by Naomi Darvell
(08/15/01)
Last night I watched David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly. The
movie feels like a romantic comedy at first, a cute flirtation
between a mad scientist and a reporter. Then Jeff Goldblum's
character, Seth, gets drunk and puts himself though his own newly
invented teleporter -- not noticing a housefly who's come along for
the ride. When he emerges at the other end, Seth, though he doesn't
know it yet, is only partly human; his matter has merged with the
fly's.
But the movie's sexiness factor doesn't go down at that point; it
shoots way up. There's a dramatic moment when Seth has taken on
the strength of the fly and just a touch of its non-human
appearance. He starts doing gymnastics: lifting himself on the arms
of a chair and slowly twirling head over heels. Geena Davis, who
up to now has regarded the nerdy Seth with bemused affection,
notices his new tensile power. You see something different cross
her face: a combination of alarm and desire.
For the time being, Seth is not less than he was; he's more. When
human meets animal, things sometimes veer this way. In the movie
Wolf, Jack Nicholson discovers his vulpine nature and becomes
similarly charged up and sexually enhanced -- enough to attract
Michele Pfeiffer. On a more tragic note, who can forget the sad,
aristocratic Beast of Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast? And one
of my most favorite hours of television is the episode of Northern
Exposure where Maggie falls in love with a bear and goes on a
romantic date in his cave. (He looks human during the date.)
When I think about how erotic the human/nonhuman conjunction
can be onscreen, it seems odd that animal fantasies (often known
by the term "furry") are being talked about like the nutty flavor of
the month just now. Anyone would think it was all about people
becoming obsessed with their Hello Kitty vibrators. Yes, there is a
Hello Kitty vibrator -- but keep in mind that the Hello Kitty
characters appear on everything from condoms to pasta. And if
some people get a little too attached to their stuffed animals -- well,
ever since earliest childhood, when you're alone and horny, that's
what's been there, right? Inevitable, in my view, that someone
would come up with something like the "Robot Vibe-inu:" a toy
dog whose nose doubles as a vibrator, which is selling very well,
according to reports.
Today I'm concerned not with toys but with fantasies: movies, art,
fiction. When the Greeks wanted to create an embodiment of sheer
randy sexiness, what did they come up with but the satyr: shaggy
goat below the waist and man up above, except for goat's horns on
his head? Ancient myth is full of stories about woman mating with
gods in the shape of big animals: Europa and the Zeus-bull; Leda
and the swan. Yeats captured the powerful eroticism of such a
match:
"A sudden blow; the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
by the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
he holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
...Being so caught up, so mastered by the brute blood of the air,
did she put on his knowledge with his power
before the indifferent beak could let her drop?"
--W.B. Yeats, "Leda and the Swan"
The nonconsensuality of this image gets my own S/M radar
humming. And in fact, a dominant man I know tells me he
connects a lot of his own urges with animal behavior. "I like to
leave some marks if I'm using an implement," he says, comparing
this to an animal's instinct for "marking his conquest". He says he
imagines that fucking from behind reminds us of a time when
humans too were on all fours. "Several animals today will resist
being picked up, but when gripped firmly by the neck -- which is
what the male animal would do when doing the business -- they
suddenly go completely still and passive." He compares this to
"The thrill of expectancy, as the woman crouches, waiting for the
incoming cock or the downcoming hand. That's been very intense,
in the women I've talked to about it, and indeed I could see it for
myself by their sudden stillness just before either of these acts."
It's true that, S/M or no, a lot of animal fantasies are scary and
aggressive, if not bloody. Even traditional children's stories -- so
much a part of everyone's psychological landscape -- feature
alarmingly libidinous animals. Think of the strong undertones of
violent sexuality in Little Red Riding Hood, where a little girl
climbs into bed with a furry wolf and is eaten. (A thousand dirty
jokes have been based on the double meanings in that story.)
But childrens' (and adults') tales also have benevolent animals: kind, truth-telling
sages. The wise lion Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia may be the prototype
for all the benign anthropomorphic and semi-anthropomorphic animals you'll find
if you cruise the Net. Reading "furry" message boards and Web pages, people even
create Utopian communities based on animals who are noble and pure -- a concept
a lot of us grew up with as kids, bonding with pets and with animals on TV.
One woman, a writer of furry fiction, explains (echoing my
dominant male friend):
"I've always loved having my neck bitten or the hair at the base of my
head grabbed and pulled gently. I'm sure that interest was inspired by
watching cats, wild and domestic. I wasn't very comfortable with people
for much of my childhood and identified strongly with the family cats."
Indeed, one of the stories at Giza's Furry Archives is called Acceptance. In this
story, animals are in some ways more civilized than people. An
anthropomorphic lioness makes love with a man and initiates him
into the lion community, which seems to be practicing an
enlightened form of polyamory. In The Morning After, also at
Giza's, a talking fox and cheetah get together. But it's not the union
of two species that's presented as unusual; it's the fact that it's also
a gay union: the first for Warren, the fox, and a gentler
introduction to sex than most humans are lucky enough to get.
I'm more a fan of animal stories that emphasize the...well, animal.
My idea of an interesting scenario is an impromptu romp in the
woods with a slightly sadistic bear, or even a scene with
werewolves or -- back to the movies again -- something along the
lines of Cat People. (I confess to liking both the 1942 classic and
Paul Schrader's more explicit 1982 version.) Or -- why not? --
maybe a nightclub act with men and women dressed up in lion and
tiger suits, like Siegfried and Roy only really sexy. That would
have people growling and licking their chops -- if not humping in
the aisles.
So I was looking forward to Tim Burton's new version of Planet of the Apes.
Helena Bonham Carter is beyond hot anyway; the idea of an ape princess Helena
getting it on with the star of Boogie Nights fired all my cylinders. At the
beginning of the movie, there was a very promising animal magnetism between
Wahlberg and Bonham Carter. Alas, it all fizzled into a regretful, chaste
little scene at the end.
You don't have to be a furry fanatic to bemoan this conservatism. Film critic
David Thomson says: "This Planet of the Apes should have allowed for a more
complete imagining of the ape's body, and it should have given Bonham Carter
the chance...to flaunt it."
Granted, apes are closer to humans than cats or wolves are. Still,
Thomson's remark applies to a lot of interspecies fantasy.
Imagining yourself in, or with, another species is as basic and
powerful as ancient mythology, and as appealing.
I go back to Yeats's vision of Leda and the swan:
"...Being so caught up, so mastered by the brute blood of the air,
did she put on his knowledge with his power
before the indifferent beak could let her drop?"
Is the swan super-human (god) or sub-human (brute)? Yeats
makes him both. He describes the interspecies encounter as
frightening yet possibly illuminating: a temporary loss of self,
leading perhaps to greater knowledge. Not what I look for in sex
every time, maybe, but what would be the point of sex if it didn't
sometimes bring you into contact with something strange and new?
