Film Metaphors of Bodily Transgressions in Human and Animal World

Autor pisze o filmach ukazujących transgresję człowieka w kierunku zwierzęcości. Interesują go ludzko-zwierzęce hybrydy, a także zakazane kontakty seksualne między przedstawicielami różnych gatunków. Wątki te obecne są w kinie, ale stanowią rodzaj tabu, w istocie niezbyt często przekraczanego przez filmowców. Okazuje się jednak, że mogą one skutecznie problematyzować fundamentalne kwestie natury egzystencjalnej, choć nie tylko.


A Tail… Film Metaphors of Bodily Transgressions in Human and Animal World
Ogon… Filmowe metafory cielesnych transgresji w świecie ludzi i zwierząt
Ключевые слова: гибрид, зоофилия, деформация тела, кинокартина, хвост "Zoophilologica. Polish Journal of Animal Studies" Nr 1 (7)/2021 Mity -stereotypy -uprzedzenia (II), s. 1-11 issn 2451-3849 DOI: http://doi.org/10.31261/ ZOOPHILOLOGICA.2021.07.12 For Frank Zappa. 1 I wish I had a tail. Not of the canine persuasion though, albeit I had two such pets and I usually like the sort -maybe not that squirrel converted into a Min Pin owned by my second-floor neighbor -but mostly, yes. Mostly, I like them fine. I would not want a dog's tail, because wagging seems somewhat unserious to me, although -truth be told -I am not quite a serious man myself. Regardless of the certain lack in respect of seriousness so easily attributed to an old professor, I would much prefer a cat's tail, because you can hold it proudly and in a dignified manner, and you are not supposed to wag it at all. I would much prefer one that is not just like moggie's, though I like them fine, as much as the next person, but like a cougar's, and one from Canada for that matter. These are bigger and, naturally, have proportionally longer tails. That is the kind of tail I am going to have when I grow up and get serious. Finally. Some day.
The human tail issue has been neglected by cinema. Sometimes, as in Jan Jakub Kolski's Jańcio Wodnik (Johnnie Waterman, 1994), a tail plays a merely marginal role, while at other times, as in Quando le donne avevano la coda (When Women Had Tails, dir. Pasquale Festa Campanile, 1970), it is reduced to the level between frivolous comedy and soft pornography. The titular women lose this extremely useful part of their bodies in a sequel released two years later. This state of affairs in the "tail department," made the Russian film Zoologiya (Zoology, 2016, dir. Ivan I. Tverdovsky) all the more interesting to me. Despite its somewhat ironic tone, it is in fact a serious film, which provokes one to venture a short interpretation and to wonder about how cinema uses the motif of a human-animal hybrid, even if what serves as the only animal-related element is a tail or rather khvost (after all, it is a Russian movie, so my discussion of it may entail some Russian contaminants).
Let us start with the work by a young filmmaker, also Russian. His heroine works in a zoo, where she is bullied as an unattractive middle-aged woman, "after the second diminution," by both her colleagues and her boss. Paradoxically enough, her tormentors' sense of complacency must be attributed to the fact that they do not own a mirror, because the creatures chosen for their parts by the casting director are of severely grotesque aspect, often monstrously overweight and dull-eyed. Natasha, the aforementioned heroine, is fifty-odd years old (Natalya Pavlenkova was 56 at the time of filming and more or less looked the part), but even before the transformation at the hairdresser's, she looks better than all her co-workers put together. But, as a victim of constant teasing and indecent jokes, she believes herself to be an ugly duckling. 1 In 1986 this outstanding artist posed the following question in the title of his concert album: Does Humor Belong in Music? Perhaps today the question is worth a follow-up, something along the lines of: Does an academic text have to be serious? Or a step further on that note: Can an academic text in the humanities today be serious at all? In our times. The times of slander. Meanwhile, her devotee mother tells her a story about a woman who prowls the area, sent by Lucifer himself. One can easily recognize her as she has three tails. Consequently, Natasha grows a tail but -as modest and somewhat cowed a person -only one. Not just any tail. An impressive huge one, reaching down below the knees. Together with the Love of My Life, we voted against it. The tail seemed to us a bit unsightly, though -as the protagonist quickly discovers while bathing in the tub -quite practical. All she has to do is to open her legs a little bit and the tail finds its way and delivers pleasure.
