The Cat, The Reverend and The Slave (2009)

 

Directors: Alain Della Negra and Kaori Kinoshita

Ephemeral Waves

How can you mistake me for a panda?!

Merely a fragment of a much larger image, the document by Alain Della Negra and Kaori Kinoshita is slight in many ways but still compelling, the collaborators from separate birth places (Negra in France, Kinoshita in Japan) yet joined to create extensive art installation, short based and even theatrical length documents of the fringes of modern human culture. From the various sub currents of Japan, of people who dress up in female masks and clothes of kigurumi cosplay, or have virtual girlfriends (Wife, Girl, Mother (2019)), to The Cat's subject which is primarily about Second Life. The couple, just from this triptych, blur the line between constructed fictionalised scenes but about real people, following three different worlds within the online virtual world created in 2003 and which became a phenomenon at the time of the documentary.

The three narratives including their tangents, "triptych" truly the best way to describe this film, involves The Cat, which is about the world of the furry community, The Reverend, in which a Christian minister has ventured out into the Second Life virtual realm to preach the word of God, and the Slave, part of a variety of individuals involved in virtual escorts and consenting BSDM-like slave to master roles. The world of Second Life is a vague one for me, frankly, but experience of family playing The Sims, a virtual game Negra and Kinoshita explored with short Neighborhood (2006), has provided me with the idea of the virtual world as an idealised one or to explore. It is for me, however, a double sided coin I admit wariness to. There is something strangely compelling yet disconcerting, with the initial shots, of an ordinary world rebuilt within Second Life, of a room where you can watch TV as in real life, recreating the ordinary world exactly and finding it not as harsh as a fantasy baring a few idealised tweaks. In contrast, when a group of women called the Earth Mothers Charity Association are seen debating to plant virtual trees to encourage real trees in the real world, you see the virtues of grappling with the virtual landscape. I find in reality, if I have to past a bias, it is that the banalities of the real world seep into the new one which has always made me wary of these virtual realms, the idea of them as places that should offer complete unnatural freedom only to be dragged down by the flaws of real life something I find a great deal of. At least repeating those aspects when virtual reality can offer if never true escape but a place for creative imagination would suffice, but a lot of repetition and grinding as one would do in real life, and not see them as the same, really startles me with the likes of this.

Commodity is there, as money transaction exists in Second Life long before bitcoin became a thing, as is the fact to even get to each sim (location in the world) you past a variety of obtrusive advertising. I wondered, if I had ever decided to go to Second Life, and be brave in my anonymous form, whether it would be possible to spend the time building places only possible in dreams, strange locations I dream of in sleep and as much are the obsessions in even cinema, itself a form to escape the real world in truth. Yet the wonder how expensive that would be is there, as estate and property are there in the Second Life, as is the man briefly seen chastised by his wife in the real world, in their ordinary kitchen as a fellow player, for starting an escort service.

The real world seeps in, not in least, that one man we meet entered the Second Life to find the wife who left him abruptly in the night, never to be seen again until he searched. This also introduces us the master and slave relations, figures who in the virtual world, be their avatars animal people or human, who have slaves willing to do what the masters want, and with slaves who have their own slaves, and many each. This is far less disconcerting to me than the banal costs and lives of the real world invading the virtual one, as it leads to one of the most interesting and mentally fulfilled figures named Lisa. Lisa, a trans woman who still has to go back to being Chris when she has to go to work, and switches between as well, lives in a small apartment and has a group of female slaves. However, with a semblance of knowledge of BDSM's ideals of consent, only the term "slave" due to its historically loaded meaning is problematic, as what we see is consenting adults involved in role-play, posting erotic photos to each other and playing games of commanded chastity to enhance their sexual lives. Lisa is also using to in finding a real life relationship away from the virtual world, with one of her female slaves which she talks of in an interview to the camera soon to be met, dealing with the reality as much as the sexual fantasy including the issue of a potential step daughter with all the baggage that will involve.

Contrasting this, in the world where Second Life is full of gambling and sex and vice, a reverend named Benjamin, an ordained Christian minister, has brought a church to Second Life alongside his wife. They would be one of many in the online game - as it progressed religion in general came to the world such as the Islamic faith - and they even acquired an island (a sim) called Truth to help the faithful escape sin. Some with raise their eyebrows at this, be it this review or actually watching the documentary, but this is not strange to me. In hindsight, the notion of Christians going out to spread the word of Christ, depending on which denomination, would have naturally gotten to Second Life, among the porn and gambling trying to bring an alternative side in a perceived view of entering a new horizon to offer salvation. It is virtual, a simulacra, but this is new land to spread the gospel, but where the segment does raise questions, and where the film's brisk length teases in a tantalising philosophical conundrum, is how the religious notions of redemption exist through this mirror.

