For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Lance Oppenheim’s compulsive sperm donorship documentary Spermworld (2024).
00:00 Welcome 01:31 Elevator to the Gallows (1958) 10:29 Double Indemnity (1944) 18:10 Black God, White Devil (1964) 27:15 Lifeboat (1944) 37:00 Spellbound (1945) 47:00 The Paradine Case (1947) 1:02:13 Rope (1948) 1:08:39 It Ends (2026) 1:13:10 Coyote vs Acme (2026) 1:21:33 Jason and the Argonauts (1963) 1:24:32 Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)
If there’s any one Ross McElwee documentary that’s essential viewing for all cinephiles, it’s his 1985 breakout Sherman’s March, which is returning to streaming platforms in a spiffy new 4k restoration early September. Its re-release is timed to coincide with the streaming premiere of McElwee’s latest doc, titled Remake, which revisits scenes from Sherman’s March four decades later, reflecting on how it established and defined his directorial career. Except, not exactly. McElwee’s approach to documentary filmmaking is a gentle bait-and-switch game, with logline premises that promise an easily marketable, digestible picture that then gets slowly eroded & replaced with what’s actually on his mind — something more personal than sellable. Sherman’s March is the foremost example of this bait-and-switch technique, pitched as a dry educational film on the history of “Sherman’s March to the Sea”, a famous Civil War military campaign that financially devastated the American South. That Ken Burnsian academia only lasts for a few wry minutes before McElwee reveals his true mission, though, as indicated in the film’s verbose subtitle “A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Proliferation”. After securing funding to revisit famous sites from General Sherman’s warpath in what’s meant to be a much more traditional doc, McElwee quickly makes the project all about himself and his romantic struggles in a time of global political doom. He still makes a point to stop by some key historical sites from Sherman’s March to the Sea, but only when they’re conveniently close to his social calls or when they’re convenient for giving his film a vague sense of narrative structure. Likewise, his latest work is not exactly a “remake” of Sherman’s March in particular, as its title suggests, so much as it is a broad overview of McElwee’s filmography to date, using the act of reviewing old footage as an access point to grieve the loss of his son, who had appeared in many of McElwee’s films over the decades since Sherman’s March. What Remake makes clear about McElwee’s career is that he is first & foremost a diarist, one whose body of work only becomes more meaningful as you spend more time with him and his loved ones, as captured on film. His first and his most recent pictures are only bookends on a much larger library of communal self-portraits.
Considered in isolation, Sherman’s March is an Odyssean epic for people with “Wait, was she flirting with me or not?” social anxiety. McElwee spends the film’s sprawling three-hour runtime hopping from one situationship to another, filming his awkward flirtations and semi-romantic entanglements with a casual parade of Southern women his parents would love to see him settle down with. The movie’s framing within the historical echoes of a Civil War military campaign, the ongoing threat of nuclear holocaust, and a cheekily imagined romantic rivalry with Hollywood sex symbol Burt Reynolds is all just novel set dressing for the real business at hand: observing Southern womanhood in the 1980s. McElwee’s softspoken narration is a constant aural presence in the film, but he rarely appears onscreen himself. Most of the runtime is populated by the women he’s lazily pursuing, allowing the audience just enough time to fall in love with each of them before some universal obstacle gets in the way of a genuine romantic connection. The camera itself is one of those obstacles, since it would’ve been much less common for everyday social interactions to be documented in the 1980s than it would be now, in the smartphone era. McElwee had to sell Sherman’s March as a historical revisit to key Civil War sites at the time, since this kind of diaristic record of personal canon events and romantic self-lore was on the more experimental end of pre-camcorder 1980s filmmaking, long before the influencer vlog was invented as a medium. On revisit, its 16mm filmstock greatly helps the picture feel more artistically substantial than it would as a modern digital object. Firstly, the depth of color in the new 4k scan of that celluloid is gorgeous, emphasizing both the geographic beauty of the South and the film’s value as a document of a recently bygone era. Not for nothing, the limitations of 16mm film reels also helps maintain a steady rhythm so that no individual moment lingers past its welcome. The overall runtime may be nearly three hours in length, but the shortened film reels keep the pace moving along at such a brisk clip that the audience hardly has time to notice. It’s like tubing down a lazy river with a gaggle of chatty strangers, each just as alluring as they are peculiar and each sending mixed signals about their romantic intentions.
Remake‘s title suggests that it might find McElwee physically retracing his steps at old Sherman’s March shooting locations by catching up with the surviving subjects of that film whom he’s still friendly with. However, that’s only a small part of an infinitely more absurd attempt to remake his name-making doc. The larger project of remaking Sherman’s March was in the hands of mainstream comedy filmmaker Steve Carr, most famous for directing Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Once Carr approached McElwee with the outlandish idea of adapting Sherman’s March into a narrative comedy feature for the wider moviegoing public, McElwee instinctively started documenting the process via digi camcorder, tracking the Quixotic project as it mutated from theatrically-released comedy to prestige TV streaming series to goofball network sitcom to nothing at all. Like the initial pitch of Sherman’s March, that Hollywood project-development campaign only serves as a convenient entryway for allowing McElwee to continue documenting his familial life through cinema; the framing, however amusing, is incidental. The real project here is in revisiting footage McElwee recorded of his son, who died tragically young of a drug overdose after years of struggling with addiction. The prospect of developing Sherman’s March into a mainstream crowdpleaser was an obvious fool’s mission from the start, but McElwee used it as a chance to get his son acclimated to the mechanics of professional filmmaking after he showed interest in it as a potential career. They spend a significant amount of time together during the development process collaborating as documentarians of each other’s professional lives, unsure of what the near future holds. As news about the Sherman’s March adaptation fizzles out and fades away, so does the professional ambitions of McElwee’s son, who appears to be more interested in the hedonism of an artist’s lifestyle than in the tedious act of making art. The tragedy of his death takes Remake into much darker, more painful territory than where Sherman’s March goes, despite the relative lightness & frivolity of its framing. It also opens McElwee up to a larger exploration of how his documentary career has both preserved and distorted his familial life. McElwee’s time in Hollywood humorously draws a distinction between documentaries and “real movies,” but things get much more serious when he then has to ponder the distinctions between documentaries and “real life”.