The phallic character of the tail seems almost obvious and in many languages it is reflected in terminology, namely a colloquial term for the male organ corresponds with one that describes the appendage which some animals grow nearby the former though somewhat further towards the rear. Let us take the German term for "the tail," that is, der Schwanz, although this is not the only example, because in our country, por ejemplo, it is la cola. In the discussed case, the aforementioned scene of autoerotic fulfillment undoubtedly confirms what the director meant. Regardless of the newly discovered application of this -admittedly unusual for the humankind -organ, Natasha goes to the doctor with the intention of having it either removed or at least examined. Here begins her journey through the post-Soviet medical hell, shown in a very suggestive fashion, which in itself comes as no surprise, because the creator has already revealed his interest in the subject on earlier occasions. However, the film is not about that; these genre scenes, sometimes so funny that they terrify, only lend the presented world credibility and provide a background for the thread of… romance. Yes, romance, because this purportedly unattractive and almost elderly a woman finds an admirer who is not only nice and handsome, but also twenty years younger than her. Pietia is a young radiologist who takes numerous photos of the tail; numerous, as they all come out blurred. The machine probably remembers the times of Leonid Brezhnev, and the unruly tail constantly wriggles while the x-ray images are being taken. The romantic entanglement starts between the two with a bottle of wine drunk together in the open air, and from there, evolves into a love story. Not immediately though do the characters end up in an alcove, despite the tail's more and more manifest attempts at indicating its other-than-wagging functionalities. In one of the scenes, during a crazy dance with the young medicus, the tail falls out of Natasha's panties causing panic among other disco-goers. But is it really a tail or rather a mere figure? This is explained in the scene where the heroine, drunk, shows the khvost to her mother who -overcome with religious passion -has decorated her apartment walls with red painted Orthodox crosses. Despite her own earlier prattle about the tailed devil woman, the old lady fails to see the tail altogether. So, is the tail to serve as a figure? And then, how should it be interpreted?
Here, what comes in handy is the only erotic scene between Natasha and Pietia which takes place in the middle of the night in the zoo in the company of many other tailed creatures, large and small. It turns out that the man desires not so much Natasha as her tail. Instead of showing higher feelings in a more traditional way, which the woman clearly expects, he satisfies himself by sucking on the end of the khvost, showing no interest in anything else.
In the context of this scene, I see Zoology as a statement about the pornographic imagination. The woman here is not perceived as an individual, but as a certain feature that can be entered in a catalogue on a dirty movies portal. Perhaps Natasha's "tail" is her advanced age, because from the perspective of the thirty-year-old man, or even younger, she must seem ancient. What constitutes an obstacle for many, turns out to be a desirable fetish for Piotr. It is also possible that the film can be understood in a broader sense, as a statement about the times when the inflation of images makes us look not for people, but only for appearances and erotic phantasms.
Linda Williams 2 sees pornography as a phenomenon that paralyses the body -above all, the female body -and thus fetishizes it. For fetish works on the principle of pars pro toto. It never constitutes a whole, although it represents it. Here, it additionally gains a perverse dimension, because the tail, as an inhuman element, points to the taboo of zoophilia, 3 although the Russian film does not refer to it. Decidedly, it is a figure representing something else, which is emphasized paradoxically by the realistic tone of the movie that -apart from the tail -portrays the post-Soviet society and ever-progressing erosion of human relations. At first, Pietia's affection may seem to send a ray of hope over the gloomy world of Zoology, but it turns out to be only a manifestation of a kind of mutilation which limits the sphere of sexuality to the consumption of pornographic phantasms and can be satisfied even when devoid of any relation with another human being.
The motif of a human tail in the context of sex also appears in The X-Files series. The 20th episode of the fourth season, titled Small Potatoes (1997, dir. Cliff Bole), begins with a scene depicting a child born with a tail. When the case turns out to be not an isolated one, enter the agents who specialize in solving criminal cases with unexplained elements or paranormal phenomena, and in which the perpetrators sometimes prove to be aliens from outer space. Although tailed children have been born in different families, their father turns out to be the same man. He is capable of changing his body to resemble the partners of his descendants' future mothers and, in this peculiar "disguise," slipping into the bedroom of unsuspecting women. The motif I am interested in appears here, of course, in a different way than in the excellent Zoology, and the popular series at the end of the 20th century did not carry as deep a meaning as the Russian director's film. Still, also this production is worth noting.
