I’m not sure if the original Swedish title, I am curious (yellow), has the same double meaning as it does in English. I.e. the protagonist, a young Swedish woman named Lena, is both inquisitive, and an enigma herself.
I have a strong suspicion that a lot of people attending this movie in the USA were hoping to see some skin and were probably disappointed and confused.
In a previous post I touched on the difference between fantasizing about a person being in peril of violence and a person actually suffering violence.
This clip above is the 1954 BBC television adaptation of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-four.
In the book, Winston is shown the rat cage device, strapped down and then the device is placed on his face. Only then does he crack.
In this production, they don’t even put the device on Winston’s head. O’Brien merely shows the device to Winston and describes how it operates, and this is enough to make Winston crack and say, “Do it to Julia!”
Angela Caperton’s blog pointed me towards several Youtube clips from the documentary, Stalags (2008), about the Israeli stalag novels:
The Introduction
A discussion of the standard plot
A professor talks about his schooldays, when Stalag novels were circulated as porn, while the works of Ka Tzetnik 135633 treated the same subject matter but legitimately.
A publisher talks about the premise of the books, in which a “pinnacle of manhood”, American pilots, are dominated by women.
An interview with present-day Israeli who talks about his fantasies when having sex with a gentile German woman.
Interview with filmmaker Ari Libsker
I think this is an example of fantasy as a reparative/redemptive rewriting of an earlier experience, either first hand or indirect. Definitely gotta see this one.
More on Ka Tzetnik 135633 in a future post.
Speaking of Canadian’s with a kinky attitude towards sex, check out this trailer for director David Cronenberg’s next feature, a film about the relationship between Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung and their masochistic female patient, featuring a fair bit of costume drama and kink.
Cronenberg’s had an interesting career trajectory. His early films, such as Shivers (aphrodisiac parasites spread through a Montreal apartment complex) and The Brood (people start externalizing their psychologies through literal bodily transformations), were far more experimental and visceral and political, in the best traditions of 1970s horror films.
Over the decades, he’s become a lot more respectable. He complains in interviews that he is still listed in IMDB as “Dave ‘Deprave’ Cronenberg”. While I still consider myself a Cronenberg fan, and I respect his career decisions, I also feel that his latest films just aren’t as gripping as his earlier works. If I wanted to sell people on the idea that Cronenberg is a great director, I’d show them Dead Ringers or Crash, not Spider or Eastern Promises.
You can see the same concerns in his latter works like Eastern Promises or A History of Violence as in his middle period The Fly: a man struggling against his transformation into a monster. I still maintain The Fly is the superior work.
My hope is that this story will allow Cronenberg to loosen up a little and not understate his themes.
“Historicizing The Sheik: Comparisons of the British Novel and the American Film,” by Hsu-Ming Teo
Cecilia Tan pointed me at the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, which feature a fascinating article by Hsu-Ming Teo on the historical context of EM Hull’s novel The Sheik, which was turned into a famous hit film of the same name, starring Rudolph Valentino. If not the basis of the “woman ravished by noble savage” trope, The Sheik is certainly one of the better known examples of it.
Shortbus 2006, written and directed by John Cameron Mitchell. IMDB
I grew up with have fond memories of Sook-Yin Lee as a VJ on Canada’s MuchMusic (she memorably mooned the camera on her last broadcast day) and I still listen to her now and again on CBC’s Definitely Not The Opera podcast, where she hosts an NPR-like show about personal anecdotes. That’s why it was a slightly odd experience to see her having un-faked, penetrative intercourse in the first few minutes of this movie. (According to the DVD commentary, she was wearing a female condom.) It felt a little like I was seeing somebody I knew in person having sex.
Quentin Tarantino has turned in the script for his next film, Django Unchained.
According to one review of the script:
Django is a freed slave, who, under the tutelage of a German bounty hunter (played by Christopher Waltz the evil Nazi officer in Inglorious Basterds) becomes a bad-ass bounty hunter himself, and after assisting Waltz in taking down some bad guys for profit, is helped by Waltz in tracking down his slave wife and liberating her from an evil plantation owner. And that doesn’t even half begin to cover it! This film deals with racism as I’ve rarely seen it handled in a Hollywood film. While it’s 100 percent pure popcorn and revenge flick, it is pure genius in the way it takes on the evil slave owning south. Think of what he did with the Nazis in Inglorious and you’ll get a sense of what he’s doing with slave owners and slave overseers in this one.
As Tarantino himself said earlier:
I’d like to do a Western. But rather than set it in Texas, have it in slavery times. With that subject that everybody is afraid to deal with. Let’s shine that light on ourselves. You could do a ponderous history lesson of slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad. Or, you could make a movie that would be exciting. Do it as an adventure. A spaghetti Western that takes place during that time. And I would call it ‘A Southern.’
