The Seed of Man

 

While I generally have a hard time getting into virtually any sort of fantasy film, especially if it involves supernatural crap like fairies and elves, I take great delight in dystopian flicks as they provides me with the sort of escapism that, quite unlike bombastic cinematic bullshit like The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, seems somewhat tangible, thus giving me some hope that someday the modern liberal globalized multicultural world, as well as the people that run and/or support it, will be relegated to the perpetually flushing toilet that is history for eternity. Indeed, whether it be the sometimes hokey flesh-eating horrors of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) or the dangerously hedonistic post-apocalyptic counterculture chaos of Jim McBride’s Glen and Randa (1971) or the crippling metaphysical melancholia of Nikos Nikolaidis’ Proini Peripolos (1987) aka Morning Patrol, there is indubitably something quite exciting and inspiring about the idea of a lawless world where all forms of bourgeois phoniness, civility, and ‘tolerance’ have become totally obsolete and true ‘equality’—nature and her indiscriminate ruthlessness—reigns supreme. Personally, I have a special affinity for apocalyptic arthouse films as they oftentimes manage to undermine the expectations of both the sci-fi subgenre and art cinema, not to mention the fact that these films tend do be more thoughtful than obscenely overrated works like Soylent Green (1973) and especially Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), which are both hopelessly tainted with phony and shallow liberal humanist messages that would make any person with any common sense feel like they are on the verge of projectile vomiting. While he certainly leaned to the far-left in some regards, great Milanese auteur Marco Ferreri (La Donna scimmia aka The Ape Woman, La Grande Bouffe) was also one of the most scathingly culturally cynical and preternaturally politically incorrect filmmakers that ever lived, thus it is only fitting that he played around with apocalyptic cinema, with Il seme dell'uomo (1969) aka The Seed of Man being his most overt contribution to the subgenre. A somewhat ironically titled work, the film depicts how a young and intelligent beta-boy tries in vain to coerce his fiercely frigid girlfriend into getting pregnant in a post-apocalyptic world where most of humanity has been wiped out in some sort of unidentified Cronenbergian plague. A sort of admirable warm-up to Ferreri’s somewhat superior and all the more absurd NYC-based flick Bye Bye Monkey (1978) aka Ciao maschio starring Gérard Depardieu and Marcello Mastroianni, The Seed of Man, like many of the auteur’s films, is actually really a film about the forsaken nature of modern sex and relationships and merely uses genre conventions as window-dressing to communicate the culturally apocalyptic nature of love affairs between contemporary men and women as a result of being totally tainted by feminism, so-called sexual liberation, and consumerism, among other things.  Indeed, in Ferreri's flick the sexual roles are largely reversed as the chick hunts and kills animals (and people) while the man tends to his garden, thus reflecting the gross inversion of sexual polarities in the Occident.  After all, most normal women would probably have a hard time getting wet for a man whose ass that they could kick.

Featuring Varangian blueblood beauty Anne Wiazemsky in a role in stark contrast to her legendary debut performance as a tragic virginal beauty in Robert Bresson’s pastoral black-and-white masterpiece Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), Ferreri’s film features arguably the most frustrating yet simultaneously absurdly farcical depiction of female frigidness in cinema history as a work that depicts a stunning and seemingly highly fertile little lady who refuses to fuck, let alone reproduce, despite the fact that the world needs to be repopulated due to the fact that most of humanity has been wiped out in the plague of all plagues.  While one would assume that some wild barbarian would stop by and impregnate Wiazemsky's character simply by raping her into oblivion, virtually all of the men featured in the film have about as martial prowess as a Vietnamese toddler with Down syndrome, with the most masculine and stoic men being ambiguously gay (indeed, a couple of actors that almost resemble women portray black-clad bandits that proclaim to be the new government of the post-apocalyptic world).  Of course, in a world where many (mis)educated Western  women consider having children and starting a family to be anachronistic, suffocating, and downright shameful and tend to believe it is an act of ‘liberation’ to live a life of recreational fucking where pregnancy is a curse that can easily be remedied with a quick pill or relatively painless abortion where their unborn spawn is vacuumed out of their vagina while they are sleep, The Seed of Man is naturally more relevant today than when it was first released as indicated by Europe’s collectively suicidal behavior, especially in regard to their dwindling birth rates. Of course, Ferreri’s film does not just focus on the plague of spiritually comatose barren women and their candy ass male partners, but also the great pains a woman will go to destroy the competition and take down a woman that is attempting to steal her man, even if she does not really care for said man. Indeed, in The Seed of Man, the male protagonist is quite excited when a woman who, quite unlike his lover, wants to have children comes into his life, but of course his perennially barren spouse does not go down without a fairly brutal and ultimately venomously vindictive fight. Indubitably one of Ferreri’s most shamelessly aesthetically pleasing features as a cinematic work where the camera is practically magnetized to Wiazemsky’s largely vacant but oftentimes subtly forlorn stare and the haunting organic pulchritude of a desolate beach that is eventually cursed with the corpse of a gigantic whale, The Seed of Man is questionably one of the most soothing and serene yet simultaneously cynical dystopian flicks ever made as a fairly idiosyncratic cinematic work that sometimes feels like an attempt at reconciling the films of George A. Romero with that of Pier Paolo Pasolini, albeit with a slight lowbrow ‘proletarian’ influence that is typical of latter’s sole protégé Sergio Citti.  Of course, in the end, the film can only be adequately classified as a Marco Ferreri flick, as the anarchic auteur invented his own readily identifiable brand of cinema just as virtually all great filmmakers do.