If there’s any major deviation in McElwee’s filmmaking methodology between Sherman’s March and its in-name-only remake, it’s that he started his career documenting life as it happened in real time but now views cinema as a record of the past. Remake finds the filmmaker reviewing footage from several major titles in his personal catalog, often in a pained attempt to spend more time with his son, whom he’s preserved a record of through decades of happenstantial film diaries. It’s just as personal and self-justifiable as any of McElwee’s other projects, but it also makes the case that his work is more effective in total than it is in individual titles. As indicated by its significance in Remake as the movie that defines McElwee’s professional career, Sherman’s March is likely the one title that could be wholly understood and appreciated as a standalone movie outside his larger body of work. Watching it alongside Remake only makes it a richer text, though, recontextualizing it as the first diary entry among many, all gently narrated by McElwee and all populated with recurring characters he deeply, truly loves: his takes-no-guff sister Dede, his boisterous poetry teacher Charleen, his son Adrian, and everyone else who’s politely suffered him pointing a camera in their direction for decades on end.
There’s a new HBO documentary out called Bang My Box that profiles the life and art of late-night TV host Robyn Byrd, who first became famous for hosting a pornographic call-in show on NYC public access channels in the mid 1970s. Byrd’s career spanned multiple decades of bright-eyed & bubbly political provocation, as she used her TV broadcast platform to advocate for free speech, safe sex, gay rights, trans visibility, and sex-positive feminism through the darkest days of Reagan’s regime and beyond. When the documentary crew catches up with her in the 2020s, she’s long outgrown & outlasted her signature crocheted bikini and mostly just lounges around her Fire Island home with her longtime partner, waxing nostalgic about the good old days. She’s a pure joy to be around in either timeline, but the audience is especially grateful for every frame of vintage footage from her heyday on The Robin Byrd Show in particular, which itself was a weekly document of the bigger personalities from the NYC Porno Chic scene of the 1970s & 80s, as filtered through Byrd’s personal brand of low-fi psychedelic video art. It’s no surprise at all, then, that the self-described “post-porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle eventually pops up in both of the timelines covered by the doc, appearing as a creative collaborator for Byrd in the 1980s and as a personal friend in the 2020s. Sprinkle’s own career saw her starting as a Porno Chic starlet on the NYC scene before she moved to San Francisco in the 1990s, where she made pornographic self-help tapes that doubled as psychotronic video art in the Robyn Byrd Show tradition (most notably among them, the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop). Given their parallel career paths, a Robin Byrd retrospective documentary is just about the most likely place imaginable to find Annie Sprinkle besides maybe her own home. To find a proper recap of Sprinkle’s career in politicized porn production, however, you have to dig a little deeper than what you’ll find on the HBO Max splash page.
Annie Sprinkle was eager to reveal herself to her audience as early as her first directorial effort, the early-80s Porno Chic confessional Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle. There, she breaks the rules of pre-video porno production by making direct eye contact with the camera and verbally addressing her audience, inviting them into her bedroom. Deep Inside is more a loose collection of Sprinkle’s sexual fantasies than a true self-portrait, though, acting as a catalog of her personal turn-ons rather than a true autobiography. It does open with Sprinkle flipping through a family photo album from her actual childhood, though, which is a lot more personal than most professional pornos tend to get. The closest thing Sprinkle has to a true Bang My Box-style career retrospective is the one-woman stage show Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real, which she filmed for the home video screen in 1999. Cinematically, Herstory of Porn borrows from the meta-critical Gen-X sarcasm of Talk Soup & MST3k, placing Sprinkle front row at her local porno theater so she can comment on a Greatest Hits clip show package of her own pornographic highlights in real time through the magic of greenscreen. As an autobiographical documentary, it’s occasionally informative, especially in the earliest stretch where Sprinkle reveals that she got into the porno business while working as a popcorn girl at a theater that was screening the Porno Chic landmark Deep Throat. When her theater’s print of Deep Throat was confiscated by the feds for an obscenity trial, Sprinkle was summoned to testify in court about its exhibition, which is where she met director Gerard Damiano, who dutifully helped initiate her into the biz. It’s difficult to take insightful anecdotes like that too seriously, though, since Sprinkle spends the majority of the runtime shoving toothbrushes & rolled-up American flags up her anus, narrating a “cumshot medley” from her classic works, and performing drag queen lip-syncs to footage of herself from various scenes of Deep Inside. Herstory of Porn is relatively informative about the general shape of Annie Sprinkle’s career, but it’s also an anarchic riot meant to shock & awe the jaded off-Broadway theatre types of 1990s NYC, which is a far cry from the softcore respectability of the Robin Byrd documentary.
