Four Self-Interviews about Cinema:
The short films of Norman Reedus
The Rub (2006)
By Pablo D'Stair
(Though not necessary to this self-interview, the film being
discussed here, as well as the others being discussed in this series,
can be purchased as digital downloads from www.bigbaldhead.com)
Concrete: I noted, and think it's as fine a point to jump in on as
any, that the identity of the Male in this film is presented through two
clearly individuated characters, while the identity of the Female, as
nuanced and multifaceted as it is, is only filtered through one. What do
you make of that-or first, do you see what I mean and if so do you
agree, and then, if so, what do you make of it?
Abstract: I very much see what you mean and-yes-I agree, though I
think it's symptomatic of you being what you are and your need to so
literally play with the component parts of a film that makes you really
say that there are "two different male characters" as opposed to
identifying them as two distinct representations of the singular Male
Persona. But I agree. And, in this case, while the film has a
fragmented, very nearly pointillist nature to it, I can see why you
would say it how you do-because the flow of things, the introduction and
reintroduction of Male is done through two individuals, literally, the
film might well be telling "two stories" or using one Male as
counterpoint or alternate to the other. Though you have to agree that
the fact that both men are presented as grotesques, horrific in mask and
make-up, is a kind of conjoining stroke in the film, something I'd even
suggest, in direct reference to your stating them as "two characters" is
done to gloss over the immaterial fact they're different people-they
are, really, The Grotesque Male and then, more directly, The Sexual
Male, the willfully, needfully sexual male.
C: Honestly I don't see the difference between what you say
and what I said. But it does bring me to thinking that the only other
"characters" in the film (with the exception of the Female) are either
background elements, more "images" than "people," or else are
purposefully ambiguous, even asexual, in their nature-it's a film not
about sex, really, but about identity, a presentation of the masculine
sexual identity and the feminine sexual identity.
A: But I don't think we should get too far off that way, get
stuck in that diagnosable and nameable a slant-I don't think the film is
stating anything "across the board," I think it is isolating certain
elements of these sexual identities, yes, and then is making them, with
all of their limitations, sentient in a limited way and having them
interact. So, it's not like "Male Sexual identity is X" and "Female
Sexual Identity if Y," nothing like that, nothing so...political a
statement or even psychological, sociological a statement. I think the
film is blatantly admitting that "these elements do exist," or really
the one element it seems centrally concerned with exists, and then
plumbing this element, unpacking it, folding it out and around itself,
tightly but not comfortably.
C: You say "mostly", or even "only", one element? I don't
know. Which element of the Male sexuality-the Predatory, certainly, the
first male is that, but what do we make of the second male, the more
shumbling, even...kindly seeming goblin male?
A: To be honest, I don't think the Male is spilt like that in
this film-I think the "male element" the film is expressing or exploring
is the predatory one, only. The second male is as much the predator as
the first and because it is literally the same female figure being
encountered, I think this redoubles the potency of the expression-I'd
think there was more of a split, or even that two (or more) aspects of
the male were being expressed if there was a distinct, second female,
but there isn't.
C: The First Male (credited as Richard Nixon, so I'll refer to
him as Richard, alright?) is overtly violent. Even before the orgasmic
moment the violence is given irrevocable physicality, he is moving in,
leading in, luring, striking, always-and from the fact that Richard is
perpetually approaching and interacting with the female (only credited
as Young Girl) through some secondary object (he has a car he prowls
from, he completes his sexual encounter with a knife) it is clear that
he wants to inflict, that his desire is outward, to possess something he
stalks down and then destroy it and in that way consume it, own it-he
wants to be the last to touch something (someone) and so not only
defiled it but reduce it to nothing, kill it, no one else can have what
he had.
A: Sure, he is the Alpha predator-he possesses the world, so
to speak, from the outset, and the only outlet, the only release, he
seeks is, as you say, to obliterate, to make something kind of
over-literally un-possessable by anyone else, therefore reinforcing it
as his, due to he being the one who "altered/vanquished it." Everything
in the filmmaking speaks pointedly to this-the dizzying way Richard's
entire sequence is filmed, from the roiling shot of the woman in the car
side mirror, the background spinning around her around her, to the
incredibly (and I would say perversely lackadaisical) voyeuristic manner
in which the camera spins around and around and around the very public,
very well lit fornication (almost as though the camera assumes the role
of all of the eyes of an idling, indifferent crowd) suggests at once the
ensnaring, the luring, the groping. But as graphic (even pornographic)
as the sex depicted with the woman is, there is also a sense of great
boredom to it, impotence even-Richard does not seem to be able to attain
any sort of release by "having the woman" by "making purchase of her"
and it is not until he quite literally destroys her, giddily,
intoxicatedly thrusting a knife into her that his character seems to
achieve "feeling". And the complete inverse in filmmaking is present
with the sexual act between the Second Male and the Young Girl-it is far
more intimate, but cloistered, overly private, filmed close, intimately,
as though the camera (and so the audience eye) is as close to being
partner with the act as can be, not merely witness to it.
