So last night's film Lars and the Real Girl - in contrast to last week's properly creepy the Orphanage -was cute, life affirming and touching. Perhaps not a little twee. We went to it as fans of Six Feet Under (one of the many series that makes me say that current US TV is the golden age. The best in the world. Ever.) I'm sure you know the set up, painfully shy (or actually mentally ill and terrified of contact) young man brings home one of those Real Doll sex toys and it gets integrated into the community when everyone plays along with his delusion that she is real (Brazilian half Danish missionary - the Danish is important, this is a Danish community he lives in). The film had to work hard not to creep me out - I'd just come across the book Still Lovers in work the other week. This is a book of men and their real dolls. Even the shots that weren't creepy were creepy. Really creepy. I mean those shots that didn't look like the aftermath of rape looked like creepy mental illness...
The first big thing they did to avoid the ick factor was they made Lars a serious churchgoer and in his fantasy Bianca (the realdoll) was a missionary so she slept in his brothers house. I'm glad to say that his brother didn't appear to take advantage of her. Leave out the psychobabble gloss they put in - that rubbish appears in all american movies and is no more or less serious than the magic that would be used to explain this in a fairy tale - and we have an incongrous, perhaps surreal device or plot element to make us consider the ordinary surroundings as if they were new. And now we see where the real fantasy is: the community he went to, his church, his work, the local GP who is also a psychiatrist and has hours of time a week to spend chatting to him (who's paying?). Hell the Emergency Room springs into action when he says Bianca is ill. Did he bring her to the local Kaiser Permanente ER? Did they perform a wallet autopsy on a sex doll? How did the insurance underwriters classify the treatment? Was it perhaps experimental and will Lars get a Real Bill be doing a long sequel of overtime to pay for it?
The fantasy is not that a man can love a doll, or that his community will accept it. The fantasy is that the community exists in the first place. Sure, you may think that your church is that community, leeching and tithing your money out of you: but try actually bringing in a sex doll to church.
