parting the sea
by Douglas Messerli
Jan
Oxenberg (screenwriter and director) A Comedy in Six Unnatural Acts /
1975
One might almost describe Jan Oxenberg’s quite
hilarious A Comedy in Six Unnatural Acts, with its purposely
low-budget cinematic values and its clever series of titles for each
section—"Wallflower,” “Role-Playing,” “Seduction,” “Non-Monogamy,” “Child
Molester,” and “Stompin' Dyke”—as belonging to the genre of high school
information films of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s
reflecting anything young people might need to know about subjects from
“How to Bake a Cake,” and “How to Change a Tire,” to “How to Drive a
Stick-Shift Car,” and “Beware the Attentions of Older Men Who Invite You In for
Candy”—generally written and filmed by adults who knew very little about these
subjects.
Except, of course, Oxenberg obviously does know a great deal about the
lesbian stereotypes she’s exploring, the humor deriving from the pretended
naiveté of the teller coupled with the
ignorance of the heterosexual and even parts of the gay communities who
might attend her cinematic lectures.
In
each of the six instances, Oxenberg presents a seemingly real lesbian “type”
either based on elements of what to some are apparently truthful observations
or the absolute stupidity of anyone attempting to characterize an entire
community on the basis of a few (mis)observations which she ludicrously
performs while deconstructing the myths they entail.
As
high school students didn’t we all believe that wallflowers were unable to get
boys because of their appearance and behavior or perhaps their simple
disinterest in the opposite sex? Of course, nothing—particularly in Oxenberg’s
films—is really that simple. As the wallflower disk jockey stands by her
records, the view she has of the rest of the room tells us what it truly means
for the other women who have found their “men.” A young scruffy greaser dressed
in a leather jacket dances slowly to “Angel Baby” with his gal who has poured
herself into a too tight-sweater, a blandly handsome jock rests his head on a
girl who surely will become this year’s homecoming queen, a nerd in a
horizontally striped T-shirt with its cuffs rolled up to hide a pack of
cigarettes pumps away with his willing bobbysoxer, and a tall guy with
slicked-back hair pulls an acne-cheeked girl half his size across the room.
Each of these mostly self-satisfied males put their hands on various parts of
their female partner’s body before they are pushed away or slapped off.
Nonetheless, just like the song’s lyrics claim, they’re all in “heaven” with
their “angel babies.”
Meanwhile the so-called wallflower peers through the large hole of a 45
rpm record as if it were the lens of a camera, seeing what we see: a bunch of
pitiable sweaty teenagers who before the night’s out might will get a kiss or
two to replace what they all truly want.
Suddenly our seemingly lonely disk jockey sees something off camera that
immediately puts a smile on her face. A tall blonde lesbian beauty comes over
to her as they quickly kiss, obviously just the beginning of a night which for
them likely holds many other delights.
In “Role-Playing” a lovely woman is seen dressing for a date, forcing
herself into a men’s tie before sitting down before the mirror to grab after a
greasy glob of hair cream to slick her handsome head of hair back the way the
curly-haired male greasers did in their day. In some respects, she is doing
precisely what heterosexual women do in their preparations for dates, but by
using the tools of male grooming instead of the brushes, sprays, and perfumes
of the so-called normative
female, we see just how ridiculous the whole
process is. Surely she looked far better in her simple black sweater and shortly
trimmed hair before she started to dress.
The “role-playing” the inter-title suggests is not about a woman
dressing up as a man as much as it suggests the entire process of
reconstructing one’s appearance, whether male or female, to match some sort of
ideal that presumably the other expects. The final touch is predictably a
bouquet of flowers to award her evening partner.
Oxenberg, however, turns even that process on its head when upon ringing
the doorbell of her date’s house, the character is met by another woman dressed
precisely as she is with a similar bouquet of flowers in hand. The two exchange
flowers, hold hands, and march away to the concert they are about to attend.
As Michelle Citron writes in “The Films of Jan Oxenberg: Comic
critique”: “Oxenberg carefully codes sequences in particular ways to ensure a
predictable cultural reading of the codes by the audience. For example, in ‘Role-Playing,’
she relies on our reading that the woman wearing a suit and tie is a ‘butch’
who, we think, will of course date a ‘femme’ in order for Oxenberg to make her
joke.”
Our very presumption that opposites attract is quickly laid to rest
when, in this case, it is butch on butch or perhaps better expressed, a woman
with woman since the director has popped any balloon of meaningless assumptions
with the pin of truth.
In
“Seduction” the director places two lesbians on a living room couch where they
quickly find common ground in their discussions of journeys to various
off-trail camping sites, listing their experiences with like-minded friends
visiting isolated canyons and wilderness spots that are seldom visited by park
officers. When they quickly begin discussing a time when they might get
together to compare maps we have almost entered the old male gay territory
where one invites the other to come upstairs to see his etchings. We know these
two will get on very nicely.
