What you can fellate and what you can't fellate

I watched Spring Breakers for the third time last night.

Informally, I believe this is the soonest after its release date I've seen a movie three times since I saw Pulp Fiction four times in the theater. That would be -- gasp -- 20 years ago now.

It's not the soonest I've seen a movie for the third time after the first time I saw it -- that would be Ruby Sparks, which I saw for the third time in just under 14 months back in February. My Spring Breakers viewing last night would make the third time in just over 14 months, dating back to its theatrical run. However, Ruby Sparks actually came out about five months before I saw it, so there's a slight (through probably meaningless) distinction there.

Either way, it confirms something I already knew -- I really like this movie.

And whenever you rewatch movies you really like, you are bound to come at them from slightly new angles, and to think about slightly new things.

There will be some spoilers from here on out -- not only about Spring Breakers, but also about Killer Joe -- so beware.

If you understood the previous spoiler alert -- and the title of this post -- you know where I'm going with this. Yes, I focused on the scene where Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson force-feed James Franco the barrels of two guns.

At first it seems as though Franco is an unwitting victim to this incident of sexualized humiliation, and I feel pretty sure that Vanessa and Ashley were kind of playing it by ear on their actual intentions with him -- after all, there's a room full of money and guns at their finger tips, and we've already seen what they're willing to do for money. But then Franco kind of empowers himself in the scenario by actively beginning to fellate one of the barrels -- wrapping his lips around it and sucking it dry, as it were. Then the girls crack a smile and the tension is defused. Moments later, Alien tells the girls (I had to look up their actual character names, which are Candy and Brit) that they are his soul mates.

The movie got an R rating, despite this rather graphic scene.

Not all movies that feature a scene of enforced simulated fellatio are quite so lucky. Take William Friedkin's Killer Joe. Another scuzzy modern classic featuring white trash "gangster life," so to speak, Killer Joe has a lot to recommend it -- a captivating lead performance by Matthew McConaughey, terrific supporting performances and a hilarious sense of black humor. It also has a gonzo final scene, which includes -- famously -- a scene where McConaughey forces Gina Gershon to give a blow job to a chicken drumstick.

NC-17 on that one. The appeal of the rating was rejected, so instead of getting rid of the scene that everyone would be talking about, they just released it that way.

The initial instinct would be to make some comment about how the MPAA always cares more about sex than violence when issuing ratings, which was a main contention of Kirby Dick's film This Film Is Not Yet Rated. It's no surprise, this perspective would argue, that the scene with the gun caused them less objection. Then you might surmise that the chicken leg is somehow more off-putting, as it is made of organic material while the gun is just metal.

Of course, these surface-level readings would both be quite incorrect. Both are violent scenes, actually, but only Killer Joe features the scene where a) it is quite clearly not consensual, and b) it's a man committing an act of violence against a woman. That's the trump card ... as well it should be.

In doing a little research for this post I discovered that Samantha (Kim Cattrall) fellates a hookah pipe in Sex and the City 2, but that obviously makes it in as an R because a) it's fully voluntary, and b) Samantha is about the most ribald character ever committed to the big or small screen.

The one certified, definite no-no among fellatible objects: the penis. You can't have a discussion like this without referencing The Brown Bunny, Vincent Gallo's scandalous film in which Chloe Sevigny actually sucks his penis on camera. No fakery, no implied mouth-to-penis action -- an actual blow job. That one never had a chance at an R.

There must be some prominent examples I'm missing ... let me know about them in the comments.

Not so prudish after all

A couple weeks back I wrote a piece about Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny, the pretentious piece of experimental art that features a graphic oral sex scene -- a scene designed merely to shock viewers into talking about Gallo's film at the water cooler.

In that piece I also mentioned that this two-minute segment of pure pornography disqualified the film from being carried by Blockbuster. (At the time I said that Netflix also did not carry it, but later realized I had mistakenly lumped Netflix' morals in with Blockbuster's morals.)

Blockbuster has long been considered kind of the Wal-Mart of rental companies, in more ways than one. Wal-Mart, of course, is famous for trying to protect its customers from what the company considers morally dangerous segments of popular culture -- most prominently in the form of refusing to carry the works of certain rappers and other edgy musicians. Blockbuster is not nearly so extreme nor so public about its censorship, but it does keep a wide berth of films like The Brown Bunny.

I'm pleased to say, however, that Blockbuster -- the company I've sided with for a variety of reasons that I've cited several times before -- is not quite so grandmotherly as we might have thought.

