NOTES: (1) This series originally appeared in the Montage: Cultural Paradigm (Sri Lanka) in September/October of 2011. The paperback and FREE E-BOOK has now been re-issued byPocketful Of Scoundrel (an Imprint of KUBOA). (2) Though not essential to the reading of this series, the three films by Norman Reedus being discussed are available through Big Bald Head Productions
Concrete: I noted (and think it’s as fine a point to jump in on as any) that the identity of the Male in this film is presented through two clearly individuated characters, while the identity of the Female, as nuanced and multifaceted as it is, is only filtered through one. What do you make of that—or first, do you see what I mean and if so do you agree, and then, if so, what do you make of it?
Abstract: I very much see what you mean and—yes—I agree, though I think it’s symptomatic of you being what you are and your need to so literally play with the component parts of a film that makes you really say that there are two different male characters as opposed to identifying them as two explicit and distinct representations of the singular Male Persona. But I agree. And in this case, while the film has a fragmented, very nearly pointillist nature to it, I can see why you would say it how you do—because the flow of things, the introduction and reintroduction of Male is done through two individuals, literally, the film might well be telling two stories or using one Male as counterpoint or alternate to the other. Though you have to agree that the fact that both men are presented as grotesques, horrific in mask and make-up, is a kind of conjoining stroke in the film, something I’d even suggest, in direct reference to your stating them as two characters is done to gloss over the immaterial fact that they’re different people—they are, really, The Grotesque Male and then, more directly, The Sexual Male, the willfully, needfully sexual male.
C: Honestly I don’t see the difference between what you say and what I said. But it does bring me to thinking that the only other characters in the film (with the exception of the Female) are either background elements, more images than people, or else are purposefully ambiguous, even asexual, in their nature—it’s a film not about sex, really, but about identity, a presentation of the masculine sexual identity and the feminine sexual identity.
A: But I don’t think we should get too far off that way, get stuck in that diagnosable and nameable a slant—I don’t think the film is stating anything across the board, I think it is isolating certain elements of these sexual identities, yes, and then is making them, with all of their limitations, sentient in a limited way and having them interact. So, it’s not like Male Sexual Identity is X and Female Sexual Identity is Y, nothing like that, nothing so…political a statement or even psychological, sociological a statement. I think the film is blatantly admitting that these elements do exist, or really the one element it seems centrally concerned with exists, and then plumbing this element, unpacking it, folding it out and around itself, tightly but not comfortably.
C: You say mostly, or even only, one element? I don’t know. Which element of the Male sexuality—the Predatory, certainly, the first male is that, but what do we make of the second male, the more shumbling, even…kindly seeming goblin male?
A: To be honest, I don’t think the Male is spilt like that in this film—I think the male element the film is expressing or exploring is the predatory one, only. The second male is as much the predator as the first and because it is literally the same female figure being encountered, I think this redoubles the potency of the expression—I’d think there was more of a split, or even that two (or more) aspects of the male were being expressed if there was a distinct, second female, but there isn’t.
C: The First Male (credited as Richard Nixon, so I’ll refer to him as Richard, alright?) is overtly violent. Even before the orgasmic moment the violence is given irrevocable physicality, he is moving in, leading in, luring, striking, always—and from the fact that Richard is perpetually approaching and interacting with the female (only credited as Young Girl) through some secondary object (he has a car he prowls from, he completes his sexual encounter with a knife) it is clear that he wants to inflict, that his desire is outward, to possess something he stalks down and then destroy it and in that way consume it, own it—he wants to be the last to touch something (someone) and so not only defile it but reduce it to nothing, kill it, no one else can have what he had.
A: Sure, he is the Alpha predator—he possesses the world, so to speak, from the outset, and the only outlet, the only release he seeks is, as you say, to obliterate, to make something kind of over-literally un-possessable by anyone else, therefore reinforcing it as his, due to he being the one who altered/vanquished it. Everything in the filmmaking speaks pointedly to this—the dizzying way Richard’s entire sequence is filmed, from the roiling shot of the woman in the car side mirror, the background spinning around her around her, to the incredibly (and I would say perversely lackadaisical) voyeuristic manner in which the camera spins around and around and around the very public, very well lit fornication (almost as though the camera assumes the role of all of the eyes of an idling, indifferent crowd) suggests the ensnaring, the luring, the groping, but as graphic (even pornographic) as the sex depicted with the woman is, there is also a sense of great boredom to it, impotence even—Richard does not seem to be able to attain any sort of release by having the woman by making purchase of her and it is not until he quite literally destroys her, giddily, intoxicatedly thrusting a knife into her, that his character seems to achieve feeling. And the complete inverse in filmmaking is present with the sexual act between the Second Male and the Young Girl—it is far more intimate, but cloistered, overly private, filmed close, intimately, as though the camera (and so the audience eye) is as near to being partner with the act as can be, not merely witness to it.
