Weekend before this last one, I got invited to a little dinner party in the condo of some guys who live in my new building. So neighborly! We toasted to being privileged white yuppies gentrifying a historically black neighborhood. OK, we didn't really, but I did make the joke that we should.
Regardless, imagine how my eyes flapped open, wide like pansies, upon one of my hosts telling me that he once worked as a quality control officer for a phone sex line. Yeah, he actually got to listen in on all that sloppy fuck-talk. What a fucking job! Why would anyone ever quit? In any case, he rattled off a list of off-limits topics for which, if he heard the conversation veering toward any one of them, he was obligated to interject and cut the caller off.
I don't remember what most of those topics were, but I do remember that necrophilia was on the list. In my opinion, a fantasy is a fantasy and is therefore generally harmless. But who the fuck does necrophilia hurt? The object of one's attentions is, after all, already quite deceased. I mean, sure, it's a little distasteful. And I certainly won't be first in line to be snuggling up to any cadavers. But I fail to see the logic in censoring the fantasy. As usual, I fail to see the logic in censoring, well, anydamnthing.
So, I spent this past weekend recovering from a post-move immune system spaz-out (involving a near-eardrum-bursting ear infection that made me realize that I have never, in my nearly 32 years, felt ACTUAL physical pain before. I'm lucky to be so effin' healthy, I know, but it's now my new point of comparison. I'm supposing childbirth, gunshot wounds and lifelong degenerating disease would trump my icepick-in-the-ear afternoon any day, but I can't be sure, never having felt anything of the sort of any of those things.). While recuperating, I treated myself to a viewing of a little film called Kissed. And lest this post become any more disjointed, allow me to reveal that it was, indeed, about a girl who liked to ride the dead.
In many ways, the film is too sterile and bears the air of a fable or fairy tale, sparing us from all the gory details of what it really means to be penetrated with something stiff with rigor mortis, as opposed to tumescence. I mean, I kept wondering, what if it... broke off? Inside? That could only be unpleasant, right? But nothing of the sort happens. At least not in this movie.
Molly Parker, our star, who seems to have made a few interesting sexual detours in her career, -- she's currently staring in the pukily judgy and malaise-filled Swingtown and she previously spat bourbon up Peter Sarsgaard's asshole in a cute little scene in The Center of the World (in another scene, she plucks a lollipop from her cunt-- as as far as I could tell, it looked pretty real) -- is nothing if not ethereal, all naked, tits lit up by the exam room lamps, while she has her way with those who are beyond choosing. She is poetic and ecstatic in a religious sense throughout-- plus possessing of a singular personal quietude that serves to distance her from the (let's be frank) utter freakiness of her lust for corpse-love. Ultimately, it's not a dirty movie at all, but a shimmery, fabular one. Which is both pleasant and, if you're me, a little disappointing. Because, man, I SO wanted to see just exactly how she went about, um, hoisting some dead little, um, sails. No dice, though.
Fortunately, though, the film does do something else that's quite intriguing indeed. Long about the time our protagonist Sandra decides to follow her career aspirations (embalming, of course) on a collegiate level, she has become the sort of pretty girl who gets approached by saucer-eyed young men in coffee shops. One such young man quickly inquires after Sandra's ooky choice in study focus. And she responds that she's in the game because she "makes love to the corpses." Because the movie is fantastical, he doesn't respond with the expected revulsion, but with fascination. Of course he does. He is supposed to be her soulmate. Who else would the random dude in the coffee shop be?
But let's say that the movie's not a fantasy. Let's say something like this could really happen. Let's say, instead of a necrophiliac, you were a girl with a blog about sluttishness and film. And you sit down in a coffee shop. And a cute boy asks you what you do. And you say you write about sluttishness. You say that maybe, just a little bit, you feel sluttishness, as a concept, as a way of life, as a mindful practice, is your calling. And he doesn't widen his eyes, cough into his hand, and turn tail to run. Or let's say you are a necrophiliac. Or a submissive. Or a bootlicker. Or a pussylicker. Or a beltloop fetishist. Or you identify with whatever other quirky thing sends blood to your genitals. And some stranger not only unconditionally accepts this weird thing about you but decides to revel in the kinky thing you are. What of that world?
It's this sort of characteristic receptiveness that makes this film unique. Sure, I kinda wish it was unique because it's all graphic and gross. But I have to settle for its providing a safe place for discussion of something of which even phone sex operators dare not speak. Of course, our girl's boy must pay the price for opening his soul in the way that he does. He knows, after all, that his living cock can never substitute for all the cold ones she works over on the job. He is destroyed because he thinks-- and rightly so-- that she is not capable of loving him as he loves her. So he hangs himself. And she fucks him. And she claims to see his glowing love in every corpse fucked ever after.
I'd venture to say that this sort of overblown gesture of romantic love has as much in common with reality as does this boyfriend's essential openness. We don't kill ourselves to satisfy our lovers' bizarre sexual cravings. And if strangers overshare, it freaks us out. Oh, but this film's is a fun world in which to live for a couple hours. And you get to feel a little like you might be out-dirtying the industry's best potty mouths, just from hunkering down on your sofa. Not bad.
No comments:
Post a Comment