Losing Our Heads Over Full-Body Transplants: My NEW Taki’s column

The comments can’t possibly be “JOOOOOO!!!!”-y today, right?

Nope, the closest I came to commemorating #IMD was watching, for roughly the 25th time, that feminist cinema classic The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962).

If Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is the Citizen Kane of crap, then surely TBTWD is, at the very least, the Vertigo.

Like the 1983 Steve Martin comedy it clearly inspired – The Man With Two Brains – TBTWD is a feminist fable.

But unlike Martin’s earnest, eat-your-spinach effort, it’s an accidental one.

(…Wouldn’t Die was released the year before The Feminine Mystique, and was actually in the can three years earlier.)

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die was clearly created to cash in on the late ‘50s B-movie brain craze. Yet, precisely because it sprang so nakedly from its makers’ raw collective male id – unfettered by considerations of taste or political correctness – TBTW is also, yes, “a treatise on unfettered male desire.”