For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the roughly prototypical high school slasher Massacre at Central High (1976).
There was some mild online controversy earlier this year when American film critic Scott Mendleson referred to Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan as “India’s Tom Cruise” in headline shorthand, as if SRK’s legendary career was secondary to its closest Hollywood equivalent. I’m going to risk doubling down on that accidental insult here by comparing those two stars’ current run of action blockbusters, hopefully in a more specific way. The cultural & industrial contexts of Cruise & SRK’s respective careers might be incomparable, but right now they happen to be the only world-famous movie stars keeping the lone-wolf action genre alive, and they’re both doing so decades past the point where they could reasonably play the archetype. While Cruise has put in two old school star-power performances in the past year with M:I Dead Reckoning (yay!) and Top Gun: Maverick (booo!), SRK has done the same, if not better, in Pathaan and now Jawan. Both stars have long enjoyed a kind of ageless, plastic handsomeness that they’ve tirelessly applied to nationalistic action spectacles in recent years, often to deliriously entertaining results. And as outdated as that muscles-and-explosions version of action cinema feels this long after Stallone & Schwarzenegger’s heyday in the Reagan Era, Cruise & SRK both managed to surprise me this year in the exact same way. There was a moment in the ludicrously overstuffed Dead Reckoning: Part 1 when it suddenly occurred to me just how many badass women Cruise had managed to gather around him as Ethan Hunt over seven entries in the ongoing Mission: Impossible series. No longer relegated to minor roles as arm candy, distressed damsels, and refrigerated wives, Cruise had slowly built a small crew of fierce femme fighters in actors Rebecca Fergusson, Venessa Kirby, Pom Klementieff, and Hayley Atwell. While most lone-wolf action blockbusters provoke you to think “Dudes rock!” (including Maverick & Pathaan), there was a brief moment of Dead Reckoning that left me thinking “I love women so much!,” a much rarer feat. So, I was delighted that SRK’s latest, Jawan, wholly dedicates itself to that same novel cause, at least once it gets the requisite hero worship of its macho lead out of the way.
Jawan stars Shah Rukh Khan as a renegade prison warden who routinely sneaks a small girl gang of select prisoners out of jail to help him commit wholesome acts of political terrorism. In a plot similar to this year’s Ajith Kumar bank-heist actioner Thunivu, SRK’s populist terrorist only takes hostages for media attention, deliberately going viral so he can expose corporate & governmental greed directly to The People. He never actually threatens the lives of the Mumbai citizens at the business end of his guns & explosives, but he uses their terror to amplify his political messages on social media & traditional newscasts. It’s an extremist cause but a righteous one, ultimately re-routing corporate & governmental bribe money to heal societal ills like high suicide rates among farmers who owe predatory banks unreasonable sums, underfunded government hospitals left to rot without proper subsidies and, the issue closest to his heart, long-overdue prison reform. It’s initially jarring to watch hundreds of women prisoners applaud their warden in universal celebration, not to mention the adulation of the hostages he takes at gunpoint while masking his identity in public. He’s always on the right side of the Us vs Them political divide, though, a righteousness backed up by his wholly dedicated girl-gang prisoner crew. It’s like watching SRK arm the cast of Gangubai Kathiawadi with rifles & grenades to aim at the politicians & bankers who damned them to poverty in the first place. Of course, since law enforcement only exists to protect property, not serve the people, armed forces are sent to swiftly, violently shut down his one-man Joker/Anonymous movement ASAP. And of course, since SRK is SRK, he escapes a fatal fate at the government’s hands by simply wooing the woman in charge, romancing her to his side of the fight as part of the gang.
I’ve maybe revealed a couple surprise, pre-intermission plot twists in the above paragraph, but there are plenty more to be discovered throughout Jawan (including a ludicrous development that directly addresses how far its star has aged out of these kinds of roles). This is a non-stop entertainment machine, the full package. It marries the recent transcendent achievements of South Indian action-blockbusters out of Tollywood & Kollywood with the classic payoffs of Bollywood masala cinema (by hiring Tamil director Atlee for a traditional big-budget Hindi production). You can feel that marriage most clearly in the musical romance sequences, which in recent years have more often been downplayed as music video asides but here feature at a central, prominent place in the narrative, emphasized just as much as the CG action spectacle of its mass shoot-outs, liberally tossed explosives, and glimpses of flaming horses. There are references in the dialogue to other mass-entertainers in the same vein like the S.S. Rajamouli historical action epic Baahubali and the reliably charming Indian actor Alia Bhatt, solidly rooting the film in a larger industry of peers. SRK is a major, load bearing pilar in that industry, and he’s afforded plenty of screenspace to ham it up here, both as a dashing romantic lead and as a grizzled political terrorist who hides behind old-school Universal Monster masks styled after The Phantom of the Opera & The Mummy. His appeal as an action star is universal (to the point where comparing him to Tom Cruise really is an insult to his own unique, unmatched celebrity), but it’s probably not out of line to note that he has a particular appeal to heterosexual women as an object of desire. So, there’s something wonderful about the way this particular crowd-pleaser surrounds SRK with hundreds of women, filling the frame to cheer him on and fight beside him as if the entire gender as a social group were his co-star instead of his assigned romantic partner in South Indian “Lady Superstar” Nayanthara. I was charmed by the brief flash of that army-of-women supporting cast in Dead Reckoning, but Jawan outshone that aspect of it with the same blinding commitment to excess that Pathaan outshone all other McQuarrie-era Mission: Impossible sequels with, besting them at their own game (even while their MVPs played on entirely different fields).
