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About ten years ago, intrigued by the rerelease of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and amused by Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, I decided to explore the rest of Russ Meyer’s oeuvre. I figured that such a project was best tackled with the same voluptuous spirit in which Meyer made his movies, so I walked up to the counter of my neighborhood video store in San Francisco with a handful of films I found in the cult bin: Cherry, Harry, and Racquel!, The Seven Minutes, and Lorna. The Seven Minutes is a mediocre, thrill-free thriller that Meyer coughed up for Twentieth Century Fox in 1971, so the clerk rented it to me for free. The videotape they had was a crummy transfer, he explained—and besides, it wasn’t really a Russ Meyer film.

In other words, it wasn’t a film about tits. Nevertheless, after Meyer died last fall (at eighty-two, of complications from pneumonia after a long, sad decline into dementia), many obituaries strained to position him as more than a soft-core icon. Time argued that he “set the tone for late twentieth century pop culture at its most cheerfully leering.” Chuck Stephens, in Film Comment, compared Meyer to Sam Fuller and hailed him as “an American independent before anyone had thought of the term.” These assessments followed years of claims by many cineasts—not least Meyer’s early booster and occasional collaborator, Roger Ebert—that colorful, bosomy, and often baffling films like Up! and Supervixens were, in fact, essays on female empowerment.

But in a new biography, Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film, author Jimmy McDonough points out that the director himself wasn’t much for this kind of sophisticated thinking. “I don’t care to comment about what might be inside a lady’s head,” Meyer once said. “Hopefully, it’s my dick.”

Sam Fuller, like hell. Meyer was exuberantly sui generis, but his impact on popular culture is modest at best. Even McDonough, who’s clearly a fan, has a hard time arguing that Meyer belongs anywhere but the cult bin. In the fifties, before moving into film, Meyer became known as a talented cheesecake photographer (a genre he referred to as “tittyboom”) and shot several Playboy centerfolds in the magazine’s early years. His first successful film, 1959’s The Immoral Mr. Teas, took its cue from Hef and helped propel soft-core porn out of grindhouse theaters and stag parties. With two exceptions—Pussycat and Dolls—the remainder of Meyer’s career amounts to nothing more than a persistent big-breast obsession, which became more dreary and perverse as time went on. Meyer spent his later years laboring over A Clean Breast, his massive memoir and photo collection, driving staffers mad with endless fussing over photo selection and even type kerning. He initially planned to title the book The Rural Fellini, until Ebert wisely suggested a change. To the extent that Meyer worked hard to find archetypal man-killers—“Meyer women” like Uschi Digard and Haji, who often appeared jiggling in the desert—he’s an auteur. But a man who learned the basics of movie-making by filming Patton’s march through France during World War II never produced anything that remotely resembled an Amarcord.
To its credit, Big Bosoms doesn’t over-sell Meyer’s accomplishments; McDonough presents his subject mainly as a snickering, grudge-bearing, I-got-mine tough guy who eagerly snookered the movie business. Teas, an hour-long bit of motion-picture “tittyboom” that looks almost comically tame today, made a million dollars when it came out—more than forty times its production cost. Indeed, throughout his bio, McDonough practically implores readers to think of Meyer as a moneymaker first and filmmaker second (the book’s section breaks are dollar signs).

Luckily for McDonough, there’s a quirky, intriguing, and sometimes baffling persona beneath the profiteering lech. “[Meyer films] without dames means TV-movie tedium,” he concedes, so Big Bosom’s most intriguing passages have little to do with the movies themselves. Instead, they’re the ones discussing Meyer’s tendency to “inspire” his actresses by either browbeating or sleeping with them; the extended obscenity battle over his 1968 film Vixen! (Charles Keating, later a notorious player in the 1980s savings and loan scandal, successfully prosecuted the case); and the ignominious meltdown that occurred around Who Killed Bambi? (aka The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle), the Sex Pistols film that Meyer was initially tapped to direct. Meyer and Pistols front man Johnny Rotten took an almost immediate dislike to each other—Rotten later called Meyer a “dirty old man” and “an overbearing, senile old git”—and Fox pulled out of the production after Grace Kelly, a stockholder, protested the choice of Meyer as director.

