COMING SOON

COMING SOON is a documentary out of the Czech Republic that professes to address zoophile issues in a modern society.  It follows a small organization called EFA (Equality For All) that acts as an animal and zoophile rights activist group.  What the film is advertised as is a “groundbreaking push for bestiality rights”.  What it actually is is a long and veiled string of pointing and laughing that does nothing of the sort.

It opens with a masked ceremony in which a woman is being married to a horse, right off the bat depicting zoophilia – not even bestiality, yet – as something inhuman and disturbing.  No faces are seen, and the picture itself fits right at the bottom of uncanny valley.  Then it goes on to introduce said woman, now quite old, as she pontificates on how God made animals superior to man, with “cuddly” souls unblemished by mankind’s faults.

This, we find, is one of the film’s sanest moments.  It goes on so that we meet a man who believes his (human) wife was reincarnated in the form of a pig (which he was about to slaughter, being a butcher); a radical vegan who equates meat-eating to the Holocaust; an Arab who claims to have a forty-seven-centimeter-long phallus; and a fellow who believes himself to be a satyr in the body of a man, and who has and wears the outfit 24/7 to prove it (complete with yet another oversized penis).  In short, every single person interviewed is at least a little messed, and at most… well, the sky’s the limit as far as batshit insanity goes.

To qualify the schizophrenic cast is a schizophrenic presentation: there is no real continuity in the film at all.  We bounce from one subject to the other without so much as a conversational string to bind the subjects, even within a single interview.  Even within a single sentence.  The interviewees attempt to explain their arguments in consistently the worst possible way, whether it be changing the subject to something completely unrelated (like a long montage of people on the street being asked whether rape or murder is worse, or a slideshow of images of animal abuse) – or else to some wacky spiritual or religious debate.

And boy, do those debates crop up often.  From the very beginning, where God is mentioned, people go on to talk about souls, then to talk about some skewed version of the story of Eden, and then go straight to some of the most idiotic New Age tripe I've ever heard, filled with inaccurate historical references (the ancient Greeks approved of bestiality, right?) to a several-minute-long take of an elf-eared “shaman” shambling around a fire and making screeching noises.  But that isn’t where it stops.

This film, as I said, was made in The Czech Republic.  That’s right, the same The Czech Republic that, as of the year of the film’s production, is the 5^th least religious country in the world.  Meanwhile, we have these neo-pagans, these conversations about God and the Bible and spirits, a porn star who used to live in a monastery, and all sorts of other things that, quite frankly, I don’t believe one would find nearly so often in the Czech Republic.  But of course, nothing says, “nutjob,” like radical religiosity, and more and more we realize that this is the film's true goal.

And to cap it all: on the odd occasion that people are actually talking about 'zoophilia' rather than spirituality, vegetarianism, radical politics, or the time they lost their job at the zoo for trying to abduct a zebra, they are in fact always only talking about bestiality: about the sexual aspect.  There is no romance, there is no emotionality, and there is no humility that, in my opinion, should accompany any conversation regarding sexual topics simply out of respect for not only the dominant culture but for your partner and your mutual relationship.  It’s just one oversexed, delusional, incoherent piece of nonsense after another.

So, are you convinced that this documentary is in fact a mockumentary?  That much of it was no doubt staged, that these things depicted do not in fact exist?  Well, now’s when we get to the unfortunate part: that is, there are serious aspects in the film, or at least one serious aspect.  Even if it was entirely faked, it’s nothing short of slander that it’s included in such a heaping pile of tripe.  I’ve actually cropped out this part for you, so you can watch what it is I’m talking about without having to muster through the rest of the charade.  I warn you, though, that if you are particularly sensitive to scenes of physical abuse (of a human woman) or to gore, you may want to skip watching this and simply take my word for it.  Nevertheless, I recommend you have a look at it if you are interested in this issue.

 

This scene is horrifically different from every ludicrous section of the film both before and after it, and it comes right smack in the middle.  The most obvious difference between it and the rest is the emotionality: other individuals interviewed report having harrowing experiences, but this woman is the only one that seems at all emotional about it - supported by the fact that she is the one of the only interviewees for which subtitles are used rather than voice dubbing.  She is also literally the only person who talked at length about her emotional relationship with the animal.  On a related note, she is furthermore very easily the only one to say next to nothing about her sexual relationship: I would not be surprised if I could show someone this clip and tell them that she and the bull never actually did anything sexual.  She’s the only one who spoke with any sort of hesitation or modesty.  She’s the only one who never once expressed some radical viewpoint about the world or the relationships between people and animals.  And she never appears in the film again.

