Word: carnal
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There is no satisfactory resolution to the comically sexual conflicts in this film. Oscar's wife throws around vague Casablanca-inspired lines about impossible love, then does her best to make her new found love impossible. The one real tension in the film is whether anything carnal is going to happen between the two lovers. This tension is dragged out and then off-handedly dismissed. Does she really go back to Oscar in the end? Can an Italian housewife find happiness with an Italian husband? Who knows and, at least in this film's case, who cares...
Speaking of carnal knowledge, Columbus notes that teenagers are not "the sex-starved maniacs" that Hollywood makes them out to be. Columbus's Spielberg movies all feature youngsters, and he tries to sculpt them differently from the mainstream teenage flick--more "precocious," he says...
...sets up a still to tide himself over the first year of farming and is soon selling 80 proof corn whisky at 32 cents a gallon. He is one of his own best customers. "Drunk" becomes a steady, solitary refrain during the fall and winter. He also struggles with carnal desires. He reads and translates erotic passages from Juvenal. When these sessions succeed, he writes: Masturbatus sum. Shortly after he arrives, he develops a crush on Fanny Cooper, the daughter-in-law of the local Methodist preacher, whose husband then providentially dies of a rattlesnake bite. As the diarist...
...woman driving south on Broadway sees a pedestrian whose "nice unimportant clothes seemed to be merely a shelter for the naked male person." She thinks, "Oh, man, in the very center of your life, still fitting your skin so nicely . . . why have you slipped out of my sentimental and carnal grasp?" Turning to a woman friend in the car, she says: "He's nice, isn't he?" The reply is vintage Paley: "I suppose so . . . but what is he, just a bourgeois on his way home...
Recently this argument has received support from some unlikely organs of the body politic. In Indianapolis the city council passed a law declaring that certain depictions of carnal mayhem were indeed civil rights violations. And psychologists at the University of Wisconsin released studies indicating that male subjects exposed to Friday the 13th, Swept Away and similar films did indeed assume the hostile attitudes of rapists. But now, leaping into the fray with the reckless assurance of kamikaze pilots, come two Hollywood films that confront the sexual-violence issue: Brian De Palma's Body Double and Ken Russell...