Carnal Reason

I read a most remarkable passage in a movie review in the NY Times:

The director Robinson Devor apparently would like viewers who watch his heavily reconstructed documentary, “Zoo,” to see it as a story of ineluctable desire and human dignity. Shot on Super 16-millimeter film, with many scenes steeped in a blue that would have made Yves Klein envious, “Zoo” is, to a large extent, about the rhetorical uses of beauty and metaphor and of certain filmmaking techniques like slow-motion photography. It is, rather more coyly, also about a man who died from a perforated colon after he arranged to have sex with a stallion.

Nothing enhances human dignity quite like death by perforated colon.

There is more.

Like many such documentaries, “Zoo” wraps its sensationalistic core in a seductive mantle, an approach that appeals to viewers already predisposed to art and the Enlightenment, “Sesame Street” …

Sesame street, so far as I can recall, never quite dared to broach the topic of sex between man and horse. But bit about the Enlightenment rings true. Mr Devor has opened my eyes to hidden meanings in certain remarks of Sir Francis Bacon.

“A man must make his opportunity, as oft as find it.”

“Death is a friend of ours, and he that is not ready to entertain his is not at home.”

“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”

The review closes with a moral vision:

After all, Bible-believers notwithstanding, if you eat and wear animals and agree that it’s O.K. to torture them in the name of science and beauty, what’s the big deal? Human beings subject animals penned in factory farms to far more grievous abuse than anything apparently done to the horses in “Zoo,” and on a daily basis human beings also subject themselves to greater risk. One zoophile’s fond memories of cooking up ham for his brethren indicate that theirs was not a PETA-approved animal love, true. But, as Mr. Devor makes clear, again and again, these were men who truly loved their animals in sickness and in health and, at least in the case of one unfortunate soul, till death finally did part them.

I have remarked before that secular liberalism is a religion with but two sacraments: abortion and buggery. The Times, in a fit of ecumenical expansiveness, invites our fellow species to celebrate.

Posted on April 27th, 2007 by pwyll
Filed under: culture