Second Life, and the internet in general, for myself, is a mirror to human perception. Again, this is my personal opinion, so this is merely an idea to contrast and scrutinise. We created these constructs, forms in digital for our ideas and our dreams, alongside our worst sides and also our subconscious desires intentionally or accidentally, even if separate from us. It raises all sorts of strange reflections, such as in other aspects of avatars and the masks players have, when the real notions of faith are involved with what is effectively these subconscious aspects of human minds made accessible as a apparently form. A senior priest, brought in to console Benjamin, refers to Star Trek and the new frontier, but there is a lot that could have been unpacked. The film briefly cocks an eyebrow, where we see the senior preacher leave his church in a lavish red car, which he calls "his mid life crisis", but never was there a subject matter, as with the rest of the triptych, which leaves one unsated and wishing for more. Openly, I do not criticise Negra and Kinoshita's film at all for slightness, and they are clearly a case of their work altogether, though sadly not easily accessible, which build to a single work based on comparing these different worlds. The depth would be found in contrasting the worlds they explore and similar themes shared between them, in their static scenes of interviews and set pieces, occasionally some ambitious (if heavily structured) moments of the camera pulling away in aerial shots over buildings or passing by among the cars outside.

The third of the triptych is one though which many of us may have some greater idea of, but as one commentator points out, in his cat ears and tail, is likely due to their exoticising in the mainstream media. I openly admit I learn of the furry culture, of people who role-play as (and even embrace the identity of) animal people through episode five, season 4, of CSI: Crime Scene Investigations called Fur and Loathing, about a dead body leading to a furry convention in Las Vegas. Furries, in their prolific communities, are likely to be come across if you look in the right places online, or at least for myself in my interest in fan art. I openly admit to not being a furry, in the sense that my connection to animals has always been of them being separate to myself even in my admiration of the natural world, but there is something profound and beautiful in the scene where a group, in full costume, proudly march through a convention hall corridor, more striking as one of them is even carrying a flag like a flag bearer. The people within he costumes are also regular people, getting into debates as one does with a female cashier, who is not one, of the difference between having sex with an animorph and a person dressed as an animorph, in mind that (as referred to in that CSI episode) there is a sexual subsection of furrydom, with terms like "yiffing" coming to the mainstream, but that it is not the entire picture in the slightest¹.  

I wish, again, that a longer version of this film existed. What we get offers a lot of a potential fragments, sub currents within sub currents as there is mention of furry escorts existing in Second Life, and the notion of these new worlds, as they would have been then as the internet was fully available, and how they interact with the normal real world is a subject that would be fascinating to see. Just in terms of scenes like one at night where an older woman wishes for members of the furry community not to talk too loudly outside her house, not wanting her lawn to become an anime expo, which paints a picture of how she has adapted to the communities around there. Or that the film ends with Second Life being struck by a virus-like prank of thousands of images of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle raining down on the screen like fake money, the flaws of the idealised world seen. But that is not a dismissal of the documentary itself, merely a wish for more. What we get is a finale briefly entering the Burning Man festival, its own potential documentary of a place of self reliance and strange sights (women nude, willingly being rotated around on an improvised art installation spit, trucks turned into coiling giant dragons). They also look to the idea of melding with Second Life, and whilst the online game has faded in the popular consciousness as others have come about, even something like the wholesome videogame franchise Animal Crossing becoming a communal experience for many as online games and virtual realms have multiplied, those which followed it were the same in creating new places for communities to exist. This subject, and the many seen, if anything could be returned to even by Alain Della Negra and Kaori Kinoshita, adding more to the interesting content here.

 

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1) That said, the sexual subculture of furry fandom, even if not the whole, can be found and is not a marginalised aspect in the slighted. It is eroticised fantasy, and far more complex than merely zoophilla, entirely different in what it entails. Again, it is not my interest either. Hopefully this lands as an amusing joke, rather than accidentally offending any potential readers who are furries, but I myself did not grow up being pulled towards the Cadbury Caramel Bunny, a figure in adverts I saw growing up who, upon looking back, was an example in mainstream pop culture of a figure ridiculously sensualised, for what is an anthropomorphic rabbit, among many that I would not be surprised would have had influenced someone towards the erotic side of furry culture.