What does Mick Jagger's dong have in common with Christian Slater's shattered pelvis?

I just watched a criminally stupid movie called Mindhunters, a recent box office bomb directed by Cutthroat Island and Deep Blue Sea auteur and Euro-trash knucklehead Renny Harlin. I'll spare you the details of the moronic plot. Sufficed to say that there's a serial killer on the loose: the kind of serial killer who creates incredibly convoluted traps with which to slay his victims, in other words, the kind of serial killer who only exists in movies. His first victim is dispatched when he trips a Rube Goldberg domino contraption that results in him being blasted with a tank of liquid nitrogen which freezes his legs. Then, his legs snap, his body falls to the floor...and shatters into several pieces. It's more hilariously dumb than watching two retards hump on a beanbag chair. You have to wonder what is going through the mind of a director who shoots that scene. Is he really thinking: yeah, the guy freezes, then falls over, then shatters on the ground! Critics will call it "heartstopping!" My guess was that the filmmakers went through with this idiocy because it hadn't been done before. Sure enough, when I watched the scene with the director's commentary on, Renny Harlin said that his main obsession during the film was to find creative ways to kill the cast. It's the exact same reasoning as the makers of Swordfish, a festering wound on the ass of cinema from about five years ago starring noted air travel enthusiast John Travolta. In that film, there is a scene in which a city bus is hooked up by cables to a helicopter and flown around Los Angeles. Trust me, it's as dumb as it sounds. The makers of that crap pile were proud as punch to have thought up something as unprecedented in an action film as a flying bus! Cinematic history had been made!

This kind of competitive idiocy is the inevitable consequence of the action/thriller filmmaking mindset. When films are nothing but empty spectacle, the only real creative endeavor left to a director or screenwriter is to come up with inventive spectacle, endless variations on the same tired setpieces.

It reminds me of the old story/urban legend about Mick Jagger and David Bowie. According to legend, sometime in the mid-70s, one of Mick's wives caught him in bed with Ziggy Stardust. Neither of them were really gay, they were just curious about what it would be like. Personally, I have a hard time keeping my lunch down at the thought of all that pasty white English skin and protruding ribs, but hey, maybe it was wonderful. The point is that both of these men, Rock n' Roll gods at the peak of the sexual revolution, were able to spend years humping their way through every size, shape, race, pigment, deformity, and handicap of woman on earth, and in every conceivable numerical permutation. As such, they eventually exhausted their own capacity for excitement in conventional heterosexual sex, so they decided to bang each other. It might not be particularly sexy, but at least it would be novel!

In both the Jagger/Bowie case and the Swordfish/Mindhunters one, the common failing is reducing the activity involved, be it sex or filmmaking, into a rotely technical exercise. When sex is emptied of love, or movies are empty of emotional resonance, the result is an inevitable spiral of diminishing returns.