(How awkward must that guy walking into the middle of this taping feel?)
Pygmalion was a man so in love with a statue he made that he prayed to Venus to have his creation turn to life. Venus granted his prayer and he married his creation and had children.
The creators of the documentary “A Perfect Fake” tries to explore modern day Pygmalion in Japan that are trying to create their own representation of modern beauty in various forms. I ran into the Youtube clip above and was absolutely blown away. The man was describing his weird devices as if it was a totally normal thing. They meet people that create virtual 3-D pornography and love dolls to try to explain why an image, or idea of a person can be sought out for as much as a real person.
How is it that an inanimate object begins to hold the feelings of love and companionship these people seek? The people in this movie genuinely have feelings for these dolls. They describe their personalities in human terms, and speak about a doll as if it was a person, even while they pop off the head and package it before going to a photo shoot. One scene had a person comparing the different personalities of his dolls.
“Oh, she’s very expressive. She always has a happy look on her face when we go outside to beautiful places. She looks sad when I take pictures of her in abandoned buildings.”
They show the pictures, and the dolls expression never changes. The man simply projects his feelings of what he thinks she should feel, and this is how he’s constructed this entire relationship with this doll. It’s sad that this man is so intensely lonely that he comes home early from work to spend time with a life size doll. He’s made an entire world where she is the center of his attention.
What kind of person avoids normal relationships for that of a doll or a virtual sex partner? Most of the people said they liked the idea of having a partner that would never age, but also was perfectly submissive. Someone they could “possess” completely. Someone that would never say “no”. Some of the people expressed regret that they were shut-ins that would rather deal with a doll than a real person, but others embarrassed their new found freedom to show their relationships as what they could now consider “normal”.
Why do people willing to love inanimate objects still seek something resembling the female form? Most of the people said that the form itself wasn’t that important. A designer said that the dolls, if real, would be grotesque, but that there is something in their look, or their design, that allowed the owners to explore a feeling they couldn’t otherwise express. They know how they are, but wish to remain as pure and be as unchanged by time as the doll. They look to the doll as a anchor that will always support them and never leave.
The documentary is full of naked non-human forms, and isn’t safe for work. This movie has one of the highest ratios of WTF?! scenes ever. It was rather awkward walking down the street with it loaded on my Cowon D2 trying to make sure no one saw me watching a movie with Japanese guys talking about making penistron devices for virtual sex over the Internet. I recommend it, but it’s really weird.
