I’ve been curious about Isabella Rossellini ever since I first saw her stumble, naked and badly bruised, off the front porch and into Kyle MacLachlan’s meager little arms near the end of Blue Velvet. “He put his disease in me!”, she screams in agony. Then she looks up. “Jeffrey, love me!” – all of this, of course, after she’d witnessed the kidnapping of her husband and child and been forced into sexual slavery by a raging drug addict who gets off on huffing gas and babbling like an infant. It was almost too much to watch, but here she was in the middle of it, possessed by madness, and she seemed to be enjoying it.
Uninhibited sexual violence, it turns out, lies at the heart of Rossellini’s career. Her recent television series, Green Porno, explores the often-brutal sex lives of insects and sea mammals. Part science education, part absurd DIY comedy, the show suggests that the psychotic primitive depravity going on in Blue Velvet bedroom wasn’t entirely David Lynch’s idea. Many things in nature are downright terrifying.
Green Porno teaches its audiences many useful things about sex in nature as well as the nature of sex in human culture. Did you know, for instance, that a male bee loses his penis and dies from blood-loss after mating, or that male spiders have to make up for their penis-less bodies by rubbing sperm on their ‘palpi’ (their hands) and sticking them into the females’ unsuspecting vagina(s)? Most of us are well-aware that the female praying mantis bites off her lover’s head after ejaculation, but did you know that dolphins are voracious swingers who regularly fin-fuck each other and encourage guy-on-guy blowhole sex? No joke. Makes all those coke-and-quaalude-fuelled stripper scenes in The Wolf of Wall Street seem kinda tame by comparison.
Now Rossellini is taking Green Porno to the stage, performing her avant-garde educational gag solo in front of a live audience at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In addition to intimate scenes of Rossellini in a day-glo costume mating with paper mache puppets, the show will also feature informational videos and monologues by the leading lady. Fun fact: Rossellini is also currently working toward a master’s degree in animal-behavior from Hunter College. If Green Porno presents itself as any sort of thesis statement, she should be just fine.
Green Porno: Live on Stage runs at BAM through January 25th.