Maybe the most revealing snippet of Herstory of Porn is Sprinkle’s assertion that sex is “simply the most interesting subject in the world,” musing to herself “why anyone would want to make a film or a video about anything else, I don’t understand it.” She really means it too. The deeper you dig into her 90s-era video productions the more you realize how all-important sex is to her, to the point where it’s just as much of a religious pursuit as a professional one. Her self-help video Annie Sprinkle’s Amazing World of Orgasm (filmed in the 1990s, completed in the 2000s) continues the greenscreen psychedelia of the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop and the Herstory of Porn videos, with Sprinkle appearing onscreen in the pose of a local weather report girl to inform her audience about the spiritually transcendent power of the orgasm in all its many forms. She’s joined in her spatial void by a variety of experts on the subject: sex researchers, sex educators, sex therapists, cultural sexologists, regular sexologists, prostitution activists, chiropractors, poets, dominatrices, yoga instructors, and erotic touch experts. Each takes a turn describing a different facet of the human sexual orgasm in a standalone vignette: how to have one, how to fake one, what they feel like mixed with laughter, what they feel like mixed with pain, how they can occur during birth, how they can occur during death, how they can connect us to the world beyond observable life altogether. The Amazing World of Orgasm video is presented as an all-encompassing documentary on the health & spiritual benefits of sexual pleasure, but it looks & feels like a Dianetics or Unarius video — more New Age religion than quantifiable science. When it ends on the proclamation, “Happy orgasms to all!” it reads like a call to wands, inspiring its audience to change the world for the better by rubbing one out as soon as the tape concludes. It also consciously functions as an outsider-art curio, though, which is immediately apparent when the very first sexpert’s testimonial is illustrated by overlayed video-warp projections from both Fritz Lang’s sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis and vintage porn from Sprinkle’s personal catalog. As sincere as Sprinkle is about the spiritual & political power about safe, pleasurable sex, she’s always careful to punctuate her rigorous research findings in that field with a sugary wink, signaling to her audience that it’s all in good fun.
As recounted in Herstory of Porn, Annie Sprinkle moved to San Francisco in the 1990s because she had earned a reputation for being too kinky for the professional pornographers of NYC. The cultish New Age hippie spirituality of California suits her well, and she’s since moved on from her “post-porn” self-help psychotronic phase to produce “eco-sexual” documentaries where she sensually fucks the planet Earth to promote Climate Change awareness (along with her wife and creative collaborator Beth Stephens). She’s also been incredibly smart about presenting & archiving her films in academic settings, where she can be primarily understood as an artist and a feminist instead of a pornographic actress, a designation that would undervalue her work in other contexts. I most frequently see her pop up as a talking head in documentaries on human sexuality these days, including the recent documentary on Fakir Musafar and the body modification movement, A Body to Live In. It may not surprise you to hear that Fakir also appears as a talking head in Sprinkle’s own Amazing World of Orgasm video, promoting body modification as a practical means for achieving religiously transcendent sexual climax. The only reason I know that is because Sprinkle maintains a subscription-based website where you can pay to access her archive of vintage “post-porn” self-help tapes online, including her must-see works: Amazing World of Orgasm, Herstory of Porn, and the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop. There’s a D.I.Y. ethos to her work in porn production & exhibition, refusing to wait around for institutions to fund, legitimize, or immortalize her art before it disappears forever. So, the most emotional I got while watching the new HBO doc Bang My Box was a scene where Robin Byrd reads a personal letter written by Sprinkle, urging her to have her personal VHS archive of The Robin Byrd Show scanned & preserved by an academic institution before that wealth of material is lost forever to time & decay. In that letter, Sprinkle stresses how important Byrd’s art is in both the realms of national politics and personal spirituality, and you can tell she means every word. Revisiting clips from that archive in Bang My Box, it became clear to me that The Robin Byrd Show was influential on Sprinkle’s signature “post-porn” video art style, and I was grateful that Sprinkle was retroactively influential on making sure that archive isn’t left to rot, unwatched.
John Waters’s Desperate Living is, for all practical purposes, my favorite movie. I’ve seen it dozens of times — twice theatrically. This week, I learned something new about one of its most outrageous scenes: the babysitter on acid vignette. It’s a minutes-long gag wherein one of the citizens of Mortville explains that their expulsion from proper society resulted from brutally murdering their teenage babysitter, as retribution for cooking her baby in the oven while high on LSD (presumably mistaking it for a roast chicken or turkey). When I first saw this scene as a teen, I correctly assumed it was based on an urban legend, because its story was already familiar to me as a fan of the Lunachicks’ punk-rock novelty song “Babysitters on Acid,” which gives a full play-by-play of the same absurd scenario. While the “Baby-Roast” story did prove to be an urban legend after all, the recent documentary Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks added a new wrinkle to its pop-culture history by explaining that the band’s most recognizable song was directly inspired by that scene in Desperate Living, not by the legend itself. Curiously, Wikipedia cites the Lunachicks track as a retelling of the urban legend but omits any reference to John Waters’s film, instead referencing Rudy Ray Moore’s Disco Godfather (another personal high school favorite) as its most prominent cinematic depiction of note. This information is very important to me, specifically, but I doubt it means much to anyone else.
The question of “Does this mean anything to anyone?” constantly nags at the heart of Pretty Ugly. The original members of Lunachicks are all alive and eager to wax nostalgic about their punk-rock glory days, but they also seem a little baffled why anyone would want to listen. If anything, the project appears to be the result of peer pressure, collectively willed into existence by other recent documentaries of culturally dormant bands like DEVO, Pavement, Butthole Surfers, Fugazi, Sparks, and Judas Priest. Pretty Ugly lays out a clear path that these revivals are supposed to take: a written biography, then some reunion concert dates, and then a documentary promoting & encapsulating the entire project. This band seems especially reluctant to go through any of it—especially the concert reunions—but they eventually drag their feet across the finish line anyway. As an artistic project, Lunachicks represents a moment that has passed, with each member moving on to adult jobs & responsibilities after spending the entirety of the 1990s touring & recording without ever fully “making it” on the same level as their peers. There’s something personally embarrassing about picking their instruments back up to play decades-old novelty songs about the junk food, junk movies, and junk TV they consumed as young snotty punks, no matter how loudly or how often they’re encouraged by loyal fans. They still eventually go through with it, though, because that’s what 90s nostalgia acts are now required to do under the law of mob rule.
