V-Day is upon us. Once again humanity’s most beautiful emotion is turned into a baited fishhook by the manufacturers and vendors of candy, cards, flowers, jewelry, lingerie and other romance-related commodities. Once again those of us who prefer actual relationships with our significant others – or even no relationship with a significant other at all – are reminded that the social norm is to care for someone only when instructed to do so by the corporate calendar.
And along with the shelves full of pink teddy bears and boxes of cards full of inappropriate sentiments to be distributed at elementary schools throughout the land, we also get a flood of “romantic movie” recommendations. Typically such menus are populated with “chick flicks,” pictures such as What Women Want that give beer-swilling louts an hour and a half to demonstrate that their commitments to their romantic partners are so great that they’re actually willing to endure something that isn’t about killing or football. With the implicit understanding, of course, that this tremendous sacrifice will be rewarded with sex.
Rage, rage against the rose-tinting of the light.
In honor of Anti-Valentines Day, I commend to your attention the following movies. Some are direct attacks on the notion of store-bought love. Others are attempts to commodify sexuality that go terribly, horribly wrong. But all eight of them have one thing in common: if you’re in the mood for sex, they’ll put a rapid stop to it. These pictures are to affectionate arousal what Niagara Falls is to a campfire. By the time you’ve devoted an evening to one or two of these, you’ll be genuinely grateful that you didn’t internalize the “holiday spirit,” give in and put out.
Enjoy!
The Stepford Wives – The first three or four entries on the list are active attacks on sex. In Rosemary’s Baby Ira Levin warns women that if they trust their husbands too much they’ll end up turned over to Satan as breeding stock. This Levin outing goes even farther: if you trust your husband too much, he’ll replace you with a robot that looks just like you. Who wants to sleep with someone when the actual sleeping part of the night’s activities involves keeping one eye open?
The Dark Secret of Harvest Home – This is the Stepford shoe placed on the other foot. The women of Harvest Home use the simple male impulse to “get some” to connive a dark ritual that ends badly for the “lucky” guy. This might be a praying mantis’s idea of a romantic evening, but it doesn’t do much for most human men.
Pink Flamingoes – “Thank goodness I was born Catholic,” director John Waters once wrote. “For me, sex will always be dirty.” He’s exploited that sentiment in almost every movie he ever made, but in Pink Flamingoes he transforms anti-sex into a fine art. I think my favorite moment in this cavalcade of sarcastic perversion is the three-way between a man, a woman and a chicken (four way if you count the voyeur watching the encounter). Or maybe it’s the flashing competition between the guy with the wiener tied to his wiener and the mid-process trans woman. Or maybe it’s the … well, you get the idea.
Even if the movie hadn’t contained a single bit of bizarre sex, it still would have poured cold water on a romantic evening. Who wants to “make whoopee” after watching the Singing Asshole or Edith Massey eating eggs? Sadly, Waters tried this trick again much later in his career to much smaller effect. A Dirty Shame does a similar job of parading perversions across the screen, but it’s not as funny and nowhere near as ground-breaking. Indeed, the whole picture seems to be more about messing with the studio by making an NC-17 movie when his contract called for an R than about actually entertaining his faithful fans. Still, if you’re looking for a date-stopper, it’ll do the trick.
Eyes Wide Shut – Because Stanley Kubrick is one of my all-time favorite directors, I’d sincerely like to believe that this “sexy” movie turns out “anti-sexy” because he deliberately intended it to do so. The picture supplies some evidence in support of this theory. The sex is emotionless, monotonous and mechanical. It employs the visual conventions of the erotic cinema (particularly the European branch thereof), but it’s like watching clock parts move, not like watching human beings enjoying one another.
Truth be told, however, Kubrick rarely did a good job of directing women. With the exception of Lolita, none of his movies feature strong female characters with whom the audience can identify. Indeed, one of the major shortcomings of The Shining is the dreadful mishandling of Shelly Duvall’s role. Watch the altercations between the director and the actress in the making-of documentary on the DVD and you’ll get some idea about why things went as badly as they did.
