Mood Movies, No. 4

by Jimmy Doyle | 0 comments

Introduction: Everyone will agree that the cinema is one of our culture’s most powerful art forms. It is best at heightening emotions. With the form’s camera framing, music, editing techniques, and other elements, a master of the movies can concentrate our attention on the minutia and nuances of certain states of mind. This is especially potent when it comes to the erotic arts. In this series of bulletins, I will highlight films that capture some essentials of BDSM, D/s, S/m sessions, and power dynamics. We can do this because since at least the 1990s, dominant women have ceased to be a gag moment of comedy relief and become accepted, normalized if you will, from Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman) in Goldfinger (1964) –

to Carmen Electra as Mistress Moira in a 12-second cameo in the HBO musical Get Over It (2001).

Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical (2005)

One of this writer’s favorite performers is Kristin Bell. She can sing and dance, act, she is funny and smart, and has good taste in projects (Veronica Mars, The Good Place). She also strikes me as … a little bossy. Though she wore some quasi kinky costumes as Veronica, she hasn’t played a straightforward Dominatrix – except once, in a dream sequence in this musical adaptation of the 1936 social-warning drama. What began as a church-sponsored warning against the evils of drugs eventually became a camp favorite among hippies in the late ‘70s.

The original is a plain bad and ill-informed movie, with maybe one or two moments of unintended comedy, that worst of all, commits the rank sin of being simply boring.

The Musical is not.

Though clearly patterned on Rocky Horror Picture Show, even down to the bracketing scenes with Alan Cumming as “The Lecturer,” Reefer Madness is funny and barbed, sexy and fun, with good songs, itself unusual in a TV musical – based on a stage play, the movie version was made for Showtime.

The musical follows the plot of the original film, but with songs, and with certain character changes and over-the-top satire as several sets of couples, dope dealers, their clients, and “innocent” high schoolers, intersect. A key transition point that illustrates the hazards of marijuana comes when one character in the original, Ralph (Dave O’Brien) attempts to rape teen Mary Lane (Dorothy Short) after first mischievously tricking Mary Lane with a Maryjane cigarette.

This scene becomes the high point of Reefer Madness the Movie Musical, and one that illustrates the real theme of both films.

In the musical, the straight-laced Mary Lane (Ms Bell) comes around to the drug house looking for her boyfriend Jimmy – who used to be chaste, like her. But Ralph (John Kassir) comes to the door, and soon he is plying her with pot, in order to seduce her.

But the pot liberates her sexual fantasies. Having been lured into using the drug, now Mary turns the tables and begins to dominate Ralph, and the musical sequence, featuring the song “Little Mary Sunshine,” reveals the inner tigress inside the repressed Mary as she becomes a Dominatrix kitted out in full leather gear. In this version of the sequence, Ralph is a much more craven figure.

The point in both movies is seduction. First the peddler seduces the young or the prone-to-addiction into buying his wares, but in this particular case, Mary, now fueled by the pot, seduces Ralph into an uninhibited fealty to her sexual power. And when it comes down to it, is not the S/m session an hour or two of careful seduction, with the Mistress knowing the mind of the subject as She manipulates him to where She wants him to go, in fact to a place he wants to go, anyway?

The imagery alternatces between Mary in the living room, and Mary in a leathern hell, as Mary sings:

Jimmy’s a boy

I’m ready for men

Let’s go up and down

and up and down

and down again