The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Geek Pin-Up #18: Shannon Whirry

It seems a fair enough definition to call a geek someone who spent a good deal of their childhood alone in a darkened room. Also that some of their most important experiences are defined by what they have seen, rather than what they have done. With this in mind, I should like to nominate Shannon Whirry, star of a series of 'erotic thrillers' during the early to mid 90's, as our latest pin up, for services rendered to a teenaged me.

The films were called things like Animal Instincts and Mirror Images and usually involved Shannon as a repressed/bored housewife struggling against the confines of her marriage/sexual inexperience who is drawn into a shadowy world of sensual intrigue by circumstances beyond her control. Perhaps her husband is secretly filming their sex so, to save her marriage, she starts sleeping with other men just so her husband can watch the video. Perhaps her evil, sexy twin sister (that would be Mirror Images) tricks her into acting as a prostitute.

She would start off shocked by this steamy new world, but it would secretly thrill her, and she would then go back again and again to it, becoming more and more confident as she finally starts to express her true unbridled sexuality. All this leads up to a scene at the end of act two where she fully sheds her inhibitions, usually involving lezzing up and some spectacularly mild bondage. A saxophone will be playing in the next room.

Then there'll be a mobster, or some sort of obsessive man and this new sexy world starts getting dangerous for Shannon and it all gets resolved usually with a gunshot or two and Shannon going back to her old life, only much more sexually free and satisfied. Something like that anyway - these films were basically only watched for the nudity and Shannon's character arc of increasing naughtiness, both of which basically ended after the lezzing at the end of act two in favour of the 'thriller' part of the equation. Plus they were on late at night and that, coupled with other circumstances, usually led to me being asleep long before the end of these films.

Shannon herself was pretty great though. Looking a bit like a slightly more refined Sherilyn Fenn, if only for having a slightly taller face and a more fragile, translucent complexion, with the added bonus of massive, natural boobs, she could do innocent and repressed but still show that hint of a sexy fire having been lit within after that first encounter with the new world. She could also keep that tension going all the way through her libidinal adventures, never turning the sex into simple mechanical rutting. The films took these indiscretions and very mild perversions very seriously. Shannon seemed genuinely shocked that she was doing these things and, even worse, really enjoying them. This rather quaint prudery actually served to give the soft focus gyrations a bit of heft. It made them saucy, naughty - these erotic thrillers, in their own cheesy way, were actually erotic.

Now the films were, of course, atrocious. Slow paced, badly acted and nominally scripted to the point of being technically unwatchable these days, even for a fifteen year old. But the simple act of having a slightly old-fashioned attitude towards nookie, where wearing a blindfold was awfully, awfully kinky, gives them a certain charm lacking in the modern, ever more extreme gonzo fucking of modern porn.

Equally, the softcore DTV romps popping up in Blockbuster over the last half decade have been the Misty Mundae starring epics like Lord Of The G-Strings and Playmate Of The Apes. I've not seen any of these (there is a quiz held in the pub that inspired Shaun Of The Dead's The Winchester and once I was only 5 points away from winning an entire set of these films. My life is a tapestry of disappointment) but the jokey, knowing nature of these 'erotic pastiches' seems less alluring than the straight-faced melodrama of the Shannon Whirry starring, post-Basic Instinct 'erotic thrillers'.

In fact (just to make sure I don't write an entire article about softcore porn), my theory as to why Grindhouse bombed at the box office is that the great unwashed like their exploitation trash dead serious and without the too-cool-for-school post-ironic posturing of the Grindhouse trailers. Witness the success of 300, which consists of exactly the same sex and violence formula as all the B-movies Grindhouse was referencing but never acknowledges how cheesy it actually is.

It's most likely that Shannon Whirry isn't really worth immortalising in TFL's great pantheon of geek pin-ups - it's just that she happened to be getting her kit off when I was learning how to masturbate. If I had been a few years older, maybe I would be writing about former softcore-nonsense star Shannon Tweed. This is a good thing, however, as Shannon Tweed is really ugly.

Nonetheless, Ms Whirry seems to be getting regular work on TV these days, so avoiding the bored housewife fate of all her characters, so that's nice. If you still aren't convinced as to her geek credibility, she was in Steven Seagal's Out For Justice so some of you could beat off to that instead if you like.

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Labels: Geek Pin-Up, Shannon Whirry

Continue reading Geek Pin-Up #18: Shannon Whirry

Posted by Andrew Clarke @ 1:28 AM :: (1) comments

Monday, February 05, 2007

Geek Pin-Up #17: Helena Bonham Carter

I haven't done one of these since Casino Royale came out and I'm feeling lonely, so I thought I would spend some time gushing about a pretty lady. This time round we have a personal favourite of mine: Helena Bonham Carter.

