Aspirations, sex dreams and my brain on Twitter

Resolved: celebrity crushes are for douchebags.

I am still subject to collecting them.

Allow me to spare myself the indignity of hyperlinking my many moonings over David Duchovny.

Here's the obvious thing about nursing sexual feelings about someone you will never meet: it's totally self-defeating if felt with any earnestness. These people are essentially inaccessible. The things we think we like about them may well be wholly fabricated by whatever publicity machines are operating around them. And, as I've argued before, actual sexual attraction cannot be gauged without a proper assessment of the pheremonal charge one picks up within physical proximity of any given lust object. Therefore, I fully admit that whatever steamy thoughts I may conjure up about a famous person are utterly pointless and based in idle self-illusioning--which I hope lets me off the hook, just a little bit, for the following indulgence in douchebaggery.

How's that for an apologist's disclaimer of an opening?

I follow all of two Hollywood types on Twitter. No, Duchovny's not one of them. There are two Twitter accounts attributed to him but neither appears to be all that authentic. Or interesting. Basically, because I only really care about language, sex, food and the continuation of human life on my planet, most of the people I follow are writers, eco-activists, sex-workers, or chefs (or some delicious mix-and-match combination of the four). But I do follow Diablo Cody. Her tweets sometimes make me snort green tea out my nose. She says cool shit about the confrontational quality of female nudity. And really, she kinda fits into both the sex-worker and the writer categories, so I figure can absolve myself of the usual celebrity sycophanticism (of which, apparently, I'm deeply concerned I'll be accused) on that one. The other one's Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

So, fine. I've been known to wax florid on a film or two of his (again, purposeful lack of hyperlinks here). I like to watch the kid. His intensity, his physicality, his offbeat charisma. I find him compelling. But I think I started following him because I was curious about the sort of hype (500) Days of Summer, which I saw last April at NaFF, would get. That's the thing about film fest fare--when you get to see something before everyone else does, and if it's any good at all, it's inevitable you'll take an interest in what becomes of it. But then, in following him, I discovered he's devised this little hitRECord.org website (Joe, help me out here. I don't understand the capitalization. As the stress in the word "record" is actually on the 2nd syllable, why highlight the first? Picky, picky, I know.), which appears to be a collaborative video remix forum. He links a lot of hitRECord-derived videos in his tweets--several of which have been worth the double-click. Fantastic, I thought. Non-boring celebrity tweets. What a boon! So I continued to follow.

And then he hits me up with this one:




All right, Joe. You got me.

It's like a missile to my ooey-gooey lit-nerd core. It could only have been made better if he'd been reading one of Jim's letters to Nora:

"My sweet little whorish Nora. I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see you do like being fucked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck up in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes."*

As it stands, that video reminds me lot of that time I caught Mr. Duchovny casually dropping the word "gerundive" in an interview...and I had to change my panties. Is it really any wonder I've been having dreams of performing prolonged fellatio on this guy?

I've noticed that, much in the way that my sexual crushes and my creative crushes seem to have collapsed in on each other, Twitter owes part of its addictiveness to this collapsing of the distance between us and those whose talents we admire--this strange false intimacy. As such, Joe's thoughts enter mine in a couple 140-character bursts a day. And those bursts have reminded me of how much I loved his 2005 film, Mysterious Skin. And from there, I've been reminded of another sort of fantasy altogether--that one I used to have about becoming a doctor of pervertology. Or something.

Remember all those months ago when I swore up and down that taking my current job would grant me the leeway to go frolicking off in search of yet another useless graduate degree? Well. It seems I've gotten a little more invested in my job than I'd planned. It seems I've grown accustomed to actually seeing my friends in the evenings and having time to pick up my dry-cleaning. It seems I enjoy waking in daylight on weekends. And in a million other ways, life has interceded. But I continue to long for school. Sometimes now more than ever.

