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Vegetable-Porn Mythology

Vegetable-Porn Mythology: Oedipus Rex as Told by Legumes

Inspire

Warning: this piece contains scenes of vegetable sensuality.

If myths are irredeemably condemned to repeat themselves throughout the history of human interaction, making a version Oedipus Rex with vegetables does not come as too extravagant. It could, on the other hand, come as brilliant. In 8 minutes of CinemaScope we see a potato, a broccoli and a potato act out this Greek tragedy in a salad version.

Made by Jason Wishnow, Oedipus is one of the first films to use stop motion with a digital camera. The team was comprised of more than one hundred volunteers and took two years to make, the result, however, is just delightful. It exceeds everything we could imagine about staging Sophocles’ tragedy, and it has a few scenes that really spread the epic genre and sensuality to the plant kingdom. We had never, for instance, seen such an erotic tomato.

Surely, under the same extravagant principle that led them to represent the tragedy with vegetables, the work is not entirely faithful to the myth; Oedipus does not kill Creon in Sophocles’ version, and Laius was Oedipus’s father —at least in the human version of the play. But here, just as in the tragedy, Oedipus, a potato, carries the “weapon of his own demise”: a potato peeler. He uses it to murder the broccoli, his father, and then to gouge his own eyes out. This largely redeems the play from its distance from the source.

Thus, in a bizarre combination of salad epic and vegetable porn, we have a newer version of Oedipus Rex —condensed in 8 minutes and in high definition. If this tragedy was already one of the most memorable pieces because of its cruel probability, Oedipus, by Jason Wishnow, brings it back to the quotidian collective imagination.

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