Is "Desolation Of Smaug" A Bad Movie?
No.
I wrote a very long essay on why “Desolation of Smaug” was disappointing, but The Hobbit 2 is still a hit. A CinemaScore grade of A-, decent reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and down 12% from The Hobbit 1 but still pretty respectable at the box office.
And Desolation is still worth watching. The scenes with Smaug are amazing, and the visuals are gorgeous. (I saw in 48 FPS, and you can count me a fan.) It’s amazing eye-candy with some fun action scenes that defy all known physics, and I don’t regret spending my cash to see it. I may even see it again.
I just don’t think it’s a great movie.
Let’s be honest; there are a ton of box office smashes that come, make their mark, and leave without a trace. If we look at 2001, Rush Hour 2 was a gigantic smash, as was Jurassic Park III and the Planet of the Apes remake. All of them were okay, and fun to watch, but in the end they entered your eyeballs in a flare of action and slithered out without a trace.
There’s a lot of movies like that. Fun while they lasted. But not great movies.
Lord of the Rings, I think, are great films that people will be watching in twenty years’ time, maybe even thirty. They’re brilliant, and deep, and moving. And The Hobbit, I think, will be the Phantom Menace; watched, perhaps, out of curiosity, maybe even loved by some, but interesting as a portion of a greater film.
There’s a distinction between “That was fun!” and “That was magnificent” that, perhaps, as a writer – who has to shoot for magnificent every time – is lost on people. But I’m not saying The Hobbit is terrible, but rather a disappointment compared to Lord of the Rings. It’s eye candy. It’ll be fun. But it won’t really last the test of time, if you’re to ask me.
And a lot of very silly people said, “Well, you said the Hobbit should be about friendship! The books aren’t about friendship!” Which I did not. What I said was this:
“I don’t envy Peter Jackson’s challenge here, because the Hobbit is a hell of a story to try to tell. You can’t make it about friendship and the dwarves bonding with the burglar, because of how bitterly the Hobbit ends….We might be able to get around all of this thematic whiplash if – if! – the story was about friendship. But it is not.”
People have made the point that The Hobbit is fractious, but then you need to figure out what it is about. And thematically, The Hobbit is a mess. Is it about Bilbo learning to be A Hero? The Dwarves, longing Palestinian-style for their homeland? Gandalf, fending off Baby Sauron? Well, it’s about all of those, and when it’s about all of those, I’d argue strongly that it’s about none of those, because the characters are at odds with each other and yet the film strongly keeps trying to hammer home the resonance of Lord of the Rings. Which was about friendship, and facing a shared challenge.
What The Hobbit is, is nothing. It’s a lot of fun, if you don’t think too hard. It’s three hours watching crazy action sequences. But it’s not the heart of the Fellowship – and that’s not to say that it needs to be the heart of the Fellowship, but rather twisting the Hobbit a bit to make it about friendship was but one way to save it. Maybe you make it thematically about lost homes, and how that eats into your soul – the tools are there, but it’s not explored in the film. Maybe you make it about how greed drives apart friendship.
But what’s the Hobbit about? About three hours long. It’s fun. But it won’t stick, because man, it just doesn’t know what message it’s trying to tell aside from “Dragons are pretty awesome, aren’t they?”
Failure Patterns In Poly: The Ping-Pong Partner
Talk it out. Talk it out. Talk it out.
That’s what’s often presented as the miracle cure for polyamory. Got a conflict? Discuss. Got a partner who wants to fuck a llama? Negotiate. Got a lover who’s just embezzled your paycheck and used your minimum wage to fund terrorist bioweapons? Hablar, mi amigo!
Problem is, that talking is not the ultimate cure for what ails ya.
It’s the decision.
Now, the talking is the way of coming to a good decision. So that’s worthwhile. But one of the core polyamory skills is listening to all sides, concluding what you think is fair, and then sticking to that decision.
‘Cause otherwise? You become Ping-Pong Poly.
Wishy-washy people don’t do well in polyamory, because if you’re dating then your partners will come into conflict. This conflict isn’t always the “battle to death in a ring of fire” style of dispute, but you’re inevitably balancing time and intimacy: Partner A wants a twice-a-week date with you, Partner B feels that you’re ignoring her as it is. Partner B wants to start moving towards a Master/Slave relationship, Partner A is not comfortable with that dynamic.
It is your job to listen to both partner’s needs, figure out what you’re comfortable with, and finalize a decision.
