voxpoptart's Full Review: Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human
Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human would appear to state its purpose rather clearly in the title: here we have, ho-hum, another documentary on the bizarre breeding rites of another species, more pornography for the polymorphously perverse. The odd thing is that the film is seriously disappointing considered from this angle.
Most notably (and least forgivably), we never watch the breeding in any sort of detail. We are given a vague explanation about the male ejecting some sort of miraculous live-giving secretion into the female, and then we cut away to metaphorical demonstrations involving dim-witted athletes, startled by a loud noise, racing down a track apparently designed for running, usually encountering a sudden obstacle. The narrator tells us which body parts of the couple we follow (named Billy Mckenzie Astin and Jenny Smith Carmen Electra) are used for which reproductive purposes, yet we never once see any of those body parts uncovered by the strange garments of preserved animal flesh they wear. (Exception: the lumps near the top of Jenny’s thorax, used to provide milk when the infant human is born, can be seen just enough via various side angles to assemble a good mental guess at their overall appearance).
So, you assume: Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human is a bad movie, vague and useless. I would argue, instead, that it is a fine movie whose quixotic purposes are badly represented by the title.
Clearest clue: at the end of the actual plot, the narrator ties up some loose explanatory ends and then announces, of the earthbound human, “We should not destroy them”. Seen from this propagandistic angle, all sorts of filming choices make sudden sense. The decision to follow one couple, for example. Scientifically, this is stupid: despite the obvious and baffling complexity of the human mating rites, one couple is far from enough to examine and make sense of the ritual’s variations. Indeed, we get cues from the very beginning that Billy and Jenny are _not_ a representative couple. Sample dialogue, from their second meeting at a blaringly loud tribal gathering ground (the first meeting ended a little earlier with Jenny throwing water in Billy’s face after a failed attempt at gestural communication):
Billy: “I wanted to apologize. I was just trying to say, before, that you’re a good dancer. I wasn’t trying to be crude. I’m just a very bad mime”.
Jenny: “A man starting a conversation by apologizing! I haven’t run into that one before”.
The same meeting suggests unusual behavior by the female. Earlier, we have seen her approached by other human males, in the male-proposes / female-disposes pattern which – however repulsive it seems to you or me – is the well-known standard of such important races as the Tajaralwugum and the Psssk!(hg)rua’al. We see her end each encounter by fleeing to what my Universal Translator rendered as “bathroom”, although it seems less likely that Jenny actually cleans herself 10 times a night than that she needs a convenient excuse. As Billy and Jenny have their second dialogue, then, he raises an issue:
Billy: “Do you mind if I go to the bathroom for a minute?”
Jenny: “No way! You won’t come back”.
Billy: “No, really, I mean I need to go. I’ll be right back! I swear!”.
Jenny: “You think I haven’t tried that a dozen times tonight?”.
Billy: “… Okay. Fine. I won’t go”.
(Billy starts shifting nervously from one to the other paw, obviously trying to reduce their contact with the ground, from which yet further dirt will be absorbed. The conversation lags.)
Billy: “You’re just playing with me, aren’t you?”
Jenny (baring teeth): “Yep!”.
(Billy races away.)
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These are not the only indications that the filmmaker has chosen an unrepresentative couple with propaganda purposes in mind. In fact, as the extended ritual continues, Billy and Jenny themselves will frequently declare how unusual they are. Jenny argues to her friends (whose names as listed at the end are immensely musical: Lana Lisa Rotondi and Lydia Lucy Liu) that “Isn’t it about time I gave a try to a nice guy?”. Billy repeatedly assures his own best friend that Jenny is “beautiful, funny, smart, considerate”, and a host of other traits that would make her unrepresentative of the species as a whole. Thus it becomes clear that the narrator’s pledge at the beginning – that we are following a random couple, and if they don’t complete the mating ritual, we’ll just go and find a new one – is disingenuous. It is likely that several couples were filmed, perhaps even dozens, in order to find Jenny and Billy.
A strength of this approach is that we do get to examine a perverse and difficult ritual in depth. Starting out with the presentation of symbolic green fibers as an entrance tool to the tribal meeting grounds, we go from “dancing” (a ritualistic means of bringing the female to ovulation by unsettling her relevant body parts) to the many, many obstacles in the way of proper mating. Apparently, before mating, the partners have to (among other things)
-- Win their packs’ approval of their mates.
-- Win their parents’ acceptance of their mates (a varying process; the Smith Carmen Electra family examines Billy casually but with implied threat of violence from the father should anything go wrong; the Mckenzie Astin family greets Jenny warmly, but the father examines Jenny’s physical bearing closely and intently).
-- Taste and approve the flavor of the female’s milk-giving lumps.
-- Taste and approve the flavor of each other’s pelvic excretions.
-- Practice the actual mating an alarming number of times.
A weakness of the movie, unfortunately, is that these obstacles are obviously not being presented by a skilled ethnoxenologist. While the above interpretations make perfect sense, in the sick and sad way that alien biologies can, other explanations ring false. We are told that Billy that is attempting to mate, early on, by sticking his mouth into Jenny’s mouth: “Unfortunately, her reproductive organs are not located in her mouth! Typical of a male not to stop and ask for directions”. Evolutionarily, it is never reasonable to dismiss a creature’s mating behavior as error (see for example Jaharuud D’yiimOnd’s the Third Chiying’(l)kapaA!t). It is far more likely that Billy is, for example, examining a sensitive area of her body for broken skin, or analyzing the health of her teeth; a scientist, rather than a propagandist, would have thought of this.
It’s equally unlikely that the scratches Jenny makes on vegetable fiber when asked “for your number” are, as the narrator asserts, a form of artistic display, a ritual drawing. Frankly, it’s not an impressive artwork, much less so than the ones we see Billy making at work, which matters because the entire purpose of artistic displays is to be difficult: in collecting materials, in creating, in protecting from scavengers, thus proving fitness as a mate. The mention of “number” suggests, perhaps, an astrological / superstitious function of comparing relative fitness, or perhaps a reference to government-issued tatoos which, when looked up, would prove sufficient genetic distance to not constitute in-breeding. The point is, I shouldn’t have to be the one thinking of these things; I’m the viewer here.
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But the ultimate virtue of the narrator’s decision to follow this one, unrepresentative, couple is this: they are charming, the little buggers. A broad hint behind some of the conversations is that the typical human mating process is not terribly comfortable or happy, particularly for the female; we sense that Billy is going out of his way to make her part of the ritual a happier one. He, in turn, seems to be thrilled to know her, perhaps just because she is “above his station”, but perhaps also because she’s considerate and has lovely comic timing. The way of mating is a difficult one, and the two encounter obstacles and even generate their own obstacles; but I found myself rooting for them to make it all work. See if _that_ happens in a documentary on the mating of the Krzup-p-p-khnatchzi Gdhhsk!
What I ultimately find is that Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human is an attempt to revive the briefly trendy genre of “romantic comedy”, which you might remember from such 20-years-ago Dnieprian films as What Lovely Teeth You Have, or Hungry for Love, or I Feel You Deep Inside of Me, or Burp! One reason reason those films lost their popularity – which happened before, not after, the Dnieprian Uncivil War – is that the economy of cinema is poorly designed to show 15-minute films, nor to audience expectations adjust well. In the earthbound human, we find the ability to experience “romantic comedy” at full feature length. And you know what? It’s kind of neat. May it impress your mating partner tonight.
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