Brown Bunny

The following is an e-mail sent to my friend Bryan - my reactions to the film "Brown Bunny" by Vincent Gallo:

I finally got around to seeing Brown Bunny. I was expecting something much more shocking than what that second-to-last scene turned out to be. Is it that no one has ever gotten/given head before, or is it just that no one's seen it in a movie before? In all honesty, I was expecting Bud to strip naked, play with himself, and then hang himself, and Daisy to enter the room and suck off the penis of the dead body - so you can see why I wasn't shocked at all.

The scene was by no means gratuitous - it fits in perfectly well with the rest of the movie. The blurb on the back on the DVD case said something like, "culminating in the most shocking portrayal of male sexuality the cinema has ever seen..." - which is perhaps true, if what was meant by "male sexuality" was not an exposed penis getting off in a Hollywood movie star's mouth, but rather how Bud's incapacity/impotence to come to the aid of the woman he loved at her time of need resulted in trauma that left him 1) isolated and unable to relate to people in general, but more specifically, to women in any way other than as Daisy substitutes, and 2) unable to be intimate with women in any way any less vacuous than merely receiving some feminine consolation. The infamous blowjob scene, in which he finally yields to intimacy/vulnerability can be summarized as follows: She’s exposed/naked, he’s just enough exposed to receive pleasure (she receives none), and he ends up hating himself and her immediately afterwards. It’s pathetic in the most literal sense of the word – “deserving of pity” – and yet, I can’t help but equate Bud with stereotypical Western male sexuality – wounded and wounding, repressed and repressive, ashamed and ashaming, disgraced and disgracing. And despite it all, in a whole other sense, the incredible beauty of vulnerability.

It’s a shame that the buzz about the movie never got beyond cock, because it really is a powerful, subtle, and sensitive movie. That's what that whole thing was about with Gallo pimping himself on e-bay - he made a very insightful, powerful movie that had a blowjob in it - everyone missed that point, and took it for smut and shock value. He couldn't sell a sensitive, insightful movie about male sexuality either to Hollywood or the viewing public, because neither Hollywood nor the viewing public is capable of appreciating a subtle, insightful movie about male sexuality, so he pretended to sell himself and a pornstar gigolo, because that’s all that Hollywood and the American public can comprehend. Disgrace? What is disgrace? Maybe disgrace is what happens when we lose all of our aesthetic and/or emotional sensitivity.

Chris