But if you’re Ping-Pong Poly, then you’re swayed by whoever you’ve just talked to. Mr. Ping-Pong goes to Partner A, who says that two dates a week isn’t all that much when Mr. Ping-Pong spends the remaining 160 hours with Partner B, and Partner A is lonely and has no other lovers. So he leaves her house convinced of Partner A’s truth…
…until he gets home and Partner B points out that Partner A gets all the fun evening times after work, and Mr. Ping-Pong’s sex life with Partner B has gone down because he’s coming in at 2 in the morning after a big whoopty-whoop date with A, and is too tired for sex.
So what does Ping-Pong Poly do? Punts. He makes firm agreements with Partner B that he will only have once-a-week dates, which lasts until Partner A wants to see a movie. And he goes, “Okay!”
That movie date lasts with Partner A until Partner B finds out and hits the roof, and then he cancels with Partner A, and…
…and it’s not good for anyone, because this nebbish can’t make up his goddamned mind. And he (or she) usually winds up sneaking around both partners, quietly breaking agreements until the other finds out. And that throws up these great clouds of psychodrama as he remains *utterly convinced* by one side… as long as he’s in their presence.
Here’s the fundamental truth of polyamory: you have to make a decision, because there’s no right answer. Does Partner A need more time? Is Partner B actually neglected? People will doubtlessly debate which side is “correct” in this example, but the truth is that there’s no objective truth to be found here. Maybe Partner A is too needy, or maybe Partner B is trying to strangle Mr. Ping-Pong with household chores.
Is two dates a week too much? It depends on the people involved, man. And I’ve not told you enough about either side to say for sure. The point I’m making is that it could go either way – and since you’re the one who’s in the middle, you’ve got to make a decision or it’s not fair to either of your partners.
It’s about what you think. You’re not a weathervane. And it may be uncomfortable to look your partner in the eye and say, “I know you want this, but I am unwilling to give it to you” – but hey! You decided to date two people! Those people will have conflicting needs!
You owe it to them to settle the matter definitively.
Because let’s be honest: it’s absolutely shitty to tell your partner that they’re absolutely right, and then about-face when you talk to someone else. It makes you unreliable, and if there’s a greater sin in a relationship than “I can’t trust them” then I don’t know what is.
And I know why you don’t want to make a decision: because one of your partners might leave! If you tell Partner A “No, once a week is all I can do,” or tell Partner B, “I think twice a week is perfectly fair,” then A or B might pack their shit and go. And that’s rough.
But you’re not avoiding them leaving by continually passing the buck: you’re just dragging it out with a lot of pain and angst. Eventually, one of them will figure out what it is you *really* want to do because you’ll have broken your word to take up with Partner A more often than not, and they’ll go *anyway*. Usually with a lot more anger and psychodrama than they would if you’d just bitten the bullet and told them what you were actually willing to do.
Being a good partner involves being honest about your limitations. Even if those limitations are “won’t” instead of “can’t.”
I’ve lost people I loved because I told them I thought they were being unreasonable in their needs. And even though we’re exes now, I think that made me a good partner for them: I didn’t lie to them about what I was willing to do. I told them flat-out what they could expect from me, and gave them the information they needed to decide whether they should stay.
Many of them were disgruntled, but stuck around. Because I was good to them in other ways, and they decided that hey, maybe the once-a-week date wasn’t a dealbreaker. And that argument healed over and things got better.
Others chose to leave. And those fractures were painful, I won’t deny. But it was also quick, and respectful, and left me with strong remaining relationships. I’m friends with a lot of my ex-girlfriends.
The alternative was spending years making two or more partners very unhappy and disrespected as I dithered between them, never making either feel truly loved, making both feel as though my sympathy was something that could be yanked away from them at any moment.
No. Better to make the call, and stick with it. Don’t Ping-Pong Poly it.
Decide.
So What's Wrong With The Hobbit?
Before we can discuss why The Hobbit 2: Electric Smeagoloo is so disappointing, we must first discuss why Lord of the Rings was so heart-rendingly evocative. And there’s a lot of reasons for LotR’s success, many of which are present in The Hobbit: Peter Jackson’s stunning camerawork and cinematography, beautiful acting, grand special effects.
But Lord of the Rings is a tapestry, and the Hobbit is a bunch of threads. Why?
