“At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance.”-Jean Baudrillard
This quote opens up “The Exhibitionists”, spelling out one of the many themes Michael Melamedoff will be addressing. Specifically, it’s the one that Walter Todd (Richard Short) is transfixed on. He’s a filmmaker obsessed with pulling back the curtains on life. He waxes on philosophically in the beginning about the dwindling health of John F. Kennedy prior to his assassination, prompting his friend to cut his “pretentiousness” off, as she puts it.
Unbeknownst to his friends, Walter’s goal for having them over on New Year’s Eve is not to ring in the new year, but to be his personal guinea pigs in a documentary. His goal is to discover where documentary ends and pornography begins. That seems to be the goal of Melamedoff and screenwriter Michael Edison Hayden as well, though I feel their message gets lost in translation.
In order to express their theory, the two Michaels bombard the audience with seedy material. Throughout the course of thirty-six hours, Walter and his friends engage in activities ranging from adultery to sexual degradation. For example, one of the guests meets her first crush, Blithe Stargazer (Laverne Cox). She’s a popular musician who Walter is hoping to pitch his documentary to. Blithe uses her star power to convince this innocent film school student to make out with her, then become her personal ashtray/human pet. Later on, she forces Walter to give fellatio to a gun. It’s at this moment that the film became overwhelming for me.
My main issue with “The Exhibitionists” is that it seems to coast on it’s risqué material. I mentioned becoming overwhelmed by the film, but not because I found the material too shocking. On the contrary, I found it to be numbing. Melamedoff seemingly loses focus on his mission statement and starts trying to one-up himself. The racy material doesn’t seem to exist to be explored intellectually; it seems to exist solely to be exploitative. There’s a twist between a brother and sister that came across as forced, as opposed to organic.
This all got me to thinking that the gratuitous nature of the film was supposed to be numbing. That Melamedoff’s whole point was to see where a person’s breaking point was. That being overexposed to something as deviant as extreme sexual proclivities could make the events become monotonous. Whether or not that’s the angle he took, I do give him credit for getting me to think.
Even so, “The Exhibitionists” completely lost me close to the halfway point, as I stopped questioning Meladoff’s intentions and simply started to lose interest. As polished and well crafted the film is, the story wasn’t engaging enough. There was a level of disconnect that, whether intentional or not, destroyed the film for me. I began doing what I hate to do most in a film; I began to count down the minutes until the finale.
I won’t deny that there’s some scenarios of interest in “The Exhibitionists”. I also won’t deny that the acting is superlative. The same goes for the production values. I just wish that I ultimately cared about the characters and events as they were unfolding. Even if I was went to be disconnected from them, I should’ve been intrigued as to why.
Final Rating: C