Four Self-Interviews About Cinema: the short films of director Norman Reedus

by KUBOA

A:I’m smiling because you’ve become the inverse of yourself. I get what you mean, but of course after she is re-animated and the clock strikes one and the film expresses that Conehead’s fantasia of nurturing of intimacy found, of sitting at the bar, laughing and kissing and having a real lover, is not going to happen, the woman (in the film’s only moment of direct dialogue, which I think is very important) flatly, even coyly, say ‘That’ll be one hundred dollars,’ revealing that her identity was neither lost by the violence done to her nor was it incorrectly determined by Richard, to begin with.

  C:Well. I do have to admit I did deemphasize that, you’re right.

  A:You seem blue. You wanted them to be a happy couple?

  C:You paint the picture bleaker than me. I guess I was trying to build a narrative of potential redemption out of it, while you rather well (if bullyingly) present a strong case of the blanket amorality of it all.

  A:Well, chin up for a minute, don’t let’s lose steam, okay? Let’s redirect and try to understand this expression of Female—who is she, this Young Girl?

  C:But see, this is also why I’m blue, because I have to wonder if it’s proper, in a strict sense, to say that there even is an expression of Female, of genuine female, in the piece. It was, after all, written by a man and realized by another man, so at best don’t you think it’s all an expression of a conceptualization of the female through the masculine persona, and therefore even more demoralizing, even more predatory an expression?

  A:It is a predatory expression, but I don’t know, I don’t think that men can’t express things actual about aspects of femininity. Moreover, though, are you kind of slyly positing that femininity is, at base, not supposed to admit to predatory aspects? All I said was it was the is, in part, an exploration of the predatory aspects of masculinity, I didn’t say that such aspects equate to immorality. Do you think they do—in the case of either masculinity or femininity?

  C:What’s the question?

  A:Tell me what you think of the woman in this film.

  C:I guess I think, at best, she’s a self-aware and a self-serving persona, manipulating the baser, unavoidable aspects of the men she encounters/lures, no matter what their predilections—that in fact she is appreciative of whatever predilection, as the more reduced a male can be made the easier the male can be utilized—and, at worst, she is an adrift individual who seems to lack the wherewithal to affect any internally, self-realized aspect of herself and so accepts her presence as objectified entity as a means of survival, even of definition, almost in an evolutionarily unconscious way accepting survival-as-identity and the particulars of that survival as immaterial.

  A:Jesus, no wonder you sense undercurrents of chauvinism in the film, listen to you! I’m not trying to sound like a talk-doctor here, but I think you’re filtering yourself through this film and not this film through yourself.

  C:You mean what I just said was chauvinist? Those are chauvinist attitudes?

  A: ‘At best she is a self-aware, self-serving persona’—even without the rest of what you layered on, that’s a limited interpretation, especially of the best of something. What I was saying a moment ago was that I wasn’t positing predatory as either moral or immoral—not even as amoral—but what you seem to be saying about the particular female on evidence in this film, is that even her predatory aspects (which I’m granting you admitted to even though you only did so implicitly) are kind of ho-hum, just what she wound up with. To simplify what you said: she is either aware she’s a whore (at best) or is a whore but not aware of it (at worst).

  C:You’re more than a little bit manipulating my description. If I literally approach the femininity in the film through the filter of prostitution and through the accepted (even relished) celebration of prostitution-as-sexuality, yeah, I identify the woman—this woman in this film, not women—as a whore, but I think, to be concrete, that it’s more than that. As you pointed out, in the concluding moment of the film, the only moment where a character is technically given voice, direct dialogue, she defines herself as such, and so is and has been in control of the entire chain of emotional circumstances, this admission of hers denuding her of the identity either of victim, corpse, or… renewed life. She begins the film as a prostitute, then for awhile kind of has this identity brought into question by the fact that she is brutalized and then is nurtured, but very pointedly she reasserts the identity at the end, willfully, even antagonistically.

  A:You’re right. I was teasing you and did so to the detriment of an exploration of the film. But you’ve side-stepped the larger question of whether the film is expressing femininity as predatory.

  C:It is.

  A: So, taking the film as a larger expression: if the men are, so to speak, ensnared without their even being aware of it, doesn’t the film express a kind of sympathetic thrust toward men-as-predatory—they might think they are predators, but they aren’t even in control or aware of enough of the world to be genuinely predatory and by extension (an extension I think the film expresses over and over) genuinely whole. And returning to this earlier point from a different vantage, maybe this is why the insistence on two individuated actors to represent Male, while only one woman for Female.

  C:You mean the film infantilizes men, but does so by kind of…what? Demonizing women? At least as far as the controlling point-of-view being sexuality?

  A: Well…not demonize, I don’t think. By making the subject matter so lurid and the struggle so all-encompassing (even, as you pointed out well, reducing the world not involved in the sexual-as-predatory into androgynous pedestrians, mutes, standers-by) the female is elevated, is elevated through having to be fully realized as an individual, an identity with multiple, conflicting attributes. She will be both sides of every coin, she is fully fleshed and made complex in the acceptance of the contradictory aspects inside her single persona. The men, though, (or The Male) have to be either this or that, one thing, not the other—infantilized, sure, reduced to iconography which can be named (Richard Nixon, Conehead). The predatory male sexuality either destroys or revives, gives or takes—the predatory female sexuality defines, full stop, it owns, doesn’t rent.

  C:Isn’t that what I’d said from the start?

  A:No. I’d have agreed with you were that the case.

  “A Filthy Little Fruit”

  Originally appeared in the Montage: Cultural Paradigm (Sri Lanka)

  September 18th, 2011