Sarah Lew | I'm Cute / 2023

no longer cute

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sarah Lew (director), Thumpasaurus (performers) I’m Cute / 2023 [2.15 minutes]

 

Since their sudden leap into video reality in “Struttin” (1921), the funk pop band Thumpasaurus, an LA-based quintet that grew out of the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, members Tamaren (guitar and vocals), Paul Cornish and keys, Logan Kane of bass, Henry Solomon on saxophone, and Henry Was on drums, played with a kind of semi-gay, camp aesthetic that, unfortunately, has increasingly grown less significant after the early naked-butt strut as they intentionally have moved in the soft, cuddly play-world they present in Sarah Lew’s direction of I’m Cute.

     Frankly, despite Tamaren’s insistence and the play-world colorings of pink, yellow, orange, baby blue, lavender, and lime green try to insist, this group is long over being “cute,” their songs having moved off into a kind of challenge of heteronormative culture that means, frankly, very little, given their own vague heterosexual associations. It’s truly difficult these days to know what the group really stands for, since they’ve stopped their struttin’ and are perfectly happy to work out of studio settings where they not particularly provocative songs seem basically to land on the studio floor instead of rising to our imaginations.

     Emma Bradford, Tara McNamara, Cory Jones Remac, and Davy Cole, who have been assigned to production design of this setting to do everything possible to put Tamaren in a kind of childhood-obsessed world that might have been possible for Pee-Wee Herman. But, frankly, as I have hinted, the group is no longer “cute,” a term I never liked in the first place.

     We no longer know what it is they are even performing against, let alone can begin to comprehend to where their somewhat gay aesthetic has settled. Are they arguing for a camp-like behavior that might have been at home in Miguel Areta’s and Mike White’s Chuck & Buck’s world of 2000 or are they simply sloppily moving over to the conviction that camp is better than any other aesthetic they might have deployed. I don’t think the group has come to a conclusion, and frankly I’ve grown disinterested in their closeted conclusions. His mock-diary entry, “Hee-hee, I’ll never tell,” says everything. My response is, accordingly, that I’ll never be truly interested.

     Playdough does not provide enough to work with. An open butt, well, that was something, at least, to think about.

 

Los Angeles, January 25, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blot (January 2025)