By Lauren Wissot
[Teeth opens today in limited release.]
Mitchell Lichtenstein’s debut feature Teeth, about a high school student who discovers she has a toothed vagina, reminded me of the first time I saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail as a teenager, particularly the scene in which the knight gets all of his limbs swiped off with a sword, blood spurting everywhere, the ground strewn with body parts. For weeks afterwards all it took was for a sadistic friend of mine to whisper, “It’s only a flesh wound,” and I’d be doubled over my desk in Spanish class, gasping for air. “Que es tu problema?” the teacher would ask, but I couldn’t answer in any language. Why the mere thought of severed limbs and fountains of blood flying across the screen could have me in stitches was beyond my capacity to explain. Of course, knowing I was exhibiting inappropriate behavior made me uncomfortable – but it did nothing to stop the giggles. Appropriately or not, the scenes in Teeth in which the heroine, Dawn (Jess Weixler, who has a young Laura Linney's looks and acting chops) uses her “power” to exact revenge are as campy and funny as anything in Python's Grail -- or John Waters' Female Trouble. Substitute dildos for prosthetic arms and legs and you get the picture.
Unfortunately, this is also precisely the problem with Teeth: the very idea of the movie is tastelessly funny, and while the director is willing to drive through midnight movie country, he doesn't want to live there. Castration anxiety aside, it’s simply not politically correct to have the first, critical laugh-till-you-cry scene in a film occur during a rape. This is the crux of Lichtenstein’s dilemma, something’s he’s acutely aware of. In an interview included in the movie's press notes, Lichtenstein calls the vagina dentata myth “a tricky subject that can too easily be misconstrued as misogynist or sexist." To head off such accusations, Lichtenstein has imbued Teeth with what can only be described as misplaced gravitas.
For Dawn is not just a girl with a penis-eating pussy. She’s the virginal (natch!) spokeswoman for the local chastity group. She lives in a Tim Burton-esque suburbia with nuclear plant cooling towers looming ominously nearby and has a crush on a school hunk with Edward Scissorhands hair. She takes science classes in which big gold stars mask the textbook illustrations of vaginas (the better to prevent “violation of a woman’s natural modesty”) and walks in late on a lecture about diamondback snakes sprouting defensive rattles, paralleling her own unique “adaptation.” She even has an evil, pierced-and-tattooed, metal-head stepbrother who can’t wait to violate her. So what does all this abstinence education, teen sexuality, environmental poisoning, the teaching of evolution, male domination/fear of women paradox, add up to? Broadly drawn, bordering-on-caricature characters; diluted dialogue; muddled motivations: a heavy-handed mess in any language.
But if you can get through the academic tediousness of the director's illustrated Camille Paglia lecture (Lichtenstein first heard of the vagina dentata myth in Paglia's literature class), gory hilarity is your reward. In fact, what’s most disappointing about Teeth is its identity crisis. Lichtenstein can’t decide whether his film is an early Waters flick, a sci-fi fest or a satirical after-school special (and a satire of a myth is damn hard to pull off). If Lichtenstein hadn’t been so worried about charges of misogyny, he might have felt emboldened to push the black comedic aspects of his material even further than he already has, going beyond shock and into campy bliss. From the sterile, John Hughes High School halls to the Blue Lagoon-style set in which Dawn and her crush swim to the horror-movie sound effects that accompany the vagina attacks to the hip-hop soundtrack that kicks in during Dawn’s first loving deflowering (“Urban music! That’s so we know she’s a ‘ho!”, my friend exclaimed), Lichtenstein’s instincts are as sharp as the tooth referred to in the line, “We found this embedded in the penile stump.” Which is almost as brilliant as Dawn’s post-orgasmic declaration, “I can’t believe you’re still alive.” Or Dawn’s reply to a lover who asks, mid-coitus, if she wants him to stop: “No...But the teeth will get you.” With lines like these, it's a shame Teeth only ends up biting itself. It's a could-have-been camp classic, the tragic victim of an inability to revel in its own sense of humor.
Brooklyn-based writer Lauren Wissot is the publisher of the blog Beyond the Green Door, the author of the memoir Under My Master's Wings, and a contributor to The Reeler.
Friday, January 18, 2008
Bite Me: Teeth
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
9 comments:
Lichtenstein calls the vagina dentata myth “a tricky subject that can too easily be misconstrued as misogynist or sexist."
Uh, how does he think it should be construed?
Yeah, how does he expect it to be construed? Isn't the only way to destroy the chompin' coochie involve using your johnson to knock all its teeth out? That doesn't exactly sound like a feminist idea to me.
And fuck that idiotic Ain't It Cool News Cloverfield review--THIS is the pussy that eats you out!
Aw. This sounds like pretentious garbage. I was hoping it would be like Def by Temptation, you know, angry woman uses pit bull punany to make a statement about men who cheat. She prowls the bars looking for a Mr. Goodbar she can bite down on. From what your review states, this guy's trying to make a movie that isn't offensive about a cock-chewing chocha. Please. I'll save my money. Where's Roger Corman when you need him?
