Jeffrey Sconce, editor

S leaze
Artists

Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics

Sleaze Artists
Sleaze
Artists
cineMa aT The

MarGinS of

TaSTe, STyle,

and PoliTicS
J E F F R E Y S C O NC E, E D.

DU KE U N I V E RSITY P RESS DURHAM AND LONDON 2 0 07

 2007 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

Designed by Heather Hensley

Typeset in Minion by Tseng

Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication Data appear on the last
printed page of this book.

Title page: Still from Scum of the Earth

(dir. H. G. Lewis, 1963)

Frontispiece: Still from Strait Jacket

(dir. William Castle, 1964)
Contents

vii Acknowledgments

1 Introduction

part 1: Sleazy Histories

19 Pandering to the Goon Trade: Framing the Sexploitation

Audience through Advertising
Eric Schaefer

47 Womens Cinema as Counterphobic Cinema: Doris Wishman

as the Last Auteur
Tania Modleski

71 Representing (Repressed) Homosexuality in the Pre-Stonewall

Hollywood Homo-Military Film
Harry M. Benshoff

96 Pornography and Documentary: Narrating the Alibi

Chuck Kleinhans

121 El signo de la muerte and the Birth of a Genre: Origins and

Anatomy of the Aztec Horror Film
Colin Gunckel

144 Art House or House of Exorcism? The Changing Distribution

and Reception Contexts of Mario Bavas Lisa and the Devil
Kevin Heffernan
 part 2: Sleazy Afterlives

167 Troubling Synthesis: The Horrific Sights and Incompatible

Sounds of Video Nasties
Kay Dickinson

189 The Sleazy Pedigree of Todd Haynes

Joan Hawkins

219 Para-Paracinema: The Friday the 13th Film Series as Other to

Trash and Legitimate Film Cultures
Matt Hills

240 Boredom, Spasmo, and the Italian System

Chris Fujiwara

259 Pure Quidditas or Geek Chic? Cultism as Discernment

Greg Taylor

273 Movies: A Century of Failure

Jeffrey Sconce

311 Selected Bibliography

321 Contributors

325 Index
Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to thank the contributors for

their patience during the long genesis of this project, as well as
the readers who reviewed the manuscript and provided many
useful suggestions for the authors. In addition to his excellent
contribution to the book, Eric Schaefer also graciously made
his photo-still and pressbook collection available for illustrative
material. I would also like to thank my colleague Scott Curtis
and the members of the Chicago Film Seminar for the opportu-
nity to present and debate an early version of my contribution
to this volume. A section of Movies: A Century of Failure ap-
peared in Framework (45:2) as The (Depressingly) Attainable
Text. I would like to thank Brian Price and Meghan Sutherland
for their invitation to contribute to that volume.
Jeffrey Sconce

Introduction

I n her 1968 essay Trash, Art, and the Movies, Pauline Kael
devotes a great deal of copy to extolling the rather scandalous
pleasures of American International Pictures hippie schlockfest,
Wild in the Streets (1968), at one point judging it more interesting
than that years achingly important 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
No doubt to the calculated shock of her Harpers readership, she
goes so far as to defend the right of teen audiences to prefer
Wild in the Streets over the eras allegedly more sophisticated art
cinema. At least Wild in the Streets, she argues, connects with
their lives in an immediate even if a grossly frivolous way, and if
we dont go to movies for excitement, if, even as children, we ac-
cept the cultural standards of refined adults, if we have so little
drive that we accept good taste, then we will probably never
really care about movies at all.1 The love of cinema, Kael ar-
gues provocatively, is in some sense both childish and based in
the disreputability of the cinemas origins in popular spectacle.
Movies took their impetus not from the desiccated imitation
European high culture, she reasons, but from the peep show,
the Wild West show, the music hall, the comic stripfrom what
was coarse and common (103). While there have always been
schoolmarms determined to transform this coarse and com-
mon medium into a more refined art, Kael champions (here at
least) another tradition of cinephilia that, like so much cultural
Figure 1 In the goofy teen-pic allegory Wild in the Streets (1968), teen fascists
force the elderly to drop acid at a new government re-education camp.

criticism in the twentieth century, seeks to rescue a once vibrant form from
the banal trappings of middlebrow respectability. True cinephiles, she argues,
always recognize one anothers company at once because they talk less about
good movies than what they love in bad movies (89).
Today many cinephiles still love to talk about bad movies, be they studio-
era B-films, low-budget 1950s sci-fi, grindhouse porn and horror, or even wildly
excessive contemporary summer blockbusters. Guilty pleasures lists remain
a staple of popular film writing, allowing otherwise tasteful critics to tempo-
rarily escape the crushing responsibility of promoting a more artistically am-
bitious cinema to champion their own personal love of down-and-dirty genre
pictures. On the DVD market, meanwhile, a proliferating number of companies
scavenge through abandoned theater attics and drive-in closets for the most
obscure, degraded, and unusual films of the past century, responding to an ever
growing audience of trashophiles. For better or worse, the entire oeuvre of
Doris Wishman is now available on DVD while John Fords is not. Elsewhere,
the anthropological thrill of finding a jaw-droppingly implausible film on late-
night television has been channeled into the prepackaged irony of televisions
Mystery Science Theater 3000 and mock 1950s Z-films like The Lost Skeleton of

 jeffrey sc once
Figure 2 Americas patron saint of sleaze: John Waters hosting Art:21, a PBS
documentary series on art in the twenty-first century.

Cadavra (2001). Meanwhile, recent work in film scholarship has made exploi-
tation, sleaze, and other low genres increasingly acceptable as objects of aca-
demic inquiry. Most shocking of all, the cinemas patron saint of sleaze, John
Waters, recently served as the host of Art:21, a PBS documentary on (conse-
crated) art in the twenty-first century. Indeed, Waterss career trajectoryfrom
director of sleazy staples of the midnight movie circuit like Pink Flamingos
(1972) and Polyester (1981) to respected gallery photographer, exhibit curator,
and contributor to Art Forumtestifies to the growing centrality of sleaze on
all levels of the cultural imaginary.
All of the above despite Kaels admonition that cinephiles should not use
their education to try to place trash within an acceptable academic tradition
(112). Ignoring Kaels now comfortably distant and increasingly irrelevant warn-
ing, Sleaze Artists continues cinephilias ongoing conversation about the low,
bad, and sleazy face of cinema by collecting a range of contemporary critical
voices with a shared intellectual interest in the many questions posed by dis-
reputable movies and suspect cinema. Writing in 1968, Kael was concerned that
academics overly eager in their attempts to elevate popular movies into sig-
nificant art would use auteurism, cine-structuralism, and good old-fashioned

introduction 
textual explication to over-intellectualize and ultimately dissipate the mindless
pleasures of films like Wild in the Streets and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968).
Happily, film studies has now expanded beyond the perpetual inferiority com-
plex of its youth and thus no longer has to ape the interpretive excursions of
New Criticism to find complexity and worth in every movie. Increasing intellec-
tual contact with a wide range of historical, theoretical, and critical paradigms
in the humanities has greatly expanded the scope of appropriate objects and
significant questions that might fall under the broad label of film studies. No
longer as concerned with questions of films aesthetic legitimacy, film studies
has been able to enter into a wider dialogue with other voices in art, culture, and
history. So, while Wild in the Streets may not be great art (by almost anyones
criteria), as a pop parable of hippie fascism rendered in a uniquely AIP melding
of go-go teen pic and ersatz New Wave, it is nonetheless a great artifact, one
well worthy of critical attention on any number of fronts. The essays in this vol-
ume speak then, not only to the ongoing centrality of low cinema in all strata of
film culture, but to the continued vibrancy of film studies itself as a diverse and
diversifying discipline within the humanities at large.
As sleaze is less a definable historical genre than an ineffable qualitya
tone that is a function of attitude as much as contentit by necessity evokes
a whole range of textual issues, from the industrial mechanics of low-budget
exploitation to the ever shifting terrains of reception and taste. Sleaziness is
a presence that must be inscribed into a text by some manner of evaluation
and critical labor; that is, sleaze is a feeling one has about a film (or television
show, or book for that matter) that requires judging, if only in ones imagi-
nation, that there is something improper or untoward about a given text.
Often, sleaziness implies a circuit of inappropriate exchange involving suspect
authorial intentions and/or displaced perversities in the audience. One could
easily argue, for example, that hard-core pornography is not sleazy in that
there is little subterfuge in terms of its production and reception. It is what it
isa textual contract sealed around the unambiguous money shots that give
the genre its identity. Mantis in Lace (1968) or Wanda, the Sadistic Hypnotist
(1969), on the other hand, are sleazy in the extreme, each attempting to moti-
vate soft-core pornography across a weak narrative field of LSD, witchcraft, and
other vaguely titillating horrors of hippiedom. No one would dare call Psycho

 jeffrey sc once
Figure 3 Imitation as a form of sleazy flattery: William Castles Psycho knock-off,
Homicidal (1962).

(1960) sleazy, and yet William Castles clumsy (yet compelling) rearticulation
of Psychos basic architecture in Homicidal (1961) is sleaze at its most brilliant,
unseemly in both its crude financial opportunism and its ham-handed re-
visiting of Hitchcocks cross-dressing shock tactics. Herschell Gordon Lewiss
oscillation between sexploitation roughies and gore-soaked drive-in horror
in the 1960s is a sleazeography without peer, a body of work that confronts the
entire spectrum of sensationalism with a uniformly leaden visual style. Finally,
though the directors associated with Troma films try desperately to achieve
sleaziness, their mannered gorefests fail miserably when confronted with the
effortless sleaze of a Hollywood studio making a film about a husband worried
that a psycho cop will break in to the house and rape his wife, and then titling
the film Unlawful Entry (1992).
As a necessarily imprecise and subjective concept, sleaze in the cinema has
always lurked at the ambiguous boundaries of acceptability in terms of taste,
style, and politics. Indeed, as a fundamentally evaluativeindeed judgmental
concept, the very term sleaze demonstrates just how crucially intertwined issues
of taste, style, and politics are in all film practice. That the sleazy, trashy, and
just downright bad lie outside the borders of normative film practice is not

introduction 
surprising. The fact that cinephilesas Kael suggestsremain so enthralled by
such cinema, on the other hand, remains a fascinating question and suggests
that an enduring rift in film culture between encouraging quality and vener-
ating crap remains wholly unresolved.
As Greg Taylor demonstrates in his elegant history of postwar film criticism,
Artists in the Audience, the contrarian desire to champion the low over the high,
the obscure over the known, the disreputable over the canonized has been a
familiar gesture among the film intelligentsia for over fifty years now.2 Tay-
lor concentrates especially on the vanguard criticism of Manny Farber and
Parker Tyler, crediting Farber as the most influential figure in the foundation of
cultism and Tyler as a leading voice of camp. For many years, Farbers aes-
thetic focused on finding redeeming details in an otherwise moribund cinema,
cultivating the cultist impulse that even today allows certain cinephiles to ar-
gue that Edgar G. Ulmer is a more interesting auteur than Eliza Kazan, or that
an obscure Monogram Noir is inherently more cinematic than a more tradi-
tionally canonical film. Tyler, on the other hand, used his early film writing as a
means of reimagining and rewriting Hollywood cinema as the Hollywood Hal-
lucination, taking the predicable mediocrity of Hollywood product and trans-
forming it through camp, if only in very personal terms, into a more vibrant
and playful textual field. Associated with aesthete gay subcultures dating back
to the precinematic world of Oscar Wilde, camp found its most public discus-
sion in Susan Sontags controversial 1964 essay Notes on Camp, and it con-
tinues to resonate as a key strategy for engaging motion pictures.3
What is at stake in this ongoing debate over the high or low soul of the
cinema? As the work of Pierre Bourdieu should remind us, to champion (but
not necessarily enjoy) a particular film or cinema in opposition to another has
less to do with any objective criteria for cinematic worth than with the social
position and cultural status of the cinephile that chooses to weigh in on this
question. Imagine, for example, two cinephiles debating the career of Steven
Spielberg. Which is Spielbergs greater achievementSchindlers List (1993) or
Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World (1997)? Those who still hold hope for the cinemas
legitimacy as an important art form must by default choose the relentless artis-
tic sobriety of Schindler. After all, it aspires to the status of a timeless classic
in range, scope, and treatment, and by engaging the Holocaust, invokes per-

 jeffrey sc once
Figure 4 Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World (1997): Steven Spielbergs greatest cinematic
achievement?

haps the single most profound subject matter of the twentieth century. Those
who embrace the cinemas more accidental forms of commercial poetry, on
the other hand, are rooting instead for the T-Rex that runs amok in San Diego
at the close of Lost World. It is an unexpectedly inspired moment in an other-
wise pedestrian film that reminds many of us of the vertiginous surrealism
that brought so many to the cinema in the first place. Sure, its merely a goofy
homage to the Godzilla cyclebut in that gesture, Spielberg acknowledges that
the entire Jurassic Park phenomenon, with all its sheen of quality and state-of-
the-art effects, can still only aspire to the childhood joy of seeing men in cheap
lizard suits stomping on Tokyo.
On a most superficial level this may seem merely a question of taste, but
as so much recent work in cultural theory reminds us, taste is anything but
superficial. Those who would champion The Lost World over Schindlers List,
much like Kael praising Wild in the Streets over 2001 almost forty years ago,
clearly understand they are making a calculatedly disruptive and scandalous
choice, one that is explicitly political, whether confined to the arena of cinema
poetics or engaging the larger ideological terrain of American popular culture.
Similarly, those defending Schindlers List as important cinema do so from an
equally entrenched sociocultural position with equally political implications.

introduction 
Indeed, as Bourdieus work would also remind us, if we were shown the living
rooms, libraries, and wardrobes of the two people involved in this hypothetical
debate, most of us could no doubt quickly match the cinephile with his or her
accessories.
Yet jockeying for position in the eternal rat race of symbolic capital can ex-
plain only so much. In an earlier article, Trashing the Academy (1995), I
relied heavily on Bourdieus mapping of taste in Distinction to discuss the ac-
tivities of badfilm fans in the 1980s, and in particular, this communitys stra-
tegic shift from approaching these films with mocking derision to a discourse
of outsider appreciation. I used the term paracinema to describe this sensibility,
a viewpoint epitomized in fanzines like Zontar, Psychotronic, and Film Threat,
and whose bible remains the Juno and Vale RE/Search volume Incredibly Strange
Films.4 I think this approach is still very useful in considering how various audi-
ence factions view themselves on the cultural terrain, and how they enter into
often fractious dialogue with one another over issues of cinema, taste, and art.
Still, looking back, there is something missing in thinking about a passion for
the bad, sleazy, or paracinematic simply in terms of symbolic economies and
social trajectories.5 While providing an excellent template for understanding
the positioning of fan discourses and their self presentation in a larger social
fieldbe it the letters column of a zine or flame wars on a Russ Meyer web-
siteBourdieus rationalist economies have less to contribute in understanding
the issues of pleasure, affect, and even obsession that attend a sincere passion
for deviant cinema.
Film cultures seemingly unending fascination with the low and sleazy, and
its closely related critical competition among cultists and aesthetes to capture
the essence of true cinema, suggests that fundamental contradictions attend-
ing the definition, practice, and appreciation of cinematic art remain wholly
unresolved. Here we are probably better served, not by Bourdieus rather clini-
cal analysis of the cultural field, but by that other extreme in French aesthetic
theoryRoland Barthes; especially the Barthes of S/Z and The Pleasure of the
Text. In Trash, Art, and the Movies, for example, Kael empathizes with the
plight of fellow film critics who have simply given up out of boredom. Many
film critics quit, she observes, because they can no longer bear the many
tedious movies for the few good moments and the tiny shocks of recognition

 jeffrey sc once
(93). To put this in Barthesian terms, critics who immerse themselves in any
art form are bound to grow tired of the text of pleasure, the text linked to
the comfortable practice of reading. Once a cinephile has mastered the Holly-
wood lexicon and has a reasonable grasp on what to expect from the various
international schools of art cinema, it becomes increasingly difficult to have
these tiny shocks of recognition, to find any film that truly challenges the
stifling boredom of normative film practice and culture or, for that matter, the
stifling boredom of normative avant-garde film practice and culture. As Kael
puts it, After all the years of stale stupid acted-out stories, with less and less
for me in them, I am desperate to know something, desperate for facts, for in-
formation, for faces of non-actors and for knowledge of how people livefor
revelations, not for the little bits of show-business detail worked up for us by
show-business minds who got them from the same movies were tired of (128
29). Kaels search for the revelatory here is not unlike the Zontarian notion of
the badtruththat moment when the narrative logic and diegetic illusions of
cheap exploitation cinema disintegrate into a brutally blissful encounter with
profilmic failure.6 With its low-budgets, frequent incompetence, and explosive
subject matter, sleazy exploitation cinema is probably the closest thing to out-
sider art possible in the capital and technology intensive world of cinema. As
such, it remains our best hope for Barthess text of bliss: the text that imposes
a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain bore-
dom), unsettles the readers historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the
consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis is relation with lan-
guage.7 Kael, Barthes, and Zontar may be writing for different audiences in dif-
ferent languages, but they are united in an increasingly difficult task of avoiding
textual boredom. This desire for the shock of recognition, a random moment of
poetic perversity, the epiphany of the unexpected, remains a major current in
the cinephiles seemingly unquenchable desire to talk less about good movies
than what they love in bad movies.8

Very few of the films discussed in Sleaze Artists are at the top of conservation
lists or are likely to replace canonical titles in the film studies curriculum. The
essays themselves, however, present a range of new historical, industrial, po-

introduction 
litical, and aesthetic questions that suggest exciting new avenues in examining
the mechanisms of film practice and cultural production. The essays in this
volume are divided into two sections. The articles collected in part 1 are the
most explicitly historical in nature, although within this shared interest in ex-
cavating a cinema previously invisible to close historical analysis, the authors in
this section pursue extremely different methodological and critical approaches
in placing style, taste, and politics in historical dialogue. Part 2, meanwhile,
is more concerned with the afterlife of low cinemas as artifacts circulating
in various personal, formal, and subcultural imaginations. Here too, however,
there is a sustained effort to understand this cinema in the historical context of
memory, exhibition, or appropriation.
Part 1 begins with Eric Schaefers examination of the advertising strategies
adopted by sexploitation producers in the early 1960s to promote the increas-
ingly explicit cinema that was in the process of supplanting the era of classic
exploitation. Responding to a very specific set of demands and restrictions on
the limits of explicit sexual discourse, sexploitation advertising, Schaefer ar-
gues, had to employ advertising appeals based on humor, adventure, and ex-
perimentation, strategies that in turn increasingly associated the sexploitation
patron as deviant and abnormal. As in his foundational study of classic exploi-
tation cinema, Schaefer here combines close historical research with a discus-
sion of these films (and their audiences) as objects presenting a crisis to the eras
normative (though changing) codes of respectability. The essay also provides a
useful gateway to the other essays of part 1, all of which interrogate the 1960s
and early 1970s as a particularly volatile moment in negotiating the appropriate
boundaries of film practice and content.
Playing on Pam Cook and Claire Johnsons landmark call for womens
counter-cinema in the early 1970s, Tania Modleskis Womens Cinema as
Counterphobic Cinema provides a welcome new perspective on the work of
Doris Wishman, the New York housewife turned sexploitation director of the
1960s who has become a major cult figure in bad cinema circles over the past
decade. Modleskis piece was actually written a decade ago but never before
published due to the authors own uneasiness with Wishmans films, especially
the roughies Wishman made during the mid-1960s. In a provocative rejoin-
der to the often unproblematic celebrations of Wishman as an iconoclastic

10 jeffrey sc once
feminist subversive, Modleski challenges the school of feminism that would
simply ignore Wishmans often disturbing but frequently fascinating work, as
well as the Wishman apologists who embrace the filmmaker and yet ignore
the often violent misogyny of the films themselves. In addition to providing a
much-needed critical overview of Wishman within the contexts of American
feminism, the article also offers a renewed dialogue with key issues in gendered
spectatorship.
In Representing (Repressed) Homosexuality in the Pre-Stonewall Holly-
wood Homo-Military Film, Harry Benshoff examines a cycle of films in the
1960s exploring homosexual desire in the military. Looking at titles like The
Strange One (1957), The Gay Deceivers (1969), Billy Budd (1962), and Reflections
in a Golden Eye (1967), Benshoff argues these films offer more complex and
theoretically queer ideas about human sexuality than the supposedly more
progressive post-Stonewall cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. In narrativizing
the ambiguous borders between homosociality and homosexuality in the mili-
tary, Benshoff argues these films often end up indicting the repression of homo-
sexual desire rather than homosexuality itself. Benshoff s article should also
remind us that art and progressive politics are not necessarily always linked
in a teleological march toward liberation and enlightenment; rather, he sug-
gests, the possibilities for representing queernesslike all political struggles of
significationoften advance and retreat independently of developments in the
terrain of conventional politics.
Building on his extensive work in documentary forms, Chuck Kleinhanss
Pornography and Documentary: Narrating the Alibi considers the strategies
adopted by sexploitation filmmakers of the 1960s and 70s to integrate images
and voice-over narration. Specifically, Kleinhans concentrates on the slippages
between image and narrator in the infamous Mondo (and Mondo-inspired)
documentaries of the era, arguing that the sleazy profile of these films stems
from a disconnect between traditional documentarian strategies like voice-of-
God narration and expert testimony and the wholly prurient and voyeuristic
images offered the spectator. In addition to providing welcome close analysis
of these important (yet often repressed) examples of documentary film, Klein-
hanss article will also be of interest to anyone interested in that alternative
documentary tradition stretching from the Mondo films to contemporary

introduction 11
reality television, a shadow tradition to the more canonized documentarians of
the past three decades.
In his study of El signo de la muerte (The Sign of Death), Colin Gunckel
examines the place of the Aztec horror film in larger political debates over
creating Mexican national identity. Beginning with the cultural policy of indi-
genismo, an attempt in post-revolutionary Mexico to align Mexican identity
with the countrys pre-Columbian heritage, Gunckel demonstrates how hor-
ror films like El signo de la muerte (1939) and The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy
(1958) provided a counternarrative to the romantic valorizations of Mexicos
indigenous populations and cultures found in so much Golden Age Mexican
cinema. Employing Robin Woods work on the Other, surplus repression, and
the horror film, Gunckel examines how the films bracket a period of immense
social and cultural transformation in Mexico, replacing the idyllic landscapes
and tragically noble Indians of the indigenismo tradition with human sacri-
fice, decaying corpses, and maniacal scientists. Routinely dismissed as inferior
and incoherent copies of Hollywood horror, the Aztec horror cycle is instead
for Gunckel a fascinating site for the negotiation of not only indigenous peoples
and heritages, but also other period transformations in class and gender.
Kevin Heffernans Art House or House of Exorcism? ends part 1 by detail-
ing the interesting industrial saga of Mario Bavas Lisa and the Devil (1973), an
ambitious art horror film that debuted to good reviews at Cannes but quickly
fell into a distribution void, only to emerge after the international success of The
Exorcist (1973) in a highly compromised and critically maligned form as House
of Exorcism. By charting the films unusual journey through the highs and lows
of art cinema, fringe television, grindhouse circuits, and the connoisseur DVD
markets, Heffernan provides intriguing insight as to how both the reception
and reputation of this troubled film were significantly affected by its various
venues of distribution. Based in part on interviews with the films producer,
Alfredo Leone, Heffernan offers a fascinating account of the complicated eco-
nomics behind the surprisingly intertwined art house, television, and grind-
house circuits of the early 1970s.
Part 2 begins with Kay Dickinsons interrogation of ambivalence and cinema
poetics in Troubling Synthesis, a discussion of how the antiseptic, cold, and
seemingly detached synthesizer scoring of Italian horror movies in the 1970s

12 jeffrey sc once
and 1980s contributed to their later vilification in the infamous video nasties
debates in England. Dickinson explores a double ambivalence at work in these
filmsthe seeming disjunction between sound/music and image, and the con-
flicting cultural meanings associated with electronic, synthesized music in the
1970s and 1980s. In this way, Dickinson finds an innovative strategy for engag-
ing the frequently formalist question of sound/image relations, arguing finally
for maintaining the power of ambiguity, both in art and in academic criticism.
Building on many of the themes in her book Cutting Edge, Joan Hawkinss
contribution to the volume examines the sleazy pedigree of art-house favor-
ite Todd Haynes. By engaging key Haynes films like Superstar (1987), Velvet
Goldmine (1998), and Far from Heaven (2002), Hawkins examines the dialec-
tical relationship between art and trash in Haynes oeuvre. As Hawkins argues,
Hayness work epitomizes the increasing hybridity of high and low taste cul-
tures in contemporary cinema, producing a form of art camp that, while every
bit as self-conscious as the shock metacamp of a filmmaker like John Waters,
speaks to a very different strategy for integrating camp history and aesthetics
into contemporary cultural production. Indeed, filmmakers like Haynes who
are increasingly veterans of the cinemas high/low debates over the past twenty
years can be seen as fashioning a new cinematic voice that seamlessly integrates
the art and exploitation traditions rather than simply pitting them against one
another.
Matthew Hillss article on fans of the Friday the 13th series (19802003) sets
out to complicate the idea of oppositionality in the taste wars between trash
and legitimate cinema. As Hills points out, slasher films in general and the
Friday the 13th series in particular remain a cinematic pariahclearly beyond
the aesthetic/taste boundaries of quality cinema and yet most decidedly not
embraced by the aficionados of paracinema. Dubbing these films para-
paracinema, Hills quite persuasively (and parodically) demonstrates that even
a reading protocol devoted to transgressive bad taste has its limits and blind
spots. Hills goes on to argue that slasher films are most frequently dismissed by
critics high and low for their repetitive formulaic structure, but then demon-
strates that this formula fallacy is often based on outright distortions, omis-
sions, and misreadings of the texts themselves. Rarely seen by film critics, but
nonetheless frequently commented upon, the Friday the 13th films become for

introduction 13
Hills a screen on which a certain critical sensibility projects its worst night-
mares about the state of film art.
Expanding on themes encountered in his always intriguing explorations of
bad cinema in The Hermanaut, Chris Fujiwara focuses here on the Italian
horror film Spasmo (1974) to explore the various implications of boredom in the
realm of film aesthetics. After considering a range of theorists on the relation-
ship between boredom, diegetic belief, and cinematic identification, Fujiwara
presents a close analysis of boredom as trope, tone, and technique in Spasmo.
In a reading that incorporates Heidegger, the cinematography of immobility,
and the peculiarities of Italian postdubbing practices, Fujiwaras essay suggests
that the indeterminacy and disinterest enabled by boring cinema makes it an
ideal candidate for the Situationist practices of detournement and drive. As
the opposite of entertainment, the boring film suspends us not betwixt and
between, but in a perpetual state of waiting, thus providing a useful tool in
combating the powers of mass spectacle.
In Pure Quidditas or Geek Chic? Greg Taylor further explores the critique
of Farberesque cultism he proposes in the final chapter of Artists in the Audience.
Looking at such diverse venues of geek cultdom as D. B. Weisss Lucky Wander
Boy, Chuck Klostermans Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, and the short-lived Com-
edy Central series Beat the Geeks (2001), Taylor unpacks the contradictions of
cultists who pretend to marshal superior forms of aesthetic discernment as an
oppositional force yet remain wholly unable (or unwilling) to confront and/or
understand the basis of their own aesthetic evaluations. In Artists in the Audi-
ence, Taylor warns that unexamined cultist and camp approaches to the cinema
work as a corrosive force on a still maturing art form. Expanding on that sen-
timent, Taylor here calls for the actual hard work to be done in understanding
the mechanisms and criteria of what Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel identified
forty years ago as popular discriminationthe ability of audiences to make
informed aesthetic judgments about all manner of popular culture.
Sleaze Artists concludes with my own essay, Movies: A Century of Failure.
This piece considers the recent emergence of what might best be termed cine-
cynicism, an adversarial form of cinephilia searching for a new critical lan-
guage through which to engage the worst aspects of contemporary Hollywood
cinema. Using Kaels Trash, Art, and the Movies as a starting point, the essay

1 4 jeffrey sc once
considers how a range of bitterly comic and comically bitter film writers
have elaborated a now century old fascination in film culture with cinematic
failure into a sensibility that loves movies and yet hates the cinema. Once seen
as the most promising and revolutionary art form of the twentieth century,
films early colonization by commercial interests and the accompanying (and
ongoing) alienation of creative labor quickly made the medium a disappoint-
ing source of frustration and lost opportunity. Over the years, cinephiles have
developed endless strategies for reframing the limitations of cinema into new
textual games and possibilities. But what is one to do in a world where both art
cinema and Hollywood blockbusters seem clichd and bankrupt and where the
A, B, and Z catalogues of Hollywood have been completely exhausted? What
can be done when the jaded cinephile faces the depressing realization that no
film on earth will ever again be a genuine revelation or even slightly surpris-
ing? The cine-cynics, I argue, create a form of pop-textual play where having a
position on the movies is ultimately more rewarding than actually seeing them,
abandoning the futile hope for cinematic art and replacing it instead with a
fascination for a larger field of cinematic practice.

Notes

1. Pauline Kael, Trash, Art, and the Movies, Going Steady: Film Writings, 19681969
(New York: Marion Boyars, 1994), 105.
2. Greg Taylor, Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism (Prince-
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).
3. Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp, Against Interpretation (New York: Dell, 1966), origi-
nally published in the Partisan Review, 1964.
4. V. Vale and Andrea Juno, Incredibly Strange Films (San Francisco: V/Search, 1985).
5. Most critics of the article have critiqued it for seeming to offer an unproblematic divide
between mainstream Hollywood and paracinema, or for portraying this commu-
nity as too homogenous and thus ignoring the turf battles within this group. That may
be true, and it may well be in my own enthusiasm for films like Robot Monster and
Brainiac, the article reads in places more like a manifesto than a sober description of a
subcultural phenomenon. Still, I believe the language of the articleif read closely
takes great pains to describe these boundaries as self-perception and self-promotion
within this community, most loosely defined, and not as an attempt to lay down the law
about what is and is not paracinema (it is described as an elastic sensibility, after all).
Perhaps such critiques are the product of working with Bourdieus scientistic, taxo-

introduction 15
 nomic, and spatialized categories in the first placedrawing lines of taste, distinction,
and counterdistinction inevitably leads to claims that one has not done so properly.
6. Jeffrey Sconce, Trashing the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of
Cinematic Style, Screen 36 (1995): 37193.
7. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 14.
8. Kael, Trash, Art, and the Movies, 89.

16 jeffrey sc once
 1
Sleazy Histories
Eric Schaefer

Pandering to the Goon Trade Framing the Sexploitation

Audience through Advertising

S exploitation films have always been a disreputable form. As

adult titles proliferated during the 1960s, even those films
that maintained the gloss of European art cinema were seen as
little more than streetwalkers, classed up with better carriage
and foreign accents. That disreputability also extended to the
audiences for the films, the filthy old men in rumpled raincoats
who peopled the public imagination. Whether it was journalis-
tic accounts of the growing number of theaters that specialized
in dirty movies, snide asides in film reviews, or cartoons in the
popular press, the audience for adult films was characterized as
a shady collection of characters at best, deviant and potentially
dangerous at worst. They were the goon trade.1 I want to ex-
amine the way sexploitation films were advertised and consider
the ways that advertising contributed to the stigmatization of
their audiencedespite the fact that in reality the audience was
largely comprised of respectable citizens. This tacit framing of
the audience for sexploitationand later hard-core pornogra-
phyeventually led to bans on newspaper advertising for these
movies in many cities across the country, a ban that had seri-
ous consequences for the production of adult films in the late
1970s.
Sexploitation films emerged around 1960 in the form of mov-
ing cheesecake pictures known as nudie cuties (e.g., The Immoral Mr. Teas,
1959), a new crop of nudist camp epics (e.g., Daughter of the Sun, 1962), and racy
foreign entries often goosed up with additional inserts of nudity and sexually
suggestive scenes (e.g., The Twilight Girls, 1961). Low-budget and unashamedly
lurid, the movies initially played in urban theaters and other failing venues,
programmed by product-starved exhibitors who wanted to keep their strug-
gling operations alive. By the end of the 1960s, however, sexploitation movies
were plentiful enough, and some sufficiently improved in quality, to cross over
into the showcase theaters of established chains.

The Art of the E ye Stopper

Advertising for sexploitation films came in two primary categories: trailers and
print. Although copy for radio spots was sometimes included in pressbooks
and prerecorded spots were occasionally made available, radio seems to have
been used only sporadically, and television advertising was almost nonexistent.
Trailers were the most important for sexploitation films in the early years be-
cause they were seen by the clientele that regularly patronized theaters special-
izing in sexploitation product. But it was the print ads that appeared in news-
papers and the posters slapped up in front of theaters that were seen by the
largest numbers of eyespeople who went to the movies, as well as those who
would never dream of seeing an adult film. Print ads for sexploitation films
were placed on the same newspaper pages with mainstream films and offered
sexploitation the most direct opportunity to differentiate itself from Hollywood
movies and more conventional foreign films.
As the independent sexploitation films began to appear in the late 1950s and
early 1960s, members of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)
were still governed by the Advertising Code for Motion Pictures. The Code
stated that good taste shall be the guiding rule of motion picture advertising,
that profanity and vulgarity shall be avoided and that nudity with meretri-
cious purpose and salacious postures shall not be used.2 Yet the confirmation
of First Amendment rights on the motion picture by the Supreme Courts 1952
Burstyn v. Wilson decision, the gradual erosion of the Production Code and
state and municipal censorship during the 1950s, and an increasingly adult slant
in Hollywood films led to more provocative ads through the period.3 Whether

2 0Eric S chaefer
it was showing off Jane Russells most famous assets in posters for films such as
Underwater (1955) or presenting a thumb-sucking Carroll Baker sprawled on a
day bed in posters for Baby Doll (1956), Hollywood movie promotion increas-
ingly favored feminine pulchritude and provocative situations. Advertising for
teenpics and films from low-rent outfits such as American International Pic-
tures (AIP) often focused on suggestive scenes or revealing costuming that sel-
dom appeared in the films themselves (e.g., Naked Paradise [1957], High School
Hell Cats [1958]). By the time Lolita was released in 1962, with the infamous
art showing a cherry-red lollipop resting between Sue Lyons pouting lips, the
early sexploitation films were already being given a run for their money by
the majors. Thus, the low-budget sexploitation film was faced with a problem:
how to convince ticket buyers that their movies were more suggestive, more
revealing, and ultimately more naughty than the increasingly adult pictures
coming out of Hollywoodnot to mention the growing crop of frank foreign
films.
In his classic 1957 expos of the advertising industry, The Hidden Persuaders,
Vance Packard wrote of eye stoppers, those sexy images that can arrest the eye.4
There was certainly nothing hidden in the persuasive power of the earliest sex-
ploitation advertising, which relied first and foremost on eye stoppersimages
of scantily clad women. Ads for nudie cuties display a great deal of similarity
to the burlesque films of the classical exploitation era that preceded them,
and which were on the wane in the early 1960s.5 Such images could take the
form of artwork or photographs. Like burlesque films, but unlike most classical
exploitation movies that had preceded them, nudie cuties made no pretense
of having any educational motives or material. This was made clear in their
humorous taglines and joking titles. Humor can often be found in the titles
of the films themselves, which at times relied on wordplay, alliteration, and a
general sense of playfulness: The Immoral Mr. Teas, The Ruined Bruin (1961),
Mr. Peters Pets (1962), The Bare Hunt (1963), Bell, Bare and Beautiful (1963),
Boin-n-g! (1963), Goldilocks and the Three Bares (1963), My Bare Lady (1963),
and so on. In addition to humorous titles, an accompanying use of cartoons or
cartoonish imagery in nudie-cutie advertising was also standard. For instance,
all of Russ Meyers earliest films were advertised with cartoon imagery. Ads for
Eve and the Handyman (1961) included caricatures of star Anthony-James Ryan

Fram ing the Sexpl oitation Audience 2 1

 Figure 1 Advertising for the
nudie-cutie Paris Ooh-La-La
(1963) making use of humor and
cartoon imagery in an effort to
deflect accusations of appealing
to a prurient interest.

wearing his handyman togs and toting a plunger. In one image he knocks on
the glass door of a shower, behind which stands a curvaceous female silhouette.
In other art he hauls a claw-foot tub, filled with bubbles and a smiling young
woman. In each instance Ryan wears a sly smile. The ads for the film promised
Youll NEVER See This on TV! as a way of indicating the fare in the film was
something not for general viewership. Another tagline was blatant in its dual-
meaning, claiming the movie was A Riot of Voluptuous Laughs & Sex! For the
BROAD-minded adults only. The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (1961), David F.
Friedman and Herschell Gordon Lewiss first foray into nudie cuties, featured a
cartoon Frenchman, complete with beret, ogling girls through binoculars. Not
only were ticket-buyers offered Delightful, Delectable, Desirable, Delicious
Damsels Devoid of Any and All Inhibitions, the film was served up in Flesh-
tone Color and Skinamascope. Similarly, AFDs Paris Ooh-La-La! (1963), with
Dick Randall, included a caricature of the grinning Randall along with the line
See Our Hero Get Plastered in Paris!

22Eric S chaefer
 The joking, fraternal nature of the advertising linked the films to traditional
male smokers where stag films were screened. Just as joking and commentary
served to diffuse some of the erotic tension in such homosocial situations,
the cartoonish and playful strategy of nudie-cutie advertising served a simi-
lar function. To acknowledge sexual desire or the generation of lust in the ads
would have been to admit that the films were made to appeal to prurient inter-
est under the Supreme Courts Roth decision and thus potentially obscene. In
that 1957 case, the Court held that protected expression included anything that
contained ideas no matter how unconventional or controversial, and that the
only expression that might not be accorded protection must be utterly without
redeeming social importance.6 Sexually oriented material was protected, ac-
cording to the ruling, if it was not obscene, and obscenity could be determined
only if, for the average person, applying contemporary community standards,
the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient inter-
est.7 The vast majority of nudie cuties thus attempted in their advertising to
displace direct erotic appeal with humor. Effective, perhaps, in avoiding censor-
ship, such a strategy also left the films open to charges that they were juvenile, if
not downright infantile, in their approach to both humor and sexuality. Writing
about nudie films in 1962, David Moller described the plot of Hideout in the Sun
as so ludicrous that had it been intended for a ten-minute short it would have
been one of the funniest, wildest ever. Spread over seventy minutes, it was like
slow death.8 A Los Angeles critic sneered that The Immoral Mr. Teas has much
the same subtle, urbane wit to be found in any one of our undergraduate humor
magazines.9 A Philadelphia judge who declined to find Mr. Teas obscene still
said the movie was vulgar, pointless, and in bad taste.10 Those who attended
the films could also be singled out as being vulgar and having juvenile taste for
their willingness to sit through such witless films. When the early nudie movies
were reviewedwhich was a fairly rare occasioncritics often commented on
the childish nature of the films and their audience.
The two other major categories of early sexploitation, nudist movies and
pseudo-art films, used other techniques to blunt potential criticism. Nudist
films stressed beauty and nature in their ads. World without Shame (1962),
for example, was the fascinating story of young people who left civilization
to commune with nature and promised Beauty as it was created. Topping

Fram ing the Sexpl oitation Audience 23

things off, the film was In Beautiful Eastman Color. Lets Go Native (ca. 1962)
presented The Untold Mysteries of TRUE NATURE LOVERS! and claimed
to be Beautiful . . . beyond comprehension! Protected by a string of court de-
cisions from the mid-1950s, the associations with beauty and nature provided
a shield against charges that nudist films were salacious. Foreign films with an
art slant, meanwhile, coupled suggestive imagery with nods to drama and emo-
tion. Ava Leighton and Radley Metzgers films for Audubon specialized in this
strategy. Ads for the French film The Twilight Girls, released by Audubon in
1961, hinted at lesbian themes in the art while the taglines served up passion:
No longer children . . . not yet women . . . caught in the turmoil of their un-
formed emotions! Although the ads for nudist and art films were somewhat
more sophisticated than those for nudie cuties, the fact that all the films played
in the same venues, often on double features, meant that they were aligned in
the publics imagination as often indistinguishable dirty movies.
Not surprisingly, most sexploitation ads in the period before the creation of
the MPAA ratings system in 1968 stressed that the films were for Adults Only!
Earlier classical exploitation films may have been pitched as Adults Only,
but those with an educational imprimatur often permitted high-school- and
junior-high-school-aged boys and girls to attend. The age of admission for sex-
ploitation films may have varied slightly, depending on community tolerance,
but seventeen or eighteen was generally the minimum age for admission. The
lure of films made for adult eyes only was sufficient to set them apart from the
pack of mainstream films, the bulk of which were still directed at as broad an
audience as possible.
Just as sexploitation films ran the gamut from elegant European imports
made in exotic locales to shabby black-and-white quickies shot in cold-water
flats in New York, the ads also deployed a range of styles. Higher-end films from
companies like Audubon, or movies that had crossover potential, tended to fea-
ture slick, well-designed art and copy, in many instances the equivalent of those
from their major studio counterparts. David Friedman has commented that
Harry Novaks Boxoffice International often used the talents of Steve Offers. His
ads looked more like regular ads. I disagreed with that. I thought they should
look like adult film ads. The art and the layout looked good, but not the copy.11
According to Joe Steinman of Boxoffice International, the company used dif-

2 4Eric Sc haefer
 Figure 2 Sexploitations
appeals to beauty and nature
in ad copy for Lets Go Native
(1962).

ferent artists depending on the type of campaign that we are working on. The
planning and inspiration behind these is always a joint effort. That is why we
are able to achieve diversification in our campaigns, but the overall credit must
be given to Harry Novak. He gives every campaign his personal attention.12
Friedmans Entertainment Ventures, Inc. (EVI) and several other producers
used the talents of Rudy Escalera, who made most of his money cranking out
art for Azteca, a company that distributed Mexican films to Spanish-language
theaters in the United States. According to Friedman, He had great imagina-
tion. He worked from stills to create the artwork. Escaleras art is distinctive
for its curvy women and use of heavy black line. Low-end companies often re-
lied on staff at poster companies such as Consolidated in New York. Friedman
claims, They probably handled art for over 1,000 pictures.13
For promotional campaigns, sexploitation film producers tended to use the
services of smaller accessory companies, such as Consolidated, Donald Velde,
Louis Scheingarten, and Bartco, rather than National Screen Service. These

Fram ing the Sexpl oitation Audience 25

smaller companies generally offered a more limited range of promotional ma-
terials, usually restricted to trailers, one-sheets, stills, and pressbooks. In 1966
EVI joined with producers Bob Cresse and Armand Atamian to create United
Theatrical Amusement (UTA), a company that produced one-sheets, press-
books, and stills. Friedman explains, The whole idea was to keep as much as
possible under one roof. EVI also operated a wholly owned subsidiary called
Ultra Volume Photo, a photo processing operation that could crank out thou-
sands of photos per day. In addition to doing our stuff [EVI], Friedman said,
they did all Cresses, Novaks, UTA, Bartco, and some for Velde. They also did
[Los Angeles] Dodger fan photos for a year.14
Regardless of who produced or distributed the advertising material, as with
sexploitation films themselves, the ads for the movies have a large degree of
intertextual similarity. This extends from the images to the words used in tag-
lines. Some words turn up over and over in the advertising for sexploitation
films. Not surprisingly, adult is the most constant signifier, usually to indicate
the intended audience either with adults only or strictly adult. Other words
that recur repeatedly include sex, erotic, passion, intimate, pleasure,
love, and variations on lust. Daring, shocking, raw, thrills, lurid,
orgy, and sin also appear often. Finally, descriptors such as exotic, ab-
normal, and bizarre turn up with some frequency. Movies werent just in
color, they were inevitably in revealing color (Notorious Big Sin City [1970])
or throbbing color (Acapulco Uncensored [1968]).
In 1966, the Supreme Courts Ginzberg v. United States decision threw a new
wrinkle onto the sheets in its determination that material that dealt with sex or
erotica might not be obscene in the abstract, but [could be considered] obscene
when promoted by pandering.15 The sexploitation business was on notice that
even if a film itself might not be obscene, if its advertising pandered it could
be considered obscene. Dual versions of ads and posters, hot ads for the more
permissive markets and cold ads for the conservative ones, had been around
from the earliest days of exploitation. Following Ginzberg they became an even
greater necessity. Friedman notes, When newspapers got too sensitive we had
two sets of ads. Thar She Blows [1969] became Thar She Goes. We had ads for
Trader Hornee [1970] with two es and ads with one e. The Big Snatch [1968] be-
came The Big Catch. We just printed extra Cs that the exhibitor could substitute

26 Eric Sc haefer
 Figure 3 The press book for 1968s
The Big Snatch included an extra C so
that newspapers in more conservative
communities could promote the film
as The Big Catch.

in the ads.16 Boxoffice Internationals Country Hooker (1968) had ad cuts so

exhibitors could substitute the title Country Playgirls. The pressbook for Aca-
pulco Uncensored included substitute art so the film could be changed to Aca-
pulco Expos or Acapulco Sex according to local tastes. The Daisy Chain (1969)
became simply Daisy C. in some ads, although they retained the image of the
flower encircled by a chain to fill in those in the know. One-sheets featured
either the flower and chain art at the center or a circular formation of eight
nude men and women for less sensitive situations.17

C reating Appeals, Framing Patrons

By the mid-1960s ads for sexploitation films operated on two levels. At the most
obvious, they were selling a single commodity, one particular film. As such,
they had to intrigue potential ticket buyers with words and images, to set that

Fram ing the Sexpl oitation Au dience 27

particular film apart from competing sexploitation films as well as other movies
in theaters and drive-ins. But beyond this they were also broadly selling the
idea of sexuality and the potential ticket buyers relationship to it. In so doing,
sexploitation advertising created an implicit profile of its abstract, but rather di-
verse audience. This profile, in turn, brought with it larger cultural assumptions
about the typical patron for sexploitation. As Pierre Bourdieu has indicated,
Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their
classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between
the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar.18 Sexploitation
advertising, in other words, worked to classify both the films and their ticket-
buying public, constructing an image of the films patrons based on their taste
in movies. A product of ones purchases of goods and services, this commodity
self, as Jib Fowles has defined it, offers up potential meanings and . . . helps
signal identity to oneself as well as to others.19 In concert with efforts to avoid
censorship through appeals to humor, beauty, and art, sexploitation advertising
also promised a commodity (and thus produced a commodity self) based on
four primary sexual appeals: excitement, adventure, curiosity, and experimen-
tation.20
As one might expect of these films, the promise of sexual excitement and
stimulation through nudity or erotic situations was standard in sexploitation
advertising. Images of women nude, nearly nude, or provocatively clothed were
a staple in the ads, designed to appeal to the heterosexual males who initially
made up the vast majority of the audience for sexploitation films. Even when
nudity or its suggestion was limited, provocative images of womens faces with
lips parted or with ecstatic expressions on their faces figured prominently. As
sexploitation films developed over the 1960s to include scenes of simulated sex,
images of nude or partially clothed men began to appear in ads as well.
Ads often featured sketches or shots of several girls, giving the impression
that a smorgasbord of women would be featured. Taglines also alluded to a
variety of women: Prisoner in a HaremA G.I.s dream come true (A Good
Man Is Hard to Find [1969]); You will experience, along with Henry, the de-
lights of 26 different wives! (Substitution [1970]). This technique of showing
multiple women in posters and ads would become an important strategy for
many sexploitation films, particularly low-end movies without recognizable

2 8E ric S chaefer
stars. The notion of variety and plenty, of multiple willing women on display,
not only recalls the burlesque stage and films as well as nudie cuties, but also the
mens magazines that had proliferated since the mid-1950s. Making good on the
ads, this fantasy of multiple, willing sex partners structured the narrative form
of most sexploitation films.
Excitement could also take the form of shock, and many movies promised
to startle viewers or to shake their sensibilities. Ads for Suburbia Confidential
(1966) stated that The Kinsey Report shocked readers, Suburbia Confidential . . .
will shock you! Olympic Internationals Japanese import, Hentai (1965), was a
film that couldnt have been made in this country! The Cam-Scope production
Mini-Skirt Love (1967) offered A Shocking Glimpse into the Warped Morals of
the Modern World. By promising shocking images and scenes, the advertise-
ments for such films suggested that they would take the ticket-buyer out of his
everyday life. By tying that shock to sexuality, the films suggested a sexual thrill
that was beyond the realm of the average individuals experience.
Adventure was another key appeal in sexploitation advertising, a lure
grounded in exotic or unusual locales where the average filmgoer was unlikely
to find himself. This included countries considered at the time to have more
open views on sex, such as France and, by the mid-1960s, the Scandinavian
countries. It also included portions of the city that were considered dangerous
or forbidden, such as red light zones and skid rows (Raw Sex begins with a
rainy day on skid row! promised Take Me Naked [1966]). Even the countryside
could also be a place for sexual adventure, in the form of nudist camps and
other backwoods locales where loose morals were thought to be the rule of the
day. Adventure could also be had in more seemingly mundane settings that
the 1960s had eroticized in some way: photographers studios, motel rooms,
suburban homes, college campuses, hippie pads, and so forth. Such erotic ad-
venturing could also be found in distant historical periods (The Exotic Dreams
of Casanova [1971]), and fantasy/science-fiction situations (Hot Erotic Dreams
[1967], Space Thing [1968]).
Curiosity was another major appeal of sexploitation ads. Beyond a desire
to see multiple, naked bodies, advertising also promised patrons they would
see and understand more about various forbidden sexual practices. Movies
often promised to satisfy sexual curiosity by revealing intimate secrets (Key

Framing the Sexpl oitation Au dience 29

 Figure 4 Like much other
sexploitation advertising, Take
Me Naked (1966) associated sex
with dangerous and forbidden
locales, in this case skid row.

Club Wives [1968]). This was particularly the case with movies about lesbian-
ism, which constituted a major theme in the late 1960s, as well as movies that
dealt with sadomasochism, bondage and discipline, or other perversions. Be-
fore the advent of hard core, a common theme was the breaking of new sexual
ground. For instance, Massacre of Pleasure (1966) was billed with the line
Olympic International presents a shattering step forward in the sensual revo-
lution in filmmaking. Until now the screen did not dare, whispered slicks
for Body of a Female (1964). And ads for Naked Fog (1966) claimed, For the
first time, a film dares . . . Echoing the puffery of mainstream cinema, these
nonspecific references to erotic advances and innovative daring appealed to
viewers curiosity to see new sights, or to see just how much films were capable
of showing as obscenity law continued to evolve.
Although the low-end films made by outfits such as Mitam, Distribpix, and
AFD were seldom reviewed, those films that did get notices were apt to incor-
porate them into their ad campaigns. Such ads were capable of appealing to the

30E ric Sc ha efer

intellectual curiosity of viewers by creating a tension between a low form and
apparent approval (or at least notice) from the critical establishment. Without
a Stitch (1968), a Danish film initially impounded by U.S. Customs, eventually
became a substantial crossover hit. Decontextualized lines from reviews used
in the advertising included, The heroine spends as much time stark naked as
any performer since Flipper (San Francisco Chronicle) and Some of the most
explicit sex scenes allowed to be shown publicly (Newark News). Audubons
Camille 2000 (1969) used lines from the New York Times (Captures beautifully
colored, explicit sex) and the New York Post (An eye dazzler . . . sex exciter!).
Not only did critical blurbs seem to offer an objective account of what audi-
ences might hope to see in a movie (as opposed to the typical hype from the
distributor), they served to provide a seal of approval from the critical estab-
lishment.
As Christopher Lasch has observed, Advertising serves not so much to ad-
vertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life. It educates the
masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences
and personal fulfillment.21 Sexual experimentation was one of the hallmarks
of the sexual revolution, and sexploitation advertising catered to the desire for
new and different sexual experiences. Whether or not viewers engaged in oral
sex, bondage and domination scenarios, extramarital sex, swapping, or other
practices, sexploitation film ads invited them to consider the possibility through
their images and copy. (More often than not, the films themselves showed the
negative implications of unhindered experimentation.) Among the situations
alluded to in ads were unusual sex practices: She sought the normal in sex but
found it in the abnormal! (Come Play with Me [1968]); age difference: Older
men driven into the arms of teenage temptresses! (Red Lips [1963]); bisexu-
ality: These girls played both sides of the fence! (The Girl with Hungry Eyes
[1967]); lesbianism: They did it because they had to (Donna & Lisa [1969]);
promiscuity: A casual pick-up shows her the way to escape from the boredom
of sexual frigidity! (Oona [1970]); and wife swapping: Filmed in a swapping
center! (Love Thy Neighbor and His Wife [1970]). Other films suggested that to
experience them was to engage in a both a sexual and cinematic experiment.
You (1968), shot with a subjective camera and supposedly in Feel-A-Vision,
claimed the star of the picture is YOU! YOU will feel every sensuous sensa-

Fram ing the Sexpl oitation Audience 31

tion! YOU will live through every shattering climax! YOU will perform every
depraved act in the picture! YOU will participate in every unspeakable perfor-
mance!
While the titles of some sexploitation films were similar to their main-
stream counterparts, or fairly innocuous, others appeared to serve as descrip-
tions of their imagined audience: The Animal, The Abductors, The Brutes, The
Curious Female, The Debauchers, The Defilers, For Single Swingers Only, The
Immoral, Lusty Neighbors, The Marriage Drop-Outs, The Molesters, Moonlight-
ing Wives, Scum of the Earth, and The Smut Peddler, to name just a few. Other
titles seemed to describe the attitudes or behaviors of their viewers: Anything
Once, Caught in the ActNaked, Do Me! Do Me! Do Me!, Excited, Forbidden
Pleasure, I Crave Your Body, Lets Play Doctor, Many Ways to Sin, Orgy at Lils
Place, Odd Tastes, Sensual Encounters, The Swappers, Shes . . . 17 and Anxious,
Some Like It Violent, and Too Young, Too Immoral! Although The Molesters, a
1963 Swiss film, played dates in Atlanta, Buffalo, and Columbus, the release
ran into trouble in both Pittsburgh, where local newspapers censored the ad-
vertising, and Cleveland, where the Plain Dealer editorialized about the films
sick producer and local booker.22 The movie itself was a series of fairly sober
courtroom sketches dealing with various psychosexual problems. But the ad-
vertising caused an uproar. The Plain Dealer rejected the ads, and in their edi-
torial suggested no normal person could find either entertainment or helpful
information in The Molesters. The implication, clearly, was that only deviates
would see the film.
In defending their product, producers may have inadvertently reinforced the
stereotype of the sexploitation customer as a deviate or social outcast. David F.
Friedman, who operated theaters in addition to producing and distributing
movies, often characterized the sexploitation regular as a rather sad, lonely,
man:

You are pandering to the most horrible of all human emotions, loneliness.
The average guy, why does a guy buy a dirty book, why does a guy buy a girlie
magazine? A guy buys a dirty book primarily to take home or wherever he
is and masturbate while he reads it, because it creates a fantasy. If you were
a lonely guy, lets say you were on the road, youre in a strange town, not one
guy out of a thousand knows how to get a date unless hes paying for it, and

32Eric Sc ha efer
Figures 5 & 6 Titles like
Scum of the Earth and The
Molesters did much to confuse
the psychopathic subjects on
the screen with patrons in the
theater.
 even when hes paying for it, hes too embarrassed to ask. So he goes to a
Nudie theater and he fantasizes.23

Indeed, until the late 1960s most sexploitation films played in decaying urban
theaters, while the earliest sexploitation films, with their copious amounts of
female nudity and Playboy aesthetic, drew heavily on the single male patron.
Friedman clearly believed that he and his cohorts were providing a service
to lonely men. Whether those individuals considered themselves lonely or not
is open to question. Observation on the part of theater managers and research-
ers indicated that people who went to see sexploitation films were average in
almost every respect. For instance, two owners of a Charlotte, North Carolina,
adults-only theater characterized their audience as mostly businessmen, white-
collar types, and sometimes a preacher. One of the owners, Charles Hodges,
said that most of his customers were middle-aged men killing time between
business appointments. Hodges told Variety that the general consensus is that
you get degenerates, winos, bums . . . its really quite the contrary.24 The rela-
tively normal nature of the sexploitation audience was confirmed by studies
performed by the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography and published
in 1971.25
But with advertising appeals based on excitement, adventure, curiosity, and
experimentation, the profile of the sexploitation consumer was constructed as
someone who was abnormallike those people who sought out The Molesters.
Such individuals were insatiably curious, voyeuristic, and sexually adventurous.
This profile linked the sexploitation consumers to other urban-centered anxi-
eties at the time. The profile of the sexploitation filmgoer embodied many of the
features of urbanismlow community social bonding, anonymity, tolerance,
alienation, and deviance.26 Put another way, those living in a state of urbanism
were, among other things, anonymous, isolated, secular, [and] relativistic.27
Crime was on the rise, and over half the women polled, compared to 20 per-
cent of the men, asserted in a 1972 survey that they were afraid to walk in their
neighborhoods at night.28 Although lacking a sound basis in fact, the advertis-
ing for sexploitation movies, and later X-rated films of both the soft-core and
hard-core varieties, contributed to the perception that the movies catered to
lonely, sexually frustrated perverts. Such a construction made it a fairly easy
proposition for opponents to attack the films that seemed to prey on desires

3 4 Eric Sc ha efer
that were constructed as deviant. For many, there appeared to be a causal link
between the appearance of adult films and theaters and the collapse of neigh-
borhoods into cesspools of prostitution, crime, and decay.29 Opposition to the
films and their patrons also came from the MPAA, concerned that the films
were taking screens away from the major distributors, as well as from religious
groups and other anti-smut factions. Some newspapers took it upon themselves
to begin a cleanup.

