The Talkies: Porn Again

...All my life I've had to wear your used things...

...To be fair,44 The perversity of our times gives even Howard Stern a kind of seriousness...

...In what is no doubt considered its prime example of "anti-war" thinking, the young war correspondent, Lt...

...The chief engineer (Klaus Wenneman) finally gets everything fixed, and the boat pops to the surface like a cork...

...But if you are excited by the sumptuous luxury of an Indian royal court of the Mughal period, this film may do something for you...

...Partly this may be because no sex is really forbidden anymore, or has that thrill about it that comes from enjoying something which we are so unanimously assured, as we are in the case of war, is not to be enjoyed by sane or responsible people...

...The simplest and most harmless example is Kama Sutra by Mira Nair, an Indian version of the English bodice-ripper style of historical romance, which relies on sumptuous visuals of an Indian royal court in the sixteenth century and the great beauty of its star, Indira Varma, to make amends for its tediousness of narrative and characterization...

...In the days when they died from them, the silent killer was sure in its work, but it always left its victims looking in the pink when they finally breathed their last...

...Not very nice of her, you might think, but Maya is supposed to be a sympathetic character, as she is both a proto-republican JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement and a proto-feminist, and she tells her mother that "I'll make my own destiny...

...Yet presumably there are still enough intellectual sensualists around who are prepared to take such crackpot philosophy seriously for the sake of re-awakening their jaded appetites...

...The first tells the heartwarming story of a shy and lonely necrophiliac who gets a job in a funeral parlor and gradually learns how to express her sexuality, while the second deals with a yuppie couple into spouse-swapping who find a new and deeper meaning in their rather soulless sexual experiences when they learn to spice them up with death and mutilation in car crashes...

...If you wanted to be provocative, you could say that here is the pornography of war, because it conveys a kind of forbidden excitement...

...Bowman's "Movie Takes" on current films are available on TAS's web site — http://www.spectatotorg...

...Movie illnesses have always been contracted almost exclusively by beautiful young men and women...

...Like Woody Allen's early Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, it is a procession of gags loosely tied together by their relation to the figure of the nebbishy hero...

...And yet the perversity of our times gives even Howard Stern a kind of seriousness and self-importance...

...I don't see how anyone with a sense of humor can watch such stuff in the voyeuristic spirit in which it is intended...

...7 the jokes seem to wear well...

...So cheaply, in fact, that we soon grow bored with mere nakedness and sexual abandon and begin seeking for ways to re-mystify what has been so precipitately de-mystified...

...Miss Stopkewich, it's true, makes a few jokes along the way, as when her virginal heroine, in her first sexual experience with a living man, is reassured by being told to "lie still...

...In part, at least, his appeal is to an audience that feels put upon by a new set of rules—sexual harassment guidelines, the taboo against certain kinds of speech—and wants release, if only in the privacy of the drive to work...

...Miss Varma plays a servant girl called Maya who, tired of getting all the hand-me-downs of Princess Tara (Santa Choudhury), decides to avenge herself by seducing the princess's new husband, Raj Singh (Naveen Andrews), on their wedding night...

...Have they finally gone, as the innocent in Oklahoma thought of the Kansas City Burley-Q, "about as fer as they can go...

...The impulse to look at the things which shame would keep hidden can be a very costly thing to indulge, but the unmatched realism of the movies allows us to indulge it cheaply...

...To be "anti-war" it would have to be ideological and doctrinaire and preachy and, well, bad, and it is none of these things...

...This month brings several movies that offer a voyeuristic thrill, but all of them in one way or another dress up mere undress with exotica from the farther fringes of human experience...

...It would be a rash man indeed who would make such an assertion with confidence, but it is hard to imagine much more exotic sexual imagery that is not merely comically fantastical...

...That kind of madness provided a pleasing garnish to easy sex thirty years ago, but now it is as familiar as the undraped female form...

...Psychosexual pathology is now a movie illness, and, like other movie illnesses, it is one that people in the real world rarely if ever get...

...68 May 1997 The American Spectator Koteas), who solemnly insists that a crash can be "a fertilizing rather than a destructive event...

...Although many of them were new to me, I noticed that even long-time Stern devotees who must have heard them many times before were thoroughly delighted with this version of the familiar material...

...He weeps and says: "Well, this is reality...

...She also discovers from the sculptor the exotic religion of hippie pantheism 400 years avant la lettre...

...Except it's not...

...James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...

...Also like the early Woody Allen (not so much the later one), the guy is funny as only someone prepared to make fun of himself can be...

...now you must spend the rest of your life with something I've used," she says to the princess...

