SEX SURVEY SEGUE

Before proceeding to Part 2 of the "sexual embodiment" test, I feel the need to draw parallels between the three categories posited in PART 1 and three categories posited in the earlier essay LET'S GET SEMI-DIRTY.

In the latter essay, I started out with two terms introduced in a yet earlier piece, which sought to analyze two aspects of what I now call "embodiment"-- that is, "sex" and "violence" in literature-- and ally them with "clean" and "dirty" versions in terms of the intensity of what the viewer/reader was shown. 

In earlier essays on this theme I tended to discuss violence, but SEMI-DIRTY is intended to focus on demonstrating an interstitial category-- "semi-dirty"-- and for that I emphasized the aspect of fictional sex:

I didn’t give [in the earlier essay referenced] parallel examples of sex, but the same standard of explicitness applies. I should note that whether a work is clean or dirty has no bearing on how exciting its kinetic elements may be for a given audience-member. Some may well find the clean but vivid courtship-rituals of NORTH BY NORTHWEST more stimulating than the explicit dirtiness of LAST TANGO IN PARIS.

The same generalization applies to the "semi-dirty" category; some may prefer it to either manifestation.  Going purely on anecdotal experience, I have one (never to be named) acquaintance who dislikes sexual explicitness of any kind.  I would presume that if he gets turned on by any sort of fiction, it would have to be something comparable to the "vivid courtship-rituals of NORTH BY NORTHWEST."

At the other extreme, I have another acquaintance whose main comment to a screening of FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! was to complain about the lack of (visible) tits.  So presumably nothing but "explicit dirtiness" would have worked for this individual.

The three categories I'll be using for the "sexual embodiment test" thus line up rather well if I say so myself:

GLAMOR-- "clean" sexuality
TITILLATION-- "semi-dirty" sexuality
PORNIFICATION-- "dirty" sexuality

The only major difference between these parallel essays is that in the "clean & dirty" ones, I didn't address narrative function at all.  In BATTLE OF THE MONSTER TERMINOLOGIES, I used separate terms to describe narrative function pertaining to spectacle, designating a dichotomy between "functional violence" and "spectacular violence"-- with the usual caveat that the same dichotomy applies to fictional sexual representation.  However, an interstititial category can be created for this aspect as well:

GLAMOR-- "functional" sexuality
TITILLATION-- "semi-spectacular" sexuality
PORNIFICATION-- "full monte spectacular" sexuality

Next up:  (part of) THE NEW 52 takes the TEST.

LET'S GET (SEMI) DIRTY

One reason that I felt compelled to write my tardy mini-obituary to Tura Satana is that lately I’d been giving more thought to a paradox involving certain types of exploitation fiction in the vein of FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! The paradox is as follows: certain fictional works can put across the impression of being “dirty” even though one doesn’t really see the “dirt.” It’s a fair parallel to my concept of the uncanny-metaphonemenal, in which certain works can convey the sense that rational order has been violated even though it has not, at least not in the cognitive sense.


In this essay I suggested that functionally the best basis through which one could distinguish between whether a work was “clean” or “dirty”--a basis that would theoretically subsume any particular cultural standards--would be to examine how explicitly the work portrays the kinetic elements of either sex, or violence, or the two conjoined.


To recap: the violence of STAR WARS is clean because, apart from one cut-off arm, one sees very little evidence of bodies being broken or torn, while ALIEN is dirty because it is replete with dozens of scenes that violate the body’s integrity.


I didn’t give parallel examples of sex, but the same standard of explicitness applies. I should note that whether a work is clean or dirty has no bearing on how exciting its kinetic elements may be for a given audience-member. Some may well find the clean but vivid courtship-rituals of NORTH BY NORTHWEST more stimulating than the explicit dirtiness of LAST TANGO IN PARIS.


Complicating the problem even more is that even though sex and violence are cognitively separable, affectively they can flow into one another with very little encouragement. Admittedly, one can never be sure to what extent this is, for denizens of the post-industrial ages, a cultural construction spawned by the haunting spectre of Freud. But even if one concedes that Freud was right in some instances, it’s easy to see places where he overstated his case, to say nothing of All His Children, many of whom I’ve refuted on this blog, ranging from Wertham and Legman to Noah Berlatsky. The one common theme of these Freud-spawn seems to be that they do not recognize the element of “violence” as having its own integrity: it’s always an overcompensation for some sexual desire. Yet even with a film like ALIEN--where it’s clear that the filmmakers consciously sought to overlay the violent elements with sexual elements--the two remain cognitively distinguishable.

FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!, however, is a even more significant blend of the two elements, even though the opening voiceover ironically insists asserts the primacy of violence:

“Ladies and Gentlemen—welcome to Violence—the Word and the Act. While violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favorite mantle still remains—Sex!”

In a very different (but not incommensuable) context, George Bataille also asserted that sex was just violence misspelled:

"In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation"-- Bataille, EROTISM, p. 16.


I've disagreed with him as well, but Bataille was correct in seeing that the common ground shared by sex and violence is that both are a “sensuous frenzy” that violates human rationality. This quality of emotional frenzy provides the liminal psychic space where the two discrete phenomena intersect: the “Lookout Point” where the two conjoin.

