drag

Podcast #226: I Love You, AllWays & NOFF 2024

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Welcome to Episode #226 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Moviegoing with Bill‘s Bill Arceneaux to review the films they caught at the 35th annual New Orleans Film Festival, starting with the local drag scene documentary I Love You, AllWays.

00:00 Welcome
07:46 I Love You, AllWays
33:06 On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
40:07 Memoir of a Snail
46:26 Ghetto Children
54:21 Taste the Revolution
1:16:52 Mysterious Behaviors
1:22:51 Any Other Way – The Jackie Shane Story
1:28:00 Eponymous
1:33:46 2024 Catch-up

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, or by following the links below.

– The Podcast Crew

Queendom (2024)

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After a softer-than-expected box office weekend for big-budget franchise extenders The Garfield Movie and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, my podcast playlist was flooded with mournful reports that movie theaters are dying and there’s nothing we can do to save them.  Spending a couple of days listening to these endless eulogies around the house had me grieving the loss of the only social & artistic outlet I can routinely afford, so I decided to say goodbye to my old friend by going to The Movies one final time.  At my neighborhood cinema that night, I was surprised to find that The Movies are still very much alive.  The Broad was playing three all-time classics on three separate screens—Tongues Untied, A Woman Under the Influence, and Pee-wee’s Big Adventure—while also hosting a pop-up sushi restaurant and a weekly pinball club.  Meanwhile, I and a few dozen other movie nerds showed up to watch a documentary about a queer Russian street performer who weaponizes drag as high-fashion political activism under the constant threat of arrest.  Despite reports to the contrary, I think we’re going to be alright.

Queendom & Tongues Untied played as a double bill in New Orleans Film Society’s inaugural LGBTQ+ Film Showcase (with the other half of the program filled out by The Watermelon Woman & Desire Lines).  It was a great pairing not only because of their shared themes of confrontational queer activism in the face of fascist governments, but also because of their low-budget D.I.Y. production values.  While Marlon Riggs made Tongues Untied with contemporary video-art equipment, a significant portion of Queendom was filmed on its modern equivalent: smartphones.  The documentary is a portrait of nonbinary Russian drag queen Gena Marvin, roughly in the stretch of time between Moscow street protests over the arrest of Alexei Navalny and Moscow street protests over the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  Marvin was a silent participant in both spontaneous rallies, appearing in genderfucked space-alien drag to both highlight the political topic at hand and to defy the Russian state’s hostility toward any public queer life.  For her participation in the Navalny protests, she was expelled from beauty school.  For her participation in the Russo-Ukrainian War protests, She was arrested off the street.  We were told in the pre-film intro that the documentary’s cinematographer had to wear roller-skates for most of the shoot so they wouldn’t also get arrested and lose that day’s footage, but there would’ve been surviving documentation of Marvin’s protests regardless, given that any time she steps out of the house in her fetishistic high heels, she’s constantly recorded by gawking smartphones (and threatened with vigilante beatings for her supposed transgressions against decency).

Outside those protests, most of Marvin’s activism is in her refusal to dampen her visibly queer characteristics while existing in public.  If anything, she intentionally amplifies her gender nonconformity both for aesthetic beauty and for easy visual provocation – maintaining an entirely bald, eyebrowless head while modeling stripper boots and ripped lingerie, even when grocery shopping.  Her photoshoots documenting her various “costumes” are all fashion magazine editorials done on spec, primarily posted on Instagram when they should be in legitimate publication.  In the film’s most satisfying sequence, we’re treated to a montage of Marvin’s Insta stories, getting a taste of both how great her artistry is and just how much of it is confined to a phone screen.  Meanwhile, in her rural hometown of Magadan, her loving but queerphobic grandparents push her to drop the act, butch up, and get a formal education (or at least demand to be paid for her labor, since publications like Vogue Russia will only “compensate” her with exposure).  Much of the film follows Marvin’s frustrated attempts to get her grandfather to not just love her but accept her on her own terms.  He obviously wants the best for his grandchild, but he’s also a brutish old-schooler who will say unforgivably cruel things to her in the heat an argument in a way that betrays just how bigoted he is at heart, with no sign of softening.  As a result, just as much of the runtime is spent with Marvin rolling her eyes on speakerphone with her semi-estranged grandfather grumbling on the other end as it is spent inside that phone, submerged in her otherworldly artistry.

Gena Marvin’s art is a gorgeous, emotional fuck-you to the state that would rather she be dead than click-clacking down a public sidewalk.  As a documentary, Queendom can’t help but feel a little safe & formulaic when compared to the striking visuals of its subject’s artistry, which wasn’t helped by having to share a double bill with the confrontational, idiosyncratic genius of Marlon Riggs.  It’s still risky filmmaking, though, and there’s a violent tension to even its most mundane, everyday public scenes.  It’s incredible that this footage not only exists but was exported to an excited audience half a world away, proving to me that there’s always going to be a place for cinema as a public, communal ritual (while also putting the petty capitalism of box-office handwringing into a larger perspective of what’s happening in the world right now).  Maybe it’ll be tough for $200mil popcorn-bucket sellers to get funded by corporate investors in the near future, but those were never the heart of the artform anyway.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Torch Song Trilogy (1988)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and we discuss it afterwards. This month Brandon made Boomer and Britnee watch Torch Song Trilogy (1988).

