Teeth Review
Men: This horror-comedy is your worst nightmare. Teeth is clever, funny and gruesome, but the jokes barely distract from a vision of black and unsettling vision of sex that almost ruins the movie.
The film opens up with two young kids playing “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” in the shadow of a nuclear power plant — and the bratty older boy mysteriously gets his fingertip bitten off, an injury that will haunt him into adulthood.
Cut to the biter’s adolescence: Dawn is a leader in her high school abstinence group and an object of ridicule (she wears abstinence tees with her own puff-paint designs and a unicorn nightshirt, for god’s sake). She and her creationist abstinence buddies spend every waking minute inverting the teenage obsession with sex into a futile pursuit of “purity”.
Things get complicated for Dawn, though, when she meets Toby through her Promise ring group, and her instant attraction to him not only inspires impure thoughts, but weakens her resolve to stay out of dangerously tempting situations. Within a short minute of her first kiss, Dawn suddenly finds Toby on top of her, howling “I haven’t even jerked off since Easter!” and her body responds with the ultimate punishment for a rapist: castration. Unfortunately for Dawn, this is just the beginning of her problems.
Jess Weixler, who plays Dawn, won a special jury prize at last year’s Sundance for this role. While she certainly deserves it for her idiosyncratic characterization and perfect comedic skills, she falls short in the film’s one deadly serious dramatic scene. You would think that rape, the loss of her virginity, betrayal by her crush, the blow to her moral code, and the incomprehensible, bloody result would affect her more than her blank face indicates.
There are some hysterical moments in this movie, like Dawn’s first visit to the gynecologist, the attempted reattachments of the severed extremities, and awkward adolescence and courtship made even more absurd by the doggedly dogmatic way the Christian kids go about it.
The gore, while sparing, is probably the most horrific stuff I’ve ever seen, enough to make an entire movie theater full of people scream, cross their legs, and go next door to the bar and order the strongest shot available to drink away the memory of what they’ve just seen.
All of this would make for a greatly enjoyable movie if it weren’t for filmmaker Mitchell Lichtenstein’s disturbing picture of desire. Every character in this movie defines sex as their own personal mix of shame and violence. The children Dawn lectures to are programmed to spew abstinence slogans when they hear certain key words, even when Dawn is trying to unburden herself of her terrible experience. Every single sexual encounter in this film is soundly negative, and almost all fit the definition of rape.
Even the sex ed teacher, in trying to explain why the state has ordered the censorship of the textbook’s anatomical drawings of female genitalia but left the men’s untouched, can’t even bring himself to speak the medical terminology for a woman’s organs — a metaphor for the film’s theory that society views male sexuality as normal and acceptable, but women’s sexuality as dirty and dangerous, with Dawn’s condition being the logical end result of that fear. However, as Dawn’s research on vagina dentata suggests, it’s hardly a new or American way of thinking.
Maybe Lichtenstein’s funny little movie would be thought-provoking, if I weren’t asking Jim Beam to help me forget the most realistic mutilated sex organs I’ve ever seen on screen.
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