C: I'd note, this back to Richard's fornication with the young
woman, that even the mask changes-the makeup/mask-in his moment of
climax and abandon (revelation, definition?). The very dulled, leering
Richard who propositions the woman and who drives her and fornicates
with her is replaced by a figure bugged eyed, open mouthed (with deep
sea fish teeth slobbering) and in a kind of dementia from the attaining
of his goal. So-doing my more concrete thing for a moment-the film at
that point, how I saw it, is done with Richard, there's a shock cut to
what I refer to as the "second storyline" beginning, and (after a few
moments) the Second Male (credited as Conehead) appears and after some
failures at starting up communicative flirtations (beyond failures,
really, as he seems unable to even distinguish gender, let alone
intention or desire, due to everyone around him being seemingly some
amalgamation of male and female, everyone part-invitation and
part-derision) he comes across the Woman, or rather her carcass and it
is this he takes back with him to his dwelling.
A: But I want to stop you there, because now that you've said
that (especially how you have) I wonder why you so still identify this
as the "same woman". Literally I see why-it is the same actress and we
just witnessed her mutilated and now we witness that still mutilated
body being discovered-but really I would have to say that this
re-introduction does have a distinct (and necessarily distinct) identity
change built in: she is now Woman-as-Corpse, in a sense she is now an
utter, will-less object, whereas on her first introduction she was
Woman-as-Commodity, still viable, still some semblance of conscious
acceptance, interaction, inclusion in her circumstances-indeed, even as
she's driven to the initial encounter with Richard she only has eyes for
herself, applying makeup in car mirrors, watching herself dance in
elevator reflections, but with Conehead she is inanimate, he decides
every aspect of her appearance, her positioning, her purpose without
conscious assent. Really, she is an "object" in both encounters, but the
change from animate to inanimate nature and that she is encountered
first (in what you call Story One) as Animate and then (in your Story
Two) as Inanimate-the approach of each male, therefore, to something
different-is enough to, I think, according to your terms, call her a
"different character"-or rather, because I don't want to trip on my own
semantics, a "wholly different aspect of a single character."
C: I don't argue with that-nor do I absolutely agree (nor do I
exactly see what you mean, quite honestly) but I get where you're coming
from. But what I don't get from that "saming" of the woman is how the
male is still perceived as "predatory."
I mean, as concrete and literal as I am, I do understand that the
film is not literally saying that Conehead found a carcass, took it
home, cleaned it, and fornicated it back to life, but I do think the
film is expressing first-between Richard and the woman-a predatory,
violent drive, male-toward-female, and is expressing second-between
Conehead and the woman-a...an almost moral, despairing, nurturing aspect
of male sexuality, the desire to make alive again what was (or at least
seems) destroyed. I know, I know there can be some undertones of
chauvinism to that statement when looked at too concretely (it's going
too far to suggest that all a violated woman needs is a nice, gentle
lover to put the bloom back to her) but-and I think you get this in a
more felt sense of the film's narrative-I think Conehead finds something
discarded and, symbolically, the film expresses that the violence done
by Richard is not what defines the woman, that though she was degraded
and we even witnessed the degradation, there is no need to think that
she has in any way been robbed of the basic, intimate and pleasurable
opportunity of finding connection, even in the same act (superficially)
as the one that violated her.
A: So, though she was in no way cognizant of encountering the
second male, you suggest (I just want to be sure) that this might be
representative of a kind of "clean slate"-her reduction to inanimate
discard is a kind of...symbolic repositioning of her, suggesting she
doesn't need to first consciously access what she encountered with the
first male, she can, like in a dream, wake up to a new (completely
removed from sequential experience) self and a more natural,
humanistically deserved one?
Direct dialogue
C: Why are you smiling? I kind of agree, yeah, except you're
obviously having a go at me.
A: I'm smiling because you've become the inverse of yourself.
I get what you mean, but of course after she is "re-animated" and the
"clock strikes one" and the film expresses that Conehead's "fantasia of
nurturing" of "sitting at the bar, laughing and kissing and having a
real lover" is not going to happen, the woman (in the film's only moment
of direct dialogue, which I think is very important) flatly, even coyly,
say "That'll be one hundred dollars," revealing that her identity was
neither lost by the violence done to her nor was it incorrectly
determined by Richard, to begin with.
C: Well, I have to admit I did de-emphasize that, you're
right.
A: You seem blue. You wanted them to be a happy couple?
C: You paint the picture bleaker than me. I guess I was trying
to build a narrative of potential redemption out of it, while you rather
well (if bullyingly) present a strong case of the blanket amorality of
it all.
A: Well, chin up for a minute, don't let's lose steam, okay?
