Can Go Through Skin

Certainly, you will not find a more screwed up and neurotic group of people nowadays than young white women, especially those from decadent Western European countries like the Netherlands, which prides itself on being the most progressively degenerate nation in the world as a place where the government is willing to pay for mentally ill men to chop their cocks off and pretend to be women and fund terrorists like Theo van Gogh’s assassin Mohammed Bouyeri via welfare to sit around all day and plot the destruction of the Occident. Of course, you can watch various arthouse films from the Netherlands and tell there is something seriously wrong with the people there, but there are very few cinematic works that attempt to depict the sort of psychosis that many modern women seem to be plagued with there as demonstrated by their lack of interest in producing children and xenophiliac fetish for Arabs, negroes, and everybody else except actual Dutchmen. In his debut Golden-Calf-winning feature Kyodai Makes the Big Time (1992)—a work that is like Straub on steroids and with a soul meets the less abstract son of Frans Zwartjes—South African auteur Aryan Kaganof demonstrated that young Dutchmen are sexual sadists and their female partners are reluctant masochists who long for emotion but also have an undying craving for being pounded mercilessly with a rock hard cock.  Of course, as the assumed result of the further effeminization of Dutchmen over the past two decades or so, it seems that Dutch women are getting even more neurotic as the result of being pounded by less and less hard cocks. In the more recent arthouse work Kan door huid heen (2009) aka Can Go Through Skin directed by Esther Rots, one bears witness to one of the most damning depictions of contemporary Dutch womanhood in the form of an uniquely unsympathetic young lady that also happens to be a sexual assault victim who moves from urban Amsterdam apartment to a rotting shack without proper plumbing in redneck Zealand as a way to get over the fact that a towelhead pizza delivery boy beat her up and sexually defiled her. As Rots’ film specifically demonstrates, the great thing about female filmmakers is that, if they are not feminists pretending to project some sort of contrived pseudo-morality, they tend to unwittingly reveal the sheer and utter lack of morality that women have. Indeed, Can Go Through Skin is nothing short of a male’s worst nightmare as a work featuring a young woman that epitomizes everything that is repellant, irritating, and contemptible about the members of the so-called fairer sex. Featuring horrible lesbo-like girly music, spastic editing, incessant annoying close-ups, masturbatory handheld camera movements, tons of improvised acting, and a distinctly unattractive lead actress whose attitude and personality seem to make her appear infinitely uglier that she actually is, Can Go Through Skin is certainly a film that I never want to watch again yet I am glad I did as it is a rare work that unequivocally demonstrates that something is not quite with modern western woman.

Intemperate redhead Marieke (Rifka Lodeizen) is suffering a mental meltdown because her handsome blond boyfriend just broke up with her and one can only assume that it was her fault as clearly indicated by her innately irrational behavior and hysteria, so she begins drink red wine and nonsensically decides to begin trolling for a rebound dick by calling every single ex-boyfriend she knows, but they all unsurprisingly turn her down as if they already know she is bad news. Meanwhile, Marieke decides to order a pizza and when the ‘Pizzaman’ (Chris Borowski)—a swarthy and scrawny rat-like fellow of the archetypical Arab sort—comes and delivers the pizza she does not even bother to shut her door and lock it after he leaves, thereupon resulting an easily preventable tragedy that will change the protagonist forever. Needless to say, while eating her pepperoni pizza and getting ready to take a bath, Pizzaman appears out of nowhere and begins choking her and ripping her clothes off. Luckily, Marieke’s friend Siska (Elisabeth van Nimwegen) shows up and attacks the seemingly physically weak untermensch delivery boy, but the protagonist also suffers the embarrassment of having to run outside completely naked in the streets of Amsterdam. On a whim, Marieke ultimately makes the impulsive decision to buy a dilapidated cottage in rural island region of Zealand that she and her ex-boyfriend had previously talked about buying despite the fact that she is a totally helpless cosmopolitan woman that knows nothing about plumbing, carpentry, or anything else that will be necessary to fix the virtually falling down house.  Obviously, Marieke has bought the house for psychological reasons as it affords her a feeling of safety and escapism from the big bad multicultural sewer of a society that robbed her of her innocence and dignity (or whatever).  Marieke also decides to attend the trial of her attacker Pizzaman, who is clearly a savage sadist of sorts that smirks at her in a sinister fashion in the courtroom and who ultimately gets off with a slap on the wrist since he is a poor non-white third world subhuman and all, which naturally infuriates the protagonist to the point where she begins chopping up stuff with an axe while yelling “fucking assholes” and “fucking lawyers.”

