AudioShocker

A celebration is in order with this post, as it marks the beginning of the second year of Culturology. Crazy, I know. I think forty-two posts/articles (some more fully formed than others, though all of them springing forth, Athena-like, from my forehead) in fifty-two weeks is pretty damn impressive. Maybe 10 weeks off seems like more than the standard number of vacation weeks in the contemporary work week, but Americans work too hard, and since these publish on Mondays, and almost all the bank/gov't/university (the latter effecting me most since it's where I get my internet) holidays take place. Had Nick and Neal any idea what a stalwart contributor they were adding to the audioshocking ranks when they convinced me to do this? It strikes me as being a worthy activity of singing my own praises for the entirety of this post, I will refrain from doing so.

Though I hit the theaters with frequency, the bulk of my movie watching, as with so many people these days, via an internet-based, DVD-rental-mailing system. Given the wide scope of my interests, without careful planning working-down-the-queue style movie arrivals (the kind of careful planning which got Bloodsport and Kickboxer to my door on the same day--a day where I had a big important meeting with my thesis adviser, so needed the ass-kicking celebration that evening (a duo of movies, by the way, which hopefully Nick and I will think of a clever way of discussing here in a future post)). As an example of less careful planning, the two movies I had over the weekend: Studio Ghibli's The Cat Returns, an animated feature for young audiences, and Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses, a movie best known, probably, for its unsimulated sex scenes (but totally legit, since, like, it's on Criterion Collection...).

So both movies were Japanese, watched by me with English subtitles, but the similarities stop with that. I figure, at least with the audio in Japanese, my neighbors, if they heard my speakers, couldn't tell what I was watching ("Ugh, our stupid neighbor is watching kids' movies again," or "Ugh, our neighbor is watching pornography again."). Both movies featured a fair amount of screaming, though the prior featured the shrieks of a teenager being startled by the strange occurrences in a mystical land of cats, and the latter the orgasmic shrieks of a woman so in love and obsessed with her lover that she cuts off his penis at the end of the movie to keep it (based on a true story!). I keep my volume pretty low, as it is.

An interesting contrast, though, since Studio Ghibli (especially the works by Miyazaki, though this movie was made by one of his proteges) consistently produces movies with refreshingly strong female main characters, and movies with unsimulated sex scenes generally ruin the careers (I'm thinking of "mainstream" movies that feature such things, not of pornography-as-such--though you can also think of pornstars making "mainstream" (if quasi-artsy) movies, most recently Soderberg's movie that did-you-hear-it's-totally-made-with-a-hardcore-porno-star-as-the-lead-actress; always a matter of spectacle)) of the woman that take roles therein (certainly the case with In the Realms of Senses, where it was the lead actress's first movie part, and she only got offers for porno movies afterward, eventually showing up in a couple more movies and then moving away from Japan entirely). The male actors, generally, I think, just get big cultural high-fives (think for instance, of Gallo's Brown Bunny).

And of course, there's whatever argument to be made, at least in the case of well-made, carefully shot, generally "good" movies, like Realm of the Senses, that it's not subjugating it's female lead within the film they way that she lost respect in the actual world. But the whole notion of "unsimulated" breaks that ability to draw that line between the representational world of the film and the actual world that it represents, insofar as, being fictionalized, even the "actual" penetration represented on film is still relegated to simulation. So the claim of "unsimulated" is quite similar to the "nonfiction" of memoir--and, also similarly, prurient garbage. So, the art of the movie, some of which is quite nice, is still art, but the pornographic aspects are just pornographic and gimmicky. I think the blurbs would generally argue for some kind of boundary-walking going on, but that's really just a moving back-and-forth from one "realm," as it were, to another. Making artsy porn does just that.

And, given that I'm still working my way through Studio Ghibli's catalogue, and my preference for all-audience fare continues--who'd a thought that I was so conservative? (Though if there were no American Right, I'd have no problem being on the pragmatic/rationalist (in my mind conservative) side of the leftist spectrum.) Well, I'm leaving a lot out of this issue for the moment; there's a larger discussion to be had, and I'd probably give way on various points for the sake of discourse and truth-seeking, etc. But this can fall back, like so many of my arguments do, to the cushion of boredom--I like tales of masculine triumph as much as the next guy (see the eventually upcoming post about the above-mentioned JCVD movies), but, (and maybe I'm just a wishy-washy liberal humanist after all) a well-balanced, well-represented, and of course, interesting and well-made cultural melange seems to me to be the way to go, and it seems like, to bring pornography into the mainstream, or the quasi-mainstream of art movies, you'd have to go out of your way to downplay its unsimulatedness, which certainly wasn't the case, based on the DVD extras, with Realm of the Senses (and maybe the Kingdom of the Cats is real!).