Whack Snake Moan

...or, another movie I won't be seeing this season. The director seems to believe he's made a real revolutionary cry of a film. In my opinion, anytime one person chains another to his radiator it's a felony.

Heroes can be felons (Layer Cake, anyone?). But what about Christina Ricci, in her torn-up Confederate flag shirt? As one man says, "she's got the sickness. She goes crazy." In some perverse way I'm a little thrilled by what a fallen woman she is. She has sex with four men in a single night, and wakes up naked and bleeding by the side of the road. Samuel Jackson says to her, "I will cure you of your wickedness" but really, why be so ambitious? He could just cure her of her scrapes, bruises and broken bones first.

And since when is Ricci's "nymphomania" (a mythical psychosexual disorder, by the way, since most sufferers of hypersexuality usually don't enjoy it) a wickedness? Let's not get carried away: it's not wickedness that gets her into trouble, it's carelessness. If she were having this much sex with, say, her husband, she'd only be obeying the injunction to "be fruitful and multiply." It's not her sex drive that's the problem. It's her addiction to self-mutilation. But the two are not the same.

I've seen the same mentality in the recent book Unhooked. As pointed out on Slate.com, the author assumes that young women who pursue casual sex are going to wake up in a world of pain. I'm not trying to be excessively modern, but I just don't buy it. The world of pain that Ricci experiences (particularly in the long hours clanking around Jackson's Tennessee shack) has nothing to do with the fact that she's been so "violated." And what about Jackson, the down-home hero who, Bible in hand, tries to restore Ricci's lost purity? The entire movie feels like a religious experience: temptation, the suggestion of all these kinky sex games, but in the end, they swear, they're just friends.

I don't buy that either. Friends don't chain their half-naked, drunk friends to the wall. I'm just saying.

Of course, one could argue that it's all allegorical. Fallen woman and knight-errant, devil and angel, left shoulder and right. But my spiritual battles tend not to be so dramatic. Also, for the most part, they don't leave chafe marks.