Pillion

In Pillion, a.k.a. the “gay BDSM biker movie,” a meek young man named Colin (Harry Melling) meets a handsome, broody biker played by Alexander Skarsgård who brings out his submissive side. They enter into a sub/dom relationship, but the biker remains so mysterious and withholding that Colin starts to want more – endangering the bond the two men share. Follow Pop Culture Happy Hour on Letterboxd at https://letterboxd.com/nprpopculture/letterboxd.com/nprpopculture http://letterboxd.com/nprpopculture To access bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening for Pop Culture Happy Hour, subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+ at plus.npr.org/happy. http://plus.npr.org/happy See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:16Speaker 01

  A warning: This episode contains discussion of sex and kink.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Folks have been talking about the gay BDSM biker movie since it premiered at Cannes last year. Well, it's finally here. In "Pillion," a meek young man named Colin meets a handsome, broody biker who brings out his submissive side. The biker is played by Alexander Skarsgård, so I mean, you get it. They enter into a sub-dom relationship, but the biker remains so mysterious and withholding that Colin starts to want more, endangering the bond the two men share. I'm Glen Weldon, and today we're talking about "Pillion" on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

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• 2:18Speaker 01

  Joining me today is NPR film critic Bob Mondello. Hey, Bob. You will call me sir.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Zipping right past that. Also joining us is freelance music and culture journalist, Rianna Cruz. Hey, Rianna.

• 2:29Speaker 03

  Hey, Glenn.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Thank you for not making me uncomfortable.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  In Pillion, timid 30-something Colin still lives with his parents. He's played by Harry Melling. One night in a pub, he meets Ray, an unnervingly hot biker. That's Alexander Skarsgård, of course. Ray ushers Colin into the world of kink, specifically that of sub-Dom culture. Colin joins Ray's biker gang, has a few orgies, and introduces Ray to his parents, both of whom love and support their gay son, but reject the nature of the relationship he's found with Ray. Can what Colin shares with Ray survive? Does Ray even want it to? Pillion is in theaters now. And by the way, pillion, it turns out, means the passenger seat on a motorcycle. I didn't know that. I kept thinking it was- I didn't know that either. One of their last names. It's like, I don't like not knowing words, specifically

• 3:15Speaker 01

  words that make a great bingo and scrabble. So now you know, pillion is the passenger seat on a motorcycle. That bugged me. So let's get to it. Rianna, this is a conversation that's going to be tough to keep NPR friendly, but let's-

• 3:27Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Let's try. What'd you make of Pillion?

• 3:30Speaker 03

  I just want to say Pillion was my favorite movie that I watched over the past 12 months. I am a really big fan of it. It's a rom-com. It's a coming-of-age movie, which are things that you wouldn't necessarily peg to, like, the BDSM biker story.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  But I think it works really well tonally. And I think there's two separate elements of Pillion that work incredibly alongside each other. One is the characterization. I think both the actors, Skarsgård and Melling, do so much work that they show, not tell. I think Skarsgård does the impossible, which is portray someone so stoic as a Dom and intentionally standoffish as, like, soft, you know? And there's multiple layers to his character. There's shells there, you know, like a jawbreaker where it's hard and then you kind of like break through it slowly and slowly over the course of the movie.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  And Harry Melling has this beautiful expressive face with these big, beautiful eyes. And there's a moment where, like, I believe it's like a third of the way into the movie where, you know, he shaves his head and goes full submissive. And like, it's a characterization that really took me aback. That and the script, I think, are both incredible. It made me laugh. It made me cry. What more is there to say? I love Pillion.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  There you go. Well, I don't know, Bob. What more is there to say about Pillion? You tell me.

• 4:52Speaker 04

  Well, first of all, it's not a rom com, it's a dom com. And second of all, you're right on all of that. The film is surprising in so many ways. I had no idea where it was going from the very start. I found myself really engaged by the characters. Harry Melling is very appealing. Is, am I correct that he used to be in Harry Potter?

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Yes, you are.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:16Speaker 04

