3 posts tagged “film”

“Just takes a few months to get to be a hundred. If you’re in the right place at the right time.”

I first saw Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterpiece The Wages of Fear when the restored version was released in the U.S., in 1991. But my awareness of it began a bit earlier, when I was twelve and saw the unfortunate American remake, Sorcerer, which sent me investigating articles about the original and searching out what Clouzot films I could find: the grim, sublime Le corbeau (1943); the strangely touching police procedural Quai des Orfèvres (1947); the tingly, unforgettable Diabolique (1954). Throughout this process, The Wages of Fear was available on video only in truncated form, shorn of all political undertones that the U.S. distributor had deemed “anti-American” during the film’s original U.S. run, in 1955 (two years after the French premiere), so I held out for the unpillaged original.

Even so, nothing could have prepared me for the seismic assault of it. Here is a film that stands alone as the purest exercise in cinematic tension ever carved into celluloid, a work of art so viscerally nerve-racking that one fears a misplaced whisper from the audience could cause the screen to explode. As obsessively attentive as Clouzot is to the narrative spine of the story—four men drive two trucks of nitroglycerin three hundred miles across a hellish landscape of potholes, desiccated flora, rock-strewn passes, hairpin turns, and rickety bridges with crumbling beams to put out an oil fire raging on the other side of the mountain—he is just as savage in his commentary on corporate imperialism, American exploitation of foreign cultures, the rape of the land, and the ridiculous folly of man. Critics at the time charged that The Wages of Fear was virulently anti-American (Time magazine, in 1955, called it “a picture that is surely one of the most evil ever made”), but this is missing the ravaged forest for the blighted trees. As director Karel Reisz pointed out in a 1991 Film Comment article, the film is “anti-American,” but only insofar as it is “unselectively and impartially anti-everything.”

I agree with Reisz about this impartiality—Clouzot’s camera may as well be the eyeball of a lizard, for all the emotion it shows the humans who enter its field of vision—but the charge of “anti-everything,” while certainly valid on a surface level, fails to take into account one of the basic tenets of cinematic humanism as employed by Clouzot and John Huston and Stanley Kubrick, among others: that by removing all hint of subjectivity from the point of view, one thus removes any stain of sentimentality. This erasure of sentiment does not cancel out empathy. In fact, in that very void, we, the viewer, are forced to decide what our capacity for empathy is. What remains in Clouzot’s chilly remove from his main characters is a fascinatingly odd mixture of contempt and love, one akin to that of a father who has closed off all outward displays of emotion for his children because he fears the heartbreak that could destroy him should anything tragic befall them.

“If I’ve gotta be a corpse, I want to be presentable.”

If so many of today’s “bleak chic” auteurs seem to have fashioned their dire worldviews by skimming Cliffs Notes of Friedrich Nietzsche while listening to Trent Reznor in well-appointed suburban basements, it’s important to note that Clouzot didn’t come by his pessimism in a vacuum. Clouzot’s career in film was just beginning when Germany invaded France, and one can’t help but imagine the effect it had on him to toil at his craft in a suddenly subjugated homeland, while all around him stood the worst aspects of human nature—not only the genocidal bloodlust of the Third Reich but

also the soiled moral lassitude of the Vichy government and various everyday collaborationist Frenchmen.

It was in this atmosphere that Clouzot would make Le corbeau, a film that managed to outrage both the Nazis—under whose auspices it, like many other French films during the occupation, was made—and the French. The Nazis, apparently, were appalled by its bleakness and by its depiction of their behavior during the occupation. The French, similarly, found their representation (as provincial informers) offensive, and deemed the film collaborationist. After the war, it would be four years before the blacklisted Clouzot was allowed to direct again. With Le corbeau, however, he had managed to commit the artist’s most triumphant miscalculation: he had made a work so unsettling in its archetypal truths that it offended everyone. All sides assailed him and none would champion him. From that point on, Clouzot would consistently attack the hypocrisy built into every “decent” society, the moral bankruptcy disguised as moralism that is so often the grimy engine that chugs relentlessly underneath otherwise gleaming bodywork.

Plagued by shaky health that would force him off projects throughout his life, ostracized by some in French society who never forgave him for Le corbeau, and intimately associated with the identity crisis that plagued most of postwar Europe, Clouzot would bring to bear in all his subsequent films a uniquely ironic disappointment in man’s inability to fulfill his own potential. But it was never more extravagantly crystallized than in The Wages of Fear.

