The Onania Club

Because the story arc is relatively predictable, most of the fun comes in seeing just how far Six will go with the shocks these ladies give off to get off. As one might expect, he gets pretty audacious. Surely some audience members may be offended, but mostly it’s just hilarious to see what the director comes up with. No spoilers here, but in most cases, he looks to knock out more than one taboo per scene. A lot of it is staged, but some real and ugly documentary footage creeps in, including 9-11 and African famine.

On a thematic level, it makes one wonder: is masturbating to footage of the Twin Towers significantly different than Rudy Giuliani running an ego-campaign for president based primarily on him being mayor when it happened? Or supporting governmental policies of cruelty because they “own the libs?” Much of American society nowadays are all too obsessed with taking pleasure in the miseries of those different from us. We may not literally stick our hands down our pants over it, but there’s a lot of self-pleasuring of a sort going on. If you think I’m only implicating conservatives, consider the way Robert Mueller was fetishized when liberals were so sure he’d ultimately bring down the presidency.

The Onania Club looks to have been shot in and around Los Angeles, which probably cost Six more but amounts to less in terms of production value than his prior films. Converting to black and white (the original teaser shows the color footage) was a wise choice – it allows us to look at overly familiar locations in a new way. That it may function as an end-run around the MPAA, which inherently seems to find black and white less explicit, could be a side bonus.

“…allows us to look at overly familiar locations in a new way.”

The story maybe didn’t need the framing device of a confession booth, which feels like an unnecessarily hackneyed call, even if it does make the viewer think about how much the Catholic church also glorifies suffering. Not only that, if Hanna is telling her entire story in flashback, it tells us that at the very least, she has survived up until that point. Part of the fun of Six’s previous movies was their unpredictability, while this one is far more straightforward.

Is it fair, however, to measure all his movies up to the same standard? Especially if his budgets and resources were different each time? The Human Centipede trilogy didn’t truly show its hand until completed. I don’t know if more Onania is planned, but I’m totally down for further Tom Six explorations of cruelty. In the meantime, he remains an acquired taste, but one I continue to enjoy savoring.