What the kink documentaries are defending

The film column on this site holds four documentaries. They span twenty-two years, one of them has never been released, and the subject is the same in every case. Watched in sequence they do something a set of unrelated films has no particular reason to do: three of the four arrive in almost identical shape, and the exception is the oldest one.

The shape is a defence. A documentary about this subject typically begins by assuming an objection and organises everything after that as a reply. Practitioners are introduced as reasonable people. Terms are defined. Safety is explained. Somewhere in the second half a statistic appears establishing that a good many people are like this. The film is patient, decent to its subjects, and by the end it has argued a case rather than described anybody.

Naming the shape is easy enough. The useful work is finding out where it came from, and that turns out to be answerable from these four films alone.

Two films, opposite incentives, one structure

Kink, which Christina Voros directed and photographed inside the Kink.com production facility in San Francisco, premiered at Sundance in January 2013. Everybody who speaks in it is an owner, a director, a crew member or a performer currently working there. The company owns the building. Its market position rested on being the operation that ran this material properly, which means the assurance the film delivers was already part of the product before Voros arrived.

tOuch Kink, directed by Todd “Max” Carey and premiered at Fantasia in Montreal in July 2023, has none of that behind it. Its four subjects are private people. Nobody in the film is selling anything the film could help sell. Carey builds the whole picture on four terms borrowed from practice: negotiation, consent, play, aftercare.

If the reassurance were being driven by commercial interest, these two films should look nothing alike. They look extremely alike. Both spend their running time establishing that what is happening is managed, agreed and safe, and both keep interrupting articulate people in order to vouch for them.

The reviews land on the same complaint from opposite directions, a decade apart. Frank Swietek, writing in Video Librarian, gave Kink two and a half stars and named the defect: “The major drawback here is repetitiveness, as the same points are continually being made.” Courtney Small, reviewing tOuch Kink for POV Magazine on the day of its premiere, found it “surprisingly tame given its subject matter” and located the cost precisely: “The clinical way that Carey’s film unfolds makes its depiction of pleasure feel oddly sterile.”

Two reviewers, two unrelated productions, one description. A pattern that survives a complete reversal of the maker’s incentives belongs to the genre and not to the maker.

What the assurance displaces

Once a film has decided its job is to correct a prejudice, every scene has to carry the correction, and the correction crowds out everything smaller. Why this person and not another. What they actually get from it. What it costs them. What they think about on the drive home. Desire is various and a good deal of it is unflattering, and a film built as a safety curriculum has room for none of that, because each of those answers complicates the case the film came to make.

The clearest illustration sits inside Kink, and Voros filmed it apparently without noticing. The interviews argue that authority belongs to the performer: she sets the terms, she can stop everything with a word. The images show a room of technicians arranging a body under lights they control, on a schedule they set, for a client nobody in the room will meet. Run the first and fourth passes of how to read a picture of power over that footage, which ask who the light favours and what authority the composition actually grants, and the discrepancy is not subtle. Both accounts are true at once. The double structure would have made a better film than the one that lets the interviews settle the question and moves on.

Beyond Vanilla defends nothing

Beyond Vanilla, finished by Claes Lilja in 2001 and given a small American theatrical run two years later, is the reason any of this can be dated. It has no case to make. It anticipates no objection. It shows practices without pausing to certify that the people doing them are well adjusted, and it assumes a viewer who has already elected to watch.

None of which is a recommendation. Lilja’s film has a flattening problem of its own and it may be the worse one. More than sixty people appear across roughly ninety minutes, which is about a minute and a half each. Nobody develops, nobody contradicts themselves, nobody says a thing that the next interview then complicates. The film is a catalogue, and a catalogue has no interior. Ernest Hardy, reviewing for the L.A. Weekly, went straight at the assumption underneath it: sexuality is “far more nuanced and complicated than can be contained in a few identity boxes or capsulized by physical practices.”

So the finding here is a negative one. Take the defensiveness away and a better film does not appear. Lilja had exactly the freedom the later documentaries lack and he used it to compile an index. Reassurance flattens by insisting on one answer; enumeration flattens by never asking the question. What Beyond Vanilla establishes is narrower than a verdict and more useful: the reassurance structure is not inherent to documentary, because here is a documentary on the same subject without it.

The convention has a date, and a distribution history

Somewhere between 2001 and 2013 the form acquired an obligation. These four films carry enough information to see how.

Beyond Vanilla was sold on tape by a small California distributor and its later theatrical release took a little under thirty thousand dollars. Reaching it required knowing it existed and choosing to order it. Kink premiered at Sundance. tOuch Kink premiered at Fantasia, a genre festival in Montreal. In both cases the audience had booked a programme rather than a subject.

That changes who a film has to introduce itself to. A tape ordered by post can assume election: whoever is watching has already answered the objection by pressing play. A film that has to hold a festival room cannot assume anything about the people in it, and the safest way to hold them is to spend the opening establishing that nobody on screen is dangerous or unwell.

The trouble with answering an objection is that the objection sets the agenda. A defence has to take the terms of the accusation seriously enough to reply point by point, and the terms of this particular accusation are all about harm, capacity and consent. Reply on those terms and you get a film about safety. What no defence has room for is the question of what any of it is for, because the case for the defence does not require an answer and the honest answers would not help.

Hold TV Guide’s line on Beyond Vanilla up against that. The film is “unquestionably educational”, the review said, and “one comes away with a certain respect for the dedication true kinkiness demands.” Dedication describes the people rather than adjudicating the practice, and it is the kind of observation the later films are too busy to make.

The film that proposes a fix and has not arrived

Divine Deviance has been in development since about 2016, directed by Jörg Fockele for a San Francisco collective, and no episode has been released. Its stated method addresses the problem head on: made by, about and for the communities it covers, rather than by a visitor who gets access and then leaves. Change the presumed viewer from a sceptic to a participant and the obligation to reassure lifts by itself. Structurally that is the right answer to everything above.

Two things complicate it. The first is the title the project took in 2022, Kink Is My Superpower, which is a reassurance claim of its own and a confident one. A flattering frame edits as heavily as a hostile frame, and anyone whose experience of this is ambivalent or compulsive or simply dull fits a superpower badly. The second is that what the collective has actually published is a book. Kink Is, its 2024 anthology, carries sixty-six photographs alongside first-person accounts, and a photograph made from inside a world for an audience that includes it is a different object from one made by a visitor, which is the argument the work of Nan Goldin has been making since the 1970s.

The comparison worth ending the section on is not about method at all. Kink went from a tour of a building to a Sundance premiere in roughly two years, on the strength of a well-known producer attaching his name. Divine Deviance has spent about a decade fundraising through a nonprofit sponsor and delivered a book instead. Both projects concern the same subject. One was made by people passing through and got a festival slot and distribution; the other is being made from inside and cannot get financed. Whatever the episodes turn out to be, the difference in how far each project has travelled is already evidence about which accounts of this material the industry will pay for.

What to ask of the next one

Not whether it is sympathetic. All four of these are sympathetic, and sympathy is where the flattening starts.

The questions that actually separate them are narrower. Who is the film assuming is in the room, and what does it think that person needs to be told first? Is anybody on screen permitted to want something the film would rather they did not want? Does a subject ever get to finish a thought that fails to serve the case? And do the images agree with the interviews, which in Kink they conspicuously do not.

The fiction shelf keeps outperforming this one on all four counts, and not because the directors are better. The Duke of Burgundy can invent a couple’s private paperwork and then film the exhaustion of maintaining it, because a film with no duty to be responsible can let its people be tired, unreasonable and specific. Television gets to a similar place by a different route, which is duration, and that is the subject of kink on television.