The Pet

Posted by Tanos on Wed 3 Jan 07, 3:42 AM

Tags: films

I got hold of a copy of "The Pet" this week, an independent film which has been hyped online over the past year or so, especially on mailing lists and web boards about BDSM. I'm not at all impressed, but it does include some references to elements of the ownership subculture so here goes...

The film feels like a softcore porn-film that thinks it's the next Secretary, but also wants to make political points about the reality of human trafficking. It's directed by "D. Stevens", who turns out to be a photo-journalist (with the emphasis on photo as we'll see later) and is his first picture of the moving variety. However, judging by his earnest comments in "Director D. Stevens talks about The Pet" from the film's website he thinks he's made a Serious Film About Something, despite lots of eye candy, like the cage shot I've included here. In the cage the pet herself ("GG") sleeps while Dr. Carole Lieberman, playing Ellen, inspects her. (It's Dungeon Steel's pyramid cage if you're interested in buying one.)

Psychiatrists slumming it as actresses aside, the acting is pretty wooden, and many of the lines that move the plot forward are as much chanted as delivered. A quick look through IMDb's entry for The Pet confirms that the cast are all unknowns with little more than bit parts and one-off TV appearances in the past, and I don't see that changing.

In choosing to present an owner/pet relationship rather than something more explicitly Master/slave, Stevens (did I say he wrote all this rather than just directed it?) didn't need to do much to justify collars, leashes and nudity (pets don't wear clothes as GG's owner says) and GG spends a lot of her time crawling around on the ground, kissing shoes, walking to heel, running after cars (I'm not kidding), fetching sticks etc.

The central conflict within the plot is between GG's owner, Philip, who wants her as a replacement for his recently dead dog, and other members of the slave-owning underground, who are engaged in illegal organ-trading. Philip and GG's relationship is presented as consensual and loving, although Philip has essentially exploited GG's homelessness and grief to get her, and does have her rather painfully branded after she is collected by his driver, in a way that appears rather coerced.

She is also fitted with a tag that is just a red and white plastic disk attached to her ear, bearing the inscription "#261 M.S.R". I'm guessing that M.S.R. stands for "m-something slave register", maybe "Market Slave Register"? There's also a larger disk which her owner retains, called her ownership coin, and this confers the right of ownership on the bearer amongst the slave-owners: if the disk is passed on, they all recognise the slave has been sold or traded.

I'm prepared to guess that "S.R." is "slave register" because Stevens is clearly very aware of The Slave Register, and refers to it in his comments on the film's website (about 244 seconds in): "Over 80,000 slaves are listed in Slave Registry, many with branding, marking or barcodes. Their weight, size measurements from ankles to neck, to their height and what kind of training or special skills they may have."

What clinches it though is this screenshot from 1 hour 8 minutes into "The Pet", showing the old version of the Slave Register certificate for SLRN 820261. Since the certificates include their download date, I also know they grabbed that image on the 24th of October 2003 - presumably very early in the production. If that were my certificate, I'd be livid, but even as it stands, I still think he's got a damned cheek: that image follows immediately after an exchange where one character confirms that the "women for the mines in Zimbabwe" are ready, and another says the "even with all this coverage, the populace does nothing about it" (ie Stevens' central "justification" for the film, about human trafficking.)

All this trafficking, both of pets, prostitutes and unwitting organ donors, takes place via the "Global Slave Market" website - the screenshot shows the profile page of the character played by the casting director, Summer Nguyen (yes, the casting director plays the only other slave with a speaking part.) The website is rather nifty, I must admit, with pictures, personal statistics, those neat rounded corners all the best sites have nowadays and live ticker lines with slave prices around the world scrolling across the bottom of the page all the time. Like the later Marketplace books, they naturally feel a need to weave the Internet into the way their fictional slave trading system works.

The final element I want to talk about is the contract that GG signs when she decides to stay with Philip permanently. It's entitled "TPE Contract" and opens with the words "This contract is provided as a secure ..." and a quick Google search turns up several versions with that wording, including this one at Albany Power Exchange. The only differences I could spot were "TPE" rather than "slave" contract, and the Pet's use of owner rather than master in the text.

So overall, what do I think about the film from an ownership subculture or D/s point of view? I think that aspect stinks even more than the acting and dialogue: he's lifted recognisable aspects of the consensual world some of us live in, including references to real individuals without their permission, and used them to flesh out the details of a story about a completely different thing: human trafficking. His comments on the film's website just confirm this muddled and/or exploitative approach: trafficking is really bad - here's a bit about The Slave Register etc - isn't trafficking really bad? And after doing all that, the PR team then had the cheek to try to use the BDSM scene to hype the film up, and attempt to involve M/s people in their campaign to get a cinema release via The Pet's MySpace profile (with some interesting replies though )

I suppose the only consolation is that without the production values and acting of a film like "Secretary", "The Pet" will sink without trace.

Edited Sun 23 Nov 08, 9:06 PM by Tanos