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lish-language action cinema for decades now, and if you think<br />
there’s little sex in American action movies, there’s practically<br />
none in their Hong Kong counterparts. Do you remember<br />
ever seeing Bruce Lee in a love scene? Of course not.<br />
Even in his Hollywood incarnation, Bruce is all about loyalty,<br />
honor, and revenge. In Enter the Dragon, the black guy and<br />
the white guy get all the pussy they want, while Bruce’s concubine<br />
is actually a double-agent helping him overthrow the<br />
evil overlord.<br />
God, I’m getting hot thinking about it.<br />
If I can be Freudian for a moment, can it be any more obvious<br />
that long swords and pointy knives and guns that spray bullets<br />
everywhere are phallic objects? (I am soooo into penetration.)<br />
I realized this some years ago when I discovered that<br />
the hottest thing on television was the Highlander television<br />
series, starring Adrian Paul. Maybe it was partly that the show<br />
was coproduced for broadcast in France, so it was by default<br />
sexier than your usual North American fare. When you’re an<br />
Immortal, the list of ex-lovers who can show up in any given<br />
episode (and in flashbacks) is quite long, so there were plenty<br />
of opportunities. But really, what’s not to like about guys who<br />
look like they just walked off the cover of a romance novel trying<br />
to kill each other with long, shiny swords? Every episode<br />
ends with a fatal duel, the “cum shot” being when one rival<br />
beheads the other, precipitating a magical transfer of power<br />
called “the Quickening.” Oh, no, not sexual at all. And how<br />
Freudian that these rivals must behead one another, clearly<br />
a stand-in for emasculation/castration—especially when you<br />
consider that our hero, Duncan, pretty much never takes the<br />
head of the female Immortals he encounters. And he encounters<br />
quite a few, from a Catwomanish Joan Jett to beauty<br />
queen Elizabeth Gracen. Oo la la.<br />
It’s the overtly sexy themes that keep cropping<br />
up that make me think it isn’t just me who<br />
gets off on screen violence. The filmmakers<br />
have to be in on it, too. Unlike porn, where the<br />
more stylized it is, the less arousing I find it, with swordplay<br />
and gunplay, the more stylized, the better. The highly stylized<br />
cinematography and improbable fighting moves succeed in<br />
transporting me into a fantasy realm. My imagination is engaged,<br />
and my heart starts to race. Maybe Freud was right<br />
about some things.<br />
When Wolverine reveals his claws in X-Men: The Movie<br />
(which had a PG-13 rating, by the way), it’s better than Rocco<br />
Siffredi unzipping his pants. Sure, he can flick them out<br />
switchblade-style (“snikt” is his sound effect), but he can<br />
also extrude them gradually, just like an erection emerging<br />
from the foreskin. If these things aren’t phallic, what are we<br />
to make of the fact that Rogue and Wolverine don’t establish<br />
intimacy and trust until after he penetrates her? With his<br />
claws, I mean. These two characters, who have had a sort of<br />
attraction/tension between them for much of the film, are put<br />
into a classic sexual set-up, in which she slips into his room<br />
at night while he is having nightmares. But instead of a compromising<br />
erotic situation, a compromising violent situation<br />
stands in—he stabs her.<br />
Look at the classic “heroic bloodshed” films from John<br />
Woo’s days in Hong Kong. The best are those in which he<br />
teamed up with star Chow Yun-Fat—Hong Kong’s answer to<br />
Cary Grant—especially The Killer and Hard-Boiled. Both stories<br />
have a subtext of unrequited love and—being Chinese—<br />
these films have buried their emotions under an inscrutable<br />
mask of revenge and honor-bound violence. (Music-video director<br />
Antoine Fuqua does his best Woo imitation in 1998’s<br />
The Replacement Killers, starring Chow. Although I enjoyed<br />
it, it was strictly softcore.)<br />
Woo isn’t having fun unless he’s sublimating love, lust, or<br />
both, into some kind of symbolic gun battle or violence, which<br />
is why Face/Off is his best US film. When the bad guy (Nicolas<br />
Cage) swaps his face for the good guy’s (John Travolta),<br />
each man enters the other one’s life in intimate ways. One<br />
of the most symbolic scenes comes when the villain gives<br />
“his” daughter some fatherly advice after he witnesses her<br />
boyfriend trying to get into her pants against her will. After<br />
beating the boyfriend black and blue, and giving her a cigarette,<br />
he asks the daughter if she has “protection.”<br />
“You mean like condoms?” she asks. You’re expecting him<br />
to whip a foil packet out of his jacket pocket and toss it to her.<br />
But no.<br />
Her grip tightens on the hilt,<br />
and in ultra-close-up she slowly<br />
but firmly glides the blade several<br />
inches from its sheath.<br />
The very next shot is a slo-mo on his right hand, unfolding a<br />
butterfly knife. The sides spread open sensuously, and then<br />
it clicks into place, the blade lusciously curved and glinting in<br />
the light. “Protection,” he repeats. If you aren’t lusting after<br />
the weapon after that cinematic treatment, you’re dead from<br />
the neck down.<br />
Then there is Woo’s signature fight-scene move—the intensely<br />
intimate “Mexican standoff” in which two characters<br />
(or more) meet in the heat of battle, each with a gun pressed<br />
to the other’s head. In Face/Off, Woo doesn’t pass up the<br />
opportunity to make a kind of 69 out of it—when each man<br />
(who is having some sort of relations with the other’s wife/<br />
girlfriend) “faces off” against the other, they end up on op-<br />
VIOLENCE AS THE NEW PORN 187
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