A Dirty Shame

Directed By: John Waters

Staring: Tracy Ulman, Selma Blair, Patty Hearst, Johnny Knoxville, Chris Issack.

This past week, I hooked up with an old friend, whom I lose touch with every so often. It’s not that our friendship is not important to me, actually, he is to blame for the radical changes I’ve been going through in the past two years. His friendship is uber important, not to mention NEEDED! He always reappears, when I’m in the midst of a neurotic breakdown and he never fails to sooth me with his words. He is my human Prozac. This afternoon, we had an in-depth talk about the relationship between Men and Women, because aren’t all neurotic breakdowns closely related to fucked up relationships between Men and Women? Anyhow, we talked candidly about sexual energy, how it is innate in women, men and nature. We discussed how, relationships are sometimes nothing but a struggle between partners to retain this powerful energy, while consuming the others. In all honesty, we wanted to see The Motorcycle Diaries, but I had an afternoon class and couldn’t make the show on time. We serendipitously, took the last matinee, A Dirty Shame!

What does the aforementioned information have to do with the movie you ask? Not as much as I thought it did now that I think about it, but the movie basically deals with SEX. Crude, rude sex! In this world that Mr. Waters created there are two types of people. “Neuters”, who hate everything there is about sex, and “Sex Addicts”, who are patiently awaiting the sexual act that will take them to ecstasy. Tracy Ulman starts the movie as a “neuter”, grossed out by her husbands (Chris issack) sexual petition (in the conversation I had with my friend, he mentioned how most women rather have sex at night, in the dark), then she tells him something along the lines like, “its morning, not time to have sex”. (I turned to my buddy, only to see that look in his eye that said, “I told you so”) And she gets all pissed off because she catches him, “pitching a tent” in the bathroom. Later that morning she gets hit in the head and is “rescued” (I don’t even have the balls write down what was done to “help”) by a scrubby, white trashy, Johnny Knoxville. Lets leave it at, if sex was a religion, Knoxville would be God. The music in this movie was great and taken care of by the P-funk master, George Clinton. He must have really dug in those crates for old time favorites like, “Sore Pussy”. This was no prudent movie, it went ALL the way! In the biblical sense!

Ok, so here comes my pseudo analysis. I think the movie was a good satire on the contemporary issue of decency versus vulgarity. It made me question who sets the standards? And are those standards innate or learned? Most importantly, it raised in me the question, should a government, overrun by indecent people have the final say of what is deemed decent? Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, Gays, Lesbians and Transvestites we live in perilous times! Howard Stern and the right wing wackos, Janet Jackson and the FCC. How far is to far is the question. My answer, aren’t we all adults to figure that out for ourselves!