At a structural level, Lord of the Rings worked for two fundamental reasons:
1) Everyone had the same goal: Stop Sauron.
Now, each character had a different path to that need: for some, it was was becoming invested in that goal (like Merry and Pippin, who initially didn’t care), and for others it was accepting the responsibility you’d been running from all your life (Aragorn), and for still others it was fighting great temptation to accomplish that goal (Frodo!), or standing by your man in order to help him accomplish that goal (brave, brave Sam), or even needing to accomplish that goal so badly you came to distrust and betray your friends (Boromir).
But every single major scene in Lord of the Rings is about that goal of stopping Sauron. Either they’re bringing the ring to Mount Doom, or they’re blunting the assault of Sauron’s armies because if Frodo throws the ring in after everyone’s slaughtered, well, pyrrhic victory: accomplished.
Now, there are many scenes where they’re not directly crossing swords with Sauron’s minions, as in the case of Aragorn and Arwen’s romance, or the loving hour-long introduction of Hobbiton at the beginning – but those are all to show us what is at stake. Those scenes either show us what will be lost should the Fellowship fail to stop Sauron, or show us what the Fellowship (and Faramir, and Eowyn) are sacrificing in order to stop Sauron.
It’s a sprawling story, but it’s tightly knitted together.
2) In accomplishing that goal, friendships were made.
Let us flash back to Return of the King, after the assault on Minas Tirith has been turned aside, and the heroes realize the only way they’re going to ultimately win the war is if the Ring is destroyed. They decide, heroically, to stage a distraction mission so that Sauron won’t be looking when their spies creep up upon Mount Doom. And despite the fact that this is the only way that anyone in Middle Earth survives, and despite the fact that this is a great cataclysmic war that will affect millions of lives and all of them, what do they say as they agree to sacrifice their lives?
“For Frodo.”
Think about that: “For Frodo.” The world is burning, and yet still their concern is to protect their friend. The vast sea of battle is reduced – and beautifully – to a single human(oid) face.
The brilliance of Lord of the Rings is that these characters come to care deeply about one another. Yes, Gimli and Legolas dislike each other at first, but battle makes them come to respect each other as brothers. Yes, Gandalf is irritated by Merry and Pippin’s superficial antics, but he also comes to love them. When Gandalf dies, the Fellowship is not devastated because this quest will be so much harder without the might and wisdom of their only wizard: they are devastated because they have lost someone they loved.
Lord of the Rings works because the personal and the plot are effortlessly interwoven. Yes, the plot states that they are trying to stop Sauron, but the goal from scene to scene is that they are trying to protect each other. They are, in a very real sense, a family.
Now.
Let us discuss the Hobbit.
The first major structural problem with the Hobbit is that the characters are literally not sharing goals. In the book, the goal of Bilbo and the Dwarves is to get the Dwarves’ treasure and title back from Smaug. And that’s pretty much Gandalf’s desire, too.
In the movie, the dwarves and Bilbo want to get the Dwarven homeland back from Smaug. Okay, great! But Gandalf wants to stop the rise of a Mysterious Dark Power. That he doesn’t tell Bilbo or the dwarves about. That, in fact, he vanishes without explanation to follow, repeatedly.
So what’s the main goal of this story? What’s the victory condition?
The main problem with the Hobbit is that the dwarves have one goal that we are – or could be – emotionally invested in, which is to say, to get their home back. And the first movie, though troubled, had made a pretty good start to that: at the end of The Hobbit, Bilbo had nobly declared that he would help the dwarves get their homes back because he had one, and they did not. Good. That works.
And in the Hobbit 2, that emotional need gets smeared, blurred, and forgotten.
The problem with Desolation is that it keeps adding new plots, none of which link up emotionally or thematically to the Bilbo and the dwarves’ quest. Okay, they’re captured by the Wood Elves! That’s great, that’s stopping our heroes from getting to the mounta – oh, wait, the elves are fighting a vast and encroaching darkness, led by a possibly-mad king, with armies of orcs angrily chipping away at their territory?
That’s – cool, I guess, but what’s it have to do emotionally with these poor dwarves and their lost homeland? How is it a reflection or an amplification or a clarification of these dwarves’ emotional desires?
…oh. It doesn’t.
Oh, and here we are introduced to Bard, who’s been retooled from the book into a smuggler fighting the corrupt machinations of an evil mayor. And he’s dealing with a poor, downtrodden townspeople (of a town characterized by a delightful incuriousness to so much as look out of their windows when hordes of orcs are slashing and growling outside their doorsteps), and he’s clearly going to need to clean up this town, and….
