“'The Kids Are All Right' and 'Sex at Dawn'”

We saw the new movie, “The Kids Are All Right,” the other night on DVD, and I thought of “Sex at Dawn,” the book I’ve been blogging about lately. The movie is about a lesbian couple, Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) with two teenage kids, Joni (Mia Wasikowska), 18, and Laser (Josh Hutcherson), 15. Joni searches for the man who was their sperm donor; she finds him nearby, and the plot thickens, mainly around Jules. She is the stay-at-home mom, who begins to work as a landscape designer for the donor, Paul, (Mark Ruffalo), and also begins to have sex with him. Jules is horrified by what her body is doing. She doesn’t love Paul; she doesn’t even like him very much, but she can’t stop. But, of course she does stop, and abruptly, when, at Paul’s during a dinner party with the whole family, Nic confronts Jules after finding Jules’ red hair in Paul’s shower and bed. With much weeping and gnashing of teeth, Jules admits her affair, but also blames Nic for being busy at work and distant.
At this point, I yelled at the TV, urging Jules to get in touch with her inner ape and proclaim that she came from female ancestors who had multiple partners and who called for more by their female copulatory vocalization (FCV) (The sex scenes were fairly noisy). Not surprisingly, she didn’t do this but continued to apologize and seek forgiveness from the family. Also, not surprisingly, they were very angry at her and furious at Paul, who is portrayed as a guy just going along for the ride. Although in the end, Jules and Nic seem to reconcile, Paul apparently is thrown into outer darkness and will never again be included in the family despite his reaching out to the kids. So, we’re left with a bruised quartet, rather than a possible quintet that might have included Paul. How sad.
And how sad that the five didn’t have insight into their ape natures, as discussed in “Sex at Dawn.” If they had realized that Jules was behaving naturally, they might have acknowledged similar feelings in themselves, understood, forgiven both her and Paul, and have begun a tentative search for an expanded family that included him.
Perhaps the moral is that we don’t always have to act out of our biology, but if we don’t know and accept our biology, we are likely to act, like Jules, without understanding and with much grief.

The Bourne Ultimatum: an Anti-Government Film

We saw “The Bourne Ultimatum” last night. It’s a very entertaining, fast-and-furious thriller continuing the saga of Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), a CIA agent who, having lost his memory, is desperately trying to recover it. His quest for his past is the driving force of this and all the Bourne movies. He is searching and on the run, not from standard-issue bad guys, but our own CIA, which is out to eliminate him, because he knows too much, is finding out too much, and will expose the agency’s criminal behavior.
The whole movie is an exciting chase with Bourne outwitting his pursuers at every turn. In his ability to survive the murderous campaign against him, he is essentially a supernatural character, a messiah saving us from our government.
I don’t remember another popular entertainment that so effectively showed the evil that is expressed in a secret, lawless government. Last summer’s James Bond epic, “Casino Royale,” in contrast, made no political statement. Indeed, James Bond always does the government’s bidding without a murmur. In “The Bourne Ultimatum,” Bourne realizes that he was duped into volunteering to serve his country and to “save American lives,” as his erstwhile mentor reminds him. Of course, instead, he has killed many people, each of whom, he says, he remembers. His memory is a grisly “cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) that torments him.
His volunteering is clearly meant to be emblematic of the trust shown by all the hapless souls now dead or still fighting our secret, lawless, futile wars. They, unlike Bourne, were not indestructible messiahs. For their trusting volunteering, they have achieved no “victory,” and for those who’ve died, we cling to the hope that they are in “the bosom of Abraham” (Luke 16:22).
In the movies, we can relax and let Bourne be our messiah; in life, we should realize that we have work to do if our world is not to be destroyed by war and lawlessness. If we ask what we should do to help avert catastrophe, we can remember the rich man who, not finding himself in the bosom of Abraham, wanted Abraham to warn his brothers that living a heedless life like his would result in the torment of Hades. Abraham’s answer is good advice for us: “They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.” (Luke 16:29) I would add: Do what they urge us to do.
Unfortunately, Luke’s story does not end on a happy note. Abraham continues, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” (v 31)
Our Messiah has come to us from the dead, we don’t listen to him, and so we’re on our own. Given our predicament, we need the luck of Bourne. Alas, I fear that’s only in the movies.

