Roland Joffe: Sexual Provocateur No. 1

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Roland Joffe: Sexual Provocateur No. 1
by Rajiv Jaswa
[Photo by Alexis Arieff]

Part I: Enveloping the Envelope

Roland Joffe's achievement in popular culture is unprecedented, his career a rollercoaster ride of transgression, regression, acclaim, and career sabotage.

As a young aesthete, Joffe began developing his remarkable talents while spearheading the Situationo-Porno movement within the British theatre of the 1970s. Writing, directing, and acting with the Young Vic (pun intended) Troupe, he drew equally from absurdist and burlesque theatrical traditions, as is the case with most of the work of Situationo-Pornographers. It is likely that at this formative stage in his artistic development, he began gravitating towards the transgressive sexual politics that figures so heavily into his later work.

However, the stagnancy of pornographic performance coupled with the ever-increasing limitations of late-century absurdism led Joffe to reconsider his aesthetics. Cultural critic and editor of the New York zine Static Chris Conolly remarks: "In my estimation, it was the seedy underbelly of Joffe's early genius-his extreme enthusiasm for the explicit, for the sex, for that incandescent sensation of shock-that ultimately did him in. British theatre in the 70's was a madhouse and he simply overindulged in its excesses and then went through what I would have to term a 'mid-career meltdown,' though it was still early on in his career."

Feeling alienated from himself and his life's work, Joffe turned his back on everything he had once known. He left the theatre and went against almost every tenet of the Situation-Porno movement by working in documentary television. However, this would not be the last time Joffe's career made such an unprecedented, all-out, 180 degree U-turn. Documentary television is a highly politicized medium with its emphasis on "exposing reality" and the deliberateness through which it constructs its singular, visual perspective as the "truth." Joffe's work within the genre appears to have given him a better understanding of the political implications of the filmic image, and clearly informs his first two directorial efforts, The Killing Fields (1984) and The Mission (1986).

Both films utilize the conventions of documentary television in their depiction of Western intervention in colonial and postcolonial settings. They also brought Joffe critical acclaim and mainstream acceptance for the first time in his career. The Killing Fields received seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and took home three for Best Supporting Actor, Best Cinematography, and Best Editing. The Mission was similarly received, winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes and Best Cinematography at the Academy Awards.

Joffe's affection for the historical drama was again at play in his third feature film, Fat Man and Little Boy (1989), which features Paul Newman as an Army General overseeing the Manhattan Project. However, the film was met with critical dismay, and began what many see as Joffe's descent into the lower regions of the brow. This unstable, mid-period film career includes directing Demi Moore's career-destroying performance in a trashy adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1995) and producing the criminally overrated The Super Mario Bros. (1993), an adaptation of the popular Nintendo video game.

Chris Conolly notes the following about Joffe's second bout of mid-career crisis:

Years later, Joffe would talk about how it was impossible to push the aesthetic "envelope" any further because "the envelope" simply disappeared, in regards to his work on MTV's Undressed. But at this stage it seems that Joffe himself was enveloped by the envelope. His overzealous pursuit of mastery over the conventions of the historical drama left him ravaged, empty, lost, physically abused. Quite simply, this "envelope", those overdetermining generic conventions, they began to eat away at his will to power, leaving him a hollow man, and incapable of producing the aesthetically significant product his genius suggested him to be capable of.

Perhaps recognizing that he had lost his way, Joffe went on hiatus for a number of years following the release of The Scarlet Letter.

Finally, in its third incarnation, Joffe's career has been fully realized in terms of both its artistic and commercial potential. Upon reemerging into the public spotlight in 1999, Joffe began work on what is perhaps his most significant contribution to Western culture, the popular MTV series Undressed.

Undressed demonstrates the complete maturation of Joffe's aesthetic genius. Abandoning narrative conventions, the structure of the show redefines the expressive capabilities of the sitcom format. In Undressed, all of Joffe's past work runs together in an exquisitely avant-garde tapestry of filmic images-the absurdist pornography, the documentary, and the Hollywood drama.

Part II: The Envelope Disappears

Needless to say, Joffe's immediate impact upon our cultural landscape has been far-reaching. Throughout his wildly uneven career, the one aspect of his work that has stood out most consistently is the use of sexuality. If nothing else, Joffe will be remembered as one of the great sexual provocateurs of our generation.

Sexuality, as coded in mainstream western culture, has not strayed far from its prior position in Victorian society. Its presence is tightly regulated, creating the need for red light districts and brothels where indulgence and deviance flourish-an allegorical "closet" obscured from public view. Western sexuality is rooted in a dichotomous relationship of the body and spirit, which is subsequently reiterated in any number of binaries that play sexual presence against sexual absence. These repressive binaries fuel the sexual tension in innuendo, the titillation of bikini-tops, and the stimulation of approaching but never breaking codes of sexual conduct-thus, the endless cocktease that is late-night television, the PG-13 rating, and the swimsuit edition.

As will be seen with the specific examples of The Mission and Undressed, Joffe is able to collapse the binary of sexual presence and absence using two very different approaches, in two very different mediums, while still remaining in mainstream settings.

As a historical drama, The Mission deals with eighteenth century Spanish colonialism in South America. As such, it is commonly shown in high-school world history classes. In shooting the movie, the filmmakers made the noticeable decision to leave the female extras who play natives bare-breasted. Not only does this qualify The Mission as one of the only movies to be shown in high schools that prominently feature bare breasts, but it is also one of the few films that does so with a PG rating from the MPAA. Thus, two central institutions that shape our cultural perceptions-censors and educators-both permit the appearance of female breasts in what ought to be permissible images.

Though the native breast is, to some extent, desexualized in the way that it is filmed-mostly as part of the scenery with thousands of anonymous women running through the jungle topless-it is still impossible for the camera to completely empty out the referential power of the isolated female breast as an icon. In western culture, the female breast, as a whole and individually existing entity, always carries with it an essential referential quality of sexual presence. The Mission brings this sexual presence of the breast into the awareness of the seven-year old who is permitted by the PG rating to watch the film, sullying even that most sacred temple of spirituality, innocence, and sexual absence-the child. Thus, Joffe is able to completely transgress the codes of Western culture without even necessarily opposing them.

Instead of suffusing a PG movie with sexual presence, Undressed inverts this process. Its cheap sets, shoddy production value, and improbable plot-lines directly reference American pornography. However, as a television show, it does not actually show any sexual activity. The show, therefore, strings together every between-intercourse pornographic convention to create pornography without sex. Undressed quite literally empties the pornographic image by moving intercourse into the offscreen space and filming its absence.

These two works approach the absence/presence binary from both angles, and collapse it by saturating permissible images with sexual presence while blanketing pornographic images in sexual absence. Breaking through to the very essence of how cultural codes and conventions operate, Joffe's greatest work offers an insight into the nature of the aesthetic "envelope" that he struggled with so often during his career. It seeks to unfold this envelope, lay it flat on the table for all to see, and finally asks of us, the audience, "Was this ever anything to fear?"

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