I saw Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest yesterday. To me, the movie had a lot of Freudian connotations, especially vagina dentata.
I know that its a mindless summer flick, but part of me wanted to yell at the screen, “Yes I get it! Sex, tempations, retribution. Stop trying to be meaningful you’re embarassing yourself!”
Anyone else thinking to hard at the theater this summer?
I liked out Batman Begins (last summer, so sue me) was stuffed to the gills with Jungian symbolism- actually, the fact that they mention Jungian pyschology in the film might show that the movie was a bit more serious than the average summer blockbuster.
Oh, and don’t get me started on Superman secretly being Jesus.
‘But their whole world is designed for things with hands, see? Why would cars use petrol pumps designed for human hands? Why would they farm tractors? If they have sponsorship deals, they must have some kind of currency, right? What do cars spend their discretionary income on? Where do baby cars come from? THIS MOVIE MAKES NO SENSE!’
At which point all my friends walked away from me.
Yes! I thought the same things!
I couldn’t stop laughing when they got to the vagina dentata. Take a man who appears to be gay in dress and mannerisms, and feed him to the giant toothed vagina, and what, exactly, are you trying to say? I completely lost track of whatever little engagement I had with the movie as it opened its ‘mouth.’
You’re not the only one to have that problem.
Actually, I came in to mention Cars, too. I kept extending the metaphor way too far and breaking it. For example, the stoner VW van has a license plate on his front bumper that looks like a “Shaggy” beard. It’s a cute little design touch for the character’s look, but, in a world of anthropomorphic cars, what excactly is the signifigance of having a unique numerical designation applied to an easily visible portion of your body? Isn’t that a little… Auschwitzy? Also, it appears that the world of Cars features an incredibly rigid caste system. Your chassis determines your role in life. Born as a tow truck? Then that’s what you’re going to do for the rest of your life. You’re a semi truck that wants to be a race car? Sorry, the best you can hope for is carrying the real race cars to their next race. There’s the whole hierarchy of intelligence, too. Passenger cars and trucks are sentient. Tractors and reapers are dumb animals. But road pavers are apparently dumb machines? How does that work? Are these cars “born” that way, or are they lobotomized at the factory so that they can fill their proper role in society? And let’s not even get started on how creepy it was for Mater to get a ride in the stomach of another sentient vehicle at the end of the film. “Whoo! Lookit me! I’m ridin’ in this feller’s belly!” Seriously: what the hell?
The Da Vinci Code
I don’t get the hype caused by the novel or the movie. The Catholic church has other things to worry about than the bones of a dead woman. (Not to mention if anyone claims to genetically related to Jesus, the Church can pass the person off as a decendent of one of Jesus’ “brothers”.) All this hype for nothing.
Anything by Verhooeven.
There. I said it.
Can you tell me about this?