David Sutton, Part 3

On edgeplay

TW for abuse, blood, BDSM, suicide

If 2020 wasn’t going the way it is, I’d say 2019 was a contender for weirdest so far.

The year started with a bloody kiss at the Stud (RIP) in San Francisco and ended with bloody needles a couple hundred miles down the coast at the Madonna Inn. I moved across the country, started hormones, got the second of two top surgeries, wrote a book, and met a lot of people. I also got myself into a few chaotic, short-lived sexual relationships, the kind I always think I’ve left behind me for good until the next one rolls around.

One of them began on the 4th of July and ended six weeks later. G had little in the way of dyke dating experience, which was just one of our many problems. While I’m no longer speaking to her because of her bad behavior during our relationship, I don’t blame her for getting her ass kicked by the queer learning curve. It’s kicked mine, too, plenty of times. Having the benefit of almost a decade of gay experience, I’d tried to explain to her what she was getting herself into. I told her about the lesbian phenomenon of merging, and that it wasn’t uncommon in dyke relationships for the intensity to come on fast and strong.

“You mean you do this all the time?” she asked. She sometimes joked about me being a fuckboy. A certain kind of cis woman tends to suspect that she’ll find all the things she dislikes about straight men, like their misogyny, in someone whose version of femininity is different than theirs.

“I mean, I’ve done it before,” I said. I thought about locking eyes with some other homo, mid-fuck, smiles playing on our faces, the final edge—I love you—looming before us a mere month or two into sleeping together. It had happened more than once. I suggested that we try to take things more slowly. We had nothing but time, after all.

Despite my warnings, G recklessly upped the emotional ante—attempting to give me expensive gifts, take me on trips, and break down the strict play boundaries I’d spent years learning to enforce—and for a while, I allowed myself to get swept along with her. Sex and blood and merging are fun and exciting for a while, but that’s because it’s dare-deviling. It’s unsustainable, and worse, it’s insincere. When I finally broke up with her, she wanted to process for hours. When she couldn’t talk me out of it, she called me a fuckboy. This time, the vitriol was undisguised.

I spent the next few months nervous that she would execute some kind of retaliation on social media, which she’d joked about doing a few times over the course of our relationship. “If you don’t do [x thing she wanted], I’ll just tell everyone that you abused me,” she purred, once or twice; she was very good at making big things seem small, and bad jokes seem not so bad. I’m not proud to admit that that was one of the biggest red flags I let ride.

To my relief, G has more or less respected my newest boundary: that she never attempt to communicate with me again. We’ve both moved on, and I console myself with the knowledge that that cluster ended after six weeks rather than eight months or four years. I’m getting better at recalibrating my picker, not from passively learning my lesson—like a toddler sticking their finger in an electrical socket—but from slowly teaching myself how to tolerate safety better than chaos.

At its worst, codependence is a team sport. My advice to G didn’t work in no small part because it was advice I should have been taking for myself. G and I were both playing out our own patterns, handy Fleshlights for each others’ masturbatory dysfunction. I’ve always been drawn to manipulators and users, women that I feel need me to save them from themselves, women that don’t think they need to listen when I say “no,” women that push for control—like G, making increasingly exhausting demands of my time, resources, and agency—until what we have cracks under the pressure. I tend to hold safe people to almost impossible standards, quick to cut them out of my life for the slightest transgression, but have an old habit of letting people like G walk all over me, believing when they say that this is the last time I will be hurt or disrespected or lied to, and that they’ve really learned, and it really hurt while they were learning, and don’t I love them like they love me?

G is ultimately responsible for her own bad behavior, but it would be silly to deny that I tend to seek out and then studiously ignore the same red flags, boundary-pushing being chief among them, in her and others. In the leatherdyke community, we often talk about the risks and taboos associated with edgeplay within scenes as if they were primarily physical; it seems to me that we could stand to talk more about the variation of edgeplay that manifests outside of scenes where we bully and manipulate each other into raising the emotional stakes to unsustainable levels, like a masochistic eating contest. It’s easy to identify when a player is failing to enforce correct bloodplay protocol (something that an experienced player like G had no excuse for doing, and yet did). It’s harder to find the language to talk about how emotional ante-upping and veiled threats are a way of manipulating a situation and the people within it.