 The Seed of Man begins with a medium shot of a fairly attractive guido gal holding a somewhat creepy homemade human-size blonde doll and stating directly to the viewer in a somewhat contrived fashion, “If you see signs of this color, it means that area is infected. Yellow means plague. But can we be sure that we shall never see these signs? We’ll be right back.” The little lady warning about the precarious nature of the color yellow is ultimately revealed to be a TV announcer that the film’s protagonists, young couple Cino (Marzio Margine of Fernando Di Leo’s I ragazzi del massacre (1969) aka Naked Violence) and Dora (Anne Wiazemsky of her then-husband Godard’s La chinoise (1967) and Pasolini’s Teorema (1968)), are somewhat apathetically watching on a large television screen while they enjoy a fancy meal at a diner. When Cino remarks while eating, “If we leave now, we’ll be back home by tonight,” the two decide to abruptly leave the diner and head home in their atrociously goofy orange jeep, but little do the protagonists realize that they will never reach their desired destination, as a pernicious unidentified biological plague will ultimately irreparably change the course of their lives in just a couple of brief moments. While sitting in their singularly aesthetically revolting automobile, Cino notices a phallic-shaped plane in the sky and pedantically remarks to Dora, “Look, that’s a Sikorsky ’61, old model. It’s got 12 seats. They don’t manufacture them anymore. In the new models, the style has been completely changed,” thus revealing the male protagonist's affinity for historical preservation and technology, which will be the focus of his life later in the film.  As Dora demonstrates while barely paying attention to Cino, she could care less about his interests, which will only become more obvious as the film progresses.  In other words, Cino and Dora make for a rather shitty couple, which only becomes all the more apparent when they are forced to totally rely on one another as a result of an apocalyptic scenario.

 In a somewhat eerie scene that is arguably symbolic of the precarious nature of civilization and how it can disappear with the blink of an eye, the couple drives through a tunnel and by the time they reach the other side, their car radio has cut out and most of the country side is covered in corpses. Indeed, when the two pass a school bus that is curiously sitting in the middle of a highway, they decide to investigate and are startled to discover that driver and all the children inside the vehicle are dead. Not long after passing the bus, an emergency helicopter forces Cino’s car off the road and the couple are examined by doctors at a checkpoint where piles of bloody of corpses, including a fairly bloody little boy, are being burnt with blowtorches. Ultimately, the head doctor checks the two for diseases (he seems especially interested in learning about Dora's sexual habits, or seemingly lack thereof), gives them a pill that is supposedly “a concentrate against leprosy, cholera, typhus, and plague,” and then tells them to find a new home in the local area. Before they leave, the doctor gives them a shot and remarks, “Remember that the plague that killed one-third of the Europeans in the second half of the 14th century was insignificant compared to what we are experiencing now.” As a rather indulgent young woman with a pathological sweet tooth as demonstrated by the fact that she has dozens of lollipops wrapped around her neck and is depicted for a good portion of the beginning of the film sucking on a sucker, Dora naturally opts to spend her remaining change at a bubblegum vending that is strangely located at the checkpoint. Unfortunately for the protagonists, their car and precious bottles of whiskey are confiscated by the military men at the checkpoint, thus they are forced to walk during their search for their new home and must accept a future where dipsomania is just not a realistic option. 

