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Not that the governmental agency knew what it was promoting with the taxpayers' hard-earned money. Apart from a lot of lollipop ladies lolloping in the nude and a lone loin purloiner pinching every buxom backside in sight, the original screenplay simply mentioned factory workers downing tools to obtain the abolition of work and the "immediate satisfaction of all their instincts." What Godin had in mind was probably beyond their wildest nightmares : a close-up of a pair of bare, farting buttocks illustrating "geothermal airstreams" (hence the title), orgies on the shopfloor involving a sow, a blind man, two lesbians from Lisbon and several crocodiles; a truly obscene scene in which a Zairean choirboy is fellatioed by a nymphomaniac, and another depicting King Baudoin being impaled on a sword. The impalement sequence in particular was deemed beyond the pale, bringing about accusations of lese-majesty from the press, and the scrapping of public funds to the film industry. Even the private co-producer got cold feet, abandoning the distribution of Grève et pets at the first whiff of scandal. Godin was somewhat surprised by this desertion, for he knew for a fact that the man had balls, and enviably large ones at that : he had happened on them in a public lavatory where the priapic producer was auditioning a young female extra.



   AESTHETICS & ANAESTHETICS

If Godin's politics were a development of his aesthetics, his aesthetics was a reaction against anaesthetic politics. While some were trying to make movies which were as wretched as life, he was flaunting the idea that life should be as glamorous as a Hollywood movie. When his righteous, right-on contemporaries - in thrall to the Verfremdungseffekt - were denouncing the American celluloid dream, he was advocating total identification with the impossibly-charming action men and action-packed plots of Tinseltown. In the interview he gave to The Observer , Godin drew a telling parallel between the Baader-Meinhof gang and "the novels of Dumas or the films of Howard Hawks" : "I have a powerful sympathy for the Baader gang, for instance. They gambled their lives, and it was an adventure that could only end one day. Their commitment reminds me of the flame that burns in the novels of Dumas or the films of Howard Hawks : unbridled friendship, reckless joie de vivre , the love of risk, the refusal to accept any limits." Again that hard, gem-like flame.



   TINPOT RED GUARDS & REARGUARD TOSSPOTS

In keeping with the zeitgeist , Godin believed that demanding the impossible was being realistic. The impossible, of course, had nothing to do with freedom fighters fighting freedom, sawdust Caesars having seizures over Che Guevara posters, or mentally-unemployed, latter-day Lotus-eaters, sheepishly waving about their copies of the Little Red Book . Those opiniated people were the opiate of the people, as far as Godin was concerned. Not that his concern stretched very far. Arguing the dialectical toss with tinpot Red Guards and rearguard tosspots seemed pointless when he could be at the pictures wooing Natalie Wood, or decimating slave traders with Carribean pirates aboard the Captain Blood.



   THE GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS

All aboard, those who will not marry Time, sailing the seven seas to by-corners Byzantine, or wondrous Wherevers, to the end of the earth, at the end of their tethers. Those who have heard the roaring violence on the other side of silence, the cacophony of the spheres, the trickling sand in the hour-glass and the deafening din of the growing grass. Hark the deadening, scythe-like sound of the cycles, going through their implacable motions.

Musical beds : the rotating, mating-game overture. Over there, everywhere. The guttural, gutter grunts - evil, primeval - of the climaxing embrace race. Crotch crotchet echoeing siren snare, transfixed by Medusean stare, drowned out by Bacchante blare. Follow, follow, through caverns hollow, and abandon all hope ye who enter there.

Enter Man. A buoy, bobbing up and down on the scrotum-tightening sea. The peacock pelvic thrusts, jerky juttings, and aquatic acrobatics; the alas and alack of it. A boy bobbing up and down on the scrotum-emptying She. She - a lass, alascivious, playing join-the-dots with the cracks in the ceiling. The sallee-man is not the man he used to be. Yo-heave-ho, and alack poor Yoprick ! All passion spent, at a price.

A limp lover panting over his prey, like a dying man praying over his own tomb, the vassal of his vessel worship. And harbouring the seaman's semen, a woman in every seedy port. And all around, the parturition partition. The embowered wooing of the womb : jellied ire entombed in the quagmire of desire. The icky, sticky time bomb ticking away within the womb. Already ticking away, Time within the wombomb; icky, dickory dock. The tempestuous breaking of waters, like all hell let loose, and the throbbing of the plucked umbilical cord. Let loose in Hell to the thrumming, humdrumming humbilical chord : another gurgling baby wreathed in smiles, pushing up daisies. Already pushing up daisies.

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