However, McDonough does champion Meyer artistically, as it were, by defending the likes of Mondo Topless and Common-Law Cabin, and here he’s on shakier ground. “When aliens excavate the ruins of planet Earth in 2525, would you rather they found a copy of some anemic, technically inept, politically-correct-to-the-point-of-boredom John Sayles film?” he writes. “They’d learn a lot more about us watching a top-heavy Lorna Maitland pulling a burro up a hill!” As if that scene from Mondo Topless shows anything more than Maitland’s remarkably cantilevered figure—and as if what the coal-mining-town tragedy depicted in Matewan really needed was more cleavage.

So why did Meyer eventually get the Sayles-like auteur treatment? And why are Meyer’s films still worth a glimpse? The answer is reflected in a comment from longtime Meyer booster John Waters: “He made industrials about tits.” Meyer’s plots are ridiculous, but the opening sequences of many of his films are skillfully constructed and sometimes utterly sublime. No matter what nonsense the ponderous voiceovers were spewing, his shots of breasts, cityscapes, cars, bars, whatever, all packed together, were brilliant, impressionistic visions of the sixties and seventies zeitgeist. It’s as if Meyer learned editing by speed-reading Eisenstein and a stack of Playboys, and McDonough captures the aesthetic perfectly: “Ass shaking! Cut! Chrome fender! Cut! Breasts quivering! Cut! Car radio! Cut! Tape recorder! Cut!”

After those sequences, though, Meyer’s films tend to run out of gas—your ability to enjoy them is mainly a function of your ability to appreciate the figures of Digard, Erica Gavin, or Kitten Natividad. It may be that what critics called “female empowerment” in Meyer’s films was really just their female stars’ unique capacity to render men immobile, both agape and agog. These women are not empowered, just overpowering. Pussycat stands out from the dross because it was with that film that Meyer developed his editing style; it also had a remarkably full-blooded and indomitable character in Tura Satana’s Varla. Brash, no-nonsense, and threatening, she’s the very definition of a man-killer: “She’s a murderous, evil villain, all right,” McDonough writes, “but you want to get into her pants.” (Interestingly, Meyer, despite some effort, couldn’t.)

What distinguished Dolls was a budget from Twentieth Century Fox, some semblance of plot, and Meyer’s ability to integrate his jump-cutting throughout the film. His editing underscored the comedy of this tale of the rise and fall of a stoner-girl rock band. The sex scene in a Bentley is more about the Bentley than the sex; and shortly after the youthful Edy Williams coos to a stud, “I’d like to strap you on sometime,” we cut to an elderly woman in ghastly makeup saying the same thing. Dolls may be the only time Meyer seemed willing to acknowledge the inherent ridiculousness in his career-long enterprise.

Because he seemed to be so willfully benighted about his obsession, it’s hard to make a case for Meyer as an enduring artist. Sexuality is an auteurist theme; tits aren’t. Discussing his 1963 film Lorna, he bristles at any suggestion of influence or aesthetics: “Did I shoot in black and white for the purpose of grittiness and to emulate the Italian masters? Horseshit! I didn’t have the money to do it in color.” If Meyer had something to say about sexuality, it’s hard to figure out what it might be. Lorna exploits a no-means-yes theme, Vixen advocates incest in a sidewise manner, and the opening of Up! is a button-pushing mess of S&M and Nazi themes. For Meyer, there was no continuity problem or philosophical bind that a shot of quivering cleavage couldn’t fix.

A defining style, it turns out, is not the same thing as enduring influence. It’s telling that Meyer’s clearest legacy isn’t in movies but in rock music: Poison Ivy, guitarist for the psychobilly band the Cramps, cribbed much of her brassy persona from Varla, and at least two bands take their name from Meyer films: the influential grunge act Mudhoney and the mediocre hair-metal group Faster Pussycat. And film? Well, nobody makes industrials about tits anymore. The classier “erotic” mainstream movies from the past few years—Swimming Pool, Y tu mama tambien, Romance, etc.—take their inspiration from randy stylists like soft-core pioneer Radley Metzger or gauzy erotica like Last Tango in Paris. And the rest? Well, earlier this year, actor-turned-director Elizabeth Starr resurrected the career of Kitten Natividad for a remake of Pussycat that was billed as “a titanic tribute to the late great Russ Meyer.” It’s a straight-to-video hardcore porno, costarring Ron Jeremy, titled Faster Pussycat F—well, you get the idea.

