Themroc (1973) The Urban Caveman and the Red Triangle

Released to Radiance this week is Claude Faraldo’s notorious 1973 French satire, Themroc, a film that gained its notoriety here in the UK on account of it being the first film broadcast in Channel 4’s Red Triangle season on 19th September 1986.

The Red Triangle season was the informal title for the then relatively new broadcaster Channel 4’s groundbreaking season of provocative and avant-garde X or 18 rated films shown after midnight and for the first time on television. All in all, ten films were broadcast in the season got its name from the ‘warning’ sign of a red triangle with a white centre and the words “Special Discretion Required” that both proceeded each broadcast and was displayed in the top left hand corner of the screen throughout the film. You can see Channel 4′ promotional clip advising audiences of Themroc’s content here.

The content of each of the ten taboo-busting films shown in the season between 1986 and 1987 transcended that which had previously been permitted by the UK’s TV censors. As such, controversy dogged Channel 4 even before they began screening the films. Mary Whitehouse of the National Viewers and Listeners Association campaigned against the broadcast of films she deemed to be ‘pornographic’, lobbying parliament and the IBA to call for the season to be cancelled as “It’s not good enough to slap on a warning symbol and then indulge in sadistic madness of this kind.” The press also joined the fight, using the scaremongering tactic that Channel 4 were broadcasting ‘video nasties’. Such was the public preoccupation with the season that it is even referenced in Neil Jordan’s 1986 film Mona Lisa, itself a Film on Four production, in a scene in which Bob Hoskins’ character is watching a porno on TV, and Robbie Coltrane remarks “Channel 4, is it?”

This outcry did little to dissuade the viewing public however, as some two million tuned in to see Themroc go out live on the 19th September 1986. Legend has it that the only complaints the film garnered were in relation to the titular red triangle appearing in the top left hand corner of the screen throughout the film’s entire duration. Subsequent films, including Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue (1980), Héctor Babenco’s Pixote (1980), Shūji Terayama’s Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1974) and Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman (1982), routinely pulled in around 3 million viewers (unsurprising given both the media attention upon the season and the lack of competition from other channels in this late night slot) but by 1987, with ratings dwindling and the objections from the press and Mrs Whitehouse remaining vociferous, Channel 4 brought the season to a close.

Less than ten years later in 1995, the broadcaster launched ‘The Red Light Zone’, in an attempt to mix avant-garde material with more overt sexual content. However, with fresh competition from Channel 5 (the new broadcaster who sought to use the timeslot to screen salacious material that appealed to the 90s trend of ‘New Laddism’), cable and satellite broadcasters such as Live TV (the home of the self-explanatory Topless Darts, and Painted Ladies, which involved topless girls “painting” on large sheets of paper with various body parts) and an overall decline in moral panic, as the aging Whitehouse’s influence started to wane, this revival was much less provocative and more commonplace, predominantly consisting of documentaries on sex work and pornography. When you consider that, in recent years, Channel 4 have screened a show called Naked Attraction at 10pm – a show that claims to be “a daring dating series that starts where some good dates might end – naked”, and allows the blind date to see the naked bodies of the candidates incrementally – it’s clear that we’ve come a long way from the Red Triangle season of 1986 to 1987. Whether that’s progress or not, I wouldn’t like to say.

But what of Themroc itself? What makes it so controversial, supposedly? Well, incest, murder and cannibalism basically. An absurdist black comedy delivered in gibberish, Themroc feels like an unholy union between Eugène Ionesco and Jacques Tati. It tells the story of the eponymous Themroc (Michel Piccoli), a middle-aged painter and decorator weighed down by the monotony of life, who lives with his disapproving elderly mother (Jeanne Herviale) and a nubile young sister (Béatrice Romand), for whom he has an interest that goes well beyond brotherly affection. Arriving for work one day, we see the clear delineating lines that Themroc must abide by, as the workforce are separated by the colour of their overalls and encouraged to be competitive and combative towards one another. When he is caught observing his boss and shapely secretary (not my words, that’s how the film credits her), Themroc is hauled on the carpet by officious uniformed staff, including one man whose sole job appears to be sharpening pencils, promptly breaking them, and then sharpening them again. Challenged to account for his behaviour, Themroc (who has been silent throughout) finds himself beginning to cough, a gesture that implies he has something within him that he has hitherto been unable to release. Faced with dismissal, the cough becomes a primal scream, and Themroc promptly goes berserk – or sane, depending on which way you look at it I guess. He goes to the secretary and performs oral sex under her desk, before going home to finally fulfil his desire to have sex with his equally mute sister.

