Snuff

It used to be that people talked about romantic love and there are all kinds of stories of star crossed lovers in the Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolde vein who either overcame or succumbed to enormous obstacles. In some third world countries with repressive cultures like Afghanistan this story is still being told. Only recently an Afghan couple faced reprisals and even death threats for rebelling against the tradition of arranged marriage ("Afghan Newlyweds, Facing Threats, Find Brief Respite in Mountains,” NYT, 4/21/14). It’s one thing to climb or move mountains and face danger for love, but is pleasure, any kind of pure pleasure so desirable that one would risk one’s life for it? For instance, there is a Japanese delicacy called Fugu or puffer fish, which is highly prized though it can be lethal if not prepared correctly. However prosaic, the Swanson’s Hungry-Man Fried Chicken TV dinner starts to seem appetizing in comparison. Sex tourists often go to great length and danger to chase after what they must consciously realize are similarly lethal temptations. As the old saying goes “15 Will Get You Life.”  One wonders if part of the pleasure or compulsion doesn’t subliminally lie in the danger, the threat of punishment, of being caught. Two recent news items underscore the lengths to which people will go not for love, but for pure pleasure. The first is the case of the Subway pitchman who was involved with child pornography and assignations with underage girls (“Jared Fogle, Ex-Subway Pitchman, To Plead Guilty to Child Sex and Pornography Charges,” NYT, 8/19/15) The second involves the student at St. Paul’s, who in exercising a contemporary form of droit du seigneur, described in the piece as “senior salute," ended up being charged with rape (“Rape Case Puts Focus on Culture of Elite St. Paul’s School,” NYT, 8/18/15).  It’s easy to see why Tristan or Romeo braved everything for love, but what accounts for the lengths that some people will go for the pleasure of eating a piece of fish or for that matter having sex with an anonymous child. In the case of the St. Paul’s student the object seems to have been to sleep with as many girls as possible and become the winner of a contest. Under age sex was involved, but the goal on first glance appears to be more about a perverse form of competition. In the case of Fogle, the motive appears to be even more nefarious and all pervasive. Back in the 70’s there was a porn film entitled Snuff, which played on the notion that it was showing an actress actually being killed in the act of making a film and advertised itself as, “The film that could only be made in South America...where Life is CHEAP." It only had a brief run, but it’s female lead was no Juliet. Necrophilia is sex with a corpse. Forget about Bill Cosby drugging women, or Jason Fogle’s pedophilia, will we soon be finding celebrities being accused of participating in safaris where the game are humans? Significantly the Times piece quotes the prosecution as describing students involved in the practice used at St. Paul’s as “slaying." But what is fun anyway? What is desire? What hedonistic wish is being gratified in the pursuit of all this “pleasure?" Is happiness killing Cecil?

The Bunny Game

Photograph: Adam Rehmeier

In a piece in the Sunday Times Arts and Leisure Section about how far directors and in this cases actresses will go to create horror (“Testing Horror’s Threshold for Pain,” NYT, 9/14/12), Erik Piepenburg remarks, “Rodleen Getsic—who endured unspeakable acts while shooting the film ‘The Bunny Game’—is no mere scream queen. Ms. Getsic, 37, plays a prostitute abducted by a crazed truck drive (Jeff Renfro), who drugs and strips her and chains her inside his rig. For the rest of the film’s 76-minute running time he sexually assaults her; slaps and spits on her; shaves her head; drags her, in a grotesque rabbit-shaped hood that gives the film its title, on a leash through the desert. There are other indignities as well, but in the film’s most brutal scene the actress is actually branded on her back.” The question is what is the demographic for such a film? Back in the 70’s a movie called Snuff, purported to depict in a no holds barred way the murderous exploits of a gang of real bikers. Snuff targeted necrophiliacs the same way, from a marketing point of view, Pasolini’s Salo, would have been a sure thing for coprophilia oriented focus groups. The conceptual artist Chris Burden literally crucified himself for the sake of art in his piece Trans-fixed (l974) and the penectomy in In the Realm of the Senses could have be blamed for stimulating a copy cat crime if Lorena Bobbitt had been a student of  Japanese film. Was Adam Rehmeier, who directed the The Bunny Game, aiming to appeal to the audience of pimps described in some of Nicholas Kristof’s journalistic exposes, the kind of pimps who think nothing about branding a young girl’s cheek? On the art side are we playing to ever growing followings of self-mutilators like Marina Abramovic, who might have cut off her penis for art, if only she’d had one?