Tosh's Journal: July 29, 2023

Ken Russell's "Crime of Passion" (1984)

Lydia Davis, one of my favorite writers, once commented that one shouldn’t face an empty page. Before you open your notebook or computer screen, think of a line or sentence beforehand the actual writing. This morning all I can think about is Ken Russell’s 1984 film Crimes of Passion because I watched it before I went to sleep last night on the Criterion Channel. At first, I didn’t like it, but then I became turned on to its sexual scenes. It’s pornography but with a good plot and excellent acting. Still, I just had the film's title in my head and no sentence attached to that idea.

As the character Joanna Crane/China Blue, Kathleen Turner is full of eros, and what I liked about her character is that they never explained how, why, or what she does. There is a division in her life that is either erotic or focusing on her day job as a clothes designer for a clothing manufacturer. At night she becomes China Blue, which reminds me of a costumed (masked) superhero in the same vein as Bruce Wayne/Batman. As a sex worker, she handles extreme to mild customer requests, and it seems she is never overwhelmed with her work. At times, it gets her down, but she is a professional and needs the duality of the double life that is her identity, both in the day and, of course, in the nighttime.

Kathleen Turner, as of last night, is now my favorite actor. I have admired her work, especially in John Waters’s Serial Mom, but here she takes acting to a Brechtian approach of being distanced from the actions in front of you. This also makes one a voyeur, but perhaps all cinema touches on the Voyeurism virus among us for those who do and like to watch. Ken Russell, the most flamboyant mainstream filmmaker of the mid-to-late 20th century, is tailor-made for this type of film that borders on exploitation but is very much a Commedia dell'arte with much depth to explore the characters of the female sex worker, the uptight preacher, and the handsome jock but troubled husband. And for those unfamiliar with Commedia dell'arte, it was theater from Italy in the 16th century that used stock characters to expose the hypocrisy of society.

As of now, I have three projects that I’m working on. Two will hopefully be books, and the other will be in a different medium. For the next six months or so, I have to be very disciplined in getting this work done, and so in a sense, a film like Crimes of Passion represents a pressure to focus on the job at hand, but then some are in the pleasure business. I hope to have my feet and hands in both worlds.