“It’s like prison here. Easy to get in. ‘Make yourself at home.’ But there’s no way out.”

When we enter the world of The Wages of Fear, we do so by way of an opening shot (later appropriated by Sam Peckinpah for the opening of The Wild Bunch) in which cockroaches are tied together and casually tortured by a half-naked child on an oily, muddy street in the oily, muddy village of Las Piedras. A flavored-ice vendor passes by, and the child abandons the cockroaches to covet treats he can’t afford. But still he has to look, to lust after the unattainable. Once the vendor passes, the child returns to the roaches, but a vulture has already taken his place. With a single stroke, Clouzot has set in motion his primary theme—that men are constantly searching the horizon to the

detriment of all else in their immediate world. Men are “goal oriented,” addicted to the “quest,” itching for the “heroic” opportunity. Or so we tell ourselves. Clouzot says no. Men are wanderers. Adrenaline junkies. Mortally terrified of home and hear

How else to explain how our four “heroes” ended up in a hellhole like Las Piedras? They weren’t born there, and no one would live in Las Piedras by choice. While we’ll never discover what has driven them there, we know it must have been sins of a particularly unforgivable nature, because no one opts to live in hell unless the alternative is demonstrably worse. But since nothing is worse, the men have long since found reason to rue their decision and pine for escape. The four men are Mario (Yves Montand), Jo (Charles Vanel), Luigi (Folco Lulli), and Bimba (Peter Van Eyck), and Clouzot presents them as if the poverty and hopelessness of Las Piedras have already stripped them of many of the attributes Homo sapiens like to believe separate them from their simian forebears.

“Even when they guillotine you, they dress you up first.”

The four men are hired by the Southern Oil Company, a ruthless, American-owned multinational that has already laid waste to Las Piedras and, by extension, Central and South America. The company is personified by O’Brien (William Tubbs, reminding one of a puffier Lee J. Cobb), who hires the men for the suicide mission and makes a blustery speech about how they should be paid a top wage, even as one suspects that he assumes only two, at best, will survive. To co-workers who argue against hiring “bums” to do the job, O’Brien counters: “Those bums don’t have any union or any families.” When informed that the Safety Commission is coming to investigate the fire, he replies, “Put all the blame on the victims. They’re done for.” And yet even as one perceives Clouzot’s icy rage at the callousness of Western corporations (“If there’s oil around, they’re not far behind,” one character quips about the Americans in town), one can also feel his seething despair at the men who would willingly hand over their lives for such a pointless mission.

Mario, in particular, is an extremely dislikable protagonist. He treats his lover, Linda (the “perfect woman” in an emotionally stunted man-child’s fantasy, and played with knee-knocking sensuality by Clouzot’s wife, Véra, in all her dark-eyed, languid uncoiling), as if she were a dog, literally petting her on the head as she crawls to him on all fours in their first scene. Linda, it must be said, is a willing accomplice. She is all sexual supplicant to Mario, no matter how repeatedly she’s debased for her efforts, and is last seen lying prostrate, her eyes closed, awaiting the return of her lover.

Mario’s treatment of her, however, speaks to a man consumed with self-loathing, so much so that he is incapable of seeing that the sole good thing in his life, maybe in the entire history of it, kneels before him, willing, as Linda says, to rob for him, kill for him. That Mario rejects this so flatly speaks, as others have noted, to his repressed homosexual bond with Jo, but even more so to Clouzot’s mortification at the treasures men leave behind in order to pursue goals of far more dubious value.

The other men are depicted just as unsentimentally. Jo, a strutting, petty tyrant, attracts or repels all around him with his casual cruelty yet will later be revealed as the weakest of them all. Bimba, looking like a poster child for Hitler’s Aryan ideal, is so tightly wound and fatalistic that he’s expecting death before he even gets behind the wheel. And

Luigi, ostensibly the warmest and most humane of the quartet, seems at best a holy fool, because even if he survives the trek, he’ll most likely die from diseased lungs, ravaged by exposure to cement during his tenure with the Southern Oil Company.

“You don’t know what fear is. But you’ll see. It’s catching. It’s catching like smallpox. And once you get it, it’s for life.”

