Sexuality and Greed in Ganja and Hess

After writing about genre conventions for my Moodle forum, I want to focus on some more specific observations I had about the film.

I was interested in how Ganja and Hess portrayed sexuality throughout the film. It goes without saying that most vampire movies have a lot of sexual overtones (although Ganja and Hess never explicitly labels its characters as vampires). The first scene that struck me was immediately following the suicide, when Hess lays next to him (I'm blanking on his name) and laps at his blood.

It almost seems like he's leaning in for a kiss, and it's heightened by the fact that they both are nearly naked. Hess looks at his victim with a sort of intimacy and desperation.

Ganja obviously relates sexuality with her kills, but there seems to be a relation between her femininity and what makes her a successful murderer. Her sensuality is introduced very quickly, as she and Hess have sex almost instantly, but I thought it was interesting that she killed the volunteer after sex. It could be that the film is trying to make a point about primal instincts and pleasures, but I believe it would be more accurate to say that Ganja's own beauty, femininity, and sexuality represent a "disease" and fear. She tells the story about a snowball fight, and her own beauty and attractiveness scared her own mother. She says that her mother always viewed her as a sort of disease, and that "whatever it was that I was, she gonna have it". Her mother only could see her beauty, despite fearing and despising it. Perhaps she decided to use this as a weapon. There's a further link between femininity and blood, which is seen with the multiple shots of her body and abundant blood. There's actually a lot of shots of naked bodies and blood, but the close up shots of her feasting on blood seem to signify a perversion of femininity. I couldn't help thinking of the article we read about the Uncanny and Freud's musings on the womb and vagina with teeth or whatever. Looking at that picture below I can't help thinking about some symbolic significance, but I kinda hate Freud, so I'm not gonna say much about that.

I do think that there's a lot to be said about greed in this film, which relates back to sexuality in some ways. I wrote in my Moodle forum that Blaxpoitation films usually are in many ways anti-capitalistic, according to Benshoff. This definitely isn't the case in Ganja and Hess, since they both live in a mansion and survive off the means of others, financially and physically. Ganja talks about her desire for money as well. The entire concept of wanting to live forever (or Hess wanting her to live forever) is based in an entirely different kind of greed that surpasses the desire to be rich. Eventually Hess decides he doesn't want this for himself, but Ganja continues an everlasting life. The final scene proposes that she feels joy in this life, at least in a sense, but I kind of don't hate her for that.