BijouBlog

Bijou Video’s social media is literally out of this world, and a major social media blitz by our esteemed videographer Miriam Webster actually increased sales and customers. I credit the brilliant Miriam with this development, and we are actually going to feature a different movie on Twitter and Facebook every Monday. Call it Movie Monday, and Monday rather than Blue Monday might actually end up being for our customers and social media followers Sex Monday. 

I do wonder though, as I’ve also noticed on Twitter even more retweets of our posts than usual, if what is really going on is an escape into sex. Yes, escaping into it, but what is it an escape from? The obvious answer: the profoundly shocking upset to America that occurred on November 8.
 

Yes, so shocking, to the point where I actually called my mother (we don’t communicate frequently). There’s that line from the movie Mildred Pierce, “everyone has a mother,” and in my case, I felt like my mother was all I had. We wept together for about half an hour. 
 

Now, I wasn’t necessarily escaping into my mother, but the election, especially for those in what are now liberal enclaves (I hate having to use that word, but it is true), triggered a descent into the most fundamental core, so deep, like the tohu-va-vohu of Genesis 1 (the primordial, undifferentiated waters, like the amniotic waters of the womb) of our personal and social psyches. And in that dark place everything gets mixed up together, what is taboo and what is pure, what is violent and what is peaceful, what is evil and what is good. It’s the place where we decide whether to cross or maintain boundaries, build walls or make bridges in the world. 
 

Sex is crossing a boundary, physically, mentally, spiritually. I wonder if this crisis just made people unconsciously desire to do so, to cross that boundary, to voluntarily experience the petit mort of orgasm, especially in a situation where they felt utterly helpless and powerless. And the orgasms perhaps were even more intense, more powerful, given the raw emotions surging through the person. There’s an intimate connection between sex and violence, and perhaps the external climate violence we are all experiencing viscerally connected with our sex drives, like an electrical charge so strong it could blow a fuse. 
 

I know in my case my horniness has literally skyrocketed, and I experienced some of the best kinky sex play the weekend after the election to the point where my playmate and I even decided to commemorate the day in the future. Yes, we were escaping from the election and into sex, but I think we were also in our own way taking back the night because in, around, and above those dark, primal waters is a living, breathing spirit. 

Die, Die My Darling aka Fanatic, 1965, directed by Silvio Narrizano,Hammer Films. (Hammer produced a plethora of famous horror movies; check out the link.) 
 

Patricia Carroll (Stefanie Powers) is an American woman who travels to London to marry her boyfriend, Alan Glentower (Maurice Kaufmann). While there, Patricia stops by to visit Mrs. Trefoile (Tallulah Bankhead), the mother of her deceased ex-fiancé, who had been killed in a car accident, intending to pay her respects. Upon arriving, however, Patricia discovers that Mrs. Trefoile's grief for her son has transformed her already fanatical religious zealotry into sociopathic violence. When Mrs. Trefoile begins holding Patricia prisoner, starving and abusing her in order to convert her into “pure virgin” for her son in the afterlife, she must find a way to escape. Her attempts to break free prove futile until a surprise intervention at the end. 

Oh, Tallulah! You turned down the Joan Crawford role in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, and now in your dotage you wanted to take advantage of the 1960s “psychobiddy” or “grande dame guignol” trend that the Crawford/Davis vehicle started. It was actually kind of odd, as she was actually more of a stage actress (Die, Die My Darling actually makes reference to this fact when Patricia asks Mrs. Trefoile is she was an actress after seeing a scrapbook of actually Tallulah stage photos) than a movie star. In fact, her last big movie role was in Hitchock's Lifeboat in 1944. 

She needed the money at that point in her life, and it was interesting that her flamboyant personality in real life actually worked well in this role about a woman who actually gives up flamboyance to become a dour religious fanatic who subjects her household staff to lengthy (think, let's read an entire book of the Bible before we eat) Bible readings and a vegetarian diet of “God's plain food.” No condiments of any kind! And how dare Stefanie Powers wear lipstick or a red blouse, the “devil's color.” Well, Tallulah herself in her indomitable way said that she looked in this movie like she was old enough to be “God's wet nurse.” 

Now, what I found interesting about this movie was not just the fabulously demented performance by Miss Bankhead, who actually seems to be channeling Bette Davis (whom she always accused of imitating her in All About Eve, because everything in the universe somehow converged on Tallulah), especially in scenes where she speaks in a creepy infantilized voice to a teddy bear that belonged to her dead son. She even whines, like Jane Hudson, who also commits a murder, “What am I going to do?” after she kills the husband of her housekeeper Anna. 
 

Yes, Tallulah gives us some marvelous campy, lurid moments as was her wont, but there's another element I noted upon repeated viewings. The housekeeper Anna (played by Yootha Joyce, actually a comic actress of some repute in England) seems to be a person of abnormal strength. Think female wrestler. 

Much of the movie is the Patricia character being subjected to physical violence, and Anna (her motivation is unclear for going along with Tallulah's insane scheme, perhaps a promise of inherited money) is the heavy. She seems to specialize in something like pro wrestling arm pinning or armlock maneuvers, but overall, she seems to be endowed with, as I said above, superhuman strength. Patricia doesn't stand a chance. She at once point resorts to biting Anna's hand, getting quite a visceral reaction from her tormentor. To no avail. “Lightweight” Patricia doesn't have the chops against this uneven match. 
 

