"Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist" is the most disturbing, nauseating documentary ever made about a man who I am grateful to have never met in person. This film is probably the closest you'll ever want to get to such a freak with a predilection for pain; a man with a debilitatingly painful disease who needs more pain to endure his own.
Bob Flanagan is indeed a supermasochist. From an early age, he was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, a disease that causes the lungs to fill with phlegm and mucus. Most people who are diagnosed with such a disease die at an early age, some reach the age of twenty-four. Bob lived to be forty-three, the longest-known survivor of cystic fibrosis. His way of enduring such a disease was to punish his own body - to show God that he can do worse things to himself than the disease He had wrought upon him! Bob becomes a member of an S & M club where he chooses different torturous techniques such as stitches, nails, steel balls, and the list goes on. There's a truly unwatchable moment where he nails his penis to a wooden board!
The main impetus of the film is Bob's own masochistic relationship with his girlfriend of fifteen years, Sheree Rose, a dominatrix. He agrees to be her slave, and she takes full advantage of his submissive behavior. Whenever he wanted to have sex, he would have to write about in his journal, at Sheree's insistence, or there would be no sex. Bob Flanagan is a noted performance artist and writer, and his masochistic rituals through video installations have become well known in most art communities. In essence, his body has become a decorative sculpture for others to look at, e.g., "Bob and Sheree's Contract" where Sheree carves an S into Bob' chest. Bob even inspires a teenage girl from the Make-a-Wish Foundation, also diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, to meet him and...start some piercing. Sheree privately admits to Bob that maybe the girl's supposed fantasies should be fulfilled.
"Sick" won Best Documentary at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, and it is the most honest documentary I've ever seen. The irony is that its uncompromising honesty is its main fault: we never get to know Bob as well as we should. Here's a man who says that the masochism and body modification were a way of containing the disease, but he never truly explains how. Why is the agonizing pain of masochism (he deeply feels it in many scenes pleading Sheree to stop) a method of relieving his own pain? And how does any of this constitute as art, or his need to be viewed as an "art object"? The film's best, most powerful scene is when a bloated Bob is nearing the end of his disease, and Sheree wonders why he will not submit to her. This scene, however, says more about their dependent relationship than anything about Bob's personal nature.
"Sick" is certainly fascinating and involving, but it never truly reveals anything about Bob Flanagan, or offer any insights into his behavior. Instead, we get a major dose of "shockarama," and some slight tidbits on Bob's family and his needy relationship with Sheree, but not much else. "Sick" is occasionally haunting, elegiac and lurid, but it says nothing more about this supermasochist other than that he is sick.
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