essence of fruits
by Douglas Messerli
Andy Warhol (director) Mario Banana #1 /
1964
Andy Warhol (director) Mario Banana #2 /
1964
The famed underground crossdresser and drag
queen Mario Montez (René Rivera), after performing in Jack Smith’s Flaming
Creatures appeared in 1964 in several films, including two versions of Andy
Warhol’s Mario Banana.
Both parts #1 and #2 consist of her slowly peeling and eating a banana,
playing with the fruit’s reference to the male penis. In #1, dressed in a white
wig that looks something like the hair of an Afghan dog, with a large circular
rhinestone brooch attached her locks, wearing white gloves, beads, and bright
red lipstick, Maria, after peeling the banana, slowly puts it to her lips,
licks it, places it on her tongue, and bites down hard suggesting both the
process of a blow job and the fact that she not only “eats” her men but in her
powerful allure and control over them, devours them as well.
Every time she puts a new bite to her lips, she pauses as if to suck its
essence before it passes through the engine-red tunnel, biting off another bit,
eyelashes fluttering with delight.
In
the #2 rendition, bleached out and apparently shot in black and white, with her
hair not as prominent, her bangles almost invisible, and the evaporation of
lipstick, her face more clearly reveals her male features, which, in some
respects, makes the procedure of pushing and pulling the banana in and out of
her mouth an even more homosexual act. In some respects, in #2 she is a man
become woman transmogrified back into a male, which for me adds another dimension
to the act of fellatio.
These short films put her front and center of the drag queen camp
performances of the 1960s that critic Susan Sontag made famous with her essay
of the same year, 1964, in which Montez performed in these videos as well as
Ron Rice’s Chumlum and Warhol’s Mario Montez Dances and Harlot,
as well as working on Jack Smith’s Normal Love—clearly one of the most
prolific periods of her career.
Los Angeles, August 12, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema review (August
2021).
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