Peter Strickland | Blank Narcissus (Passion of the Swamp) / 2022

sour cream

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter Strickland (screenwriter and director) Blank Narcissus (Passion of the Swamp) / 2022 [12 minutes]

 

   Playing on the lovely and campy gay fantasies of James Bigood (Pink Narcissus) and Wakefield Poole (Boys in the Sand), British director Peter Strickland, transforms a narcissus-like adventure story akin to Poole’s while twerking into what he describes as “mockucommentary.” While using the same kind of lush homoerotic visuals of those filmmakers, Strickland counters the images by employing a narrator (Michael Brandon) who speaks an aged New York accent that utterly contradicts and intrudes upon the sexual enticements of the film’s hero Wade (Sebastien Kapps), a beautiful young adventurer exploring the swamps.

     The mysterious beauty studying the map of his explorations is pulled back into the street scenes of the narrator’s youth, reminding him of a “pick up” who stood outside admiring the narrator’s window dressing in the department store where he worked, different from all the others only by not being brought home from the Saint Mark’s baths; his allure, so the narrator reports, leads Brandon to turn him into a lover: we “balled each other every night.”

     The suddenly unexpected—and quite hilarious—tree snake in this empty paradise is explained away as having originally been a stud hiding in the papier mâché tree poking his cock out of the gnarled hole, which the hero Wade refused to suck after he found out he was a Republican. A later replacement from the Saint Mark’s bath came down with “the clap” (gonorrhea), so what we see in the film, so the narrator tells us, is a cheap prosthetic device and the cum Sebastian swallows is just sour cream.

      Soon after, when upon witnessing his own image in a small pool of water, Sebastian masturbates his lovely uncut cock; yet we are told that the landlord had interrupted the scene to tell them that he was raising their rent, and poor Wade couldn’t get an erection. Sour cream was again used to simulate the semen along with a great deal of baking soda to help the small pool bubble with the pleasure of receiving the offering of his cum. They couldn’t afford to shoot the scene over again.

      A bit earlier as we watch with wide open eyes as the young Adonis strips naked twice, the narrator takes the opportunity to tell us their relationship begin to sour after a year during its final months. The excitement in his lover’s eyes disappeared, and the two moved to different beds, attributed to Brandon’s snoring. They still had sex, but it seemed to have lost all its enchantment. He wonders what the beauty looks like today as an old man, does he suffer arthritis like Brandon does. Would he even recognize him if he’s still living—a slight allusion to the possibility that our young Narcissus might have been a victim of AIDS.

      In short, the real Narcissus is now the filmmaker himself who as an old man is interested only in his own life experiences having no longer the interest or plain good sense to allow his erotic short to speak on its own terms, undermining it at each point with the intrusions of the reality of the past, the ridiculousness of everyday life.

     Through the heavy irony of the commentary, we are reminded that all such sexual reveries and pornography in general are merely illusions, the real men (and women) merely contorting their own bodies before the camera to suggest the ecstasy and rapture of sexual bliss. Strickland’s film shamelessly removes the lacquer from the idol standing before our voyeuristic eyes. The story he tells, in fact, is much more interesting and poignant than the pleasurable images unspooling through light and motion. But strangely, we are so pulled into the images while our minds protest the information we are hearing. It is a true battle between our senses, rational and erotic, that perhaps never will be resolved.

 

Los Angeles, December 8, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).