C: I’d note, this back to Richard’s fornication with the young woman, that even the mask changes—the makeup/mask—in his moment of climax and abandon (revelation, definition?). The very dulled, leering Richard who propositions the young girl and who drives her and fornicates with her is replaced by a figure bugged eyed, open mouthed (with deep sea fish teeth slobbering) and in a kind of dementia from the attaining of his goal. So—doing my more concrete thing for a moment—the film at that point, how I saw it, is done with Richard, there’s a shock cut to what I refer to as the second storyline beginning, and (after a few moments) the Second Male (credited as Conehead) appears and after some failures at starting up communicative flirtations (beyond failures, really, as he seems unable to even distinguish gender, let alone intention or desire, due to everyone around him being seemingly some amalgamation of male and female, everyone part-invitation and part-derision) he comes across the Young Girl, or rather he comes across her discarded carcass and it is this he takes back with him to his dwelling.
A: But I want to stop you there, because now that you’ve said that (especially how you have) I wonder why you so still identify this as the same woman. Literally I see why—it is the same actress and we just witnessed her mutilated and now we witness that still mutilated body being discovered—but really I would have to say that this re-introduction does have a distinct (and necessarily distinct) identity change built in: she is now Woman-as-Corpse, in a sense she is now an utter, will-less object, whereas on her first introduction she was Woman-as-Commodity, was still viable, and possessing and showcasing some semblance of conscious acceptance, interaction, inclusion in her circumstances—indeed, even as she’s driven to the initial encounter with Richard she only has eyes for herself, applying makeup in car mirrors, watching herself dance in elevator reflections, but with Conehead she is inanimate, he decides every aspect of her appearance, her positioning, her purpose, all without regard or desire for her conscious assent. Really, she is an object in both encounters, but the change from animate to inanimate nature and that she is encountered first (in what you call Story One) as Animate and then (in your Story Two) as Inanimate—the approach of each male, therefore, to something different—is enough to, I think, according to your terms, call her a different character—or rather, because I don’t want to trip on my own semantics, a wholly different aspect of a single character.
C: I don’t argue with that—nor do I absolutely agree (nor do I exactly see what you mean, quite honestly) but I get where you’re coming from. But what I don’t get from that saming of the woman is how the male is still perceived as predatory. I mean, as concrete and literal as I am, I do understand that the film is not literally saying that Conehead found a carcass, took it home, cleaned it, and fornicated it back to life, but I do think the film is expressing first—between Richard and the woman—a predatory, violent drive, male-toward-female, and is expressing second—between Conehead and the woman—an almost moral, despairing, nurturing aspect of male sexuality, the desire to make alive again what was (or at least seemed) destroyed. I know, I know there can be some undertones of chauvinism to that statement when looked at too concretely (it’s going too far to suggest that all a violated woman needs is a nice, gentle lover to put the bloom back to her) but—and I think you get this in a more felt sense of the film’s narrative—I think Conehead finds something discarded and, symbolically, the film expresses that the violence done by Richard is not what defines the woman, that though she was degraded and we even witnessed the degradation, there is no need to think that she has in any way been robbed of the basic, intimate and pleasurable opportunity of finding some connection, even finding it in terms of the same act (superficially) as the one that violated her.
A: So, though she was in no way cognizant of encountering the second male, you suggest (I just want to be sure) that this might be representative of a kind of clean slate—her reduction to inanimate discard is a kind of…symbolic repositioning of her, suggesting she doesn’t need to first consciously access what she encountered with the first male, she can, like in a dream, wake up to a new (completely removed from sequential experience) self and a more natural, humanistically deserved one?
C: Why are you smiling? I kind of agree, yeah, except you’re obviously having a go at me.
A: I’m smiling because you’ve become the inverse of yourself. I get what you mean, but of course after she is re-animated and the clock strikes one and the film expresses that Conehead’s fantasia of nurturing of intimacy found, of sitting at the bar, laughing and kissing and having a real lover, is not going to happen, the woman (in the film’s only moment of direct dialogue, which I think is very important) flatly, even coyly, say ‘That’ll be one hundred dollars,’ revealing that her identity was neither lost by the violence done to her nor was it incorrectly determined by Richard, to begin with.
C: Well. I do have to admit I did de-emphasize that, you’re right.
A: You seem blue. You wanted them to be a happy couple?