Max didn’t mean to kill those toads. Still, years later, their demise remains one of my son’s most painful childhood memories. Max was three years old, and the morning was cool and dewy, but toasting up as the sun climbed. In capturing the toads, Max was dexterous, but also humane. He understood that they needed more than the hot tin floor of a Folgers can. He pulled up fistfuls of grass and gathered sticks and leaves to carpet the metal. He also filled a mayonnaise lid with water to make a tiny toad swimming pool. Things would have worked out fine had he not chosen the unprotected south side of the house as the place to forget his two captives for several hours. By the time Max opened the can, the toads were half baked by the beating sun.

Max was devastated, crying disconsolately over his carelessness. But agony can be instructive. I think it did him more good than harm to experience, early on, such an intimate and solitary exchange with the raw and sometimes cruel forces of nature. To glimpse the stubborn machinations of life and death. Every child should be so lucky.
Unfortunately, every child is not. Long afternoons in the great outdoors, sometimes strung out to sundown, have grown alarmingly uncommon for modern kids. With TV, Nintendo, and an ever-expanding array of “structured activities,” children are spending less time in unsupervised outdoor play than ever before—with potentially disastrous results.

Scheduled bursts of physical activity, it turns out, are no substitute for direct and ongoing experience in nature. The childhood obesity epidemic has peaked right alongside an unprecedented surge in children’s participation in organized sports. Clearly, playing freely outside affords both physical and mental benefits that Little League does not: prolonged exposure to the sun and its feel-good vitamins, and to bacteria, which experts now say is necessary for a healthy immune system. Child advocacy experts are even beginning to wonder how simple interactions with nature—climbing trees, wading through creeks, making mud pies, building forts—might foster overall health and happiness.

In his new book, Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv calls the waning connection between children and nature a crisis in the making. Louv points out that time outdoors can provide a respite from the everyday pressures that lead to childhood depression. And in The Human Relationship with Nature, author Peter Kahn recounts the findings of more than one hundred studies confirming nature’s stress-reducing benefits. Moreover, these benefits, unlike so many of life’s other perks, bestow themselves most generously on those with the greatest need. “The protective impact of nearby nature is strongest for the most vulnerable children—those experiencing the highest levels of stressful life events,” says one environmental analysis researcher from Cornell, cited by Louv in his book. In other words, nature offers a potent balm to kids struggling with divorce, relocation, poverty, illness, or loss. One alternative is drugs: Twice as many American children take antidepressants today as five years ago.

So kids need to play outside. What simple and welcome news this should be to harried parents everywhere. Why, then, is it not happening? Seventy percent of today’s American mothers played outdoors every day during their childhoods, one recent study found, but just thirty-one percent of their children do. And while more than half of the moms stayed outside for three or more hours at a time when they were children, only twenty-two percent of their own children spend that kind of time out under the sun.

The reasons for the decline, it seems, are complex. Among the forces that have eroded our children’s time for outside play are homework (up twenty percent between 1981 and 1997), organized sports (up twenty-seven percent during that same period), and a flood of enticing indoor entertainments. Many books have been devoted to the deleterious effects of overprogramming our kids, but it turns out that another, less tangible force is a far more stubborn roadblock between kids and nature: fear.
“Fear of traffic, of crime, of stranger-danger—and of nature itself,” writes Louv, separates developing children from an unstructured exposure to nature and its life-giving benefits. The radius of space around the home in which children are allowed to roam on their own has shrunk to about a ninth of what it was in 1970. And while increased automobile traffic has undoubtedly restricted children’s range, Louv’s unscientific hunch (and my own) is that in the past twenty-five years, a “generalized, unfocused fear” has come to outrank traffic as the primary reason for penning kids in. This diffuse fear, which Louv calls the Bogeyman Syndrome, is fueled by the media, especially the nightly news, which creates a powerful “crime script” in the public’s mind.

