PicoBlog

General anesthesia sucks. Obviously I’m glad it exists, but as an experience there’s not much to recommend it: you’re out, and then in an instant then you’re back. Your whole body gets thrown off for days as you readjust from having been in a controlled near-death state for a couple of hours. All the comedown, none of the high.

Of course, anesthesia — and the medical practice of painkilling in general — isn’t supposed to be about pleasure. It’s about minimizing discomfort, not having a good time. Which isn’t to say that you can’t have one while you’re getting cut up. I mean, Paris Hilton was in a movie about it. It’s called REPO! The Genetic Opera, and it’s a beautiful disaster.

Hilton’s character, Amber Sweet, is the daughter of a biotech magnate whose innovations in organ growth and transplantation have made him the most powerful man in the world. The film is sort of about biopower and capitalism, sort of about fatherhood, and sort of about revenge. Did I mention it’s a musical where Anthony Stewart Head puppeteers a body he’s ripped the organs out of in a song about how somebody’s gotta forcibly remove delinquent debtors’ guts?

Nobody really has any clear motivation in this movie — all we get about Hilton’s character is basically this: she’s obsessed with her body, she’s a disappointment to her father, and she’s intensely jealous of another woman in the spotlight. So she does what any insecure, rich girl would do: she reinvents herself and embarks on a series of surgical interventions in her quest to be a star.

There’s a drug in the universe of REPO! called Zydrate. It’s a super-powerful anesthetic that glows blue for some reason, and is seemingly necessary to accomplish the frequent surgeries and transplants that occur in the film. There’s a subplot that’s never really explored where the narrator character, The Graverobber — portrayed by REPO! creator Terence Zdunich as a kind of nonthreatening drug-dealing bad boy — extracts an inferior form of Zydrate from corpses. And there’s a whole musical number about the drug, titled “Zydrate Anatomy.”

Like so many aspects of REPO!, Zydrate Anatomy is confusing and unpleasant. I have a feeling that Zdunich has hundreds of pages of worldbuilding that explains a lot of this stuff. But what landed onscreen is a poorly-written song in which Amber, flanked by musclebound goons in leather pants, fashion harnesses, and sunglasses, begs the Graverobber to shoot her up in a filthy alley in front of a teen girl.

The Graverobber explains that Amber is “addicted to the knife,” but the whole setup is kind of ambiguous. Is Amber into the Graverobber, the drug, or the surgery? The film’s answer is basically “yes.” Zydrate Anatomy badly wants to portray surgery as something sexy, if slightly trashy and self-destructive. It does this by deploying hot nurses in latex outfits, stilettos and weird face masks straddling a patient who isn’t in a clinical coma but high as fuck on magic blue superdrugs.

In all, the scene isn’t nearly as visceral as the aforementioned one in which a character tears a man’s organs out of his body. Still, I admire the effort. Because even if it shies away from the actual facts of surgery, it still messes with a lot of our ideas about medicine, pleasure, and the body. Through its over-the-top depiction of surgery as sexy, it invites us to wonder: what if medicine wasn’t so scary? What if we had an aesthetics of our insides in place of our current fear and disavowal of them? What if we could love our guts?

REPO! isn’t a “good” movie, but it is relentless in its confusion of the division between the body as functional and as a site of enjoyment. It depicts a world where getting cut up can be a good time and where the internal structures of the body are as aestheticized as the external. That this is also a world in which these facts have been incorporated into a dystopian capitalist nightmare where corporations own organs is perhaps the least interesting thing about it.

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