Fetishes is a 1996 documentary by the British filmmaker Nick Broomfield, a non-fiction look at high-end commercial fetish culture. It was made for HBO. The DVD is in color and runs about 84 minutes. The camera is at Pandora’s Box, one of New York City’s most luxurious SM and fetish houses. Broomfield interviews professional dominants and the clients who pay them, and he gets a picture of that polished 1990s New York scene. The New York filmmaker Maria Beatty is among the clients on screen, which is one reason people in the scene still use the film as a reference.
It opens on black-and-white footage from the photographer Irving Klaw. Models, including Bettie Page, wear classic fetish clothes. Broomfield and the crew then arrive at Pandora’s Box on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Mistress Raven, a professional dominant, walks them through the workspace: the dungeon and the medical room. This is not the dirty-basement cliché. It is a luxury interior built for paid power exchange, kept clean and professional, with the ritual of a working house.
After the tour, the film splits the house’s menu and the clients’ motives into eight chapters: Slaves, Mistresses, Rubber fetish, Wrestling fetish, Corporal punishment, Masochism, Infantilism, and Socio-political fetishes. It moves from how the rooms look to who pays whom, and for which fantasy of control, status, or giving yourself over.
The people on screen are adults who are paying for the session. In the Infantilism chapter, adults are role-playing. There are no children in that play.
A U.S. DVD came out first. The film later went into Nick Broomfield’s Documenting Icons box set. A fuller uncut version, with extra archive material, is available in the UK. It is still a straight non-fiction record of fetishism, rubberists, and professional domination: the workers, the clients, and the menu at Pandora’s Box in the 1990s.