However, what makes PUSSYCAT more impressive than ALIEN is that by the terms of my earlier definition, PUSSYCAT would have to be regarded as “clean.”

Reputedly director Russ Meyer had intended to film some or all actresses in the buff, but the local authorities were watching the shoot too closely, and he was forced to make do with a few discreet shower-scenes. And though the scenes of violence—Varla’s fights with two men, her attempt to slowly crush a strongman with her car’s bumper—are sensationally executed, they also avoid showing much in the way of bodily violation: of seeping blood or broken, disarranged limbs. (With both elements Meyer would become much more explicit in such later films as BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS.)





Thus it seems that even though PUSSYCAT looks as clean as STAR WARS or NORTH BY NORTHWEST, it suggests explicitness far more than the other two films, and therefore PUSSYCAT feels “dirty.” Thus, it is “affectively but not cognitively dirty,” a.k.a. “semi-dirty.”


I don’t actually plan to use this term on a regular basis, but it does serve to illustrate that intervening liminal space for possible future use. In the next essay I’ll trundle down memory lane to reminisce about some of the first films in which I experienced the quality of “semi-dirtiness.”

BATTLE OF THE MONSTER TERMINOLOGIES

"The scenes I have in mind are ones of violence, specifically ones of preposterous violence. By 'preposterous' I mean so exaggerated that most of the audience know full well that what they are watching is make-believe."-- James B. Twitchell, PREPOSTEROUS VIOLENCE (1989), p. 3.

Roughly twenty years have passed, and to my knowledge no one's forged a better overarching analysis of the element of violence in pop culture than Twitchell. I don't advocate his thesis as a whole, which focuses on pop culture as pedagogical training somewhat after the fashion of Bruno Bettelheim, but the book puts forth a number of telling insights, one of which is his above-cited concept of "preposterous violence." I won't be using his term here, in part to distance my theories from Twitchell's, and in part because one of the problems with his theory as expressed in PV is that he doesn't formulate a term for the opposite of his "exaggerated" form of violence.

I said in an earlier essay that I would address the differing "intensities" of violence in fiction, by which I meant what I called "clean violence" vs. "dirty violence." These are NOT meant to be covalent with my versions of Twitchell's preposterous violence and its unnamed opposite. I refer to the "intensities" of clean and dirty because they are determined purely by how intensely the work does or does not present scenes of violence. As I see it preposterious violence and its opposite are not determined by intensity of effect but by narrative function.

In that earlier essay I used STAR WARS as an example of "clean" violence while ALIEN served for "dirty violence." Clearly the distinction doesn't arise from any quantification of violent acts, since there are many, many more scenes of violence in SW than in ALIEN, and many of those scenes culminate in someone's death. ALIEN's violence involves only the title critter and a half dozen humans vying with one another.

But ALIEN, though less violent in terms of numbers, is "dirtier" than STAR WARS because of the former's determination to show the visceral side of violence in all its oozing, bleeding, gushing and chest-bursting glory. The violent acts in STAR WARS are "clean" because the film declines to show Storm Troopers with their chest cavities blown open, or with their blood gushing out onto the hangar deck, and so on. Indeed, scuttlebutt asserts that the only reason Lucas had Obi-wan cut off some alien felon's arm in the Cantina Scene was to avoid having the film given the kiss-of-death "G" rating.

Now, in my view both SW and ALIEN, despite the intensity or lack of same with which they depict violence, are alike in the way both use violence as a narrative tool. I don't know if James Twitchell would find that both of them qualify as "preposterous violence" (neither gets much attention in PV), but I consider that both qualify as "spectactular violence," which I re-define as "that violence whose depiction is more the point of the story than the ostensible plot." Spectacular violence is the violence of the spectacle: it's meant to be looked at.

In contrast to this, I offer the term "functional violence." Twitchell doesn't put a name to this category of violence in PV but he clearly describes its distinction from its more exaggerated relation on page 188:

"The three film-genres which the Museum of Modern Art chose as being the most violence-prone [in 1969] were the Western, the detective, and the juvenile-gone-delinquent... But if you really examine the films chosen to typify violence in America in the early postwar decades, your immediate reaction is that they seem tame by modern standards... Violence is almost always a means to an end..."

Twitchell goes on to compare a list of these tame postwar films, including classics like LADY FROM SHANGHAI and THE BIG HEAT, against both the films that rose in the late 60s and early 70s (WILD BUNCH, STRAW DOGS) and in later periods (NIGHTMARE ON ELM ST, DAWN OF THE DEAD). [Side-note: he mistakenly implies that 1963's BLOOD FEAST belongs in this third list.) Twitchell stresses the greater "intensity of violence" in the later films.

Yet some viewers might find the scalding of Gloria Grahame's face in THE BIG HEAT as viscerally horrifying as anything in STRAW DOGS. Because of this sort of viewer ambivalence I choose to determine the "intensity" of the violence in a work purely on the "clean/dirty" dichotomy. Does blood flow, do arms get broken, are heads blown off? If not, they're "clean;" if so, they're "dirty," using "dirty" in the sense that Mary Douglas defined dirt as "matter in the wrong place."

For me the defining distinction is that films like THE BIG HEAT generally use their violence, no matter how visceral, in a "functional" way: as "a means to an end." In such a work a given violent act may be spectacular but it does not detract from the plot.

More in Part 2.