Piranha 3D: The Pornography That Loathes Itself. Part 1.

When considering Piranha 3D (2010), one is wont to deconstruct it into two very different thematic elements, a chronological break down between the first and second halves. The bizarre juxtaposition of the erotic libertinage that constitutes the first act is contrasted with  the orgiastic violence of the second, but this violence itself is painted over the first act; the characters are still eroticised and existing in a sexualised sphere, and yet all sensuality is brutally destroyed as they all meat their gory, excessive demises. Like a painting over a painting, the blood and meat of the second act forms a manipulation of, and by extension a comment on, the sex of the first. The slaughter is itself a comment on the inequity of the  Lake Victoria collective, whose collective sexual sinning begets their judgment like a modern-day Sodom. Yahweh afflicts them with a pestilence as he did the Pharoah, the plague of the piranha is visited upon them, ‘and all the water was changed into blood.’ (EXODUS 7:20)

So what of the titular Piranhas themselves? Originating like avenging angels from a time before man in their cave underground, they are a symbol of constancy, the indomitable violence and aggression of nature that predates us and will eventually consume us all. As the cleft is shown to be opened in a manner according to Micah 1:4, ‘The mountains melt beneath him (-him being the fisherman with whom we open this tale. An interesting and telling choice, considering several of the disciples were fisherman, perhaps this individual is supposed to represent the Wandering Jew, and the Piranhas a messianic deliverance. He has lived millennia to be present as this moment of import, and yet dies alone. By opening with this tableaux of futility, Aja, the director, is confronting us with a summary of the film we are about to watch. Despite the excesses of life and sex, the only true sensation is pain, and the only purpose to life is to build up a reason to die. Furthermore as ’the fisherman’ this man is likely the only character able to stem the tide of Piranhas, which are fish, by the virtue of his fishing ability. By taking him out so early in a tactical strike which rivals even Israel’s propensity for aggressive direct action, the Piranha are making an intelligent and well planned manoeuvre, leaving the remainder of the human population helpless. If in the first half the humans are having a decant celebration of all possible excesses, within the second act it is the turn of the Piranha to party, and their gory feast is an interesting chiastic counterpoint to the culture of drink and sex which proceeded it) and the valleys split apart, like wax before the fire, like water rushing down a slope’ we see the detritus of mans commercial hubris lying neglected on the lakebed. Cans, bottles, garbage of al shapes and sizes. Though to us it seems permanent, the vestiges of our culture, the things we construct that cannot decay as we do, here even our one immortal mark on the planet is questioned. Next to the eternal Piranha, living within their own underground ecosystem, our commodities are nothing but rot, and stand doomed before nature. If Piranha is anything it is a comment on commercialism. The first act with it’s beer, boats and boobs reeks of materialism and corruption. The people of Lake Victoria have forgotten their own humanity, their moral compass has been offset.

The arrival of the Piranha is nothing short of revelatory. Aja is careful not to make them mere piranha as we know them typically, but another element of the natural order we exist within, and yet constantly try to usurp. Rather, these are prehistoric in appearance, like demonic mazzikim divine entities whose entire purpose is to afflict others. They descend on the town by Lake Victoria, ‘and I saw a beast come out of the sea. He had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on his horns, and on each head a blasphemous name.’ (REV 13:1) Here the beastly appearance of these dinosaur fish, with their spikes and horns cannot be avoid interpretation as an allusion to and possible fulfilment of such eschatological prophecy. These are no mere piranhas, but Piranha. Like the evil spirits within the Demoniac at Gerasenes (also by a lake, the Sea of Galilee- surely no coincidence?) they are not individual beings, but are defined by their nature as a collective; ‘My name is Legion, he said, for we are many.’ (MARK 5:9) The Piranha are just that, Legion. Scholars of Hellenistic Jewish folklore have oft remarked on the demonic fondness for water, and legislation pertaining to it occurs in the Talmud; one must not leave pots of water uncovered on Wednesday nights, for instance, for fear of infection by evil forces. Is it any small wonder this film is then set in oasis like lake in the middle of the American desert? Sadly in mainstream cinema it is hard to pass off a film set in Palestine or Judea, so Aja has transplanted a Hellenistic Jewish society of the first century A.D onto a canvas of American Consumerist Decadence. Like the blood of the second act that drenches the bodies of the fornicating masses from the first, this uncanny combination only goes further to serve the films aims of chastising the viewer, and causing them to grieve for the ruins of society, and yearn for a better time, the time of Christus himself.

The pornography of the fist act is explicit, so as to almost throw the viewer off, so strongly is it applied. There is no subtlety here, only fornication and excess that continues on and on. ‘The spirit of whoredom leads them astray’ (HOSEA 4:12) and the masses are so taken up in their masturbation, sex without love, just to please the self, that they do not heed the prophets, and so, like daughter Zion, the City on the Hill, they too will fall.

Indeed the rampant sex and orgiastic bouncing of flesh actually causes the viewer to wish for the titular Piranha. They have come expecting a monster movie, and are presented with pornography. And as this drags on, they become more and more impatient, desirous to see a bloody end to all this fornication. Aja has here constructed a masterwork of audience manipulation; he has made them feel the frustrations of Yahweh himself at the deviant masses; but when they are presented with the eventual outcome of their insatiate bloodlust, the horror of mutilation and suffering, they realise what is corrupt about themselves. Their result of their lust for violence is revealed to be too disturbing to handle, and after they have rejected sex, and then rejected the gore they craved, what is left to their humanity? Nothing, or everything? Here I think Aja purifies the interior soul of the audience, stripping them of the sexual drive, and the propensity for aggression. The audience emerge at the end shaken, but changed for the better, purified as though they had been newly baptised. They have been released from vice, and are free to explore the world again.

End of Part I.