I had a lot of trouble with this film. My explanation requires a bit of a preamble:
To say that "this really happened" does not absolve the director of all responsibility in deciding to film the event, as if he were merely a window to history rather than a selective distorting lens. Zobel wanted to film this particular event in a way that requires complete enhancement and a lot of speculation, all of which is radically distinct from the actual event, both representationally and, of course, ontologically. But even more fundamentally, I would say that the basic decision to film one event instead of another speaks to any filmmaker's values, biases, and intentions.
Following that, I don't understand Zobel's decision to make a film of this event in the particular way that he did. For one thing, "ChickWich" does not speak to powerful overseers; only by using (quite impossibly, I admit) the actual corporate "McDonald's" rubric would we be able to appreciate the panoptical effect of employee behavior in a remote franchise. Without the historical corporate charge investing these franchises, we are left to think allegorically, and we will tend to ascribe guilt more to individuals caught in this situation, because we know nothing about the invented "ChickWich."
Zobel speculates that the assistant manager Sandra, perhaps even subconsciously, had it out for Becky, given a number of fraught moments, including Becky's mockery of Sandra's sex life and Sandra's subsequent baleful stare, both of which are dramatic inventions that telegraph a secret motivation for Sandra's willingness to have her employee suffer humiliation. This personal grudge is distinct from the influence a corporate environment might have that would permit such a terrible thing to happen, and more attention is brought to bear upon this resentment than any universal human tendency to follow faceless authoritative commands.
Becky is shown to be oddly unaffected at first by her manager's order to disrobe. She is indignant, fleetingly defiant, but in spite of her apparent self-possession, she conforms. The history of the event dictates her compliance, but her personality is an invention that creates dissonance between who she seems to be and what she actually does. What's more, the conventional beauty of her naked physical appearance suddenly sexualizes her presence in a way that makes it too easy to imagine why Van would suddenly look at this young girl as a sexual object (without, of course, justifying any of his behavior). These directorial decisions bring us further and further away from implicating the powers of authority that facilitated this tragedy.
I agree with puxzkkx above that showing the caller was a mistake, partly because, as puzxkkx writes, "the focus is shifted from the psychology of compliance [presumably the raison d'être for this film] to an external avatar of villainy." The caller is a middle-class father who works as some kind of phone support for a nameless corporation, but before we know this, we can only identify him as a man who operates from a home and occasionally smirks at his victims' willingness to do what he commands. These reaction shots enlist our own disbelief, for example, when Van gamely asks the caller if he should put the phone on her back so that he can hear the spanking. By sharing the caller's suppressed grin of astonishment at his own success, we see through the ruse and are lifted above the victims, and as a result, we can more easily condemn the actions of the lower-class employees.
One of the striking details of this event that was omitted from the film version was the fact that the caller David R. Stewart worked for Corrections Corporation of America, a company that owns and manages prisons and detention centers. Does his commanding rhetoric--his ease with a policeman's vernacular--stem from his experience working for this company? Why doesn't the fictional caller in Zobel's work have an identical job? And even if it were legally impossible, doesn't this omission, like the one above involving the switch from McDonald's to ChickWich, erase a large part of the systemic authoritative influence supposedly being implicated in this film?
The result of these decisions, for me, is a story about a vindictive working-class woman with a sexually violent, perhaps mentally impaired fiancé. Sandra's final pathetic attempt to utter pleasantries in the face of the atrocious evidence of her criminal behavior underscores her pathology of denial that further distances her from "us." Because of these peculiar, invented characterizations, the film winds up speaking to neither the pitfalls of power systems nor our positions as individuals in a late capitalist world unduly influenced by authoritative institutions, which, judging by Zobel's accounts, was the Foucauldian thesis behind this film.
Finally, and on a lighter note, while my wife hated the film's presentation and despised the director's methods, I was able to blur my eyes occasionally, abstract the swatches of
teal and
orange, and enjoy a conspicuous example of what has been decried in the
Orange & Teal thread.
