“I Wasn’t Like That”: Converging Ill Bodies in Documentary Film

Documentary films necessarily exploit the human body. Those that deal with ill or afflicted bodies further this process by complicating the relationship between the implied “healthy” viewer and the undesirable “realities” presented on screen. Both Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997, dir. Kirby Dick) and The Crash Reel (2013, dir. Lucy Walker) portray the struggles of ill or afflicted bodies navigating personal pain in the face of the inequities of circumstance. However, they cleverly employ sequences that see these bodies coming into contact with other ill or afflicted bodies, destabilizing a clear sense of narrative trajectory. These vital encounters at once expand and complicate both the subjects’ and the viewers’ conceptions of illness and suffering. Comparative analysis reveals that while these sequences may expand the audience’s empathic concern for the subjects by forcing them to acknowledge the universality of illness and trauma, they also come to reflexively comment on the problematic voyeuristic dimensions of watching sick bodies converge. Simply put, these scenes point to the problems that arise from finding pleasure in pain.

The sequence in Sick where Bob Flanagan meets Sara, who also suffers from cystic fibrosis, at once functions to complicate and expand the viewer’s empathies towards Bob. Sara is established as Bob’s opposite: she is young, optimistic, and presented as a victim of circumstance otherwise living in a stable domestic environment, typified by her supportive mother. Mother and daughter are presented, through a series of close ups and medium close ups, as equals in Sara’s illness journey. Sara, it seems, has come to terms with her illness in a more measured way than the performative extremities of Bob’s art installations and masochism. These differences are immediately acknowledged in Sara’s talking-head introduction; in trying to explain what drew her to Bob, she echoes the incredulity of her loved ones: “What do you see when you look at this man? What do you see?” (51:27-51:31). These concerns reflexively point to the viewer’s questions about her fascination with Bob: what, indeed, will happen when these oppositional bodies, nonetheless stricken by the same illness, converge?

This convergence is presented as a shaky camera, fast motion sequence, favoring rock music to actual conversation (52:25-52:53). The viewer is deprived of actual dialogue, but the effect produced here suggests Sara and Bob’s meeting is a sort of whirlwind that defies simple description. Sara and her mother, here, at once stand in as surrogates for the audience—finally, we can see our own bewilderment with Bob’s lifestyle replicated on screen, as most of the sequence lingers on footage of Sara’s bemused mother toying with one of Bob’s large, black dildos—and also help to expand the frame of reference for how “illness” takes shape within the film’s universe. But despite her differences from Bob, Sara’s sense of empowerment is at once augmented by and distinct from Bob’s: as she asserts to the camera, “You don’t hear about people having diseases being like that” (53:36, emphasis added). Here Sara gives voice to a sort of interpretive motif already occupying the viewer’s mind: how can a sick body possibly act “like that?” In this way, Sara champions Bob’s agency and reasserts the radicalism of his lifestyle, but also legitimizes his approach to his sickness by acknowledging its otherness.

Sara is “like this” to Bob’s “like that;” she is intrigued by but not obsessed with BDSM culture, and at least presents herself as unmoved by thoughts of her impending death. Her measured assertion that “death’s never bothered me, really” is, initially, a relief to hear for the viewer; she is the attractive, uncomplicated type of sick body who will not burden us with her pain, despite the inevitability of her fate (54:18-54:20). However, meeting Bob has nonetheless influenced her outlook. Bob’s inspiring Sara to think more independently about her future renews a sense of empathy and optimism within the viewer regarding both parties and comes to prefigure Sara’s eventual departure away from the safety of domesticity. (For instance, a close up shot of the mother asserting that “it wasn’t the S&M that attracted her” zooms out to a close up of them both. The mother then starts, “Is it...?” but can not complete her thought (53:20- 53:26). For all of the narrative comforts that self-assured Sara and a demure mother provide, Sara’s meeting with Bob has led to a sudden philosophical disconnect.)

The hermetic sense of safety the viewer first felt when Sara graced the screen is shattered when Bob and Sheree accompany Sara as she gets her nipples pierced (1:03:42-1:05:06). Close up shots of the actual piercing formally evoke the too-close-for-comfort footage of Bob’s more severe sadomasochistic play, and suggest that Sara, one year later, has been drawn into Bob’s world of body-positive self-reclamation. As she exclaims with no shortage of irony, “I made a wish, and look what happened!” (1:04:17- 1:04:20). Notable, too, is how Sara’s mother is gone from sight. Whether or not she is standing in the background, monitoring the entire process, the camera portrays Sara as having independently emerged from a cocoon of innocence; she is, even in an innocuous way, symbolically joining the ranks of Bob and Sheree and reclaiming her own body through a practice of pain.

In The Crash Reel, former professional snowboarder and traumatic brain injury survivor Kevin Pierce meets Grant Russum, who has also suffered from a TBI. This encounter, denoted by subtitles as a part of Kevin’s two-year evaluation, comes at a critical time in Kevin’s recovery process. Just as the viewer expects good news or evidence of progress, the film takes a swift, unexpected detour. Over footage of Kevin and his mother entering the hospital, the voice of a doctor says, “This young man was similar to you” (1:03:07-1:03:10). Immediately, Kevin’s meeting with Grant is framed as a meeting of two afflicted bodies bound by mutual experience. The actual encounter, however, is excruciatingly uncomfortable. No extradiegetic music plays to dictate the viewer’s “proper” emotional response; instead, the white noise of the antiseptic space of the hospital stands in place of any affective cues. The camera adopts a mid shot of both Kevin and the wheelchair-bound Grant, while the doctor occupies the middle of the frame. When Kevin awkwardly shakes Grant’s limp hand and asks, “You hanging in there?” it produces further secondhand embarrassment in the viewer—was Kevin really expecting an answer (1:03:18-1:03:20)?

