Review of Body of Lies (2008) by Chads. — 14 Oct 2008

The lonely person on the other end of the line wants to believe that the phone sex operator has her undivided attention on him alone. But that's just not the case. In Robert Altman's "Short Cuts", the jaded sex industry worker(played by Jennifer Jason Leigh), diapers her baby as she talks dirty to a client.

Likewise, Ed Hoffman(Russell Crowe) achieves a seamless synchronicity between his professional and domestic life, too, tending to his young daughter while he's in communique with Roger Ferris(Leonardo DiCaprio), the man in the field, at the mercy of a disengaged partner, jaded, just like the sex hotline caller in the Altman film(based on the Raymond Carver short story collection).

Film theorist Linda Williams, author of the essay "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess", explicates on how victimized women elicit a corresponding fluid in three interconnected genres of film: semen(pornography), blood(horror), and tears(melodrama).

In "Short Cuts", the fetishized release of a fluid is coordinated by an empowered woman; the phone sex operator instigates the happy ending, not the man. Likewise, while Ed is obviously not a woman, he assumes the feminine side of the gender binary, since Roger is a man of action(masculine), not talk.

Losing semen can't kill a man like how losing blood can. Ed's relative indifference for his partner has the potential to result in an unhappy ending(death, unlike the happy ending; the little death); the real-life horror of being martyred by the enemy at some undisclosed location.

Contrary to the popular(and condescending) notion that a woman could never start a war, the primary quality associated with traditional(or is that reactionary) womanhood(femininity), until recently(as women in combat became more prevalent, therefore unfixing the masculine/feminine binary), has been the catalyst behind wars since time immemorial, when people like Ed stayed behind and allowed the real men do the dirty work.

It's even worse here, since Ed gives Roger his marching orders in the informal setting of his home. Like a housewife, perhaps? In "Body of Lies", through a multitude of intertextual prisms, the filmmaker unconsciously suggests that the final destination point of the film body is not exclusive to the tyranny of male objectification.