While roaming the beach in pursuit of a new place to call home, Cino and Dora get lucky and discover a fairly large and startlingly scenic two-story beach house that seems like it is located at the edge of the end of the world. Somewhat humorously, they find the lifeless corpse of the house owner (as fittingly portrayed by auteur Marco Ferreri) sitting in a chair outside the front door, as if the man was admiring the natural beauty of the ocean when he succumbed to the plague. As indicated by the large library of books, various taxidermied animals, and assortment of scientific instruments that are discovered by the couple in the house, the previous owner was a reclusive intellectual of sorts. Needless to say, Dora is quite happy when she discovers a cabinet full of fancy dresses in the house and thus dresses accordingly, though, as the film progresses, vulgar rubber military fatigue style overalls seem to become one of her favorite wardrobes. During the first night at the house, Cino and Dora watch a TV broadcast that reveals that all of London is on fire and where the announcer somewhat melodramatically states, “This footage speaks for itself. A whole civilization destroyed. We’ll have to start over again.” Somewhat humorously, there is also footage of the Pope repenting to god while dying, stating while seeming terribly guilty about the life that he has lived, “I rather die than offend you.” Of course, compared to the rest of the world, it seems that Cino and Dora have lucked out in many regards as they have a splendorous house full of various fancy trinkets and knickknacks, but, as one can expect from a Ferreri flick, nature and especially human nature, will ultimately get the best of them in the end.

When Dora notices a gigantic object floating in the sky while looking through an antique telescope, she and Cino wrongly believe that it a plane that has come to rescue them, so naturally they are quite disheartened when they eventually realize that their ostensible savior is actually a gigantic blimp in the shape of a Pepsi-Cola bottle that reads “Merry Christmas.” In a scene that seems to epitomize Dora’s sort of passive nihilism and overall seemingly nonsensical attitude towards life, she states when the large blimp begins to float away, “The bottle is floating away. What a pity, it was pretty.” As for Cino, he, quite unlike vapid philistine Dora, has a more practical and even sometimes romantic view of life and really cherishes European man’s singular contributions to technology and civilization as indicated by his obsessional reading of books on rocket science and space travel. Indeed, as demonstrated by the fact that he wears the dead man's clothes and even grows the same sort of medieval facial hair, Cino begins to adopt the identity of the previous owner of the house, thus indicating in a somewhat symbolic way that he, quite unlike Dora, is a staunch traditionalist that sees culture and history as something that is linear and is inherited. Using the previous owner’s books, Cino starts a garden and even manages to cure Dora with medical herbs that he has grown when she becomes sick. For his efforts, Dora pays Cino a backhanded compliment about how she is surprised that he was able to harvest such herbs and then coldly ignores him after he sensitively states to her, “I want a child.” Indeed, for reasons that are never made totally clear, Dora refuses to have children, though one suspects that it is the result of her being a thoroughly spoiled and self-centered modern woman who just can’t bother to suffer through childbirth or make the effort to be a loving mother. While Cino will clearly do anything for her, Dora refuses to budge when it comes to her stern antinatalism, as if she considers reproduction to be the gravest of mortal sins.

One sunny day while beating a wild black hog to death, Dora is startled to see a group of masked horsemen dressed in all-black approach her property. Rather pathetically, both Cino and Dora immediately submit to the somewhat enigmatic horsemen by passively raising their hands in the air as if they expect to be executed, though luckily the worries are ultimately revealed to be in vain. Led by a strangely effete, slender and pale man with dark curly hair named Major Devotis who curiously carries the bright red revolver with white bold polka dots from Ferreri’s previous film Dillinger è Morto (1969) aka Dillinger Is Dead and later also featured in the auteur's anti-western Don't Touch The White Woman! (1974), the sort of ‘Horsemen of the Post-Apocalypse,’ who all seem like gay repressed holy men types, are revealed to be the new leaders of the government (or as Devotis stoically states, “We are the State Administrative Service”). Not surprisingly, Major Devotis’ right-hand man is an older but similarly effeminate priest that has a giant crucifix symbol on the front of his black robe.  As men with strikingly sullen feminine faces, they are the sort of rare men that could pass as women if they dressed in drag and one can only speculate that Ferreri decided to use these uniquely unforgettable actors to insinuate that government and religion are oftentimes ruled over by gay men that have no interest in women or children.  After the priest berates Cino because Dora is not pregnant, Devotis declares, “The world needs new inhabitants. All women must be fertilized. That’s an order.” After the couple is forced to enter their names and provide a bloody fingerprint in a giant three-foot-long leather-bound black book with a lock, Cino proudly declares, “I haven’t had children yet…But at least I had an idea that I think everybody will find interesting” and then shows the horsemen how he has taken upon himself to transform his home into a sort of makeshift museum, with items like a portable TV, refrigerator, gold watch, piece of Parmesan cheese, etc. being on display as historical remnants of the pre-apocalyptic world. While his fairly flat affect gives no indication of his true emotions, Major Devotis seems fairly impressed with Cino’s work and not only gives the protagonist a “memento of Florence” to add to his collection in the form of an ancient painting of a stoic blonde woman, but also appoints him as the “Museum Curator” of the new post-apocalyptic world. Cino is so happy with his new title that he informs Major Devotis that he will be putting up a sign in his museum that reads, “Major Devotis Foundation.” After pulling his red revolver on a beautiful blonde whore that is traveling with his group who attempts to steal a gold watch that is on display in a scenario that further hints at the character's latent homosexuality, Major Devotis and his men leave just as abruptly as they once came, though the priest warns Cino before getting on his horse, “Dear young man, there is darkness, there is lightning, and you two are alone, but remember, a child. You need to have a child.”   Naturally, as a man that clearly respects law and order, Cino's plans to abide with the priest's fairly reasonable request.

