“A laugh and information!”
Editor’s note: Designed not for the local cineplex but for YouTube, iPods, and cellphones, Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno is a witty riff on the sex life of bugs and other creatures. The series comprises eight short films conceived, written, co-directed, and starring Rossellini wearing compound eyes, a snail shell, and other insect accoutrements. All the films have a playful, DIY quality that contrasts amusingly with the erotic doings of flies, bees, ants, and other creepy-crawlies. The films were produced by Sundance Channel and are being distributed this year.
Miss Rossellini, what’s so sexy about animals?
I don’t know if I find them sexy. The reason why I did Green Porno is rather that sex is interesting to everybody. I personally have been interested in animals since I was a child, but I noticed that when I started talking about animals people were getting a bit bored. So I thought that they would start listening, if I talked about the sex of animals. I think that in Green Porno I wanted to share my own wonderment about nature and about the great variety of life on this planet.
Why did you focus on the sex life of insects?
When I was a little girl I always had this dream of the wilderness and wanted to be like Jane Goodall who has lived with a chimpanzee for twenty years, until I realized that even in your backyard or your apartment there are a lot of animals – and very strange ones! Of course, they are not as glamorous as elephants or tigers, but they are at least as fascinating. That’s why the first episodes of Green Porno are about the sex life of insects.
Did you find out the main difference between human and animal sex?
Well, the thing that is incredible about humans is that there is no other organ that has so many legislations as the penis or the vagina. [Laughing] There are laws, there is the church . . . there is the state . . . I mean, it’s quite astonishing that there are no laws about lungs or hearts but about sexual organs. And they are all trying to define what is normal. Is gay natural? Are you born with it, or does it mean you have been brought up wrongly? Is it maybe a sort of trauma or something that could be corrected?
When you look at nature in contrast, you will realize that there is an enormous and a very natural variety. Of course, you cannot say “Earthworms are hermaphrodites so humans can be hermaphrodites, as well!”, but it certainly gives you a lot of wonderment about the narrowmindedness of our society that is constantly trying to define what is normal or correct. If you look at nature, the scope becomes so wide and the mystery of that is humbling and amusing to me.
Does it take down borders?
It gives a certain freedom, I think. When I look at the animal world and the variety of the things that they do, it helps me to be more open-minded. It gives you doubts about certitudes, about who we are. You can get lessons from a spider walking in your sink! [Laughing]
So I would say, yes, it takes down borders. I learned, for example, of a certain type of shrimp that start life as a male and die as a female or of animals who are having both the act of penetration and of penetrating. Another famous example is the penguins that are often enough living in gay couples. If they have too many eggs they sometimes even give an egg to a male or a female couple and the children are brought up in a gay relationship.
I grew up in a very catholic family and got to learn [to be] suspicious of people that were gay and not understanding. In my childhood I was taught that these people would need to be reeducated. When I hear today people saying that gay is an aberration of the natural, I would just invite them to a promenade through nature!
To solve the old problem of Darwin?
It’s true! We are somehow still confronted by similar problems. Of course, since Darwin many things have changed, but religious and cultural beliefs are still blocking scientific research in many parts of the world. Though I have many friends who are very religious but believe in Darwin. I personally think that it’s even a bigger portrait of God if he didn’t only create animals and humans but if he also invented their strategies of surviving and the mechanisms of evolution.
What animal sex most resembles human sex?
Mammals and especially the apes, of course. Just because they have penises and vaginas! But there is still a very important difference: Animals go into heat, they sort of give an advertisement that they will be ovulating. People don’t in such a declared way. And who knows why there is that difference?
How did you prepare yourself for playing the roles in Green Porno?
Of course, I am not a scientist. I’m a model and actress and a writer and director in the case ofGreen Porno. I sort of tried to generalize, and often enough [was] scientifically incorrect: I remember calling a friend of mine who is a scientist, and I was asking him a question about a fly, and he would ask me “What fly do you mean? There are 36,000 types of flies!” [Laughing] So my Green Porno is, of course, a generalization, but I think this is how I wrote them: When I read a scientific book, I have to read very slowly. Most of these books are rather boring and very complicated. But I would read and think, Okay, this is my mouth and . . . it opens like this. So in order to understand the animals, I started from my own body and imagined transforming into that animal like in a Kafka novel.
So is there an animal you would like to change places with?
Oh, I think I would like to stay a human! [Laughing]. Though I envy birds for their ability to fly and their eyes which can see very far and very well. There is a hawk that lives on Fifth Avenue. When it flies over Central Park, I can see it looking down on that wonderful city and its amazing body of water. I think I would like to change with that bird, sometimes. And with one of my dogs, of course! I raise dogs for the blind, and these dogs are always very close to their owners as they guide them and are like friends to them.
And on a sexual level?
I think I would very much like to change sex, actually! So I would like to be a fish or a shrimp maybe, that changes it sex during its lifetime. I’ve always wondered if there is an essential difference between male and female . . . If I only could be a male for one day, I could have an answer to that question!
What would you like to do as a male?
I think the most important thing I would like to know if I were a man would be how I feel. Because we always have the feeling that men feel more entitled and more secure of themselves. I’d also like to know if it’s true that men sometimes feel so attracted to women that they can’t control their sex. It seems to me that the sexual desires are stronger in men. I would like to know if this is culturally induced or if it’s the real nature of men. So if you are a man – especially after being a woman – I think I would sense that there is a difference between feminine and masculine. Would I be attracted to cars and guns, maybe? [Laughing] Or would I just continue loving my children and raising my dogs? I don’t know, if I would like to do anything, but I would definitely like to feel what it means to be a man.
