Mouth of hell, mouth of hell, vanquish me to your chompy recesses. I ache to be obliterated.

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 giant gold foil sticker covering up the textbook's diagram thereof, of course! The class twitters and one of the kids asks why they can discuss the penis, but not the vagina... and the teacher says something like, "Well, it's just different." And we're all supposed to have a good laugh at the prudery of the establishment, right? So, Lichtenstein is clearly aware of the cultural anxieties regarding depictions of female anatomy, but instead of really taking any strides to demystify said girl-parts, he just perpetuates the anxiety by continuing to not show them.

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 perspective (and Lichtenstein's), the world is out to get her. She may be able to defend herself against this predatory existence, but it's still pretty sad that she'll never live peaceably within it.

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.)

Despite to shortages at the Big Red "A" Store, there is still pain to be administered, or Marjorie meditates on the subject of adultery

This weekend, I caught the end of one of my favorite movies of all time: Grand Canyon, the Lawrence Kasdan film about interconnectedness, community, responsibility and the psychic pain we all inflict upon one another while grappling towards the interconnectedness, the community and the responsibility. I hadn't watched this movie in a while and I'd forgotten Mary-Louise Parker's oration to Kevin Kline (her boss, who'd fucked her and then refused to do so again, on grounds of, uh, being married) about how, despite the fact that he was kind and caring and well-meaning in virtually every aspect of his life, he was still an asshole because he'd created a situation in which he was oblivious to the inevitability of her very particular hurt. I suppose what I love about this scene and the movie in general is that the characters are continually putting themselves in positions where they transgress social boundaries--and sometimes they face consequences for those transgressions, and sometimes they don't--but the film doesn't ever demonize them for doing so. Neither the homewrecker, nor the cheating husband, nor the otherwise-occupied wife could ever be wholly exculpated or wholly blamed because these events are, in the context of this film, just part of negotiating the world as an adult. Interestingly, though, Parker's character is the one to bear the deepest wound from the aforementioned transaction, because she is the one not chosen--and the wife never knows. This, I find to be the saddest thing about this movie--and one of the most interesting things because the pain of the interloper has been so minimally explored. But wouldn't we always consider it a "best-case scenario" when The Other Woman is the only one who gets hurt, no matter what? Certainly, she is awfully low on the morality totem pole (on which we also find innocent children, innocent wife, and fallible-but-well-meaning husband in descending order), poor girl.

Coincidentally, when I arrived home on Friday night, I had a long-ago-ordered box from Amazon (man, that free super-saver shipping option didn't always take this long, did it?) which contained, among other books, Daphne Gottlieb's (queer, post-punk, guttermouth, San Francisco poet) anthology entitled Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader (see my new subheading quotation above). Though I haven't yet had much time to read a whole hell of a lot of the stories and poems therein, there seem to be quite a few accounts of already unstable marriages, rendered more so by the inevitability of extramarital desire. Really, though, I particularly interested in Gottlieb's own introduction to the book. She rather succinctly sums up pretty much all my reasons for being interested in and buying this book to begin with:

After Homewrecker's call for submissions went out, I received a number of fevered, upset emails. Over and over, they said: You're not in FAVOR of it, are you? I want to believe (but rather doubt) that this same question would be asked of me as the editor of an anthology on motherhood, cancer, or swing dance. But mothers, the ill and dancers do not have to lie to nurture, heal or perform. (On a side note, if cheating is as rampant as even the moderate statistics suggest (Earlier in the intro, she mentions that "statistics vary widely, from a marginal 15 percent to a whopping 80 percent of married couples cheating."), it strikes me as odd that we're still blaming the "homewrecker" rather than questioning the system. What would it look like if we prized honesty and love instead of pair fidelity?)

OK, so, what WOULD it look like if we prized honesty and love instead of pair fidelity? Well, firstly, it's not at all as simplistic as that. And I think part of the faulty system is that we do, in some problematically idealistic way, prize love above all.

For myself, I tend to see marriage as a rather futile endeavor. Much research has shown that the average lifespan of a pair-bond between two human animals is roughly four to seven years--i.e., the amount of time it takes to raise a child out of infancy. In other words, we're biologically predisposed to feel the proverbial 4-to-7-year-itch because any given sexual attraction is designed to peter out somewhere within that range. That's how it WORKS! This idea that we're supposed to be in love for life is one devised purely by the heavily restrictive social mindset. In this way, how can marriage be anything but such an extreme uphill battle? It is not what our bodies' instinctual drives to propagate the species want for us.

