Coitus interruptus

Ever see one of those extraordinary landslips, where a whole chunk of cliff gives way, dragging some benighted homestead with it? I have those in my brain all the time.

During one such seizure last week, the effects were so cataclysmic that, against all possible logic, habit and natural inclination, I came ’round to find myself halfway through Michael Dwyer’s report from Cannes in the Irish Times.

So if it hadn’t been for the brainslip then, there’s no way I would have read the following about Vincent Gallo’s new movie The Brown Bunny.

“Produced, directed and edited by Gallo, it features him throughout its yawn-inducing two hours as he drives across the US. This ugly, grainy travelogue is shot mostly through the dirty windscreen of his van as he drives and drives and drives, with pauses along the way as he gets petrol, takes a shower, puts on a sweater or contemplates buying a bunny in a pet store. Towards the end, there is a graphic and entirely gratuitous scene in which Gallo receives oral sex from Cloe Sevigny.”.

Fisting

A couple of points arise for discussion here, I feel. Firstly, there is no such thing as a “gratuitous” sex scene, let alone an “entirely gratuitous sex scene” and certainly not one that comes, if you will, at the end of a “grainy travelogue” which consists of some geezer driving, buying petrol, showering, putting on a sweater and contemplating – “contemplating”, mark you – buying a bunny.

After a dismal litany like that, I would suggest that, far from being “gratuitous”, a sex scene would be vital, obligatory, perhaps even enforceable by natural law – and the more graphic the better. Or put it this way: think of how much more interesting and memorable all those fashionably grainy No Disco home-movie videos would have been if they’d ended with some fine, close-up images of a blowjob, a 69 or a spot of fisting. Jezz, the show might even still be on the air.

Or perhaps not. My own experiences with the artistic powers-that-be suggest that the new puritanism is a major barrier against free expression, resulting in a creeping self-censorship which threatens to suffocate all notions of risk, adventure and non-conformism. In short, it’s very hard to get some good porn at the box office these days.

Sure there only a few years ago, I went to Hollywood with a sure-fire winner: a breakthrough special effects-laden romp fest, featuring unprecedented scenes of slow-motion fucking in mid-air, up walls and across ceilings, with the odd bit of existentialist bolloxology thrown in to keep the film critics and the nerdy-types happy. It was called The Mattress and it couldn’t fail.

Friends, will you be surprised to learn that my script wasn’t even returned? And conceive of my chagrin when, not two years later, The Matrix was released with guns and fights replacing the third-leg boogie, and zen foolishness instead of existentialist bolloxology serving the cause of the higher bullshit. Now, I fear that my tasty follow-up, The Mattress Restuffed, will not see the light of day either.

Not that the world of rock and pop is any more hospitable. You’ll often hear it said that our pop kids are exposed to ever more explicit lyrics these days but, just the other night, a Classic Albums show about Lou Reed reminded us that in 1972 – that’s thirty-one years ago, pop-pickers – you could turn on your tranny (Jeez, there’s a great line Lou never wrote) and hear the great man singing “But she never lost her head even when she was giving head”.

Gobbling

Of course, pedants many point out that in 1972 only 12 people in the whole world actually knew what giving head was, and they were all based in The Factory in New York, but I’ll still bet that if, all these years later, I offered Ronan Keating a song containing such innocent words as sucking, slurping, licking, gobbling, blowing, nibbling and “expertly hoovered like a vacuum cleaner”, he’d probably have to get back to me on that one. And that’s minus the verse about the pink torpedo.

As for my dear old chum Wayne County, I don’t suppose his (her?) epic late-70s trash-punk love song, ‘If You Don’t Want To Fuck Me, Baby, Baby, Baby Fuck Off’, will turn up any time soon as the soundtrack to a report on the annual Lisdoonvarna bachelors’ festival on Nationwide.

All things considered, we still have a long walk to go on the wild side.

Your ever lovin’ Samuel J. Snort Esq