The above painting is Courbet's Origin of the World. It's a beautiful painting, no?
Now. Imagine a world of idyllic Americana. A world of abstinence oaths and scrubbed-clean blond girls. A world over which two nuclear cooling silos keep watch, like the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, over so much suburban gloss. A world in which every man is a deviant predator, but you still want, no, NEED to see him naked. A world in which all the victims are monsters and no one's really a monster.
In that world, you've got pretty much all you need to get a grasp on the conflicted and muddy imagery within the movie, Teeth. This is a very, very bad movie. There are so many things wrong with it that I'm fumbling for the starting line. In this post, I plan to tear it a few bonus assholes. But make no mistake. I LOVE this movie. I've waited and waited and waited, panting, for the release of this film. And finally, finally, it's here. It's available to one and all on DVD. Blessed be. This film and this blog are fated lovers, I'm afraid, though the affair is destined to be populated with barbed and sniping little trysts. The following shall be the savage, roiling swell -- after so many months of delaying the gratification. Let it ensue:
I love this movie because it so pointedly illustrates so many of things upon which I've been harping for, like, my whole life. It purports to come from a feminist place, and yet it insists that all women are victims and all men are predators. It thinks it's a story of female empowerment, when really, it's a story of female estrangement-from-desire. And it really does think it loves women, but it's so squeamish about girl-parts that it shrouds them in mystery at every turn. I really do think the filmmakers are pretty fucking stupid, in that they don't have the first clue as to what the story they've told really means (as ascertained from some really inarticulate making-of footage in the DVD extras). But it's such a great example of so many things simmering beneath the surface of the communal discourse right now. If I get into grad school, you can bet that Black Snake Moan's gonna be the first chapter of my thesis. And then Teeth might very well take up the rest of the damn book. Bless its little heart.
For those who haven't baited their breath in anticipation of this release, I suppose I should offer a quick synopsis: Teeth is a movie about a girl with teeth in her cunt. In the beginning, she's part of one of those creepy cults of virginity. You know the ones I mean-- the ones in which the members swear off sex but are so consumed with sex that they do nothing but wax rapturous on all the permutations of sluttery and debauchery. Sure, they all call it dirty, but their derision is glazed over with the ecstatic cum-lust of the whore-iest among us. So, then, she gets raped. And subsequently, she severs her first penis. And then another. And another. She is afflicted with the much-mythologized phenomenon of the Vagina Dentata.
There are about a million websites dedicated to the pan-cultural stories of women with toothed pussies. I'll leave it to you to do your googling yourselves, as I couldn't narrow it down to just one for linkage purposes. The image is certainly ubiquitous enough that it's a wonder a million films haven't been made about it. So, as the myth goes, the vagina dentata is a imagistic shorthand for the overly aggressive and/or avenging female. Or it's an embodiment of male shit-your-drawers terror with regard to the female. Or, it's the hellmouth. That is, the myth teaches us that the quickest route to the fall of man is via coitus with woman. In short, it's a myth that paints women as scary, toxic, evil-doing Others and men, alternately, as weaklings who can't resist the Power of the Pussy or as fraidy-cats, who fret over being subsumed into the female (i.e., it's that trusty ol' Freudian castration anxiety). It's a win-win, for all involved! OK, it's not. At all.
This film tries its damnedest to flip the myth on it's head. Oh, how it tries. And oh, how it fails. In the bonus materials, the director/writer, Mitchell Lichtenstein explains how he hoped to re-envision the myth and make it into an emblem of female empowerment. The most prevalent resolution of the conflict in this myth involves a "hero" taming the vaginally toothed monster. To do so, he must break or remove her teeth (most often, he does this by raping her with his colossal and legendary cock-of-steel) and then she marries him out of gratitude at being freed of her monstrosity (and who could fault her?). It's your average quelling-the-female-savage story. In Lichtenstein's version, Dawn, his eponymous character, never gets quelled. She becomes something of an avenging angel against predatory men everywhere. And that's all fine and good except that Dawn's lonely. I'm not sure I really understand how Dawn is made any happier or empowered at all by an affliction that does nothing but distance her from other humans.
