I am an SM writer (I am not by the way, it is just the title of a film....)

[GavinRees at aol.com]

In a message dated 11/9/99 2:08:20 PM, Serdar Yegulalp wrote.

If this is in fact the "Merzbow documentary", as some have called it
(Merzbow is Akita's performing name), then it would be more than worth a
look. But it sounds offhand like it's not.
------- 

Well no, it certainly isn't the aforementioned documentary, but it certainly 
is worth a look at. I am not quite sure I understand how you can tell just 
from the English title of a Japanese film, whether it is worth watching or 
not. Hats off to you if you can. 

 I was quite impressed the film, because it is both funny in an Itami-esque 
way, and the material has interesting things to say about sex and gender in 
Japan. The plot line hangs around the attempts of a second rate hack novelist 
to write a masterpeice of SM fiction. He  pays a rope master to tie up and 
sleep with a young woman, and writes down the minutitiae of intecourse in 
graphic detail as the "investigations" proceed. Although the language is as 
pornographic as it could be, the visualy imagery is relatively tame, and 
underlines the absurdity of the writers purple prose. The writers wife 
objects to her husbands work, accusing him of being  a pervert (hentai). He 
replies that the money he earns from writing pornography is the only  way 
that he can get the momey to pay for her upper middle class life style. 
However, she refuses to have sex with him until he gives up the job. I won't 
give away much more of the plot, because I think it would spoil it, but most 
of the film deals with the writers attempts to get his wife back into bed, 
and along the way to find the reasons for his decline in sexual power.  
Moreover rather than assuming that his wife isn't interested in physical sex, 
it becomes apparent that she is, but that her aggenda is very different from 
her husband's. It is not that she doesn't have a pornographic imagination, 
but just one at odds with her husbands reduction of sex to the barest 
mechanical details. 


Gavin