And if my belief system about the unnatural-ness of life-long companionhood-contracts is too antiseptic, skeptical or extreme for you, how about the fact that we've invented a legislated civil institution, that once was originally devised as nothing more than a way to manage personal assets and to sanction certain bloodlines, but is now based solely on what we must admit is often a whimsical predilection for one person over another. Sure, marriage is still quite often about nothing more than money, convenience, and/or stability for the children's sake (and there's certainly nothing wrong with these things--or, really, even basing a relationship on these things), but if we want to marry for love? Love is tenuous, fragile and flighty. Love is irrational. It would be a problem for one such as myself, who is made uneasy by such irrationality, to make a lifelong commitment based on a state that I have only known in its temporary aspect. As Gottlieb says, "Love does not conquer all."

My skepticism about marriage did not, however, prevent me from attempting one such commitment. Nor does it prevent me from believing in falling in love. My longest relationship to date was with a woman, and because our government has deemed such relationships to be unworthy of tax breaks, property rights and power of attorney (thus, incidentally, reinforcing the notion that the civil institution of marriage remains little more than a financial arrangement--and one not afforded to all citizens--which, in my opinion, renders our lofty aspirations of "sanctity" and "love" within marriage wholly secondary, thus devaluing the system entirely. Thank you, U.S. government, for commodifying love, along with everything else!), I was not able to make my commitment official. Do I see some silver lining there, because I would obviously now be divorced? Well, no. The creation of a second class of citizens through denial of civil rights is nothing to celebrate... but, yeah, I guess I am glad I never married her.

However, I must admit, I entered into that relationship with every intention that it would last me a lifetime. Never had I met someone with whom I could laugh and cry in equal share. Never had I met someone who opened herself to me with such abandon and ferocity. Never had I doubted my own lovable-ness less. Never had had I encountered someone of whom I did not get bored or annoyed. I do not doubt that I was in love with her. But love doesn't conquer all. I can confirm that this is true because I was still in love with her the night I left.

I will spare my readers the sordid details of why I had eventually had to leave her, this woman who was supposed to be the love of my life. My real point in relaying any of this is just to say that there is no greater feeling of failure than that which one experiences at the moment at which one realizes that one can no longer abide by a commitment that was intended to be lifelong. It does not compare to failing a class in school and it does not compare to getting fired. When you, once and for all, abandon a pair-bonded relationship in favor of sex with another or singlehood or whatever it is that has led you astray, you feel utterly irredeemable. And strangely enough, this horrible feeling is not great enough motivation to stay.

And some might ask me, in this post that is supposed to be about adultery, was I unfaithful, there at the end? Sure, in some ways, I absolutely was. Sometimes, when you need to get out, you engage in activities so as to force your own hand. So, there's that.

And now I can come 'round to my recent viewing of Little Children. Man, I could never make it as a real movie critic. I just want to talk about myself too much, now, don't I? Well, anyway, I should just say that I think this movie is one of the best I've seen in a couple years. Really, I watched it a couple weeks ago and it's gotten so under my skin that haven't been able to wrap my head around how to write about it.

One review that I read discusses how, early on, when the two main characters, Brad (the knock-out, despite receding hairline, Patrick Wilson) and Sarah (Kate Winslet), kiss in a park in front of several other soccer-mom-types, despite being strangers. The review says that the horror of the soccer moms establishes that we are not in the landscape of the swingin' suburbs, such as is portrayed in movies like Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, wherein there is still a sort of detached discomfort that accompanies one of those parties at which all the husbands throw their keys in a fishbowl in spite of the social bravado implied by writing such a scene into a script. In a movie like that, sex is not intimate and no one is expected to fall in love as a result of it. In Little Children, though, it's a different story. Sarah, the former English lit PhD candidate, is bored and disenfranchised with her little domestic life. And Brad, the football star and would-be lawyer who can't pass the bar, is emasculated and a chickenshit, while his gorgeous, creative wife (still uber-hot Jennifer Connolly) is the successful documentary filmmaker that their son insists upon favoring. In other words, these two are ripe for the distraction and drama of falling in love with each other. Brad is still probably in love with his hot wife, even though he despairs at his life with her, but once Sarah finds her husband jerking off in front of the computer with polka-dot panties stretched over his face, well, I just don't think she was really feeling it anymore. Regardless, these two seek refuge from the lush-suburban-cum-bleak-and-vapid narrative landscape of this film in each other. And, maybe because we do not want to associate ourselves with the prudish suburbanites, we are glad for them.

