Famed Director: There's Nothing Wrong With Incest

[cash__whatiwant]

Director Nick Cassavetes ("The Notebook," "Alpha Dog&quot debuted his controversial new movie this weekend, but his comments in an interview with TheWrap may well out-shine the project itself.

"Yellow" bowed at the Toronto International Film Festival. The movie revolves around Mary, the main character played by Cassavetes' ex-wife Heather Wahlquist. Mary visits her brother in prison, and the two are, as The Wrap's Sharon Waxman notes, engaged in a "love affair."

Here are Cassavetes' thoughts on the plotline:

“I have no experience with incest. We started thinking about that. We had heard a few stories where brothers and sisters were completely, absolutely in love with one another. You know what? This whole movie is about judgment, and lack of it, and doing what you want.

Who gives a shit if people judge you? I’m not saying this is an absolute but in a way, if you’re not having kids – who gives a damn? Love who you want. Isn’t that what we say? Gay marriage – love who you want? If it’s your brother or sister it’s super-weird, but if you look at it, you’re not hurting anybody except every single person who freaks out because you’re in love with one another.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/10/nick-cassavetes-incest-who-gives-a-damn_n_1871005.html read more

[Blecht]

1. Misleading headline

If you read what he actually said, he was making more of a comment on how being judgmental is wrong than about incest being "OK".

[closeupready]

3. Huffington Post's S.O.P., seems like sometimes.

Go for the salacious interpretation in creating a headline, to draw people in, then give the more dry facts in the story.

[BeeBee]

2. Unrec for misleading headling. n/t

[Cahow]

4. Maybe he's been watching too much GoT's?

Well, if it's good enough for Jaime and Cersei Lannister....

And those pesky Targaryen's and Craster had a thang for their own mtDNA, too.

[Rider3]

5. Eww..

Sorry, but just the title made me sick. There is a lot wrong with incest. Sex between a brother and sister? Uh, no.

[Warren DeMontague]

6. Wasnt that sort of a subplot of the movie "Lone Star"?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116905/

Sheriff uncovers all sorts of hidden stuff about his dead father, turns out his girlfriend is actually his half sister?

Oops.

Perils of living in a small town, i guess.

Anyway, the obvious "ick" factor notwithstanding, i think most people make a distinction between what consenting adults do and pretty much anything else.

[cthulu2016]

7. The odd facts about Brother-Sister attraction:

There is a thing in human nature that triggers an incest taboo relative to certain people.

In evolutionary terms, mating with a parent or sibling is the best strategy because the child will have a higher proportion of your genes than a child conceived with someone unrelated.

But it is undesirable to mate with close kin because it increases the chance of activating bad genetic defects that require both partners to have the gene. (Like sickle cell, which I think requires that both parents have the gene.)

So there is a trigger that we are typically not sexually attracted to people we lived with as young children. In the artificial families of Israeli Kibbutz's they found that boys and girls who grew up in the same group seldom got married. The incest taboo was being triggered by their experience of being family.

I suspect that adopted siblings are only slightly more likely than blood kin to get into any incestuous shenanigans for the same reason.

But, in one of those fascinating but embarrassing things science sometimes tels us about ourselves, brothers and sisters separated early and adopted by different families who seek each other out as adults often feel a powerful sexual attraction.

The fact that siblings would, in many ways, be ideal mates is countered by a powerful developed sexual aversion to people you grew up with.

Evolution doesn't plan for weird hypotheticals. It cannot. Family members typically cohabitate through early life, and the circumstance of siblings first meeting as adult would have almost never have arisen, so there's no internal defense against it.