JAMESFEST #8: The Ultimate Masturbation

James had planned to end his marathon with Prisoner of Love, but had a couple of extras if the timing worked out to play them. For the bonus round, James prepared yet another Pink film, albeit a more contemporary one, 2016’s The Ultimate Masturbation. The film opens with a beautiful, serene forest and meadowy hills. Five men climb to the top of the hill, drop their trousers, and begin masturbating. The camera pans across their bare asses, clenching and unclenching just out of sync with one another. As one man calls out a mantra (referencing famous anti-masturbation activist and inventor of Kellogg's cereal, John Harvey Kellogg), the five men release long, ropey streams of clearly artificial cum like silly string. Bam, title drop.

From there, we revisit the men, four of them in leotards alternately wrestling and jacking each other off as an older man (Kazu Itsuki doing a pretty good David Bowie impression) orders them. Their reverie is interrupted by Ryuichi (Sousuke Yamamoto), a sex researcher on a quest to ask the legendary Professor Kuroki about masturbation, the latter having “perfected” it. The catch is that this is specifically a retreat for gay men, and one participant in particular, Yojiro (Yoshio Hosokawa), doesn’t take kindly to a straight guy wandering in to leer and gawk at their intimate moments.

However, the Professor allows him in, on the condition that he follow his rules. From there, The Ultimate Masturbation takes on the tone of a martial arts training film. Like The Five Deadly Venoms, each member of the quartet has their own specialty to achieve release. One has invented a combination nipple clamp and suction tube; another uses a VR headset; the final two practice synchronized masturbation. Ryuichi, and by extension the viewer, are invited to watch each member’s “symposium” as they explain their philosophies and perform their technique.

These scenes are goofy, but so is masturbating in real life. The characters themselves are refreshingly free of shame and open about their desires and turn-ons. As you’d expect, there is a push and pull between the ostensibly straight Ryuichi and his curiosity regarding their single-minded pursuit of pleasure. Scenes of the men masturbating together in the woods takes on a spiritual tone. Like kung fu monks practicing their craft, they seem at one with the nature around them. Even the cartoonishly artificial cum splashing onto leaves, rocks, and streams feels like returning life back to the earth from which it originated.

Masturbation has almost always been an object of ridicule in film, especially male masturbation. The idea of a man, straight or gay, cranking their hog is culturally played for laughs, which makes the gravitas with which the professor and his students treat the pursuit of self-pleasure refreshing. It’s still somewhat played for laughs to an extent, but it’s also compelling, both for Ryuchi and the viewer.

It’s obviously tempting enough for the young sex researcher to sneak away and try the VR headset and suction tube, but he’s assaulted midway through by Yojiro. What follows is an extended, and violent, rape scene that ultimately ends with Ryuichi realizing he likes being gay and isn’t made about being assaulted. It’s an egregious betrayal of the tone established prior in the film, and The Ultimate Masturbation seems to have no real answer for how to continue or, ultimately, end the film.

The Professor lightens the restrictions on group oral sex, and the boys enjoy various configurations while their individual personalities, both in dialogue and sexual quirks, fade into the background. I couldn’t even begin to hazard a guess as to what this creative choice meant thematically, and, like with Homocula, the film’s need to comply with never showing an onscreen penis handicaps its ability to escalate the sexual situations. There are countless scenes of the men licking and slobbering on underwear bulges, and while eroticism tends to be a “to each their own” situation, it doesn’t seem either as sensual as earlier, more subtle scenes or as escalated as full-frontal might be.

And, like with Homocula, the film ends with a shocking left turn into morbidity in its final moments—whether that’s an accepted trope of gay Pink films or not, it felt extremely jarring.

Thus ended Jamesfest, a marathon run through some of the wildest movies that James’ incomparable film library had to offer. I highly recommend all true cinephiles attend next year.

This is Part 8 of Jamesfest.

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