Over the course of the last three years writing this blog, a series of observations have coalesced into a couple of big questions. I still don't know what kind of program would have me (Critical film studies? Gender studies? Pop culture criticism? An amalgam?) but I have a hunch said questions would benefit from some academic structure. Here are the basics: in fictional reflections of our culture, non-compartmentalized sexuality, particularly if the sexuality in question belongs to someone female, is described as a threat to social order. As a result, it's often explained away by means of one of three causes--and have a cause, it must. In fiction, disruptive sexuality is rarely a naturally occurring phenomenon. Rather, a fictional slut has become a slut, not because s/he was born overtly sexual, but because either s/he is demonic, s/he suffers some sort of mental pathology, or s/he is a victim of abuse. And as the story goes, the slut either seeks a "cure" or is forced into one--and by "cure," I mean either (usually heternormative) monogamy or celibacy. And there it is: the pattern for which I've been looking-- a little one, a humble one--but a pattern nonetheless. The thing that intrigues me so about this pattern is that it really does seem rather divergent from the way I've experienced my own sexuality. Actually, it's divergent from the experiences of a lot of other sexually open people I know. So, the questions themselves. Why the disparity? Why are filmic depictions folks with fully integrated, big, showy, swaggering fuck-vibes so rarely positive? Why do we perceive sex as threatening in the first place? And so on.

So, because it's what good geeky girls do, I thought, why not turn that question into a scholarly inquiry? Oh, some day. Some day.

But here's where Mysterious Skin fits in. In many ways, this film relays a very conventional slut's narrative with the victim variant I mentioned above. An 8-year-old kid is molested by a man he worships. He grows up to become a rent boy, furiously seeking to replicate the feelings that early experience drummed up in him--feelings he names "love." And then, literally and figuratively, he gets beaten down--punished for his slutty transgressions. On the surface, the character of Neil McCormick, as embodied with so much slit-eyed heat by our Joe, isn't really all that different from, say, Rae in Black Snake Moan. She too was molested as a kid. She too develops an itch. And she too gets smacked into unconsciousness for it.

Now, it's no secret that I love Black Snake Moan for being the flawed disaster that it is. It really is a mess. I suppose I value it most for the way it adheres so slavishly to the model I described two paragraphs ago. Black Snake Moan tells a fallen girl's tale so very straightforwardly, stopping obligatorily to suggest Rae's childhood molestation before depositing her safely into her monogamous hetero marriage, that it veritably points out its own ridiculousness in the doing. The film is, after all, not much more than a fantasy of a sexed-up white trash American South that never was. It's perfect. Bless it's sweaty, bruisy, spermy little Southern heart.

But Mysterious Skin is just that much more sophisticated. For all the ways that it plays by the rules, as determined by the pattern I've been chasing, it breaks just as many. And what I really love about it is that the rules it breaks have very little to do with gender roles, despite Neil's maleness and his queerness. Actually, the film's casual handling of Neil's queerness makes it, in essence, incidental.

Rather, he is subject to many of the usual vulnerabilities visited upon slutty women. Being a lithe young kid, physical debasement is a particular occupational hazard for him. And though he is described as having "a black hole where his heart should be" (or something like that--I don't have the exact quotation), he seeks love through sex-- a thing folks like Oprah try to tell us is behavior typical of women. It's not, of course, but my point here is that within the construct of what I'm calling the slut narrative-- a species of story usually populated with women--Neil ain't special because he's a boy. His psychological motivations seem very much aligned with your garden variety contemporary fictional construct of the harlot. (Incidentally, that boy-seeking-love thing is most of why there's so much fuss being made over the (tres debatable) "reversal of gender roles" in (500) Days as well. That makes me giggle because, last I checked, being a fool for love isn't gendered behavior. Regardless, I continue to find it rather satisfying when it just happens to be a cute boy dipping toes into this gender-role-discussion bath. In more than one film, even!)

So, no, at first glance, Neil isn't a terribly anomalous character. However, this film takes a very notable risk--a risk that knocks it slightly asunder in relation to that pattern upon which I'm harping. Namely, it presents Neil's disruptive sexuality as a thing that precedes his abuse. I know. It seems small. Except that in a culture in which prepubescent children are generally ascribed a pointed asexuality, positing lusty thoughts in the head of an 8-year-old kid drastically complicates the hustler-as-victim paradigm. Can I just shorthand the pretentious Foucault reference here? I mean, here we are, 30-some-odd years after The History of Sexuality: Volume I was first published in French, and still, a large portion of the energy Western culture directs at this thing we call child-rearing is focused on negating innate sexuality in our children, and claiming said sexuality doesn't exist. But it does exist. So when a a very young child in a film describes jerking off to orgasm and being "sledgehammered" by desire, it's noteworthy. And more than that, it takes the story arc out of the realm of the conventional whore's tale.

