Too Many Movies: The Social Justice of Bollywood and The Sexual Politics of Genetic Horndogs

This week, Joe McCulloch saw Raajneeti as part of his blood oath to watch more Bollywood, while Tucker paid for the penis of Splice and the dead seals of Nanook Of The North.

Splice
No, I Watched The Other Cube, 2010
Tucker Stone

Oh. Spoilers ahead!

What the tepid reviews of Splice won't prepare you for is the first five minutes. After a cursory You Are Inside birth scene (think Fallout 3, with Adrian Brody in the Liam Neeson spot), the film cuts to a wide angle shot of a couple of genetic monsters. They're realistic looking. They're named Fred & Wilma. They'refalling in love, under the proud stares of Brody and Sarah Polley.

They also happen to be gigantic severed penises, approximately the size of Jack Russell terriers.

Splice is getting a weird kind of mileage right now, with people like Armond White comparing it to David Cronenberg's body horror films, but the similarities seem a tad superficial--yes, Splice is quick to throw weird sexual intrigue into the mix, and the eventual human hybrid our two scientists create packs a stinger tail that's reminiscent of Marilyn Chamber's armpit attack in Rabid, but the film doesn't marry its creepier moments to any sort of specific statements, the way Cronenberg's did. Where The Brood was a proud and loud "i hate my ex-wife" kind of adventure, Splice is mealy-mouthed, whining a stream of superficial status updates while visually delivering visceral moments of grossness that, initially, seem to bear meaning. It's almost like Vincenzo Natali willingness to alienate came about when the computers that designed his hyper-sexualized creature effects were turned on--on the page, the film's script never makes a choice that can't be accepted by everyone. His scientists are arrogantly playing God, but then again they're struggling against profit-obsessed corporate power, but that corporate power is an understanding and kind European female, and either way they really don't think it's a good idea to play God, and on and on. There's no line in the script that isn't met by its opposite, resulting in scenes where people scream and yell, only to decide that maybe everything is just kind of okay, you know, sort of, we guess. Meanwhile, the screen is visually delivering a mid-climax battle of giganto-penises (inside a huge aquarium, on a stage) resulting in a Gallagher/Raging Bull blood & pus explosion all over the faces of a gaggle of reporters. It's a weird mix of extreme-o visuals and the sort of ethical debates you might see on an episode of MTV's Real World, seeming to assume that an audience is willing to tolerate incestuous hybrid monster sex and slimy penis worship, but they'd stay away if the dialog happens to pick a side and get all fuckin' preachy.

Maybe that's true? But what they're in for is a film that fails to deliver much of a scare--sure, the last ten minutes (three deaths, one rape) turn into the factory farm spooky picture that the advertisements imply--and instead delivers a glum parable on the mistakes science will make if the practitioners don't take a break to, you know, make each other cum every once in a while.

Thanks?

Raajneeti
Directed by Prakash Jha, 2010
Joe McCulloch

This is a bunch of silly bullshit from a director noted for social justice themes, a whole cable miniseries’ worth of political thriller and soap opera complications crammed into 167 minutes, purportedly inspired by the warring cousins of the Mahabharata and doubtlessly influenced by The Godfather, but with politicians in place of gangsters, since they’re exactly the same thing. There’s a character in here, the Irish-American lover of one of the major players, whose sole purpose is to reinforce how no politics anywhere on planet Earth are as dirty dead rotten as Indian politics.

It’s a work of total offhanded cynicism, implicitly deriding the populace as easily manipulated by self-interested power-players locked in self-annihilating struggles. Common folk are ennobled on one hand as a font of compassion while positioned narratively as the introduction of thuggish violence into the rarefied world of the economic elite. Tongues are clucked at limited, degrading roles for women, while multiple scenes find testosterone-addled male leads all but throwing their lovers aside when they’re done with them, ‘cause there’s nasty men’s work to be done, which is really all the picture cares about. Witness the civil war of the Pratap clan, ranging from an illegitimate eldest son raising hell in the streets to a soft-spoken poetry scholar whose father’s assassination sees him dressing in black and playing highly symbolic electronic chess on his mobile device. The big election draws near, a splinter party cracks loose, Change is cited, cars explode, a male prostitute’s neck is slashed in bed and the sexy longhaired brother mugs for the camera spattered in blood as he prepares to take a baseball bat to the sexually exploited girl hopeful who accused him of rape. It’s okay - all the mayhem results in a woman rising to unlikely authority! See? Balance!

