I Tricked My Boyfriend Into Seeing the Grossest Movie of the Year

While Allen has been blissfully unaware what this movie is about aside from the fact that it’s in German, we run into our first problem right in front of the auditorium. There, while an usher takes our tickets, Allen narrows his eyes at the poster next to the door, the one that loudly proclaims how base and disgusting the movie is. I rush him inside where we sit in front of a couple who are loudly discussing the play party they went to last night. Allen looks around and then picks up his phone. He’s going to look up the film and I have to stop him. I tell him to finish his hot dog before it gets cold. Then I make him hold my soda until the lights go down.

The film begins with an excerpt from a letter to the editor of a newspaper (which, I forget) denouncing Wetlands as garbage. It must never, states the letter-writer, be made into a film. Ever. Ever. Allen looks at me. There is betrayal in his eyes. He knows that I have lied to him, and worse, we have to move to the front row because I can’t read the subtitles. The next scene features our protagonist as she tromps through a dirty underground toilet, sloshing her feet through muck and rubbing her ass all around the seat, which is covered in piss and other unidentifiable stains.

Allen puts his popcorn away.

Unfortunately, Allen stays conscious throughout the rest of the film, even when I loudly whisper edits that have been made to keep the movie playable in theaters to him. “In this scene,” I say, as Helen and her friend Corinna take more drugs than any reasonable human should ingest and expect to remain alive, “the book is a little different. You see how they’re just flushing the vomit down the toilet? Well, in the book they put the vomit in a bucket and drink it because there are still drugs in it.” Allen coughs, loudly and urgently.

“In this scene,” I whisper as Helen stuffs a vegetable into her vagina, “the book is a little bit more descriptive. Helen also enjoys putting the shower head inside herself and filling her vagina with water until she feels like she’ll burst. Then she pushes until the entire thing feels like it’s going to fall out.” Allen looks at me in disbelief and sucks in a deep breath. Then he waves me away, too polite to even shush me.

When Helen and Corinna exchange homemade menstrual supplies and cover each other in menstrual blood, I say nothing. This scene is done right and Allen is looking away. I offer him some of my soda. He glares at me. The same happens when Helen fantasizes about men angrily jerking off on her pizza, getting off on the idea of men having rape fantasies about her. The semen used to glaze the pizza in the movie, you will be happy to know, was a mix of real semen and other liquids. I wish I had known this before I watched the film; I would have been certain to explain it to Allen in detail. “According to Vulture,” I would have said while chomping loudly on the uneaten popcorn, “the men were porn stars and they had to use a special high-speed camera to capture their jizz geysers in slow motion.” I regret being robbed of this moment, just like Helen regrets biting into a piece of pizza that is perfectly delicious but devoid of ejaculate.

As the movie rolls to a close, I ask Allen what he thought of the film.

“Why didn’t you tell me what it was about?” He asks as we step outside and start towards the car.

“Would you have gone if I had?” I ask.

“Nope!” He says and giggles. “Because I don’t like those types of movies. You know that.”

This is an excellent chance for me to ask Allen what he thought of Helen, her family and their secret (NO SPOILERS) and the whole point of the film. But first I ask him whether he thought it was disgusting. “Kind of,” he says.

“You looked away several times. Did you ever feel like you were going to faint?” I ask.

“No. It wasn’t that gross. Except the scene with the blood and the one with the poop and then the other one with the rat. I don’t like rats. But it was more gross because she was impolite and inconsiderate. You can’t go around a hospital spilling blood everywhere. That is unsanitary and not good for the other patients.”

This is an interesting point because, on one hand, Allen is right: It is gross to leave bloody bits of yourself in places where others may find them, but in the context of the movie it makes some sense. Helen is fighting, if not the patriarchy, then her mother, who demands that all of Helen must be clean. This, I tell Allen, is something that young women hear all the time, that they must be clean and not smell and not do anything disgusting. Isn’t Helen’s subversion of this rule really kind of admirable?

“No. It’s gross.”

“What if it was a male protagonist? Would it be as gross?”

Allen lapses into silence. We are driving through downtown San Francisco now and as he thinks about his answer, he is also intent on making sure we don’t crash and die, something he is also very concerned about. That’s why we usually wait until we get home if we’re going to talk about a serious topic. But we’re not going home, we’re going to Costco and then to a party. We won’t be home for hours. If we’re going to iron out our differences about the film, it’s going to have to be now.

“I think that if they made it more funny, I would be less disgusted.” Allen says. “Like in There’s Something About Mary, that was funny.”

“You mean when the guy got his semen in Cameron Diaz’s hair?”

“Yeah! But then they made a joke about it and it was okay. There is nothing funny about putting an avocado in your vagina.”

“So if they made a joke about it…”

“It would be okay. Well…no. It wouldn’t be funny like There’s Something About Mary. It was a bad movie, Mark. It was too in-your-face without any jokes.” His voice is stern.

Here we reach an impasse: I thought the movie was excellent, like an Amelie for adults, and he thinks that the sexuality was too much. And perhaps that’s why the people in the audience at readings of the book (no images, just words) were fainting and the lone man in the third row walked out of our screening of the film. Not because the movie itself was disgusting (it’s too light and airy for that), but because it shows a woman in control of her own sexuality. A woman who, at 18, gets sterilized because she doesn’t want to have children. A woman who’s not afraid of her bodily fluids and wears them proudly. A woman who wants to subvert the tampon industry by making her own at home, even if they do sometimes get stuck. If that’s too in your face at the movies, what would it be like if all women acted like this all the time, not worrying about wearing clean underwear or being concerned about their reputations because they chose to have as much sex as they wanted to.

I lay this all on Allen and he agrees that he may have been wrong initially due to the graphic nature of the film and the way Helen’s sexuality was presented, and while I don’t get an admission of “this was actually a pretty good film” what I do get is the permission to buy it on DVD when it comes out for a rewatch.

“Maybe, I was wrong.” Allen says. “It’s just that blood and poop get to me. I don’t know if I ever want to eat again.” He does look a little queasy. I promise never to do this again (fingers crossed behind my back) as we park and walk to Costco. Outside the store, a young woman in a Giants shirt is selling candy for a good cause. It is five dollars for two packs.

“Give me five dollars,” Allen says. “It’s for a good cause. We can eat candy while we shop.”

Well, I think as Allen pops a bunch of pretzel M&Ms into his mouth and chews on them happily, perhaps there’ll be a grosser movie next year, one that will actually render Allen unable to eat. For the moment there’s nothing I can do but take hold of the shopping cart and walk into the store, intent on grossing him out by reliving the scenes that made him most uncomfortable.

“Those M&Ms remind me a little of what vomit feels like,” I say. “Didn’t Helen have a crunchy vomit towards the end there? I wonder if she might have eaten some of those, too.” I’m reaching. Hard.

Allen pales noticeably anyway. Mission accomplished.

Images via Strand Releasing