on fire: the sacred vs the profane
by Douglas Messerli
Luther Price (director) Sodom / 1988-1989
After various pseudonyms, including Brigk Aethy, Fag, and Tom Rhoads—performing as an unassuming clown along with various of his family members, including his own mother—the director chose while making his most controversial work, Sodom, the name of Luther Price, which he would use for the rest of his life. His final pseudonym was an amalgam of names calling up the great Protestant religious reformer, Martin Luther, the important religiously inspired black rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and Vincent Price, actor in dozens of films of horror and sleazy pleasure.
Price himself later commented on his name change at a presentation at the California College of Arts: “I actually changed my name to Luther Price because I couldn’t make the film under the previous name. He was much too innocent to make films like Sodom. Tom Rhoads, he made films about birthday cakes and mothers. Luther was thinking about other things. He had a different cake in mind.”
The transformative film created over two years, 1988-1989, combined gay porno films he found in dumpsters behind Boston strip theaters showing X-rated films, darkly lit biblical epics, and Gregorian chants looped to play backwards. Like Stan Brakhage before him—Ed Halter described Price as being “Brakhage after Punk”—he scratched the surfaces of his 17-minute tape and, more innovatively, punched holes in the Super 8 frames which he carefully filled in with other images from the porno figures, while ecstatic faces and penises,as Roberta Smith described it in her The New York Times obituary, "jumped feverishly back and forth, almost as if the film were trying to escape the projector.” Connected by depictions of fire, the biblical masses are seen often carrying torches and flaming pieces of wood to which they often set fire to everything around them; the Gregorian chants are now and then accompanied with candles set with glass tumblers; and the male bodies heat up and symbolically burn with the friction of their inserted cocks and masturbatory hands. This can be described on all levels as a truly “hot” piece of filmmaking.
Quite predictably, more conservative viewers—although given the obscurity of Price’s films and the paucity of their showings, one can hardly imagine who such viewers might have been—found the filmmaker’s work as being scandalous, in a way similar of the early reactions to some of the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. Critic J. Hoberman perhaps expressed their viewpoint best, suggesting that Sodom might almost be seen as an “illumination of Jerry Falwell’s unconscious.”
Far more surprisingly, many influential figures of the gay world refused to show it at such otherwise open-minded film festivals such as those in Los Angeles and New York, describing Price’s cinema as being “homophobic.”
Although eventually the film grew in fame as its iconic imagery came to be recognized over time for a new opening for gay cinema, and that initial reaction—probably still held by some—completely stymies my thinking. Who’s kidding who, I immediately wondered at reading of this response? Didn’t nearly every gay boy and many a lesbian learn about their own hidden sexuality in the days before computer availability through porno magazines and films, to say nothing about all those heterosexual kids who were exploring the more normative variations?
The director surely knew, given his name change, that what one critic described as his “Boschian vision” of gay sexuality might rub some even otherwise sympathetic viewers in the wrong way. Price himself, however, argued against the viewpoint that maintained he was presenting gay life was a monstrous Rabelaisian-like hell: “I became known as this gritty, badass, gay filmmaker and…I’m not. Yeah, I’m gay, I like to look at guys’ asses, but Sodom is not a pornographic to me. It’s just very fleshy and visceral, and it talks about a story.”
I think we have little choice but to perceive those images torn from the biblical epics the director employed as being far more violent than are the sexual interchanges themselves. In almost every brief scene that this film shows us of the biblically recreated world, the crowds seem to be massed with arms held up in anger or revenge, sometimes, as I mentioned above, holding burning beams of wood or torches, while in many scenes these religiously inclined men are perhaps burning up with sexual passion, but also involved in an almost sacred ceremony of the holy spirit and flesh.
I can well understand why the viewers of 1989, at the height of the AIDS epidemic—the year when the number of cases in the US reached 100,000 and artist Robert Mapplethorpe died—perceiving the film as a vision of those who saw gay men deserving their hellish sufferings precisely because of the orgiastic behavior that the film seems to portray. Narratively, the crowds with burning torches seem to be routing the evil sexual perverts, their torches a kind of Nazi-like denunciation of their seemingly tormented sexual actions.
