On beauty? No. On lust.

Tens of thousands of feet in the air and with hours to kill, I thought I'd take the chance to tackle one of the subjects that's been on the backburner for a while because I knew it would take a lot of words.

My days lately have been taken up with a lot of movies. It makes sense, since it's not only the hibernating season, when it's cold and the folks at the Netflix warehouses must be working overtime, but it also coincides with a (long story short) desire for escapism.

Then again, it's also Oscar season, so I've been trying to catch up on the nominees, both at home and with the National Archives' free showings of a lot of the smaller films that were up for Academy Awards. They showed all of the feature-length documentaries, and all of the documentary shorts. But the real appeal of the program for a lot of us comes when they bundle together the nominated short films, first showing all five of the live action shorts and then all five of the animated shorts. For a group of us, this has been a yearly tradition whenever we could find someone in DC showing them.

Unfortunately, this year's batch was really weak, especially with the live-action films. There was a ridiculous Irish film (the one that won) that betrayed that annoying obsession with violent films, and they mixed in some cheap humor (though I did think it was kind of funny when the protaga-jerk said that a baby looked like, "your man out of Bronski Beat."). There was a German film that took a little too much of it's inspiration from The Sixth Sense. There was an Icelandic film that was typical of Icelandic films, and I say that as someone who, until last Saturday, had never seen an Icelandic film in his life. But wouldn't you expect one to be beautifully filmed but bleak and grim? Of course you would, and that's what it was. I liked that one alright, and I liked the American film about a psychiatrist whose discovery that he has a fatal illness makes him start giving tough-love advice to his patients.

But it seems kind of amazing that, of the five films that the Academy picked out as the best of the entire year, the best two were ones that I just liked. Either the quality of short films in 2006 was as desolate as an Icelandic story of a old man burying himself alive, or the Academy wouldn't know quality if it knocked on their door like a dying German kid. My guess is a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B.

This is all leading up to the worst of the bunch. Striking another blow to the quality of film from the British Isles, there was a English film called Cashback. It began as a dull but sometimes funny look at a supermarket workplace. The jokes were cheap, and the observations of customer-service life wasn't anything we haven't seen plenty of times before, but it was alright I suppose. The main point (sort of) was that everyone in the store used any tricks or techniques to make the time go faster. Yeah...real revelatory, huh?

But then the film took a turn. The narrator of the film was a guy only working at the store to put himself through art school, and in contrast to the rest of his coworkers, he tried to make time slow down. He wanted time to slow down so much that everyone in the store would freeze. And at this point, he would undress all of the women in the store while they were frozen, and draw them. There was an extended montage of close-ups of breasts, butts and the types of, uh, low camera angles that people look for in porn. And all of the women looked identical: they were the standard definition of "hot".

What bothered me about this sequence was not the nudity or the strategic camera angles or the fact that it was only women. What bothered me was the rationale for the scene. Throughout the whole thing, the art school guy talked at length about his deep, artistic appreciation for the female form, an appreciation that was explained with a flashback to his childhood, when a Swedish student staying at his house would walk around naked.

Besides the boring stereotype (Swedish girls are all hot and walk around naked!), this part really hit on something that bothers me a lot. I have absolutely no problem with anyone wanting to look at or be with traditionally good-looking or hot people. What pisses me off is the rationalization of it as a deep, artistic appreciation of beauty. It's not at all an appreciation of beauty; it's simply a long-winded explanation of why this art student likes hot girls, and an excuse for some English filmmaker to rationalize making a movie with a bunch of naked women in it. If they want to make a film where a guy working in the supermarket likes to pretend he can freeze time so that he can ogle the hot girls that come in, I would have been more okay with that. It's still lecherous, but at least it's honest.

It's the pretense of a deep appreciation of "beauty" that bugs me. A true appreciation of beauty is one that goes well beyond lust. It has little to do with who you want to sleep with. If this art jerk really appreciated beauty, it would include beautiful men. It would include old people and children. It would allow to see the beauty in different personal styles and body types. A true appreciation of beauty finds beauty. It doesn't just wait for the kind that you want to sleep with.

Don't mistake my problems with this movie as some self-superior statement against sexism, or as a way to try and out-sensitive-guy the sensitive guy in the movie. I'm actually kind of a lech, though I'm pretty quiet about it. And while I do find beauty in a lot of people and different kinds of people, and that there's very few women in the world that I find less than cute, I get excited about the standardly hot women as well, about bodies and the "female form" and all the things that make up the assumed objects of male lust. And like the filmmaker of Cashback, I found that excitment at a very young age.

But what I don't do is try to rationalize it as anything other than lust. It's those guys who take that lust and try to pass it off as something deeper and more poetic that makes me crazy, just as the women who try to pass of their desire for a hot, rich guy becomes a series of rationales, instead of an upfront statement of plain desire. I can understand wanting to chase some of the more shallow things in life. I just want people to be honest about it.

And there's really no good way to end this, so this is how it ends.