Men have strange relationships with
penises. Or maybe it's just society in general. Case in point: I just
wrote the last two sentences with a childish smile on my face.
Another example: in Husavik, there's a place called the Icelandic
Phallological Museum. It's the world's premiere dick repository.
Founded by Sigurður Hjartarson in 1997, the Icelandic Phallological
Museum features 280 penises preserved in formaldehyde, including
specimens from hamsters, polar bears, walruses, and whales. For the
longest time, Hjartarson's collection was lacking its crown jewels: a
human penis and testicles.
Jonah Bekhor and Zach Math's
documentary The Final Member is all about this bizarre search
for the final... well, member. It's an hilarious quest to capture on
film, but more importantly, The Final Member is also an
unexpectedly moving experience given the sincerity of Hjartarson and
the other subjects. Yes, this is a movie about penises and issues of
male body image, but there are also universal concerns independent of
the penis: posterity, national pride, folklore, sexual virility, and
the strange glory of accomplishment regardless of the accomplishment.
If I can reappropriate a dick joke from Drew Carey's Dirty Jokes
and Beer, The Final Member is so broad that we are all a
part of The Final Member and The Final Member is a part
of us.
There are two men who want their
tallywackers to become enshrined in the Icelandic Phallological
Museum. Yet there can only be one. I don't want to say too much about
these fine specimens since the joy of The Final Member is
watching this dick-wagging match play out over the course of the
film. I will simply say that there's a man from Iceland of advanced
age who's lived a storied past. There is also a middle-aged man from
America who constantly refers to his penis by a proper name, and yes,
that is the least of that guy's problems.
The Final Member focuses a lot
on the nature of collection, and it made me realize how absolutely
male these sorts of things are. Generally the obsessive need to
complete a collection seems such a masculine trait, whether it's
comics or movies or baseball cards or retro games. It's as if the
stuff that's collected is an extension of the self, so to speak.
Since the movie focuses on a man collecting penises, the
completionist principle is doubly male. And yet there's also genuine
scientific rigor behind Hjartarson's museum; so, yeah, it's penises,
but it's also about research and not necessarily penises (even though
it's so much about penises).
The competition aspect is also key, and
I can't help but feel the quest to be included in the Phallological
Museum is akin to the Steve Wiebe/Billy Mitchell high score feud in
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. This is all about
out-alpha-ing the other guy--a display like peacock feathers, a duel,
a kind of one upmanship in order to emasculate the lesser man.
There are occasional breaks away from
the museum and the potential members to speak with sociologists and
folklorists about penis hangups and why talk about penises makes
people laugh or feel uncomfortable. These side topics and anecdotes
add greater texture and welcome depth to the film. (You're probably
giggling now, so you're proving them right. Stop it.) What I found
most striking about The Final Member is that it's so
wonderfully filmed. There are multiple shots of Hjartarson wandering
the landscape ruminatively. He ponders his own mortality, his own
future, what his museum really means to him and his family and
friends. Is this the mark he'll leave on the world when he eventually
passes? The camera drifts around him as he looks out on gray skies
and damp green hills and the cold vast sea. The quality of this
imagery is not unlike a Terrence Malick film.
It should be noted that in many of
these scenes, Hjartarson is holding a dried-up bull's penis; he
wields it like a cross between a flimsy walking stick and a
conductor's baton. That absurd beauty/humor (and the fact I haven't
outgrown my inner sixth grader) may sum up why I enjoyed The Final
Member so much.
The Final Member premiered last year
at Hot Docs. It is slated for release by Drafthouse Films in April
2014.
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