Beyond Vanilla: the survey film before the argument

Claes Lilja made a list and then filmed it. That is the method of Beyond Vanilla and there is not much more scaffolding than that. More than sixty people sit down, say what they do, and in many cases show it. The film moves through the inventory, one practice at a time, from the sort of thing that turns up in mainstream comedies to activities that carry genuine medical risk, and then it stops.

The dating is slightly awkward and worth clearing up first. The film was finished in 2001 and was on sale on tape that year, when a review ran in the Journal of Sex Education and Therapy listing it at ninety minutes and available from Red Productions in Beverly Hills. A small American theatrical release came in May 2003 and took a little under thirty thousand dollars. Databases split between the two dates. The work is a 2001 film with a 2003 release.

What the method gets you

Taken as a record, the film has real value, and it is value that has increased with time. In 2001 there was no settled public vocabulary for any of this. The internet had not yet standardised the terminology, the subject had no mainstream reference point, and the people who practised it were mostly organised through local groups and events. Lilja got a lot of them in front of a camera and let them speak in their own words about their own equipment.

The demonstrations, uncomfortable as they are to describe in a film column, are part of that record. Lilja was documenting technique at a moment when technique was transmitted in person or not at all. Watching it now is closer to watching an ethnographic film than to watching a documentary with a thesis.

The film is also, and this is the surprising part, cheerful. TV Guide’s review caught the tone: the film is “unquestionably educational”, and “one comes away with a certain respect for the dedication true kinkiness demands.” That word dedication is well chosen. The people on screen have the manner of hobbyists explaining a craft, and Lilja does not undercut them.

What the method costs

Sixty people in ninety minutes is a minute and a half each. Nobody develops. Nobody contradicts themselves, changes their mind on camera, or says something that the next interview then complicates. The structure is a catalogue, and a catalogue has no argument, no counter-argument and no interior.

Ernest Hardy, reviewing for the L.A. Weekly, identified exactly this. Sexuality, he wrote, is “far more nuanced and complicated than can be contained in a few identity boxes or capsulized by physical practices.” That is a criticism of the film’s organising principle rather than of its taste. Sorting people by what they do assumes that what they do is the thing about them worth sorting, and the film never questions the assumption because the assumption is its table of contents.

Critical reception at the time was mild. The film carries a Metascore in the thirties. Reviewers were not scandalised, which in 2001 is itself notable; they were unpersuaded that the film had done anything with its material.

Where the power sits, and who gets to look

Ask the usual questions about who is lit, who is permitted to speak and who is merely displayed, and the film’s framing turns out to be flatter than its subject. In a documentary of demonstrations, the person being demonstrated upon spends the sequence as an illustration. The talking is done by the practitioner with the equipment. The receiving partner is in shot throughout and says almost nothing, while being the body the camera is actually studying.

That is not malice, it is the format. Instructional filming naturally gives the voice to whoever is performing the technique. But it means the film’s account of authority is inherited from its shooting style rather than examined, and across ninety minutes the effect accumulates. The people who explain and the people who are displayed are largely different people.

Set this against the fiction on this shelf and the difference is stark. Story of O is a far more compromised object in every ethical sense, and it is nonetheless more curious about what its central figure wants, because narrative forces the question and taxonomy does not.

The film that came before the argument

Here is the reason this one matters for the shelf as a whole. The later documentaries in this section are all shaped by a defence. They anticipate an accusation and structure themselves as a reply to it, which is why they keep arriving at consent explainers and reassurance and headcount statistics.

Beyond Vanilla is not doing that. It is not defending anything. It shows practices without pausing to certify that everyone involved is well adjusted, and it assumes a viewer who has already elected to watch. That absence of anxiety is the most striking thing about it now, and it dates the film more precisely than any of its equipment does.

So the reassurance structure is not inherent to documentaries about this subject. It arrived later, and something specific brought it. What Beyond Vanilla demonstrates is that removing the defensiveness does not automatically produce a better film. Lilja got the freedom and used it to compile an index. The problem he has is not flattening by reassurance but flattening by enumeration, and both flatten in the end.

Where it sits

It is the useful control case for the two films that follow it. tOuch Kink, two decades later, has an argument and loses the strangeness. Divine Deviance, which its makers have been developing for years without releasing, proposes to solve the problem by handing the account to the people who live it. Whether that works is unresolved, because the films do not exist yet. Lilja at least finished his.