“It’s like a blooming flower, because it starts like a seed and then spreads all over,” explains one woman at film’s beginning.

She talking, of course, about a…

Yeah, that.

“Orgasm Inc” is a documentary that explores the intersection among Illness, desire, and the ultimate sexual experience (for some) – the Big O.

Begin with pharmaceutical company Vivus, a for-profit outfit newly committed to “getting into the female dysfunction arena,” explains company clinical researcher Darby Stephens. Vivus (Latin for “alive”) was founded with a mission to “put life back into dead penises,” says company founder Virgil Place, whose corporation is dedicated to the seemingly innocuous-sounding goal of “pharmaceuticals for healthy living.” Now, they’ve moved beyond mere male members of the flaccid variety to so-called problems of, um, female floridity.

Filmmaker Liz Canner is after big game here – the corporate creation of “female sexual dysfunction” (or is it truly a real-life problem?), which may have been constructed and classified by Big Pharma to (and this will shock you) sell their “mother’s little helpers” to women who think they might have said FSD disorder.

I know what you’re thinking.

Men fell for this ploy a few years back – and voila, Viagra was born.

Cha ching.

But women, of course, are much smarter than men.

But, it is also true that many women (like many men) have sexual lives that are less-than-perfect, for a wide variety of reasons: stress, repressive religious upbringing, broken relationships, sexual abuse, a lack of education about what constitutes actual healthy sex, and more.

The big question is this: can drug companies “medicalize” FSD and then market their cure-alls to a gullible female populace? Early on, they received the federal government’s blessing when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) green-lighted Big Pharma’s research by identifying FSD as an actual medical disorder. Double Cha-ching! With help from a compliant corporate media (Oprah is a conspirator), some medical researchers on the Big Pharma payroll who are wined and dined in Utah ski resorts, and some simplified medical research, suddenly 43% of American women appear to have “some sort of sexual disorder.”

Enter “the Orgasmatron.” I’m not kidding.

There are skeptics in this story, too (thank goodness). Most convincing is British medical journal Lancet writer Roy Moynihan, who walks the audience through the simplified medical “research,” and establishes the “conflict of interest” connections that are rife in the medical/industrial establishment. The film also tags Ronald Reagan as the guy who opened the deregulatory floodgates to commercial carpet-bombing of pharmaceutical products on the Tee Vee, a campaign that exploded in 1997 with direct consumer marketing strategies.

The result? Americans makes up 5% of the world’s population, consume 42% of the world’s prescription drugs, can stomach popular magazines with articles focused on “designer vaginas,” and embrace cosmetic medical procedures like “labia reduction.”

What an Empire, huh?

One thing for sure.

As long as oil remains cheap and people have enough to eat, the “hunt for the pink Viagra” will continue.

In the meantime, perhaps this movie will help shed some light on a vital but difficult-to-discuss topic.

In the United States of Empire, early fall is traditionally a lousy time to see a good movie. The blockbuster-action-thriller days of summer have come and gone, and Hollywood is keeping its Oscar-worthy stuff close to its chest until the holidays. So when something remotely interesting lands in theaters, it’s worth noting.

“District 9” is such a film.

Director Neil Blomkamp’s edgy and provocative virgin effort, supported by New Zealand film titan Peter “Lord of The Rings” Jackson’s Wing Nut films, is a fascinating if flawed piece of movie-making.

Here’s a brief description of the plot – think “Blair Witch Project” meets “Aliens” meets “Borat” - which will make the film sound outlandishly silly. Trust me – it is much better than it sounds.

Flash back to 1990. A gigantic starship lands outside of Johannesburg, South Africa, and the strange creatures on board – seven-foot-tall click-articulating humanoids covered by crustacean-like armor - are greeted with enthusiastic anticipation by an interested multi-racial human population.

More than two decades later, however, as the film opens in serious mockumentary fashion , the aliens have long worn out their welcome, and the entire crustacean population has been forced into a militarized “refugee camp” called “district nine,” a place of poverty and squalor, and are about to be evicted by a munitions corporation bearing the symbolically sinister name Multi-National United. The lead guy on this eviction project is the unfortunately-named Wikus van der Merwe, a hapless and slightly goofy government agent who mugs for the faux doc camera with grinning alacrity, even as he confronts the desperate “prawns” (the pejorative name given to the aliens by the South African population) scrambling to survive outside their run-down shacks in the dirty neighborhoods of District 9. “We just need you to sign the necessary paperwork,” he amiably asks them, before they go bye bye.

As you can imagine, things soon go horribly wrong. First, a group of Nigerians, led by a charismatic but paralyzed warlord figure named Mumbo, engage in black market trade with the “prawns,” and give the government agents a run for their money. Even more strangely, Wikus is mistakenly splashed with an alien liquid biotech potion, and gradually starts transmogrifying into a “prawn” himself, which ruins his surprise birthday party, not to mention his marriage.

Rather than give away the bulk of the story, I will simply say that I found “District 9” strangely compelling. It begins as a mockumentary, complete with well-coiffed sharply-accented liberal intellectuals yammering on about “interspecies relations” and the like, interspersed with CGI-inspired special effects of the spaceship hovering over the city like a giant insect. Quickly, though, the film sheds its pretensions and turns into a tightly-edited, whipsaw-violent thriller, and ends as an inter-species “buddy” film (That’s all I’ll say about the plot here.)

Some critics have dismissed the film as either too escapist or too racist, but they miss the point. Blomkamp wants us to think about what anthropologists like to call “The Other,” and the images of life in District 9’s “refugee camp” appear disturbingly familiar. In a neat trick, though, he cuts through all preconceived racial stereotypes by showing us how all South Africans, regardless of race, have demonized the aliens and relegated them to third-class status, even though it is clear that their technology and culture is, in many ways, far more advanced.

Moviegoers interested in escapist action will have more than enough to keep them satisfied, but viewers looking for a little more intellectual meat will find some gristle upon which to chew after seeing this film, one of the most unique of the late summer season.