“Why do I watch WrestleMania? My answer is that the poet must not avert his eyes from what’s going on in the world. In order to understand, you have to face it.”
“Our sense of the real world today is massively challenged; I include here reality television, breast enhancement, and the carefully choreographed, fake drama of WrestleMania, populated by larger-than-life characters with muscles that nature doesn’t normally provide us with and who take pleasure in telling everyone how unbelievably evil they are.”
“What is fascinating about WrestleMania is the stories around it: the dramas between the owner of the whole show and his son, who are feuding, and his wife in the wheelchair who is blind, and he is then showing up in the ring with girls who have huge, fake boobs, and he is fondling them. This is almost sort of an ancient Greek drama – evil uninterrupted by commercials.”
These are just a choice few Werner Herzog quotes about the cultural & literary virtues of professional wrestling, pulled from the 2019 GQ listicle “Werner Herzog Cannot Stop Talking About WrestleMania” – a masterpiece of modern clickbait publication that I return to often. Herzog was promoting his work as an actor on the Star Wars television series The Mandalorian around the time those various press junket quotes were assembled, a time when his familiarity as a household name was bridging the gap between art cinema snobs and their sworn enemies, “Disney Adults.” His public perception has since been bifurcated in recent years, split between his well-earned designation as a world-class auteur and his more recent evolution into a Nic Cagian human meme who pontificates about supposedly low-brow subjects like WrestleMania & Ana Nicole Smith in a severe German accent. Unlike Nic Cage, though, Herzog has not allowed his YouTube Era reputation as a human meme affect the tone or content of his work as a serious filmmaker, give or take a few over-the-top scenes in his collaboration with Cage in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans. As often as you hear Herzog explain the grotesque poetry of reality TV & pro wrestling in interviews, it’s difficult to detect their influence on his actual work. That is, unless you happen to be one of the few people who remember his 2001 historical fantasy drama Invincible, which presents an academic-level understanding of the historic origins of wrasslin’, as well as its modern mutation into mass, crass populist entertainment.
Invincible stars real-life strongman Jouko Ahola as historical strongman Zishe Breitbart, a young Jewish blacksmith from a small Polish village who grew to fame as “The Strongest Man in the World” in 1920s Germany. Herzog takes a pro wrestling-style truthiness approach to the material, moving Breitbart’s story to the early stirrings of Nazi Germany a decade later, playing up the significance of his Jewish heritage in a heightened, more satisfying kayfabe version of his life’s story. In the film, Breitbart enters the entertainment industry through the strongman circus acts that sparked pro wrestling as an artform. He challenges a traveling strongman for prize money in what is supposed to be a rigged wrestling bout and easily defeats the brute in a Goliath vs Goliath matchup. Word of his incredible strength quickly spreads, and he’s summoned to work as a regular stage act in a Berlin cabaret, ringmastered by a Nazi-friendly psychic played by Tim Roth. Roth’s conman mystic is quick to use Breitbart’s Jewish heritage as a race-baiting point of division between the Nazi officers and Jewish citizens in the cabaret audience, which is perfectly in tune with how hot-topic political divisions are exploited for cheap heat in modern pro wrestling programs. Breitbart is the underdog hero for the Jewish people, who feel increasingly hopeless as the Nazis rise to political power. The carnie mystic MC is a hero to the Nazis, pretending to summon supernatural strength from The Dark Arts to overpower the strongman’s brute force (a “skill” he can sell as a war-winning weapon for Hitler’s army). In truth, they’re working together as a scripted act, putting on a show to stoke their divided audience’s Us vs Them bloodlust; it’s wrestling in a nutshell.
Aesthetically, Invincible is worlds away from the reality-TV crassness of what Herzog refers to as “WrestleMania”. In its best moments, there’s an ancient cinematic quality to the director’s visual storytelling, effectively remaking Bob Fosse’s Cabaret as if he were Tod Browning adapting a fairy tale. In its worst moments, it plays like standard-issue Oscar bait of its era, bolstered by a prestige-desperate Hans Zimmer score that tells the audience exactly how to feel at every second of runtime. Its Oscar chances were self-sabotaged by Herzog’s choice to have his European actors speak phonetic English in post-production dubs instead of performing naturally in their various native languages. That might have been a deliberate attempt to evoke a Bressonian style of performance, but it just comes across as bizarre & confused, and only the established professional actors Tim Roth & Udo Kier come across as capable performers. The camerawork can come across as bizarre & confused as well, alternating between a handheld documentary style and a Hollywood-schmaltz fantasy & artifice that attempts to (in Ross’s showman wording) “[articulate the audience’s] collective dreams”. Its moments of visual lyricism make sense to me as a historically set fairy tale about Nazi obsession with mysticism clashing against a Freaks vs. The Reich style superhero. They’re especially effective when Herzog gazes at the sea-life bodies of jellyfish & crabs as if he were a space alien considering their otherworldly beauty for the very first time. He’s really good at articulating the uncanniness of everyday life & pop media in that way, which is how he’s gotten famous as an interviewee outside of art cinema circles. It’s amusing, then, that he can’t convincingly translate that wonder with the world into an Oscar-friendly movie for normies; he’s too much of a genuine weirdo.