…what’s that have to do with the dwarves and their emotional needs?
Nothing?
Oh well.
The thing is, it could be argued that Bard has a lot to do with the dwarves, because his ancestor was instrumental in fighting Smaug, and he has the secret arrow, and yadda yadda yadda…. but the Bard storyline is merely tied into the Dwarvish storyline, it is not thematically related to it. The Bard section of the story isn’t resonant, like poor Boromir, who wanted to do the right thing in the wrong way, and presaged a possible collapse of the Fellowship’s noble desires. It isn’t emotionally resonant like Gollum’s story is to Frodo, of a fellow magical addict who Frodo needs to believe he can save because he needs to believe he can save himself. It isn’t emotionally resonant like Denethor, a cold and power-hungry man who shows Aragorn all the reasons why Middle Earth needs a King who cares.
I’m not saying the Bard storyline isn’t interesting (though honestly, it’s a bit cliched). But it’s not a reflection of the dwarves’ needs. It might be, with some work, as both Bard and the dwarves are suffering from the failure of their ancestors – but that’s not actually brought up at all in the story. Thorin literally does not know about Bard’s past, and so cannot be affected by it.
And so what we get in the Hobbit is, as I said, a tangle of string. We have scenes that exist and are exciting in a vacuum… but each additional scene literally plants a big thumb on the “PAUSE THE DWARF EMOTIONAL EVOLUTION” button while we explore the machinations of Baby Sauron. And the Baby Sauron plotline is ineffective because nobody is on the same page except for Gandalf and the other wizards, and the people who could know about that – like, say, the wood elves or the dwarves – are kept in the dark.
I don’t envy Peter Jackson’s challenge here, because the Hobbit is a hell of a story to try to tell. You can’t make it about friendship and the dwarves bonding with the burglar, because of how bitterly the Hobbit ends. (I’m being good about not explicitly spoiling you here, but come on – the Hobbit’s all of 300 pages in large type, it’s been around for seventy years, you’ve got no excuse.) You have to give Bard the Bowman some backstory, because in the book he literally appears out of nowhere to accomplish a large plot device, which is hell. And you’ve got people expecting the new Lord of the Rings, which the Hobbit isn’t and never was.
But the Lord of the Rings was a tapestry because each scene knitted together into a larger whole – when you introduced each of a billion new things, they were all related. The Hobbit introduces new plotlines at the expense of other plotlines, and that leaves it with this sing-songy structure where we are asked to care about one thing here, and another thing here, and never quite care.
And it’s not that we didn’t have those in Lord of the Rings! One of my favorite scenes of all time is Gimli, recounting receiving his gift from the beautiful Galadriel, where he asked for one hair: “She gave me three.” And that’s such a beautifully delivered line – such a wonderful, evocative mix of Gimli being so deeply in love that he literally does not care that she will never love him back in that way, a sadness and beauty and weird strength and vulnerability from a gruff dwarf.
And Peter Jackson cut it from the first film.
He put it back in because sure, it’s great once you know all the characters and are in love, but in that first tight cut he said, quite rightfully, “This isn’t relevant to the overall quest. It’s a frippery. And it can go.” Likewise, the interruption of the interminable Tom Bombadil was never filmed because this Peter Jackson, back then, realized that a guy who showed up and didn’t even care about Sauron or about getting the heroes closer to Sauron was something we didn’t need to see.
But in the Hobbit, we get ten minutes of the Skinchanger, who also serves no real relevant purpose aside from getting our dudes some ponies.
Which brings us to problem #2. We might be able to get around all of this thematic whiplash if – if! – the story was about friendship. But it is not. I think that’s really summed up nowhere else than in Bard’s town. Because let’s be honest, even if we leave out every spoiler in the world, there is a town living in the shadow of a dragon, and a dragon, and if you haven’t figured out one of the key scenes in this series is going to revolve around a big old dragon fight, well, you’re probably shocked when your toast comes with your eggs at the diner.
But the Dwarves are at odds with Bard, the only person we’re asked to give a crap about in this entire town. They don’t like him. They don’t respect him for his cleverness. They, in fact, literally escape him at the first available opportunity, and are at odds with him. So when the dragon roars out of the mountain, headed to destroy this fishing village, what does Bilbo say?
