A high heel, jammed into a human mouth, forever
Sean T. Collins on The Hunting Wives
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Luke O’Neil
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Heil If You’re Horny!
by Sean T. Collins
“If you run [for governor], everything changes. You really want people looking at the way you have fun? The way we have fun?”
“Oh, hell, people don’t care about that anymore. They don’t want a Boy Scout, they want a man!”
—from The Hunting Wives
The libidinal appeal of fascism is a perversely powerful motivator. The thrill of exerting brute force against the weak is formidable and irresistible enough for some people — a sort of death’s-head hedonism that grants its practitioners a nigh-orgasmic sense of autonomy not through giving or receiving physical pleasure, but through inflicting physical pain. Seen in this light, fascism is the ultimate form of liberation. It sets you free not, or not only, from propriety, but from our shared humanity itself.
Artists, however, have long taken “the libidinal appeal of fascism” more literally. Beginning in the 1970s, an entire cycle of art films that eroticized agents of the Axis powers — for varying purposes and to varying ends — flourished, made largely by filmmakers from those countries themselves.
Lina Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties shows an Italian tough guy (Giancarlo Giannini) whose cavalier assumptions about his own machismo are destroyed by the war, and by a sexually predatory female concentration camp guard (Shirley Stoler) who assaults him after he is incarcerated for desertion. Nagisa Ōshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence uses the unstated sexual obsession of a Japanese officer (Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Ryuichi Sakamoto) with a British prisoner of war (David Bowie) to show how racist assumptions about the otherized enemy are often shot through with a desire so intense it is transmuted into hatred.
Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter depicts the rekindling of a sexual relationship between an SS officer (Dirk Bogarde) and the much younger concentration camp prisoner (Charlotte Rampling) he repeatedly raped until she warmed to him, and he to her. It explores the way we derive pleasure from our worst traumas, and how we excuse our own crimes by sheltering them under love’s penumbra. Most infamously of all, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, by the martyred director Pier Paolo Pasolini, reduces fascism’s entire political program to the sexual torture of teenagers by a quartet of middle-aged grotesques. Even beyond the metaphor, one need look no further than Jeffrey Epstein’s guest lists or Donald Trump’s cabinet appointees to understand the truth behind Pasolini’s scatalogical metaphor.
I promise you, from the bottom of my heart, that The Hunting Wives isn’t doing anything nearly this interesting. Adapted by Rebecca Cutter from the novel by May Cobb, this Netflix soap hit the top of the streamer’s opaque Top 10 list this summer and got a lot of people, critics included, buzzing happily about their new guilty pleasure.
The show stars Brittany Snow as Sophie O’Neil, a Boston (Cambridge, actually, she specifies) native who moves to Texas when her architect husband (Evan Jonigkeit) lands a job with right-wing oil baron Jed Banks (Dermot Mulroney). Sophie, who is recovering from the trauma of killing someone while driving drunk — poor her, right? — quickly falls for Margo (Malin Åkerman), Jed’s beautiful and flirtatious wife.
As Sophie ingratiates herself with her new crush and the show’s eponymous circle of gun-totin’, God-fearin’, beer-sluggin’, affair-havin’ girlfriends, Sophie is drawn into the murder of a teenage girl similarly caught up in the Hunting Wives’ psychosexual shenanigans. Twists, turns, and topless scenes galore ensue.
The show is not without its charms; sex scenes between Malin Åkerman and Brittany Snow are foremost among them if you’re at all oriented in that direction. Even if you’re not, there’s Brad (George Ferrier), Margo’s 18-year-old boytoy; or Sheriff Jonny (Branton Boxed), the hulking, bearded lawman who enjoys taking it up the ass from his wife Callie (Jamie Ray Newman), Margo’s best friend and secret girlfriend; or Jed (hunk of long standing Mulroney), who does the whole Big Daddy thing.
The Hunting Wives is a deeply stupid show, made for stupid people, the kind who need a character to say “Signal? What are you sending encrypted messages for?” to make sure everyone out there in TV Land knows what Signal is. It’s a show in which a character does donuts in a parking lot while yelling “Woo! We’re doin’ donuts!” It’s Second Screen City, in other words.
Nevertheless, it provides an instructive example, if we are to answer a question that’s haunted me as a critic since Trump’s openly fascist third election campaign began: What’s sexy about these disgusting motherfuckers?
Seriously. The observation At least the Nazis dressed well has passed back and forth from offensive to banal many times, but the appeal of Dirk Bogarde in his full Hugo Boss kit, or Charlotte Rampling out of it, is clear enough. Ditto the contest of wills between world-historically good-looking art-rock icons Bowie and Sakamoto. I may be straight, but I’m only human, and as Gang of Four sang, I love a man in uniform.
The uniform adopted by today’s Nazis, by contrast, is sartorially risible. They wear camo in the middle of city streets in broad daylight. They hide their identities with the sunglasses you see the dads of the shittiest kids in your kid’s grade wearing. They compensate for a lack of physical fitness one usually associates with television critics by wearing skull-emblazoned neck gaiters, impairing their breathing as they unsuccessfully chase fleeing delivery guys.
Then look at the leadership. Nazi upper echelons have always been a haven for the most chinless Innsmouth-looking degenerates ever to claim to be a master race, this is true. To a man and woman, however, Trump and his reichsministers look like one of three things: octogenarian stroke victims, rejected Archer characters, or a Garbage Pail Kid named “Brain-Worm BOBBY.” Just when you think you’ve seen the limit of fascist hideousness, along come some real innovators in the space.