Around the time of Invincible, Herzog was essentially directing one feature film a year at a consistent pace, and he’s only gotten more prolific in the two decades since. While some of his 2000s titles like Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World, and the aforementioned Bad Lieutenant have endured with a certain cultural cachet, many like Invincible have fallen through the cultural cracks; they can’t all be stunners. If you’re going to excavate this one Herzog title out of relative obscurity within that massive catalog, I do think it’s worth considering as a bizarre, failed attempt to reach for Awards Season prestige beyond the usual, routine boundaries of his critical accolades. He has found wider public recognition in the years since, but mostly as a weirdo public persona (an extension of the first-person narration style he developed in his 2000s-era documentaries). Invincible does recall one very specific aspect of that public persona, at least: his inability to stop talking about WrestleMania. Whether that’s enough of a reason to dig this one particular discarded Herzog DVD out of the Goodwill pile is up to your completionist interest in his career, I guess, as well as your personal fascination with the Greek tragedy & grotesque poetry of wrasslin’ as an artform.
Like many bored, frugal Americans, I recently dragged myself out of the house on National Cinema Day to take advantage of the newly invented corporate holiday’s adverised movie ticket price of $4. I very much appreciated the discount, just as I appreciate local theaters’ weekly $6 ticket deals on Tuesdays. On the audience’s end, it’s nice to feel like we’re scoring a bargain; on theaters’ end, it’s a smart ploy to lure us through the door to buy the popcorn & cocktails that actually drive profits. On both sides, it was just a great excuse to hide from the heat on what turned out to be the hottest day in the history of recorded temperatures in New Orleans (so far!). What I couldn’t get over while sweating my way through The Broad Theater’s parking lot, though, was the genius of stoking ticket sales during such a low tide of new, exciting releases. Besides the promise of central air-conditioning, there just wasn’t much on The Broad’s marquee that looked like it would pull in a huge crowd without the $4 ticket deal. Barbie & Black Beetle were the blockbusters on offer, neither of which were in their first-weekend rush; Passages& Landscape with Invisible Hand were their smaller, artsier counterbalance, neither of which are especially attention-grabby outside a small circle of media obsessives who know the names Cory Finley & Ira Sachs. And so that left room on the marquee for the true heroes of the day: a restoration of the four-hour French New Wave manboy autopsy The Mother and the Whore and an opportunistic re-release of Emma Seligman’s stress-nightmare comedy Shiva Baby, working up some enthusiasm for the following week’s follow-up Bottoms. Early this summer, when there was absolutely nothing of importance or interest to see in local theaters, IP-driven monstrosities like Fast X, Super Mario Bros, and The Little Mermaid clogged up local marquees for months, leaving us in a stagnant cultural dead zone. By National Cinema Day, theaters & distributors had figured out the perfect way to fill that cultural void: robust repertory programming.
Truth be told, August’s best repertory re-release had already left theaters by National Cinema Day, but I made time to catch it at The Broad earlier that week on a $6 Tuesday deal. A new digital restoration of Park Chan-wook’s international breakout Oldboy was re-released nationwide by the hip cinema distributor Neon last month, commemorating the film’s 20th anniversary. That’s two whole decades of college-freshmen edgelords daring each other to watch this Totally Badass, Totally Fucked Up revenge thriller over a case of the cheapest beer that’s ever been swallowed. And since I was a college freshman around when Oldboy first hit DVD myself, it’s incredible that I had never seen it before its prestigious victory lap this August, enjoying the afterglow of Park’s more refined, acclaimed works like The Handmaiden & Decision to Leave. My friend group just happened to get our grubby, beer-clutching hands on other edgelord starter-pack films of the 2000s instead: American Psycho, Requiem for a Dream, Suicide Club, Ichi the Killer, etc. However, I am a movie nerd with an internet connection, so I have absorbed plenty of the details & circumstances of the sex & violence in Oldboy over the past couple decades of “You’ve got to see this fucked up movie!” cultural osmosis, to the point where I wasn’t sure what was left to be discovered by finally watching it once its re-release arrived at my nearest theater. I mostly showed up to watch Oldboy out of solemn duty as a Cult Cinema enthusiast needing to mark a major 2000s title off my checklist. So, given how familiar I felt with its major bullet points (and hammer holes), I was shocked by how well the mystery aspect of the movie worked for me as a new viewer. Just like its reformed shitbag protagonist, I really wanted to know the whos & whys behind the elaborate torture schemes. Unlike the titular oldboy, though, I was fully aware of how much we’d have to suffer to get to those answers.
As a digital “restoration”, the new Oldboy release is not some revelatory visual experience; this is not Criterion cleaning up & hyper-saturating a Technicolor marvel like The Red Shoes. Neon’s Oldboy scan still looks stuck in the mid-00s, and it’s much more likely to impress a longtime devotee who’s used to screening it on a cathode-ray TV than a first-time viewer. Its overt aughtsiness is integral to its prominence in the pop culture canon, though, so it’s for the best that it still looks of its time. Its sickly fluorescent lighting is true to the aesthetics of American torture porn in that era—typified by Saw & Hostel—while its absurdly convoluted plot mechanics recall the grander, elevated European torture porn of the time: Martyrs, Calvaire, Inside, etc. Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-sik) may have been imprisoned & tormented in a small cell outside of time for fifteen grueling years, but he’s allowed a window to the outside world in a small motel-style television, where he consumes early-aughts pop culture & news coverage like oxygen entering his lungs. Once “freed,” he’s equipped with a 2000s-vintage flip phone, a pay-by-the-hour internet cafe, and a rudimentary video chat platform that doesn’t yet stream audio. Of course, he hasn’t really been freed at all, as the mysterious tormenter behind his imprisonment uses these wicked tools of the early internet to imprison him in a slightly larger cell (the massive city of Seoul instead of just one room inside it). He’s trapped by the lack of reasoning behind his torment and the mysterious face responsible for it, given five days to solve the puzzle and secure his revenge before the punishment gets even more severe. The audience knows he’s being played with like a half-dead mouse, but it takes a while to find the cat who’s batting him around, and it takes even longer to figure out why that cat hasn’t gotten bored of him yet.
Maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe all audiences everywhere already know every beat of Oldboy, and I was the last genre gobbler around who could enter the theater without knowing exactly where its twisty story is going. After so many years of dorm room canonization, it wouldn’t be surprising if there were no surprises left in Oldboy for the uninitiated. I hadn’t seen it, nor read its comic book source material, nor spoiled myself with its 2010s Spike Lee remake, and even I already felt like I had its iconic hallway fight scene and the grimiest details of the final villain’s speech committed to memory. It was a joy to squirm along with fellow in-the-flesh moviegoers during its scenes of covert incest & unflinching dental gore, though, and I was surprised by how much I cared about the motivation behind those grotesqueries beyond their shock-value novelty. In fact, I skipped out on seeing a personal-favorite cult classic I’ve seen many times before (but never in a proper theater) to make time for that first-time watch of Oldboy, and I left a satisfied customer; it was up against a 50-year anniversary restoration of the landmark folk horror The Wicker Man that same week. Neon’s re-release of Oldboy appeared to be a successful financial gamble too, surpassing the box office sales of the film’s original run in just a couple weeks. I can only hope that success means more nation-wide repertory programming is on the way, bolstering the couple regular local slots The Prytania clears in its schedule for its Wildwood & Classic Movies series. The Broad is pretty great about picking these releases up when they’re offered by distributors, which is how I’ve gotten to see other, obscurer cult classics like The Doom Generation,Funeral Parade of Roses, and The Last Movie for the first time in a proper theater. It’s a rare treat that’s getting a lot less rare, and I hope that it becomes the go-to move when padding out release schedules during the leaner months on the theatrical release calendar. It would certainly lure me in to buy more cocktails & popcorn, whatever keeps the projectors on.
Welcome to Episode #195 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Hanna, and Britnee discuss the rudimentary CG realms of director Brett Leonard, starting with his supernatural serial killer thriller Hideaway (1995).
00:00 Welcome
01:58 Fools Rush In (1997) 05:55 Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013) 13:28 Rebecca (1940) 16:13 Amateur (1994) 20:40 Petals on the Wind (2014) 25:33 We Were the Mulvaneys (2002) 30:15 Jawan (2023) 35:35 Cyberstalker (1995)
39:16 Hideaway (1995) 1:00:24 The Lawnmower Man (1992) 1:23:11 Virtuosity (1995) 1:41:50 Siegfried & Roy: The Magic Box (1999)
Only two feature films into his career, I’m already comfortable thinking of Bertrand Mandico as my favorite working director, even though only his debut was a total stunner. Mandico’s The Wild Boys is my favorite film released within my lifetime – a Bidgoodian wet nightmare about gender dysphoria and, ultimately, gender obliteration. His follow-up, After Blue (Dirty Paradise), is more of a flippant prank, using the same sensory intoxication & erotic menace for a much sillier purpose: worshipping the almighty Kate Bush in the rubble of our fallen civilization. Although it’s seemingly shot in a muted black & white that sidesteps the cosmic blues & purples that make his other features so vivid & vibrant, I’m dying to see his third feature, Conann, which appears to be a gender-subverted riff on the pulp fantasy character Conan the Barbarian. It’s going to take a while for that latest dispatch from Mandico’s id to reach American screens (it just premiered at Cannes this summer), so I decided to placate my curiosity as best as I could by digging into his back catalog of short films. Altered Innocence has consistently been Mandico’s home distributor since the company’s inception; it’s even arguable that Mandico’s films have been a brand-defining cornerstone for the Vinegar Syndrome partner label, along with the similar dreamlike genre throwbacks of Knife+Heart director Yann Gonzalez. Given that close affiliation, their publishing a collection of Mandico’s short films on a single Blu-ray disc, titled Apocalypse After, was a total no-brainer. Given my own personal obsession with The Wild Boys, the only surprising thing is that I didn’t jump on this disc the second it was released last year. I guess I needed to get worked up about a new feature from Mandico dangling just outside my reach to seek out his already-available shorts I hadn’t yet seen. Well, that and if I immediately jumped on every new Altered Innocence release I wanted to see I’d struggle to pay my energy bill, and I wouldn’t be able to watch them anyway.
The titular short on this disc, “Apocalypse After (Ultra Pulpe)”, is a calling-card submersion in the subliminal perversions of cinema, consciously transforming “science fiction” into “science titillation” while shouting in frustration that the images still aren’t erotic enough for the director’s liking. Longtime Mandico collaborator & muse Elina Löwensohn stars as the director’s avatar, an arthouse pornographer named Joy d’Amato (in cheeky reference to real-life pornographer Joe d’Amato). Mandico’s films are full of sarcastic allusions to real-life artists he admires in this way: Kate Bush, Henry Darger, Jean Cocteau, Walerian Borowczyk, etc. Curiously, he has yet to name-drop the three filmmakers he most reminds me of—Kenneth Anger, Guy Maddin, and James Bidgood—likely because their influence is already blatantly apparent in the text. Joy d’Amato is more Bertrand Mandico than she is Joe d’Amato, though, shooting a live-action version of paperback sci-fi cover art with the same vintage porno sensibility you can find in all of Mandico’s recent work. In a way, the film shoot setting positions “Apocalypse After” as Mandico’s Knife+Heart (a movie he acted in as a porno cinematographer), but it’s even less of a coherent, linear story and even more of an expression of its director’s fascinations & frustrations with his artform. Dialogue that declares details of the film shoot “magnificently hideous” or complain, “It’s beautiful, but at the same time I don’t know what he means,” function as meta commentary on the achievements & shortcomings of Mandico’s art. No dialogue feels more essential to the piece than an actor’s monologue recalling watching forbidden, adult films as a child – compelled & mesmerized by the images on the screen but too young to fully comprehend them. Mandico has a way of turning pornographic indulgence into transcendent visual art, and even then he directs his avatar in Löwensohn to shout that the images are still not erotic enough. Nothing ever could be.