Not long after the horsemen ride away into the sunset, the protagonists discover a large whale corpse on their beach that makes Cino quite happy but completely petrifies poor dunce Dora, who complains to her beau in regard to the rotting sea beast that “It will only bring us misfortune!” and then pleads to her lover, “Let’s lock ourselves in the house. It’s cold. I’m scared.” When Cino asks Dora after joyously climbing on top of the whale corpse, “Why aren’t you happy? It’s the white whale. It’s Moby Dick. It’s Pinocchio’s whale,” she replies in a fairly bitchy but ultimately quite prophetic fashion, “Soon, because of the beast, we won’t be able to live here anymore.” Not surprisingly, Dora’ s perturbing premonitions seem to be not unfounded, as a strange foreign woman (Annie Girardot of Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and Haneke's The Piano Teacher (2001)) soon randomly shows up on the beach while Cino is painting a sketch of the dead whale and then proceeds to seduce the assumedly hopelessly horny young male protagonist. Naturally, when Dora comes home after spending the day hunting a rabbit and overhears the foreign woman state, “It’s an absolutely charming shelter. And what about these clothes? But maybe it’s a dream,” she has good reason to be concerned as she knows that she is now in competition for Cino. In fact, the foreign woman actually has the gall to brag that she is a “thief” that “emptied three stores” while taking a bubble bath in front of both Dora and Cino in a scene that reveals that the post-apocalyptic femme fatale is quite confident with her body and has no qualms about exploiting it in her quest to steal the male protagonist from his frigid girlfriend.  At one point, Cino even goes so far as to hint that he is interested in the foreign woman and her womb after stating to her after she asks him to take a picture of her and Dora, “No. I only have two pictures left. And I’ll keep them for my child.” After all, at this point, Cino is desperate for a child and Dora is just too pigheaded to give him one, so the male protagonist has to keep his options open, not realizing that his beloved will literally kill for him if she is forced to.

Notably, the foreigner woman symbolically helps herself to a wig and fancy dress that she finds in the house in a rather cunning attempt to make her seem like a classy broad that is fit to be a mother, thus representing how women tend to wear a sort of figurative costume when attempting to appeal to males, who are always dumb enough to fall for such disguises (indeed, as Esther Vilar once wrote, “A woman [...] is the author of her own transformation and produces femininity by means of cosmetics, hair style, and different components: emphasis on secondary sexual characteristics and distancing herself by means of masks.  Woman makes use of various types of masks in order to make the difference between herself and a given man as conspicuous as possible.  The first component serves to make her desirable to man, the second to make her mysterious to him.  She herself thus creates the equivocal, unknown 'opposite sex,' making it easier for him to accept his enslavement.  Thanks to the wide range of possible transformations each woman can offer a man [...] she keeps him in a state of constant bewilderment.  While he is still trying to find yesterday's woman in today's, she gains time to achieve her own ends.  She will maneuver the man into an untenable position, all the time skillfully distracting his attention from the stench of rotting mind beneath the pleasing mask.”). Of course, the foreign woman is far from the elegant and cultivated bourgeois wife type that she attempts to disguise herself as, yet book-smart beta-boy Cino seems entirely oblivious to her fairly glaring aesthetic deceits. Indeed, one night while the protagonists are sleep, the foreign woman knocks on their bedroom door and manages to make her way into their bed after crying in a less than believable fashion, “Can I come in? I’m so scared. I’m all alone downstairs.” While lying in bed with the couple, the foreign woman strategically massages Dora until she falls asleep and then fucks Cino in the hope she will be impregnated with his seed. The next day while Cino is working in his study, the foreign woman successfully hints that she would be a better wife than Dora by showing genuine interest in his studies. On top of that, the foreign woman declares, “I’ve been thinking about last night” and then gives Cino a present in the form of a pacifier, thereupon letting the protagonist know that she is fully committed to having his child. Unbeknownst to the foreign woman, Dora was only pretending to be asleep when she dared to fuck Cino while lying next to her and thus fully realizes the cunning homewrecker's unsavory intentions. Indeed, when the foreign woman eventually attempts to beat Dora to death with a stick, Dora is ready to fight back and not only manages to strangle her nemesis to death, but also goes to the effort of dismembering her body with an axe. In a sort of sick celebration of her defeat over the foreign woman in a scene that wickedly demonstrates that Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, Dora cooks her corpse for dinner and then serves it to Cino, who remarks while unwittingly savoring his quasi-mistress' flesh, “This is good meat. It is very sweet.”

