Movie: Compliance
Expectations: None
Results: Unexpected Emotional Response (Holy Fucking Shit)
Warning: Spoilers Everywhere
It always a good thing when we hard working Americans take time out of our busy schedules to sit down and enjoy a film—as was the case when I decided to hit play on the Netflix movie entitled "Compliance”. It had been a hard week, as I'm sure many of you can relate to: the boss was being a dick; my co-workers were unhelpful, and the traffic was mean and unforgiving. The back of my eyes had been pulsating with a terrible pain for hours, making my brain retreat to the back of my skull and leaving me with a set of uncooperative motor skills accompanied by a mangled short term memory.
It was a Wednesday, hump day to some, but for me it was just another cloudy day in March. So when a voice shouted "Let's get some donuts and make coffee!” my body responded in full force.
"That's a fucking brilliant idea!"
As with all brilliant ideas, there tends to follow an un-announced and equally un-brilliant idea that limps behind it, destined to try and spoil the fucking party. We made our way to the donut shop, picked up the goods, and returned making great haste. The man at the register even gave us some free donut holes. Things were beginning look up. We made some coffee, topped it with whip cream and caramel, and took our usual positions on the couch in front of the TV--donuts in hand.
For no particular reason, we decided to watch this movie. The description was interesting enough. A prank call that leads to a disaster you say? Sure! Why not? The film starts with a series of monstrous fonts (oh how I love fonts!) spread out against an evolving black backdrop, inviting my complete attention. The words leaped out of the screen and practically bathed in our coffee, inspiring all sorts of fear and anger. I saluted the sonuvabitch who was directing this film as the whole thing moved along with great confidence. We were truly in the grasp of someone with skill, a visionary with absolute control with the world being realized on the screen. The dreaded "based on a true story" also made an appearance, but we quickly forgave this small offense in light of the images being presented on the screen.
The stage was set in an instant. We had our main characters and our location: a fast food restaurant suffering from a bacon shortage, a middle-aged female manager suffering from a lack of sexy time, and a slew of young to sort of young employees just trying to earn a paycheck. The store manager, played by Ann Dowd, gives a speech to her team of cashiers and burger flippers (chick patties in this case) in attempt to motivate the day's efforts. In short, "Alright guys, someone fucked up and left the freezer open, we lost a shit ton of bacon and were running low on
pickles, so, only two strips of bacon per sandwich, and fucking eh let’s have a good night of business"--she even sealed the speech with a few melancholic claps that would have been more appropriate for a half-time locker room speech.
A moment later the store manager gets a call from a supposed Police Officer, informing her that one of her employees has apparently stolen money from one of their paying customers. Yadda, yadda, next thing you know we’re standing there (we the audience that is), in the restaurant's storage room, staring at the accused villain of the story, played Dreama Walker, systematically remove her articles of clothing in a demented and mind fucking phone supervised strip search. That's right, this supposed Police Officer somehow manages to convince the store manager that she would be required to perform a strip search of one her own employees without a single officer stepping foot into the restaurant.
My brain leaped to full processing power, attempting to find some rhyme or reason to what I was watching on the screen. The film succeeds in creating a superiority complex in the viewer, making them characters on the screen seem so impossibly naive and ignorant that I wanted smash my apple fritter into the soft tissue of my eyes to make the pain stop. There was dissension amongst our ranks. Have we been fooled again into watching a shitty movie on Netflix's shitty selection? Had this round of movie roulette failed like all the other sad nights we spent indoors, longing for our beloved movie stores of the past?
I'm pretty sure I still have coffee floating around in my nasal cavity, a direct result of watching this SUPPOSED Police Officer manipulate the store manager into collecting the undergarments of the accused, leaving her in the palest of birthday suits. For the tired and restless, it would have been enough to say "fuck it, let's just watch re-runs of Breaking Bad", but we kept on. I couldn't say why exactly, but we did. A movie so ripe with conviction, a well-chosen cast, and a perfect musical score surely couldn't be as terrible as it seemed? Could it?
The insanity of the entire situation only escalated as the SUPPOSED FUCKING POLICE OFFICER continued to tinker with the store manger's cognitive abilities. There she was, attempting to handle a bacon shortage while simultaneously RAPING this poor girl's dignity and there was not a single voice of reason to be found. There is no need to go on describing the horrible scenarios that unfold in this movie, (you can go to IMDB to do that, freaks), but I have to say at the end of the journey that the movie was very well executed.
The simple truth of the matter, unfortunately, is stories like this happen to be quite common across America's rule crazy society. Don't get me wrong, rules are absolutely necessary in order to keep the peace, but sometimes people tend to forget their own rights as citizens and go along with whatever a SUPPOSED authority figure instructs them to do. During the ending sequences of the movie, we get a nice PSA stating that there have been over 70 cases of unwarranted searches of this nature across the U.S, involving restaurants similar to the one in this movie. I told myself that it couldn’t be true, but as I gulped down the last bit of whip cream and cold coffee I knew the reality of it all. You don't
have to look far to find numerous cases of people being taken advantage of by all sorts of deceptive beasts, people who possess no authority what so ever and still persuade people to surrender their humanity.
There were reports of people walking out movie theaters all across the U.S when this film made its debut. It's not surprising, this movie is difficult to watch and even more difficult to accept as a cultural reality. If you decide to take this movie on be prepared. Save it for a night that you don't plan on getting a lot of sleep. A night where you can numb your senses with a glass full of cheap alcohol and maybe some carne asada fries for good measure. A night where you stay in bed until the mid-day sun burns through your window with an unabated gaze, inspiring you to set sail with a fresh wind blowing behind you. Don’t down cups of coffee mixed with donuts on a work night, arguing with the phantoms of your mind as you lay in bed--ultimately arriving at your job an angry, vindictive, zombified believer that our society is fucked. Don’t do it. It’s not worth it. Save your anger for that fateful day when some FUCKING SUPPOSED MASTER OF THE LAW attempts to deprive you of your most vital assets. And when that day comes, when your palms bleed red from clenched fists, and your teeth chatter from restraint, you can firmly state:
“Fuck you Mr. Man, I’m in charge”.