The “Apocalypse After” short is a thematically cohesive but logically incoherent collection of all the stylistic flourishes & quirks sketched out in Mandico’s first two features: the plant life molestations of The Wild Boys, the hollow geode-face zombies of After Blue, and the practically achieved glamour that merges their aesthetics – gel lights, rear projections, body glitter, smoke, prosthetic nipples, etc. The presentation of Mandico’s previous shorts on the Apocalypse After disc is strictly chronological, so you can watch the director arrive at that personal aesthetic over decades of obsessive tinkering. Over three full hours of his two decades of short-form experiments, Mandico Heads get to watch the filth maestro develop his cosmic visual language in ten preceding works. In that context, “After Apocalypse” is less of a jumbled collection of Mandico pet obsessions than it is a natural crescendo of a clear pattern in methodology. His seemingly weird-for-weird’s sake indulgences become more recognizably thoughtful & designed in retrospect, the same way the “Magick Lantern Cycle” packaging of Kenneth Anger’s shorts makes “Lucifer Rising” feel like the most obvious place his art could lead him, not an out-of-nowhere novelty. The Apocalypse After disc starts with Mandico imitating Jan Švankmajer’s stop-motion nightmares in antiqued sepia tone, then seeking the same ancient artifice in short-form magical realist dramas. He hits a breakthrough mid-career with the mid-length film “Boro in the Box”, which playfully reimagines filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk’s life in the style of Au Hazard Balthazar (a prototype for the more recent Balthazar riff EO). By the time Mandico returns to stop-motion in his post-“Boro” short “Living Still Life” (this time animating taxidermized animals), his style is distinctly of his own. As a result, all of the essential Mandico bangers arrive late on the disc, after he finds his distinct voice as a filmmaker: the Cronenbergian colonoscopy sideshow act “Prehistoric Cabaret,” the fairy tale creature feature “Our Lady of Hormones,” the unlikely Enys Men sister film “Depressive Cop” and, of course, the aforementioned self-portrait in heat “Apocalypse After.”
There are certainly other current filmmakers whose every feature I anticipate with the same gusto as Mandico’s, namely Peter Strickland and Amanda Kramer. None in that unholy trio of perverts gets the critical respect they deserve as playful subverters of the artform. The academic interest critics used to have in similarly perverse, cerebral genre filmmakers like Cronenberg, Lynch, and Jodorowsky has more recently shifted to formally muted & restrained works of slow cinema auteurs instead. A lot of the leeway we used to give venerated genre freaks of the past hasn’t trickled down to the unvenerated genre freaks of today, at least not for anyone who hasn’t struck a distribution deal with A24. Altered Innocence appears to be committed to the cause at least, offering a step-by-step study of Mandico’s work for anyone who cares to learn how he arrived at something as wildly baffling as The Wild Boys. The only other comparable presentation of a current director’s shorts that I can name is the The Islands of Yann Gonzalez, which I will leave to your imagination what is covered and who handled the distro.
I have an ambivalent relationship with my gender identity, which I tend to label with “cis enough” and “cis-by-default” so I don’t have to think about it too hard in concrete terms. Part of that ambivalence is in figuring out where a mostly-straight male crossdresser fits in the current gender studies zeitgeist, which is righteously (and rightfully) focused on ensuring that trans people have a right to exist in public. Any personal irresolution I carry around as a man who’s both attracted to women and to wearing “women’s” clothing feels at best secondary to that political activism, especially in recent years when Conservative pundits have turned the basic daily existence of transgender people into an easy Culture War target for fascists & bullies. My interest in trans narratives in cinema is two-fold, then: admiration for the societal transgression of decidedly rejecting your assigned gender identity and belief in the necessity to reinforce that trans and gender non-conforming people have always been part of the human social fabric. There have been at least two great recent releases that speak to that dual interest, two documentaries on vintage trans life that allow their subjects to tell their own stories at length without editorial interruption. And since this is the most I’ve ever overshared in a single paragraph on this blog, I will report that I recently watched them both in a comforting afternoon double feature while recovering from a vasectomy.
The most recent film in this pairing is the new documentary Casa Susanna, which was plucked from its festival run for television & streaming broadcast in PBS’s American Experience series. The titular Casa Susanna was an American getaway camp for covert crossdressers in the 1950s & 60s, established as a Catskills meeting place for a larger attempt to build “a national sorority of crossdressers” who organized through backpages in the era’s fetish magazines. Documenting a time when public crossdressing was against the law outside “female impersonator” nightclub performances to entertain the straights, Casa Susanna is a heartfelt tribute to the value of “safe space” havens in a rigidly moralistic world. Two elder trans women who met at the getaway camp in their youth reunite at the historic site and trade stories with the daughter of an attendee who documented his own time there in a book titled A Year Among the Girls. The director only intrudes on these oral histories through inclusion of archival footage that establishes the general mood of the era, from anonymous home videos of the scenery to news reels of Christine Jorgensen reluctantly announcing her historic, headline-grabbing sex change. Mostly, the history of American transgender identity in the era is recounted by two women who lived it, whose full stories are told in long takes with no contextual chyrons or talking-head punditry. They talk about how some crossdressers (including their younger selves) used the societal isolation & like-minded camaraderie of Casa Susanna as a trial run for full-time public trans identity, while others used it as a temporary break from “playing the game” of straight, cisgender life. In the film’s most vivid sequences, they narrate a breathtaking slideshow of vintage glamour photos taken at Casa Susanna in its heyday, invaluable evidence of authentic American life that the American majority seeks to extinguish & forget. It’s a small, intimate film that only covers the personal stories of the few remaining women who were still around to tell them, but it does so with immense care & warmth.
