four unloved women
...adrift on a purposeless sea, experience the ecstasy of dissection (dir. david cronenberg, 2023)
they’re floating there, the four of them. the water’s just as unreal as they are. you know just by looking at it that that’s not the ocean, and they are not women, but the opaque unreality of their bodies never gets less disarming. at first it’s kind of sexy, sensuous. like one’s fingers parting the drapery of an antique mattress, a suggestion of things to come. the plastic sheen of breasts and legs, panned over slowly by a clinical camera in a pale imitation of love.
and then, with a barely perceptible hesitation, we’re being made to hover over a bulbous mass that obscures from us the fact of sex. instead of the opening we’ve come to expect from human anatomy, the vertiginous reveal pulls us over a cavernous ditch lined by a fragile spread of veins and arteries lying bloodless and petrified. we expect – we hope – that there is an end to this rupture. we want the camera to have some mercy on us, on her, but it keeps going all the way up to her throat, where two blackened nodules wrench apart her esophagus. her face is in frame now, and where we expect a wince or a shout of pain, there is only the reverse; the rapture of a girl in ecstasy. think Catherine of Siena, holding her pierced hands up to the light, gladder for the wound.
now we’re thrust into the familiar again, a mouth with her pink lips half-open, moans superimposed over the image. we’re almost relieved for this reprieve into the blatantly explicit, before we realise her organs are still splayed open in the background, blurred but present nevertheless. there’s another open throat before we’re made to pull away. to watch them all, together, sighing at some unseen force from above which has come down only for long enough to rip them open and leave. from now on, every time we’re returned to the caressing fingers, or the parted mouth, they’ll be accompanied by the strange flowering of internal organs splayed open and shining. their insides are brown and hardened, like dried fruit, but we’re being asked to believe that there is life in them because the terrible ripping has, in fact, restored something essential.
these openings can be quite elegant, contrary to what you might be thinking. intestines can unfold as delicately as flora, and touch the skin of the body’s exterior just as gently as the fingertip of a lover. in some ways it’s more intimate – when else would your insides and your outsides ever get to touch, to know each other this way? everything so neatly parted, made space for. the drift goes on for years. a blood vessel slips shyly out of a vein to graze a strip of skin, just above your thigh. the eyes refuse agony. the large intestine fans itself over the rest of your body protectively. what do you know about being this lonely.
