Pornosophy: Vice isn’t Nice, but Neither is Sex

Oedipus at Colonnus by Jean-Antoine-Theodore Giroust (1788)

For some people sex is an embarrassing painful and even expensive process whose only reward leads to the birth of a little tyke who trails you around admiringly for at least the first few years of its miserable life. Gay folks used to be exempt, but now that eggs and sperm can easily be drafted into service, sexual orientation no longer matters. Later the tyke will grow up and hate your guts so much that it may even want to off you, especially if it’s a motherfucker who wants its dad dead. Oedipus tried to run away from his fate, but ended up murdering the appropriately named Laius. But getting back to rewards. It’s like the time trials for the l00 yard dash. Some people exhaust themselves and end up with nothing more than cramps. There are a minority who enjoy sex. Usually these are the same people who trumpet the notion of art for art’s sake. This small but voluble group are always trying to get more conscripts through the creation of hedonistic propaganda. The Marquis de Sade, Frank Harris, D.H. Lawrence, Pauline Reage, Henry Miller and most recently E. L. James of 50 Shades of Grey fame are literary examples of this tendency, along with Gustave Courbet (“The Origin of the World”), Egon Schiele, Bernardo Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris) and Lars Von Trier (Nymphomaniac) representing the fine arts and film. But one wonders if they would shut up if they actually had to put up. Talk is cheap. Is the pursuit of pleasure, Freud’s “pleasure principle,” actually all that it’s cracked up to be?

Pornosophy: Ten Sex Clubs Where You Can Redeem Your Rewards Points

There's obviously nothing unusual about credit cards being used in sex clubs and lap dancing establishments. That's in fact how most of these businesses make their profits. The customer gets inebriated and the sky or his credit ceiling is the limit. How many purveyors of credit card sex wish the day after that they had not had their cards so readily available? But what about the sex tourist with a good business sense, the kind who is level-headed enough to use his or her rewards points to pay for their transactions? One of the most common ways of using rewards points is for air travel. Accumulate enough points and you can buy your tickets to Paris, Rome or even a sex capital like Bangkok. But once you have arrived the trick is to find the kind of lap dancing establishments, massage parlors and brothels where you can use your rewards points to buy foreplay or even intercourse. The question is can you reap a real reward for your rewards points and if in the moment of passionate lust, you have the wherewithal to defer your reward so that you can make a financially sound decision that will not exhaust the budget. How many sex tourists would have been spared credit card debt if they had had the presence of mind to employ this version of coitus interruptus? Sure they might drain their rewards point accounts to the point where it will be a long time before they’re flying, but the experience will undoubtedly produce its own high. Imagine a hypothetical list of ten new sex clubs where rewards points can be exchanged for sex. The first would be Last Tango in Paris’s Second Arrondissement. There for 1,000, 000 rewards points you’d be able to relive the famous butter scene from the Bertolucci classic.

Towards a Revisionist Cinema

Many classics of the European cinema could easily be turned on their heads with relatively minor tweaking of their scripts. Let’s consider a sequel to Bertolucci’s The Conformist entitled, The Nonconformist. The film would be a revisionist work that takes the theme of the Bertolucci classic and turns it into an essay about a good guy who refuses to go along with fascists and suffers from no psychosexual problems. You wouldn’t need a beauty like Dominique Sanda in this low budget production since the main character would never flee from his pleasant inauspicious surroundings and his plain Jane wife. After the war, our central figure, Massimo, is rewarded by getting a bureaucratic job filing papers for the ruling Christian Democratic party.  L’Avventura Redux  could be another another revisionist classic. In this sequel, three fashionable Italians, contemporary versions of Monica Vitti, Lea Massari and Gabrielle Ferzetti (who starred in the original Antonioni movie) play a threesome who go off on a pleasure cruise. The Masari and Ferzetti types are an item and the Monica Vitti look- alike is the odd man or in this case woman out. She triangulates and is intermittently seductive as she sunbathes topless on a rock, but only in an innocuous way and at the end of the movie the boat returns to port. In a final shot, the three are shown driving off to dinner in an Italian restaurant, which is not surprising since the movie is set in Italy. Why do we need revisionism in cinema? Why can’t we simply be happy with the restored prints? The answer is simple. The Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended, but the great old dinosaurs of modern cinema, which were products of their eras, never budged. It’s a new world and one in which films, in order to remain relevant to their audience, must be remodeled like old houses in which 50’s appliances are replaced with up to date refrigerators and stoves.

The Conformist

What is normalcy—in the human being, and in the philosophical perception of reality that is the theoretical underpinning of Bertolucci’s masterpiece The Conformist (1970), currently in revival at Film Forum? Professor Luca Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), the doomed anti-fascist, is the quarry of Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), whose name resonates the search for clarity. Quadri had taught Clerici the allegory of Plato’s cave when Clerici was Quadri’s student, and an initial scene in which they are reunited literally depicts the shadows disappearing from the wall. But the whole style of the film, in which seeming realism is belied by a complex storyline made up of time shifts and flashbacks, also puts the viewer into the point of view of Clerici, whose attempt to rid his life of ambiguity about both his sexuality (he’d had an early homosexual experience with the family chauffeur) and upbringing (he’d been brought up by a drug addicted mother) leads him to seek the illusion of normalcy through joining the fascist party. What then is being normal? At one point Clerici’s blind fascist comrade tells him normalcy is gazing at a woman’s bottom and then going to bars and other gathering places where like-minded men gather. Georges Delerue’s haunting score, the magnificent beaux arts settings, rendered by the great production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, and the astonishing work of the famed Bertolucci cinematographer Vittorio Storaro in making Clerici an iconographic almost architectural presence—his fedora-clad silhouette, shot from the back along the narrow corridor of a Paris hotel—all contribute to this great monument to the trompe l’oeil nature of both the political and personal worlds.

I am Love

Luca Guadagnino’s I am Love is an essay on superficiality posing as profundity. The film begins in snow and ends with rain falling on statues. Using these images, Guadagnino introduces the classic elements of the pathetic fallacy, with nature mirroring the emotions of delusion and sorrow. Add to this the stylized title sequences draped in Art Deco fonts. Name your scandalous heroine Emma and cast the role with an actress who has made a reputation in high-art cinema, like the film based on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Have her fall in love with a chef. Is it her love of his shrimp that is the turning point of the drama, or is it her lust for him that makes her eventually fall in love with the shrimp? Establish the aristocratic, novelistic Italian drama, which is immediately suggestive of truly great works of cinema like Visconti’s The Leopard, and then add lush lyric sequences (including, naturally, the friezes of auspicious edifices) that conjure the sweep of history in movies like De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and Bertolucci’s The Conformist. Portray doting servants of the kind that appeared in the self-same Italian epics. Create leitmotifs like a cropped hairstyle shared by an adulterous mother and lesbian daughter to establish a relationship predicated on rebellion. And then, as the coup de grace, create the ultimate piece of melodrama in an adventitious and tragic accident that reveals the falsity of a world. In The Leopard, as a case in point, Visconti created a tragic figure defined by the complexity of the historical context in which he found himself—an aristocrat at the time of Garibaldi, facing the economic exigencies of an aggressive new mercantile order. Based on the novel by Lampedusa, The Leopard was a profound meditation on the passing of a way of life. Ironically, there are Tancredis in both movies, but the similarity is in name only.