Yep, for those possible audience members who might get off on this type of scene with its potential eroticism, there's plenty of it here. And the violence in this movie usually ends up exposing more and more of Ms. Powers' breasts. (Was she even possibly not wearing a bra earlier on? I'm sure that would rank very high on Mrs. Trefoile's catalog of sins.) At one point, during one of the fights with Anna, Stefanie gets stabbed with in the shoulder with scissors, and there's plenty of skin show there. I was thinking of some of those images of early Christian virgin martyrs subjected to all kinds of torments (St. Cecilia stabbed in the steamy bath, and St. Agatha losing, yes losing her breasts, yikes). 

Leading up to the final scene of the almost successful virgin sacrifice (no spoiler here, watch the movie), one sees a bound and gagged Patricia pushing herself down the stairs in an usual for her futile escape attempt (the boyfriend has to rescue her, of course). But once again, I kept thinking how a potential straight male audience (or any others who might be interested) might get excited by seeing the struggling “damsel in bondage.” 

The movie is finally available in a no-frills DVD (no menu, no subtitles) for your hot summer of grande dame guignol. 

Yes, the book, Valley of the Dolls, on which the camp classic movie was based, is 50 years old! Hard to believe!

I actually saw the movie before I read the book. A former friend of mine seemed to think I needed to see it as part of Gay 101. I showed it to another friend, who knew nothing of the movie's gay cult status, and he said, “This is a bad movie.” Yes, it is. I could go on and on about why it is bad, but like other cult movies, it oddly suck the viewer in, perhaps because it's consistently bad (Neely, Neely, Neely O'Hara!), except for the touching performance of Sharon Tate as Jennifer. Even more touching, as we know of Sharon's horrible death.

When I finally got around to reading the book, I was actually shocked that the Jennifer character played by Sharon Tate in the movie enjoys a lesbian tryst while in college This tryst is not the movie, of course, and even though Jacqueline Susann is relatively explicit here, girl-on-girl sex in school wasn't as shocking socially at that time, because the hetero man finds it titillating, and it reaffirms the stereotype that a woman can easily experiment with lesbianism before finding the man of her dreams.

And as the recent article on this book in Slate points out, the word “fag” shows up quite often in the book, emphasizing the stereotype of the bitchy queen hairdresser or clothes designer prevalent in the 1960s and before.

Yes, much seems dated, but the the trials and tribulations of the fame- and fortune-seeking “dolls” who pop dolls parallel the hyperkinetic, hyperreal, hypertweet celebrity culture of today.

One could even say that Jennifer, Neely, and Anne are the infinitely more talented grandmothers of Real Housewives, the Bachelorette, and the Kardashians. Jennifer was beautiful and also kind, Neely, according to her nemesis Helen Lawson “has really got it” (referring to talent) and Anne was both smart and beautiful. One feels for them as they fall into their own respective valleys of the dolls.  

Could one say the same about their 21^st century granddaughters? I wonder.

I've lately decried what I consider to be an increasing lack of free choice in one's daily life (unless one is rich). In fact, there's one particular part of one's life, an important one, over which you have no control: your address. I doubt most people would move to a place because they like the name of the street. If one moves there, one is stuck with the address, like it or hate it. 
 

However, in 2009, the residents who lived on Butt Hole Road in Leicester, England, did have the name of the street changed. Apparently they were also sick of the constant mooning pics going on in front of the street sign. In contrast, the people who live on Butthole Lane (also in Leicester, England) like the name and defiantly refuse to change it. By the way, in both cases the word “butt” is either Anglo-Saxon or Middle English, and means a target, not an ass. Oh, well … 

In the United States, the most common street names are mostly numbers (boring!) and innocuous ones named after trees like Maple and Oak. Main and Church are up their in popularity, harking back to the small town culture of America, still predominant up to the middle of the century. 

In fact, according to the link above, “road names are pieces of history. They encode the culture and geography of America. In Arizona, popular street names are Apache, Palo Verde, Mesquite. In New Mexico, Cedar and Pinon top the list; In Colorado, it’s Aspen and Spruce.” For example, in Chicago, I've noticed Native American names like Winnemac and Milwaukee as well as the ubiquitous Lincoln because Chicago is in Illinois, the Land of Lincoln. 
 

So true, but I've often wondered about how one might feel about certain street names in this time of widespread cultural transformation. Words change meaning as contexts change. For example, might an atheist feel upset that he or she lived on Church Street? Or a woman living on King Street? Perhaps now certain gay guys might feel piqued that they live on Queen Street. In this case, perhaps, one could be too “pc.” 

I also found out that some newer housing subdivisions have been able to choose new street names. Perhaps in this case one could buy or rent a place because one like the name. For example, in Sterling Heights a subdivisions boasts street names from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. I myself would love to live on Rivendell Lane. For me, it evokes an image of a pastoral paradise more than the common and boring tree and park-related names one often sees in suburban housing developments. 
 

In the second paragraph, I mentioned that the word butt in those street names did not refer to the ass. Yet the sexual names abound (perhaps not intentionally). I've discovered a Manlove Street and a Cumming Street that intersects with Seamen Street. And Morningwood (again, not intentional!).Broomrape Lane is the address of four families. Really, people, try very hard to get that one changed. Most people don't know it refers to a flower. 
 

So, what is the name of the street where you live? My street is the name of a famous opera where a gypsy seduces a soldier. I don't know if that was the inspiration for the name. It's located between two streets with Native American names, and there's some Scottish ones in the area too. Just be sure to often walk down mine, especially is you are cute and single.