Amusingly enough, this has apparently caused some off-screen political consternation, in that certain parties may have interpreted the production as a $20 million dollar troll on Indian National Congress President Sonia Gandhi. “I must say some of the people who were in the revision committee had come with an agenda,” Jha noted regarding the film’s submission to the Central Board of Film Certification for review, surely a more down-to-earth example of political maneuvering than anything liable for cuts or bleeps. Still, I can’t deny the trashy pull of a lot of it, and for a nearly three-hour movie it’s remarkably agile, knowing just when to conspire with the audience in tittering at awful anti-heroes and proud villains who maintain viable internal consistency right up to the final half-hour, where conflicted personalities collapse into plain contradiction. Even then, it’ll certainly appeal to anyone who secretly wished the U.S. drama of Election 2008 ended with a shootout in an abandoned warehouse and a car chase with party flags flying from each vehicle, like the banners of mythic armies.

Nanook of the North
Lived and Directed by Robert "Bobby the Tuba" Flaherty, 1920
Tucker Stone

Watching this nowadays, one can't but wonder how animal lovers might take to it, because man-oh-man does this movie contain a heaping amount of slaughter. Laying in wait, catching and fighting with a gigantic seal, killing it, skinning it, and then eating it raw...all In Real Time, just like Jack Bauer did it. A good ten minutes of the film is spent watching people--Nanook, mostly--licking blood off of his foot long knife, and another good ten minutes of the film is spent watching him lick the rest of the blood, but this time off of his face. It's all nature documentary style violence, sure, none of it is ever visualized in a trying-to-be-gory fashion, but its still incredibly graphic, even more so when the film opens by telling you that the guy died--from starvation, natch--two years after it was filmed. (Which doesn't exactly bode well for the two small children who were apparently dependent upon what he killed, with his bare hands, for sustenance.)

Of course, some of it isn't real. Nanook wasn't his name, he usually hunted with a gun, and he died at home, and not of starvation. Some of those people weren't even his family. This is the part of the blogging template where I'm supposed to start a sentence by writing "But that's not the point", except, well, that is the point, isn't it? Flaherty isn't a bad guy for doing what he did--he couldn't fake the general lifestyle he was trying to capture, and he did actually live with these people for a much longer period of time than the film itself depicts--but Nanook isn't a very good documentary, any more than Man of Aran was. They are powerful nonetheless. (After you've seen the tedious, bone-jarring effort required to "create" soil delivered in Man of Aran, any fanciful notions of the soothing ease of back-to-nature existence are fundamentally crippled.) Flaherty's failed thesis statement aside--supposedly, Nanook of the North is about how happy these hard-luck Eskimos were despite their extremely difficult day-to-day lives--both Nanook and Aran are immeasurably useful as artifacts, visual documentation as museum relic: this is survival, this is hunting, this is the North, where we do what they want. That alone, and more than enough. Grungy, but gorgeous as hell.

-Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, 2010

Comments

[AComment]

Actually, stone age life can be relatively comfortable. It all depends on the local fauna, and on not taking it to let's-drive-ten-fucking-thousand-horses-of-a-cliff-and-swim-in-meat-for-the-rest-of-our-lives extremes.

There were horses in the Americas long before the Euros arrived. The nature loving natives drove them to extinction.

[Tim O'Neil]

Man of Aran is one of those movies every person should see once. Because no one could ever be paid to sit through it twice.

[Tucker Stone]

They show it to you for free when you go there. And trust me, after you've been on one of those islands for a few weeks, you'll watch just about anything twice.

[Tim O'Neil]

Wait a minute, you've been to the Aran Islands? Like, for real? Dammm.

[Tucker Stone]

Yeah, it was pretty great at first. Then I got kind of lonely. It's pretty angry and windswept--there's a lot of time spent standing on rocks and watching the ocean slam into other rocks over and over again. I'd still go back. Nothing else like it.