Personally, I’m grateful for the result of that peer pressure campaign. Unlike the more famous bands referenced above, I never really knew much about Lunachicks despite owning every single album they released on CD. A lot of the revelations in this documentary are things I would’ve assumed just by looking at their still images in those CDs’ liner notes. Of course they were heavily inspired by John Waters movies; of course most of their interpersonal issues were the result of drug abuse; of course they never broke through to major-label success. However, a lot of my assumptions about their place in the punk-rock ecosystem were heavily distorted by the era when I caught up with them as a teen. By the time I first heard Lunachicks, they were making a modedty living on the Vans Warped Tour mall-punk circuit; what I didn’t know is that they had earned decades of NYC punk-scene bona fides long before that cultural moment, initially “discovered” & promoted by members of Sonic Youth before working as contemporaries of better-remembered acts like L7, Luscious Jackson, and The Go-Go’s. I had never seen footage of them playing to rowdy barroom crowds, provided in excess here via camcorder-quality VHS footage (but mercifully synced to the cleaner studio recordings of their most popular songs). They were, by every measure, a real band. They just never broke through to a wider audience the way their peers did, as most brutally illustrated here by having to trade opening-headliner slots with The Offspring on successive tours, after the lesser band won the war of the charts.
It’s difficult to not blame the entirety of the Lunachicks’ failure to break through to industry misogyny. As young, hip NYC brats with a professional fashion model for a lead singer (Theo Kogan), they were actively resistant to being sexualized in their art, choosing to purposefully ugly themselves up in Waters-inspired drag instead of playing pretty for the camera. I loved that about them as a teenager, but I can also see how that could limit their marketability — as opposed to, say, The Donnas, who eventually had to go full glam to earn a full paycheck. Even in the 2020s, the punk rock marketing machine is a little squeamish about fully promoting their act. The documentary opens with band members encountering a NYC subway ad featuring a vintage Lunachicks concert photo that has edited out the stage-makeup menstruate running down their legs in the original still, leaving only the image of hot girls playing guitar. That squeamishness says a lot in the context of the recent nontroversy over Olivia Rodrigo’s adoption of the 90s kinderwhore aesthetic, wherein she dresses in the babydoll gear once perverted by grunge-era acts like Hole & Babes in Toyland but doesn’t have the grit & grime to pull it off, so she just looks like an actual baby. Everyone wants to profit off the 90s rocker aesthetic but no one wants the 90s rocker attitude that comes with it, which apparently has been true since the Lunachicks were helping define that aesthetic in the 1990s, to little lasting acclaim.
At the same time, the Lunachicks’ missed opportunities as a great band that could’ve been are also somewhat a result of happenstance. They put in the work, producing five fun, rockin’ records packed with memorable hooks and genuinely funny lyrics. They toured relentlessly, living in vans & RVs for a decade solid while some of their peers were arbitrarily called up to millionaires’ lives touring in a megabus instead. In the long run, time has flattened out the difference; each of those 90s acts are assigned their own reunion tour and nostalgia doc regardless of their achieved level of fame, each cherished by loyal fans and forgotten to time by the rest of the masses. In a way, this band-validating documentary is the reward for all that work, something I’m sure every Lunachick would happily trade for a regular royalty check from an Offspring-level radio hit they never got to enjoy.
One of New Orleanians’ most treasured pastimes is to complain that the city ain’t what it used to be, waxing nostalgic about all the people & places that “ain’t dere no more” as time has marched on without them. I tend to roll my eyes at this hyper-local brand of cynicism, because it’s very obvious to me that the city’s greatest charm (and most glaring fault) is that it never really changes, so when people get romantic about “the New Orleans that used to be” I assume they’re mostly just personally nostalgic for being in their twenties. Every time I have an especially great day in the Quarter, at Jazz Fest, or watching a second line from my front porch, I find myself getting emotional about how the people & culture of New Orleans have remained the same for at least as long as I’ve been alive. The city is just as beautiful now as it’s always been. Sometimes, I can even get verklempt about that much-debated fact while watching locally produced documentaries, such as the gay Mardi Gras doc The Sons of Tennessee Williams, the year-in-the-life party doc Always for Pleasure and, most recently, the late-90s documentary profile Ruthie the Duck Girl, which the New Orleans Film Society recently screened at The Broad. Looking at the French Quarter through director Rick Dulaup’s camcorder lens, I was overwhelmed by the comforting feeling that it’s just the same now as I always remembered it, and seeing local legend Ruthie the Duck Lady on the screen felt like running into an old friend while day-drinking on Decatur Street — sublime.
