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Directed by Kirby Dick
Starring Bob Flanagan, Sheree Rose
Unrated • 1997 • 89 minutes
by Deeky Wentworth
Most victims of cystic fibrosis don’t live to their teens, that Bob Flanagan survived into his forties is almost unbelievable. How he did it may be harder to believe still.
Bob Flanagan fought his disease by becoming a masochist. And not just any old masochist. No, he became a super masochist; doing to his body what few others had the desire to do, let alone the nerve.
The pain he felt every moment since birth was something he wouldn’t succumb to. He didn’t master it so much as he outdid it. The only way he could control his failing body was by beating it into submission. Pushing himself to the limits of pain was his own personal fuck you to the disease that plagued him. As he survived well beyond the six years his doctors had given him, he became a performance artist, using his sickness as his canvas.
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When Bob hammers a nail through the tip of his dick, he isn’t doing it for shock value (though, there is no doubt that seeing it is a shock), he is doing it because he enjoys it. And that may be the hardest thing for some to grasp.
The film reveals a man of considerable depth, humor and warmth. He’s not just a pervert or a weirdo, but a person who has spent every waking day facing his mortality and found a way to survive, to outlast an illness that should have killed him in his childhood.
Graphic depictions of sexual sadism notwithstanding, the film is not for the squeamish. It’s an unflinching look at his death as well as his life. Watching him die may be harder than any of the tortures he inflicts on himself.
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