COSMOPOLIS

"Sex finds us out. Sex sees through us. That's why it's so shattering. It strips us of appearances. I see a near naked woman in her exhaustion and need, stroking a plastic bottle pressed between her thighs. Am I honor-bound to think of her as an executive and a mother? She sees a man in a posture of rank humiliation. Is that who I think he is, pants around his ankles and butt flung back? What are the questions he asks himself from this position in the world? Large questions maybe. Questions such as science obsessively asks. Why something and not nothing? Why music and not noise? Beautiful questions strangely suited to his low moment. Or is he limited in perspective, thinking only about the moment itself? Thinking about the pain.[...] Days like this. He snaps a finger and a flame shoots up. Every sensitivity, all his attunements.Things are ready to happen that normally never do. She knows what he means, that they don't even have to touch. The same thing that's happening to him is happening to her. She doesn't need to crawl under the table and suck his dick. Too trite to interest either one of them. The flow is strong between them. The emotional tone. Let it express itself. He sees her in her wallow and feels his pelvic muscles begin to quiver. He says, Tell me to stop and I'll stop. But he doesn't wait for her to reply. There isn't time. The tails of his sperm cells are lashing already. She is his sweetheart and lover and slut undying. He doesn't have to do the unspeakable thing he wants to do. He only has to speak it. Because they're beyond every model of established behavior. He only has to say the words." "Say the words." "I want to bottle-fuck you slowly with my sunglasses on."  (22-23)

On the occasion of the loungingly approaching premiere of Cronenberg's Cosmopolis (hyped-up for the virilized role of still annoyingly deadpan Pattison)- an excerpt from Don DeLillo's 2003 original masterwork. Despite the major leading role inconvenience in this one and his recent glossed over A Dangerous Method, I still hope DC will return in some style to the ugly assymetries that speak their own art.

LOVE IN MOTION

Mindfuck of the week is the newest music video from SebastiAn, directed by Gaspar Noe, and featuring an under age Dutch child-model of name Lente Tresor. The rumor has it that it got banned from youtube 3 times and now it's back, proofread against pedo-content by a scads of youtube experts who decided that, for now, it's not child pornography after all. I bet they'll change their minds soon yet again since you might get fooled by looking at the off-set photos alone. The video is presumably to be read in the context of the recent awarness raising amongst the French public on the damaging influence of the lolita entertainment industry on little girls' psyches. Tresor prances around in her pink room, wearing devil horns, while being filmed by a little boy (her brother?) with digital camera. In a slightly more aggressive manner, she reduplicates the sexuality of minor performers launched into 5-minute stardom by the cyber media. Her smudged face carries the seriousness of the 10-year-old French supermodel of haute cauture Thylane Blondeau while the kitschy poses bring to mind an average minor youtube female artist aspiring to the title of  the pedo-mascot of the month. Excluding herself , since she's sort of cuddly and innocent when she sings those pop covers in her sweet cacophonic voice. Love in Motion reminds me at points of Noe's other works, especially Enter the Void and We Fuck Alone where juvenile orphan protagonists are also enclosed in nauseously shifting interiors, left alone with artificial toys of sensual self-annihilation ad infinitum. At the very least, the video is Noe's grim wink at the unconditional greviousness which surrounds debates about the safe sexual development of contemporary children. I can't help but recall James R. Kincaid's superb Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting in which he notices that with the end of archetypal notions about female chastity, the child has become  the last vestige of innocence for radical purists which, in the context of our times, has led to a paradoxical situation: "[t]he laughing child has been replaced in our cultural iconography by the anxious, fretting child - really, a grotesquely sexy little adult. Not a kid, a not a companion, not an ally; just an unhappy undersized thing, tormented by being cast in terms that allow it no room to move: the child is the sexual being whose essence is that it has no sexuality at all."[1] All at once playful and sexual, tiredsome and restless, ridiculous and grave, Tresor is an avatar of those schizoid beings whose very appeal is their prismatic sexuality.


[1] James R. Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting. Durham University Press: Durham and London,1998: 282-283.

Here's Love in Motion: