Now that “Team America: World Police” has narrowly escaped its threatened “NC-17″ rating in the U.S. (equivalent to Canada’s “R” rating — it received an “18A” rating throughout most of Canada), perhaps Ivo Petrov’s “The Green Dollhouse” will finally see daylight.
Petrov created “The Green Dollhouse” by taking a low-budget porno movie, “The Green Room,” and re-creating it, shot for shot, camera angle for camera angle, with Barbie dolls and G.I. Joe action figures.
In Petrov’s movie, the dolls make pretty much the same motions as the actors and actresses did in The Green Room, only this time they’re assisted by off-screen human hands. For the soundtrack, he simply hijacked the original. The Green Room’s soundtrack plays over Petrov’s movie, so when you see Barbie’s friend Lea having an orgasm, the moaning and screaming you hear is porno actress Kelly Glean.
When I saw this movie in 1998 at a college film festival, some of the audience members thought it was supposed to be a comedy. Others saw it as a genuine porno flick. Some others simply squirmed uncomfortably in their seats through its twenty-nine minute length.
Of course this spurred some of the same types of discussions which are now going on as a result of “Team America’s” release. The question now the same as it was then: Is it pornographic?
To answer this, we first have to step back, and take a look into the world of fine art.
Exploring fine art, one quickly discovers that nudes are not difficult to find. Paintings depicting naked females hang, on public display, in art museums throughout the world, where anybody, even children, can walk in and see them. Children are actively encouraged to seek out fine art, even if such art includes nudity. Why? Becasue it’s not real. A painting of a naked woman is not the same thing as an actual naked woman. It’s only an abstract representation of a naked woman. As such, the “woman” exists only in our minds, and only when we are looking at the painting and imagining that it represents something real.
By the same token, a drawing is even more abstract. A drawing is less realistic, and requires a greater degree of imagination on the part of the viewer to picture a real woman in the place of the drawing. From there it follows that a cartoon, being a series of drawings, is also nothing more than an abstraction. To say that such an abstract collection of lines could be considered pornographic is absurd. There is no such thing as a pornographic cartoon! I find it unbelievable that “Fritz the Cat” received an X rating (Canadian R) in 1972. Good grief, the people in that movie aren’t even human, they’re cats!
The bottom line is that the events depicted in a movie or cartoon are only as real as you allow yourself to believe they are. If I allow myself to get “sucked in” to a Hitchcock thriller, I will find myself becoming genuinely scared. On the other hand, if I constantly remind myself that these are just actors speaking rehearsed lines on a movie set, I feel no fear. A movie is all fake, and everybody in the audience knows it. Nobody would think to “blame” Alfred Hitchcock for “scaring” people with one of his movies. That’s ridiculous. Obviously, a filmmaker cannot be held responsible for what goes on in the hearts or minds of the people watching his movie.
By the same token, I suppose the measure of whether or not something is “pornographic” is whether or not the audience gets “turned on” by it, but properly speaking that’s a measure of the audience, not the movie itself. As an experiment, I tried wacthing a real porno movie and concentrating on NOT getting turned on by it. I succeeded.
When I watch The Green Doll House, if I close my eyes, I can’t tell the difference between this movie and an actual porno movie. Of course, that’s what the soundtrack actually is. And when my eyes are closed, I do — I admit it — get turned on by it. In fact, with my eyes open, if I allow myself, I do find myself getting turned on by it.
But to say that it’s pornographic is ridiculous.