Flippant Remarks about Last Tango in Paris

Netflix is now streaming Last Tango in Paris. This was the first “pornographic” film I ever saw. I saw it when I was left alone in a hotel room in Pasadena in the late 1970s (maybe the early 80’s). It was totally devastating to me and left me with sexual preoccupations that lasted decades. This film had a similar consciousness-shifting effect as Diva, mentioned under “Vietcong Diva” in “rasx() Screenshots: More Shots out at Slavery” here in the kinté space.

Now that I am just over half a decade short of Marlon Brando’s character’s age in the film, Last Tango in Paris brings these random points:

• Much respect to those happy couples with the older guy and the younger woman, but Last Tango in Paris still serves as the psychological template for my view of such relationships.
• Marlon’s monologue style (shown in “Paul’s Past” on YouTube.com) was utterly fascinating to me as a young man. I am almost certain that Francis Ford Coppola wanted to recreate this in 1979’s Apocalypse Now.
• Note how fast Marlon Brando gained weight after Last Tango in Paris when he appeared in Coppola’s film. The self-loathing, id-orientation thang is nothing to shake a Roman-orgy stick at…
• Maria Schneider has great breasts but no hips at age 19 in Last Tango in Paris. But for decades after I saw her, I thought she was super, super sexy. This is what it means to be an isolated child. And, yes, I did make some serious life-scale, detrimental choices in women based on the conceptual model fictionalized by Ms. Schneider.

rasx()