C leanups and C rackdowns

Whether it was through their advertising appeals or because patrons were more
willing to resist potentially negative social pressures, by the later part of the
1960s a segment of sexploitation film output was achieving a broader audience,
and in particular the coveted couple or date market.30 Breakout films such as
I, a Woman (1966) and Vixen (1968) paved the way for other movies to mine
this lucrative niche. For instance, the pressbook for Bunny & Clod (1970), a
less-than-subtle stab at sexing up the 1967 Warren Beatty/Faye Dunaway hit,
encouraged exhibitors by claiming, Bunny & Clod is a film that has great ap-
peal to ladies and should be sold with couples in mind. Think couplesthey
are the key to the future of our business. Ads for Together (1971), featuring
Marilyn Chambers before she went Behind the Green Door (1972), breathed a
sigh of relief: Finally, an X rated movie your wife or girlfriend can enjoy! Such
films tended to eschew leering copy and suggestive photographs for humor,
topicality, or sensuality. What was clear was that dirty movies were reaching
a larger audience and moving onto screens that they did not have access to in
the past. As sexploitation films succeeded in reaching a bigger, more diverse
audience, however, they also faced increasing opposition.
Newspapers had already started to take an increasingly dim view of ads for
adult movies. In 1964 Variety claimed, In hundreds of small towns around the
United States the voice and muscle of unofficial censorship is the local news-
paper advertising manager. He stands as a barrier to the sexy hot imported
features and Hollywood underworld bare skin epics. He is the final and highest
authority on whether a film can be advertised. The article described the power
wielded by ad managers to refuse ads, though he seldom, if ever, sees the films
questioned and invariably bases his judgement on the leer in the proposed

Fram ing the Sexpl oitation Audience 35

 Figures 7a & 7b The
press book for Bunny and
Clod (1970) included advice
to exhibitors emphasizing
the importance of couples
to the future of the business.

copy, a certain amount of hearsay about the film, and the example of nearby big
city police censors.31 In one such small-town case, the Michigan State Court of
Appeals affirmed the right of the Battle Creek Enquirer and News to bar ads on
adult films in 1966.32
But such cases were not limited to smaller cities and towns. In 1965 the Hearst
newspapers in San Francisco established guidelines for amusement ads because
of what it called the excesses of a few. Among the taboo topics were bust
measurements, couples in bed, double-entendres, nude figures or silhouettes,
perversion, and references to nymphomania. Variety detailed that frowned on
words include cuties, flesh-a-scope, girlie, homosexual, immorality, lesbian,
lust, naked, nothing on, nudies, nudist camp, nymphs, pervert, professional
girls, prostitute, rape, scanty panties, seduce, skin-a-scope, sex . . . sex ritu-
als, sexpot, sexsational, strippers, and third sex.33 A 1968 survey of forty-four
newspaper advertising directors representing sixty-eight metropolitan papers

36E ric Sc haefer

found that most were concerned that in far too many instances motion picture
advertising [was] becoming progressively more distasteful, according to the
surveys author, Raymond Wild. Most felt that they had a moral obligation to
their readers to censor objectionable movie ads.34
A clear example of such censorship at work appeared in a May 1969 issue
of Time magazine. The article noted that the New York Times recently ran a
movie ad for The Libertine [1969] showing the back of a girl, bare except for
panties. The Daily News ran the same ad for one editionbut then sloppily
sketched in a bra strap. Apparently, even the notion that the girl might be bare-
chested was too much for the News censor.35 Other newspapers were taking a
page from their small-town counterparts by completely refusing to run ads for
X-rated and unrated films, and in some instances even refusing ads for R-rated
movies.
On August 1, 1969, James S. Copley, the publisher of the San Diego Union
and Evening Tribune, announced that his two newspapers would no longer
promote X-rated or unrated movies and would not accept advertising from
theaters showing such films. If Copleys action wasnt the first of its kind on
the part of a big city newspaper, it was the first to attract serious notice in the
trades, and some not-so-serious commentary as well. The San Diego Door, an
alternative weekly, editorialized against Copleys moral judgements made
on behalf of San Diegans by poking fun at his policy. Incidentally, the Door
has a movie ad censorship policy too, which most people in San Diego are
unaware of. We will not accept ads from any movie theater that shows the
cervix of the uterus or the male prostate glands. We feel this is going too
far.36 But irony was an insufficient weapon against publishers worried about
their images and their readers sensibilities. In short order the Detroit Free
Press jumped on the antismut bandwagon,37 and by the close of 1969 the In-
dependent Film Journal calculated that twenty-seven newspapers across the
country had banned ads for X- and R-rated films. In addition to small city
papers, larger city dailies included the two San Diego papers, the Phoenix
Gazette and Phoenix Republic, the Indianapolis Star & News, and the Dallas
Times Herald.38
Within several months, producers were feeling the pinch. Dan Cady, who
operated Clover Films, claimed,

Fram ing the Sexpl oitation Audience 37

 Every theater has problems of one sort or another. To deny any paid ad-
vertisement is to deny your own company revenue. They should have the
discretion or the power to say youre not going to print any obscene words
whatever an obscene word isand youre not going to have phallic symbols
throughout the paper, but I dont think they should discriminate by arbi-
trarily ruling that the adult motion picture houses cannot be represented as
they are in San Diego and Arizona and Chicago and Detroit and Florida.39

Just as producers and distributors had to contend with wildly differing com-
munity standards for what could be put on screen based on the Roth test, they
increasingly had to contend with differences in what constituted acceptable
adssometimes within the same city.
In 1970 San Franciscos two major dailies, the Examiner and the Chronicle,
which shared advertising revenues and printing costs, engaged in a war of
words when the Examiner decided to drop ads for all sex films. The Examiner
lamented the citys reputation as the smut capital of the world and said, We
should have thrown this ugliness out of our advertising columns long ago. The
Chronicle responded that the ban would debase the coinage of the American
free press.40 Other dailies picked up on the debate, such as the Denver Post,
which detailed the Bay Area controversy while explaining to readers that the
Post kept its house in order by insisting that the advertising content itself not
be offensive to good taste. The article went on to suggest that a refusal to run
X ads would encourage the film industry to give up any attempt at the self-
discipline of ratings because those ratings would have been turned into eco-
nomic weapons against it.41
Even if the ratings system was itself not threatened by the newspaper ban
on X-rated ads, the ban could not have come at a worse time for sexploitation
theaters and the adult film industry as a whole. Such a ban in the early or mid-
1960s, when sexploitation films catered to a largely male audience of regulars,
would have had little effect. Regulars could rely on posters and trailers to keep
themselves abreast of upcoming movies. As both sexploitation and hard-core
films, which began to appear in 1969 and 1970, began appealing to a more di-
verse audience, curious couples and women who sought to have their interest
satisfied would have relied on newspaper ads to find out what films were play-
ing, where, and when. While there is no documentation immediately available

3 8 Eric Sc haefer
to back up the contention, we can theorize that theaters unable to advertise
X-rated or unrated films would have been forced to turn to mainstream prod-
uctsand increased competition in buying and bookingin order to remain
afloat. On Long Island, the Bethview Amusement Corporation, parent company
of the Bethview Theater, resorted to filing a lawsuit in Nassau County against
two local newspapers, Newsday and the Long Island Press, and the Bethpage
Civic Association, charging that they had engaged in a conspiracy to destroy
the business. According to the defendants, the Bethview, which had a sexploi-
tation policy, was the subject of coercive tactics on the part of the civic group
and the newspapers, which refused to run ads for the sexploitation product the
theater booked.42
The Des Moines Register editorialized, If newspapers attempt to close the-
aters by stopping advertising, they are assuming the function of the legislators
and the courts in determining what is obscene and deciding what the public
may see. Yet some individuals were very explicit about their desire to dry up
patronage for [X-rated] movies and to stop their production and exhibition.43
Efforts to undercut adult films by restricting their advertising increased on sev-
eral fronts. For instance, in South Dakota a bill was introduced in the state
senate to prohibit ads for X-rated movies in any general advertising medium
in the state. Bills in New Mexico and Massachusetts would have forbid show-
ing trailers for X-rated films with family or G-rated pictures.44 The Oklahoma
Publishing Company, which owned newspapers and radio stations, not only
refused to run ads for X-rated films, but also refused to carry ads for R-rated
movies unless the movies were first screened and met with the approval of the
publishers. A Columbia executive rhetorically asked whether the publishers
sampled every restaurant or used every suppository they advertise?45 Some
papers refused to use the word sex in titles, substituting love or other words, or
substituting the ex with stars in a misguided effort to make the word less lurid.46
Newspapers in Portland, Oregon, and Boston joined the X ban.
Sexploitation theaters were also under pressure from municipalities and
neighborhood groups when they used posters, stills, and lurid come-ons to
draw patrons in off the streets. Kevin Thomas reported on a meeting of the
Adult Film Association of America (AFAA) in 1971 for the Los Angeles Times.
Among the concerns addressed at the meeting were continuing censorship and

Framing the Sexpl oitation Au dience 39

the increasing move to hard core, but Thomas stated that the one issue that
concerns many citizens that was not explored at length was that of lurid adver-
tising, especially outside theaters and store fronts. Thomas claimed that many
adults who might defend the right of individuals to see porn films resent taste-
less, graphic stills and posters on public displayespecially when theyre so
easily seen by children. He advised that the AFAA would be wise to consider
that there may be countless people who would defend their right to show any-
thing they want inside their theaters as long as they dont thrust it on an unwill-
ing audience outside them.47
The MPAA made noise periodically about the ban on X-rated advertising,
especially when it threatened to creep into the R and GP (later PG) categories.
For the most part, however, its films had remained untouched. But in 1972 both
the MPAA and Warner Bros. were forced to reckon with the ban directly when
Stanley Kubricks A Clockwork Orange was rated X by the MPAA. Publishers of
the Detroit News finally followed the lead of the Free Press and banned X adver-
tising, which drew MPAA president Jack Valenti to the Motor City for a meet-
ing with the papers publishers. During a news conference following a cordial
conversation with representatives of the Detroit News, Valenti stated that the
X rating does not connote pornography. He then went on to urge the news-
papers that refused ads for X films to distinguish between quality pictures that
may be rated X and the so-called skinflicks that fall into the X category.48 In
typical fashion, the MPAA could not advance an unequivocal argument against
censorship. To do so would have given a potentially strategic advantage to a seg-
ment of the motion picture industry not affiliated with the MPAA and at times
seen as robbing member companies of time on now increasingly prime urban
screens.
Sam Chernoff, owner of adult theaters in Detroit, wrote a letter to the Detroit
News in which he claimed,

With the exception of a small group of storefront 16mm theaters that pos-
sibly show films without story line or short subjects depicting acts of sexu-
ality that may go beyond the limits of candor, none of the standard 35mm
adult theaters in Detroit ever shows pornography or hardcore films. All
adult-oriented films shown in this type of theater, projected by union pro-
jectionists and staffed by hard working people trying to make a living, are

40Eric Sc haefer
 within the limits set by the U.S. Supreme Court and have a lot of social [sic]
redeeming value.

Like Valenti, who spoke for mainstream pictures, Chernoff made distinc-
tions as well, differentiating between the hard-core character of 16mm films
and the soft-core nature of sexploitation films. When asked, he pointed to the
difficulty in categorizing films: How can the brass of The News make an overall
statement that points out that Detroit adult theaters show hardcore and porno-
graphic films? Even the highest court in the country cant determine what con-
stitutes pornography, so how can you?49
The Los Angeles Times eventually segregated adult movie ads into their own
section in the newspaper, and in 1977 Otis Chandler, publisher of the Times,
sent a memo to the papers staff announcing that ads for all hard-core films
would be banned. Given our long and deep commitment to free expression,
the decision to drop this advertising was reached reluctantly and after long and
careful deliberation, wrote Chandler: The truth is, we have been dealing with
an indefensible product, one with absolutely no redeeming values, and this
phenomenon shows no sign of leaving the contemporary social scene. Cutting
through the arguments on all sides, we think it is entirely out of character for
The Times, with its long history of vigorous citizenship in this community, to
continue to play a role in the promotion of commercialized pornography. Thus,
effective today, we have banned advertising which appeared formerly under the
Adult Movie heading.50 The Times replaced the adult movie heading with a
Family Film Guide. Also in 1977 the New York Times implemented a policy to
severely restrict the size and content of adult film ads.51 Both the Los Angeles
and New York papers assumed the role of determining what constituted re-
deeming social value or importance.
As much as any other factor, the ban on X advertising served to turn back
the clock for the adult film business. Producers either worked to cut their films
to a solid R-rating or pushed headlong into the increasingly ghettoized produc-
tion of hard core. Friedman has said,

When the LA Times stopped the advertising cold that was the beginning of
the end for the [California-based] Pussycat and other [adult movie] circuits.
That one paper had more than anything else to do with it. In New York it

Fram ing the Sexpl oitation Audience 4 1

 didnt make that much difference. In New York the trade came from people
just walking by, bums stumbling into the theaters. But in LA no one walks,
everybody drives. The [la] Times had circulation of a million, the [Herald-
Examiner] paper only 200,000. Without the ads in the Times it really began
to hurt things.52

He notes that even when the Pussycat Theaters attempted to place an ad in the
Los Angeles Times that claimed that the chain served the freshest popcorn in
town and simply listed locationswith no mention of any film titlesthe ads
were refused.53 The Los Angeles Times, which depended on the First Amend-
ment to remain a viable institution, refused to accept advertising for another
business touting fresh popcorn. The Pussycat Theaters were forced to advertise
in the Herald-Examiner, local papers, throwaways, and to even experiment
with advertising on independent television stations.54
Although other factors were among the determinants in the decline of sex-
ploitation and the theatrical exhibition of adult films (among them the disap-
pearance of the drive-ins and the rise of video), newspaper bans on adult film
advertising in key markets served to substantially disable the economic viability
of the form. Yet it was the adult film distributors themselves who sowed the
seeds for the advertising ban early on. By employing appeals that focused on
sexual excitement, adventure, curiosity, and experimentation, they had shaped
a negative profile of the sexploitation customer. Despite evidence to the con-
trary, the sexploitation audience was framed as dangerous and deviant, and
their presence in the urban landscape was considered a factor in the decline
of those areas. This led to calls for cleanups and urban renewal that ultimately
shuttered the grindhouses that had given sexploitation films their earliest
venues, established their profitability, and led to the proliferation of the form.

Notes

1. John Hallowell, Making Movies for the Goon TradeSex! Money! Monotony! New
York World Journal Tribune, January 8, 1967.
2. An Advertising Code for Motion Pictures, in The 1961 Film Daily Yearbook for Motion
Pictures (New York: Film Daily, 1961), 917.
3. Motion pictures had essentially been without First Amendment protection since the
Mutual v. Ohio decision of 1915. In Burstyn v. Wilson the Court affirmed that motion
pictures are a significant medium for the communication of ideas and thus protected

4 2E ric S chaefer
 by the constitutional freedom of speech and press. See Edward de Grazia and Roger K.
Newman, Banned Films: Movies, Censors and the First Amendment (New York: R. R.
Bowker, 1982), 81.
4. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: David McKay Company, 1957), 84
85.
5. For a full explanation of the parameters of classical exploitation films, see my book
Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Classical Exploitation Films, 19191959
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999).
6. The concept of social importance was reaffirmed in the Supreme Courts decision in
the Jacobellis v. Ohio case of 1964. In that decision, Justice William J. Brennan wrote
that material dealing with sex in a manner that advocates ideas, or has literary or sci-
entific or artistic value or any other form of social importance, may not be branded as
obscenity and banned. See de Grazia and Newman, Banned Films, 26465.
7. See de Grazia and Newman, Banned Films, 9596.
8. David Moller, Nuderama, Vision 1, no. 2 (1962): 19.
9. Charles Stinson, Immoral Mr. Teas Ends Era in Movies, Los Angeles Times, January
26, 1960.
10. Vulgar, Pointless, in Bad Taste but Mr. Teas Not Pornography, Variety, November 2,
1960, 7.
11. David F. Friedman, telephone interview with the author, February 26, 2003.
12. Boxoffice Internationals Joe Steinman, The Late Show, undated 1974 clipping, Box-
office International File, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library.
13. Friedman interview, February 26, 2003.
14. Entertainment Ventures, Inc., 19691970 Annual Report, 5 (Los Angeles: Entertainment
Ventures, Inc., 1970); Friedman interview, February 26, 2003.
15. Richard S. Randall, Censorship of the Movies: The Social and Political Control of a Mass
Medium (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 60.
16. Friedman interview, February 26, 2003.
17. It is worth noting that the pressbooks for sexploitation films, which were sent to the-
ater managers and buyers, were often far more explicit than the films themselves in the
days before hard core. A motion picture that might feature only a flash of pubic hair
could appear to be a beaver spread when frozen as a series of stills in a pressbook.
The degree of explicitness and the attractiveness of the performers, coupled with the
elaborateness of the pressbook (color, size, layout), no doubt had an influence on the
willingness of a buyer to book a film.
18. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard
Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 6.
19. Jib Fowles, Advertising and Popular Culture (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications,
1996), 4748.

Framing the Sexpl oitation Au dience 4 3

 20. Ibid. See also Fowless Advertisings Fifteen Basic Appeals, in American Mass Media:
Industries and Issues, ed. Robert Atwan, Barry Orton, and William Vesterman, 3rd ed.
(New York: Random House, 1984), 4354. In the latter article Fowles discusses Murrays
List, a list of general advertisings appeals based on the work of psychologist Henry A.
Murray.
21. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing
Expectations (New York: Norton, 1991), 72.
22. Peek at Trailer Brings Roar from Cleveland Editorialist; Never Seen, Molesters
Yanked, Variety, June 3, 1964, 11.
23. Quoted in Kenneth Turan and Stephen F. Zito, Sinema: American Pornographic Films
and the People Who Make Them (New York: Praeger, 1974), 45.
24. Bums Few in N.C. Sex Audiences, Variety, December 10, 1969, 9.
25. See Charles Winick, Some Observations on Characteristics of Patrons of Adult The-
aters and Bookstores, Technical Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornogra-
phy, vol. 4 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), 22544.
26. On urbanism, see, for example, Charles R. Tittle and Mark C. Stafford, Urban Theory,
Urbanism, and Suburban Residence, Social Forces 70 (1992): 72544.
27. See Herbert J. Gans, Urbanism and Suburbanism as Ways of Life: A Re-evaluation of
Definitions, in Human Behavior and Social Processes: An Interactionist Approach, ed.
Arnold M. Rose (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962), 626.
28. Quoted in Margaret T. Gordon, Stephanie Riger, Robert K. LeBailly, and Linda Heath,
Crime, Women, and the Quality of Urban Life, in Women and the American City, ed.
Catherine R. Stimpson, Elsa Dixler, Martha J. Nelson, and Kathryn B. Yatrakis (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 141.
29. For a full elaboration on the ways these arguments were mobilized, see Eric Schaefer
and Eithne Johnson, Quarantined! A Case Study of Bostons Combat Zone, in Hop on
Pop: The Politics and Pleasure of Popular Culture, ed. Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson,
and Jane Shattuc (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 43053. While I am
trying to indicate that perceptions of the adult movie audience as a whole were clearly
skewed to the negative, this should not be construed as suggesting that all patrons of
adult movies, or all theaters, were squeaky-clean. Some theaters, especially in big cities
and particularly after the advent of hard-core, had reputations as cruising spots where
men engaged in quick, anonymous sexual encounters. See, for instance, Samuel R.
Delanys memoir about cruising Times Square theaters in the 1970s and 1980s, Times
Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999).
30. Deep Throat (1972) is often considered to be the first adult film to crack the couples
market. But like so many of the tales surrounding that film, this is simply incorrect. For
more on the sexploitation films and preDeep Throat hard-core movies that succeeded
with the couples market, see Eric Schaefer, Gauging a Revolution: 16mm Film and the

4 4Eric S chaefer
 Rise of the Pornographic Feature, Cinema Journal 41, no. 3 (2002): 6. The article also
appears in a slightly altered form in Porn Studies, ed. Linda Williams (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 2004).
31. Moral Arbiters of Stixville, Variety, March 4, 1964, 1, 78.
32. Paper May Refuse Adult Film Ads, Variety, November 16, 1966, 1.
33. Throw Rocks at Sexpot Copy: Hears Joins War on Leer, Variety, February 24, 1965, 5.
34. Ronald Gold, Dailies Copy Censors Call Film Ads Pornographic to Refined in Tone,
Variety, April 3, 1968, 5.
35. Laundering the Sheets, Time, May 30, 1969, 54.
36. Copley: Morals Dictator, San Diego Door, August 14, 1969, 17. See also X Film Ads
Dropped, Independent Film Journal, August 5, 1969, 6.
37. Newspaper Ban on Smut Ads Names Theaters, Independent Film Journal, September
16, 1969, 8.
38. 27 Newspapers Ban X Ads, Independent Film Journal, December 23, 1969, 3.
39. An Eye for Quality: An Interview with Dan Cady, Exploiter, February 8, 1970, 13.
40. Quoted in N.Y. Arrest Moratorium; Papers Duel in Frisco, Independent Film Journal,
December 23, 1970, 7.
41. Quoted in Denver Post Explains Rationale for x Ads, Independent Film Journal, Feb-
ruary 4, 1971, 5.
42. Newspaper Bans on X Films Get Contagious, Independent Film Journal, December
9, 1969, 4.
43. Trade Hits Newspaper Ban on X-Rated Films, Independent Film Journal, April 13,
1972, 3, 10.
44. Legislators on Rampage with Plethora of Bills, Independent Film Journal, February 18,
1971, 3.
45. No X or R in Oklahoma Ads, Variety, March 21, 1973, 5, 28; see also Oklahoma Papers
KO R Rated Ads; PG Advertising OK Required, Independent Film Journal, March 5,
1973, 6.
46. N.Y. Obscenity Law Upheld by Appeals Court Decision, Independent Film Journal,
January 7, 1974, 5; Charles Teitel, No E-X in Sex Chi Press Rules Stay Chintzy, Variety,
January 8, 1975, 8.
47. Kevin Thomas, Current Censorship Status in Adult Film Market, Los Angeles Times
Calendar, February 7, 1971.
48. Trade Hits Newspaper Ban on X-Rated Films, Independent Film Journal, April 13,
1972, 3.
49. Sam Chernoff, Theater Owner Protests Ban on X-Films, letter to the editor, Detroit
News, April 15, 1972. Reprinted in AFAA Bulletin, June 1972, 2.
50. Los Angeles Times Management Bulletin, AFAA clipping file, Margaret Herrick
Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, California.

Fram ing the Sexpl oitation Au dience 45

 51. Anna Quindlen, The Times Will Curb Ads for Pornographic Films, New York Times,
June 21, 1977, 66.
52. Friedman interview, February 26, 2003.
53. David F. Friedman, telephone interview with the author, January 17, 2003.
54. Take Hardcore Ads into Homes via TV, Variety, January 11, 1978, 1, 82.

46 Eric Sc haefer
Ta n i a M o d l e s k i

Womens C inema as Counterphobic C inema

Doris Wishman as the Last Auteur

W hen Lorena Bobbitt was on trial for castrating her hus-

band, who she said had repeatedly abused her, there was
one aspect of her story that the media, who were generally on
her side, found particularly troubling: Bobbitts resentment
even as a battered wife over the fact that she was not deriving
sexual pleasure from her husband. Obviously, the media, like a
large majority of Americans, were unable to sustain an image of
Lorena Bobbitt as a victim without explaining away the remarks
she made to friends about her sexual dissatisfaction. Typically,
the media would cite her lack of familiarity with the language:
that is, she did not speak English well enough to express what
she really meant, and what she meant was that she was purely
and simply a battered woman.
Could it not be argued that at least part of Lorena Bobbitts
abuse consisted of being denied the sexual pleasure that her
husband repeatedly experienced in relation to her body? Femi-
nists like Carol Clover have celebrated the scenario encountered
repeatedly in rape revenge films in which women castrate their
violators.1 What about a scenario in which a woman is cheered
on as she seeks revenge both for being battered and for being
sexually unsatisfied? However much I might have reservations
about recommending that women in reality adopt Bobbitts
solution to a complicated but surely not uncommon and only very superficially
contradictory social problem, Id sure like to see the movie.
For feminism, it seems to me, has every reason to affirm women who make
female eroticism an issue, even, or perhaps especially, under circumstances
where that eroticism is violently suppressed. In the early 1980s, this was some-
thing that was vociferously expressed by a number of feminists who partici-
pated in the so-called sex wars. For example, the pioneering lesbian writer Joan
Nestle wrote of her mothers sexual adventurism: Oh my mama, the things
you liked to do / fuck and suck cock / one customer knocked your teeth out . . .
you lay in a pool of blood and teeth until the police broke the door down. . . .
No wonder you are a Lesbian they will say. No the wonder is my mother who
taught me when to go on my knees / and when not /who kept alive her right to
sexuality when sex was killing her.2
One of the questions I wish to ask here is whether in analyzing the films of
women working in especially violent male genres we can locate moments that
both protest sexual violence and keep alive womans right to sexuality when
sex is killing her. This question bridges the two sides of the sex wars debatethe
side taken by the radical feminists, who emphasized womens victimization in
patriarchy and claim that womens sexuality is alienated or stolen from them,
and the self-proclaimed sex positive feminists who affirmed womens sexu-
ality no matter what form it takes or how violently it seems to be expropri-
ated. I cannot emphasize enough the fact that this debate was inaugurated over
twenty years ago by second-wave feminists. Revisionary feminists like Katie
Rophie would have the mainstream public believe that it is only a third wave of
feminists who insist on the importance of women seeking pleasure rather than
always and only condemning female victimization.
In looking at the work of Doris Wishman, the granddame of the grind-
house cinema circuit, as one catalogue blurb calls her, a woman who in many
respects is surely the radical feminists worst nightmare, I would like to keep
in the foreground the sex wars debates and their aftermath. Is the oeuvre of
Wishman, as her very name suggests, the result of a straightforward case of
penis envy in a woman who capitulated to the conventions of male pornog-
raphy and sexploitation at its sleaziest? Or is it possible that a woman living
in a prefeminist time and trafficking in genres that routinely dealt in violence

4 8Tania Modleski
against women may be said to have kept alive the right of women to sexuality
even when it was killing them?
There can be no question of entirely rehabilitating someone working in a
genre that as a rule was far more misogynist and brutally violent in its treat-
ment of women than even the standard hard-core pornographic films that were
destined to supersede the sexploitation films made by Wishman and others.
Indeed, it is no doubt symptomatic that in her relatively upbeat book on por-
nography, Linda Williams omits from her history of the genre all references
to sexploitation except for a brief mention of the most benign and relatively
short-lived subgenre of nudie cuties.3 These flourished for a brief time in the
early 1960s and represented a step beyond 1950s nudist camp films, which had
become legal as a result of a Supreme Court ruling that exempted films set in
nudist camps from the general ban on filmed nudity, holding that such films
were allowable because they were educational! Wishman made a number of
nudist camp filmsfor example, Nude on the Moon (1962), a film about two
scientists who travel to the moon, which has a rather Floridian landscape, and
discover inhabitants who look very much like nude humans sporting antennae
that suspiciously resemble pipe cleaners. In cutting between the activities of
these aliens (nude volleyball) and the men studiously taking notes as they ob-
serve them (thereby demonstrating the educational value of what they see),
the film from this vantage point in time strikes the viewer as a humorous com-
mentary on the Courtsand by extension Americasnavet and hypocrisy
in matters of sexual representation.
After producers of sexploitation had gained some ground in the courts fight-
ing censorship battles over nudie cuties like Russ Meyers The Immoral Mr. Teas
(1959), a film about a man who has the power to see through womens clothes,
they decided that if they couldnt include as much sex as they would like they
would increase the sensationalist quotient by adding violence. Just as educa-
tion furnished an alibi for viewers of exploitation films, so too did violence in
late 1960s sexploitation films provide viewers with a fetishistic substitute for
sexuality, the sight of which was both desired andin terms of mainstream
moresfeared.
The films that supplanted the nudie cuties were usually called roughies or
kinkies (the latter supposedly dealing more with perversions than the former)

D oris Wishman as the L ast Au teur 4 9

 Figure 1 Poster art for
Wishmans Nude on the Moon
(1962), one of the directors early
nudist camp films.

and contain some of the most disturbing depictions of male violence against
women ever filmed. Indeed, what is most striking about many of these films is
the extent to which they shamelessly traffic in battery. For example, in The Defil-
ers (1965), produced by the king of sexploitation David Friedman, the two male
protagonists kidnap a young woman and imprison her in a rat-infested base-
ment where they retire periodically to molest her. The sexual abuse they visit on
her usually culminates in overwrought beating scenes, in which, for instance,
one of the men punches the woman with his fists until her face is a bloody mess.
At the very end, after the more evil protagonist assures the less evil one that they
are finally going to release their captive, the former loses control and beats her
with a belt until she is either unconscious or deadthe film seems not to care
which.
As a female viewer of such scenes, I find myself ardently desiring to see the
woman begin to experience her torture as sexually pleasurable so that it be-
comes more tolerable to her (in other words I am placed in the position of one

50Tania Modleski
 Figure 2 Released in 1965,
The Defilers epitomized a
growing traffic in battery in
the sexploitation roughie.

who embraces in all seriousness the male joke: if rape is an inevitability, relax
and enjoy it). One of the side effects of these films is, then, that they actively
instill in women spectatorsthose hardy enough to sit through them with their
eyes openthe desire for womens suffering to be sexualized. But let us make
no mistake about it; while a critic like Linda Williams can argue that pornogra-
phys stake is female pleasure, so that even scenes of rape must demonstrate to
their presumably male audience that women really want it, in many sexploi-
tation films it is at best a matter of indifference whether or not the woman finds
pleasure in her pain and at worst, a desideratum that she experience her pain as
simply painful.

Doris Wishmans filmmaking career closely followed the trajectory of sexploi-

tation films through the 1960s and early 1970s. As was the case in the work of
many filmmakers, even mainstream ones like Alfred Hitchcock, the level of

D oris Wishman as the L ast Au teur 5 1

violence, nastiness, and degradation in Wishmans films increased during the
late 1960sthough they never reached the heights of sadism seen in films like
Love Camp 7 (1969) or The Defilers. Sick cinema really came into its own in
1970, the year Hitchcocks Frenzy was released. Wishman directed two of the
most bizarre films ever made that year, earning herif she didnt already pos-
sess itan enduring place in the pantheon of directors of sleazy underground
movies. But I anticipate.
Beginning in the early 1960s with nudist camp films, which bore titles like
Nature Camp Confidential (1961), The Prince and the Nature Girl (1965), and
Blaze Star Goes Nudist (1960), Wishman moved on to directing roughies.
After Russ Meyer came out with Lorna (1964), widely considered to be the first
roughie and considered as well to have inaugurated the so-called noir period
of sexploitation, Wishman wrote and directed Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965), one
of her best-known films. Shot, like other such films at the time, in black and
white on an extremely low budget, the film depicts the trials and tribulations of
a woman named Meg. At the beginning of the film, it is a Sunday morning and
Meg attempts to seduce her husband into staying at home rather than going to
work. He rebuffs her, and she is left alone. Taking out the trash (in a skimpy out-
fit which she covers with another see-through outfit), she is raped by the jani-
tor of her apartment building, kills him in self-defense, and runs away to New
York City because she fears no one will believe her. There she meets a man who
befriends her and lets her stay in his apartment. Meg is at first suspicious of
him, but it soon becomes evident that he has no sexual interest in her. Indeed,
he exhibits a kind of coldness and controlled anger that seems puzzling. Won
over by his kindness, Meg at one point tries to initiate a romantic encounter,
but Al angrily pulls away. Later Meg puts out drinks for the two of them, but it
turns out that Al is an alcoholic, who proceeds to get very drunk and beat her
savagely with his belt, the camera looking on dispassionately the whole time.
Meg next finds herself in the apartment of a woman named Della. One night
Della comes to Megs bed, and Meg at first turns away, but then turns back to
embrace Della, again taking some sexual initiative. The next day Meg prepares
to quit the apartment and Della protests, saying, You know that I love you.
Meg replies, I love you, too; thats why I must go. Della gives her money to
help her on her way, and Meg finds a room to rent. At her new residence the

52Tania Modleski
husband of the landlady tries to rape her, knocks her out when she resists, and
finishes molesting her while she lies unconscious. At the end of the film Meg
wakes up and discovers that she has been dreaming, but the film goes on to
indicate that the dream has foretold the reality.
What are we to think of this film? The title seems unambivalent, and indeed
a reading that sticks purely with the narrative and sees the title as a guide to
interpretation could plausibly argue that the heroine is punished for acting on
her own sexual desire, although questions will linger. She tries to seduce her
husband and keep him from going to work. (Yes, but it is her husbandthis is
not Psycho, for Gods sake, and, whats more, it is a Sunday, as Meg observes.
Why is he going to work?) She seems to want to get beyond the friendship stage
with Al. (Yes, he has treated her rather decently; still, hes a nut case whom we
mistrust from the beginning.) She has lesbian sex. (Yes, but she immediately
departs, taking herself out of temptations way.)
A French critic maintains in an article written soon after the directors death,
that the film is an unconscious urban remake of Justine ou les Infortunes de la
Vertu.4 While its possible that for this critic the accent falls not on the virtue
of the character but rather on her seeming cluelessness, it is nevertheless highly
significant that he sees Meg as resembling Justine rather than her sister, the
bad girl Juliette. Indeed, it is apparent to me that the film in no way adopts
a judgmental attitude toward Meg. Often it adopts her point of view, in fact,
and our sympathies lie with her. It might even be argued that at times the film
brings together the two poles of feminist theorizing about female sexuality dis-
cussed earlier in that while Meg is constantly victimized by men, she does not
relinquish her sexual desire, even though in the end it kills her (to paraphrase
Nestle). However, let us make no mistake about it. The film in general plays to
the male gaze, as the camera lingers on various female body parts of the scantily
clad Meg and the soundtrack plays the cheery, chintzy Muzak that is a staple of
pornography to this day.
Yet even in this regard the situation is somewhat more complicated than
might at first appear. To understand this, we need to look more closely at Wish-
mans style of directing. Here is how one worshipful commentator describes it.

Doris Wishmans style is all her own. Only Jean-Luc Godard can match her
indifference to composition and framing; if two people are talking and one

D oris Wishman as the L ast Au teur 53

 Figure 3 Bad Girls Go
to Hell (1965): One of
Wishmans best-known
films and a prime text in
discussions of Wishmans
visual style.

is partially obscured by a post, so be itthe camera will not change its angle.
Sometimes we are treated to static shots of feetor torsos or handswhile
voices talk off-screen. At other times, Ms. Wishman will trade off shots in
such a way that we never see the person whos talkinginstead we watch the
listener, his head nodding thoughtfully to words from a speaker we cant see.
Often her camera imitates a human eye roving restlessly around the room,
occasionally allowing insignificant objects to hold its attention. For example,
the camera might follow a person to a dresser then stop to dwell on the vari-
ous items (objects completely irrelevant to the plot) it finds there.5

It needs to be noted, however, that this style was dictated in part by economic
exigencies: Because the films were so low-budget, they were shot without sound,
which was dubbed in later. Silent footage has to be edited to keep the number
of times you post sync with lip movement at a minimum, remarks one com-
mentator, who succinctly adds, It forced a style on her.6 It is tempting for a
feminist critic like me to claim that the style that was forced on her performs a

54Tania Modleski
deconstruction of the authority of the speaking subject: in no other films I have
seen does the camera spend more time looking at people who are listening than
at those who are doing the talking.
Economic imperatives, censorship codes, and, it would appear, personal
predilection combined in Wishmans films to expand on the fetishistic possi-
bilities of cinema. Thus, especially in Wishmans early films, when people make
love the camera will discreetly focus on their intertwined legs; when women are
undressing the camera will linger on a shot of the discarded underwear. But the
fact that even when its not required by the exigencies of dubbing, the camera
seems so interested both in random objects and in bodily fragments (the legs
and feet of people walking in a park or on a city street, for instance) that in gen-
eral the womans body comes to be less isolated as a site of fragmentation than
it usually is within male-dominated cinema. At the very least, the films seem
to suggest that there are more things of interest to look at in the world than
womens butts. Perhaps its possible to go further. Insofar as objects like lamps
or clocks or items on a dresser frequently substitute for fetishistic items (e.g., a
lamp instead of the underwear which stands in the stead of female genitalia),
eroticism is diffused across the text.
While Wishmans plots are often (and with considerable justification)
faulted for containing episodes that have implausible (or nonexistent) narra-
tive or psychological motivation, some of the implausibility bespeaks the sexual
confusion experienced by women throughout the greater part of the decade,
a confusion that has not been entirely dispelled for many to this day. What is
a bad girl? Is a victim of sexual assault responsible for that assault? One male
commentator, betraying immense but not uncommon navet about the way
rape victims have been treated and blamed for their assaults, finds the heroines
running away after she has been raped in her apartment to be one of the most
baffling aspects of Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965).7 A feminist viewer of Bad Girls
might indeed find another aspect of the movie to be more mysterious: why does
lesbianism automatically disqualify itself in a world riddled with male violence,
where men ruthlessly prey on women, while many womenlike Dellaare
kind to other women, love them, and are loved in return?
A film Wishman made somewhat later in the decade, The Amazing Trans-
plant (1970), continues to traffic in sexual violence, although if possible in an

D oris Wishman as the L ast Au teur 55

even queasier way. Shot in color and displaying Wishmans usual tacky, next-
to-no budget mise-en-scne, the film deals with a man named Arthur who
goes around sexually assaulting women, knocking them out, or even killing
them when they resist. His uncle, a police detective, investigates the crimes
and interrogates the various women with whom the young man has had con-
tact. Although in this respect the film seems to be classically structured around
the male point of view, a series of flashbacks accompanies the womens narra-
tion of their encounters with Arthur, thus putting the emphasis much more on
womens reactions to sexual violence than is usually the case in the genre. For
the most part, the women are devastated by their experience. For example, after
relating her story of rape (during which she is knocked out and molested while
unconscious), one of the women dissolves into tears, saying she didnt go to
the police because she didnt want the publicity. Besides, she asks, what good
would it have done? She apologizes for being so upset (!), and after the detec-
tive leaves, the camera lingers while the woman buries her face in her hands
and sobs. During the rape of another woman, the woman struggles, is hit, and
vomits as the rape is taking place; after Arthur departs, the camera focuses on
her splotchy buttocks as she leans over the toilet to vomit some more.
We might say theres something for everyone herefor any male spectator
who might enjoy witnessing the brutalization of women; for the feminist, or
more precisely, perhaps, the radical feminist who clearly sees confirmation
of womens victimization within male-dominated culture and systems of rep-
resentation. Yet in the middle of the film occurs an episode that is bound to
unsettle the radical feminist reading: one of the women who told the detec-
tive when he initially questioned her that she had not seen Arthur for a long
time calls to retract her statement and to admit that she and Arthur had been
together recently. In the flashback the woman and Arthur chat for a bit and then
we see him suddenly push her down on the bed. She resists at first and then,
when Arthur says, Please dont fight me, she relaxes and clearly enjoys the
experience. On the one hand, this episode might seem to undermine any pos-
sible message about the unacceptability to women of rape. On the other hand,
the woman finishes her story by confessing that she had long been attracted to
Arthurthus suggesting that the definition of rape in a given situation might
have something to do with womens desire (or lack of it).
Interestingly, The Amazing Transplant involves a rather literal case of male

56Tania Modleski
 Figure 4 Wishmans The
Amazing Transplant (1970), a
confused foray into both the
politics of rape and the politics
of the phallus.

penis envy, since Arthurs problem, it turns out, is caused by a penis he has
had transplanted from his dead friend Felix, whose sexual prowess Arthur had
long admired (there is no doubt that Wishman had a genius for thinking up
gimmicks). Confusing, as it were, his friends penis with the phallus, Arthur
has the operation only to find that he is in less control than before. Arthur
has to learn the sad Lacanian lesson (so often disavowed in pornography) that
nobody really does possess the phallus: as his uncle, the detective, discovers,
Arthur is driven to assault women when he sees them wearing certain kinds of
earringsjust as Felix, we learn, used to get very excited by the sight of such
jewelry.
In the final image of the film, after Arthur has been apprehended, we see
a close-up of a newspaper bearing the headline, JURY FINDS ARTHUR
BAILEN . . . . But the final word is obscured by an ashtray resting on the paper.
In frustrating the desire for closure, the film leaves various questions in the
air about the nature of sexuality and of guilt and innocence with respect to
sexual violence that would only be fully articulated by feminists in the next de-

D oris Wishma n as the L ast Au teur 5 7

cade. Some of these questions have to do with the nature of male sexuality, such
as: Do men really think with their dicksor indeed (as theorists of mimetic
desire would have it) with someone elses?
Of all the many and usually nasty little films Wishman turned out in the
1960s, at least one other distinguishes itself in my viewIndecent Desires
(1967), which is about a pathetic and reclusive young man who collects junk
and one day finds a doll he brings home. Some time later he encounters a young
blonde woman, Ann, and the camera shows a superimposition of the blonde
doll onto the body of the woman. When the man returns home, he strokes the
doll all over its body, and Ann back at her apartment feels the fondling on her
own body, her hands tracing the movements of the unseen hands. It is as if she
were subject to some sort of voodoo version of Foucauldian theory in which
female autoeroticismthe staple of soft-core pornographyis inscribed onto
the body from forces operating outside of it. In this film, then, the possibility
of female sexual desire, as regards the heroine, seems entirely foreclosed, and
when the woman dies after becoming increasingly panic-stricken, desperate
and agoraphobic, she performs a striking mime of being strangled, her head
twisting about like a puppets on a string as the man wrenches the dolls head
from its socket. The camera itself twists around and around as it moves in for a
final close-up of the lifeless woman.
Before her death, Anns one attempt to reach out for help is rebuffed when
she tries to get in touch with a friend, whom the camera has featured through-
out in scenes of autoerotic display in front of a mirror. The friend will not re-
spond to Anns pleas for help because she is in the middle of making love with
her European boyfriend Monty (who wears a fake moustache and dark glasses
he keeps on even during sex). The film in this regard reads almost like an an-
ticipatory parable of the divisions between radical feminists, who hold that
womans sexuality is not really their own, and sex-positive feminists who, busy
fulfilling what they see as their relatively unconstrained sexuality, refuse the
radical feminist message and resist solidarity with the female victim.

The two films for which Doris Wishman is perhaps best known and most loved
by her fans are those she directed in the early 1970s starring a woman whose

58Tania Modleski
pseudonym was Chesty Morgan, an actress billed as having seventy-three-inch
breasts, a measurement that truly seems scarcely an exaggeration. In the first
of these, Deadly Weapons (1967), the title of which refers to the breasts them-
selves, a gang of thugs murders the boyfriend of Crystal, played by Morgan,
who retaliates by smothering each of them to death with her breasts. Nowhere
is lowbrow contestation of highbrow culture (often, of course, without deliber-
ately setting out to do so) more pronounced than in this film. If, as Jean-Louis
Baudry once famously suggested, the screen is a stand-in for the breast, then
the sight of the huge breasts of Chesty Morgan stifling the screams of the man
whose head is held between them until the life is smothered out of him phan-
tasmatically confirms the childs worst fears about the potency of the bad ob-
ject (to adopt Kleinian terminology).
In the second Chesty Morgan film, Double Agent 73 (1974), a film that draws
on the James Bond films so popular at the time, the plot involves Jane (Mor-
gan) as an agent of the government who tracks down and kills members of
a Soviet drug ring using a variety of methods, including spreading some sort
of poisonous substance on the breasts and then making love with the victim.
Because she needs to prove the mens identity, Jane snaps a photograph of each
dying man with a camera which has been surgically implanted in one of her
pendulous breasts (so large, they hang down to her waist). As she presses on
her breast, it bounces up and we hear the sound of a camera going off. The
camera (Wishmans, that is) typically cuts back and forth from shots of the man
dying to shots revealing his wavering point of view captured in close-ups of the
breasts blurring in and out of focus. (The nicest touch in the film involves Janes
paramour accidentally tripping the camera during lovemaking, which leads to
the discovery of his identity as the head of the drug ring, and to his death at the
hands of Jane herself, who shoots him.)
For those of us feminists who have been steeped in a tradition of leftist theo-
ries that stress the political importance of self-reflexive art, the film must strike
us as somewhat of a parody of our ideas. Wishman might be said to have cre-
ated a sort of female version of Michael Powells Peeping Tom (1960, a film much
celebrated in feminist film theory).8 In Double Agent 73, the men become the
constantly photographed subjects, forced to look upon the lethal objectthe
breast-camerathat has exposed them in their death throes. However, if any-

D oris Wishman as the L ast Au teur 59

 Figure 5 Chesty
Morgan in Double
Agent 73 (1974), a film
that proves doubly
alienating by virtue
of its self-reflexive
plot and a ludicrous
obsession with
breasts.

thing works to distance and alienate a viewer from the visions upon the screen,
it is less the self-reflexive dimension of the plot than the cameras ludicrous
obsession with the breasts, which are seen in lengthy close-ups, for example,
as Jane talks on the phone, or hanging out of the negligees she wears at home.
The heavy breasts are so large that when Jane strokes them in scenes apparently
meant to be autoerotic, it is as if she is actually trying to soothe the soreness she
must feel from having to carry them around unbound most of the time. Even
Joe Bob Briggs, who has put a few of Wishmans films out on his video series,
The Sleaziest Movies in the History of the World, asks at the end, Dont you
just get sick of looking at those boobies all the time? Moving away from the
diffuse fetishism of her earlier films and reflecting the trend of that time (and,
it must be said, now again in our own) toward extreme fetishization of womens
breasts, Wishman quite literally rubs mens faces in itfetishizing with a ven-
geance.
It may seem fitting that the last film made by the woman named Wishman
was a pseudo-documentary about transsexualismthough the film deals mostly
with men wishing to be women. Throughout the early years of sexploitation,
the format of the documentary had enabled filmmakers and film producers to
get sensationalist movies past the censors. The earliest and most enduring of
such movies was a film about birth called Mom and Dad (1945). Promoted in

60Tania Modlesk i
the old American spirit of hucksterism (sexploitation films are traceable back
to the heyday of carnivals), the film would be introduced with a lecture about
birth control, especially the rhythm method. According to David Friedman,
the only film his wife ever objected to his showing was Mom and Dad: Carol
never objected to the carnivals, to pickled punks, to the nudie cuties or even to
hardcore. But to the birth-of-a-baby shows she said, That was the worst thing
you have ever done. . . . I hate to think of the poor girls who are pregnant today
because of Vatican Roulette. She thought the whole thing was a scam (which it
was) and that we were exploiting a very natural medical function.9 It gives me
some pleasure to think that in the very last phase of the genre, which began by
trapping some women into reproductive sexuality, a woman would make a film
about the ability to change ones sex voluntarily.
We all know what sex we are, says the male voice-over in the beginning
of the movie. We know deep inside us, we are a man or a woman. But per-
haps its not so simple. Our guide into the world of transsexualism is Dr. Leo
Wollmandoctor, surgeon, psychologist, minister, medical writer. Woll-
man lectures directly to the film audience, exhibits naked transsexuals, using a
pointer to illustrate parts of their anatomies, conducts group therapy sessions
with transsexuals and would-be transsexuals, and even displays and discusses
dildos. Periodically a Puerto Rican transsexual talks to the camera about her
experiences, her views, and her feelings. We also watch several scenes of love-
makingincluding one that involves a woman who picks up a man in a park,
takes him home, allows herself to be fondled, and, when the man leaves, re-
moves her clothing to reveal a penis. It turns out she has been taking female
hormones but has not yet had the operation.
Inserted into the middle of the film is some outrageous surgical footage of
a sex-change operation. Wollmans voice-over describes what we see on the
screen: First a circular incision is made around the base of the penis. The inci-
sion is then extended in one continuous line along the middle of the penis. The
skin is then inverted to form a sheath much as a sock is turned inside out. It is
this inverted penile sheath which forms the vagina. If Mom and Dad had sexu-
alized a very natural medical function, titillating audiences by regaling them
with the so-called facts of life, Let Me Die a Woman (1978) takes the fetishism
at the heart of male sexual fantasy, medicalizes it, and materializes the fear be-

D oris Wishman as the L ast Au teur 61

hind it: the fear that the penis can be cut off and one will be (like) a woman. In
making such a film Wishman, who had spent so much of her career creating the
kinds of films women find hard to look at, discovers and exploits images which
assault male vision: for, as the man who writes the blurb on the video jacket
says, this is footage that, years after first seeing the film on Forty-second Street,
he still cant watch.
But of course this unwatchability paradoxically functions precisely as a lure
to the male spectator. How to explain such a paradox? Let us above all not leap
too hastily to the facile conclusion that we are dealing with the phenomenon of
male masochism. In Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol Clover has famously
argued that one can view as masochistic the appeal to men of scary and violent
movies such as the rape revenge films that sometimes feature scenes of male
castration.10 If masochism is indeed involved in the male spectators response
to such films, it is surely so in a way entirely consonant with an ideal of the
phallic tough guy able to withstand the most intense horror and pain. Such
a response is probably most accurately understood as a counterphobic mecha-
nism, enabling the spectator to go out to meet, to face down, and to survive his
very worst fears.
What interests me here, in considering the implications of the work of a
woman whose films often went to extremes in fetishizing female sexuality and
in objectifying women and depicting violence against them, is the possibility
that such films may also function counterphobically for women filmmakers and
their female spectators. To take myself as an example, my own interest in horror
films and violent films in general began as a deliberate attempt to conquer the
abject terror they inspired in me as a child. In going frequently to see such films,
I have been, I think, far from masochistically indulging in assaults on my vision
and on my female proxies on the screen; instead I was psychically refusing to
succumb to the terror these films inspire in many of us. (I dont mean to claim
to have been more resistant than my friends who would not go to see such films
at all; I am simply saying that not looking is only one possible form of refusing
to be intimidated and terrified.) In the early 1970s, Claire Johnston proposed
the term counter-cinema to refer to films by women that strained the codes and
conventions of patriarchal cinema and male genres.11 Perhaps a second cate-
gory could, only partly facetiously, be added to explain the appeal to women of

62 Tania Modleski
adhering to these codes and taking them to extremes. Thus, in addition to the
notion of womens cinema as counter-cinema, we would have womans cinema
as counterphobic cinemathe prefix serving as the token of resistance. Posit-
ing a counterphobic notion of filmmaking and filmgoing enables us to consider
the psychically contestatory powers of excess without always having to confine
ourselves to the useful but limited notion of parody.
Let me explain carefully what I am saying and what I am not saying. Re-
cently I showed some films of Doris Wishman to a graduate seminar on women
in exploitation and horror films, and one of the few male students in the course,
a truly brilliant student, supported my position by recounting an experience he
had had recently of being in an audience watching a film in which a woman was
tortured at length before being killed. When men in the audience would holler
out Bitch to the woman on the screen, a group of women would holler the
epithet even louder. My student cited this experience as one that supported my
idea of womens counterphobic response to female victimization. I was aghast.
Is this what I meant by the term? If so, I was ready to abjure it on the spot.
But no, this is not what I meant. I am assuming there may be a kind of split
response on the part of some female viewers who recognize their connection
to the woman on the screen but are ready to face the most extreme forms of
female victimization without blinking, that is, without letting themselves be
victimized (terrorized) by a representation of that victimization. Such a viewer
neither repudiates her identity as a woman nor identifies with the (often) psy-
chotic male on the screen (or in front of the screen, for that matter)she does
not merge her identity with that of the torturer, at least not to the point where
she disavows any connection with images of female suffering.
Even though what I am proposing suggests a split response on the part of
the female viewer, it does not bring us back, or fully back, to the early posi-
tions of feminist film theory (as elaborated by Laura Mulvey and Mary Ann
Doane) that descried the split experience of the woman spectator forced to
identify with both male and female characters. First, it posits the notion that the
female viewer is not merging with the images on the screen but is more aware
of their status as images than early film theory sometimes supposed. Second,
this notion of a somewhat macho mode of film viewing may be aligned with
the more positive aspects of gender performance that have been celebrated in

D oris Wishman as the L ast Au teur 63

queer studies over the last decade or so (as in the work of Case and Garber).
And as the theorists of female masculinity tell us, one can be macho without
being misogynist.

I have always thought of sleazy, gross-out films as very male, essentialist as this
idea may be. Is there any ultimate value in finding evidence that women can be
every bit as raunchy and sleazy as men? What do women have to gain by enter-
ing the realm of the grotesque?
The grotesque has of course been a category affirmed in recent years by those
who have taken up the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (including feminist scholar
Mary Russo, in her book The Female Grotesque). According to Bakhtin, the
emphasis on the grotesque body liberates objects from the snares of false seri-
ousness, from illusions and sublimations inspired by fear.12 Now, it seems to
me that Wishmans work, like most sexploitation, touches at the heart of fears
of both men and womenin the former case, of course, one of the ensnaring
illusions is that of the intact body, an illusion that protects against fears of cas-
tration and dismemberment. The illusion of the screen as breast, theorized by
Baudry, provides one example of false seriousness, and Wishman drives right
to the heart of this illusion in Deadly Weapons. Feminist theories designed to
understand and ward off womens fears, which tend to be a bit more rooted in
reality, have sometimes had their ludicrous side as well, and the degree to which
we have banked upon self-reflexive, experimental cinema to rid us of the snares
of patriarchal cinema now often seems excessive. A film like Double Agent 73
has the potential to make us see the humor in the excess.
Slavoj iek, renowned for juxtaposing high theory with low culture, justi-
fies his enterprise by citing the ability of popular culture to illustrate not only
the vague outlines of the Lacanian theoretical edifice but sometimes also the
finer details. He goes on to admit, It is clear that Lacanian theory serves as
an excuse for indulging the idiotic enjoyment of popular culture.13 Presum-
ably, Lacan himself never produced idiocies that popular culture might expose.
But feminists, constantly admonished by men to recognize the importance of
having a sense of humor, might be able to lead the way, showing not only that
popular culture provides an alibi for enjoying idiotic forms of popular enter-

64 Tania Modleski
tainment, but that it can help us laugh at our sacred theories as they appear
from the perspective of the profane.

Although it has been somewhat updated, I wrote much of the foregoing essay
a decade ago and never published it. I never published it because when all is
said and done, Wishmans films leave a very nasty aftertaste, and when they are
shown to, say, sophisticated feminist students, they are often shocked and re-
pelled at the level of constant violence directed against women in these films. I
myself experienced such a shock after first viewing many of them and continue
to do so to this day. I had obviously chosen very selectively in trying to make
a feminist case for a woman working in a virtually all-male domain, exploita-
tion and sexploitation cinema. Of course, critics always choose selectively, and
certainly male critics have wished on Wishman, sometimes with ludicrous and
deplorable results.
Take Michael Bowen, who as Wishmans biographer interprets Wishmans
films in terms of her own life experiences, especially her so-called bodily ex-
periences. It is always tricky for a biographer to attempt to understand the rela-
tionship between a persons life and her art, and this is particularly the case in
an era mistrustful of categories like gender, biological sex, and even experi-
ence. The more talented critics are nevertheless able to achieve a subtle analysis
that carefully negotiates the minefield of essentialisms. Bowen, however, is not
one of these critics. Formulating a grotesque argument that focuses in the last
segment on the grotesque elements in Wishmans later work, Bowen writes:

At issue in Wishmans work of this period is a body which can no longer be

trusted, a body which has acquired the fatal will to go astray. This theme, I
would argue, is largely a manifestation of Wishmans own concern about the
status of her own body at the time. Aging, having just experienced the fail-
ure of a second childless marriage, very likely menopausal, Wishman began
to organize her work into an exploration of the bodys capacity to betray its
operator, to degenerate, and to empty itself through bloody excess.14

(Let us disregard Bowens bizarre understanding of the phenomenon of meno-

pause, which after all is about the cessation of bloody excess, if one must put it

D oris Wishma n as the L ast Au teur 65

that way.) To support his argument Bowen focuses on The Amazing Transplant,
which is, as we have seen, about a man losing control of his body (with deadly
consequences to women), and on Double Agent 73. Speaking of the latter film,
Bowen cites the fact that the camera implanted in Janes breast turns out to be a
time bomb waiting to go off. Anyone who hasnt seen the film might get the im-
pression that the spectator is on the edge of his seat during most of the movie,
thinking that Jane will die if she doesnt accomplish her mission in time. But in
fact, we only learn about the time bomb at the very end of the film, and no real
suspense is built around it before the problem is eliminated. True to her style
of working, Wishman must have said at the last minute of filming, I know
lets make the camera a time bomb, but rather than go back and redo the film
something that would not have been economically feasibleshe just threw it
in as a gimmick at the last minute. No suspense is built around the time-bomb
device, as it would be in, for example, Hitchcock. What fascinates the spectator
throughout the film instead is the sight of Jane killing men and coldly filming
them when they die, a sight we witness over and over and over. Whose body is
out of control in such a scenario?
Not only does Bowen, in his discussion of the grotesque aspects of Wish-
mans later work, turn male fears back onto the grotesque body of woman
character, actress, and directorbut, as evidenced in the above passage, he
renders all female bodies grotesque insofar as they are destined to become
menopausal, grow old, and dieand insofar as they give or dont give birth.
Indeed, throughout the article Bowen makes much of the fact that Wishman
never had children, even going so far as to propose that the work may be seen in
terms of an aesthetics of procreation, a sublimation of the desire for children!
Interestingly, he doesnt invoke Deadly Weapons to suggest that it is the imagi-
native product of a woman whose mothering instinct has gone awry, although
one could sure see how that argument would go. But a feminist weary not only
of the mammary madness of our own time but of our cultures harping on the
horrors of womens biological clocks running down (at which point the clocks
might as well turn into time bombs for all the importance typically accorded
childless women), might rather smile at a sensibility that contrived a plot in
which gigantic breasts smother rather than nurture life.
Other male critics have been rather more sophisticated in their approach to
Wishmans work. Thibaut, it will be recalled, characterizes Bad Girls Go to Hell

66 Tania Modleski
as an unconscious urban remake of Justine ou les Infortunes de la Vertu. The
article goes on to note (more than once) Wishmans total absence of cynicism
and characterizes the work as marked by a total refusal of received methods
and as revealing the ingenuousness and navet of the novice. One cant help
but notice here another projection along the lines of what we have seen oper-
ating in Bowmans article. Wishman the director is seen as possessing the same
traits as her films innocent character. Here is the author invoking a comparison
to Andy Warhol:

Far from the movie theaters of Times Square, the sanctuary of exploitation
cinema, the New York intelligentsia thrilled to the bold experimentalism of
the Warhol family. In the same city, there coexisted two kinds of cinema,
both having little to do with the current clichs. The one big difference:
Warhol filmed in order to assure his artistic survival; Doris Wishman to
assure economic survival. Strangely fascinated by Hollywood, the ascetic
fair-haired boy (lascetique blondinet) threw temper tantrums while Doris
Wishman unconsciously created the perfect anti-star, the true negative of
the Hollywood model, of which the artistic underground could up to then
only dream.15

For this French critic, the price of Wishmans canonization as auteur whose
work served as the veritable negatif du modele hollywoodien, was conscious-
ness itself. As a female auteur she is praised for her very lack of ambition, her
indifference to all aesthetic standards and to Hollywood commercialism.
One can only wonder: if Wishman had appeared to have a little more am-
bition, had revealed herself to be a pretender to the throne of queen of sleaze,
would she have been so eagerly crowned? Pardon my own cynicismso unlike
the alleged navet of a Doris Wishmanbut it seems to me that this kind of
analysis is strictly an affair between men. Wishman is invited to assume the
throne in order to eject Warhol. But since (or rather precisely because) she her-
self is unconscious of the critical and aesthetic stakes and indifferent to fame,
the person who becomes the true auteur is the critic, one of the inside dope-
sters, as Pauline Kael so memorably called the auteur critics back in the 1960s,
who can describe her style, locate her meaning, and assign her place in the pan-
theon anti-hollywoodienne.16
I can well believe that Wishman was extremely cynical. She needed money;

D oris Wishman as the L ast Au teur 67

there was money to be made in the aptly named exploitation and sexploitation
genres, especially when they indulged in hard-core violence against women
so she went for the gold, or at least the gilt. I can believe she might also have
been cynical about the viewers of such movies, and I can imagine her satisfac-
tion in the kind of revenge I see operating in the two films with Chesty Mor-
gan. But do I believe that Wishman was conscious of, for example, supporting
lesbianism in Bad Girls Go to Hell? No, I dont. Does that make me like the
authors I have been criticizing, those who project their own meanings and de-
sires and fears onto the director who herself is seen as unconscious of what she
has wrought? In a way, yes. But I have at least been consistent throughout my
career on this point. In detecting feminist meanings, whether they are located
in certain moments of Hitchcocks films or in those of Doris Wishman, I have
followed the strand of auteur criticism that emphasizes the unconscious aspects
of films and their directors, connecting those meanings to ideology (and I have,
moreover, always argued that the critic invariably brings her own set of values
to texts). Yet I fear that many critics, and certainly many French critics, betray a
double standard, and continue, perhaps in spite of themselves, to grant all sorts
of conscious, artistic intent to the male directors of the movies they love, while,
at best, patronizing movies made by women.
Both Bowen and Thibault return us to prefeminist days of criticism in which
women authors were treated in the most condescending manner imaginable.
Before the late 1970s and 1980s, criticism of female authors (such as Charlotte
Bront, Emily Bront, and Emily Dickinson, to name a few who were routinely
subjected to grotesque paternalistic criticism) habitually treated womens works
in terms of their biographies (and biology) and attributed felicities of female
texts to the operations of the unconsciousin contradistinction to the sup-
posedly artfully crafted, brilliant works of canonized male authors. The same
criticism operates now paradoxically in relation to texts that lack felicities, that
are often ill-made and even idiotic. Those directors and producers who make it
into the canon of sleaze are generally those who care the least about art, ideas,
and craft, but the men among them are frequently given credit as admirable
old-time hucksters who thumbed their noses at a hypocritical and pretentious
Middle America, subverting it from below.
But let us not forget that Middle Americas standards of artistic taste and
the moral values embedded in, say, Book of the Month Club fare were more

68Tania Modlesk i
often than not upheld by women, and in this respectand not only in the more
obvious onesit might be said that the sexploitation genre as a whole had a
misogynist cast. At the same time, however, given that women of the period
wound up being the stuffy purveyors of hackneyed art, good manners, and re-
pressive morals, it means something to me, at least, that one woman emphati-
cally rejected the role and expanded the borders of bad taste. This returns us, in
effect, to the argument with which I began: feminists insistence on their right
to politically incorrect fantasy and behavior has to be seen (and Im of course
hardly the first to make this argument) in light of the repression historically
imposed upon them.

In many respects Wishmans films are no different from those of the misogynist
fraternity of cinematic exploiters. Feminism forgets or disavows this at its peril.
But handing Wishman over to the boys, permitting male critics to have their
way with her, does not seem to me advisable, especially given the kinds of ar-
guments we have seen them advance. Hence my decision, after all these years,
to publish this essay.
I believe I have shown that there are elements in Wishmans work that allow
for (I dont say force or impose) a feminist reading. Yet we would do well to
recall these many years later the arguments of Pam Cook and Claire Johnston,
writing in the early days of feminist film theory. Women directors work with
the codes and conventions of patriarchal ideologies and genres. It is impossible
for women working within a male-dominated cinema to effect a radical break
with it. But there are moments when their texts reveal the tensions and contra-
dictions that are the result of their peculiar and marginal positions. These are
the momentstransitory, fleeting, and almost inevitably recuperatedwhen
the impulses of a female flesh peddler and the wishes of at least one feminist
critic may converge.
Bad girls, unite.