Teeth does beg this question, though: Does Summer's Eve make a toothbrush? And is that hip hop song on the soundtrack the infamous one that goes "You gotta lick it before we kick it..."
Nah, Odie, Corman shmorman. Troma one-upped this flick long ago when they imported the German splatter comedy Killer Condom, about a dick-chomping hybrid alien/rubber. I just remember walking around with a deranged grin for a couple days after the press screening. Yes, if I remember correctly, something called Killer Condom had a press screening. I know I damn sure didn't pay to see it.
I can't imagine somebody messing up a chomping-vagina flick. But, then I never imagined two boring Alien vs. Predator movies, either.
A dick-chomping condom or the ultimate in safe sex? Go Troma!
Now showing at the Abstinence Only Film Festival: Killer Condom and Teeth! Next week, Pacino's Sea of Love and Claire Denis' Trouble Ever Day, followed by Def By Temptation and Species!
Remember: when it comes to doin' it before marriage, Jesus quotes Amy Winehouse: "NO! NO! NO!" You will be punished BIG TIME, as these movies in our film festival suggest! So keep it in your pants! Or you won't get it back.
The Keep it Zipped Film Festival. The schedule should be mailed out in plain brown paper.
I had a somewhat similar reaction to yours, Lauren. I enjoyed the movie, but thought it fell short of its potential precisely because it could not decide which of two courses to commit to: demented exploitation or coded coming-of-age melodrama. It could have gone either way, really. The teen abstinence meetings, the sex/death scenes, the Adam and Eve interlude in the grotto, the hilariously cheesy reactions to mayhem (the gynecologist lying on the floor post-digit amputation, wailing, "Vagina dentata!") reminded me of Stuart Gordon's "Re-Animator," for my money the greatest midnight movie since "Rocky Horror." The psychosexual conundrums -- the heroine's muddled relationship with her stepbrother; the male classmates trying to manipulate her into sex; the sense that the entire culture is pressing down on her (no pun intended) and trying to coerce her into defining herself through sex, all seemed like something out of a dark teen satire with feeling -- something like "The River's Edge."
David Cronenberg or Tim Burton might have been able to direct a movie that folds all these elements into a fully satisfying whole. Lichtenstein isn't quite up to it, though he shows flashes of brilliance when dealing with either aspect. Cronenberg's "The Fly," particularly, managed to be subversive, romantic, satirical, horrific and moving, all at once. This is no "Fly," and I am truly sorry to have to say that, because horror films that aim to do so many things at once are few and far between these days.
I was sick in bed today, flipping around the movie channels, and came across the remake of "The Hills Have Eyes," a pretty horrible, in every sense of the word, movie -- the film equivalent of a hateful little boy that pulls the legs off insects. I hated it the first time, and I could only stand about 15 minutes of it today. There's nothing going on it but cruelty -- the "social relevance" borrowed from the original is just a pretext for viciousness. Cronenberg is violent, but somehow it rarely feels like he's just rubbing our noses in nastiness. I love how he's tried to expand his artistry beyond the expected genre tropes, but sometimes I miss the old Cronenberg. Whenever I see a disappointing horror movie I think about what Cronenberg might have done with it. Whether it worked or not, it surely would have been more fascinating and intelligent and wickedly playful than whatever I just suffered through.
Odienator's phrase "pretentious garbage" is interesting because for all of Lichtenstein's flashes of insight and cruel wit, that's pretty much what "Teeth" comes down to. I suspect if "Teeth" had thrown all its energies into being either pretentious art (genre film division) or unpretentious garbage, it might have seemed more completely realized. As is, it seems as though the filmmaker is trying to eat his cake and have it, too. Again, no pun intended.
One more observation: The most intriguing element in "Teeth," the thing that has stayed with me since I saw it two months ago, was the sense that Dawn's vagina was, in some weird sense, her survival instinct externalized. It was like an internalized attack dog that only bared its fangs when it felt that Dawn was being treated with something other than respect and love; that's why she manages to have sex with a classmate without any violent incidents, then de-cockifies that same classmate after learning that he, too, considered her an object of conquest, and had no interest in her as a person. Dawn's pussy is only looking out for her best interests, long-term; it wants her to be both physically and emotionally safe, and violently eliminates any man who avails himself of her body without proving himself a good potential mate (as opposed to lover).
There's an insanely great mother-love exploitation picture struggling to get out of this one. Think "Stella Dallas" with a man-eating vagina instead of Barbara Stanwyck.
Slow, fat pitch over home plate, that.
Think "Stella Dallas" with a man-eating vagina instead of Barbara Stanwyck.
It doesn't sound like the man-eating vagina is self-sacrificing like my beloved Stanwyck. Plus, if any actress has teeth in her na-na, it's Joan Crawford. Don't tell what Mildred Pierce did...to that guy.
No, from your description, it sounds like this coochie is Mama Rose. Instead of Gypsy, it's GypUSsy.
Isn't that the working title of the new Bond film?
Post a Comment