Isabella Rossellini was nominated for an Oscar this year for portraying a nun in the drama Conclave, but what she should have gotten an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, Tony, Nobel Prize, World Beard and Moustache Championship Award, and Best Local Burger St. Paul for is her short film series, Green Porno. If you exist on the internet, you’ve probably seen out-of-context clips of Green Porno because it’s got a lot of hilarious scenes where a lady is dressed in big silly bug costumes, and that lady is Oscar nominee Isabella Rossellini.
Green Porno is the cure for sadness. It looks cool, It teaches you fun facts, and it allows a woman who is a master of her craft to use everything she has learned across her decades-long career to portray the joy of a horny housefly getting laid.
The show originally aired on the Sundance Channel across eight episodes that were solely focused on bugs and their reproduction. Season two had six episodes and focused on the sex lives of sea creatures. An abbreviated season three was sponsored by Bon Appetit. It took a more serious tone with an environmental message about the dangers of overfishing at the end of each episode. It’s a message that’s surprisingly not hindered by the big silly anchovy hat.
The episodes vary in length from around one to two minutes and focus on one animal at a time. They were pretty popular in the mid-2000s when they aired and ended up spawning multiple spinoffs, including Seduce Me, which was about animal courtship displays and mating behavior, and Mamas, which was about animal motherhood. “I am not a monster. Yes, I killed my baby and ate him. It was my tenth child. I was exhausted.” That’s a dramatic monologue by an Oscar-nominated actress portraying a hamster.
In case you weren’t aware, Isabella Rossellini can do whatever she wants. She’s the daughter of actress Ingrid Bergman and director Roberto Rossellini. She probably doesn’t even need to work at all, but she’s a straight-up freak who voiced Lady Cadaver in the video game Goosebumps Escape From Horrorland because that’s what she felt like doing on a Wednesday. Isabella Rossellini is the Nicolas Cage America deserves.
Green Porno utilizes the color pallet and low-budget look of a very stylistic children’s show to set the vibe. This makes it extra funny when they do something like have Isabella Rossellini stand in a forest of cardboard animal penises during the episode “Why Vagina.” Yes, it’s a forest of objectively terrifying animal cocks; some of them look so much pointier and twistier than seems natural, but also, it reminds me of the Hamburger Forest in Mcdonaldland commercials. They’ve created a magical land for us, but not one anyone would ever want to visit. I know, I know, I’m just speaking for myself. I’ve seen the internet, you perverts.
My favorite episodes in the Green Porno universe are the ones that don’t focus on a specific animal but more on a broad topic, like the evolutionary purpose of a vagina. In Seduce Me, there’s a great episode about Noah’s Ark, in which God gets angry at the animals going into the ark that don’t reproduce using both a male and a female. He checks all of their genitals as they enter the ark and then yells at them if there isn’t one male and one female. Sorry God, but all Whipped Tail Lizards are gay icons. I learned that from Isabella Rossellini and a lot of cardboard.
Most nature shows are fairly sympathetic to the animals they observe but also kind of condescending. We all know the famous Animal Planet catchphrase, “Look at the leopard, what a schmuck.” In Green Porno, Isabella is inhabiting the animal not just by dawning a series of fabulous hats, but when she acts out their behavior, she’s explicitly expressing how the animal would feel about itself, not how humans view their behavior. When a mother cuckoo puts her egg in another bird’s nest, she’s a glamorous girlboss with better things to do than care for her giant ass baby.
When a bedbug gets stabbed in the stomach by her lover’s dagger-like penis, and his sperm is injected directly into her bloodstream, she is thrilled. There’s no human moralizing about how a bloodstream full of semen would feel. Isabella completely loses herself in the role of a bedbug filled with ecstasy (and semen).
The reason the show was on The Sundance Channel is Isabella Rossellini is good friends with Robert Redford, and he basically gave her a free ticket to make any kind of short-form video she wanted. She could have gone for an Oscar. She could have made something about World War 2, or a woman with cancer, or a woman with cancer who flew planes in World War 2. Instead, she made her life’s work the cardboard penis show, and that was absolutely the right decision. She even slapped the fancy-looking independent film titles that look like an invitation to a wedding with a steak entree option and an open bar.
When interviewed about her decision to make the Green Porno family of shows, she said in her enormously charming Italian accent, “I always wanted to make films about animals. There’s not enormous audience, but there’s an enormous audience for sex.” She tricked us into learning, and I respect that. Trickery is the only way I’ve ever learned anything. Here are some of my favorite things that Isabella Rossellini tricked me into learning:
1. Limpets are Sequential Hermaphrodites
This means that they start life sexless, and then wherever they are in an orgy pile determines their sex. When the lady on the bottom of the pile dies, the closest male becomes a woman, and they continue mating. Gross, nature, ew.
2. Male Bees Don’t Do Shit
Literally their only purpose in life is to wait around until they see a female bee that’s ready to mate. Then they fight to mate with her and die in the process, or mate with her, which tears his penis off and kills him. Losers.
3. Spiders Don’t Have a Dong
No dong at all! They can’t send dick pics to spider ladies who don’t want them, only genital hole pics.
4. Isabella Rossellini is Gorgeous as Both a Boy Shrimp and a Girl Shrimp.
Ok, I may have learned this one voluntarily. She didn’t have to trick me into this.
Oh, have you somehow been trained to expect five entries in a list? Well, guess what, suckers, we don’t do that here! I only learned four things and refuse to learn one more for your nostalgic comfort. A list with four entries is unacceptable chaos, and that’s how we like it around here.
Immediately following the completion of Green Porno, Isabella Rossellini went on to star with Jake Gyllenhaal in a surrealist psychological thriller called Enemy. She later served as president of the jury at The 61st Berlin International Film Festival and the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. She also did a short web series with Burt’s Bees called “Burt Talks to Bees” where she portrayed both Burt and the bees. There is nothing this woman can’t do. She has limitless talent, and she’s willing to use it to be as silly as possible, which is why she has all the respect I have to give, which isn’t very much because I’ve already given most of it to Angela Lansbury.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Jared MountainMan, a mother cuckoo in a power suit, outsourcing all parental responsibilities.