Beyond that, every male character (except, kinda, Dawn's stepfather) is something if a dickhead. Even the ones who initially seem sweet-- and seem to actually admire Dawn for her convictions-- wind up attempting to predate upon poor Dawn. Try as they might, they cannot see her as something other than a thing to be fucked. And she, of course, is anything but empowered because she's a shivering little bunny (well, Bunnicula, perhaps) running scared through hordes of groping, lecherous men. Sure, Dawn quickly learns that she has a special defense against all these men, but in what way is she empowered? She lives in a world in which she'll never experience pleasurable sex (so long as she remains "untamed" and her teeth intact) and in which she must constantly remain vigilant against the ever-present male threat. I've said it before and I'll say it again: fear is not empowering. And Dawn has always been and will always be scared. She is so very victim-y-- even when she figures out how to do a little victimizing of her own. So, if the story is, as is so obvious, an allegory for the war between the genders, it seems to imply that women are inherently victims and men are inherently predators. How is that an even remotely feminist sentiment?
Now, much has been made of the fact that Lichtenstein is a gay man. And to be fair, prior to my viewing of this film, I instinctively raised an eyebrow, wondering, what the fuck could a gay man possibly have to say that could be at all relevant to hetero female sexuality? I mean, he's got nothing at stake! He doesn't want to fuck us and he's not one of us, so why does he even care? Just the same, it didn't have to matter. I imagine that some gay man somewhere could write a story of this subject matter that could be convincingly authentic. But, man, does Lichtenstein ever miss THAT boat! There are tell-tale signs of his queer aesthetic every where you turn in this film.
Firstly, let me address the gratuitous quantity of dick in this film. For a movie about vaginae, seriously... it's a hell of a lot of cock. There's one scene, in which Dawn and the object of her affection have a telephone conference from two different locker rooms. In the boys' locker room, several totally naked dudes mill about in the background. In the girl's locker room, several chastely toweled girls chat and flip their hair behind Dawn. And every time a male character gets castrated, we are treated to a special shot of a prosthetic "decapitated" crotch with blood spurting out... and then, a sad little severed member not far after. Do we ever get to see Dawn's parts? Why, no! Of course not.
This omission strikes me as an egregious one, particularly when there is no shyness at all about having dicks in the film. I'd read enough reviews of this film so that I knew in advance that I wouldn't be getting any good visuals of the vagina dentata, but, by the end, I was aching for one. I mean, there was such a build-up about it that I think it's pretty stupid that Lichtenstein chose not to satisfy the audience's curiosity. I mean, how hard would it be to have, maybe, included something reminiscent of the famous shot of Marky Mark's prosthetic at the end of Boogie Nights? But no, clearly this writer/director was far too squeamish about vaginae to actually make good on the implied promise of his premise.
Sculpture by Gail Neke, as part of her "Facing the Vagina" series.
Now, the hysterical part is that he really does try to address this issue of the general cultural discomfort around the dark and mysterious recesses of female anatomy. He has one scene that takes place in a health class. As the teacher wraps up his discussion about the penis, the students all turn the page, expecting their next lesson to regard all that is pussylicious. But what do we find? A
So, Mr. Lichtenstein. You've made a movie that you thought was about female empowerment but is really just about male castration anxiety. Do you really think it was wise to make our cunts seem even scarier? You might have noticed some of the lovely art with which I've decorated this post. They are my antidote to the notable absence within this film. As I said, all this talk of the vagina dentata really made me just want to see one. So here they are. And no, they don't scare me.
In any case, there are myriad other patently anti-woman details in this film. For example, there's a big rottweiler who eats one of the cut-off dicks. Guess what *her* name is? "Mother." Yeah. I know. It would be funnier if it weren't so over-the-top, wouldn't it? And also, the only way for Dawn to "exact her revenge" is to submit herself to rape after quasi-consensual sexual interlude after rape after quasi-consensual sexual interlude. And, particularly in the beginning, she's fairly horrified by her, um, super-power-- she feels guilt and dismay and, you know, like there's something wrong with her (which there is!). So there is little doubt in my mind that Lichtenstein was taking some voyeuristic joy in allowing his so-called heroine to be battered and violated time and time again. It's a more subtle misogyny, perhaps, but it's still there. And you can't really enjoy the humor of this film (because it really is pretty darn funny) unless you accept that it's there. Bring your grain of salt.