Brandon: On a recent vacation to San Francisco, I found myself in the Haight-Ashbury location of Amoeba Music, digging through the LGBTQ section of the record store’s used Blu-rays & DVDs.  There were plenty of obscure gems in there, as you might expect, and I took home copies of the surrealistic drag-queen freak show Luminous Procuress as well as the punk-and-junk porno chic documentary Kamikaze Hearts.  However, my biggest score that day was a used copy of a film distributed by Warner Bros subsidiary New Line Cinema, something much more mainstream than the other standout titles in the bin.  1988’s Torch Song Trilogy has been commercially unavailable since I first watched it on the HBO Max streaming service back in 2021, when it caught my eye in the platform’s “Leaving Soon” section.  Since then, it has only been legally accessible through used physical media, as it is currently unavailable to rent or stream through any online platform.  The Streaming Era illusion that everything is available all of the time is always frustrating when trying to access most movies made before 1990 (an illusion only made bearable by the continued existence of a public library system), but it’s especially frustrating when it comes to mainstream crowd-pleaser fare like Torch Song Trilogy.  This is not the audience-alienating arthouse abstraction of a Luminous Procuress or a Kamikaze Hearts; it shouldn’t feel like some major score to find a copy in the wild. It’s more the Jewish New Yorker equivalent of a Steel Magnolias or a Fried Green Tomatoes than it is some niche-interest obscurity.  I have to suspect it’s only being treated as such because it’s been ghettoized as A Gay Movie instead of simply A Good Movie, which is a shameful indication of how much progress is left to be made.

Torch Song Trilogy is Harvey Fierstein’s big-screen adaptation of his own stage play about a drag queen’s life, loves, and heartbreaks in 1970s New York.  It might be one of the few 80s & 90s gay classics that doesn’t have to touch the communal devastation of HIV/AIDS, since it’s set before the darkest days of the epidemic.  The opening shot of a graveyard at the outskirts of New York City feels like visual acknowledgement of how cultural circumstances had changed between the film’s setting & production, but the mission of the story that follows is mostly to show an adult gay man living a full, healthy, normal life . . . filtered through the wry humor of Fierstein’s hyper-specific personality.  There’s a little hangover Boys in the Band-style, woe-is-me self-pitying in Fierstein’s semi-biographical retelling of his own love life, but he remains delightfully charming throughout as he recalls his two great loves: one with a strait-laced, self-conflicted bisexual (Ed, Brian Kerwin) that was doomed to fail and one with a perfectly angelic partner (Alan, Matthew Broderick) that only failed because of violent societal bigotry.  The major benefit of the film’s strange distribution deficiencies is that owning it on DVD means you can also access Fierstein’s lovely commentary track and double the time you get to spend with his unmistakable voice & persona; it’s like becoming good friends with a garbage disposal made entirely of fine silks.  Loving the movie means loving his specific personality, from his adorable failures to flirt graciously to his fierce defenses of drag queen respectability and the validity of monogamous homosexual partnership.  His stage performances as Virginia Hamm are classic barroom drag that feel like broadcasts from a bygone world (one I last experienced first-hand at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge in San Francisco), but a lot of his observations about seeking traditional love among strangers who are just cruising for sex still ring true, especially as modern dating rituals have been re-warped around the de-personalized window shopping of hookup apps.

There’s something about how complicated, interwoven, and passionate every relationship feels here that reminded me of Yentl of all things, except transported to a modern urban setting I’m more personally connected to.  Structurally, there are some drawbacks to Fierstein’s insistence on covering decades of personal turmoil & interpersonal drama in a single picture, but the movie’s greatest accomplishment is ultimately its approximation of a full, authentic life – something gay men were rarely afforded onscreen at the time, even the cis white ones.  By all accounts, the original stage-play version of Torch Song Trilogy approximated an even fuller, more authentic record of gay life in 1970s NYC, since it was twice as long as its movie adaptation.  One of the producers’ only contractual obligations was that the movie could be no longer than 2 hours, which meant a lot of tough-choice editing of a play that ran for 4.  Instead of narrowing in on a few key moments in his life (through the fictional avatar of Arnold Beckoff), Fierstein decided to maintain the full breadth of the play’s story for most of the runtime, so that an inopportune bathroom break means that you could miss a half-decade of love & loss.  It isn’t until the final sequence that he really slows the story down to stew in the drama of one key event: a home visit from his loving, homophobic mother (Anne Bancroft).  After so many sweeping gestures covering long stretches in Arnold’s life, there’s initially something jarring about stopping the momentum cold to depict a heated bicker-battle between mother & son, but that’s also where a lot of the strongest, most coherent political arguments about the validity of gay life & gay romance are voiced in clear terms.  Boomer, what did you think about the lopsided emphasis on the drama of the final act and how it relates to the broader storytelling style of earlier segments?  Was it a meaningful dramatic shift or just an awkward one?

Boomer: There’s something important to note here about the original staging that contributes to this: each of the three segments were meant to be done in different styles, so much so that it’s almost a miracle that they work when smashed together into the veritas of the screen. In the first segment, International Stud, the story is told in fragments between Arnold and Ed, with the two actors kept apart on stage and the narrative being relayed through a series of phone calls (staged like this), while Fugue in a Nursery, which is the play in which Alan and Arnold visit Mr. and Mrs. Ed, is staged with all four actors in one giant bed (see this image from the 2018 revival). It’s only the final segment, about Arnold and his mother, that the style is more naturalistic and less surreal, in an effort to make the pain of those moments all the more visceral and meaningful. That carries over into the film, and in all honesty, it ought to. Joy can be fleeting, especially for those in the queer community (as we see all too gruesomely with Alan’s death at the hands of a band of bigots, who are seen standing around at the scene even after the ambulances arrive, watching with impunity as their victims are carted away while they remain free men). When you’re happy and in love, it really can feel like three years pass in the blink of an eye, while pain, especially that which comes from intolerance, ends up taking up much more room in our memories than our happiness. 

