Exploring Isabella Rossellini’s ‘Green Porno’ series
Sex education has always been a sticky subject, but perhaps none more so than when trying to explain the mating rituals of non-human animals. However, incredibly, that’s precisely the challenge that Isabella Rossellini took on in 2008 with her Green Porno series that aired on The Sundance Channel.
During a conversation with The Talks, Rossellini explained the origin of Green Porno: “I did the first series as an experiment for Sundance Productions, the company run by Robert Redford. He wanted to do films that were for the Internet, for mobile devices. They were quite successful, and immediately we were also shown on the Sundance channel, on television, before screenings of films. After the first eight episodes, I was commissioned more and more by Sundance. We did a total of forty.”
The first season of Green Porno explored the mating rituals of eight different insects, including spiders, earthworms, snails, houseflies, bees, praying mantes and dragonflies, while the second focused on marine life. Rossellini amusingly used cardboard cutouts to simulate and explain exactly how each animal likes to get down.
Some may have thought that simulating animal sex on television may have been too graphic. However, Rossellini maintains that the order of the show was to be humour rather than explicit content. She said: “The intent was always to be funny and to be scientifically correct. My intent was to make people laugh because I see myself most of all as an entertainer. But I also hope to have people say, ‘I didn’t know that; that was interesting,’ after they laugh. Those were the two emotions I wanted to elicit.”
Indeed the very title of Green Porno is undoubtedly provocative, so perhaps some people tuned in for the wrong reasons. Similarly, Rossellini admitted, “There were some institutions where the name Green Porno has turned people off.” However, she noted that she had once been touring a monologue named Bestiaire d’Amour. She added: “Everybody knows what a bestiary is, but in America, it is confused with bestiality, which is to make love to an animal! That was an even worse title than Green Porno!”
However, the fact remains that Rossellini chose animal sex as the topic of her supposedly educational series. She claimed to have “chosen the problem that is most titillating and interesting. I could have picked digestive systems, but I chose sex because I know that everybody is interested in sex.”
Rossellini also drummed home the fact that it is through humour that we can learn something interesting. In this light, she points out that we learn best from those teachers who, indeed, have a profound sense of humour. “Some of these things we’ve learned at school, they’re taught with such big, complicated words,” she said. “We can’t understand it. But I see myself as an entertainer; I don’t see myself as an educator.”