THE PILLOW BOOK (1996)—Skins of the Flesh

Cinema of Cruelty (Movies for Masochists)

This week The Cultists Present Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1996). This film was marketed as your standard mid-90s soft-core erotic tale, and yet, in typical Greenaway form, there is nothing standard about it. A deeply insider film about calligraphy fetishism, formalist objectification, and 10th century Japanese literary references—all culminating in a climax of Ewan McGregor getting turned into a literal book because his skin is an art that’s just too pretty to let go— The Pillow Book unfolds in a manner that is singular to itself. A film that despite it’s bizarre premise and turns, remains indeed surprisingly hot.

Deep dives include: film formalism; The 10th century Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon; the hemisphere cognition of sound processing; and how (not) to make a book out of human skin.

Episode Safeword: “vanilla”