9 SONGS

In the spirit of spreading domestic pornology, I'm posting today a fragment of a scholarly analysis of 9 Songs. The piece is a part of an MA thesis entitled Eroticism and Pornography in Mainstream Cinema in relation to Postmodern Sexuality and written by a compatriot from the north-eastern part of the country. As a whole the work is a comprehendible exposition of titular concepts for neophytes, but it tackles nicely converging themes of sex, nudity and intimacy in two contemporary R-rated films. I've been intending to write something on this softer side of new extremism for some time now, especially pertaining to cinescapes of sterilized sexuality, but it's a pending project in my mind, one out of few. Anyway, the author of hereby presented excerpt has pretty accurately captured my tactile impressions of  the movie and this must serve as a preliminary to my own input. The only copy of the text I possess is, alas, in Polish, so this is basically for my Polish confreres.

Postmodern Eroticism in 9 Songs by Adrian Milanowski

SEXUALIZATIONSHIPS via ARTERTAINMENT II

Today's mini-reviews are devoted to Fassbender porn.

Such a shame to believe in escape

SHAME (2011). Mainstreaming weighty sexual themes is by necessity trouble and Shame is the recent example that proves this judgement true. In short, the movie centers on a lone New York corporate cog (Fassbender) who would enliven the American Dream of consumptionist independence if not the psychological distress resulting from sex addiction. Inasmuch as I admire the endeavor for the minimalist beauty and the emotional tension, I can’t find the portrayal of the protagonist convincing enough to either enjoy the film or find it engaging. The problem is, of course, ideological framework which continually slips the character in the direction of potential moral catharsis and salvation. Firstly, in a failed attempt to build a relationship with his co-worker, he thoughtlessly throws away his impressive porn stash, which is sort of derisory considering the short span of the pair’s dating period and the implicit sweep of his addiction. Then, he provokes a surprisingly mild physical assault after offering sex to a non-single woman in a bar and verbally offending her boyfriend. Finally, he gets a blowjob from a gay bar regular in a scene that has been stylized emotionally as Dante’s seventh circle of hell, but you can tell from Cruising that far worse things happen in such places. All for vain, but the concluding scenes of supportive binding between brother-sister supply a glimpse of light in the dark tunnel of shameful sexaholism. Something is amiss in the psychological delineation of Brandon. On the one hand he’s charmingly honest and affirmative about his lifestyle, on the other he exhibits manic-depressive symptoms, as in the noted above moments of erratic behaviour spurted by … what exactly? The moral decline of his sister, the hypocrisy of his boss, the oppresive and deepening loneliness? The titillating availability of all forms of sexual release except through intimacy? His ambiguous past? In accordance to his sister’s exculpatory pronouncement, Brandon is not a bad person, in fact the furthest he gets to being lousy is through his egotism and solitariness, but that’s too little realism to fill a half-and-an-hour of screening time. In case one might discard the gravity of the subject matter on the basis of a shallow plot line alone, the director illuminates the narrative by heavyhearted music. Fassbender’s long, pale and pained physiognomy adopts sympathetic grandeur whilst he’s night jogging to Bach, crying to a cheesy rendition of Sinatra (another tacit attack on late capitalism!!! If porn, sex and money can’t make you happy in the city of unlimited possibilities – what can?), or exchanging telling looks with a beautiful soon-to-be slut stranger on the subway to Harry Escott’s orchestral score. All that to make the audience realise that sex addiction is unmistakably a problem of monumental proportions for the XXIst century generation of yuppies and generally for the sophisticated middle-class. Not that I’m desensitized to the extent of spurning the sublime aesthetics of the story. The subway scene is beautifully executed, the sense of loneliness is depressingly close at heart , Fassbender’s performance is flawlessly beyond axiological evaluation, and I couldn't hold sway of my dirty voyeristic little heart in the overstretched scenes of urinating and frontal nudity. Still, the movie neither shocked nor surprised me, surely not with a threesome and a homoerotic blowjob as the extrema of today’s male lecherousness.

