The Skin
I'm In
by Pat PaduaIn My Skin comes from writer-director-star Marina de Van. With her high forehead and big pale eyes set in an oval face, de Van is both funny looking and gorgeous. The film turns on what happens when Esther (de Van) goes to a party. She -- feeling claustrophobic? -- wanders into the back yard. In the darkness, she steps through an obstacle course of scrap metal, where she trips and falls.
She doesn't realize she's injured until hours later, when she sees the blood trailing from her leg. Her doctor is puzzled how she walked around with such a big gash without feeling a thing, and it is odd. But Esther, stuck in a corporate job and ambivalent about buying a house with her boyfriend, does want to feel something -- but what?
Her skin, her self -- that's what. She obsesses at her original wound; she digs at it as if scratching a violent itch; and when that itch is sated, she cuts herself another and another. And somehow, it seems more reward than punishment. She enjoys -- thrills in -- the sensation, the release, as if she's letting herself out of a cage that happens to be her own body.
She cuts, and she cuts. She gets drunk at a business dinner, then checks herself into a hotel and has her way with herself, slicing herself and hungrily drinking her blood. It's very graphic and
disturbing to see, yet it's also abstract. You see her hand make a cutting motion, but the cut flesh is hidden by the camera angle -- her body obstructing the camera's gaze. You see her expressive face wince and grimace, then fall into an ecstasy that's wonderful to her, and which might seem wonderful to us if it weren't accompanied by blood. You see lots of blood, and the resulting scars, but you aren't always sure what part of the body you're looking at, especially in a brilliant split-screen view of her cannibal masturbation. Perhaps Esther is deranged. But she has a look on her face of such satisfaction, a satisfaction that only she can give herself.
Behind the Scenes, a 1978 film produced by Encyclopedia Britannica, takes us backstage at a hit TV series: The Donny and Marie Show. Among the talking heads is a producer who earnestly tells the camera, "The show is about ideas ... and I try to convey that philosophy to our writers..." One idea is found in the recurring bit where Marie is in grave danger (there's a sequence of stills from different skits that have Marie tied up and screaming, baring those teeth for any would-be rescuers); Donny would sidle along and remain oblivious to his sibling's crisis of faith. In another piece, guest star Paul Lynde runs a refreshment stand in the middle of a desert, and refuses Donny a drink of water unless he coughs up the dough. Obviously, family entertainment and sadism are not mutually exclusive concepts.
Goin' Coconuts is the first and only feature film vehicle for Donny and Marie Osmond. By any standards, it's a lousy movie. Jokes are badly timed or just bad: in a chase scene, one of the baddies hijacks a car with a little old lady in the passenger seat
(reinforcing the subordination of women in the patriarchal society); the car takes a bad turn and rolls over, the little old lady peering out of a broken window with what one assumes are massive internal injuries. This and other chase scenes are shot at what look to be breakneck speeds upward of 20 mph. Editing is crude. As Donny sings a ballad to his love interest in the hotel lounge, the song is rudely interrupted with bad guy cat-and-mouse scenes in hotel hallways. I got a kick out of this -- the transition from song to action is so abrupt as to be aggressive, as if the editor was thinking, "I'd rather watch the most boring establishing shot than listen to any more of this pap."
Still, Coconuts is not without its thought-provoking charms. The plot revolves around an airport incident. On her way to a tour stop in Hawaii, Marie encounters a priest who gives her an ugly necklace. Naturally (subversively?), the priest is really one of a group of bad guys who try to gain control of this necklace (the virtue of a Mormon girl? the triangular shape of the necklace suggests a bejeweled vagina). Marie is painfully aware of the fight for her treasure, but neither Donny nor her agent takes her concerns seriously. Marie sports a short coif that further infantilizes her; a friend noticed a shot that follows Marie through the halls of a hotel room, which cemented our suspicion that Goin' Coconuts takes inspiration from no less than Rosemary's Baby .
Like their TV show, the Osmonds' film projects a surprising hostility. Not just the old lady in a car crash, but racism, with stereotyped Asians, Hawaiians, and Germans (Kenneth Mars, clumsily playing out the mind-body duality of Dr. Strangelove ). Are we to be reassured that Donny tries to "get down" with the savage native dancers? Howard Morris, of Your Show of Shows and Andy Griffith Show fame, directed Goin' Coconuts . The thing drags, and aside from a promising disco routine behind the opening credits, and the hit title theme behind the closing credits, the musical numbers fall flat. But despite its badness the Polanski and Kubrick references indicate a kind of intelligence at work. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
My recent viewing included a local program of how-to films, notably the mind-boggling How to Drown-Proof a Child which I had programmed without seeing, having no idea how traumatic it would be.
This 1970 short opens with a shot of a shimmering pool, as a baby struggles not to drown. A long shot seems to echo the opening of Sunset Boulevard , with not one but a half dozen children floating atop a pool as if dead. An adult instructor drops a toddler (6-12 months) into a pool and lets it flail and struggle to survive. The narrator dead pans as the bawling begins, "The child may become upset because it does not know what is happening." The background pianist sounds a lot like Errol Garner -- swinging gently behind the struggle of an unformed psyche.
Instructors are also fond of the "splashing technique." A child may manage to float but will kick its legs ineffectively. Relaxation is the key, so the solution is of course to splash water on the child's face as it kicks: "let him kick until nearly exhausted."
"It's better that a child cries now instead of a parent crying at the child's funeral."
The opening and closing theme is "A Summer Place."
I want my blanket.
©2004 Pat Padua
CineScene