Louv devotes an entire chapter to excessive fear and its consequences—which include, frighteningly enough, the permanent transformation of a person and modification of her behavior. Fear can change the very structure of the brain. But with all the best intentions, we bequeath this sense of fear—of strangers, germs, insects, physical pain—to our children. So instead of buying bicycles and badminton sets, we build indoor fortresses. We outfit our homes with year-round climate control and a tempting stash of electronic goodies. As one fourth-grader in Louv’s book explains, “I like to play indoors ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.”

In Last Child in the Woods, Louv urges parents to set aside their fears and send kids back into the woods—or the yard or an empty lot, whatever’s realistic. The benefits far outweigh the dangers. As it stands, the average eight-year-old can more readily identify fast-food mascots and Pikachu, Metapod, and Jigglypuff (characters from the Japanese game Pokemon) than he can several quite common inhabitants of the natural world, such as otters, beetles, and oak trees.

Sending kids out to play does mean forfeiting a measure of control. But unsupervised play in wild places, no matter how small or ordinary, may be as fundamental to children’s health as food, water, and love. What they need most could be as simple as more time outside, with all its smells, tastes, splinters, and even accidents. More places to roughhouse and catch toads, without being told what they can and can’t touch. More opportunities to hone their characters, to discover possibilities and limitations. Just kids and nature. Nothing fancy.

Part of what makes Louv’s book so engaging is his skillful use of profiles and anecdotes. In one chapter, he refers to D.H. Lawrence, who once wrote of his own “awakening to nature’s sensory gift” in Taos, New Mexico. For Lawrence, this gift was an antidote to the “know-it-all” state of mind he recognized in himself and the culture at large, a mentality fostered by a globe that people now “trot round … as easily as they trot round … Central Park.” Lawrence wisely observed that our grandfathers, who never went anywhere, had more actual experience of the natural world than we have. He described our jaded affect this way: “We, bowling along in a rickshaw in Ceylon, say to ourselves: ‘It’s very much what you’d expect.’”
Direct experience in nature, on the other hand, should fill us with genuine wonder and awe, and make us feel appropriately small, thus placing us in a much-needed context with the larger world. To reap the benefits of nature, Lawrence wrote that one must get beneath the “transparent mucous-paper in which the world like a bon-bon is wrapped so carefully that we can never get at it.” Underneath that wrapping is everything we don’t know and are afraid of knowing.

Grand excursions to science museums, botanical gardens, and zoos, or even campgrounds and scenic wilderness areas, do help kids experience the breadth and depth of the natural world. But they don’t automatically invite the daily communion with nature that feeds the body and soul. Louv and Kellert both maintain that the kid-nature connection occurs most readily via mundane, up-close explorations of whatever patches of land are at hand. That’s because these interactions are spontaneous and unplanned and tend to occur in casual settings described by ecologist Robert Pyle as “places where kids … [are] free to climb trees, muck about, catch things, and get wet.”
It’s difficult to know the long-term implications of kids watching endless hours of TV, rather than ant hills and blades of grass. Hard information is so scant, in fact, that Stephen Kellert, author of the forthcoming book Building for Life: Designing and Understanding the Human Nature Connection, felt compelled to disclaim his chapter on nature and childhood development. “Given the relative lack of available research,” he wrote, “this chapter’s conclusions will be preliminary and tentative.”

One problem is a lack of money available to study the way children use woods, fields, vacant lots, and other unstructured natural sites. There is more financial incentive and commercial interest in having our children spellbound by cartoon characters and computer games. Yet even in the absence of statistics, the issue seems fairly clear-cut. Common sense tells us that kids need the outdoors.

What will happen if we produce a generation of adults afflicted with what Richard Louv has cleverly diagnosed “Nature Deficit Disorder”? Americans born between 1946 and 1964, says Louv, may constitute the last generation to share an intimate, familial bond with nature. That shift, Louv says, portends more than a threat to our future ability to appreciate or protect nature. It threatens our very humanity.
Mucking about is not just good old-fashioned fun. As Kellert eloquently points out in Building for Life, “… a child’s experience in nature can elicit far less pleasant feelings, such as uncertainty, anxiety, pain, and fear.” And all of it, even the stomach-turning shock of two dead toads in a coffee can, contributes to maturity, morality, and self-development. The naturalist Franklin Burroughs nailed it when he said—to a group of conservationists, interestingly enough—“better to let kids be a hazard to nature, and let nature be a hazard to them.”

