Choke (2008)
Fox Searchlight
d. Clark Gregg; pr. Jonathan Dorfman, Temple Fennell, Beau Flynn, Tripp Vinson; scr. Clark Gregg; novel. Chuck Palahniuk; ph. Tim Orr; m. Nathan Larson; ed. Joe Klotz; cast. Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Brad William Henke, Kathryn Alexander, Jonah Bobo, Paz de la Huerta, Bijou Phillips (89 mins)
Choke is the latest Chuck Palahniuk adaptation, the first since the epochal Fight Club, a controversial look at thirty-something, Gen-X male discontent at the emasculating nature of contemporary American consumerist society. Interestingly enough, one of the protagonists of Fight Club remarked that there is now a generation of men in America who have been raised under the “civilizing” influence of women. In Fight Club, this generation of mother’s boys rebel by violently beating each other up in cultish rituals which eventually extend to the creation of a terrorist cell. Although nothing like that happens in Choke, it does have one thing in common with Fight Club – author Palahniuk’s obsession with men forced to adapt to a post-feminist socialization, the sign of a modern America losing Patriarchal self-control.
Oedipal socialization thus saturates Choke, about a sex addict (Sam Rockwell) obsessed with his demented, delusional, dying mother (Angelica Huston) and struggling with the absence of a father figure in his formative years, which his best friend (an ingratiating Brad William Henke) aptly describes as “abandonment issues”. Indeed, as Rockwell goes from sex with stranger after stranger to a support group for sex addicts, he is left a nearly devastated, pathetic wreck. A malfunctioning Matriarchal-Oedipal socialization has made him unable to relate to women on an emotional level. He resorts to con games to get money out of sympathy, chuckles his way moronically through a dead end job and fantasizes continually about sex, visualizing almost every woman he sees as naked (including a nun old enough to be his grandmother).
Ironically, Rockwell spends much of the film in the ward of the psychiatric hospital where he has had his mother committed, pretending to be someone else and facing the continuous attention of the elderly women on the ward, only to seek refuge in internet dating sites and anonymous sex with strangers and trying to have sex with his mother’s doctor, who thinks she can save his mother from her dementia. Yet, Rockwell is conflicted and guilty about his behaviour hoping that the sex addiction clinic (where he has sex with other addicts) will allow him a behavioural breakthrough, though he struggles to express why he desires to change. He is a trapped individual, the product of a deluded mother and an absent father, who has grown up unable to relate to women except sexually: indeed, the one time he cannot get an erection is when he tries to have sex with a woman he is becoming emotionally involved with – though he blames it on the pressure of trying to fornicate under a crucified Jesus in a hospital chapel.
It is on this note that the film develops its next important theme – individual sexuality as shaped and affected by Christian moral expectation. In an hilarious plot twist, Rockwell, desperately needing to know who his father is as if such will bring the needed personality transformation he desires, is told that he was possibly fathered through a bizarre scientific genetic extraction – Jesus’ foreskin as stolen in a theft of holy relics in Italy some time before his mother came to America. Told that he could be effectively be Christ’s “half-clone”, his answer is to follow what Christ would not do – anonymous, promiscuous sex. He is told of the transformative power of love but his not a spiritual love in any way: what transforms Rockwell is the ability to finally have sex with someone he is emotionally attached to. And this is only possible when he rejects both the law of the mother and the example of Jesus so ironically dangled over him and which in a bizarre moment he almost wishes to be true.
Replete with sly sacrilegious humour, Choke emerges as a clever meditation on modern sexual socialization and of how men raised without male role models relate to women, though is cynical about this in that all such men are sexually dysfunctional as adults and the women they must relate to are driven by fantasy. Sexual obsession and the indulgence of fantasy saturate Choke, but are merely symptoms of what is a greater problem – compulsive gratification. Few mainstream films have attempted to examine the psychological state of constant sexual arousal and in the film’s slyly subversive ending, such sexual addiction is, however warped the cause, finally the means of catharsis – sex is both result of and antidote to a malfunctioning Oedipal socialization process: a rebellion against the myth of Christ.
Pretence and fantasy dominate Rockwell’s existence, from his job as a performer in a history-based theme park to his sexual role-play with women to the put-on identities he assumes when with his mother. This too is the result of his childhood experiences with his mother, seen in flashback, who advocated that the “pretend” was as valid as the real – to the point where now, in accordance with such, he lives a life of pretence. His aspiration, on finally escaping the Oedipal yoke of Matriarchal madness that has made him what he is, is to find something concrete – hence his obsession with discovering his father. Indeed, the only male role model he can turn to is Jesus Christ, whom he rejects completely, the suggestion being in the end that individuality stems ultimately from choice and self-awareness, not delusional moral absolutism as symbolized by Jesus Christ in this film’s rationalistic examination of Oedipal socialization and its consequences on sexual behaviour.
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