There’s verisimilitude in that, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t get to spend a long time in sympathetic happiness with Arnold and his loves during the good times, too, and the dilation of unhappy times isn’t merely realism for its own sake, it gives us time to really ground ourselves. This is a piece of fiction that’s about gay people but was breaking out of the mold at the time by not being simply for gay people as well. We see this in the difference between Arnold and his brother Phil, who understands his brother better than their parents do but whose life is clearly one with very few stumbling blocks and in which he can simply saunter without much trouble. The straights in the audience are presumed to be of the same cloth and thus need to have the portrait of what it’s like to have to deal with one’s (loving and beloved) mother also behave in a manner that’s dismissive, cruel, mean-spirited, and bigoted toward her own son, and they need to look into that portrait long enough to get it. Even if the need to provide some socially conscious “messaging” has dimmed in the intervening decades, this scene is also still the tour-de-force segment that makes auditioning for the role of “Ma” worthwhile, enough to attract an actress of the caliber of Estelle Getty (as in the original staging) or Anne Bancroft (as in the film). While I agree that it changes the timbre, I’m not sure I’m fully in agreement that it changes the momentum, as it still feels like it’s barreling through, helped along by the frenetic energy that the desperate-to-please soon-to-be-adopted David brings to the proceedings; he and Ed never seem to really sit still, so it creates the illusion of motion even if the subject matter at hand is heavy and slow. 

One of the things that I really loved about this one was that it wasn’t (and felt no need to be) a “message” picture. With the first cases of HIV being diagnosed in the summer of 1981, the triptych of plays first opened less than two weeks after the January 4th establishment of GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis), the first U.S. community-based AIDS service provider, on the fifteenth of that month. As such, there’s really no room in the narrative for the specter of HIV/AIDS to loom large, and although the intervening years between the play’s premiere and the release of the film were haunted by that epidemic, it’s still banished from the narrative. That’s because this is a story about queer . . . well, not queer “joy” exactly, but one in which the omnipresent shadow of social inequality, potential violence, and familial rejection is outshone by the light of authentic living, easy intimacy, and finding the humor in things. As such, although it may be telling the audience something they might not know or understand about the way that gay people are treated by their families, it doesn’t feel the need to educate them about those broader social issues, the way a lot of other queer films of the time did. 

Britnee, given that this was originally a (series of) stage production(s), there’s a lot of room for more sumptuous, lived-in set design in a film adaptation, as well as the opportunity to do a little more visual storytelling. One of favorite bits of this is how Arnold shows us that the ASL sign for “fucking” is to make two rabbits with your hands and bang them together, and then we see that Arnold’s decor is more rabbit centric than your local grocery store in the lead up to Easter. Another is the change that we see in Ed’s farmhouse between Arnold’s first and (possibly) last visits there, that tell us how much time has passed as Ed has had the time to repair the steps and put up proper supports on the porch. This, more than the change in tempo, is what stands out to me about the final scenes with Mrs. Beckoff, as they are heavier on dialogue (read: argument) for exposition and character work, as those last few scenes of the two of them feel more like a stage play than any other part. Are there any visual flourishes or touches of visual storytelling in particular that stood out to you? 

Britnee: Torch Song Trilogy has been on my watchlist for years. I didn’t have much knowledge of what the film was actually about or based on, but I knew that Harvey Fierstein starred in it. That’s more than enough to pique my interest because he is such a gem. I had no idea that it was based on a play that Fierstein wrote himself! Like Brandon, it reminded me so much of Steel Magnolias, which was also a film adapted from a play with a personal, auto-biographical touch. Both films have loveable characters, witty dialogue, and create a feeling of intimacy between the audience and characters. I felt like I was Arnold’s confidant, following him throughout his journey. Of course, that intimacy with the audience is very typical of a stage play, but it doesn’t always translate to film as successfully as it does in this one.

Until you mentioned it, Boomer, I didn’t notice the rabbit connection! I was admiring the rabbit tea kettle among all of the other rabbit trinkets of Arnold’s, but I had no idea that it was in reference to the ASL bit. There are just so many layers to discover! If I had to highlight any other the visual storytelling touches, there is only one that really stuck with me. I adored the opening sequence of a young Arnold playing dress-up in his mother’s closet, which then transitions to adult Arnold in his dressing room before the first drag performance. There were so many important moments that occur in his dressing room, and to remember one of his earliest crucial moments occurred in his first makeshift dressing room (his mother’s closet) really touched my heart. The ultimate sacred space. 

Lagniappe

Brandon: I’m glad to hear y’all were also delighted by the overbearing rabbit theme of Arnold’s home decor.  I’ve obviously only seen this movie a few times so far, but with every watch my eyes are drawn to more rabbit decorations that I didn’t catch previously.  They’re hopping all over the frame, and yet the only acknowledgement of them (besides the ASL connection) is a brief moment when a hungover Alan quizzically examines a rabbit-themed mug Howard hands him with breakfast before noticing he’s surrounded by them.  Otherwise, it’s just one of many small touches that makes Arnold feel like a full, real person instead of a scripted character and a political mouthpiece.  

Britnee: The dramatic relationship between Arnold and his mother gave us some powerful moments, but I kept wondering about the relationships Arnold had with his brother and father. We do see these characters interact with each other and there’s some dialogue referring to each in various conversations, but I would have loved to see their relationships explored more. Since the play is twice as long as the movie, I’m curious to see if they’re more explored there and were cut for time.

Boomer: Because I always want to recommend it to everyone, especially because it’s one of the few musical theater adjacent texts that I, a musical agnostic, enjoy, I want to call attention to the fact that Tovah Felspuh is totally channeling Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Beckoff in her introductory scene in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, beyond just cashing in on some of the same character tropes. Secondly, as a film that is filled with countless quotable lines, the one that has resounded around in my skull the most since the screening is “He used to be a euphemism, now he’s just a friend.” And finally, I find it funny that Brandon should mention the apps in his intro, since I watched this film in a way that I hope Fierstein would appreciate: lying on a bed in a Denver hostel, swiping away app notifications as they attempted to grab my attention and cover the top half of my screen. 