1983’s Vestida de Azul (Dressed in Blue) is a much more substantial, confrontational work. Restored & re-released this year by MVP queer cinema distributor Altered Innocence, it’s a Spanish documentary about trans sex workers in the country’s post-Franco years. Those women’s stories are likewise told directly by the subjects in question, but in this case they are supplemented by dramatic re-enactments of their most cinematic anecdotes. The women meet at an artificially staged Sex and the City-style brunch to gab about the ups & downs of their collective lives as a social class, then are each allowed command of the narrative to invite audiences into their individual worlds. There’s a consistent class consciousness to their self-advocacy, explaining that they only participate in sex work en masse because no other profession has made room for their public existence, and because they need to eat. Lines like “Crimes are always committed by the poor” resonate just as sharply and vividly as the women’s stunning early-80s fashion, typified by black-lace lingerie worn directly under a fur coat. Where Casa Susanna is gentle & warm, Dressed in Blue is aggressively candid, documenting estrogen injections, breast surgery, and sex-trade price negotiations with a confrontationally matter-of-fact candor. The entire picture is thorny, sexy, and cool – instantly recognizable as a Paris is Burning-level cinematic landmark, except about the art of hooking instead of the art of voguing. It’s essential viewing for anyone with affection for queer resilience stories or, more generally, for documentary filmmaking as an artform. You can practically hear a young Pedro Almodóvar frantically scribbling details in his notebook in the background and, as much as I love his early work, there’s something invaluable about directly hearing these women’s stories without the filter of his well-represented perspective.
It’s occurred to me in writing this that I’ve committed the exact mistake I’m praising these two documentaries for avoiding: pointlessly imposing my own voice on these women’s stories. The impact & importance of Casa Susanna & Vestida de Azul rely on their shared cultural value as oral histories. The amount of time their subjects are allowed to talk without interruption is remarkable in both cases, even if the earlier film allows room for more traditionally, transcendently cinematic indulgences. At the same time, their dual effect triggers an unavoidable moment of self-reflection in the audience – both in assessing our own personal relationships with gender and in political rage against the systems that make those relationships so needlessly strained & unnatural. That’s what I was thinking about while icing my testicles with frozen peas last month, anyway, in an unrelated private struggle with my body.
And so, with all of the festival buzz surrounding Yorgos Lanthimos’s upcoming vulgar Frankenstein riff Poor Things, we have lived to suffer yet another round of online Sex Scenes Discourse. It’s only been a month since the young Evangelicals of the American suburbs were traumatized by brief flashes of Florence Pugh’s breasts in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer the last round, and now we’re hearing from international YA fiction nerds who claim that “Most actors and many viewers don’t particularly like or miss [sex scenes in movies]. Only film critics and some directors seem to want them.” Like everyone else who’s addicted to online outrage bait, I always find myself scrolling through the replies to these Sex Scene diatribes in stunned disbelief of the support they receive, convincing myself that Zoomer prudes are itching to bring back The Hays Code. Also like everyone else who’s addicted to this monthly ritual, I’d be a lot better off just putting down my phone and watching a dirty movie instead. It’s worth reminding ourselves that these anti-sex scene freaks don’t speak for an entire generation of moviegoers; they’re isolated cases of puritanical mania, most of whom get their steady stream of chaste content through Disney+ and romance paperbacks written for teens, only to be scandalized by intimate moments of nudity & bodily contact the one or two times a year they accidentally watch a movie for adults. For the rest of us—audiences who believe sex is a common aspect of human life worth interpreting onscreen—there are still a few cinematic holdouts that haven’t given up the culture war to The Prudes, despite constant online chatter decrying their existence. The very best way to combat Sex Scene Discourse is to log off and go see a dirty movie in public, the filthier the better, which is exactly what I did the week Poor Things kicked off another round of puriteen grumbling online. Actually, I saw two.
Because America is a nation founded by Puritans, my best bet finding graphic depictions of sex at my local multiplex is catching up with the few adult dramas that happen to land domestic distribution at international film festivals. Memphis-born American director Ira Sachs seems to understand this conundrum, which is likely how he ended up making his messy bisexual love triangle drama Passages in France instead of the US. Here, Passages was threatened with an “NC-17” rating for its frank, onscreen depictions of queer sex, the modern equivalent of an “X.” In Europe, it’s a standard-issue adult drama, acted out by a small cast of Euro film fest regulars familiar to mildly risqué dramas just like it: Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, and Adèle Exarchopoulos. Rogowski stars as a temperamental, narcissistic German filmmaker living in Paris with his much stabler, milder-mannered English husband (Whishaw). At the end of a typically tense film shoot (of a fictional movie also titled Passages), Rogowski feels the communal attention to his control-freak antics & directorial authority plummeting, so he acts out by sleeping with a French woman on the film’s crew (Exarchopoulos), seemingly on a first-time bisexual whim. Addicted to the thrill of stirring up drama in his marriage and in the romantic life of his new sexual partner, the film follows his desperate, darkly hilarious stunts for attention as he plays his two lovers against each other for his own momentary amusement, until he pushes both relationships past their breaking point, leaving him inevitably, permanently alone. It’s basically Poly Under Duress: The Movie, as anyone who makes the mistake of finding Rogowski attractive is sucked (literally and figuratively) into his hedonistic little orbit. There’s nothing especially deep or revelatory about Passages as a character study of a horned-up narcissist, but it is always encouraging to see that someone is still out there making complicated dramas about messy adult relationships, and Sachs goes the extra mile by centering this particular story on The Messiest Bitch in Paris.
