Word: excrementalism
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What makes the prospect especially hazardous is that one of the molecular biologists' favorite tools is the bacterium Escherichia coli, which inhabits every human bowel, is present in normal excrement and is highly amenable to laboratory manipulation. Its natural form is dangerous only when it runs rampant in an accidental or surgical wound or in organs other than the gastrointestinal tract. But a laboratory mutant might cause a plague of infectious disease resistant to available antibiotics. Altered DNA can be dynamite...
Thus Peter Martyr, a Habsburg court chronicler and diplomat, greeted the Old World's first exaction upon the New: a stupendous hoard of ornaments, masks and ritual objects cast and hammered from teocuitlatl, "the gods' excrement"-as the Aztecs called gold-which Montezuma had given to the insatiable Cortes. It was shown in Europe in 1519, and nothing from it survives today. Like nearly all the gold artifacts that Spain dragged from the New World, it was melted down for bullion...
...figure that the image of cold, yet capricious New York is built around. He communicates by shock. Flattering several matrons in an elevator by immediately identifying them as members of the Daughters of the American Revolution, Christian informs them that one of them has certainly stepped in dog excrement. In the park, he systematically picks out obese women to ask them if they want to fornicate...
Morality aside, "The Grande Bouffe" is a liberatingly funny pitch-black comedy. Ferreri assaults us. You're bound to be caught off guard by the overheated outhouse humor, the bloated, fetid atmosphere, the absorption with vomit and excrement, the colossal disrespect for human anatomy. Like pornography, it turns us (whether we're willing or not, and if we pay our pornmovie price of $5 we certainly ought to be willing) into voyeurs and accomplices. It appeals to our prurient curiosity at the same time that it disdains erotic indulgence. The movie tests our limits of shockability: how much...
...visual pun is a man holding a turkey between his legs while a woman cuts the squealing bird's head off with an ax. Ferreri's other sight gags include a couple rutting around in pastry batter and a toilet exploding, inundating everyone in the vicinity with excrement. Much is alien to a sensibility like that, although little is beneath...