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I'm bumping this back to the top, 'cause I saw this movie on the weekend and wrote a review of it, sliiping into other stuff, on my livejournal. Which I think I'll just quote...
(Could start a whole new thread about sexuality and whatever in the Head Shop -- moderators please do so if you wish.)
"Saw Y Tu Mama Tambien on the weekend. I think it's possibly one of the best movies I've seen all year and okay, maybe that's 'cause it was all about sex, which was fitting given the mood I was in. Or maybe it was because it's a summer film, and the Mexican beaches reminded me of beaches I've inhabited here, something about the way the light fell.
But there's a kind of critical point there too, reminding me of Craig's June rant on make, suggesting 'interesting stuff' about sex/sexism, gender and class. It was dirty, a fun kinda dirty, and yet the prevailing mood by the end of the film was sadness and nostalgia and denial. Because learning about sexuality when you're young is all about the learning of a code. For boys, this code is almost always about gaining sexual experience, like the boys' Charolastra manifesto, which will make no sense unless you've seen it but here's a few items: 'Wanking is good and must be done as often as possible.' 'Don't fuck your friends' girlfriends.' 'The truth is really amazing but totally unattainable.'
But if your sexuality spills out of the learnt code, implicitly or explicitly, there's a moment of shock and isolation and pleasure. Like the moment when the kids both realise they're really bad in the sack, and no-one had ever told them. Like the moment when Luisa says, 'Have you ever wiggled your finger... up someone's ass?' and they simultaneously inhale all shocked. And the moment when they... (Go and see the movie.)
But isn't that the way of the world? You get drunk, you fuck people you weren't supposed to and do things you never thought you'd do. In the morning you pretend it didn't happen. And so 'thinking-about-sex' becomes a constant recuperation of false innocence, heterosexuality, non-perviness, masculinity (or femininity): the continual remaking of a shell to protect the slipping, crazy desires/pleasures you and everyone else experiences, all the time, everywhere. The codes 'change', or maybe they were never really about 'getting experienced': maybe they were always about containing those experiences into something recuperable, containable, taxonomical. Which is perhaps why my hackles always rise when I hear someone protest disingenously that anything sexual is 'too much' -- too much information, too crazy, too weird, too slutty/pervy, too much sex with too many people. It's a microfascism; it's all about self-regulation, and hasn't the 'too much' always/already infected you anyhow? It's all a matter of border protection, baby, but you make the borders by pretending they existed in the first place.
And I'm not saying that Y Tu Mama supported this status quo; actually, I think the film worked worked in a subtle way to reveal it, show it for what it is. Amongst all those nice asides about class and ethnicity and Mexican politics, that great busted-up brown station wagon with the anarchist symbol on the window, tequila consumption and naked girly bottoms."
Um, discuss. |
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