Bug Eyed: “Green Porno,” directed by Isabella Rossellini and Jody Shapiro

Is there anyone among us who isn’t fascinated with the way insects look and move? In her most recent film project, Isabella Rossellini is counting on that inclusive fascination. Green Porno is a series of eight short films on the sex lives of insects that Rossellini conceived, and scripted, and in which she performs all the crawly parts. She also directed the first three–Dragonfly, Firefly and Spider–and then turned to Jody Shapiro to direct the final five–Fly, Snail, Bee, Mantis and Worm. Together they are like the Masters and Johnson of the entomological world; there is nothing insects won’t do in their urgent need for sex. By the time these delightful download-friendly films are over (they were commissioned by the Sundance Channel for “third screen” devices like iPods and cell phones), you will have seen everything from sado-masochism to hermaphrodism, and from the symmetry of the soixante-neuf position to the less graceful machinations of headless copulation.

Each chapter in Green Porno is under two minutes in length and has a distinctive look. Acting on the suggestion of Laura Michalchyshyn, Sundance Channel’s Executive Vice President, Programming and Creative Affairs, that the films be “short, green and flashy,” Rossellini began her work. After downloading a number of different films on her cellular phone, Rossellini realized the most successful ones “were cartoons and animation, so that gave me a general idea.” The colours are intense and the films avoid special effects, what Rossellini calls “the most intimidating aspect of filmmaking.” The three she directed use more animation than the others in the series; in Spider the female is a large, two-dimensional creature on a filamented grid; and in Firefly the insects are represented by a collection of lit discs that flicker about a nocturnal, constructed landscape, searching for the right female, while avoiding the “imposters” who mimic the flashes of the species played by Rossellini. “If I get near it,” she says worriedly, “I could be eaten.”

This is not the kind of eating that would give sexual pleasure. Throughout the chapters of Green Porno, the threat of being consumed, or otherwise damaged, is constant. You could be sucked dry by your spidery mate, have your head bitten off by the female praying mantis (all females of this species are better described as preying), or bleed to death after your penis breaks off and is embedded in the female bee who got you buzzing in the first place. There is, admitedly, the pleasurable encounter between snails, whose sexual activity involves a degree of consensual SM. “I can produce darts,” says the shell-backed actress, “I use them to inflict pain on my partner before mating. It turns me on.” A good deal of “oohing” and “aahing” transpires at the end of the snail chapter, and the piece climaxes with a punctuating moan.

Rossellini’s insect surrogates allow her to assume different characters. As the snail, she mischievously informs us that she is able to withdraw her entire body into her shell, “where I can hide my vagina and my penis. I have both.” She leaves only a trace of shiny saran wrap on the ground as she slips back into the double-sexed comfort of her shell. Her earthworm delivery is no less insinuating when she tells us, “I am both male and female. I need to mate with another hermaphrodite in the 69 position.” Clearly, for the worm, the earth does move.

In observing she is cheeky, playing a firefly who swings her body-stockinged derrière back and forth–“If I were a firefly I would light up my ass at night and fly here and there”–is to state the obvious; and in the opening shot of Dragonfly her unmistakable, beautiful face lights up the frame. Rossellini is a bug for all seasons, and her pleasure in making these playful lessons in insect sexual practices is everywhere apparent.

I wouldn’t want to give the impression, though, that buggy sex is all good, clean, deadly fun. The series offers more than a trace of the scatological. In one wacky scene, the snail twists her body into her shell in such a way that “my anus would end up on top of my head.” She completes the scene with the word “unfortunately” only after a trail of green slime oozes onto her cheek. In Fly the ooziness factor increases. The chapter begins, as do all the films, with the conditional form, “If I were….” In this case the conjecture goes, “If I were a fly, a common one, a Musca domestica, you would try to swat me.” This section is an example of the educational side of the series, there are 36 species of fly and Rossellini is concerned that we have our science straight. What follows are some facts about the fly’s ability to see and react. “I can flap my wings 200 times per second,” we are told, and “my eyes see movement 200 times better than human eyes,” both of which skills make the swatting of a fly with a newspaper more difficult. Then the chapter shifts to the insect’s eating habits, performed over a plate of spaghetti and meatballs that could have been served in a restaurant owned by Thomas Demand. The fly spits out a gelatinous dollop of saliva to dissolve the food (Cindy Sherman meets David Cronenberg) and after a little proboscis action, the porno overtakes the green. The operating procedure is something like, “I heard a fly buzz when I dined,” as Rossellini flicks over to mount a life-sized model of a fly that she rides as if it were a customized motorcycle. This model, like all the others, is wonderfully designed by Andy Byers and Rick Gilbert, who headed the production team that worked with Rossellini on the look of Green Porno. The Fly chapter concludes with a gruesome scene in which a medium-scaled fly drifts in like a spaceship from an old Flash Gordon animation and lands on a likeness of Isabella’s decapitated head. (The head looks like the design crew has borrowed some parts from Tom Friedman’s self-portrait as a victim of a motorcycle accident, an idea that the dead drone re-embodies surrounded by pools of blood in the Bee chapter.) The Fly voiceover tells us “our babies grow up in cadavers. They’re called maggots,” and the film ends. To be sure, the chapters have a summary quality about them. After the clitellum, “a kind of muff,” that glides over the worm’s body collects its freight of sperms and eggs, Rossellini concludes the chapter with the declaration that “my little worms will be born in 2 to 3 weeks. The ending is so abrupt that it seems a case of insectus interruptus.”

Rossellini’s subjects carry the weight of a fierce, natural mortality and, as viewers, our inclination is to want to anthropomorphize their behaviour. Cynics among us can see the fate of the drones in the Bee chapter–“we would do nothing, just waiting to have sex”–or the mindlessness of the mantis, screwing away even without a head, as close enough to the male psyche to make inevitable the insect-to-human comparison. But there is a kinder, gentler message in our need to humanize these tales, read in wing and mandible. At the end of the Firefly episode, the male spots what he hopes will be his ideal mate. “There she is. Oh, I hope she’s the one,” and then even more hopefully, “I do believe she’s the right one.” This sweet monologue concludes with the word “yes” repeated three times, and who among us doesn’t hear in the insect’s small voice the echo of Molly Bloom’s orgasmic affirmation at the end of Ulysses? The final sound we hear, watching the twinkling of the coupling fireflies, is a sigh. It carries the satisfaction of the benign weight of a dragonfly on your arm, and is as fragile as the sight of a honeybee’s wing.

Green Porno is distributed by Maximus Films International and will be officially released in May. Three of the films premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, and the remaining five premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2008.