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I wish I loved anything even half as much as the director loves Scarlett Jo's feet. While I didn't like the movie while watching it, the Memento-like twist at the end really justified the Brechtian ordeal, so the pay-off was great.
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May 19, 2014 03:15
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 17:48 |
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View the film backwards. She is a normal girl, just a stupid American tourist who was raped on a ramble. This caused some major disassociative problems and she felt like she was an alien in her own skin. She tries to re-establish a romantic connection with her boyfriend but find that sex is now much too impersonal. She just can't do it. So she reverts to hypersexuality as a way to deal with rape (common enough) but this escalates to murder because she is driven by her own need to reclaim some kind of power. Her doting boyfriend does his best to help her but even he eventually has limits and she is left an entirely broken human being. A complete alien clothed in human skin.
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May 19, 2014 16:09
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I'm still working with those elements as well. It doesn't help that I went to the bathroom when she let the elephant man go and had that scene quickly whispered to me by my g/f. Edit2: Elephant man is a manifestation of her own disgust and how she now views men. She can't do her first random hook-up because she views men as fundamentally disgusting. That also makes sense, given that she is a rape victim. Her struggling with hypersexuality also makes sense if you read the scene where she tries (and fails) to connect with her boyfriend as an attempt to lose her virginity after the fact. Given that it is a Scottish film, I have a hard time believing that they'd go with the whole "virginity" angle but I'm basing my understanding of Scottish culture off of my time spent in England (London), Germany (primarily Cologne but all over) and other Europeans I've known. I've got an n=1 of Scottish people and I don't even know him that well, so a puritanical edge may not be unreasonable. Still holds. Especially when it comes to the light. You have opposite poles, with really harsh, almost painfully blinding whiteness. It happens again and again with things like the sky as well. Contrast that with the absolute blackness. They are pretty clearly telegraphing artificiality. That ties into a lot of the other Brechtian nonsense going on during the first half of the movie. Elephant-man represented a turn towards more natural colors, culminating in very natural, realistic shot at the end. So it fades from blinding unreality to soft (albeit brutal) reality. I just took the immolation at the end as a visual representation for the destruction of the self that resulted in the rest of the film. Probably more to it, since metaphor and reality play with each other a lot during this movie and I'm admittedly a philistine. But that is what I took out of it. Edit: Foot Fetish. I just saw a lot of longing camera shots at S Jo's feet. Also, a lot of framing shots. Mouth, breasts, feet, crotch. Eye-as-a-vagina/anus, feet, breasts, crotch. Walking slowly away, until nothing but the feet are showing, cut-frame to a raging erection. First focusing on her face and then Venus-of-Willendorf style smash-cutting to her chest and panning down her body showing the crotch, the legs and then lingering at the feet. Dude likes him some feet and isn't afraid to let everybody knows that he considers them (at least) on par with eye-as-anus, breasts and crotch. Shbobdb fucked around with this message at 05:13 on May 20, 2014 |
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May 20, 2014 04:51
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I think the director thought it was erotic and was trying to express that to the audience, yes. I don't have a foot fetish, so I thought it was somewhere between jarring and hilarious. "Dude, look at these feet! So much better than breasts!" "Uhhhhh . . . OK man, whatever floats your boat . . ."
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May 20, 2014 18:59
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I'm really surprised nobody else noticed it. My g/f and I were cracking up throughout the entire movie because of it. It made Quentin Tarantino seem subtle.
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May 20, 2014 21:27
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vivisectvnv posted:Thirding...i have no idea what you are talking about. The "feet" frames were just low perspective shots that showed the men being progressively sucked into the black goo and her feet tracked along with that shot. While there are more egregious examples, those were the kinds of things we found funny. You've got a sex scene, right? Naked chick, walking along. The only bright aspect in a dark screen (light/dark in the movie is a big theme). This pans slowly along her naked body until feet. And then nothing but feet, feet, feet. It spends much more time on her feet than it does on her breasts. Walking away. SMASHCUT! Dude with a giant erection. Sure, it is "just filmed that way". But this is a sex scene. An aborted, emotionally stunted sex scene, but a sex scene nonetheless. Think about the other options he could have used. Jesus walking on water is the only other metaphor I can come up with, as opposed to the more explicit "HOLY poo poo I LOVE FEET!" I we are going to go with the Jesus angle, I can only think of Kahlil Gibran's fascination with "The whole Earth is my home but I have nowhere to rest my head" which could work with the alien stuff . . . but I don't see it. It's easy to say "Work X" is about Jesus because the Christian tradition has such a huge influence on Western (and now World) culture. You want to Jesuit it up, sure, you've got an alien trying to give love (of a physical variety) that seemingly can't, is redeemed (by the rejects of society), and then sacrificed in fire, like how the world ends (and aren't we all, like, a world man? Contrasting with the aqueous deaths "a la petite mort" we saw earlier in the film). Bing-bang-boom. Feet aren't sexy, all those foot-shots are just to establish that she is Space Jesus come to love and forgive us all. Nevermind all the shots associating feet with sexual organs. We'll push those to the side. They represent artifice(?) on the director's behalf. Because if I'm shooting a sex scene with boobs and pussy and mouths and poo poo, what it needs is the occasional palate cleanser of feet. And we all know that we end dinner on a light palate cleanser, and not the desert we've been craving all meal. As a lover of food (and not of film) I may be reifying certain factors. But when you have a tasting menu, the chef is clearly in love with something and trying to tell you that. When that love in cooking is non-commercial or in film otherwise forbidden, workarounds are found. I may well be wrong, but rewatch the movie and think "feet". The boob/feet/eye-as-anus (expanding anus also means "willing" rape/she was asking for it!*)/feet/crotch shots and their variations make a lot more sense. NO! I'll admit that interpretation works. But it is incongruent with the film that I saw. I'll give you "Is an Alien" and "Walks on water" as totally sufficient for a Christ metaphor. But what is Christ-like about the alien? Where is the metaphor or simile or allusion? Or is a cigar just a cigar and it is just a poorly-executed movie about an alien who murders people? *If the movie is about rape's aftermath, which I think it is, the eyes' normal expansion and contraction of arousal contrasts with the anal/involuntary message of the film with the eyes' contraction, expansion and then aggressive contraction. But during sex aggressive contraction is tight-tight-tight and AWESOME!
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May 21, 2014 00:50
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Projection-as-denial only really works if there is social pressure. What kind of social pressure exists on an anonymous internet forum? I saw plenty of projection-as-denial in Middle School when my gay friends were actively insisting that everyone else was a cum-guzzling human being while they loved them some girls with their breasts and them titties. But that theater only makes sense within the context of them trying to convince everyone else that they are super not-gay. Anonymity removes that impetus.
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May 21, 2014 08:30
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 17:48 |
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That's what is cool about directors. They are just filming what is there, so their personal aesthetic has no bearing on how the film is presented. Also, direct discussions of directorial intent only exist within the framework of death of the author.
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May 21, 2014 16:10
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