The journey section of the film begins at the hour mark, and from that point on—for eighty-seven minutes of Homeric obstacles and knuckles so white you expect them to burst through the skin—it never relents. Each man who, as Jo puts it, rides with a “bomb on his tail” attempts to adapt to the never-ceasing thump of sheer terror as the trek begins with a full-out dash across the “washboard,” a road so ungainly, slick, and rutted that the only way to drive it without vibrations is at under six miles per hour or over forty; a turn so tight that to make it, they must back up onto what remains of a rotting bridge that hangs, as if by hope alone, over an abyss; and a gut-scouring set piece in which they must use some of the nitro to blow up a fifty-ton boulder in their path, and still make the fuse long enough to reach safety.

The entire journey, in fact, is a primer in what Clouzot and Alfred Hitch-cock understood above all others—and something I always felt that I, as a budding novelist, learned at their knees: that tension exists in the absence of shock, in the suggestion of dire possibility, as opposed to any presentation of calamity, which often ends up looking rather pedestrian. After the boulder, there is a pool of oil to drive through, in which Mario, determined not to get stuck, purposefully crushes the leg of Jo, who is guiding him . . . and still gets stuck. As each crisis is averted, the toll on the men’s nerves (particularly Jo’s) grows worse. It’s a refreshingly authentic concept—that exposure to terror does not make one less fearful, as most heroic films purport, but more so. You can’t conquer fear, only temporarily elude it. So each encounter represents merely another wink from Death. But the four men know all too well that Death, sooner or later, will open his eyes.

“Mario, my darling, why are you doing this?”

A film in which one character dies saying, “There’s nothing!” is bound to be attacked (as this one was and continues to be) for being both misanthropic and atheistic, but I’ve never felt that Clouzot was saying, “This is the world,” but rather, “This is the world we’ve made.” (A vision that condemns what man is, in despair over what man could be, is, perversely, a hopeful one.) It was we, after all, who helped make a world in which men risk all for the simple need to do so, are willing to lose all because it confirms their self-defeating interpretations of “fate,” destroy all because all is, well, destroyable. These men are, one can’t help feeling with a tragic sense of waste, children—torturing bugs to kill time while they wait for the vendor to come hawk delicacies they can never afford to purchase.

I

When you get to manage a party for beauty queens in a cruise ship, probably near the coastlines of Manila in the early 80s, you get the feel of an era long-lost gone. Amidst the exagerrated dance grooves, you will be reminded that fun is such an easy thing to achieve in a time when dictators rule the land.

But when the cruise catches fire in the middle of the bay (or should I say) somewhere in the South China Sea, amazing things happen all at once...First, it was as if no one died. Second, all the beauty queens manage to survive. Third, all of them coincidentally drift ashore to a lone desert island somewhere in the country (God knows where). And fourth, they still look stunningly beautiful!

Jessica Zafra's essay on Joey Gosengfiao's Temptation Island started the hullabaloo in the early 90s on this early 80s sexy-fantasy-comedy film. Though a box-office hit during the time when Marcos was on the verge of establishing a moralistic crusade againsts Bomba films, the movie was relatively disregarded if not ignored by critics of the time.

Understandably enough, Temptation was regarded as a qualified candidtate in a line-up of promising films at the start of the Philippine Cinema's second Golden Age. A roughly plotted story of four (4) beauty contestants who got stuck in an desert island, with a man for each of the three and a maid for one would have simply pulled it off. But as argued in a a Brocka-regime, the film's large element of artifice and exaggerated ironies pulled it out from the list of potential classics and study. As viewed during its time, this sexy, almost like the 90s' pito-pitos, was obviously another Monteverde revenue project that will assure her profit goals for 1980.

Since Zafra's article, many followers expressed their own thoughts right after. Noel Vera tags it as a third-world Pedro Almodovar "only funnier and stranger." Lawyer-Critic Francis Cruz describes it as "a bizarre and absurd sexual romp where genre elements merge into a hodgepodge that is surprisingly effective and hilarious." As the years pass, this cinematic trash has been proving its greatness in its subtle themes, motifs and craft.

With the many reviewes and immediate reactions from new-young viewers, what seems to be lacking is a technical standpoint that will defend the film and director's ingenuity. Though it is understandable that Camp as a genre, is only meant to be enoyed and not studied thouroughly, there is still a need for defense to comprehend its innocent depth and hilarious bliss.