Is it “For Frodo”?
No. It’s a generic “Oh, no.”
Because what’s going to happen is that the dragon is going to kill a lot of abstract people, in an abstract CGI tragedy, and that’s kind of a shame but none of that has the emotional punch of two hobbits on a volcano.
And that could be a tense, awful, gutpunch of a scene – if the dwarves or Bilbo had come to care about Bard, and when the town was about to be destroyed, it was their friend who was going to die. But as it is, we don’t even see the dwarves particularly liking the other dwarves. They bobble along in a sort of beardy river, but despite the endless fighting scenes, we never see any real concern that oh my God this man who I love like a brother is about to have his face eaten by a warg. It’s an abstract and assumed thing, where they’re all in danger so none of them are, and they eat at the same table but none of them really care.
So we don’t care.
The fundamental trick an author learns is that if you want your audience to care about a character, have someone care about them. Or vice versa. Your rogue is a bloody-handed murderer, the kind of guy who stabs hobos and drinks their wine? Well, if he has a mother who thinks the world of him, a mother who he’ll kill to protect, all those concerns over his behavior will evaporate. Because we respond to people who have ties.
The dwarves have no ties to each other beyond “Hey, we’re all dwarves.” They have weak ties to Bilbo – ties that could be stronger, but for every “Oh, burglar, we do adore you!” moment in Desolation, we literally have an hour of BANG BRAH YEAH ARROW fighting, and so that bond is tenuous at best.
And so what you get in Hobbit 2 is a bunch of scenes at odds with each other, with different stakes and goals, enacted by people who don’t appear to give a crap about each other. Add Peter Jackson’s new-and-all-videogame-level fight scenes, where all the excitement just beats you in the head and face until yes, we get it, Legolas is very badass, and you have a long movie that you want to like but somehow cannot love.
Because there is nothing to love. The characters in it do not love. Fellowship was all about love, and friendship, and about why the people in it came to adore one another so that group of nine people could never be broken, and every plot advancement brought them closer to extinction and closer to each other.
Desolation has a group of people. Some of them like each other. Many don’t. They do things, purposely keeping their agendas secret. They have entirely separate agendas, in fact. And so you’ll pass a few hours in a movie theater, watching a gussied-up Tin Man – a pretty thing with no heart.
Is It So Wrong To Admit You Don't Know?
Obamacare is now in full force across the nation.
I have no idea whether it’s a good idea.
Oh, it sounds good to me – not so much the whole “give extra money to insurance companies” schtick, but the whole “preexisting conditions” seems extremely useful to me as a heart patient, and I like the way that insurance seems cheaper for most (not all, but most) people.
But how’s it gonna work out five years from now? Ten? Will it be too expensive for America, will it cover the poor, will it break the insurance companies, will it raise or lower rates?
Nobody knows.
Let me repeat: nobody fucking knows.
Everyone has hopes, backed by a bit of data – but the entire health care industry is as complex as the economy, and nobody’s been able to predict the economy consistently, either. There’s too goddamned many moving parts. Obviously, Obama hopes it’ll do more good than harm, and Republicans think it’ll do more harm than good, but…
…over the last month, I’ve seen a lot of very firm predictions that Obamacare is either a total success or a shivering flop, and they all drive me batty. It’s like looking at a month-old baby boy and congratulating the parents on his Noble Prize win, or giving them the sad news that they’ve just given birth to a hobo.
Even if no further laws affected Obamacare, we’d still have no clue how this was going to go. And that’s scary to a lot of people, to think that Congress passed a law that they really had no clue as to its far-ranging effects – but if you look closely at American history, that’s pretty much every major law. They all had unintended consequences. Some of which were severe, some of which had been predicted, and – and this is important – some of which were predicted, and turned out to be seriously overblown.
All we ever do with this country is make educated guesses. Because there’s literally billions of moving parts. Because there’s literally millions of people looking to profit off of this in some way, either as a consumer or a business, and they’ll warp and twist the intent to suit their own needs. Because the government either will or will not enforce selected bits of it, depending on which parts they feel are important.
Nobody knows. Not you. Not anyone.
Which is not to say that you can’t have opinions. But stop pronouncing judgment as though it’s a fait accompli. Like the Iraq war, you can have your suspicions, and I think the only thing we can say for certain is that enacting it will be more difficult than we thought. That’s already proven to be true, and it’s true of any major change.
