gay gangs,
drag queen lesbians, and indulgent cross-dressing mothers
by Douglas Messerli
Bradford Nordeen, curator Hardcore Home Movies / Redcat (Roy and
Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) at Disney Hall, March 2, 2015
Greta Snider (director) Hard-Core Home Movie / 1989
Greta Snider (director) Our Gay Brothers / 1993
Jill Reiter (director) The
Birthday Party / 1994
Rick Castro (director) Dr. Chris
Teen Sex Surrogate / 1994
Scott Treleaven (director) The Salivation Army / 2001
The crudely conceived, rough-cut,
home-made quality of these gay and lesbian movies from 1989-2001, attempt in
their audacious characterizations and their outré behavior to satirize,
challenge, and explore sexual identity. Not all of them succeed.
Jonesy’s Fiend, for instance,
shot in Super 8, shows clips from a “legendary sex party” of 1994, as the
members of the queerchord band, Fagbash, tear off their clothes and, in
solitary shots, masturbate. Yes, there are moments here of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, particularly in the
fact that despite the truly “hardcore” images, there is nothing truly erotic
about this film. Yet it also lacks the joyful innocence of Flaming Creatures, and in its presentation of such “solitary
pleasures,” it participates in, rather than satirizing, the 1990s sense of
self-infatuation.
Greta Snider’s 1989 Hard-Core Home
Movie, in fact, presents us with no hardcore images, but rather features
teenagers and numerous others expressing their opinions of what hardcore images
mean and why are they of interest. Filmed in San Francisco, the commentators
are hardly able to express themselves, but are nearly all in agreement that
such images are appealing, alluring, and important as expressions of societal
disregard. Giggling, sticking out their tongues in mockery and tease, these
mostly young interviewees clearly see themselves as part of the underground
picture which Snider’s grainy images depicts.
Far campier and wittily self-aware, Jill Reiter’s The Birthday Party (1994) depicts a sixteen year old girl
celebrating her birthday with her only two friends, one a Jehovah’s Witnesses
proselytizer and the other described as “a precocious slut.” Presumably the
16-year old lesbian girl can find no other friends, for which her “mother,” a
hippie played by a drag queen compensates by requiring her boyfriend to
lasciviously deliver up a birthday cake while a male dancer and female sex
worker entertain them. Shot just like the 1960s homemade films, in faded out
colors, the film takes family life by the balls, overturning any presumably
“normal” conventions and forcing us to reconsider the whole concept of motherly
and fatherly love.
Perhaps the most disturbing and truly conceptual of these films is Scott Treleaven’s The
Salivation Army of 2001, which documents the director’s and his
friend’s fascination with outsider images of blood, sex, spit, and cult life.
These images, he suggests, are always appealing to the young who feel separated
from the world around them; and suddenly, through the early violent images of
the film, we cannot help but make connections with some of today’s youth who,
inexplicably to most, become attracted to murderous armies such as those of
ISIS.
To promote their counterculture “gang,” Treleaven and his friends
develop a zine, featuring events of mock violence and a blood exchange between
members. One young “recruit,” however demands that they truly beat and rape
him, which they somewhat unwillingly agree too, filming the images. Suddenly,
their popularity not only increases but they begin to receive messages and
films from others who take their violence seriously, apparently doing actual
harm to their recruits, some of whose members seem determined to take their
“mock” cult into true cult territory. The group, which have determined to have
no coherent manifesto nor dogma for their acts, were suddenly faced with a
dangerous usurpation of their purposely amorphous activities and beliefs. Faced
with the brutality they have accidently bred; they are forced to close their
zine and disband. And the film itself is transformed into a kind of shamed
confessional, helping to make The
Salivation Army a far more important document than the others included in
this program.
The
most outrageous of these films, however, is Rick Castro’s “Dr. Chris Teen Sex
Surrogate,” the third part of his Three
Faces of Women—a kind of camp deconstruction of Joanne Woodward’s Three Faces of Eve. This portion of the
triptych from 1994 features Fonda LaBruce and Vaginal Davis as two drag queen
lesbians whose sex life has gone missing. Without telling David, LaBruce has
called in Dr. Chris Teen, a sex therapist, to reenergize their love, which Dr.
Chris proceeds to do with the introduction of several large dildos,
foot-kissing fetish activities, and slightly sadist aggressions. Not only does
it seem to work, but the hilarious, pyscho-babbling, cliché-spouting Dr. Chris
joins them in bed. In an after-event discussion, Castro commented that in 1994,
when the film was shot in Manhattan by the famed porn director, Bob Alvarez,
they were attempting to take identity in directions which had never before been
conceived, but which today have become quite ordinary.
Greta Snider’s Our Gay Brothers (1993),
finally, takes found film footage from porn movies, children’s instructional
films, and sports scenes while various gay men express their opinions about the
opposite sex. Many of these are, predictably, favorable, but an increasing
number of their comments begin to build up a huge chasm of hostility gays and
women, as words such as “fish,” “sticky,” “flabby,” etc. etc. begin to crackle
through the air, while Snider closes out the film with a recurring image,
reversed in direction and pattern, of a woman swimmer diving through mid-air
that seems to contradict almost all the negative assertions that are being
expressed.
Surely contemporary theorists on gender and queer studies will make
enormous claims for these independent experiments. But, unfortunately, they
remain too raw, poorly conceived, and anti-intellectual to truly challenge our
cultural thinking. At the most they are titillating caricatures that suggest
directions rather than thoroughly exploring them.
Los Angeles, March 5, 2015
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (March 2015
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