She gets a lot of stick in the gossip press these days for mostly looking like she slept in a bush, and gets equal amounts of stick from geek circles for being engaged to director Tim Burton, who mostly looks like he slept in a bush, but she retains a peculiarly nymph-like (old-fashioned meaning, people) beauty, despite committing the sin of being over 30, and has retained a cussed refusal to play into the fantasy beauty myth that makes the nymphy (new-fashioned meaning) sexuality she can portray wonderfully believable. Who, in the real world, doesn't spend a good part of their week looking like they slept in a bush? All the stick she gets tells us a lot more about the truly bizarre cultural trend of needing our beauties scrubbed clean and looking like they are made out of plastic. Why should wanting to look like you live in the real world seem so perverse?

But enough of feminist cultural studies - I want to talk about Fight Club. Spoilers follow, but come on - if you haven't seen it, piss off now and come back when you have. David Fincher's 1999 classic about men beating each other up is full of anger, cynicism, nihilism, and features flashy attention grabbing performances by nerdy careerist Edward Norton and studly anarchist Brad Pitt. The film is full of noise and fury, full of raging against machines, fathers and Ikea furniture and full of the still-impressive sfx whizzbangery that gets male geeks so inflamed. Yet it is a classic not for these reasons, but because it has a very human heart at the centre of it, and it does not belong to Edward Norton, who's character dominates the running time and even has the voice-over. It belongs to the character of Marla, played by Helena Bonham Carter.

Plenty of young men didn't even get past the twist of Norton and Pitt being the same, mentally divergent, character and went off to form fight clubs of their own, with any brain damage they incurred being probably justified and barely noticeable. On the second viewing, once we know the twist, the film seems to be about Norton's character's (never actually named) arc of self-discovery. The film becomes about a redefinition of manhood in a world where even being a rebel has become co-opted by society.

But on further viewings it becomes clear that it is all about humans simply trying to make genuine connections with others in a very alienating modern world. And the only character who is truly trying to do this through the movie is Marla, Norton's long suffering girlfriend. While all the other characters are flying around their neuroses in testosterone fueled delusions, she is standing the centre of things, open and vulnerable, and getting horribly hurt in the process.

Norton's character is trying to create an identity for himself and, due to it being a fake construct, is a big giant mess and ultimately unsatisfying. All those who join the fight club or Project Mayhem are looking for this same sense of identity - as if it was something external to them, something they could put on like a fashionable coat. They are trying to find a means of controlling the world they are lost in, and of course it turns into a horrifying mess. And there is Marla, in amongst all the male wailing, accepting that the world is a painful, confusing and possibly bad place, but trying to offer up some love to what she thinks is the fellow soul in front of her.

The scenes where Norton utterly fails to see this and pushes her away with vicious words become utterly heartbreaking.

Throughout the entire movie, Marla is the only one who is actually being honest.

The film, importantly, ends with Norton's character having been stripped of all delusion and posturing, accepting that he hasn't got a clue what is going on, and accepting her hand. Yes, this most monolithically male film is actually completely female and it is made possible by the performance of Helena Bonham Carter.

By the way - you may want to watch Seven again, and realise that the central scene is in fact the one in the coffee shop where Gwyneth Paltrow talks to Morgan Freeman about her being pregnant.

Helena, here looking like she slept in a goth bush, plays it cool and darkly glamourous in the first act, and proves that she can keep toe to toe with the big spunky boys, with nominally showy-er parts, she is playing against in terms of sheer screen presence and in an excellent line in crudity. 'I haven't been fucked like this since grade school' is a line I kind of wish someone would say to me one day. But she introduces a more open, emotional side as the film moves on and her relationship with Norton's character develops, without ever falling into whining, sobbing or other other cliched 'female' behaviours. Hollywood's standard formulation of an independent, complex or strong woman is an ugly dyke, a sexless mouse or a dead-eyed hard body with penis-envy. Here is a character who is strong but open to being vulnerable, independent but knowing she both wants and needs the love of another, and much smarter than the men around her. No wonder she is such a difficult character for audiences to get, she's far too close to being real.

The truth is something boring like schedule conflicts, but I like to think the reason Fincher, Pitt and Norton didn't do their commentary for Fight Club at the same time as Helena Bonham Carter is because they were terrified of her.

Now, Helena hasn't fared too well in other geek-related movies. She was in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes and she was in Kenneth Branagh's Frankenstein, both of which are appalling. But didn't you think the section in Frankenstein from her murder, through her resurrection as the monster's bride to her suicide was the only emotionally resonant sequence in the film? Didn't you want Mark Wahlberg's astronaut character in Apes to cop off with Helena's monkey character instead of that dull blond human, Estella Warren? Equally as the voice of the corpse in 2005's Corpse Bride, didn't you find yourself reconsidering your position on necrophilia? And Helena did that with only her voice.

Helena you are great, and if you ever get bored of the bad-toothed, one trick pony of a fiance you have in Tim Burton, I'll be hanging around in some bushes near your house.