This weekend I received in the mail a copy of I Spit on Your Grave, the infamous cult film from 1978, which features a brutal gang rape, and then the brutal retribution carried out by the victim. In that same Brown Bunny piece I discussed how Roger Ebert had given this film zero stars, which is what put it on my radar back in the 1980s. Writing about the film a few weeks back put it on my radar again, and I received it on Friday.

I saved watching it until my wife was out of the house. She wouldn't have judged me for watching it any more than she would have judged me for watching The Brown Bunny. Still, there's something about watching a movie you know is famous for a brutal gang rape that feels a bit icky. Best done in the privacy of a single-person viewing, and without going out of one's way to advertise that you actually watched it. Which is why, you know, I'm writing a piece about it on my blog. This is like my super-public confessional, and you all are my priests.

As with The Brown Bunny, I had no prurient interest here -- I just wanted to see what all the fuss was with an infamous film that was likely to shock me. It would make up for all the other times I'm not shocked in the slightest, during hours and hours of middle-of-the-road fare.

As I was preparing to watch it, I was also preparing for it to be a seriously neutered version of the original film. After all, this is not what Blockbuster usually endorses. Although I Spit on Your Grave has the alternate title Day of the Woman, critics at the time -- Roger Ebert in particular -- did not consider this anything close to a feminist film. Even if the main character draws out her revenge against the men who raped her, taunting and teasing them before finally killing them in the most gruesome ways imaginable, there's still the inescapable fact that she gets her clothes torn off, gets sodomized against a rock, and has a bottle jammed inside her. Some of this is suggested -- some of it isn't.

Yet I saw it all. There was no evidence of a clean, Blockbuster-friendly version here. If there were images removed from this film, I don't know which ones they could have been. Anything more than I saw here would have prevented this from getting a theatrical release, even in the more-permissive 1970s. There was full frontal nudity from both genders, and stomach-churning violence intermingled with it. In fact, during the aforementioned scene against the rock, Camille Keaton's shrieks were so loud and horrifying, I had to hurriedly close the windows and turn down the volume so the neighbors wouldn't think I was watching a snuff film. (Part of the reason the film was so controversial at the time, I think, was that Camille Keaton is Buster Keaton's grand-niece.)

And in the end, I think Ebert was a bit extreme with his zero stars. The movie is not super long on plot -- it basically consists of four upstate New York hillbillies catching the woman, raping her in three different locations, and then being picked off by her one by one several weeks later. But it's actually done with a decent amount of artistry -- shot well, edited well, and paced in a way to draw out the agony, but not for sadistic purposes. It seems like director Meir Zarchi's intention is to make the viewer really identify with the horrors experienced by a rape victim, to spell out exactly how brutal and terrifying non-consensual sex really is.

I actually do think there's something feminist here. I understand that merely putting these images into the world is in some way harmful toward women, but there's no ambiguity here about who is evil and who is righteous. And as Keaton's character goes through and delivers these men their just desserts, it's exquisitely satisfying. The film takes on the form of social critique in its portrayal of the men, several of whom lower their guard in her presence because they innately believe that she's truly back to seduce them, rather than exact revenge on them. The men seem to think that rape victims are "asking for it" to such a degree, that a few sultry words spoken in deceit by her are enough to convince them she's insatiable, back for more. It's so extreme that Zarchi's only intention can really be to point out just how morally bankrupt these men are, how programmed to view women as objects they can bend to their will, to the extent that it blinds them to threats to their safety.

The interesting thing about I Spit on Your Grave is that it exists simultaneously as exploitation and feminism. Either way, it's not something a person is likely to forget anytime soon.

And I have the surprisingly permissive standards of Blockbuster to thank for giving me the full, unfettered experience. What I found even more interesting is that Blockbuster listed the film with a slightly altered title -- like many cult classics, I Spit on Your Grave seems to have several different titles depending on various re-releases, in addition to its alternate title Day of the Woman. Blockbuster actually listed the film as I Spit on Your Corpse, I Piss on Your Grave, and at first I was wondering if I would actually get the version of the film I was supposed to get. Not only am I sure I did, but the two new words in that title -- "piss" and "corpse" -- are both words that a skittish company like Blockbuster would usually try to steer clear of. Yet they went out of their way to include these words in a title which, when listed in its more standard version, has only the less-sensitive words "spit" and "grave" in it. That might have been more shocking than anything I actually saw in the movie.

Now if Wal-Mart is the next company to surprise me, then I'll really be shocked.

The unattainables

One of the things about being the kind of movie fan I am is that you want to see everything. I have told people, only half jokingly, that my goal is to see every movie that has ever been made.

The good ones. The bad ones. The extremely foreign ones, and the extremely local ones. High budget and low budget alike. All the movies.

