SEXIS WRONG

entire henchman population of the Crazy 88, to intimate, as
when sultry teen assassin Gogo asks the man on the barstool
next to her if he’d like to “screw” her. When he replies in the
affirmative, she stabs him, asking again if he’d like to “penetrate”
her. But these are all just warm-up scenes, akin to the
ones in, say, I Dream of Jenna (a Jenna Jameson bestseller),
where the climax of climaxes comes when Jenna does her
lone boy-girl scene—at the end.
In the final part of the films, Bill (David Carradine) and the
Bride meet and have some of the most bizarre ex-lover banter
ever filmed, as it becomes clear that, like so many exes,
they each have a mound of conflicting feelings for one another
and they want to kill each other—literally. In his way,
Tarantino takes the ultimate step in equating love/lust/desire
with violence, where the kill is the consummation. He creates
a fantasy world, one where people carry their samurai
swords on airplanes and where “thieves’ honor” has become
“assassins’ ethics.” Bill and the Bride ultimately are meant
for each other. They share a value system (unlike the Bride’s
rival, Elle), and they speak the same language. When they
communicate, foreplay, flirting, and attempting to kill one another
are all part of the same exchange. Since his arrival on
the scene, Tarantino’s films have been the id of
Hollywood, the primal (some would say infantile)
need for gratification, but with Kill Bill the
sexual urge finally takes its place alongside the other themes
in his work.
Which brings us full-circle to Asian cinema. Here we have
the newly emerging genre of high-gloss fantasy martial arts
films, launched by the success of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon in 2000. This film’s got it all, with a story of
unrequited love between Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh
(an action star in her own right), plenty of “flying wire” action
with swords, knives, furniture, etc...as well as some actual
young love run amok as kung fu ingénue Zhang Ziyi plays an
upstart princess who steals a near-magical sword and ends up
having a passionate affair with a barbarian-in-exile. There’s a
“girl talk” scene in the beginning of the movie when Michelle
shows the sword to Zhang, who gets breathless looking at it
while the older woman waves it around and tells her stories
of its prowess. Yep, everybody wants the phallic symbol.
“It must be exciting to be a sword fighter,” the girl says, “to
be totally free!” She believes that the ability to fight or use a
sword is the same as the ability to love whomever you want
and when—and for her it’s true, as she has not only secret
fighting skills but a secret lover. Ang Lee has never been
afraid to tell deep stories about human desires (The Wedding
Banquet, The Ice Storm), and in making a martial arts epic he
melds the love story with the fight scenes by making them
thematically equivalent. In other words, the fight scenes are
love scenes.
We find out about the princess’ barbarian lover and then are
treated to a long flashback about how they met. His band attacks
her caravan. He snatches a jade comb from her hand,
and she downs a man and takes his horse to pursue him.
Their “flirtation” consists of her shooting arrows at him and
them exchanging sword and spear blows as their horses gallop
side by side. They end up having a nice hand-to-hand
match, then wrestling in the desert sand. Since we already
know that they end up lovers, this all serves as an extended
love scene for the audience (or at least for me). This is the
slow nibbling on the chin, the caress down the neck, the soft
focus as the lovers throw their hair back and slide down onto
the satin sheets...except in this case the nibbles are smacks
with a sword, the caresses are spinning backfists, and the
satin sheets are wherever they fall while fighting.
At the end of the fight, they both fall back exhausted and pass
out. Hmm. Later in her captivity, when the budding erotic attraction
between them has been revealed, they finally have
Penetration is penetration is
penetration.
actual sex. But how does it start? She stabs him. His blood
pours over them as their wrestling turns sexual. Penetration
is penetration is penetration.
Later, she steals the sword and sets off to find her fortune.
Her story reminds me in an uncanny way of the plot of Behind
the Green Door. In this classic porn film, Marilyn Chambers’
character is kidnapped for an erotic sex show. First, she is
mentored by an older woman, as Zhang Ziyi is by Michelle
Yeoh. Next, she takes on a group of people who all want a
piece of her—in Behind the Green Door she’s touched by
many hands, pleasuring her on stage, while in Crouching Tiger
she fights multiple foes who are trying to get the sword.
Then comes a confrontation with the Big Man on Campus—
in Green Door, a black man with sizable equipment, and in
Crouching Tiger, swordsman-hero Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat
again).
The parallels eerily continue. The princess has an orgiastic
fight scene where she takes on all the kung-fu fighters of a
whole village; Chambers does multiple men at once, including
three on trapezes, whom she handles one in each hand,
one in her mouth, while straddling another man underneath
her. Then a man from the audience, who is sort of a narrator
of the story, grabs her and runs off with her for an intense
one-on-one “true love” scene. In Crouching Tiger, she ends
VIOLENCE AS THE NEW PORN 189