Sachs also dared to directly engage with the Sex Scene Discourse in his response to the MPAA’s decision to slap this would-be R-rated drama with a higher, penalizing NC-17 rating – yet another data point in the organization’s long history of homophobia (see also: their egregious R-rating for M Knight Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin earlier this year). The main sticking point with most sex scene haters is that they’re “unnecessary” because they “do not advance the plot.” Personally, I think anyone who’s watching movies for The Plot above all else are already lost causes and would be better off reading an airport novel than engaging with cinema as an artform, but I appreciate the way Sachs pushes back on this notion anyway. In Passages, all advances in plot & characterization are achieved through sex scenes. We learn more about these characters in their private moments of intimacy than we do in their more guarded public lives, and there’s something especially pointed about the way Rogowski’s character deliberately creates drama in the bedroom to make his weekly schedule more interesting now that he doesn’t have a film project to work on. In explaining his refusal to edit Passages to meet the MPAA’s criteria for an R-rating, Sachs stated, “It is a film that is very open about the place of sexual experience in our lives. And to shift that now would be to create a very different movie. To make an interesting sex scene is not easy. Each of the sex scenes to me is a chapter in the film. It has a story. And I wanted each one to have its own relevance and have its own details and be interesting to the audience. I think making interesting sex scenes is the hardest thing . . . What I tried to track here was not to look at sex, but to look at intimacy, not constructed through editing and avoidance.” That sounds like an artist who’s committed to the cause, and we’re lucky to have him fighting on the frontlines of the online Sex Scene Wars.
All that said, I don’t know that treating sex as a normal, natural human behavior onscreen is enough anymore. It might be time to escalate the weaponry of war and make our dirty movies even dirtier, officially adopting a scorched Earth policy. That’s why it’s always important to go see a John Waters repertory screening whenever it’s offered to you, and I’m fairly sure The Prytania’s recent screening of 1977’s Desperate Living was the first time a Waters film has played here since NOMA’s retrospective of his work in 2017. It’s been even longer since I watched Desperate Living in particular with a crowd, and it was projected off the same ancient DVD scan of the film both times, well over a decade apart, because there’s no better version available – a damn dirty shame. Partly a hand-constructed dystopia about a community of crust-punk murderess outcasts and partly a storybook fairytale about a lesbian uprising that topples an unjust monarchy, Desperate Living is my personal favorite John Waters film and, thus, my favorite work of art. About halfway through this most recent screening, I was thinking that this little D.I.Y. geek show manages to touch on every single cinematic subject I’m passionate about except witchcraft, and then I had the joy of rediscovering Mink Stole cooking up a magic rabies potion in a giant cauldron, completing the full set. I was also delighted to see more graphic queer sex on the big screen for all the same reasons detailed above, including its unexpected contributions to the almighty Plot. Yes, Waters includes plenty of his signature pure-shock-value sex & violence in Desperate Living, most notably in scenes where Edith Massey’s evil-queen villain expresses a distinctly Gay Male sexuality purely for the audience’s delight: spanking her army of leather-clad twink underlings, huffing their jock straps, and cheerfully exclaiming “Look at those balls!” at their naked, writhing bodies. However, there’s also a surprising tenderness in the sex scenes between the various lesbian couples of Mortville, most significantly in how Mink Stole’s relationship with fellow fugitive Jean Hill evolves from employer-employee to partners-in-crime to mutually-betrayed-lovers, all tracked through their onscreen sexual contact.
Waters has also been roped into commenting on the state of Gen-Z puriteens and Sex Scene discourse, because he’s the kind of interview subject that regularly gets roped into commenting on the state of everything. An interviewer from the Los Angeles Review of Books writes, “From the rosary job in Multiple Maniacs, to Divine playing both participants in a filthy roadside fuck in Female Trouble, to penetration via chicken in Pink Flamingos, Waters’s films are chock-full of sexual debauchery. I elicit his take on a recent opinion, seemingly held among a younger, online generation that sex scenes in films are unnecessary. Waters scoffs: ‘I haven’t heard that one. That’s a good one. Young people don’t want to see sex in movies? Jesus Christ.” Honestly, I appreciate that complete dismissal of Sex Scene Discourse as a worthwhile topic of discussion even more so than Sachs’s earnest attempts to combat it through his art. It’s laughable that an entire generation of young people would be disinterested in sex as a cinematic subject; we just happen to live in a time when that outlier opinion gets amplified online for outrage engagement, making the voice of a few sound like the voice of the many. I can report from the ground that there were plenty of young people (presumably ones with internet access) present at that recent screening of Desperate Living, and they were hooting & hollering just as loud as the elder perverts in the room, myself included. There was something righteous & defiant about watching such a filthy movie in public (screened as a weekend kickstarter for this year’s Southern Decadence festivities), as if we were protesting for our Constitutional right to watch graphic sex at the multiplex. Meanwhile, my mid-afternoon screening of Passages at The Broad that same week was much more subdued, as it’s a movie that treats sex as a normal, healthy aspect of daily life instead of a nuclear weapon to wield against Evangelical suburbanites.