The little tag on a tray of Smart Chicken brand breasts at the Byerly’s
meat counter said, “One hundred percent vegetarian-fed chicken.” Does
this mean the Bush administration has finally found a use for all those
pesky, liberal vegetarians? Or does it mean I might somehow obtain by
proxy some vegetarian virtue from the animal that will sustain my
carnivorous vice?

Fortunately, the people at Smart Chicken are eager to say what value is
added to poultry when animal products are subtracted from their diets.
Yes, there is much waxing sentimental about “land stewardship” and
“birds raised free range with access to fresh air and sunlight.” But
vegetarian feed for the animals is mostly promoted as part of the
basket of consumer health benefits, along with antibiotic- and
hormone-free organic production methods. These claims include lower
rates of salmonella and camphelobacter contamination in addition to
preservation of “natural flavors.”

And, of course, there’s the issue of those little brain-eating proteins
called prions.The most notorious prion is the one that causes bovine
spongiform encephalopathy, mad cow disease. BSE was introduced to the
human food chain via cows that had been raised on feed enriched with
sheep brains infected with a prion. British cattle acquired BSE,
passing it along to about two hundred beef consumers in the form of
variant Cruetz-feld-Jakob disease.

Statistically, prions are a very rare encounter, not much more
dangerous to the general public than standing between a TV camera and
Michael Osterholm. But prion expert Will Houston admits they “stimulate
the imagination.” Houston also pointed out that “risk” is tricky to
assess; likelihood of infection can be very low, while outcome if
infected can be catastrophic. Houston went to Great Britain to
investigate BSE in 1991 for the U.S. Agriculture Department and is now
the director of the Center for Animal Health and Food Safety at the
University of Minnesota. He generously supplied a number of prion facts
that justify their unusual grip on our attention. “They aren’t sexy,”
he confessed when asked what they look like. “They look kind of like a
twist tie.” But they can’t be destroyed with cooking the way most
pathogens can. One reason is that they are not alive in the first
place; they are just protein. They can also withstand temperatures of
up to one thousand degrees Fahrenheit.

Of course, the real attention-getter is what the prions actually do to
their unwilling host. They don’t make copies of themselves, like
viruses, Houston explained. “A prion is more like a domino effect. We
all have normal prion proteins in our brains. When that abnormal-shaped
protein encounters a normal-shaped protein, it converts it. The body
can’t recycle the abnormal-shaped proteins and they accumulate into
amyloid plaques.” The plaques then make holes in the brain. Centers for
Disease Control descriptions of symptoms include “seizure, depression,
appetite loss, ataxia, aphasia, combative behavior, memory loss, and
coma.” Prion disease is untreatable and fatal.

Producers of vegetarian-raised meats do not currently promote claims of
prion safety with their products. But Mark Haskins, founder and chief
executive of MBA/Smart Chicken, believes that especially in the case of
poultry products, demand is partly driven by BSE fears. “I believe the
consumer has become very discerning in the marketplace,” Haskins told
me. “They know that the BSE challenge has come from animal proteins.”
This sentiment was echoed by Ed, a meat-counter staffer working at the
Wedge Co-op when I stopped by. “We have a very well-educated
clientele,” he said, and other staff confirmed that “mad cow” is much
on the minds of meat shoppers there.

But prions appear to be getting educated, too. Deer and elk now appear
to exchange the chronic wasting disease prion without the intermediary
step of eating each other, leading to concerns about potential contact
with farm animals. “If such transmissions were to occur,” states a 2004
CDC study, “passage of the agent through a secondary host could alter
its infectious properties, increasing its potential for becoming more
pathogenic to humans.” Hopefully, smart, free-range chickens will read
the memo: Don’t hang around the elk.—Joe Pastoor

One Sunday evening in June, three regular guys are settled into a
corner of the bar at Figlio in Uptown, within spitting distance of one
of the room’s three flat-screen televisions. On the tube: men’s beach
volleyball on Fox Sports.

