13 result(s) tagged “Bodily Emissions”

(As much as I’d love for you to enter blindly and leave scarred, one cannot talk around the premise of Teeth, so heed the Spoiler’s Creed. And beware of dirty talk. And bad wordplay.)

Dawn is afraid of her body, but it’s the boys who are in trouble.

She is a star in a local abstinence program — a heartfelt, eloquent advocate for preserving virginity — but she’s not immune to the temptations of the flesh. One night, while fantasizing about the cute boy she just met, her hand creeps down ... but she can’t do it.

Perhaps she knows instinctively what a handful of boys and men are about to discover in Teeth: She has a bloodthirsty vagina.

(A warning for sensitive folk: This essay discusses and uses screen captures from a short film in which a man conquers mammoth bare breasts and inserts his entire naked body into a woman’s vagina. [And, magically, the number of Culture Snob readers grows exponentially.])

An object within an object of the same type — the novel within a novel, the film within a film — is rarely considered out of its context. Its meanings, and its narrative or thematic roles, are derived from its conversation with the larger work.

But if the object is nearly whole — that is, if it’s not just a fragment, if we have a reasonably full sense of its shape, structure, and content — looking at it in isolation can bear fruit and is an act of respect.

In a previous entry, I noted the disconnect between Guillermo del Toro’s assertion that Pan’s Labyrinth is “not about sexual identity” and the movie’s marketing materials and design.

In this short audio commentary (part of Culture Snob’s Five Minutes series), we look at the toad scene in the movie to undercut the writer-director’s claim even more. Pan’s Labyrinth is very much about sexual identity, particularly a woman’s reproductive power over a man.

As much as I’ve wanted to write about Pan’s Labyrinth, it hasn’t happened, so you’ll have to wait until its DVD release for a proper essay. (I have lots of ideas, but the movie’s details have faded so much that anything I write would be either too vague or filled with errors. Even more than normal.)

For now, I’ll note that I was struck by something writer-director Guillermo del Toro said in an interview:

Question: “So often in fairy-tale analysis, there’s a tendency to read any story of a young girl as a psychosexual parable, but this film specifically doesn’t go that way.” Answer: “Not at all. I consciously avoided it, not out of prudishness — though I probably am prudish — but out of the same reason why I tried to avoid the myth of vampirism in Cronos through using the most completely unerotic window I could; I tried to approach it like an addiction. In Pan’s Labyrinth, I knew that the psychosexual angle was really tired; it felt very 1980s for me, and I felt this was a movie about a girl who was on the threshold of making a choice, where she could cease to be a girl, but it was not about sexual identity.”

Perhaps he should have told that to the movie’s designers and marketers. Take a look at these images and say with a straight face that they don’t bear a striking resemblance to female genitalia.

I have no problem
choosing films of morbid love
from our Netflix queue.

Trouble Every Day
on the recommendation
of The House Next Door.

A film of few words,
buzzing with a quiet dread,
demands haiku squared.

To slake your thirst for Culture Snob poetry, as well as the interactive, I have crafted multiple options for haiku based on Lynne Stopkewich’s 1996 movie Kissed.

If you’ve never seen it or heard of it, I think you’ll get the gist pretty quickly. And if you’re a little rusty on the specifications of haiku, it’s a line of five syllables followed by a line of seven syllables and then another line of five.

Please offer finished poems — or more line alternatives — in the comments.

Marnie is narratively and technically artless — literal and obvious and shrill and nearly naked in its themes and concerns, a story clumsily built around Freudian repression. Its psychology is facile; its score is overbearingly dramatic; and director Alfred Hitchcock seems hostile toward even the most basic realism with his rear-projection drives and the mechanical horseback riding of the fevered climax. The technique of Marnie is downright standoffish, easily read as laziness or incompetence.

Yet Marnie is not the travesty many people think.

It might sound like a lame excuse.

But if a man cheats on his wife, he might explain himself this way: “I couldn’t help it. My evolved psychological mechanisms made me have an affair.” And he’d be right.

Sort of.

David M. Buss, a psychologist at the University of Texas, has spent more than two decades studying sexual desire and behavior. And his research has led to one overarching observation: Across cultures, people’s mating strategies are universal.

While holding his nose, Daniel Neman dares not call that which offends by its proper name. Instead, he dubs it a “flatulence joke.”

And he is not amused. After counting 100 movies with — say it together — fart jokes since 1989, Neman writes disapprovingly in the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

“Do you know how a joke is never funny the second time you hear it? Imagine that sensation extended into triple digits.”

Forget about the shit, piss, vomit, semen, vaginal mucus, blood, burst boils, incest, abortions, anal sex, oral sex, fisting, bestiality, sex with wounds, anal musical talent, and other pleasantries in The Aristocrats. I wanna talk about editing!

There’s a good movie in the seed of There’s Something About Mary — that being a beautiful woman carries with it the burden of a dozen or so stalkers — but the brothers Farrelly use it simply as a vehicle for a handful of sex-related sight gags spread very thinly over nearly two hours.

All evidence suggests that the people who made Secretary didn’t pay much attention to the failure of David Cronenberg’s Crash. The movies share a similar M.O.: A relatively normal person is introduced to sexual practices that some might consider deviant and violent, and then gives him- or herself over the them. And the films also have the same fatal flaw: They are closed systems that don’t allow access to the characters. Both are beautifully made and so distant that the most I can do is admire their craftsmanship.

Just as Pulp Fiction spawned a number of crude imitations, it appears that Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves has inspired young filmmakers to mimic his bleak depictions of degradation. The British film Under the Skin brings with it the affectations of von Trier’s film — the hand-held cameras, the grim natural light, the misogyny, the attempted shocks — in the service of a painfully immature story without a shred of psychological understanding or depth in its main character.