“He still looks guuud for his age,” marveled some queer behind me when Anger shuffled to the podium in the Walker Art Center’s cinema room Friday night in his red sweater with “Anger” cross-stitched across his chest. The comment’s lisped delivery suggested he’d read about the program a couple days earlier in City Pages, zeroed in on some combination of the ingredients “homosexuality,” “Hollywood” and “hypnotic,” checked IMDB and thought “why not?”
Still, despite how fascinatingly amateur, limited and ridiculous I still find Kenneth Anger’s work (and I mean all three in the best possible sense in the same way my friend complimented Inland Empire for being “singularly unpleasant”), it still takes a back seat to the man as an icon. This is a man, after all, who in Scorpio Rising spelled out his own director’s credit in metallic studs along the waist-strap of some beefcake greaser’s leather jacket (donned upon bare, rippling skin) … a greaser who then goes on to either stand in for Jesus or Hitler and conjures up black magic to kill another biker-cum-former lover. I’m still sort of sorting that one out.
It’s directors like Kenneth Anger that make me understand what drew John Waters to the world of underground art cinema. There may have been a misconception (in my head, if no one else’s) that a-g in its heyday was ruled by the anonymous, but I’ve come to realize that the underground thrives as much if not more on the cult of strong personalities. On this count, Anger’s stand-up correspondence with his peeps — delivered as he supported himself upon the podium and sometimes caught himself leaning a tad too far into the microphone — did not disappoint. And I’m saying this as someone who, after listening to Peter Kubelka explain for about two hours that when you rip a piece of paper in half it goes “sssssssrrrrccchhhh,” declared that attending lectures from filmmakers would furthermore be something I wouldn’t actively pursue.
The films in the program were Fireworks, Rabbit’s Moon, Scorpio Rising, Kustom Kar Kommandos and Invocation of My Demon Brother, plus Mouse Heaven and an excerpt from a film he says he has been working on for many years now about the Nazi youth called Ich Will!
I’d seen all but the third and last in that group, and really only got off on Fireworks, which still retains the power of a first crush. (Or, as Anger playfully insinuated to another member of the audience who naïvely admitted the film hit him in a vulnerable spot: “Did you first feel it in your crotch?”) I’m Un Chant d’amour’s bitch now, and admit to sleazy trysts with Pink Narcissus every now and again, but it was Fireworks that, ahem, first lit my charge. Projected in Anger’s beloved 35mm, Fireworks surprisingly retains its hermetic, private majesty. Rough trade passion play in a spare basement den, it never fails to amuse me that gays go for this one while straights seem to flock to the infinitely more bejeweled Puce Moment. Then again, the former does have the biceps and pecs and the latter the inverted-mascara ingenue (proto-Paltrow). Straight up sex vs. deflection onto fetishized feminine objects.
Rabbit’s Moon was shown in a near-flawless print with, I presume, the reconstructed original soundtrack. My introduction to the film had been, at least as far as the Walker’s liner notes suggested, the “children’s version.” Great, I didn’t even “get” the one for kids?! The new version — which swapped out the rockabilly I’d accepted with much resistance the first time around for The Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes For You,” the “Love Hangover” of the dwindling 1950s — felt far more fresh and coherent, but this is still one nut I can’t bust. The Senses of Cinema profile tells me it’s about Arlecchino and Columbina conspiring to rob the protagonist (a Baptiste-style mime) of not only his fabricated infatuation with Columbina, but also his understanding of the cosmos (revealed to be nothing more than a rear-projection). The sustainability of artifice is about as precious as Anger ever managed, but in the end it boils down to a suicide note. I’m starting to get it. Maybe preferring the songs on the soundtrack really does matter in the end, though Anger mockingly clutched his heart when the woman introducing him said “it’s been said” he is the godfather of the music video form.
The remaining three in the main program all live up to the director’s namesake, and this is where the sniping, vengeful undercurrent of Anger’s public personality — the Hollywood Babylon side — informed the films, more so than vice-versa. I noted that a table set up outside the auditorium was selling copies of his classy, canonical scandal rag, so it’s hardly like he’s unaware that the myth precedes the man. The table also did not contain copies of the recent Fantoma DVD collection, disproving Nathan Lee’s syndicated article in the aforementioned City Pages, which insinuated he was out promoting the disc over the films. Anger bluntly informed the audience at the Walker that this DVD is yet another manifestation of suits fucking him over for profit and that he hasn’t seen one red cent of the $5,000 promised him (which itself seems a shockingly low compensation for what it contains and what Fantoma’s charging), doubly sad when he admitted he was going into surgery towards the end of February to have his enlarging prostate (i.e. “the fucker”) removed. I had already cancelled my preorder at Amazon some months back after the release date had been pushed back one time too many, and the only thing keeping me from patting myself on the back about it is wondering whether some fine print in whatever agreement was drawn up between Anger and Fantoma stipulated his payment be disseminated after recoupment of production costs. That and the fact that it’s on my Netflix queue, as I haven’t seen Eaux d’Artifice or Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome yet.
Semination and prostates and the spectre of commerce were all given ample play while Anger’s brief introductory comments and “five minute” Q&A turned into a total of about a half-hour or 45 minutes of expositional tangents. At 77 years old, at least according to the Midsummer Night’s Dream press release from Warner Brothers that Anger ruefully treated as having as much credibility as his birth certificate, the level of babble was probably to be expected. What wasn’t so much the given would be how much rage he still had against the dying of the light. Among the bits of information Anger thought important to pass on to us, as though we were his godchildren and great-godchildren and regardless of how obvious or well-reported they have been in the past:
• Anger’s siblings screwed him out of his ownership of one-third of his parents mansion. His mother played bridge with the Reagans.
• Jennifer Jones was not a virgin when she starred in The Song of Bernadette but pretended to be one because “that what starlets had to do.”
• Nietzsche was not to be blamed for catching syphilis because all they had back in his day to make love with was candlelight and that telltale sign could easily be mistaken for a “rosy birthmark.”
• Sperm have little regard for those little “women’s diaphragms.” They have one purpose in their lifespan and it is to attack and invade that egg.
• The reason Nazism was a culture of death is because they referred to Deutschland as “fatherland” instead of “motherland.” Masculinity is defined as a constant overload of testosterone, and Nazism was one movement that embraced it instead of trying to contain it.
• Saddam Hussein ought to be referred to as “Saddam Insane,” it’s good the fucker got hanged, more public executions should be videotaped and exhibited (if for no other reason than he could fashion a film from it) and Iraq, being ancient Babylon, is a geographically evil location. (I’m not sure the audience realized he probably meant this with respect and awe.)
• Pauline Kael is an overrated little film critic who wrote (poorly) over-effusive pieces celebrating second-rate talents like … [And here I held my breath, expecting the next words to come from his mouth to be Brian De Palma.] … Sam Peckinpah … [Whew!]
• The current year is actually 1907.
• Ba’al would only ingest babies from rich families, not poor children.
• Thea Von Harbou was quite content to be a member of the Nazi Party. Being a German, she wasn’t about to let empirical evidence sway her commitment.
I missed a lot more because I was caught without a pen. I should’ve grabbed the one I saw on the floor outside the auditorium but I was unfortunately too concerned with taking a head count on the disappointingly thin ranks of leather daddies in the will hold line.