Personally, I happen to think this little facet of Neil's character goes a long way to lend this film a particular authenticity. I mean, long before I ever read Foucault, I knew in my, er, heart that fucklust precedes the acquisition of secondary sexual characteristics. I was born with basically all the same nerve endings I've got now-- and, as I may have mentioned in previous posts, I figured out what all those nerves endings do pretty early on. Which was kind of awesome. Getting busted by a fellow kindergartner? Not as awesome.

So, right. My point here is that if we understand Neil's seemingly precocious sexual awareness exists prior to his being molested, even in an unformed way, it becomes much more difficult to view Neil as an unadulterated, agency-free victim. I know that idea could be touchy but bear with me. Neil's desire for his baseball coach doesn't, by any means, absolve the adult coach his transgressions against a little kid--a kid utterly lacking in adult perspective, self-preservation instinct and aplomb. But it does mess with the head of the viewer just enough for for a niggling little thought to wedge its way in: just how does a kid's willing participation affect the dynamic between victim and victimizer?

Oh, I know. That thought is an unnerving one that confounds the conventional wisdom regarding these sorts of encounters. It's one few of us particularly want to dwell upon. The notion that grown-ups shouldn't touch the sensitive parts of children is a wholly nonpartisan--and sacred--concept in our culture. Within the landscape of a film, to make an infraction against that concept is to jeopardize an audience's loyalty in a very serious way. But the fact that Neil's ostensible collusion in his coach's desire does indeed squirm its way into this film, without actually exculpating the coach character, is truly what makes its narrative feel both a little dangerous and uniquely challenging. Those two descriptors constitute just about the highest compliments I'll ever pay a movie.

That said, the film itself even looks for ways to undermine the implications that Neil's childish, yet clearly sexual, desires cast upon it. One could point to the character of his mother, for instance. She keeps porn under her bed (bonus points for her, by the way--a woman who likes porn? In a film not so terribly far from the proverbial main stream? How often do you see that?), she doesn't hide her own sexual shenanigans from her kid, and she seems generally oblivious to Neil's teenage tricking on the edge of the playground. Some might call her "negligent." Some might say she "sexualized Neil too young." Well? Meh. I don't buy that argument. I tend to think it draws upon some class-ist rhetoric, actually. She is a blue-collar single mom with resources simply too limited to allow her the luxury of the perpetual child-monitoring that we like to call "good parenting"--which isn't to suggest that she isn't something of a mess herself. But she is, as they say, doing the best she can.

And, yes, the film does go on to imply that every last bit of the blame for Neil's career trajectory into professional cock-jockeying lies with the attentions of his once-beloved coach, rather than with... I don't know...Neil's own jubilant lustiness and generous desire to service the world, one blowjob at a time, with only paltry remunerations as his reward. Now, don't get me wrong--I don't begrudge this movie its portrayal of sex work as degrading. An awful lot of it is degrading. It's not like I'm gonna try to deny that. It's more that, when looking at cultural representations of whorishness through a wider lens, there are so blasted few of them that consider sex work as something other than an act of desperation. I've used the following quotation from debauchette's blog before, and again, it seems apt here:

"This is where the press consistently gets it wrong: they suggest that all sex work is oppressive and dehumanizing, when it isn’t. Dehumanizing sex work is dehumanizing, just as any work that treats human beings as automata is going to be dehumanizing. Or they suggest it’s empowering, which it can be, but only empowering sex work is empowering. There’s tremendous range. And within that range, it’s easy to feel valued only for your sexuality, as if you have nothing else to offer the world. But then, that’s not limited to sex work alone."

Well, someday that perspective will get some screen time. Some day. Maybe. Right?

Fuck me. I miss school.

Anyway.

It comes to this:

"I've played the smart kid, the funny one, the nice sweet one, even the angry one, but never the sexy one."

