# Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997)

### reviewed by
Wallace Baine

    by Wallace Baine
    Film Writer
    Santa Cruz Sentinel

Most of us are determined to get through this life without witnessing a man nailing his johnson to a board. So it is with extreme caution and deep respect for the public's gag reflex that I recommend `Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist.'

Certainly, this startling documentary will be one of the most unpleasant experiences you're likely to have in a movie house not involving Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. But at the same time, it is a luminous statement about art's ability to trump death. In the end, it's hard to determine what's more difficult to watch: a man mutilating his own body or the same man facing the very real specter of death.

Bob Flanagan is the kind of man who would give Jesse Helms a stroke. One of the longest known survivors of cystic fibrosis -- a fatal disease of the lungs that usually takes its victims in childhood or early adulthood -- Flanagan discovered the joys of sado-masochism in his teens. By the time he reached 40, he had become an icon of the perverse, an artist locked into a weird one-upmanship with the disease that was destroying his body.

Filmmaker Kirby Dick does not flinch from Flanagan's excesses. That nifty demonstration of Flanagan's carpentry skills mentioned earlier is deeply revolting, but it is only one in a long list of Stupid Human Tricks he performs. He is spanked, cut with blades, burned, pinched, buggered, bound, strangled, humiliated, mostly at the hands of dominatrix Sheree Rose, his long-time lover and torturer. If Rose treats Bob like a giant steak in need of tenderizing, she does so with an skewed sense of gratitude and motherly devotion.

As an artist, Flanagan used a deadpan, at times morbid wit to express his day-to-day misery, evoking the horror of his disease by illustrating its principal by-product, i.e. the fluids that filled his lungs and gave him an everpresent menacing cough (Wait till you see `The Visible Man'). One of the film's more twisted visuals is taken from the opening of one of Flanagan's New York art shows. While most artists would be sitting in the corner in a nice sweater sipping chardonnay, Bob is hanging aloft, naked, by his feet from the ceiling like some prized marlin. Whatever turns you on, guy.

As a jarring and sad contrast, Flanagan's aging parents, the picture of cozy middle American domesticity, are also interviewed. Despite living with the dread disease through their children (Bob's two sisters also died of CF), they seem perplexed about Bob's, uh, unusual lifestyle. `Where was I?' asks Mom, shaking her head in sorrow.

`Sick' takes an astonishing turn when Flanagan's disease finally seizes the upper hand. Director Dick was given full access to Flanagan's life even when both knew that he wouldn't survive much longer. It is mesmerizing and profoundly moving to see this S&M exhibitionist turn into a bewildered child at death's doorstep. Flanagan's death is recorded with a tenderness and dignity you wouldn't expect after seeing him utterly destroy the mystique of physical pain.

An important collaborator was Flanagan's tormentor/lover Sheree Rose who, as Bob's Yoko, had originally decided not to allow Kirby Dick to make the movie. Eventually, she came around and made available many of her own private videos of Bob, including some astounding footage in which Bob painfully tries to persuade her that he is simply not up to taking her punishment anymore.

Rose, it should be noted, does not come off like a monster, despite her severe attitude toward Flanagan. In the end, she is genuinely grief-stricken and, at this point it becomes apparent that the harsh language of S&M they used between them was indeed a lovers' dialogue. `Sick' is full of agony, disease, pain and more than enough stomach-turning scenes of mutilation. To watch it is a small act of courage, which is fitting considering the monstrous courage Bob Flanagan was able to summon to live like he did. Only, don't ever expect to be able to hammer a nail again without a flutter of fear in your belly. That you would be your Inner Bob speaking.

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