Upon moving into her new pastoral shithole in Zealand, Marieke beings living a hermetic paranoia-ridden existence full of internet chatrooms, fetishistic torture and murder fantasies, and uniquely unsanitary living. When a rather fat and unattractive middle-aged neighbor who looks like someone from a West Virginia trailerpark named John Maan (Wim Opbrouck) begins coming by Marieke’s home and helping her fix up the place, the clearly mentally perturbed protagonist becomes increasingly angered and paranoid as she misguidedly sees the kindly and rather altruistic fellow as a menacing intruder with dubious motives. One day when she comes home and finds John working on her roof, Marieke becomes exceedingly enraged like a super cunt from hell and screams “what the fuck are you doing?!” and “bugger off.” When John comes by during weekend to fix her shower as he promised he would, Marieke decides to act like a scared child by hiding in bizarre cramped places to pretend that she is not home. Meanwhile, while rummaging around her house, Marieke finds such thing as a seemingly authentic original photograph of Aryan aristocrat and failed Hitler assassin Claus von Stauffenberg (?!), as well as a loaded rifle that she attempts to use as an empowering pseudo-phallic of sorts. Indeed, with the gun, mad Marieke does really bad Travis Bickle impersonations and fantasizes about shooting her attacker ‘Pizzaman’ while he begs for mercy.  In fact, Marieke fantasies about keeping Pizzaman as her slave and letting him rot away in her attic. At one point, Marieke decides to collect all her used tampons, which she uses as teabags to make Pizzaman a nice warm large cup of menstrual tea that a vampire might enjoy (indubitably, with his superlatively swarthy appearance, Pizzaman looks ghoulish enough to be a bloodsucker of sorts). When Marieke bumps into a neighbor outside carrying a trash bag full of apparently ill kittens, she becomes rather defensive over the kitty cats and demands that the man give them to her in a somewhat rude fashion. The kitties seem to be covered in feces, thus the fit perfectly in Marieke’s filth and garbage-ridden home.  Of course, since she can barely take care of herself, Marieke is fairly negligent with the animals. When one of the cats randomly drops dead while, Marieke is not the least bit shaken and she apathetically puts the dead kitty in a plastic bag and takes a bath right next to the dead feline. As for the rest of the kitties, Marieke uses them for target practice while fantasizing about killing Pizzaman.  Undoubtedly, in terms of rape victims, you won't find a more deplorable one than miss Marieke, who seems to use the trauma she has suffered as an excuse to carry out every single sick fantasy she has ever had and the more the days pass, the more depraved and despicable her behavior gets.