 

Fassbender and Theron in W Magazine erotic fashion session [2]

PROMETHEUS(2012).In Prometheus Fassbender plays David, an android with a surprisingly acute sense of humor, existential reflection and a will to freedom. For all the talk that the movie is a bleak metaphor of human civilization, the outcome strikes me primarily as something of a mythologizing Freudian space opera. What’s with the biblical allusions, disavowing of children, senseless testosteronic aggression among the male humans and engineers, vagina dentata symbolism? Not that I expected a pro-feminist agenda residual of 1979 but why the lack of at least mildly non-irritating female characters and why no female enegineers? Have they all stayed on the planet of engineers in order to take care of the engineer babies whilst their engineer husbands went out boldly to explore the space? Are women a Darwinian blind spot of evolution? I’d be less offended by a sacrificial engineer virgin in the initial scenes than this implication. Then at least it'd be clear why the world is so vile and dirty. The two female protagonists in the movie are cringingly asexual – one is a barren Catholic who hypocritically performs abortion on a miraculously conceived alien baby, and the other is a masculinized corporative daughter with patricidal tendencies. Two implicit sex scenes featuring the women are preceded by unbelievably vegetative flirting iniciated respectively by alcohol intoxication and libidinal drive of the hulky black captain of Prometheus. Apparently the android is the one character in the film that is not implicated in economic or carnal desires, or possessed with the morbid drive to decypher the nexus of ontogenesis, death and immortality. His telling citation from Lawrence of Arabia resounds with a Sisyphean resolution to survive despite the all-present stupidity and unkindness of the universe. On the surface he comes across as a bit of a sissy, ostensibly emasculated by Vickers and Holloway, and disregarded by other crew members. Yet, David is as sly as he is pitiable and Scott apparently intended him to be a  postmodern Adam(/artificial serpent?), the monster of Frakensteinian biotechnological humanity which creates and destroys uncontrollably and in the end gets what it deserves. What’s David purpose when he impregnates Holloway with the back alien goo? Is he acting on Weyland’s behalf? Is this his revenge on the humans who engineered him or pure curiosity? Is he “feeeling” the same way aliens “felt” towards engineers? Does his androidal atavistic hatred towards humans activate in clear and present danger? That’d explain some of it. Somehow David seems to be amused by the idea of random ontogenesis, at least to the point when he loses his head, but maybe he wasn’t versed enough in mythology (sic!) to predict the savagery of the gods. His final questioning of Shaw’s somewhat zany request seems to emphasize his artificial hence instinctually superior nature or just a lower spectrum of conceptalization of things that don’t impede his actual being(-in-itself?). Or he just doesn't care like the rest of the audience.What's obvious is that Prometheus reduplicates in a nearly Kristeva-esque fashion horrific visions of endless propagation with the abject goo that gives birth to a virus which begets a tentacle monster and then a xenomorph – I don't quite follow this disturbed gestation story arc but undoubtedly all alien forms are meant to be born in death or pain, at best, through incubators with a human DNA. A weaker form must die so that a superior one might be born; our reign is coming to an end but we’re still venturing into the cold space in search of a benevolent maker. That’s how I’m going to pretend I’ve understood the message anyhow. No need to add that I see unlimitless possibilities in the porn version/continuation of this movie on the planet of "bald albino bodybuilders"[1].

                                      

  [1] The designation is not mine but I find its homopatriarchal simplicity disturbingly adequate in the context of the movie. See http://m15m.livejournal.com/23209.html.
 [2]  http://www.wmagazine.com/story/charlize-theron-michael-fassbender-prometheus-cover-story. You're welcome.

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:

FEMALE PORN

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IN TROPICAL - LIES

From In Tropical and Jonathan Leder, the NY-based photographer of vintagesque Playboy pornomodelling.