  He's a wonderful character, a very endearing character. And then I found myself sort of finding Skarsgard appealing too. And that surprised me because he's a cold character, at least in everything he's trying to be. And I think ends up being more complicated than that, which I thought was almost refreshing. This picture went places I wasn't expecting. I found myself much more engaged than I thought I was going to be. I fought it for about a minute and a half and then stopped.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  I'm gonna be the outlier here. I liked this movie in retrospect. I liked having watched it, but for most of its running time, it felt very basic, very normcore, very sub dom 101. And that's not really the movie's fault. That's a function of drama, right? Of this film feeling like we must introduce this world to the audience. And our audience surrogate, the point of view character, is someone who despite being gay, has grown up in a very basic normcore world with these heteronormative sensibilities. That's the lens reviewing this world through. And that really colored how the story got told. And also because when you dramatize something, there is a plan, a shape, a schematic we all have to follow.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  And I don't blame the movie for this. I blame Aeschylus and Euripides and Sophocles. Because at the end of the day, guy discovers kink, comma, has a great time. That's not a story, right? That's not drama. That is an eight minute video clip that I'm told one can find online. I have very good authority. So instead, we get this movie, which is guy discovers kink, sort of enjoys it. But then quickly, very quickly, too quickly, becomes convinced that what he really wants is this vanilla relationship stuff his parents have and what his parents want for him. And that is, I get, again, that's a dramatic story beat. You get what you think you want and then you want more.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  That's how drama works, but that is not, and this is my issue, that's not how kinks work. Someone doesn't discover a kink and feel unfulfilled by it. By definition, the kink satisfies them in a way vanilla stuff doesn't, or else they wouldn't do it. So it felt like this movie never really committed to showing us Colin, who was happy, who was turned on, who was exactly where he wanted to be, even in the orgy scenes, which should be fun. I felt this primness, this judgment, this kind of quality of, well, yes, he might be having fun, but of course he's unfulfilled. And that is such a boring normcore attitude toward this stuff. And it's complicated. I get it, because that's the character's attitude toward this, right? Because of how he grew up.

• 7:53Speaker 04

  I am fighting you on this. And let me tell you why. Colin goes from one domineering relationship to another. His mother is in control of his life in ways that are pretty obvious in the scenes where he's with his family. And this is an alternative to that. So he sort of knows what he's going into. I thought this was a transference from one situation where he's submissive to someone, to another situation where he's being submissive. And that he wants the things that he's been used to didn't really surprise me in that respect. But anyway, that would be my take.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  I also think that like, part of what makes the movie so good to me is that it doesn't really feel to me like dom sub 101, or kink 101. Colin's wants and needs are more nuanced than like, he's unfulfilled in the kink world, because I think the big transition in his character happens when his mom dies. And that kind of like flips his perspective, you know, and he kind of starts reconsidering everything after that happens, which goes back to Bob's point about the domineering relationships in his life. But I think that like, It's not necessarily that he is unfulfilled the entire time.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  I think he has a wide-scale shifting of the self and a lot of self-doubt that creeps in. I don't know, I don't necessarily think that's a constant throughout the entire movie. I think it's a distinct character shift.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  I didn't pick up on that. I'm open to the fact that you're right. I agree with you both that the tension with his parents was, to me, the newest thing, the most interesting thing in the movie. Yes, it felt a little anachronistic because I think this is a holdover from the book. The book, Box Hill by Adam Mars Jones. In the book, it's a guy remembering a relationship he had in the 1970s. In the film, they brought it into modern times. But that feeling, I mean, it is touching on something real, like that feeling his parents have, which is, we want you happy, but only if we can recognize and approve of this relationship because it's something we recognize. If we widen out, that's a real tension within the queer community, right? Because there is this feeling of what gay men of a certain age, and Bob, you and I are in that box, I put them both in that same box.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  How gay men of a certain age envision the world for themselves is different from how younger queer folk, what they want and expect and demand from the world, in spite of the world, because they should, they should demand more, it should be on their own terms. The film is grappling with that in those scenes with the parents, and I really appreciate that. But I keep going back to this. In the book, the Colin Ray relationship goes on for six years. In the movie, it's several months. Now, I can buy a kink, this world starting to pall, lose its juice over six years, not over a handful of months. The whole world of this film should feel new and exciting to Colin. And if the movie was doing more work of placing us inside his head, I think we'd feel that

• 10:52Speaker 01

  joy, that feeling of, I've found this thing more deeply. But the reason we don't is because of this movie's point of view, because it's going through Colin.

• 11:00Speaker 04

  Now, wait, you're saying that over the course of months, he wouldn't get bored with something that he's never been involved in before and that he hadn't considered before? The relationship started. He's just gonna leap in with both feet and be entirely. I'm sorry, I don't buy your premise here.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  I'm saying the film doesn't show us him actually enjoying it. The film shows us having qualms because it's dealing in repression, right? It's dealing with where he comes from. This film is not interested in the release, the, at last I found this in the joy. It's interested in repression because it's British and repression is their national identity and that's where the comedy of the film comes in.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  And yeah, that's, that's kind of what I'm saying about.

• 11:37Speaker 04

  All right, well, I won't fight you on it. Again, I think what I found intriguing about the characters, not so much the film itself, but the characters, is that I think they're malleable and I think you even see that in Ray. There are moments where you can see doubt in his eyes and I think that's really instructive and it speaks to what Colin is trying to achieve in the relationship too. I think it's an interesting character study of these two guys and also of their relationships with the world. And Collins is the more compelling of the two stories. Colin wants to set boundaries.

