Thinking of Shannon

A couple days ago I found myself thinking of Shannon Tweed. The actress will turn 60 next month (March 10, to be more precise), which puts her in her late thirties when she was the undisputed queen of the Erotic Thriller in the mid-1990s. As such she was a frequent presence in my old VCR, and I can well remember how great it felt, when I was in college, to run one of her films once in a while to clear my head from all the crap one had to stuff there in order to graduate. Well, maybe that is not entirely true. After all, she always played the woman (one can not think of her as a girl) one imagined one day one would get. With her stunning body and next-door-girl good looks, Shannon Tweed had something of an earthly quality, some indefinable and appealing mix that made one relate to her. She seemed real, unlike main competitors Shannon Whirry and Delia Sheppard who could never quite discard their self-conscious aura of sex fantasy come to life. Moreover, whether playing the competent professional, be it sex-therapist or talk show host, or the well-to-do unoccupied rich wife, Tweed always managed to seem troubled, preoccupied, as if partaking with us the woes of real life. Although not a great thespian - no Glenn Close or Meryl Streep there, thank goodness - she was able to brand a definite home-video period as her own.

I guess what prompted this unexpected trip to the past was my recent reading of a few works on the genre, that left me somehow unsatisfied and wanting more; wanting something that would directly address the allure of the genre for the viewer. Instead I suffered through the pompous academic prose of Linda Williams' The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (2005), Nina K. Martin's curious hit-and-miss approach in Sexy Thrills: Undressing the Erotic Thriller (2007), and the totally clueless essay "They Kill for Love: Defining the Erotic Thriller as a Film Genre" by Douglas Keesey, published in volume 56 of CineAction back in 2001. What they all had in common was best summarized by Aneta Karagiannidou in her not less clueless thesis Getting Away With It: The Erotic Thriller and Its Fantasies (2006): "Like Slavoj Žižek, 'I never feel guilty about enjoying films that are generally dismissed as trash'(...) Erotic thrillers are definite candidates for the trash category, so that writing a PhD thesis on such a contested genre was a great challenge. I realized early on that unless I were very careful about the way I handled my topic [my thesis] would be dismissed as lacking academic seriousness (...)".

Well, we all know what academic seriousness does to truth when we're dealing with the (post)modern social 'science' and humanities departments. However, with more or less seriousness, all these authors handled the Erotic Thriller with long pincers, as if afraid it could contaminate them, or, worse, as if they feared they would enjoy such trash. But the most frustrating of all, was that they all tackled the subject as if they were making some kind of ritual sacrifice to the irate gods of tastefulness. Why someone would choose to study a field of the arts for which they have no affinity is something I'll never understand, unless they're invested in some kind of cultural-political-ideological crusade - which I guess most of them are - intent on procrusteanly squeeze even the smallest drop of confirmation for their stick-legged intellectual elephants. But for me, personally, what was really, really, galling, was that I found almost no connection between the readings they were making and the films I had watched. Was my memory tricking me? So, I decided to go back to some of those films and jot down some viewing notes and, if I have the time, the will, and the discipline, I'll share those  notes with you, dear (and possibly non-existent) reader, under the heading The Erotic Thriller: Bodies in Motion.

And so it was I started thinking of Shannon Tweed, the epitome of the Erotic Thriller heroine. When I finished college and opened my own practice, I was sure I would someday meet my own Shannon Tweed. I was in my late teens and early twenties when she was reigning over the erotic thriller, and now that I'm entering my late forties, I feel that she is still the same alluring blonde professional in her early thirties and that she's still plagued by unfaithful husbands, killer voyeurs or sex-psychos, and in need of some help dealing with them. I still think of her every time my door opens, but I know the woman I was hoping to catch is now the woman I never got. Somehow, time, and life, have passed me by, leaving her still an earthly, tantalizingly close dream... but a dream nonetheless.