Ursula Andress. Have a seat.
Put down the gun. Relax. And...
In Hindu mythology, Shiva, seeing that the universe is about to be destroyed, performs her dance of death — establishing a Ying to life's Yang; foreshadowing Western culture's equation of sex and death; and establishing Mother Nature, in the words of Uma Thurman's Poison Ivy, as both giver and taker of life.
This myth is powerfully at work in the minds of both men and women who watch Ursula Andress perform her own death-tease in the opening scene of The Tenth Victim.
The symbolism is equally powerful, from the glinty flashes of Ms. Andress's barbed bikini to the male relaxation of his "gun" — and, ultimately, the use of the female's breasts, a source of sustenance and life, to take life away, in a sexy Freudian role reversal of bang-bang, no-sex-for-you...
the ultimate price, as it were, for premature male orgasm.
Why it's so sexy
Unlike Shiva, Catherine Meredith (Andress's character) isn't out to save the world, the universe, or Rupert Murdoch's ratings. She lives in a future society in which killing is legal — or at least, there is a legal outlet for it, an elaborate game called "The Big Hunt."
Winners — those who survive five sessions as hunter, five as the target, and thus, obtain their "tenth victim" — receive honor... prizes... and one million dollars. (That's one million in 1965 dollars — gold at $35 an ounce, oil at $3 a barrel, and so on.)
Still, there' are props and gestures aplenty to make this 1965 clip, perhaps, the most explicitly fem-dominant piece of popular theatre since Lolita — and give it a cosmic, almost mythic quality.
(The two strains meet, perhaps, in Joan Collins's "Siren" in the Batman television series.)
"Take off my mask..."
Few words ring more compellingly in the minds of males than Ursula Andress's encouragement to her soon to be victim. On an assignment from "The Big Hunt" to kill her — and with Andress, at least initially, not knowing her hunter's identity — the male assassin has been discovered, lured into a BDSM establishment, "The Masoch Club," and induced to lay down his gun.
All that remains is for Ms. Meredith, the femdom stripper, to elicit his collaboration and participation in the dance — to draw him in, if you will, as co-facilitator of his own demise. He does as he is told; she smiles; she spins... and he no longer exists.
There's a lovely review from our friends at WOm-WAm, here — critical observations on one of the most discussed femexecutions in history, WOm-WAm-esquely cogent and crisp.
An excerpt:
"Few men who see this ever forget it ("Oh yeah, there was this movie, I can't remember the name of it, and there's this woman in it, uh, I forget what actress, and she, uh, dances, in some kind of costume and she, uh, she does something with her breasts, but I just can't remember what").
"Of course, the breasts are the ultimate source of nurturing for a man, so to turn them into deadly weapons is a hideously perverse twist... Italian cinema in the 60s enthusiastically engaged male sexual perversions with style and humor and while the S&M Dance in the 1st scene works first as a put-on, it pays off at an all-time classic level."
Death and the classics
What Deadlier than the Male is to camp comic-book humor, then, Andress's gyrations as a Disco Shiva are to an almost Cruellan, Greko-Hindu mythology.
Elektra... Delilah... Jessica... they all seem to be present as Ms. Andress hoofs and slaps her way across the floor from one helplessly adoring male to the next.
