The Addiction

Thisⁱ is the story of some symbolically hippie chick of the retarded waveⁱⁱ and her merry adventures in the fleshy submarine. It starts predictably enough with a scene in which her & her dorkfriend try really hard to be all serious and like, you know, mature about stuff and like, you know, things. Of import! That they understand, honest they do. They even have glasses! After which she gets captured by a streetwalker in a gown, manhandled a little and harvestedⁱⁱⁱ a little too.

The film is delightfully ambiguous and artfully layered. Supposedly the assailant is a vampire, on the lowest level of interpretation. However, we're dealing with a sexually ambiguous figure, can't quite discern if it's a trap or what the Hell exactly. Furthermore, the process enjoyed by the victim replicates quite exactly the psychological aftermath of rape, which I guess isn't all that surprising, in that rape is violence rather than sex. And then she runs out of class to go puke in the toilet, and the loose wool vestments atop a twentysomething in mid heel shoes, on her knees before the toilet in the late morning are so clearly epitomic of a generation... So she's pregnant, not the first time it happened, not the last time it will happen, and each and every single time it seems subjectively to the subject that it's quite the fucking extraordinary, exceptional, large and important thing, doesn't it. Because it is, right ? It HAS TO BE!

And so it flows, a movie completely opaque in its absolute transparency. Her browsing of the toilet floor with her pretty curly hair, rubbing her own blood on the tiles and the resulting mixture back into her own mouth, all those things that curdle the immature secretions of the virginally squeamish but otherwise compose the bread and butter of their gender's existence just a few short years later... and of course the camera cuts and there's a baby crying.

Basically this is a film made for anthropologists to jack off to. Cultural especially. Enjoy.

1. The Addiction, 1995, by Abel Ferrara, with Christopher Walken. [↩]
2. Hippies come in waves. The first wave, the proper hippies, are people born in the late 30s to early 40s, who didn't wash too good, din't comb too well, didn't really manage math and figured it's all okay because the world really needs more singer-songwriters and fewer doctors and engineers, plus who needs reasons when you got acid, man! Then there's the second wave, people who were born in the 50s, had an older sibling at Woodstock and really really wanted to have been part of the 60s. Except they were like... nine. Or eleven. So they smoked their pot, wore their ridiculous disco hair with bad rendtions of bell-bottoms and married some trucker or whatever. The third wave, the retarded wave, are mostly kids born in the 70s, by which time the 60s were sort-of mythical. Doesn't take much to start a myth in a country inhabited by a prenational population devoid of history. So they're in college in the 90s and hop up and down in pseudointellectual excitement about responsibility and ridiculousness, as if either are topics that may be even vaguely touched upon by spring lambs on their way to Stuprum Hall. There's more waves after that, even, but excuse me if I'm bored already. [↩]
3. Reap, rape, big fucking difference. [↩]