Novelist Chuck Palahniuk seems to have a predilection for pithy titles that invoke death. Two of his works—Choke, the film adaptation of his 2001 book by the same name, and Snuff, his latest novel, offer glimpses into characters who appear soulless, heartless, and thus, lifeless, but are merely hiding behind a chilly demeanor.

Both Choke and Snuff present a series of sordid sex scenes, graphic details and improbable scenarios. They are also cynically hilarious Pynchon- and Easton-Ellis-esque satires about romantic and platonic love, family and sacrifice, reunion and redemption.

Palahniuk stuffs his work with wit and irony, literary leitmotifs, stunningly researched facts, neuroses and truly touching hijinks—which are elegantly directed and performed by Choke director Clark Gregg and Sam Rockwell respectively.

Choke, which opened September 26th, centers around Victor Mancini (Rockwell), a thirty-something sex-addict med school drop-out. Like Fight Club’s unnamed protagonist (played by Ed Norton), Victor frequently sits in on support group meetings to fulfill a need not conforming to that group’s intended goal. In his case, Victor trolls sex-related 12 Step programs for tail. When he’s not venturing into the self-help world, he earns most of his money playing an Irish indentured servant in a recreated 18th century American setting and gets the rest of his living as a con-man.

Victor spends much of his life choking. That is, and without giving much away, he has a fear of facing intimacy, his shortcomings and potential and anything else that will actually make him experience an emotion other than wry disdain.

But that commitment-spawned paralysis isn’t the only choking Victor indulges in. He regularly visits restaurants and forces himself to choke mid-meal. He does so in order to get a (preferably wealthy) fellow patron to use the Heimlich on him, forcing that individual into the unique position of forming one half of a bond between a savior and the saved. The way Victor sees it, it is not the person who is choking who should be grateful to the Heimlich-performer, but the other way around. That one act forces the innocent diner into a heroic role he or she would never have otherwise filled, thus priming him/her up for an endless pattern of future extortion. Struggling to pay his demented mother’s medical bills, Victor turns to his scheme often. When strapped for cash, he successfully enlists the aid of one of his many benefactors, relying on the generosity he will evince in his rescuer.

Because of her deteriorating mental state, his mother, Anjelica Huston, never knows who he is. She tends to confuse him with everyone but himself, confiding in those she thinks he is (her old lawyer Fred, for example) that she’s appalled by her son’s negligence.

Her portrayal of Ida J. Mancini is reminiscent of the quirky roles she played in The Addams Family, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited. After all, she is the queen of what I call “Bombay Sapphire Cinema” (dry, fun and nicely packaged).

Both Ida and her doctor turn out to be very important figures in Victor’s life and path to emotional recovery. It’s the complicated relationship he has with his batty mother that plunges Victor into his unfeeling state in the first place, but it’s also that relationship—as well as a specific one that develops with that doctor—that allows him to take that fourth step of the 12 to self-repossession.

Similarly, Snuff takes a troubled child-mother and common law husband-wife relationship and upends it until its altered state is best for all concerned.

The book revolves around the making of a “high priestess of porn’s” presumed best and last work: a serial fornication involving 600 lay (smirk) men who, with their possible embolism-causing thrusts, could be unintentionally involved in the production of a snuff film.

Narrated by four people, Mr. 600, Mr. 137, Mr. 72 and Sheila, the talent wrangler orchestrating the whole thing, the reader never really hears porn star Cassie Wright’s side of things but through their memories, lurid descriptions and the constantly streaming videos from her portfolio (e.g. World Whore One: Deep in the Trenches).

The numbers Palahniuk gives the men are, in most cases, arbitrary, but their presence in that green room is not. Through them, and through Sheila, we find out who Cassie Wright really is, what she means to those waiting and they to her, what this movie could really be doing for her and those closest to her and how it could be seen as an absolution for all such parties.

Two scenes stand out as particularly poignant. The first involves Mr. 600, Branch Bacardi’s, famous pornstar-“woodsman,” loss of innocence, the second with Cassie Wright’s meeting with Sheila as the latter pitches the serial fornication film to Ms. Wright in the first place. The scenes, when read retroactively, convey heartbreak and vendetta but also set the stage for that aforementioned reunion and redemption.

Behind the absurdist, life-lampooning bravado and gasp-worthy shocking punchlines, these stories are as much about humanity as something as treacly as Love, Actually: they concern sons and mothers, fathers and sons, and mothers and sons and daughters, as well as mistaken identity. Palahniuk’s people, stripped of all their costumes and crutches, reveal a pathos all too familiar to us all.

Miitt Romney, the Republicans’ top family values and big love candidate, is fearful of the internet because… he doesn’t know anything about it. Over the last few weeks, he has been turning his campaign into an anti-internet-porn crusade, taking a strong stand against sexual predators on “these networking sites.” He wants to lock up the predators “for long periods” and then “monitor them for life with GPS,” so there will be “no more walking around on the streets” for them “no more in places where there is access to children.” Mitt Romney, he’s the candidate who’s out to protect our children!

How serious is he? Very. He’s now proposing that every computer sold in America come with some kind of filtering device that would block pornography. How will that work? It won’t. Why? Because it’s assinine. How assinine? Very. Does he know that? No. In speaking about it, our new internet guru confused MySpace and YouTube.

“YouTube is a website that allows kids to network with one another and make friends and contact each other. YouTube looked to see if they had any convicted sex offenders on their website. They had 29,000.”