Towards the end of the film, Cino gets so desperate to have a child that he builds a naked woman with sand and then simulates copulation with it. While Dora witnesses the particularly pathetic sight of Cino’s sand sensuality, she lets him know that she still refuses to have a child and then forces him to take sanctuary with her at a nearby building this is full of dummies since she is afraid that the beach house will continue to give them bad luck due to the dead whale. In fact, Dora tells Cino that she does not even care if he stays with her. When a virtual army of bloodthirsty vultures transforms the dead whale into nothing more than a sort of abstract skeleton formation, Dora eventually agrees to move back into the beach house because she is finally convinced the curse has been lifted. Using the dozens upon dozens of dummies that he found in the nearby building that they temporarily lived in, Cino creates what Dora describes as a “dummy cemetery” by laying the somewhat creepy mannequins on the beach in parallel rows outside of their home, as if he hopes they will somehow come alive and provide him with company. Finally completely fed up with Dora’s pathological frigidness, Cino comes up with a pathetic rape strategy and decides to drug his lover’s wine and ricotta cheese and then insert his semen inside her while she is knocked out cold. Indeed, before penetrating her assumedly less than wet main vein, Cino writes in a journal, “Today I’m going to sow, I hope, the seed of man” and then proceeds to quasi-ritualistically remove the clothes from Dora's lifeless body. When Dora complains a couple days later that her stomach hurts and that she is hungry, Cino smiles and eventually brags, “You’re pregnant. I sowed you.” Needless to say, Dora is not happy with her involuntary pregnancy and starts chasing after Cino while yelling “We didn’t have the right,” but the male protagonist is just too damn happy to care and instead proudly chants, “The seed of man has sprouted.” Considerably upset, Dora proceeds to lie on the beach in a somewhat fetal position while holding her womb while Cino jumps around her in a jubilant fashion and proudly shouts, “The seed of man has sprouted! All the children! The children of the children! I sowed the seed! I sowed the seed! The seed of man has sprouted.” Ultimately, in the end, Cino looks like a pathetic braggart who was too quick to celebrate, as both he and Dora are both killed when at least one of them inexplicably spontaneously explodes.

