Screening Sex (a John Hope Franklin Center Book) by Linda Williams

Author:Linda Williams [Williams, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2008-09-01T22:00:00+00:00

Don’t you fucking look at me!

—FRANK BOOTH in Blue Velvet (1986)

What the fuck are you looking at?

—ENNIS DEL MAR in Brokeback Mountain (2005)

6

primal scenes on American screens (1986–2005)

In the last third of Pedro Almodóvar’s 2002 film, Talk to Her (Hable con ella), we are presented with a charming seven-minute, black-and-white silent film. Benigno (Javier Cámara), an effeminate male nurse working the night shift, describes this silent film to his comatose patient, Alicia (Leonor Watling), while giving her naked body one of its regular massages. Benigno adores his patient despite the fact that doctors say she is brain dead. As he relates the story of the film, called The Shrinking Lover, we see it on the screen: A slightly overweight man, Alfredo, watches his scientist girlfriend, Amparo, concoct a diet formula that he impulsively drinks. Soon after, while kissing Amparo, Alfredo shrinks slightly. He continues to shrink for the rest of the short film, until he is no larger, as the film scholar Marsha Kinder puts it, than a fetus or a tampon.1 Failing to find the antidote for Alfredo’s shrinking, Amparo can only care for him as if he were a tiny child. In bed one night, a Tom Thumb–sized Alfredo makes the Herculean effort of pulling the sheet off of Amparo’s naked, sleeping body. He roams over its contours, climbs up and then rolls down the hill of a breast, descends the length of her body to the genitals, and jumps down to the V formed by her parted legs. There he faces a patently fake, giant vagina with curly, plastic-looking hair. He tentatively inserts an arm into the dark cavity, then briefly his entire torso, and comes back out for air, shaken (figure 93). Taking a final resolution, he turns to face the vaginal opening, removes his shorts and plunges naked into it. Soon only his feet protrude, then nothing. We see Amparo’s face register fleeting pleasure and Benigno’s voice-over concludes that the film’s hero “stayed inside her forever.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.