But looking at this film again today, in 2023 I see a very different film from the one the gay community would have seen upon the film’s release—had they even been able to see it. First of all, it is very much a piece with Jerry Tartaglia’s movie of the same year, Ecce Homo, which uses similarly doctored and collaged images of male pornography to, as Vito Russo argued, “reclaim desire in the age of AIDS.” Tartaglia argues, moreover that gay men should not give in to the notion that it was their sexuality and its representations that brought on their sufferings, or that such behavior should now be controlled—and perversely enjoyed as did the prison guards in Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour—but should be explored. As I described Tartaglia’s use of the porn images in my essay on that film:
“His 'preposterously' inverted film reveals this through several methods, first by his recitation of a mad mass-like incantation, with Gertrude Steinian logic, chanted with the musical accompaniment of something like a Gregorian chant by monks. While focusing on the Genet image of the guard peeping in the cell, the director overlays what the guard observes in his prisoners’ sexual activities with gay footage of men having sex from porn films, tinted various colors—purple, green, red, blue, yellow, and sometimes in the original colors or black-and-white—which render the images of men with their penis’ inserted to men’s asses and penis’ endlessly spouting semen almost as something like Hallmark greeting cards. No matter how shocked heterosexual onlookers—the doctor, the women and others who might make up any such board of decency—might be when realizing what is being portrayed, they cannot help but recognize them as standing apart from whatever one might describe as pornography: “printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.”
And this is precisely how we might look at Price’s film, not as a pornographic work itself to which the societal forces are reacting negatively, but as a celebration of gay sex, an act of faith and conviction that results, as the Gregorian chants suggest in this work, in a true worship of the holy body in all its possible forms and expressions by these hallow-headed porn boys. And just as Lot’s wife did not at all wish to leave her town of Sodom in James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber’s gay romp Lot in Sodom, even Lot enjoying the pleasure of getting “to know” the visiting angel, the sensual celebrants of Price’s Sodom don’t seem at all distracted in their communal eucharist, truly eating the blood and flesh of their God-blessed fellow communicants and certainly giving no evidence of being run out of their cloister. Instead of reading the flickering images of hands raised in protest as the masses of city on their way to destroy their Frankenstein, we might as easily read those raised arms and their flaming faggots as celebratory cheers in the manner of a Woodstock-like concert, the actual fest celebrated one year after this film was made.
Even if one cannot get the image of the crowd’s violence out of our minds, mightn’t we then ask if the sometimes seemingly tough sex scenes are far less horrific than the men of God revenging, one presumes, the heathens around them. Both visions are single-minded in their intensity, and both involve, to a large degree, the ecstasy—bodily (expressed also in the obvious materiality of the film itself) and spiritual, both enhanced by the perverted (spoken as in the Devil’s
language in reverse) monkish chants, which at one point sound almost like a series of howls before they return to the quieter male choral monophonic sacred songs of the 9th and 10th centuries. In none of these worlds are women allowed, and all three share a commitment of patrimonial action and belief that is implacable, unable to be mitigated as faith generally is. In the end, it all depends on what you perceive as the sacred and what you determine to be profane.
In fact, these visions are embodied in both Old and New Testament figures and their stories from Abraham and Moses to finally Christ, who is the body made holy by the spirit of God (to slightly restate The Apostle’s Creed).
In a very clear way Price’s film is similar to the famed photograph of two years earlier, which also received severe criticism from both conservatives and established artistic communities: Andre Serrano’s Piss Christ, which pictures a small plastic crucifix floating in a tank of the artist’s urine—yet another statement of the body linked to the holy. Indeed, Serrano’s reaction to the outrage his art received is remarkably similar to Price’s reaction: "I had no idea Piss Christ would get the attention it did, since I meant neither blasphemy nor offense by it. I've been a Catholic all my life, so I am a follower of Christ."
The major apologist for Price’s film, Michael Wallin, describes it in terms quite close to those I have used in my linking of the sacred and the profane:
“Beauty, pain, compassion, power, pathos decay, tenderness… These words all come to mind trying to get a fix, as it were, on this super-8 film by Luther Price. It is elusive. Sodom is a visceral experience of such passion and intensity that coming to terms with it in words seems a futile exercise. Yet it’s a film so provocative and confrontational that it demands response. …It hits somewhere in the solar plexus, that nebulous area where emotional and physical sensations converge.”
If the word “emotional” can in any way linked to the word “spiritual” or as something of the imagination and mind, then I think I very much agree with Wallin. But finally, the work also very much a formal work with its rhythmic and repetitive actions gradually picking up in pace as it eventually spins out and erupts, like the semen exploding from the cocks over these men’s bodies, in a series of crescendos as fully realized as the spectacular white “fireworks” of Kenneth Anger’s 1947 experimental film of that name.
Los Angeles, July 22, 2020 / revised March 12, 2023 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2020) and (March 2023).
.png)