Susan Sontag, in her 1964 essay Notes on "Camp" will be the main resource for this analysis. Sontag's views on has drafted a clearer definition of this 18th century-old genre. Her views on this artform has more complex syntheses, and by analyzing Gosengfiao's greatest work from a campy, yet theoretical perspective, will be more appropriate, as the film has been regarded as the best example of camp in the history of Philipine Cinema.

II

Temptation Island has a mixture of the needed elements of Camp in films. Its clear exhibition of basic Camp elements from sheer theatricalization, outrageous sensiblity, to exaggeration, - integrated with a subtle revolutionary idea has made it to a genre so hard to achieve, that even Joel Lamangan still finds it hard to make one.

Theatricalization:

Gosengfiao viewed acting as a mere tool to exhibit creative aspects of his actors. Even as early as Katorse, the too timid Dina Bonnavie was made to splurge and cry hysterically in the middle of the street, too dusty you see some particles moving from her hair to her face. Who can forget Alma Moreno's hand-on-waist-while-standing-on-an-irrigation-stream with mud all over her upper body asking: "bakit ako mahihiya?" These too campy theatrical movements are evident in almost all the scenes in Temptation. Who would not raise an eyebrow when you see Dina (Bonnavie) throwing sticcomitatic lines to Alfredo (Alfie Anido) during a rough confrontation after the former learned that the latter slept with Suzanne (Jennifer Cortez). Apparently these lines would have been appropriate in a scene delicately prepared for such romantic quarrel. But finding the players in the middle a god-forsaken desert, with no food and water (that most of them just decided to dance instead) makes the theatrical effect more out of placed and out of

context.

Sontag's description of too dramatic representations of reality in Camp has been cleared extensively enought to delegate appropriate utilization of such in the genre. These playful exhibition of an artform (in this respect - acting) has been clearly manifested in almost every possible opportunities in Temptation. Despite the too obvious inappropriate setting and time for such dramtizations, the characters continually put their best foot forward in confronational, fashionistic, climatic and denoumatic scences. I cannot say that the performances were dry. I think that's the magic of the genre. But the surrealistic undertones mixed with a fantastical mood leaves the viewer laughing with both disbelief and acceptance.

III

Outrageous Sensibilities

Another point to regard on the film's plot is its regard on sexuality, gender and self-discovery. As early as the first few scenes, we see the characters establish their subplot that will eventually contribute to their developments as the story progresses. We see characters viewing themselves as winners in a chosen field...Azineth (Azineth Tobias) as a triumphant crook able to win a beauty contest for the prize money; Dina, a self-neglected-only-daughter who will prove her brothers that -yes - she can buy a car of her own once she wins the contest; Bambi (Bambi Arambulo) as an ex-runner-up from previous pageant aiming to get the throne this time, and; Suzanne a socialite with a maid (Deborah Sun) who's only goal is to win the pageant to prove to everyone that she's the rightful owner of the throne!

In the argument of sensibility, Gosengfiao did not dare dismissed the concept of affection, betrayal, and sex through  a candid twist of transposing this basic instinct to another realm made each intial goal look funny and pathetic. Even in a setting that will force human beings to focus on self-preservation, Gosengfiao geared these basic human emotions and linked it to the latter. Who would have thought that love and sex are also part of self-preservation, and that these emotional coping mechanismns can be good as food in a place of drought and death?  

Indeed, the Campiest part in terms of sensibility lies in a revolutionary tone when Joshua (Jonas Sebastian), the lone gay character, died amidsts straight people who fornicated to compensate the lack of food and water. Maria, despite the want of a partner, simply danced the whole night to compensate her need, and yes, she survived.

This sensible point proves that in a society filled with prejudice will eventually kill, or if not, eradicate, the unwanted - the unloved if not properly filled.

 

IV 

Exaggeration

Camp style has been evident in other forms of the genre. From the too elaborate Tiffany lamps to Visconti's direction of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, one requirement for this post-modern approach is inevitable concept of drama-dramahan.

One thing that is noticable are the unintended exaggerations in Temptation. Most critics would argue that some of the scenes were a bit messy in terms of line-flow and blocking, but I think that's simply the point! Under-blocks like Azineth's jumpy dance groves while sitting down and talking to Alfredo about being

 a crook (a damn good crooook) was unintentionally made unstable and unrealistic. But think again, don't most beauty queens move this way? What about the scene when Alfie rolled over a hill after Dina pushed him away? We see that the hill wasn't so inclined and that the character can simply stand up and sit to resist the fall. But the fall was obviously choreographed, you just can't avoid raising an eyebrow.

