SEXIS WRONG

posite sides of a two-sided, full-length mirror. This time the
face each man sees is his enemy’s, but also his own.
Speaking of Mexican standoffs, the next director who seems
to share my kink is Robert Rodriguez. Take a look at Desperado,
his sequel/pseudo-remake of his own cult-indie hit
El Mariachi. The weapon-as-object-of-lust theme translates
easily from culture to culture in cinema. As one character
says of the protagonist, who carries his guns in a guitar case:
“He sat that thing on the stool beside him as if it were his
girl.” Rodriguez is not subtle in this film, and I love him for it. It
stars heartthrob Antonio Banderas, described by his fan sites
as “the Ultimate Latin Lover.” Rodriguez pairs him with the
sexy, sultry Salma Hayek, and I do mean pairs.
Here’s how the major sequence of the first act unfolds. First,
Rodriguez’s camera lingers over Banderas’ beauty, as our
hero shaves, puts back his hair, and dons his best jacket. Hot.
To go out and pick up a girl? Yes and no. His intent is to kill just
about every inhabitant of a seedy Mexican bar. He does, with
verve and oodles of choreographed, Woo-esque gunplay. As
he walks away from the bar, the lone survivor stalks him unseen
through the daytime streets. Or so we think.
The bad guy catches up to our hero just as sexy Salma enters,
in a midriff top that causes a car accident as she crosses the
street. She sees the gunman coming from behind, and at the
last moment, our hero sweeps her out of the way, turns on
the assailant, gets shot in the arm, and ends up on the ground
Action-film directors have figured
out what I—the slobbering audience
member—want: a visceral, physical
experience which is akin to sex.
on top of him, with the bad guy’s guns pressed under his own
chin. The cum shot: Our hero shoots him, blood sprays everywhere,
then Antonio swoons into Salma’s arms. Honestly, if
that isn’t all an analog for sex, I don’t know what is.
Act two opens with a beautiful S/M scene between the two
of them, where she tweezes the bullets out of his wound in
sadistic fashion, scalds him with hot water, and plays with
needles, while they make repartee. In the next scene, she
looks through his guns and finds one that looks remarkably
like a strap-on dildo, and he says that she can have it. The list
goes on. Did I mention I love Robert Rodriguez? There’s even
a sequel, Once Upon a Time in Mexico—check out Salma
and her garter full of knives. Oh, baby. Rodriguez directed the
aforementioned Sin City, as well. The next time I go to see
one of his films, I may as well bring a Pocket Rocket vibrator
in my purse. (Provided it isn’t SpyKids 4, of course.)
No discussion of modern action would be complete without
mentioning Rodriguez’s compadre, Quentin Tarantino, a man
so influenced by John Woo’s work that upon seeing A Better
Tomorrow he started wearing a skinny tie and trench coat
like Chow Yun-Fat in the film. The look—though not the suppressed
but inherent sexuality—of Chow’s characters surfaces
in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Tarantino,
I think, appears to have some sexual hang-ups himself, and
he repressed them deeply for his first several films, where he
investigates violence as violence (what a concept!).
We get a taste of the lewd from him in the cheesy, over-thetop
flick he and Rodriguez did together, From Dusk Till Dawn,
which features Salma Hayek doing one of the hottest stripper
acts on film (though note, again, no actual tittie shot). But
despite that foray, Tarantino’s gunplay and bloodshed don’t
read, for me, as sublimated sex, so much as an actual fascination
with pain, humiliation, and violence.
That is, until his magnum opus in two parts, Kill Bill, in which
every sexual impulse Tarantino probably has ever had comes
exploding out like the snakes from a joke can. (The Pussy
Wagon. The nurse outfit right out of a fetish fantasy catalog.)
The film is structured as a kind of Debbie Does Dallas of violence,
in which each fight scene (sex scene) involves more
important characters than the previous, coming ever closer
to the big finish in which yin meets yang, Debbie meets Mr.
Greenfield, and the Bride confronts her former-lover/killer,
Bill.
In one of the early sequences in the film, Uma Thurman’s
character (called “the Bride”) fights another
female assassin—this is the standard girl-ongirl
scene in a porn flick, which is a warm-up
for the guy-on-girl action. When the Bride visits
renowned swordmaker Hattori Hanzo and
he shows her his swords, the music that plays
can only be described as a light love theme. A lilting, wordless
vocal, this is the music that should be playing when a
hero sees his love interest for the first time, or when they
first fall into bed together. Instead, Uma stares lovingly at a
rack of swords. She reaches hesitantly for one, shy, nearly
fumbling like the eager ingénue at a man’s belt, but then her
grip tightens on the hilt, and in ultra-close-up she slowly but
firmly glides the blade several inches from its sheath. She
could just as easily be gliding down the jockey shorts of some
young lover, letting his boner stand up.
There’s more. The sexual themes run the gamut from the disgusting
to the uplifting, from the apparently regular rape of a
comatose woman by hospital employees to the life-changing
experience that procreation can be, even for assassins. The
action ranges from orgiastic, as when the Bride kills off the
188 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG