Extremities (1986)
MGM DVD (region 1)
d. Robert M. Young; pr. George W. Perkins, Burt Sugarman; scr. William Mastrosimone; play. William Mastrosimone; ph. Curtis Clark; m. JAC Redford; ed. Arthur Coburn; cast. Farrah Fawcett, James Russo, Alfre Woodard, Diana Scarwid (89 mins)
William Mastrosimone’s play Extremities was originally a controversial Broadway hit, attracting to its central role actresses of the caliber of Susan Sarandon, Karen Allen and finally Farrah Fawcett.
It was Fawcett who would ultimately inherit the lead role when the playwright eventually adapted his hit work for the cinema screen. Although Fawcett was still remembered mainly for her fame as a sex symbol and pin-up girl thanks to her part in the hit 1970s television series Charlie’s Angels, the actress had effectively re-invented herself playing a battered woman in an acclaimed tele-movie The Burning Bed, a role that saw her garner some positive reviews. She seemed to have a distinct interest in this character type (and / or the positivism it generated) for she would develop it further in Extremities: this time, however, with a bizarrely psychodramatic assessment of victim and victimizer roles. Although the film sought feminist validity and eventuated in a Golden Globe nomination for Fawcett, there were many who felt that even the nomination was a joke. Indeed, the once notorious play slowly fizzled in its screen adaptation and despite an initial controversy upon release, remains something of a minor obscurity, its failures all the more disappointing considering that director Robert M. Young’s previous experience with filmed theatre had been the exceptional Miguel Pinero adaptation of Short Eyes.
The film concerns the ordeal suffered by a young and independent woman (Fawcett). One night she drives to an ice cream store only to find it has just closed. When she returns to her car there is a masked man inside.
He forces her, at knifepoint, to drive off to a secluded area where he intends to rape her. She goes along with his demands until the opportunity to run away presents itself. Although she escapes successfully, she leaves behind her wallet and identification. She goes to the police but is greeted with bureaucratic indifference on a most inhumane level. She returns to her home, with her two roommates, although her subsequent days are filled with paranoia. One day when her roommates are away, a strange man comes to her home: the foiled rapist (James Russo) has finally shown himself. He forces her to act to his will, this time terrorizing her psychologically and physically, forcing her into sexual subservience. Before he can rape her, she disables him and ties him up, imprisoning him in the fireplace. She intends to call the police but he taunts her, saying that he will walk away and come back to get her. Soon she decides on a more extreme course of action and begins digging his grave in her garden. Her activities are interrupted by the return of her roommates, one of whom tries to talk her into a more humane solution, even for this animal now feigning innocence in an effort to stay in control and secure his release.
Extremities owes much of its tension to the slasher movie, which had by that time almost exhausted itself. Indeed, the film also speaks to such revenge-for-rape dramas as I Spit on Your Grave and the vastly superior Ms .45.
Its male / female standoff is perhaps even meant as an allegorical power struggle between liberated women and the men (at first anonymous and masked) who resent them having such independence and who correspondingly seek to humiliate them through enforced sexual subservience. Indeed, the rapist is a married man who over-compensates for his home frustrations through such sexual violence. Here the film makes an intriguing but sadly undeveloped point – that marriage is a kind of emasculation for men, who then turn to violent fantasies and acts as a means of restoring their potency, in the process putting women back into a subservient position, that of enforced masochism. The reversal of the situation finally allows the woman to indulge her sadistic, vengeful desires and thus purge this enforced masochism. Themes of victimization and aggrandizement through violence and sadism saturate this battle for gender-based control. However, although the film is quite adept at exploring and relating the role of sadism in this dynamic, it is uncertain about what is infinitely more problematic (especially to feminists) – the role of masochism in such dynamics, here modulated through a kind of role-playing.
Each character must at some point pretend to be other than they are, in order to appease the other and work towards their own release from enforced captivity.
However, the film falls apart in the second half for it diffuses this tension between victim and victimizer as soon as it is reversed by re-introducing the roommates. The issue then becomes not what the victimizer says to Fawcett but how other women react to the fate of such a monster. Thus, the second half becomes an exploration of just what kind of humane treatment such a monstrous man is entitled to by women in general? What is the responsibility facing women with power over such vile, irredeemable men – to the victim or to some greater liberal humanism? What is important, however, is Fawcett’s progress from reaction to action, taking charge of her fate and denying the man his intent to enforce masochism upon her, whilst the man has to adjust to the reality that he may have lost control not only of her, but of his own fate – the moment of the rapist’s ultimate defeat is thus his confession of his crimes as an act of acquiescence, itself almost masochistic and pitiful. Power and humiliation are the intertwined weapons in this exploration. But Fawcett retreats into a vengeful psychosis demanding that she humiliate and debase her victimizer in order to restore the moral balance and the intense exploration of victim and victimizer dynamics becomes ridiculously histrionic.
DVD DETAILS:
Vision
The anamorphic widescreen transfer is merely adequate. The opening use of a male’s predatory point of view is a generalization that owes to countless slasher films, although director Young initially manages some confronting juxtapositions of points of view of victim and victimizer which are unfortunately diffused in the latter stages. At its best, it keeps the film intimate and immediate, the subjective camera the basis for the film’s style. The opening use of parallel editing between future victim and victimizer suggests that their destinies are intertwined; gender on a collision course – this determinism, however, in turn suggests the film’s intention as a post-feminist empowerment allegory: indeed, the dilemma is always on how women react, even should react, to the monstrous man now in their control. The brutality is disturbing for its suggestion of sadistic pleasure as somehow innately masculine, given to women only as a reaction to an intensely stressful ordeal: thus Fawcett’s vengeful urges are seen as a psychotic break from which she must return, purging herself by humiliating her victimizer, by getting even and psychologically emasculating him through perhaps another kind of enforced masochism. The reversal of roles is the point here, of psyches pushed to breaking point, and in that the film sometimes manages a physical intensity despite a rather cold and glossy look.
Sound
The sound transfer is in Dolby Digital mono only, merely engaging and rarely vibrant. The dated pop music score proves a drawback, overused in situations to the point where it merely distracts from the intensity. Scenes of quiet with only the male and female voices engaged in a power struggle reach dramatic highs only to be eroded by the music, a problem presumably not in the stage play. The mix is otherwise composed of voices and minor everyday sounds but finally is over-scored to the point of turning an intended psychodrama into a ludicrous melodrama. When the score lets up and we hear the pain and torment in Fawcett’s moans and the pleasure in Russo’s the film is immediate and unsettling, as subtle sounds speak to the psychological horror of this awful dynamic. Gasps of pleading desperation are well captured as a prelude to Fawcett’s later outraged (but justified and understandable?) moral abandon. Russo’s voice effectively carries the sense of a petty man who cannot contain his misogynistic rage despite his deceptions – he is an absolute monster, the worst of predatory masculinity, although the film makes him out to be an everyday father as well: the patriarch. Ultimately what may have worked on theatre is undermined in this film treatment. On its part the transfer fails to make the most out of the natural highs and lulls in the dialogue and is too flat overall to match the intensity.
Special Features
The only special feature is an original trailer, which clearly plays up the gender allegory aspect of this disappointing but not uninteresting movie.