What I consider most hilarious, in terms of blocking is Azineth's orgasmic position on the beach. This too exaggerated pose could pass for a White Castle photograph in the 70s, but think again, wasn't the lighting and angles just too perfect enough? This unrealistic positionings were amiably accepted and unquestioned. But then again, you get the POINT, you get THEIR point!

Oscar Wilde wrote: "The more we study about art, the less we care about Nature." I think this only goes to show that Gosengfiao's infatuation with the cinema and art direction was greatly exhibited in this masterpiece. Much as we want to believe that the director intentionally made these ridiculous dances and poses, our subcounsious tells us that this was created with a clean motive. It whispers that everything was done in good faith, without the intention of making it look as bad as it was for higher taste.

In the process we accept Azineth's vanity poses and Bambi's girlish moods. We smile when we see Dina and Alfredo run along the deserted shorlines, shot in landscape and played via slow motion. We laugh when we see Maria (Deborah Sun) requests for more panty hoses for more fish, and relate when Suzanne worries that she might get sunburned.

In this respect, Camp succeeds here.  

V

Subltle Revolution

Now comes the most challeging area in the genre - revolution. When Gosengfiao encased four beauty queens, three men, a homosexual and a maid in an island without help from the outside world, what formula can you think of that may pull off a socio-political idea, thinking that you're making a sexy film?

Amidsts the many flaws and imperfection, we feel the subtle undertones of a socio-political struggle in Temptation. Among the stem-pillared huts and screaming temperatures, we are presented with Marx's social triangle. Each main character represented a social class that interacts between and among the other classes. This political perspective presented an unintentional microcosm prevalent in the universal society. However, a natural twist managed turn this traingle upside down towards the middle of the film to its end.

We see the triangle with the two Marxist classes: The Bourgeoisie (Suzanne, Joshua and Dina) and The Proletariat (Azineth, Maria, Bambi Ricardo and Umberto).

 

The members of the upper classes are stylish, manipulative and idle. Despite the natural demands of the island, they continue to live out their class, even added artificial expectations from the others. Dina, on one hand, managed to conform with the members of the other class. Her character eventually shifted from a bourgeoisie perspective to a laborer after realizing the need for manual labor to survive. Suzanne, on the other hand, consistently lived her class. Tagging along her maid, Maria, anywhere she goes, scolding her for each petty mistake and making her tell lies for her own motives.

The characters in the lower class were also members of the same class even before they came to the island. Umberto, a waiter is the most useful character for the others. His survival skills were extremely utilized. Ricardo, a male-prostitute, made use of his strategic surviving skills - though some of his thoughts were a bit off and hilarious. Azineth the crook, gave the other girls the nerve to use common sense and style to survive each scorching-starve-filled day.

As the plot progresses, we notice the shift of focus from the upper class to the lower class. Joshua the socialite died and eventually got eaten by the group. Suzanne eventually gave up her bitchy tactics to manipulate others and eventually gave in to help the others to find food. Moreso, Maria's payoff scene where she went on top her lying and helpless Senorita demanding respect and equality is the final compensatory climax for this revoulutionary idea.

In the interim, the lower class eventually became the leaders in the island. This revolutionary concept gave way to

the film, in consideration of a post-modern genre, will have to take time to ripe and conform to the development of taste. Viewing it from the 21st century perspective, will allow the young new viewers to see new dimensions in the film that has been disregarded in the 80s. Further, as Camp is relatively hard to achieve, Gosengfiao, was able to create a timeless example of a film that can represent such.

 

 

It ALL started with an extreme close-up of a computer-generated drawing of the Statue of Liberty...too close you'll see

the cemented lines as the camera zoomed down, fast enough toward the New York coastline in a matter of seconds.

Flying across the city the camera travels above a colorful array of rooftops, penthouses, dark and well-lighted windows. The flow will allow you to see a panoramic view of the cityscape interspersed throughout the first few seconds of the Main Titles. As the camera zoomed through a window and the next, you see characters, in independent sexual acts involving self-fellatio (if there is such thing), S&M, and an extreme exhibition of coppulation between two characters in a remotely serene bedroom.

