Ian Cook, Alexandra Szoke - Beware of the Stag

A British man on his stag party in 2007 managed to gain the attention of two Slovak police officers. He was apparently bollock-naked in a fountain in downtown Bratislava in the small hours of the morning and, according to some sources, having a wank. After asking the man to exit the fountain and dress, the officers arrested him. A night in the cells and a fast-track court procedure later, and the young gentlemen was facing a two-month spell inside, a sentence which would have resulted in him missing his 20,000 pound wedding. Luckily for him and his wife-to-be, leniency prevailed and he was released on time, flew back to England and began a much longer and more severe sentence than the Slovaks could ever have dreamed of. Newspapers in the UK and Slovakia revelled in self-righteous ingloriousness of it all.

The headline-making wanker in the fountain was part of what is now a declining trend for British men to travel to Bratislava for their stag parties. The event, also known as a bachelor's party outside of the UK, is a traditional occasion for flexing freedom's last muscles with a hedonistic mix of booze and boobs. Cheap flights and relative economic wealth has been identified by the media as the main reason behind the rise in popularity of eastern European destinations amongst those in search of a stag destination. There is also no doubt much to be gleaned from scraping the bottom of the gender-studies' barrel to construct sophisticated explanations about why men like to get drunk and have their faces pressed into a naked bosoms. Neither of these however is the subject of my research. I am rather more interested in the relationship between the stag and the city, why it garners so much anger amongst the local population, why usually money-hungry pubs shut their doors and why a naked man in a fountain caused such a news-paper worthy story. But also why Bratislava continues to draw tourists in spite of the hostility, why eastern European cities continue to have a certain draw.

I argue that it is all a matter of a clash of rhythms. The diverse rhythms of a city that are interrupted by the one-off rhythms of the stag. The slow-burning life-long rhythms of marriage and kids are engulfed by the two-day binge of stings-free enjoyment. As the stag parties come to be a regular part of the city, they become an overtly noticeable rhythm to be curtailed and constrained. A rhythm that disrupts the quiet humdrum of small city life, simultaneously is a rhythm that brings excitement.


Theoretical Interlude: Ešte Jedno Pivo vs. The Pub Crawl

According to the Henri Lefebvre in his book Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life, nothing in the world is inert; everything is moving; from people to flows of capital, from stones to buildings. Some things are moving very slowly and others are moving very quickly – but they are all moving; they all have a rhythm. This conception of rhythms is a little different from the common understanding of what constitutes a rhythm; for Lefebvre, a rhythm is produced through a dialectical triad of space, time and energy: whenever there is a meeting of time, space and energy there is a rhythm. There are two basic oppositions of rhythms: “repetition and difference; mechanical and organic; discovery and creation; cyclical and linear; continuous and discontinuous; quantitative and qualitative . . .” (p.9)⁠ Though we can separate out these two categories when we analyse them, the world is made up of innumerable interactions between the two. The cyclical rhythms of days and nights, lunar cycles and seasons continually clash with the liner rhythms of everyday grind, monotony of repeated actions and brutal repetition. Whereas the cyclical is refreshing and renewing, the linear is exhausting, gruelling and arduous. Whereas dawn brings replenishment, a city’s traffic induces unease. From here it is possible to analyse rhythms in terms of: a) repetition (movements, gestures, actions, situations, differences); b) interferences of linear processes and cyclical processes; and c) lifespan, i.e. birth, growth, peak, decline and end (p. 15). In sum: the world is made up of a collection of (time-space-energy) rhythms, these rhythms are either cyclical or linear (or their corresponding categories) and can be analysed in terms of their repetitiveness, interferences and lifespans.

If we can imagine the city as such, we can move beyond the 'spatial turn' in the social sciences to embrace temporality as an equal alongside spatiality. The stag party is not only abhorrent in the eyes of local city-dwellers because it is an invasion of their city space – be in fountain, favourite bar or woman's dignity. It is also detested because of its short and violent interruption to the times of the city, times that appear in material forms in bus schedules, market days, student holidays and working patterns. The short, obnoxious and violent rhythm disturbs.

The city's rhythms used to part for the stag in a Moses-like fashion, with Western money opening bars' doors and girls' legs. Yet this is a rhythm that Bratislava was too proud or too small to accommodate. The city said no. However, though in increasingly diminished numbers in Bratislava, eastern European cities still retain a unique draw for the pre-married British male. It is a mix of danger and unknown with cheapness and availability. The desire for the sense of liminality that arises out of the spatial and temporal dislocation. Out of time and out of space – away from the married future and the domestic cocoon.

Methodology and Output

I plan to make a short (around 15 minutes) film of the interactions between the rhythms of the city and how they mould, play with and reject the rhythms of the stag; between the rhythms of the stag and his cohorts and how this moulds, plays and accepts them. Film is an appropriate medium (though text would also be conducive, although in a very different manner) to capture the clash of movements. Concretely, I plan to make a number of 'talking head' interviews about the issue of stag parties in the city and combine them with images of stags in action amongst the city's other rhythms. Possible interviewees include: stag party organisers (company owners and guides), 'disgruntled locals', bar owners who are anti-stag, British embassy representatives, journalists who covered the story, stag party attendees, people who benefit from the stags. In terms of images, I still need some more conceptual work (it's my weakest point, I've only ever made one film before). I don't want to create something that could easily be from a tabloid (which would be easy and soon as I spot a tourist throwing up in the street, or dancing naked through the city centre) nor something boring with lots of talking.