The reason I’m writing about this and other topics only loosely tied to BDSM is that it’s about the discourse of slavery. There are lots of ways to write and talk about slavery. You have Roots, which is the big budget, mainstream TV miniseries treatment, in the earnest melodrama mode. You have Goodbye Uncle Tom, which is the exploitation/enraged quasi-documentary/polemic mode. You can argue that one’s more politically progressive than the other, but you can’t completely discount the other. It is saying something about slavery, and we need to listen to it, at least.
Over on the DoubleX blog, Debra J Dickerson has misgivings:
But I do worry that Tarantino will over rely on stock incidents of slavery porn: whippings, auction blocks, rapes. Slavery and white supremacism were so much more complicated than that. Why does the master holding Django’s wife have to be cruel? He’d have left her there if she’d been working only under Union rules and spent her evenings sipping mint juleps on the veranda in complete equality with Massa? Slavery wasn’t evil because some masters were. Slavery was evil because, however humane its conditions, it is a crime against humanity. Making the wife’s owner a beast … it worries me.
Dickerson outlines a variety of scenarios of betrayal and emotional cruelty fostered by the institution of slavery: the children sold away from their parents, husbands from wives, the moment when you realize that person you grew up with owns you, and so on. These are emotional hurts, and arguably deeper than lash marks.
But they’re the core of a dramatic movie, not an action movie. And Tarantino wants to make an action movie.
However, for all it’s action-movie style and glamour, I think Kill Bill did have something to say about gender relations, emotional manipulation and abuse, sexuality and sexual violence. Note that, while Volume 1 ended with a giant battle and a duel, Volume 2 ends with a dramatic scene, of Bill and the Bride talking over a table. The actual fight is over in less than twenty seconds. Tarantino revels in the form of the action movie, but what’s ultimately driving the entire story is the interpersonal dynamic, the mutual betrayal, between the Bride and Bill.
Thus, I think that Tarantino will come up with an emotional drive for his story, and one that is more complex than a straightforward captivity/revenge/women-in-distress narrative. Or rather, he could. (I keep thinking of the scene in Pulp Fiction, when Tarantino inserts himself as a character, who drops multiple N-bombs in front of a black man who happens to be a professional killer, and gets away with it.)
Dickerson’s reference to “stock incidents of slavery porn: whippings, auction blocks, rapes” suggests just how easily writing about slavery can slide over into the exploitative or pornographic. Django Unchained could slip and fall into that. Or we could view it as just another way of writing about slavery.
Gaitskill, Mary. “Secretary” in the Bad Behavior collection. Vintage books, 1988.
A friend and I were considering doing an unofficial commentary on the film Secretary. The project fell through before we did anything, but I did read the short story that was the basis for the movie.
The short story “Secretary” in this collection is the basis for the much-discussed film Secretary (2002)
In the movie, the basic premise is worked into a fairly standard romantic-comedy “marriage plot” story. The protagonist’s masochism is equated with her compulsive self-cutting, and further folded into a standard heterosexual romance.
Unsurprisingly, the story is quite different from the film. Hollywood will do that.
In the early years of the 16th century, to combat the rising tide of religious unorthodoxy, the Pope gave Cardinal Ximinez of Spain leave to move without let or hindrance throughout the land, in a reign of violence, terror and torture that makes a smashing film. This was the Spanish Inquisition…
Monty Python
I’ve only seen clips of the notorious Goodbye Uncle Tom (IMDB, Wikipedia, Google Video), an Italian pseudo-documentary that purportedly shows a recreation of the antebellum South with a focus on slavery. I decided to review the whole thing, and rented the director’s cut on DVD, which is not dubbed into English.
There are startling, horrifying spectacles recreated in this film, beginning with the horrors of the Middle Passage and running through the process of sale and labour, a perverse initiation narrative. There are periodic rapes and other abuses and mutilations. The overwhelming impression is an homogenous mass of brown humanity, undifferentiated by sex or age. How exactly they managed to get so many extras willing to be naked is beyond me.
From Xbiz, via Warren Ellis’ Twitter feed:
Kink.com will stream the deflowering of young virgin Nikki Blue in a ritualistic ceremony live on the Internet on Jan. 15 at 7 p.m.
The ceremony will be held on The Upper Floor of Kink.com’s headquarters, the San Francisco Armory. Prior to the event, a trained expert will insert Kink.com’s official hymen-cam to validate that Blue’s hymen is still in place and that she is a true virgin. Once her hymen is confirmed, the evening will proceed, the company said.
