Dialogic Cinephilia: Shortbus (USA: John Cameron Mitchell, 2006: 101 mins)

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Shortbus (USA: John Cameron Mitchell, 2006: 101 mins)

"In the old days, when you couldn't show sex on film, directors like Hitchcock had metaphors for sex (trains going into tunnels, etc). When you can show more realistic sex, the sex itself can be a metaphor for other parts of the character's lives. The way people express themselves sexually can tell you a lot about who they are. Some people ask me, 'Couldn't you have told the same story without the explicitness?'. They don't ask whether I could've done Hedwig without the songs. Why not be allowed to use every paint in the paintbox?" --John Cameron Mitchell, "How to Shoot Sex: A Docu-Primer" (2007): Shortbus Region 1 DVD release (Th!nk Film)

Shortbus (USA: John Cameron Mitchell, 2006: 101 mins)

"The character of any age is tellingly revealed in the popular representation of intimacy. For all the sexualisation of our culture, we live in strangely repressed times: a late-night, infrared fumble on Big Brother is front-page news. While the online porn industry, with its humourless siliconed stereotypes, is worth a reported $10bn a year - more than the cumulative box-office receipts of Hollywood - real human sexual relationships, vulnerable and fun, are hardly anywhere to be seen." -- Tim Adams (2006)

Adams, Tim. "Everybody's Doing It..." The Guardian (November 26, 2006)

Barounis, Cynthia. "Queerness Meets Disability in Shortbus." In Media Res (February 2, 2011)

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---. "Gender and Sexuality at the Carnegie Center." North of Center (January 29, 2010)

---. "Getting off on John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus: American Sex and Sexuality." North of Center (March 30, 2011)

---. "Review of Straightlaced: How Gender’s Got Us All Tied Up." North of Center (October 13, 2010)

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Brunsting, Joshua. "For Criterion Consideration: John Mitchell's Shortbus." Criterion Cast (February 25, 2014)

Cannon, Kristopher L. "Hedwig leaves her stain on the Shortbus." In Media Res (February 1, 2011)

Chan, Karen B.K. "Should Sex Be Like Jazz." Sociological Images (March 4, 2013)

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Dargis, Manohla. "Naughty and Nice in a Carnal Carnival." The New York Times (October 4, 2010)

Dino. "Penetration in Shortbus: Trauma, Representation, and 9/11." Synoptique #14 (May 2010)

Dubowski, Sandi. "Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret: John Cameron Mitchell pushes the sexual boundaries once again in Shortbus." Filmmaker (Fall 2006)

Elizabeth, Heather, et al. "Sex, Truth and Audio Tape: Shifting identities on a changing sexual landscape (Part 1)." Ideas (October 25, 2017) ["It's often been said that everything in the world is about sex, except sex itself — sex is about power. So what are we to make of today's sexual landscape, where we see the most diverse range of orientations and expressions of sexuality in history? Lesbian, gay, queer, cis, pansexual, leather daddies, stone butch, asexual... the list keeps growing. And there is entrenched push-back against that expansion. So who gets to say what about whom? And as the sexuality landscape broadens, what will it mean?"]

---. "Sex, Truth and Audio Tape: What does consent really mean? (Part 2)" Ideas (November 1, 2017) ["The Harvey Weinstein story has unleashed a veritable tsunami of sexual assault and harassment claims. And there's a huge gender gap at work: overwhelmingly, men are the accused perpetrators; women, the victims. IDEAS producer Mary O'Connell explores the motivations, conscious and unconscious, behind this disturbing dynamic. "]

Escoffier, Jeffrey, ed. Sexual Revolution. NY: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2003. (BCTC Library HQ 21 I85 2003) ["What does "sexual revolution" mean? When, how, and why did it begin? What, if anything, did it change? And what hope do we have that its ideals of equality and pleasure can be realized? From Susan Sontag's "Pornographic Imagination" to Al Goldstein's notorious review of Deep Throat, Sexual Revolution explores the cultural, economic, political, and moral consequences of new ways of sexual thinking and behaving — reclaiming the female orgasm and challenging the double standard; celebrating open marriage and homosexuality; and defying taboo and censorship. With Anne Koedt's classic "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm" and Norman Mailer's "The Homosexual Villain;" Helen Gurley Brown to Lenny Bruce — to name a few — this book features the voices of those who registered and provoked popular consciousness and transformed how we think about sex. Today, Dr. Phil talks about oral sex among grade-schoolers and porn star Jenna Jameson gets a six-figure advance for her memoirs. Something has changed, but Sexual Revolution reminds us that our sexuality remains a bitterly contested battleground. This collection includes selections by Erica Jong, Lawrence Lipton, Masters and Johnson, Betty Dodson, Gayle Rubin, Timothy Leary, Henry Miller, Huey Newton, Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, and many others."]

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Fauth, Jürgen. "Shortbus." About (No Date)

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Harris, Mark. "Revisiting the Tryouts for the Orgy: Could John Cameron Mitchell’s gleefully sexual 2006 film Shortbus get made today?" Vulture (January 26, 2022)

Hudson, David. "Sex in the Movies." Green Cine (2005)

---. "Shortbus in 2006 - and in 2022." The Current (January 27, 2022) [Rewatching Shortbus, Harris decides that the film probably could not be made today, 'not because of its sexual explicitness, although that would doubtless be scrutinized through a stern contemporary lens of power dynamics and problematics and representation but could probably survive all that and maybe even wink at it, but because of its optimism. It’s a movie full of joy and delight—not just in sexual discovery and self-discovery, but in the awkward, itchy, uncomfortable, embarrassing stuff, in the fact that sex is messy because people and their feelings are messy. In a way, the movie’s conviction that the mess is part of the fun seems like its most transgressive aspect.'"]

Jhally, Sut. "Codes of Gender: Identity and Performance in Popular Culture." (Media Education Foundation, 2009) [documentary--available online]

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Macio. "Redefining Our Relationships: An Interview with Wendy-O Matik." Revolution By the Book (February 19, 2010)

Mayer, Sophie. "In Praise of Soft Cocks." cléo 5.1 (2017)

Mitchell, John Cameron. "Let's Talk Dirty." The Independent (November 26, 2006)

---. "Why My New Film Has Real Sex In It." Landmark Theatres (2007)

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"Polyamory." Wikipedia (No Date)

Popova, Maria. "Alain de Botton on How to Think About Sex More." Brain Pickings (February 14, 2013) [“The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.”]