As I was reminded by my relationship with G, self-destructive behaviors and untreated PTSD will land you back in the same unhealthy cycles, over and over. “It’s amazing, the substance abuse pattern,” said my friend S a few days ago. “How it never really changes.” We were at Riis, tanning and talking about the dykes we know. Her baseball cap said LEZGO and mine said Support Trans Futures. She had just heard about an ex that had relapsed, hard, in the same configuration she’s been repeating for years.

It’s extremely difficult to break those patterns. Even “break” here implies a one-time action, belying the time, effort, and intentionality that go into healing: It’s not an event, it’s a process, one that can’t be done without external support.

Our understanding of trauma and related mental illness is still so superficial, but one thing we know for sure is that willpower is rarely enough to accomplish real healing. For years, I was told that CBT would cure my OCD; that if I chose to let go of my need for control, I could get better. And it’s true that there’s a component of the conscious mind—the illusion of control is infinitely more appealing than the knowledge of powerlessness. I was also told that prayer would fix me, too—but there’s a neurological underbelly to self-harm and maladaptive behaviors that requires more from “healing” than individualistic determination.

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Possessed (1947) is about a woman obsessed.

I’ve written about obsession in film here on DAVID a few times before, about Mark Wahlberg in Fear and a sixties movie about a young man with severe OCD called David and Lisa. Starring Joan Crawford as Louise Howell, Possessed tells the story of a woman driven to madness by her desire for a man who doesn’t desire her back. This wanting of hers is distinguished from longing and yearning by its potency and locus. It leaves the sphere of agency—obsession—and resides somewhere else, as if the want inside of her is of alien origin. Possessed has as much in common with bunny-boiler cinema (Fatal Attraction, Single White Female, and Fear, after a fashion) as it does with religious horror, like The Exorcist, in which a central character is overcome by an external, supernatural evil.

Fittingly for a woman who clawed her way to the top of the studio system, obsession is a trademark of many popular Crawford vehicles, especially as her career matured. The studio banked on this aspect of her appeal. “To the millions who applauded her in Mildred Pierce,” proclaims the theatrical trailer, “Warner Bros. promise an even more exciting woman” and a “more startling story.”

When Louise is found wandering the streets of Los Angeles, confused and repeatedly asking strangers for someone named David, she is taken to a mental hospital where a kindly psychiatrist uses “narco-hypnosis” to coax her to speak. Slowly she tells the story of falling in love with a neighbor named David Sutton (Van Heflin). We travel back to the memory with her, where the lovers sit on a piano bench together, arguing about their future.

“I want a monopoly on you!” Louse weirdly declares.

“Louise, you hang on to me too hard,” he reprimands.

“Something happens to a woman when she isn’t wanted. Something dreadful,” Louise sadly reflects.

We’ve been introduced to Louise and David just as he’s about to break up with her. We’re given very little information as to the quality of their relationship, or of David himself, and why it is he’s so damn lovable. In the moments between and during their breakup, he comes off as scummy and she, clingy. It seems that the strength of Louise’s feelings have more to do with the fear of being alone and unloved than of losing David in particular.

After David ends their affair and leaves the country for work, Louise continues to work as a caretaker for a sick, wealthy woman. The woman seems to suffer from some kind of mental illness, and is paranoid that Louise is conducting an illicit relationship with her husband. When the woman’s body is discovered in the lake beside their mansion, it is suspected that she died by suicide.

Though distraught over David’s absence, Louise continues working for the woman’s widowed husband, Dean (Raymond Massey), caring for his son and daughter, Carol. When David, a friend of Dean’s, comes for a visit, Louise makes a desperate pass at him, which he rebuffs. When Dean proposes to her a few minutes later—Louise is after all quite beautiful, and a man needs companionship, after all—the angry, humiliated Louise agrees, though tells him frankly she is not in love with him.

When adult-yet-still-teenage Carol takes a fancy to David, and the very-much-a-39-year-old man takes a fancy back, Louise tries to dissuade Carol from starting a relationship with him. As it becomes more obvious that they’re falling in love, Louise's mental disturbances increase. She hears voices, has hallucinations, and believes her husband's first wife is still alive. She’s right about David being a creep, though. She begins to lose touch with reality. Dean tries to get her help for her distress, but it’s all too late. After threatening Carol, Louise breaks into David's apartment and kills him.

