Tom Rhoads [Luther Price] | Warm Broth / 1987-1988

home sweet home

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Rhoads [Luther Price] Warm Broth / 1987-1988

 

As David Hudson reminds us, artist Carolee Schneemann once described watching Rhoads/Price’s Warm Broth as “an indelible experience. That really is that apposite word when describing Luther’s movies—indelible. They stay with you, like a childhood memory, or a scar.” Indeed, how can such a movie not stay with you when for 35 some minutes a mechanical doll that seems to be losing power but still keeps going repeating over and over four major sentences that represent a nightmare of the heterosexual world in which every mother must constantly endure: “Tell me a secret,” “Hold me tight,” “Give me a kiss,” along with an occasional “We love you mommy.”?

     The poor harried mother of Rhoads’ work, played mostly by the director in drag, spends the largest part of the movie hanging out clothing on a clothes line whose endposts look more like a cross than supports, surely one of the numerous crosses she must daily bear, along with peeling potatoes for dinner, which, as Hudson reminds us, echoes Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Her ordeals are endlessly repetitive just as the doll’s cries. As New York Times critic Manohla Dargis observes, “It is a film without pity.” Certainly, it is a relentless demand for love that is rarely satisfied despite all the symbols of joy and satisfaction the film shows us.

 

    The suburban world of Warm Broth, however, is not only a horror film for the mother at the center of this piece but for young gay boys and lesbian girls growing up in the endless heterosexual environment of room after room of floral wallpaper, bedding, and coverlets, of wrapped candies in yellow cellophane, of pretty decorative table arrangements, and rows and rows of other lifeless and seemingly rotting dolls—as the Light Cone description put it, a bit like a “descent into hell in your grandparents’ house.”

     Only this is the home of two children, a boy and a girl who must both endure the rigid gender roles embraced by the secretive father and mother, who twice during the half-hour enliven the viewer’s vision just for a second with an image of raw sex. Otherwise, it is an endless depiction of sweetness that surely might kill anyone trying to survive this distracted dream just as the overdose of candy killed one of Price’s pseudonyms in an early performance.

    The doll, aged since its original creation, has a voice so irritating and difficult to properly hear that I was certain for the first five or ten minutes of the film that I was hearing the words, despite my incredulousness: “hetero-secrets,” “hetero-songs,” “hetero-flowers,” interspersed with the “We love yous.” Obviously, no doll might be programmed to say such things, I realized, and it was just my brain orally expressing the experience I was witnessing with my eyes. It was, in fact, a variation of what all young children must endure in suburban American homes which celebrate the kitsch of normality.

 

  As a collection of images alone, it almost makes you want to vomit; as Hudson hints: “This is a ruthless film, imbued with a sense of decay and horror” for both the mother and her children, the father—except in a few frames, being notably absent.

Los Angeles, March 11, 2023 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2023