C: You paint the picture bleaker than me. I guess I was trying to build a narrative of potential redemption out of it, while you rather well (if bullyingly) present a strong case of the blanket amorality of it all.
A: Well, chin up for a minute, don’t let’s lose steam, okay? Let’s redirect and try to understand this expression of Female—who is she, this Young Girl?
C: But see, this is also why I’m blue, because I have to wonder if it’s proper, in a strict sense, to say that there even is an expression of Female, of genuine female, in the piece. It was, after all, written by a man and realized by another man, so at best don’t you think it’s all an expression of a conceptualization of the female through the masculine persona, and therefore even more demoralizing, even more predatory an expression?
A: It is a predatory expression, but I don’t know, I don’t think that men can’t express things actual about aspects of femininity. Moreover, though, are you kind of slyly positing that femininity is, at base, not supposed to admit to predatory aspects? All I said was it was the is, in part, an exploration of the predatory aspects of masculinity, I didn’t say that such aspects equate to immorality. Do you think they do—in the case of either masculinity or femininity?
C: What’s the question?
A: Tell me what you think of the woman in this film.
C: I guess I think, at best, she’s a self-aware and a self-serving persona, manipulating the baser, unavoidable aspects of the men she encounters/lures, no matter what their predilections—that in fact she is appreciative of whatever predilection, as the more reduced a male can be made the easier the male can be utilized—and, at worst, she is an adrift individual who seems to lack the wherewithal to affect any internally, self-realized aspect of herself and so accepts her presence as objectified entity as a means of survival, even of definition, almost in an evolutionarily unconscious way accepting survival-as-identity and the particulars of that survival as immaterial.
A: Jesus, no wonder you sense undercurrents of chauvinism in the film, listen to you! I’m not trying to sound like a talk-doctor here, but I think you’re filtering yourself through this film and not this film through yourself.
C: You mean what I just said was chauvinist? Those are chauvinist attitudes?
A: ‘At best she is a self-aware, self-serving persona’—even without the rest of what you layered on, that’s a limited interpretation, especially of the best of something. What I was saying a moment ago was that I wasn’t positing predatory as either moral or immoral—not even as amoral—but what you seem to be saying about the particular female on evidence in this film, is that even her predatory aspects (which I’m granting you admitted to even though you only did so implicitly) are kind of ho-hum, just what she wound up with. To simplify what you said: she is either aware she’s a whore (at best) or is a whore but not aware of it (at worst).
C: You’re more than a little bit manipulating my description. If I literally approach the femininity in the film through the filter of prostitution and through the accepted (even relished) celebration of prostitution-as-sexuality, yeah, I identify the woman—this woman in this film, not women—as a whore, but I think, to be concrete, that it’s more than that. As you pointed out, in the concluding moment of the film, the only moment where a character is technically given voice, direct dialogue, she defines herself as such, and so is and has been in control of the entire chain of emotional circumstances, this admission of hers denuding her of the identity either of victim, corpse, or… renewed life. She begins the film as a prostitute, then for awhile kind of has this identity brought into question by the fact that she is brutalized and then is nurtured, but very pointedly she reasserts the identity at the end, willfully, even antagonistically.
A: You’re right. I was teasing you and did so to the detriment of an exploration of the film. But you’ve side-stepped the larger question of whether the film is expressing femininity as predatory.
C: It is.
A: So, taking the film as a larger expression: if the men are, so to speak, ensnared without their even being aware of it, doesn’t the film express a kind of sympathetic thrust toward men-as-predatory—they might think they are predators, but they aren’t even in control or aware of enough of the world to be genuinely predatory and by extension (an extension I think the film expresses over and over) genuinely whole. And returning to this earlier point from a different vantage, maybe this is why the insistence on two individuated actors to represent Male, while only one woman for Female.
C: You mean the film infantilizes men, but does so by kind of…what? Demonizing women? At least as far as the controlling point-of-view being sexuality?
A: Well…not demonize, I don’t think. By making the subject matter so lurid and the struggle so all-encompassing (even, as you pointed out well, reducing the world not involved in the sexual-as-predatory into androgynous pedestrians, mutes, standers-by) the female is elevated, is elevated through having to be fully realized as an individual, an identity with multiple, conflicting attributes. She will be both sides of every coin, she is fully fleshed and made complex in the acceptance of the contradictory aspects inside her single persona. The men, though, (or The Male) have to be either this or that, one thing, not the other—infantilized, sure, reduced to iconography which can be named (Richard Nixon, Conehead). The predatory male sexuality either destroys or revives, gives or takes—the predatory female sexuality defines, full stop, it owns, doesn’t rent.
C: Isn’t that what I’d said from the start?
A: No. I’d have agreed with you were that the case.
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