Ultimately, through the internet, Marieke begins living a second life after ‘befriending’ a middle-aged fellow that goes by the user name ‘Herfst’ (Roel Goudsmit) in a chatroom who feels rather guilty over the fact that his lover was raped by a cabdriver and he was unable to stop it, thus he has developed a sort of vigilante attitude against rapists that he slowly but surely converts the protagonist to. While providing Marieke with support for the trauma she he has suffered, he also guilt-trips her into getting involved in vigilante violence by telling her that if she does not kill Pizzaman man and he ends up attacking someone else that it will be her fault because she failed to stop more attacks. Upon meeting up with Herfst and some other unmentioned people, including a couple more young women, Marieke gets involved with setting and murdering rapists, which is never actually depicted in the film in great detail so as to emphasize that it is a highly secretive of the protagonist's life that even she does not want to think of. Meanwhile, Marieke comes by John’s house with a bunch of egg foo young and allows him to fuck her after having one too many drinks, though she sneaks out in the middle of the night as if she is ashamed of her actions and scared of intimacy. It should be mention that Marieke's ex-boyfriend is a rather handsome blond Nordic man with an Adonis-like figure, so the fact that the protagonist would allow herself to be defiled by a big pig like John just goes to show how much her self-esteem as plummeted since her traumatic encounter with pernicious prick Pizzaman. To her great dissatisfaction, Marieke’s one-night stand with John results in her pregnancy and she initially plans to abort the baby, even rationalizing her decision by pretending to talk to the fetus, stating to it things like, “I think I’d come to hate you and hurt you” and that she’d be “bad mother.” Indeed, there is no doubt that Marieke would be a cruel and horrendous mother as demonstrated by the fact that she murdered a litter of kittens and even refuses to let free a bird that she finds stuck in a net, thus guaranteeing the creatures slow and painful death. For some reason, Marieke decides to keep the baby and John naturally becomes the perfect supportive cuckold husband, sweetly stating to her pregnant stomach, “Dear little man or woman, I don’t care, as long as it’s one of the two. Hey, sweetheart. Come on, baby, give us a kick.” 

 By day, Marieke is pampered and comforted as a soon-to-be-mother by her fat ass beau John, but at night she becomes an ostensibly powerful anti-rapist vigilante who goes around with her comrades. While Marieke initially seems empowered by her schizophrenic lifestyle, as she is able to feel simultaneously strong and tough yet protected and tender as a girl who is warmly protected by a caring man who has no clue about her secret double life as a vicious vigilante, she cannot keep up the act forever. Indeed, one day while shopping for groceries, Marieke sees a couple cops and her plaguing paranoia gets the best of her to the point where she runs home, deletes all the files her computer to hide evidence, starts smashing her laptop whilst cursing at it, and calls up Herfst and begs him to destroy all his evidence, thus indicating that the vigilante must have made the moronic mistake of filming their murders. Naturally, John tries to calm her down and comfort her, but Marieke just acts all the more hysterical and violent and begins hitting him like a rabid animal, so he forces her to take a cold shower while she complains “I'm drowning,” thus making it seem as if she is suffering from schizophrenia.  After her cold and luckily emotionally capacitating shower, Marieke seems to enter an almost catatonic state and John carries her to bed where she lays lifelessly as if her soul has left her body. The film concludes with the inter-title, “for my little Siska Februrary 3-7, 2008,” thus reflecting that Marieke had a baby girl that she named after her best friend, but it died a couple days after birth. Assumedly, Marieke deranged behavior probably led to her baby’s death.