Louise’s story finished, the psychiatrist pronounces her insane and not responsible for her actions. Dean stays by her side, and the psych assures him that she can be cured, but it will a long and painful journey. If only she had seen him sooner, the psych laments, this could all have been avoided. He’s seen her symptoms in many other women. “Society is the virus, basically—worse than heart disease and tuberculosis,” he dourly reports.

In a way, the medicalization of Louise’s behavior is almost progressive. Possessed frames her mental illness as no different from physical illness. Her doctors, with their gentle, one-on-one attention, understand her illness as an embodied affliction, against which she is helpless. As they patronizingly discuss her care over her head, the audience learns through their process of “visualized psychoanalysis” (of great interest to the audiences of the forties) that she is schizophrenic.

It’s this centering of the disease, almost before the patient, that caused the New York Times to complain that too much of Possessed’s focus is on Louise, to the detriment of the other characters’ development, and I have to agree. Even to her own character development is hollow—we see the world through her paranoid fears, but not even her fixation on David is thoroughly explored. Possessed is not a drama about but an “exciting woman,” but a PSA for mental illness with the human interest of a DSM checklist.

For all its claims, I don’t think Possessed is a more “startling” story than Mildred Pierce. Even the movie version of Pierce, more or less sanitized of the very explicit mother/daughter incest themes of the novel by James M. Cain, goes harder than Possessed. (If anyone ever wants to talk about Mildred Pierce with me, please DM. I love to talk about Mildred Pierce).

Louise is probably my least favorite Crawford to date. I prefer cunty Crawford, not longsuffering Crawford, but the longsuffering/cunty Crawfords of Mildred Pierce or Harriet Craig at least had glamour and depth; the New York Times called Joan’s skintight Louise “dehydrated,” which I think is putting it nicely.

But Louise does figure as the logical conclusion of Mildred and Harriet, middle-aged women driven to their literal wits’ end by men’s bad behavior, disloyalty, and rapacious sexual desire for young girls, which includes the dazzlingly beautiful Carol (the Hayworth-esque Geraldine Brooks). Louise’s attempts to prevent David from craddle-robbing Carol isn’t about protecting Carol, however, but about keeping David to herself. It’s not about protecting young girls, but being replaced by them. It’s not very feminist but it is authentic, isn’t it?

Perhaps Louise rings so hollow to me because she’s one of Crawford’s most conventional characters: No man, or sociological force, or past experience is identified as having contributed to her dysfunction, which we must assume is simple bad luck. She is tortured rather than complicated, then appropriately punished, with hope for a grueling redemption, just as the credits roll. She is at her most womanly because she is so empty.

“Crawford…is a case-study in beauty capital gone bad: an ingénue, and then a sex symbol, and then a calcified image of what she believed a sex symbol ought to be, both immovable and outdated,” writes Phillippa Snow. In her life, Crawford was masculinized by her childhood poverty, relentless ambition, and unapologetic sexuality (“I need sex for a clear complexion, but I'd rather do it for love.”). The slinky pre-Code flapper and the languorous Crystal Allen have been replaced by her legacy, that of the crumbling icon, so femme as to wrap suspiciously around the other side: geometric eyebrows, broad shoulders, pinched waist, harridan voice, twisted lips. François Truffaut described her in Johnny Guitar (1954) as desexualized, “beyond considerations of beauty.” “She is becoming more manly as she grows older,” the director said. “Her clipped, tense acting, pushed almost to paroxysm by [director Nicholas] Ray, is in itself a strange and fascinating spectacle.”

As a highly gendered woman and infamous reference point for gender weirdos, Crawford’s turn as a normal gal is boring but, perhaps, true to the nature of those (self) abuse patterns I was talking about earlier. Obsession quickly becomes boring for the observer, and could too, for the agent, unless they keep raising those stakes, upping that ante. That’s the problem with edgeplay: If you’re not careful, it bleeds beyond the boundaries of the scene.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.