Notes

1. Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Prince-
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press), 1993.
2. Joan Nestle, A Restricted Country (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Firebrand Books, 1987), 86.

D oris Wishman as the L ast Au teur 69

 3. Linda Williams, Hardcore: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999).
4. Professeur Thibaut, Une affaire de femme, Cineastes 8 (2002): 44.
5. Andrea Juno, Doris Wishman, in Incredibly Strange Films: A Guide to Deviant Films,
ed. Jim Morton (San Francisco: Re/Search, 1986), 113.
6. Mike Quarles, Down and Dirty: Hollywoods Exploitation Filmmakers and their Movies
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1993), 144.
7. When she is raped by the janitor, she decides she has to run away, so her husband
will not know what happened. This may be a commentary on mid-1960s morality, but
it doesnt make a lot of sense, Quarles writes (ibid.). Of course, feminism has shown
that this kind of reaction does make a lot of sense. Interestingly, Quarles here omits
mentioning that Meg has killed the man who rapes her twice.
8. Linda Williams, When the Woman Looks, in Revision: Essays in Feminist Film Criti-
cism, ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams, American Film
Institute Monograph Series (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1984),
3:9093.
9. David F. Friedman, Wages of Sin, interview by David Chute, Film Comment 22, no. 4
(1986): 3239; 4248.
10. Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws, 166230.
11. The term counter-cinema had a polemical force but perhaps undermined the subtlety of
the argument advanced by Cook and Johnston, since both took care to note that ideol-
ogy could not be contested from a place outside ideology. A woman filmmaker had to
rely on the grammar of Hollywood cinema even as she could be seen to deform it. See
Claire Johnston, Womens Cinema as Counter-Cinema, in Movies and Methods, vol. 1,
ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
12. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1984), 376.
13. Slavoj iek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York:
Routledge, 1992), viii.
14. Michael Bowen, Embodiment and Realization: The Many Film-Bodies of Doris Wish-
man, Wide Angle 19, no. 3 (1997): 79.
15. Thibaut, Une affaire de femme, 44.
16. Pauline Kael, Circles and Squares, Film Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1963): 1226.

70Tania Modleski
Harry M. Bensh o ff

Representing (Repressed)
Homosexuality in the Pre-Stonewall
Hollywood Homo-Military F ilm

I n the late 1960s, gay film critic Jack Babuscio wondered:

Why . . . should some gays choose to join the military? . . .
The answer, though muted, is plain: the Forces are a refuge, a
military mask that calms the chaos rumbling in the closets of
those who repress their gayness. The bureaucratic structure of
military life, with its constant surveillance and strict discipline,
aims to obliterate the former identity of its members and replace
it with a sense of self as Soldier.1 Military psychiatrists of the
era echoed Babuscios musings, admitting that many men with
homosexual tendencies joined the armed forces in the hope that
the army would be a salubrious and perhaps even curative ex-
perience for them.2 However, the concentration of young men
in close association with the intimacy of barracks life [often cre-
ated] subsequent temptations.3 When soldiers were caught in
homosexual acts, or accused of being homosexual, they were
immediately segregated from their units, evaluated by military
psychiatrists, and in most cases dismissed from the armed ser-
vices.4 Careers were destroyed and lives were ruined by unde-
sirable discharges that frequently listed homosexuality as their
cause.
The issue of gays in the military became a national debate in
the 1990s when President Bill Clinton attempted to integrate the
armed services. The hysteria surrounding the debate and the resultant dont
ask, dont tell policy (which in fact has led to even more homosexuals being
discharged from the armed services) indicates that even in the 1990s homosexu-
ality was considered a distasteful subject to many. Yet this essay demonstrates
that the issue was alive (if unwell) in mainstream American popular culture
as early as the late 1950s, perhaps most visibly represented through a small cycle
of films that I have dubbed the Hollywood homo-military film. These films in-
clude lower-budget exploitation films such as The Strange One (1957) and The
Gay Deceivers (1969), as well as more prestigious A-film literary adaptations
like Billy Budd (1962) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967). Indeed, by 1972
there were so many films that explored or exploited homosexual desire within
the military that Parker Tyler could devote an entire chapter of Screening the
Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies to what he called Homeros in Uniform.5
Nevertheless, during the pre-Stonewall era, the very idea of homosexuality
in the armed services was an inherently sleazy one, an issuelike homosexu-
ality in generalthat could barely be spoken about in coherent terms. This
essay examines the sociocultural context, production history, and reception of
several of these homo-military films, in order to illuminate the diverse and
often contradictory ways that the issue was understood in the 1960s. Contrary
to what one might assume, many of these films actually feature more complex
and theoretically queer ideas about human sexuality than many of those pro-
duced during the 1970s and 1980s. The films raise issues of sexual identity and
repressed homosexual desire, and explorehowever confusedlythe borders
between male homosociality and homosexuality. While in many cases these
films appear to depict gays in the military as a situation either hopelessly
comedic or tragic, upon closer examination many of them actually indict the
repression of homosexual desire and not homosexuality per se, an idea that
many film critics of the era slowly began to acknowledge.

Homo-Militarism in Postwar America

Cultural intercourse between queer men and the military has existed for cen-
turies, and such intersections were especially prominent in America during
and after World War II. Some historians even point to the militarys antihomo-
sexual policies as a major factor in the development of postwar gay commu-

72Ha rry M . Benshoff

nities: as queer people were dishonorably discharged, many settled in urban
gay ghettos rather than return home to face further discrimination.6 As such,
homo-military iconography and themes were prevalent in postwar gay male
culture. As Michael Bronski has noted, beautiful, sexy, well-built servicemen
are perpetual inhabitants of wartime and postwar gay fiction, surfacing in
works as diverse as [Carson] McCullerss Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941),
John Horne Burnss The Gallery (1947), [Gore] Vidals The City and the Pillar
(1948), Russell Thachers The Captain (1951), and Lonnie Colemans Ships Com-
pany (1955).7 The eras gay physique magazines and avant-garde filmsper-
haps most famously Kenneth Angers Fireworks (1947)also explored homo-
sexual desire within military trappings. And, as postwar Hollywood faced an
increasingly unstable social, economic, and industrial climate, such unsavory
themes began to seep into mainstream film practice.
Classical Hollywood war films had always celebrated homosocial bonds be-
tween military men. Love scenes and even passionate kisses were shared be-
tween (ostensibly heterosexual) men in films such as Wings (1927), Test Pilot
(1938), and Only Angels Have Wings (1939). Occasional buddy comedies such as
the Dean MartinJerry Lewis vehicle At War with the Army (1950) based their
hijinks on the repeated failures of less-than-masculine men to adapt to macho
military worlds. Yet, as the 1950s progressed and the cultural image of the male
homosexual shifted from the pansy stereotype to the more menacing invisible
homosexualone who could or did pass for straightintense homosocial
buddy relationships (both onscreen and in real life) became more and more
suspect. A kiss between men was no longer a sign of fraternal friendship, but
now a sign of potential sexual perversity. This cultural anxiety over the border
between male homosocial and male homosexual desirea central concern of
the homo-military film is also prevalent in the eras buddy films (Midnight
Cowboy [1969]), boarding school films (If . . . [1968]), prison melodramas (For-
tune and Mens Eyes [1971]), and biker films (The Leather Boys [1964]). It was
also a central concern of the U.S. armed services themselves.
Official Army policies of the era not only maintained that homosexuality
was incompatible with military duty but also divided homosexual offenses into
three types, in order to classify more precisely who was and who was not truly
homosexual. Class I homosexuality consisted of those cases which involved

The Pre-Stonewall Holly wo od Homo-Military Film 7 3

assault or coercion. Class II homosexuality was defined as all cases of homo-
sexual conduct not defined as Class I (i.e., acts committed consensually). Class
III homosexuality consisted of cases in which personnel exhibit, profess, or
admit homosexual tendencies [but] wherein there are no specific homosexual
acts or offenses.8 As such, the provisions of Class III sought to remove homo-
sexual persons from the military and not just people convicted of homosexual
acts. The provisions of Class III did (and still do) create a widespread culture
of paranoia and witch-hunting, as the mere suggestion of being homosexual
could warrant an investigation.
Military psychiatrists were routinely called upon to distinguish between
true and confirmed homosexuals and those individuals who solely as the re-
sult of immaturity, curiosity, or intoxication have been involved in homosexual
acts.9 This classification was usually made on very little evidence. Scientific
tests for patulous rectums and repressed gag reflexes (thought to be indicative
of sexually passive or true homosexuality) were called for by some specialists,
while others based their decisions on a brief verbal interview.10 In that case,
true homosexuality was defined in terms of effeminacy, while shower-room
horse-play among traditionally masculine men tended to be overlooked.11
Such distinctions were made out of necessity: as one official report put it, Sup-
pose everyone who has engaged in homosexual play were to report himself
as having homosexual tendencies at the induction station! This might affect
more than one-third of the candidates for enlistment.12 Clearly, the militarys
need for young masculine men overrode its official policies proscribing homo-
sexual behavior among them.
Despite its obsession with psychiatric categorization, this official classi-
ficatory schema rarely took into consideration any theorization of repressed
homosexuality. Indeed, men accused of homosexuality who consciously denied
such desires were more likely to be retained in the services. As such, the system
tended to self-select for either consciously lying or repressed homosexuals
individuals in greater or lesser states of psychic conflictwhile discharging
adequately functioning men at ease with their homosexuality.13 The idea that a
repressed homosexual might be more of a problem to the military than an open
one was an idea rarely countenanced within official documents, even as the eras
homo-military films seemed to suggest as much.

74Harry M. Benshoff
D ropping Hairpins: The Strange One (1957 )

and Billy Budd (1962)

In pre-Stonewall gay male subcultures, dropping a hairpin meant alluding in

covert, coded ways to ones own homosexuality. If an individual being so ad-
dressed picked up the hairpinresponded knowingly to the coded statement
or questionthen one was safe is assuming they too were gay. Two of the first
films of Hollywoods postwar homo-military cycle might be thought of in those
terms: they hint at homosexuality in the military in oblique ways, but maintain
plausible deniability should they be suspected of actually being about homo-
sexuality. (As Chon Noriega has argued, the queer content of such films was
also put into discourse by their advertising copy and reviews.)14 Thus, much like
contemporary Madison Avenues use of gay window advertisinga practice
that targets gay and lesbian consumers in ways meant to be overlooked by most
heterosexual spectatorsso did these films allude to homosexual meanings in
more-or-less coded ways. From todays perspective, one can view these films as
excellent examples of the very discourse of the closetthey employ connotative
and symbolic means to signify homosexuality for those in the know while
ostensibly being about something else altogether.
Such connotative means were the only way homosexuality could be signified
under the dictates of the Hollywood Production Code (written in 1930 and offi-
cially enforced in 1934). Although it was continually challenged throughout
the 1950s (by films such as The Moon Is Blue [1953] and Baby Doll [1956]), the
Production Code still exerted a profound effect on the content of Hollywood
film, especially in relation to homosexual themes. The Production Code Ad-
ministration (PCA) edited queer backstories and subtexts out of the film adap-
tations of Tennessee Williamss plays A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). Vincente Minnellis film of the Broadway hit Tea and
Sympathy (1956) had to be rewritten in order to emphasize that the young stu-
dents problem was not so much male homosexuality as it was heterosexual
male effeminacy.15 However, even though the Production Code Administration
tried to delete overt homosexuality from the films it policed, it often failed to
eradicate a more diffuse, connotative queerness. Suddenly Last Summer (1959),
another Tennessee Williams adaptation revolving around a pedophilic homo-

The Pre-Stonewall Holly wo od Homo-Military Film 7 5

sexual and his horrible cannibalistic fate, is perhaps the most spectacular ex-
ample of the Production Codes failure to remove queer content from 1950s
Hollywood cinema.
The Strange One (1957) is another excellent example of how male homo-
sexuality could be spoken within the censoring discourse of the Hollywood
Production Code. The film, based on Calder Willinghams novel and play End
as a Man, takes place at the fictional Southern Military College and centers
on Jocko de Paris (Ben Gazarra), a cunning and manipulative upperclassman
who sadistically brutalizes his fellow students. None of the characters are repre-
sented as being forthrightly homosexual, but the film wallows in a steamy mix-
ture of homoerotic imagery and verbal innuendo. The mise-en-scne is filled
with phallic signifiers such as towers, trumpets, cigars, flashlights, nightsticks,
bottles, brooms, swords, and scores of erect young men marching sweatily
through the night. The specter of homosexuality also envelops the characters
of Cadet Perrin, an effete poet who idol-worships Jocko, and Cadet Simmons, a
Peter Lorre look-alike who refuses to date girls or shower with the other cadets.
Ultimately, all this queerness is displaced onto Jockos violent sadism, a link-
age not uncommon in the eras medical discourse about homosexuality. Thus,
when Jocko calls Cadet Perrin a three-dollar bill and repeatedly towel whips
his ass in the crowded shower room, it is hard not to read the scene as an act
of metaphoric sodomy, wherein (Code-sanctioned) homosocial violence dis-
places (Code-forbidden) homosexual contact.
The story itself is an extended gloss on secrecy in the barracks, centering on
a bizarre narrative event that also speaks homosexuality in barely coded ways.
At the start of the film, a drunken poker game, organized by Jocko, turns vio-
lent and implicitly sodomitic when Cadet Simmons is beaten on the ass with a
broom handle. The next morning another cadet is found beaten and drunk on
the quad, having been force-fed liquor through an enema bag, an act suggesting
both oral and anal rape. A later scene wherein Jocko is grilled about the gag
reflex extends the analogy even further. (Cadet De Paris, dont tell me you
you dont know what a gag reflex is!) Ultimately, all the cadets find themselves
in a double-bind situation similar to that faced by homosexuals in the military
(both then and still today): should they admit they lied about these transgres-
sive events (and thus be expelled), or should they stay silent about their behav-
iors so that they may continue to serve in the corps?

7 6Harry M. Benshoff
Figure 1 In The Strange One (1957), Jockos (Ben Gazarra) violence repeatedly
manifests in acts of metaphorical sodomy, creating a confused conflation of
homosexuality, homosexual repression, and sadism.

Despite the Production Code Administrations attempt to censor overt

homosexuality from the film, many reviews made some comment on the films
homosexual overtones.16 For example, Weekly Variety suggested the film would
need strong selling [since] stories involving military schools havent been too
popular with filmgoers nor do homosexual themes figure to be either.17 Trying
to make some sense of the film, Time magazine theorized that Jockos sadism
was the result of his repressed homosexuality,18 but Motion Picture Daily com-
plained that that link was not made strongly enough: The scenes do not add
up to a . . . credible portrait of a sadistic man. The motivations for all his hate
and hostility are only superficially explored.19 Thus, while the film may have
been an attempt to show how sexuality is school-disciplined into sadism,20 it
failed to make a clear distinction between homosexuality, homosexual repres-
sion, and sadism, all of which are blurred together rather unthinkingly within
the film.
Peter Ustinovs film of Herman Melvilles classic novella Billy Budd (1962)
works in similar ways, hinting at homosexual desire among sailors through its
mise-en-scne and suggestive dialogue. Yet, whereas The Strange One was pro-
duced and sold as borderline exploitation fare (despite its literary pedigree),

The Pre-Stonewall Holly wo od Homo-Military Film 7 7

Figure 2 Billy Budd (1962): Homosexuality made invisible to the Production
Code through the power of literary prestige.

Billy Budd was conceived of and marketed as a prestigious literary adaptation.

In an interview from the era, Ustinov acknowledged that the novella contained
homosexual themes, but that he had decided to mute them out of propriety,
or perhaps fear of censorship.21 Nonetheless, the film lingers on crotch shots,
phallic signifiers (a lovely knife youve got there), and prolonged, unexplained
gazes between Master-at-Arms Claggart (Robert Ryan) and the object of his
obsession, the beautiful sailor Billy Budd (Terence Stamp). The films ad cam-
paign also highlighted homoerotic beefcake, with bare-chested sailors knife-
fighting and being lashed on deck, while the print copy breathlessly exhorted:
The Men! . . . The Might! . . . The Mutiny!22 Master-at Arms Claggart can best
be understood as a repressed homosexual: he is both attracted to and repulsed
by Billy, afraid of being charmed by him, and so will not allow himself to be
physically or emotionally touched by him. Claggarts speech about the nature of
the oceancalm above but teeming with monsters belowmetaphorizes this
repression while simultaneously figuring his homosexual desire as monstrous.
At one point Billy even comes close to diagnosing Claggart as an ego-dystonic
homosexual, asserting that Claggart hates himself, but the cause of that self-
hatred is never made manifest.

7 8Harry M. Benshoff
 The Production Code Administration never objected to homosexual con-
tent in Billy Budd because it didnt see any.23 Instead, it was reviewed as part of a
cycle of naval stories including Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) and Damn the De-
fiant (1962).24 Upon its release the film was hailed by critics as a faithful adapta-
tion of a literary classic about the eternal struggle between good and evil; it was
even screened in high school English classes for years after its initial theatrical
run.25 Most reviewers discussed Claggart not as a repressed homosexual but as
a devil incarnate.26 However, a few reviews did hint at what was missing from
the film. One complained that the force and fearfulness of [Claggarts] nature
and power, and the reasons for his consuming hatred, are insufficiently con-
veyed.27 Another critic called Claggart a strange invert who appears to hate all
those who do him a kindness, but despite the pointed use of the term invert,
did not follow up on the possible meanings of that assertion.28 Only in recent
years have reviewers been freer to acknowledge the texts queer dynamics. In
1990, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick devoted a chapter of her book Epistemology of
the Closet to it,29 and in 1993, Gays and Lesbians in Mainstream Cinema called
the film an overt study of homosexual frustration leading a manhere the vil-
lainto his doom and, in the process, destroying the nave hero.30 Although
the cultured British actor and director Peter Ustinov might have acknowledged
the novellas homosexual themes, most mainstream American criticseven
academic oneswere loath to do so in the early 1960s.

Coming Out: Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967 )

and The Sergeant (1968 )

Hollywoods homo-military film reached its apex in the late 1960s. Much had
changed in a relatively short span of time: what could only be hinted about in
The Strange One and Billy Budd was beginning to emerge from the closet. In the
fall of 1961, the Production Code had been amended to allow for the sensitive
treatment of homosexuality, although what this seemed to mean in practice
was that homosexuals could be depicted as long as they were also punished,
often via suicide or murder. Perhaps because of that, many of the eras films
encode rather complex ideas about homosexuality and its repression. For ex-
ample, homophobic blackmail is explored as a political weapon in Advise and
Consent (1962) and The Best Man (1964), while Rachel, Rachel (1968) implied

The Pre-Stonewall Holly wo od Homo-Military Film 79

that lesbian desire is sometimes displaced into religious fervor. Perhaps most
forcefully, The Detective (1968) suggested that antigay violence is itself linked
to conflicted or repressed homosexual desire, an observation that behavioral
scientists have only recently demonstrated to be valid.31
Both Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) and The Sergeant (1968) focus on
military men whose repressed homosexual desires lead to violence. Though re-
leased a year after Reflections, The Sergeant had actually been in the production
pipeline for many years. In it, Army sergeant Callan (Rod Steiger) becomes
obsessed with a young soldier under his command. When the nature of his
fascination becomes clear to the sergeant, he commits suicide. Although the
words homosexual or gay are never uttered, the audience is meant to under-
stand that the sergeant is experiencing a homosexual passion that even he does
not understand. As revealed by an interoffice production memo, The Sergeant
was designed to be the story of a man [who] is not a practicing homosexual,
though he is a homosexual who cannot express it in the usual fashion, under
the circumstances.32
Negotiations occurred during the last few months of 1961 between The Ser-
geants production team and PCA officials. At first, it seemed as though the film
would be permitted to be made under the provisions of the newly liberalized
Production Code. Geoffrey Shurlock expressed general discomfort with the
films subject matter but did advise that this material, dealing with sex aber-
ration, seems generally acceptable under the current interpretation of the Pro-
duction Code.33 However, just a few weeks later, that decision was reversed
when the Appeals Board of the Motion Picture Association of America up-
held the rejection of a Code Seal for the British film Victim (1961). As a MPAA
memo put it, the Appeals Board denied Victim a Code Seal because it dealt
with the subject of sex perversion far beyond their intent. The PCA was told
not to countenance any picture in which the theme dealt wholly, or in major
part, with the subject of sex perversion.34 As such, the planned production
of The Sergeant was shut down by the PCA in the last days of 1961. In a similar
move, despite the newly liberalized Code, The Victors (1963) lost several scenes
that would have indicated that American soldiers (George Peppard and George
Hamilton) were sleeping with a young French male prostitute (Joel Flateau).35
The Sergeant would eventually be made and released in 1968, but by then its

80Harry M. Benshoff
provocative subject matter had been stolen by the flagrantly baroque Reflections
in a Golden Eye, released one year earlier. Reflections, based on the scandal-
ous southern gothic novella by Carson McCullers, focuses on Major Pender-
ton (Marlon Brando) and his obsession with the handsome Private Williams
(Robert Forster). Pendertons wife Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor) is having an affair
with Colonel Langdon (Brian Keith), whose neurotic wife Alison (Julie Harris)
has mutilated her breasts with a pair of garden shears. Alison is tended to by a
flamboyantly effeminate Filipino houseboy named Anacleto (played by Zorro
David, a former Saks Fifth Avenue hairdresser discovered by director John
Huston). True to the form of southern gothic melodrama, the film ends with a
shocking act of violence as Penderton shoots his object of desire while Leonora
looks on in horrora scene made even more hysterical by John Hustons wildly
panning camera.
Reflections in a Golden Eye combines elements of serious literature, psycho-
logical melodrama, campy sexploitation, and baroque psychedeliaa hybrid
form common to many Hollywood films of the era desperate to connect with
younger, more countercultural audiences. The production was designed from
its inception to push at the boundaries of Hollywood form and content, and
perhaps unsurprisingly, its production history was a long and tortuous affair.
In 1964, the PCA tentatively approved the film, but cautioned that there should
be no overt homosexual approaches between the Captain [sic] and Private Wil-
liams.36 The need to suggest rather than show such a key element of the story
presented a challenge to the many screenwriters who worked on the screenplay
(including Francis Ford Coppola, Christopher Isherwood, William Archibald,
and Truman Capote).37 Warner Brothers executive William Fadiman found
himself confused by the scripts sent to him: Im not at all certain that the writer
wishes to indicate any homosexual relationship, inferred or direct, between
Penderton and Williams. Or if he does, it is done in such a shadowy manner as
to be unclear. If I am right then there is no real relationship between these men,
which I would consider a defect since this relationship has enormous dramatic
possibilities. But as I said, I may be wrong and can only judge from the rather
tentative, groping outline.38
While it seems remarkable that even the producers of Reflections in a Golden
Eye would be in the dark about the homosexual content of their property, only

The Pre-Stonewall Holly wo od Homo-Military Film 81

a few years earlier Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn had starred in The
Childrens Hour (1962) without discussing their characters lesbianism.39 Homo-
sexuality was still, quite literally, the love that dare not speak its name. The
silence that surrounded itas dictated by dominant regimes of taste and poli-
tessewas an effective tool used to circumscribe the very existence of pre-
Stonewall queers.
Perhaps as a way to circumvent the PCA should they ultimately deny the film
a Seal of Approval, the production of Reflections in a Golden Eye was heavily
hyped in the press. The various changes in scriptwriters were duly noted by The
Hollywood Reporter and Variety, as was a major cast change: Marlon Brando re-
placed Montgomery Clift in the role of Penderton after Clift was found dead.40
By 1966, as the film was being shot in Italy, the trade and fan magazines were
awash with stories of trouble on the set, tempestuous stars, and the potential
nudity of both Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Forster.41 And as the film entered
postproduction, director Huston decided to tint the film with a sepia/gold wash,
a process that desaturated all the colors in the film except redwhich instead
registered as pink.42 Eventually the film was released with a PCA Seal of Ap-
proval, but under the condition that it be advertised as Suggested for Mature
Audiences.43 That decision did not appease everyone, however. Mrs. Marjorie
Snyder, President of Family Theatres, Inc. of Tulsa, Oklahoma, wrote to the PCA
to chastise Geoffrey Shurlock for allowing the film to be released at all.44
While the films depiction of repressed homosexual desire is fairly obvious
(with countless shots of the major following and mooning over the private),
its press materials were still unable to mention it directly. Thus the film was
described as the story of a complex Army officer battling his own bizarre emo-
tions while trapped in a marriage of strange and opposing passions.45 When
the New York Daily News panned the film, Warner Brothers publicity depart-
ment excerpted the following memorable line for a new round of ad copy: Its
dirtya combination of lust, impotency, vulgarity, nudity, neurosis, brutality,
voyeurism, hatred and insanity that culminates in murder. (Note that homo-
sexuality or repressed homosexuality is still not mentioned in this list of alleged
atrocities.)46 Many other reviews panned the film as well, calling it a strong
candidate for the years worst,47 and at least one commentator objected very
strongly to the whole idea of homosexual desire in the military, stating that

82Harry M. Benshoff
such a story makes more sense in a psychiatrists case book than in a picture
dealing with an Army Post murder.48
Nonetheless, many reviews did get the point of the film: that the majors
mental breakdown and resulting violence was the result of his repressed homo-
sexuality. Variety called the film an attempt to be a literate exposition of latent
homosexuality49 and Cue magazine opined that the film is a character study
that pits those who live by self-repression against those who reach for sensi-
tivity or passion.50 Charles Champlin similarly praised it: Its major theme is
of a mans anguished realization not only of his latent homosexuality but also of
his failing powers or will to repress much longer the furies within himself.51 By
2001, when the film was revived for contemporary audiences, it was hailed as a
perversely perceptive study of how repression cultivates poisonous emotional
fetishes.52
One year later, the reception of The Sergeant was framed within similar pat-
terns of denial and confusion. As with Reflections, its press materials could not
(or would not) openly speak about the films subject matter, euphemistically
calling it a tense drama of the conflicts and frustrations of peacetime army ser-
vice [that] centers on a veteran sergeant (Steiger) who tries to break up the ro-
mance between a private ([John Philip] Law) and a French girl.53 Rod Steiger
went on record saying the film was not about homosexuality but loneliness,54
and the film critic of Womens Wear Daily seemed especially offended that any-
one could read the film as being about homosexual desire, repressed or other-
wise:

I cannot warn you strongly enough to ignore the advertising and the ad-
vance word that [The Sergeant] is a homosexual film. It is an insult to any-
ones intelligence to promote it as such; sure, you can read it into the film if
you want to, but it would be stretching several points way out of recognition.
[The sergeant wants the private to] be his confidant, his buddy, his drinking
companion, his friend. To claim any hint of homosexualism in this is a lot of
crap. . . . who has not been jealous when a really close friend takes up with
another friend?55

The feverishalmost panickedtone of this review seems to be the result of

the reviewers need to make clear-cut boundaries between male homosocial

The Pre-Stonewall Holly wo od Homo-Military Film 83

Figure 3 Though clichd in its depiction of repressed homosexuality, The
Sergeant (1968) nevertheless made the more radically queer suggestion that
homosexual desire is coterminous with heterosexual identity and homosociality.

and male homosexual desirea need still endemic in most Western patriarchal
cultures.
Much of the moral indignation that the bizarre Reflections in a Golden Eye
had engendered was missing from the reception of The Sergeant. Whereas the
National Catholic Organization of Motion Pictures had condemned Reflections
in a Golden Eye as an exploitation picture, it passed The Sergeant as A-III.56
In fact, by the time The Sergeant premiered at the San Francisco International
Film Festival (in between screenings of Weekend, Lonesome Cowboys, and Yel-
low Submarine), its old-fashioned social-problem approach to its topic seemed
almost quaint. Stanley Kauffmann quipped that Rod Steiger takes two hours to
find out what the rest of us knew in 15 minutes: hes a repressed homosexual.57
Vincent Canby complained about the films obvious symbolism, citing a beer
bottle handled as if it were a phallus, fondled guns, and the like.58 Whereas
those obvious symbols were the chief ways that homosexual desire was spoken
in Hollywood films only ten years earlier, by 1968 they had become tired cli-
chs.
Nonetheless, the films slow, obvious plotting did allow its theme to be
understood by many reviewers (the Womens Wear Daily critic notwithstand-

84Harry M. Benshoff
ing). The Los Angeles Times stated clearly that the film was about latent homo-
sexuality,59 while the Motion Picture Herald also reported that the sergeant
was afflicted with homosexual inclinations that are so latent that he does not
recognize why he is strongly attracted to a handsome young private under his
command.60 Other reviews connected the sergeants macho sadism to his re-
pression of his homosexual desires, suggesting he fears his own weakness so
much that he bears down brutally on weakness in others.61 At least one review
found in the film a broad critique of the military mindset: there is a good deal
more to The Sergeant than merely the case history of a homosexual. As soon as
one poses the question of how he could have concealed his latent tendencies for
so long, one realizes (as in Reflections) that the Army provides a base of power
that not merely gives rein, but tacit approval to sadistic impulses.62
Many of the more interesting comments made in reviews of The Sergeant
focus on the character of Private Swanson, and why, as one reviewer puts it, he
gives up the lovely young girl with whom he is in love to drink and go out on
the town with the older man.63 Several reviews spoke of how the privates char-
acter seemed queernot quite straight, and not quite gay. For example, Playboy
noted that John Philip Law (as the private) catches precisely the right nuances
of ingenuousness and sexual ambivalence in a small town American golden
boy. . . . Wary at first, he becomes compliant, even subconsciously seductive at
times, until the unequivocal eruption of perversity frightens, then enrages him
and finally leaves him wondering just a little bit about himself.64 The film may
have used clichd devices to depict repressed homosexual desire, but its sug-
gestion that homosexual desire is a coterminous and even constitutive aspect
of heterosexual identity and homosociality makes it seem radically queer, even
by todays standards.

Flaunting It: The Gay Deceivers (1969)

The eras homo-military film came to an end with a glossy exploitation film
made on the fringes of Hollywood. While Reflections in a Golden Eye and The
Sergeant were cautionary tales about the tragedy of repressed homosexual
desire, The Gay Deceivers (1969) treated its subject matter as farce. Although
the film invites audiences to laugh at homosexual stereotypes, it also contains
pro-gay sentiments and raises queer ideas about the social construction and
fluidity of male sexual identity. Ultimately, for some reviewers, the sexual and

The Pre-Stonewall Holly wo od Homo-Military Film 85

textual ambiguity of The Gay Deceivers was effective in deconstructing tradi-
tional models of sexuality, blurring the lines between straight and gay, homo-
social and homosexual.
The Gay Deceivers focuses on Danny and Elliot, who, at their Army induc-
tion hearing, pretend to be gay in order to avoid the draft. Dogged by Lieu-
tenant Colonel Dixon, a military officer who suspects their ruse, Danny and
Elliot are forced to keep their heterosexuality closeted and live a gay lifestyle.
The general hilarity of these antics turns more serious when Danny and Elliot
come to realize that their performance has been too good, and they are forced
to confess their deceit to Dixon. However, in a twist ending (what one reviewer
called a nice dirty dig at the military establishment),65 it is revealed that Dixon
is himself homosexual, that he does believe the boys are straight, and that that
fact is what disqualifies them from the service. As Dixon coos to his aide in the
final moments of the film, We dont want their kind in the Army, do we Joe?
Yet, lest the film be considered too radical, it also frames its story in terms
of compensating moral values that stress that deceiving the U.S. Draft Board is
wrong. (As the films pressbook synopsis put it, Danny and Elliots world of de-
ception crumbles, forcing them to face the consequences of their actions when
to their dismay, they discover no one will believe the truth.)66 Clearly, the film
was calculated to have a broad appeal. The Los Angeles Times noted that it was
so shrewdly and amiably written that not only homosexuals but also hawks are
not likely to be turned off.67 The Hollywood Citizen-News found it palatable,68
and the Catholic Newsletter awarded the X-rated film an A-IV and called it
very humorous.69 Even the Advocate (grudgingly) endorsed the film: All the
gay characters are acted as if one straight is telling another a Thay thweetie!
joke. Still, Dammit, its funny.70
The Gay Deceivers is something of an oxymoron: it is a polished and com-
paratively sophisticated exploitation film, seemingly produced by straight
white men but also aimed at a gay male audience (most obviously through the
repeated objectification of blond lifeguard Elliots nearly naked body).71 The
film was successful in attracting the newly discovered gay audience: as Film
Daily snidely noted, the sneak preview audience was almost entirely male, if
considerably less than masculine.72 In another attempt to make the film more
appealing to gay men, the producers hired Michael Greer to play Danny and

86Harry M. Benshoff
 Figure 4 The Gay
Deceivers (1969) in
the wake of Stonewall:
sickening prejudice or
unintentional insight
into the plight of the
homosexual?

Elliots swishy neighbor, Malcolm De John. Greer was a gay cabaret performer
who himself had served three years in the Air Force before being discovered
by Judy Garland and propelled onto the burgeoning gay nightclub scene. Ac-
cording to Vito Russo, it was Greer who brought a more gay-friendly tone to
the film, rewriting some of his and others dialogue.73 Greer was so memorably
over-the-top in the film that there was even talk about a Best Supporting Actor
Oscar nomination for himsurely a first for a sexploitation film.74
However, not all homosexuals were happy with the film. When it opened
in San Francisco just two weeks after the Stonewall Riots, it was picketed by a
dozen members of the Committee for the Freedom of Homosexuals. Far from
seeing it as gently satiric, the activists complained that the film flaunts every
sickening prejudice and bigoted misconception that supposes we homosexuals
are both lacking in manliness and patriotism.75 A resultant letter to the editor
of the San Francisco Chronicle took the opportunity to critique the militarys
antigay policies: This film is not only an insult to the proud and manly gay

The Pre-Stonewall Holly wo od Homo-Military Film 87

persons of this community but to the millions of homosexuals who conceal
their identity to fight bravely and die proudly for their country, which rejects
them.76 Thus, regardless of how the film was decoded by its various audiences,
it became a platform for more overt commentary about the militarys discrimi-
natory policies.77
In fact, the film is much more than a collection of simple-minded fag jokes.
Boxoffice noted that the film provides subtle, if unintentional insight into the
plight of the homosexual in contemporary society, but many of the points the
film makes about discrimination are strongly sounded and seem far from un-
intentional.78 Elliot is fired from his lifeguard job because he might be a bad
influence on the kids, and he and Danny lose everything of importance to
them when they are perceived by their friends and family as gay. In another
example, a character in a gay bar relates how he was fired from his government
job for security clearance reasons, and the ending of the film seems to argue
that homosexuals are already in the military and doing just fine. The film also
presents a loving and stable gay relationship (that of Malcolm and his partner),
and perhaps most importantly represents gay men as members of a social mi-
nority group and not psychiatric abnormalities.
The Gay Deceivers also thematizes the performativity of sexual identity in
multiple ways. From Danny and Elliot acting either straight or gay, to a cli-
mactic costume ball wherein a drag queen punches out a leather daddy, the film
repeatedly constitutes sexual identity as performative. This multiple role playing
is present in Michael Greers performance of Malcolm, what the Advocate called
a phony overly exaggerated parody of a parody.79 Perhaps most interestingly,
and recalling actual psychiatric attempts to police the homosocial/homosexual
divide, the interrogation scene that opens the film acknowledges the gray area
between having a homosexual experience (depends on how you would define
an experience) versus being homosexual.
Reviews of The Gay Deceivers raised these and other questions about sexual
fluidity. The critic for the Baltimore Sun noted that due to the ambiguity in
Jerome Wishs screenplay . . . compounded by Larry Caseys performance as
Elliot . . . one cant help but wonder a bit about old Elliot. . . . He throws himself
into his homosexual impersonation with such to-the-manner-born breeziness
that the spectator can never be sure that, underneath all those muscles, Elliot

88Harry M. Benshoff
may not be the real thing.80 Elliots oft-stated need for frequent heterosexual
sex (and his career as a gigolo) were seen by other critics as overcompensa-
tion for his repressed homosexuality. Indeed, Elliott tells Danny that he might
develop a complex if he doesnt have frequent sex with women, echoing an-
other moment in the film when a doctor says that latent tendencies sometimes
dont show themselves until theres a crisis. The Hollywood Reporter noted that
Elliott takes to the camping with suspicious ease. . . . [and although] the latent
possibilities and stud pose never converge in resolution or insight . . . there are
several inexplicable scenes which defy logic. Why, for example, would he casu-
ally head to a gay bar to taunt the customers if the whole homosexual scene
were supposedly just a recently appropriated act solely for the diversion of the
draft investigators?81 Other reviewers were also disturbed by these implica-
tions, noting that Elliots potential queerness made his problem of having to
pretend to be something he isnt less amusing than it might have been other-
wise.82 In other words, for some reviewers the joke stopped being funny when
it stopped being just a joke.

Conclusion

As the war in Vietnam trickled to an end, and Hollywood regained its eco-
nomic footing, homo-military themes retreated from mainstream film. Occa-
sionally a television movie (Sgt. Matlovich vs. the US Air Force [1978]) or an
independent film (Streamers [1983]) would address same-sex desire within the
armed services, but it was not until the 1990s that gays in the military once
again became a subject of national discussion. A few documentaries and social-
problem television movies (Coming Out under Fire [1994], Serving in Silence:
The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story [1995]) were made in support of ending
the ban against gays in the military, but mainstream media more regularly
framed the topic as a nervous joke in countless sitcoms, talk show monologues,
and militaristic blockbusters such as Independence Day (1996). Male-male
desire within the military was strictly dichotomized: in Hollywood it was repre-
sented as good clean homosocial bonding, while within gay pornography, such
homosociality always gave way to explicit homosexuality. Only rarely would
mainstream media dare to link military homosociality and homosexuality. For
example, in the independent film Sleep with Me (1994), a character played by

The Pre-Stonewall Holly wo od Homo-Military Film 89

Quentin Tarantino explains in minute detail how and why Top Gun (1986) is
really a story about a mans struggle with his own homosexuality. However,
the ironic way in which the monologue is delivered allows the spectator the
chance to laugh it off, effectively repressing the reading and thus maintaining a
strict homosocial-homosexual divide.
Hollywoods pre-Stonewall homo-military films raised significant and com-
plex questions about masculinity and sexual identity and suggested that the
borders between male homosocial and homosexual desirebetween straight
and gaywere not always so clear cut. They hinted at why, in Parker Tylers
observation, sexual repression is so important in the annals of war, where sol-
diering [is] an aspect of love.83 And they dramatized how, in Jack Babuscios
formulation, sexual repression invariably ends in violence, be it psychic or
physical.84 Writing in the 1970s, seminal queer theorist Guy Hocquenghem
put it this way: the latent homosexuality so beloved of psychoanalysts cor-
responds to the oppression of patent homosexuality; and we find the greatest
charge of latent homosexuality in those social machines which are particularly
anti-homosexualthe army, the school, the church, sport, etc. At the collective
level, this sublimation is a means of transforming desire into the desire to re-
press.85 In other words, sublimated homosexuality provides [Western patriar-
chal] society with the minimum humanitarian cohesion it needs to survive
and ultimately, to make war, not love.86

Notes

1. Jack Babuscio, Screen Gays: Military Masks, Gay News 86 (circa 1970), exact date and
pages number missing. Xeroxed columns compiled and on file at the One Institute, Los
Angeles.
2. Richard G. Druss, MD, Cases of Suspected Homosexuality Seen at an Army Mental
Hygiene Consultation Service, Psychiatric Quarterly 41 (1967): 65.
3. Ibid., 63.
4. For a psychiatric overview of the situation as it pertained to the late 1950s and early
1960s, see Louis Joylon West, William T. Doidge, and Robert L. Williams, An Ap-
proach to the Problem of Homosexuality in the Military Service, American Journal of
Psychiatry 115 (1958): 392401.
5. Parker Tyler, Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies (1972; New York: Da
Capo, 1993), 24081.
6. For an overview of these issues, see Allan Berube, Coming Out under Fire: The History

90Harry M. Benshoff
 of Gay Men and Women in World War II (New York: Penguin, 1990) and Lillian Fader-
man, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century
America (New York: Penguin, 1991).
7. Michael Bronski, Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps (New
York: St. Martins Griffin, 2003), 26. Similar points are made by Richard Dyer in Now
You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film (New York: Routledge, 1990), 11113. For
more contemporary accounts of how gay male desire infiltrates and circulates within
military settings, see Steven Zeeland, Sailors and Sexual Identity: Crossing the Line be-
tween Straight and Gay in the U.S. Navy (New York: Harrington Park, 1995) and
Military Trade (New York: Harrington Park, 1999).
8. West, Doidge, and Williams, An Approach to the Problem of Homosexuality, 392
93.
9. Druss, Cases of Suspected Homosexuality, 62.
10. See Berube, Coming Out under Fire, 14974; see also Nicolai Gioscia, The Gag Reflex
and Fellatio, American Journal of Psychiatry 107 (1950): 380.
11. As many queer theorists have pointed out, being a passive male homosexual is femi-
nizing and therefore considered pathological by much of Western culture. Guy
Hocquenghem writes, Only the phallus dispenses identity; any social use of the anus,
apart from its sublimated use, creates the risk of a loss of identity. Seen from behind
we are all women (Homosexual Desire, trans. Daniella Dangoor [1978; Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1993], 101).
12. West, Doidge, and Williams, An Approach to the Problem of Homosexuality, 398.
This particular article continues: Approximately 25% of the picked group of normal
controls in our special study gave histories of sexual irregularities during childhood
and adolescence, including sexual contacts with parents and siblings (both hetero- and
homosexual), with farm animals, and even (in three cases) with watermelons. These
were basically well-adjusted 17- and 18-year-old airmen who were doing well in their
training and who presented no signs or symptoms of abnormality. Nearly half had at
one time or another engaged in homosexual play.
13. Very rarely, the eras popular press did address the issue of homosexuals in the army.
See David Sanford, Boxed In, New Republic, May 21, 1966, 89. In 1961, Newsweek
acknowledged the fact that homosexuals are often exceptionally courageous in battle,
and on the job theyre frequently intelligent and efficient [but] the Army doesnt want
them (Homosexuals: One Solider in 25? Newsweek, May 15, 1961, 92).
14. Chon Noriega, SOMETHINGS MISSING HERE!: Homosexuality and Film Reviews
during the Production Code Era, 19341962, Cinema Journal 30, no. 1 (1990): 2041.
15. See Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers,
1987), 100123, for an overview of the changes the Production Code mandated to these
and other queer films of the 1950s.

The Pre-Stonewall Holly wo od Homo-Military Film 91

 16. Specifics on how The Strange One was edited by the PCA are detailed in memos from
Geoffrey Shurlock. Today we met with Sam Spiegel and agreed to the following reedit-
ing of the above picture: The scene between DeParis and Perrin has been lengthened so
that Perrin reads his manuscript up to the point where he says NIGHT BOYthat is
the name of the book. At this point we cut to the other student entering. The later scene
in the drug store has been reinstated, with the deletion of the underlined words in the
line Leave that girl and come with me (memo dated April 9, 1957, on file in Production
Code archives, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles).
17. Review of The Strange One, Weekly Variety, April 3, 1957. The review also pointed out
that three minutes of these scenes were deleted from the original print following a
ukase of the Production Code Administration that this footage violated its rules ban-
ning sex perversion or any inference of it.
18. Review of The Strange One, Time, April 22, 1957.
19. Richard Gertner, review of The Strange One, Motion Picture Daily, April 3, 1957.
20. The phrase is Parker Tylers, though he first used it to describe the German film Young
Torless (1968). See Tyler, Screening the Sexes, 245.
21. The homosexual theme that sometimes obtrudes in the story has been removed and
the sense of hopeless tragedy in the death of Billy Budd has been tackled while still
keeping to Melvilles ending (Anthony Gruner, London Report, Boxoffice, July 10,
1961, 17).
22. Other print ads prominently featured Claggart ogling Billy, while a blurb quote from
Hazel Flynn of the Hollywood Citizen News asserted that new star Terence Stamp, with
the face of an angel, is powerfully virile! (press book, Margaret Herrick Library, Los
Angeles).
23. Instead they objected to the use of the word bastard and asked that the filmmakers
shorten a lashing scene (PCA files memo, April 26, 1961, Margaret Herrick Library, Los
Angeles).
24. Bosley Crowther, Flogging in Three Sea Films, New York Times, November 21,
1962.
25. Hazel Flynn, Melville Classic Fine for Family, Hollywood Citizen-News, November 14,
1962.
26. Harrison Carroll, Billy Budd Rates an Oscar Prospect, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner,
November 15, 1962.
27. James Powers, Lubin-Ustinov Pic Strong on Action, Hollywood Reporter, August 27,
1962.
28. Flynn, Melville Classic Fine for Family.
29. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Los Angeles: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1990), 91130. I remember having my queer reading of the novella in an
undergraduate seminar in the mid-1980s summarily dismissed.

92Harry M. Benshoff
 30. James Robert Parish, Gays and Lesbians in Mainstream Cinema (Jefferson, N.C.: Mc-
Farland, 1993), 42.
31. Henry E. Adams, Lester W. Wright Jr., and Bethany A. Lohr, Is Homophobia Asso-
ciated with Homosexual Arousal? Journal of Abnormal Psychology 105 (1996): 440
45.
32. Martin Ritt Collection, folder 515, correspondenceRay Stark, Margaret Herrick
Library, Los Angeles.
33. Memo, November 7, 1961, MPPA files on The Sergeant, Margaret Herrick Library, Los
Angeles.
34. Jack Vizzard, memo, November 20, 1961, MPPA files on The Sergeant, Margaret Herrick
Library, Los Angeles.
35. Russo, The Celluloid Closet, 136.
36. Geoffrey Shurlock, MPPA memo dated September 15, 1964, collected in the MPPA files
on Reflections in a Golden Eye, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
37. See Coppola on Screenplay of 7 Arts Golden Eye, Hollywood Reporter, May 10, 1963,
and Mike Connolly, Rambling Reporter, Hollywood Reporter, March 10, 1966.
38. William Fadiman, memo dated April 21, 1966, John Huston Collection, Margaret Her-
rick Library, Los Angeles.
39. MacLaine discusses this anecdote in the film version of The Celluloid Closet (1995).
40. There was also brief speculation on whether or not Richard Burton would take over
the role. See Peter Glenville Helms Richard Burton Film, The Hollywood Reporter,
August 24, 1965.
41. A Topless Liz Promised by WB, Weekly Variety, November 21, 1966.
42. After a brief run, 100 of the tinted prints were pulled from theaters and replaced by 250
full color ones. See W7 Heeds Demand, Makes 250 Tint Print of Reflections Avail-
able, Variety, November 13, 1967. The special color process was itself reported on by
American Cinematographer in December 1967.
43. Golden Eye Gets Mature Code Seal; Wont Make Cuts, Variety, September 6,
1967.
44. MPPA files on Reflections in a Golden Eye, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
45. Pressbook, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
46. The controversy over that ad line was itself covered in the trade press. See W7 Thinks
Better of Its Dirty as Sell Copy for Golden Eye, Variety, October 25, 1967.
47. Allen Eyles, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Films and Filming, May 1968, 24.
48. Reported about a New York Post essay in the Motion Picture Herald, November 1, 1967.
49. Murf., review of Reflections in a Golden Eye, Variety, October 11, 1967.
50. Review of Reflections in a Golden Eye, Cue, October 21, 1967.
51. Charles Champlin, Reflections Tours the Southern Gothic Style, Los Angeles Times
Calendar, October 8, 1967, 14.

The Pre-Stonewall Holly wo od Homo-Military Film 93

 52. Program notes for a screening at the American Cinematheque, February 11, 2001, Mar-
garet Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
53. Press book, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
54. P.K., Sergeant Star Says Film Not Unnatural, San Francisco Chronicle, October 19,
1968.
55. Peter Davis Dibble, Film: The Sergeant, Womens Wear Daily, October 26, 1968, 29.
Bold print in original.
56. Under the National Catholic Organizations rating scheme, A-III designated a film as
suitable for adults only. MPPA files on The Sergeant, Margaret Herrick Library, Los
Angeles.
57. Stanley Kauffmann, On Films, New Republic, January 25, 1969.
58. Vincent Canby, Review of The Sergeant, New York Times, November 21, 1968. Simi-
larly, the Hollywood Reporter complained that there is a dialogue between Law and
Steiger during which Steiger taps a rather blatantly symbolic tattoo on a beer bottle
as they speak. Even in full shot, the hand business is highlighted and the overstressed
sound further draws attention from every other element in the overextended sequence.
Afraid we may have missed the only thing in the scene that hasnt been missed, [direc-
tor] Flynn repeats the action in a hand close-up (John Mahoney, W7s Sergeant Artie
BO; Vixen for Skin Trenches, Hollywood Reporter, October 28, 1968).
59. Kevin Thomas, Sergeant on Screen of Picwood Theater, Los Angeles Times, Decem-
ber 24, 1968.
60. Richard Gertner, review of The Sergeant, Motion Picture Herald, December 4, 1968, 71.
61. New Films: The Sergeant, Cue, January 4, 1969.
62. Arthur Knight, SR Goes to the Movies, Saturday Review, January 4, 1969.
63. Elsa, The Showmens Trade Reviews: The Sergeant, Motion Picture Exhibitor, Decem-
ber 25, 1968.
64. Review of The Sergeant, Playboy, February 1969.
65. John Mahoney, The Gay Deceivers Offers an Alternative to Canada, Hollywood Re-
porter, June 5, 1969.
66. The Gay Deceivers press book, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
67. Kevin Thomas, Gay Deceivers at Two Southland Sites, Los Angeles Times, July 16,
1969.
68. Dean Holzapple, Gay Deceivers Proves Hilarious, Hollywood Citizen-News, July 18,
1969.
69. Catholic Newsletter, July 1969, MPAA file on The Gay Deceivers, Margaret Herrick
Library, Los Angeles.
70. J. R., Gay Deceivers: With So Many Faults, Why Is It So Funny? Advocate, September
1969, 31.
71. I have been unable to find any evidenceeither concrete or circumstantialthat might

94 Harry M. Benshoff
 suggest that director Bruce Kessler, producer Joe Solomon, or writers Gil Lasky, Abe
Polsky, and Jerome Wish were anything but heterosexual. Each of them worked pri-
marily in television or low-budget filmmaking.
72. Francis O. Beermann, The Gay Deceivers, Film Daily, June 23, 1969.
73. Russo, The Celluloid Closet, 186.
74. Review of The Gay Deceivers, Boxoffice, June 11, 1969. The press book for another Greer
film, Fortune and Mens Eyes (1971), alleges that 1960s bercritic Andrew Sarris felt
Greer should have been nominated for an Oscar for his role in The Gay Deceivers.
75. Reported in Pansies Picket Opening of Gay Film in Frisco, Variety, July 18, 1969.
76. Reported in ibid.
77. Similarly, Boston After Dark commented that the film might indicate an important cul-
tural shift in how the gay community was being treated: If the public is ready to laugh
at them they may be ready to stop persecuting them. Tom Ramage, Gay Deceivers
Film: Tis Gay to be Fey for Fun and Profit, Boston After Dark, September 20, 1969.
78. Review of The Gay Deceivers, Boxoffice, June 11, 1969.
79. J. R., Gay Deceivers, 31.
80. R. H. Gardner, Satirical Film Cites One Way to Beat the Draft, Baltimore Sun, Sep-
tember 26, 1969.
81. John Mahoney, The Gay Deceivers.
82. R. H. Gardner, Satirical Film.
83. Tyler, Screening the Sexes, 249.
84. Jack Babuscio, Screen Gays: Military Masks.
85. Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 72.
86. Ibid., 110.

The Pre-Stonewall Holly wo od Homo-Military Film 95

Chuck Kleinhans

Pornography and Documentary Narrating the Alibi

F rom its beginnings, photography braided documentary form

and sexual content, using pin-up and pornographic images
of female performers and prostitutes. The introduction of mov-
ing images continued this paired development and the inter-
woven nature of the erotic and the factual. We know that this
pairing goes back to the origins of cinema, when Maxim Gorky
notes that he first saw the Cinematograph in a brothel, or when
Edisons twenty-second film, The Kiss (1896), was denounced
as obscene. The pattern continues. Today in the United States
on the most successful subscription cable channel, Home Box
Office (HBO), the most productive programming area is HBO
documentary (gaining the greatest viewership for the lowest
production costs). The most successful HBO documentary series
is Real Sex, a one-hour program typically featuring four to six
short documentary segments covering such topics as an adult
masturbation club or a manufacturer of extremely realistic sex
toys or mannequins. Also in the United States, the music video
channels MTV and VH-1 regularly produce sex-themed docu-
mentaries, including a survey of porn stars who appear in rock
videos and a depiction of how young women can audition for
hard-core pornography videos in Los Angeles. The broadcast
networks have followed suit and presented occasional inves-
tigative documentaries on aspects of the sex industry. In each
Figure 1 Highly rated HBO series like Real Sex and Cathouse (above) continue a
documentary tradition as old as Edisons notorious film of 1896, The Kissthe cinematic
documentation of sexual practice.

of these, the content is sex, employing a transgressive voyeurism showing us

what is normally censored, but at the same time marking the transgression with
digital blurs of nipples and butt cracks. The defense of this forbidden content
is the documentary form itself: documentarys gravity, the discourse of so-
briety, provides the excuse that allows the naughty content to appear in the
public sphere with little controversy.
To say this is to restate commonplace observations. First, even when pre-
sented as dramatic fictional narrative or as freewheeling fantasy, pornography
has a fundamental core of documentation: this is it, this is sex, this is what it
looks like. Second, one legal defense of pornography has been precisely its edu-
cational possibility; thus pornographers have often tried to evade censorship
by explicitly presenting sexual images as factual documentation (or sometimes
as art). My interest here is to move beyond these well-marked points and ex-
tend recent work. What happens when documentaries move beyond their usual
sober realism directed at significant social matters to more bizarre, eccentric,
and low subject matter? Further, in such sleazy voyeurism, what is the role of
the narrator, almost always present in voice, if not in onscreen person? What
are the politics of the alibi?

P orno graphy and D o cumentary 97

 I take it as axiomatic that sleaze, as understood by both makers and audi-
ences, depends on an understanding of existing conventions and also on a sense
of those conventions being worn out. The voice of sleaze in documentary is
always cynical.1 Therefore, looking at one key element in most sleazy documen-
tariesthe narratorshould help us better understand these works and, not so
incidentally, more fully comprehend narration in mainstream documentaries
as well. The narrator, whether appearing only in off-screen voice or in person
on-screen, is a presence between the screen sound and image and the audi-
ence. Understanding the margins, the limit cases, always clarifies the center,
the norm, and normal, and underlines the social construction of both. To ad-
vance this analysis, I will examine several particular cases and arrange their dis-
cussion chronologically. However, my main interest is in constructing a critical
typology of sleazy narrator styles rather than a true history of development and
change. This survey (with several detours) should allow a conclusion about the
aesthetic politics of sleazy documentary.

An Aside on Sleaze

What do I mean by sleazy? Ill offer a working definition here and return to the
question of definition in conclusion. Sleazy in current usage refers to something
disgusting, filthy, nasty; that is, it has the connotation of being low culturally
and morally. In current British usage the word is often used in discussions of
politics to refer to politicians compromised by payoffs, graft, or mercenary ac-
tions overriding law, principle, or the common good. And the term is often
present in making distinctions about sexual matters: sleazy means sexually pro-
miscuous, sexually active without discrimination.
In an earlier essay, I distinguished a tendency in popular commercial art
that I called self-aware kitsch.2 These texts are filled with parodic clichs and
depend on exaggerating and underlining, thus setting up a camp response, as in
the heightened bedroom-and-boardroom television series Dynasty. Following
Susan Sontags discussion of camp and significant gay/queer critical elabora-
tions of the concept, high camp can be seen as a strategy for ironic and comic
reading of the highly aestheticized (The Importance of Being Earnest, the typical
staging of Verdi operas, Cole Porter lyrics, etc.).3 Low camp, or trash, can be a
strategy for celebrating the debased: in the counterculture avant-garde (early

98Chuc k Kleinha ns
John Waters films, Jack Smith, George Kuchar) and in the commercial cinema
(Dumb and Dumber [1994], American Pie [1999]).
Sleaze, then, is used pejoratively, judgmentally. It depends on making cul-
tural distinctions (understanding distinction as a class and cultural term, as in
Pierre Bourdieus definition).4 Essentially ironic, it depends on looking down
on something. In the case of the work considered here, there is also a strong
sense that the sleazy work is crass, that it is not sincere but is adopting what-
ever ethical and moral stance it has simply to exploit its subject. A classic ex-
ample can be found in the scenes of slave trading in Mondo Freudo (1966) and
Mondo Bizarro (1966). These fake documentaries purport to show the auction-
ing of (mostly) women in Mexico and Lebanon. The scenes are patently staged
(Lebanon is a well-known Los Angelesarea location, Bronson Canyon). The
slaves are disrobed, to display female breasts, but genitals are obscured with
scratched-on censor bars, thus implying that the female pubic area (viewed in
a distant telephoto image) is more shocking than trading in humans. If we as-
sumed the documentation was genuine, the filmmakers moral/ethical stance
is obviously questionable in that they simply record and do not intervene in
the moment of the sale, nor do they provide their cinematography as evidence
to the police or other authorities, nor do they publicize what is going on to the
press or social and political organizations. Mondo Bizarro actually goes so far as
to have an extended sequence showing the camera crews heroic efforts to move
their heavy equipment to a hilltop, using a block and tackle and sledge, for
secret telephoto filming of slave trading. Clearly the aim of the slavery sections
is not justice or human sympathy for (fictional) victims, but simply to show
something sensational, titillating (and tits), combining this with a pompous
voice-over narration that makes a feeble attempt to justify it as information.5
With sleaze, the joke, the demeaning part, is on the audience.

1960s exploitation

Mondo Freudo and Mondo Bizarro follow after Mondo Cane, an internationally
successful sensationalist documentary phenomenon from 1962.6 Cheaply made
rip-offs, they belong economically and industrially to the exploitation film mar-
ket. The exploitation film has roots in the fairground show, the circus sideshow,
and the traveling carnival. The carnival pitchmans basic plan is this: (1) gather

P orno graphy and D o cumentary 99

a crowd; (2) promise them something sensational; (3) get their money; and
(4) fool them and get away. At its worst-intentioned, in the classic con job, the
mark is left at the end so confused, embarrassed, humiliated, or compromised
that he does not go to the police or authorities to complain (and this is rela-
tively easy when the content is sexual). But there is also a much milder version
of exploitation, closer to P. T. Barnums celebrated humbug effect. Barnum
observed and exploited the fact that if the deception was done in a fairly jovial,
over-the-top manner, marks would gladly pay to observe the fraudulent and
leave amused rather than outraged.7
Building on this exploitation tradition, the Mondo films of the 1960s simply
adapted this con to new technologies, audiences, and rationales.8 In Mondo
Freudo, for example, the filmmakers purportedly explore a world of nude per-
formance, topless-dancing night clubs, and other sexual scenes, using the pre-
tense of a journalistic investigation into unusual social behaviors to present
mostly fake scenarios (created and performed only for this film). During this
period, the only legitimate legal defense against obscenity in the United States
was to claim artistic, social, scientific, or educational value in exhibiting nudity
(the juridical constraint on media circulation). It would take tortured logic to
claim scientific or educational value for this material, and it would be difficult
to claim it was art (at least as art was understood by most people and the judi-
cial system at the time). Therefore it was safest to claim value in social investi-
gation: the social sciences and investigative journalism come to the rescue of
sexual looking. (We might note that in 1960s America, after the basic college
introductory course, the favorite sociology course for undergraduates on many
campuses was Sociology of Deviance, often known by campus slang as Nuts
and Sluts.)9
Following the model of Mondo Cane, Mondo Freudo offers an anthology
of unusual activities and behaviors, mostly centered around some form or
another of sexual display, which in the mid-1960s world of U.S. theatrical
cinema meant bare breasts. In an early sequence, Mondo Freudo purports to
show night vision images of heterosexual couples caressing on a beach in Los
Angeles. Ordinary young people are thus presented as ethnographic Others.10
The film then shows teenagers gathering on Hollywood Boulevard and driv-
ing around in vehicles (using poorly executed, very cheap location footage shot

100Chuck Kleinhans
without sound) followed by footage of various nightclubs, with local variations
and restrictions on nudity and dancing. But from the very beginning, an off-
screen narrator marks the visuals with an ironic tone:

Long Shot: ocean beach from palisades above.