Admittedly, when it comes to most female filmmakers, I usually think of someone trying in vain to do a man’s job and failing terribly at it, but I must admit that Can Go Through Skin is a piece of pure and unadulterated feminine cinema that no male, no matter how queer or effeminate, could have ever directed as it depicts Dutch womankind in such a unflattering, repugnant, morally retarded, and just plain decidedly disgusting fashion that no man could have been able to tolerate working with such material.  One must also consider that the film was largely improvised and thus the product of hours upon hours of fairly organic deranged dame behavior.  Apparently, during most of the shooting of the film, only a total of five people, including the entire cast and crew, were around in a small claustrophobic setting, so it must have been a nightmarish experience for any males involved.  In a way, Can Go Through Skin is like the ultimate horror film for heterosexual males, as it forces the viewer to get beyond uncomfortably intimate with an uniquely unhinged chick who suffers from the worst sort of hormonal hysteria and lack of self-control.  Indeed, Ms. Esther Rots’ film is a rather rare kind of work in that it is the cinematic nightmares of both rabid feminazi dykes and rampantly heterosexual male chauvinists, which is certainly not small accomplishment. Arguably, the biggest taboo the film breaks is that it demonstrates female rape victims can be deranged cunts whose traumatic experiences make them all the more cunty.  The only other film that I can think of that depicts a rape victim in a similarly unflattering light is the German arthouse ‘rape epic’ Der freie Wille (2006) aka The Free Will which, on top of depicting a sexual predator in an uncommonly sympathetic sort of way, features a middle-aged bourgeois blonde rape victim going berserk upon meeting her rapist's girlfriend and beating the girl up and violently shoving a toilet brush into her vagina as if it is her god given right as a sexual assault victim to commit such an act.  Of course, in a ‘feminized’ (translation: lesbianized) world that encourages young women to live in big cities around ‘diverse’ people, be ‘strong’ and ‘independent,’ and forgo getting married and having children, Can Go Through Skin is far from a politically correct ‘pussy power’ flick as it demonstrates how weak and vulnerable young women really are, especially when living in close proximity to swarthy untermenschen who see nothing wrong with rape because it is part of their ‘culture’ and they think Dutch women are easy whores anyway (indeed, this is the common assumption among Turks and Moroccans in the Netherlands). Interestingly, the female lead of Rots' film even admits she used to be naïve about city life before she was sexually assaulted, confessing to her lard ass lover, “The city is so aggressive. You don’t realize it at first. But once you notice it, you see it all the time.” Ironically, after her traumatic experience, the protagonist (or more like ‘anti-heroine’) of the film eventually takes on a somewhat traditional female role by getting pregnant and having a protective male lover do all her work for her, but she ultimately fails at this as she is already far too tainted by modernity and a lifetime of feminist brainwashing to live the life of a simple humble housewife. 

 Interestingly, in her official ‘director’s statement,’ Rots wrote: “Another question I was trying to come to grips with is: ‘How do you deal with a legal system protecting the rights of offenders, instead of the victims? Along with the instinctive, all-consuming feelings of vengeance from which there is no relief?”’  While seeming rather random initially, I think Rots included the scene where the protagonist of Can Go Through Skin finds a photograph of failed German resistance movement figure Claus von Stauffenberg to demonstrate that there are certain circumstances in life where one must break the law and take actions into their own hands, like when a towelhead rapes you and the loony left-wing Dutch legal system does not make the rapist serve any jail time because it would be ostensibly ‘racist’ or something. Indubitably, it was uncommonly bold of Rots to portray the rapist of her film as an Arab, as one of the biggest taboos in the Netherlands and the rest of contemporary degenerate Western Europe is to recognize that virtually all rapes and violent crimes in these countries are committed by third world illegal aliens and so-called ‘asylum seekers,’ especially of the Islamic Arab and negro sort, and that the conspicuously corrupt legal systems in these countries are pathetically lenient with these people and even try to cover up their crimes, like the Paki-led underage white sex slavery rings in Oxford, England. Sadly, Can Go Through Skin ultimately demonstrates that, since the death of Theo van Gogh, it seems that at least one female Dutch filmmaker has more testicular fortitude than most of the Dutch male filmmakers combined, as it is a work that, whether intentional or not, completely demystifies the bullshit liberal multicultural feminist cosmopolitan dream that the Dutch seem so particularly proud and fond of.  Notably, Can Go Through Skin was nominated seven times for the Golden Calf—the Dutch equivalent of an Oscar—and ultimately won three of the awards, including the coveted Special Jury Prize, with the jury’s reason being: “In a time of deepening professionalism, air tight scripts and firm rules, the jury is pleased to see that it is possible to make a film outside of the trodden paths. Because of their courage and willingness to follow the experiment, both in ways of narrative as well as ways of working, with a special end result, the jury gives the Golden Calf for the Special Jury Award to the team of CAN GO THROUGH SKIN.”  Of course, the jury forgot to praise Rots and her crew for making a film that dares to contradict the feminist, multicultural, globalist narrative and ultimately exposes a hidden unfortunate truth about life in Amsterdam for young Dutch women.

-Ty E