Have I used this before?
Yeah, probably.
So, um, I should preface this with something that I've been meaning to get off my chest for a while.
I've been doing this for a long time, a really long time,
seven years this summer, which is forever in internet terms,
and I know some of you started watching me, like, back when I was doing stuff on Channel Awesome
with the more comedy-centered stuff.
You know, like in the older videos where I'd talk about something that's really gross and transgressive
and I'd have nothing really insightful to say except for, you know, BLEH.
If you like my older videos, that's fine, that's your taste, I'm not really a fan of them.
And I know a few of you have only just now discovered me through my more recent video essay-ish stuff.
And I have to say that I've been enjoying that a lot more,
just personally and professionally I get a lot more out of the research,
out of the audience reaction to it, I just enjoy it more.
It's something that's been on my mind a lot,
just reconciling who I am now with who I started out as.
That's why I've been hesitant to upload a lot of my older stuff to this channel, for example.
I'm not sure what I want to be from here on, I'm not sure how I want to present myself,
I'm not sure where I go from here.
And I bring this up because I'm positive that, for better or for worse,
this movie I'm going to talk about today is going to bring me back to my roots.
[laughter]
"Well, doctor, it burns when I pee."
[intro music]
Taxidermia, released in 2006 and directed by György Pálfi,
is the story of three generations of a family in 20th through 21st century Hungary.
We're introduced to it with a voice-over that will be explained at the very end,
but for now, we're thrown into the deep end with matchstick man here.
[laughter]
It's possible that he's hallucinating this.
The man, named Morosgoványi, is a low-ranking soldier in the Hungarian army assigned to various menial tasks.
He's plagued by an unsatisfied libido, which he nurtures in private
with fantasies so disgusting that I'd rather not speak aloud
because I enjoy having a YouTube channel and I would very much like to keep it.
One night, he's visited by the wife of his commander
and it's unclear if he actually has sex with her
or if he's fantasizing it while he's really doing it with, um...
[pig squeals]
Ugh.
He is just full-on David Cameron-ing, isn't he.
[gunshot]
Ah! Phew, that's over with.
So, the woman he may or may not have been "porking"
gives birth to a baby with a pig's tail who grows up to become Kálmán,
a champion speed eater which, okay, I guess that's a thing.
And in between training sessions and ritual puking,
[splashing]
he gets married to this woman who's also a speed eater
and they have a baby boy who might actually be another speed eater's kid? It's vague.
So that kid grows up to become, of course, a taxidermist.
This taxidermist, named Lajoska, is still living with his father and--
oh my god, he's Mr. Creosote.
-And how are we today? -Better.
-Better? -Better get a bucket, I'm gonna throw up.
Dad gets eaten by his cats,
the son stuffs his father,
then through an insane process of Rube Goldberg-ing, he taxidermizes himself.
The body is then discovered and displayed in a museum, where an art critic, the voiceover from before,
tries to analyze the greater significance of this simultaneously self-destructive and self-preserving act.
And the film ends by figuratively and literally navel-gazing.
So...
why...?
I mean, why?
Just, what was going on in Hungary that could have produced this?
What's been going on in Europe in general?
What is it with so many European directors indulging in the grossest, most taboo-breaking--
oh my god, it's a genre, isn't it.
Maybe they're all tapping into nationalist traditions of absurdism and body horror,
maybe they're all trying to express anxieties that can't be articulated through quotidian storytelling,
or maybe they know that there's a global audience of people and critics
who'll watch anything with sex and gore in it just for the perverse pleasure of witnessing something taboo--
Guys they're onto us the jig is up!
But that's a little dismissive, right?
I mean, it's not like the director is untalented.
For one, I loved this sequence, where he uses a complex rig to revolve around this bathtub,
and in the process shows how life revolves around it.
It's all of human existence through an object.
So, what is he doing here?
I'm pretty sure I can make this make sense...
Alright, here we go.
Now, Pálfi's story is--
well, okay, it's actually two stories by Hungarian writer Lajos Parti Nagy, with the third written by Pálfi himself--
but the overall narrative could be a simple generational drama.
Grandfather, father, son.
But is it?
The actual parentage of both sons is dubious at best,
so the narrative that the art director applied to the son's artwork feels forced, artificial.
Lifeless, one might say.
But nevertheless, we're asked to make those comparisons ourselves,
because we like arcs and we like logic and we like things to make sense.
But history doesn't always make sense, does it.
I mean, since we live in a world where facts are alternate
and news is fake and satire's dead and nothing matters anymore,
then why the hell are we bothering?
But for a Hungarian like Pálfi, history was that disjointed.
After the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
Hungary was an axis power, a Soviet satellite, then a member of NATO,
and since this movie came out, it slowly descended into a lightly repressive kleptocracy,
which is apparently a very popular thing to do nowadays!
Yes, I'm being political.
Deal with it.
And that fractured history is reflected in Taxidermia's three stories in three societies.
One fascist, one communist, one capitalist.
And in each setting, the protagonist resists through the most immediate battlefields they have,
their own bodies.
Cue digression about, like, Foucault's concept of the body and its relation to power
and feminist discourse about the body as a site of resistance
and other stuff that I probably should have written out, but I haven't because I'm kind of rushing this episode.
Morosgoványi lives under fascism, and so is reduced to function as a pure cleaning agent.
So he rebels by cultivating a vivid fantasy life,
a vivid, disgusting, illegal fantasy life.
Hey, wanna see a joke that writes itself?
Kálmán lives under communism, a system which bans private property,
so he rebels by ingesting as much as humanly possible.
Lajoska lives under a capitalist system,
where he's given every possible thing he could ever want to consume, yet he doesn't.
Instead of stuffing himself with consumer goods,
he stuffs himself with stuffing.
Spartan cleanliness fought with perversion,
deprivation fought with mass consumption,
consumerism fought with preservation.
All embodying
the antithesis of the dominant ideology.
I mean, that makes sense, it's the immediate reaction,
it is the gut reaction.
Society tells you to be polite, you be impolite.
Society tells you not to cause offense, you cause as much offense as possible, y'know?
Cause that's the edge, that's being edgy, that's how you change people's minds, right?
Mom?!
But they're all still stifled in some way.
Morosgoványi is denied sexually,
Kálmán competes with another speed eater over who has the right to date a mutual crush,
Lajoska wants to talk to this cute supermarket clerk, but she doesn't respond to him--
huh, all of them seem to think that the only way they can get power is by exerting it over women,
I wonder if the movie's ever going to explore that aspect of the story--HA!
But none of them, none of them overturn the system they rebel against.
David Cameron gets shot,
Mr. Creosote is immobilized and eaten by cats,
and Chuck Testa, well...
And here's the profound thing:
not only do they not overturn the system, they boost the system's power.
The first, by serving as a moral example,
by embodying the sort of perversion that the state pledges to eradicate.
The second supports the grander narrative that the system has abundance
and can afford to waste food.
And the third becomes yet another commodity,
put on display and consumed.
All of them were deluded into thinking that simply by performing actions deemed taboo by society,
they could find freedom in oppression,
when in reality, those actions, seemingly subversive, reinforce the core beliefs of the dominant power.
And that is the meaning behind this oozy, pukey, icky barf movie about gross things, ew.
In conclusion, all dissent will be subsumed into the dominant ideology.
There is no meaningful form of opposition.
The individual's only power is self-destruction.
All opposition is dead, there is no hope.
Oh.
So that's why I just used to tell jokes.
[laughter]
Ha!
Fire crotch.
[Burnin' for You by Blue Öyster Cult]