Last night, I watched "Zoo," an impressionistic documentary about the true story of a Washington man who died after having sex with a horse. It is an amazing film: painterly, exquisite, alive. Voices tell the story of what happened in this cloistered world of zoophiles, but the screen's arresting beauty is what transports you inside their minds. There's a particularly compelling scene in which the men, mostly in shadow, gather on the edge of nowhere, preparing for what comes next. There was something in it that reminded me of what it was like to stand on the set of a porn movie, a sense of being transported into another dimension, the primordial pleasure of deep transgression. In a screen within a screen scene, we see the real footage of what really happened, this strange intercourse between people and animals, their bestiality. "Zoo" shows mankind at its most deviant, but, by refusing to look away, insists we see our humanity--even as the beast emerges.
