Touching the image: Egoyan's The Adjuster

Notes made in 1998

The male characters in Egoyan’s breakthrough feature, The Adjuster, are characterised by their prosthetic hook-up to fantasy. The head of the censorship team is drawn to his job because the material which they must view arouses him sexually. Likewise the newcomer to the job.

The newcomer offers a pivotal moment in the film’s denouement as well as a pointed clue as to where the directorial judgement lies vis-a-vis the ethical and politico-sexual issues raised - by definition - by the film’s setting (in a film classification board). Herra, who often cannot bear to watch the violent, misogynist pornographic images which it is part of her job to rate according to an escalating scale of acceptability takes footage of the parts of films she knows will be cut or banned from public view. The reason, we only learn later in the film, is that her older sister (whom we never hear speak) is and always has been - even back in the unamed homeland (an Egoyan mainstay) - fascinated by whatever her other sister does outside the home. When her sister views the excerpts at home she is proud, Herra says, to see what her sister has, effectively, effaced. However, she is seen ‘stealing’ the footage (with the aid of a camcorder) by the newcomer, who promptly reports her activities to the head censor. Behind this act is a presumption on his part -later mirrored by the boss - that Herra copies the images for her own pleasure, or for that of her husband, and that through ‘bringing this into the open’, in the words used by the boss, the two males will be able to profit, whether through a fantasised complicity (fantasised by them) in the rape (which could be read otherwise) they seem to be attempting to carry out at one point. Schooled in the pitiful scenarios of pornography Herra quickly spots the set up: her response, one of laughter, freezes the would-be rapists, isolates them in the beams of the projector. Herra then is seen doubly to transgress the codes adhered to by her employer and his sidekick: first, she consumes pornography (but not by consuming it as such, rather by counteractualising it), but not for pleasure, unlike them. Second, she refuses the complicity presumed by her employer.

The Adjuster has no identity: just a tissue of cliches, codes, which he repeats to each victim. All are seduced by it. Herra, however, sees through it, finally (and perhaps all along: we suggest, on the basis of the suggestion that the adjuster meets her through an accident) leaves him - while his own house goes up in flames (he, finally, becomes a victim). In a superb finale the trio of Herra , sister and child are seen looking on as their house burns and an adjuster, not the same and yet the same, puts a comforting hand on her shoulder and mouths the same series of platitudes.