Wasn’t it in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (1946) that the beast, upon turning human, says to his princess, “It’s as though you missed my ugliness”? Oh god, doesn’t that just hit the nail on the head? Isn’t desire all about ugliness? Must devotion and disgust always be antithetical to one another? Can they not coexist, as lust and rage do? Aren’t we all just fantastically, wonderfully, irresistibly hideous in the eyes of those who love us?

“I was thinking about him in terms of masculinity. I was working at Playboy at the time, and it's a men's magazine, of course, so for every issue, we would do these fashion spreads on icons like Steve McQueen and Cary Grant, or whatever. Like, buy this pair of Persol sunglasses to emulate Steve McQueen! These icons of Western masculinity basically. And so I was thinking, ‘Well what if you were to push that extreme even further? What does hysterical masculinity look like like?’ And I just started thinking about Yetis and Sasquatch.”