adjusting to life
by Douglas Messerli
Atom Egoyan (screenwriter and director) The
Adjuster / 1991
On paper the plot of Canadian director Atom
Egoyan’s 4th feature film, The Adjuster (1991) sounds like
the most perversely surreal movie ever made, an complete artifice that
requires, more than simply its audiences’ suspension of belief, but a complete
immersion into a sexual planet that includes everything from the worst of what
is imaginable in porn films and the most outlandish of voyeuristic and
exhibitionist fantasies, to romantic straight and gay liaisons performed by one
seemingly nice guy insurance adjuster. To actually attempt to describe the
narrative is a little bit like trying to outline a mad mix of cinematic and
literary works that one might encounter in the library of Dr. Alfred Charles
Kinsey—which is perhaps why no film critic I read has done it very
successfully, often confusing and misinterpreting what eventually is revealed
as being pretty straight forward, even if totally unbelievable, after Egoyan’s
rather clear presentation.
Let me give it a try. Hera Render (Arsinée Khanjian) works for the
Canadian Censor Board, daily reviewing all porn films which they rate with an
extensive list of categories from A through H. It might help if I—following the
details of the film provided by a new censor just entering his
A.
Graphic or prolonged scene of violence, torture, crime, cruelty,
horror, or
human degradation.
B.
The depiction of physical abuse or humiliation
of human beings
for purposes of sexual gratification or as
pleasing to the victim.
C.
A person who is or is intended to represent a
person under the
age of 16 and appears
1.
nude or partially nude in a sexually
suggestive content or text
2.
in a scene of sexually explicit activity.
D.
Explicit and gratuitous depiction of
urination, defecation, or
vomiting.
H. A scene where an animal is
abused in the making of the film.
We’re never told why E and F do not exist, or if they do what they
represent. And, to be fair, I do not know if this list has anything at all to do
with the real Canadian Censor Board. The offices, filled with overflowing bins
of pornographic magazines and fliers which a staff of numerous others to attend
to them, seems like something out of a sexual science fiction film in the
manner of Roger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968).
Hera is clearly a very competent and committed worker, except for the
fact that she inexplicably films the porno works she watches. When the genial
and personable Head Censor (David Hemblen) is alerted to her possible
infraction, she reveals that she does it not for her own enjoyment but to share
her workday duties with her sister Seta (Rose Sarkisyan), who lives with her
and her husband and watches the films all over again each evening, often with
Hera’s young son Simon in the same room with her. She and Hera are close and
have shared their every experience with one another throughout their lives.
One day on the subway Hera encounters a drunken derelict, an overweight
disheveled being who at one point falls to the subway floor. While she
passively watches another woman goes over to the drunk and sits next to him,
slowly lifting up her skirt and guiding his hand to her crotch as he publicly
masturbates her, she obviously fully enjoying the act.
These two, we soon discover are a wealthy married couple, Bubba (Maury
Charykin) and Mimi (Gabrielle Rose) who, other than throwing lavish dinner
parties, spend most of their lives planning outlandish sexual events that
fulfill Bubba’s voyeuristic desires, while Mimi is able to exhibit her lusty
pleasures in the most public of ways possible.
For
their next adventure, Bubba hires an entire football team along with their
stadium so that Mimi can live out her cheerleader fantasies by having sex with
each and every member from tight end down the line to guard, center, and
quarterback.
But even earlier in the film we have seen Bubba scouting out a place for
a new “shoot,” the strange suburban development in which only four large homes
were built among many empty acres, only one of them having been sold and
inhabited before the developers ran out of money.
In
that isolated house lives Hera, Seta, and Simon with this strange trio’s
father, Noah Render (Elias Koteas), a good-looking and apparently mildly
tempered insurance adjustor.
From the evidence in the very first scene, we sense that Noah and Hera’s
relationship is not a terribly close one, particularly since in the dark Hera
seems to be moaning and shaking from some nightmare vision as Noah quietly
rises to dress, having been called out to a house fire which he must
investigate. He telephones her on his way to the fire just to check up, but she
seems unappreciative for him having awakened her.