The sex offender statistic was released by MySpace this week. Romney has clearly never used either YouTube or MySpace, nor has anyone on his staff— at least not openly, not when Mitt’s in the office, that is, and could see what they’re seeing on their screens! Why in the world would we let Mitt protect us? Why would we hand our communications media over to Mitt Romney and his people to futz with for four or eight years? Why? Because that’s just what we need, more people writing internet legislation who don’t know the first thing about the internet!

From sexy witch to saucy maid, from skanky mail carrier to slutty scarecrow, the Halloween-costume wardrobe for women is now entirely built on a base of thigh-high fishnets and push-up bras.

Even the New York Times is ready to hang up the G-string vampire costume this Oct. 31 (you may have to log in, and for this I am sorry)

New York Times: Good Girls Go Bad, For A Day
New York Times: Halloween On Heels

I’m hoping this skeezy trend is a sex-positive feminist “Take Back The Dominatrix Outfits!” holler, but it’s hard to keep up that optimism while vainly searching for a costume that wouldn’t make my parents cry.

“I think it’s damaging because it’s not just one night a year . … If it’s all the costume manufacturers make, I think it says something bigger about the culture as a whole.” Tanda Word, Texas Tech student, likes being warmly dressed on Pumpkin Day

It’s worse when tacky oversexualization, aka Skankula, starts preying on the kids’ costumes:

Now, Pope John Paul II even gets his own animated film.
Cartoon tribute to Pope John Paul

Experts are calling this a move toward bolstering Catholicism’s dwindling popularity among the young folk, but honestly, a cartoon isn’t going to lure in us Catholics feeling increasingly disillusioned by the church’s rigid policies. We want condoms! We want birth control! And not that shifty rhythm method stuff, the real kind! Women clergy members! Popemobiles!

A favorite of every pulp tabloid, insider blog and gossip show, Paris Hilton has achieved pop-cultural ubiquity. No mere celebrity, she has created a public persona outrageously exploitable in the marketplace– a long-legged, cat-walking, air-kissing, drunk-driving designer advertisement.

The “Paris” brand is used to hawk perfume, watches, even cheeseburgers. Soon the shelves of shopping malls across the country will be stocked with signature lines of lingerie, bathing suits, makeup, wigs, purses, shoes, a video game, and champagne in a can– basically anything she can slap her name on.It seems Paris can sell anything– anything, that is, except herself as a singer. Music industry observers have gleefully labeled her debut effort, Paris, “a certified flop.” First-week sales figures reached only 75,000, as compared to Christina Aguilera’s sales of 320,000.

That Paris’s celebrity comes not from any visible talent or ability– other than her talent for being famous– may account for some of the hostility directed toward the album. There seems to be more to it, though, and certainly more to the fact that even her fans have thus far rejected her redefinition as a pop star.

Paris public relations rep and legendary Hollywood flack Elliot Mintz once managed John Lennon. He can be seen these days following Paris from club to club, grinning crazily and generally trying not to look thirty years older than everyone around him. Far from seeing his work for Paris as a step down, Mintz views her as having the same generational appeal as did the former Beatle– it’s only the times that have changed, he says. “Young people don’t believe in politicians,” he told the New York Times. “They don’t believe in their leaders. They look to celebrities to represent them.”

People love Paris. Teens around the world swoon for her sleepy-eyed debutante act. In their eyes, she can do no wrong, despite being the Pullman car of train wrecks. The calamitous events of her life– recent DUI arrest, release of a raunchy sex tape, and a public spat with one-time chum Nicole Ritchie– only make her more intriguing to her fans. She may be out of control, but that only heightens her legitimacy, making her seem less scripted or fake. Her fecklessness is charming. Her life may verge on chaos, yet she skates merrily by, still making the scene, still not wearing underwear. She remains aloof in the face of events that would ruin lives and careers for most people– or, more to the point, keep them grounded and without MySpace for months. Paris embodies the life without consequences, a life all of us, on some level, wish we could lead.

The album, however, represents a departure from the brand Paris-the-performance-artist has cultivated during these years of party-going and vamping for the paparazzi. Clearly Paris wants to change her image. This would explain the presence of Mintz. Recent public appearances reveal a conscious desire to distance herself from the “air-head heiress” persona that has served her so well. Her declaration of abstinence from sex for a year is just one example. Paris recently told the New York Times that “the whole Paris thing” was “a game,” and in Blender Magazine she proposed that she was “always playing a character.” “I’m really serious as an artist,” she told Chris Lee of the Los Angeles Times, “I’m a businesswoman.”

Paris now seeks legitimacy by insisting on the unreality of her brand. As limiting a role as she may have devised for herself, it is what people now expect of her. Attempting to move away from it could prove disastrous. If her album is any indication of the way Paris will be received as a serious artist and businesswoman, she has seriously miscalculated.

Whatever the reason, Paris’s efforts to be “real” offend. The world doesn’t want to hear Paris sing, regardless of how good or bad she might be at it. They don’t care. As one reviewer put it, they want to see her get back to “the more serious business of standing around a nightclub in a pair of really enormous sunglasses.”

Why? Because they don’t want to be entertained as much as they want something they can believe in.

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Greg Magnuson edits the blog BorderlandObserver and is currently working on his first novel, Hyperion Bridge, a mystery set in Los Angeles in the early 1950s.