Landing : Athabascau University

Nightdreams (1981)

http://xhamster.com/movies/286697/nightdreams_1981.html

The scene at 32:00 in which the star pulls another character's cock out of his pants to reveal that it's a dead fetus is priceless. There is no shortage of pornographic and non-pornographic images connecting sex and death, and sex and reproduction, but this (pre-HIV-crisis) scene works wonders with anxieties about women's reproductive freedoms as well as women's anxieties about the risks of sex with men. Other than that, and while it is certainly the strangest pornographic movie I've yet seen, it doesn't seem to do as much as the surrealistic scenes suggest it could to reconfigure notions of what sex is. (Also, the lesbian scene is awful. I understand that it's designed for heterosexual men, not lesbians, to watch, but you'd think even heterosexual men would balk at watching characters miss each other's clits for ten minutes.) 

In terms of my MRP, there is definitely plenty to work with here on fantasy and fantasizing, and, taken together with texts like "Blue Light" and Frankenhooker, a suggestion that "cult" and "camp" will be productive keywords. (Is straight "camp" a thing? Does giving a box of Cream of Wheat a blowjob count as straight?? [About 47 minutes in, for the curious among us.] I think Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam have both theorized camp extensively, so I will have to look it up.) 

There has been some scholarship on this particular film, focusing mainly on its uses of sound and music, and providing details of its production and reception, including its sendup of writer Stephen Sayadian's earlier work at Hustlerhttp://0-muse.jhu.edu.aupac.lib.athabascau.ca/journals/vlt/summary/v059/59.1smith.html

Comments

  • Mark A. McCutcheon November 28, 2012 - 2:58pm

    The canonical theorization of "camp" is by Susan Sontag, and it's been hugely influential, but it's also been critiqued to bits.

    Identifying the film as surrealistic is accurate, but this accuracy, I'm afraid, also applies to its heteronormative mises en scène, rather than pointing to more subversive possibilities for estrangement in representations of sexuality. The French Surrealist movement is distinguished not only by its radical political fusion of Marx and Freud and its aesthetics of détournement, but also, and rather unfortunately, by its consistently heteronormative representations of human sexuality. Whether in the litany of enumerated sex positions for "man" and "woman" in Éluard and Breton's Immaculate Conception, the drastically and sometimes obscenely objectified female figures of Dalí's "paranoiac" landscapes, or the visual "dirty joke" of Man Ray's "Prayer", the Surrealists do not distinguish themselves as capable of imagining anything close to queer. That said, I suppose the Surrealist canon could be (and perhaps has been) subjected to queer misreadings and appropriations.

    Lastly, the Cream of Wheat sequence is perhaps best contextualized according to the legacy of African American slavery, which (as carefully documented in the alternate-history "documentary" The Confederate States of America) continues to inform the advertising of products like this (see also Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben...). Note too that the song played back during this sequence is an anthem from the racist musical Showboat, which has a long and hotly contested performance history in Noerth America.

  • sarah beth November 28, 2012 - 5:10pm

    I didn't know that about surrealism and heteronormativity. I had sort of just made a "common sense" assumption that if the rules of "reality" don't apply, then of course a dead fetus can show up where a cock "should" be; sex can be and look like and produce anything

    One of my frustrations with studying queer and feminist porn has been its embrace of this kinda stubborn literalness, often in the name of producing "better" porn that portrays "authentic" pleasure and serves a pedagogical as well as entertaining function. That's not all bad (as remarked above, no one should have to sit through bad pussy-eating), but it doesn't get very far away from the more-standard argument that porn is a window to someone else's sex, and that it should be studied (and suppressed, for radical feminists; or produced, for sex positive feminists) primarily for its effects on society. The pro-porn "movement" posits itself as opposition to earlier feminist calls for state censorship, but it seems to confirm the same premises about what sexual representation is and does. It's not like it's unwatchable, but if I'm considering affect as a part of the power of narrative, then I am more interested in images to which my response is more complex that just being turned on. (In this case, the images I do find sexy are also disgusting, confusing [and even more so because it's straight porn], frightening, embarrassing... there's just a lot more there than in a film that re-presents a sex scene that I could act out in my own life.)

    What I liked about the surrealistic quality of Nightdreams -- what I thought was especially promising, even if it didn't wholly deliver -- was the potential to surprise me with things I would never think of as sex, as embodied, as pleasurable. Maybe something like Pink Narcissus, which we looked at but which got dropped from my MRP list (not twisted enough, I guess), could be read as a queer appropriation of the aesthetic of surrealism. It's not nightmarish the way this one is, but it does have that same absent-augmented sort of reality, in its non-linear plot and in some of its uses of animation as literal augments to the live-action film. I'm sure there are more; a quick Google turns up papers that mention the surreal in queer art, though not (and this seems to confirm what you've said) as much as my "common sense" would have guessed about queerness in Surrealism. 

  • sarah beth November 28, 2012 - 5:29pm

    On further thought, the star's direct implication of the viewer ("I know you're watching me..."), her own apparent reading of voyeurism as a kind of interaction ("I can feel your eyes..."), and the placement of the audience behind a window (a one-way mirror, actually, which both allows and obscures vision) -- all could serve as critique of the attitude treating porn as a transparent window to someone else's sex, instead of the scripted, stylized and mediated performance that it is.