Six Feet Under and Could Have Been Kissed

Necrophilia is admittedly not a common subject to see in the movies, even in art films. Female necrophiles are even rarer a subject -- perhaps because like female exhibitionists, they seem like too much like a guy's fantasy -- especially a weird guy's fantasy -- to take seriously. Or perhaps it's more likely that we would like to think women are above that kind of stuff. After all, there's relatively little one could write about a man's sex life that one would not believe, no matter how weird it is. But women, of course, are supposed to be different. And anyway, if we have to explore such fantasies, wouldn't a film like Eyes Wide Shut or Nine and a Half Weeks seem like a safer direction to go?

In any event, the 1996 movie Kissed does attempt to go in such a direction -- though for a while, it seems determined to shadow the far darker movie Heavenly Creatures. It starts out with a young girl named Sandra Larson (played by Molly Parker) who is obsessed with death to the extent of devising her own private rituals to deal with it -- rituals so weird even her would-be friend gets freaked out by them. Eventually, she grows up and gets a job in a funeral parlor where she learns to subliminate her obsession with death by "kissing" the bodies of young dead males.

Of course, she does a lot more than just kiss them but alas, there is no verb in English one could use as an adequate substitute. "Embrace" sounds like way too mild an euphemism and a more sexually explicit term would imply that mere lust was Ms. Larson's sole motivation. Indeed, while the film does not pretend that Ms. Larson's horizontal activities are exactly normal, it does not pretend that mere sex is Mr. Larson's sole motive either -- unless one prefers to argue that Ms. Larson's obsession with death is merely a substitute for a more "normal" obsession with sex. And even then one would have to ignore the quasi-religious overtones of Ms. Larson's obsession -- though one might argue that Sandra would hardly be the first person to confuse sex with religion...

Anyway, Sandra eventually gets the chance to have a conventional sexual relationship, only to frustrate her would-be boyfriend with her apparent lack of interest. Then her boyfriend discovers her real secret and decides upon the ultimate solution to their relationship problems...

If there's one flaw in Kissed, it's that in the end, it settles for an all too conventional ending. Granted, they had to end the movie somehow but it still seemed strange that a movie originally focused upon a female character ended up being centered on the fate of a male character.

For that matter, I can't help feeling a bit uneasy about the film's efforts to portray necrophilia as a "natural" impulse. After all, it's easy to argue that such a practice would be harmless if practiced by cute young women like Molly Parker but it's usually not women like Ms. Parker who go in for such a practice in real life. More often than not, such women are the victims of would-be necrophiles, not their kindred spirits. And it can be argued that necrophilia is the ultimate form of sexual assault since there is no way the victim could give consent even if he or she wanted to. And even if one were to make an airtight legal case on behalf of such a practice, there would still be something sad about a person who voluntarily chose to embrace the dead instead of the living. Even if the living are a bit hard to put up with these days.