“We will start the evening by tightly binding Ms. Blue and introducing three Kink.com legends: Mark Davis, Jack Hammer and James Deen,” said Kink.com director John Paul “The Pope.” “Fans will vote for which of them will take Nikki’s virginity. Once the voting is complete, we will move to the sanctum, which will be dressed as a ritualistic chamber with candles and ceremonial tools. She’ll be placed in the circle and the winner selected by fans will deflower her. The other two will then join the ceremony and make her airtight.”
Whats surprises me about this is just how retrograde this seems. Virginity in 2011 just isn’t what it used to be. After the invention of condoms and antibiotics, it isn’t a magic talisman against sexually transmitted diseases. Virginity doesn’t have the social weight it used to either. Few people in North America expect a woman to be “virgo intacta” at the altar anymore, or to display a blood-stained bedsheet the morning after her wedding night. 18th century libertines fetishized virginity because its removal in a socially unapproved manner (e.g. rape or “seduction”) had such huge social ramifications for the woman. Apart from the direct violation of a person’s integrity, it would also result in social ostracism. (Assuming she wasn’t of low social standing, in which case society didn’t give a crap.)
In Clarissa, Lovelace spends most of the book trying by seduction and deception to get Clarissa to give up her virginity willingly, suggesting that he still puts a social value on it, despite his libertine views. Eventually, he just gives up, drugs her unconscious and rapes her, marking him as both a failed seducer and a coward. When she comes to, finally disillusioned about him, he offers to marry her to wipe away his crime and save her from social death, but she refuses.
Fast forward about 250 years, and watch the “Like a Virgin” number on the TV show Glee, in which three different people are moving towards their first full-on sexual encounter. They are not motivated by internal lust or passion for another so much as a desire to change their social status by removing the status of virgin, which they view as a stigma. In this case, they want and need others in their community to know that they have completed sex and are no longer virgins, completing their initiations into normative adulthood. Again, the social implications of virginity and non-virginity outweigh the physiological implications.
The existence of Girls Gone Wild and Barely Legal-type porn suggests there is still a fetishization of virginity, but I think this is more of a fascination with youth and freshness. It isn’t fascinated with the almost-magical instant of transition between two binary states, virgin and non-virgin, which seems to be driving this particular scenario.
The second thing that seems just odd is the definition of virginity implied in the press release. Kink.com seems to assume that virginity is not a social or psychological phenomenon, but an empirically verifiable physiological state. In other words, what they are really showing is the presence and then absence of a small scrap of human flesh, via heterosexual coitus. Big whoop. By that definition, a lesbian woman who has never had heterosexual intercourse would be a virgin her entire life, even if her first girlfriend got rid of that pesky hymen ages ago. In fact, a woman can have a non-intact hymen for any number of reasons, sexual or not. If we sign up for the pay per view, do we get a notarized affidavit of virginity after confirmation by the “trained expert”? (And who is this expert anyway? A gynecologist? Annie Sprinkle?)
I have no idea what Miss Blue’s sexual history is. It quite likely that she is hardly sexually inexperienced, and thus is a “technical virgin” only. This particular scenario may earn her a sentence or two in the history of porn, but it won’t significantly change her social status. The sign (the intact hymen) is de-coupled than the signifier (the woman’s sexual status). When the press release uses language like “sacrificing Nikki’s innocence”, it’s speaking in an obsolete language. We don’t believe in it anymore, in the same way we’re not impressed by a white woman with an Afro representing a lost tribe of beauties.
If I’m coming across as callous to Miss Blue, it isn’t intentional. I’m much less concerned about the state of her hymen, and whether it is breached in the right or wrong way, than whether it will be good for a rookie adult film performer to be dropped into the deep end. That this will be a live show, where they are discouraged from stopping and renegotiating if something goes wrong, is even more of a concern. As we saw in that excruciating scene in Graphic Sexual Horror, live shoots can create a situation in which everybody, including the models, wants to press on instead of stopping and making sure everybody’s okay with what’s happening. Nikki Blue’s first time (however you define that) doesn’t have to be hearts and flowers and soft music, but I would rather it didn’t go haywire for her.
That said, I don’t know how this can be anything beyond an ordinary video shoot. Linda Williams in her book Hard Core says that pornography evolved a complex visual language to represent what could not be represented: women’s subjective experience of sexual arousal and orgasm. What Kink.com is doing is attempting to visually represent what exists only as physiology, and has nothing to do with the social status or subjective experience of anyone involved. There’s nothing to see.
Addendum: Clarisse Thorn has a couple of good posts (1,2) on this.
Miss Maggie Mayhem has a good discussion of what “virginity” actually means.
Also, there are rumours going around that Nikki Blue is not actually a virgin. The deception!