But it’s okay. Be ignorant. You don’t need certainty in your life, especially when it’s an illusion that excuses you from looking at the facts.
All we know is that it’s here to stay, and hopefully it’ll get massaged into something workable. And like I felt during the Iraq war, even if you’re dubious you should be hoping this works out. Because you’re kind of a scumbag if you hope that millions of people suffer just so you get to say “I told you so.”
Are Psychopaths Better In Bed?
So this was startling: On a list called “10 Signs Your Man (or Woman) Is A Psychopath,” #5 was “Great Sex.” “Those who have been with a psychopath often say it’s the best thing they’ve ever experienced,” I was informed. “A psychopath goes out of his way to please you.”
It’s the old stereotype: bad boys are better in the sack. Those nice boys just don’t put gravy on your biscuit, honey.
Problem is, that didn’t really fit with the psychopaths I’d seen in action. Some of them were stellar in bed, almost addictively so. Yet others were really great at the “sweeping women off their feet” part, but turned out to be mediocre or unresponsive in the sack, caring more for their own needs than their partner’s. They got by because they manipulated their partners into wanting to please them, but there’s a difference between that and actually being good betwixt someone’s nethers.
And then there’s the skittery problem of diagnosing psychopaths in the wild. I mean, how are we diagnosing psychopaths? Was this a scientific survey? No, it was 1,300 blog readers self-diagnosing their ex-boyfriends, all of whom presumably turned out to be jerks. And I’m a little leery of that – I’m sure every one of those exes were manipulative jerks in some way, but there’s a large gap between that and a person clinically diagnosed as “lacking all sense of guilt or empathy.”
No. I’m willing to bet that sociopaths run the same gamut of sexy satisfaction as normal people, and this article’s just playing into old sexy-vampire legends of “The man who can kill your body can own your body.”
So what’s happening here? Self-selection, one suspects. Let’s try a new theory:
You’re more likely to stick around if someone hands you earth-shattering orgasms.
Sex is the grease in the wheels, baby. There have been plenty of times that Gini and I were furious with each other, but our kept us, ahem, coming back. Because even if a relationship is dissatisfying, degrading, and dismal, an hour-long romp that musses your hair just the way you like it is at least one bright spot. And it’s easy to confuse that sort of lubetastic shenanigans for love, because someone just made your body feel sooooooo damn good, how could they do that if they weren’t there for you emotionally?
But no. Some of the most memorable sex I’ve had has been with people who turned out to be completely incompatible with me. They say the heart wants what the heart wants; well, the genitals also have their own agenda. Access to the genitals is, hopefully, gatewayed by the heart, so often there’s a lot of overlap – if you’re sleeping with people you find repugnant to your soul, you’re probably doing it wrong.
One suspects that if we could delicately separate this concept of “love” from the concept of “physical satisfaction,” you’d find that all sorts of surprising people might be sexually compelling. You just wouldn’t want to wake up next to them in the morning. So you don’t bother. Which is good, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying to go start popping open loathsome men like Cracker Jacks on the off-hand chance they’re your Kavorka Man.
Yet it does mean that people tend to slur that distinction. Good sex often inspires fondness… even when it really shouldn’t.
And those sexy sociopaths, well, one suspects there may have also been unsexy sociopaths who just didn’t cut the mustard bedwardly. But they weren’t around long enough to do damage! The reason all these smoochable Hannibal Lecters seem to be boudoir-omnipotent is because they were the ones who were so good at sex they rode this “good sex inspires fondness” exploit into an extensively damaging relationship.
I’d posit the sign is not “Good sex is the warning sign of a psychopath,” but rather “Good sex means you’re way more likely to stay with a guy.” And if that guy’s a psychopath, well, you’re in trouble. But we silently discard all the “good guy, good sex” cases because they’re not of interest, and we silently discard all the incompetent psychopaths who might have wormed their way in to do damage if they were just a little more skilled at oral.
Nah. I’m saying #5 is the same old story that tells us that good sex is linked to danger, as a subtle way of slut-shaming. The only way you can satisfy yourself, goes the subliminal impulse, is to find an evil man. For only evil men could master this evil skill.
Good men blow their lovers’ minds, too. They just don’t get the PR.
So what’s the real lesson here? “If someone’s mastered your horizontal mambo, be careful. Love is not sex; sex is not love.”
Which is, I think, a little nicer than “Those orgasms may have been a killer‘s orgasms!”, don’t you?