Male Voice-Over:
It is Saturday afternoon in Southern California. A lazy summer afternoon,
and on this day some 25,000 people will come onto this beach for fun and
relaxation. Our cameraman has established a vantage point on a hill high
above the beach.
Medium Shot (man removes lens from case):
This is a 1000-millimeter telescopic lens with a telebar attachment devel-
oped by Burns and Sawyer Cine Equipment Rental of Hollywood. The unit
is equal to a 1,700-millimeter lens. The lens is being mounted on an Arriflex
model 11B 35-millimeter motion picture camera. This camera and lens will
provide you with the majority of what you are about to see in the film. They
will give you a long close-up look at our society. This lens and this camera
will be your eyes to peer into Mondo Freudoa Freudian world of sex and
sex symbols and the strange and unusual laws that govern them. (Surfer
sound music up.)
Credits begin, alternated with daylight telephoto shots of people on the
beach.

In addition to a montage of telephoto shots of ordinary people on the beach,

medium shots show the removal of the long lens, which is then mounted on the
camera. The voice-overs recitation of details such as the length of the lens and
the name of the equipment rental company (still in business today) grounds
the images with selective fact, giving the film an aura of investigative truth (and
most likely also a rental discount for promoting the equipment house).
While the film claims to show Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Ham-
burg, and Kyoto (a kind of comparative ethnography of strip clubs), the claims
become suspect when you notice that London has the same tablecloth pat-
terns as Los Angeles, and that Hamburg is identified only by common travel
posters on the wall of an inexpensive set. A topless dancer in Los Angeles
appears to also be (magically) in the audience in London. Similarly, the film

P orno graphy and D o cumentary 101

claims that it is showing us a public wall where London prostitutes freely adver-
tise, but the location is the mythological space of Piccadilly Square.11
The title sequence in Mondo Bizarro, meanwhile, purports to show a hidden
camera view inside a lingerie store; the voice-over narrator tells us its the east
side of Chicago (another mythical place, since the east side of Chicago is Lake
Michigan).12 The narrator explains the camera is behind a two-way mirror (a
disconcertingly weird detailone would expect a one-way mirror) and that the
filmmakers were forced to censor the models faces. This censorship is accom-
plished visually by scratches on the film to obliterate the eyes).13 Here a parade
of women remove their clothes and try on different bras to peculiar changes
of music, producing a weird musical collage. After this introductory credit se-
quence with fictitious crew names and acknowledgments to imaginary organi-
zations (apparently to make the production seem more impressive), there fol-
lows a shot of a slowly turning and badly rendered handmade globe. A male
voice-over intones a nonsensical epistemological statement: To the worm in
the cheese, the cheese is the universe. To the maggot in the cadaver, the cadaver
is infinity. And to you, what is your world? How do you know what is beyond
the Beyond? Most of us dont even know what is behind the Beyond.
In both films, the unseen Mondo narrator recites his facts to us in an un-
even rhetorical stance. At times the voice-over seems to give unnecessarily spe-
cific factual details (the 1000-mm lens with the telebar attachment) and at other
times it simply lies about what is on screen. Thus in Mondo Freudo, after the
daylight shots of the beach, a camera assistant is shown rigging a pitifully small
scoop reflector light while the narrator describes it as an infrared night vision
apparatus that will allow the surreptitious night filming. At other times, the
narrator presents as fact statements that, upon reflection, seem incredible. In
Mondo Bizarro, for example, over some standard tourist shots of urban areas
in the Bahamas, the narrator explains that the former African slaves still prac-
tice voodoo on the island and promises that the telephoto lens will reveal a
secret nighttime ceremony. The xenophobic narration contrasts the presently
civilized everyday appearance of Bahamians with their wild and primitive an-
cestors, claiming that in the past celebrants sacrificed a white baby in such
ceremonies (but today substitute a white chicken). Yet simple reason would as-
sume that in a slave culture with a small group of white settlers and a large black

102Chuck Kleinha ns
population, the whites could hardly produce enough babies for the frequent
ceremonies. Moreover, even if this incredible event did happen, even just once,
the immense power differential between colonialists and slaves would produce
swift and severe punishment, making it impossible for any voodoo cultists to
maintain the practice. In the end, what we actually see is a distant group danc-
ing around a fire at night, and possibly the beheading of a fowl and the sacrifice
of a large snake (though it could easily be a fakeperhaps a length of rope). The
real content, however, is a racist fantasy of an African threat concocted from
tourist footage, staged dancing, and shaping powers of the offscreen narrator.

Historical Side Trip:

God Interpellates the Audience

The classic off-screen narrator is often called the Voice of God, since the audi-
ence hears his pronouncements without seeing the embodied speaker. Usually
this is a male voice with deep tones, sure phrasing, and an educated accent,
which in the United States often means a hint of British intonation or a voice
that seems trained for stage delivery. Through wartime and postwar educational
materials, audiences in the military, industry, and schools became extremely
habituated to such narration, or even a single omnipresent voice talent. In
Canada, for example, actor Lorne Greene (later best known as the family patri-
arch in the popular television western series, Bonanza) was the standard stento-
rian offscreen voice for a generation of National Film Board documentaries.
Having grown up with this convention, it is easy to see why a younger gen-
eration of documentary filmmakers, especially in the 1960s, were eager to move
away from this kind of authoritative (even authoritarian) voice. They chose to
work instead in classic Direct Cinema style, employing a narrational style that
seemed to eschew such external authority. This often involved placing the nar-
rator on screen, either on location as an on-the-spot investigator or as a relay
for eyewitness accounts. In this respect, the narrator becomes a more embodied
character, a teller of the tale who, though perhaps unreliable, allowed the audi-
ence to better gauge his veracity.
Both forms of narration, however, demonstrate cinematic strategies for
adapting the older form and forum of the public lecture. In the United States
in particular, the public lecture blossomed in the nineteenth century with the

P orno graphy and D o cumentary 103

Chautauqua and other forms of informational address. In a society that stressed
public education, literacy, and democratic citizenship (for white men), the pub-
lic lecture, like political oratory and religious preaching, served an epistophilic
function. The serious voice-over narrator in documentary media began with
the nineteenth-century slide-lecture show and continued with the live voice-
over narration of film travelogues before the advent of the sync-sound film.
Typically, the presenter, posed as an educated gentleman, narrated trips to
civilized places and adventures in exotic locales. Visiting the Holy Land was
a favorite lecture topic in Middle America, and like the rhetoric of National
Geographic, the presentations usually mixed a quasi-intellectual edification
with banal imperial tourism. In a lecture with a slide show or silent film, the
voice appeared embodied in the initial setup but then became simply a pres-
ence in the dark that explained the visuals. The same model developed as well in
broadcast journalism that followed prints eyewitness reportage model.14 The
defining moment took place in the mid-1930s with the transformation of the
March of Time documentary to a voice-over format, abandoning its origins as
a silent film short (with intertitles) that followed the editorial lead and style of
Time magazine. The announcer, Westbrook Van Voorhis, quickly became rec-
ognizable delivering Time-speak voice-overs for the monthly series. A New
Republic critic made the analogy to a god explicit: Just such a voice . . . would
have been hired to speak the lines of one of Euripides suave male godsthose
gods who appeared so opportunely at the end of a tragedy when everything was
going up in flames and agnosticism, and explained matters away. Nobody has
ever been quite sure what those gods believed in or whether they even believed
in themselves; and this gives them a real affinity with the voice that does the
talking for the March of Time.15 Within the business, Van Voorhis was dubbed
the voice of fate, and by the late 1930s, comedians often imitated his distinc-
tive style. At the same time, U.S. radio drama flourished, often using the an-
nouncer as a prime character, voice, and organizing presence in the narration,
as in much of Orson Welless radio work of the period.
By the time the Mondo films adopted this convention in the early 1960s, the
voice of God was a well-established and familiar device. The authoritarian voice,
delivered in the same implacable tone across a diversity of topics, has over the
years led to a perhaps inevitably ironic, even cynical audience response. Indeed,

104 Chuck Kleinhans

Figure 2 Lobby card for Time magazines famous March of Time series,
which established Westbrook Van Voorhis as the documentary forms voice
of fate.

even in the 1940s, the mock March of Time newsreel at the start of Citizen Kane
(1941) was as much a parody of these conventions as mere exposition, a satiric
aspect usually lost on todays audience.16 This irony becomes especially salient
when the subject turns from the recitation of dry facts to advising on matters
of policy and personal behavior. The voice of God in classroom scare films,
for example, is often a target of derision, laughter, and outright hostility as it
moralistically lectures teens about reckless driving, drug use, alcohol abuse, or
premarital sex.
In the classic voice-of-God vehicle, then, a disembodied voice provides
an authoritative interpretation of the images on screen. The Mondo films, on
the other hand, frequently revel in contradicting the narrators discursive so-
briety. For example, in a Mondo Bizarro segment on Fredericks of Hollywood
(the mail-order store of sexy womens underwear), we meet designer/owner
Mr. Frederick, who demonstrates such items as cutaway-rear girdles that pro-
duce round rather than flat buttocks (illustrated with a live model). Many other
types of underclothing are exhibited as well, including brassieres incorporating
novelties such as cutout tips, cutaway tops, and inflatable cups (shown repeat-

P orno graphy and D o cumentary 105

edly with the wearer blowing into a plastic tube to enlarge the appearance).
The sequence ends as the narrator proclaims an industrial symphony: there
follows a poorly executed montage sequence of the shipping room efficiently
sending off orders, accompanied by the strains of Beethovens Fifth Symphony.
Thus does Mondo Bizarro capture the heroic grandeur of shipping womens
underwear!
Is such a narrational inte rjection telling us something we dont know, in-
dulging our epistephilia? In Mondo Freudos time it was widely known that
some cities had topless dancing, and it was simple to obtain a copy of Playboy if
one wanted to see bare breasts. What exactly does this comic voice of God add
to this cinematic parade of (near) nudity? Echoing Barnums humbug effect,
the narrators voice and persona is that of a carnival pitchman with a touch
of (usually jovial) condescension. I will call this narrative device reverse dis-
avowal: I know this is fake, but I still want to see it. The audience knows it is
seeing not some actuality but an event staged for the camerawhich is the basic
technique of most U.S. newsreels in celebrity and staged-publicity events.17 But
the audience doesnt necessarily resent this kind of deception, since the film
and its narrator are also giving it something else: a pretext for indulging its
voyeurism while also leaving room for an ironic response. In other words, the
film offers the viewer a desirable spectatorial position of amusement, curiosity,
and visual pleasure in a quasi-dramatized cinema. The Mondo films encourage
viewers to laugh at, or along with, the voice of sobriety: the narrator pre-
tends to be serious, but we know his presence merely provides an excuse for the
images on screen. We are drawn into the narrators attitudelet me show you
this strange thing or event. We agree and accept the contract because it gives us
the gratification of naughty transgression in the mocking guise of epistophilic
discovery.
This strategy of reverse disavowal is a prominent feature of many current
reality television programs, especially the Mondo-like forum of The Jerry
Springer Show. Here a series of people visibly and behaviorally marked as low-
class are brought forward to behave badly in front of a jeering audience (who
are themselves marked as low-class) and enact various scenarios of abjection
in public. Momentary fame overcomes any sense of pain or shame. The basic
gesture is flaunting ones attitude. In addition to the shows female guests often

10 6C huck Kleinhans
Figure 3 Jerry Springer: inheritor of Barnums humbug effect and a
central practitioner of reverse disavowal in current reality television.

displaying their breasts (digitally blurred), recently Springer has addedin a

nod to the incredible popularity of the Girls Gone Wild video seriesaudience
participants who spontaneously flash and flaunt in order to get a string of cheap
beads from the shows staff. As an onscreen narrator and provocateur, Springer
ends each show with his Final Thoughts, sham moralizing that once again
justifies the preceding charade as edifying.
We doubt these narratorswe are skeptical, we know that we may be put on,
cheated, taken advantage of. But we want it. We can enjoy the rogue, especially
if he is charming. We want the forbidden; at the same time we also see it as
somewhat ridiculous or, in the Mondo case, juvenile, especially in its portrait of
heterosexual masculinity. As we look at the displays of sexy underwear and the
industrial symphony of underwear shipping in Mondo Bizarro, our response
today can only be camp. In their own time, however, these Mondo films also
allowed for a campy pleasure, since the narrator, even in his cynicism, pre-
tends to address an impossibly naive viewer. As in the pitch of the carnival
sideshow, they employ the mechanism (detailed by Freud) of being in on the
smutty joke.18 The pleasure, then, is not in knowing or learning, but in sincerely
appreciating the spectacle even as we ironically revel in the lowbrow tackiness

P orno graphy and D o cumentary 107

of the presentationimagining an absent viewer who would actually fall prey
to the narrators absurd claims. Much like current fascination with supermarket
tabloids that promise new and lurid exposs, Mondo viewers, both then and
now, enjoy a smarty-pants pleasure that presumes a naive viewer who prob-
ably never existed.

Ripe Danish Blue

While Mondo Freudo and Mondo Bizarro clearly, often comically, convey cyni-
cism in their narration, Sexual Freedom in Denmark (1970) instead presents an
apparently sincere discourse on the public sphere, only occasionally betraying
a mercenary voyeurism. The commercially successful film played fairly widely
in porn/adult venues in the early 1970s, just as more explicit foreign dramatic
fictional films, such as I Am Curious Yellow (1969), were achieving wider exhibi-
tion as court decisions gradually opened the field of legal content. Documen-
tarians could exploit this new environment by arguing that their films didnt
show anything more than the fiction films that were being defended as cine-
matic art.
Sexual Freedom in Denmark uses an off-screen narrator whose voice quali-
ties are similar to those of narrators for standard educational/informative
documentary essay films of the time. This quietly stated aura of professionalism
smooths the films style and contextualizes the explicit visual content within the
norms of good taste, a device that, in turn, potentially broadens the audience.
Rather than play in the male-only porn venues of the 1960s, the film could thus
cross over to the growing and crucially important couples market of the early
1970s.
The film itself presents a pastiche of various types of exploitation documen-
taries. We hear a lecture about representations of sex within the history of art
while we see still images from art books. At times the narrator argues that most
of societys illsincluding war, overpopulation (and thus starvation), prosti-
tution, venereal disease (with a close-up of a syphilitic penis) and so forth
are due to sexual repression. Various heroes are mentioned: Freud, Kinsey, and
Masters and Johnson. Other passages describe with visual support the joys of
nudism, the presence of sexualized images in print advertising, and the recent
history of image and performance censorship (which provides an opportunity

108Chuck Kleinhans
to show topless and bottomless dancing). The films long conclusion presents
an elaborate sex-education segment that includes images of an egg entering the
fallopian tubes, microscopic sperm, a zygote dividing, different forms of birth,
anatomy lessons, demonstrations of Kegel exercises, and the mechanics of vari-
ous methods of birth control. In addition, the section contains a fairly complete
depiction of heterosexual intercourse using live models shot in negative-space
studio settings with soft focus of various sexual positions. This sequence is inter-
cut with drawings giving cutaway views of the penis in the vagina. Combining
science, medicine, practical advice, and soft romantic images of young couples
in coitus, the film combines older exploitation forms with the new limits of
protected content in the 1970s. The narrator is key to unifying these disparate
documentary forms, bringing the film in line with the eras liberal agenda in
progressive sex education.
The films title cues its most peculiar aspect. Intercut with the standard ex-
ploitation fare are recurring on-the-scene reports from Denmark addressing
assorted topics related to the then-recent liberalization of Danish censorship
laws. During this period, sexual liberalization advocates in the United States
frequently referred to Denmark as a positive example, particularly for a re-
ported decline in sex crimes following legalization of explicit pornography.19
Reinforcing this image of a progressive, well-adjusted, and sexually active Den-
mark, the onscreen male reporter interviews a range of subjects discussing an
array of sexual controversies (at least in the United States). In one on-the-street
interview, for example, a young woman explains in front of a crowd of passersby
that she and her unmarried friends are sexually active but have no access to
legal abortion and if needed have to go to the East countries (apparently Asia)
for the procedure. The reporter mentions Poland as another possibility. On the
set of a porn film, our interviewer (now hatless, revealing an odd male pattern
baldness that underlines his middle-aged nerdiness) talks to the filmmaker and
then several nude women during a break. He asks about how much money they
make, if they have boyfriends, and the age at which they first had intercourse.
One model places her arm over his shoulder, laughing, perhaps smirking, at
him. A female fashion model is asked the same questions. A male research psy-
chologist discusses the decrease in sex crimes after legalizing pornography, and
a female journalist discusses laws and policies affecting youth. She shows a new

P orno graphy and D o cumentary 109

sex education book for teens that includes images of masturbation, use of a dia-
phragm for birth control, and an erect penis and close-up of a clitoris. She ar-
gues for future increased liberalization including education in sexual technique
to increase female orgasms and produce more happiness.
Overall, the narrators tone in Sexual Freedom in Denmark strives for dis-
passionate professionalism. At key moments, however, disparities between this
sober narration and images on the screen allow the film to drift into sleaze. As
the narrator begins reading the Biblical creation story, for example, the image
shows an attractive couple with contemporary hairstyles strolling nude in a for-
est setting. Discussion of legal changes in Denmark is accompanied by images
of (presumed) Danes on a nude beach, and then later revelers frolicking naked
on a small sailing ship in what amounts to the basic soft-core sunbathing foot-
age seen in so many other exploitation titles. Later, as the narrator discusses the
open sale of pornography in Copenhagen, we see exterior shots of shops before
cutting to an interior where a female in a revealing mesh body stocking re-
tails magazines to a male purchaser. Illustrations from porno magazines, nude
females being body painted, and topless/bottomless performers illustrate other
sequences of factual narration. While not accommodating the cynical hilarity
of the Mondo films, Sexual Freedom in Denmark nevertheless allows viewers to
adopt dual reading strategies, attending to either the sober discourse on sexual
policy or the titillation of forbidden spectacle (or both).

The On-screen Expert in Decline

While Sexual Freedom in Denmark is staged as an informative, expository docu-

mentary, The Postgraduate Course in Sexual Love (1970) employs the ruse of a
college classroom in which a Professor Collins lectures a group of students,
mostly about sexual techniques. Here the lectures exposition provides the alibi
for very low budget sex scenes typical of 1970s porno films. His lecture begins
with a review of previous lectures and a slide show of obscene art through
the ages. Then the professor introduces the days topic: sexual activity. As he
discusses his topic, the camera zooms in on the faces of students who are then
shown demonstrating whatever behavior the professors voice-over describes.
The film thus faintly borders on the magical, as if simply hearing an abstract
medical lecture would stimulate students into fantasizing a detailed scenario.

110 Chuck Kl einha ns

Alternatively, we could assume that the students are recalling events (and thus
indicating that the students know more than the professor, at least in terms of
carnal knowledge). The sex scenes are shot without sync sound in medium long
shot with occasional zooms, accompanied by postdubbed sounds of groans,
moans, and West Coast acid rock. The lecture is mildly progressive in its sexual
politics: students are encouraged to experiment before marriage, men are en-
couraged to use much foreplay with female partners, and variety is endorsed
throughout. After a scene featuring two gay men, the professors Vietnam-era
politics come into play as he points out that two men having sex can be jailed
while one man killing another in combat will be rewarded. After a final orgy
with three heterosexual couples awkwardly coupling on one double bed, the
bell signaling the end of class sounds. But the professor insists the students stay
for a short film on venereal disease. This film-within-a-film describes the need
to Fight Love Pollution as a pipe-smoking doctor advises a young couple
about the dangers and prevention of syphilis and gonorrhea, including the
required worst-case close-ups and illustrations of advanced stages of disease.
With charts he marks a recent rise of syphilis, which he directly links to the
Vietnam War.
The Postgraduate Course in Sexual Love thus relies on two narrators, Profes-
sor Collins and the anonymous pipe-smoking doctor of the VD film-within-
the-film. Each serves as an authority figure, of sorts, although operating in dif-
ferent discursive contexts. Like much sexploitation cinema, the movie uses a
standard VD-warning film to pad out its length with more sexual content,
in the process bringing the onscreen authority of the MD in contact with his
more comic embodiment in the character of the professor. With the professor,
slight smirks among the students (setting up transitions from lecture material
to fantasy, memory, or anticipation) seem possibly to undercut his absolute au-
thority (as do the sex scenes, which demonstrate they have already mastered
the material). With the MD, on the other hand, the couple takes every admoni-
tion as a strict rule. When the female partner complains her guy was sleeping
around with some tramp and brought the disease home to her, the doctor uses
his authority to stop this quarrel and focus on preventive medicine and proper
treatment. Through this basic juxtaposition of medical and soft-core footage,
the film inadvertently demonstrates the eroding authority of the on-screen nar-

P orno graphy and D o cumentary 111

 Figure 4 Ad copy for The
Postgraduate Course in Sexual
Love (1970), a film with two
narrators operating in very
different discursive contexts.

rator as an absolute arbiter of sexual knowledge. The expert becomes merely a

comic pretext for motivating sexual spectacle.
Doris Wishmans infamous transsexual documentary Let Me Die a Woman
(1977) presents a similar crisis of authority for the onscreen narrator, a conflict
once again provoked by the presence of an MD within more mercenary ex-
ploitation fare. This expert, Dr. Wollman, invokes medical discourse and sexual
science to promote a sympathetic understanding of transsexualism. But Wish-
man, a veteran of such exploitation subgenres as the nudist-camp film and the
roughie, constantly undermines the doctors discourse of tolerance with foot-
age that presents transsexuals as freaks and staged episodes that exploit tran-
sexualism for sensationalistic effect. At one point, Let Me Die a Woman fea-
tures a heartfelt interview with Leslie, a young Puerto Rican woman who tells
a story of childhood gender dysphoria, the transformation process, her cur-
rent postoperative situation, and her optimistic hope for an ovary and uterus
transplant. Yet, to increase its exploitative appeal, the film also inserts explicit

112Chuck Kleinha ns
 Figure 5 Ad art for Doris
Wishmans infamous Let Me Die
a Woman (1977). The disjointed
film combines a putative call
for tolerance of transsexuals
with exploitative images
of sex-change surgery and
reenactments of prostitution,
self-mutilation, and suicide.

surgical footage of a male-to-female operation. The original version of the film

also included a bloody reenactment of a desperate male who began to cut off
his own penis and testicles (a procedure finished in a hospital when the fellow
collapsed).20 There is also a staged sequence of a female transsexual picking up
a man in Central Park. After their sexual encounter, she shocks the viewer by
removing her underpants to reveal a small penis.
Dr. Wollman is charged with the responsibility of weaving these disparate
segments together. Even with this familiar device, however, the current version
of the film is particularly disjointed, and I surmise from internal evidence that
reels have been placed in the wrong order, increasing the films disorientation.21
Shot over a five-year period, Let Me Die a Woman is riddled with continuity
errors as Wollman attempts to connect anatomy lectures, personal stories, dra-
matic reenactments, medical footage, anatomical demonstrations, and footage
from Wishmans previous films. Though a documentary, the film nevertheless
exhibits many of the trademark stylistic quirks of Wishmans narrative films,

P orno graphy and D o cumentary 113

most notably her penchant for awkward postdubbed dialogue and frequent
cutaways to seemingly meaningless objects in the mise-en-scne. This clumsy
aspect of the film enhances its aura of sleaziness, especially in the inelegant
juxtaposition of the MDs authoritative call for tolerance and understanding
(supported by the affecting testimony of actual transsexuals) with footage of
cheap porn, anatomical close-ups, penile surgery, and sensationalistic reenact-
ments of prostitution, self-mutilation, and suicide. The film is striking for its
ironic contrast of the on-screen experts good intentions and the exploitation
tactics of shock, cheap sensationalism, freakishness, and prurient voyeurism.

The Sleazy Narrator

As these examples of 1960s documentary exploitation demonstrate, the putative

authority and discernable earnestness of a narrator (on- or off-screen) is often
unable to withstand the crisis presented by the trashy, suspect, and incongruous
images of exploitation cinema. While it would be easy to dismiss these films
(and their narrators) as examples of pure, naive camp, the strategies deployed
by these stylistically diverse films suggest a more complex relationship between
filmmaker, subject, and audience. I argued earlier that sleaze is marked in a
way that reveals the makers cynical nature; therefore it is a matter of nuance
and interpretation, most often cued by form. In its documentary form, perceiv-
ing sleaze depends on both the narrators relationship to the material and the
audiences perception of the filmmakers relationship to the narrator. It con-
trasts with naive camp, which is often inept but sincere (with the gap between
intention and ability providing the irony and humor). The classic example here
is Ed Woods Glen or Glenda (1953), where the directors obsessive concern to
portray male transvestism as normal, socially acceptable, and in no way related
to homosexuality collides with clumsy and cheap filmmaking techniques. Nor
does sleaze mirror the deliberate trash stance of Pink Flamingoes (1972) or The
Devils Cleavage (1975), films that invite the audience to play along with the film-
makers own delight in being bad, violating norms of good taste, and reveling
in general outrageousness.
In contrast to the dramatic fictions of Wood, Waters, and Kuchar, the autho-
rial presences of the sleazy documentaries Im discussing here reveal their cyni-
cal and mercenary intent largely though the voice-over or on-screen narrators

11 4 C huck Kleinha ns
Figure 6 An impassioned plea for the public acceptance of transvestism, Ed
Woods Glen or Glenda (1953) avoids sleaziness by virtue of its navet and ineptitude.

themselves. The films break down in the narrators inability to bring a convinc-
ing unity or purpose to their disparate elements of actuality footage, awkward
reenactments, and endless opportunities for (near) nudity. Whether attempting
to play it straight, as in Sexual Freedom in Denmark and Let Me Die a Woman,
or through a winking parodic mode as in the Mondo films and The Postgraduate
Course in Love, a narrator and film drift toward sleaze when this narrational au-
thority becomes unconvincing in its attempt to perform artistic, educational, or
journalistic motivations. Such slippage would seem to contradict the usual cri-
tique of the voice-over narrator, particularly that offered by the Direct Cinema
documentarians. In arguing that the voice-over narrator is authoritarian as well
as authoritative, that the narration dominates the visuals (which become mere
illustrations) and forces a reading on the audience, such critics underestimated
the audiences ability to perceive and exploit fissures, incongruities, and ironies
between voice and image.
No doubt these slippages, ironies, and an overall sense of sleaziness in-
crease with historical distance and changing cultural contexts. Considered
today in the contemporary U.S. political climate, Sexual Freedom in Denmarks
argument that the state education system should include instruction in sexual

P orno graphy and D o cumentary 115

technique so women could have more orgasms seems truly revolutionary. In
the Clinton administration, after all, Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders lost her
job for suggesting that masturbation might give teens a sense of personal au-
tonomy and was useful for controlling teen pregnancy and the rapid spread of
AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Today, with a conservative presi-
dent and Congress pushing family values by restricting sex education and
enforcing abstinence-only instructions, the films journalist-narrator seems a
throwback to Wilhelm Reichs Sex-Pol movement.
The sexploitation documentaries discussed above can be fully understood
only within the context of sexual commercialization under late capitalism. The
cash nexus around sex means that everyone knows you have to pay to get in-
formation: for carnal knowledge its prostitution; for intellectual knowledge, its
pornography. The argument made by pornographers that porn is educational
has almost always been dismissed as a lame defense for profiting on voyeurism.
But in the 1960s, porn was to some extent informative. In a society with very
limited information and education about sex, even showing this is it, this is
what it looks like, carried with it a progressive element. Today sex education in
the state sector is heavily restricted by Republicans and Christian fundamental-
ists, but for-profit sex information continues to expand its presence across the
mediaas long as you pay for it. However, as the ineffable quality of sleaze
that permeates these early forms of sexploitation suggests, the embedding of
sex in consumer culture also carries with it a certain consumer skepticism. In
this way, these sleazy documentaries present an inversion of arts aspiration to
the sublime and become instead examples of the capitalist grotesque.

Notes

Earlier versions of this paper were given at the Visible Evidence Conference, Marseille,
France, December 2002, and the Media, History, and Culture Colloquium, Northwestern
University, January 2003. A shorter version was presented at the Society for Cinema and
Media studies conference, Atlanta, March 2004. I thank people who gave me helpful com-
ments and answered questions: Michael Booth, Michael Bowen, Gary Fine, Jane Gaines,
Jyotsna Kapur, Julia Lesage, Larry Lichty, Josh Malitsky, Derek Paget, Jim Schwoch, Jeffrey
Sconce, and Tom Waugh.
1. The voice of documentary . . . is the means by which this particular point of view or
perspective [of the world] becomes known to us, observes Bill Nichols in Introduction
to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 43. Nichols established

116 Chuck Kleinhans

 this concept for documentary in his original article The Voice of Documentary (Film
Quarterly 36.3 [1983]: 1729), which was elaborated in Representing Reality: Issues and
Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Basing his
discussion on rhetorical concepts, Nichols develops a typology of documentary modes
that employ different rhetorics. Nichols is not referring primarily to the particular vocal
qualities of narrators and characters in sound cinema (a concern of Michel Chion in
The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman [New York: Columbia University Press,
1999]), although this is a concern with some works discussed here.
2. Chuck Kleinhans, Taking Out the Trash: Camp and the Politics of Irony, in The Poli-
tics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (New York: Routledge, 1994), 182201.
3. Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp, Partisan Review 31 (fall 1964): 51530.
4. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard
Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).
5. International human rights organizations have shown that human slavery does exist,
particularly in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and in exploitation of immigrants, often in
prostitution and sometimes in the United States and Europe as domestics or sweatshop
workers.
6. Mondo Cane (dir. Gualtiero Jacopetti, Italy, 1962) documented unusual human activi-
ties around the world ranging from cannibalism to nude art. The narration draws par-
allels between presumed civilization and primitive impulses and behaviors to excuse
the voyeurism. An international hit, it spawned Jacopettis Mondo Cane 2 and many
imitators.
7. As Neil Harris writes, This delight in learning explains why the experience of deceit
was enjoyable even after the hoax had been penetrated, or at least during the period
of doubt and suspicion. Experiencing a complicated hoax was pleasurable because of
the competition between victim and hoaxer, each seeking to outmaneuver the other,
to catch him off-balance and detect the critical weakness. Barnum, Poe, Locke, and
other hoaxers didnt fear public suspicion; they invited it. They understood, most par-
ticularly Barnum understood, that the opportunity to debate the issue of falsity, to dis-
cover how deception had been practiced, was even more exciting than the discovery
of fraud itself. The manipulation of a prank, after all, was as interesting a technique in
its own right as the presentation of genuine curiosities. Therefore when people paid to
see frauds, thinking they were true, they paid again to hear how the frauds were com-
mitted. Barnum reprinted his own ticket-sellers analysis. First he humbugs them, and
then they pay to hear him tell how he did it. I believe if he should swindle a man out of
twenty dollars, the man would give him a quarter to hear him tell about it (Humbug:
The Art of P. T. Barnum [Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973], 77).
8. The definitive scholarly history is Eric Schafers Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A His-
tory of Exploitation Films, 19191959 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999).

P orno graphy and D o cumentary 11 7

 9. Sociology of deviance was also a central contributing stream of British cultural studies,
as in 1970s studies of youth gangs, soccer hooliganism, and subculture activities.
10. Jane Gaines has written a pioneering article on how the ordinary is made strange in
some documentaries. See Gaines, Everyday Strangeness: Robert Ripleys International
Oddities as Documentary Attractions, New Literary History 33 (2002): 781801.
11. Apparently this was a conflation of the real Piccadilly Circus and Leister Square. As
anyone who has been to London at the time of the film knows, there were public mes-
sages for various forms of sex work including massage, domination, and so on, usually
posted in telephone boxes at various heavily trafficked locations such as the Under-
ground. While the voice-over announces we are in this imaginary place, we see stock
footage of London at night with neon and advertising signs with a cut to a wall with
handmade postings. All the notices are slight variations of the same handwriting.
12. Again, a voice-over tells us where we are while an exterior visual of a modest lingerie
store window appears before we cut to the dressing room and its one-way mirror, with
the camera looking through the mirror at the models and the various title cards pro-
vided by directly painting on the glass.
13. The same scratched-eye technique is used by experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage
in his landmark Reflections on Black (1955). By attacking the surface of the film and
by using materials which reflect back on the conditions of film-making, Brakhage be-
gins to formulate an equation between the process of making film and the search for
consciousness which will become more clearly established in his later work as he has
greater confidence in the truth of the imagination, writes P. Adams Sitney in Visionary
Film: The American Avant Garde (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 177.
14. Of course, much of the time news events do not have professional reporters as eye-
witnesses (notable exceptions: unanticipatedthe Hindenberg disaster; anticipated
Murrows rooftop reporting during the German Blitz of London), but rather usually
appear as on-the-scene reporters after the news breaks. The subsequent advent of tele-
vision has simply changed an unseen voice into an authoritative standup presence, a
persistent convention taken to idiotic lengths when a network news reader who doesnt
know the local language appears in a foreign elsewhere telling us authoritatively what is
going on, or the late-night news reporter stands at 11:15 p.m. in an empty location where
something significant happened earlier in the day.
15. New Republic, August 19, 1936; George Dangerfield quoted in Raymond Fielding, The
March of Time, 19351951 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 1023.
16. Similarly, the surrealist Luis Buuels documentary Las Hurdes (Land without Bread,
1932) employs a narrator to make political points about the poverty depicted, which
depends on an audience understanding the offensive voice-over as ironic. Not all audi-
ences (or critics) are able to do so.
17. A classic example was discovered by Dan Streible, in which a fake Leon Trotsky

118 Chuck Kl einha ns

 appears in a Fox Movietone newsreel. See Streible, Tom Mix Meets Leon Trotsky:
Newsreel Outtakes as Documentary, www.sc.edu/orphanfilm/orphanage/symposia/
scholarship/streible/park-row.html.
18. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey
(New York: Norton, 1960).
19. The Johnson administration commissioned an extensive academic researchbased re-
port on pornography that was received at the beginning of the Nixon administration.
Nixon refused the report and its liberal conclusions, but the report was widely distrib-
uted and influenced public discussion. A nongovernment reprinting with illustrations
including hard-core images of penetration, fellatio, anal sex, and so forth was sold with
(depending on how it was read) the official text providing the excuse for the obscene
illustrations, or the images providing the visual explanation not included in the Gov-
ernment Printing Office text-only version. See Earl Kemp, ed., The Illustrated Presi-
dential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (San Diego: Greenleaf
Classics, 1970).
20. According to several reports, this footage was removed as too objectionable. The cur-
rent Something Weird Video version has an MD narrator telling the incident on cam-
era, which then cuts to a different scene; apparently the gory self-mutilation footage
was elided in the cut. Michael Bowen has restored a full version, forthcoming on DVD,
that shows the preparation with a wood chisel and hammer, the swinging mallet, and
(film) cut to a fake bloody aftermath.
21. I initially worked with the video version distributed by Something Weird Video; how-
ever Wishmans as-told-to biographer Michael Bowen provided me with a copy of his
master copy for DVD (private correspondence, October 2003February 2004). My
initial argument rested on the fact that the film begins in medias res with Dr. Woll-
man leading a discussion group for transsexuals. The group is discussing whether one
should tell people one is dating or an employer that one is transsexual. At about twenty-
two minutes into the film, we have what I take to be the dramatically appropriate begin-
ning of the film, with Puerto Rican transsexual Leslie talking to the camera and then in
close-up saying, Last year I was a man! with a cut to the title Let Me Die a Woman.
This is followed by a male voice-over announcer telling us over images of Adam and
Eve what we can expect during the film, then introducing our guide Leo Wollman,
MD, PhD, doctor, psychologist, minister. The same voice-over announcer appears at
the conclusion of the film and provides a summary of what we have seen. This is, of
course, classic bookending technique.
Given this, the most logical explanation is that somewhere along the line, the reels
were put together in the wrong order, but that no one ever noticed or straightened the
matter out. Bowens version starts with the pretitle remarks by Leslie and then the titles.
However, theres little if any evidence that Wishman was ever attentive to the aesthetic

P orno graphy and D o cumentary 119

 integrity of her films or their prints. No one seems to know who made the decision to
excise the self-mutilation fake footage from the film. Tom Waugh reviewed the film
in its initial seven-week run in Montreal with the self-castration intact. See Thomas
Waugh, Medical Thrills: Born a Man . . . Let Me Die a Woman, 197879, in The Fruit
Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema (Durham, N.C., Duke University
Press, 2000), 7273. Further, in the abject grindhouse theaters where Let Me Die a
Woman and other exploitation and porn films played, it was common to witness fairly
atrocious projection. In such theaters, personally I have seen films with reels out of
order, or sections of different films spliced together, trailers suddenly appearing during
a reel change with a subsequent return to the narrative, as well as the results of unat-
tended and inattentive projections such as films breaking, being stuck and burning in
the gate, breaks followed by the projector still running for minutes on end, and so forth.
This was, after all, the lowest end of the theatrical film world; much of the audience was
unable or unwilling to complain (except to shout out, uncomprehending that there is
enough noise in the booth that the projectionist cannot hear the audience). Many in
the audience were sleeping, drunk, drugged, or engaged in some kind of sexual activity
with themselves or others, thus inattentive to the niceties of professional film projec-
tion. For an excellent ethnography of the porn theaters in particular, see Samuel R.
Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press,
1999).

12 0Chuck Kleinhans
Colin Gunckel

El signo de la muerte and the Birth of a Genre

Origins and Anatomy of the Aztec Horror Film

F ollowing the social and political upheaval of the Mexican

Revolution, intellectuals and policy makers deployed a series
of discourses that interrogated and attempted to reconstruct a
national identity in crisis. Among the most visible of these was
indigenismo, an ideological formation that situated Mexican na-
tional character within the countrys pre-Columbian heritage,
while proposing a variety of strategies for the integration of the
indigenous.1 Perhaps the most celebrated manifestations of this
discourse were the murals of artists like Diego Rivera and David
Siqueiros, who invoked the indigenous past as both subject
matter and formal strategy. Since Mexican cinema also contrib-
uted significantly to the dialogue surrounding national identity,
indigenismo often achieved cinematic form, influencing early
productions like Redes (dir. Fred Zinnemann, 1934) and Janitzio
(dir. Carlos Navarro, 1934), and emerging as a principal theme
in the films of Emilio Fernndez, including Mara Candelaria
(1943) and Ro escondido (1947). While such efforts, in keeping
with the prominent strains of this discourse, frequently engage
in a simplified, romanticized glorification of an apparently ho-
mogenous indigenous culture, another body of work disrupts
this reverence through an extreme reversal, situating the Aztec
past as horror. In films like El signo de la muerte (The Sign of
Death, dir. Chano Urueta, 1939) and those of the later Aztec
 Figure 1 Mexicos Aztec
Mummy cycle: indigenismo
gives way to human sacrifice,
decaying corpses, and maniacal
scientists.

mummy cycle (e.g., The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy, dir. Rafael Portillo, 1957),
idyllic landscapes and tragically noble Indians are replaced by human sacrifice,
decaying corpses, and maniacal scientists. By examining the specificities and
sociohistoric context of both Uruetas film and the later exploitation genres,
this paper will attempt to explain how a heritage often characterized as central
to national identity can provide the basis for both fear and ridicule. Although
to some extent these films constitute a satire of indigenismos sanctimony, they
also engage issues of national identity in a period of social transformation,
using cinematic horror to engage the tensions and anxieties of a Mexican cul-
ture and nation in transition.

El signo de la muerte:

Present Horrors of an Indigenous Past

El signo de la muerte is comprised of three distinct, yet converging narrative

trajectories. First, Dr. Gallardo (Carlos Orellana), a renowned archaeologist,

122C olin G unckel

has discovered an ancient codex, using its inscriptions to plot the resurrection
of the Aztec race through a series of prescribed sacrifices. At the same time,
Carlos (Toms Perrn Jr.) and Lola (Elena DOrgaz) are two romantically in-
volved reporters who compete for interviews and clues regarding the rash of
mysterious murders that are ultimately linked to the doctors gruesome rituals.
During the course of her investigation, Lola is targeted as the final sacrificial
victim, her capture and eventual rescue providing a dramatic climax during
which the villains are thwarted. Throughout the course of the film, Cantinflas
(Mario Moreno), a guide at the National Museum and assistant to the archae-
ologist, and Medel (Manuel Medel), portraying an ineffectual house detective,
appear in a series of apparently autonomous comedy segments, which often
take on a magical or surreal quality. Throughout the film, these two charac-
ters also sustain a humorous rivalry for the attentions of Lolas aunt Ta Mati
(Matilde Correll). While both men are aware of the events of the principal nar-
rative and interact with the other characters, their bumbling ineptitude and
self-absorption prevent them from intervening in a meaningful way.
In his brief analysis of El signo de la muerte, Jeffrey M. Pilcher, citing the
avant-garde tendencies of director Chano Urueta and his collaborators (who
included composer Silvestre Revueltas and screenwriter Salvador Novo), situ-
ates the film as an intentional parody of the indigenismo championed by Rivera
and others.2 Pilcher claims that by casting Orellana, a fair-skinned actor with
somewhat of a Spanish visage, as an obsessive indigenist scholar, the film-
makers engaged in an obvious critique of the sham of Indian identity among
Mexicos postrevolutionary elite.3 While approaching this film as satire cer-
tainly proves illuminating, it also fails to account for a large portion of the text
and its appeal.
Dan Harries defines parody as the process of recontextualizing a target or
source text through the transformation of its textual (and contextual) elements,
thus creating a new text. This conversionthrough the resulting oscillation be-
tween similarity and difference from the targetcreates a level of ironic incon-
gruity with an inevitable satiric impulse.4 Although El signo engages multiple
source texts, the manner in which it does so complicates its classification as
parody. While clearly ridiculing indigenismo, for instance, the film also dis-
plays the influence of Universal horror features such as Frankenstein (dir. James

Origins an d Anatomy of the Aztec Horror Film 123

Whale, 1931). Rather than lampooning these films, however, El signo reproduces
many of their conventions (lighting, narrative, mise-en-scne) without irony.
In this instance, differences between the target texts and the new text are not
necessarily a function of parodic distance, but conceivably a result of the genres
translation to a Mexican context. Similarly, the antics of Medel and Cantinflas,
while certainly satiric at points, also manage to transcend parody (and even logi-
cal explanation). Harries also points out the importance of selecting an appro-
priate target text upon which the parody is based: limited genres or unknown
prototexts do not usually generate enough of an anchor from which the parody
can deviate effectively.5 While knowledge of the public rivalry between Novo
and Rivera informs Pilchers analysis, this information may not have been uni-
versally available to various audiences over time, and, furthermore, enjoyment
of the film certainly does not depend on a familiarity with this issue. Dr. Ga-
llardo, for instance, can just as easily (or simultaneously) be interpreted as a
variation upon Universals mad doctor characters. In fact, even Mexican film
scholar Emilio Garca Riera criticizes the film for its servile imitation of Holly-
wood horror formulas, failing to acknowledge any of its parodic dimensions.6
My intention here is not to privilege one reading over another, but to suggest
that in this case, as in any, numerous readings and interpretations are made
available by the text. Following a dialogic approach, then, perhaps the most ad-
vantageous way to approach the complex, apparently fragmented El signo de la
muerte is through a consideration of its multiple intertexts: Cantinflass persona
and career, the politics of the filmmakers, Mexican comedy film, the horror
genre, melodrama, parody, indigenismo, and sociohistorical contexts. Taking
these various factors into account allows for a more nuanced understanding of
the film, offering a number of approaches and readings without fixing the film
to a single, definitive interpretation or intention.
Having established this, however, I will to a large extent be treating El signo
as a horror film, although, as even a brief plot summary suggests, its diverse
pleasures certainly cannot be reduced to those of a single genre. My reasons
for approaching the film accordingly are multiple. First, since I am primarily
interested in examining the horrific manifestations of Aztec culture across a
variety of films, this seems in many respects the most obviously logical way
to proceed. Appropriately, the films narrative tension and suspense, its threat

12 4 C olin Gunckel
of violence, and its graphic depiction of human sacrifice (a dagger plunged
into the bare breast of a young woman, blood flowing copiously forth) serve
to place it squarely within this genre. Furthermore, its more comic elements
do not disqualify it from being classified, at least for our purposes, as a horror
film. As Andrew Tudor points out, the systems of codes and conventions that
constitute horror change over time in major as well as minor ways, changing
also the terms in which horror appeals to its users.7 This fluid notion of genre
allows for cross-fertilization between genres, and for the translation of the mad
scientist subgenre to a Mexican context. In addition, as both Tudor and Rhona
Berenstein argue, horror films elicit a variety of often contradictory responses,
from laughter to terror and points between, a concept that problematizes any
notion of an inimical relationship between comedy and horror.8 Consequently,
the presence of Cantinflas and Medel does not invalidate El signos status as
horror. In fact, the comedy segments, although apparently digressive in nar-
rative terms, are not structurally or thematically autonomous, and, as we shall
see, become integral to any consideration of the film as a whole, including its
more horrific aspects. Finally, El signo conforms to the narrative conventions
that Nol Carroll has identified as central to the genre. Specifically, it might be
regarded as a combination of what he labels the Discovery Plot, which em-
phasizes the discovery, confirmation, and confrontation of a threatening force,
with the Overreacher Plot (of which the mad-scientist narrative is the most
recognizable variant) which often stresses the short-sightedness of science
and criticizes sciences will to knowledge.9
Perhaps the most effective way to begin drawing out the various tensions
and anxieties mobilized by the indigenous past in El signo is through a close
examination of an early scene in which the illustrious Dr. Gallardo delivers a
lecture on the prophecy of Quetzalcoatl, and the missing section of the Xilitla
codex that contains the necessary instructions for the revival of the Aztec race.
As Gallardo explains the Aztec sacrifice ritual, a woman in the audience turns
to the reporter Carlos and sighs, Que admirable civilizacin, verdad? (What
an admirable civilization, dont you think?). Carlos, obviously somewhat dis-
gusted by the lectures graphic nature, replies, Le parece usted? (You really
think so?). This immediately establishes the ambivalence toward Aztec culture
that will continue throughout the text: a simultaneous admiration and dis-

Origins an d Anatomy of the Aztec Horror Film 125

dain, attraction and repulsion. On the one hand, indigenous culture is recog-
nized as an important aspect of national patrimony and identity. After com-
pleting his lecture, for instance, Gallardo is approached by the woman and her
friends who, practically swooning, shake his hand and ask for his signature.
One woman boasts of having read all his books, while her companion credits
Gallardo with imparting important knowledge about viejas culturas (ancient
cultures) through his descubrimientos asombrosos (amazing discoveries).
Similarly, Carlos approaches the doctor for an interview, citing the necessity
of exposing the public to Gallardos meritoria y patritica (meritorious and
patriotic) body of work.
The terms of this attraction, especially as it emerges in the women charac-
ters, is especially intriguing. In her conversation with Carlos during the lecture,
the woman explains how noble and romantic it would be to offer ones heart to a
deity and virtually trembles in ecstasy as she imagines being stripped naked and
held down by four priests. Carlos, apparently speechless, merely responds with
an expression bordering on discomfort and disbelief. While this exchange is
played largely for humor, the horrific aspects of Aztec culture begin to emerge
in this scene not only through Gallardos eccentric appearance or his suspi-
ciously passionate description of human sacrifice, but through an association
with female assertions of (deviant) desire and the masculine response these en-
gender. This manifests itself not only in Carloss reaction to the womans fantasy,
but also in another conversation between the same woman and another man,
presumably a friend. While exiting the lecture hall, she and her female compan-
ion continue praising Gallardo and his accomplishments. Eventually, the male
acquaintance undermines their unconditional infatuation by repeating rumors
that the doctor is sombroso y manitico (shadowy and maniacal), that he lives
surrounded by indigenous servants, and frequently disappears from the city.
This particular scene thus begins sketching rather effectively not only the vil-
lainy of Gallardo and the experiment he is devising, but also the dynamic that
makes Aztec culture and its intellectual representatives both admirable and ex-
cessive, a potential threat to stability and normalcy, and, for Mexican women,
an irresistible force both seductive and potentially destructive.
Following Pilcher, this particular scene does indeed betray a critique of indi-
genismo, casting suspicion upon the motives and sincerity of its promoters,

126 C olin Gunckel

as well as expressing ambivalence regarding their influence over an apparently
gullible Mexican public. Consistent with a parodic reversal, the film also exag-
gerates and fetishizes the bloody and brutal aspects of Aztec culture that seem
antithetical to a romanticized discourse. Those drawn to this doctrine, particu-
larly Gallardos female admirers, are also ridiculed, both for their overtly pas-
sionate enthusiasm and for their slavish devotion. Once again, however, this
satirical bent is complicated by the murderous threat Gallardos scheme even-
tually poses to characters within the film, and El signos consequent adherence
to the conventions of horror. Thus the film is imbued with an atmosphere of
anxiety and fear. Through its evocation of indigenismo, Aztec iconography, and
issues of gender, it becomes associated with a crisis of national identity in a
period of uncertainty and transition.
Robin Woods ideas regarding repression in the horror genre present an
especially useful conceptual framework through which to consider the mul-
tiple implications of Aztec horror in this context. Following the work of Gad
Horowitz (which in turn builds on Freud and Marcuse), Wood distinguishes
between basic repression, upon which our proper development as human
beings depends, and surplus repression, which he characterizes as specific
to a particular culture . . . the process whereby people are conditioned from
earliest infancy to take on predetermined roles within that culture.10 This form
of repression requires, in the U.S. context, the sublimation of sexual energy
in general, and that of bisexuality and female sexuality in particular. Insepa-
rable from this is the concept of the Other, an entity that functions not simply
as something external to the culture or to the self, but also what is repressed
(though never destroyed) in the self and projected outward in order to be hated
and disowned.11 According to Wood, the monsters of horror film embody this
Other, which represents the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization
represses or oppresses, its reemergence dramatized, as in our nightmares, as an
object of horror.12 Consequently, horror cannot justifiably be considered an
escapist genre, for its fantasies represent attempts to resolve those tensions in
more radical ways than our conscious can countenance.13
While El signo de la muerte does not feature a monster in the strictest sense,
the specter of an Aztec resurrection sufficiently mobilizes the fear and appre-
hension Wood associates with the Other. Considered in the light of indige-

Origins a nd Anatomy of the Aztec Horror Film 127

nismo, one might speculate that the film dramatizes the vengeful reemergence
of the actual indigenous groups, or a cinematic representation of the Others
repressed within this discourse, whose champions often failed to acknowledge
linguistic, historical, and cultural differences or even variations in racial stock
among the diverse groups that made up the indigenous populations.14 While
metaphorically such an explanation may be valid, the film is not interested in
correcting indigenist representations, nor in creating psychologically complex
or more authentic indigenous characters. In fact, El signo deploys the familiar
iconography often associated with muralism and calendar illustrations: muscu-
lar Aztec warriors (sporting loin cloths and headdresses), scantily clad sacrifi-
cial virgins, and monolithic idols assembled in the performance of a ritual. The
difference here is that the picturesque representations have become grotesque
and horrific, a reversal that never pretends to engage social reality or cultural
specificity. Instead, El signo capitalizes upon negative stereotypes of indigenous
character, using the notion of a violent and primitive Aztec race to instill fear in
the other characters.
A corrective, or more realist approach, in fact, seems antithetical to horror,
which depends on the terror and anxiety generated by an unknowable Other
to achieve its intended effect. Screenwriter Novos personal antagonistic rela-
tions with Rivera, for instance, represent a more probable explanation for these
representations, as does his opposition to the Lzaro Crdenas administration.
Along with support for organized labor and the repatriation of the petroleum
industry, Crdenas, expanding the agrarian reform promised by the Mexican
Revolution, redistributed 50 million acres of land to rural peasants and insti-
tuted education programs and economic initiatives with an indigenist orienta-
tion.15 If, as Pilcher argues, these policies inspir[ed] a wave of nostalgia among
the urban middle classes that assured the success of All en el Rancho Grande,
could it also, for anti-Crdenists like Novo, go beyond the level of satiric cri-
tique to express an anxiety about the shifts of power and wealth, and the pri-
orities of an administration that appeared to favor the peasant and working
classes?16 In this respect, the bloodthirsty Aztecs, Gallardos raza subyugada
por los hombres blancos (race subjugated by white men) may embody or at
least coincide with the elites fear of social and racial upheaval, a return of the
oppressed and of the revolution that threatened to upend traditional power
structures. This anxiety is perhaps borne out through the progression of sac-

12 8 C olin G unckel
rifices throughout the film. While the first two rituals involve two priests and
four attendants who secure the victim, the final climactic sacrifice includes a
veritable army of Indians who chant, bow, and drum in anticipation of the im-
pending resurrection. Appropriately enough, an equally impressive regiment
of police, representatives of state authority, arrives at the appropriate moment,
and in an extended fight scene, resubjugates the potentially insurgent Indians.
As an extension of the insecurity generated by social transformation, the
film may also betray a more general uncertainty about the manner in which
these discourses translate to personal identity and national policy. According
to Charles Ramrez Berg, Mexicos Indian problem is the governing metaphor
for an entire nation, the hypersensitive national sore, a central dilemma that
extends to multiple aspects of Mexican life.17 For instance, if indigenismo ar-
gued that the roots of modern Mexican identitylo mexicanolay in the cul-
tural legacy of pre-Columbian Indian cultures, how is the mestizo population
to internalize or reconcile the negative attributes (embodied in the films as a
penchant for human sacrifice) historically invoked to situate the Indian as an
inferior race and class?18 Following the model of repression, the Aztec horror of
El signo (and other films) may function as a projection on to Mexicos inescap-
able Other of what are perceived as the darker, more undesirable inheritances
of an indigenous past that must be repressed within the individual self and
the denial of a heritage that occupies the lowest rung of the social hierarchy,
whose representatives within the text must consequently be defeated.19 Thus
the indigenous past, in the context of the film, also participates in the dynamic
of attraction and repulsion that, according to Carroll, constitutes the central
appeal of horror, the genres attempt to negotiate themes and issues that gener-
ate complex, contradictory responses.20 Considering Ramrez Bergs argument,
this dynamic then traverses a number of crucial issues: ambivalence about the
consequences of Indian blood for the constitution of Mexican character, about
the feasibility of an indigenous-based identity in the context of a moderniz-
ing Mexico, uncertainty about how to integrate Indians into mainstream so-
ciety, and, more broadly, an interrogation of Mexicos future, the terms of its
progress and development.21 In many respects these dilemmas, the anxieties
that circulate throughout the film, strike at the heart of the attitudes that inform
official policy and public discourse in Mexico during this period.
This persistent, fundamental ambivalence, rather than being focalized, per

Origins and Anatomy of the Aztec Horror Film 129

Carroll, upon a central monster, is distributed across the text of El signo, ex-
tending to any individual or object contaminated by Aztec culture. This is per-
haps most directly embodied by the character of Dr. Gallardo, who suffers from
an excessive embrace and enactment of indigenous heritage and thus provides
a fitting example of what Ramrez Berg refers to as Mexicos divided subjec-
tivity.22 Simultaneously an elite intellectual and murderous megalomaniac, he
periodically exchanges the ascot and tuxedo of his public life for the ornate
robes of an Aztec priest, as the codices, artifacts, and statuary of his meri-
torious and patriotic professional endeavors are transformed into sacrificial
tools. This double existence is expressed as a murderous, irreconcilable tension
that creates narrative havoc, demanding resolution. The apparent contradic-
tions between his indigenist aspirations and his career as a modern scientist
are resolved at the films finale, when, unwilling to sacrifice his own daughter,
he is speared by his Indian followers. As a heightened, exaggerated engagement
with contemporary concerns, the film uses Gallardo to hint at both the violent,
conflictive implications of this heritage for Mexican identity and an uncertainty
regarding its place in modern existence.
Not surprisingly the films lighting and mise-en-scne actively participate
in this dynamic of attraction and repulsion, using darkness, shadow, and con-
fined space to signify hidden and dangerous forces lurking beneath the surface
of a glorified heritage. The sacrificial chamber, for instance, appears to be lit
by nothing more than two small fires on either side of the altar; all the ritual
sacrifices thus transpire against a background of nearly complete darkness. Ap-
propriately, this foreboding underground chamber is accessible only by stairs
or through a series of damp, claustrophobic tunnels. The site of considerable
violence, where on two occasions we witness an obsidian knife plunged into
the chest of an unconscious maiden, this room is easily interpreted as a meta-
phorical space, a recess where repressed, primeval desires and tendencies are
given form. The filmmakers do not, however, establish a clean binary between
this space and the more publicly accessible museum. In El signo, the impressive
idols housed in the National Museum, rather than merely standing as signs of
a noble national origin, cast imposing multiple shadows upon the walls, their
cluttered arrangement and immense proportions combining to overwhelm the
humans with whom they share the screen. Thus even the farcical tours peri-

130 C olin Guncke l

odically guided by Cantinflas convey, at least aesthetically, a foreboding and
anxiety regarding this patrimony, an uneasiness regarding the power, fascina-
tion, and significance these monuments mobilize, an emotion apparently justi-
fied by subsequent narrative events.
As I mentioned previously, the darkness and danger emerging from the
Aztec resurrection in El signo is also closely associated with female desire,
which appropriately enough, Wood cites as a primary target of surplus repres-
sion. On one hand, Aztec culture represents a source of irresistible fascination
for the women characters. The museum tours led by Cantinflas are attended
primarily by curious and attentive women, and it is often to them that he ad-
dresses his commentary. As we have seen during Gallardos lecture, this inter-
est is potentially deviant, involving sexual fantasy infused with violence and
masochism. Thus while an indigenous heritage seems to imply for men (i.e.,
Gallardo) a potential toward violence and bloodshed, for women it seems to
entail an unleashing of desire and sensuality. Ultimately, the sacrifices required
by the codex make this desire destructive and dangerous, punishing women
for their sexual transgression and curiosity. For instance, Ta Mati, reading the
same newspaper in which the first sacrifice was reported, discovers and be-
comes intrigued by an advertisement for an Aztec spiritualist who treats only
women. The mysterious energy that draws women to this fortune teller, we soon
discover, also endangers them: he is later revealed to be an associate of doctor
Gallardo, using his spiritual powers to identify the doncellas predestinadas
(predestined maidens) prescribed by the codex. The sacrifices themselves, con-
sistent with the first womans fantasies, are indeed sexually charged, with mus-
cular men in loincloths subduing a young woman draped in nothing more than
sheer cloth, a ritual culminating in the penetration of her naked breast. During
these moments, violence and sensuality unite in a perverse spectacle that un-
leashes desires and impulses whose containment promises to restore balance
and normality.
The sacrifices, however, become a matter not only of containing female
sexual energy, but also of stifling their increasing social ambition and inde-
pendence, imbuing the film with the heightened moral dilemmas and the
personalization of social conflicts associated with melodrama. According to
Joanne Hershfield, Mexico during this period was experiencing an unprece-

Origins an d Anatomy of the Aztec Horror Film 131

dented economic boom, stepped-up industrialization . . . [that] combined to
pressure the women to continue working outside the home.23 Hershfield ar-
gues that this alteration in womens economic roles threatened existing tradi-
tional structures, including the family and patriarchy, which in turn threatened
male identity.24 In El signo de la muerte, Lolas prominence as a reporter clearly
threatens the ego and career of her boyfriend Carlos, an imbalance of tradi-
tional gender roles that is expressed and resolved through the threat of sacri-
fice. While Lola secures an interview with the reluctant Gallardo, Carlos is de-
moted by his editor for linking the professor to the series of murders. His new
assignment: a section titled La esposa y la cocina (Wife and Kitchen), where
he will be responsible for dispensing home decorating tips and recipes. Carlos
is clearly emasculated by his girlfriends success, and when he finally proposes
marriage to her, he mentions her resignation as a condition of their union.
Although Lola accepts, she points out that she was such a skillful reporter, that
she managed to steal the front page from her boyfriend. Imitating Gallardos
apocalyptic language, he counters: Pero los dioses la castigaron (But the gods
punished her). As if a projection of Carloss sublimated aggression, the film in-
deed proceeds to punish Lola for her ambition. After a comment from Ta Mati
begins to suggest a connection between the spiritualist and the murders, Lola
decides to investigate further, scheduling a session with the hooded fortune
teller. A palm reading reveals that she bears the appropriate mark, and she is
thus kidnapped, nearly becoming the final victim. This turn of events is directly
linked to her inquisitiveness and professional aspirations, and her femininity is
ultimately posited as incongruous with her participation in a potentially dan-
gerous career.
Her eventual rescue at the hands of Carlos not only restores his masculinity
but also cements their marital engagement and Lolas domestication. As she
quite succinctly intones, this means a movement from the front page to the
matrimony section, and a transition from physical sacrifice to a professional
one. The defeat of the Aztec revivalists therefore channels excessive and danger-
ous female sexuality into the confines of marriage, while successfully repress-
ing a more destructive masculine violence (the obliquely expressed desire to
punish Lola) in favor of a more constructive and acceptable form of heroism.
Thus the multiple anxieties and imbalances released by a horrific Aztec revi-

