Marie Losier | Bird, Bath and Beyond / 2003

sharks, shopping malls, and the kissing parakeet

 

Marie Losier (director) Bird, Bath and Beyond / 2003 [13 minutes]

 

The star and subject of Marie Losier’s 2003 short is the low budget, gay camp filmmaker Mike Kuchar, who made films with his also gay twin brother George, who died in 2011, and by himself. Together and separately, Mike made over 200 films involving lurid, mostly homosexual sex, Hollywood glamor, superheroes, monsters, and soap-opera situations. As Kelly Vance describes the brothers in the East Bay Express, “They were shoestring Cecil B. DeMilles, the Mozarts of 8mm cinema” (a sobriquet hung on them by screenwriter Buck Henry), charting epic concepts on cardboard and papier-maché sets.”

     In Bird, Bath and Beyond Losier lets Mike, dressed up in ridiculous costumes probably of his own making, talk. He says absolutely nothing about filmmaking, except for his beginning sentence:

 

"I used to have dreams where I would go shopping in a department store. But when looking down I would realize I forgot to put on my clothes. I was afraid that maybe I exposed and revealed myself too much through my films or drawings. I don't put myself into my movies because that would be too much - my pictures reflect my own feelings. So hopefully it's entertaining. Otherwise I can't bear looking at them, ha ha!"

 

     From there on, he opines on sharks, outer space, and his and George’s pet parakeet Lulu.

   Traveling horizontally in Losier’s frames, Mike bemoans the reputation of sharks. It’s the human being who is the predator he insists, having himself supped on shark-fin soup several times. All they do is take a bite out of you, he argues. It’s simply a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, although it’s the right time for the shark.

    He loves to think about outer space, the constellations. Surely as our sun dies off, we will have to extend human life by living on other planets, where we’ll have to build domed shopping centers like malls. “I like malls, shopping malls, they’re kind of space-agey,” he admits.

     The longest and most fascinating moment of Kuchar’s rambling conversation is about his pet bird Lulu, who every morning pecked him and his brother on the lips. He would take the parakeet out of its cage and put it upon his record turntable, putting it on the lowest speed where Lulu would move quickly to retain her position, like she were exercising on a treadmill. He’d then turn it up just a bit more and the bird would start into a kind of run, and when he finally put it on full-speed within 3 seconds, Lulu would fly off. One day she flew out the window, and they never saw her again.

     As in most of the Kuchar films, there is certainly nothing profound here, and unfortunately his wry short monologue is not really even that humorous. And it eschews any discussion of significant LGBTQ interest. But Kuchar is always fun to be with nonetheless, behaving like an uncle who, having grown up, still behaves as a naughty schoolboy of the kind in Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct (1933).

 

Los Angeles, November 17, 2022 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review.