Coming to Logo’s WHAT!? doc series tonight, Monday, November 11: ANIMISM: PEOPLE WHO LOVE OBJECTS
Bill Spahic’s exploration of people who develop feelings for objects made its world premiere on Canadian television in September. The Logo airing marks its US debut.
Spahic’s subjects identify as Objectum-Sexuals, an unfortunately clunky-sounding term that has helped to unite a small subculture of individuals who manifest strong emotional and romantic attraction to inanimate objects. Like Angela Tucker’s (A)SEXUAL, which deals with people who express no sexual desire at all, this doc in some part serves the purpose of trying to validate this still relatively obscure population to the mainstream. Unlike the earlier film, what Spahic’s lacks is a strong central figure, so what results is basically a meandering survey that never gets particularly deep, following five figures: a woman who repairs and marries a carnival ride, a man who has sex with his car, a woman in a long distance relationship with the Statue of Liberty, a priest excommunicated for loving his soundboard, and a woman who married the Eiffel Tower, but finds herself falling for the Berlin Wall. While genuinely curious, the doc profiles too many characters for its limited running time, and skirts close to the exploitative edge in that the viewer is never given much of a chance to understand these people as anything but OS. Still, it’s clearly a sympathetic portrait that successfully engages the audience to learn about something that they otherwise might not encounter.
what (not) to doc 