Is this why you are often playing the male in the Green Porno episodes?
No, that was actually by accident! The Sundance Channel who produced them gave me a first budget for the pilot episodes. In one of these episodes I was playing the spider. It made much more sense to play the male spider as it moves more actively around and is much smaller than the female spider. I never did really think much about that. But many people were reacting “Oh, you’re playing the male! You’re playing the male!” And they were laughing about it. So I promised that I would play the male whenever possible – just to get another laugh.
So you don’t see yourself having a mission?
I think the Sundance Channel has a mission of being a green channel concerned about the environment and its problems. Green Porno was my way to contribute to that concept – not by telling the people what to do, but by telling them about the variety of nature and sharing my fascination and amusement about it. Laughing has always been a big occupation in my life.
Is laughing about sex important?
It’s not only important, it is a recommendation – for men-to-women, men-to-men, and women-to-women relationships. If you can find a partner with whom you can laugh about your sexual relationship, it is always very appealing. I never thought a man should protect me or provide for me. It has rather been important that he would be able to make me laugh. That’s my number-one request!
Do you think that people take sex too seriously?
I think that people talk about sex a lot. We talk about it in our advertisements, in fashion, in our songs, books, and movies, but I rarely have the feeling that we actually talk about the truth of it. My own sexual experience has not been so passionate, orgasmic, and mind-blowing. It has often been very difficult. And when I meet my friends and they open their hearts, we all talk about these difficulties: About how difficult it is in a long marriage to continue your sexual relationship. And about how difficult it is in the beginning – when you are more sexually active – to find an intimacy and easiness. Sex just doesn’t happen as easily as the popular culture wants to portray it. The lovers I had always had a sort of chemistry which was hard to grab. You wouldn’t just meet, fall in love and go to bed.
Do you think there is a lack of subtlety and intimacy today?
It’s hard for me to talk about the world. But I can say that there hasn’t been one song or film or book that made me say, Oh, this is my sexual life. This is how it is! Compared to something that is so much talked about, there is not a lot of truth in it. I don’t think my experience is very unusual. I don’t have the difficulty of being gay, I have been married twice, I have two children, but the sublime celebration of sex hasn’t corresponded to my life. This doesn’t mean that I haven’t had good sex or that I didn’t enjoy it. It just has often been very difficult and unpleasant – and if not unpleasant, complicated or lonely. You couldn’t really talk to many people about it. So I somehow have the feeling that sex is still a taboo in our society. In the Victorian Age you couldn’t talk about it at all, and now we talk about it a lot, but we talk about it in a way that we don’t really talk about it. It’s strange, even when I did my Green Porno, I never used any code words. Never! I just used scientific words. I never said “cunt” or “fuck,” I said “penis,” “vagina,” and so on. And yet people were saying, “Oh, you said vagina!” As if it would still be a taboo. Actually they would rather hear “pussy” or other words you hear on television all the time. Because a “pussy” is something which is not belonging to your sister or your mama, but if you say what it is, a penis or a vagina, everybody reacts a bit shocked!
You have been working as a model, as an actress, and as a writer and director. How did your approaches to sex change on these different levels?
You know, during my modelling it was just a very simple and elegant gesture: women being beautiful, being attractive, and consequently sexy. But the idea of men buying a Vogue magazine, going home and masturbating over it, was never really a dream to me. You know, when people were saying to me “Isabella, you’re so sexy!” I would react “Oh, oh, how far do you get with that?” [Laughing] I was taking that kind of compliment with a little bit of recul (distance).
And in acting? In David Lynch‘s Blue Velvet, for example.
Blue Velvet was a very difficult experience. There is one scene where Dorothy is raped, and you can imagine other things of that kind having happened to her. My own experience of being beaten by one of my first boyfriends helped me a lot for that role. In another scene I meet the character Jeffrey Beaumont in the closet, an innocent boy, and I start torturing him. So through the character of Dorothy Vallen I learned about sadomasochism. My famous line was “Kiss me, hit me!”. I still don’t know what sadomasochism is, of course, I don’t know its soul. But I can maybe understand the victim, certainly not the upper end. I can understand that people can be so insecure and [full of] self-hatred that when this self-hatred is expressed, they might have a sense of relief. You know, in being beaten and insulted, you might feel “I’m getting what I deserve” instead of always trying to say that I’m better than I am. So I do understand that masochist aspect, but I still don’t quite understand the sadistic side – maybe it is about the control over another person.
Another professional contact with sex was Madonna’s book Sex that you contributed to.
Yes, it was actually Steven Meisel – a fashion photographer I had worked with a lot for Vogue – who asked me to be part of that project. At first I just thought: “Steven, I have two children, I already went through hell with Blue Velvet. Leave me in peace!” So at first I didn’t want to participate. But then we went to dinner, Steven, Madonna, and I. And I would tell her that I didn’t want to take my clothes off. They respected it, and my photos were of two girls playing, dressed up like men and changing all the rules. This was fun, of course!
But when I looked at the book in the end, I thought it was incredibly enough a kind of moralistic book. It was moralistic because I think Madonna did the book in order to teach us a lesson, as if she would know more about sex. That sort of irritated me. And then, of course, she has a body that is so athletic and perfect that this book was again lacking in truth about sex. I think she was honest and I think she did try, but in the end the book didn’t touch me, unfortunately.
Would you like to direct a full-length feature on sex?
You know, I think I somehow lost a bit of interest in the complication of human mating! [Laughing] Because I have been and still am a feminist, and so I talked a lot about sex and the role of women. Now I would really just like to do comical films about animals. Because that’s what makes me laugh! It’s simple and there is not much philosophy behind it. A laugh and information!