132C olin Gunckel

val are thus effectively contained: the upheaval of social and racial hierarchies,
the unseemly character traits lurking in an indigenous heritage, the crossing of
gendered boundaries, and the unconditional trust placed in intellectuals with
questionable motives.
As is often the case with melodramatic resolutions, however, not all of these
tensions are completely recuperated by the end of El signo, an excess that can
largely be attributed to the performance of Cantinflas. Although on the one
hand his star billing may have assuaged suspicions of the films subversive ten-
dencies by ostensibly placing it within a comedic genre, to a significant extent
he actually intensifies its irreverence. While lighting and composition imbue
museum exhibits with a menacing aspect, his commentary mocks and threat-
ens to undermine the solemnity of official history. During the films opening
sequences, for instance, he stands beneath the Aztec calendar, or Sun Stone,
and pretends to be supporting it on his shoulders. Quite literally, he appears to
dislodge the piece, transforming an enshrined monument to national identity
into a comic prop. His subsequent explanations of a sacrificial altar and the
sculpture of Coatlicue achieve a similar effect through their almost indecipher-
able, nonsensical quality. This tendency to confound approximates his effect on
El signos narrative, with his segments often derailing the linear trajectory of the
principal story lines. Appropriately, he and Medel even problematize the films
resolution by, in a scene mirroring the reunion between Carlos and Lola, both
agreeing to marry Ta Mati and each planting a kiss on her cheek.
Cantinflass irreverent, sacrilegious attitude toward history and the bound-
aries of propriety persists unabated throughout the film, compounded by his
ability to align himself with every other character in the text. While working for
Gallardo (unaware of his illicit activities), he engages in friendship and rivalry
with Medel, accompanies both Ta Mati and Lola to the spiritualist, and as-
sists Carlos in his attempts to prevent the final sacrifice. In a short montage of
the Spanish Conquest that opens the film, both he and Medel appear briefly
dressed as Aztecs. This shifting between social, racial, and class affiliations ex-
tends to his personal behavior and the ability to absorb the influence of those
around him. While on his first trip to the fortune teller, for instance, he acquires
magical powers, making a beverage cart, and then Medel, appear and disappear
at will. Similarly, during his second visit, he accompanies Lola dressed as a

Origins and Anatomy of the Aztec Horror Film 133

 Figure 2 Cantinflas in El signo
de la muerte (1939), undermining
the solemnity of official history.

woman. Thus while a transgression of gendered boundaries and the mysteri-

ous powers of Aztec culture terrorize the other characters, for Cantinflas (and
to some extent Medel) these become an opportunity for play. This culminates
in perhaps the films most absurdly bizarre scene and its most significant nar-
rative digression, in which Medel and Cantinflas, rather than participating
in the climactic rescue of Lola, become inebriated and transform themselves
into the Emperor Maximillian (Medel) and Carlotta (Cantinflas). Obviously
mutually enraptured, the two spout comic phrases in formal Spanish, climb
into a carriage on display in the museum, turn on the radio (!), appear to nearly
kiss, and fall asleep in each others arms. According to Pilcher, homoeroticism
and gender reversal had become a part of the interaction between Medel and
Moreno in previous films and in stage performances, forcing the audience to
laugh at the breakdown of family values that became increasingly apparent in
modern urban life.25 In the context of El signo, this also engages issues of his-
tory and identity, with Cantinflas moving effortlessly between representations

13 4 C olin Gunckel
of indigenous and European heritage, ultimately laying siege to the sanctity of
both. Consistent with his personification of the often transgressive, resistant
pelado, Cantinflas here embodies an archetype of racial mixture (mestizaje) and
poverty, a figure caught between rural origins and urban existence.26 Cantin-
flass early association with Novo (and others) often placed this character in
the service of political and social critique, a tradition that likely informs his
performance in this film.27 Throughout El signo, the liminal and contradictory
qualities of the pelado replicate and delight in the kind of divided subjectivity
mentioned by Ramrez Berg, ultimately refusing to resolve the complexity and
tensions pried open by the text, managing to mock propriety, history, and con-
vention in the process.28

Aztec Mummies: The Resurrection

Although, as I have already argued, El signo de la muerte can hardly be char-

acterized as a progressive treatment of the indigenous, it nonetheless diverges
markedly from the more reverent cinematic reproductions of indigenismo.
Consider, for instance, the films of Emilio Fernndez, perhaps the most cele-
brated director of the Golden Age, whose indigenist films elevated the Indians
to mythic stature, romanticized their lives, and, following the model of earlier
films, linked the meaning of lo mexicano visually and narratively to Mexicos
indigenous roots.29 While Laura Podalskys analysis of his film Mara Cande-
laria uncovers a more ambiguous attitude toward the representational prac-
tices informed by indigenismo, this example nonetheless plug[s] into an iconic
tradition that equates the Indian with the uniqueness of Mexico.30 Curiously,
Fernndezs recourse to established stereotypes also resulted in a flirtation with
the same representations of indigenous peoples and culture that inform Aztec
horror films. In Mara Candelaria, for instance, Maras (Dolores del Ro) refusal
to pose nude for the artist (Alberto Galn) is contrasted with the willingness of
a visibly darker Indian woman to disrobe without reservation. The baring of her
body, once again positing a more permissive indigenous sensuality, ultimately
leads to Maras death, when the inhabitants of Xochimilco, believing that she
herself posed nude, stone her to death. This collective homicide itself indicates
an indigenous constitution impervious to reason, whose violent, destructive
instincts are not even blunted by the civilizing influence of the church. Thus

Origins an d Anatomy of the Aztec Horror Film 135

Mara Candelaria exhibits a conception of the indigenous that is amplified and
expanded upon in representations of Aztec horror. By establishing a conflict
between the lighter-skinned, virtuous Mara and the backward tendencies of
the Indians that threaten her, the film also engages in the ambivalence apparent
in El signo, a fundamentally contradictory attitude at the center of official dis-
course on the indigenous.
While during the Golden Age, an industry sustained by state financing
generated studio films that, however complex, generally reproduced and often
promoted dominant discourses of nationalism, production on the margins of
this industry provided opportunity for variations upon or divergences from
the official strains of this rhetoric. Susan Dever, for instance, has illustrated
the more inclusive nationalism proposed by director Matilde Landetas inde-
pendently produced Lola Cassanova (1948), which rather than merely situating
the indigenous as a symbol of national essence suggests the possibility of their
meaningful integration into society.31 Manuel Barbachano Ponces independent
production of Benito Alazrakis Races (1953) likewise departed from indigenist
convention, offering a glimpse of indigenous life that oscillates between tragedy
and satire. El signo de la muertes parodic, anxiety-ridden distortions of indi-
genismo might likewise be attributed to its independent status (produced by
entrepreneurs Pedro Maus and Felipe Mier), which allowed it to diverge from
the more orthodox, state-financed representations of the 1930s, including the
images of Indian peasant life in Redes. In addition, as Eduardo de la Vega Alfaro
points out, because the industry was on the verge of consolidation during this
particular decade, filmmakers benefited from an atmosphere of experimenta-
tion in which the terms and conventions of Mexican cinema were still a matter
of contention.32 This was itself reflected in the career of Cantinflas, who not
yet having secured his stardom with Ah est el detalle (dir. Juan Bustillo Oro,
1940), still retained a somewhat subversive quality that would be dulled by his
attempts to negotiate mass appeal and a bourgeois audience.33 To some extent,
these industrial conditions may explain how El signos outlandish reversal of
indigenismo was even permissible or conceivable.
Appropriately enough, when the industry began to disintegrate in the late
1950s, Mexican cinema experienced a resurrection of Aztec horror, emerg-
ing this time in the low-budget horror, wrestling, and exploitation genres that

136 C olin Gunckel

proliferated during the industrys collapse. It is not entirely coincidental that
Charles Ramrez Berg chooses to situate Ismael Rodrguez Tizoc (1956) as a
marker of the golden ages decline.34 This glamorous prestigious epic deploying
narrative conventions and representations entirely consistent with Fernndezs
tragic indigenist romances was followed by an inundation of cheap films that
capitalized upon a similar iconography in the service of both humor and fright.
These efforts include La Llorona (dir. Ren Cardona, 1958), The Robot vs. the
Aztec Mummy, The Living Head (dir. Miguel San Fernando and Chano Urueta,
1961), and Las luchadoras contra la momia (dir. Ren Cardona, 1964). As audi-
ences apparently tired of the themes and subject matter of the golden age, and
their reiteration was perceived as outmoded, these films seemed to ridicule and
defile what in previous decades was often held sacred, while many producers
abandoned prestige for quick profits.35
Curiously, although they are separated by nearly twenty years, a remarkable
continuity emerges between El signo de la muerte and the later cycle of Aztec
horror films. It is not surprising, therefore, that Jorge Ayala Blanco proposes
El signo as a precursor of the horror/fantasy films starring masked wrestler
El Santo, which emerged as the most successful variation of the low-budget
genres.36 As a matter of fact, Chano Urueta continued his career in this era by
directing horror and wrestling films, including The Living Head and La bestia
magnfica (1952). On a visual level, works of the new cycle employ a vocabulary
established by the earlier film: shadowy, subterranean tombs and temples dra-
matically lit by flickering flames and submerged in the smoke of burning copal,
mysterious rituals presided over by foreboding idols, and half-naked damsels
stretched over sacrificial altars. What proves even more intriguing, as we shall
see through a brief consideration of the somewhat representative The Robot vs.
the Aztec Mummy, is the extent to which horrific manifestations of Aztec cul-
ture mobilize a similar set of anxieties.
The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy takes place as a series of flashbacks, in which
Dr. Eduardo Almadan (Ramn Gay) narrates the strange events of the film to
his assembled colleagues. In an attempt to prove the possibility of revealing past
lives through hypnosis, he has used his wife Flora (Rosa Arenas) as an experi-
mental subject, discovering that in a previous incarnation she died in an Aztec
sacrifice. Her lover, Popoca, was later buried with a breastplate and bracelet

Origins and Anatomy of the Aztec Horror Film 137

 Figure 3 Poster art for
La momia azteca contra el
robot humano (1961).

that when deciphered reveal the location of the Aztec treasure. Naturally, the
couple, along with several friends, set out to locate Popocas tomb. They succeed
in doing so, only to awaken and anger the mummified warrior and to discover
that they have acquired a competitor for the Aztec gold: the evil Dr. Krupp
(Luis Aceves Castaeda), also known as The Bat. After a series of multiple
reawakenings of Popoca, Dr. Krupp decides that only by devising a human
robot can he hope to defeat the apparently invincible Aztec. The inevitable,
final confrontation results in the defeat of the robot and Dr. Krupp, and the re-
turn of Popocas adornments, which presumably facilitates his peaceful, eternal
rest.
Quite obviously, this film constitutes a Mexicanization of the Hollywood
horror creatures that had become internationally recognized and imitated by
this point in time. The mummy and the robot are thus clearly variations upon
the many mummies, zombies, Frankensteinian monsters, and science-fiction
monstrosities that populate not only Universal films, but also the countless low-
budget B-movies being produced concurrently in the United States. Likewise,

13 8 C olin Guncke l
Figure 4 The atomic powered robot of The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy,
Mexicos contribution to the eras iconography of the science-fiction B-film.

the maniacal Dr. Krupp is a rather conventional mad scientist, a character that,
as Nol Carroll reminds us, typically betrays a generalized uncertainty about
the advances of science.37 His cyborg creation is even imbued with atomic
powers, echoing the nuclear anxieties of similar U.S. films of this period. Once
again, however, the arrangement of these elements around a heritage often
equated with national identity suggests that it at least metaphorically engages
contemporary tensions regarding this issue. While many of the same dynamics
that inform El signo are consequently evident, they are treated with less com-
plexity and ambiguity (nothing even approaches Cantinflass anarchic trans-
gressions, for instance) and are reduced to a series of heightened battles be-
tween good and evil.
Science, as I have already suggested, repeatedly emerges in The Robot as a
potentially destructive force, the unethical use of which threatens to unleash
dire consequences. The respective unearthing capacities of modern psychology
and archaeology (even in the virtuous hands of Eduardo), for instance, con-
spire to awaken the slumbering Aztec, while the nuclear-powered abomination
designed by Dr. Krupp becomes a tool for greed and devastation. As in El signo,
there also seems to be an uncertainty about the role of traditional culture and
heritage in a country experiencing the effects of modernization and industri-

Origins a nd Anatomy of the Aztec Horror Film 139

alization. This is embodied rather blatantly by the climactic confrontation be-
tween the robot and the mummy. The outcome of this battle naturally reinstates
the supremacy of the good scientists and the necessary defeat of the villain,
whose megalomania ultimately provokes his own demise. This resolution also
proposes a compromise: while responsible scientists like Eduardo promise to
control the progress of technology, the Aztec warrior is returned to his tomb, a
figment of the past revered as history although ultimately irrelevant and dan-
gerously out of place in the present.
As with the other films of this cycle, The Robot centers the attraction/repul-
sion dynamic in a single monstrous character. On one hand, the Aztec mummy
is perceived by the various characters as an element of national patrimony, a re-
search opportunity, and a potential source of riches. Simultaneously, however,
he is inhumanly powerful, indestructible, ferocious and physically deformed
from centuries of decay. As in El signo, this may hint at the fundamental am-
bivalence toward the implications of this heritage for national and personal
identity. Extending to mise-en-scne, Eduardos vastly cavernous and brightly
lit bourgeois home finds its antithesis in the subterranean Aztec tomb, a locus
of violence and repressed desire that threatens to disturb the stability of modern
life. In a structural correlation, as a series of flashbacks related to an audience
of fellow scientists assembled in Eduardos opulent abode, the entire narrative
and its threat of graveyards and tombs are located safely in the past, a trauma
unearthed yet cleanly resolved and relegated to memory. Once again, this posi-
tions the indigenous past as history, a narrative worth reciting but whose pro-
tagonists remain at temporal and spatial distance.
The repression that the Aztec past unleashes, not surprisingly, finds its ori-
gins in Flora, Eduardos wife. As he uses psychoanalysis (a discipline tradition-
ally associated with the sexual drives of women) to unravel her past life, he
manages to uncover her ancient relationship with a strapping Aztec warrior,
and her willing participation in a ceremony that culminated in her penetra-
tion by a sacrificial knife. Once again, the indigenous past becomes associated
with anxieties about female sexuality, and the hidden desires lurking within the
respectable bourgeois wife. Of course, the resolution of the film also entails a
reburial of Floras sexual past, of which the mummys persistent reawakening
served as a constant reminder.

1 40 C olin G unck el
 While The Robot gives expression to certain anxieties regarding identity,
heritage, and issues surrounding gender, its failure to engage more specific so-
cial and cultural subject matter make its relevancy rather vague and indefinite.
Its only identifiably Mexican quality is the Aztec mummy himself, making the
films tensions and terrors more applicable to a general anxiety about modern
life, consequently aligning it with similar U.S. productions. In fact, The Robot is
among the films of this cycle that was dubbed in English for distribution in this
country by AIP, the pyramids of Teotihuacan evidently proving a ready substi-
tute for those of Egypt. Nonetheless, in the context of a cycle of such films, and
given the possible influence of El signo, it is still possible to perceive traces of
persisting doubts and the tumult generated by modernitys social and economic
transitions.

Conclusion

Although it is certainly tempting to dismiss the improbable lunacy of Aztec hor-

ror as B-movie zaniness, or as an inferior imitation of Hollywood horror film,
I hope this essay has suggested additional, even provocative explanations for
the existence of this curious subgenre. While any number of horrific configu-
rations could have been fashioned from a creative mining of Mexican history
and current issues, this particular approach betrays a fearful confrontation of
national identity and the self, uncertainty about modernization and the social
transformations this entails, and the appropriate role of tradition in contempo-
rary life. While striking aesthetic and thematic continuities between El signo de
la muerte and the exploitation films might indicate the former as a foundational
text, their similarities also suggest a consistent set of anxieties mobilized by in-
digenous culture and heritage. Accordingly, these films appear to engage con-
flicting attitudes regarding the indigenous of Mexico and the ways in which this
population and their legacy/influence will be incorporated into national poli-
tics and discourse. Just as revealing as the diverse traits and desires ascribed to
Aztecs in these films are the dynamics these characters are consequently used
to represent: a fear of the darkness lurking beneath a cultivated middle class or
bourgeois exterior, and tensions surrounding social transformation and shifts
in gender roles.

Origins an d Anatomy of the Aztec Horror Film 1 4 1

Notes

1. An outline of indigenismos basic tenets and variations is available in Alan Knight,

Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 19101940, in The Idea of Race in Latin
America, 18701940, ed. Richard Graham (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 71
113.
2. Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity (Wilmington, Del.:
Scholarly Resources, 2000), 60.
3. Ibid., 6062.
4. Dan Harries, Film Parody (London: BFI, 2000), 6.
5. Ibid., 34.
6. Emilio Garca Riera, Historia documental del cine mexicano: 19831942 (Guadalajara:
Universidad de Guadalajara, 1992), 96.
7. Andrew Tudor, Why Horror? The Peculiar Pleasures of a Popular Genre, in Horror:
The Film Reader, ed. Mark Janovich (London: Routledge, 2002), 51.
8. Rhona J. Berenstein, Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship
in Classic Horror Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2122; Tudor,
Why Horror, 53.
9. Nol Carroll, Nightmare and the Horror Film: The Symbolic Biology of Fantastic
Beings, in Film Quarterly: Forty YearsA Selection, ed. Brian Henderson and Ann
Martin with Lee Amazonas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 170.
10. Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986), 71.
11. Ibid., 73.
12. Ibid., 75.
13. Ibid., 78.
14. Joanne Hershfield, Race and Ethnicity in the Classical Cinema, in Mexicos Cinema: A
Century of Film and Filmmakers, ed. Joanne Hershfield and David R. Maciel (Wilming-
ton, Del.: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1999), 85.
15. Jeffrey Pilcher, Cantinfladas of the PRI: (Mis)Representations of Mexican Society in
the Films of Mario Moreno, Film Historia 9, no. 2 (1999): 191.
16. Pilcher, Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity, 50.
17. Charles Ramrez Berg, Cinema of Solitude: A Critical Study of Mexican Film, 19671983
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 156, 138.
18. Hershfield, Race and Ethnicity, 84.
19. Ramrez Berg, Cinema of Solitude, 138.
20. Carroll, Nightmare and the Horror Film, 15971.
21. Ramrez Berg, Cinema of Solitude, 153.
22. Ramrez Berg, Cinema of Solitude, 138.

1 4 2 C olin Guncke l
 23. Joanne Hershfield, Mexican Cinema/Mexican Woman, 19401950 (Tucson: University
of Arizona Press, 1996), 29.
24. Ibid., 29.
25. Pilcher, Cantinflas and the Myth of Mexican Modernity, 63.
26. Both Jeffrey Pilcher and Carlos Monsivs provide an analysis of the pelado character
and its role in Cantinflass career and persona. See Pilcher, Cantinflas and the Myth of
Mexican Modernity, and Carlos Monsivis, Cantinflas: Thats the Point! in Mexican
Postcards (London: Verso, 1997), 88105.
27. Pilcher details Cantinflass role in political debates and satire during the Cardenas ad-
ministration in Cantinflas and the Myth of Mexican Modernity, 3364.
28. Ramrez Berg, Cinema of Solitude, 137.
29. Hershfield, Race and Ethnicity, 87.
30. Laura Podalsky, Disjointed Frames: Melodrama, Nationalism, and Representation in
1940s Mexico, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 3 (1984): 68.
31. Susan Dever, Celluloid Nationalism and Other Melodramas: From Post-Revolutionary
Mexico to fin de siglo Mexamrica (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003),
10638.
32. Eduardo de la Vega Alfaro, Origins, Development and Crisis of the Sound Cinema
(19291964), in Mexican Cinema, ed. Paulo Antonio Paranagu (London: BFI, 1995),
8185.
33. Pilcher, Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity, 64.
34. Charles Ramrez Berg, The Cinematic Invention of Mexico: The Poetics and Politics
of the Fernndez-Figueroa Style, in The Mexican Cinema Project, ed. Chon A. Noriega
and Steven Ricci (Los Angeles: UCLA Film and Television Archive, 1994).
35. Eduardo de la Vega Alfaro details the factors that contributed to a decline in quality of
Mexican film and the consequent rise of cheaply made horror and fantasy films that
offered producers promising returns on minimal investment in The Decline of the
Golden Age and the Making of the Crisis, in Mexicos Cinema: A Century of Film and
Filmmakers, ed. Joanne Hershfield and David R. Maciel (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly
Resources, 1999), 16586.
36. Jorge Ayala Blanco, La busqueda del cine mexicano (19681972) (Mexico, D.F.: Editorial
Posada, 1986), 285.
37. Carroll, Nightmare and the Horror Film, 17071.

Origins an d Anatomy of the Aztec Horror Film 1 4 3

Kevin Heffernan

Art House or House of Exorcism? The Changing

Distribution and Reception Contexts of Mario Bavas Lisa and the Devil

Here we have, ladies and gentlemen, a unique example of medieval Chris-

tian art. Tour guide in Lisa and the Devil (1972)

BOMB. Incoherent witchs brew of devil worshiping, exorcism, and per-

fectly awful acting that has [Telly] Savalas as a lollipop-popping M.C. in a
house of horrors where one of the wax dummies may or may not be a girl
possessed by Satan. Leonard Maltin

B etween 1971 and 1973, Italian American producer Alfredo

Leone and Italian director Mario Bava collaborated on three
gothic horror films. The first, Gli Orrori del Castello di Norem-
burga (Baron Blood, 1971) starring Elke Sommer and Joseph
Cotten, was picked up by American International Pictures and
became a worldwide box-office success. Their second collabo-
ration, Lisa and the Devil (1972), enjoyed Bavas largest-ever
budget of $1 million, the return of star Elke Sommer, and sev-
eral successful screenings at the Paris Theater during the 1972
Cannes Film Festival. Still, the film was unable to secure a dis-
tribution deal. In 1973 Leone and Bava reshot portions of the
film and added new scenes featuring Robert Alda as a psycho-
logically tormented priest exorcising the possessed Elke Som-
mer in a hospital room. This re-edited film, now bearing the title
House of Exorcism, was eventually released in the United States
Figure 1 A cursed film? Endlessly recut and repackaged, Mario Bavas
Lisa and the Devil (1972) has over the years been regarded as a Cannes
sensation, a knock-off of The Exorcist, fodder for late-night television, and
a lost masterpiece.

by independent distributor Peppercorn-Wormser in 1975 and grossed over $5

million through bookings in American drive-in theaters and inner-city grind
houses specializing in lowbrow genre fare. The film also benefited from lucra-
tive foreign sales in Great Britain, Europe, and the Far East.1
The two versions of this film and their respective commercial and criti-
cal fates offer fascinating insights into the relationship between popular cul-
ture, canons of taste, and the financing and distribution of 1970s exploitation
cinema. The original cut of Lisa and the Devilwith its nonlinear narrative,
painterly compositions, wild exaggerations of Italian horror film conventions,
and dizzying allusions to religion, mythology, and art historywas considered
bad art (or at least bad product) by AIPs Samuel Arkoff and other purvey-
ors of more conventional horror fare. Three years later, critics also tagged House
of Exorcism with the label of bad art, but now the film failed for being sen-
sationalistic, morbid, pornographic, exploitative, and derivative of The Exorcist
(1973). Here the film languished, shackled with its reputation as a cursed film
or dismissed as a bomb by Maltin and other mainstream movie critics. Twenty
years later, however, a lucrative and upscale demand for restored auteur cinema

Art House or House of E xorcism? 1 45

on laserdisc, videocassette, and (later) DVD would allow both versions of the
film to circulate widely, contributing to a new appreciation for the influential
stylistic innovations of director Mario Bava. The films many incarnations illus-
trate an often-ignored reciprocal relationship between changing technologies
of film distribution and the instability in genre and audience address in a popu-
lar cinema seeking to take advantage of those changes.

The Witchs Brew

The entire setting is so right for a tall tale of gloom and perdition. We could make it up as we
go along. Sophia Lehar in Lisa and the Devil

Lisa and the Devil is a wild mixture of the starkly original and the brazenly
borrowed. The story begins with Lisa Reiner (Elke Sommer), a young tourist
in Spain, transfixed in an antique shop by a music box depicting the medi-
eval danse macabre. The boxs buyer, Leandro (Telly Savalas) reminds her of
an image of Satan carrying away the damned that she has just seen on a fresco
painting. Leandro is carrying a life-size wax mannequin of a dark man with a
mustache, and soon Lisa sees this man, Carlo (Espartaco Santoni) on the street,
where he aggressively embraces her and calls her Elena. She knocks him to the
ground and flees. As darkness falls, she asks for a ride out of town from an aloof
and wealthy married couple, Francis and Sophia Lehar (Eduardo Fajardo and
Sylva Koschina) and their chauffeur, George (Gabriele Tinti).
In one of the most shopworn clichs of the horror genre, the automobile
breaks down, and the group goes to a secluded villa to use the telephone. Lisa
is terrified to find the sinister Leandro welcoming them at the gate, and she
discovers that he is the majordomo to a dying aristocratic family with (to put
it mildly) a shameful family secret. The blind matriarch (Alida Valli) lords over
her neurotic and emotionally arrested son Maximilian (Alessio Orano) in a
plot element clearly lifted from Psycho (in fact, Bava and Leone had originally
wanted Anthony Perkins for the role of Max).2 Unbeknownst to the other char-
acters, Carlo shows up and begins creeping around the mansion, apparently
involved in some type of investigation.
Sophia turns out to be the lover of the much younger chauffeur George. Both
the contessa and the soft-spoken but wild-eyed Max obsess over Lisa and keep

1 46 Kevin Heffernan
comparing her to an unnamed she. Lisa begins to lapse into hallucinations
(to the strains of Rodrigos Concierto de Aranjuez) in which she is the lover of
Max, or Carlo, or both. Meanwhile, the butler Leandro is amassing a collection
of wax dummies, each of which resembles a member of the family. Then, about
halfway through the film, the characters begin to murder each other: Georges
throat is slit with a pair of garden shears; Sophia runs over her husband Francis
half a dozen times with their car; Max bludgeons Sophia and Carlo to death and
chloroforms Lisa, places her in bed next to the skeleton of Elena, the woman
whom she so closely resembles, and attempts to have sex with her unconscious
body. It is only in the following scene, some fifteen minutes before the end of
the film, that the familys elaborate backstory is revealed: The contessa had been
married to Carlo, and Max had been married to Elena. Elena and Carlo fell in
love and began an obsessive and forbidden relationship, and, it is implied, the
impotent and enraged Maximilian killed his adulterous wife and kept her body
in an upstairs bedroom. All of this is revealed in an incredibly long take in the
family chapel as the camera arcs distractingly around Max, dressed as a groom,
and the contessa, and back again. At the end of their confrontation, Max stabs
his mother to death.
Now, the completely unhinged Max runs through the house and finds all of
the corpses, including the skeleton of Elena in full bridal gown, arranged at the
dinner table in a parody of the Last Supper (or of the danse macabre figures on
the music box). Grave worms writhe about in the icing of the wedding cake.
He attempts to flee the floating ghost of his mother, approaching him in what
is obviously an invitation to join them in death, only to fall out of the window
and impale himself on the metal gates below. The gliding ghost is revealed to
be the contessas perfectly dead corpse being carried into the dining room by
an exhausted and distracted Leandro. The next morning, Lisa wakes up nude in
the exposed ruins of what was once Elenas bedroom. Birds fly across the bed,
and vines and branches are everywhere. She walks, mesmerized, through the
overgrown chateau grounds and flees quickly to the airport to catch a plane
home. Surprised that she is the planes only passenger, Lisa walks through the
cabin and finds the staring corpses of all of the family members seated together
and Leandro piloting the plane. Her face takes on a cadaverous pallor, and she
collapses dead.

Art House or House of E xorcism? 1 4 7

 Leonard Maltin and his colleagues could not have been more inaccurate in
their description, much less their assessment, of Lisa and the Devil. There is
no devil worshipping or exorcism anywhere in the film, and there is no wax
dummy that resembles Lisa until five minutes before the end of the movie. Nar-
ratives of Satanism and devil worshipping proliferated in the horror film after
the worldwide success of Rosemarys Baby in 1968, certainly, but Lisa and the
Devil draws upon an entirely different set of generic norms. Specifically, Bava
and Leones script contains many elements of the Italian gothic cinema of the
early 1960sof which Mario Bava was the most accomplished practitioner
exaggerated almost to the point of parody. Like so many other Italian gothics,
Lisa and the Devil uses female reincarnation as a structuring device. Through
her descent into the hellish world of the contessas family, Lisa discovers that
she is the reincarnation of Elena. Bava himself treated this theme in his directo-
rial debut, La maschera del demonio (Black Sunday) in 1960. In the earlier film,
British actress Barbara Steele, the greatest star and central icon of 1960s Italian
horror, plays both Asa the witch, burned at the stake during the Inquisition,
and her nineteenth-century descendant, the virginal Princess Katya. Steele
went on to play similar dual roles in 1960s Italian gothics, including Amanti
doltretomba (Nightmare Castle, 1965).3 A variation on this theme can be found
in one of Bavas most distinctive mid-1960s works, Operazione paura (Kill,
Baby, Kill, 1966), a vampire film in which Erika Blanc plays Monica, a young
nurse who is initially presented as a damsel character and helper to the films
Van Helsing character, Dr. Eswai (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart). Eventually, all of the
male characters recede into the background, and the viewer discovers Monica
is the lost daughter of the bitter necromancer Baroness Graps, and sister to the
resurrected vampire child responsible for all of the killings.
This theme of reincarnation in Italian horror is one of many elements obses-
sively focused on what Andrew Mangravite has called a murderous past that
stalks a presentguilt-free only by virtue of ignorance or willful omissionto
extract payments of blood from it.4 From this central core extends the Ital-
ian horror films most infamous convention, a preoccupation with incest and
necrophilia, usually painted in the hues of a delirious romanticism. The powers
of family, Christianity, and heterosexual love, the three markers of a redemptive
normality in conventional horror films from Dracula (1931) to The Exorcist,

1 4 8 Kevin H effernan
wither and warp under the onslaught of darker forces of the past in the Ital-
ian horror film. Riccardo Fredas LOrrible Segreto del Dr. Hichcock (The Hor-
rible Dr. Hichcock, 1963), for example, recounts the story of a bourgeois doctor
who has sex with female cadavers in the morgue and drugs his wife to simulate
death in their bedroom. After one of these sex games seemingly goes too far,
the wife is buried and, years later, he returns to his mansion with a young bride
(played by Barbara Steele). The original wife, buried alive by mistake, turns up
to demand revenge.5 In Lisa and the Devil, this confusion of the forces of Eros
and Thanatos approaches the baroque.6 Bava introduces this theme early in the
film when the antique-shop owner tells Leandro that he has outfitted the wax
mannequin of Carlo with a black tie because it would be good for both wed-
dings and funerals. By the end of the film, the drugged and nude Lisa shares a
bed with the desiccated corpse of Elena and the still-alive but deranged Maxi-
milian who, disrobing, says gently to the unconscious Lisa, It will be different
with you. As he attempts sex with the unconscious woman (once again to the
strains of Aranjuez), Maximilian hears the haunting sounds of Elenas laughter
and is unable to sustain an erection. In I tre volti della paura (Black Sabbath,
1963), the young Zdenya attempts to escape her undead father with a handsome
young count. Nobody can love you as much as we do. You know that, coos her
father, the vampire patriarch Gorka (Boris Karloff ). Maximilians exchanges
with his mother the contessa in Lisa and the Devil are similarly tinged with
hints of incest, as she calls him my love and reacts with cold jealous fury to
his halting expressions of attraction to Lisa after she arrives at the villa.
This bewildering proliferation of aberrant sexualities is also on display in
Antonio Margheritis Danza Macabra (Castle of Blood ) from 1964. In this film,
a journalist meets Edgar Allan Poe in a London pub and wagers with Poes
drinking companion that he can spend the night in a remote castle. In his one
night in the castle, Alan, the journalist, meets the ghosts of all of the people
who have died there, alive for this one night to ensnare Alan and increase their
number. He sleeps with the beautiful but melancholic Elisabeth (Barbara Steele
again), who is told by the bitter, icy lesbian ghost Julia that it is impossible
that she could ever find happiness with a man. The master of ceremonies in
the haunted house is the ghost of metaphysician Dr. Kalmus, who shows an
initially skeptical but increasingly terrified Alan the violent deaths of all who

Art House or House of E xorcism? 1 4 9

have come before him. In one scene, rape, lesbianism, adultery, and murder
result in a bedroom strewn with corpses, laid out in various stages of undress
in a gruesome and erotic tableau. At the end of the film, the ghost of Elisabeth
helps Alan leave the house, but he is impaled on the closing iron gate just be-
fore dawn. Poe and his drinking companion arrive soon after and collect the
gambling debt from the coat pocket of Alans corpse. There is much in Castle of
Blood that anticipates Lisa and the Devilthe isolated mansion with the family
secrets and sexual taboos that are relived and which draw the visitor into their
vortex; the necrophilic moment that Alan and Elisabeth cuddle in postcoital
repose and he discovers that her heart is not beating; the narrative resolution of
reuniting the heterosexual couple in death; and a climax in which the last living
human runs from room to room only to find ghosts everywhere who summon
him to the world of the dead. This last motif even carries over into the films
Italian title, The Dance of Death, which is of course depicted on the music
box that first draws Lisa into Leandros nightmare world of the damned.
The danse macabre was a common motif in murals and European fresco
paintings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and is a recurring icon in the
Italian horror film.7 In this tableau, the figure of Death, usually personified as
a skeleton, summons a group of humans to their fate in order of their earthly
prominence.8 One of the conventions used by the mural painters to suggest
Deaths sequential summoning of his victims was to alternate his skeletal form
with that of the doomed humans, creating a long line of figures appearing as
part of an elaborate dance. Many mural depictions of the danse macabre, such
as the Cloister of the Innocents in Paris or the Hungerford Chapel in Salisbury
Cathedral, also featured a narrative poem recounting each persons agony over
attempts to refuse Deaths invitation to the dance. In the Hungerford Chapel,
for example, a youth attempts to run away, but Death points to the other bodies
in the dance and says to the fashionably dressed young man, Behold them well,
consider and see / For such as they are, such shalt thou be9 (a couplet that could
serve as the epigraph for a book on the Italian horror film). In 1463, in a chapel
in Lbeck, Switzerland, a spectacular life-sized Dance of Death was painted on
the walls and wrapped all the way around the chapel. In the background of the
painting was a landscape panorama of Lbeck, against which the Dance depicts
all strata of earthly society, from pope to beggar. The mural was restored in 1701

150 Kevin Heffernan

 Figure 2 Locandina poster for Danza
Macabra (1963).

after centuries of deterioration, only to be destroyed during Allied bombing in

World War II.10 A portion of the mural illustrates Death calling a usurer, curate,
and a merchant, each identified by his costume and surroundings: the usurer is
still carrying his abacus; the curate is dressed in the cassock and black circular-
brimmed capello romano of the parish priest; and the merchant stands in front
of ships ready to carry his goods to market.
Even before Lisa and the Devil, the danse macabre was a familiar iconic and
narrative device in Italian horror. Bavas own I tre volti della paura, for example,
features the members of a vampirized family coming to claim their remaining
holdout, the virginal Zdenka. She begs with them to let her stay in the world of
the living, but they are everywhere she turns and eventually claim her as one
of their own; Sei donne per lassassino (Blood and Black Lace, 1964) represents
a variation of the theme as the female corpses of a serial killer are arranged in
grotesque poses that mock the erotic vitality of living women; and La frusta
il corpo (Whip and the Body, 1963), with its narrative of a sadomasochistic rela-

Art House or House of Exorcism? 15 1

tionship between a woman and her lover that continues beyond the grave, ex-
emplifies the danse macabres mythological sibling, Death and the Maiden.11 An
Italian/Belgian co-production from 1971, La plus longue nuit du diable (Devils
Nightmare), features a narrative strongly prescient of Lisa and the Devil, with
a bald Satanic trickster, a demon succubus, a female lead named Lisa, and, in
Phil Hardys description, the clichd situation of the family curse and the trav-
elers stranded in an aristocratic mansion with the folkloric theme of the seven
deadly sins,12 with each of the seven travelers representing one of the deadly
vices. A highlight of the film is a scene of the demon succubus (Erika Blanc)
seductively goading the gluttonous coach driver to eat himself to death at an
elaborate midnight banquet.
Like most of the narrative and stylistic elements in Lisa and the Devil, the
film pushes these allegorical depictions of characters to more obvious and al-
most comical extremes. With its figures of Death, a king and queen, a bride, and
a laborer, the music box featured at the films opening explicitly references the
Dance of Death. The parallels between these figures and the guests at the man-
sion are obvious: Francis and Sophia are the king and queen, Lisa is the bride,
and George is the laborer. The bald and sinister Leandro, of course, is the films
compression of Death and Satan into a single character. This imagery of the
music box bleeds over into the mise-en-scne throughout the film. As Leandro
leads the visitors to the guest cottage, their reflection in the water as they cross
the footbridge suggests the music box; Maximilian appears to float off of the
music box and into Lisas arms at the onset of one of her hallucinations; the
makeshift funeral procession for the murdered George moves behind a screen
in a parody of conventions of fresco painting (compare this also to the poster
art for Danza Macabra); and the final camera track across the corpses at the
dinner table suggests the spinning music box.
The stylized presentation of reincarnation, paraphilia, and mythological
allusion helped establish the commercial success of the eras Italian horror
films. Why, then, did Lisa and the Devil find no takers at the Cannes Film Fes-
tival, especially given the unqualified success of Leone and Bavas preceding
film? The answer lies, I think, in the films serious transgressions of audience ex-
pectation for horror filmsspecifically, a lack of narrative clarity and an indif-
ference to dramatic suspense. AIP had produced and distributed horror/com-

152 Kevin Hefferna n

edy hybrids before: Bucket of Blood (1960), Tales of Terror (1962), and Comedy
of Terrors (1964) all had strong elements of low comedy and genre satire. The
companys biggest star, Vincent Price, would be the lynchpin in AIPs crowning
horror camp masterpiece, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, just a few months after
Arkoff turned down Lisa and the Devil. Still, Bava and Leone were a full two or
three years ahead of their time in introducing the high levels of camp, black hu-
mor, and art cinema leavened with graphic violence and sexual perversion into
the horror genre without the commercial safety net of either a major horror star
or a GP (later PG) rating. Putting even the hysterical Price to shame, Savalass
extraordinary turn as Leandro/Satansucking Tootsie Pops, singing songs to
himself, telling jokes, and pretending to serve the needs of the helpless damned
souls in the mansion with mock-solicitous seriousnessis an object study of a
performance on the edge of self-parody. A line that never fails to rock a movie
audience with laughter is his presentation of dessert cake to the contessa and
her dinner guests while fussily whispering, Its with chocolate sprinkles!
In his landmark 1984 study of Bavas oeuvre, French critic Pascal Martinet
refers to Lisa and the Devil as Mario Bavas Marienbad.13 Martinet writes of
the films proliferation of doubles and its subplot of Leandros growing collec-
tion of wax dummies, The genius of Bava in La casa dellesorcismo [Lisa and
the Devil] is visible in his consideration of mental illness, seen in every frame
of the film, as a perfect understanding of the relationship of the spectator to the
false image which is, of course, the basis of the art of the cinema.14 Here we
find a critic who, less than three years after Bavas death and, never having seen
the original cut of Lisa and the Devil, has found the key to understanding the
commercial failure of the film, namely, its general evocation of the conventions
of European art cinema and its quite specific reworking of motifs from one of
the most celebrated and difficult of the received masterworks of that cinema,
Alain Resnaiss Lanne dernire Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961).
Last Year at Marienbad begins with a long series of tracking shots through
the hallways of a lush French villa-turned-hotel as ominous organ music plays
and we hear a male voiceover recount in a hypnotically repeated refrain, I ad-
vanced once again through the corridors, salons, galleries, the structure of this
mournful mansion from another age, this huge and luxurious mansion, where
corridors without end follow upon corridors. The narrative, such as it is, con-

Art House or House of Exorcism? 153

cerns a stranger, X (Giorgio Albertazzi), who becomes entranced by a woman,
A (Delphine Seyrig), married to the gaunt and sinister M, her escort or hus-
band (Sascha Pitoff ), and Xs efforts to remember if he and the woman know
each other, perhaps from a previous sexual affair, perhaps from last year, per-
haps in Marienbad. The character of M, like Leandro in Lisa and the Devil, is a
sinister trickster figure who is a master of games and illusions, and X is unable
to beat him in a number of parlor games over which M has an almost super-
natural mastery. The confusion of the characters about their own backstory is
doubled in the Fredericksburg garden, where the characters of X and A argue
about the story behind the statues there. While the camera moves around its
interchangeable human and stone subjects, we hear the voice of the man say,
You asked me their names. I said their names didnt matter. You disagreed and
proceeded to name them at random, I think. Then I said they could as well be
you and I or anyone. The actors, particularly Delphine Seyrig, exhibit an al-
most dancelike stylization in their movements through the decor, and Seyrigs
distracted, vacant-eyed performance as she is circulated between the two male
leads could be a template for Elke Sommers performance in the last half of Lisa
and the Devil.15 Marienbad, of course, would have a lasting impact on Euro-
pean and American art cinema. Just a year after its release, American producer
Robert Lippert would use a similar pretext of alienated characters in an isolated
environment in his nightmarish remake of one of the classics of expressionist
fantasy cinema, Cabinet of Caligari (1962). Clearly indebted to the commer-
cially viable motifs, themes, and mythology of Italian horror in the previous
decade, Lisa and the Devils ambitious attempt to translate this material into
the emerging aesthetics of camp and art cinema doomed the film to failureat
least in the eyes of distributors looking for more sensationalistic genre fare.

From C ursed F ilm to E urotrash

to Lost Masterpiece

The people of this region believe that it is only the power of the Devil himself that has kept
this entire fresco from ruin. Tour guide in House of Exorcism

The curious fate of Lisa and the Devils unusual art-horror hybridity was as
much a result of changing taste in the world film market as it was of Mario

154 Kevin Hefferna n

Bavas peculiar artistic sensibilities. As producer, Leones engagement of this
changing marketplace had a major impact on the films commercial and critical
destiny. When the first Bava/Leone collaboration, Baron Blood, was completed
in 1971, Leone screened the film for buyers at Allied Artists, hoping to secure
a distribution deal. Allied Artists had its origins in the Poverty Row studio
Monogram, which had been successful in the 1940s supplying supporting titles
for the bottom half of double features. After becoming Allied Artists in 1953,
company head Steve Broidy attempted several times to enter the production of
prestige A-film releases. Even with this change of corporate strategy, however,
much of the companys success during this periodand into the 1960sde-
pended on providing programmers for the genre market.16 By 1971, the com-
pany had finally positioned itself to produce a string of prestige attractions,
including Cabaret (1972), Papillon (1973), The Man Who Would Be King (1975),
and Conduct Unbecoming (1975). For this new corporate philosophy, Baron
Blood presented a step backward in the companys quest to improve its reputa-
tion and status.
Baron Blood eventually did find a home at American International Pictures,
the most successful provider of exploitation and genre films to the world mar-
ket, where it proved to be a sizeable hit for its distributor. Perhaps regretting
the earlier decision to pass on such a bankable film (even if it was from a low
genre), Allied Artists expressed an interest in securing Leone and Bavas next
project, Lisa and the Devil. Andy Jaeger of AAs television distribution arm
was particularly interested in the film and persuaded Leone to shoot network-
friendly cover shots for the expected scenes of nudity and graphic violence.
Meanwhile, AIPs Sam Arkoff also wanted Leone and Bavas follow-up to the
successful Baron Blood, offering Leone $250,000 upfront for distribution rights
to the as-yet-unseen Lisa and the Devil. Hoping to recoup more of his million-
dollar investment in the film, however, Leone held out for $300,000. Arkoff had
breakfast with Leone at Cannes the morning of the films premiere at the Paris
Theater and again offered Leone the quarter-million-dollar check. Al, dont
be a fool. Take the check, Arkoff said. You never know what happens with a
movie.17 That night, Arkoff attended Lisa and the Devil s premiere and then
promptly withdrew his offer. The horror film audience doesnt like camp, he
told Leone. You cant toy with that. Theyre very serious. Ironically, in less than

Art House or House of Exorcism ? 155

a year, Leone had moved from one potential distributor, Allied Artists, which
passed on Baron Blood because it was a mere horror film and a troubled fit in
their increasingly upscale release schedule, to another, American International,
which turned down Lisa and the Devil because it was too arty, obscure, and
campy. One international buyer offered Leone a pittance for Far East rights to
the film, but Leone turned him down as well.
For about a year, Lisa and the Devil sat on the shelf while Leone tried to put
together other projects. Of course, the films million dollars of red ink on the
ledger was an extraordinary burden for an independent producer to accommo-
date, and so Leone eventually returned to the problem picture in an attempt to
translate this sizeable investment into a more saleable commodity. The most
promising solution for Leone was to add new footage that could reframe the
story while providing more commercially exploitable story elements for the
films promotion campaign. As both Tim Lucas and Troy Howarth have de-
tailed elsewhere, Bava, Leone, and actress Elke Sommer spent three and a half
weeks reshooting a new subplot to the film featuring Lisas demonic possession
at the base of the fresco depicting Satan. This also involved adding Robert Alda
as Father Michael, a priest haunted by memories of his lover Anna (Carmen
Silva), who had perished in a car accident. Father Michael consults with hospi-
tal doctors about Lisas condition and eventually performs an exorcism in the
hospital room.
To this day, Leone is unsparing in his praise for the artistic integrity of di-
rector Bava and his willingness to work for free on shooting the new scenes.
Still, Bava could not imagine how this new footage, redolent of motifs from The
Exorcist, could be successfully integrated into the existing version of Lisa and
the Devil and was afraid that the cobbled-together film would be an embarrass-
ment to all of the filmmakers. He eventually walked off of the set and asked that
his name be removed from the credits. Leone, working with editor Carlo Reali,
successfully solved the technical and narrative problems through a clever cross-
cutting between scenes of the exorcism and the backstory at the villa, which
now recounted the story of the ghost who was possessing Lisa. Transitions were
indicated through an elegant use of sound bridges and rhyming match cuts
between the old and new footage.
With an answer print of this newly recut movie in hand, Leone was once

156 Kevin Heffernan

again contacted by Andy Jaeger at Allied Artists and offered a television deal
for the original cut of Lisa and the Devil. Jaeger offered Leone an advance of
$150,000 for the television rights on the original Lisa and the Devil, which
Leone eagerly accepted in order to, in his words, take the edge off of the
money that he had spent on producing two versions of the film. In addition to
the television rights for the original version of Lisa and the Devil, the contract
also gave Allied Artists a lien on the new version, House of Exorcism, until
Lisa was in active television distribution and their debt was paid.
This turned out to be a devils bargain. Leone began screening House of Ex-
orcism for potential distributors in 1974 and 1975, and Universal, which had en-
joyed blockbuster success with Jaws (1974), was ready to offer Leone a deal for
the film. To protect their original investment in Lisa and the Devil, Allied Art-
ists began to spread word throughout the industry of their lien on House of Ex-
orcism. A skittish Universal withdrew its offer. Word of Allied Artists potential
legal action against other distributors over House of Exorcism also destroyed
possible deals with both AIP and Paramount. In the midst of this turmoil,
Leone received a call from Andy Jaeger at Allied Artists with the welcome news
that Lisa and the Devil was to be part of a feature-film package for prime-time
network broadcast on ABC. Other films in the package included Cabaret, Papil-
lon, and The Man Who Would Be King. This would have cleared Leones debt to
Allied Artists and allowed him to shop House of Exorcism to other distributors
without further interference. But in the end, the producers of Papillon exercised
their option for a better deal and took the movie to CBS. Without Papillon as the
crown jewel of the ABC feature package, the deal collapsed and Leone was out
in the cold yet again.
Leone then secured a $300,000 offer for House of Exorcism (the identical
sum he had demanded from Sam Arkoff three years before) from indepen-
dent distributor Peppercorn-Wormser. Since 1965, Peppercorn-Wormser had
successfully distributed an eclectic mix of art-house entries and exploitation
films from Europe and the United Kingdom, including Welless Chimes at Mid-
night (1965), Wertmullers Love and Anarchy (1973), the Italian-French farce Le
Sex Shop (1973), and the Hong Kong women-in-prison melodrama Bamboo
House of Dolls (1974). This skill for tapping high and low markets made them
well-suited to handle House of Exorcism. Once again, however, Allied Artists

Art House or House of Exorcism ? 15 7

stepped in to inform Peppercorn-Wormser that Leone did not own the rights
to the film because of his outstanding debt.18 Eventually, Leone watched from
the sidelines as Allied Artists, Peppercorn-Wormser, and independent inves-
tor Gus Bern negotiated a deal among themselves for theatrical distribution of
House of Exorcism. The film finally reached the screen in 1976 and was a sig-
nificant commercial success. House of Exorcism was profitably slotted into what
the trade called underbelly runs, playing as a supporting title in drive-ins and
inner-city grind houses alongside kung-fu films, blaxploitation pictures, and
midnight horror screenings. Variety did not even bother to review the film, nor
did any other trade or popular publication take notice of its release. Released
in this context, the film was simply another example of Eurotrashinexpen-
sively mounted genre pictures, usually co-productions between two or more
European studios featuring down-at-the-heels American players in roles de-
signed to capitalize on hits from Hollywoods major studios.19
To add to the confusion, even as House of Exorcism finally found theatrical
distribution, another version of the original and still unreleased Lisa and the
Devil began to circulate. Allied Artists struck a number of 16mm television
prints of the film, but instead of going to the lab and inserting Leone and Bavas
original cover shots for the scenes of nudity and violence, these television prints
either cut the material out entirely or substituted slugs in the place of the
offending images. These slugs were then covered by stills or reaction shots of
characters from elsewhere in the film. Allied Artists then placed this pros-
tituted version (in Leones phrase) into syndication for local late-night tele-
vision, the broadcast equivalent of the grind house and drive-in circuits. Once
a highly anticipated property with multiple suitors, Lisa and the Devil would re-
main unseenat least in its original cutfor the next two decades, Italian hor-
rors contribution to the cinematic lore of the tortured and lost masterpiece.

Conclusion

During the 1970s, Leones and Bavas artistically ambitious Lisa and the Devil
mutated from its premiere at Cannes into two highly compromised versions
the reedited House of Exorcism and the mangled print syndicated by Allied
Artists television. But even this was not to be the end of the films complicated
and seemingly endless engagements with a changing terrain of taste and exhi-

158 Kevin Hefferna n

bition. As the growth of videocassette, laserdisc, and DVD formats during the
1980s and 1990s created new and voracious niche markets for home distribu-
tion, genres, films, and directors once known only to buffs and cognoscenti
found new life. Mario Bavas work, particularly in the Italian gothic, became a
focus of renewed critical and popular attention. By the mid-1980s, book-length
studies of Bava and other Euro-horror auteurs began to appear in France, Italy,
and Benelux. Eventually, a younger group of American critics began to echo the
missionary zeal of the 1950s Cahiers du cinma, actively championing the cine-
matic art of such previously invisible and/or disreputable filmmakers as Bava,
Jess Franco, Antonio Margheriti, and others.20 Drawing on the Cahiers model
of auteurist analysis of styles and themes for a decidedly nonacademic reader-
ship, this new generation of criticism appeared in magazines such as Photon,
Cinfantastique, and, later, Video Watchdog. At the same time, cult, camp, ultra-
violence, porn, bad movies (such as those of Edward D. Wood Jr., whose films
achieved major cult status as a result of home video) exploded in popularity
and continued to shift canons of taste in the omnivorous video market.21 By the
mid-1990s, the Internet provided an even more extensive resource for buying,
selling, discussing, and creating shrines to films and filmmakers on the margins
of taste, style, and politics.
This critical reappraisal of the artistry of filmmakers working in lowbrow
genre forms is, among other things, an epiphenomenon of changing technolo-
gies of film distribution and exhibition. Almost every change in film distribu-
tion is followed by a temporary shortage in product, and the attempt to meet
the increased demand for movies often results in a confounding of commer-
cial categories. This is apparent in the postwar rise in the art theater, in which
exhibitors forced into showcasing imported and other films from small dis-
tributors deliberately cross-marketed auteur cinema with exploitation films; the
perpetually underserved drive-in theater market of the fifties, which AIP and
other companies mined as a market for its preconstituted double features; the
rise of television as a lucrative subsequent-run market for movies, in which
both local syndication and network runs of feature films led to a similar mix
of high and low forms in the same exhibition context; the rise of home video
on Betamax and VHS in the 1980s, which resurrected obscure and forgotten
films and filmmakers to feed the insatiable maw of a rental-driven retail busi-

Art House or House of E xorcism? 159

ness; and, finally laserdisc and DVD, which sought to carve out a more upscale
niche of home video by showcasing a more exacting presentation of films often
enhanced by restored or never-before-seen cuts of films long available in other
incarnations.22
Lisa and the Devil played a part in many of these later changes. It premiered
at a film festival as a prestige item, but was unable to straddle the art-cinema
and exploitation markets. Then, it was reshot and reconstituted for the drive-
in and grind house market, the most desperate and undiscriminating venue
of its day, by a distributor of both Lina Wertmuller movies and Asian women-
in-prison flicks. Next, it found unlikely sisters such as Cabaret and Papillon
in a network television package during the height of the early 1970s sellers
market for movies before the made-for-television film stabilized the role of
feature films in network programming. It turned up on the first home grind
house, late-night syndicated television, in the prostituted Allied Artists cut.
Then, the second home grind house, videotape, rescued from critical dismissal
the entire filmmaking tradition from which Lisa and the Devil emerged. Re-
sponding to this new market and critical environment, the long-lost and long-
suffering original cut of Lisa and the Devil finally appeared in restored form
in 1995 (Leone had kept the extant 35mm prints and original sound/picture
elements for some twenty years). Image Entertainment released the film on a
two-disc set with Baron Blood (after what must have seemed to Leone like an
interminable twenty-year distribution deal with AIP finally came to an end).
Then, in 2000, Image released a single-disc double feature of Lisa and the Devil
and House of Exorcism with audio commentary by producer Leone and star
Elke Sommer. Now, the two films could finally be seen as what they in fact were,
a diptych of two separate works of art. Once divided by the demands of art
and commerce in the 1970s film market, the two films were reunited on disc in
2000 as a case study available for historical, critical, artistic, and commercial re-
appraisal by a new generation of gothic cinephiles. The 2003 review of Lisa and
the Devil in Leonard Maltins Movie and Video Guide provides a final testament
to the films extremely unstable identity over the past thirty years. Dismissed
by Maltins guide only a decade ago as a BOMB, Lisa and the Devil now rates
two and one-half stars, its incoherent witches brew now described as a truly
strange, surreal psychological horror tale filled with hallucinatory imagery.23

160 Kevin Hefferna n

Notes

1. For a detailed history of the production, Cannes premiere, reshooting, release, and res-
toration of Lisa and the Devil, see Tim Lucass indispensable critical biography, Mario
Bava: All the Colors of the Dark (Cincinnati: Video Watchdog, 2007). See also Troy
Howarth, The Haunted World of Mario Bava (London: FAB, 2001), and Alfredo Leones
audio commentary on Image Entertainments 2000 DVD release of Lisa and the Devil
and House of Exorcism.
2. Leones audio commentary on the DVD edition of both films provides a wealth of detail
about the casting and art design of Lisa and the Devil. The filmmakers had also wanted
Burt Lancaster for the role of the adulterous Carlo, which would have expanded the
films web of allusions to include Viscontis Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963).
3. A rhapsodic consideration of Steeles iconic status in Italian horror is Alan Upchurch,
Barbara Steele, an Angel for Satan, in the Horror Pictures series (Cahors: G. Nol
Fanditions, 1991). A shorter version appears as The Dark Queen, Film Comment 29,
no. 1 (1993): 53.
4. Andrew Mangravite, Once upon a Time in the Crypt, Film Comment 29, no. 1 (1993):
51.
5. LOrrible Segreto del Dr. Hichcock, along with many of the other early 1960s horror
films discussed in this essay, was written by screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi. The prolific
Gastaldi, whose screen credits are often hidden by a number of pseudonyms, was re-
sponsible for over one hundred movies in the peplum, horror, science-fiction, spaghetti
western, giallo, and crime genres from the 1960s to the 1990s and was an uncredited
contributor to the script of Sergio Leones Once upon a Time in America (1984). His
key role in the history of Italian cinema has yet to be fully documented or appreciated,
although, in classic Italian fashion, Gastaldi himself attempted this task in his autobi-
ography, Voglio entrare nel cinema: Storia di uno che ce lha fatto (Milan: A. Mondanori,
1991).
6. A year after Lisa and the Devil, producer Andrew Braunsberg unleashed a film that
would seize the camp humor, necrophilia, and incest crowns for all time, the Paul Mor-
rissey and Antonio Margheritidirected Flesh for Frankenstein, which features a pro-
tracted and explicit scene of necrophilia between the Baron Frankenstein (Udo Kier)
and his eviscerated and completely nude female creation (Dalia di Lazzarro) in wide-
screen and 3-D, no less. The film was shot by Mario Bavas cinematographer, Ubaldo
Terzano.
7. For an introduction to and historical survey of the danse macabre in the visual and lit-
erary arts, see James M. Clark, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
(Glasgow: Jackson, Son, and Company, 1950); Sarah Webster Goodwin, Kitsch and Cul-
ture: The Dance of Death in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Graphic Arts (New York:

Art House or House of E xorcism? 161

 Garland and Company, 1988); and Jean Wirth, La jeune fille et la morte: Recherches sur
les thmes macabres dans lart germanique de la Renaissance (Geneva: Librairie Droz,
1979), 2028.
8. Clark, The Dance of Death, 1.
9. Ibid., 1112.
10. A remarkably detailed Web site about the Lbeck Totentanz that recounts its history
and provides photographs of the entire mural can be found at www.dodedans.com/
Eindex.htm.
11. For a discussion of the relationship between the myths of Death and the Maiden and
the danse macabre and their common ancestors in classical mythology, see Wirth, La
jeune fille et la morte.
12. Phil Hardy, ed., The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Horror (Woodstock, New York: Over-
look Press, 1995), 240.
13. Pascal Martinet, Mario Bava: Filmo n. 6 (Paris: Edilig, 1984), 35.
14. Ibid., 36. This and other translations from French and Italian are my own.
15. Although Last Year at Marienbad, along with Fellinis 8 1/2, became a sort of watershed
film for intellectuals with a passion for film who never went to the movies, the film
bristles with references to pop culture and genre cinema, from Seyrigs Theda Baralike
costumes in some of the fantasy flashbacks to a matted-in cameo by Alfred Hitchcock
ten and a half minutes into the film. This aspect of Resnaiss film has never received the
attention that it warrants.
16. A discussion of Allied Artists role in 1950s genre cinema against the background of
its attempt to enter A-film production can be found in Kevin Heffernan, Ghouls, Gim-
micks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 19521968 (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).
17. This following detailed recounting of the distribution problems of Lisa and the Devil
and House of Exorcism was provided by Alfredo Leone in a September 2003 interview
with the author.
18. Later, Leone discovered that Allied Artists had sold Lisa and the Devil for a tax shelter
for $90,000. Throughout all of his attempts to pay his debt and secure distribution for
House of Exorcism, Leone was never told that his debt had therefore been reduced to
only $60,000 plus interest.
19. Two of the most infamous of these Eurotrash knockoffs, the Exorcist clone Beyond the
Door (1974) and the Jaws-inspired pastiche Great White (1980), were actually success-
fully enjoined by the Hollywood studios whose properties they slavishly imitated. A
year later, Woody Allens 1977 Academy Awardwinning comedy Annie Hall featured a
middle third that is a nonstop assault on the witlessness, cultural sterility, banality, and
insanity of Los Angeles. Featured prominently in one of Allens travelogue sequences
of this cultural wasteland is a movie marquee advertising a double feature of Messiah of
Evil and House of Exorcism.