The juxtaposition of the animal-related element with the sphere of sexuality is hardly new. Tomas Geyskens 4 points out that the perception of nature as a phenomenon based on natural and sexual selection originates from Darwin, who -like Freud -contrasted it with the field of culture. Within it, both "animality" and sexuality are suppressed. Hence, they are often collated with each other. Interestingly, the creator of psychoanalysis is the patron of a film that constitutes one of the first open statements on female sexuality. Cat People (1942, dir. Jacques Tourneur), which verges on a horror movie, was produced by Val Lewton for RKO Pictures. His projects, created with limited budgets, were characterized by a lack of literality. Suggesting rather than showing, they created an atmosphere that seems extremely evocative even today. The protagonist of the film, Irena, comes from the Balkans from a tribe affected by a kind of a curse that turns women into dangerous black panthers in moments of sexual arousal. Although it sounds exciting, probably not every man would dare to date such a feline creature. In the film dating back to the early 1940s, this idea was undoubtedly daring, especially since in one of the final scenes we receive a literal interpretation of the protagonist's sexual neurosis. This way the viewer does not have to guess anything, because the symbolism used here is explained in accordance with the spirit of a kind of "pop-psychoanalysis" popular in the 1940s, especially in black cinema, but also in horror films.
The 1942 production was followed by a much poorer sequel, but also a remake under the same title, made by Paul Schrader in 1982. The film was received 5 as an attempt to render Lewton and Tourner's vision more literate. In the early 1980s with the beginning of AIDS crisis, which constituted a symbolic (though not only) closure of the sexual revolution, the story of discovering female sexuality would have been meaningless. Hence, although his work does not match the original in class, Schrader created a contemporary film about "high-risk" sex, about the times when it was necessary to forget about the carefree pansexuality, whose patron was the contraceptive pill launched onto the market in the 1960s.
The animal-related element, shown as something simultaneously dangerous and attractive, has been a recurring motif in horror cinema. We can find it in countless movies about werewolves or vampires as well as in many screen versions of the story about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. For what other purpose does the transformation of a steady and reliable medicus into a beast serve if not to depict the release of repressed sensuality and, at the same time, animal-ism? This theme has been repeatedly described and analyzed by film experts, both in cross-sectional 6 and more detailed 7 approaches. Therefore, I will not return to the films and motifs that have already been interpreted many a time; instead, I will focus on cases that are particularly interesting and, in their own way, exceptional.
In an old joke, inquisitive Johnny asks his mother if the snake has a tail? In this sense, John Gilling's film The Reptile (1966) seems to be most on the subject, because as we all know -instructed by the young genius's mother -the snake has a tail. A tail and nothing else. The production by Hammer Film Productions, who specialize in cheap horror movies 8 ruthlessly exploiting classic motifs adding a touch of macabre and sex, 9 is one of the few gems in the studio's output.
Although not truly original, the movie differs from the mainstream Hammer. Gilling does not even try to frighten the viewer, using a fantastic convention to tell a story that can be interpreted on at least two levels: existential and political. The heroine -the titular "reptile" (in Poland the title was translated as the equivalent of Snake Woman) -is Anna. Paradoxically, though eponymous, in fact her role is only a supporting one and the ostensible heroine appears in just a few scenes. Travelling with her father, a bit too inquisitive a doctor of theology, she gets "infected" with a curse that affects the followers of a primitive religion of the serpent-people of Borneo. The father hides her from the world, trying to feed her mice and rabbits, but from time to time the girl goes on a more serious hunt. Andrzej Kołodyński once drew attention to the first interpretation, 10 that is, the existential one, but perhaps it would be more interesting to understand The Reptile as a political voice on the colonial past of Great Britain. 11 In 1966, the colonial empire was not completely dismantled yet, but it was then that its 6 Cf. for example, David J. Hogan, Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film (Jefferson: McFarlan, 2016).
7 For example, one of more interesting items on the list is Erin Harrington's Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror (New York: Routledge, 2018). The authoress focuses on the monstrosity of female body, often perceived -usually in the context of its reproductive functions -as something bestial, ruled by the laws of nature, subject to the instincts rather than will. 8 It is this type of films that Hammer was most famous for. They were produced there from the end of the 1950s, while the studio was established in 1935, and horrors and broadly understood fantasy were not the genres produced from the very beginning. 9 The studio often produced several versions adapted to the expectations of various markets: British, American or even Japanese. They varied with the intensity of the graphic scenes of violence and sex (certainly very innocent from today's perspective), as well as the title was different, sometimes.
important overseas possessions were gaining independence and the echoes of this process also appeared in films that seemingly had not much in common with British colonial policy. Anna is not only a victim of a strange "tropical disease," but also a stigma carrier who is being punished for her father's sin of treating instrumentally the followers of the religion he studies.