I would have known & caught glimpses of Ruthie the Duck Lady exactly as she appears in this documentary, drinking & smoking away her 60s in the late 1990s & early 2000s. As this documentary’s title suggests, however, her history goes back much further back in New Orleans’s past, back to Ruthie’s girlhood. Ruthie started her lifelong performance-art project as a humble Duck Girl, purposefully attracting attention by wearing a garish Easter bonnet and shepherding ducks around the Quarter. She was an eccentric by nature, but she was also one by choice, making a modest living out of selling autographed postcards of her image. By the time I would’ve seen her, the ducks were long gone, and the bonnet had evolved into a much more elaborate fashionista ensemble, covered in promotional buttons and accessorized with a ratty fur coat, no matter how hot or humid. Ruthie no longer needed to sell postcards; she’d get by just fine on free Budweisers & Kools, generously provided by the fine folks of New Orleans who were just happy to see she’s still around. If you stepped into her orbit at that time, like I did, it might be unfathomable how she had developed her character over the decades, like jumping into the Dune series by reading God Emperor first. This documentary does its best to answer the basic questions you’d have about Ruthie’s life & art, which were one & the same, preserving it for posterity in the process. The city that made her story possible might’ve continued on unchanged, but she only held on for another decade. So, it’s a gift to see her frozen in time here, exactly the way the Ain’t Dere No More cynics wish everything could remain.
Aesthetically, Ruthie the Duck Girl is the kind of New Orleans culture documentation you’d expect to see on local PBS affiliate WYES. Even so, it’s the WYES equivalent of Grey Gardens, spending time getting to know a larger-than-life character while she was still alive to contribute to her own legend. Ruthie even occasionally waves around a miniature American flag like Little Edie, modeling her “costume for the day” with the full intent of making herself a fabulous spectacle. The biggest revelation of this profile was just how aware Ruthie was of her public perception, using it as both a modest source of income and a shield for some of her riskier behaviors (such as kicking tourists she found annoying in the shins with her roller skates). You’d expect a documentary profile of a local eccentric to go out of its way to humanize its subject, but Ruthie’s humanity was apparent to anyone who spent time talking to her instead of gawking at her. What’s much more compelling is puzzling through how much of her persona was a deliberately constructed character, to the point where she tests out new catchphrases like “That did it!” and “Can I get a beer for later?” on-camera, as if Delaup were shooting a sitcom pilot in front of a live studio audience. Revisiting Ruthie did feel like stumbling across an episode of some long-forgotten sitcom I haven’t seen since I was a child, a feeling amplified by the movie’s spotty distribution as an occasional cultural event outside the streaming market. Much like Ruthie herself, you can only see it by leaving your house and spending time around the city’s cultural hubs, occasionally catching a glimpse of the artist at work.
Practically every adult I know socially has either a tattoo or a body piercing, if not both. Even I, a total square, have a few small tattoos myself, which you’ve only ever seen if we’ve hung out in an environment where it was appropriate to not wear socks. It’s increasingly common to see visible tattoos, nose rings, and other low-level body modifications in professional settings, since they’re now so common that they’re no longer transgressive or taboo. It wasn’t too long ago that this wasn’t the case. I remember tattoos & body piercings signaling a much edgier, fringe personality type growing up in the 1990s, whereas they’re now just as casual of a fashion choice as a quirky hat or what color shirt to wear. You can track the timeline of that body-mod culture shift in the new documentary A Body to Live In, which profiles the life, art, and spiritual practice of “modern primitivist” Fakir Musafar. From his early experiments with corset-binding fetish photography in the 1940s through his educational body-piercing and body suspension workshops in the 2010s, Musafar’s entire artistic, spiritual, and professional life was dedicated to the practice of body modification, and he saw that practice evolve from private kink play to public fashion display first-hand, seemingly involved with every major milestone of the journey. So, the documentary doubles as both a portrait of Fakir Musafar and as a broader overview history of body modification in the American mainstream.
I had never heard of Fakir Musafar before seeing this documentary, but he lived such a Forrest Gumpish life across so many various subcultures that I am familiar with that he continually crossed paths with faces that were already familiar to me: fellow self-promoting ritualist Anton LaVey, feminist pornographer Annie Sprinkle, professional Bob Flanagan flogger Sheree Rose, etc. Musafar’s body-mod journey was inspired by pure impulse (charged, at least partially, by unresolved gender dysphoria), and his early photographs were all produced in private, mostly consisting of corseting his body to simulate a female figure and then piercing that figure with needles and heavy ornaments. Once he found likeminded spirits across underground queer subcultures in 1970s California, the practice became much more social & less insular, and he was involved with a seemingly impossible range of extreme subcultures: heavy leather kinksters, Radical Faerie hippies, gallery-scene performance artists, and whoever else would show a sexual or spiritual interest in the ritualistic piercing & contorting of the human body. A lot of ground is covered very quickly as he drifts from subculture to subculture, always positing himself as a kind of mystic elder for the young & uninitiated to up to for guidance. We get to witness the evolution of professional body modification from the very first body-piercing shop opening in 1970s San Francisco to their modern omnipresence in every small town’s strip malls, but it’s always filtered through Musafar’s very particular, singular worldview.
For how impressively influential is subject was in a wide range of hip vintage subcultures, A Body to Live In is surprisingly smart about not devolving into hagiography. Musafar’s most glaring faults & criticisms are out there in the open, including control issues in his private relationships and larger accusations of cultural appropriation. In describing his early, private body-mod practices, Musafar explains that he was often inspired by ethnographic photographs in National Geographic magazines but would not read the accompanying captions, because he did not want the imagery spoiled by journalistic “interpretation.” Later, while promoting his “modern primitivism” philosophy on daytime talk shows, he struggles to articulate the authenticity of his body-mod rituals when confronted by Indigenous audiences who find his pick-and-choose appropriation of their cultures politically offensive. Even the term “primitive” is directly challenged for its political implications in the opening minutes, which might not be expected of a documentary exalting the movement for its positive influence across American subcultures. It’s very thoughtful, measured, and yet sincerely participatory in the body-mod spirituality depicted, making sure to include voices of dissent & discomfort with the practices’ cultural insensitivity while also showing the therapeutic & political good it can do in the right contexts.
