UPDATED: The film "Zoo" was well received at the prestigious Sundance festival. It seems the story inspired by one Boeing engineer named Kenneth Pinyan, who was killed being anally penetrated by a horse, is partly about how we can cruelly consign our brethren to the margins. The Seattle Times reports that the movie is:

...about Seattle-area zoophiles, particularly one who died, and how his death and the ensuing media coverage precipitated the 'excommunication' of that community.

Perish the thought that grown men who chose to regularly gather south of Seattle in Enumclaw to be mounted by male steeds, and who, according to police, there filmed each other in extremis, should be "excommunicated," shunned or otherwise marginalized by normal society.

We must resist the temptation to pass judgement.

Instead, zoophilic equine afficionados should be granted the use of public library meeting rooms for support group gatherings.

They should have special non-discrimination legislation introduced on their behalf in the state capital.

Public schools, quite apart from helping "questioning" fifth graders figure out if they are gay or lesbian, should also help them understand whether or not they may instead wish to become the sexual objects of animals.

At the University of Washington, the post-Pinyan Washington state law making sex with animals illegal will be discussed in class by humanities faculty and students within the appropriate Foucaultian sphere; that of "socially-constructed" mores intended to regulate and suppress the dynamism of the human spirit, thus serving ruling class interests.

We'll have to leave class warfare and the shunning of man-horse sex for another day, though. For now, provoked by critical acclaim of the film "Zoo," it is our duty as fully sensate, compassionate moderns to ponder why men choose to relate to horses thusly.

Naturally, it's quite complex. Here's the Seattle Times, from the same review linked above, published this past Friday:

(Filmaker Robinson) Devor and (writer Charles) Mudede (a staffer at The Stranger) splinter the focus of their film to include a broader discussion of human behavior, marginalization, the Iraq war, changes wrought by the advent of the Internet, death, family, journalism and the city of Seattle.

Bad me. All this time I had it pegged simply to continuing innovation in the field of human perversity; and the speed and efficiency with which the Internet makes available everything, whether beneficial or ruinous. I should have figured Iraq was part of the backdrop.

It's been a growth opportunity.

I learned several weeks ago in another Times article about the film that Kenneth Pinyan is Everyman. The film's New York-based distributor Mark Urman tells the paper:

"It's not a specific story of freakish behavior but a universal look at what goes on behind the façade of everyday, quotidian, normal American middle-class life. It is not salacious."....Urman sees it as his responsibility to "give people the right set of eyes" and "the proper preparation" before hearing about or seeing Devor's unavoidably controversial film. Rather than dwell on the perverse act, Urman centers his discussions about the movie on what he perceives is its universalism. While the protagonist "seems like an oddball at the outset of the movie," Devor seeks to "reveal untold amounts of information about the human capacity to do the most awful things, chart[ing] the journey of this unhappily married man who began to explore sexual alternatives, as so many do. Instead of turning back to the light, he went deeper and deeper until he got trapped in the darkness, and it had fatal ramifications."

How entirely universal. A man disillusioned with his marriage comes to feel that ameliorative succor must lie within the universe of interspecies sex.

Indeed: There but for the grace of God go we all.

TECHNORATI TAGS: SEATTLE, HORSE SEX, MOVIE, SUNDANCE

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at January 28, 2007 10:43 AM

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