She’s also the only one who talked about what’s really important - what this film said it was setting out to do in the first place: zoophilia in society today.  What happened to her is horrendous.  I don’t believe I’m even only speaking for myself when I say that, provided this young woman’s story is true, her ability to press on in life is nothing short of incredible.  If it’s not true, though – and here’s where I start to get mad – it actually is anyway, because this sort of thing happens in real life.  It doesn’t matter one lick if the entire scene was completely scripted, because the reality of it is not.  So why the hell are these filmmakers shoving this comparatively reasonable woman’s incredibly poignant story into the middle of what is inextricably otherwise a complete farce?

I don’t have an answer to this, and it truly is infuriating.  Imagine if you will if someone decided to make a film about the trials homosexuals in some places are still going through. (To any homosexuals reading this who may not be totally on my side here, I apologize for using your demographic as an example.)  Imagine if in the middle of this film was a man telling his story about how he escaped a mob of neo-Nazis descending upon the home in which he lived with his partner.  He says that he only escaped after bearing witness to the bastards stabbing his boyfriend to death and scattering his bloody limbs across the room in which he was in.  Now imagine if the other hour and a half of this film was full of gays and lesbians, all with IQs of less than eighty: talking about how much they love fucking, giving obscure references to Wicca and Gnosticism that somehow prove that homosexuality is superior to heterosexuality, dreaming of building a world in which homosexuality is totally approved of so that, by natural process, everyone would be gay, and whatever other nonsense one might conceive.  How would you feel about the filmmakers?  How would you feel about this man depicted who had been forced to watch as his significant other was brutally murdered?  Now, how do you think the rest of the world would feel about how this film depicts homosexuality?  How about, again, that one section?  I’ll give you the answer: it would be called the most offensive shit of the decade, it would be banned in many nations, and its producers would be sued into cardboard boxes in back alleys.  A sheer farce on homosexuality may be called offensive, and may get a few death threats; but that insertion of something that is truly serious as though it’s just another part of the parody would mean the literal end of careers.

Why isn’t that the case here?  Why, instead, is this mockumentary lauded as “funny and thought-provoking” by so many critics?  Simply, it’s because people hate zoophiles.  It doesn’t take much to put two and two together: this film has anything in mind but the intent of sparking a zoophilic rights movement.  It’s just one more nail in the coffin of such a rights movement, whether inadvertently or otherwise.  As though we needed more media talking about how disturbed, antisocial, diseased, and vapid zoophiles are, we now have an entire movie about it – and it’s the one that says it’s for equality.  This is all we’ve got; it’s the closest we have to anyone in the mainstream media advocating understanding and acceptance of romantic human-animal relations.  Right in the middle of it is perfect material that might, in any other context, win hearts; inserted for just another squirm and a giggle.

COMING SOON is a problem, and it’s made possible by a group that professes to want to remove these problems.  EFA, also, has never achieved anything of worth; it’s only given this travesty of a documentary its support.  So quite honestly, fuck them both.  Yes, I’m going to close with that.  And to you, reader, I have a bit of perhaps a bit tangential advice: not only in the realm of controversial subjects such as this, but on all topics, do be sure you consider the origins and the motives of the published media you consume.  Consider to whom you give your support.  You may find this isn’t the only instance in which people proclaim one thing, but do the exact opposite.

September 2012: EFA, also, has never achieved anything of worth; it’s only given this travesty of a documentary its support - after it was filmed.  That's right, EFA doesn't actually exist: the website was established following the film, and there is no such organization in the Czech Republic.  Those who call themselves EFA on the site's 1990s-style guestbook are gullible people who found the place after COMING SOON.  The documentary was in fact created using actors entirely for the sake of trying to make something that is both convincing and filled with ironic humour, based on my conversations with individuals who had followed its production as well as my own looking into the dates of EFA's site and organizations in the Czech Republic.  So there you have it.