If you’re going to make a formulaic talking-heads documentary about a broad cultural topic, you might as well interview David Byrne: an actual Talking Head with a distinct cultural point of view. There’s not much to the late-80s cultural commentary doc Heavy Petting that you can’t find in most current reality-TV confessionals, in which random, fame-desperate weirdos shamelessly divulge TMI insights into their personal lives in exchange for extended screentime. The only difference, really, is that Heavy Petting interviews vintage hipster celebrities instead of contemporary nobodies, which gives it a sharp edge over its modern competition. David Byrne is included among the likes of Laurie Anderson, Ann Magnuson, Sandra Bernhard, Alan Ginsburg, Abbie Hoffman, and William S. Burroughs as the talking heads interviewed – a real who’s who of art-school-weirdo idols who haunted the streets of 1980s New York City. They’re all individually sat in front of a black-void Sears & Roebuck photoshoot backdrop and asked to recount their earliest childhood memories of and experiences with sex. For the most part, they’re surprisingly open to the interrogation, give or take a visibly irritated Burroughs, who acts as if he’s impatiently waiting for a delayed bus ride home. There might be decades of reality TV confessionals exposing the raw sexual psyches of everyday extroverts, but there’s only one place you can go to find David Byrne talk about the mechanics of open vs. closed-mouth kissing as if he were a middle school space alien who just crash-landed his UFO into the schoolyard, eager to smooch his first earthling.
One-and-done director Obie Benz juxtaposes these personal confessionals about childhood sexual discovery with vintage propaganda reels promoting sanitized, Leave It To Beaver era sexual “health”, as well as clips of the 1950s sex icons that subverted the morals of the era. All of the interviewees were raised in an era when Elvis & Mansfield’s wiggle, Dean & Brando’s biker leather, and Monroe’s husky whisper commodified the horned-up rebellion of rock ‘n roll for teenage consumption (during the birth & definition of The Teenager as a concept), but they were not prepared for the physical mechanics & consequences of sex through any formal education. Rock ‘n roll got them riled up, but the unscientific gender-performance propaganda of the era left them completely clueless about the basic facts of sex: the physiology of pregnancy, the existence of sperm, the existence of the female orgasm, etc. It’s easy to dismiss the film’s subversive use of 1950s instructional reels as an aesthetic cliche, especially after decades of these same vintage, Father Knows Best-style images being mocked on ironic postcards & bumper stickers. However, the personal vulnerability of the interviews and the low-key insidiousness of the stock footage prove to be shockingly affecting as the widespread failure of American sex “education” curdles the ironic laughter into political fury. The initial novelty of hearing Abbie Hoffman reminisce about a totally-hetero circle jerk he had with his childhood schoolmates gradually gave way to my own resentful memories of being raised sex-ignorant as a small-town Catholic in the exact era this film was produced, leaving little room for nostalgic kitsch since the problem never went away.
I was initially annoyed by Benz’s choice to avoid labeling his interviewees in identifying chyrons. You either know who Ann Magnuson is or you don’t; even the final montage jokingly credits her as a “TV spokesmodel”, not the fringe actress & Bongwater poet I know her as. When that montage reveals that a couple reality-TV level nobodies (i.e., NYC businessmen) are mixed among the more recognizable talking heads, I came around on the decision. The movie intends to diagnose a widespread cultural rot in the rift between America’s leather-jacket horniness and America’s prudish aversion to sex education, so it’s smart to demonstrate that it’s a psychological damage that affects everyone, not just artsy-fartsy perverts. This closing-credits reveal also pairs the subjects with their actual high school photos, confronting the audience with the faces of children who were deliberately left unprepared for healthy sexual lives in the name of Family Values. All of the marketing for Heavy Petting promises benign Gen-X irony and repurposed 1950s kitsch, but there’s something bravely vulnerable & culturally heinous about what it unearths in its interviews and its moldy stock footage. I found it strangely powerful and unfairly undervalued.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 