It’s a tale as old as time. Boy meets boy. Boy organizes a rendezvous in an alleyway on Christmas Day. Other boy discovers the joys of boot-licking, and a relationship begins. Pillion, the debut of director Harry Lighton, isn’t your average movie romance. Harry Melling plays Colin, a meek and inexperienced man who still lives with his parents but finds himself falling headfirst into the world of leather and submission thanks to an impossibly handsome biker named Ray (Alexander Skarsgård.) Yes, the sex is full-on, and the dom-sub dynamic between two men is layered, but the film is also surprisingly sweet and funny as all hell. Imagine if Rainer Werner Fassbinder directed an Alan Bennett monologue, with a sprinkling of Richard Curtis, and you’re halfway there. This makes Pillion a rarity in modern mainstream cinema—another exception to the rule that sex on-screen doesn’t sell, and a story undeniably and enthusiastically about non-vanilla sex that does not portray such things as the actions of depressed or damaged people. Defying sex-scene discourse, Pillion is a full-hearted depiction of kink as something sweet, fun, and completely average.
Colin and Ray’s relationship is certainly not ideal. Frankly, Ray is a bad dom, one who isn’t upfront with the rules and who thinks cold distance is the same thing as allure (in fairness, he does look like Alexander Skarsgård). Colin, completely new to this world, is forced to navigate unknown waters and figure out what he likes versus what he believes is expected of him. But it’s within that dynamic that Pillion finds its sweet spot and its sweetness. Lighton has a non-judgmental approach to this world, one where there’s no seediness in seeing some leather daddies and pups in dog masks enjoy a few rounds at the local pub. There’s not a single scene in Pillion where kink is accompanied by red doom lighting or uneasy strings on the score. Nobody dies because they enjoyed being whipped too much. In the chaste world of film, that’s progress.
Even after the Production Code of the 1930s, which enforced stifling censorship that treated sensuality as worthy of damnation, fell out of favor and the film industry entered a new era of on-screen liberation, things didn’t get too raunchy. 1960s films like Shampoo and Bob And Carol And Ted And Alice were candid about the era’s freedoms, but shied away from depicting many of them. Neither was anywhere close to saying anything as frank as “Buy yourself a buttplug. You’re too tight,” as Ray tells Colin after an unexpected wrestling match. It’s still the case that films with straightforward portrayals of sex are more harshly rated by the MPA than those with explicit violence. And it’s even more restrictive once anything beyond the missionary position enters the bedroom, with queer films punished more severely. Pillion‘s editor said the film needed to undergo cuts to avoid an NC-17, as the ratings board thought the sex was “too realistic.”
There was more room for this subject matter outside of America—though it was still often courting controversy in the realm of exploitation, with films like In The Realm Of The Senses (which featured unsimulated sex), The Night Porter (a still-shocking erotic thriller about the relationship between an SS Officer and a concentration camp prisoner), and Bernardo Bertolucci’s now-infamous Last Tango In Paris (which has taken on a tragic legacy after star Maria Schneider revealed that Bertolucci and co-star Marlon Brando had humiliated her and left her feeling “a little raped.”) Though these films found various degrees of critical and popular success, they’re also tales of emotional trauma, and the kink content is about escaping from the real world or descending into a kind of oblivion. It’s not a fulfilling lifestyle or healthy passion, but a last resort.
Hollywood got braver by the ’80s, but kink was still likely to be relegated to window dressing or a symbol of malevolence within the characters and the worlds they inhabited. David Lynch was labeled a misogynist by Roger Ebert for Blue Velvet, a film whose peek behind the white picket fences of American suburbia revealed a world of rot and degradation. Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) becomes the lover-slash-punching bag of the truly terrifying Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), a gas-huffing maniac who begs at her feet like a child before beating her. It’s an act she sometimes seems to enjoy, and one she asks the naive Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) to replicate. Almost four decades later, Blue Velvet remains a troubling watch for how it acutely conveys the experience of one’s kink being entangled within an undesirable situation. Blue Velvet‘s approach to cinematic kink seemed to provide the new status quo for filmmakers who wanted to explore these themes, and they were almost exclusively told with straight couples. Having your character be a sadist meant they were probably the villain, and having another be a masochist was code for a life of trauma and suffering. Consider 9 1/2 Weeks, Adrian Lyne’s oft-parodied erotic thriller, wherein Kim Basinger loses her sense of self down a rabbit hole of escalating desire with the alluring but obviously dangerous Mickey Rourke.
