zedz wrote: ↑Sun May 16, 2021 4:47 pm
The film itself is way smarter than it needs to be, with lots of pleasing / amusing / ridiculous ornaments most movies of this ilk wouldn't bother with. It seems to exist in the same kind of hellish Teen Utopia as
Massacre at Central High, where the law of the schoolyard has been extrapolated to society at large.
That's a good point- these 70s exploitation films often imbue an internal logic of camp, but usually there's a dissonance between the key players and their social environment that indicates inherent discord, hence the conceptualization of pitting trends or populations as outcasts within a larger system via the necessary methodological intervention of exploitation cinema. In
Switchblade Sisters though, the idea that some of these people are pariahs is quickly smashed, as Joanne Nail forges a seamless affinity with the gang she decried just moments earlier, and her vehement opposition transforms into unconditional, boundless loyalty within seconds. The 'normal' folks, cops, and prison guards all seem to understand where they stand, or if they don't they are quickly reminded of their subservience.
On some level, everyone is playing a part in the theatrics that occur like clockwork within their world, whether they expect it or continuously forget the expectations in order to drum up excitement before yielding to the assumed power dynamics: The officers apathetically announce that they're just going through the motions again, call the Dagger Debs a gang, get the response "what gang?" and nobody bats an eye as if it's a recycled script; the guards are bested in slapstick mayhem and tap out with a look of, 'Same time next week?'; the assaulted victims want to press charges in a robotic manner just to get the Debs (who approach this situation like business as usual, as a daily checkpoint) to their next task; a teacher questions the authority of a gang-connected student, but the power shifting occurs so rapidly as everyone stands up to signal his disempowerment, that he's clearly just playing a role in the theatre games of these youth who need some light, predictable pushback to allow them to flex their force.
Hell, in a rather unsettling and audacious scene, Nail is raped and the subsequent conversation indicates that, perhaps in this world, she
did "ask for it" as the perpetrator/gang leader nonchalantly says. It's expected, for this "law of the schoolyard" has become the ethos of the culture, infecting all facets of socialization via reduction to a simplified caste system and structure of repetitive cause and effect. So as opposed to the endlessly-dissected rape scene in
Straw Dogs, this film's subjective worldview reframes any form of aggressive violation as acceptable, and even covetous, if it's an engagement with the right person. Two minutes later, she's in love with him, and a few minutes after that she's engaging in sex acts with strangers to fulfill her mission to win him an amulet; an allegiance that guts her identity and replaces it with a vocational motivation that she didn't have to start the day.
The Warriors would later reclaim this internal logic of gang life as the prime cult film of its kind, but
Switchblade Sisters is a more interesting work because it's narratively looser, admits to objectively lower stakes, and thus leaves room for unpredictability in how it's going to spread its diluted predictability for us. Instead of the later film's conviction to lay out a clear path of obstacles for its principals to traverse through their creative milieu, Jack Hill continues to develop the specific dynamics between these principals in his social context under a vague set of rules where Everyone Knows What's Going On regarding codes of conduct. So we become exhilarated not by the rules themselves- or the superficial details of the dystopian atmosphere (for the record, I like
The Warriors, and find these attributes to be a great strength of
that film by contrast, though significantly a more foreseeable avenue); but we become intoxicated and destabilized by just how deeply ingrained the rules are into the schemas of these characters, and of the extent that they fatalistically manipulate the existential course of everybody, no matter how violated or disconnected they are from the superfluous plot mechanics (which
Warriors conversely approaches with the same sincerity its characters do).
Nail's trajectory ascending the ranks isn't dramatized, but presented as the determinist nature of any fellow who encounters the Dagger Debs or Silver Daggers, and opts for inclusive survivalist empowerment rather than to be oppressed to reside as an non-participatory bit part in the margins of their world. The lawlessness erupts into a wonderful third act that disintegrates the organization as a few screws fall out of the revolving wheel, and proves two things: One, that like many dystopian novels, this film has drawn an inverted system of order from our own, keeping its population in check with a sense of security from socially-assigned functions that are easily vacated into pandemonium once a shift occurs in the expectations set by dominant apparatuses; and two, that this monotonous theatrical pattern is unsustainable under a dialectical formula where fallible humans vie for increased power and emotional catharsis as the only meaningful currency to achieve an existential release higher than a purely physiological one of adrenaline rushes.
After we witness so many duplicated interactions pile up in the film's second half, I wonder if this 90-minute slice of narrative isn't the outlier for this habitat but the average breaking point, for how long it can endure its hold over subjects before their submissive complacency wears off under the spell of innate drives for power, control, and expelling of emotional needs. The idea that a different, mercurial kind of Hobbesian anarchy can be a horrifying revelation for such an evidently already-anarchistic, horrifying alternative to our reality subverts the very notion of these dystopian worlds as hells, and banks them in the familiarity of our own philosophical and psychological needs to ground us to some semblance of sanity.