A while back, I randomly found that little nugget on IMDb, which attributes it to none other than Joe. That's right. He once said he'd never played sexy. Now, who knows when he said it--if it was before or after Mysterious Skin. Clearly, it's hopelessly marooned sans any semblance of context. But, Joe! Seriously? What the crap? Surely you know it's not the part. It's the human energy in the part. You simply can't actualize a haunted teenage prostitute without tapping into some kinda fuck-vibe. It's there. It's in some of those smart, funny, sweet and angry kids too. It's innate. It's what it is. If it weren't there, you probably wouldn't be populating the wet dreams of women who don't know you. Just sayin'.



*It should be noted that I bought my used copy of the 1976 Ellmann-edited Selected Letters of James Joyce with the spine already broken. It naturally falls open to the filthiest of Joyce's erotic letters. It seems some perv before me also bought this book with prior knowledge of its unique contents.

What other folks do with their graduate theses

It was my friend Jennifer's idea that we go see one of NaFF's animated shorts programs and I'm really glad she suggested it. I found that, of these, the ones I liked best were the least slick, most homemade-looking pieces and I'm thinking that's because they're less interested in creating a space that replicates the real world (in the way that obvious CG cartoons do) and are more interested in creating brand new, weirder worlds.

The program we saw contained 11 shorts and had two extras tacked onto the end for the benefit of the Film Festival jury. The first of the two extras was this retarded bit if business called Once Upon a Christmas Village. It was voiced by Jim Belushi (a farting, loogie-hocking, trash-talking Santa) and Tim Curry (a self-professed evil and, uh, bisexual (he was, indeed, quite fey) one-eyed knight), and it looked like something out of the Pixar studios-- polished to a spitshine, even! And good lord, this thing was so full of lame jokes and saccharine musical numbers that 15 minutes was really far too long. Needless to say, it was my least favorite.

My second-least favorite was probably Dandelion. I guess it was a story about a little girl and her grandfather who were mystically connected through the wonder that is dandelion seeds... except that it made even less sense than what I just said. The grandfather had some outta-control eyebrows that covered his eyes and made him seem kinda creepy and the little girl sounded as though she'd been voiced by one of the girls who voices hentai videos... except she was supposed to be a toddler, not an animated nympho. Perhaps it would've been more exciting if she WAS an animated nympho. Oh, well. This was also very computer-y-looking. Slick and pretty with no evidence of the hand of the artist. Too, too bad.

Another one that kinda falls into the slick-n-pretty category is Mirage, except that it manages to scrounge up a little more pathos. It's about a robot with a beautiful baby face who needs water to live... and climbs this big pipe sorta structure and finds the fruit of the water plant (yeah, just bear with it...), which he taps and out flops a fish... which he decides to keep as a fun glowing pet within his body cavity (which also happens to function as the robot's reservoir for water). The face of the robot is what give this short its soul. It's frightening with its human expressiveness and I wonder that the animator (Youngwoong Jang) didn't actually film a kid and then transpose the video into the CG images. I'm not sure you could animate that kinda detail with a computer alone.

And then there was a slightly disturbing thing called Atomic Bananaabout a scientist and his chimp using some sort of Pinky-and-the-Brain-esque genetic mutating machine to turn themselves into a giant banana. The final image is of one big banana, one end having the scientist's head, the other end having the chimp's head... and the chimp hungrily eating this weird scientist/monkey/banana conglomeration-- which is maybe a little cannibalistic, I guess? I mean, it was kinda funny, I guess but there's also something dirty about a giant naked banana up there on the movie screen... I'm sorry, there just is!

Among the more folksy-looking ones was Dragon, about a little girl who becomes orphaned and draws a lot of pictures... until the director of her orphanage has a gallery showing of all her drawings, claiming them as his own... and then she sics her imaginary dragon friend on him for revenge. This one's interesting because it uses several different styles of animation to cue its audience about fantasy sequences and whatnot. There's a little claymation, a little classic Disney-esque painterly-looking stuff and a little line-drawing simple animation... and the animator (Troy Morgan) does a really great job of using all these different techniques to show us his character's different headspaces. Still, it's sad has an interesting Eastern European nesting-doll quality.