But, though it would be great for the purposes of this post if this movie was really about nothing beyond adultery, it isn't. Adultery is, by far, NOT the most sinister of the topics broached in Little Children. Jackie Earle Haley plays Ronnie McGorvey in probably the most disturbing portrayal of a child molester in the annals of cinema. He is both sorrowful and repugnant. And the thing is, you want to love him and forgive him, until you just can't love or forgive him, not even remotely. Most indicative of the heinousness of this character is the sequence of scenes in which he goes on a date with a young woman. As it turns out, she's depressed to the point that she's made a couple attempts on her own life and, during their dinner together, he listens to her confessions of craziness and despair in such a way that he leads her to believe she's finally found a sympathetic ear. After their date, however, he asks her to drive him to a quiet street where he has a view of the neighborhood playground. While staring at her lap, she tearfully begins to tell him how he seems to be such a nice person and how she's so glad he listened to her, but when she looks up at at, he's gazing out the window of the car at the top of a swingset, vigorously masturbating. And he tells her that if she tells on him, he'll punish her. It's horrendous. It's horrendous, not only because he's given into his destructively deviant drives but because he's used this broken sad-sack of a woman to do so. After all, he's not allowed within 100 yards of a playground, unless he's hidden in some stranger's car!

Really, throughout the movie, it is McGorvey's story that serves as context for all the psycho-sexual unrest amongst all the characters. I'm particularly curious to note, though, that here, American suburbia is portrayed as a place simultaneously so full of castration-anxiety and so full of castration-lust. Male and female characters alike profess a desire to lop off McGorvey's dick. And yet all the men are stymied by their own in ability to live up to the expectations of their gender. Their sadness and frustration about all this is palpable. As are the resulting sadness and frustration the women. And in the face of all this batting around of this castration-as-a-metaphor-for-the-futility-of-domestic-life, it is finally McGorvey who takes the initiative and LITERALLY performs the gruesome deed upon himself. And so, in the end, none of the characters have dicks. And none of them are particularly good at performing... anything.

And so, if these ineffectual folks are representatives of those who've achieved the general American goal of upper-middle-class privilege, I gotta say, I'm both trepidatious and disappointed. I mean, I'm interested in the idea of male virtues being valued in and of themselves, so long as they don't denigrate or infringe upon female virtues, right? (And I guess so long as any virtue can be considered applicable to either gender...) But what of the men who wrote and directed this film? Tom Perotta wrote the novel on which it's based, and co-wrote the screenplay with director Todd Field. I wonder, are these men feeling these sorts of anxieties? What cultural rivulet of thought have they tapped into? I mean, is the fear that men are no longer entitled to their gender identities really so prevalent? I'm thinking back, now, to when I saw Byron Hurt's documentary, Beyond Beats and Rhymes, which talks a lot about the overcompensation inherent in the hyper-masculinity of hip-hop culture. So, surely this concern regarding metaphoric and literal castration is not one specific to rich white guys... and surely it is not new, but nonetheless, does it not point to some great societal illness? And because women are often both direct and indirect receptacles, if not victims, of this sort of psychological unrest in our male counterparts, well, shouldn't we have equal vestment and cause for concern?

I suppose, Little Children is not really a movie about adultery at all. It's a movie about how helpless people are when faced with their own unadulterated fucked-up-edness. And what does the movie present as the cause for said fucked-up-edness? Why, the frustration and demoralization that accompanies our inevitable inability to live up to whatever it was we were supposed to live up to, whether that be society or self-inflicted expectations-- of goodness, of tangible success, of beauty, and of course, of fidelity.

So, why, exactly is it that we just want so damn MUCH from ourselves? What would it look like if we valued questioning the system and coming to terms with our nature as human animals over aspiring to some obsolete American Dream?

UPDATE:
(Disclaimer) I don't suppose I can really stand 100% behind all the anti-marriage assertions I made in this post. It just seems that I'm getting bombarded with an awful lot of information about this topic lately and, apparently, I've got some processing to do. I don't know. Maybe I do mean it. But maybe not. Too soon (young, unattached, out-of-love) to tell yet?