The Reptile is an interesting film because the transformation into an animal it depicted is not sensual in character, although the erotic undertones -for example, in the series of films about Dracula -were almost the trademark of Hammer's productions. Gilling's intimate piece corresponds in a way to a slightly later production, titled Skullduggery (1970, dir. Gordon Douglas). It was based on a novel titled Les Animaux dénaturés 12 by Jean Marcel Bruller, known as Vercors, the pseudonym which he had assumed back in the time of World War II occupation when he had been a co-founder of an originally underground publisher called Les Éditions de Minuit. 13 Douglas's adaptation is not a successful film, mainly due to the rather unfortunate combination of serious and comic elements. Like its literary original, it touches upon a problem that is important to my considerations, showing human-animal hybrids in an original way. In this case, there is more to it than a tail. In Papua New Guinea the heroes discover a Tropi tribe, who are perhaps the long-lost missing link between humans and the world of other mammals. Initially, they are only meant to be a cheap workforce helping in the extraction of valuable minerals, but, in the end, the sensational plot gives way to issues closer to the Vercors's novel. Who are the Tropi? Are they humans or still animals? The sexual thread also appears here, although very differently presented than in the aforementioned horror movies. Here, the criterion of belonging to the human race is the ability to reproduce in a system in which the mother comes from the Tropi tribe and the father is a human. What constitutes an interesting twist to the plotline is the introduction of racial thread, which allows the film to be interpreted not only as a reflection on the limits of what is human, but also in the context of what was happening in the USA at the time the film was released. Four years earlier, the radical Black Panther movement had been formed, and in 1970, its armed fraction -the Black Liberation Army. In an extensive court scene, which is to deliver the final determination whether or not the Tropi are human, an unexpected voice appears in the discussion: Tropi are not people, not because their body is covered with fur, but because their skin is white. It is an abomination since human skin is inherently black! In one of my beloved Polish films -Lech Majewski's Angelus (2000)a group of primitivist painters decide to save the world from destruction. For this purpose, they need to find a virgin young man who will sacrifice his life and "take upon himself" the impact of a ray that will "wallop" down from Saturn towards the Earth. They do not "beat about the bush, but ask" the candidate straight-forwardly: "Are you a virgin, dude?" "Say it, now!" "Have you popped your cherry yet?" "Yup! Just once, though. Not with a girl but a goat." And that is the point where a doubt arises -does it count with a goat? It seems that the world's self-proclaimed saviors would be willing to turn a blind eye. Though the candidate is eventually disqualified, the question remains, even though zoophilia is one of the fundamental sexual taboos. Interestingly, in some European countries the practice was banned quite recently. In Spain, for instance, which is my home, as late as in 2015. At the same time, another practice remains still legal here to this date -perhaps because of the sin of negligence -namely, pornography involving animals. In the liberal Netherlands, it was banned already in 2010.
This motif appears in the cinema from time to time -sometimes in a slightly veiled form, sometimes in an openly literal one. This is another variety of "animal transgression," which I am trying to track down in more or less forgotten films, because even though we are convinced it is impossible to cross-breed a human and a representative of another species, the anxiety as to whether this is really the case stimulates filmmakers' imagination.
The scandalous Marco Ferreri talks about it literally in a film screened in Poland and Spain under the title of Liza (1971). The Italian title -La Cagna, meaning "bitch" -sounds blunter and is probably a better way to reflect the atmosphere of this erotic fantasy. Although the protagonist does not literally engage in zoophilia or rather bestiality, he does engage in a relationship with a woman who decides to replace his dog. Jealous of the Giorgio's beloved bitch, Liza kills her and takes her place, agreeing to put on a collar, playing fetch games and similar merriment. She is not the only one willing to play the role of a "bitch." His wife, abandoned by the protagonist, suggests to fit in with the erotic fantasies of her unfaithful spouse and have "doggy style" sex with him. However, having scorned the offer, Giorgio returns to his lover to throw her a stick on the beach.
Not extreme enough? Vese de noces (1974, dir. Thierry Zéno) is an almost forgotten film from bordering on exploitation and horror, which has never been screened in cinemas and remained present only through screenings at film festivals -mostly shady, but not only. Black-and-white, completely devoid of dialogue, but illustrated with the music by Perotin and Monteverdi, the movie is both disgusting and intriguing. First, its unnamed hero copulates with a pig, which soon gives birth to a litter of piglets; subsequently, he hangs his offspring, kills their mother, and himself indulges in acts of self-mutilation and coprophagy to finally braid a rope for himself. The Belgian film certainly belongs to the category of the most disgusting works I have ever seen, butand this worries me the most -while watching it, I had the feeling I was in contact with something surprisingly sincere and authentic, with a story about the pursuit of total destruction, resignation from being human.