Next month: Boomer presents Notorious (1946)

-The Swampflix Crew

Twelfth Night: Or What You Will (1996)

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The 1996 BBC Films production of Twelfth Night: Or What You Will is a mostly faithful staging of the classic Shakespeare comedy, directed by The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Trevor Nunn. It’s not the kind of MTV-era update to Shakespeare’s text that you’ll find in fellow 90s titles like 10 Things I Hate About You or My Own Private Idaho, which tried to Make the Bard Cool Again for a generation who mostly knew him through frustrating homework assignments.  You wouldn’t know that from Twelfth Night‘s poster, though, which sold it as exactly that.  Attempting to cash in on a recent string of mainstream gay comedies with themes of crossdressing & drag, 1996’s Twelfth Night was marketed with the tagline, “Before Priscilla crossed the desert, Wong Foo met Julie Newmar, and the Birdcage was unlocked, there was … Twelfth Night.”  I assume most adults expecting a boundary-pushing gay farce based on that marketing would’ve found this film tame by comparison, as the queer sexual tension of the text isn’t updated or sensationalized for the 90s in any flashy, daring way.  If nothing else, it’s somewhat surprising that Tromeo & Juliet is the 1996 Shakespeare update that includes a lesbian makeout session, given which one would’ve been supported by its source text.

I have to imagine, then, that this version of Twelfth Night was a little more subtle & subversive in its queer appeal.  If the adult audience marketed to in that tagline were already well fed by the mainstream echoes of New Queer Cinema and the bratty teens of the time were looking for Shakespeare plays set in the halls of their high school (preferably starring Julia Styles), it’s the younger, more sheltered crowd who would’ve benefited most from the queer themes of Shakespeare’s play.  It’s not hard to imagine a heavily policed gay preteen who wasn’t allowed to rent a copy of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert sneaking Twelfth Night past their parents as a cultured, educational video store selection.  1996’s Twelfth Night seems ideally suited as a queer-awakening VHS rental for younger audiences who grew up watching titles like Ever After, The Secret Garden, and The Secret of Roan Inish in regular slumber party rotation or on solo lazy afternoons.  Romeo+Juliet was the Shakespeare update with true Gay 90s™ flair; this one lets the confused-lust genderfuckery of the original play stand on its own without any post-MTV stylistic embellishments.  It’s very warmly pleasant & endearing for that, and maybe even quietly transgressive depending on the parental censorship of your childhood household.

I won’t dare recount the plot of such a faithful adaptation of the original play here, at least not until this blog starts generating income as a SparkNotes subsidiary.  All you need to know is that twins who make do as traveling entertainers are separated by shipwreck, presuming each other dead.  Putting their twin-magic cabaret act to good use, the sister goes into hiding in male drag and quickly gets entangled in a queer love triangle with a man & woman who use her as a romantic surrogate, to the sexual confusion of everyone involved.  Then, her near-identical twin brother shows up wearing the same dumb little wispy mustache, leading to a chaotic reset to normalcy at a heterosexual wedding, in classic farcical tradition.  Before order is restored, though, there’s plenty of intense dwelling on the same-gender attraction stoked by the hiding-in-drag sitcom premise.  Characters often breathe heavy as they lean in for a near-kiss – an exchange that reads gay whether it’s Viola-as-Cesario nearly kissing her male employer or Viola-as-Cesario nearly kissing her employer’s female crush.  Other highlights include tender bathtub flirtation between bros and an opening-credits montage where Viola first gets into Cesario drag, with major emphasis put on her stuffing the crotch of her pants for accuracy.  It’s not hard to imagine a young audience discovering things about themselves watching all of this gender play & queer desire onscreen, and it’s all presented under the guise of traditional, sophisticated theatre.

Presuming that you are no longer a sheltered 90s child depending on Blockbuster Video rentals to smuggle Gay Content into your family home, the best reason to watch the 1996 Twelfth Night at this point is the cast.  Imogen Stubbs does a decent enough job in the central Cesario drag king role, in which (through Viola) she mostly equates being a man to being a Bugs Bunny level smartass.  Ben Kingsley, Richard E. Grant, and Nigel Hawthorne are all formidable fools in the goofball periphery of the central conflict as well, along with what I can only presume are veterans of The Royal Shakespeare Company and of multi-episode arcs of Downton Abbey.  The real draw in the cast, though, is a young Helena Bonham Carter, especially if you have any nostalgia for the era when her time machine got stuck in centuries past and she made a name for herself playing love interests in costume dramas (including an early starring role in director Trevor Nunn’s Lady Jane).  While the film’s younger video store audiences experienced a queer awakening at home, HBC was experiencing a kind of goth awakening onscreen as Olivia, who’s introduced in mourning for her own deceased brother, which is what attracts Viola to her.  She takes to black lace like no one before or since; it’s a marriage built to last longer than any among the story’s main players, so it’s romantic to think that it all started here.

-Brandon Ledet

Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things (1971)

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Usually, when I don’t fully know what to make of a movie, I turn to the Bonus Material footnotes of physical media to search for context.  It turns out some movies cannot be helped.  The regional horror oddity Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things sets itself up to be the Floridian take on Psycho, but instead delivers a domestic melodrama where everyone’s love language is belligerent screaming.  It’s an obvious work of transgression, but also a mystery as to what, exactly, it aims to transgress – recalling other schlock bin headscratchers like Something Weird, The Astrologer, Bat Pussy, and Fleshpot on 42nd Street.  Is it a seedy, Honeymoon Killers-style thriller about two sexual degenerates on the run, or a Sirkian melodrama about a gay couple who’ve been shamed by society into fugitive status, one hiding in drag for cover?  Who’s to say?  All I can report is that David DeCoteau’s commentary track on my outdated DVD copy from Vinegar Syndrome told me more about David DeCoteau than it told me about the movie he was contextualizing.

Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things is like a hagsploitation version of Psycho where Norman Bates never fully gets out of hag drag, stealing a good job away from aging stars like Crawford & Davis.  Or maybe it’s more the hippiesploitation version of Psycho where Norman’s personae are split into two separate bodies: a drugged-out free lover who becomes murderously violent whenever he gets in bed with women, and his fellow fugitive sex partner who poses in drag as the hippie’s aunt to avoid neighborhood suspicion of their sordid romance.  Aunt Martha claims to despise the Mrs. Doubtfire scenario he’s trapped himself in, but when in private never fully undresses into boymode – often taking obvious, lingering pleasure in the feeling of silk & stockings on his balding, hairy body.  When he has to “clean up” the messes (i.e., kill the sexual partners) of his younger, sexually confused lover, the violence only flashes in quick jabs of psychedelic screen-prints & film-negatives.  Mostly, we just spend time pondering what’s the deal shared between the two violent, oddly intimate men at the film’s center, a question one-time director Thomas Casey has never satisfyingly answered.

Despite being an expert in the field of low-budget queer transgression himself, David DeCoteau doesn’t have many answers either.  He spends most of his commentary-track conversation with Mondo-Digital’s Nathaniel Thompson expressing the same exasperation with what Thomas Casey was going for with this confusing provocation, often sidetracking into rapid-fire lists of other low-budget, transgressive queer ephemera from the 1970s that might help make sense of it in context.  It’s a great listen if you’d like to hear about David DeCoteau’s childhood memories about watching The Boys in the Band on TV, or if you’re looking to pad out your Letterboxd watchlist with genre obscurities Sins of Rachel, Widow Blue, and The Name of the Game is Kill. Unfortunately, it also features a lot of DeCoteau complaining that “It’s hard to be politically correct in genre filmmaking” (which is probably true) while casually indulging in some good, old-fashioned transphobic slurs and reminiscing over which trans characters in film have fooled him before their gender situation was revealed vs. which were immediately clockable.  In short, it’s a mixed bag, but it says more about DeCoteau than it says about Aunt Martha.

To Vinegar Syndrome’s credit, they’ve since updated that 2015 release with a Blu-ray edition that replaces DeCoteau’s commentary with a new track by Ask Any Buddy‘s Elizabeth Purchell, a trans film historian with extensive knowledge about Floridasploitation schlock.  If I get any more curious about how to fully make sense of Aunt Martha, I’ll have to upgrade my copy to hear that alternate perspective.  I have no regrets getting to know David DeCoteau better in the version I already own, though, since it’s always been hard to tell exactly how passionate & knowledgeable he is about outsider-art filmmaking in his own work, which can be a little . . . pragmatic, depending on who’s signing the checks.  Besides, it might be for the best that I can’t fully make sense of this one-off novelty from a mystery filmmaker.  As much as I love the rituals & minor variations of genre filmmaking, it’s probably for the best that not every low-budget provocation can be neatly categorized, or even understood.

-Brandon Ledet

Luminous Procuress (1971)

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Like a lot of people, I found Kyle Edward Ball’s childhood nightmare simulator Skinamarink compelling both as an experiment in form (especially in its layering of visual & aural textures) and as a breakout success story (from microbudget outsider art to TikTok meme to wide theatrical distro).  Unlike its loudest, proudest champions, however, I can’t say I was fully captivated with it as a narrative or emotional experience.  I found Skinamarink effectively, impressively creepy, but I can’t say I felt the revelatory breakthrough in form that my fellow horror nerds found in its darkened corners.  I suspect that’s because I’m not a regular visitor to the spooky YouTube channels and creepypasta message boards where Kyle Edward Ball cut his teeth as a short-film director before making a splash in that debut feature.  In a lot of ways, Skinamarink is the exact low-fi creepypasta horror that We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was mismarketed to be, and its most ecstatic praise appears to be coming from creepypasta enthusiasts who are relieved to finally see their online obsessions projected at feature length on the big screen.

I mention all this because I recently did have a revelatory, emotional experience watching a film that shares formal similarities to Skinamarink; it just happened to be steeped in the visual art traditions of drag & genderfuckery instead of online creepypasta lore.  Luminous Procuress is the sole feature film of visual artist Steven Arnold, whose own experimental short-film production & programming happened to be platformed at the legendary Nocturnal Dream Show screenings in 1960s San Francisco, not on YouTube in the 2010s.  I recently purchased a DVD copy of the film’s 50th Anniversary restoration while playing tourist in San Francisco, unfamiliar with its history beyond its proud credit “introducing The Cockettes” – the genderfucked drag krewe that performed as carnival sideshow accompaniment for Arnold’s Nocturnal Dream Show programs.  I was a little worried that a feature-length dose of Cockettes-era hippie drag wouldn’t be able to sustain itself, so I was oddly relieved when it turned out to be an experimental anthology of “silent”, psychedelic vignettes.  Like Skinamarink, Luminous Procuress is a film composed entirely of vibes & textures; those vibes & textures are just slathered in acid & glitter instead of childhood fears & digital grain.

The titular Luminous Procuress is Arnold’s childhood friend & lifelong partner in art, Pandora, posing as a kind of drag queen sorceress in a California hippie commune.  Two himbos wander into her pleasure palace looking for a good time, and the Procuress obliges by guiding them through a series of gorgeous bootleg-drag tableaus: the bejeweled-beard Cockettes posing in tropical Carmen Miranda drag and staging a Last Supper food fight; pre-Deep Throat hardcore sequences shooting straight & bisexual sex as if they were far-out geek show attractions; Kenneth Anger-inspired occultist rituals worshipping a stoic sci-fi futurelord.  Their cumulative effect seeks psychedelic holy ground between the transcendent sensuality of Pink Narcissus and the thrift store glam of Vegas in Space.  Besides Arnold’s auteurist vision as director, The Cockettes’ self-styled Old Hollywood wardrobe, and the glorious “hair creations by Nikki” (modeled by Pandora, naturally), the most important name among the credits is experimental musician Warner Jepson’s, whose noise music soundscapes are almost entirely comprised of synthy bird chirps & shrill baseball stadium organs.  It was Jepsen who provided the film with its deliberately obscured, unintelligible Charlie Brown dialogue track, adding the texture of spoken language without any of the pesky words or meaning of traditional dialogue getting in the way of the tripped-out glam on display.