My friend and I plant ourselves across from them, armed with a stealthy
little device that hangs from my keychain and looks vaguely like a
Batman toy or a keyless entry fob. Invented by a forty-eight-year-old
guy named Mitch Altman, TV-B-Gone can turn off almost any television,
anywhere. However, it doesn’t seem to be working today on the TV
hanging from the ceiling just ten feet away—or on any of the bar’s
other large, looming monitors. As a result, TV-Was-Still-Here, and I
gave the gadget to the guys to try. It didn’t work for them, either,
but their curiosity was piqued.

“Who would come up with something like this?” asked one, incredulous.

Perhaps, I suggested, an antisocial person who doesn’t approve of
television. “Well, that person shouldn’t be allowed in public,” he
replied.

I asked the guys if they would have been upset if the device had
actually blacked out the beach volleyball game. Even though they’d been
devoting only occasional glances to the game, they agreed that its
sudden absence would have been irksome. “I don’t have this channel at
home,” one of them said.

In another corner of the bar, there was one remaining TV I hadn’t tried
to zap. It was an older model on which a 60 Minutes broadcast had just
started. I walked across the bar casually, keeping TV-B-Gone out of
sight at waist level (shooting from the hip, as it were). I hit the
button, and the TV went dark. No one seemed to notice.
Back in our corner of the bar, the guys cheered. When I sat down again,
they confessed they were beginning to think I’d made up the whole thing
about TV-B-Gone and was just using the gadget to pick up men—a
corollary activity for which it actually seems to work moderately well.
(Though wouldn’t that make it—ahem—a turn-on?)

Rachel, a young woman seated next to me, said, “My ex-boyfriend used to
watch TV in public all the time. Whenever we went out. It’d be just the
two of us and he’d be staring at the TV. I go out to socialize. It
drove me crazy.” She gestured at her Argentine boyfriend, Ozzy. “That’s
why you have to date someone from another country. He doesn’t care,”
she said. Ozzy said he would care if it were a soccer game. “If you
went to a bar in Argentina during a soccer game and shut off the TV,”
he said, “people would go crazy.”

Angering sports fans seems to be one of TV-B-Gone’s easiest and most
cruel amusements. The day before, at Billy’s on Grand in St. Paul, my
friend and I had walked onto the patio, where the bartender and several
of the waitstaff were engrossed in the second game of a Twins-Yankees
series, their backs to the restaurant. I aimed from the hip and one of
the bar’s two outdoor televisions went out. The bartender’s head
snapped around as if someone had fired a shot from the grassy knoll. I
had never seen fury erupt so quickly. He scanned the patio patrons and
the peripheral bushes for snipers (no one ever suspects the blond) and
finally turned the set back on warily.

Seated inside, I turned off the big-screen TV above our table. And
though there were three other televisions still on, a twenty-something
dude nearby screeched, “What the—? Shit!” as his wafer-thin girlfriend
continued nibbling at her salad and baked potato. The waiter scratched
his head and went looking for the remote control.

Inciting public riots, as it turns out, is not the inventor’s
intention. A self-described former television addict, Altman invented
TV-B-Gone in the first place “so I’d have one for me.” For the record,
he never turns off a TV that people are actually watching. Instead, he
says he takes aim at those televisions tucked in the corners of
laundromats and hovering over bar stools, those boob tubes that are
adding only noise or silent yet distracting images to the atmosphere.
“Even people who love television don’t like to have toothpaste sold to
them during dinner,” Altman told me. His original inspiration came
about twelve years ago when he was out with some friends and noticed
that they all, at various times, were distracted from conversation by a
nearby television. Altman admitted that if he’s out in public and a
television is on, “There’s no way I can stop looking at it. We’re all
helpless in the face of it.” He laughed.

TV-B-Gone’s arrival on the market was greeted with a frenzy of media
coverage, and the initial inventory sold out in two days. After almost
a year, people have purchased nearly fifty thousand of the
feather-light zappers. “You could easily go to an electronics store and
buy a universal remote,” said Altman when I asked about any legal
issues regarding “tampering” with private property. “This is just a
little more stealthy.”

Back at Figlio, a very tall man who’d joined our conversation decided
to take matters into his own hands. He got up and turned off the
flat-screen TV the old-fashioned way: by pushing the power button. No
one seemed to notice or care. And though 60 Minutes’ hour was up long
ago, that TV was still dark, too. Something even Andy Rooney might find
amusing.—Shannon Olson