Sunday 16 January 2011

On My Own With Cocks: In the Cut & Enter the Void


Both times I have gone to the cinema by myself there has been a massive cock on the screen. By this point you are probably expecting a joke about an actor I don't like, and I promise I will not leave you unsatisfied, but you will have to put a little more time in before I provide you with your jollies...

The first film I saw at the cinema by myself was Jane Campions's In The Cut.It was an important experience for me as a “straight” man and there was a cock on the screen.

Meg was almost as surprised as me.
Meg Ryan's character walks through to the back room of a club, she peers round into the darkness. A man whose face is obscured by shadow is receiving oral sex from a young woman. We are then shown several close ups of the woman's lips moving over the man's erect penis. This scene occurred before I had really realised that this was being viewed from a female gaze, and I did not understand why I felt so uncomfortable. I did not think it was just because I was in a packed cinema on my own with predominantly older women. The camera angle was low, the woman's face was to the left of the screen and as you read across to the right you could see along the erect shaft towards the man. It's an extreme close up of the angle that Meg Ryan is viewing this all from.

This new view point was what I found really disconcerting. I do find oral sex an odd thing in pornography, very often the only pornographic body part on show is the penis, so the element of arousal for straight men is what the woman is doing to the penis and/or what the penis is doing to the woman. This turns fellatio into a matter of male dominance rather than an intimate sexual act between two people. I find this odd and wrong but it does not make me uncomfortable. I remember thinking that I did not think it right that pornographic oral sex did not make me uncomfortable and yet it did from a female view point, even though this was in an artisticly creative context and did not probe at my internal morality metre. Either I should feel uncomfortable in both circumstances or neither, well in this case possibly only comfortable with In The Cutbut I don't want to make a judgement call on pornography right now, but I feel pretty confident there is something fundamentally wrong with this inequality of perspective.

To see either fellatio or cunnilingus from the female perspective is very rare. Even pornography that has been shot by females for females often takes these male perspectives, viewing from the male in terms of camera angles and in male dominant/female submissive positions. In The Cutdeals with the cunnilingus female perspective later in the film when Meg Ryan's character has sex with the detective. We see his body, we see him moving her into position, we see down her body to his head moving in.

This is when I truly realised what was going on, why all of this felt so unnatural to me. I was not used to seeing so much of the man. It felt so alien to see sex scenes from these angles, and as a man to see sex at all from a female perspective. It made me wonder about the effect that all the rest of the films are having on their audience. For men it means that we are neglected an alternative perspective, one that might make us more empathetic individuals when relating to the opposite sex, which would be a good thing for everybody.

I imagine for women being subjected predominatly to a male gaze would alienate their perspective and could encourage them to view everything from a male one, which would mean they would always be looking at themselves as if they were a man gazing unto them. It is bad enough to be objectified by others but it is surely even worse to objectify yourself. I imagine this could and probably does cause a great deal of insecurity about body image.

The issue of the male gaze is well documented within film theory but yet there are so few female directors making films actually from a female gaze. Even when a films protagonist is female we are usually asked to gaze upon her and follow her rather than being asked to take her role as is the case with the majority of male focused films. It seems natural that this is instinctively done by male directors, but it is very often the case for female directors too. It takes someone like Campion to realise what is going on and do something different. But it is sad that it seems to take such a conscious decision to make a film from ones own gender's perspective. In The Cutdoes a great job of breaking free of the male gaze but it is a shame that it has to break free of anything to offer this. It was also a good thriller and well worth watching on top of all this other stuff.

This is not the best examples of male/female gaze in relation to oral sex but it gives an idea and I did not want to use anything completely explicit on my blog. I had tried to draw some crude little pictures to demonstrate it better but apparently my drawing ability doesn't even stretch as far as crude when it comes to representing perspectives.


The second film I have seen at the cinema on my own is Enter the Void.I went to see it at a quarter past three in the afternoon in a near empty cinema, two sweet older ladies said hello to me as I entered, they were sat at the back and told me they liked to come there often in the afternoon to watch films. I wondered if they knew what they were getting themselves in for. But I do not like to make assumptions about people (well I probably do like to but I do not think I should) and thought 'well they watch a lot of films they probably are happy with all kinds of stuff and I am being terribly rude thinking that they could not “handle it”'. Another man came into the cinema and then the film began, not long after the barrage of opening credits I heard the two women at the back saying to each other that it was lucky they did not suffer from epileptic fits, and they had a little giggle. I also heard another person enter the cinema, they sat just behind me.

The film certainly lived up to the trailer, lots of surreal imagery, a dark tone, lots of flashing colours, lots of sex, lots of drugs and all pretty in your face. I was disappointed that by about an hour in (time was very difficult to gage during the film) the two ladies at the back left the cinema. I had really hoped they would prove my thoughts wrong and prove me right for feeling bad about having them. The acting was a bit hit or miss and the story was a tad meandering and a touch obvious in a way which just made me think 'narratively it went on a bit' but it did not really matter because it was such a stunning visual piece and I was happily floating about in the cinema for the 2 hours 40 minute duration.

I have since read that film has been compared to 2001: A Space Odyssey,and although I see the resemblance I would struggle to believe that this film will stand the test of time to such a degree. It is ground breaking in so many of the things it does, bringing things I have only really seen in experimental moving image into narrative cinema and this is a good thing and very exciting. However, if other people begin to use these techniques with grander stories with more depth and better performances then what will be left will be a landmark in film history from a technical perspective but also a film that has a lot less beneath its skin than I think it would like to think it had. Not to undersell it though, it was good.

1st and 3rd person at the same time.
As for the the cock, well this was a film that was definitely from a male perspective, so much so that the entire film was first person, sometimes third and first person at the same time, from the male protagonists perspective. I would say however that the film was aware of this and the issues that it dealt with, for instance a real fixation on nipple sucking, were treated with a strong awareness of the complexity of sexual feelings.

Despite being chock full of real sex toward the end, the film did a fine job of not descending into pornography. At least not my definition. Like In The Cut,Enter the Voidwas also an uncomfortable experience. This has a lot to do with how it challenges sexuality and plenty to do with the incestuous nature of so much of it, be it the more acceptable links between the mother's teat and a fascination with breasts or the confused incestuous relationship between the brother and sister or the mother figure who the protagonist had sex with or the older Japanese sugar daddy who did actually seem to care for his stripper/the sister.

In the end though like the giant close ups of the erect penis receiving oral sex that I witnessed during my first lonesome cinema outing, I was treated to another giant close up of an erect penis, this time from inside a vagina, and as an extra special treat it ejaculates right at the screen. This is quite a change from the male perspective of the rest of the film, although we then follow the semen on its journey and technically we have yet to leave the protagonist's perspective. Despite the almost scientific approach to this sequence I still found the image surprising and I am left wondering why cocks on screen surprise me so much, but lady parts do not, I guess that is just more evidence of the considerable lack of gender balance in this supposedly enlightened era.

The two women at the back of the cinema might have left, but when I got up after the film was over I discovered that the person who sat just behind me was an even older woman who had come to watch it by herself. That made me happy.
I think the real lesson I have learnt is that whenever you go on your own to the cinema you will definitely see a larger than life penis. I guess I might go and see The Next Three Daysby myself, I believe that has a massive cock in it.

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