How do you sexualize a problem like MAGA, then? In part, you follow in the footsteps of the past and stack your cast with dimes is what you do, as discussed above. But the real secret is locating the animating impulse behind contemporary fascist sexuality: Hedonism for me, puritanism for thee.
Jed and Margo enjoy a life of unimaginable luxury and splendor compared to the vast majority of people in the history of the planet. As an oil magnate and Republican politician, Jed is determined to deny that luxury and splendor to as many other people as possible through a combination of economically and ecologically ruinous policies. You know, the usual.
But even as he’s fearmongering about immigrants — “personas malas,” as he puts it — and going to a megachurch and sharing the rest of the Texas’ characters constant, reflexive vitriol toward liberals and liberal policies, especially abortion, he’s living the life of an ancient sybarite. His wife bids him a fond goodnight while two escorts jerk him off in their jacuzzi. They share reports of their interests and conquests. The deal isn’t a fair one, of course — Jed is free to have sex with as many women as he wants; Margo is also free to have sex with as many women as he wants — but it’s substantially better than anything they’re willing to cut for anyone else in the state or the country.
Margo’s conquests range beyond the terms of the arrangement, however. For one thing, she has a passionate affair with Callie, unbeknownst to her husband, a gubernatorial candidate, and Callie’s husband, a sheriff with ambitions to be “the next Joe Arpaio.” (He acts like any other cop on TV, though; it’s a poorly written show.) Catching feelings, or encouraging others to catch them, is not how this is supposed to work.
For another, she’s fucking Brad, the son of Margo’s friend Jill (Katie Lowes) and her husband, the megachurch pastor. As with Callie, she’s shitting where she eats. She’s also fucking a man, which is expressly forbidden. Moreover, though this is never stated outright, in no way does it seem this relationship began with Brad’s 18th birthday.
This kind of double standard is endemic, even intrinsic, in these characters. The loose gun laws they institute, which enable them to concealed-carry and go on boar hunts for the ‘Gram, enable shootings and murders in their hometown that they race to blame on immigrants. As they conspicuously consume the fruits of Jed’s fossil-fuel labors, power outages plunge their town into darkness. They gasp with horror over the concept of abortion, a medical procedure they are more than happy to sneak off to have themselves when need be. They live lives of pornographic privilege.
Here, I think, we’ve located the core of Erotic MAGA: Not merely “if you’ve got it, flaunt it,” but “if you’ve got it and they don’t, flaunt it.” We see every day how fascism gives its adherents a license to steal, to kill, to behave like abominable children. Why wouldn’t it also give them permission to act like oversexed teenagers even as they move to rigidly police everyone’s sexuality? Why wouldn’t it allow them to commit the kind of sex crimes they luridly invent and pin on people they want to punish?
In reality, this has been borne out time and again. Virtually the entire MAGA leadership consists of legendary philanderers, serial sex pests, and bizarre messianic tech perverts, with an adjudicated rapist at the top. Elon Musk allegedly got a shiner from Stephen Miller for fucking his wife. Corey Lewandowski and Kristi Noem are an item. Laura Loomer is the Gatekeeper to Trump’s decrepit, senescent Keymaster.
MAGA politicians and pundits are famously pornbrained, from Jordan Peterson crying over milking fetish videos he believed were real CCP facilities to that “Nude Africa/Black Hitler” freak. Pedocon theory has been lab-tested and peer-reviewed. They are willing to burn the country to the fucking ground to block the release of the goddamn Epstein files! That’s a real thing that’s happening!
This is what Jed’s getting at in the quote that opens this essay, when he says right-wing voters no longer want do-gooders. As Matt Christman once wisely noted, the conservative trajectory is encapsulated in how they went from depicting Obama as the Joker as a pejorative to depicting Trump as the joker as a compliment.The Hunting Wives was written and takes place prior to the advent of Trump II, and the stakes are accordingly lower.
The instincts animating Margo and Jed, Callie and Sheriff Jonny, and their clique, however, are entirely consonant with President Pedophile and his coterie of ghouls. Fascism is, at root, a politics of lies; nothing is true, everything is permitted. You get to enjoy whatever you want, whenever you want, no matter what people say, and you can punish anyone who disagrees, and the hypocrisy of it all doesn’t even muss your perfect hair.
As Margo memorably puts it to Sophie:
“I’ll tell you my deal: I believe in doing whatever the fuck I want. Because what else is there? I mean, don’t get me wrong. I love God, and I love my husband. But in this life, what else is there, really?”
Despite its often nonsensical plotting and first-draft dialogue, The Hunting Wives is surprisingly provocative with this understanding of MAGA in mind. In the hands of more adept filmmakers, a Trumpian fantasy of total freedom at the expense of others’ submission could be made both compelling and revolting. But now, at least, I think I get how the art filmmakers of the future will depict the libidinal appeal of American fascism: a high heel, jammed into a human mouth, forever.
Sean T. Collins is a critic who has written for The New York Times, Rolling Stone,Vulture, Decider, Pitchfork, and others. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House, published by Mutual Skies in 2021. Together, Sean and Julia Gfrörer are the co-editors of Mirror Mirror II, an anthology of horror and erotic comics and art, published by 2dcloud in 2017. They live with their children on Long Island.
He previously wrote for Hell World on Sinners, Fargo, The Curse and the 2024 election; Sexy Beast, vampires and class warfare; Godzilla Minus One and the trauma of war; and the surveillance cinema of The Curse, The Zone of Interest and Skinamarink.
Me new book We Had It Coming is available now!
