involved.
When he discovers them missing, the
adjustor speeds back to their previous home, only to discover Bubba pouring gas
over the contents of the entire bottom floor of the house. We don’t know if
Mimi is upstairs, whether the boys have left the premises, or even if perhaps
Hera, Seta and Simon have returned to their rooms above. With match box in
hand, Bubba, calmly warns the sudden intruder that it is time to make a
decision: “Now you’ve come in just at the moment that the character in the
film, the person who was supposed to live here, decides that he’s going to stop
playing house. So....are you in...or are you out?”
Noah, already in tears, slowly backs
out, obviously preferring real life with everything that it entails, the touch
of human flesh and the friendly assurances of human discourse to all the other
alternatives with which he’s been faced.
Appearing as it did early in the 1990s,
Egoyan’s The Adjuster remained one of the most powerful statements about
sexuality in general throughout that decade and is still among his very best cinematic works.
Los Angeles, January 21, 2021
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (January 2021).
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