162 Kevin Hefferna n

 20. An extensive bibliography of this writing can be found in Stefano Poselli and Riccardo
Morrocchi, eds., Horror allitaliana, 19571979 (Florence: Glittering Images, 1996), 168
71.
21. Two of the most well-considered historical and cultural accounts of this phenomenon
can be found in Jeffrey Sconce, Trashing the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerg-
ing Politics of Cinematic Style, Screen 36 (1995): 37193, and Joan Hawkins, Cutting
Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2000).
22. See Heffernan, Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold, for a detailed account of many of these
changes.
23. Leonard Maltin, ed. Leonard Maltins 2003 Movie and Video Guide (New York: Plume,
2003), 806.

Art House or House of E xorcism? 163

 2
Sleazy Afterlives
K ay D i c k i n s o n

Troubling Synthesis The Horrific Sights and Incompatible

Sounds of Video Nasties

False clarity is only another name for myth; and myth has always been
obscure and enlightening at one and the same time: always using the de-
vices of familiarity and straightforward dismissal to avoid the labour of
conceptualization. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

I approve of any form of scepticism to which I can reply, Lets try it! But
I want to hear nothing more about all the things and questions that dont
admit of experiment. This is the limit of my sense of truth; for there, cour-
age has lost its right. Friedrich Nietzsche

Italian horror, particularly the schlocky, confusing, unrelenting,

bizarre, and graphic strain that spans the late 1970s and the
early 1980s, has had its fair share of academic attention. How-
ever, almost all of these writers have huddled around what they
understand to be a preoccupation with imagery in these movies.
Leon Hunt, for example, informs us that the 1987 Dario Argento
movie Terror at the Opera presents an entire film devoted al-
most exclusively to issues of visibility, spectatorship and hor-
ror.1 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith makes a similar claim about that
directors work: The imaginary breaks free from narrative and
Argento allows vision to take priority, in a kaleidoscope of glow-
ing images which reflect an original poetry of the horrific.2
However, these films are more than elaborate spectacles; the
 Figure 1 Cover art for the U.K.
video release of Cannibal Holocaust
before its ban under the 1984 Video
Recordings Act.

bewilderment and shock they engender are partially generated by their equally
startling soundtracks. The specimens splayed on this essays dissection table
Cannibal Holocaust (dir. Ruggero Deodato, 1979), Inferno (dir. Dario Argento,
1980), Cannibal Ferox (dir. Umberto Lenzi, 1981), The Beyond (dir. Lucio Fulci,
1981) and Tenebrae (dir. Argento, 1982)all share two things. They overlay a
barrage of unflinchingly violent imagery with often smooth, mellifluous syn-
thesizer scoring. And, perhaps partially as a consequence, they were all banned
in the United Kingdom under the 1984 Video Recordings Act, making them,
in colloquial terms, video nasties.3 What marks these movieswhat may in
fact have contributed to their illegal status within the United Kingdomis their
soundtracks refusal to condemn or morally justify the images and ideas they
are accompanying.
Yet weas scholarsare historically lacking a framework within which to
scrutinize this disjunction between soundtrack and its cinematic carrier. Film
music analysts have seemed drawn, for the most part, to interactions where

168 Kay Dick inson

the soundtrack and the moving image appear somehow to move to compatible
rhythms. Whether these writers find their niche in the realms of industrial syn-
ergy or suitable orchestral scoring, their theoretical touchstones have usually
been hewn out of a belief in the superiority of moments of uncomplicated
union between music, visual imagery, and narrative agenda. Surprisingly, con-
sidering these researchers love of the aural, there is a certain tendency to cast
music as a mere support system for supposedly more central diegetic priorities,
perhaps because, in the classical Hollywood Fordist-Taylorist model, the score
is created in postproduction (although this is by no means an all-encompassing
way of building up a movie).4 The specially written score that refuses to reiter-
ate a closely empathetic message about the films action is still wildly under-
researched.5
What often gets left by the wayside in traditional soundtrack analysis is the
fact that music and film are communication systems obeying grammars, syn-
taxes, and vocabularies that are often completely alien to one another. Many
of the compositional traditions of music predate the arrival of cinema, and
musics physical makeup (which is primarily sonic, while most movies create
an audiovisual balance) occludes nearly all suppositions that music qua music
and film share a substantial amount of core properties. There are parallels to be
drawn between musical expression and how, for example, cinematographic in-
formation is delivered, or emotion is achieved through narrativeaims may be
sharedbut the languages themselves are different, and less reconcilable than
most writers admit. Following this line of thinking, there arises a sense of dis-
tance, of things perhaps being untranslatable, and of both music and film con-
stantly making declarations that the other could never entirely comprehend.
This opens up the potential for understanding music as more than a slave to
the narrative; indeed, its very divergence from filmic enunciation makes such
an arrangement difficult to shunt into place. So, with two (at the very least)
articulate and educated voices speaking at once, it is entirely possible that the
semantics of the composite object might be jumbled and clashing, might tell us
contradictory stories, might provoke a strange form of ambivalence.
The political potential of such a statewhich will assume a central struc-
tural position in this chapteris thoroughly acknowledged in Zygmunt Bau-
mans book Modernity and Ambivalence. Bauman argues that ambivalence cre-

Horrific Sights and Inc ompatible Sounds of Video Nasties 169

ates fault lines in the smooth and ordered domain of language. These, in turn,
produce a type of instability and cultural anxiety aroused by a lack of taxo-
nomic controla condition anathema to the post-Enlightenment world, where
we struggle to rid ourselves of such confusion. For Bauman, Though born of
the naming/classifying urge, ambivalence may be fought only with a naming
that is yet more exact, and classes that are yet more precisely defined.6 What
ambivalence apparently compels us to do is either systematically expand the
language system or, more worryingly, to deny the ambivalence (either by de-
stroying its physical manifestations, or by dismissing its conceptual power). In
the case of the five films considered in this chapter (and many more like them),
outright prohibition through governmental intervention was the culminating
action against the ambivalence presented by these movies.
All five amalgamate principles and practices that just dont fit together, that
sabotage a neat concluding interpretation, and that often prompt this sort of
ambivalence in their audience. As Maitland McDonagh claims of Argentos
oeuvre,

Obtuse meaning is obtuse precisely because it lies outside of whatever sys-

tem the reader has adopted in order to make sense of a particular work;
it seems unnecessary, excessive. Your mind rebels: the material doesnt fit,
doesnt make sense . . . Barthes radical proposal [to be found in The Third
Meaning] is that the excess, all the meaning that falls outside the system or
systems that determine the works overall structure, forms its own system,
one which may exist parallel or tangentially to the others.7

While McDonagh and I are plowing up similar terrain here, I wish to dis-
tinguish my furrow from hers. First, she immediately identifies the apparent
linguistic mish-mash as outside the system. In contradiction to this, my ar-
gument lingers very much within the system, seeking to comprehend why
seemingly acceptable signifying practices become troublesome when they are
locked onto other, perhaps even more benign ones. It is mainly in their off-
kilter combination of various normally condoned ideas that these films become
threatening. The force of these juxtapositions should be measured not through
analyzing their various formal components in isolation, or by building them a
special avant-garde sphere all their own, but by endeavoring to understand how

1 70 Kay Dic kinson

they destabilize or reconfigure current, more typical (some might say main-
stream) modes of film experience (and a more necessarily restricted definition
of this vast fieldone which relates to these particular movieswill be put
forward presently). Consequently, this essay is less concerned with seeing or
hearing the impossible;8 instead it favors a contemplation of how everyday lan-
guages that have been deemed incompatible, for some reason, might be yoked
together.
This understanding of ambivalence parts company with similar strategies for
the proliferation of meaning (ideas such as polysemy and aporia) in its distinct
sense of opposites existing together. Labeling and classification still hold court
and rule out any more diffused hermeneutic possibilities. Ambi- after all, means
both, each factor remaining to some extent discrete, pointing out (or propping
up) an old orderthe choice of action being paramount here. This is not a con-
fusion ormore usuallya creation of something unheimlich, but a vacillation
between coherent entities. The familiarity of the space in which this locking of
horns occurs is something Bauman9 wishes us to examine closely: The typi-
cally modern practice, the substance of modern politics, of modern intellect,
of modern life, is the effort to exterminate ambivalence: an effort to define pre-
ciselyand to suppress or eliminate everything that could not or would not
be precisely defined. Modern practice is not aimed at the conquest of foreign
lands, but at the filling of the blank spots in the compleat mappa mundi. It is the
modern practice, not nature, that truly suffers no void.10 Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer make a similar observation about our inability to deal with
the ambiguous: The mythic terror feared by the Enlightenment accords with
myth. Enlightenment discerns it not merely in unclarified concepts and words,
as demonstrated by semantic language-criticism, but in any human assertion
that has no place in the ultimate context of self-preservation.11 Rationality,
comprehensibility, and clarity are, these thinkers argue, politically invested and
controlled, and I would contend that the hegemonic alignment of all sorts of
ideas under the banner of logic can be extremely damaging to our perception
of the world. One such enforced rallying often occurs at the point at which a
film meets its soundtrack. The music within my five chosen films largely refuses
to muster in this locale, creating, through its sense of rebellion, an ambivalence
within the minds of the films audiences.

Horrific Sights and Inc ompatible Sounds of Video Nasties 1 7 1

 But there are still more ambivalences at work here. Perhaps the most re-
warding (or troubling) characteristic of these films is their confusion of fact
and fiction, realism and fantasydistinctions that often support extremely
delicate political propositions within the generic domain of the horror film.
This determination to tamper with semantic opposition (which is so much the
darling of the defenders of these films) creates an intellectual commentary on
the role of the horror movie and its constriction within contemporary society.
Of note here is their country of origin, Italy, a place where the bewitchment
by and interrogation of the codes of representational realism have been consis-
tent philosophical threads leading from the development of Renaissance per-
spective through to neorealism, the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Mondo
documentaries. These more recent cinematic engagements have definitely
informed the so-called video nasties. For instance, Deodato (Cannibal Holo-
causts director) once worked as an assistant producer for neorealist figurehead
Roberto Rossellini. The delight with which Cannibal Holocaust and Cannibal
Ferox concoct lurid fantasies about the non-Western world is not only a com-
mentary on Mondo movies, but also a continuation of the cinematic discussion
of how to depict violence and torture that sees Pasolinis Sal (1975), itself a film
with a long history of prohibition, as a precedent.
These movies extend their deconstructive eagerness into their plotlines as
well. Cannibal Holocaust follows an NYU research team into the Amazon basin
to watch them make a documentary film. They fabricate all manner of horrific
events in order to sensationalize not only the film they are making, but also
the one we are watching.12 Similarly self-aware qualities infuse Cannibal Ferox,
whose protagonist, Gloria, is a doctoral candidate at Brown University intent
on wielding what would now be called postcolonial theory to disprove the exis-
tence of cannibalism. Tenebrae is the story of a crime fiction writer embroiled
in murderous situations that seem inspired by his own books. All three of these
films assemble a myriad of self-reflexive plot devices and formal witticisms
that alert us to how the media manipulate realism. This ranges from Cannibal
Holocausts jokey intertitle For the sake of authenticity, some scenes have been
retained in their entirety to Deodatos contextualization of his film within a
larger media environment: At the time on television we were always seeing
death scenes, they were the years of terrorism and my film was also a condem-
nation of a certain type of journalism.13

1 72 Kay Dick inson

 Yet, despite this dabbling with the rules and power of realism (perhaps one
of the key factors that got these films into such trouble), all of these texts simul-
taneously delight in their artificiality. The Beyond, Tenebrae, and Inferno, in par-
ticular, are awash with irrational, mystifying plot lines; their gore has more in
common with spilled ice cream splurted with ketchup than the inner workings
of an actual human being. We are to marvel at the aesthetics of these mock-ups,
more than we are to believe in them. Argentos work especially is very much
in dialogue with the worlds of fashion, interior design, architecture and (inter-
estingly for a study of music) operarealms where mutilation and murder are
rendered with greater abstraction and where art is less frequently asked to jus-
tify itself in the way that horror cinema is. This rendition of fantastical and
almost ornamental violence does not sit well within the popular and distinctly
more literal understanding of cinematic storytelling. In order for the assump-
tions about the depravity of these films held by the anti-nasties lobbyists to
stand firm and for greater numbers of troops to be gathered under their cause,
particularly bland, unquestioning ideas about realism were projected onto
these movies. Experiencing them on a surface value of what can be seen (but
not how and why it is shown) supposedly elicits facile revulsion, identification,
and the dread fear of copy-cat behavior erupting out of societys most gullible
and vulnerable viewersor so the tabloids would lead us to believe.14 Intrigu-
ingly, although the soundtracks to these films are often distracting and might
knock any confused audience members out of such a detrimental engrossment,
the messages their music relays are so wildly removed from the moral agenda of
representational realism that the films seem even more abhorrent to those loyal
to this aesthetic alone. But to fully comprehend what these soundtracks might
be saying, we first need a thorough analysis of what the synthesizer means cul-
turally.
Electronic scoring has a long legacy within films that deal with the un-
earthly, nonhuman, and supernatural, including Louis and Bebe Barrons en-
tirely electronic compositions for Forbidden Planet (dir. Fred M. Wilcox, 1956)
and the common usage of the theramin in other sci-fi films of the 1950s. Jeffrey
Sconce points out the physical similarity between the theramins electronic sen-
sors and the antennae that ubiquitously graced the heads of Martians as they
were depicted in popular culture of the time. Sconce then traces out how a
symbolic allegiance between the two was suggested through their inseparability

Horrific Sights a nd Inc ompati ble Sounds of Video Nasties 1 7 3

in contemporary representation: What antennae ultimately came to stand for
in postwar science fiction was the absence of humanity. . . . Their mission on
earth, often executed to the eerie tones of the theremin, was to wholly perme-
ate, slowly occupy, and eventually conquer all of humanity.15 These film music
ancestors, then, proposed a way of thinking about electronic instrumentation
that continued into the Italian horror films of the 1980s.
More specifically, synthesizers proper have occupied a position within
movies of a more overtly aggressive persuasion since Wendy Carloss work
on A Clockwork Orange (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1971). Throughout the film, we
are encouraged to read the instrument as an overtly cold and distancing tech-
nology, one expressive of disenfranchisement and even a breakdown of tra-
ditional moralityan insinuation that becomes all the more upsetting when
Beethovens extremely emotional and tumultuous orchestral compositions are
given the chillingly precise and staid synthesizer treatment. This sense of in-
appropriate detachmentwhich mirrors the film protagonist Alexs initial re-
sponses to his own actionsis heightened by a startlingly ironic deployment of
familiar upbeat music (such as Singin in the Rain) during scenes of carnage,
a technique that does much to usher into hermeneutic play, by association, this
dialectical use of the synthesizer. A related sense of occasional disconnection
(albeit more to create a congruent atmosphere of narrative disquiet) is con-
veyed in the synthesizer scores of other horror flicks such as The Exorcist (dir.
William Friedkin, 1973), where we hear Mike Oldfields delicate Tubular Bells,
and the films of John Carpenter, which the director himself scoredAmerican
examples that, somehow or other, managed not to get too heavily caught up in
the Video Recordings Act furor.16
Although the choice of using synthesizers in these films is frequently dis-
missed as the cheap option,17 this was not really the case. During this particu-
lar period, synthesizers were expensive and rather incomprehensible; it took
a committed composer with the requisite skills and, usually, an investment in
the semantics of the machine to bring about such a score. Also, most of these
soundtracks amalgamated more traditional instrumentationthe kind that not
only cost money but also demanded a certain compositional aptitude. To label
such scores the outcome of corner cutting or bad musicianship (the work of
people who did not know how to put together a proper horror score) under-
mines the ingenuity embodied in the sounds of these films and ignores the

1 74 Kay Dick inson

Figure 2 Scored by Wendy Carlos, Stanley Kubricks A Clockwork Orange (1971)
employed the synthesizer to help create its dystopic vision of distance and detachment,
an effect made especially profound in Carloss clinical dissection of Beethovens Ninth
Symphony.

lineage of musical pioneers as diverse in makeup as Neu!, Stevie Wonder, and

Yes. In response to such prejudice, Dario Argentos explanation of his creative
methods can also effectively enlighten us about how his movies were scored: I
love the poetry of technology. For me, technological advances are inspiring. Ill
hear of a new camera and it will suggest a story to me.18
Perhaps what truly sparks animosity toward such scores, however, is the way
in which the new juxtapositions of synthesizer sounds and violent imagery vio-
late many of the rules of horror scoring. Very few violent films are unaccom-
panied by music, and those that refuse itsuch as Henry: Portrait of a Serial
Killer (dir. John McNaughton, 1986)are often upsetting to censor and ordi-
nary viewer alike because of their moral ambiguity.19 The lions share of horror
soundtracks deploys instruments that sound as close as possible to humans in
pain: instruments like violins and even the voice that linguistically tag along-
side the victim and most pointedly provoke our empathy. Music itself can also
function as the perpetrator of brutality, so much so that assertive sonic spasms
are commonly known in the scoring trade as stabs. Dissonance rears its head
frequently, although it does so mainly to tell us that things arent quite right, to

Horrific Sights and Inc ompatible Sounds of Video Nasties 1 7 5

provoke an unease, certainly, but one in keeping with our sense of both moral
and musical right and wrong. The famous shower scene in Psycho (1960) incor-
porates all of these techniques, leaving us suitably shocked, disoriented, and
somewhat violated.
However, synthesizers in the late 1970s and early 1980s (the period when
these films were scored) were continually perceived as post- or anti-human/hu-
mane, in part because of the implications loaned out to them by the history of
sci-fi scoring. Their surface textures were too even to immediately evoke rup-
ture, emotion, or distress, and their workings and histories of technical achieve-
ment seemed coldly scientific and futurist rather than bohemian, artistic, and
concerned with a sensitivity toward human suffering. For many a listener, the
synthesizers preset predictability (the fact that no matter what the player did
physically to a key, the note would still sound the same) would have distanced
the instrument from the typical practices of compassionate human input. These
were cultural assumptions about what the synthesizer could mean rather than
predetermined characteristics, but they were ideas readily played with and pro-
moted by many of its advocates, particularly by deadpan, robot-obsessed bands
like Kraftwerk, Tubeway Army, and Devo. Such rationalistic qualities, along
with the instruments association with the nonhuman, did not and does not sit
well with how music conventionally functions within the horror genreand
this becomes all the more troubling when a film edges toward more extreme
obsessions like dismemberment, anthropophagy, and violence toward women,
representations that seem to need the clearest of justifications for their very
portrayal.
The synthesizers lack of depthin all sorts of sensescomplicates its posi-
tion within horror scoring. A synthesizer of that period produced incredibly
even resonances that often cut off abruptly; notes were comprised of much
fewer overtones and so sounded emptier than more familiar instruments. This
sonic flatness jarred with the ways in which the accompanying images pene-
trated deep within the victims bodies, rummaging around protractedly in their
innermost recesses. Instead of absorbing the shock of these images or framing
them within a consistent sense of three-dimensional depth, the shallow quality
of these soundtracks also seems to be reminding the viewer of the fragile and
ghostly presence of the flickering cinematic form.20 The sense of flesh and all

1 7 6 Kay Dic kinson

 Figures 3a, 3b, and 3c Synth-
based recordings of the late 1970s such
as Kraftwerks Man-Machine, Devos
Are We Not Men?, and Tubeway Armys
Replicas solidified the instruments popular
association with a dispassionate and at
times robotic aesthetic.

the damage that is being done to it is not treated with appropriate emotional
or spatial responses by the music.
Although the lineage of these scores probably springs from their production
teams affection for the synth prog genre,21 for many a contemporary viewer
the sounds of the synthesizer were perhaps more commonly heard in that place
of part-time hedonism: the disco. There is often (but not always) a spandex-
like 22 effortlessness and a disinterest in pain rather than wailing, pleading, and
limbs torn asunder; the obsessive ripping and piercing of flesh is disquietingly
matched by high-sheen surface textures. It is almost as if the soundtrack did not
care about what it was watching and just wanted to keep on having a good time.
Moreover, at the time, synthesizers were, misguidedly, assumed to be easy to
play, something that piled an extra sense of work-shy loafing onto these already
pleasure-seeking sounds. Nor did the fact that these scores sounded extremely

Horrific Sights a nd Inc ompatible Sounds of Video Nasties 1 7 7

similar to those of coexistent porno movies do anything to extinguish a sense
of inappropriate debauchery or a fundamental disrespect toward the evocation
of horrific death. A suitable moral tone to comment upon debasement, rape,
and torture was not to be found in the persistent clarity and tunefulness of the
music.
Goblins23 electronic soundtrack for Tenebrae perhaps best epitomizes all
these values. Upbeat synthesizer music (the kind that easily seduces the body
into dance-related movement) surfaces without fail during every violent scene:
it enters and exits loudly and abruptly so that we register it and everything it
stands for. For example, while a shoplifter is being repeatedly knifed in the
neck and pages of Peter Neils latest novel are being shoved in her mouth, the
music is utterly unfaltering in its sleek, laser-like melodies, its even rhythms
and resonances. The tunes steady progress and the swift cutouts of its sounds
(particularly the hollow drum beats) do little to align us with the pain and
penetration that is being forced upon this womans body. Ultimately, to the
uninitiated audience member, the music makes no concession to what is hap-
pening on screen.
Infernos soundtrack, composed by Keith Emerson, formulates similarly
disjunctive audiovisual arrangements. Despite Emersons synthesizer prowess,
most of Infernos soundtrack is built out of hyperbolic classical orchestral scor-
ing. However, perhaps the messiest corpse in the filmthe one of John, the
servant, who is found with his eyeballs gauged outis introduced to us with
ethereal planes of synthesizer layering that seem oblivious of the stomach-
churning tableau that we see before us. There is also a striking use of electronic
music in the scene where Sara (who is soon to be murdered) rides through the
rain in a taxi. While nothing particularly dynamic is happening visually, we
hear a complicated and ostentatious synthesizer reworking of Verdis Nabucco
(which has been the object of study in Saras lecture earlier that day) positioned
extremely high in the audio mix. Such sonic presences become slightly more
tenablebut only slightlywhen we later learn that the architect (who has
designed the three hellish buildings the film explores) is forced to commu-
nicate through an electronic voice mechanism by whose flex he is eventually
strangled.
This sense that the synthesizer becomes somehow strangely (and often in-
consistently) identified with the source of the horror also resonates throughout

1 7 8 Kay Dic kinson

Figure 4 Director Dario Argento (left) consults with his frequent musical collaborators,
the rock group Goblin.

The Beyond, whose soundtrack was composed by Fabio Frizzi. Like Tenebrae,
the music in The Beyond often appears as if from nowhereit starts and stops
at the same volume rather than phasing subtly in and out as many standard
soundtracks tend to do, and its quick-fire launching and docking seem some-
what ridiculous (as it does in many of these movies, if one is accustomed to
the volume-controlling of mainstream movies). The Beyonds soundtrack is
an elaborately flavored gumbo that mixes instruments like bass guitars, flutes,
and violins. However, it saves up its more forceful synthesizer deployment for
the rendition of zombie attacks and their gruesome outcomes. The synthesizer
is thus directly associated with the horror that the film gradually reveals: that
Lizas run-down hotel holds within it one of the seven gateways of hell. In the
flashback delivered in the opening scenes, the synthesizer lurks in the back-
ground as the warlocks face is burned with acid. A synthesizer also readily ac-
companies Liza during her entry into the accursed room 36. The film oozes,
melts, and rips flesh regularly; bodily fluids gush and eyeballs pop, but there is
always a smooth synthesizer sound close at hand to confuse our responses to
violence and mutilation. Normality, on the other hand, is evoked through older
musical styles, such as those heard when John and Liza are safely ensconced in
a New Orleans jazz bar.

Horrific Sights and Inc ompatible Sounds of Video Nasties 1 79

 A similar juxtaposition between musical safety and danger (this time urban
New York and the unpredictable Amazon basin) is created in Cannibal Ferox.24
Perhaps the biggest musical jolt comes when we both see and hear a Salvation
Army band as the movie cuts back to Manhattan immediately after Mikes cas-
tration. However, the films other regular returns to civilization are more often
bluntly marked by funky jazz-infused pieces on horns and bass guitars that
contrast with the unusual choice of representing nature (both bountiful and
destructive) through the synthesizer. That the most technological instrumenta-
tion should stand in for the wilderness ultimately creates a sense of alienation
rather than pity as we witness a variety of violent acts in this desolate space. We
are left to wonder why this ambivalence has been devised, why a largely pop
main theme (which does, admittedly, turn harmonically discordant at various
intervals) should befriend such scenes of disorder, chaos, and inhumanity. Per-
haps these two sensibilities are closer than we imagine, and it is conceivable
that this proposition (and others like it) helped bring about the banning of the
film.
Cannibal Holocaust fashions similar musical corollaries between its Amazon
location and its score, which was, interestingly, written and conducted by Riz
Ortolani, the man behind Mondo Canes (dir. Paolo Cavara and Gualtiero Jaco-
petti, 1962)25 lilting and peaceful rejoinder to the films various engagements
with acts of brutality. The soundtrack is instrumentally, generically and tonally
complex, fusing synthesizer sounds with challenging modernist string arrange-
ments26 and a mawkishly dreamy acoustic guitar-led main theme which is, like
Mondo Canes signature tune, somewhat out of place considering the films con-
tent. However, despite the scores hybridity, it is almost always the synthesizer
in either a wafting and ethereal mode or a jubilant, driving onewhich we hear
first during the many acts of savagery. Although other instruments are quick
to participate in a commentary on the violence depicted, the initial shock of
hearing a synthesizer at these moments is scarcely dampened when more lin-
guistically manageable instrumentation joins the fray. There are sections where
we hear only synthesizers (for example, when the Amazonians commit their
first act of cruelty and near-cannibalism by cutting off a monkeys head and
eating its brains), but these are actually fairly rare. The final scene of retribution
is perhaps the most elaborate in its interweave of synthesizers and other instru-

180 Kay Dic kinson

 Figure 5 Riz
Ortolanis ambitious
score for Deodatos
Cannibal Holocaust
juxtaposes a strangely
mawkish theme,
modernist string
arrangements, and a
variety of synthesizers.
Yet within this diverse
sonic palette, the
synthesizer most
frequently takes the
lead in introducing
scenes of violence and
savagery.

mentation. During the sequence where one of the documentary crew is cas-
trated, dismembered, decapitated, and devoured, the composition is up-tempo
and positively groovy (albeit infringed upon by the occasional discordant
string surge). Nothing of the viscera spilling across the screen is captured by
the music; the washes of synthesizer resemble buzzing electrical currents rather
than anything more corporeal. The soundtracks signature synthesizer sine y
pow noises also make a return visit. These flourishes, which are common to
disco tracks like Kelly Maries Feel Like Im in Love (1980), erupt very much
like little explosions of pleasurepart of a disco firework display. It is as if the
ambivalence of the film wished not only to proclaim the proximity of pleasure
to pain, but also to unmask the menacing underbelly of disco hedonism.
In all five of these movies, variations on this kind of music can evidently
render their violence gratuitous to certain viewers. Because the tidy, if not
somewhat trite, responses of moral condemnation, pity, and identification have
been denied us, because the soundtrack we are given is frequently either anti-
thetical or disinterested, these films invite us to ask questions about how ap-
propriate or justified our standard engagement with cinema might be. Philip
Brophy (talking about musical dissonance, but in a way that could also relate
to synthesizer scoring) makes an astute, rather Brechtian, suggestion: Perhaps
this is why music cues are so neurotically Romantic in their Hanna Barbera

Horrific Sights a nd Inc ompati ble Sounds of Video Nasties 181

reduction of humanist traits: when audiences cannot identify with on-screen
characters, they have to delve into themselves to question why they cant. And
most people probably seem happy to pretend they can relate to others, when in
their social reality they may be totally incapable of such engagement.27
These films are so visually visceral, so unrelenting in their depiction of Bad
Acts (or so the tabloids insisted at the time), that this musical aloofness which
would not offer a standard, safe, moral reproof quickly became that worrying
incarnation of the ambivalent statement. In this situation, if we were to choose
to watch the films at the level of deconstructionenjoy the camp, remain de-
tached and critical, or even laugh (which it is easy to do when confronted with
the hyperbole of the synthesizers and the stylized gore)then viewers inclined
toward the particular investments in realism outlined earlier will find us repug-
nant. Such an unpredictable set of options, it would seem, was too dangerous
for many a Briton, who feared that the coin might land the wrong way up; these
movies would have to be dealt with severely, kept out of harms way, even de-
stroyed. The ambivalence of the films became the pariah, something that just
might coax the weak-minded toward an entwined dark side. While many cul-
tural products delight in ambivalence and opacity (indeed derive their revenues
from this, in part), the particular location of these films within a seemingly
unsurveyable environment (on video, at home) and viewed by certain sections
of the population who are habitually considered to be at risk (poorly morally
educated under-18s whose guardians are frequently out of the picture, for in-
stance) meant that these films were inscribed as unsafe by a host of dynamic
campaigners. And so the delicate refusal of these texts to be forthright was
left unreported by many tabloid news reports in favor of vehement claims that
they embodied unmitigated, uncomplicated reveling in evil and malicewhich
was so much easier to outlaw. What became manifest was neither the creation
of new vocabularies that might incorporate such ambivalences into a more
widely acceptable understanding of logic, or a ferreting among the ideological
underpinnings of our old linguistic categories (as someone like Bauman would
have hoped for), but utter banishment under the 1984 Video Recordings Act.
While suppressing any serious contemplation of the ambivalence in these
films, the contemporary moral assertions made about the movies also gorged
on other meanings and agendas, swallowing them up and insisting upon the

182 Kay Dic kinson

logical and organic wholeness of an essentially expansionist projectone that
also made claims about safety, family, and surveillance. Such engulfing prac-
tices were largely made possible because of the new status of film on cassette
as a domestic object. As Martin Barker details, There will now be three stan-
dards of assessment for some films: a cinema standard, a TV standard, and the
harsher video standard, all of which would be classified by a censorship board
appointed by the Home Secretary.28 With its redefined role in the home, film
now occupied a space that was heavily inscribed as a family environment with
all its concomitant ethical trappings, and its short shrifts for gray areas. In an
eagerness to battle for family values, a moral majority sought both to ignore
and to wrongly interpret the ambivalence of these movies and to whittle down
their suggestiveness by falsely accusing them of a certain literalism. By com-
mitting such actions in the name of child protection, the campaigners covered
their backs with a raison dtre that very few people were likely to want to argue
against. Under this guise, a host of other ideas furtively entered the political
arena. As Barker argues, The video nasties issue allowed Thatcherism to be-
come strong again, to present itself as unequivocally on the side of law and
order.29 During an all-important preelection period, the ever-popular cause of
child protection allowed the party to drum up mass support that then comfort-
ably buoyed the ensuing legislation.30
Of course situations like these, where cinematic matters become contested
ground for a wide cross-section of the population, are red rags to the bulls of
the cult-film fan world. In they leap (and continue to leap for decades after-
ward) to defend the subtlety, the intelligence and, most importantly, the liberty
of their cherished art form against a manipulative and sanctimonious conser-
vative power structure.31 While my sympathies lie on the side of the former
rather than the latter, I am not interested in validating or excusing these films
outright. Fans who do this, I would argue, are often as unequivocal and unre-
mitting as the anti-nasties protesters themselves and are nearly as blinkered and
control-hungryalthough, admittedly, their desired political end points are
entirely different. The fascination in these films for me lies not in whether they
are good or bad, trash or art, but in the fact that they are unresolved and
nebulous, that they confound the strict notions of hermeneutics which are so
easy to politically co-opt. While intriguing work is being done, mainly within

Horrific Sights and Inc ompatible Sounds of Video Nasties 183

the Bourdieu school of thought, on the hegemonic foundations of taste,32 I am
drawn less to the more rarefied stabilities that cult fandom (including the love
of video nasties) offers, and more to the riggling chaos that remains if we refuse
to neatly pack such films into preexisting pigeonholes, cutting off various of
their organs in order that they might fit.
The often confusing audiovisual arrangements of these films encourage us to
linger within the not quite sure, to vacillate, and, for me, this is an undervalued
dimension of critical thought. First, as Bauman points out, undecidables bru-
tally expose the artifice, the fragility, the sham of the most vital separations.33
Through these interactions between soundtrack and image, we are encouraged
to question our need for an opposition of dissociation and the representation
of death, or to unpick the allegiance between specific realist codes, human-
ist sympathy, and morality. Second, the urge to achieve a unified, spick-and-
span conclusion on what the music, the image, and the narrative are trying to
say as a whole often enters into a logic of conquest and eventual domination
which fails to ask why such conflicts might have arisen in the first place and
how producers and audiences might suffer from so uninquisitive a resolution.
Perhaps we should question whether attributing or taking a stance over two
opposed debates is always necessarily the most politically judicious action to
take.34 Must we always belong (as cult fan academics are often wont to do) to a
coherent belief system if we are to present a strong argument or sense of per-
sonal identity?
I would like to propose another approach, one that would involve open-
ing up such ideologically laden contradictions in order to help create a dif-
ferent means of rationalizing our world. This would entail not only trying to
understand taste, but also endeavoring to reshape it and use it in new ways.
The music in these once banned, now heavily cut35 horror films is stopping us
short of a straightforward engagement, but our wavering is intriguing, thought-
provoking, and perhaps (eventually) politically fruitful. Yet such contemplation
is possible only if academia does not also fall prey to the very wariness of am-
bivalence I have outlined. This type of film and music analysis can be carried
out only if scholarly enquiry relinquishes its frequent supposition that music is
simply Mother Images little helper, colluding with some speciously maintained
chimera of narrative univocality and order. If music is seen largely as backing

184 Kay Dic kinson

up the image track or the storyline, then we are not going to see a way to profit
from the ambivalence that erupts out of the clash between these distinct and
different languages.

Notes

1. Leon Hunt, A (Sadistic) Night at the Opera, in The Horror Reader, ed. Ken Gelder
(London: Routledge, 2000), 333.
2. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, with James Hay and Gianni Volpi, The Companion to Italian
Cinema (London: Cassell and BFI, 1996), 6465.
3. According to Martin Barker, the term video nasties was first coined in 1982 by the cam-
paigner for public decency Mary Whitehouse. It became a catch phrase in tabloid
print journalism later on that year and thus had become a familiar concept in the minds
of the general British public by 1984. See Martin Barker, ed., Nasty Politics or Video
Nasties? The Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Media (London: Pluto,
1984).
4. Key authors such as, for example, Irwin Bazelon, Mark Evans, and Royal Brown work
almost exclusively in relation to this model, and, although Flinn is critical of classical,
after-the-fact systems of scoring, she does not extend her analysis to incorporate differ-
ent types of soundtrack realization. Even Jeff Smith, who is one of the few theorists to
concentrate on pop scores and compilation soundtracks, is driven primarily by a need
to understand the harmonious and profitable associations between the music and film
industries. See Irwin Bazelon, Knowing the Score: Notes on Film Music (New York: Van
Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1975); Royal Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading
Film Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Mark Evans, Soundtrack:
The Music of the Movies (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1975); Caryl Flinn, Strains of
Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1992); and Jeff Smith, The Sounds of Commerce (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998).
5. Interestingly, the early days of sound provoked a spate of manifestos and declarations
about the creative, dialectical possibilities of attaching sound to the moving image, par-
ticularly from Soviet director-theorists such as Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudov-
kin. For instance, in their Statement, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov
insisted that THE FIRST EXPERIMENTAL WORK WITH SOUND MUST BE DI-
RECTED ALONG THE LINE OF ITS DISTINCT NONSYNCHRONIZATION WITH
THE VISUAL IMAGES [sic]. And only such an attack will give the necessary palpa-
bility which will later lead to the creation of an ORCHESTRAL COUNTERPOINT of
visual and aural images . . . [which] will inevitably introduce new means of enormous
power to the expression and solution of the most complicated tasks that now oppress
us. See Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov, Statement on Sound, in Film Sound:

Horrific Sights a nd Inc ompatible Sounds of Video Nasties 185

 Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1985), 8485. Likewise, Pudovkins Asynchronism as a Principle of Sound
Film argues that the role which sound is to play in film is much more significant
than a slavish imitation of naturalism . . . deeper insight into the content of the film
cannot be given to the spectator simply by adding an accompaniment of naturalistic
sound; we must do more. . . . Only by such counterpoint can primitive naturalism be
surpassed and the rich deeps of meaning potential in sound film creatively handled by
discovered and plumbed (ibid., 86, 91). However, very few extended calls to arms of
this persuasion have concentrated upon the musical score, a notable exception existing
in Theodor Adorno and Hans Eislers Composing for the Films. Since this books publi-
cation in 1947, only small numbers of writersMichel Chion and Philip Brophy among
themhave sought to valorize, or even examine, soundtracks that might contradict
other elements of their films formal organization. See Philip Brophy, The Secret His-
tory of Film Music series (199798), media-arts.rmit.edu.ac/Phil_Brophy/soundtrack-
List.html; and Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
6. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 3.
7. Maitland McDonagh, Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento
(London: Sun Tavern Fields, 1991), 23.
8. As, perhaps, might be the desired end point of such similarly anti-Enlightenment logic
projects as Adorno and Horkheimers. This book is too rich to dwell upon hereit de-
serves (and has already received) critical attention of a more focused nature. However,
Adorno and Horkheimers image of Odysseus and the sirens is a bleak yet persuasive
one to consider at this point and, pertinently, it alludes to the power of music. The
writers define the two limited possibilities offered to us under Enlightenment tyranny
for encountering new, politically disruptive thought (as symbolically personified by the
sirens): we may listen to the sirens song, as Odysseus did, but remain strapped to the
maskin effect, utterly powerless to move or effect changeor we can block our ears
with wax, like Odysseuss crew, and thus entirely relinquish the opportunity of hearing
the sirens. Despite the hopelessness of this metaphor, though, Adorno and Horkheimer
still cling, as I have already suggested, to the possibility of overthrowing the regime
they define and despise. See Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment
(London: Verso, 1979).
9. Although Bauman is primarily charting the modernist period, his ideas, as he is quick
to acknowledge, continue into contemporary life.
10. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, 78.
11. Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 29.
12. This story line has recently resurfaced in the form of The Blair Witch Project (dir. Daniel
Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999), another film that plays with the formal conven-

186 Kay Dick inson

 tions of vrit documentary, updated by the integration of that contemporary truth-
exuding and immediate technology, the handheld digital camera.
13. Interview with Deodato by Gian Luca Castoldi in Castoldi, Harvey Fenton, and Julian
Grainger, Cannibal Holocaust and the Savage Cinema of Ruggero Deodata (Surrey, UK:
FAB Press, 1999), 19.
14. A compelling argument about a different form of identificationone fascinated by
deconstructive rather than realist modes of filmic interactionis developed in Jeffrey
Sconces article Spectacles of Death: Identification, Reflexivity, and Contemporary
Horror, in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. J. Collins and H. Radner (London:
Routledge, 1993), 10319. In both these films [Freddys Dead and Henry: Portrait of a
Serial Killer, although this argument could be extended to all sorts of horror films], the
self-reflexive techniques thought by many theorists to challenge dominant modes of
enunciation and identification are used instead as a means of intensifying certain forms
of viewer identification (111). Following this line of thought, viewers are not wrap-
ping themselves up in the characters in a traditional realist engagement, but are feeling
a special bond with the film because they understand and appreciate the manner in
which it is unraveling cinematic trickery. In other words, the character with whom
they [the fans] identify never appears on the screen, but is instead the artistic enunci-
ator whose presence is felt in the text (117).
15. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Dur-
ham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 121.
16. One would imagine this was because of the greater clout the American studios had
with the British censors, something the Italian producers did not enjoy.
17. This is the first argument that was leveled against my interpretation of these scores on
the two occasions when I have delivered conference papers on this topic. Both (name-
less!) respondents were keen to contend that the only reasons for these films to bear
synthesizer soundtracks were those of economic limitation, rather than an apprecia-
tion of the synthesizers semantic richness.
18. Dario Argento, 1991 interview with Maitland McDonagh, in Broken Mirrors/Broken
Minds, 238.
19. Sconce suggests that the lack of musical soundtrack to Henry: Portrait of a Serial
Killer enhances the documentary feel created by other formal devices such as the films
cinema vritstyle camerawork. Thus, cumulatively and with the help of the absence
of music, the movie is ironically positioned within a more objective set of factual dis-
courses. This, in turn, means that firm moral guidelines, so typical of the ways in which
violent narratives are framed and distanced, are much less pronounced, and judging
the impact upon the audience (ostensibly one of the jobs of the censor) is extremely
tricky. See Sconce, Spectacles of Death.
20. My thanks to Jodi Brooks for pointing this out.

Horrific Sights a nd Inc ompatible Sounds of Video Nasties 187

 21. Dario Argento, in particular, is known to be a fan of Yes and King Crimson, and he
commissioned Keith Emerson to score Inferno.
22. The instruments very name recalls high-tech artificial fibers such as this one.
23. Goblin was a band that focused mainly on producing sound tracks and attained a large
amount of album chart success in Italy for their work. Their lineup changed frequently
but, for this score, Goblin was comprised of Massimo Morante, Fabio Pignatelli, and
Agostino Marangolo.
24. The music to this film was composed by Budy Maglione and arranged by Carlo Cor-
dio.
25. Another film that plays cat and mouse with the standard propositions of documentary
filmmaking.
26. It is worth noting here that modernist recourses to atonality are themselves often am-
bivalent gestures. Consonant and dissonant musical arrangements meet on an equal
footing in the work of composers like Schoenberg who refused to adhere to hierarchies
which tell us which combinations of notes sound right. However, to ears that have
been tutored according to age-old notions of harmony (and this applies to most of us),
these pieces sound confusing, even wrong. Just like video nasties, then, certain strains
of modernist music interrogate cultural oppositions and logics.
27. Brophy, The Secret History of Film Music.
28. Martin Barkers edited collection The Video Nasties provides a very rewarding contem-
porary discussion of the key debates that accelerated the passing of the Video Record-
ings Act.
29. Barker, Nasty Politics or Video Nasties, 11.
30. Ibid., 910.
31. See Jeffrey Sconce, Trashing the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of
Cinematic Style, Screen 36 (1995): 37193.
32. This is a sizable area of scholarship, with key authors such as Henry Jenkins, Sconce,
and Sarah Thornton using Bourdieu in their respective studies of the cult texts of tele-
vision, film, and music. Matt Hills offers a rigorous overview, critique, and develop-
ment of these theories. See Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Par-
ticipatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992); Sconce, Trashing the Academy; Sarah
Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (Cambridge: Polity);
and Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002).
33. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, 3.
34. I write in the midst of a war helmed by two menGeorge W. Bush and Saddam Hus-
seinwhose policies are both abhorrent to me.
35. In the U.K. context.

188 Kay Dic kinson

Joan Hawkins

The Sleazy Pedigree of Todd Haynes

I n October 2000, the Wexner Art Center invited Todd Haynes,

the centers resident visiting artist, to curate a retrospective of
his films. The resulting program paired Hayness own films with
films he said had influenced him for a series of double features
that ranged from the illuminating to the quirky. Poison (1990)
was paired with Fassbinders Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1973). Safe
(1995) was shown with Max Ophulss 1949 noir melodrama The
Reckless Moment. Some early student films were paired with
Jean Genets homage to erotic voyeurism, Un chant damour
(1950). And Velvet Goldmine (1998), Hayness tribute to the glam
rock era, played against Russ Meyers Beyond the Valley of the
Dolls (1970), the cult film that Meyers claimed was beyond any
film youve ever seen.1
On many levels, pairing Velvet Goldmine with Beyond the
Valley of the Dolls makes perfect sense. Thematically, they both
deal with the rise and fall of rock musicians against a theatrical
backdrop of sex, drugs, and cross-dressing. Formally, they both
feature a strong visual style that at times threatens to overwhelm
the plot and characters. Both films feature a camp aesthetic.
Both narrate a protagonists fall from innocence. And both rely
heavily on rock songs to drive the story. On just the surface
level, then, the juxtaposition of these two films invites viewers
to interrogate the boundaries between high and low culture and
Figure 1 Curating a retrospective of his own work, Todd Haynes
paired his glam-rock Velvet Goldmine (1998) with Russ Meyers Beyond
the Valley of the Dolls (1970), explicitly placing his work in dialogue with
the tradition of low trash and high camp.

to consider the ambiguous distinctions between high and low body genre films,
which Ive discussed at length elsewhere.2
What the double bill did not do was demonstrate the influence cult film has
had on Hayness entire oeuvre. One could even argue that the Wexner program
was misleading in that it positioned Velvet Goldmine as the only Haynes movie
indebted to paracinema.3 In point of fact, almost any Haynes film can be situ-
ated within the history of degraded cultural forms4 that make up low popular
culture. And if one extends the category of degraded cultural forms to include
television, which is so often positioned as high cultures binary opposite, then
every Todd Haynes film owes a debt to trash and trash aesthetics.
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) uses Barbie dolls to tell the com-
plicated story of Karen Carpenters rise to stardom and her death from anorexia
nervosa. Interestingly, some early scenes of the film invite comparisons to Ed
Woods Plan 9 from Outer Space, a film some critics have called the worst movie
ever made. Poison (199091) weaves together three separate stories to comment
on the medias portrayal of AIDS. One, a stylized love story between two prison
inmates, is equally indebted to the conventions of art cinema and the writings

190Joan Hawkins
of Jean Genet. One is a modern tabloid news show about a boy who killed
his father; and one is a 1950s-style, sci-fi B-movie about a scientist who, after
successfully isolating the sex drive, accidentally ingests it and becomes a sex-
fiend, mutant, id monster. Velvet Goldmine (1998) is indebted to Russ Meyer.
Safe (1995) uses a dense mediascape (drawn from popular music, infomercials,
film, and television clips), as well as pocket book self-help titles, to mount its
scathing critique of this societys treatment of gendered and sexed diseases
(like environmental illness, chronic fatigue syndrome, and AIDS). Dottie Gets
Spanked (1994) uses a young boys obsession with a Lucy-style situation com-
edy to reinvent Freuds A Child Is Being Beaten. Even Far from Heaven
a stately homage to Douglas Sirktakes on a slightly, over-the-top, B-movie
logic at times. The film treats a 1950s couple that seems to have everything
until Frank (the husband, Dennis Quaid) realizes he can no longer deny that
hes gay. The scenes in which he cruises men at the local art house cinema and
gay bar borrow heavily from the canted-angle aesthetic that characterizes the
mad-scientist sequence of Poison. In that sense, Far from Heaven is as indebted
as Poison to the 1950s B movies that, as Harry M. Benshoff argues, were always
about queer(ed) sex.5
The fact that so many low culture references occur within the oeuvre of an
acknowledged art director is telling. Haynes made his reputation as an inde-
pendent, downtown filmmaker,6 whose work has increasingly crossed over into
mainstream art house venues. With the diverse filmography referenced above,
Haynes has established himself as a serious filmmaker, whose concerns in-
clude AIDS, homophobia, adolescent sexual development, female identity, and
environmental disease. A stunning film stylist, he has created a body of work
that is often beautiful to watch. He has won prizes at Cannes and Sundance and
has established himself as an important director in the New Queer Cinema. So
the use of sleaze elements and trash style in his work invites the same kind of
reading that elsewhere I have ascribed to collector catalogues and fan publica-
tions.7 They enable us to perform a cultural reading strategy similar to the one
Fredric Jameson advocates in Signatures of the Visible. That is, they invite us to
read high and mass culture as objectively related and dialectically interdepen-
dent phenomena, as twin and inseparable forms of the fission of aesthetic pro-
duction under capitalism.8

The Sl eazy Pedigree of Todd Haynes 191

 What I would like to stress in this essay is the dialectically interdependent
phenomena part of Jamesons quote. That is, dialectic has a precise philo-
sophical meaning that Jameson is too theoretically savvy to ignore or to in-
voke lightly. For Hegel, and later for Marx, dialectic refers to the collision of
two antithetical terms. As a result of this collision, a new third term is created,
one that includes all the elements and contradictions of the original terms, as
well as a new possible meaning (the result of synthesis). When I explain this to
studentsusually as part of a lesson on Sergei EisensteinI use the example
of parents and their child. That is, two people contribute genetic material that
results in the creation of a wholly new, third being. The resultant child contains
all the genetic material she has received from her parents (plus a healthy dose
of the contradictions anyone who lives within a family experiences), but is still
a wholly separate unique individual.
So what I believe Jameson is saying in the above quote is not that we should
read high and low culture as twinned, but still essentially separate, terms. Rather
I believe he advocates seeing them as mingling in a kind of synthetic union
one from which a new taste culture might ostensibly emerge. The later use of
the term fission confirms the idea that what Jameson is stressing here is not the
coexistence and co-pairing of opposites, but a complex sociochemical reaction
that generates a hybrid form (a mutant of its own, if you will).
Many authors claim that postmodernism, with its mixture of high and low
culture, its dependence on quotation and pastiche, and its tendency to look for
meanings between terms (in the spaces between words, for example) is exactly
the kind of third term Jameson is predicting and advocating. But the term post-
modern has itself become so compromisedso frequently a shorthand reduc-
tion of complicated historical and cultural processes into a kind of sound bite,
that I am reluctant to use it here (although, if pressed, I would say that yes, Todd
Hayness style is postmodern). I would like, though, to turn to a scholar who
frequently writes on postmodern phenomena and borrow one of his terms to
describe what I think is going on in the best of Todd Hayness work.
In Architectures of Excess, Jim Collins identifies what he sees as a series of
hybrid genre films that emerged in the 1980sRoad Warrior (1981), Blade
Runner (1982), Blue Velvet (1986), Near Dark (1988), Who Framed Roger Rab-
bit (1988), Batman (1989), Thelma and Louise (1991), Last Action Hero (1993),

192Joan Hawkins
and Demolition Man (1993). These are popular film narratives that, Collins ar-
gues, had become ever more eclectic and citational.9 While reviews of these
films frequently describe their citationality and intertextuality as further evi-
dence of Hollywoods diminishing ability to create new material, Collins reads
them as signifiers of massive, widespread changes within some of the most
fundamental categories of filmmaking and film criticism, namely genre, auteur
and national cinema.10 The eclecticism of contemporary genre films, Collins
writes,

involves a hybridity of conventions that works at cross-purposes with the

traditional notion of a genre as a stable, integrated set of narrative and sty-
listic conventions. . . . Ultimately, the ubiquity of this hyperconscious quota-
tion and re-articulation suggests a profound change at the most basic level,
that of the narrative contract established between text and audiencewhat
films now promise to deliver in terms of action and what audiences now
conceive of as entertainment has changed so thoroughly that the cultural
function of storytelling appears to be in the process of profound redefini-
tion.11

As Collins makes clear later in the chapter, the challenge to traditional models
of genre mounted by these hybrid texts goes far beyond the blurring of genre
boundariesbetween horror and sci-fi, for examplethat scholars have always
noted. In fact, Collinss notion of hybrid genres might be seen as bearing the
same relationship to the older notion of blurred (or unstable) generic bound-
aries that the dialectic bears to binary opposition. That is, the idea of blurred
generic boundaries still presupposes the logic of discrete genres (a binary, if
you will)there are elements of horror and elements of sci-fi that are readily
identifiable according to their own generic rules and then a gray area where
they seem to trip over into one another. Hybrid genres, on the other hand, are
new forms that result from the collision of previously stable categories, such
that a wholly new synthesis is created. For Collins, this hybridity is a distinctly
historical phenomenon, one that emerges in the 1980s and 1990s (the time of
Hayness career). The generic transformations that were previously at work in
the 1960s and 1970s, he writes, may have differed in regard to the degree of
respect shown a particular genre, but in each case the transformation is one that

The Sl eazy Pedigree of Todd Haynes 193

remains within the confines of a specific genre, whereas the eclectic, hybrid genre
films of the eighties and nineties . . . all engage in specific transformations across
genres which yield new, synthetic forms.12
What Collins believes a film like Thelma and Louise does to traditional
notions of genre, I believe a film like Superstar does to conventional notions
of taste culture. In Hayness movies, elements of low and high culture are so
imbricated that they can no longer be seen as inhabiting distinct and separate
realms (as in blurred categories).13 Rather there is a hybridity of conventions,
one that can be seen as operating across traditional notions of taste culture to
create a kind of synthesis. To paraphrase Collins, what Hayness films promise
to deliver in terms of taste and what his audiences now conceive of as enter-
tainment has changed so thoroughly that the cultural function of taste appears
to be in the process of profound redefinition.14

Not Exactly Barbies D ream House

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987)15 is a hybrid text at the levels of
both genre and taste culture. The film opens with a date (February 4, 1983).
This is followed by a shaky, handheld traveling shot, as Mrs. Carpenter tracks
through the house looking for her daughter, Karen. For Barbara Kruger, this se-
quence is shot in a tension-laden, cinema-verit-ish style, but for me its more
low-grade and less arty than that, more reminiscent of the opening sequences
of low-budget slasher films and the kinds of grainy police crime shoots that
Chris Kraus depicts in her 1987 film How to Shoot a Crime.16 While the words
that flash on the screenA Dramatization seem largely in keeping with the
reality style of a cop show (i.e., a crime shoot), the slasher reference also has
strong resonance. One of the key points of the forty-three-minute film is that
Mrs. Carpenter bears a great deal of responsibility for her daughters death. So
its no accident that shes turned into the slasher here. But the film also impli-
cates the commodification of womens bodies, the sociopolitical climate of the
times, Americas investment in consumption as a way of life, and star culture, as
well as hetero-normative family life as possible causes, or at least analogues,
of Karens disease. Throughout the film there are repeated, seemingly unmoti-
vated, insertsa Barbie doll being spanked, documentary footage of Richard
Nixons Cambodia speech, news footage from the Vietnam War, documentary
television footage of the Carpenters performing, Nixon playing the piano, the

194 Joa n Hawkins

Miss America pageant, some interviews with people who assess Karen Carpen-
ters style, and documentary footage explaining the symptoms and treatment
of anorexia nervosa. As one critic noted, its a Lilliputian Sirkian movie of the
week, shot through with Bruce Conner overtones.17 I would agree, although
as noted aboveI would add grade-Z horror as an important element in the
mix.
As the dramatization of the first scene gives way to simulation (the next
intertitle to appear on the screen), the films style changes from low-budget
slasher to an older horror-exploitation model. Focusing for a while on the ex-
terior of the Carpenters house, Haynes creates a shot that appears very much
like a pastiche of the establishing shot in Bela Lugosis old man stopping to
smell the roses sequence from Plan 9. While the image of the house itself
seems general enougha necessary establishing shot in a film about Barbie
dollsthe style of the narration here seems so much a parody of Wood that
students often groan and laugh appreciatively when I show the clip in class.
The sepulchral timbre, the rhythm, and the intonation of the narrator (Bruce
Tuthill) as he asks, What happened? match the dread-serious tones of Plan 9s
narrator (The old man . . .) almost beat for beat.
Certainly the admittedly brief intertextual reference resonates with the rest
of the project. Working with miniature sets (literally doll-size), on the cheap,
with materials commonly found around the home, Haynes seems to have lifted
an entire film aesthetic from Wood (the director who painted paper plates to
look like flying saucers and used his Zippo lighter to set them on fire for spe-
cial effects shots). In addition, Hayness position as an important director of
the New Queer Cinema movement lends a certain ironic edge to his homage to
one of the great transvestite directors in exploitation film history, an edge that
also surfaces in Superstars insinuation that Karen was not the only Carpenter
with gender and sexuality issues. At one point in the film, Karen threatens to
tell her parents about Richards private life if he tells them about her relapse
into anorectic behavior. And in case the audience doesnt get it the first time,
she pointedly asks, Do the Carpenters have something to hide? We never find
out if they do or dontor what Richards private life might entailbut students
and popular audiences commonly read this scene as a reference to homosexu-
ality.
Finally, the comparison to Wood opens a space for camp in a film that at

The Sl eazy Pedigree of Todd Haynes 195

timesBarbie dolls notwithstandingrisks becoming a little too lugubrious.
In fact, for some critics, the space opened for camp allows camp to take over
completely and threatens to undermine the entire project. Writing for The Spin-
ning Image, Graeme Clark asks, But how seriously are we supposed to take all
this? The use of dolls gives the film a campy tone, however sincere Haynes is
about his subject matter. And the dramatization of domestic scenes resembles
something out of a bad soap opera, complete with corny dialogue. From some
angles, Superstar looks like a sick joke.18
In part, Clarks comment demonstrates the same tendency to split camp off
from serious cinema appreciation that Barbara Klinger observes in Douglas
Sirk criticism, where it becomes largely an issue of taste. As Klinger defines it,
the requisite components of camp . . . a penchant for lowbrow tackiness,
hyperbole, and artifice over nature . . . appears as a specialized mode of in-
terpretation available primarily to those schooled in culture. That is, only those
who are familiar with a broad range of aesthetic offerings, who understand the
conventions of good taste well enough to enjoy deposing them . . . are liable
to pursue the highly self-conscious and omnivorous art of camp.19 Klingers
articulation of camp is closely linked, then, to the ironic reading strategy,
which Sconce identifies as a key element of paracinema fandom. This is a read-
ing strategy whereby those with the right kind of what Bourdieu calls cultural
capital are able to valorize all forms of cinematic trash and [render] the
bad into the sublime.20
Superstars seeming invocation of Ed Wood and the use of a certain Woodsian
aesthetic throughout the film draws a parallel, then, between camp and para-
cinema, one which links the process of postmodern taste hybridization (which
Ive read into Jim Collinss work) to an overall queering of the cinematic pro-
cess, a queering that, some critics maintain, is the crux of Hayness larger
film project.21 The films citations and intertextual references should not be read
then merely as low-culture moments (or references) within an experimental
work, but rather as transformative gestures in the text, gestures that encourage
reading across the bounded categories of genre and taste culture to create a new
kind of queer synthesis.22
This becomes all the more evident when we consider the presence and func-
tion of Barbie dolls in the movie. As Chuck Stephens notes, there is an element

196 Joa n Hawkins

of kitsch that surrounds the dolls, particularly given their presence in an art
film (i.e., a film whose audience will be predisposed to read the dolls ironi-
cally).23 That is, there is a degree to which the use of the dolls itself infuses the
film with an element of low culture (kitsch) that cant be easily bracketed off
or set apart from the serious intent of the film. In fact, the use of Barbie makes
sense only when considered against the films serious attempts at social cri-
tique. As Lynn Spigel has pointed out, Barbies plastic form is doubled by her
equally plastic ability to be molded to almost anyones desire.24 It is precisely
this malleability, and Barbies status as the perfect plastic waspwaisted creature
onto whom fantasies might be projected, that makes her the ideal analogue for
the downside of star culture. The pressure of Karens careerwhich here is
depicted as contributing to her anorexiais the fear of not measuring up to fan
expectations, either of her body or of her voice. In that sense, her anorexia can
be read as her attempt to mold herself according to the audiences desires. In the
film, this is given a graphic dimension, as the Barbie doll depicting Carpenter
is literally whittled away, her little face finally scarred by the necessary mold-
ing she has attempted both to accommodate and control. Furthermore, the
very commodity status of Barbie underscores one of the major threads of so-
cial criticism in the filmnamely, that the commodification of womens bodies
within the larger culture is a necessary precondition to the emergence of a dis-
ease that plagues women only in industrialized nations.
Haynes himself has said that he used the dolls to experiment with ques-
tions of identification, to see whether audiences could become emotionally
connected to dolls onscreen. He learned, he said, that people will identify at
the drop of a hat . . . at almost anything.25 While Im not sure that people
identify with the dolls in quite the same emotional way that they identify with
Rick in Casablanca, it is true that the use of dolls allows the audience to see
the way the process of identification is created (in a way, precisely because we
arent distracted by the presence of real people onscreen). As Jeremy Heilman
notes, the use of the dolls . . . allows an opportunity for the viewer to observe
the way that editing choices and musical cues can help to create a performance.
Hayness smart use of camera movements [the tilts to mimic POV shots, for
example] often lends a bit of emotion to the completely expressionless dolls.26
Certainly the use of zooms combined with sound distortion succeeds in ren-

The Sl eazy Pedigree of Todd Haynes 197

Figure 2 Hayness infamous debut, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,
employed the already highly charged icon of the Barbie doll to anchor its
melding of political commentary, experimentalism, and tawdry melodrama.

