A Demonic Ménage à Trois: Audience Participation and Bedroom Politics in Hex

Curator's Note

Did you feel that? The disconcerting sensation of being pulled through the fourth wall? You haven’t been invited into the scene – you’ve been abducted – and here you are, sharing drinks and sexual innuendo. Sultry vocals and BDSM set dressing complete the mood: this isn’t a place where nice boys meet nice girls to bring home to mother. This is Hex, Britain’s sexier answer to Buffy: she’s possessed and he’s a demon; what’s your excuse for hanging out in this bar, you naughty thing? This scene features more than just a wink and a nudge at the audience while the action takes place on screen; the characters are staring right at you, and the foreplay is enacted between characters and viewer. You as the viewer go beyond being merely implicated (by the act of watching) in a transgressive union between innocence and evil, human and super-human, schoolgirl and remarkably well-preserved, age-old demon. As you allow yourself to be seduced (you watched it all the way through, didn’t you?), you become complicit, and, as the third in an activity where three has traditionally been a crowd, you even participate in the rejection of traditional mores. Ultimately, though, Hex’s attempt at progressive sexual politics, like the denial of the formal distinction between character and viewer, can’t be sustained; the promise of the bar can’t be delivered. The bondage girls are sultry and threatening, but they melt away from the protagonist as she walks by. Without any revolutionary follow-through in the bedroom to back them up, the visual motifs of the bar have no teeth. By the time the couple ends up back at the dormitory, the viewer as third is left behind. Watching a scene of bedroom shadowplay where transgressive identities collapse into two-dimensional silhouettes, the viewer reassumes voyeur status and can look at (but not touch) the ultimately heteronormative puppet show. In order to tell a story, narrative structure generally demands a withdrawal from the extremes of form; conversely, playing with form seems to require a simplistic story. Probing the far edges of both form and content at once creates a tension that is difficult to support for long, except perhaps at the expense of the story. So why do I keep watching, despite the disappointing retreat into normative structures? Because the story is the compelling part – and because I’d be perfectly happy if these characters did pick me up in a bar.

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