I considered starting off this posting with something titillating, but given that I’m already a little worried about what sordid types will accidentally pull up this link because of the inclusion of the word “porno,” I should probably just jump into the matter at hand: Isabella Rossellini’s strange but amusing Sundance Channel series, “Green Porno,” which soon begins its second season.
What is “Green Porno,” you ask? Well, not that it will probably help clarify things a great deal, but here’s a photo from the show, courtesy of Sundance:
Okay, here’s the deal: Ms. Rossellini decided that she wanted to do a series about the sex life of different animals, but to avoid the issue of not actually having footage of the beasts in mid-coitus, she provides a re-enactment herself with the assistance of costumes which offer, shall we say, a slightly artistic interpretation of the momentous event.
“I don’t want to be like documentary filmmakers, in a hole in the cold for five months, waiting for that squid to mate,” she says. She does, however, writee the scripts and storyboards the episodes herself, doing all the requisite research to make sure everything’s up to snuff, including a recent trip to Patagonia.
“I’ve read about animals since I was a child,” she said. “I wasn’t good at school, but if I had been good at school, I would have been a biologist. Or I would have been Jane Goodall. That’s who I wanted to be.”
Now, you’d think it might get to be a bit of the same-old same-old after a few episodes, but you’d be wrong: some of methods of reproduction are, in Ms. Rossellini’s words, “scandalous.”
“You know, some of them are hermaphrodites, some of them change sex during their lifetime,” she explained. “Things that if we would do it as human beings, we would be arrested, but they do it naturally. It’s the variety that anything is impossible, the unthinkable. You think you can think of something really scandalous in your mind? Well, the animals are going to do more that you can imagine. A lot of fish are sometimes born female and become male or born male and become female. That I didn’t know. I was surprised, even simple animals like shrimp, that we eat all the time, we don’t know that he does that. Earthworms, that we all know, we find in our garden, they are hermaphrodite and they mate in the 69 position with the head and the tail like that.”
At this, Rossellini smiled.
“So you wanted something scandalous?” she asked. “There it is.”
Season 2 of “Green Porno” will launch on May 5th on Sundancechannel.com.