If there’s any legitimate reason to discuss Skinamarink & Luminous Procuress as a pair, it’s in their shared connections to the experimental cinema foundations of Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou.  Kyle Edward Ball appears to make direct homages to that landmark surrealist short, both in Skinamarink‘s nonsensical time-passing title cards and in its ocular gore.  Steven Arnold’s connections to Un Chien Andalou‘s history is much more direct, as Dalí was such a massive fan of Luminous Procuress that he took Arnold in as a protege in his Court of Miracles.  In all honesty, though, any experimental, surrealist work made after 1929 owes some debt to Un Chien Andalou, so these films are likely only paired in my mind because I happened to watch them the same week.  Both are largely silent, experiential pieces with only the barest of plot structures to justify their liminal-space tableaus.  Of their two premises, I happened to connect much more deeply with a drag queen sorceress asking “Hey, y’all wanna see something weird?” than I did with a childhood nightmare simulation where all doors & windows disappear from a suburban home.  What’s incredibly cool about the two films’ modern distribution is that they’re both widely available outside of the fringe event spaces where experimental works of this ilk would’ve been exhibited a half-century ago: art galleries, universities, and Salvador Dalí’s hotel room. Skinamarink may be a far-out, revelatory work in the context of niche internet media being projected in suburban multiplexes, but it’s also part of a long tradition of experimental filmmaking – including, apparently, 16mm footage of drag queens playing dress-up on LSD.

-Brandon Ledet

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022)

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In the opening scene of the Nan Goldin documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the legendary fine-art photographer is leading a flash-mob protest at a modern art museum, demonstrating against their acceptance of donation money from The Sackler Family.  She lays down on the museum floor, pretending to be a corpse alongside dozens of collaborators, and the camera catches glimpse of a “SILENCE = DEATH” tote bag commemorating ACT UP protests of decades past.  Later in the film, similar archival footage from the ACT UP era shows Goldin decrying Reaganite Evangelical indifference to the AIDS epidemic, platforming fellow activist artists like David Wojnarowicz to combat institutional cruelty in an art gallery setting.  Both protests are personal to Goldin, who has recently become addicted to the Sacklers’ profit-over-people product Oxycontin and has historically lost countless loved ones to the Reagan administration’s deliberate mishandling of AIDS.  Both protests earn their screentime thematically, but only one is compelling to look at, having earned a fascinating vintage texture through the technological passage of time.  The modern smartphone footage at an overlit Metropolitan Museum exhibit just can’t compete, since it’s near-indistinguishable from disposable one-glance content on a social media feed.

That textural difference between past & present footage weighs heavily on the film throughout.  All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is half a career-spanning slideshow from Nan Goldin’s legacy as a fine art photography rock star and half a document of her current mission to deflate The Sackler Family’s tires, at least in the art world.  The career-retrospective half can’t help but be more compelling than the current political activism half, since her archives are dense with the most stunning, intimate images of Authentic City Living ever captured.  Her personal history in those images and her recent struggles with addiction more than earn her the platform to be heard about whatever she wants to say here, though, especially since the evil pharmaceutical empire she’s most pissed at has trespassed on her home turf.  The protest group Goldin helps organize, Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, specifically aims to have the Sackler name and donations removed from fine art museums, attacking the family’s cultural prestige since it is improbable to dismantle their personal wealth.  P.A.I.N.’s protests in the film only target museums that feature Goldin’s work in their permanent collection, leveraging her cultural clout in the art world to do as much practical damage to the Sackler name as they can.  The only problem is that documentation of these efforts only amounts to Good Politics, not Good Art, which is an unignorable fault in a film that proves it’s possible to achieve both.

Documentarian Laura Poitras was likely excited to make a movie about Nan Goldin precisely because of those modern-day P.A.I.N. protests, since amplifying Goldin’s personal war on the Sacklers fits in so snugly with her past modern-politics documentaries about WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden, and the NSA.  I’m grateful she took interest, no matter what her reason, since it’s the closest I’ll ever get to being in the audience for one of Goldin’s classic Ballad of Sexual Dependency slide shows.  Setting up a rack of six slide projectors like a guitarist’s Marshall stack, Goldin’s slideshows register as more of a D.I.Y. punk act than a gallery exhibit.  Here, she recalls her journey from developing her early drag bar photos at the local pharmacy to earning enough art-world clout that she can convince museums to turn down 7-figure donations from prestige-hungry, life-destroying benefactors.  I’m used to seeing Goldin’s photos in isolation, collected as single images among her No-Wave NYC contemporaries’ similarly unpretentious, self-documentary imagery.  It’s a treat to be immersed in her work at length here, learning the names & personalities of the recurring “characters” in her photos and getting a better sense of her iconoclastic presence in the larger world of fine art.  So, of course, the modern protest footage that presumably drew Poitras to the project often frustrates in its distraction from what drew me to watch it.  Goldin’s artwork is hardly a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, though; it’s just more potent, tastier medicine.

Laura Poitras is not using Nan Goldin’s life story as an excuse to score political hits against Purdue Pharma & The Sackler family.  If anything, this documentary feels like a fluid collaboration between the two artists, and Poitras is only there to give Goldin as much space as she wants to rant about how the Sacklers have turned fine art galleries into “temples of greed.”  If Goldin wanted to tell the story of her life’s work separately from the story of her recent protests, I’m sure she could’ve found an obliging collaborator to film her self-narrated slideshows.  She even could have made that movie on her own, since her control over the rhythm, scoring, and storytelling of her slideshows is in itself a kind of improvised filmmaking, a skill she’s been honing for decades.  It’s reasonable to assume that the decision to give her modern crusade against the Sacklers equal weight as her bottomless catalog of breathtaking city-life portraits was partly—if not entirely—Goldin’s own.  It’s a politically respectable choice, of course, but it’s also an artistically limiting one.