At the movies: “Eating Out2: Sloppy Seconds”

My partner and I wanted to get out of the apartment last night, so we went and saw a movie, called “Eating Out2: Sloppy Seconds,” the sequel to the successful gay movie, “Eating Out,” which we enjoyed last year.
One function of fictional narratives is to transport us in our imagination to worlds we want to explore. The “Eating Out” movies provide such a world. In this world, there are problems, but we know that by the final scene, they will be solved. And so it is in “Eating Out2,” where the grass is green, the sky blue, and the characters pretty, both girls and boys, but emphatically, the boys.
Our hero is Kyle (Jim Verraros) who decides to go “straight” in order to bed Troy (Marco Dapper) who also seems straight and appears first in art class as the nude model. Of course, Troy is a gay wet dream: tall, handsome, muscular, hung, and, (unbelievable, uh?) sweet. Not only Kyle, but also his girl friends, Gwen (Emily Brooke Hands), Tiffani (Rebekah Kochan), and Kyle’s ex-boyfriend Marc (Brett Chukerman) all scheme to capture Troy for sex and love. Kyle’s plan is to present himself as an ex-gay with a girlfriend (one of his girl friends – I’m not sure which). Troy wants to be sure that he isn’t gay, so he gets Kyle to take him to a meeting of an ex-gay organization, “Homo No More,” whose office has a poster asking, “Who Would Jesus Do?” No one at the meetings, of course, is very enthusiastic about being ex-gay, and near the end of the movie the group’s leader, Jacob (Scott Vickaryous) gets his comeuppance via Octavio (Adrian Quinonez), another very hot hunk, who converts Jacob quickly back to his true gayness by forcefully entering Jacob’s more than willing backdoor.
And our dreamboy, Troy? He scandalizes everyone at the end by declaring (gasp!) that he is bisexual over everyone’s jeers. He soon supplies proof by making one of the girls very happy with his tongue in her nether region.
This movie is silly and loaded with sex. It’s also a picture of people who like sex and enjoy having a lot of it. They convey the idea that sex is fun and should not be hole-in-the-corner. It’s also about lying and its costs, it’s about repenting and seeking forgiveness, it’s about how love only flowers with trust and truth, it’s about being happy with who you are and enjoying your life.
So, “Eating Out2” for me was a vision of what the world might be like if everybody wasn’t hysterical about gay people, sex, and having fun. That’s not an inconsequential achievement for a little, frivolous gay movie.

At the Movies: “Unconscious” and Anti-Platonic Leakage

Yesterday, my friends Richard and Joseph and I saw the 2004 Spanish movie, “Unconscious.” The “New York Times” review on February 9th called it, accurately, a Freudian farce, and so it is, because the characters are not conscious that they have an unconscious. Set in 1913 in Barcelona, where Freud’s ideas about not only the unconscious, but also about hysteria, penis envy, and the incest taboo, were just coming into vogue, we follow the misadventures of Salvador, a young psychiatrist. Salvador declares that “Emotion is a hormonal disorder,” and he prides himself on not being disordered, and therefore he doesn’t know when he is having feelings. He is in an apparently unconsummated marriage to Olivia, who proclaims that she is too “tight” (too sealed up) to receive Salvador’s member, which is celebrated around Barcelona as being the biggest in town.
Although it’s bad form to reveal endings, the ending of “Unconscious” is so delicious and so revelatory of our Platonic mindset that I can’t resist. Olivia has come out as a lesbian and gone off to Paris with her lover, and, in the last scene, Salvador is finally in bed with the woman he has loved throughout the movie, Alma, the widow of León, Salvador’s brother-in-law and best friend. Alma is atop Salvador, moving vigorously. Suddenly, Salvador’s body stiffens and writhes uncontrollably. He pants and screams and his body goes limp. After a moment, recovering a bit, Salvador, puzzled, asks Alma, “What was that?” Sweetly, Alma responds, “Art.”
Salvador had suffered, in Don Cupitt’s wonderful term, leakage. His defenses were down and he leaked, nay, he exploded. His ideal, Platonic strength of identity was lost because he lost his bodily identity. In that moment, he no longer had control over what passed through his bodily orifices. In “Radicals and the Future of the Church” in the section, “Sex, power and the production of reason,” Cupitt writes that in some societies, it has been denied that adult, initiated male warriors shit. Athletics and war may require temporary continence. Western monks pray nightly to be delivered from polluting nocturnal emissions (Peter Brown in “The Body and Society” documents this in great detail). In general, a man is pure, strong and holy insofar ass he is sealed up. Bits must not fall off or leak away.
We live in ‘a man’s world,’ where it seems that reality itself favors and privileges that which is relatively more unified, substantial, self-identical, active, integral, closed, independent, self-consistent, and systemically coherent, i.e., more like God (Or, at least, the ideal God of Platonic theology, i.e. classic Western theology.)
In contrast, consider woman. She appears less strong, less independent and self-consistent, and with a weaker identity. Her body is cloven by a wound that drips blood monthly. Her ritual purity and integrity, that is, her identity, is further ruptured by the invasions of men and her own extrusions of babies. She is seen as being relatively more impure, fickle, and... leaky.
So poor Salvador in his leakiness was, like women, vulnerable. By letting go, he lost control of his body and, for the moment, ceased to be the ideal, Platonic man, showing order, systematization, coherence, and ‘closure.’ For a moment, he was one with his partner and he was not conscious of the male hierarchy, of which he was a prime representative.Thus, such are the joys of sex, leakage, and the “Unconscious.”