Blood-Sucking Perversion

One might guess, that the combination of being under 30 and living in Berlin should amount to some widened knowledge on the panorama of fetish, the extended range of desire (at least in the arts). Moving to Berlin – about ten years ago – exposed my to film-makers like Bruce la Bruce, Jack Smith, Werner Schroeter. Yet, obviously I don’t know anything. Two movies I saw recently (or rather the conversations I had after I saw them) made me stumble upon things I’ve never heard of before. Frauke Finsterwalds episodical critique of the German language includes a character, which is crazy about what they call furrying (furry fandom). Something  which, if you follow the self-descriptions, is not specifically, but at least slightly sexual: It’s all about wearing animal costumes, about exploring (like Wikipedia says) “fictional anthropomorphic animal characters with human personalities and characteristics”. There’s even a term indicating sexual activity in the furry movement: “Yiff”. The second thing came to me seeing Jim Jarmushs classy old musical Weltschmerz-Vampires. The friend I went to movies with is a documentary photographer. She told that me that there is a community of vampires in Berlin, she actually had accompanied one of them for some months for a project. That vampire, a transgender woman whose name I won’t mention, lives between blood-reserves (human and animal ones), curtains and sunglasses – in a flat in Savignyplatz. Now I wouldn’t dare to genuinely value any of that stuff, it’s first of all interesting. Yet, honestly speaking, the second one makes more sense to me. When I think about furrying, it seems like an attempt to alienate and thereby sacralize the body. Think about it: it’s not really surprising, that Finsterworld’s head Furrier is a police officer. It’s about hiding the profane and supposing there was something like an unnameable, childhood-like playground. The outcome isn’t really as shadowy and perverted as it might seem, it’s actually quite boring, morally upright, graphic and consumable. The vampires however stick to their otherness. It’s about fear, interruption, being a pariah. I should probably stop at this point, since I never met a furry-ice-bear or a blood-sucking bat. Maybe it’ll just need some more years in the city.