Conclusion

Abstract

When I began researching this book, I was convinced that in the 1990s and early 2000s a group of films existed that explored the interplay of pleasure and pain to depict contemporary anxieties (perceived or real) regarding loss of control and freedom of consent. Nonetheless, there always remained a fear I was chasing a chimera, not because the topic was not addressed in the cinema, but because notions of consent and control would become so flexible they would have no validity, and that instances of tattooing or artistic murder would be just that, isolated pockets overwhelmed by other aspects of the narrative. What I hope to have offered is a corroborating argument in support of my initial intuition, and by so doing, to have revealed a specific mode of control that operates through various constructions of consent, a marking of the flesh and a revelling in the corporeal. It initially proved confusing that social practices discussed as separate strands in chapters 2–5 diminished in their cinematic specificity as the first decade of the twenty-first century progressed, for it cast a shadow over my primary concern of tracing a masochistic impulse directly informed by these idiosyncrasies and nuances; but ultimately the coalescing of themes of pain, pleasure, submission, dominance and consent confirmed my agenda of a unifying concept of a controlled body.