Director Angelo Madsen does his best not to personally intrude on the material, except in a brief expression of regret for not asking Musafar a couple clarifying questions while he was alive to answer them. The most stylistic imposition on the material is found in the colorful psychedelia of the photograph development process, which helps transition from still photo to still photo without the clinical rigidness of an art-gallery slideshow. Madsen also arranges individual photos and slides on the screen to deliberately create a frame-within-a-frame distance from the original images, drawing attention to how Musafar’s curation of his photographs pushed his practice further into a fine art sphere than mere personal documentation of religious ritual & sexual kink. Musafar publicized his work through a wide range of artistic mediums, from the still photography he experimented with in his parents’ basement to documentary hosting in 1985’s Dances Sacred and Profane to confrontational performance art in the post-AIDS 1990s. It’s clear that his own body was the medium he was most interested in expressing himself through, though, as evidenced by his decades-long development of his nipples into cylindrical ornaments of great public interest. There’s a range of debate offered by the documentary’s talking heads about whether his primary motivation for that art was sexual, political, intellectual, gendered, or purely spiritual, and it’s to the film’s benefit that no one could definitively answer the question. They’re all partially true.
I have never been more creatively or spiritually fulfilled than I was for the few brief years when my biggest weekly priority was an academically rigorous poetry workshop. Still, I gave up the practice as soon as I graduated college, realizing that sticking with it would mean a life-long professional dedication to academia, something I had no interest in pursuing. I was fondly reminded of those days while watching the documentary A Litany for Survival, though, which features several scenes of its subject—activist-poet Audre Lorde—running a poetry workshop at Hunter College in New York City. She’s tough on her students’ work in a productive, fully engaged way that you can see improving their art in real time. Other formidable poets like Adrienne Rich & Sonia Sanchez appear in interviews to reminisce about how Lorde improved their own work through a similar kind of collaborative criticism, pushing them to sharpen their ideas through revision. It’s difficult to write meaningfully without that kind of peer-to-peer friction, which is largely why I gave up on the medium of poetry entirely to work on this silly movie blog instead. And that’s not even taking into account how increasingly niche & insular the world of poetry has continued to become in recent decades. Anyone who’s still out there making a full life out of that kind of work is superheroic, since this 90s-era documentary already feels like a time machine trip back to the last moment it was considered societally Important in any way.
Audre Lorde was tough on everyone: her students, her colleagues, her children, her nation, herself. Which is to say that she continuously fought for a better world the entire time she was alive, applying her skill for ruthless revision to societal structures the same way she applied it to her own poetry, through political activism causes like Civil Rights, Gay Rights, and Feminism. She billed herself as a “Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet,” rising to prominence in the literary world in the 1960s & 70s, when those identity markers had a real-life chance to either get you killed or change the world. Her writing and her activism were both heavily fixated on Intersectionality, drilling down into the particulars of what made her a distinct social outsider while also seeking commonality among comrades who were fighting similar struggles. By the time documentarians Michelle Parkerson & Ada Gay Griffin told her life story in the 1990s, she had shifted to fighting a very different fight: battling cancer instead of oppression. A Litany for Survival is a very straight-forward, made-for-PBS style production, but it took nearly a decade to complete, so a significant chunk of the footage features Lorde wheezing through her final days while suffering from lung cancer, no longer able to perform her poems with her usual fierceness. Thankfully, they were around for her healthier days too, when she could still provoke & incite with the best of ’em.
In both form & content, the movie Litany most reminded me of was the more recent documentary Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project. Giovanni occupied such a similar place in American literature that Litany only passingly references her by her first name, “Nikki”, since you presumably already know who she is if you’re watching this profile of her contemporary. Both films exceed their limitations as PBS-style documentary profiles of activist-poets by drifting through different phases of their lives instead of strictly following a linear birth-to-death biography. We meet Lorde in her final years of illness, when she can barely speak. Earlier, more forceful interviews about her life story then mix with audiobook readings of her prose autobiography Zami, live readings of her most iconic poems, and candid domestic scenes shared with loved ones in the final decade of her life. None of these conversations or monologues feel complete in representation; the edit crossfades between them like overlapping waves, illustrating the images evoked by Lorde’s past with still photographs from her personal albums and vintage NYC stock footage. It’s a full life retold in out-of-context snippets, with the only incomplete element being that we never see the world through Lorde’s own handheld camcorder, which she points around her home garden in her final days as a new way to capture images for her art.
A newly restored version of A Litany for Survival recently saw its local premiere at the Patois Film Festival, screening at the Joan Mitchell Center instead of the fest’s usual home at The Broad. That venue choice was . . . suboptimal for appreciating what the new scan might have offered as a pure sensory experience, but it did contribute to my personal nostalgia for college-level poetry workshops. It was projected onto a scuffed-up screen that unrolled from the ceiling; every shifting body in the packed room’s hard-backed chairs could be acutely heard & felt; and the presentation concluded with a panel discussion about how Lorde’s work was an effective form of political activism. It was a perfect simulation of a college classroom environment, like a VR headset experience of what it might be like to have Audre Lorde sit across a workshop table from you, pushing you to do better work and to make a better world. I’m still not convinced that I should quit my desk job and enroll in grad school just because I miss participating in those workshops for real (if not only because the guaranteed outcome would be me getting another desk job after graduating, with only more debt to show for it), but it was a pure pleasure to return to that headspace, and it made for an easy argument that Lorde improved the life & work of everyone she ever collaborated with.