This kind of sexual need is rarely shown as just another part of a character’s day-to-day, which is how Pillion approaches it. Why can’t you be both a traffic warden in a barbershop quartet and a sub? In one of the film’s most awkward yet revealing scenes, Ray attends a family dinner with Colin’s parents and is chewed out to delightful effect by his mother (Lesley Sharp). Ray responds by noting that they don’t truly understand his life or the one his son has chosen. They may be eagerly supportive of their gay son, but they’re still not that supportive. There’s always an invisible line that many people deem unacceptable to cross, and with kink, the goalposts are forever moving. Even the most commercially successful portrayal of BDSM in Hollywood history pulls its punches around its own subject matter.
The Fifty Shades trilogy is far and away the most well-known modern mainstream representation of kink, in both print and on screen, though its sadomasochistic romance felt archaic at the time and is positively prehistoric compared to Pillion. Christian Grey would rather hurt a woman than go to therapy, and Anastasia Steele views the entire concept of kink as abhorrent to her prim sensibilities. There is no sweetness like that between Colin and Ray, nor any mutual fulfillment found through assuming these sexual roles. E.L. James’ books and their subsequent film adaptations have long been condemned for their depictions of S&M as something only traumatized people do, and for their stance that such afflictions are inherently temporary—lasting only until they’re fixed by a nice future of missionary with the missus. “All the work that has been done to establish that BDSM is not a pathological symptom, but one of a wide range of normative human erotic interests, is in danger of being undermined by the success of Fifty Shades,” wrote sex therapist Pamela Stephenson Connolly in 2012. After all, this is a story where an abusive jerk is “cured” of his nasty predilections by a “normal” woman, a marriage, and a baby. Kink means danger in this world, and it has to be fixed by conservative domesticity.
If Pillion has a true cinematic partner in American kink, it’s Secretary, a film that previously held the superlative leash of the dom-com collar. In the film, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Lee, a troubled young woman with a history of self-harm and depression, finds pleasure and purpose through being the submissive secretary to E. Edward Grey (James Spader), a harried lawyer with a love of spanking. And even Secretary isn’t a flawless example of pristine BDSM etiquette. Clear consent isn’t given in the pair’s first encounter, for example. But the film has endured as an accepting rom-com of S&M thrills, and stood relatively alone in its genre for over two decades, because it makes kink seem like an absolute blast. As Lee becomes more involved in her boss’ games, she also becomes more active in her pursuit of him—he may be the dom, but is otherwise not in charge. Secretary is still a traditional romantic comedy in most ways, right down to a happily-ever-after ending. It also doesn’t make the lovers abandon their desires to find this lasting happiness. When Grey says, “We can’t do this 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Lee asks, “Why not?” It’s this supportive stance that permeates Pillion. Even if Colin’s fight to get what he wants isn’t fully successful, his future will be one where he can sub for someone who deserves it.
Colin doesn’t exactly get a knight in shining armor with Ray, but Pillion is also clear that this kinkster’s desires are valid. Moreover, they’re so normal that they shouldn’t warrant any hushed discussion from outsiders. He has a community that welcomes him and a future where he will eventually find a dom worthy of his aptitude for devotion. To quote Adam Mars-Jones, author of the book Box Hill, from which Pillion was adapted, “He isn’t owned, he just belongs.” That shouldn’t feel radical, but in a sea of scolding portrayals of anything remotely kinky on-screen, Pillion stands tall—even when it’s on its knees.
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