Egoyanesque

by Giselle Renarde

I didn't renew my opera subscription.  I'm just too poor this year.

An opera subscription sounds too decadent for a poor writer, and that's probably why I'm such an apologist  ("My seats are in the nosebleed section. When you break it down, I'm only paying like $20 per ticket.  You spend nearly that much to see a movie.") but I'm glad I had the opportunity, this season, to catch the COC's production of Salome directed by Atom Egoyan.

When I first started writing, I wanted to create work that felt... Egoyanesque?  Work that evoked that striking carnivalesque dreamscape of an Atom Egoyan film.

Like Lisabet, I came into the world of erotic fiction very naively.  And romance?  What's that?  I've still never read a heterosexual romance novel.  I tried once, just to get a feel for the form, but gave up pretty quickly.  I read a few lesbian romance novels, but they didn't speak to me either.  It seemed like lesbian couples were just superimposed on the tried-and-true form.

But I'm not a romantic, and I've already admitted that to you.  For a story to appeal to me, it's got to be pretty fucked up.  Have you seen Atom Egoyan's "The Sweet Hereafter," wherein Sarah Polley's character is sleeping with her father?  Or "Exotica," about a father seeking solace in a stripper following the murder of his child?  There's a special fucked-up-edness that is distinct to Egoyan's work.  I love it.  I perv on that brand of Canadian weirdness, and I wanted to replicate it in my own little way.

Amanda's post last week did a great job of spelling out why weirdness doesn't work.  Basically, the fucked-up crazy-ass shit I'd most like to write (and I think some of you are with me on this) is deemed unacceptable by most publishers in the erotic fiction genre.  It's all well and good to be Egoyanesque if you're writing literature, but if you want to work in this town, kid, you'd better keep it clean.

Isn't it weird that we have to sanitize our sex books? Crikey...

The first novel I wrote was a bisexual ballerina book called "Ondine."  Nobody would touch that manuscript.  It was too lesbian.  It was too strange, too full of lies and deception.  It was too this-that-and-the-other.  Too unhappy-ever-after.

One editor who passed on the novel gave me a whole list of insights, and I put her advice to work.  I turned a hetero subplot into a leading lady.  I changed the book so it ended in a proposal.  Happy-for-now is about the farthest I can roam from my desire for pain and suffering.  I write it because I have to.  It's almost always forced.  The only exception I can think of is a trans lesbian novella I wrote called "Friday Night Lipstick."  That one ends in a wedding scene that makes me cry every time I read it.

But, for the most part, I'd rather see despair, or watch characters drive themselves crazy doing things they shouldn't.  Case in point: I've got a novella called Adam and Sheree's Family Vacation coming out next week with eXcessica.  It's brother/sister incest--something I never considered writing until the plot came to me in an Egoyanesque dream state and took over my mind.  I couldn't not write it.  And how could Adam and Sheree ever see a happy-ever-after together?  They couldn't marry, even if they wanted to.

Thank goodness I have a publisher who believes in freedom of speech, or Adam and Sheree would probably never see the light of day.

So, HEA?  I don't often write it.  Maybe if I did, I'd be able to afford that opera subscription.  Opera loves the delicious, the titillating, the wicked, and the heart-wrenching.  And so do I.

Beauty and the Bizarre

By Lisabet Sarai

Our topic this week, courtesy of Charlotte, is "Sexy Movies". I had a number of candidate films that I considered discussing: Bound, the breath-taking lesbian thriller starring Jennifer Tilley and Gina Gershon; Earth Girls are Easy, which I know is on Charlotte's list, too (what could be sexier than inspiring love in a sweet, geeky alien?); almost anything directed by Zalman King but especially 9 1/2 Weeks (predictable, right?). But I think that perhaps the most erotic film I've ever seen was Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, directed by Steven Shainberg and featuring Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey Jr.

I didn't realize, when I went to see this film, that the director was also responsible for sweetly perverse Secretary, another erotic favorite of mine. In retrospect this makes perfect sense. Both films concern themselves with the twisted side of humanity, or perhaps, the humanity of kink.

"Fur" chronicles the imaginary but convincing awakening of celebrated photographer Diane Arbus to her obsessive fascination with the grotesque. Frustrated and oppressed by her life as a vanilla 1950's housewife, Diane yearns for something more. She goes through the motions of daily life, assisting her husband in his photography business, distractedly caring for her daughters, and enduring the sarcasm of her wealthy mother. She lies awake next to her adoring but uncomprehending husband, trying to understand her own dissatisfaction. Her sharp eyes pick up all the bizarre and disturbing details in her surroundings that others miss, but she doesn't know what to do with her observations.

When she catches a glimpse of her new neighbor Lionel (Robert Downey Jr.), completely masked, she somehow recognizes him as the key to escaping her suffocating life. He recognizes her as well, recognizes the brilliant and disturbed creature hiding behind her facade of conformity. He sends her the key to his apartment through the sewer pipes, an appropriate metaphor. When she finally dares to climb the winding stairway to his attic lair, he invites her into his world, a twilight wonderland peopled by societal outcasts and circus freaks.

Lionel himself is a "beast-man", suffering from a genetic disorder that causes his whole body to be covered with hair. With his gentle voice and rude questions, he forces Diane to admit to her strange interests and desires. Hesitant at first, then exuberant, she surrenders to her true self, the beautiful, poised woman surrounded by dwarves and Siamese twins who is nevertheless, in Lionel's words, a "real freak". For Diane, this is badge of honor.

Although they hardly touch through most of the film, Diane's relationship with Lionel is intensely erotic. The excitement stems from their mutual fascination with the strange and terrible, their recognition of each other as complementary deviants. It is essentially the same excitement that I felt when I finally found my Master and he made me admit that I craved submission. Finally, Diane has found someone who understands her and who does not judge her, indeed who celebrates her perversity.

The tension between the two protagonists is maintained throughout the film, gradually turning to desperate longing. We expect an explosion at any time, a conflagration that will finally burn away the falseness of Diane's old life. Nevertheless, their inevitable coupling near the end of the film seems anti-climatic. The real climax is the terribly intimate and prolonged scene in which Diane shaves Lionel's entire body. Slowly we see the man emerge from within the beast. When he stands naked before her, bloodied by slips of the razor, I almost expected Diane to reject him as too normal. However, kinkiness is more than skin (or fur) deep.

Both Kidman and Downey provide quiet, nuanced performances that are completely believable. The imagery in the film mirrors Diane's skewed perspectives, showing us that the rich patrons of the photo studio and the precisely-groomed fashion models are every bit as grotesque as Lionel's freak show friends. The allusions to Lewis Carroll's irrational dream-worlds are obvious but apt.

I found this a disturbing and arousing film. For days after I saw it, I couldn't get it out of my mind. It found its way into my dreams. Weeks later, I was still feeling the echoes of excitement, still recalling erotic images, noticing artful details and metaphoric parallels.

I think that my reaction to this movie was a bit unusual. It has a relatively low rating on IMDB. I sent a copy to my Master, and even he didn't really "get" why the film had such an impact on me. But then, he's not the submissive one in our relationship.

If you haven't seen "Fur" - well, let this serve as a recommendation. If you have, I'd love to know what you think. Does anyone else find it as arousing as I did? Or am I just a freak?