In summary, the answer to the supposed problem of Sex Scene Discourse is the same answer to most problems in the Internet Era: go outside. It helps to live in a sizeable city with adventurously programmed cinemas like The Prytania and The Broad, of course, but according to the easily spooked adult YA readers of the world, you can’t seem to go see any movie without being accosted with an “unnecessary” sex scene these days, so any theater will do. And if there is absolutely no public access to adult-targeted movies where you live, it is your solemn duty to invite friends over to watch the filthiest movies you own with popcorn at home. Having recently invited friends over to watch Rinse Dream’s semi-pornographic take on Dr. Caligari, I can proudly say that I am doing my part. It is imperative that the puriteens do not win this particular battle in the culture war, even though I’m starting to think there aren’t enough puriteens in the world to register as a genuine threat in the first place.
It’s a disconcertingly popular pastime among Millennial & Gen-X film nerds to ponder “What’s the next Heathers?” every time the discourse turns its evil eye towards the high school comedy genre. Maybe it’s because we’re old enough to remember a time when Heathers had legitimate pretenders to the throne: that bitchy late-90s malaise that birthed such vicious teen girl high school comedies as Jawbreaker, Drop Dead Gorgeous, and Sugar & Spice. Maybe it’s because we’re too old to take full delight in those films’ recent, toned-down equivalents in titles like The Edge of Seventeen, Do Revenge,The DUFF, and Spontaneous. If any films have earned enough cultural capital to compare to Heathers‘s sickly, surrealist take on high school culture in the decades since 1988, only Clueless & Mean Girls could claim to share in its enduring popularity and, although both are very funny in their own way, neither are nearly cruel enough to match the acidity of Daniel Waters’s influential screenplay (or its deliciously evil late-90s echoes). Whatever the case, it’s not surprising that most professional reviews of Emma Seligman’s high school black comedy Bottoms mention its place in the Heathers lineage, despite there being infinite other heightened high school satires to choose from for easy points of comparison: Better Off Dead,Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, Clone High, Daria, and the list goes on. I won’t go as far as to say declaring every successful high school dark comedy “the next Heathers” is a hack move (despite being a certifiable hack who’s guilty of that behavior myself), but I at least want to note that the search for The Next Heathers is becoming a time-honored tradition among an aging generation of media critics.
So, in the interest of mixing things up, I’d like to compare Bottoms to a different heightened high school comedy that I love dearly: Strangers with Candy. Specific events and characters in Seligman & co-writer Rachel Sennott’s screenplay might have more direct correlations in Heathers (especially in the comedic approach to a potential school bomber), but the tone of the humor is much more closely aligned with the vintage Amy Sedaris sitcom. The surrealism of Heathers has a dreamlike, soft-focus quality you will not find in Bottoms, which instead repurposes the rotten dirtbag energy of Sedaris’s cult show. Sennott co-stars with Ayo Edebiri as the film’s Jerri Blank equivalents: two adult actors in hideously slovenly high school drag who relentlessly proposition their classmates for sex while everyone around them obliviously focuses on normal high school media conflicts like homework and the upcoming football game. In both works, teachers and school staff match the teenage deviants’ dirtbag mentality with equally monstrous comebacks, sidestepping the decorum of professional, adult behavior. No one acts like a real human being at any time, reflecting the collective, horned-up mania of American high schools’ insular worlds. The filmmaking is deceptively commercial in both cases (mocking 1970s afterschool specials in Strangers with Candy and mocking 1990s high school boner comedies in Bottoms), delivering pitch-black narcissist line readings with the cheery poptimism of a well-behaved mainstream sitcom. If you deeply miss the mixture of high-femme costume designs with high-artifice teen cruelty in Heathers, there are plenty of modern movies willing to offer a facsimile. Meanwhile, if you deeply miss watching Jerri Blank hit on a comically naive Tammi Littlenut (“Pee on me.”) or trade vicious barbs with Principle Onyx Blackman (“You must be about as worn out as a hooker on VJ Day.”), Bottoms is your only viable modern substitute.
The only reason it’s so tempting to compare Bottoms to previously existing works—Strangers with Candy, Heathers, or otherwise—is because Seligman & Sennott’s screenplay is so referentially rooted in teen sex comedy tradition. Its basic premise, in which two unpopular, unfashionable high school lesbians start an afterschool “defense class” in a misguided attempt to bed cheerleaders, functions as a basic-bullet-points mashup of Fight Club and Revenge of the Nerds. Sennott & Edebiri are obviously not the typical protagonists of the genre’s losing-your-virginity crisis template, but there have already been plenty other post-Porky’s, post-Superbad correctives to make it clear that high school girls get desperately horny too: The To Do List, Blockers, Booksmart, Never Have I Ever, Plan B, Slut in a Good Way, etc. None have quite matched the shameless selfishness of Sennott & Edebiri’s manic libidos, though, at least not since Jerri Blank described the way high school football makes her “damp as a cellar down there – all mildewy.” There are two basic placement tests that will determine your relationship with Bottoms as an audience: whether you find the jokes funny and whether it speaks meaningfully to your personal, pre-loaded high school comedy reference points. The former can’t be helped, but I would at least like to encourage people to look beyond Heathers to better support the latter. In general, we could all stand to look past Heathers more often when considering the genre’s darkest subversions; there are plenty other titles to choose from, to the point where the exercise of identifying The Next Heathers is getting a little silly. Really, what’s most encouraging about Bottoms is how little comparison it supports against Seligman & Sennott’s previous collaboration, Shiva Baby, despite both being queer nightmare comedies starring Sennott. It’s nice to still feel surprised even while also feeling as if you’ve seen it all before.
Swampflix 