ISSUE #33: Bugs on Film, Isabella Rossellini Edition

An infamous series of insect mating ritual performance art.

If you find yourself “getting into bugs” at any stage of your life, it won’t be long before you start learning more than you ever thought you would about their mating habits. Insect sex is fascinating and strange, appearing in infinite variations all over the world, to such unholy and alien degrees of weirdness you will think to yourself, “How did they even figure that out?” Insect romance is timid, aggressive, tender, violent, lightning-fast, arduous, and unlike anything else on the planet. The possibilities are overwhelming. Thank goodness we have Isabella Rossellini to show us all how it’s done. 

Back in 2008, Rossellini began a series of short films in collaboration with Robert Redford and his Sundance Channel, which at the time was working on a number of projects with an ecological slant. Rossellini named her series Green Porno, and it is exactly that: each 2-minute short dramatizes an act of insect or animal copulation by dressing up Rossellini in elaborate and colorful costumes while she explains exactly how these creatures do it. 

Most of the videos are available on YouTube, and all are currently streaming on the Criterion Channel in higher definition as part of their series of Surreal Nature Films (which also includes both Phase IV and Microcosmos, essentials for all Bugstack subscribers). Green Porno Season 1 focuses entirely on insects, Season 2 is all about marine life, and Season 3 features sea animals that are threatened by overfishing. Criterion Channel also has both seasons of Seduce Me, more short films about even more animal rituals, and Mammas, films about animal parenthood.

With costumes made out of sheets and wire, and sets cut from slabs of painted cardboard, each video has a delightfully low-budget feel, like something you could make yourself with things around your house. Being hosted by Rossellini, an Italian actress and the daughter of filmmaking royalty, gives the whole thing the appearance of surreal high art. 

Rossellini chose to focus on the familiar, showing how even the most commonplace creatures can have the most fascinating habits. “If you go to the animals that surround us everyday—like fly, earthworms, starfish, barnacles—they have this incredible variety of mating, which is very scandalous,” she explained in an interview with Vanity Fair. Her three criteria were whether the animal is familiar, whether it has an odd way of coupling, and whether she could actually make a wearable costume out of it. Her most difficult was the earthworm, the outfit for which was a giant 35-foot-long tube with no arm- or leg-holes that she was stuck inside for twelve hours at a time. 

Do you think she and Heidi Klum have compared notes?? I’m dying to know. 

Watching any of these short videos will teach you more than you ever wanted to know about how snails or shrimp get it on, while highlighting Rossellini’s sneaky sense of humor. The videos are meant to be informative, and also funny, taking a lighthearted approach to some supremely odd subject matter. “I think that if you know how incredibly mysterious and varied and eccentric and strange and fascinating nature is, you hopefully will take care of it,” Rossellini said in that same interview. “I mean, I hope. I don’t know how to dictate that. But I try to convey my emotion when I see animals, which is that somehow animals strike me as funny.” If only the bugs knew how we love to laugh at such serious matters.