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Posted on 02 August 2004
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Bosomania: The Sex, the Violence, and the Vocabulary of Russ Meyer
Russ Meyer’s legacy, if not isolated solely to film, includes a contribution to the English language. The descriptions of his eighteen films available on VHS include the following adjectives: Buxom, Buxotic, Cantilevered, Capaciously Domed, Conical, Heroically Endowed, Super Abundant, and Voluptua. Obviously, these are all words to describe breasts.
Such vocabulary is justifiably redundant, but in Meyer’s oeuvre it evidences his aesthetic. After watching a handful of Meyer’s more renowned films, one may discern between a woman who is “Pneumatic” and one who is merely “Protuberant.”
Such obsession with breasts can be, and traditionally has been, considered sexist, but Meyer’s films are dynamically contrary to the implicit definition of sexism, in which women are isolated as the victims of sexual discrimination. This claim is contested by the reputation of Meyer as a chauvinist filmmaker (occasionally, his films are located precariously in Adult sections of video stores). Meyer’s efforts, however, are generally tame, misrepresented by their ratings and suggestive descriptions. Meyer’s women are eligibly cast according to their bust size, but breasts are indicators of power in a Russ Meyer film; his women are like an army of female praying mantises, poised to seduce and then kill.
After service in WWII (in which Meyer claims to have attended a Paris whore house with Ernest Hemmingway), Meyer began making “nudie” pictures in 1959, with The Immoral Mr. Teas. His first few films are shoestring efforts, shot on 16mm without live sound (each is narrated), and, at the very most, amount to a series of risqué sketches. There is little contemporary relevance in his early films, other than for their dated cultural reflection. They were the first of their kind, an entertainment without any pretense, designed solely for comedy and slight arousal, artifacts of a past culture of sexual inhibition.
Meyer’s later films are dynamically ironic, specifically in comparison to the pornography that would litter the 70s, as his women are usually more sexually discriminatory than his men. Most every sexual scenario in a Russ Meyer film is instigated by a woman. His men are often bumbling, under-established, indifferent bumpkins, oblivious to the woman panting for them to remove their pants.
This tactic evolves in Meyer’s career. From the agenda of his wife Eve to seduce to Meyer’s masterpiece, in which a trio of women so presumably unsatisfied they are to be considered hazards to men, Meyer promotes female sexuality and endorses female empowerment. If labels are necessary in this argument, he is even feminist.
His liberated women excepted, there are other merits to Meyer’s filmmaking. He is a master of pacing; his films are commendably edited, staged, and even framed (there are numerous instances in his filmography that presage The Graduate’s famous shot of Ben Braddock locked inside Mrs. Robinson’s foreground leg). His most accomplished trait would be his dialogue. Delivered in heavy slang, Meyer’s written words are idiosyncratically poetic and so instantly colloquial so as to have been dated the second they left the actors’ mouths.
A trademark secondary, although nonetheless apparent, to Meyer’s obsession with breasts is violence, which characterizes his most known film, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. The film’s villain is a threesome of ably threatening women, whom, in an opening monologue, are given the attributes of vampires. It is noteworthy that for a director so apparently chauvinist his female characters are promoted with fear in his seminal film. Theirs — and others in Meyer’s canon — is a sexuality that is to be understood. As it is recommended that one must know his enemy before engaging in conflict, so must the male fear a woman in a Russ Meyer film.
The Immoral Mr. Teas
The Immoral Mr. Teas is fascinating as a cultural artifact, a film that relays a culture’s sexual inhibition despite the fact that it was made to challenge that very trait.
Eve and the Handyman
Eve illustrates one of Meyer’s ironies, that he’s a filmmaker with unpretentious chauvinist interests, yet his primary character is an empowered female.
Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
The sex is intended to arouse, the violence to excite, and the combination of the two is completely dynamic, enabling Faster Pussycat’s status as an absolute masterpiece of subversion.
Motor Psycho
The scenario is keenly similar to that of the director’s seminal Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, only with the sex and preferred transportation of the main characters supplanted.
Vixen!
The dialogue of this film alone, without any visual accompaniment, would presage a much more explicit film, not to mention its entertainment in and of itself.