On a formal emotional level, there is a sense that Grant is interrupting a narrative to which he does not belong. Grant’s inability to speak or emote—his eyes merely dart around the hallway—suggests a crude fourth-wall break; he almost appears distressed at the prospect of being inserted into someone else’s filmic narrative. His presence thereby jars the viewer out of the direct-cinema solipsism that they could enjoy up to this point. A close up shot of Grant, who can only grunt due to his recent surgery, emphasizes the inscrutability of his emotional state, not to mention the deep scars on his shaved cranium. Furthermore, Kevin’s imploring Grant to “stay positive” and “keep working hard, and you’ll get better” are almost laughable as the camera once again cuts to a close up of the unresponsive Grant (1:03:50-1:03:53). The pathetic irony of the situation—Kevin’s clumsy encouragement, Grant’s inability to respond—is that the two bodies fail to achieve a connection through their mutual suffering.

Kevin’s swift posturing away from Grant after their encounter is especially telling, as he whispers to his mother, “I wasn’t like that. I wasn’t like that,” which echoes Sara’s assertions about her separateness from Bob in Sick (1:03:55-1:03:58). Like Sara does with Bob (at first), Kevin sees himself as not-that. The visual juxtaposition of the standing, mostly recovered Kevin with the mute, blankly staring, incapacitated Grant only heightens this sense of tragic contrast. This scene’s placement within The Crash Reel’s narrative highlights this disconnect: not until now does the film show Kevin having to interact with a body worse off than his own. It at once jars Kevin and the viewer; both must now contend with a newfound perspective of what it means to be an afflicted body. Ironically, Grant is still in the frame during the final mid shot; the camera lingers on him as if to suggest that the viewer must not forget him—he even captures a glance straight into the camera (1:03:59). The camera’s lingering on Grant jolts the viewer out of Kevin’s narrative—the supposed bravery of his recovery, the quasi- literary evocations of hero’s journey—and into a different, more complicated universe of pain and trauma. Suddenly, the viewer and Kevin realize, that merely one person’s pain might not prove so important in a whole world populated with afflicted bodies. Yet Grant’s story possesses no formula, structure, or teleology. A quick cut to an exterior shot relieves us from any further interaction.

Sara and Grant’s introductions offer more globalizing, although complicating, perspectives on both Bob and Kevin. In Sick, Sara acts as a sort of palate cleanser for the viewer: a sick body that provides a welcome reprieve from footage of Bob’s visceral sex games and art projects. Yet she comes to expand the viewer’s understanding of the forms an ill body can take and therefore acts as a conduit through which to sympathize with Bob. That the film suggests that Sara also enters into Bob and Sheree’s world of bodily reclamation and BDSM kink, as symbolized through her veritable “piercing” into the world of adulthood, also grants her an agency that goes against the viewer’s expectations of how an ill body like Sara’s “should” act. Grant, on the other hand, is a subtler force in destabilizing The Crash Reel’s narrative trajectory. He is a briefly featured yet profoundly impactful presence that acts as a narrative pitfall in Kevin’s journey. Grant, with his stunted development and inability to communicate, reminds the viewer that Kevin’s is but one journey to recovery. Another more seriously afflicted body briefly seizes the hero narrative perpetuated by long, emotional rehabilitation sequences, and the keen sense of Kevin-oriented empathy that has been cultivated throughout the film is immediately thrown off course. In both films, what were once provided as individual struggles come to populate a larger universe of sickness and pain. This is a dangerous game to play with the viewer: it expands the worlds through which the protagonists progress, but consequently complicates the viewers’ capacities for empathy. Why should we care about Bob, or Kevin, when their stories are just two illness narratives among millions?

In a sense, all documentary films must find eke pleasure out of pain. They purport to present the intricacies and blemishes of “real life” through others’ lived experiences but still must remain artful and entertaining. At the center of documentary filmmaking lie not only the consumption of bodies—the same phenomenon is observable across the entire entertainment-industrial complex—but the consumption of “real,” “documented” bodies. Sick does not suggest the essentialities of Bob’s orgasms or visceral performance art; The Crash Reel does not hint at the brutality of Kevin’s chaotic fall. They present them to the viewer as unadorned “reality.” These “meeting” sequences, then, are not easily interpretable or even remotely didactic. They merely portray the convergence of ill bodies that either results in radical union or radical disjunction. Indeed, Sick mobilizes Sara’s innocence into radical art-making of her own. We see her innocent passivity christened into a performance of pain as if to punish the viewer for believing she could possibly act as their surrogate. The Crash Reel produces a more complicated sort of empathy in the viewer: it places Grant at the intersection of Kevin’s recovery and the viewer’s own need for narrative fulfillment. His presence drives a wedge between himself and Kevin and symbolizes the viewer’s need to confront how Kevin’s journey diverges from Grant’s. Where Sara acts as a uniting force that spurns the viewer’s expectations, Grant is a dividing, interruptive force that still manages to implicate the viewer’s voyeurism. For the damage the viewer has done in consuming these ill bodies, Grant does not, and can not, reclaim himself from the viewer’s gaze: he can only, for a split second, meet it directly.