dering food as threatening and frightening in a way that I havent seen matched
in any other film. In that sense, the film manages to create, if not a sense of
identity with and sympathy for Karen Carpenter, at least a sense of identity with
and sympathy for people suffering from Karen Carpenters disease.
Throughout his career, Haynes has been interested in revealing the way in
which narrative and traditional processes of cinematic identification work,
without nullifying the process of identification itself.27 And, for him, Superstar
is the best, cleanest example of something hes been drawn to in all his films;
namely, the way stylistic tropes and conventions of expression can be taken
to an extreme point of self-conscious, ironic, highly theatrical, highly worked
presentation without losing emotion.28 That is, the use of dolls provides the
best, cleanest way of renegotiating (and, Haynes would argue, warming up)
the mandates of modernist art cinema (with all its chilly Brechtian distancia-
tion devices), through an emphasis on the reading strategies of camp and para-
cinema/low culture.
Before closing this section, Id like to say a few words about the very real hy-
brid physical nature of the object most of us have come to know as Superstar. In

198Joan Hawkins
1989, Richard Carpenter and A&M records sued Haynes for unauthorized use
of the Carpenters songs. As a result of this law case, Haynes has been enjoined
against further distribution of the film.29 He is able to show it, in limited cir-
cumstances, during complete retrospectives of his work; but he is not allowed
to show it in separate, independent screenings. The film is also not legally avail-
able for commercial or classroom use. As a result, most people know this film
through encounters with pirate videotapes, which may be purchased through
paracinema catalogues and Web sites. The effect of this samizdat distribution
of what is arguably Hayness best and boldest work is that viewers frequently
watch an experimental film very much through the lens of low culture. The best
videotape Ive seen of the film is so dark that it completely obscures the date
and intertitles at the beginning of the movie and makes reading the surface of
the dolls themselves (as theyre whittled) almost impossible. A new DVD exists,
and while it restores some of the quality of the transfer, it has its own problems,
since its not legible on all DVD machines. As a commodity form, then, Super-
star enacts transformations across taste cultures, transformations that have
been dictated by institutional practices, andas I have shown elsewherethe
larger hybridization of taste cultures at work in late capitalism.30

Kens without Barbies

Like Superstar, Velvet Goldmine is a hybrid text that invites readings across
genres, taste cultures, and even media. The opening title card blends the usual
disclaimer of film texts with the acoustic recommendations commonly found
on import albums: Although what you are about to see is a work of fiction it
should nevertheless be played at maximum volume.31 This opening directive to
listen to the movie as though it were an audio recording establishes a tone that
extends throughout the film. Much more than Superstar, Goldmine plays with
the total market saturation of pop culture and the interconnections between
media, as album covers open up into music videos and film clips, television
appearances segue into concert performances, and so on.
The film deals with an erathe glam rock erain which the usual order of
things was inverted, shaken up. Suddenly, the dandies and the woofters were
fashionable and it was hip to be bisexual. As Goldmines female narrator says at
the beginning of the film, little did the boys who were being beaten up in the

The Sl eazy Pedigree of Todd Haynes 199

1960s know that one day, the whole stinking world would be theirs. As part
of this inversion, a certain hybridization of fashion took placeas androgyny
emerged as the dominant look, and the historically elegant merged with what
formerly had been considered tacky. Furs blended with green nail polish and
glitter eye makeup. Fashions previously considered appropriate only for eve-
ning were seen on the street in daylighton men as well as on women. Camp
was in, and it brought with it a hybridization of sleaze and glamour, the total
theatricality that characterized the era.
As mentioned earlier in the article, camp is closely linked to the ironic
reading strategies that Sconce identifies as a key element of paracinema fan-
dom, and as a key element of the kinds of hybridity I have discussed through-
out the article. Certainly many critics attribute to camp the qualities I attribute
to Hayness hybridizationa fascination with colliding high and low cultural
forms, ambiguity of voice, emphasis on performativity and reveling in failed
seriousness. Even more striking, though, is the way in which, for some critics
at least, the categories of hybridity, paracinema, and camp seem to mergeto
become themselves synthetic forms. In his influential Uses of Camp, Andrew
Ross argues, from an institutional point of view, camp has become the resi-
dent conscience of a bad film subculture which has its own alternative circuit
of festivals, promoters, heroes, stars, and prizes.32 In the course of the article,
he mentions two films that Haynes explicitly notes as influences for Goldmine.
Whats interesting here is that Ross sees these cultural references as belonging
to the decadent and not the vibrant spirit of camp.33 I say interesting because
decadence (both in its sense as a historic cultural movement personified by
Oscar Wilde and as a term used to signify the last chapter of a decaying era/
genre/movement) is precisely Goldmines topic.
Ross begins his discussion of campy bad movies with a consideration of
Myra Breckinridge (dir. Michael Sarne, 1970) and Russ Meyers Beyond the Val-
ley of the Dolls, films that were frequently paired in popular reviews and linked
in the popular imagination. For Ross, Myra Breckinridge becomes yet another
example of a good book badly adapted to the screen. Michael Sarnes much
hyped Myra Breckinridge, he writes, based on Gore Vidals entertaining novel,
was a tired, laconic treatment of gay camp fascination with Hollywoodiana,
and it evoked a wave of scorn among critics for Rex Reed/Raquel Welchs dual

2 00Joan Hawkins
portrayal of transsexualism.34 Its not clear from Rosss comments (nor, inci-
dentally, from the reviews he cites) whether the scorn was for the actors per-
formance or for the mere representation of transsexualism onscreen. This was
a time, after all, when gay themes were not particularly well received outside
gay and camp circles,35 a fact Ross neglects to adequately address. Similarly, Be-
yond the Valley of the Dolls is dismissed as an example of problematic camp. It
overexposed the keen gluttony of Russ Meyers earlier exploitation skin flicks,
Ross writes, . . . while Roger Eberts gilded-trash script for this most synthetic
of movies demonstrated how camp deliberately aspires, as Mel Brooks puts it,
to rise below vulgarity.36
My quarrel with Ross is not that he points out the vulgar and trash elements
of camp, since camp does deliberately embrace both the vulgar and the trashy,
but rather that within the hybrid category of popular camp culture he attempts
to identify a taste hierarchy (a move that seems antithetical to the consumer
practices of both paracinema bad film aficionados and followers of popu-
lar camp culture). That is he attempts to mark a distinction between a kind
of good camp and inferior camp, and this distinction is drawn along rather
standard taste-class lines. While the American drive-in/suburban movie the-
ater camp represented by Myra Breckinridge and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
receives what I consider to be problematic treatment in the essay, another film
that greatly influenced Velvet Goldmine is extolled as the film that finally gave
countercultural camp . . . a run for its money.37 That film is Nicholas Roegs
Performance (1970), a film that played mainly in art houses and appeared as a
prestige import film on HBO in the early days of cable television. Performance
is an extraordinary film whose importance to the era can hardly be underesti-
mated. As Ross correctly points out, it brought together the working-class
criminal subculture and the experimental rock avant-garde within the hal-
lucinogenic milieu of a bad trip.38 The overarching theme of the film isas
the title suggestsperformance, the performative nature of stardom, criminal
subculture, and middle-class life. In this film, as in Jenny Livingstons Paris Is
Burning (1990), every job and every social role becomes a form of drag. But for
all the interest it potentially continues to hold for young paracinephiles, Per-
formance is also a supremely difficult film for contemporary youth audiences
to read. Certainly my students have more trouble deciphering the codes and

The Sl eazy Pedigree of Todd Haynes 2 01

 Figure 3 Velvet Goldmine:
a densely intertextual collision
of high and low camp.

cultural references of this film than they have in reading any other film (includ-
ing Hayness early experimental films) shown in my Todd Haynes class. They
complain that even at the level of story, the film is harder to negotiate than films
by Godard. Good camp, for Ross then, becomes the kind of camp that requires
a very special kind of classed cultural capital to read, one that is foreign to many
contemporary youth audiences.
In Velvet Goldmine Haynes merges these two strands of camp cultureor
rather, shows the way in which glam rock merged these two strands into a hy-
brid. At the same time, however, he interrogates the very kind of class divi-
sions that Ross, inadvertently perhaps, introduces into camp (the very notion
that there are two strands of class culture). Theres humour in glam rock,
Haynes says, theres irony and wit, and its often about its own point of address;
its often about presentation, the inherent artificiality of our so-called natural
world. And yet it ends up being very moving with its rhythm, its meter, its
colour.39 In an attempt to convey the irony, the wit, and the rhythm, Haynes

2 02Joan Hawkins
uses intertextuality to a dizzying degree in this film, so much so that its hard
not only to see where one reference ends and another begins, but also where the
boundaries between high culture and low culture actually lie. At the beginning
of the film, Oscar Wilde makes an appearance as a space alien who wants to be
a pop icon, and whose emerald green brooch marks and binds glam rockers
Jack Fairy, Brian Slade, Curt Wild, and journalist Arthur Stuart into a kind of
dandified line of succession. Furthermore, quotes from Wilde and references
to his work throughout the film make him one of the keyif mostly unseen
players in the story. In addition, the film makes pointed reference to Cabaret
(dir. Bob Fosse, 1972), Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles, 1941), Lisztomania (dir.
Ken Russell, 1975), David Bowies Ziggy Stardust tour, the bizarre rumor that
Paul McCartney was really dead, Leopold von Sacher-Masochs Venus in Furs,
Bryan Ferry, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Kurt Weill, and the artifacts of pop
culture (fan magazines, club culture, etc.). At one point, it even pays pointed
homagevia a Ken-doll sequenceto Superstar.
As though the sheer number of references werent sufficient to suggest the
cultural stew that characterizes postmodern pop culture, the film is organized
around a logic of cuts clearly designed to render what Haynes sees as glam rocks
rhythm, its meter, its colour. What Haynes calls fast cuts (mainly rapid dis-
solves) mingle here with what he calls mad cuts (rapid dissolves combined
with 180-degree pans and swish pans, and competing onscreen motiondur-
ing the credits sequence, for example, the letters of the titles move across the
screen left to right, while the camera and actors often rush right to left), cuts
that blur motion and colour into a kind of kaleidoscopic effect. These punctuate
long still scenes, shot at medium to medium-long range, in which theatrical
mise-en-scne is put on display, and they are punctuated by hard cuts, used
to visually accentuate moments of rupture, transformation, and closure in the
story. Stylistically, its an exhilarating film to watch, and it plunges us into the
world of glam in much the same way that the style of Superstar plunges us into
the world of eating disorders. The fact that all this is taking place in the past
the film is actually set in 1984, and a journalist is investigating the now-defunct
glam eralends a certain political edge to what Bakhtin might call the carni-
valesque atmosphere of the 1970s. The Reagan 1980s are depicted here with a
monochromatic gray palette reminiscent of Michael Radfords Nineteen Eighty-

The Sl eazy Pedigree of Todd Haynes 2 03

Four (1984), a palette that contrasts sharply from the colors and textures of the
1970s. We wanted to change the world, glam rocker Curt Wild says during
one of the 1980s segments, and ended up . . . just changing ourselves. Whats
wrong with that? the films hero, Arthur, asks. Nothing! Wild replies. If you
dont look at the world.
The jumble of textual references and rhythmic shifts makes it difficult
to locate the point of each particular reference or citation (this is not a film
whose pointed references can always be read as specific individual analogues
or counterpoints to whats going on in the main storythe usual use of such
citations in mainstream cinema). Rather its the mix and hybridity itself that is
important. When the references do stand out in a way that invites exegesis (the
Nineteen Eighty-Four reference, for example), they do so in a way that causes
us to read for culture as much as for content. The best example of this is the
pointed use of Citizen Kanes structure as the organizing structure of Goldmine.
As in Kane, we have a journalist assigned to investigate the mystery connected
with a popular icons death (in Kane the death is real; in Goldmine the death
itself is a hoax). In each film, the mystery is seen as the key to identity; and in
each film the story unfolds as a result of the journalists interviews and research.
Neither story adheres to the strict logic of linear narrative; the interviews often
overlap, so that we as viewers find ourselves rewinding the plot in order to
add additional information or another point of view.
Not only does Goldmine borrow the structure of Kane, it includes pastiches
of at least three scenes from Welless classic. The newsroom scenes, in which the
respective reporters are given their assignments, are remarkably similar. The
scene in which Arthur visits Brian Slades first manager, Cecil, in a hospital or
nursing home, looks almost exactly like the scene in Kane in which Mr. Thomp-
son interviews Jed Leland. The conversation Arthur has with Brians ex-wife,
Mandy, in a bar, looks almost exactly like the analogous scene in Kane, in which
Thompson finally gets to talk to Kanes ex-wife, Susan.
While the references to Kane lend a certain cultural pedigree to a film (Gold-
mine) that is so heavily obsessed with flash and trash, the inclusion of Kane here
also invites a reexamination of the classic film, which the American Film Insti-
tute named the greatest American movie ever made.40 That is, Citizen Kane
is treated here, in much the same way that it is treated in Michael Chabons

2 04Joa n Hawkins
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), as a work whose natural
cultural allies are drawn from the low end of popular culture (comic books in
Chabons novel; fan magazines, rock n roll, and the films of Russ Meyer in
Goldmine). As in Chabons novel, the inclusion of Kane here denaturalizes it,
renders it strange, and for that very reason enables us to read it outside the
box of its own prestige, to remember that it, too, is a compendium of high and
low culturesone has only to think of the vast storehouse at Xanadu, which
houses both jigsaw puzzles and works of European art.
The importance of such taste-culture hybridity is not only that it calls atten-
tion to the inherent artificiality and constructedness of our so-called natural
or self-evident taste categories (according to which the elements of high and
low are presumably always easy to see). It also helps to remind us of what was
always truly dangerous about some of the most exciting high art. The pub-
lished screenplay for Velvet Goldmine calls for a title card that never made it
into the final version of the movieFor Oscar Wilde, posing as a sodomite. In
Hayness work, all the great artists citedRimbaud, Wilde, Genetare homo-
sexuals whose work and lives were seen as dangerous precisely because they
threatened prevailing standards of good taste. What Haynes would like to do,
one suspects, is turn them all into pop idols.
I began this section on Velvet Goldmine with a discussion of Andrew Rosss
article on camp and class-based taste culture. So, before closing, a more specific
discussion of the treatment of class in the film seems warranted. Rosss article
Uses of Camp invokes class in two ways. On the one hand, it appears to make
class-taste distinctions within the broad category of campa move that, as I
have tried to show, Velvet Goldmine pointedly avoids or even subverts. On the
other, it invokes camp as that category of cultural taste, which shaped, defined,
and negotiated the way in which sixties intellectuals were able to pass as sub-
scribers to the throwaway Pop aesthetic.41 Ross is speaking here of a specific
use of camp that enabled middle-class intellectuals to overcome a certain bias
against popular culture and to find its legitimate cultural use. It is this aspect of
camp as a means by which specific classes can negotiate taste and class lines and
can gain access to certain classed realms that I want briefly to address here.
One of the key aspects of glamas represented in Velvet Goldmineis
the way in which it opened a space traditionally closed to working-class kids.

The Slea zy Pedigree of Todd Haynes 2 05

Arthur Stuart, the journalist who guides us through the search for Brian Slade,
is something of a street kid in the flashback sequences. Forced to leave home
because of his sexual preferences, Arthur scrapes together a living, finds a home
with a band, and periodically glams it up and goes to concerts. This is not bleak
footage. The glam rock concerts give a texture and color to Arthurs life that
successfully block out whatever is humdrum and colorless (we dont see him at
work, and we dont know how he makes his living, for example). This is in dis-
tinct contrast to the contemporary 1984 sequences, in which the gray reality
of a bleak economy has successfully blocked out whatever vibrancy and plea-
sure there might be in the world (in fact, if Tommy Stone is an indication, it
even blocks good pop music). Part of the point here seems to be that even in a
heavily class-based culture (the glam sequences take place in England), camp
and glam rock shape, define, and negotiate the way in which working-class kids
can pass as middle-class kids from good schools (again a comparison to Jenny
Livingstons Paris Is Burningin which homeless kids dress up as military offi-
cers, fashion models, and Hollywood starletsseems apt) and can gain access
to a world of style, glitter, and seeming privilege. The way in which this surface
style becomes linked to real cultural currency for working-class kids is perhaps
best emblematized by the green brooch that passes from Oscar Wilde to Jack
Fairy to Brian Slade, Curt Wild, and finally Arthur Stuart. Not only does the
brooch mark a dandified line of succession, as I argued earlier, it also confers a
kind of cultural pedigree on anyone who owns it. Both Brian Slade, whose best
ideas initially seem to come from his handlers, and Curt Wild, who initially
appears as an inarticulate ex-junkie, begin to speak spontaneously in Oscar
Wilde aphorisms and witticisms, once they get the hang of glam style and, inci-
dentally, possess the brooch. That is, in this film, style itself conveys a kind of
cultural currency that generally comes only from good middle-class schools
(the ability to quote Wildeand also Shakespeare); one can say, in good camp
fashion, that here style becomes cultural currency and a potent means of eras-
ing or at least flattening out certain rigid markers of class (education, accent,
taste).

All That Sirk and Fassbinder Allow

Andrew Ross ends his discussion of the campy bad movies that influenced
Todd Haynes with a brief nod to a camp director whose project in some ways

2 0 6J oa n Hawkins
mirrors Hayness own: John Waters. While Waterss films are characterized by
a different style and voice than Hayness, the way that he uses both camp and
avant-garde strategies in his films links his project to the one Im describing
here. Most interesting for our purposes, though, is that Waters is a huge fan
of Douglas Sirk. In Shock Value, Waters acknowledges Douglas Sirk, a true
gentleman who made such great melodramas as Written on the Wind and Mag-
nificent Obsession that I wanted to fall to my knees when introduced.42
In some ways, Haynes did fall to his knees before Sirk when he made Far
from Heaven (2002), a film that J. Hoberman calls a supremely intelligent pas-
tiche. Set in 1957, the film is a retelling of Sirks All That Heaven Allows (1955).
In Sirks film, Cary, an attractive widow (Jane Wyman), falls in love with her
gardener, Ron (Rock Hudson). Her country club friends and children disap-
prove of the match, and Cary succumbs to the pressure to stay within her own
social class and age group. The film has a happy ending, though. Cary finally
realizes that shes made a mistake when she hears that Ron is ill, and the two
lovers are reunited at the end.
Hayness version of the film complicates the basic plot by references to what
Hoberman calls the mirrored scenarios of Sirks Written on the Wind (1956)
and Imitation of Life (1959)43that is, by references to homoeroticism and race.
In Far from Heaven, the woman (Kathy) is not widowed, as she is in Sirks film,
but married, and she becomes aware of Raymond, her African American gar-
dener, at about the same time she learns that her husband Frank is having af-
fairs with other men. There is no happy ending hereat least not in Sirkian
terms. After his daughter is attacked in an episode of racial violence (in which
he is specifically named as the reason for the assault), Raymond packs up and
moves to Maryland. The final scene shows Kathy in the Hartford train station,
waving good-bye.
As with the other Haynes films weve discussed, Far from Heaven enacts a
certain hybridity of taste culture at the level of style. Certain scenes of the film
(the opening and the hawthorn in a vase scene, for example) seem to mirror
those in All That Heaven Allows almost shot for shot, and certain elements of
the mise-en-scne, Kathys station wagon, for example, are so identical to Sirks
that one wonders if Haynes found them at a Universal-International lot sale.
Furthermore, during the shooting of the film Haynes very self-consciously
restricted actors to a series of conventions associated with the time frame in

The Slea zy Pedigree of Todd Haynes 2 07

Figure 4 Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman in a press still for
Douglas Sirks All That Heaven Allows (1955). Sirks celebrated
talent for refracting the lowly Hollywood melodrama through the
sensibility of the European avant-garde has made him a pivotal
figure in a variety of cinematic pantheons, high and low.

which Douglas Sirk was workingthe acting style of the 1950s. Theres a sort
of vocabulary that comes with that type of acting, Dennis Quaid (Frank) said
during a Sundance Channel television special, which is different from what
film acting is today. Haynes echoes that when he says, in the same television
special, We set up a very specific set of restraints in approaching this film, and
it began with the writing. It was as if only a certain number of words could be
spoken, a certain series of phrases, certain gestures that could take place, and
nothing beyond that. Its in a way that still feels like stock dialogue.44
This restriction of the acting vocabulary lends a certain campy, theatrical
air to the films entire project. In setting up a distance between what the actors
could do and what they were used to being able to do, a distance between what

2 08Joan Hawkins
contemporary audiences could see and hear, and what were used to seeing and
hearing, Haynes creates a milieu that enables us to see actors negotiating their
roles, in ways that generally remain invisible to us. Interestingly, this is most
evident when Dennis Quaid is onscreen in his queer man trying to pass per-
sona. In scenes such as the Do you want another lamb chop? dinner scene, or
the portfolio-week office-montage scenes, we can literally see Quaid negotiate
between past and present acting vocabularies as he builds a persona. This adds
heightened irony, since the whole problem for Frank, Quaids character, is how
to pass, how to negotiate between queer and heteronormative sexuality, and
Quaids difficulty in negotiating acting codes foregrounds the discomfort of the
character (who is himself seen as a kind of actor).
This sense of ironic distance and camp is reinforced by the films costum-
ing and music, which is in many ways more Sirk than Sirk. Kathys dresses
throughout the film are so startlingly full-skirted and beautiful that at times
they threaten to eclipse the actress (Julianne Moore). Certainly, they seem to
serve a kind of drag function here, as they continually remind us that Kathys
femininity must be constructed and performed anew every day. Its telling that
in the final scenes of the film, when she no longer has a man to dress up for,
Kathy wears a simple straight skirt, an outfit that stands in stark contrast to the
costumes she wears throughout the rest of the movie. By the time Raymond
leaves, it appears, she has given up a little on what Joan Rivire calls the mas-
querade.
Just as the acting and costumes in Far from Heaven call attention to the arti-
fice of gender-based style (the constructedness and performativity of gender),
the drama of the music calls attention to a certain artifice within the genre of
melodrama itself, the way the genre is itself literally constructed, as Thomas
Elsaesser has maintained, around problems of style and articulation.45 As
Elsaesser points out, melodrama derives its name from its theatrical use of
music, and in its dictionary sense . . . is a dramatic narrative in which musical
accompaniment marks the emotional effects.46 Certainly, the musical score in
Sirks dramas is theatrical and lush, in ways that are often startling to students
(who comment on the use of music to punctuate and drive the story). The lush
score here serves the same purpose that it has always served in melodramato
provide dramatic punctuation and mark emotional effect. But because Far from

The Slea zy Pedigree of Todd Haynes 2 09

Figure 5 Far from Heaven (2002): Hayness stylization of Sirks already stylized vision
of 1950s America.

Heaven is a contemporary film that uses 1950s codes as much as possible (James
Lyons has spoken of the way he even tried to make the editing conform some-
what to 1950s styles), the constructed nature of the genrethe films adherence
to certain modes of articulation and stylebecome easy to see. This is different
from the kind of remake project that translates 1950s codes into analogous con-
temporary codes, thereby preserving the seeming naturalness of the storytell-
ing device. In that sense, one could argue that Hayness use of music and his use
of costume in this film constitute a kind of dragand, following Andrew Ross,
maintain that a certain camp meaning is generated in the text through a sort
of historical incongruity and stylistic tension.47
At the same time that Haynes engages in a kind of camp channeling of Sirks
style, he also borrows heavily from Rainer Werner Fassbinders homage to
All That Heaven Allows, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974). Here an older German
working-class woman, Emmi, falls in love with a young Moroccan worker, Ali,
and must confront the racial prejudice of her children, colleagues, and neigh-
bors as a result. The mise-en-scne of Fassbinders film is spare by comparison
to either Sirks or Hayness. But the framing of the charactersoften within
door frames or positioned between slats and barsis visually compelling. As

2 10Joan Hawkins
Haynes himself notes, Ali is organized around a visual economy of looks, an
economy to which Haynes has consistently returned in his own work. There is a
scene early in Fassbinders film in which Emmi enters the foreign workers bar,
where she meets Ali. There is an intricate interplay of connecting glances, as
Emmi looks at the assembled patrons, who each in turn look at her, before the
barmaid finally comes to take her order. This relay of glances is repeated several
times in the film, and Haynes uses it to remarkable effect in Far from Heaven.
As J. Hoberman notes, Far from Heaven is a movie about the limbo of petrified
desiremost eloquently expressed by a yearning gaze.48 Both the framing of
the characters and the way the yearning gaze is represented in Far from Heaven
owe more to Fassbinder than they do to Sirk. Certainly the scene in which
Kathy meets Raymond at the art show is heavily indebted to a Fassbinder-style
social economy of looks, as we literally follow a relay of curious and castigating
glances throughout the gallery. In addition, the choice to cast the forbidden rela-
tionship as an interracial one is indebted to Fassbinders retelling of Sirks story,
and even the choice to make homoeroticism explicit in the text seems to be as
much a nod to Fassbinder as to Sirk. One of Hayness few published articles on
film aesthetics deals explicitly with homoaesthetics in the films of Fassbinder.
And Far from Heaven seems to beat least in partHayness attempt to work
out some of the homoaesthetics he attributes to Fassbinder within the context
of a Hollywood movie.49
At the level of style, then, the film is a hybrid art-house melodrama/serio-
camp romance, and as with the other hybrids we have been discussing, its
frequently difficult to separate out influences, to say which shot is influenced
by Fassbinder and which by Sirk (and by extension, which is camp and which
is straight, which is melodrama and which is art film). In addition, Far from
Heaven mixes cultural references to create a hybrid taste culture. This is most
clearly seen in the scenes involving Raymondwho can discuss modern art and
gardening with his white middle-class patrons, and then slip into an entirely
different vocabulary as soon as he goes to his favorite club across the tracks. But
its also present in the references to Poison and, by extension, to grade-B sci-fi
movies, which I cited earlier in the article. Its present in the way in which cer-
tain anxieties about popular culture that are present in Sirks film are smoothed
over in Hayness. The demonization of television, which is so much a part of

The Sl eazy Pedigree of Todd Haynes 2 11

All That Heaven Allows (where the final sign of Carys loveless future arrives in
the form of a television seta Christmas present from her adult children), is
largely erased here, as Kathy and Dennis become Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech, and
the scenes involving television viewing seem to be reassuringly homey scenes.
Similarly, while the action in All That Heaven Allows halts at a key moment to
allow Cary to read aloud from Henry David Thoreaus Walden, the analogous
scene in Far from Heaven has Kathys best friend, El, reading to a group of
friends an article about Kathy in a popular ladies magazine.
But while Far from Heavens effect of mixing high and low cultural forms, art
and pop taste cultures, camp and straight performative styles brings it in line
with the rest of Hayness hybrid work, there is something about this film that
sets it apart from the rest of the directors project. In Superstar and Velvet Gold-
mine, Hayness hybridization of taste cultures and styles serves to elucidate the
politics of the movies and give us real clues as to how the films should be read.
The textual and taste-cultural hybridity in Far from Heaven, on the other hand,
resists opening the text to analysis in quite the same way. For me, at least, Far
from Heaven remains Hayness most difficult and least legible film. For a work
that outs the homoerotic subtext of Sirkian melodrama and which revels in a
kind of camp theatricality, Far from Heaven is a movie whose sexual politics are
peculiarly hard to decipher. Gay audiences often complain that the film seems
to be more about race than about queers, as Kathys relationship with Raymond
is really the compelling nexus of the plot. But even at the level of race, the
film can be difficult to decode, since it encourages us both to sympathize with
Kathys attempts to rise above the racial politics of her place in time and to feel
superior to her.
There is one scene that has made every audience with whom Ive seen this
film laugh: the scene in the art gallery, when Kathy meets Raymond with his
daughter. Kathy is delighted to see Raymond but surprised that he would know
about an exhibit of modern art. I read the newspaperlike everyone else, he
tells her. Caught in a betrayal of her unconscious class prejudice and possibly
racism, Kathy is flustered. Im not prejudiced, she tells him slowly and care-
fully, and my husband and I have always supported equal rights for Negroes
and the NAACP. This scene is immediately followed by a shot of everyone look-
ing at Kathyone of the key scenes in the film where she becomes the object of
a critical collective social gaze.

2 12Joa n Hawk ins

 We want to sympathize with Kathy in this scene, and I think we do (since
were aware that shes so much nicer than everyone else in Hartford). Yet the
ironic tone of the film here also foregrounds how problematic her liberalism
is. This strikes me as a different kind of tension than the class tension we see in
All That Heaven Allows (where, even among contemporary youth audiences,
Ive never heard anyone laugh at Cary). In the Sirk film, when we as an audi-
ence realize that Cary still has the prejudices of her class, we also recognize
that shes in real danger of losing contact with her children if she marries Ron.
That realization helps to mitigate the superiority we feel over her. Would we
really behave any differently? Would we sacrifice our relationship with our kids
in order to have a second chance at love? Similarly, in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul,
we recognize Emmis racismher relationship with a man of color notwith-
standing. But Fassbinder refuses to let us off the hook as he paints a picture of
racism whose very horror lies in its ability to taint even good-hearted people
like Emmi. There is no irony here, even when Emmi takes Ali to one of Hitlers
favorite restaurants on their wedding day. Racism is such a part of the social
landscape, the film seems to suggest, that Emmi can recognize it only when she
herself becomes its victim.
In Far from Heaven, there is no family pressure (as there is in Sirk) to miti-
gate against the kind of ironic distance that the film establishes between the
audience and Kathy in the art gallery scene. The film does allow us to feel su-
perior to the heroine in ways Fassbinders film does not. A send-up of white
liberalism permeates Far from Heaven, emphasized in the improbable scenes of
the NAACP canvassing a white, middle-class neighborhood for support and a
seemingly overdetermined scene of Kathy herself phoning the NAACP to volun-
teer her services for their program. That is, theres a certain irony surrounding
Kathys white liberalism here that colors the depiction of the liberal sensibility
available to people living through that time and perhaps undermines our ability
to read the film as a comment on social problems we still face.
Part of the problem stems from our desire to read these scenes natural-
istically, as though they were meant to be realistic depictions of the true-life
scenarios people actually confronted in their suburban homes. But, as Haynes
notes, this film is not really about Hartford, Connecticut, in 1957. Rather its
about the way that life in Hartford gets represented to us, the classic American
family scenario, which, as Haynes notes, we know from the movies more than

The Sl eazy Pedigree of Todd Haynes 2 13

anywhere else.50 From the movies and from televisionfor while its true that
real people in the 1950s did not see the NAACP routinely canvassing white afflu-
ent neighborhoods, they did see scenes very much like this in television dramas
of the period (which, like melodrama, often used a certain amount of artifice
and heightened drama to create situations of existential choice for the char-
acters). If audiences dont always recognize the media references in Far from
Heaven, it is perhaps because Haynes did not camp the film up enough, didnt
make some of the invisible quotation marks around scenes obvious (the way he
does in Goldmine).51

A F inal Note on Camp

Throughout this essay I have alluded to the ways in which camp merges with
or sheds light upon Hayness hybridizing project. As Susan Sontag points out in
her famous Notes on Camp, camp is not a natural mode of sensibility; in
fact it calls the whole notion of natural modes of sensibility into question.52
Marked by a love of the unnatural, of artifice and exaggeration, camp is a su-
premely theatrical category of cultural taste. Related to the cult of the dandy,
it is a highly aestheticized mode of viewing the world. It privileges style over
content (or shows the absolute inseparability of the two); it privileges irony,
stylization, and certain bad forms of art. It is, as Sontag tells us, decadent.
As a verb (to camp it up), it functions as a mode of seduction. It dethrone[s]
the serious.53
Certainly, these elements are present in Hayness work. In addition Haynes
frequently pays explicit cinematic homage to camp icons: Oscar Wilde in Gold-
mine, Jean Genet in Poison, Rimbaud in The Assassins (1985). His early essay on
Fassbinder, Homoaesthetics and Querelle, can be read as a theoretical attempt
to reconcile the aesthetic project of camp with certain strands of feminist film
theory. Without putting too fine a point on it, one can argue that reconciling
these two modes of knowing (camp and feminist film theory) has been the
theoretical underpinning of Hayness entire film project (certainly, Haynes has
returned again and again to movies that he identifies as feministSuperstar,
Safe, Far from Heavenmovies also heavily indebted to camp). What I have
here identified as a project of hybridizing taste cultures can also be read, then,
as Hayness particular inflection on the camp aesthetic.

2 1 4 Joan Hawkins
 This is particularly interesting since Haynes sets so many of his films in pre-
cise historic moments1957, 1983, 1984, the Nixon 1970s, the Reagan years
moments of cultural crisis or difficult historic transition. In this context, camp
becomes one way (even if only in retrospect) that the culture negotiates diffi-
cult moments of social change. George Melly, the English jazz musician and
as Andrew Ross calls himpop intellectual, writes that camp is central to
almost every difficult transitional moment in the evolution of pop culture.54
Haynes takes Mellys assertion and flattens it out, by showing that everything
from the most seemingly serious historic trauma to the most seemingly banal
pop music scandalis part of the pop culture landscape, and camp (or taste-
culture hybridity) is one of the most effective means we have for negotiating it
all.
All of Hayness films are hybrid texts, shot through with a camp sensibility.
Ive chosen Superstar, Goldmine, and Far from Heaven for the main focus of this
essay in part because they are overtly about a mediascape that is itself becoming
increasingly hybridized. In all Hayness films, though, elements of high and low
not only coexist in a twin relationship but tend to coalesce into a synthetic taste
culture, one that we increasingly recognize as the taste culture in which we
live.

Notes

Special thanks to Chris Anderson, Margaret Ervin Bruder, Chris Dumas, Skip Hawkins,
and Jeffrey Sconce for their help and suggestions.
1. Quoted on the video box, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Twentieth Century Fox,
1970).
2. See Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
3. Jeffrey Sconce has defined paracinema as an elastic category that includes splatter
films, B movies, government hygiene films, Japanese monster movies, Japanese pink
movies, old sci-fi and horror, exploitation, sword-and-sandal epics, Elvis flicks, and so
on. See Jeffrey Sconce, Trashing the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Poli-
tics of Cinematic Style, Screen 36 (1995): 37193.
4. This was a term much in use at the 1995 European Cinemas, European Societies con-
ference, held in Bloomington, Indiana. Cutting Edge resulted in large part from my
irritation over the unproblematic way in which scholars were invoking the notion of an
agreed-upon low (as in lesser) culture.

The Sl eazy Pedigree of Todd Haynes 2 15

 5. See Harry M. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).
6. Downtown cinema is a radical form of independent cinema, which for want of a better
term I have elsewhere called avant-garde. See Joan Hawkins, Midnight Sex-Horror
Movies and the Downtown Avant-Garde, in Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics
of Oppositional Taste, ed. Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lazaro Reboll, James Lyons, Julian
Stringer, and Andrew Willis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 22334.
7. See Hawkins, Cutting Edge.
8. I used the same quotation from Jameson in a similarly worded passage in Cutting Edge,
8. See Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992).
9. Jim Collins, Architectures of Excess: Cultural Life in the Information Age (New York:
Routledge, 1995), 125.
10. Ibid., 126.
11. Ibid., 12627.
12. Ibid., 131 (first set of italics added).
13. I have purposely avoided using the term stable in relation to taste culture. While it is, of
course, arguable that genre was ever really a stable category, my previous work on taste
culture has attempted to demonstrate that taste itself clearly is not stable. See Hawkins,
Cutting Edge.
14. Sconce has done some of this work in Trashing the Academy, in which he argues
that the notion of cultural capital, expounded by Bourdieu in Social Distinction, has
become something of an elastic category as paracinephiles have entered the academy.
15. Since the film has been withdrawn from circulation by A&M records and the Car-
penter family, copies are difficult to find. Low-grade bootleg videos are available from
Video Vamp, 23 Big Spring Circle, Cookeville, Tenn. 38501. A better-quality DVD is
available from Anonymous Film Archive.
16. Barbara Kruger, Remote Control: Power, Culture and the World of Appearance (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 160.
17. Chuck Stephens, Gentlemen Prefer Haynes, Film Comment 31, no. 4 (1995): 7681.
18. Graeme Clark, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, Spinning Image, www
.thespinningimage.co.uk/cultfilms/displaycultfilm.asp?/reviewid=164&aff=13.
19. Barbara Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture and the Films of Douglas
Sirk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 135, emphasis added.
20. Sconce, Trashing the Academy, 372, 378.
21. See, for example, Norman Bryson, Todd Hayness Poison and Queer Cinema, Invisible
Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Studies, http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_
culture/issue1/bryson/bryson.html.
22. For more on what such a queer synthesis might entail, see Michael Warner, Fear of a
Queer Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

2 16 Joan Hawkins
 23. Chuck Stephens, Gentlemen Prefer Haynes.
24. Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Dur-
ham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 311.
25. Justin Wyatt, Cinematic/Sexual: An Interview with Todd Haynes, Film Quarterly 46,
no. 3 (spring 1993): 28.
26. Jeremy Heilman, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, November 4, 2002, archived
at moviemartyr.com and available at www.rottentomatoes.com/m.Superstar-10002120/
reviews.php.
27. Todd Haynes, Risks of Identity, paper delivered at Knowing Mass Culture/Mediating
Knowledge, Center for Twentieth-Century Studies conference, University of Wiscon-
sin, Milwaukee, May 1, 1999.
28. Todd Haynes, Velvet Goldmine screenplay (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), xx.
29. The copyright issueespecially within the music industryhas ruined many a good
film. Superstar cant even be shown in its proper format, as a result of copyright re-
strictions. Kurt and Courtney, Nick Broomfields 1998 documentary about Courtney
Love and Kurt Cobain, suffers from the absence of any of Cobains songs. And Velvet
Goldmine, with its many references to David Bowie, would be a better film if some of
Bowies songs had been included on the film sound track.
30. Hawkins, Cutting Edge.
31. Interestingly enough, this title card replaces the one called for in the published screen-
play, For Oscar Wilde, posing as a sodomite. See Haynes, Velvet Goldmine screen-
play, 3.
32. Andrew Ross, Uses of Camp, in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New
York: Routledge, 1989), 155, emphasis added.
33. Ibid., 153.
34. Ibid.
35. See the chapter on the 1970s in Vito Russos The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the
Movies, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1985). When Sunday Bloody Sunday (John
Schlesinger, 1971) was first released, I went to see it in a suburban California theater.
During the scene in which two men kiss, the audience in the balcony stood up and
made retching noises.
36. Ross, Uses of Camp, 153.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Haynes, Velvet Goldmine screenplay, xx.
40. American Film Institute, 100 Years, 100 Movies, www.afi.com/tv/movies.asp.
41. Ross, Uses of Camp, 136.
42. John Waters, Shock Value (New York: Thunders Mouth, 1995), 215.
43. J. Hoberman, Sign of the Times, Village Voice, November 6, 2002.

The Slea zy Pedigree of Todd Haynes 2 1 7

 44. Anatomy of a Scene: Far from Heaven (television show), series producer Toby Oppen-
heimer, first aired Sunday, November 17, 2002, on Sundance Channel.
45. Thomas Elsaesser, Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,
Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 4th ed., ed. Gerald Mast, Marshall
Cohen, and Leo Braudy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 519.
46. Ibid.
47. Ross, Uses of Camp, 138.
48. Hoberman, Sign of the Times.
49. See Haynes, Homoaesthetics and Querelle. Subjects/Objects (1985): 7199.
50. Anatomy of a Scene.
51. My undergraduate students tend to talk about the racial politics raised by the film in
historical terms, as something weve overcome. In part that has to do with the racial
zeitgeist were experiencing at the moment, but in part it has to do with something in
the tone of the film itself which seems to encourage students to read for ironic dis-
tanceweve come a long way.
52. Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp, in Against Interpretation (New York: Dell, 1966),
275.
53. Ibid., 28889.
54. George Melly, Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts in Britain (London: Allen Lane, 1970),
16061; see also Ross, Uses of Camp, 136.

2 18Joan Hawkins
M a tt H i l l s

Para-Paracinema The Friday the 13th Film Series as Other to

Trash and Legitimate Film Cultures

I will argue in this chapter that academic accounts of trash

cinema can be read as overemphasizing trashs opposition
to legitimate film culture. By excavating a line of argument
from foundational work on trash,1 I will suggest that we need
to consider how notions of trash film have worked to exclude
certain types of filmic sleaze that have also been simultaneously
excluded from, or devalued within, academic discussion. Types
of slasher films have, I will suggest, marked one limit to trashs
classificatory elasticity. Despite being rejected by legitimate film
culture, certain slasher flicks have nevertheless not been wel-
comed into the trash pantheon, becoming intensely problematic
in this respect. For example, the Friday the 13th franchisecur-
rently running at a total of ten filmsseems to have remained
resolutely beyond trash revalorization, while also being fixed in
many academic accounts as a marker of the low and illegiti-
mate slasher film. This piece will thus explore what has and what
hasnt been counted as sleazy artistry, taking the Friday the 13th
films as a case study in fan/academic struggles over the cultural
distinctions of trash and legitimate film.

The Limits to Trash

In his influential article outlining the way that certain films and
their auteurs have been reclaimed under the classification of
trash cinema, Jeffrey Sconce suggests that the explicit manifesto of paracine-
matic culture is to valorize all forms of cinematic trash, whether such films
have been either explicitly rejected or simply ignored by legitimate film cul-
ture.2 By paracinema, Sconce means all that exists outside the sacralizing
functions of academic film criticism, paracinematic aesthetics being either in
excess of, or opposed to, those valued by official, legitimate culture: For its
audience, paracinema represents a final textual frontier that exists beyond the
colonizing powers of the academy, and thus serves as a staging ground for
strategic raids on legitimate culture and its institutions by those (temporarily)
lower in educational, cultural and/or economic capital. Paracinema is a read-
ing protocol that is devoted to all manner of cultural detritus.3 Note that in
these formulations, Sconce repeatedly stresses the inclusiveness of trash; its
reading protocol (and thus its interpretive community) responds to all forms
of cinematic trash and all manner of cultural detritus. According to this
position, trashs coherence as a category lies in its very oppositionality to legiti-
mate film culture. This account posits a cultural struggle for distinction be-
tween two groups: trash fans and academics studying and valuing official film
culture. It therefore tends to marginalize struggles for distinction that occur at
intragroup levels; that is, between factions of trash fans and also between fac-
tions within the academy.4
However, Sconces foundational study of trash cinema does not only oppose
trash and legitimate film cultures, and it is an alternative interpretation that
I want to stress here. Sconce also notes that in cultivating a counter-cinema
from the dregs of exploitation films, paracinematic fans, like the academy, ex-
plicitly situate themselves in opposition to Hollywood cinema and the main-
stream U.S. culture it represents.5 I want to explore this dimension of Sconces
definition of trash cinema and sleazy artistry by not opposing trash and
legitimate film cultures but rather considering the ways in which they act in
concert to exclude certain types of pop culture as mainstream sleaze rather
than sleazy art.
Considering levels of (sub)cultural struggle within and between different
pop culture fandoms, and within the academy, I will argue that paracinema
and its reading protocols therefore depend on multiple exclusions. They never
merely oppose all legitimate film culture, but occasionally come into align-
ment with aspects of it, tending to discursively construct specific types of

22 0 M at t Hills
trashy, low-cultural film as other to paracinema and its canon. It is this othered,
sleazy cinemanot accorded the status of sleazy artthat I will term para-
paracinema here, since its texts are simultaneously othered by academic frac-
tions of legitimate film culture. Certain illegitimate films escape revaloriza-
tion via trashs reading protocol, while their illegitimacy remains a matter of
contention within the academy. Furthermore, such films may not simply rep-
resent a mainstream U.S. culture, as Sconce suggests; they can also be linked
to discourses of cult film (and can possess their own dedicated cult fandoms)
without being revalued either by trash fans or by the academy.
Exploring the limits to trash, a number of previous writers have sought to
amend Sconces account. In Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-
garde, Joan Hawkins writes, Because Sconce is mainly interested in theorizing
trash aesthetics, he doesnt take the high aspects of the [paracinema] catalogs
video lists into account. So he does not thoroughly discuss the way in which
the companies listing practices erase the difference between what is considered
trash and what is considered art, through a deliberate levelling of hierarchies
and recasting of categories.6 By focusing purely on trash, Sconce allegedly
neglects to consider how trash films are transformed in their meaning and
their cultural value by virtue of being placed in a paradigm with art or high
cultural film such as avant-garde material directed by Maya Deren, Luis Bu-
uel, and Salvador Dal. However, this supposed attack on Sconces work actu-
ally resonates with the aspect of his argument that I have drawn attention to
above, since it demonstrates that paracinema can be and has been revalued as
film art by placing it in direct cultural proximity to films already deemed aes-
thetically (and legitimately) valuable. Again, this should remind us that trash
film culture often resembles legitimate film culture,7 especially in its reliance on
notions of film art and authorship.8
Significantly, Hawkinss assumed corrective to Sconces work does not simply
demonstrate the collapse of cultural hierarchies at work, as Hawkins claims.
Operating as a dissemination of cultural value (a case of gilt by association?)
this process relies on avant-garde films being paradigmatically valued in order
to place trash (however uneasily or insecurely) within this paradigm. Legiti-
mate film culture is supported here, its value-system being used tactically to
confer value on sleazy film art.
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieus work on cultural distinctions has

The Friday the 1 3th Film Series as Other 22 1

been much used in discussions of trash cinema fans and fan cultures more gen-
erally.9 Bourdieu offers an analysis of cultural hierarchies that allows us to make
sense of Hawkinss observations on trash and avant-garde cinema, when he
writes:

One can never entirely escape from the hierarchy of legitimacies. Because
the very meaning and value of a cultural object varies according to the sys-
tem of objects in which it is placed, detective stories, science fiction or strip
cartoons may be entirely prestigious cultural assets or be reduced to their
ordinary value, depending on whether they are associated with avant-garde
literature or musicin which case they appear as manifestations of daring
or freedomor combine to form a constellation typical of middle-brow
tastewhen they appear as what they are, simple substitutes for legitimate
assets.10

This appears to precisely capture the aspect of trash that Hawkins draws
attention to (and which she suggests is absent in Sconces account). Trash, or
paracinema, becomes a manifestation of daring or freedom through its asso-
ciation with avant-garde film. But this valorization of trash does not so much
collapse cultural hierarchies as presuppose (and reinforce) the cultural value of
avant-garde film by way of attempting to contextualize trash within this para-
digmatic class of object. Cultural hierarchies are not escaped; instead the lines
of cultural demarcation around film as art are stretched as avant-garde legiti-
macy is discursively borrowed. Trash, in such an analysis, appears to rely more
on its legitimate other than on a reading of Sconces work that would construe
trash and legitimate film cultures as oppositional. This line of thought suggests
considering trash film culture as always (parasitically) aligned with legitimate
film culture, rather than viewing trash as significantly oppositional yet tacti-
cally united with legitimate film culture against the Hollywood mainstream. I
will explore this issue below with my case study of Friday the 13th.
A second line of trash criticism has been forwarded by Mark Jancovich, who
has argued that Sconces . . . account of paracinema . . . tends to conflate major
differences between the fan cultures that it discusses and so constructs its own
sense of the real authentic nature of this fan culture.11 Jancovichs work and my
own earlier discussion of paracinema fans both suggest that fan cultures tend

222 Mat t Hi lls

Figure 1 Herschell Gordon Lewiss foundational gore film Blood Feast (1963):
crude and vicious carnage of the animal innard school.

to struggle for distinction internally and in relation to other fan cultures.12 For
example, Jancovich demonstrates how trash or paracinema fans often reserve
their most direct and vitriolic attacks [for] the tastes of other fansfans who
are dismissed as inauthentic. For example, Incredibly Strange Films frequently
distinguishes itself from fans of the 1980s slasher film, who are presented, by
comparison, as . . . indistinguishable from the conformist masses.13 This dis-
cursive othering proceeds by contrasting the aesthetics of director Herschell
Gordon Lewiss Wizard of Gore (1970) with those of special effects (SFX) creator
Tom Savini, used in the first Friday the 13th film and Friday the 13th: The Final
Chapter: The Friday the 13th series began in neo-horrors late formative period
and initially displayed the effects wizardry of Tom Savini (Friday the 13th),
and Carl Fullerton (Friday the 13th Part 2). Both were interviewed in the early
issues of the premier horror fanzine, FangoriaSavini in issue 6, and Fullerton
in issue 13where they discussed their craft for these films.14
Where Lewiss gore effects are praised in Incredibly Strange Films as crude
and vicious carnage of the animal innard school, Savinis work is dismissed
as technically virtuosic [but] slick and facile.15 In contrast to this trash fan
position, Savinis gore effects worklinked to Friday the 13this frequently ap-

The Friday the 1 3th Film Series as Other 223

plauded by that fraction of horror fans who read the niche U.S. commercial
magazine Fangoria, as Ian Conrich has demonstrated by quoting from Fangoria
classified ads:

Fangoria is #1, so is Friday the 13th. Long Live Horror, Blood and Guts.
This is Dr. Blood Signing Off, Gore: Friday the 13th and any other horror
moviesI want info. Send to Gore, 1354 . . . ,Dawn of the Dead, Friday the
13th and Tom Savini rule [blood & guts forever]. It is here, where the films
function culturally as a modern Grand Guignol [for their fans], that argu-
ably the greatest attraction of the series exists.16

What takes place between the Friday the 13th fans analyzed by Conrich and
the paracinema fans analyzed by Jancovich amounts to an intrageneric con-
flict . . . between fans of a particular genre.17 Fans of trash horror other and
devalue slasher-cycle horror as overly commercial or nonunderground. What
counts as real or authentic horror for these paracinema fans is thus defined
against mainstream horror, but this latter category is a profoundly mobile sig-
nifier; the horror texts that are nominated here as mainstream1980s slasher
filmshave been simultaneously othered in much academic film criticism and
in legitimate film culture, but such films are nevertheless not viewed and de-
valued as mainstream by their cult fans. As Jancovich has argued, addressing
slasher-movie fans knowledge of SFX professionals like Tom Savini and Dick
Smith, these are hardly figures who would be familiar to the majority of movie-
goers. The term average movie goer [used in Incredibly Strange Films to char-
acterize slasher-movie fans] is therefore an extremely slippery one that operates
to conflate a small fan culture with the conformist mass and so produce a clear
sense of distinction between the authentic subcultural self and the inauthentic
mass cultural other.18
Thus, films discursively positioned as mainstream by trash and legitimate
film cultures may be socially and discursively positioned as subcultural by
their cult fans. These small fan cultures, and their subcultural contextualization
of 1980s slasher films, have to be ignored by trash and legitimate film cultures
if they are to sustain their imagined version of slasher movies as irredeemably
mainstream. That these attributions of mainstream and authentic status are
such highly mobile signifiers is brought home by the fact that Tom Savinis work

22 4 Mat t Hills
Figure 2 Special effects guru Tom Savini poses with Jason (Ari Lehman) on the set of
Friday the 13th (1980).

has been championed by fans of cult horrorespecially for his contributions to

George Romeros Dawn of the Dead (1979) and 1985s Day of the Dead19and
simultaneously devalued by anti-mainstream slasher fans in relation to the likes
of Friday the 13th. Although it could thus be argued that Savinias a figure
and as a version of SFXs Foucauldian author-functionmediates and bridges
authentic and mainstream genre texts, I would suggest that this point grants a
coherence to these differing interpretations and attributions of status that they
do not possess. Instead, I view shifting versions of mainstream and cult or au-
thentic horror as emerging through rival (but closely related) interpretive com-
munities.
In a 1993 study of taste and cultural politics, Sconce explored some of these
issues around the slasher film, noting the low critical esteem most film com-
mentators have for the . . . subgenre of the slasher movie. Despite their com-
mercial success and stylistic variety, such films remain a target of indiscrimi-
nate ridicule by the film cognoscenti. Often, this derision is aimed as well at
the teenage target audience for these films, which critics routinely characterize
as a legion of brain-dead pubescent zombies docilely filing into the nations
multiplexes for each new teenie-kill release.20 Slasher movies have, then, dis-

The Friday the 1 3th Film Series as Other 225

played extreme discursive mobility. The slasher flick has represented both a
convenient doormat of popular film criticism [that] provide[s] a formulaic ref-
erence point for critics to compare other, more worthy horror films [to],21 and
a point of contrast for fans of horror operating within a paracinematic reading
protocol. Hence constituting a form of para-paracinema, slasher movies have
been multiply located within the cultural politics of taste, being a final tex-
tual frontier for legitimate cultures cinephiles/critics and trashs connoisseurs
alike.
Even this narrative is overly monolithic: not all slasher films have been
equally devalued by critics. Indeed, certain slasher movies have, over time,
been accorded a limited respectability within academic film criticism. Sconces
own comparison of the Nightmare on Elm Street series with Henry: Portrait of
a Serial Killer locates the taste wars surrounding these films as largely gen-
erational22 but neglects to consider how Nightmare on Elm Street can be (and
has been) recuperated by academic criticism via the originality of auteur Wes
Craven.23 The self-reflexivity of Wes Cravens New Nightmare (1994), made a
year after the publication of Sconces essay, has also, arguably, boosted Cravens
(sub)cultural capital within legitimate film culture. Sconce relates the criti-
cal devaluation of certain horror films to the opposition between appeals to
issues of originality, character, and realism where these are discursively posi-
tioned and valued over formula, sensationalism, and special effects.24 Such
oppositions have certainly worked to devalue certain slasher movies intensely,
while other slashers have been recontextualized as historically significant film
art within academic and critical circles. This self-conscious historicization of
1980s slasher movies has provoked and sustained a range of situated shifts in
the slasher flicks cultural value. It has allowed contemporary fans of the Friday
the 13th franchise to discursively locate themselves outside the mainstream by
contrasting their enduring love of Friday the 13th films with the sheer commer-
cial success of early films in the franchise, making this more of a cult fandom. It
has also allowed Friday the 13th to be devalued and othered academically via a
historical contrast between this film and Halloween (dir. John Carpenter, 1978).
It is this latter shift that I will focus on in the next section.

226 M at t Hills
The Friday Franchise and the Formula Fallacy

Even academic writers who are kindly predisposed to the Friday the 13th films,
such as Ian Conrich, position themselves slightly apologetically against an as-
sumed weight of critical opinion: The popular view is that the slasher films
of the horror New Wave began with Halloween (1978). The importance of this
film is undeniable, yet the commerciality of Friday the 13th (1980) showed that
the success of Halloween was repeatable and it was only from this position that
there was an explosion in the number of slasher films produced.25
Halloween is accorded the status of the slasher movies origin here, whereas
Friday the 13th is linked to discourses of commerciality. Halloween is thus
artful and historically significant as the (retrospective) head of a film cycle.
It defines and creates a formula, whereas Friday the 13th simply repeats this:
Despite the repetitive nature of these films, they have acquired a cult following
demonstrated perhaps, today, by the number of devoted websites.26
Such an oppositionbetween the valued Halloween as original and the
devalued Friday the 13th as a formulaic repetitionhas stalked through the
pages of academic criticism, indicating that the relationship between legitimate
culture and slasher films has, over time, become less one of monolithic antago-
nism and more a case of selective valorization in line with the academy and
its dominant aesthetics of realism, originality, and antisensationalism. Toward
the end of his excellent survey of horror films and the U.S. movie industry,
Kevin Heffernan baldly states that Paramounts Friday the 13th series follows
the time-honored 1950s and 1960s tradition of a major studio knocking off the
genre success of an independent production (in this case, John Carpenters . . .
Halloween).27 To take another example, Steven Jay Schneider has remarked
that the revolutionary impact of Carpenters film can hardly be denied, going
on to contrast this with the bloodier Friday the 13th, which is described as
taking Carpenters film as a template.28 This term template condenses and
carries the logics of cultural distinction at work here, and it recurs in academic
criticism, along with the notion of Friday the 13th as pure repetition: Note . . .
that the majority of Halloweens many imitatorsfor example, the . . . Friday
the 13th films . . . are somewhat gross in comparison with the original, both
in style (their use of subjective camera is laughably obtrusive) and in their in-
creasing emphasis on repellent physical detail.29

The Friday the 1 3th Film Series as Other 227

Figure 3 John Carpenters Halloween (1978): The original slasher film and
perpetual critical foil to the Friday the 13th franchise.