The first few scenes of John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus deliberately details the initial establishment of a character-driven plot and an exploitation of liberty in a city overlooked by a statue that signifies it all. It explores the adventures of sexuality and gender in a society driven by passion, philosophy, independence and orgasms. It details a frank exhibition of sex in post-9-11 New York among sexual explorers with goals that are a bit too naughty for the conservative mind. It clearly depicts a new exploration of self-thought, experimentation and liberation in search for oneself.

Sofia (Sook-Yin Lee) is married to the attractive, self-centered, yet dumb-witted Rob (Raphael Barker) who looks at his

manhood as a tool to inavertly supress the former's ecstatic satisfaction in sex. Suprisingly, Sofia is pre-orgasmic, and hasn't reached actual orgasm since her first try.

 She eventually comes into contact with two gay couples; James (Paul Dawson) and Jaime (PJ DeBoy) who themselves have been having issues in their relationship as the latter finds it hard to accept the love given by the former while the former has found the need to express his overflowing love for everybody.

 

Enter other supporting characters that will bring spice to this character-driven story: First we are brought to the Shortbus: a Brooklyn "salon for the gifted and challenged." Here get to enter a world of utmost liberty where sex is a common escape from a world dictated by rules and cynicism. Next we see Ceth (Jay Brannan), a former commercial model turned songwriter who met the Jaimes in Shortbus. We also

get to know Severin (Lindsay Beamish), a self-proclaimed lesbian masochist who created a special bond with Sophie as she explores her sexuality to achieve her ultimate sexual goal. Also, we see Caleb (Peter  Stickles) a voyeuristic photographer obssessed with the Jaimes (James and Jaime) who made it a habit to view the couple from their windows through a telescope. We also get introduced to Justin Bond (as himself) the visible alter-ego for our characters and host for the Shortbus guests who shows great traditional cycnicm againsts society and standards, saying: "As my dear departed friend Lotus Weinstock used to say:I used to want to change the world. Now I just wanna leave the room with a little dignity."

Through these characterizations, we see the wheels of the plot revolve through the next hour or so. We get to explore the senses of becoming a female in search for herself and finding an extremely suprising realization. Sophia's journey from being a preserved Couple's Counselor (since she doesn't want to be called a Sex Therapist) to a sexual adventurer exploited new arguements on physical gratifications. The new world, as introduced to her in the Shortbus, created a new perspective on sexual adventure, odessey and exploration of preference. Her absolute negation throughout the entire film againsts the idea of lesbianism served as a key to finally open the door for her lifelong questions and search for meaning. This pre-orgasmic New Yorker learned, through a clear manifestation of lust in room full of people dressed to the nines and others dressed extremely down and making out.

The Jaimes on the other hand, presented a twisted, yet universal picture of a gay-relationship gone bland. James has started seeing that his relationship with Jaime is going nowhere since he started feeling that Jaime's overflowing love

has never penetrated his "skin." Jaime on the other hand, has been finding ways on how to make the relationship work, to the point of managing to include a new party, Ceth, into the relationship making a ménage à trois that explores various sexual experimentations.

 

When James reached the height of his journey to freedom from Jaime, he came across Caleb and ended up looking from the latter's window to their own apartment across the street. This almost fantastical climax paved a new perspective for James in his search for himself as he aimed to finally recieve Jaime's love for him. He viewed the spot, not from his own eyes, but from the eyes of an obsessed photographer who believed in their love for each other, a love that surpasses his limited understanding like a lone role player who would not fully see his own ground. Amidst the dark climatic scene, we see supernatural James looking across the windows, lighted not by flourecent nor incandecent lights, but by plain candlelights sybolically expressing the warmth of first love and the flame of a long forgotten love.

Clearly, this movie could be argued as pornographic. But the Cannes Film Festival did not say so. The depiction of sex in the film was not erotic nor suggestive, as it simply exhibits plain sex among people: Americans or not. The exploration of sexual gratifications is but common among people who see that sex is a part of the physical, psychological and spiritual realm of our being. Our orgasms are not taboos, but an everyday concern especially for those who never had it and that satisfaction cuts across gender, identity and preference. Our freedom to explore our needs, our desires is continuous journey to self-realization. Without motivation to pursue this natural gratification, we will begin to lose our hopes and begin our walk towards decay.