Hollywood Feigns Outrage over a Fictional Screen Rape, 44 Years after the Non-Fact, as if It Had Really been Committed; but It’s All a Cynical Marketing Ploy One of Hollywood's many charms is its habit of exercising itself, in condemning crimes that never happened, while ignoring real atrocities.
The year 2016 was early in the me-too rape and sexual harassment hoax campaign, and I missed this nontroversy at the time. Actress Jessica Chastain posted an outraged tweet about a movie made before she was born.
In 1972, Bernardo Bertolucci made a pretentious, simulated porno movie called Last Tango in Paris. It made quite a stir at the time, because it went further than previous movies made by big names.
At the time, the press reaction was so overwrought, as to make it seem as though it were a hard-core porno film with real, onscreen sex. When I saw it in West Germany during the early 1980s at the local theater in Tübingen, I thought I had to be watching a censored version, because there was no explicit sex. But no, I saw the uncut version.
If memory serves, the story is about two strangers—a handsome, middle-aged man and a pretty, bosomy, young woman—who meet in a large apartment. Suddenly, without any introduction, the man grabs up the girl, carries her to a wall, and ravishes her while standing. She finds this incredibly erotic, and he certainly doesn’t mind.
The man’s wife, a famous actress, has just committed suicide a few days earlier, and is laid out in her coffin, dressed up to go, with all the trimmings, in another room.
For several days, the man and the girl have orgiastic, impersonal sex. Paul (Marlon Brando, hereinafter, “the bum”) doesn’t want to know anything about the girl, Jeanne (Maria Schneider), not even her name.
At one point, he grabs a pound of butter, lubes up her butt, and anally rapes her. Actually, since I don’t recall her fighting him off any more than during the other sex scenes, it may not have even been a simulated rape, but I don’t intend to see “the thing” again, in order to precisely determine what happens in the scene.
But she falls in love with him. However, since he has no personal interest in her, she falls out of love with him. This now piques his personal interest, and he does fall in love with her. She wants to be rid of him, but he stalks her.
(She has a regular lover, played by Jean-Pierre Leaud.)
He follows her to a public tango dance, where they join the dancers, scandalizing the whole ritual. They sit at a table, and he cajoles her into giving him a hand-job, as a parting gift.
She gets up to leave, but he won’t let her go, so she shoots him in the gut, and he stumbles off and dies.
I surmise that Bertolucci, assuming I’m not projecting grand meanings onto nothingness, wanted to say that sex without love is a dead-end which, taken to obsessive pursuit, will result in death. I called it an epitaph for the budding sexual revolution.
Of course, there was no need to make a porno movie, if that’s what the director sought to say. Rather, it was a cynical move for a big-name director and the world’s most idolized movie star to make a porno movie. People paid to see it, because of the porno, not the meditations on sex, love, and death, which few people got out of it.
“The thing” had two things going for it. Its star, the bum, was the world’s most talented actor. He squandered much of his talent, but basically just playing himself here, he still managed to be entertaining.
And it had a virtuoso score by Gato Barbieri.
“They conspired to basically rape [Maria Schneider’s character] and she didn’t know that that was going to happen, and he said he didn’t want her to act humiliated, he wanted her to be humiliated,” Chastain continued.
“In a recently surfaced interview, Director Bernardo Bertolucci admitted to La Cinémathèque Française in Paris in 2013 that he and Brando conspired to use butter as a lubricant for the rape scene, but chose not to tell lead actress Schneider about the idea.
“‘So if that in fact is the case, I think that’s wrong and I think we need to reexamine how we look at that film and perhaps it needs to be defined as something else and not an excellent piece of film making because it’s a situation where a woman was victimized and then it was recorded and she was 19 and he was 48,’ Chastain said.”
There was no rape. Did Schneider try to fight off the bum, regarding the butter? I can’t recall, the discussions of the nontroversy since 2016 didn’t say so, and the late Schneider didn’t complain at the time. But there still couldn’t be any legitimate complaint about a rape that never happened. And the age difference between the performers was irrelevant, but points to how desperate Jessica Chastain was to fabricate an issue.
Oh, but the “conspiracy” wasn’t even about a rape that never happened, but about the use of butter, as opposed to say, Crisco, in the rape that never happened!
So, what’s really going on? First and foremost, Jessica Chastain had a new movie coming out, and was ruthlessly exploiting a 44-year-old, simulated porno movie, in order to market it. And the matriarchal media were promoting to death the me-too hoax, because they are dominated by feminists, and most of the female shakedown artists were themselves in the media.
It was a porno movie, for crying out loud, albeit a simulated one. Anyone claiming to be outraged that a simulated porno movie was pornographic, is as phony as a three-dollar bill.
I deal with real rapes a great deal in my work, yet Hollywood never complains about them. The racist kidnapping-gang-rape-torture-murder, by seven blacks—two still at large—of White sweethearts Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, on January 6-7, 2007, in Knoxville, TN, which I dubbed The Knoxville Horror.
Hollywood has never reacted with outrage over any black-on-White atrocities, with or without rape being perpetrated. Actually, it is in the habit of changing black perpetrators into Whites, as it did, for instance, in a TV movie about the murder-rape (likely in that order) of White Kitty Genovese by black serial murderer-rapist, Winston Mosely, on March 13, 1964, in Kew Gardens, Queens (as I learned via my friend and partner-in-crime, David in TN), or any number of black-on-White and black-on-Asian crimes depicted on Dick Wolf’s perennial hit series, Law & Order, with the races switched.
Tinseltown’s moral dudgeon is always fake. Twasn’t always so, but it’s been that way for a very long time.
Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.
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