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Approximately 0:34:51 into American Pie Presents: Beta House (2007), Erik Stifler, sexually inexperienced and effeminized cousin of the notorious Steve Stifler, “prematurely” ejaculates on love interest Ashley’s childhood teddybear Mr. Biggles, whose odd spectacles vaguely  nod to “Cum on My Glasses,” a porn site in which glasses are fetishized as worn by nerds, students, and secretaries. Before it hits Biggles (along with a framed graduation photo, from peripheral splatter), it passes slow motion (~35-40% speed) through the air in front of Ashley, who looks both shocked and fairly irritated. Shooting across where a mustache could be drawn, one is reminded of Duchamp’s treatment of Mona Lisa. Ashley (no last name given) had inadvertently induced this scene by applying ointment to Erik’s inner thigh, which had been scalded with a prophetic-y clam chowder a waitress had spilt on him two scenes prior. The reason this post is not tagged NSFW, arguably at least, is because (a) semen “alone,” even in this eroticized context, is not pornography without a clear view of its target or emitter; and (b) the semen in mention is not actually semen, but a mixture of cream, cornstarch, corn syrup, and gelatin, a well known culinary recipe for cum. Mere representation is not liable to having meaning. We imagine a special effects assistant with a turkey baster, or perhaps more elaborate contraption designed for expelling said fluid. Both men and women will agree this “load” is on the profuse side, which may point to either the overall excessive nature of the American Pie series, or to imply that Erik did not “clean his pipes” the way Ted (Ben Stiller) was instructed to in There’s Something About Mary, leading to their more pop-historical cum scene involving Ted’s earlobe and then Mary’s hair. In horror film, and even action movies, blood is splattered and sprayed everywhere. We almost relish in it; and while we are more subdued and embarrassed by cum, it is piss and shit which remain truly subversive, never film friendly, as if we were ashamed of our waste the most. To induce blood or cum takes so much more conviction and indiscretion, yet it is the prosaic biologically inevitable urine and feces upon which we bestow our deepest morals and fears. It is not we who are not safe for work, but work which is not safe for life. To your boss or co-worker looking over your shoulder at this flying jizz, tell them simply to come on as in get over it not my face.

Williams College is a liberal arts college in Williamstown Massachusetts, from which Charles Webb, who wrote the novel from which Nichols’ The Graduate (1967) was adapted, graduated. He is oddly, or expectedly, not associated with the film’s success. He is married to Fred, who calls herself that name in solidarity with Fred, a support group for women with low self-esteem. His homeschooled children, now adults, sold their wedding presents back to their guests, each got divorced in protest against marriage, and now, rumor has it, work at kmart and live in a shack. “The Sounds of Silence,” (1965) enmeshed with the iconic pool scene, forty-six years after it was was released, would be performed by a visibly distraught Paul Simon at the 9/11 Anniversary Memorial Ceremony, wearing a suit of out respect but looking like he’s going in for a job interview. Benny is seduced by an older woman but falls in love with her daughter, played by one doe-eyed Katharine Ross, who seventeen years later would end up marrying Sam Elliott, the omniscient narrator of The Big Lebowski (1998), whose appearance as The Stranger at the film’s ending can be seen as a pedestrian second coming of sorts, which is an odd way for Marco Polo, or you, to wade across the chlorine to one Uli Kunkel (screen name “Karl Hungus,” who appeared in a porn film with Bunny) seen passed out next to empty Jack. I like it how, in bars or parties, a group of exclusively males standing in a circle will shoot straight whiskey or tequila — suddenly throwing their heads back as synchronized swimmers — followed each by a coy yet uncontainable grin, as if the word cool could not contain what had just happened. “Uli doesn’t care about anything. He’s a Nihilist,” soon-to-be 9-toe’d Bunny Lebowski says. “Ah, that must be exhausting,” goes The Dude, whose $0.69 personal check to Ralph’s for some milk in the opening scene was dated September 11, 1991, exactly 10 years before the event exactly 10 years before Simon’s sad song was sang again through the bravery of a non-facelifted face. As for that day, they said we were nihilists, so we said they were back. People talking without speaking.

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Texas

In 2006, six years after Cast Away was released, a man named Doug Mathieson drove his Hyundai to N 35° 38.036 W 100° 27.076 — an intersection approximately 15 miles south of Canadian, Texas, by the Oklahoma border — and got outside, rested Wilson (a volleyball adorned with a red hand implicating the events of said film) on the hood of his car, and took a photo of it with the intent of commemorating both the film and his commemoration of it. Having not been anywhere near where he’s talking about, your contributor has Google maps displayed on another tab, the flat beige America honoring the endless wheat, the little orange man severely sun burnt from the forever high noon sun. In a description from which said photo was culled, Doug endearingly says, “Cast Away has one of my favorite Movie endings where Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) is at the ‘crossroads’ of his life deciding what he will do now with the rest of his life.” I imagine Doug in his early forties, probably married and with an o.k. life, with maybe a little too much time on his hands.

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Teenwolf (1985) begins with the muffled sound of a basketball in place of, or competing with, a heartbeat — that of Scott Howard (Michael J. Fox), a lanky self-conscious high school student trying his very best at basketball. The conquest of men, drained of blood and necessity, finds its charade in contemporary American sports. The opening scene is shot from below, with Scott’s head prophetically eclipsing the round lunar overhead stadium light. Despite the brief elevated pulse, we see Scott under his pallor, unwittingly negotiating the complexities and politics of the external world, tightly mapped out on a basketball court. Comparisons to Goethe’s Young Werther, Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, and Dostoyevski’s narrator in Notes from the Underground are likely, though we all know the imminent metamorphosis into wolf (i.e. the postmodern “other”) is essentially Kafkian; thus, Teenwolf preserves the legacy of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis as the grotesque as metaphor for perceived self-deformity and body dysmorphic disorder. One may note, or at least this contributor, the inverse-POV angle of Scott looking at us from above, intent on our gaze, sweaty, as if we, or the cameraman, were fellating the young actor; though the space between these two orientations is collapsed by the camera’s super-consciousness, its pictorial convex sweep bestowed with omniscience, as if we, void of God, were desperate to find its robotic mascot. Hey boy, big boy, we think under muffled vowels at the film’s opening shot. It seems the director, in an act of cinemagraphic authority, has been careful to put us into place.

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