Moonstruck

Venus de Milo

Mooning is looked at as adolescent behavior. What is the point of putting your ass in the windshield of a car—something which could cause an accident? Even streaking seems to have lost its popularity. Princeton used to have a streaking team, but it was done away with several years ago. Exhibitionism is now looked at as clownishness, as is the case with the Naked Cowboy in Times Square who has become as sorrowful as the Midnight Cowboy played by Jon Voigt in the film classic of the same name.. But when you come down to it nudity plays a function that's rather profound. When you take off your clothes, you are rehearsing for the spiritual strip tease by which you remove the veils, the lies, the subterfuges upon which you hide. Nudity is to honesty what the Zen bench is to meditation. Know thy self is the expression and what better way to know and be known than to undress. What are we besides the adornments that identify us as adherents to this or that rung on the ladder of this or that position on the food chain? Get naked and find out. A law should be passed where one day a year those who wish to take their clothes off and parade around in public are given immunity from indecent exposure. One thing is certain, in our materialistic age, no one is likely to have the imagination to praise the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus and 2012

The search for Nirvana had not lost its virginity when it first started to appear in films and novels in the in the 50’s and 60’s. Enlightenment was the Holy Grail, which would be attained through, marijuana, mescaline and LSD. Easy Rider and On the Road are the eponymous examples which left an indelible mark on the genre. Sebastian Silva’s Crystal Fairy &The Magical Cactus and 2012 actually is dated or postdated, as it were, for a reason. Now the spiritual search has not only lost its virginity. It’s an aging whore. Jamie (Michael Cera) is an American in Chile who suffers from a kind of OCD regarding hallucinatory experience itself. Though he doesn’t realize it, he’s a burgeoning addict. Silva’s brilliance lies in not reducing the malady to the usual hand wringing. Through Silva’s lens we see Jamie as a compulsive seeker for the drug that will free him from being what he is. He meets up with another American, Crystal Fairy (Gaby Hoffmann). On the surface, she’s a later day love child (nicknamed Crystal Hairy because of her unshaved armpits and pubic hair) who regards sugar as a toxin, but sees nothing wrong with drugs. But she too isn’t easily reduced. As a teenager she’d been raped and while the tension between her and Jamie always revolves around her quest for meaning and beauty in the face of his drive to simply get high, she turns out to be a dominatrix who assaults her slaves with a strap-on. One scene at the beginning of the film tells the whole story and it alludes back to an iconic scene in another drug soused film, Trainspotting. Jamie’s at a party and takes a monster dump that doesn’t flush. In Trainspotting the drugs disappear down the toilet. So here’s drug taking circa 2012—pure shit. The actual drug that the characters in the movie seek derives from cooking a cactus found in Northern Chile, but it’s almost an afterthought. Jamie and Crystal (whose real name turns out to be Isabelle) learn something, but you wonder if it’s because of the drugs or the interpersonal ordeal, that takes place in the process of trying to acquire them.

Homo Sapiens Cybens

Hal 9000 From 2001: A Space Odyssey, photo: Cryteria

In an Op-Ed piece entitled “Weiner’s Woman,” (NYT, 7/30/13), Susan Jacoby remarks that women who participate in internet sex are “not victims of men like Mr. Weiner… but full and equal participants” though she finds it “infinitely sad to imagine a vibrant young woman sitting alone at her computer and turning herself into a sex object for a man... she doesn’t know, even if she is also turning him into a sex object.” Jacoby also remarks that women are still getting the lesser end of the stick since  “men are more interested in and aroused by pornography than women” and “women who settle for digital pornography are lowering their expectations and hopes even more drastically than their male collaborators are.” What Jacoby doesn't realize is that the Weiner scandal is just the tip of the iceberg. It merely gives us a portal into the fate of mankind. If the future of the human race lies not in the body which will become an anachronism when the sun dies and the world falls apart, it certainly exists in cyberspace, where Homo sapiens cybens will be the new species--as mankind preserves the great accomplishment of consciousness while shedding its bodily form the way the butterfly escapes its chrysalis. Politicians like Anthony Weiner will be sending images of their “selves,” or avatars since there will literally be nothing else. The neurogenic pathways of sexual desire will be preserved as a memory even if there is no brain to house them and consciousnesses starved for contact will gratefully welcome cybersexual advances. One thing is certain, life in cyberspace will be far less cruel than it is here on earth where love is still a meat market and humans imprisoned in their bodies pay more attention to outer appearances than they do to the beauty of the mind. Looking at it this way, Anthony Weiner like millions of other people who enjoy cybersex, is a pioneer, a tragic figure way ahead of his time. He would have been the perfect mayor for the cyber version of New York that will undoubtedly replace our city millions of years from now.

The Servant

Saying that The Servant is about reality is like saying that a great poem like “Ozymandias" is about reality. "Ozymandias" is about reality, but it has a peculiar relationship to reality. Thus you could say the Joseph Losey masterpiece, with screenplay by Harold Pinter, currently revived at Film Forum (today is the last day of the run), is about colonialism, about sado-masochistic sexuality, or about servitude (Dirk Bogarde’s portrayal of the title character, Hugo Barrett, is a tour de force). The iconography of colonialism is everywhere from the Georgian mansion with its military portrait, the sexuality with its mixture of submission and resignation and the master servant relation which gets reflected in the convex mirror brilliantly based on van Eyck’s,  “The Arnolfini Marriage.”And then there is this one piece of narrative which brings everything together. Tony (James Fox), the fey upper crust master is building cities in the Brazilian jungle, while in effect the movie charts a jungle being released in the middle of one of the most posh areas of London. But the genius of the film is that none of the themes which one might extrapolate adequately account for its power which is that of music. Speaking of music Cleo Laine singing “Now While I love You Alone,” is one of the leitmotifs, which include the dripping of water, the falling of snow and rain and a bookshelf which is also a door. In music you speak of cadences and keys. In The Servant indenture and unraveling are the river on which human debris flows. The integrity of personality is shattered and the lines divided the self and others is blurred. There’s a wonderful scene in restaurant where conversations between a pair of prelates, an arguing mother and daughter and Tony and Susan all meld into one, a harmonious cacophony, with each reflecting the other,  like the mirrors which are ubiquitous in the movie. In another scene Hugo Barrett’s girl, Vera (Sarah Miles), tells Tony, “I love Hugo,” but the words come out sounding like “I love you, though." “Oh I forgot to tell you. I found a man servant,” Tony tells his girlfriend Susan (Wendy Craig) at the beginning. “A what?” she laughs in disbelief. At first you wonder what’s so hard for a woman of Susan’s class to understand. Then you find out.