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High Life

#1
C C Offline
Watched this yesterday (probably among the final laggards on the planet to do so). Even though released in 2018, it didn't debut in the US and UK until well into 2019.

This was Claire Denis's first film in English. Also her first venture into outer space. No ray-gun battles and monsters here - just mood, visceral imagery, constricted carnality, and unsettling human tensions that explode in the course of non-linear storytelling. Including a crazed fertility doctor who murdered her family back on Earth, who rides a wild sex-machine (even puts a condom on it), who finally has to roofie and rape the celibate guy with good genes in order to collect his semen.

But remember that this was directed by Claire Denis, rather than long-deceased Mario Bava. It's not a Euro horror or sci-fi flick with art-house pretensions from the '60s and '70s. It's more sober than it sounds like.


https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/AtOwfo1ypOw
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#2
Secular Sanity Offline
That looks good and it’s included with prime. Right on.

Thanks, C C!
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#3
Secular Sanity Offline
It was different. The psychological aspects were okay. I liked that it was nonlinear. We get it, sex is clinical. The sex machine was unnecessary, almost unrealistic. Perhaps, Miss Claire doesn’t understand female anatomy. The reproduction obsession drowns out all the other well-placed subtleties. It had a wee bit of Ingmar Bergman feel to it. The final song made the last scene stick with you. It was worth watching though.

Thanks, C C!


https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/8xNSN6Kd8rI

Next up, a few Terrence Malick films. They look pretty good.
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#4
C C Offline
(Jun 17, 2020 12:42 AM)Secular Sanity Wrote: It was different. The psychological aspects were okay. I liked that it was nonlinear. We get it, sex is clinical. The sex machine was unnecessary, almost unrealistic. Perhaps, Miss Claire doesn’t understand female anatomy. The reproduction obsession drowns out all the other well-placed subtleties...

Here's her brief explanation in the video below. 

I know why successful reproduction in space would be essential on a generational interstellar voyage, but I didn't understand the fixation on a ship that would reach its destination within less than the lifetime of its occupants. But in the context of these throw-away people being lab rats (there was even that prototype mission with the animals/dogs) -- then I guess you'd want to use such as an initial opportunity to work some of the bugs out (trial and error style, like Elon).

If a permanent crew was to be established someday at a black hole station to maintain energy extraction, then Earth would want them to eventually replenish their numbers on their own rather than constantly be sending replacements long distance. Even if these mentally disturbed "astronauts" sent out there killed themselves along the way, there would presumedly be data returned up until then about the mad doctor's work and results. "Better luck next time."

As for "the box", that masturbation gizmo for the crew -- again, it's Euro cinema. When it comes to sex, the continental mind has always been an inscrutable enigma for us Anglophone onlookers to puzzle over. It probably would have been an even crazier and nonsensical contraption back in the old days with Carlo Ponti or somebody as director. (No doubt it would have had mechanical tentacles like an octopus, with penile extensors emerging from the end of each as they rose in the air to plummet toward their multiple entry ports.)

At one point I thought I saw a synthetic, hairy male torso thingie writhing around Dibs -- but am not sure because as usual I was intermittently distracted by background household commotions. Anyway, don't even waste time trying to figure out their erotic and technological art designs or why French and Italians were so obsessed with _X_  decades before the rest of the globe (Hubby's folk theory is that it stemmed from Catholic disdain for contraception).


https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/1pM0wXy77O4
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#5
Secular Sanity Offline
That makes more sense as far the obsession with reproduction is concerned but the F*ck box...not so much. It’s not like sex wasn’t permitted. She said that the device was too mechanical to fully satisfy Dr. Dibs and that’s why she climbed on top of Monte. Why use it at all, if not for mere shock value? I thought it was too distracting. I could be wrong but I think that was a last minute thought.

She said that Juliette Binoche was never part of the plan. Originally, she didn’t want any French actors. She planned to have Patricia Arquette play Dr. Dibs but she was busy. Juliette said that she would love to play the doctor. She said that when she decided to use her, she changed the feminine persona into something closer to a magician. She thought she’d turn her into a queen of the night—a shaman of sperm. She’s always played dominating characters, but realistically, how would you control men in that enviroment? They’re physical stronger. They’re criminals in a setting without repercussions.
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#6
C C Offline
(Jun 17, 2020 03:54 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: That makes more sense as far the obsession with reproduction is concerned but the F*ck box...not so much. It’s not like sex wasn’t permitted. She said that the device was too mechanical to fully satisfy Dr. Dibs and that’s why she climbed on top of Monte. Why use it at all, if not for mere shock value? I thought it was too distracting. I could be wrong but I think that was a last minute thought.


Elsewhere it is stated by a source that because they were prisoners, sexual relations were forbidden. I didn't recall hearing that and probably a dozen other official items, but chalked that up to having my attention being deflected throughout the movie.

At any rate, the "autoeroticism unit" was apparently also the way semen was garnered from the men for Dibs' artificial impregnation efforts with female crew members. (Otherwise, why not simply provide the penal crew with personal sex toys and porn? Or why are these guys so unreliable that they can't be trusted to donate samples à la mode de how sperm-banks approach the matter?)

Why the device seemed so grotesque is again what I just attribute to the loopy nature of continental film-makers. I was being half tongue-in-cheek about that, but I feel it genuinely used to apply in some instances, if not still that they're intermittent clowns who sacrifice logic for style or metaphor. Shifting to a wholly different context, kind of like Jacques Derrida appalling stuffy American-British scholars back in the day with juvenile play on fallacies (of reasoning) with phalluses.

