I watched Pillion after reading Box Hill and I have so many things to say about it. After spending almost a day sitting with the film and the nagging feeling that something about it just didn’t sit right with me, I’ve come up with this list. Spoilers for both Pillion and Box Hill below:
1) firstly I realize that Box Hill is probably an incredibly hard story to adapt. The character’s introspective first person narrative and the overwhelming sense of lonesomeness and isolation conveyed in Box Hill is very very difficult to nail on screen.
2) Building off of this, this film was absolutely a disaster in the way it was marketed. As a “rom com” and “honest and heartfelt” look at BDSM. In no worlds is that true. Box Hill is a bittersweet, devastating book about the nature of love, self-annihilating devotion, and how these desires can quickly become maladaptive when mixed with the daily struggles and isolation of being a gay person in society. Box Hill takes place in 1975 for reason. Transposing the setting to the modern day and adding in the trite family drama just erodes at the entire isolating feel of the book. It makes this film a decent dark romance but a HORRIBLE adaptation of the source material.
3) I’m kind of stunned seeing all the reviewers who haven’t read the book bitching and moaning about how consent isn’t shown and the dynamic the characters establish in the film is bad blah blah blah. Both reviewers in the kink community and outside of the kink community are bitching about this and it drives me mad. Newsflash people, the unhealthiness of Ray and Colin’s kink dynamic is the ENTIRE point of the fucking story. Both in the book (especially in the book) and in the film. Ray lures a sexually repressed man with low self worth and under the thumb of an unfulfilling daily life by whisking him away into this 24/7 biker dominant dynamic and Colin accepts the subsumption of his identity and desires into Ray because he’s LOST and AIMLESS. The aimlessness of Colin’s life and his low self worth is the core of the entire narrative and the key tragedy of the book and film. Well, the book really. Because the film misses that point entirely and tries to make it into this glib rom com thing where Colin tries to teach Ray to love…. Which ARGHHH
4) The changing of the film’s ending cheapened the entire thing. In the book, Ray and Colin spend 10 years together until Ray dies in a bike accident. Colin is left grieving as Ray’s mother burns his items, the biker gang refuses to show Colin where Ray is buried, and the mystery of who Ray was and his life is completely erased by his death. It’s a horrible, gutwrenching ending as both the reader and Colin are left stricken and confused. There is also the added horror of book!Colin being unable to realize how he was so tangential and accessorized in Ray’s life that the man could spend ten fucking years with him and never share anything substantial about him or include him in his death plans. Colin realizes he has essentially allowed his submission - now a focal part of his sexuality - to be shaped by a callous man who never once bothered to truly love him or push past the rigidity of the kink dynamic to cherish Colin in a way that was actually legible to the outside world. And that’s HORRIBLE, and has so much deep and interesting parallels to closeting and identity issues within the LGBT community. But the film is unwilling to sit with that discomfort. Instead Ray just runs away because he realizes he can’t give Colin what he wants - love - and his mysterious disappearance after this cheesy ass revelation is just so deeply unsatisfying and trite. It has none of the messy, uncomrtable, and tragic undertones of the novel. Which brings me to my last point
5) Pillion’s positive reviews by critics and BDSM gays alike point to the tendency of EVERYONE these days to shy away from tension and discomfort. I’ll explain why. Everyone is happy with this film because it presents a trite and appealing fantasy. A man in a transgressive and clearly unhealthy BDSM relationship learns to establish his boundaries and the end of the film shows him going on a Grindr match empowered with his new boundaries and again seeking satisfaction armed with his new sexuality and self confidence Ray imbued. It’s liberal feminism and girlboss narrative for leathergays and leatherdykes. See, after an incredibly tormented and pathological damaging kink relationship you too can become EMPOWERED by hopping back on the apps and shaking your big booty! Show your boundaries queeeeeen!!!! And I’m not saying that’s a bad message. It’s a positive one. But it misses the point of Box Hill. It misses the Crux of what made the original novel so compelling and disturbing.
Kinksters like it too because the film doesn’t make them too uncomfortable. The film boils down a host of transgressive and ugly kink dynamic relationship issues to “you see, all of these issues are just because subs won’t be self assertive and girl-boss like and doms just need to learn to LUV and open their hearts!!!” No babes. No no no no no. The core of the original Box Hill was so deeply challenging and uncomfortable and yet resonated with a lot of kinksters because it asked the very uncomfortable questions of: “why do I want to give my love and devotion to someone in this way? What would I do to keep someone’s love and devotion in a gay world that is often lonely and isolating? Is it more comforting for me to subsume my personality and will to the one I love, even when I resent it, in order to keep that love? Is it worth it to hang on to love you know isn’t sustaining you if it means not being lonely?” These questions were all more relevant in the books 1975 setting and the film fumbled massively
In short Pillion is a decent film but it is a SHIT adaptation of Box Hill. The film maker is more concerned about sanitizing the uncomfortable lessons of the book, shy away from really unpacking Colin’s warped view of sexuality (probably to avoid offending kinksters, although I doubt they would actually be offended since many of them were media literate enough to get the point of the original book), and presents this faux-empowerment ending that cheapens the tragedy of the original and shills boring ass neoliberal solutions to very real problems of gay yearning and isolation: get on a Grindr app babes!!! Customize your profile!!! The fact that they didn’t even show or explore Colin’s own psyche being in such a relationship, what submitting to Ray did to his mindset outside of “go on Grindr and be a girlboss” is fucking insulting. Book Colin would never. Book Ray would never. In fact, Book ray was a tantalizing villainous asshole, who would be fucking offended by him being watered down to some hunk in wrestling gear and leather just for the masses to salivate over him. What the film did to Ray: reducing this complex, brooding, and frankly villainous character into fetish fodder and a pair of good abs for fanboys and fangirls to salivate over is EXACTLY what Pillion did to its source material: cheapened it.
Future literary scholars will view Pillion’s butchering of Box Hill’s aesthetics and message in the same way current critics bemoan Stanley Kubrick’s butchering of Lolita. Goddamn. Read box hill, it’s quiet and devastating. And watch pillion, but absolutely do NOT treat them as the same story because they are vastly different in content and messaging.