Let's redirect and try to understand this expression of Female-who is
she, this Young Girl?
C: But, see, this is also why I'm blue, because I have to
wonder if it's proper, in a strict sense, to say that there even is an
expression of Female, of genuine female, in the piece. It was, after
all, written by a man and realized by another man, so at best don't you
think it's all an expression of a "conceptualization of the female"
through the masculine persona, and therefore even more demoralizing,
even more predatory an expression?
A: It is a predatory expression, but I don't know, I don't think that
men can't express things actual about aspects of femininity. Moreover,
though, are you kind of slyly positing that femininity is, at base, not
supposed to admit to predatory aspects? All I said was it was an
exploration of the "predatory aspects of masculinity" I didn't say that
such aspects equate to immorality. Do you think they do-in the case of
either masculinity or femininity?
C: What's the question?
A: Tell me what you think of the woman in this film.
C: I guess I think, at best, she's a self-aware and
self-serving persona, manipulating the baser, unavoidable aspects of the
men she encounters/lures, no matter what their predilections, in fact
she is appreciative of whatever predilection as the more reduced a male
can be made the easier the male can be utilized and, at worst, she is an
adrift individual who seems to lack the wherewithal to affect any
internally, self-realized aspect of herself and so accepts her presence
as "objectified entity" as a means of survival, even of definition,
almost in an evolutionarily unconscious way accepting
survival-as-identity and the particulars of that survival as immaterial.
Chauvinism
A: Jesus, no wonder you sense "undercurrents of chauvinism" in
the film, listen to you! I'm not trying to sound like a talk-doctor
here, but I think you're filtering yourself through this film and not
this film through yourself.
C: You mean what I just said was chauvinist? Those are
chauvinist attitudes?
A: "At best she is a self-aware, self-serving persona"-even
without the rest of what you layered on, that's a limited
interpretation, especially of the "best of something." What I was saying
a moment ago was that I wasn't positing predatory as either moral or
immoral-not even as amoral-but what you seem to be saying about the
particular female on evidence in this film, is that even her predatory
aspects (which I'm granting you admitted to even though you only did so
implicitly) are kind of ho-hum, just what she wound up with. To simplify
what you said: she is either aware she's a whore (at best) or is a whore
but not aware of it (at worst).
C: You're manipulating my description. If I literally approach
the femininity in the film through the filter of prostitution and
through the accepted (even relished) celebration of
prostitution-as-sexuality, yeah, I identify the woman-this woman in this
film, not "women"-as a whore, but I think, to be concrete, that it's
more than that. As you pointed out, in the concluding moment of the
film, the only moment where a character is technically given voice,
direct dialogue, she defines herself as such, and so is and has been in
control of the entire chain of "emotional circumstances," this admission
denuding her of the identity either of victim, corpse, or... "renewed
life". She begins the film as a prostitute, then for awhile kind of has
this identity brought into question by the fact that she is brutalized
and then is nurtured, but very pointedly she reasserts the identity at
the end, willfully, even antagonistically.
A: You're right. I was teasing you and did so to the detriment
of an exploration of the film. But you've side-stepped the larger
question of whether the film is expressing femininity as predatory.
C: It is.
A: So, taking the film as a larger expression, if the men are,
so to speak, ensnared without their even being aware of it, doesn't the
film express a kind of sympathetic thrust toward men-as-predatory-they
might think they are predators, but they aren't even in control or aware
of enough of the world to be genuinely predatory and by extension (an
extension I think the film expresses over and over) genuinely whole. And
returning to this earlier point from a different vantage, maybe this is
why the insistence on two individuated actors to represent Male, while
only one woman for Female.
C: You mean the film infantilizes men, but does so by kind
of...what, demonizing women? At least as far as the controlling
point-of-view being sexuality?
A: Well...not demonize, I don't think. By making the subject
matter so lurid and the "struggle" so all-encompassing (even, as you
pointed out well, reducing the world not involved in the
sexual-as-predatory into androgynous pedestrians, mutes, standers-by)
the female is elevated, is elevated through having to be fully realized
as an individual with multiple, conflicting attributes. She will be both
sides of every coin, she is fully fleshed and made complex in the
acceptance of the contradictory aspects inside a single persona. The
men, though, (or The Male) have to be either this or that, one thing,
not the other-infantilized, sure, reduced to iconography which can be
named (Richard Nixon, Conehead). The predatory male sexuality either
destroys or revives, gives or takes-the predatory female sexuality
defines, full stop, it owns, doesn't rent.
C: Isn't that what I'd said from the start?
A: No. I'd have agreed with you were that the case.
Pablo D'Stair is a writer of novels, shorts stories, essays, and also
conducts the book-length dialogue series Predicate. His current project
is the literary novel VHS, which is being distributed
absolutely-free-of-charge through a variety of channels
(www.vhsbook.wordpress.com). He welcomes any and all comments at
[email protected]
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