Vintage Golden Girls Recap: Chaos Reigns
Season 2, Episode 22; "Diamond In the Rough" as Reviewed By Lars Von Trier
Romance is a falsehood, only pain and suffering provides us with the human experience. However, the mother stares grimly at the daughter, a grown woman enveloped in the stink of her own loneliness. The mother offers her a metaphorical teat: she is trying to purchase a date for her daughter to the big banquet. Prostitution is loneliness commodified.
The good Doc Cottle, transported by a time machine from the Battlestar Galactica warship, enters the brothel. His time travel is not questioned, nor the likelihood that a woman could comprehend the complexities of time travel without feeling the pain of a thousand lashes on her vulva. The women, as they do, welcome him with the heat of their loins with the visceral notion of a fox eating its own entrails. However, there is one woman, the Nymphomaniac, that captures his attention. “Chaos reigns,” are the words her pheromones spelled.
And so they go about the banalities of a sexual relationship. satiating the Nymphomaniac with the fatherly attention she is trying to recreate. In this moment, he understands Hitler. But her fear of gynocide causes her to sabotage the pairing, claiming the class differences that divide them are degrading her. “I want to degrade you for the rest of your life,” the swarthy doctor from the future asks her, but with too late for irony and impatience have clouded the judgement of the human woman, as has through all of time. “A woman’s lies are her truths,” the metaphorical wombat in the corner utters as it devours an unborn fetus.
As the Nymphomaniac projects her suffering onto her lover, for he was tardy to their date for fixing a stranded woman’s car - a woman fixing a car is like a fish reading the Koran- the other Nymphs in the brothel begin their heated estrus phase. This does not squelch the Nymphomaniac’s ego, as she compels him to remember the gross class divisions between them. “A fortitude of melancholy is a women’s bow and arrow,” the metaphorical wombat quips.
There is a formal affair, to which all pageantry is brought, including a grotesque and degrading commentary on cross-dressing is played for the humor of the masses. The Doc is there, providing physical nourishment and interpersonal agony. He cannot be with a women, this nymph, if she tries to change him. He is who he is, a man that works with his hands with pride, and the superficial Nymphomaniac can never receive his love.
“Life is only on earth, and not for long,” says the wombat.