I truly hope this never happens. If it did, it would probably mean that I would live in some kind of post-apocalyptic world where they stopped making movies, and where I was probably the only person still alive. The power would be out, so I'd walk the world smashing the windows of Best Buys to use up the battery power of all their portable DVD players, and one by one watch all the movies that I had never seen. It would take a very, very long time, mostly because of my power restrictions, but mostly because there have probably been over 100,000 movies made in the history of mankind (and that's a conservative estimate), less than 3,000 of which I've seen. But if there was no one else around, I'd try to tackle it. It might be like that episode of The Twilight Zone where the last man on earth gets to read all of earth's books (until he breaks his glasses), or maybe like I Am Legend, which I watched again last night, or maybe like Zombieland, which I watched on Friday night.

The point is not really whether I will succeed -- but how it affects my day-to-day approach to seeing movies. There are certain films I want to see just because they exist, and The Brown Bunny has been one of those movies.

If you're a regular at this blog, my guess is you have also heard of The Brown Bunny. But if you haven't, here's the famous thing about it: It contains a scene in which Chloe Sevigny gives writer-cinematographer-editor-director-star-costumer-key grip-crafts services guy Vincent Gallo a blow job. I'm not talking about her head bobbing suggestively in Gallo's lap -- I'm talking about his actual erect shaft and her actual mouth moving up and down the length of that shaft.

This scene has given the movie far more notoriety than it deserves. The movie itself is a pretentious piece of experimental art in which basically nothing happens except Gallo driving across the country and having pointless interactions with various people he encounters. Gallo's Buffalo '66 was also essentially pretentious and artsy, but at least that film worked for me. This one is a true waste of celluloid, and it deserves to be hated, but it does not deserve to be well known. Enter the blow job scene, which instantly turned it into a bizarre little curiosity that someone like me wants to see. And it's not because I'm some debased lover of porn, but simply, because there's something essentially fascinating about seeing a well-known actress give actual fellatio in a "legitimate" film. Not to mention that I'm always interested to see something I've never seen before, period.

The problem thus far about seeing The Brown Bunny: Where the hell am I supposed to get it?

Even though nothing remotely disturbing happens in the rest of the film, except one other short scene -- there's barely even any bad language -- this one scene was enough to keep the film from receiving an MPAA rating (or else they just never submitted it to be rated). It's also obviously enough to keep "respectable institutions" away from the movie. My two sources for watching films on video have been Blockbuster and the public library -- two institutions that want nothing to do with The Brown Bunny. The funny thing is, it would be terribly easy to release a version of this film that might even be PG-13, let alone R. Then again, without "the scene," there's really no point to see it, so perhaps Gallo just saved us some time by steadfastly refusing to cut a clean version.

So for a couple years now, since I've been aware of The Brown Bunny, I've stopped to wonder now and then how I could get it. My most obvious answer was that I had to get a membership at some cult little video store staffed by hipsters, kind of like Kim's Video in Greenwich Village. However, I live 3,000 miles away from Greenwich Village, and am not aware of its Los Angeles equivalent. Not that it would be particularly hard to figure it out -- just that The Brown Bunny hasn't been important enough to me to actually bother. Besides, as institutions like Kim's Video become less and less viable while losing ground to the dueling giants of Netflix and Blockbuster, I also imagine that their inventory has dwindled. Why carry The Brown Bunny if it takes up precious shelf space?

But as I was looking for something else on my desk the other day, I found my old rental card from Odyssey Video, which had what I considered a great deal when I used to live in the San Fernando Valley. If you rented on a Tuesday or a Thursday, any movie in the store was only 99 cents. Of course, there was a catch -- you had to return it by closing the next day. So a person might wonder whether it was really worth a 10-15 minute drive to their North Hollywood location on consecutive days, whether that didn't sap the value of the savings. But when I was sustaining myself by being a freelance film critic my first year in Los Angeles, I'd rent three on a Tuesday and watch them all by the next night at midnight, so I maximized the value. I remember racing to finish movies by at least 11:42 to make sure I'd get there in time.

Anyway, Odyssey Video has several locations in Los Angeles, the closest of which is only five minutes from where I currently live. I checked it out a couple times, but they no longer have the Tuesday-Thursday deal, and besides, it feels strange to actually pay for renting a movie. Of course I pay Blockbuster for their online program, but as it is a single payment on my credit card each month, it feels different. Besides, the main reason I even have Blockbuster is that I need their extensive access to whatever titles I want -- and because I have beefs with Neflix, which I've described on this blog before. So making a real-time payment to not even know if I'm going to find the movie I'm looking for in their inventory? It no longer met my needs.