-Brandon Ledet

Last Dance (2022)

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It’s undeniable that the art of drag has changed drastically in the past decade, at least from what I can see in New Orleans.  The traditionalist dive-bar pageant drag that I grew up with in the city has been pushed out to the edges of the frame, found only in the annual Gay Easter parade in the Quarter or at spaghetti & mimosas brunches on the West Bank.  These days, most local drag acts are young cabaret weirdos who are much more interested in testing the boundaries of good taste than they are in looking pretty under a pound of pancake-batter makeup.  In most cities, drag’s recent shift towards the avant-garde might only be attributable to the popularity of television programs like Ru Paul’s Drag Race and its legion of international spinoffs.  Here, it’s more directly influenced by the New Orleans Drag Workshop, an intensive drag bootcamp that spawned most of the city’s most vital, exciting queens for the better half of the 2010s.  That’s the local legacy of drag mother Lady Vinsantos, who closed the New Orleans Drag Workshop just before the pandemic in 2019, leaving behind a glamorously mutated art scene that now sets the city apart from the Southern Pageant traditions I remember from Mardis Gras & Decadences past.

The French “dragumentary” Last Dance honors Vinsantos for recontouring the New Orleans drag scene into the vibrant freak show it is today, so it was wonderful to see it presented with ceremonial prestige at this year’s New Orleans Film Festival.  As the older, stuffier crowd attending the local premiere of the Louis Armstrong documentary Black & Blues spilled out onto the sidewalk in front of The Prytania, the drunken reprobates waiting for the Vinsantos doc rushed in, ready to cheer on & heckle the projection of their friends’ faces onto the century-old silver screen.  The movie asks, “Remember when Neon Burgundy had that gigantic beard?” as if it’s making nostalgic small talk between stage acts at The All-Ways.  It treats local drag performers like Franky, Tarah Cards, and Gayle King Kong as if they were the first wave of punk bands to perform onstage at CBGB’s, a much-deserved reverence you’ll only find in film-fest documentaries like this & To Decadence With Love.  Director Coline Albert may not be from New Orleans, but she does a great job of highlighting what makes the local drag scene special, and how much of a hand Vinsantos had in shaping that scene into what it is.

Besides, New Orleans is only one part of Vinsantos’s story, as it’s told here.  This is a documentary of thirds, split between the closure & legacy of the New Orleans Drag Workshop, Vinsantos’s youthful run as a chaos queen in San Francisco, and the character’s official retirement show in Paris – a lifelong dream realized.  The writing & production of the Paris show helps establish a narrative momentum as Vinsantos reminisces about what he’s accomplished with his drag artistry in two distanced American cities, saving the movie from devolving into pure talking-heads tedium.  Even as someone who’s attended many shows populated entirely by Workshop “draguates” (as well as Vinsantos’s horror-host screening of the San Francisco cult film All About Evil), I’ve had little direct interaction with his own work, as he’s been gradually, consciously ceding the stage to younger talent.  Last Dance operates as a fly-on-the-wall portrait of Vinsantos as a self-doubting, frustrated artist with a chaotic stop-and-start creative process.  The Paris retirement show finale and clips from past triumphs also offer a decent sketch of what the Lady Vinsantos stage persona is like in action – a volatile combo of a Strait-Jacket era Joan Crawford and a Grande Dame revision of Freddy Kreuger.  The retirement of that persona is very much worth preserving here, even if she eventually rises from the grave to terrorize yet another city.

To Last Dance‘s credit, it doesn’t attempt to cover all of Vinsantos’s various art projects from throughout the decades.  His dollmaking, songwriting, and filmmaking efforts are only captured in glimpses, sometimes frustratingly so.  The archival fragments of the D.I.Y. drag-horror films he made as a prankish youth in San Francisco were the major highlight for me, since they have a vintage texture that can’t be matched by modern digital cameras.  Even just limiting itself to the dual retirement of the Drag Workshop and the Lady Vinsantos persona, though, the movie can still feel a little narratively unfocused, frantically plane-hopping between the three cities tethered to Vinsantos’s heart.  If it’s at all meandering or overlong, though, the indulgence is clearly earned.  If anything, we should have rolled out the red carpet and handed over a Key to the City to make the ceremony of this retirement documentary even more ostentatious.  As is, getting home from the post-screening Q&A after 1a.m. at least felt appropriate to the late-night freak scene Vinsantos helped establish here; the only thing the event was missing was a crowd-hyping MC and a two-drink minimum.

-Brandon Ledet

The Cockettes (2002)

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I’m often alienated by hagiographies of late-60s hippie culture, where Boomers & burnouts wax nostalgic about the time that they almost saved the world through the power of Positive Vibes.  The early 2000s documentary The Cockettes is the one major exception to that personal distaste.  The grimy San Francisco drag scene it profiles feels like it’s only hippie by default, emerging too early to be D.I.Y. punk and too late to be an echo of the Beats.  The only other countercultural icon of the era that speaks to (and, honestly, guides) my sensibilities is the Dreamlanders crew, headed by John Waters.  It’s no surprise, then that Waters and partner-in-crime Divine feature prominently in the film as Cockettes-adjacent artists at the fringes of the scene.  It’s the one snapshot of hippie culture where I’ve ever genuinely felt “These are my people.”

