Ben Benjamin | Where Does the Love Go: An Opera in Five Parts / 2019

where o where is love?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lucas Tamaren (music with Thumpasurus), Ben Benjamin (director) Where Does the Love Go: An Opera in Five Parts / 2019 [17 minutes]

 

If you might have thought Lucas Tamaren’s strutting wide-open butt of the 2021 video Sruttin’ was sexually transgressive—which it most certainly was, as well as highly entertaining—but you also might want to go back a few years in time to visit their full 17-minute “opera” tribute to closeted gay actor John Travolta. This is not just a tribute to Travolta by a fan musical group, but a full statement of his career, as it moves in part 1 from its longingly sung lament about the lost love of his earliest years as an actor, re-enacted in the first part of this “opera,” wherein they sing almost endlessly of “Where does it go, where does the good love flow?” as the video presents numerous scenes from Travolta’s early works.

     The film reminds me of the rumors of how homosexual writer Gore Vidal moved just to be near to him. Whether true of not, Travolta was long rumored to be bisexual, with a great deal of evidence, despite his and other highly protective friends’ fierce denials.

     In this opera by Thumpasaurus it doesn’t truly matter. The operatic performance is in love with him, decrying the fact that the deep love has gone, and relating its history.

      The second act, “Without Your Love,” details the part of his career where Travolta’s love interests had turned entirely into the heterosexual world of Two of a Kind (1983), Staying Alive 1983), and other files of the decade in which he seemed to have lost his role as a slightly gay icon

in Saturday Night Live, Urban Cowboy, and The Boy in the Plastic Bubble of the 1970s. The dominant song here is “I’m in Love with Her, Where Did It Go, I Cannot Know.” We are presented with shots from his major films of that period

      It gets worse in Act III, “Hell…and the Abyss,” where we enter the nadar of Travolta’s 1990 films such as Look Who's Talking Too (1990), Look Who’s Talking Now (1994), and from the gay perspective even his successful films such as Pulp Fiction (1994) and Get Shorty (1995) and Battlefield Earth (2000). He now had become a clearly heteronormative figure, and the lover, at least from the Thumpasaurus perspective is seemingly forever lost as a Bosch-like figures. He had become so closeted as a member of the Church of Scientology that he now appeared truly in a hell where no gay person might love him, even when in 2012 when two former masseurs accused him of homosexual demands.

     There is only a kind of echo music in this section of the work, with the heavy thump of Henry Was’ drums. The visuals, however, from Ben Benjamin’s direction, are truly quite spectacular.

     The dog/duck sneaks back in for the Fourth Act, titled “I Will Get the Love Back,” in which Travolta returns to film as truly loveable figure through the film’s graphics, playing a French horn on the Ellen DeGeneres Show before he transforms in the last Act, titled “Love” as the heavyset worried Baltimore mamma of the musical version of John Waters’ absurdist musical, Hairspray, playing Edna Turnblad, the woman all transvestites wanted to be as overweight men.

       This love story to Travolta might be the sincerest, although quite campy and silly at moments, tribute to any Hollywood figure; I hope John, if he still can, jizzed into his tight bluejeans of decades before upon viewing it.

        The graphics in Benjamin’s film say everything except for the endless questioning chorus of lyrics: “Where does it go where does the good love go.” Evidently into just such a video.

       I’m still surprised that there is so little out there about Lucas Tamaren and Thumpasurus; Wikipedia does even provide a full entry.

 

Los Angeles, November 14, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).