Quote:She said that Juliette Binoche was never part of the plan. Originally, she didn’t want any French actors. She planned to have Patricia Arquette play Dr. Dibs but she was busy. Juliette said that she would love to play the doctor. She said that when she decided to use her, she changed the feminine persona into something closer to a magician. She thought she’d turn her into a queen of the night—a shaman of sperm. She’s always played dominating characters, but realistically, how would you control men in that enviroment? They’re physical stronger. They’re criminals in a setting without repercussions.


Yah, it doesn't make sense that the women weren't better protected from such incidents like the guy who went horndog psycho. I don't know if the ship with canines and their state of devouring each other was further emphasis or not on how Earth also didn't give a flip about what happened to their human lab rats. That's the only excuse for it I can see (not an excuse but merely the kind of "The Sopranos" and "Game of Thrones" level of administrative sadism casually dispensed as if it was the norm of a society, in television and cinema productions nowadays).
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#7
Zinjanthropos Offline
I dunno guys.... movie sounds like a parody of Pigs in Space. Anyone seen Dr. Strangepork?
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#8
Secular Sanity Offline
(Jun 17, 2020 07:15 PM)C C Wrote: Why the device seemed so grotesque is again what I just attribute to the loopy nature of continental film-makers. I was being half tongue-in-cheek about that, but I feel it genuinely used to apply in some instances, if not still that they're intermittent clowns who sacrifice logic for style or metaphor. Shifting to a wholly different context, kind of like Jacques Derrida appalling stuffy American-British scholars back in the day with juvenile play on fallacies (of reasoning) with phalluses.

Ah-ha! This explains it.

"You’ve exhausted its power. It couldn’t keep up with you. This is incredible. What kind of girl are you? Have you no shame? Shame-shame on you!" 

Oh, and the hairy male torso thingie was just animal skin.


https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/NX2hTObHfxM

Edit: BTW, do you remember this film?


https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/4FWReqkTWfA

If that was true, we would all be hysterical. Pap smear with a happy ending. Big Grin

Quote:The film is based on historian Rachel Maines's 1998 book The Technology of Orgasm, which includes the claim that manual genital massage of women had been a common medical remedy since antiquity. A 2018 paper by Hallie Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg dismisses this idea as false, with no more than "circumstantial evidence that a few physicians and midwives may have practiced genital massage before the 20th century".

Hysteria was a recognized malady until the American Psychiatric Association discontinued this term in 1952. Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville filed the first patent for an electromechanical vibrator termed Granville's Hammer in about 1883. Granville, however, did not apply his invention in the treatment of hysteria; rather, he used it to treat muscular disorders. Some believe that other physicians started to apply the vibrator for the treatment of hysteria, but this claim is under dispute, with Lieberman and Schatzberg writing that Maines "fails to cite a single source that openly describes use of the vibrator to massage the clitoral area".—Wiki



(Jun 18, 2020 02:55 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: I dunno guys.... movie sounds like a parody of Pigs in Space. Anyone seen Dr. Strangepork?

Zinman, you really should stick with ghosts, faith, UFOs and bigfoot. You know, keep it simple...because that’s where you shine.

I'm not judgin'  Cool  I'm just sayin'
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#9
C C Offline
(Jun 19, 2020 01:49 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: [...] Ah-ha! This explains it.

"You’ve exhausted its power. It couldn’t keep up with you. This is incredible. What kind of girl are you? Have you no shame? Shame-shame on you!" 

Oh, and the hairy male torso thingie was just animal skin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX2hTObHfxM

Ah, figures. "Barbarella" was one of the items crossing my mind in terms of outlandish Euro romps from the past. The US-made "Silent Running", too, because of the garden.

Bava's "Terrore nello Spazio" had arty design sets (on the cheap) and lacked the sex mania, but did feature a couple of token, exotic crew members like Evi Marandi and Norma Bengel for the teenage and fraternity male masturbators of that era to ogle. OTOH, it deserves a nod for depicting them more like ordinary, working astronauts instead of there to a be a Captain Hunk's romantic interests or objects purely to save from _X_ menace.

Because of "High Life" seeming to play on bits from the '60s and '70s, I guess I conceived it as more apt if that scene in the box I only caught a brief glimpse of had been simulating the retro "Hairy Man" of The Joy of Sex book, rather than animal skin. Wink

Quote:Edit: BTW, do you remember this film? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FWReqkTWfA [...]

If that was true, we would all be hysterical. Pap smear with a happy ending. Big Grin

LOL, I didn't know there was a movie inspired by her book. This excerpt I posted calling into question Maines' historical accuracy even referred to the movie, but that apparently didn't register on me back then or lodge in my memory, or I forgot it, or something. The ole neural connections already petitioning for their decline into senescence.
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#10
Zinjanthropos Offline
Zinjanthropos Wrote: Wrote:I dunno guys.... movie sounds like a parody of Pigs in Space. Anyone seen Dr. Strangepork?

Zinman, you really should stick with ghosts, faith, UFOs and bigfoot. You know, keep it simple...because that’s where you shine.

I'm not judgin'  [img]//www.scivillage.com/images/smilies/cool.png[/img]  I'm just sayin'



P in S was obviously a social commentary on sexism, misogyny and the rights of women. Using space travel to bring attention to the plight of depraved and deprived psychos imprisoned along with their sex toys isn’t as much of a stretch from the Muppets IMHO. On one hand we have cartoon characters acting out real human indignities and on the other humans acting out cartoonish scenarios. But I’m only going on what I’m reading from you guys, I haven’t watched the movie nor do I intend to. 

There’s only one reason why I keep it simple. Just sayin’.
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