As Alyssa Rosenberg of ThinkProgress
recently
pointed out, audiences and content providers have reached the peak of
anti-hero narratives. Thus, a film about a woman who works her way from sex
slave to trafficker-in-training should not be that transgressive in the age of
Walter White, Dexter Morgan, and Don Draper. Even if the film was based on the real
life story of Chong Kim, a Korean-American who was forced to work as an “escort”
in the early 1990s before she escaped her captors. Instead the most distressing
aspect of Eden is its indictment of
our own complicity in a thriving underground economy.
The narrative arc of Eden
begins with an innocent bit of law breaking: two underage girls use fake IDs to
gain access to a bar. There they meet a dashing young firefighter who promises
to take one of them (Jamie Chung) home. Instead he sells her to a trafficking
syndicate where she is renamed Eden and joins scores of other girls who make up
a sick stable.
Eden’s first attempt to escape ends badly. She mutilates a
john’s member with her mouth and dressed in a schoolgirl uniform with blood
streaming down her chin runs into suburbia in search of help. Vaughn (Matt O’Leary),
her handler, while slow-witted is not slow on his feet and quickly runs her
down. But not before she stumbles upon a garden party of elderly women,
pleading through tears for assistance. Vaughn pulls her to the ground and handcuffs
her, assuring the women that he is a police officer and Eden is a dangerous
drug addict. The women seem to not believe this story, asking themselves if
they should call the police. As Vaughn takes Eden away he admonishes her, “It
doesn’t matter if you scream. They’re cowards.”
The ugliness of complicity is further explored as Eden
begins to try and convince Vaughn of her usefulness as an apprentice, a
strategy she employs in order to survive beyond her expiration date (most of
the girls are killed once they reach 18, Eden is already 19 but has
successfully kept her age a secret).
Eden finally has her moment at a frat party when two girls
escape while Vaughn is otherwise occupied. In a panic Vaughn drives Eden around
the city in search of the runaways. He is desperate and swearing, finally
collapsing over the steering wheel. As he puts his head down the audience and
Eden both see the runaways across the street in a convenience store. The camera
holds for an agonizingly long time as Eden merely stares at the girls. Will she
alert Vaughn to their presence? Will she encourage Vaughn to go on without
them?
Director Megan Griffiths is not waiting for Eden to make a
decision, but rather the audience. What do we want her to do? Should she allow
her fellow captives to get away, hoping they will bring the police back to the
compound? Or should she alert Vaughn and begin the process of embedding herself
within the cartel? What do we want Eden to do? Once we make that decision it
becomes easier for us to either justify or demonize the rest of Eden’s actions.
We are given the opportunity here to become an accomplice. The camera cuts away
just before we see what Eden’s decision was, cutting to a shot of the two
runaways subdued in the back of the van. The viewer and Eden now have to live
with whatever decision we made.
It’s a chilling moment and Griffiths revisits the same
technique a couple more times in the course of the film, giving Eden a way out,
agonizingly pausing for her to make a decision, then cutting away just before
we can determine which path she chose.
In some ways Eden
reminded me of another “ripped-from-the-headlines” film that came out last year
with much more buzz: Compliance. Just like
Eden, Compliance compels the audience to ask “What would I do in that
situation?” The stakes are considerably higher in Eden, but both films are fundamentally about characters attempting
to justify actions that appear to beyond the scope of morality. In Compliance the justification is made
possible by a Milgramesque
authority figure, in Eden the
justification is survival.
The one time Eden does not pause to consider her options is
when a brief window is opened in which she can poison Vaughn. This is an
opportunity she seizes upon immediately and uses to ultimately escape. Eden
does earn a measure of redemption in the film’s closing minutes, but maybe not
enough to cleanse the horrible acts she was involved in to earn her freedom.
She is alive, yes, but the lives she helped ruined may be too much for her to
bear alone.
In reflecting upon the film I keep returning to Vaughn’s
outburst upon Eden’s escape attempt. While Vaughn is clearly referring to the
women who ultimately decide not to help Eden, he could just as easily be
talking about society as a whole. We think of the sex industry as being either
legitimate, as demonstrated by mainstream companies such as Vivid or Hustler,
or illegal. But the lines are not always clearly delineated. Even the seemingly
legitimate side of the business can
be built on a foundation of indentured servitude or be a smokescreen for
money laundering. And this is just the part of the industry that has been
uncovered. Not only is sex trafficking prevalent in the U.S. (by some
estimates up to 300,000 American children are at risk of sexual exploitation),
but the
murder of sex workers are often left unsolved.
This is not to say that the problem is completely ignored.
There are very capable groups, such as the Polaris Project, that are working to
end such horrendous practices. But it will be impossible to end sex trafficking
if we can keep finding ways to justify our inaction.
Eden is currently
streaming on Netflix (where it is referred to as The Abduction of Eden, perhaps to avoid confusion with the Dan
Aykroyd/Rose O’Donnell BDSM detective comedy Exit to Eden) and Vudu. It is also available for rental.
