What to say about Matthew Barney? Drawing Restraint 9 was visually and acoustically stunning (though the operatic howling almost drove me mad, Bjork's soundtrack almost overshadowed the movie), and everything else was inexplicable. The narrative was curiously and comfortingly linear, with Bjork and Barney arriving onboard separately and being bathed, clothed, adorned and shaved for an elaborate wedding ritual below-deck on the Nisshin Maru, while the whaling ship operates 'normally' above. Normal meaning that the whalers create a huge Vaseline sculpture on the deck by pouring liquid jelly into a mold. Everything is going well, below and above-deck, and then a storm hits the ship. The sculpture melts and fills the lower deck and the Occidental Tourists unite in love, hacking each other's lower bodies to pieces. Their lower bodies turn into whale tails (fins?) and they end by feeding each other delicate pieces of their own flesh. There were also rocky spines, mermaid-like oyster divers, children singing, priests and shrimp in cement...


I found everything to be ornate and shockingly beautiful, and much more delicate (if vats of petroleum jelly and floating bits of human flesh can be delicate) than the Cremaster visuals. I think the ideas of life and death, creation and destruction were not meant to be subtle, but there was a stark quietness to everything in the movie that lent Drawing Restraint a sense of deep sensitivity and tranquility. Could have used a few more floating testicles, phallic imagery and bees, though.