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200 Taste ReenteringtheMovieTheater The modern dichotomization of subject and object—­ that is, the denial that they are effects of discourse—­results from the metaphorical turn I just described and is a logical outcome of the mind–­ body dualism. If I may, though, I’ll venture this: the collective enjoyment of bodies, our own bodies as well the bodies of others, and the social relations that stem from such an enjoyment constitute the lived and sometimes highly pleasurable experience of the untenability of strict Cartesian thought. My purpose, then, is to try to make life a little less still and nature a little less dead. And for that, we need to enter the dark recesses of movie theaters, where different kinds of viewership and social interactions take place, and where bodies do things together. I should warn you: it’s not going to be pretty. That’s the point. To argue this point, I turn to three films taking place almost entirely within the confines of movie theaters where men go for sexual, but also social, encounters, demonstrating that the two need not be separated. One of them is a French movie from 2002, Jacques Nolot’s La chatte à deux têtes (Porn Theater in its rather prosaic American title and a more suggestive Glowing Eyes on the international market). The story is set in a Parisian movie theater showing heterosexual pornographic films but teeming with sexual activity among men. The story, although one hesitates to call it that, since nothing happens in the traditional narrative sense, presents a collection of “characters” who remain unnamed. They are referred to in the closing credits as “the homeless man,” “the naked man,” “the man with the yellow dress,” and so on. The three characters with whom we spend the most time are “the 50-­ year-­ old man,” a gay man played by the film’s writer and director himself;“the cashier,” a middle-­ aged woman whose sexual identity may best be described as flexible—­ which means with no sexual identity; and “the projectionist,” a young and candid heterosexual man fresh off the boat, or the train, from his native province. The fact that all the characters remain nameless is, no doubt, a reminder that the movie depicts what is often referred to as anonymous sex. But this also reflects the author’s desire to emphasize contact over identifiable, subjective depth. Throughout the movie, we encounter cross-­dressers, hustlers, homeless men seeking a dark place to sleep,“regular” and probably married men, and eventually police officers.With the exception of the latter, these are the people HIV prevention has taught us to think of as “men who have sex with men,” a fluid group defined by behavior rather than identity. As so many Taste 201 French movies do, this one depicts several sexual encounters, along with smoking and a number of conversations about life and death in between. Finally, the cinema closes, and our three main characters leave the place together for what appears to be a three-­ way in the making. End of “story.” What sets this film apart is that it is the only Western one of the three, and, as such, it pertains to my point about Western culture more directly. The other two provide us with non-­ Western perspectives, although, to the extent that all three offer critiques of the globalization of sexual culture, we are bound to see some significant overlapping as well. One of these movies is Tsai Ming-­Liang’s Bu san (or Goodbye, Dragon Inn in its international, English-­ language title). From Taiwan in 2003, the “plot” (and there is even less of a plot than in the French film) unfolds in a giant Taipei movie palace, the Fuhe Grand Theater, on its very last night. (The actual theater used in the film had closed its doors for good not long before its fictional counterpart . Tsai looked for people who might be interested in preserving the grand old place but found no takers.) The movie being shown that night is the 1967 Taiwanese classic wu xia pian, or sword-­ fighting flick, Long men ke zhen, known internationally as Dragon Gate Inn. Our movie more or less follows a young, gay Japanese man who tries, without much success, to have sex with other men in the toilets or other discreet spaces of the nearly empty theater. Perhaps as a reflection of the young man’s apparently limited ability to speak Chinese,perhaps as a desire to show...

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