Confession: I totally said I wanted to write this movie up, and I still kind of do, but doing this in the same week as the revival of the Fantastic Fest debacle feels so icky and gross. And, yes, I know that I wrote up Chatterbox!, another softcore film whose title ends with a bang, yesterday, but Chatterbox! wasn’t as morally ambiguous as this.
The most important aspect of Russ Meyer’s Vixen! is that it is one of two movies to be cited as the first movie to receive an X-rating under the new MPAA rules. As a quick film history lesson, prior to the current ratings system we have today, America made movies under the Hayes Code, a strict guidelines of moral decency as created by a Catholic League-esque group. Under the Hayes Code, nudity, sex, explicit violence, and homosexuality were strongly verboten. You couldn’t swear, you couldn’t even let the villains win without some sort of explicit moralization. As filmmakers pushed back in the 1960s, especially in light of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Abuse being aired nightly on the local news, the MPAA birthed CARA, the Classification And Ratings Association. Suddenly, it was OK to show sex and violence as long as they were properly rated and listed for their content.
The X-Rating was never an official banner. Movies that applied for ratings were given an X only if they had enough immoral content that they couldn’t qualify as an R. That’s how Midnight Cowboy and A Clockwork Orange were originally Rated X. These movies wouldn’t be censored; but they would be released with a proper banner stating the movie was made for adults. This led into the golden age of pornography when any production company could put the X-rating on their film and call it good.
Enter Russ Meyer.
Before Vixen! and the MPAA rating system changed his career, Russ Meyer was King of the Nudies. He specialized in exploitation films (Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) and nudie documentaries (Mondo Topless) to feature the Russ Meyer women. in their states of dress and undress. Russ Meyer had a certain type of woman he liked to featured both physically – larger breasts, smaller waist and rounder hips, what used to be called a Wasp Waist – and in personality (angry, hardened, willful and horny). In his most famous Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Meyer pitted men against women as 3 strong thrill-riding go-go dancers had a showdown against the men of a small town farm.
Vixen! was a product of the era’s changing morality. Set in Pacific Northwest Canada, Erica Gavin plays Vixen (yes, that’s the character’s actual name), the bored wife of Tom, a wilderness guide and charter pilot. While he’s away, she screws anybody she can gets her hands on. Vixen is an empowered woman with a sexually voracious appetite who takes charge of her relationships. As the movie opens, her latest conquest is a Canadian Mountie whom she promptly ditches as soon as they’re done having sex. When Tom brings home a married couple who seem sexually unfulfilled, Vixen acts as a marital aid by screwing each of them in turn, and then setting them up to have fun by themselves. The sex in this first half is usually zesty, sexy and fun on all accounts, a pure celebration of carnal desires and human connection.
This sort of fun porn-logic is complicated by her tempestuous relationship with her biker brother, Judd and his black best friend, Niles (who is currently hiding out to avoid the draft). Judd and Niles both have a secret thing for Vixen, but Vixen is a down and out racist who calls Niles every slur she can think of whenever he’s around. She offers no respect, and regularly irritates the pair for shits and giggles. In a weird middle sequence, Vixen does bone Judd in a contentious assaultive manner that becomes very rapey when Niles interrupts their sex and she lays into him and then he goes at her. It’s actually a pretty damned morally gross sequence that flips her sexual aggression back on itself, then does double flips when Tom returns home with his final client of the film.
Tom’s last client is O’Bannon, a rich Irishman who claims he wants to go to San Francisco for a night of fun, but is actually going to hijack the plane to get to Cuba – then known as a communist haven where all of the world’s problems will have been eliminated. After witnessing Vixen’s racist attitudes towards Niles, O’Bannon recruits Niles with the promise that Cuba isn’t nearly as racist as the white dominant Canada and America, and he will be treated just like everybody else. During the hijacking, where Vixen and Tom are in the front and O’Bannon and Niles are in the back, Vixen uses her upfront racism to rile Niles up and expose O’Bannon’s own secret racism, which is pose as being even more vile than Vixen’s open racism, demonstrated by O’Bannon’s use of the N-word (which Vixen doesn’t use). It’s the invocation of the N-word that changes Niles’ mind, leading him to team up with Vixen and Tom.
Is the racism cute? Is it promoted? Is it endearing? Or is it useful? Does the rampant racism justify the sexual assault? Niles doesn’t apologize for assaulting Vixen against her will, nor does Vixen apologize for being a racist piece of shit. Their mutual borderline-but-not-quite apology is an attempt to say it all without saying anything, but it also can be seen as not addressing its own problematic parts. Is open racism better than closed racism? Is capitalism better than communism? Is Canada better than America?
It’s these questions that had my mind wondering what Russ Meyer was doing. Did he have an opinion? Was he exploiting these taboo topics for added titillation? Did he turn a relatively fun romp through the sexual revolution into a political hotbed just to stir controversy? I’m not sure that Russ Meyer is ignoring the questions, nor am I sure that he is thinking about these questions; at the very least, it seems that Russ Meyer doesn’t have the answers even if he is playing with fire. I did wonder about the sexual, gender and racial mores of 1968 and 2017, and whether we do need everything to fit into a neat easily digested morality tale.
