Posted 4/25/2007 05:51:00 PM by Douglas

I'm pretty sure The New York Times thinks I'm a mouth-breathing gastropod living out in some fly-over state eating a moon pie and listening to talk radio in-between lewd sex acts with my sister. But if this is what educated bourgeoisie discuss over cognac and tweed blazers, then I say no thanks.

The director Robinson Devor apparently would like viewers who watch his heavily reconstructed documentary, “Zoo,” to see it as a story of ineluctable desire and human dignity. Shot on Super 16-millimeter film, with many scenes steeped in a blue that would have made Yves Klein envious, “Zoo” is, to a large extent, about the rhetorical uses of beauty and metaphor and of certain filmmaking techniques like slow-motion photography. It is, rather more coyly, also about a man who died from a perforated colon after he arranged to have sex with a stallion.

A bestiality-themed snuff film. Not really my speed, yet I read on:

The prowling camera and dusky colors give much of “Zoo,” which opens with the portentous image of what appear to be miners emerging from a tunnel, a sumptuous, almost velvety look and vibe, an effect enhanced by the repeated use of slow-motion photography. Characters don’t just walk in this film; they float across the frame, pouring like liquid toward their inexorable destinies.

Written by Mr. Devor and Charles Mudede, “Zoo” is nothing if not artful.

I don't care how "prowling" the camera work is or how "velvety" the colors are, no amount of lens filters is going to soften the blow from Mr. Ed corn-holing Clyde the barber. So maybe Devor should save some of his prowling for a Ferris wheel, or a plastic bag in an updraft. But it gets worse.

In “Zoo,” three of those voices belong to men who, along with a group of unnamed, unnumbered other men, regularly met at a farm near the small city of Enumclaw, about 45 minutes southeast of Seattle, to party with one another and animals, occasionally recording their activities on video. Some of the men are identified only by their Internet handles (they met online), like the dead man, “Mr. Hands.”

Or "Mr. Bagel Anus" or "Señor can't fart."

Far more interesting is Mr. Devor’s decision not to name the dead man, identified in news reports and even the film’s production material as Kenneth Pinyan, a divorced Boeing employee.

Didn't see that one coming. . .

Reality is in the eye of the beholder, and so too, Mr. Devor would seem to have us believe, are death and deviance. Not that he labels man-horse sex deviant or comic or icky or anything much at all.

Of course not! Who are we, who is anyone to pass judgment on anyone's lifestyle. You're OK, I'm OK, right? It's really quite remarkable in our society that we're so obsessed with offending anyone that we're afraid to even insinuate that it might be "icky" for a bunch of people to video tape themselves gettin' jiggy with Miss Piggy. I know shame is extinct, but what happened to just plain gross?

That’s too bad. After all, Bible-believers notwithstanding, if you eat and wear animals and agree that it’s O.K. to torture them in the name of science and beauty, what’s the big deal? Human beings subject animals penned in factory farms to far more grievous abuse than anything apparently done to the horses in “Zoo,” and on a daily basis human beings also subject themselves to greater risk. One zoophile’s fond memories of cooking up ham for his brethren indicate that theirs was not a PETA-approved animal love, true.

Yeah, but probably not the kind of animal love you're thinking about, either. Definitely not the kind you see on old Lassie re-runs.

I know there are those out there that think that bestiality is the last sexual taboo to be broken, and to them I say, good luck with that. I'll be rooting for the horse to pierce all of your colons.