The Oscars stage looked like a geode (or maybe a vagina dentata).

Here's an amethyst geode:



Here's the set:



I said "geode" in my post last night, and now I'm reading about the set in Architectural Digest:

The proscenium... "feels a little bit like a geode, or a kind of sculpture made out of crushed glass,” [designer Derek McLane] says. When producers Mike De Luca and Jennifer Todd asked the designer to do the show again this year, the proscenium was the first design he conceived. The end result is this dazzling faceted piece decorated with a staggering 45 million Swarovski crystals. (For comparison, last year’s proscenium only had 27,120 crystals.) He then expanded upon the crystalline structure for the other pieces on the stage you see here, flattening them into more abstracted, two-dimensional forms that have a bit of an Art Deco flair to them.

I'm glad to see the set's designer intended what I saw, a geode. I don't know if he also had in mind my alternative interpretation: vagina dentata.

Vagina dentata (Latin for toothed vagina) describes a folk tale in which a woman's vagina is said to contain teeth, with the associated implication that sexual intercourse might result in injury, emasculation, or castration for the man involved. Such folk stories are frequently told as cautionary tales warning of the dangers of unknown women and to discourage rape. Erich Neumann relays one such myth in which "a fish inhabits the vagina of the Terrible Mother...".

A fish! We heard all about that fish-in-the-vagina character last night. The creature won best picture! "How Weird, A Movie About Fish Sex Became Awards Season’s Consensus Vote" (HuffPo). It beat out "Get Out" in which white people got inside the head of black people. A fish gets into a woman's vagina:

[A] mute woman (Sally Hawkins) fucks a godly fish-man (Doug Jones), and we swoon with the same emotional heft once devoted to “Titanic,” “West Side Story” and “Casablanca” ― all (deserving) Best Picture winners of yore. What a seemingly repulsive concept, brought to life in the dreamiest of fairytales and packaged for uncynical audiences willing to embrace the lore.

Well, our psyche is complicated and jumbled and Hollywood trades in dreams. Me, I have dreams where I shout "Get out!" and wake up my poor non-piscine husband. But glam it up, attach 45 million Swarovski crystals and we'll be fucking fish in our dreams.

The Oscars host, Jimmy Kimmel made a joke:

The most nominated movie tonight, a film that’s up for 13 Oscars, The Shape of Water written and directed by Guillermo Del Toro, a wonderful man. Congratulations I’m very happy for Guillermo. You made a beautiful movie and thanks to Guillermo we will always remember this year as the year men screwed up so badly, women started dating fish.

They used to say "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle," now a woman doesn't need a man but she needs a fish. A fish doesn't need a bicycle, but does a fish need a woman? I assume that in the movie the fish does need the woman. I haven't seen it. Does she ask for consent? She's mute! But fish don't talk anyway. It's all in the gestures, I guess. Start reaching, groping, and observe. Does she/he just let you do it?

That reminds me of how the over-the-top glitziness of the stage — especially the changing interiors within the geode/vagina — made me think of the strivingly posh interiors within the erections of Donald Trump.



Ah, dreams! Who can penetrate the depths of our dreams? Guillermo Del Toro (the bull)? Little Barron on his lion (big pussy)? Donald making the vagina symbol with his hands in front of his crotch while Melania, standing next to him, extends a long, phallic leg?

And that reminds me of Jimmy's most notable joke/"joke" last night:

Oscar is the most beloved and respected man in Hollywood and there’s a very good reason why. Look at him. Keeps his hands where you can see them. Never says a rude word, and most importantly no penis at all. He is literally a statue of limitations. And that’s the kind of men we need more of in this town.

We — who's we? — need more of the kind of men with no penis at all? I read that to mean: Ladies, that's not really what you want, is it? Don't you think you need to recalibrate your demands? And, indeed, the Oscar statuette has long been regarded as exceedingly phallic. Here's a woman named Bidisha bitching about it in the Guardian 3 years ago (before we got the gilded white man in the White House):

The Oscar statuette is a gilded white man holding a sword – basically, a phallus holding a phallus. 

When you happen to watch 2 movies in a row and see a common theme.

There are a million things you might perceive in a movie. So when you see 2 movies in a row, your brain is going to match things up, and then something looks interesting and you go running down that road.

Let me tell you about the 2 movies we happened to watch this week. Because we almost never watch movies, 2 recently watched movies are going to suggest a lot of connections with each other, even when they have little in common.

1. "Magic Trip/Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place." This is a documentary about Ken Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters driving a gaudily painted bus from San Francisco to the New York World's Fair in 1964. A man who's written a very successful novel ("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest") and discovered LSD (by volunteering for a CIA-financed study) lets a speed freak (Neal Cassady) drive him and his friends across America. They take many, many reels of poorly shot film, and 50 years later, some talented filmmakers figure out how to base a watchable documentary on that sprawling footage. Highlights of the film: Kesey on his CIA/LSD trip, painting the bus, going to a blacks-only beach on Lake Pontchartrain (and not being welcomed as integrators), visiting Timothy Leary at his Milbrook Estate (and getting snubbed and looked down on), partying with Jack Kerouac (who wasn't On-The-Road Kerouac anymore, but a boring drunk), and making it back home where LSD really worked better, staying in one place and partying with the Grateful Dead as the house band.

2. "Get Out." This is a 2017 movie, by a black writer-director (Jordan Peele, who came from the world of sketch comedy), about a black man going on a short, strange trip with his white girlfriend to visit her parents, who turn out to be a real horrorshow. I recommend seeing this movie without knowing what's going to happen, so please stop now and come back later if you haven't seen it yet. It came out last winter, but maybe you're like me and you don't get excited about movies because they happen to be new. You might be noticing this movie now because it's on various year-end lists and getting nominated for awards. It's on HBO on Demand, where we watched it. Anyway, the man character — Chris Washington — feels uneasy being around so many white people and takes heart whenever he encounters a black person, but the black people there are very weird, for a reason we eventually learn: They are really white people who got surgically inserted into the black person's head. The black person is still in there, riding along, observing but unable to speak or act. The evil white people are systematically bringing black people to this place, one by one, lured by Allison Williams (of all people), and using them as shells for the aging white people to gain a new life. It's not just a way to avoid aging and death, but a way to experience life as a black person. That's something they all really want, these people who like to tell Chris about as soon as they meet him that they voted for Obama and would vote for him for a third term if they could.

Now, what are the connections I'm seeing between these 2 movies I happened to encounter in sequence?

In both, you've got a group of white people who see ordinary life as a white person in America as a predicament in need of transcendence by radical means. They take drastic, dangerous actions to break out of themselves and get somewhere else entirely. So involved and entranced with their own journey, they impose on everybody else.