• 12:19Speaker 04

  Colin wants to have a relationship, but he also wants to have a sense of self and he doesn't realize that at first and he realizes it as the movie goes on and he becomes more interesting as a result of that. And I think the thing about the way the film works is that once he asserts himself, it becomes an interesting power dynamic, right? That there's something going on there. He needs to assert himself with his mother as well, right? He doesn't have to with his father. His father's sort of on his team. And I thought the dynamic of those characters and how he was negotiating the family dynamic and the love dynamic. Were really interesting and really compelling. And that's what kept me going in the movie.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  I think they're very lived in and I think they're very real. And I, I think the thing that I keep coming back to with this movie is how genuinely and brilliantly queer. It feels like it's a queer movie. And I think like, there's a lot of content these days that is gay, but not queer. And I think there's defined distinction between the two, looking at you heated rivalry. And I, I think like, we need things like Pillion because I feel like they're more authentic than the alternative. They're more authentic to the community, to the kink community and things like that. And to your point Glenn, I don't know, I feel like, maybe I'm speaking for myself here, but I've had fiery

• 13:50Speaker 03

  relationships over the course of three months that have burned and fizzled out. And I think there's something so queer about that, that the fact that it happens only over the course of several months, where, you know, he is introduced to this world, it envelops him. And I don't know, it, it feels real to me and it feels like a real coming of age movie. And maybe it's because, you know, I'm young, I'm in the community, I see people around me go through this. Like it felt like Colin was a friend of mine that I was watching on this journey. And I think that's part of what makes this movie so special.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Okay, I'll take that. I know there is a more explicit version of this film, the directors talked about it. And, and maybe that would have addressed some of my concerns, but the team also said they, they thought a more explicit cut would make audiences laugh. And, and that's where I disagree with you, Rina, because they don't mean audiences would have laughed. They mean straight audiences would have laughed, which made me think, who cares what straight audiences think? And then, and then I thought, oh, no, no, no, it's this film, this film does. And when I read that, I was also taken aback because isn't that what you want, given this subject? People laugh when they're uncomfortable. This is a film about someone stepping outside of the group, his familiar vanilla world into an uncomfortable place. So let people laugh. And I mean, also, not for nothing.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Have you seen how these guys dress? It should be fun. It should be funny. I mean, the guys in Tom of Finland drawings aren't scowling and taking themselves super seriously. Those guys are beaming, they're grinning because they're having a great time. And this film wasn't interested in having a great time. This film was interested in what would happen to this guy if he found himself in this place. And that's a journey that you guys were prepared to go on that I, you know, I just felt I was less willing to go on that particular journey.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  Well, I feel like Glenn, I, I want to push back on that though as well because I feel like the idea that they don't want people to laugh at this movie kind of reflects a sensitivity that's at the heart of the movie, right? Like, I think like the sensitivity to these characters, to the story, to the relationship is what makes this movie great. And I think that's why it connects with these audiences, these queer gay audiences. And I think that couching, right, of like, well, we didn't want to show more stuff because people would laugh is more of a protection, I think, for the audience and for the content shown and the sensitivity that's portrayed.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  Then it is like, well, you know, we, I don't know, don't want to get straight audiences confused.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Or upset or uncomfortable.

• 16:28Speaker 04

  Well, what they don't want people to laugh at is not the movie, but the kink. They want not to mock the people that this film is about. I read some interviews with the director where he said that he involved a lot of people from the community, biker community. And that what he discovered, riding around with them on the backs of their bikes, on the pillion's, I guess, am I using that correctly? Was that this was not all about sex, that this was about a sense of community, a group of, of men having fun. That it wasn't just about, when you look at somebody in harnesses and leather and studs, it looks a little dangerous if you're looking from outside.

• 17:11Speaker 04

  That that is more about performing something that is fun. And it is less about sex. And that he didn't want to misdirect an audience in that way. So that if the audience had been laughing at the kink. That that would be misrepresenting what the community that he was showing was all about.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  That's an interesting point. I mean, yes, I do think the film could have found some fun without turning it into let's laugh at these people. And I don't think it did for me. But here's the thing about film. Reasonable people can disagree. I think we're reasonably disagreeing. But now it's your turn. What do you think? We want to know what you think about Pillion. Find us on Facebook at facebook.com slash P C H on Letterboxd, at Letterboxd.com slash NPR Pop Culture. We'll have a link in our episode description. That brings us to the end of our show. Rianna Cruz, Bob Mandela, thank you for being here. Great conversation. This was great fun.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  Thanks for having us. I could hear the two of you argue all day.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  And just a reminder that signing up for Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus is a great way to support our show and public radio. And you get to listen to all of our episodes sponsor free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org slash happy hour or visit the link in our show notes. This episode was produced by Carly Rubin, Liz Metzger, and Mike Katsif, and edited by our showrunner Jessica Reedy. And Alok Amin provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glen Weldon, and we'll see you all next time.

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