...Already in Crash, the illusion of reality that is so essential to successful pornography can hardly survive the views of the crash-philosopher, Vaughan (Elias Hollywood's pornography doesn't excite—it bores...

...T hat, at least, is where I would like to leave him in order to recommend as Movie of the Month a new "director's cut" of Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot, first made in 1982 but now returning with over an hour of additional footage (it runs three-and-a-half hours long, but the time flies) and digital sound...

...Reality is both death (which comes to many of them subsequently) and the escape from death that is so exhilarating to the survivors...

...Stern's allegiance to conventional values is the foundation of his comedy, even at its base worst...

...As he told David Remnick in the New Yorker, his "singular ambition" is "to be the most honest man in America...

...It may be, as Remnick says, that Stern's "jokes, bad or funny, gross or sharp, are a cumulative blast at the contemporary rhetoric of piety and identity politics...

...Likewise, the distaff pervert (still something of a novelty) in Kissed develops a whole rationale for her behavior based on quasi-spiritualist ideas about "transportation" and "crossing over...

...But if so, it is successful pornography in a way that the sexual kind rarely is...

...This is perhaps the best war movie ever made, capturing as it does both the excitement, the adventure, and the glory of waron the one hand, and the horror of it on the other...

...I used to worship inside temples," he tells Maya, "until I saw that everything around me was holy...

...Perhaps Miss Nair, being of foreign extraction, didn't know this...

...For although images of perverse erotic excitement may be finite in number, there are an infinity of ways to talk nonsense...

...Miss Thomas boldly struck out in a new direction in The Brady Bunch and created a model of what such a picture ought to be (given that it has to be at all), but with Private Parts she has contented herself with presenting the familiar Howard to a wider audience...

...Nowadays, although the mortality rate among the young and beautiful in the movies is still disproportionate, movie illnesses are often designed specifically to disfigure...

...In this it is a disappointment...

...Werner (Herbert Gronemeyer), talks of his romantic illusions of going forth to meet "the inexorable, where no mother will look after us, no woman will cross our path and where only reality reigns with cruelty and grandeur," he says, quoting his own fine words about the warrior's life...

...If not, you will just have to rely on the kinky-exotic of the present day, like most red-blooded Americans...

...Even bullet wounds did not disfigure until the pioneering work of Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah...

...To her, this means going off on her own to learn the arts of the courtesan—so that she can then come back to the palace and do some more damage to the princess's marriage...

...The press material naturally stresses, as I'm sure most reviewers will do, the "anti-war" angle—especially as it is about the valiant submariners of Nazi Germany, but don't you believe it...

...Now, like a madman, I worship everything I see...

...Although the film has a sort of plot in that it purports to be a biopic about Stern, nearly all its energies go into a cinematic re-creation of the radio gags that made Stern famous...

...In Crash, there is physical disfigurement, but in both Crash and Kissed, there is moral disfigurement...

...As I watched James Spader in Crash, making love to a livid cicatrix, which ran up the back of Rosanna Arquette's leg like the seam of an old-fashioned stocking, or the handsome young woman played by Molly Parker in Kissed climbing naked on top of a corpse on the undertaker's table, I thought: is this it...

...0 r Canadians, I should say, since both Kissed by Lynne Stopkewich and Crash by David Cronenberg come to us from our neighbor to the north...

...Along the way, she meets a hunky sculptor (Ramon Tikaram) who follows her like a puppy dog and who naturally makes Raj Singh jealous...

...So Vaughan talks of the thrill of "reshaping of the human body by modern technology" (by which he presumably means the elaborate system of braces and prostheses hanging on poor Miss Arquette) or how "there's a benevolent psychopathology that beckons towards us...

...But the preponderance of evidence is that this material is meant to be taken seriously—and to take it seriously you need to suffer from a form of perversity almost as rare as the heroine's necrophilia...

...Now, he says bitterly as he reflects on the certain death that seems to await him and the rest of the crew: "I was drunk with these words...

...But also it is because Das Boot possesses that look that is almost never to be found in pornography and without which it cannot be truly exciting: the look of reality...

...Above all, movie illnesses did not disfigure...

...Presumably that's the way Stern wanted it...

...But to take him that seriously is itself to undermine "conventional values," according to which Stern is a mere buffoon...

...It represents indifferently the good and the bad of war and is neither pro nor anti—which of course is just what is necessary for any film about war to be convincing...

...E-mail him at 72056.3226@compuserve.com...

...But when we see it on the silver screen, we may persuade ourselves that perversion is as normal as, say, space aliens, who also make much more frequent appearances in the movies than they do in real life...

...The refreshing thing about Howard Stern's Private Parts, brought to the screen by Betty Thomas, is that it never pretends to seriousness...

...The American Spectator • May 1997 69...