Keren Cytter | Terrorist of Love / 2016

diversionary tactics

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tal Hefter, Yammi Wisler, and Naama Yuria (music and lyrics), Keren Cytter (director) Terrorist of Love / 2016 [3 minutes]

 

Video artist, filmmaker, dramatist, choreographer, and novelist Keren Cytter has long expressed interest in her work about issues of gender and sexual difference, although, as critics have made clear, her interests are so vast, it is difficult to pigeon-hole her art.

      But in several films, particularly in 2016, she seems to explore these concerns without fully making clear what her attitude is toward them, an aspect of the disorientation of the viewer she insists upon in all of her films.

    Strangely, however, Terrorist of Love is presented in the form of a genre that is most comprehensible, a music video which relies of the music and lyrics instead of the usual complex narrative, formal structures, and dialogical absurdity of Cytter’s works such as Object of the same year.

      Here, we’re talking about love and desire almost as straightforwardly as we can, a young singer, standing on a New York rooftop begins, with a stationery camera facing him, to sing about love. Even the director suggests that film appears as if “It’s going to be cute. It’s like, all Disney.”

      But the barking klezmer-like music, performer Peter Gramlich singing out, “Come, come, come, come go ahead, why, why, why, why, why, why can’t you catch me in?”

      Suddenly, we see him in his Justin Bieber T-shirt, the video having surrounded both sides of the frame with the waving colors of the LGBTQ community. His song, we suddenly realize, is a gay song about unrequited love, a desire for sexual copulation.

      Singing, “Search me, search me, search me,” he pulls off his T-shirt, pours out a coke, singing “glub, glub, glub, glub, glub, won’t you drink me?” The lyrics have suddenly fallen into another mad dimension, and he now pounds his belly, singing “do, do, do, do, come again.”

      Suddenly into the scene cartwheels a young woman in a short red dress, surely a temptress (Laura Hajek is the performer) performing in something closer to a rap style who argues that he is “like a bomb to a camel is a tourist of love.”

      The young man seems to call out in a sort of Tarzan call, suddenly moving in a choreographic manner of a sort of automaton, dancing in sync with the female interloper, just as a series of flowers

replaces the side banners that previously represented the LGTBQ flag. Cute cats and an image of crossed trumpets complete the complete banner of now heterosexual love, a kind a greeting card that truly repeats some of the Hallmark card representations of love, although we wonder whether or not the seeming Asian characters on his chest suggest something other.

       Little hearts appearing above their highly choregraphed hand movements, almost as if they were puppets, suggests our young gay man has suddenly found love that removes him from the terrorist list—in short into heteronormative behavior. The red-dressed temptress seems to have been successful in her quick conversion of the terrorist’s desires.

       It’s a rather terrifying possibility. But as the song ends, the young man again puts on his Justin Bieber shirt, as the temptress moves off in one direction and the boy in another. Their momentary bonding was apparently only as long as the song, hinting at perhaps the reality of many such a commercial musical video that represents worlds that never could or should have existed.

 

Los Angeles, January 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).