Although their bottomless appetite for LSD and their complete lack of a work ethic often made their stage shows sloppy to the point of incoherence, the Cockettes had a clearly defined point of view as a visual art collective – at least in the medium of drag.  They were basically a never-ending carnival where every single attraction was a bearded lady, freaking out even their fellow hippie communes with their 24-7 dedication to glamor & hedonism.  Their version of drag makeup was distinctly modern, defined by exaggerated eye lines and mountains of glitter packed into their unshaved beards.  Cisgender women were equals among the crossdressing men in the collective, establishing an aggressive genderfuck ethos long before that term was coined.  While their makeup was cutting-edge, their wardrobe was purposefully old-fashioned.  Most of their stage shows consisted of hard-tripping, half-naked drag queens singing showtunes & acting out Busby Berkeley chorus lines in the discarded rags of 1940s Hollywood starlets who’d left their gowns & furs behind with the changing times.  The gimmick only worked because everyone in the audience was on the exact same drugs as the performers, but the documentary allows us to enjoy their visual artistry as a gorgeous lookbook in motion while members who survived the dual epidemics of heroin overdoses & AIDS outbreaks gush about the best of times in reverent “You had to be there” tones.  It’s fabulous to behold, even when their half-forgotten anecdotes drift into “Kids these days” bitterness.

Of course, having John Waters on hand as your bearded-lady-carnival barker helps tremendously, as he’s one of our great living storytellers.  Hearing him vouch for the Cockettes as “hippie acid freak drag queens” who conjured “complete sexual anarchy” out of the Peace & Love movement is a huge boost to the film’s entertainment value, and he’s interviewed extensively throughout to capitalize on that infectious enthusiasm.  It’s a justified inclusion too, as the Cockettes’ San Francisco venue—The Nocturnal Dream Show at The Palace Theatre—was the first cultural institution outside of Baltimore to embrace early Dreamlanders pictures like Multiple Maniacs, and the Cockettes themselves were the first subculture to treat Divine like a legitimate celebrity (along with iconic queer soul singer Sylvester).  Any excuse to hear John Waters riff on a subject he’s passionate about is well worth the time investment, but this particular queer-culture doc does way more than most to justify the indulgence.

Revisiting this documentary on DVD after only having seen it on a taped-off-the-TV VHS was like wearing glasses for the first time.  The iconography of The Cockettes is visually splendid and, even two decades after its original printing, the Strand Releasing DVD does rightful justice to their visual art.  As inextricable as their art & lifestyle were from late-60s hippie culture (so much so that their genderfucked utopia quickly fell apart in the early 1970s), I still see a grimy D.I.Y. punk ethos to their version of counterculture theatrics that’s missing from most of the scene’s proto-Burning Man feauxlosophies.  If nothing else, I think it’s exceedingly easy to connect the dots from the Cockettes’ Old Hollywood carnival drag to the iconic costume designs of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which directly influenced the visual markers of punk fashion, if not punk’s sexual politics.  Their nostalgia for the long-gone days of functional hippie communism isn’t too different from the punk communes led by bands like Crass either.  And then there’s John Waters—the only other hippie-era counterculture institution who’s outright proto-punk in his personal philosophy & art—putting his stamp of approval on the entire experiment.  The Cockettes may have self-identified as hippies, but I’m claiming them as an example of ahead-of-their time punks, if not only so I won’t fee l so self-conflicted about waiting to re-watch this movie every goddamn day of my life.

-Brandon Ledet

Death Drop Gorgeous (2021)

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The no-budget slasher Death Drop Gorgeous has the best drag-themed horror title since All About Evil.  That’s good!  It also has one of the worst laugh-to-punchline ratios in the genre since 2003’s Killer Drag Queens on Dope.  Ooh, that’s bad.  It packs a few truly gnarly kills that make you squirm in your knickers.  That’s good.  But those kills are spread thinly across an outright criminal 104min runtime.  That’s bad.  It’s one of the few horror movies I’ve seen in recent memory that features erect onscreen peen.  That’s good!  That mutilated cock was made of silicone, not flesh . . . That’s bad.  Can I go now?

Death Drop Gorgeous is a dirt-cheap regional horror set on the Providence, Rhode Island drag scene.  Its entire cast & crew appear to be staffed by drag performers & gay men, recalling the queer communal immersion of no-budget drag classics like Isle of Lesbos & Vegas in Space.  We join the Providence drag circuit at a point of generational warfare, when classic cabaret queens like the seasoned & embittered Gloria Hole are left clawing for the scraps of spotlight leftover by disrespectful newcomer novelty acts like Janet Fitness, a total brat with no respect for their queer elders.  That tension is escalated by a gloved killer who’s been slaughtering patrons & performers who frequent the local drag spots, draining them of their blood for a mysterious purpose.  Cops get involved, our protagonist ends up being a looky-loo bartender who’s barely involved in the main action, and the whole thing just ends up feeling overloaded with too many non-sequitur time-fillers that dilute its core entertainment value (including a wasted cameo from 1980s scream queen Linnea Quigley).

This film works best if you imagine you’re watching an early-00s SOV slasher and not its modern digi equivalent.  Its drone shots & Grindr jokes constantly drag you by the wig into a post-Knife+Heart world, where a glut of straight-to-streaming horror titles and queer #content feel more like a matter of course than a welcome novelty.  Twenty years ago, in a less crowded field, this might’ve stood out as something truly special, necessary even.  Its flat digi camerawork does a good job of time-traveling back to that headspace too, especially in the tasteless grime of its crueler kills: screwdriver stabbings, mirror shards smashed into faces, dicks fed to meat grinders, etc.  And it even conjures some singular images I can confidently say I’ve never seen elsewhere, like a goth drag queen playing the theremin or a slimy latex hand beckoning victims closer through a glory hole.  For the most part, though, Death Drop Gorgeous struggles to carve out its own unique space despite the specificity of its local cast & setting.

Still, I’m overall fond of this film’s let’s-put-on-a-show community theatre charm.  It might be the kind of regional slasher that earns its value as a cult curio over the years, especially for Providence locals as their drag scene inevitably changes with the times.  I’m sure there’s someone out there who’s already giddy to own any movie starring Gloria Hole on DVD, regardless of its overall quality.  Even as an outsider from 1,400 miles away, I appreciated that novelty myself.

-Brandon Ledet