Note: I'm turning a blind eye on the preposterous implication that a prostitute would want her clients to love her, and otherwise she might be expected to exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic disorder. Particularly, because I'm such a big sucker for semi-gratituous nudity set to dramatic storytelling and catchy tunes. Besides, I like how vultures duplicate dispassionate sexual necrophagists that fill capitalist deserts of flesh exchange nowadays, and the way they feed on the perishing sensuousness reminds me of the Baudrillardian melancholia for true seduction, too.

THE NEW OLD PORN PROTOCOL

1. Do not imagine that the pornography upon which you are engaged will ever authorize any possible explanation, interpretation, or knowledge of the world; you have riskier, more interesting work to do. Pornographic invention is neither an alternative form of knowledge, nor does it replace knowledge. Rather, it is the irreducible supplement of knowing, pornographic invention engages what the aspiration of explanation, interpretation, and knowledge can only dismiss as accidental, transitional at best. [. . .]

2. Abandon the assumption that the pornographic enterprise is reducible to questions of representation, correspondence, adequation, or judgment; what is specifically pornographic in porn is precisely what in the act of presentation exceeds representation, for porn is not merely a portrait of pleasure, but presents itself as in itself pleasurable; provoke pleasure and enjoyment instead of teaching appreciation, and thereby free art's work from every possibility for a moralistic pedagogy.

3. Address yourself, therefore, to what of your readers exceeds knowing, judging, or desiring subjectivity, for it is neither epistemological, moral, nor desiring subjects who experience the unbearable pleasure of the fuck. Offer them not objects that would confirm them in the comfortable neuroses of their subjectivities, but the singular risk of the fetish, withdrawn from the very possibility of intelligibility and meaning. Honor thereby the ontological stammering upon which the art's work opens, thus recalling to your readers what of life, beyond all reason, is consecrated to pleasure, bios apolaustikos.

4. In addressing yourself to what is most obscene and perverse in your readers - that is addressing yourself to the indestructible supplement of interpretation, knowledge, judgment, or desire, in addressing yourself to the chaos of the passions and affects, in addressing yourself to thinking - you thereby abandon the respectable comforts of the seductive transcendence promised in nostalgia and prolepsis. Choose non-transcendence, the destitution of John Greyson's Patient Zero in Patient Zero, Luke in Gregg Araki's The Living End, the unrepentant faggot of Diamanda Galás's Plague Mass, the cast of Samuel Delany's The Mad Man, Isabelle Stengers and Didier Gille's "utter fool," all memebers of a "race" that in affirming its non-transcnedence "is not the one that claims to be pure but rather an oppressed, bastard, lower, anarchical, nomadic, and irremediably minor race - the very ones Kafka excluded form the paths of the new Critique," as Deleuze and Guattari have it: the whore, the hustler, the bad queer, the junkie, the Lumpenproletariat, the mad, the stranger.

5. And thereby abandon any project that would reduce the political (as such) to any geography of location or cartography of position, whether literal or metaphorical. Abandon the putatively neutral white cube of the museum for the labyrinth and the corridor; desert the boulevard for the alleys, forsake the park's lawns for the shrubbery; leave the stadium for the deserted warehouse. Or better yet, transform the white cube into a labyrinth, architecture into something not simply anti-architectural, but undecidedly contingent, something at once both and neither architecture and anti-architecture. Above all. transform location or position, always already a point in space fixed in a possible cartography or geography, into place, the "here, now" of Whitehead's prehension, or Deleuze and Guattari's plane of immanence, or the place of the stranger's pleasure - all of which specify an engagement of thinking with its impossibility precisely in an absolute resistance to any attempt to reduce place to location. "Here, "now" is the place of simultaneity of deterritorialization/reterritorialization, the place of fragmentation, anonimity, promiscuity, utter strangeness, unknowable difference, and an obscene perverse pleasure subject to no possible calculus. The New Porn never forgets that this untenable place of absolute risk is at once infinitely hospitable and entirely uninhabitable; "here, now" is nevertheless the New Porn's only place, for it is here, and here alone that the political ("in itself and as such") happens.

William Haver, from the Foreword to The Logic of the Lure and the New Pornography. London: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p.xi-xiii.