doesn’t mean my body must always be a source of pain.

Brown Bunny is crap fondue. Yo Vincent, I know what a road trip looks like, thank you. The only saving grace behind his fake-beauty, misanthropic, played-out Nietczean (sp) “men can’t cope with their emotions because women are variable” boring-ass pity play was that between alternating shots of highway, windshield wipers, and Vincent Gallo’s bangs, I was reminded of how much I despised On the Road.
The fellatio brouhaha, for its part, was pertinent to the story; it was the story. If I had a higher opinion of Gallo I’d think it was a literal commentary on how far an audience will sit through a director’s conceit to get to the happy ending. But Brown Bunny is just more hate mail from a miserable narcissist imposing his own bleakness upon the audience. Not unique, or even very interesting. Granted, for cinematic aptitude and cohesion alone, he is somewhat more graceful than others (for instance, Todd Solondz, with the exception of Welcome to the Dollhouse). But there’s an underlying cruelty to his moments of artfulness, evident in the significantly less-discussed rape scene (here, not the blowjob); it’s one of the most profoundly upsetting psychological devices in cinema, a suckerpunch in a dirty fight. (Thereby rarely employed by woman directors, and even in Coralie’s Baise-Moi, used as a motivation for women to embark on a killing rampage in “feminist” revenge, it was unnecessarily obtrusive.) He introduces it with little warning, framing it with evil words and power dynamic, right after the blowjob scene. It was supposed to illustrate his pain, but incredibly, it could’ve been meant as farce — implied by some cardboard lines and purposely trite devices. Meanness inhabits all forms.