The Metropolis

Going on and on and on and on …: After Human Centipede, where can humanity drop next?

Michael Pollitt | Saturday 3 July, 2010 15:11

As you read these words, somewhere in the lovely summer light of this great and cultured city, one actress is miming having her lips sewn to the anus of another. As civic honours go, London is cleaning up. First we win the right to host the Olympics, and now we win the right, no, the honour, of hosting the filming of Human Centipede II, which started this month.

For those of you who have spent the last few months on planet decency, Human Centipede I was a film about a surgeon who creates a monster by sewing three people together in the manner described above.

How to top that in the sequel? The makers are understandably keeping tight lipped. One can only hope that once the cameras start rolling, the actors manage to do the same.

Rumour has it that rather than the three components of the original, the Human Centipede II will consist of twelve people joined together ass to mouth to form a perfect circle. I think the technical literary term for this is ring composition.

It’s pretty sick, for sure. But for all the comment the film has attracted (this column included), I can’t shake off a sort of shrugging feeling as I read the plot synopsis. Ass, mouth, shit: it might disgust, but does it really surprise? Generation X might have been shocked by this sort of thing. but we’re Generation Meh, haven’t we seen it all before?

Which asks the question, where are the next generation of artists going to turn for controversy? Oh there’s bestiality of course, or trusty old paedophilia. And I guess you could say no one has yet written the scatological incest novel, although Ian McEwan will probably get round to it sooner or later.

But these things are already available on the internet, right now, on Redtube, Youporn, Xvideos, Dudetube. And it spills over into real life. Time was when there was a ripple of excitement over whether you’d get a kiss on the fifth date without a chaperone. Now if you don’t fuck on the third, you can find yourself in court over breach of contract, and unless you’re a black belt in dildo you can’t help but find your performance inferior to the stuff you’ve seen online.

And then comes Chatroulette, an idea so theoretically pure and wholesome you could sell it in Waitrose. Here is an opportunity to communicate directly with anyone in the world. Imagine, to choose two nationalities completely at random, an Israeli child and a Palestinian, divided by their religions, their ideologies and their people. One day they chance upon each other in this great meeting place of the world and they talk, as children do, and their talk is unmediated by rancour, censorship or propaganda. They discover that for all that divides them, what unites them is so much more, and a beautiful friendship blooms. Chatroulette teaches them what their parents never could (and I’m copyrighting this slogan for when the film comes out): “you can’t put a blockade on love.”

And now think to what use Chatroulette is actually put: wanking. Why? Because there are no repercussions, and this means there are no rules.

In Freudian terms (yeah, snipe can do deep), Chatroulette is the unfettering of the id, the removal of the civilising force, the return to the wild. It’s also a parade of men wanking over each other in the desperate hope of stumbling across a woman, but that doesn’t sound nearly so impressive.

Think about it: humans disappearing into a darkened space, crouched alone round a small spot of light and heat, thinking only of sex, food and bodily functions. It’s like we’ve gone back to living in caves, only now they have wifi.

So stop using it people! Re-fetter your id! It’s stupid, it’s inane, it’s as unshocking and as vacuous as the Human Centipede. It’s also profoundly boring. And as all Generation Meh-ers know, there’s nothing worse than that.

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