Yet
Oxenberg introduces something else that seems absolutely out of place in what
was to have been a normal evening to determine whether or not they might be
compatible. A server pours out endless drinks of champagne, another pushing the
couch pillows closer together. A gypsy violinist pops out of nowhere to
serenade them. And a bevy of dancing women jump into action like a musical
chorus-line in order to lure them into a nearby hot spa. These romantic
enticements have clearly no place in this otherwise ordinary evening between
two attractive lesbians.
It
is as if, instead, the tokens of heterosexual movie romance has wandered into
their conversations about their preferences for isolation. As much as they
attempt to ignore them, they find their friendly discussions enforcing
something upon them for which they had no need or desire. Once more, it is as
if the normative pretenses of romantic love have been imposed upon them simply
because others in their heterosexual audience have presumed they needed help.
In
almost all of these wonderful satiric situations, lesbians are represented as
outsiders who those within the society insist must be made over if they are to
succeed in their affairs. In the most outrageously naughty of her lesbian
stereotypes, Oxenberg explores an issue that might just as be easily made fun
of in the male gay or even bisexual community: child molestation. Since many
conservative straight people have long imagined that lesbians have a secret desire
to sexually abuse and convert children to their way of life, the director
pushes that ridiculous assumption into absurdity, as the lesbian of this
“unnatural” act has an entire wardrobe in her closet devoted to various ruses
and disguises to engage in such behavior. The morning we’re invited into her
closet she chooses, after great deliberation, the outfit of a Girl Scout leader
complete with several boxes of cookies to draw the children to her.
Off she marches to engage two young girls sitting together at a nearby
playground. She invites the girls over to shower them with cookies, but a large
tightly gridded fence stands between her and them, and most of the cookies
break into pieces the moment they hit the fence. She pretends to talk to them,
but little gets through the wall created for just such purposes, to keep
unwanted visitors out.
Indeed, even in this exercise in perversion, the lesbian is locked out
as an outsider from any possible attempts of communication. The girls observe
her from the protected world they inhabit with some amusement, eventually
becoming bored with her gestures. They stand, kiss one another, and turn away
to the playground. In short, these two innocents protected within the world
they inhabit, are permitted a kind of love from which any would-be lesbian
intruder is intentionally locked out.
In
a terribly homophobic review of this film in The Village Voice, James
Wolcott wrote: "'Child Molester' concerns a lech who dolls herself up in a
Girl Scout outfit and haunts playgrounds, lusting after little girls. When she
tries to entice a pair of tots with GS cookies, the girls gigglingly kiss each
other and scamper off — they don't need the Scout Leader, see, because they're
already budding lezzies.”
Obviously, he utterly missed the meaning of Oxenberg’s jest. In the
first place, lesbians and gays are not out to corrupt innocent children. But
what this skit does reveal is that all LGBTQ people, just by their outsider
status, are kept away from even sharing or communicating with children. Even
seeing these innocent girls, black and white, as being lesbians because they
kiss demonstrates the bigotry that keeps same-sex people ostracized from the
so-called normative world. Has the very act of two children kissing become
evidence of some prurient desire? If so, I think the director has made her
point. Any aspect of same-sex love is perceived automatically as an issue of
perversity and deviation, leading to the idea that all LGBTQ people need to be
kept away if not locked up.
In
her final piece, “Stompin’ Dyke,” Oxenberg features a rather normal looking
woman, actually rather petite, but who, arriving upon a motorcycle dressed all
in leather and looking mean and tough, automatically terrorizes the entire
community, from home boys and Hare Krishna dancers, to passing visitors and
sand-locked sunbathers, all of whom move away from her and one another simply
to let her pass. She walks toward the ocean, for a moment the camera losing
sight of her as
she moves down to the shoreline. She does not
even pause at water’s edge, but moves forward, the seas themselves parting for
her as if she were Charlton Heston playing Moses in The Ten Commandments.
Oxenberg takes this stereotype into new territory as we witness, for the
first time in her presentation of “unnatural acts” a woman who is all powerful.
Yet, we also recognize, as the figure moves unaccosted through this space, she
is still very much an outsider to whom no one apparently wants to even get
close. We can see in the “Stompin’ Dyke’s” eyes a feeling of justifiable
well-being, but also sense at moments an enormous depth of loneliness.
This is a brave work, not afraid to explore half-truths in order to
reveal their absurdity, a film that demonstrates the observations of those who
differentiate themselves from the lesbian community as generally exaggerated
and false.
Los Angeles, October 16, 2020
Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My
Queer Cinema blog (October 2020).
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