Last night, I went to see a shadow-cast performance of Repo! The Genetic Opera. (It was freaking awesome and I am a geek.) Seeing the local cast of mostly non-professional actors contrasted against the movie's real cast, I couldn't help but notice how much sexier the humans were.
They were so much more different from each other. I know that's a weird comment since the characters in Repo are already pretty distinct-looking, but they seem like variations on just a couple models compared to the way real people are different. Real people have so many body types--and I don't just mean "real is fat!" although that's one part of it--real people have so many permutations in their fatness but also their muscularity and their proportions and their masculinity/femininity and their very skeletons. Real people have tattoos, they have blemishes, they have weird noses and they have cute haircuts.
In the movie, Amber Sweet has two bodyguards who are hunky male-fitness-model types with no body hair and ledgey haircuts. They look identical, perfect, and mostly uninteresting. In the shadow cast, one of the bodyguards was thin with buzzed hair and a goatee, and the other one was taller and bigger and had a little bit of hair on his belly. They were so much sexier that way.
It's the humanity, I guess. A person with flaws is a person with history, a person who exists when I'm not looking, a person who's had a stiff ankle since that bike accident and who eats their fries with mustard and has a total crush on that one barista with the fauxhawk. Idols are overrated; I want someone who always gets an itchy nose right after putting on gloves.
The one time I saw Repo in a theater, a woman came dressed as Amber. She'd done the chest stitches with an actual surgical staple gun. Her build was pretty close to "generic perfect model"*, but the staples... They showed a, ah... level of individual variation that I'd describe just the way you did. Even apart from the kinkiness, it's something unexpected and unique. "You're a real person who likes weird things! That is so hot!"
ReplyDelete[* - No hatin' on the type, mind you. If that's what a person naturally looks like or enjoys looking like enough to strive for it, mazel tov; they're as much a part of the diverse tapestry yadda-yadda as anybody else.]
Maybe it's just a quirk of my personality but the longer I look at someone "perfect", the weirder they start looking to me.
ReplyDeleteIf there's a guy who's just ordinary-cute with a great personality, though, that's the sweet spot right there. Y'know that optical illusion that looks like two faces/a cup/two faces/a cup? When I start to have a crush on an ordinary-cute guy, he starts flipping back and forth for me between "cute" and "OMG so beautiful I want to fuck him until he can't walk anymore".
Anon - I know exactly what you mean. Although for me it's less of an optical illusion and more of a sense that "he's so cute I'm horny for him, but so real that he could also be horny for me."
ReplyDeleteI love this post. The bit about lives and history and individuality, that's what makes humanity. It's nice to see a "perfect" person now and then, in the same way it's nice to look at a beautiful statue, but who wants to have a relationship with a statue? Give me my beloved with his bit of extra weight and the hair and the limp, because he's *interesting*.
ReplyDeleteI'm sharing this with all my writer friends because you articulated things I've been groping at for a while.
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