Ultimately, however, it's not really all this inadvertent misogyny that's the real problem with this film. The real problem is its muddled thinking. It wants to be pro-feminist, but it doesn't know how to do that without getting mired in an outdated version of the feminist narrative. It wants to hold men responsible for eons of mistreatment of women, but it doesn't know how to do that without indicting them all with a fell swoop... and then indulging their perfectly irrational anxieties about becoming emasculated through their relations with women.
Furthermore, the film really doesn't understand with which of its characters it wants its sympathies to lie. I think the character of Brad, Dawn's step-brother, illustrates this point pretty effectively-- in that I see in him a potential to be a much meatier, complex character than the film itself allows him to be. Clearly, he's set up to be her foil. He's dark-haired and tattooed where she is blond and milky. He keeps this random fish-netted woman corralled in his bedroom, always available for his sexual whims-- and as I mentioned, Dawn is repressed... uh, I mean, a virgin. And yet, he confesses pretty early on that he's in love with Dawn-- and has been since they were children. He's drawn to her restrictive ethics and feels emptied out by his own libertinism. He both wants her and hates her for denying him. For my money, he's probably the most compelling character in the film. But he's VERY poorly realized. I blame the script much more than I blame the actor. The script tires to make him glib and sinister while the actor tries his damnedest to make him soulful. The film wants him to be the villain. So, ultimately, Dawn gets her opportunity to exact her punishment upon him. (It is his cock that Mother eats.). The actor plays the scene as though he's heartbroken that the love of his life has finally let him near her, but only so as to give herself the opportunity to mutilate him. The context, however, is far more sanctimonious and would have us believe that Dawn is, at last, vindicated against the years of harassment from this sad, conflicted step-brother of hers. It refuses to see the depth in poor Brad that the actor attempts to instill in him.
Perhaps I'm engaging in a little wishful thinking and giving this character too much credit, but my intuition about Brad tells me that he's the only one that really "gets" Dawn. He, more than everyone else, sees that all her celibacy pledges and promise rings are really only (dental) dams and firewalls put in place to prevent her from acknowledging her own natural libidinous drives. He's the only one that sees that she's as human as he is-- and not some angelic eunuch (what's the female equivalent of a eunuch?). And yet, in his castration, not only does she cut off his cock, but she also cuts off her connection to the only person who might lead her down a path of self-evaluation that just *might* deposit her in the midst of a realization that sex is NOT a thing to be guarded and withheld any more than it is a weapon to be wielded against those who transgress social boundaries. In this way, Brad's castration becomes tragic... as does Dawn's missed opportunity for sexual awakening. She'll never enjoy sex and she'll never become a full-fledged autonomous woman because, from her
So, I really do love this film because it so clearly illustrates so many of the ways this thing I call "paleo feminism" (i.e., second-wavery)-- the philosophies that put folks of both genders at a disadvantage-- excerbates already painfully-felt fissures between us. And it also reflects our culture's lack of clarity of thought surrounding so many of these issues. I expect Lichtenstein probably did want to tell a feminist story. But he really had no idea how to truly empower a female character, without slogging her through the dregs of victimization. I can fault him, yes, for not doing enough homework on contemporary gender theory, but I'm almost kinda glad he didn't. This film reflects how confused we ALL are about this stuff. A film that came straight out of some tower (that may or may not be made of ivory) might not be so illustratively muddled... and therefore, it probably wouldn't have given me so much to pick at. Nor would it have generate such a lengthy blog-gasm out of me!
Oh. Oh. And I do love that.
One more picture? OK. Here.
Photo by Andres Serrano, "The Interpretation of Dreams (Vagina Dentata)" (Yes, this is the guy who got famous for the "Piss Christ" piece back in the '80s.)
(Please excuse the weird spacing. I can't seem to fix it.)
1 comment:
Women need to be empowered more in general. They need to use their looks for good rather than use them for personal selfish persuits. When you get a moment check out:
www.prettygirlssavetheworld.com.
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