Dark Revelations of a Boyhood Buddy

Nudity Advisory: If you are uncomfortable with male nudity or gay themes, please exit this blog at once. Thank you.

We watched three films by Pedro Almodovar during the long Memorial Day weekend.

The first, Volver, was too bloody and it turned him off. Besides, the only half-sexy guy was soon in a pool of blood and, for my buddy at least, the movie was all downhill from there. I thought Paco (Antonio de la Torre) had his charms, at least when he was still alive.

The next day we watched Kika and he liked Ramon (Alex Casanovas), but in my opinion, for eerie reasons that I had never thought about when I had enjoyed that movie countless times before. He liked the fact that he was such a sexy corpse. Of course, the guy in question would come out of his Cataleptic fit and live again, until the next near-death fit.

It wasn't so much that he was into dead guys--or at least I hoped--but rather that he liked sexy guys that were asleep so he could play, as he put it, "baby doll games." These games consisted of undressing sleeping men and playing with them as they slept. Perhaps Almodovar had these innuendos, or a subtext, but until this buddy pointed them out, I was clueless. I always thought it odd that the major love interest in the movie was always simulating death whenever he got a cataleptic fit.

The last film, Bad Education, also had a sleeping hunk but this time he was dead drunk, but still very hard. Zahara, the young trannie (Gael Garcia Bernal,) in the film-within-a-film climbed on top of that sleeping drunk's pole and road that stallion for hours. But for my friend, the fantasy of, again, having sex with a man who's deeply asleep, was more than he could wish for.

It sometimes takes a different pair of eyes to see realities in favorite works of art that you were oblivious to on your own.