In many ways, The Seed of Man is one of the most patently pessimistic and culturally cynical dystopian films ever made, as a work that not only makes human existence after an Armageddon-like scenario seem patently pointless and completely undesirable, but also dares to make a scathingly sardonic mockery of such reproductive ambitions, as if human existence is nothing more than a cycle of nihilistic progress that is built upon nothingness upon nothingness without end. Indeed, while watching the film, I certainly got the image in my mind of auteur Marco Ferreri as a sort of guido Joker who laughs and daintily sips wine while watching the entire world burn. In his depiction of a woman that refuses to fuck and make babies in a post-apocalyptic realm where repopulation is an unquestionable necessity, Ferreri hints that the world, and especially the Occident, ended long before the plague even happened as a result of some sort of malignant metaphysical affliction that had completely consumed both the Faustian spirit and collective unconscious, with the surviving humans being mere hollow shells of their former selves.  Indeed, one could certainly argue that, in a sense, the characters are not unlike the relics from the museum displays that male protagonist Cino collects, as they are mere anachronistic remnants of a decidedly dead civilization that only exists today in a purely material post-decadent corpse-like form. Interestingly, in his later work Bye Bye Monkey, which almost feels like a pseudo-Warholian reworking of The Seed of Man (notably, the lead character played by Gérard Depardieu resembles Joe Dallesandro) and even features the beach-ridden corpse of King Kong in place of a dead whale, Ferreri would do somewhat of a 180 in terms of the sexes and pretty much solely blame man as opposed to woman for being too weak and ill-equipped to sire children. Of course, then again, one could argue that Wiazemsky’s character did not want to have children because her boy toy was too big of a bourgeois pussy, hence why she is depicted hunting while he is sitting around the house reading books. If one thing is for sure, it is that the female protagonist, who is somewhat like a frog female equivalent to Melville’s Bartleby in terms of her somewhat deleterious campaign of passive resistance against pregnancy, is symbolic of the fact that, at least on a primitive level, it is ultimately the choice of womankind where the fate of humanity leads, as she holds the biological keys to the future (after all, it is no mere coincidence that Ferreri would later direct a film entitled Il futuro è donna (1984) aka The Future Is Woman). Indeed, as the anti-feminist Jewess Esther Vilar once wrote in her classic text The Manipulated Man (1971) aka Der Dressierte Mann, “The basis of any economy is a system of barter. Therefore, someone demanding a service must be able to offer of equal value in exchange for it. But as a man must fulfill his sexual desires and, since he tends to want to possess exclusive rights over one vagina, the prices have risen to an extortionate level. This has made it possible for women to follow a system of exploitation which puts the most exploitative robber barons to shame. And no man remains exempt. The concept of femininity is essentially sociological, not biological. Even a homosexual is unlikely to escape without paying his dues. The partner whose sexual drive is less developed quickly discovers the weak points of the other, whose drive is more intense and manipulates him accordingly. It will always be the woman, or the ‘female’ partner in any homosexual relationship, who exploits the man: for to be a female means to be undersexed.”

Of course, what makes Wiazemsky’s character so disturbing and even horrifying than the sort of archetypal female described by Vilar is that she is so superbly stingy that she won’t give up her pussy for any price to the point where she brutally murders another woman just so that she can maintain her largely platonic ‘romance’ with her hapless boyfriend. Judging by the breeding habits of contemporary European women, one can only come to the conclusion after watching the insanely ironically titled work The Seed of Man that the apocalypse has already happened and most Europeans just do not realize it yet, or as Francis Parker Yockey once foresaw in his book The Enemy of Europe (1953), “The Europe of 2050 will be essentially the same as that of 1950, viz. a museum to be looted by barbarians, a historical curiosity for sightseers from the colonies; an odd assortment of operetta-states; a reservoir of human material standing at the disposal of Washington and Moscow; a loan market for New York financiers; a great beggars' colony, bowing and scraping before the American tourists.” Undoubtedly, the fact that Ferreri was able to make such a cute and sweet dame like Wiazemsky seem like such an insufferable cunt to the point that you would not even want to fuck her just goes to show the director's genius as a filmmaker.  Indeed, I certainly cannot even guess how many beauteous blondes I have met that only provoked contempt and hostility in me due to their post-feminist mentalities and complete and utter lack of feminine virtues, hence why so many contemporary American and European males have given up and have begun settling on women from Eastern Europe and the third world.  Of course, the fact that the male protagonist of the film passively tolerates such an attitudes indicates that males are just as hopelessly despoiled as their female counterparts.  Indubitably more relevant today than when it was first released, The Seed of Man demonstrates in a darkly humorous absurdist fashion that Europa and the rest of the West is inhabited by revoltingly entitled and frigid navel-gazing cunts that lack even the most fundamental motherly nurturing qualities yet expect handsome princes and pathological passive pushovers and cuckolds that would probably just stand around and do nothing if they saw their girlfriend being raped.  In that sense, I can see why Ferreri would be cynical about the prospect of surviving humans attempting to rebuild after an apocalyptic scenario.  After all, it is horrifying to imagine a futuristic museum where the displays include a pink iPhone, Eminem CD, Schindler's List Blu-ray, three-foot-long rubber dildo, a bottle of Viagra, and Afro-Sheen, among other worthless consumer objects that epitomize the innate soullessness of the modern world.  Post-apocalyptic considerations aside, if there is anything that can be learned from The Seed of Man, it is that one should not bother with any woman that does not support your goals and interests and/or fails to provide a special wet place for you seed as she is probably a parasite and psychic vampire that will drain you of everything yet give nothing back in return aside from the occasional phony smile.

-Ty E