Finding liberation through this carnality, Themroc proceeds to wreck his apartment, bricking up the doorway that his mother routinely admonishes him from at 6am each morning and demolishing a big, ragged wall in the side of the building with a sledgehammer, throwing from it all his modern conveniences into the street below. Now with his home transformed into something akin to a modern-day cave, his previously long-suppressed animal urges and Neanderthal behaviour goes on full display to the world outside, and his neighbours (including the improvisational theatre performers Coluche and Miou-Miou) begin to fall under his spell. The police arrive to instil order, but they’re easily repelled by our urban caveman and his growing supporters, and the film descends into murder and cannibalism when Themroc literally brings a policeman home for dinner; roasting him on a spit for the neighbours (appropriately, a pig carcass is used in place of the cop’s cooked remains). In scenes that likely recalled the events of 1968 for French audiences, the Compagnies républicaines de sécurité (the general reserve of the French national police whose responsibilities are crowd and riot control) arrive en masse to deploy tear gas, but the effects lead to a mass orgy instead.

The central theme of Faraldo’s film is that it is only when we break from conformity and reject every facet of bourgeois life that we can initiate a meaningful revolution and look to truly becoming free. However, I feel that this message is somewhat clouded by the manner in which the neighbours take their cue from Themroc’s peculiar example. The moment the masses acquire their freedom they willingly abandon such independence in favour of a seemingly strong leader. In depicting such herd behaviour, the political satire of Themroc actually seems quite topical and prescient, predicting as it arguably does Russia’s submission to Putin in the years following the collapse of the USSR, Trump pulling the same trick twice on gullible Americans, and the rise of populist right wing movements in the UK in the wake of a disastrous Brexit referendum that was only ever designed to benefit the establishment. The truth is though, I don’t think this was ever really Faraldo’s intention. I feel that his message is rather shaky and vague, as evinced by it quickly running out of anything meaningful to actually say once its controversies have been paraded in front of the viewer.

Nevertheless, the fact that Faraldo hailed from a proletarian background, in which he claimed never to have read a book until his mid twenties, makes Themroc a rather rare, and therefore important, political film, in that it is refreshingly free from the middle-class, beard-stroking philosophising and abstract intellectualism of someone like Godard. Whilst Themroc is clearly a product of its time, riding not only the aftermath of 1968 but also the popular wave of absurdist theatre that a good deal of its cast hailed from, it still has some currency and its influence can still occasionally be felt. In 2015, Sightseers star Steve Oram wrote, directed and starred in Aaaaaaaah!, a film populated by actors behaving like primates, with grunting and screaming its only dialogue. I suspect Oram was one of the two million watching Themroc on Channel 4 back in 1986…

Extras on Radiances’ limited edition Blu-ray release consist of two newly recorded interviews, the first with film critic David Thompson, whilst the second sees Manuela Lazic discussing the film’s star (and its bankroller) Michel Piccoli. Piccoli also features alongside Faraldo in the disc’s best extra; an archive interview from 1973 in which the pair face questions from an audience who had just watched Themroc, one of whom attests that it’s likely to incite mass murder. Under a persistent blue fug of chain-smoked Gitanes, Piccoli faces down one middle-aged woman’s questioning about his character’s sexual relationship with his sister and astonishingly seems to argue that it is society who creates incest, because families are forced into overcrowded slum dwellings in which it is only natural that a boy would sneak looks at his sister. Meanwhile, an earnest bowtie wearing man delivers several highly praised and philosophical readings of Themroc to a pleased but quietly bemused Faraldo, who admits that they are all new theories to him and not something he ever considered whilst making the film. It is both wonderfully French and wonderfully 70s at the same time.

Mark’s Archive – Themroc (1973)