In an effort to promote Celine Song’s blank-eyed romcom Materialists last summer, A24 listed the director’s “movie syllabus” for similar big-screen romances that would set the mood for the picture, ranging from obvious Jane Austen-inspired connections like Autumn de Wilde’s Emma. to headscratchers like the Robert Altman murder mystery Gosford Park (huh?). This year, Emerald Fennell promoted her “Wuthering Heights” adaptation with a similar syllabus of inspirations compiled for the BFI’s Letterboxd account, with obvious choices like Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet clashing against headscratcher inclusions like David Cronenberg’s Crash (huh?). This “movie syllabus” trend is far from the most obnoxious promotional gimmick in an age where filmmakers are pushed to chug hot sauce, take lie detector tests, and play video games to reach audiences through TikTok & YouTube; at least it’s about the movies. Still, there’s a kind of “Show your work” eagerness to the maneuver that feels pre-apologetic, asserting that the filmmakers have done their homework and know their stuff, therefore the movie they’re promoting is Legitimate Cinema. It’s the same feeling I get when biopics conclude with real-life footage of their subjects in the end credits sequence, proving that they were well cast, styled, and researched regardless of whether the final product of all that effort was any good, as the point of making movies was accuracy, not artistry.
In a way, Baz Luhrmann’s new documentary EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is a two-hour argument for his 2022 Elvis biopic‘s historical accuracy, extending the “Show your work” credits sequence bragging to feature length. Constructed entirely from the archival footage pulled for reference material while staging the Vegas residency sequence of the Elvis biopic, EPiC hammers home just how accurate Luhrmann’s team was in recreating Vegas-era Elvis’s sets & costumes. The 16mm footage from those Vegas shows, its rehearsals, and the resulting roadshow American tour is cleaned up & restored to the same vivid HD image quality as the narrative feature it inspired, to the point where you can hardly tell the difference between Austin Butler fellating his microphone vs. Elvis doing the same (except that Elvis is slightly goofier about it, and more beautiful). Like with the other “Show your work” maneuvers of its ilk, however, that doesn’t retroactively make Elvis a great movie, just because it’s proven to be a visually accurate one. It is a lot more useful to an audience than an email screenshot, a Letterboxd list, or an end-credits stinger, though, since it stands on its own as a separate work of art. As a concert film, EPiC is equally garish & scatterbrained as the last picture Luhrmann made about Elvis, but it does have a leg up on its bigger, louder predecessor in that it’s anchored by its reverence for the archive, and it isn’t frequently interrupted by Tom Hanks blathering about “snow jobs” under several pounds of prosthetics.
I don’t personally care much for Elvis Presley’s music, especially during his Vegas period, when he had strayed so far from rock-n-roll that he had become a kind of lounge-singer circus act. Luhrmann frequently draws attention to the contrast between Elvis’s 1950s rock-n-roll beginnings to his 1970s stage-musical crooning by juxtaposing early television-broadcast performances of songs like “Hound Dog” with the proggy monstrosities they had become by the time they reached Vegas. It’s a different genre of music entirely, one that prefers broad spectacle over lean aggression, which is exactly what makes Luhrmann such a great fit for the material. Even if you don’t vibe with the music of EPiC, the spectacle of its onstage pageantry is still worth a gawk. Elvis is working in James Brown mode here, conducting every guitar stab and drum fill of his backing band with the suggestive wiggling of his caped & jumpsuited body. He belts, patters, and sweats with the best of ’em, performing more as an athlete than as a musician. In the most deranged sequences, Elvis takes a break from singing to instead run laps around the concert hall, making out with untold dozens of women in the audience one at a time without concern for personal violation or illness. It’s more of a space alien encounter than it is a live concert (the kind where everyone in the audience clearly wants to fuck the alien), making him the perfect subject for a Baz Luhrmann stage show.
On a formal level, there isn’t much Luhrmann is doing here that can’t be found in other recent music docs; he’s mostly just following the modern industry standard. In sequences where Elvis’s stage show is interrupted by rehearsal footage from behind the scenes, EPiC recalls the Beyoncé concert film Homecoming. In the frantic introduction that provides context for Elvis’s pre-Vegas career before the show begins, Chris Smith’s recent DEVO doc comes to mind. The brief sequences of pure restoration recall the Aretha Franklin concert film Amazing Grace, especially in the third act, when Elvis goes Gospel. David Bowie has recently seen both extremes of that treatment, both in the restoration of his concert film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and in the post-modern kaleidoscope edit Moonage Daydream. I enjoyed all of those movies to varying degrees, mostly because I enjoy listening to those artists’ music, so it was obviously more of an uphill battle to get on board with a singer whose songs I don’t care about. If the two entries in the Luhrmann-Elvis project have done anything for me musically, it’s in convincing me that “Suspicious Minds” is a pretty good song, one that Luhrmann was smart to make the core theme of his Elvis thesis, both sonically and lyrically (leaning on the “caught in a trap” motif when depicting the Vegas residency as the apex of Colonel Tom Parker’s abusive mismanagement of Elvis’s career). If the project’s done anything for Elvis’s legacy, it’s in posthumously fulfilling the singer’s wish to appear in “better movies,” which he was frequently blocked from doing after returning from WWII (again, through Parker’s mismanagement). Luhrmann should be prouder of that accomplishment than the lesser feat of “showing his work” by restaging the Vegas Elvis lookbook, which is a victory usually celebrated in more by-the-numbers biopics like Rocketman or Bohemian Rhapsody.
Welcome to Episode #256 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of high-concept true crime documentaries, starting with 1987’s Landscape Suicide.
