The Flesh and the Screen

Movies and television, the moving media have many similarities with sex. The lights are turned off, intimate and comfortable placement is achieved between fellow viewers, and attention is focused on the task at hand. However, the attention is too often between the screen and the viewer, not between the viewers themselves. Watching moving images can become an isolated and self-involved experience, and the option of intimacy is ignored and devalued.

One may say that moving media can easily replace sex. Why have sex, when you can fall asleep with a good episode of Twin Peaks? If anything, sex easily becomes a placeholder for television in television's absence. Blackouts and back-wood cabins can act as examples for the ideal occurrences of this phenomena.

It is up to the viewer to realize that the sense of touch can be as fulfilling and satisfying as the sense of sight and sound.

But forget porn. Forget pot. Forget the lights. A quality movie can have the ability to give the viewer an amazing videosexual experience, as long as the viewer makes themselves available to get physicall involved in the movie. We give too much of our mental selves to moving images, and we use too few of our senses to get involved with the screen. We need to bring the mentality of what is on the screen outside of it, in our physical world instead.

Here are some neat movies I would recommend. Some are absurd and twisted, but all are worth feeling into.


Antichrist - 2009, Lars Von Trier


Y Tu Mama Tambien - 2001, Alfonso Cuarón


Dead Ringers - 1988, David Cronenberg


Videodrome - 1983 David Cronenberg


Crash - 1996 David Cronenberg


Repulsion - 1965 Roman Polanski