Porn Perspectives

No one really gets what it is. Isabella Rossellini has
written, directed, and starred in a series of one-minute short films called
“Green Porno” to premiere on the Sundance channel sometime in the near future.
They feature her dressed as various insects, copulating.

Yes.

I think the Onion’s The Hater encapsulates the world’s collective reaction:

Short of Leonardo Di Caprio dressing up like a slab of ore and making an educational documentary about the extraction of metallic iron, or maybe Hal Holbrook doing a video short about the post office and depression while wearing a giant envelope costume and crying, or, I don't know, Amanda Bynes dressing up like George Washington (but with a wig made of cotton candy) and starring in a commercial for a funeral home, I can't think of a weirder juxtapostition of ideas than this one.

Desperately searching for something—anything—to indicate what the hell this is all about, I came across a short interview Isabella did at Sundance.

Isabella Rosellini is hilariously matter of fact about the project, as though it were only natural she would create a series of shorts depicting herself as a male insect having sex with much larger paper mache representations of female insects.

The interviewer, who clearly is not comfortable talking about sex, at one point asks Isabella: “Is it true that the lady praying mantis eats the head of the man praying mantis after they make love?” These last words breathily eak out.

Lady praying mantis. Isabella is unfazed.

“While they make love,” she corrects. “The female eats the male’s head and the male keeps copulating even without the head.” She emphasizes this point with an index finger aimed at the now quivering interviewer, who, I kid you not, jumps back in her seat.

Charging ahead, Isabella reports that she has, in fact, portrayed this very scene: “I play the male, and the paper mache (female) eats me. And then I am seen without my head, still making love to the female cut-out.”

The clip ends with Isabella as a male spider, fingering a spider web with trepidation but clear desire.

“She is very very big, and very very aggressive,” the spider laments. “If I shake the web, she might think she caught a fly, and eat me.”

This spider could be a New Yorker contemplating pick-up lines in a bar.

Isabella directs the interview towards tech theory, discussing the “third screen” (i.e., the itouch and other personal technology devices) and how it will inspire a new art form and reach new audiences.

This is true but entirely tangential to what’s going on here. (I have a feeling Isabella is trying to downplay the sexual overtone for the comfort of advertisers.) As an aside, I will acknowledge that it is not the obligation of the artist to tell us what it means—they need just create the art. Interpretation is the job of us sniveling masses, and I cannot yet offer an assessment without seeing these films in their entirety--BUT. I have a feeling that "Green Porno" could be a strangely subversive way to get something perhaps not visually pornographic, but conceptually pornographic, on television. Perhaps Isabella means to underscore the draw of female sexuality, using the animal kingdom as allegory. These films are also completely NOT about insects, despite the claims of the press release. 

Whatever their ultimate purpose, there is some importance in the fact that a 55 year-old woman renowned for her beauty is generating these films. I have no doubt she acutely feels the effect of aging and my dearest hope is that these films represent some kind of statement (message?) from one of the great beauties in the world to the next generation.