Unexpectedly, this satisfaction is not provided by Max, My Love (1986, Max, mon amour, dir. Nagisa Oshima), although it is the work of a master who had already caused a scandal a decade before with his In the Realm of the Senses (1976, 愛のコリーダ). The cinematic work, created in France, tells the story in which a diplomat's wife has an affair. Nothing extraordinary, one might say, if it were not for the fact that Max is… a chimpanzee. This is probably one of the less successful films of the Japanese director, although the opening credits feature many great names apart from Charlotte Rampling who plays the lead role. The creators' intention was probably to create an anti-bourgeois satire similar to the films by the above-mentioned Marco Ferreri, but this idea failed completely. Oshima, hitherto shocking with images of non-simulated sex depicted literally, this time does not cross the border of pornography, contenting himself with kissing and cuddling scenes between Margaret and Max, played not by a real animal, but by Ailsa Berk, an actress and choreographer, specializing in creating animal characters in films. Anyway, the scenes turn out shocking enough to the guests invited to dinner by her husband.
Fantastic cinema is sometimes created simply for the delight of the public; whereas at other times, sometimes unconsciously, it efficiently renders themes and metaphors of human fears. Horror usually focuses on such existential anxieties as fear of death, disability, loss of control over one's own body, while science fiction refers to social traumas -disturbing the integrity of the community, fear of foreign ideology, the possibility of losing a species identity. The films discussed here most often draw on the heritage of fantasy, but not always, and to a different extent. They have one thing in common -the theme of losing human identity, whether through hybridization of the body or by breaking taboos of sexual contacts with representatives of other species.
We will not find an obvious common ground in them, 14 although probably there is a kind of contradiction in all of the mentioned films. Fascination with animality meets the fear of losing human identity. Animality intrigues, but also invariably refers us to a taboo zone, which is difficult even to joke about, although sometimes it happens, for example, in the independent dark comedy Sleeping Dogs Lie (2014, dir. Bobcat Goldthwait). The heroine has an unexpected "adventure" in her youth -oral sex with a dog. It turns out that this unfortu-nate episode will affect her entire subsequent life. Mostly, however, films on the subject of zoophilia -including those not mentioned in my article -are serious in tone, and intercourse with animals constitutes a form of ultimate transgression in the sphere of sexuality. In mainstream cinema, this topic is almost absent -although there are exceptions, such as The Shape of Water (2017, dir. Guillermo del Toro). In this fantasy drama, which has probably been overrated by the Academy, the heroine makes love to a creature which, admittedly, has animal features but it comes from the world of fantasy. So perhaps this example does not count.

* * *
What has turned out to be an unexpected summary to my somewhat frivolous reflection is the Spanish movie known as Skins (though not in Poland where the title has been translated as Ciała, i.e., Bodies). Here, in Spain, its title Pieles (dir. Eduardo Casanova, 2014) has the same meaning as its English equivalent. Although there are no scenes that directly refer to zoophilia or human-animal hybrids, it proposes a different approach to the problem raised in the film with which I started, that is, Zoology. This multi-threaded fantasy produced by Alex de la Iglesia, known for his extravagant ideas and peculiar sense of humor, is in fact about a pornographic imagination, just like the outstanding Russian film. Its heroes are mutilated or deformed people, but also a boy fantasizing about losing his legs and replacing them with a mermaid's fin (here is the tail, so we are still on the subject). It all starts in a peculiar brothel, where a naked old madam with pink-dyed pubic hair offers forbidden pleasures to the clients -sex with children, with disabled people or with people who have some organs missing. One of the heroes chooses an 11-year-old girl who was born without eyes. And, this is just the first scene followed by a subsequent eruption of the Spanish filmmakers' imagination, though almost all of the heroes could actually be born just as Casanova portrayed them. With just one exception: a girl who has her digestive tract that is turned 180 degrees: her anus is where her mouth should be, and vice versa.
The description probably sounds quite extreme, but Skins is in fact a truly poignant and visually fascinating film, discussing how sad it is to be lost in the world of sexual fantasies that substitute relationships which otherwise the protagonists might have and in which their partners might be accepted as they are without looking for a "tail."