‘This is how we find Angel after use,’ explains the nice lady on ‘Maintainancer’, Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s German brothel documentary. The camera turns to the bed –where a plastic doll lies in a tangle of cheap lace, bouncy balloon boobs and cream sheets. And then, the woman starts to clean her.
Hansen’s 2018 work is shown alongside a more recent film, ‘End-Used City’. The newer piece is about surveillance culture and how this makes money for the tech industry and others. But it does little with the information. Unless surveillance capitalism is new to you, the three-part film is unlikely to produce as much of a jolt as intended.
‘Maintainancer’, in contrast, is one hell of a ride. Before watching, I felt fairly convinced by the pragmatic arguments connected to it – that it’s better that whatever the customer pays for is done to a doll and not a real woman, or the emphasis placed on how lovingly the brothel workers ‘care’ for the named dolls, maybe even the fuzzy stories of meek and mild men who are oh-so-polite and thankful after their ‘appointment’ is complete.
But there’s nothing like watching a post-coital sex doll being cleaned out to make those arguments crumble. It’s hard to stay objective when you’re staring at what is unmistakably a woman’s body (albeit in doll form) having a wet wipe-coated fist shoved up it, the way the arm of a vet sinks inside a cow.
It’s harder still to subscribe to the view that some men have an irrepressible urge to shag inanimate woman-shaped lumps and that, firstly, their desires should be supported and catered to or, secondly, that the requirement can be separated from what happens to real female bodies outside the brothel.
This is what Hansen’s work, at its best and not-so-best, gets at: the apparent disposability of people when they become nothing more than a series of ant-like movements monitored to generate money or, ultimately, when their bodies are replaced by robots with soft holes in.