0:00 Welcome 02:50 Swampflix’s Top 10 Films of 2025 04:17 F.A.R.T. The Movie (1991) 07:52 Amish Stud – The Eli Weaver Story (2023) 11:13 Project X (2012) 15:02 January horror 18:45 Atom Egoyan 30:20 The Roottrees are Dead
Tony Ganz & Rhody Streeter only made films together over a couple of years in the early 1970s. A few of their documentary shorts aired on the syndicated PBS series The Great American Dream Machine, which was simpatico with their collaborations’ wryly humorous portrait of the nation. Otherwise, their catalog of shorts remained unseen by a wide public audience until their recent exhibitions in New York City, now collected under the anthology title America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of. Because of that spotty history of distribution & scholarship, there wasn’t much context for what Gap Tooth‘s weekly repertory audience would be seeing when the collection premiered in New Orleans last week, besides the films being rare. It was a packed room anyway. The ten Ganz & Streeter shorts that make up America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of were met with shocks of laughter and stretches of stunned silence, depending on the mood of the moment. The individual films weren’t produced with a unifying theme or intent in mind, but since they were made with such a small, consistent crew in such a short period of time, they end up forming a singular mosaic picture of 1970s America — especially the white parts, the very white parts.
America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of is at its strongest when its shorts are hitting on a common theme, illustrating a postcard advertisement for The American Dream as a prepackaged plastic commodity. The opening short “The Best of Your Life (a.k.a. Sun City)” plays like an early prototype for the recent surreal retirement community doc Some Kind of Heaven, inviting the audience into a 3D brochure to gawk at all the uncanny weirdos who reside within. The other standout shorts in the set also work as ironic advertisements for the kitschiest corners of American monoculture: a novelty sex resort in “Honeymoon Hotel,” a Christian Nationalist death cult in “Risen Indeed (a.k.a. Campus Crusade for Christ)”, an elevator music studio in “A Better Day in Every Way (a.k.a. Muzak)”, a finishing school for adults in “Woman Unlimited”, and a billboard advertisement painters’ studio in “Sign Painters (a.k.a. Signs)”. It’s in these ironic snapshots of microwave-dinner America that Ganz & Streeter land their biggest laughs, likening retirees’ synchronized workout routines to soldiers Sieg Heiling their Fuhrer and infiltrating anti-hippie Christian activist circles who believe Communists to be Satanists engaged in a literal holy war. At the same time, they find a way to mock institutions instead of laughing at individual interview subjects. Later documentaries like Grey Gardens & Gates of Heaven would soon take on a similar project to much wider attention & acclaim: recording sweetly humanist interviews with ordinary, everyday weirdos like you & me, who happened to have gotten wrapped up in fascinatingly unreal scenarios.
Any one of those on-topic shorts could land as someone’s personal favorite in the collection. Personally, I laughed the hardest at the robotic corporate speak of the “Muzak” and “Sign Painters” docs, as straightlaced business suits passionlessly explained how they’ve turned once artistic mediums into uniform, sellable products. The candy-colored splendor of the “Sun City” retirement home tour and the women’s-mag “Honeymoon Hotel” ad is also undeniably enticing, making for the most visually striking and spatially disorienting selections in the bunch. It’s the other, “off-topic” shorts in the collection that really make those works stand out, though. You don’t get a full sense of just how uncanny & inhuman the collection’s portrait of American culture is until they cut away from the Norman Rockwell postcards to black & white snapshots of real people struggling with real problems in real environments. In “Help-Line” & “Y.E.S.,” desperately lonely people on the verge of making life-ending decisions re-establish tenuous human connections via phone call. In “Bowery Men’s Shelter,” New York City alcoholics and discharged mental patients find a temporary place to sleep between psychotic episodes & binges, barely limping along to the next day. The furthest-afield inclusion is “Hoi: Village Life in Tonga,” which leaves America entirely for a quiet anthropological study of indigenous Tongan social life. It was the very first film that Ganz & Streeter shot together and, while it doesn’t fit in tonally or thematically with the other shorts in the collection, it does help contextualize their countercultural-outsider approach to American anthropology in the more idiosyncratic shorts. Not for nothing, but “Hoi” & “Bowery Men’s Shelter” are also the only films in the collection in which non-white subjects are interviewed, making for some politically productive tension in their contrast with other subjects, like the prayer-warrior fascists of “Campus Crusade for Christ”.
If there’s anything especially remarkable that Ganz & Streeter achieved with these short-form American anthropologies (besides conveying a clever editorial eye for selecting environments & industries worth documenting in the first place), it’s in their avoidance of outright condescension. The uncanny, hyper-American scenarios they captured on film range from conceptually funny to outright evil, but the people who are trapped within them are consistently charming regardless of their participation. The nation’s cultureless rituals have made fools of us all, and so we can only feel warm comradery with our fellow fools who’ve fallen into its strangest crevices. That warm humanism is especially apparent in the closing short, “A Trip Through the Brooks Home,” which expands on an interview with a married couple who live in the Sun City retirement community profiled in “The Best of Your Life.” It’s very simply a guided home tour, but there’s a pervasively sweet awkwardness to the husband & wife at the center of it, recalling the Mitch & Micky folk singer duo of Christopher Guest’s A Mighty Wind. It’s that generosity towards its subjects that makes America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of such great theatrical programming, as you can hear individual members of the audience being delighted by one isolated character quirk at a time. Hopefully, it’ll be more widely available soon, both in theaters and at home, since it’s both a useful historical document of vintage American kitsch (especially when juxtaposed with genuine American suffering) and a godsend for cult cinema freaks who’ve already rewatched similar human-interest docs like American Movie, Vernon, Florida, and Heavy Metal Parking Lot too many times to count.
Swampflix 