Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood/Dziawer AAAAAAAH-dyssey, Part 12 by Greg Dziawer

This week, Greg detects the influence of Ed Wood in the oddest places!

  

(top) The infamous Justin Bieber video
(bottom) The porno loop "Bubble Bath"

Sometimes, readers, I think I've completely lost it. My obsession with Ed Wood can be so relentless and enveloping that I see the signs of the man's work all around me. It happened again just a few days ago when I was catching up on some headlines. Although contemporary pop culture is largely off my radar, I scan the news almost daily so as not to utterly lose touch.

A recent entertainment news story was just goofy enough to catch my eye. Former teen idol Justin Bieber was marrying model and celebrity offspring Hailey Baldwin in public—they'd already gotten legally hitched last year—and on his yacht prior to the rehearsal dinner, he was caught on cellphone camera "humping" his bride. The individual who'd shot this quasi-salacious footage from a nearby vantage point posted the video to Instagram and, oddly enough, added a subtitle reading "AAAAAAAH" in all caps and a plain white font.

Watching this fuzzy medium shot of two figures gyrating on a boat, I was inevitably seized with a moment of eerie recognition. Indeed, the grainy, low-res video looked like a shot right out of a silent 8mm pornographic loop, the kind produced by the Bloom family and subtitled by Ed Wood circa 1973. It's highly unlikely that whoever added that subtitle—along with some additional text in black in a different font, including an ellipsis and four consecutive exclamation points—was referencing the loops. 

But perhaps he or she was drawing from the wellspring of a collective unconscious, as per Jung? Or maybe it's just a weird coincidence, if such things exist, nearly half a century on. 

Either way, I present for your Eddie-fication a subtitled exchange from the mid-1970s Swedish Erotica loop "Bubble Bath" starring John Holmes: 

Girl: AHHH!!!!

Girl: OHHH!!!! 

Girl: AHHHH!!!!! 

Girl: KEEP PUMPING FEELS SO GOOD

Girl: OH, JOHN DEEPER, DEEPER

Girl: OH, THAT FEELS SO GOOD

John: TURN OVER

Girl: AHHH!!!!!

John: AHHH!!!!!

Not exactly Ibsen, but it's still remarkable that the subtitles from a 43-year-old porno loop could be so similar to the subtitles of a celebrity viral video from 2019.