But finding the card on my desk happened to coincide with another reminder of my back-burner interest in seeing The Brown Bunny. Odyssey Video also has a full-fledged adult section, so they certainly aren't going to shrink away from The Brown Bunny on moral grounds. The main question would be if they bothered to carry it, if it ever rented. Remember what I said earlier about a dwindled inventory?

So I decided to check it out yesterday. I'd been looking through the B section of drama for less than ten seconds when I found it. (They're very anal with their alphabetization at this Odyssey, something that really pleases an anal list-maker like me). A little thrill rushed through me when I saw the title. And I promise you, it wasn't because it meant I could actually see Chloe Sevigny go down on Vincent Gallo, because I'm sure I could find that on the internet if I wanted. It was just the strangeness of it that struck me. Here was The Brown Bunny, verboten in all reputable establishments, right at my fingertips. It was like the moment of disbelief that accompanies finding the exact rare gift or other object you've been fruitlessly seeking for years.

No sooner had I found The Brown Bunny than I decided to test how good this Odyssey really was. I wandered over to S and almost immediately found Shortbus. Shortbus is a far more respectable effort in terms of cinema that should actually exist, as far as I understand it. It's directed by Hedwig and the Angry Inch creator John Cameron Mitchell, and explores modern sexuality among straights, gays and bisexuals. It just happens to explore them fairly graphically. However, there doesn't seem to be anything prurient about it, as there is in The Brown Bunny. My guess is that the more graphic stuff is probably gay, which in itself makes it seem more artistically justified than that Brown Bunny hummer.

I decided to go for #3 with Caligula. Caligula is the repellent and pornographic 1979 big-budget telling of the story of the third Roman emperor, which features such big names as Malcolm McDowell, Peter O'Toole, Sir John Gielgud and Helen Mirren. (Who gets naked.) I have had a life-long interest in seeing Caligula, but not for the reason you think. When I was younger -- maybe, junior high -- I had a big compilation of Roger Ebert's film reviews in a book he released annually, and I just loved reading the reviews for the movies he gave zero stars. (A reason I also have I Spit on Your Grave and Mother's Day (1980) on my radar). Caligula was one of those, and quite simply, Ebert reserved the most hateful language he could possible conjure for this film. I could extract quotes from it, but it's all so delicious that I ought to just tell you to check it out here.

Like I said, I'd always wanted to see it -- the absolute worst example of something can be almost as fascinating as the absolute best -- and was all the more enthused for that prospect when I saw that there was no review of it on my website. So I got approved to review it, then sent away for it -- from Blockbuster, bad choice -- almost three years ago. In fact, I watched it on Halloween of 2006 -- it was a day off for me, since I was starting my current job the next day. (And never mind the debates about whether this is a good way to spend part of a rare day off -- I know, I know).

But as I was going along, I realized this was the truncated version -- in fact, reading up on it, I then realized there were no less than a half-dozen versions of the film, some re-cut for length (it was two-and-a-half hours in original form), some re-cut for decency in the vain hope of trying to attain some kind of cultural respectability. The version I saw gave me an idea of how unremittingly awful it was, but it still did not give me what I considered to be the true Caligula, the one Roger Ebert walked out of back in 1979. So I held off on the review, and have been holding off until this day, waiting to find that elusive original print.

Odyssey Video did not have Caligula, but that's just as well. In looking it up online, I now see that my approval to review the movie must have expired, or slipped through the cracks. Another critic has submitted the review, and that's actually fine. Save me the worry.

Although I have stated that I'm impressed with Odyssey Video for carrying these two titles, I probably shouldn't be surprised. If there is any way for them to compete with Blockbuster and Netflix, it's by carrying titles those places don't. That sounds kind of ridiculous, on the face of it, since there are only a couple dozen films that exist that would be prominent enough to be worth carrying, but not carried by the two giants, and those movies would probably not rent very often. But Odyssey already gets a majority of its business, I'm guessing, through its porn section, another thing that the giants obviously don't offer. This is just an extension of that philosophy.

Oh, so to finish up the story, I rented The Brown Bunny (but not Shortbus) and watched it yesterday. Vincent Gallo drives across the country and then Chloe Sevigny gives him a blow job. The end. And yes, it did feel as surreal to watch the blow job as I was expecting. Save yourself the trouble and watch that scene online if you must, and leave the obsessive duty of watching the whole movie to a person like me.

I'm probably not going to see all the movies that have ever been made, but at least it's nice to know that there are fewer I can't see because I can't find them. There's something definitely exotic about an unattainable movie, kind of like Indiana Jones searching for the headpiece to the staff of Ra.

Except the erstwhile Henry Jones has to travel to a local drinking establishment in the harsh winter of Nepal, while I now just have to make a five-minute drive to the video store.