OTAKU MAnKO: Fetish and the Metropolis
The main event of this past Saturday’s San Francisco Fetish Ball was a spirited fetish reconstruction of German-Austrian director Fritz Lang’s 1927 German Expressionist masterpiece Metropolis. Some people would consider Metropolis the most influential science fiction film of all time, not to mention a socialist manifesto, so it’s worth asking what it’s doing at a fetish ball.
But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself again. In case I’ve left you several steps behind: a fetish ball is an event where hundreds or thousands of folks get dolled up in latex, leather, PVC, uniforms, clown outfits, bunny ears, tuxedos or other wacky attire. They swill $8 drinks, dance to “Bela Lugosi is Dead” and the Lords of Acid and occasionally spank each other on the ass or kiss each others boots.
Fetish Balls should (probably) not be confused with BDSM play parties; the fetish community tends to focus more on hot outfits and pervy dance moves that hint at bondage, SM and the like, rather than actual hardcore BDSM play. The tropes at a fetish ball are those of kinky decadence and haute couture fashion spiced up with sadomasochism, not the other way around. That said, the distinction between fetish and BDSM is almost meaningless in today’s world. Many if not most of the attendees at a fetish ball are people who do BDSM in their private lives, even if they don’t do it at the ball.
A relative rarity at their inception, oh, let’s say the early ’90s or thereabouts, fetish balls are now celebrated all over Europe and North America, with the best-known balls occurring in London, Tampa, Miami, Montreal, Toronto, Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, and Essen, Germany, in addition to San Francisco and more recently the Phoenix area and Detroit. Fetish balls as a general concept receive both rave reviews from participants who love the mind-boggling decadence of it all, and sneery putdowns from self-appointed “serious” BDSM people, who call the fetish scene “Stand & Model.” Like I said, though, the distinction between “fetish ball attendee” and “serious hardcore pervert” is sort of a subjective thing, and depends largely on which club(s) you have chosen to join. A Fetish Ball may not be an educational seminar on the politics of rope bondage, but it is far from a gathering of Givenchy models.
The San Francisco Fetish Ball, scheduled in March every year or two (there was a 2006 ball but none in 2007), is SF’s rendition of this fetish ritual. It is uniquely San Francisco and yet half the people there are from out of town; it is more of a straight crowd than a lot of San Francisco hoedowns, but there’s a healthy dose of sexual diversity that gives it a Bay Area feeling.
Back to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: This year’s San Francisco Fetish Ball took the 1927 silent masterpiece as its theme for the fetish fashion show that forms the centerpiece of the Saturday Night event. This makes oodles of sense given that Lang’s Expressionist vision has some of the moodiest visuals of all time, not to mention some seriously freaky outfits. Metropolis posits a future where the “planners” or “thinkers,” who live high above the ground in total ivory-tower luxury — wearing a lot of white, attending lectures and symposia, and sipping champagne — and “workers,” who live under the ground and toil to support the lifestyle of the sky-dwelling thinkers. In Metropolis, two well-meaning aristocrats touch off a class war that ends in a great conflagration. I’m skipping the part about the robot stripper.
For Lang, Metropolis was about the conflict of workers and aristocrats in society. The violent liberation of workers comes from the semi-enlightened and well-meaning aristocrats who want to make everything better. Ultimately, the villain of the movie is technology, which seems to require workers and aristocrats to live separately, and aristocrats to exploit workers — whether they know they’re doing it or not. Lang’s manifesto seems to be against a stratified society, even though the film is ultimately pretty pessimistic — the mobilized workers are a terrifying force reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s service in World War I. But on the other hand, the aristocrats, while beautiful, are pretty ditzy. Nobody comes off untarnished in Metropolis, though true to Lang’s artistic vision, everybody looks amazing.
How, then, does Metropolis serve as the theme for a fetish ball, with its message of “if it looks good, do it” — a fetish ball, which serves by its very existence as a manifesto of ultradecadence, with $60 tickets and $1500 outfits and pricey cocktails? This question especially has to be asked in an election year when San Francisco is, many of us hope, about to finish up an unwelcome stint as the isolated left-coast bastion in an increasingly right-wing, sexphobic and xenophobic nation?
The obvious answer is that “if it looks good, do it,” and Metropolis, as anyone who’s seen it will attest, looks damn good — in decadent conflict with its socialist tendencies, maybe, but inarguably and irresistibly beautiful.
There’s a deeper answer, though, because Metropolis seemed to be (on some level) Lang’s attempt to reconcile his bourgeois background with the genuine conflict of rich and poor in society. What’s more, Lang’s decadent, gothic, expressive films reportedly earned him both the ire and admiration of none other than Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who regarded Lang’s work as unacceptably decadent and erotic, but so well executed that he offered Lang a position as head of the main German national film studio.
There’s a (probably apocryphal) story about Lang fleeing to Paris without any money after a meeting with Goebbels, but the point’s not so much what happened as what it means. Lang’s exploration of future decadence and worker’s reality can represent more than just socialist anxiety about the future — it represents the triumph of imagination in envisioning a world where sensualism meets reality, for good and ill. Metropolis, if you’ll allow me, could be the triumph of freak chic as a liberating force.
For my money, that’s what I saw at the climax of the re-enacted Metropolis with its stage full of latex-garbed fetish models raising their hamhocks in proletarian unity: the freaks of the future, pumping their fists as one.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, 11 March 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Wednesday, 12 March 2008 at 11:03 am Tina Marie wrote:
While no one thinks of it as a stronghold of kink, Houston actually has several fetish balls a year.