Bites, Camera, Fashion is a column from Davey McNelly, who is disabled, likes films and makes poor choices while trying to simplify his life.
Bites, Camera, Fashion is a column from Davey McNelly, who is disabled, likes films and makes poor choices while trying to simplify his life.
Trigger warning: My kids should not read this column. I think they would die from embarrassment.
Hi! It’s been a while. I got married and went on a honeymoon and a few other things which have kept me busy. When we returned from Spain, what better way to re-integrate into American culture than to watch a genre-less meta film about metaphorical (and real) orgasm and pleasure?
Bites
At the wedding, Lee, one of the owners of Siam Thai, came and took a selfie with us with a beer in his hand. Some people are good at taking selfies (I am not) but I can tell Lee is. As he angled his phone, some of the beer sloshed down my leg. It was the end of the night and he helped out immensely in cleanup and is an all around good guy.
Apologetically, and as a wedding present, he offered us a meal at his restaurant. Lee is an excellent cook and made us delicious spicy eggplant and pad see ew, which we ate before the film.
Eggplant is such an interesting fruit. It’s so bad if you cook it incorrectly, but it’s so good if you know what you’re doing with it (that is a sexual innuendo for those who were unsure). Lee’s food, I can tell, is made with great care and with an emphasis on balance between spicy, sour, sweet, and umami. He has been an owner and cook for a couple years now, and I think the food has gotten better. Try it if you haven’t been recently.
Camera
I’m going to talk about dopamine here. So much of life is about the buildup to what will happen. Our dopaminergic centers in our brain are stimulated the most before something happens, not while it’s actually happening. Biologically, this gets us ready for the experience. This is often very useful, because it gets us off couches and meeting with friends, cooking food, or procreating.
Often though, the actual experience that we got so worked up about leaves a lot to be desired. Your favorite meal at your favorite restaurant doesn’t live up to your memory, the movie isn’t that good, or the sexual experience ends up being lackluster. While you’re eating the current sandwich you disassociate and think about eating a sandwich from the past or just try to get through it if it’s really bad because, hey, it’s calories.
“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” deals with this particular subject. The framing of the film is as a horror film, specifically a slasher, where a killer comes out of the lake, wearing an air conditioning ceiling duct on their head, and proceeds to cut everyone up.
In a traditional slasher film, what happens before the killer comes out is that a teenage girl decides to have sex. It is very much told through a male gaze lens, with a woman at some point running through a suburban neighborhood, scantily clad, while the killer chases after her.
I’ve never been too interested in this kind of film, as it seems a little bit too on the nose for America’s obsession with possession of young female bodies — it’s not that interesting of a concept. What is there to do while being fetishized but disassociated?
This film in particular focuses on what the “final girl” is feeling during those moments of sex before the killer comes. Hannah Einbinder (who is great in the TV show “Hacks”) plays a filmmaker who has asked to reboot the (fictional) Camp Miasma slasher franchise in a more feminist way. She is also in a hilarious poly relationship and very distant from her sexual experience.
Enter Gillian Anderson (from “The X-Files”) who was in the original Camp Miasma movie. She serves as Hannah‘s sexual mentor. Some of the metaphors in the film are particularly understandable, such as the killer being called “Little Death,” an obvious allusion to the French word for orgasm (la petite mort).
Some of the metaphors are harder to grasp, such as the killer wearing a mask that is an air conditioning ceiling duct. Is that what a woman is looking at to disassociate during particularly bad sex?
I won’t go into too many details about what is actually in the film, but I will say, as someone who doesn’t enjoy slasher films, that the slashing is so stylistic that it did not bother me and that the messaging about embodiment during sex and feeling pleasure resonated deeply. I recommend that you get some popcorn, mix in Raisinets and peanut M&M’s, and go to town. Just take a deep breath and fully enjoy the pleasure it gives you.
Fashion
Hannah Einbinder and I are both Jewish and supporters for a free Palestine and seem to like wearing well-made linen suits. As I’m writing this, Ed Sheeran just allowed Macklemore to be fired from his tour because Zionists pressured him to do so. Einbinder, as a fellow redhead, wished him a bad sunburn.
Once, in Washington, D.C., I was at a karaoke room with other disabled advocates blowing off steam after doing our best to ask policy makers for better legislation around disability. The karaoke technician was showing us how to make the machine work and while she did this, Ed Sheeran‘s song that starts with “my legs don’t work like they used to” blared out of the speaker.
Four of us in the room could not walk. The technician melted into the floor due to embarrassment, which is what I’m sure my kids are doing if they’re still reading this column. Meanwhile, our group couldn’t stop laughing for about 20 minutes.
It’s becoming more fashionable (and more and more urgent) to speak out against Zionism, and it’s OK to change your mind and start speaking out now.
Also, it’s fashionable to become embodied and find your pleasure, at any age you can.