The program opened with a short called One Rat Short, which is a tragic love story about a street rat and a lab rat who are not destined to end happily, due to a terrible mishap involving a Cheetohs bag. This one was probably the most realistically animated piece in the show and it was certainly cute. However, the Cheetohs bag business was in such direct reference to American Beauty (it spends a lot of time blowing in the wind, as though it's filled with a soul), that I kinda felt like, yeah, ok, I get it: the Cheetohs bag is another character. Thanks for the explication! Still, it didn't leave as many plot holes as some of the others did... and as Jen said at the end, slightly ironically, "Oh, that was very sad." Such are the lives of street rats and lab rats and Cheetohs bags. Apparently, this one won a BAFTA, though.

Probably the goofiest among them was called First Flight about a pot-bellied sad sack of a man upon whom a little bluebird chick imprints. Yep, tiny bluebird... totally convinced this big goober with an ink stain on his shirt pocket is its mother... surely, this is the stuff of greatest comedy. The whole thing is kinda ridiculously cute, all the way down to the man's impromptu wings made of yellow post-its. Endearing through and through.

There was another strange one... I guess it was about death? Or angels? Or a little girl with a bad heart? Not quite sure... but it was all done with animated etchings and the animation itself was really something to look at... all scratchy and primitive. It's called Tragic Story with a Happy Ending and it just won an honorable mention for best animation. I suppose I liked it so much because it has that old-school styling and craftsmanship that reminds you what hard work hand-animation can really be. And I don't know but I imagine there was some computer work in this piece, too, but, man, it has a beautiful old patina for being so new.

So, it looks like The Wraith of Cobble Hill won for Best College Student Animation... and this one probably had the most realist subject matter of any of them. It's exceptionally well-done clay-mation and a pretty touching story about a kid's inner conflict with regard to responsibility within his Brooklyn neighborhood community. The animator, Adam Parrish King, employs some really effective lighting techniques that remind me a little of that old black-and-white movie of the Anne Frank play. You can tell that the spaces within which he's working are tiny... but his shadows and shadings are moody and demonstrative and exacting. Really just great.

In this collection was also this year's Oscar winning animated short, The Danish Poet, which was not really my favorite of the series, but was certainly pretty good. Its animation was simple and reminded me of some of the shorts they used to intersperse into shows like Sesame Street and The Electric Company. Except that it's all about the way writers influence each other and influence their cultures... and it's about simple mishaps that lead people into love. It's sweet, really.. and I might be inclined to say that it's too sweet except that there's a repeated series of frames in which a bunch of Scandinavian drunks board and deboard a boat... and it's hilarious. Oh, also, the subtle commentary about nationalistic feelings between different Scandinavian countries is pretty interesting. If you can get your hands on it, it's quite enjoyable.

Now, one of my two favorites from the main program, it seems, got an honorable mention for Best Student Animation... and that one's called Windows Masks Doors. This was probably the least narrative of all of them but it reminds me Jonathan's collection wall in the Everything Is Illuminated movie-- or a Rauschenberg sculpture or something. It's detailed and palimpsestic and crinkly and a little dirty and old-looking. It's mostly abstract but has a funky little conductor guy leading several tableau inside an ancient radio. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if Sarah Orenstein, the animator, has a little Julie Taymor-like career in her future.

And for all its macabre silliness, I think I loved Ujbaz Izbeneki Has Lost His Soul most of all. It's a totally rinky-dink little Scottish clay-mation about a guy who loses stuff and ends up having to go to Hades to find his soul... and winds up losing the devil while he's there. Besides the fact that his name is Ujbaz Izbeneki, which is comical unto itself and more comical when spoken with a Scottish accent, it's got a nice little corporate-bureaucracies-are-hell attitude about it and is lovely and deadpan in its minimalism. I think I have a little crush on it, quite frankly.

And then there was the other bonus short they showed for the jury... I can't seem to find a title anywhere... but it was another favorite of mine-- with a sad lonely mousy sort of creature on a ship. Something poetic being spoken over what appear to be mostly hand-painted images... mostly gray and black and white with a trickle of red and brown now and again. Damn, I wish I could find the title!

So, most of these are the masters' theses of artists from different schools all over the place. What fun it must be to spend two or three years working on projects like these. And probably, they are as insular and idiosyncratic and academic as anyone else's graduate project but I'm really glad they have fora for greater viewership than, say, a manuscript stuck on a shelf, all nicely bound in green.... just to use a completely hypothetical example.

May you all pray that they wind up on YouTube so you can all have a look!