If the story calls for active misogyny (A Clockwork Orange) or simple indifference to half the human race (Full Metal Jacket, Dr. Strangelove, Paths of Glory, or even 2001), then Kubrick has no trouble at all. But erotic drama? Never going to happen. And in fact it doesn’t. Most of what you need to know about the nonsexiness of this picture is already included in the review. The only thing I’d add here is that stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman have no on-screen “chemistry” at all despite the fact that they were married at the time.
The Reader – One of the lessons art students learn from drawing models is that nudity by itself isn’t all that exciting. Sure, there’s a little thrill to it the first time. But it wears off fast, especially given the need to concentrate on the task at hand. While the mundane nature of the human form is an asset to artists trying to practice their skills, it’s a drawback to the film-maker trying to create something sexually stimulating.
The Reader is a perfect case in point. Kate Winslett is an attractive woman. Her physical appeal easily shines through the plain-Jane makeup she wears in this picture. But by the umpteenth time she peels off, it’s no sexier than an artist’s bowl of fruit or verdant landscape. “Let’s get dressed and get on with the story” isn’t really how you want your date to go.
Further, imagine the gender roles reversed. If the illiterate former concentration camp guard had been an older man having sex with a teenage girl, audiences would most likely have found it a lot harder to swallow.
Lolita remake – On the other hand, maybe we are expected to be turned on by a relationship between a middle-aged man and an adolescent girl. To be sure, neither of the film versions of Nabokov’s novel features an actress the age of Lolita in the book. But if you tried to make a sex movie out of a man getting it on with a ten year old, you’d stand a fair chance of joining Roman Polanski in exile.
However, at least Kubrick had enough wit to understand the book. Humbert isn’t a “good guy.” His sexual craving for a child is no more heroic than Raskolnikov’s decision to kill his landlady. But boy is that ever not how Adrian Lyne saw things. Judging by what he did to Nabokov, his version of Crime and Punishment would have turned out something like Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween.
What he serves up in this picture is a clear celebration of pedophilia. It’s fetishism worthy of Glen or Glenda? shot with the panache of a Victoria’s Secret commercial. If your idea of a date is the sort of thing that could end up on Dateline, then you’re in the right place. However, most folks should find this a bit of a turn-off.
Stealing Beauty – This picture suffers from a lot of the same faults as the last one. To be fair, it’s at least an attempt to show a teenage girl trying to work through the normal awkwardness and confusion of adolescence. But she has to “come of age” in the middle of a relentless stew of soft-focus sexuality. The result is somewhat like going out with a guy who’s focused exclusively on one thing and hasn’t the tact to even pretend that he cares about you otherwise. The picture seems to say “Are we going to do it now okay how about now are you in the mood for it yet will you be soon c’mon I haven’t got all night let’s get down to it baby let’s do it now okay how about now how about now?” If a tiny dog trying to mate with your leg is your idea of romance, then perhaps this desperate mess is in fact for you.
And though this may be purely a matter of personal taste, I didn’t care for the Italian countryside setting either. To me it was like taking a date to the Olive Garden. The feeling wasn’t “I’ve carefully chosen something I think you’ll like ” as much as it was “Do you like the food baby this place is great huh chicks dig the Olive Garden okay are you almost done with dinner are we going to go back to your place and do it now how about now how about now?”
Crash – Like Waters, most of David Cronenberg’s work is just about as anti-sexy as you can get. But unlike Waters, Cronenberg actually seems to think his stuff is hot. He’s taken an extraordinary range of attractive women – from porn stars to pop singers – and produced sex scenes that are far too little “ooh” and far too much “ew.”
Though he’s done plenty of movies with plenty of icky sex – Videodrome and Dead Ringers come immediately to mind – Crash is basically nothing but fetishistic creepiness. Cronenberg starts with a novel by outsider erotica maven J.G. Ballard and runs with it, serving up just about as many just-plain-wrong ways that sex can be associated with car accidents. It’s a stylishly-designed rubber raincoat. But it’s a rubber raincoat nonetheless.
No comments:
Post a Comment