What we soon discover is that Noah’s job seems to consist primarily of
him showing up to burning households to meet the owners whose whole lives have
just gone up in flames. He asks them for photographs and complete descriptions
of their every destroyed possession, but goes far beyond what the company might
require by gently consoling them, often using the company mantra “You may not
feel it, but you're in a state of shock.” To help them find their way back into
the “real” world, Noah not only attempts to jog their memories in order to
replace what they have lost, but offers most of his clients his own body,
making love to beings who are temporarily without anything else in their lives.
At the local motel where he puts up most of his suffering customers he
is known as a hero, not only by the motel’s operators and service workers whom
he has helped to keep in business and employed, but by his grateful insurance
holders to whom he has provided new hope both mentally and physically. A bit
like the beautiful family visitor of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968),
this more everyday angel offers the customers, apparently both female and male,
young and old, far more than they might have imagined when signing up for their
policies.
If
we see Noah in bed with one of his newest female clients, we also witness those
who are still waiting for the company payment seeking out his reassurances and
caresses—at one point an older man holding Noah’s hand and kissing it like a
mafia Godfather, and by the end of the film his most recent client, a
photogenic Hispanic man named Matthew (Raoul Trujillo), laid out naked on the
motel bed, having just had sex with the always ready-to-please adjuster. Through
the film Egoyan represents him with a bow and arrow, a man playing cupid to his
own self.
The clever movie-goer probably has already perceived that all of these
figures, each in their own way, are different kinds of adjusters. Through her
coding and the cuts in her ratings result, Hera is adjusting what those
addicted to pornographic sex can see and enjoy. Through their enactment of
fantasies and later film-making Bubba and Mimi transform the sexual imagination
into something closer to “real” life enactments; while Noah not only adjusts
for the financial loss of the grievers’ previous possessions but helps them
socially and sexually to readjust to life itself.
Yet it is their very differences in the way they affect people’s
existence that explains the final ending of this “theorem/theory” film, a work
which the director himself described as being about "about believable
people doing believable things in an unbelievable way."
Hera, her sister, and her son live in a kind of passive world where
images represent real actions for good or bad. Pornography is pernicious not
just because it represents “violence, torture, crime, cruelty, horror,
and human degradation” along with abuse of adults, children, and animals, but
because it replaces real human action with representations of them. If nothing
else, the real actions at least involve living beings and their bodies which is
why even the representation of these acts are so atrocious. But for Hera the
body does not even exist. We recognize that her and Noah’s relationship is
empty, replaced as it has become by her observation of the most vicious visions
of what human relationships consist.
Mimi and Bubba bring those pornography fantasies to life, nudging them,
if nothing else, a bit closer to reality. The last great “performance” which
they plan involves the lonely Render house itself, which they have rented out
to the couple so they “play house” with a gathering of pre-teen boys
celebrating a birthday party at which the scantily-clad Mimi apparently intends
to introduce them to the pleasures of female sex. But this realization of mass
child abuse is finally, at least if Bubba has his way, to be their final act.
Having rent out their house for what he believes is a regular film
shoot, Noah makes the mistake of putting up his own family in the motel which
serves as his workplace. Slowly it dawns on Hera and Seta both what precisely
is going on when Noah visits his clients. And as Noah sits beside the bed where
he has just fucked Matthew, we notice in the background his wife,
sister-in-law, and son, with packed bags, getting into a taxi—obviously to take
them all away from the far-too-real sexual activities in which Noah is
involved.
When he discovers them missing, the adjustor speeds back to their
previous home, only to discover Bubba pouring gas over the contents of the
entire bottom floor of the house. We don’t know if Mimi is upstairs, whether
the boys have left the premises, or even if perhaps Hera, Seta and Simon have
returned to their rooms above. With match box in hand, Bubba, calmly warns the
sudden intruder that it is time to make a decision: “Now you’ve come in just at
the moment that the character in the film, the person who was supposed to live
here, decides that he’s going to stop playing house. So....are you in...or are
you out?”
Noah, already in tears, slowly backs out, obviously preferring real life
with everything that it entails, the touch of human flesh and the friendly
assurances of human discourse to all the other alternatives with which he’s
been faced.
Appearing as it did early in the 1990s, Egoyan’s The Adjuster remained
one of the most powerful statements about sexuality in general throughout that
decade and is still among his very best cinematic works.
Los Angeles, January 21, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (January 2021).