As in Andrew Tudors cultural history of the horror movie quoted above,

some critics do not feel the need to distinguish between the Friday the 13th
films, assuming that they entirely repeat themselves as well as repeating the
template of Halloween: The appealing stability of the monster is worked out
formally through the serialization process. The only constant in, say, the Friday
the 13th films is the psychotic killer. The monster is the norm. It is he, not his
victims, to whom the audience finally relates because he will live on into the
sequel.30 Friday the 13th films have therefore been powerfully articulated with
critically devalued notions of gore over character or narrative (Tudors increas-
ing emphasis on repellent . . . detail), repetition over originality, and commerce
over art. Indeed, the nature of the Friday franchises reception in the academy
has been, if anything, more formulaic than the films themselves. Despite Paul
Budras allegation that the only constant . . . is the killer, the franchises killer
has not remained constant. In the first Friday the 13th the killer is not Jason
Voorhees, it is actually his mother (a point of horror-fan trivia that becomes a
matter of life or death in the first Scream film). Only in Part III does Jason don
the hockey mask that becomes his trademark. It could also be argued that once
Jason has become a constant fixture of the series, he changes significantly across

22 8 Mat t Hills
the franchise, developing superhuman strength in Part III, becoming more
obviously zombie-like after Part V and Part VI, and displaying a capacity to in-
habit other bodies in the possession horror reworking of Part IX, Jason Goes
to Hell: The Final Friday. Recently, the franchise has developed a post-Scream
self-referential playfulness, evident in the virtual reality sequence of Jason X,
where the Camp Crystal Lake mise-en-scne of the first film is recreated, and
where Friday the 13ths gender representations are critiqued via exaggerated and
parodic portrayals of teen bimbos. This increased self-referentiality is also ar-
guably in evidence in the Freddy vs. Jason franchise crossover from 2003.
The gender of Friday the 13ths killer has also been rendered more formulaic
in academic criticism than it was in the pop cultural text itself, with Jonathan
Lake Crane rather bizarrely referring to Jason as the first films slasher: Jasons
spirit has used his mothers body to cleanse the camp of human beings; yet it
would be wrong to call Jason a she.31 Crane ties himself in knots attempting
to sustain a critical reading of Friday the 13th that marks its killer as male, or at
the very least as not female. Failing to do so, Crane eventually falls back on a
gender-neutral interpretation, asserting that Jason is neither male nor female:
Jason is really an it. He has no identity beyond the hockey mask that carries no
gender markings. The faceless mask . . . is the human face horribly reduced to a
plane of purely vicious instrumentality.32
Cranes commitment to a formulaic semiotic equation of slasher = male ap-
pears to overwhelm his response to the text. Friday the 13ths denotative level
whereby we would generally agree that Pamela Voorhees, Jasons mother, is the
female killer, and that she is motivated by revenge but that she is not shown to
be possessed by Jasonis displaced by a piece of critical legerdemain which has
it that Jason is the killer, and that he is not a she. This entirely overwrites the role
played by the character of Pamela Voorhees, as does Cranes torturous conclu-
sion that Jason is really an it. Although Carol Clover refers to Friday the 13ths
play of pronoun function as a visual identity game,33 such pronoun confu-
sion appears to be far more pronounced in Cranes critical, formula-sustaining
interpretation. Despite the first film offering what will become an unusual
equation of (maternal) femininity with the role of slasher (and this actually
occurs before the male = killer convention becomes firmly fixed in place in
the slasher cycle), Crane interprets Friday the 13th retroactively as more of the

The Friday the 1 3th Film Series as Other 229

Figure 4 The elusive Jason: perpetually misidentified, degendered, and denigrated.

franchised same, and as more of Jason on the rampage. Pop culture that pre-
cedes and doesnt fit into a slasher formula is here interpreted, and devalued,
through the template of just such a formula. Cranes interpretive grid is entirely
that of the critic aiming to denigrate and dismiss the Friday the 13th franchise. I
would therefore argue that most academic criticism circling around the Friday
the 13th franchise is guilty of a type of formula fallacythat is, it projects the
notion of formula onto these films as an interpretive strategy or activates such
a notion through critical intertextuality. Lending an extra poignancy to this
fallacy is the fact that readings offered by the academic interpretive community
are, empirically and in this instance, more formulaic than the popular cultural
texts they denigrate as such.
Whereas Crane concludes by lambasting Friday the 13ths total lack of
morality,34 the following statement by Vera Dika carries almost all of the cul-
tural distinctions that critically surround Friday the 13th and thus comes close
to being a condensed statement of the formula fallacy: Friday the 13th is a
minimalization or reduction of Halloweens essential structure. . . . What Fri-
day the 13th most definitely adds to the stalker formula is a subcultural tone, a
quality of exploitation that was not evident in Halloween. . . . Friday the 13th has
no artistic pretensions, no film-school allusions or homages; . . . its elements

230 Mat t Hills

have been combined for their maximum impact and profitability.35 Friday the
13th formulaically reduces Halloween. Where it adds to the formula (and again,
formula is the prioritized term here) it does so by a quality of exploitation
(for which, read the gore and repellent detail so disliked by Andrew Tudor),
and has no artistic pretensions whatsoever. Instead, its all about maximum
. . . profitability. Unlike Wes Cravens Nightmare on Elm Street, his later re-
turn to the franchise, and John Carpenters Halloween, Friday the 13th has no
auteur who can be mobilized, via the cultural work of the author-function, to
defend its cultural value within an official/legitimate cultural reading. Sean S.
Cunningham carries no critical reputation, and thus no subcultural capital as
a source of author-based interpretations, as well as being contrasted to well-
known film school graduates (Carpenter, Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola etc) by
virtue of not hailing from one of the elite filmmaking schools.36 In terms of
cultural distinctions, then, Cunninghams absence as an author-function can
be related to accounts of the flesh-and-blood authors relative lack of cultural
capital or a scholarly or arty film-school disposition. Either of these could allow
film scholars to reclaim Cunninghams work by articulating favored academic
theories to his films. Instead, in Vera Dikas account of the slasher cycle, Cun-
ninghams authorial agency is restricted to his plan to imitate Halloween and
Dawn of the Dead.37 Dika then discusses the work of the director of Friday the
13th Part II and Part III, Steve Miner (who went on to direct Halloween H20)
in terms of its approximation to absolute nonstyle. Sean S. Cunninghams di-
rection of Friday the 13th was, according to Dika, minimally significant via its
construction of a nonlocalized sense of pervasive threat. Even this minor dis-
tinction is lost in the sequel: The gaming process of Friday the 13th Part II is
also systematized through its changed formal strategies. . . . not only is the story
structure identical [to Friday the 13th], but most of the formal, narrative and
visual elements have been repeated. The most significant variation, however,
comes in Miners direction of the film, and in the tendency toward standardiza-
tion that it reflects.38
This repetitive, formulaic set of critical clichs has produced a situation
where, as Reynold Humphries has recently and astutely noted, Halloween is
given serious critical treatment, partly because its reflexive naturethe func-
tion of the looklends itself perfectly to an articulation of theory and close

The Friday the 1 3th Film Series as Other 231

analysis, but also because of its status as the first slasher. Friday the 13th is con-
sidered to lack the intellectual dimension of the earlier film.39 In fact, Hum-
phriess conclusion is something of an understatement; as I have shown here,
Friday the 13th has not just been critically positioned as intellectually lacking, it
has been othered and devalued in line with the conventional aesthetic norms of
the academy and official film culture,40 said to lack originality and artfulness, to
possess no nominated or recognized auteur, and to be grossly sensationalist in
its focus on Tom Savinis gory special effects. In contrast, the originality and sub-
tlety of John Carpenters film-school-educated and theory-alluding, homage-
paying Halloween have been consistently applauded (although later entries in
this Halloween franchise are rarely discussed academically, with the exception
of Halloween H20, legitimated via the authorial role of Kevin Williamson).41
This extreme contrast in the critical receptions for different slasher films indi-
cates that legitimate film culture does not so much distinguish between genres
or cycles (where slasher movie = bad tout court) as between entries in a genre
or cycle that can be valorized through official criteria and those which cannot.
The Friday the 13th franchise has thus found itself languishing outside the
sanctuary of legitimate film culture as well as outside the trash-as-art revalua-
tions of paracinema. Too obviously a commercial success at the time of its ini-
tial release to be feted as underground trash, too historically recent to be recu-
perated as archival exploitation cinema, too standardized or proficient in its
direction to be bad, and yet possessing its own cult fan following, this re-
ject from legitimate film culture has yet to find a trash revalorization. As para-
paracinemasimultaneously other to trash and legitimate film culturesit in-
dicates that ways in which paracinematic and legitimate film reading protocols
can become tactically aligned through a shared revulsion for the untutored, the
artless, and the commercial turned cultish.
However, legitimate film culture is, in the case of the Friday the 13th fran-
chise, seemingly more elastic in its textual boundaries than is trash cinemas
reading protocol. A small number of attempts have been made to academically
revalue Friday the 13th. Unlike Cranes strained interpretation and attempt to
preserve critical distaste, Carol Clover notes that Friday the 13th is one of the
most dramatic case[s] of pulling out the gender rug42 ever seen in the slasher
movie. Clover also notes that it is a matter of some interest that gender repre-

232 Mat t Hills

sentations are visibly adjusted in the slasher movie, a shift thus occurring at
the furthest possible remove from the quarters of theory and showing signs of
trickling upward.43 Like some avant-garde, surreal wound bleeding upward,
this imagery positions the slasher movie, Friday the 13th included, as a definite
source of cultural value for Clover. This bid for cultural distinction is not aes-
thetic per se. It is, rather, cultural-political, emerging via the very marginality
of horror as a genre that [allegedly] appeals to marginal people (not, by and
large, middle-aged, middle-class whites) who may not have quite the same in-
vestment in the status quo.44
Although I have previously criticized academic cultures tendency to divide
popular culture into good and bad objects or reactionary and progres-
sive wings,45 this emphasis adds a degree of complexity to the academic inter-
pretive communitys cultural distinctions. Even given a lack of aesthetic cri-
teria, the cultural politics of representation can morally trump and overrule
traditionally aesthetic concerns, resulting in bids for cultural distinction that
are relatively autonomous from the criteria for official valorization identified
by Sconce and followed so far in my argument. Of course, in practice, cultural-
political bids for cultural distinction can be harnessed to auteurist arguments,
and this often proves to be the case in horror criticism, with the films of David
Cronenberg challenging gender norms,46 the films of George Romero radically
representing consumers as zombies,47 the films of James Whale coding queer
subtexts,48 and so on. Yet the logical possibility remains that cultural-political
bids for cultural distinction can disturb and reorder cultural hierarchies more
radically than stretching art discourses to recontextualize low-cultural objects.
Furthermore, such an axis of cultural distinction is specific to academic writ-
ing, at least in terms of its potential power to trump other axes of distinction.
It has no meaningful analogy in either trash cinema fan culture or film jour-
nalism. Perhaps for this reason, academic cultures links to official/legitimate
culture, at least within the terrain of cultural and film criticism, are less mono-
lithic than those of other interpretive communities. It is a sense of cultural poli-
tics, extending into the capacity to consider bids for cultural valueits own
includedas politicized, that acts as academias community-specific form of
distinction.
Academic cultural politics hence operates not only at the level of textual

The Friday the 1 3th Film Series as Other 233

analysis, but also at a metalevel addressing how texts are criticized/canonized,
and devalued/distinguished. With regards to trash and horror film, such an em-
phasis on the political construction of taste is shared by a range of scholarly
writers.49 I have argued here that such a focus must rebound on definitions of
trash cinema, such that trash becomes considered not as an inherently inclusive
reading protocol that absorbs all that legitimate culture disavows, ignores, or re-
jects. To the contrary, trash culture presupposes an exclusionary politics of taste
that works to expel and marginalize its constructed others, and these others go
beyond the officially sanctioned as well as beyond the self-evident mainstream.
Although the tawdry detritus of pop culture can be reclaimed as trash, implicit
criteria underpin this process, meaning that certain pop cultural texts cannot
be readily (anti)canonized as trash, despite being academically devalued. Chief
among the criteria for trashification would appear to be the ease with which
texts can be disarticulated from commercial popularity and thus positioned as
underground or as sources of subcultural capital. Also significant is the ease
with which texts can be recontextualized as trash art, meaning that discourses
of authorship and avant-gardist aesthetics remain important in the counter-
sacralization of trash art status.
Although not drawing on a Bourdieu-derived theoretical approach to cul-
tural distinction, Ian Conrich has also recently bid for the Friday the 13th fran-
chises recognition and cultural value within academic film criticism. Unlike
Clover, Conrichs argument for valorization does not hinge on cultural politics.
Instead, Conrich negotiates a discursive position in relation to the conventional
norms of official film culture as identified by Sconce, where textual sophisti-
cation is valued over the visual stimulation of special effects. How, then, does
Conrich seek to align the Friday films with legitimate culture?
Like many other bids for horrors cultural value within legitimate film culture,
Conrich seeks to recontextualize his object of study by intertextually linking it
to, and reading it through, cultural texts that are less obviously devalued as low-
cultural. This process of recontextualizationalready observed by Hawkins in
the case of trashmeans that horrors academic discussions tend to invoke
the timelessness of horror, relating horror films to myths as well as to valued
theories.50 Rather than Greek myth, Conrichs valorizing intertext aimed at pro-
moting the Friday the 13th series and its cultural value is the late-nineteenth-

23 4 Mat t Hills
and early-twentieth-century theater of Grand Guignol. By reading the series as
modern grand guignol, Conrich recontextualizes its sensationalism, linking
it to a historical and theatrical precedent and thus bidding for its increased
cultural value. Conrich also emphasizes moments of parody and irony in the
series, as well as intertextually relating the first Friday the 13th not to Halloween
as template but rather to the Italian cinema of Mario Bava.51 Stressing parody
has the effect of reading the franchise as self-reflexive, thus aligning it with the
aesthetic values of legitimate film culture. Invoking the films of Bava, however,
links Friday the 13th to films valued as trash art by trash film culture. Hence
Conrich attempts to rearticulate Friday the 13th intertextually as trash art at the
same time as linking it to the norms of legitimate film culture, again indicating
that trash and legitimate film cultures cannot always be viewed as opposed to
one another. As Friday the 13ths twinned others, trash and legitimate film cul-
ture are drawn intertextually together by Conrich in his attempts to reposition
and revalue the franchise.
A move to validate Friday the 13th as trash art is also made by some Friday
the 13th fans on the www.fridaythe13thfilms.com message board, where early
Friday films are repeatedly valued by sections of the fan culture for their dis-
play of the killers gloved hands rather than for showing Jason as a lumbering,
masked killer:52

I think the way that the killers arent shown except for hands and feet until
the end in the first five movies is great. It makes it a lot more scary, because
the kills werent so obviously coming.53

I agree, a bit more Italian giallo style in the early films. The later ones are still
fun . . . but the fear factor is almost nonexistant [sic].54

For me, less Jason is more. I like the way they played up the tension as best
they could in the first 5 Friday the 13th films.55

By making a similar intertextual link in his academic discussion of the Friday

the 13th franchise, Conrich combines academic, legitimate intertexts (citing
theory and positioning the films as modern grand guignol) with fan intertexts
(Friday the 13th being read through the trash art giallo rather as a copy of Hal-
loween). Such a hybridized set of intertextualities, contained within the norms

The Friday the 1 3th Film Series as Other 235

of scholarly discourse, suggests that (unusual) bids for the value of popular cul-
tural texts in the academy are more likely to be made by scholar-fans,56 that is,
professional academics who claim fan cultural identities. It is scholar-fans who
have put trash cinema on the academic agenda,57 and it is typically scholar-
fans, now well-established in the academy, who continue to challenge separa-
tions of trash and legitimate film cultures.58 Furthermore, it is scholar-fans such
as myself and Conrich who have challenged the devaluation of specific texts
like Friday the 13th in both cultures. Scholars who are also fans are, perhaps,
particularly sensitive to the ways in which academia silences or devalues their
objects of fandom, as well as being especially alert to the minutiae of cultural
distinctions that pervade both academic and fan cultures.
We need to go on investigating the cultural distinctions of trash culture, not
only welcoming sleazy film art as an attack on legitimate film culture, but also
viewing it, on occasions, as no less exclusionary than its official other. For not
all that might be termed popular cultural detritus or sleaze becomes sleazy art.
For some texts, the nonactivation of criteria of authorship and trash/legitimate
aesthetics can result in a twilight existence beyond academic valorization and
trash revalorization. Discursively positioned as lacking an author-function and
film-school cultural capital, and viewed as pure, gross commercial repetition
(by what I have termed the formula fallacy), the Friday the 13th franchise has
been one such victim. Friday fans track differences across the franchise, ana-
lyzing how it evolved with the times.59 Yet legitimate film culture has con-
strued the series, sometimes hysterically, as sleazy, artless, formulaic horror,
while trash film culture has simultaneously othered Friday the 13th and its cult
following of fans as mainstream.

Notes

1. Jeffrey Sconce, Trashing the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of
Cinematic Style, Screen 36 (1995): 37193.
2. Ibid., 372.
3. Ibid., 379, 372.
4. Mark Jancovich interprets Sconces work as displaying these difficulties. See Jancovich,
Cult Fictions: Cult Movies, Subcultural Capital and the Production of Cultural Dis-
tinctions, Cultural Studies 16 (2002): 30622.
5. Sconce, Trashing the Academy, 381, emphasis added.

236 Mat t Hills

 6. Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press), 16.
7. As noted in Sconce, Trashing the Academy, 381.
8. See Jancovich, Cult Fictions, 314.
9. As in Sconce, Trashing the Academy, and Spectacles of Death: Identification, Re-
flexivity and Contemporary Horror, in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins,
Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins (New York: Routledge, 1993); Matt Hills, Fan
Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002), 4664; Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music,
Media and Subcultural Capital (Cambridge: Polity, 1995); and Lyn Thomas, Fans, Femi-
nisms and Quality Media (London: Routledge, 2002).
10. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London:
Routledge, 1984), 88.
11. Jancovich, Cult Fictions, 313.
12. See Hills, Fan Cultures, 6162, and see Mark Jancovich, A Real Shocker: Authenticity,
Genre and the Struggle for Distinction, Continuum 14 (2000): 2335.
13. Jancovich, Cult Fictions, 312.
14. Ian Conrich, The Friday the 13th Films and the Cultural Function of a Modern Grand
Guignol, Cinema Journal (forthcoming).
15. Spainhower quoted in Jancovich, Cult Fictions, 31213.
16. Conrich, The Friday the 13th Films.
17. Jancovich, A Real Shocker, 28.
18. Jancovich, Cult Fictions, 313.
19. See Tony Williams, The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead (Lon-
don: Wallflower Press, 2003).
20. Sconce, Spectacles of Death, 103.
21. Ibid., 104.
22. Ibid., 1067.
23. See John Kenneth Muir, Wes Craven: The Art of Horror (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland,
1998).
24. Sconce, Spectacles of Death, 118.
25. Conrich, The Friday the 13th Films, emphasis added.
26. Ibid., emphasis added.
27. Kevin Heffernan, Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie
Business, 19531968 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 223.
28. Steven Jay Schneider, Kevin Williamson and the Rise of the Neo-Stalker, PostScript
19, no. 2 (2000): 74.
29. Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 19899; see also Vera Dika, Games of Terror: Halloween, Fri-
day the 13th and the Films of the Stalker Cycle (London: Associated University Presses,

The Friday the 1 3th Film Series as Other 237

 1990), 78; Mark Jancovich, General Introduction, Horror: The Film Reader, ed. Janco-
vich (London: Routledge, 2002), 8; Darryl Jones, Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction
and Film (London: Arnold, 2002), 114.
30. Paul Budra, Recurrent Monsters: Why Freddy, Michael and Jason Keep Coming
Back, in Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel, ed. Paul Budra and Betty A. Schellenberg
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 195.
31. Jonathan Lake Crane, Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of the
Horror Film (London: Sage, 1994), 151.
32. Ibid., 151.
33. Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws (London: BFI, 1992), 56.
34. Crane, Terror and Everyday Life, 147.
35. Dika, Games of Terror, 64.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 65.
38. Ibid., 78.
39. Reynold Humphries, The American Horror Film: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edin-
burgh University Press, 2002), 143.
40. See Sconce, Spectacles of Death, 1993.
41. See Schneider, Kevin Williamson and the Rise of the Neo-Stalker.
42. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws, 56.
43. Ibid., 64.
44. Ibid., 231.
45. See Hills, Fan Cultures, 30.
46. As argued in Linda Williams, The Inside-Out of Masculinity: David Cronenbergs Vis-
ceral Pleasures, in The Bodys Perilous Pleasures, ed. Michele Aaron (Edinburgh: Edin-
burgh University Press, 1999).
47. See Humphries, The American Horror Film, 11318.
48. Harry Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Man-
chester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 4051.
49. See, for example, Hawkins, Cutting Edge; Jancovich, General Introduction and A
Real Shocker; Sconce, Spectacles of Death and Trashing the Academy.
50. For more on this general process in academic writing on horror film, see Matt Hills,
Doing Things with Theory: From Freuds Worst Nightmare to (Disciplinary) Dreams
of Horrors Cultural Value, in Psychoanalysis and the Horror Film: Freuds Worst Night-
mares, ed. Steven Jay Schneider (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
51. See Conrich, The Friday the 13th Films.
52. With the latter being referred to as Rampage Jason by Peter Baker, Jason On-
screenHow Much Is Too Much? www.fridaythe13thfilms.com, April 25, 2003.
53. James M, Jason OnscreenHow Much Is Too Much? www.fridaythe13thfilms.com,
April 23, 2003.

23 8 M at t Hi lls
 54. heh, Jason OnscreenHow Much Is Too Much? www.fridaythe13thfilms.com,
April 23, 2003.
55. LilTouchUpWork, Jason OnscreenHow Much Is Too Much? www.fridaythe13th
films.com, April 25, 2003.
56. For a case study concerning the cult blockbuster, see Hills, Fan Cultures, 1115, and
Hills, Star Wars in Fandom, Film Theory, and the Museum: The Cultural Status of
the Cult Blockbuster, in Movie Blockbusters, ed. Julian Stringer (London: Routledge,
2003).
57. As in Sconce, Trashing the Academy, 37778.
58. For a more recent example of this, see Walter Metz, John Waters Goes to Hollywood:
A Poststructural Authorship Study, in Authorship and Film, ed. David A. Gerstner and
Janet Staiger (New York: AFI/Routledge, 2003).
59. Mommas Boy, Halloween 1 Discussion, www.fridaythe13thfilms.com, March 4,
2003.

The Friday the 1 3th Film Series as Other 239

Chris Fujiwara

Boredom, Spasmo, and the Italian System

Lennui, cette consolation incurable. E. M. Cioran

O
ne is almost never totally bored by a movie, according to
Christian Metz. The reason for this, Metz says, is the affec-
tive and perceptual participation that films release in the specta-
tor through their spontaneous appeal to the spectators sense of
belief. This participation, which produces the experience of the
film as a fully realized world, has been given the name projec-
tive illusion by Richard Allen. Noting that some films promote
this illusion more than others, Allen claims that the rationale of
classical Hollywood narration is precisely to maximize the pos-
sibilities of filmed drama as projective illusion. Nevertheless,
the conventions of narrative cinema are insufficient to ensure
that projective illusion will be experienced; they can only make
it more likely. Conversely, although films that challenge these
conventions (Allen uses Chantal Akermans Jeanne Dielman, 23,
Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles [1976] as an example) may
undermine our capacity to experience projective illusion, they
cannot rule out the possibility that the viewer, after making an
adjustment to their strategies, will have such an experience.1
But does disbelief in the reality of the diegesis (as Metz seems
to imply) define filmic boredom? The answer is clearly nega-
tive. The boring film may succeed in obtaining my belief in its
 Figure 1 Italian release
poster for Spasmo (1974).

world, but it remains boring nonetheless. To understand this phenomenon, it

is necessary to separate affective and perceptual participation from the sense
of belief that allows it to take hold. A sense of belief may be present, but par-
ticipation may fail to occur or may be withdrawn. The illusion of reality is ir-
relevant to boredom; it may even encourage it. As for participation, what is it
in most cases but the will to be distracted, to accept the film as entertainment
commodity on its own terms, and to accept ones place as the subject of con-
sumerist desire? In boredom there is the lure of a possible object of desire, and
the lure of the escape from desire, of its meaninglessness, notes Adam Phillips.
To be bored by a film is to reject the offer of, or to collude with the films failure
to offer, a distraction from ones own condition and ones own duration. Its also,
as Patrice Petro observes, to refuse the ceaseless repetition of the new as the
always-the-same that is the hidden logic of commodity fetishism.2
By allowing us to suspend desire, boredom films give us an opportunity de-
nied by entertainment films. In such milestones as Andy Warhols Sleep (1963)

B ored om, Spasmo, a nd the Italian Syste m 2 4 1

Figure 2 Andy Warhols Empire (1964): a cinematic landmark of duration and
boredom.

and Empire (1964), Michael Snows La rgion centrale (1971), and Akermans
Jeanne Dielman, duration radically affects the viewers experience of the film.
After the threshold of discomfort is passed, the viewer enters into a state of
pure film watching without identification, in which image and sound are no
longer correlated with desire. When director and teacher Mikhail Romm com-
plained that some scenes in Andrei Tarkovskys diploma film, The Steamroller
and the Violin (1960), went on for too long, Tarkovsky replied: If you extend
the normal length of a shot, first you get bored; but if you extend it further still
you become interested in it; and if you extend it even more a new quality, a new
intensity of attention is born.3
What happens if this intensity isnt attained, and the viewer remains stuck
at the stage of waiting? The viewer undergoes the separation from time that
E. M. Cioran identified as the hallmark of boredom. In boredom, time cant
flow. Each instant swells, and the passage from one instant to the other isnt
made. . . . Time is detached from existence and becomes external to us. . . . We
are no longer in time.4 (These terms resemble those in which Michael Snow
described the experience of watching his landmark La rgion centrale: You are
here, the film is there. It is neither fascism nor entertainment.)5 This experi-

2 4 2 Chris Fuji wara

ence turns out to be one of pleasure: One can end up loving this state, Cioran
observes.6
The less a film seems to change, the more the viewer becomes conscious of
her own internal change, and thus of her own duration. (Freud: In mourn-
ing it is the world that has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the
ego itself.)7 This formula might appear to make the film-as-boring wholly un-
necessary, since one could just as well shut ones eyes and plug ones ears to
achieve the same result of focusing on an internal object. But in practical film
viewing situations, its impossible to concentrate entirely either on a film or on
ones self (by self I mean the totality of internal objects of consciousness, in-
cluding physical comfort or discomfort, reflections, recollections, verbalized
thoughts, etc.what Henri Wallon, in Lacte perceptif et le cinma, calls the
proprioceptive series). There is a continual fluctuation between conscious-
ness of an external object and consciousness of an internal object, between the
ideal extremes of 100 percent film/0 percent self and 0 percent film/100 percent
self.8
The latter type of consciousness, focused on the self, can be identified with
what Vivian Sobchack, borrowing terminology from Don Ihde, calls the specta-
tors echo focusthe awareness that the film experience is mediated through
an apparatus. According to Sobchack, the echo of the apparatus is especially
noticeable at two junctures: that between the spectators total visual field
and the film frame, and that between the place of viewing and the projected
visual space of the film. Sobchack notes that the machines echo appears quite
prominent in the perception of the theoretical or bored spectator.9 With such
theorizing we discover what Metz, in denying filmic boredom, missed: the exis-
tence of a world outside the world of the film.
To what extent is boredom a willed action, and to what extent is it a passive
experience? Does the subject experience boredom as her own act of rejection,
or as a force that she submits to? In being bored, this distinction doesnt come
up. A fusion takes place between the experience of something as boring (the I
reject this of the bored subject) and the boring thing as experienced (the this
bores me).
Boredom is a state of freedom. No one can force me to be bored. I can, in
fact, choose to be bored; I can even choose to consider in the light of boredom

B ored om, Spasmo, a nd the Italian Syste m 2 4 3

some object that I once found interesting. Boredom isnt incompatible with a
certain excitement; but in being bored, I choose not to be interested in this ex-
citement; I put it at arms length and see it through a voluntary haze.
As a pointless waiting without explicit content, boredom has sometimes
been thematized in films. Some films generate a kind of implicit boredom by
focusing on people who are bored or who are in conditions favorable to bore-
dom such as a holiday, a trip, or isolation. Terence Fishers agreeably mundane
Night of the Big Heat ([1967] shown in the United States as Island of the Burning
Doomed) is an excellent example of this type. The proportion and balance in
Fishers framing and the movies ability to light on something of interest from
moment to moment imply an obsessive yet tender concern for a shrunken, de-
mented world about to come to an end. The movie has that sour late-1960s
mood of exhaustion and nerves at their limit, perfectly expressed in the recur-
rent situation of residents of an island off the coast of Britain gathering in the
islands only pub to share desultory complaints about the abnormal heat.
British filmmakers werent alone in becoming interested in boredom during
the 1960s. Jean Mitry thought that Antonioni went as far as it is possible to go
toward thematizing boredom and toward an aesthetic system based on audi-
ence boredom, on the expression of emptiness, the representation of immo-
bility (though it be only moral or mental).10 But Antonioni was only one of the
more illustrious of the many filmmakers responsible for the tidal wave of bore-
dom that was the Italian cinema of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970sa period during
which Romes Cinecitt flourished as, perhaps, the greatest capital of boredom
the world has ever known. Not only was boredom made the overt subject of
films dealing with the Italian film industry such as Fellinis La dolce vita (1960)
and Godards Le mpris (1963), but Italian filmmakers also promoted boredom
through an exhaustive approach to standardized, sensation-mongering genres,
such as the peplum cycle of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the spy films of the
mid 1960s, the spaghetti westerns of the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s, and
the gialli of the 1960s and 1970s. I wish to look closely at a film of the latter
group, Umberto Lenzis Spasmo (1974).
Before doing so, it may be desirable to spell out my purpose in selecting
Spasmo to exemplify the promotion of boredom in Italian cinema. First, Id be
unhappy if my claim that certain Italian films, including Spasmo, are boring

2 4 4Chris Fujiwara
Figure 3 Fellinis La dolce vita (1960): a film about boredom and the Italian
film industry.

were read as a contemptuous dismissal of these films. On the contrary, its

through being boring that these filmsseveral of thembecome interesting
to me. Second, in investigating the boringness of Spasmo I wish to lay emphasis
on those aspects of the film that highlight and comment on the nature of film
spectatorship and that disclose the intimate connection between film viewing
and boredom. Indeed, the only importance of Spasmo to me, for purposes of
this essay, lies in its ability to make this link apparent. Third, in alluding to the
fact that certain key features of Spasmo are shared by other Italian commercial
films of its era, I wish to acknowledge that the way in which Spasmo discloses
the link between viewing and boredom is the way of a certain genre (a low
one) and to suggest the study of the relationship between film genre, low cul-
ture, and boredom as a path for research.
The beginning of the film is boring. Were given no reason to care about any-
thing. In a high-angle long shot, a motorcycle bearing two young people, a boy
and a girl, turns off a main road onto a dirt path along an attractive coastline
at night. This shot cuts to a medium-long shot of a parked sedan. The motor-
cycle pulls up near the sedan. The direct appeal to the spectator is immediate:
the boy gets off the motorcycle and approaches the camera, which is inside the

B ored om, Spasmo, a nd the Italian Syste m 2 45

car; the boy addresses it (us) through the passenger window. We know nothing
of the person whose place we take: only when the car drives away at the end
of the scene, after the young couple have had their lovemaking spoiled by the
macabre sight of a doll hanging by a cord nearby, can we infer that the driver of
the car hanged the doll; it wont be until the end of the film that we can identify
this unseen person with a character in the film.
The young couple is marked as generic young couple. Nothing charac-
terizes them: they merely perform a short series of actions and fulfill a short
series of functions. They are present in the film only to be exploited. The camera
tilts from the girls face to her breast as the boys hand caresses it through her
sweateran automatic and imperious redirection of the viewers gaze equiva-
lent to a pan that occurs a few moments later, from the girl kissing the boy to
the dolls legs hanging in the air. Both camera movements exploit the human
figure, treating it as material and implying an equivalence, which the narrative
of Spasmo will eventually make explicit, between human beings and dolls. The
camera movements also exploit the viewer, who is addressed as someone who
wants to be titillated, and is capable of being titillated, by images of clothed
foreplay and displaced violence against women.
Intercut with the credits, we see a series of shots of dolls. We are bored fur-
ther. This is to be a film about dolls, apparentlythe most boring of things, em-
bodiments of a functionalization of being to which the only possible responses
are irritation or melancholy. The music too is somewhat boring, though beauti-
ful: Ennio Morricones theme, vocalized by a chorus (ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-
ooh-ooh-ooooh) over cyclical rhythm-guitar figures, promises a melancholy
experience rather than nerve-jangling Argento-esque terror and suspense.
The prologue lies stranded, never to be incorporated into the body of the
film. Nothing about an inanimate doll can be an event worthy of a date in the
narrative calendar. Only once in the film will the dialogue refer to the dolls, in
a line spoken by a nameless character at a gas station.
The story told by the film concerns two brothers, Fritz (Ivan Rassimov)
and Christian (Robert Hoffman), sons of a wealthy industrialist (Tom Felleghy).
Christian has inherited their grandfathers insanity, and Fritz has long helped
Christian, while blaming him for their fathers suicide. Hoping to force Chris-
tian to recognize his mental disorder and commit himself to a clinic, Fritz

2 46 Chris Fujiwara
hires several people to take part in a strange plot to drive Christian to a mental
breakdown. One of the conspirators, Barbara (Suzy Kendall), lures Christian to
her motel cabin, where he is attacked by an intruder, Tatum (Adolfo Lastretti).
Christian apparently kills Tatum with the latters gun. Barbara persuades Chris-
tian to hide out with her in a supposedly vacant house that proves occupied by
two other members of the conspiracy, Malcolm (Guido Alberti) and Clorinda
(Monica Monet).
There Fritzs plan goes awry because of the sympathy or attraction that
Barbara, Malcolm, and Clorinda all feel toward Christian. Nevertheless,
Christians madness overtakes him, and he kills Clorinda. Tatum returns, kills
Malcolm, and tries to kill Christian, but Christian runs over Tatum with his
car and fakes his own death. Christian goes on to kill a prostitute-motorist
(Rosita Torosh), his ex-girlfriend (Maria Pia Conte), and finally Barbara, before
Barbaras lover, Alex (Mario Erpichini), kills Christian in revenge.
The ambiguity of the motives of Fritz and Tatum complicates the story. Why
Tatum kills Malcolm, and why he tries to kill Christian, are mysteries the film
does not deign to elucidate. Perhaps hes acting under orders from Fritz, who
appears scarcely discomfited by the news of his brothers apparent death. Its
unclear, in any case, whether the aim of Fritzs plot is to render Christian men-
tally incompetent for Christians own good, to avenge their fathers suicide, or
(as Barbara thinks) to put Christian out of the way so that Fritz can take over
the family business.
Even if these questions were answered, the story, as narrated by the film,
would still be hard to discern. For most of the film, the plot closely follows the
point of view of Christian, who fails to realize that he is insane. Much impor-
tant informationincluding the fact that most of the characters, apart from
Christian, are conspiring togetheris withheld until the last half hour; and its
only in that last half hour that Fritz himself appears. Also, not only does the
film delay exposing Christian as a murderer until his last killing, that of Barbara
(which comes nearly at the end of the film); but were not even made aware that
his three previous victims have died until their deaths are shown in flashbacks
during the scene of Barbaras murder.
Limited by the point of view of a passive and insane character, the plotting of
Spasmo is as slack as the story is inscrutable. A dissipation of narrative energy

B ored om, Spasmo, an d the Italian System 2 4 7

becomes especially noticeable after Christian and Barbara arrive at the house,
which she says belongs to an absent friend (shes a Brazilian painter and she left
for Rio two weeks ago). At this point, the film becomes paralyzed by timeless-
ness and emptiness. Christian and Barbara have no apparent incentive to leave
the house. The narrative seems to lack the obligation to move in any direction
in particular. There is nothing to do.
Immediately on entering the house (by breaking a kitchen window), Chris-
tian recognizes that a certain dullness has set in and will overtake them:

CHRISTIAN: You say your girlfriend paints?

BARBARA: Yes, why?
CHRISTIAN: I dont know, everything is soso dull.
BARBARA: Shes got some good booze.

Barbaras last line perfectly manifests the pall of vacation idleness that now
hangs over Spasmo. The characters have nothing to anticipate and nothing to do
but drink. Its unclear when they will be allowed to leave this purgatory. Instead
of taking part in a narrative, they are in hiding from it. The decor of the house
including stuffed birds, caged live birds of prey, and a suit of armorexpresses
the kind of stifled, frozen time that the characters have entered.
The cinematography plays an important and paradoxical role in instilling
this sense of immobility. Shot by Guglielmo Mancori, a busy and accomplished
cinematographer who shot many other films for Lenzi and also worked with
such directors as Antonio Margheriti, Michele Lupo, Lucio Fulci, and Sergio
Sollima, Spasmo exemplifies the dominion that the zoom lens held in the Ital-
ian commercial cinema of its era. As in other products of the Italian cinematic
system, the zoom in Spasmo constitutes the characters as static visual patterns.
The zoom controls an extended space, but the animate creatures who occupy
this space are immobile or suspended, or their movement is annulled: exterior
movement is held in abeyance while the movement of consciousness is per-
formed by the zoom.
One moment shows the structural role of the zoom for Lenzi. Barbara and
Fritzs lieutenant, Lucas (Franco Silva), arrive at Fritzs office to meet him. The
three talk, but we cant hear their dialogue. The camera slowly zooms out to re-
veal that were watching them through the window of another office. The widen-

2 4 8Chris Fujiwa ra
ing field of view finally encompasses an intercom on a table in the foreground,
on which the camera reframes, zooming into an extreme close-up. Christians
hand reaches in from off camera and flicks a switch. At this point we begin to
hear the dialogue in Fritzs office (the first line heard is Fritzs In other words,
you made a mess of things, a complete mess!). Having through this elaborate
visual device justified our ability to hear the dialogue from Christians auditory
point of view, the film now (with its characteristic combination of perversity
and opportunism) cuts to a shot inside Fritzs office, as the dialogue continues.
It becomes clear that Lenzi uses the zoom as punctuation, marking the start
and end of shots with emphasis; to give structure to his scenes, to give the sem-
blance of movement to dialogues and shapes that lack inner movement: not just
the actors who pretend to be corpses (like Barbara in the first postcredits scene
and Tatum in the motel bathroom), but also the actors who pretend to be alive
but are unable to supply inner movement. The zoom compensates for, but also
confirms and celebrates, the tendency of the characters of Spasmo to become
inanimate and doll-like. (The very faces in Spasmo may be taken as boring, in
their almost abstract beauty: the faces of Robert Hoffman and Suzy Kendall
are perfectly chiseled and defined, that of Ivan Rassimovthe ultimate Italian-
system actor?even more so.)
If Lenzis preoccupation with the zoom suggests a concern with the external
effect of movement at the expense of inner movement, the same can be said of
the directors preoccupation with cars. The car is an appropriate analogue to the
zoom. Like the zoom, the car is an extension of the bodys power to explore the
external world. They are comparable in ease of operation: the zoom can be trig-
gered at the push of a button, without the camera or its operator having to
displace themselves; typically, for an experienced driver, driving a car requires
little strain, only a mostly unremarkable, unacknowledged engagement with
the steering wheel, pedals, and other devices.
Both car and zoom lens annul space; they also annul time. Both are tech-
nologies of imaginary possession: just as the car makes possible a possession
of landscape and scenery (several shots in Spasmo revel in the beauty of the
seaside environment, as visible from a road), so the zoom facilitates the taking
possession of distant visual objects.
The prologue establishes the importance of automobility in Spasmo. Over a

B ored om, Spasmo, a nd the Ital ian Syste m 2 4 9

shot of the young couple staring at the doll, we hear the sound of a car starting
up; on the cut, we see the sedan drive away. Cars starting up and driving away
are a motif in the film, and often, as in this case, the film insists on the motif by
having us hear a car before we see it. In the first scene after the credits, Barbara
surprises Christian by taking off abruptly in her car, off-screen. Later, Christian
hurries off Alexs yacht to drive away in his car (this time the car is visible in
long shot when the engine starts). In a later scene at the painters house, the
sound of a car starting up is heard over a shot of Christian exploring the house,
looking for Barbara.
Christian spends much of the film in his car. Twice the camera pans, follow-
ing his car, only to stop and reframe on a doll attached to a tree. In one scene,
Lenzi intercuts close-ups of Christian at the wheel with flashback close-ups of
Malcolm and Barbara, repeating dialogue they addressed to him earlier in the
film, and with long shots (taken from the front of the moving car) of the road,
which, animated by the moving camera and distorted by the wide-angle lens,
seems simultaneously to recede into the distance and hurtle toward and past us.
Finally, the car is the instrument with which Tatum tries to kill Christian, and
by which Christian turns the tables on Tatum, running him over and disposing
of his body.
A number of connotations of the car are made explicit in Spasmo: namely, its
associations with (1) sex, (2) masculinity, (3) economic power, and (4) freedom
of movement. (1) Sex: the motorcycling couple at the beginning of the film go
in search of a place to make love; Christian and Barbara seduce each other in
Christians car. (2) Masculinity: cars in Spasmo are invariably driven by men. In
the seduction scene, Christians imminent possession of Barbara (she has just
invited him to her motel) is clinched by a close-up of his hand controlling the
phallic gearshift. Women apparently lack direct access to automobility: to leave
the yacht and rejoin Christian, Barbara must (at least she claims) get a lift from
a truck driver. (3) Economic power: Christian drives a BMW, symbol of wealth
and privilege. (4) Freedom of movement: the film is set in a resort area largely
configured by automobility; the various locations of the film are separated by
distances that cant easily be spanned except by car; several plot points depend
on Christians ability to jump into a car and travel quickly from one place to
another.

250Chris Fujiwara
 Cars are vehicles of boredom in Spasmo. The car inevitably attracts the notice
of the camera, displacing people as objects of visual interest. The relentless at-
tention paid to characters arrivals and departures by car becomes mechanical;
the film seems to say that where the characters go, or merely that they are en
route somewhere, is more interesting than why they are going, or who they
are.
In the shots of the road taken from the front of Christians car, Lenzi makes
an exceptional effort both to reproduce the visual experience of driving and to
infuse it with a psychological element. The shots of the road also activate the
familiar analogy between film screen and windshield, although this is com-
plicated by a subtly unnerving aspect of the sequence: the close-ups of Chris-
tian are filmed through the windshield, but the road is viewed directly, with-
out the mediation of glass and the concomitant reflections. The mise-en-scne
thus delineates Christians world as private and closed and reminds us that we
have access to it, and him, only through reflections, while staging a relatively
unmediated confrontation with the external space of the road, which seems
to threaten us. Both sides of this shot/reverse-shot pair exemplify Heideggers
description of the terrifying in The Thing: The terrifying is unsettling. . . . It
shows itself and hides itself in the way in which everything presences, namely,
in the fact that despite all conquest of distances the nearness of things remains
absent.11
The films abrupt transitions between night and day take to a disorienting
extreme the films tendency to collapse time, its foregrounding of the conquest
of distances. A straight cut takes Christian and Barbara off Alexs yacht and into
Christians car, but on the yacht it is day, and in the car it is already night. At
night, Barbara proposes to Christian that they hide in the painters house; when
they reach the house, it is day. Finally, Christian crawls away through the woods
at night, wounded by Alexs gunshot; a straight cut then finds him still crawling,
but now on the beach, and in bright sunlight.
Other aspects of the film affirm, in different ways, the inconsequence of
space and time, challenging projective illusion and the spectators capacity
to believe in the world of the film. The dialogue in Spasmo is entirely post-
synchronized. From this practice, characteristic of the Italian system, several
consequences ensue. One is that there is no original text to reconstitute, whose

B ored om, Spasmo, an d the Ital ian Syste m 25 1

virtual, potential, or real existence would control readings of the film, to whose
authority all interpretations would be referred. What the actors said while being
photographed was never meant to be part of the film (Fellini famously told his
actors to count, when he was shooting scenes for which the dialogue had not
been written); with the international cast of Spasmo (the male lead is German,
the female lead British, and most of the other actors Italian), the scenes might
have been played multilingually (a common practice in Italy).
This means that although the dialogue often sounds like an approximation
of what the characters might say, it makes no sense to try to guess what they
actually said. Take Christians remark to Barbara: I dont know, its all so absurd,
meaningless, and whats absurd is dangerous. The line sounds like a translation
from another language. We take such a line as not really spoken. But no really
spoken line stands behind it to assure us of a really meant meaning. The mean-
ing of the dialogue isnt anchored to the film.
We have no guarantee that the voices in Spasmo are those of the actors who
were photographed, nor do we ask for one, if were familiar with the cinematic
system of Italy, in which the movie character is a peculiar construct. But the
cinema in general always reserves the option of combining the image of an
actor with the voice of another actor (as part of the general arbitrariness of the
relationship between image and sound in film), and among many well-known
English-language films that exercise this option, we may cite Orson Welless
Othello and The Trial (though both of these, it may not be irrelevant to point
out, are European productions). So it may be more accurate to say of the Italian
system that it tolerates as no breach of verisimilitude a somewhat greater obvi-
ous discrepancy between voice and image than is usually acceptable in the cine-
mas of the United States, Britain, or France, that it tolerates disruption between
sound and image and the presence of traces of the independence of sound from
image (e.g., obviously inexact lip synching) to a greater extent than do other
cinematic systems. (An early explicit reference to dubbing in Italian cinema,
from the point of view of Hollywood, can be found in Vincente Minnellis Two
Weeks in Another Town [1962].)
The Italian system also relies on a certain kind of voice and on actors adept
at recording dialogue distinctly while following the lip movements of the on-
screen actors. In Spasmo, the voices all have that vacuous, colorless, vague
quality characteristic of the dubbed voices in standard Italian commercial films

252Chris Fujiwa ra
of the 1960s and 1970s. Alexs voice is smooth and impersonal. Christians voice
is soft and neutral. Uncommitted to these bodies, these faces, the voices gener-
ate boredom.
If, as Merleau-Ponty writes, the movies are peculiarly suited to make mani-
fest the union of mind and body, mind and world, and the expression of one
in the other, the opposite can just as well be said, as Spasmo reveals by making
manifest the separation of meaning from voice and voice from body, and thus
the disunion of mind and world.12
One sequence in the film grounds this incoherence in an elaborate primal
scene of viewing: the sequence in which Fritz, alone in his office, sits down,
turns on a movie projector, and watches a film. The film he watches starts out
like a home movie: in a handheld shot of children playing on a lawn, one child,
whom we identify as Fritz, runs toward the camera with his hand extended
to block its view. But the next scene is shot from a tripod and reveals a vigor-
ous mise-en-scne and decoupage, starting with a shot in which, as Fritz and
Christians father sits on the lawn, reading a newspaper, Fritz enters the shot at
right to pick up a glass and take a drink. This shot cuts on Fritzs movement to a
striking composition with Fritz in extreme close-up in right foreground, drink-
ing, and Christian framed from the waist up in the middle ground. The camera
zooms in on Christian, losing Fritz.
In the next shot, Fritz sits in a chair in the foreground, his back to the cam-
era, while in the right background, the mother approaches; this cuts back to the
previous close-up of Christian, looking up and past the camera. This shot cuts
to a close-up of the adult Fritz watching the film (the projectors flare aimed at
the camera, in the right of the composition), so that Lenzi identifies the two
looks at the mother from across twenty years.
If the Kuleshov effect means the imposition of a meaning on shot A through
its contiguity with shot B (the meaning consisting in a spatial and psychological
contiguity), the cutaways to the adult Fritz watching the film-within-the-film
may be considered vacant, meaningless: no transference of meaning through
contiguity takes place, only a duplication of looking. We might call this the
Lenzi effect. Meaning resides with the film-within-the-film and stays there. The
function of the spectator is always only to see, to recognize, to understand.
What is seen, recognized, understood is not meaning, but the self-identical.
The next shot in the film-within-a-film zooms in from behind the boy Fritz

B ored om, Spasmo, an d the Ital ian Syste m 253

on the mother as she rushes forward, arms extended. Unexpectedly, Christian
enters from off camera right to receive her embrace. This shot is composed, like
all the previous shots of the film-within-the-film, so that the projection screen
is framed on either side by wood-paneled wall; but now, the camera zooms in
on the screen, so that as mother and child embrace, the edges of the screen
become lost, and the film-within-the-film engulfs the frame, a visual effect that
resembles a blow-up of the 1.33:1 home-movie image into the 2.35:1 Scope image
of Spasmo. This engulfing of space by the film-within-the-film equals the loss
of Ihdes and Sobchacks echo focus and a heightening of the spectators in-
volvement in the film. Spasmos inscription of this involvement as a cinematic
figure linked to the primordial unity of mother and child and to an observing
character, Fritz, is both an offer to the viewer to emulate Fritz and a comment
on the eviction from reality that befalls any viewer of a film. At the same time
as the zoom draws us into the film-within-the-film, the onscreen embrace ex-
cludes us.
The film forcefully reminds us of this exclusion by cutting to a close shot
of the excluded child, Fritz, looking up from his chair. The camera zooms in
on him as he looks down. This shot cuts to a very tight close-up of the mother,
looking past the camera and then down as she caresses Christians head and
kisses him. She looks up again past the camera, as if challenging someone, or
expecting a challenge.
Unexpectedly, the film now cuts to a high-angle close shot of the father, sit-
ting, looking up past the camera. At the left of the composition, behind him,
is a tripod. He turns away slowly (disapproving? resigned?), puts his pipe into
his mouth, and resumes reading his newspaper. This cuts to a new shot: a tight
close-up of Christian in his mothers embrace, staring fixedly at the camera as
her hand caresses the back of his head. Fritz (as spectator in the present time)
freezes the frame and looks up at it intensely, then resumes normal projection
as the camera zooms in on the boys blue-gray eyes. In these shots, Spasmo
links together Fritz, the father, and the film viewer: this passage of the film can
be seen as a lesson for the viewer in occupying the paternal role (which Fritz,
as the elder son, is to inherit from his father), biding time and waiting for re-
vengea lesson whose significance will become apparent later in the film.
The downcast look of the excluded child, Fritz, before his mothers defiant

254Chris Fujiwara
embrace of his brother, repeats what can be called the inaugural gesture of the
film. At the end of the prologue, the male motorcyclist watches the mysterious
sedan drive off, then looks down. The disappointment apparent on his lowered
face, in a close-up extended to a seemingly pointless length, is prophetic of the
audiences almost inevitable disappointment with Spasmo, and it reveals the
profoundly disappointing truth of the film.
Here we must consult Heidegger, who distinguishes being bored by a spe-
cific object from being bored with a certain passing of time. This second kind
of boredom is most relevant. In it, we have given ourselves time by entering
into a situation organized in response to an indeterminate emptiness that it is
designed to fill.13 Heideggers example is an evening out with friends. This kind
of passing the time not only fights against boredom, it also captures it.14 We let
ourselves be swept along by whatever is transpiring, in a state of casualness
about joining in. In this state, any seeking to be satisfied by beings is absent in
advance.15 Furthermore, our being satisfied, in being there and part of things,
manifests itself, if only faintly and indeterminately, as an illusion (a peculiar
dissatisfaction!)as a passing of time which does not so much drive off bore-
dom as precisely attest to it and let it be there.16 In seeking to pass the time,
we have, not wrongly or to our detriment, but legitimately, left our proper self
behind in a certain way and remained in a state of emptiness.17
What Heidegger says here can be read as a model of a passive and reserved
film viewing that differs radically from Metzs, with its stress on participation.
Having left ourselves behind in advance by giving ourselves time to be entirely
present for what is present in the film, we are cut off from our having-been
and from our future. This entails a compression of the present into itself, so
that without the possibility of transition, only persisting remains. The Now
(that peculiar time which is in the present) stretches itself it becomes a
standing Now that sets us in place.18
The loss of past and future are characteristic of film time. Not only does the
viewer willingly leave herself behind to give herself over to the film for its dura-
tion, but this duration is a compressed, sealed-off present.
The boredom unleashed by Spasmo may force us to confront a truth about
cinema: that filmsnot all films, but those films that we approach as Heidegger
approaches his evening out, seeking to pass the time rather than to be deeply

B ored om, Spasmo, a nd the Italian Syste m 255

satisfied, casual about joining inare boring. Why is Spasmo better able to
bring this truth to light than another film? Here I must express a reservation. I
dont claim that Spasmo is uniquely boring; I take it as a film that exemplifies a
boredom that can also be found in other films of its genre. Its the genre thats
deeply boring, and that in its way of being boring reveals a truth about cinema.
But I have no interest in the problem of constituting the genre and defining its
limits, whether historical, national, narrative, thematic, iconographic, or stylis-
tic. Its enough for my purposes that a few qualities that define Spasmo, notably
as a product of the Italian commercial cinema of a certain period, can also be
found in other films that are, perhaps, just as boring. The genre of Spasmo is,
then, only its way of being boringa way it shares with certain other films.
Finally, theres something reassuring, comforting, relaxing about Spasmo.
Spasmo is not a deeply troubling film. It doesnt traumatize or attack the viewer.
It shows very little blood, and it features only brief moments involving physi-
cal pain. The ending of Spasmo, which finally explains the prologue and the
intermittent shots of dolls throughout the film, is especially reassuring, let-
ting the lover of the giallo (a form in which the attractions of violence against
women are notoriously blatant) off the hook by portraying a form of violence
that could be considered harmless: Fritz, we discover, compulsively mutilates
dolls. The viewer of the film is doing something still more innocuous: watching
someone mutilate dolls. The escape to which we have given our time gives us
back a vision of our own activity as an acting upon the inanimate without con-
sequences for the self, and the society, that we have left behind for ninety-four
minutes.
This inconsequentiality reminds us that though boredom offers the anti-
dote to distraction, it can also be recuperated as distraction. Spasmo may be
boring entertainment, but it is still entertainment. Foreseeing this danger, the
Situationists attacked boredom as a dead end, merely the inevitable result of
the endless accumulation of images characteristic of the modern, spectacular
culture against which they mounted their radical critique. Its possible, how-
ever, to argue in favor of boredom in situationist terms. The Situationists used
two main weapons against the spectacle: dtournementthe rerouting of exist-
ing artworks into new contexts; and drivea creative drifting through urban
environments. Does not the indeterminacy unleashed by the boring film make
it an ideal candidate for dtournementand even, perhaps, constitute it as pre-

256Chris Fujiwara
dtourn? Can we not, furthermore, conceive of the boring film as an environ-
ment for aesthetic drive, in which we wander freely?
If entertainment keeps us waiting, holding out the promise of the new but
never fulfilling it, boredom admits waiting to be infinite. It defeats the lie of
culture by positing nothingness. As Guy Debord remarks in the penultimate
section of The Society of the Spectacle: A critique capable of surpassing the
spectacle must know how to bide its time.19 In boredom, we attend to the in-
determinacy of what we are waiting forin which lies the saving recognition
that it does not exist.

Notes

Parts of this article were adapted by the author from his essay The Force of the Useless,
Hermenaut 16 (winter 2000): 92100.
1. Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 4; Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film
Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), 115, 118.
2. Patrice Petro, Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 2002), 66.
3. Trond S. Trondsen and Jan Bielawski, Nostalghia.com Looks at The Steamroller and
the Violin, 2002, www.acs.ucalgary.ca/tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/Steamroller
_and_Violin.html.
4. E. M. Cioran, uvres, ed. Yves Peyr (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 1748.
5. Michael Snow, La Region Centrale, Film Culture 52 (spring 1971), quoted in Simon
Field, Michael Snow: A Filmography, Afterimage 11 (winter 198283), 15.
6. Cioran, Prcis de decomposition, 1748.
7. Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, in General Psychology Theory (1917;
New York: Touchstone, 1991), 167.
8. Henri Wallon, Lacte perceptif et le cinma, Revue internationale de filmologie 13
(1953): 97100, quoted in Metz, Film Language, 1011.
9. Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Prince-
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 181.
10. Jean Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology in the Cinema, trans. Christopher King
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 362.
11. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York:
Harper and Row, 1971), 166.
12. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia
Allen Dreyfus (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 58.

B ored om, Spasmo, a nd the Italian Syste m 25 7

 13. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude,
trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1995), 115.
14. Ibid., 112.
15. Ibid., 117.
16. Ibid., 11718. Compare Kierkegaard: A misdirected search for diversion, one which is
eccentric in its direction, conceals boredom within its own depths and gradually works
it out toward the surface, thus revealing itself as that which it immediately is (Sren
Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson [Garden
City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1959], 1:28687).
17. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 119.
18. Ibid., 12425.
19. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York:
Zone Books, 1995), 154.

258Chris Fujiwara
G r e g Tay l o r

Pure Quidditas or Geek Chic? Cultism as Discernment

The need for a systematic reappraisal of the American cinema, director by

director and film by film, has become more pressing in recent years. . . . The
excavations and revaluations must continue until the last worthy director
has been rescued from undeserved anonymity. Andrew Sarris

Switchblade Sisters, Macon County Line, The Warriorsto you, mere drive-
in flicks. To me, shattering works of art. Marc Edward Heuck, Movie
Geek, Beat the Geeks

H ow times have changed. Forty years ago, cultist connois-

seurship of Americas cultural margins could still be con-
sidered the rarefied domain of select highbrow critics who
hoped to liberate readers from the scourge of middlebrow ste-
rility by trawling the depths of a mass culture that others either
ignored or took for granted. But today, cultism is everywhere,
and movie geeks (and music geeks, and television geeks) are
a dime a dozenthe word geek has even been included in the
latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.1 This cultural
diffusion of cultism is hardly a bad thing, insofar as cultisms
canon upheaval and oppositional discernmentthe conferring
of aesthetic specialness on unlikely artifactshave essentially
transformed the way we interact with cultural products, offer-
ing us an elusive promise of authority through an accessible and
engaging means of coping with the sheer onslaught of pop arti-
facts. A great many of us now champion our discernment of specialness within
the vast field of popular culture as a matter of coursein recreational banter,
but also in our engagement with books, fanzines and fan sites, chat rooms, Triv-
ial Pursuit editions, movies (the pastiche frenzy of Tarantinos Kill Bill: Vol. 1),
television programs (VH1s The List, I Love the 70s, I Love the 80s, 25 Greatest
Commercials, etc.), the collectibles market (where an original set of Gilligans
Island bubble gum cards can fetch $1,500), and Entertainment Weekly and TV
Guide pop-connoisseur lists (The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time, The Fifty
Funniest Moments of I Love Lucy).2 Today, it seems, we all want (and get) to
be oppositional cultists, resistant tastemakers, gloriously marginalized geeks.
The startling emergence of oppositional connoisseurship as a mainstream phe-
nomenon obviously raises some important questions, not least concerning the
continued validity of the very distinction between mainstream and margin. But
cultisms ascendance has also bared some of its inherent limitations as a form
of aesthetic discrimination, and it is these limitations that I want to focus on
here. In opposing mainstream works, cultisms oppositional discernment ap-
pears to oppose the very normative criteria by which such works are accorded
their normative high cultural status. Yet in reality this is something of a smoke
screen. Cultism can hardly eschew normative standards outright, as it provides
an alternative canon of marginal worksso it downplays their centrality by
subsuming them within a larger oppositional gesture that seems to suffice as
an end in itself. Thats why, in the midst of a heated musical debate, it seems
fun and empowering to single out a marginal/alternative act such as the Stone
Roses, but even more fun and empowering to single out not the Stone Roses
universally praised self-titled 1989 debut, but their much derided (and much
delayed) 1994 follow-up, Second Coming. My intuitive sense that the music on
Second Coming is aesthetically engaging and powerful is still relevant, certainly,
but the enjoyment and empowerment of reaching down to rescue this more
marginal work depends less on sophisticated analysis than on my willingness
to assert my more advanced and daring critical acumen. In fact, sophisticated
analysis can even get in the way of the fun, when it starts to cloud the terms of
engagement with boring complexities. (Sure, The Stone Roses has some great
tracks on it, but . . . ; sure, Second Coming is overblown and uneven, but . . . .)
This is not to say that pop-cultural works cannot beor indeed are not

260 Greg Tayl or

judged within such traditional evaluative meansall the time. But the domi-
nance of cultist frameworks has not encouraged us to figure out upon which
criteria we make our assessments in the first place. Instead, cultist gesturing
asserts personal relevance and provides nostalgic good feeling, empowering us
by confirming the validity of our own idiosyncratic past and present cultural
choices. In truth, cultism was never equipped to handle the complexities of
aesthetic analysis, because it originally pitched itself as an alternative to this
very sort of traditional discernment. That it did so at least in part by singling
out works that actually did not seem to warrant such discernment is highly
relevant here, as it reminds us that the real nemesis of old-time cultists was not
high culture, but the specter of mass-marketed aesthetic complexity offered by
the middlebrow text.
Pioneering film cultists such as Manny Farber and Andrew Sarris, like their
intellectual brethren Dwight Macdonald, Jos Ortega y Gasset, and others,
pitched their oppositional connoisseurship precisely against this competing
form of high pop culturehere epitomized by those Big Important Movies
polished with a fake artistic sheen, maudlin piffle gussied with big, important
themes or a false air of social conscience. For critic-painter Farber, who toiled
for years writing acerbic reviews at the New Republic and the Nation before
penning cultist manifestos such as Underground Films: A Bit of Male Truth
(1957) and White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art (1962), tough-guy action flicks
by Anthony Mann and Raoul Walsh beat the pretentious garbage of the Fred
Zinnemanns, Sidney Lumets, and Michelangelo Antonionis of this world any
day of the week.3 Similarly, Sarriss much-vaunted auteur theory was really
just a naked assertion of cult taste, a declaration that Alfred Hitchcock is artis-
tically superior to Robert Bresson by every criterion of excellence, and further,
that, film for film, the American cinema has been consistently superior to that
of the rest of the world from 1915 through 1962.4 For both critics, an opposi-
tional dip into the popular was first and foremost a daring gesture of refusal, a
radical insistence that American pop culture was not something to be embar-
rassed about, and further that the most authentic, vital products of that culture
could be found not floating on top, but lurking near the bottom, among the
forgotten bits of junk. Becoming a pop culture expert thus meant, first and fore-
most, acquiring a broad enough awareness of the depths and margins in order

Cultism as Discernment 261

to seem not as beholden to normative middlebrow standards as many of ones
readers, and not as beholden to normative highbrow standards as ones friends
and associates. Obviously enough, it also meant cultivating the ability to spot
diamonds in the rough; whether these jewels took the form of forgotten films or
neglected directors, they were to be validated as objects of cultural reappraisal
by virtue of their virulent stance against the institutional forces of American
mediocrity.
This was taking the depths and margins seriously, to be sure. But as a con-
noisseurship of trash it was always a form of cultural slumming, toofirst, in
that the rough standards of reappraisal were frequently also those championed
in American high art of the postwar period (vitality could now be found in
action movies as well as action painting), and second, in that said standards
tended to remain vague, obscured behind the oppositional gesture itself, the
ardent refusal that always lay at the heart of cultist practice and enabled the
celebratory reclamation of cultural authority in the first place. Thus, attempts to
delineate the strengths of cult objects in detail have been so rare simply because
they are difficult to sustain given the sparseness and even dubious relevance of
underlying criteriaas witness the ease with which Sarriss auteur theory was
gleefully decimated by his would-be nemesis Pauline Kael.5 Because cultism is
fundamentally gestural and personal, because it is fundamentally about claim-
ing and (less obviously) refusing in order to establish and reinforce ones own
personal and cultural identity, discriminatory criteria can prove counterpro-
ductive. Cultism is so inextricably bound up with issues of self-definition as
to make the critique of any particular cultist gesture tantamount to personal
attack.
If anything, this has become only more apparent since the 1970s, when cult-
ism in its various forms emerged as a democratically accessible source of en-
gagement and amusement for literally millions of consumers, even as the high-
brow modernist aesthetics that initially spawned it began to wane. Yet what we
have been left with is oppositional spectatorship for its own sake, a promise of
cultural authority within a larger us-against-them struggle whose terms remain
vague at best. Today it seems clearer than ever that the appeal of cultism lies not
in marginal aesthetics per se as in the very ability to claim and regulate cultural
authoritythe ability to claim that I like what I like (and know what I know),

262 Greg Tayl or

not why I like what I like (and know what I know). Identifying with others who
claim similar tastes and expertise, and against others who remain uninitiated,
while vigilantly rooting out those profane wannabes who would deign to sully
the sacred ground in naked pursuit of their own status, provides more than half
the fun.
The centrality and limitations of this sort of identification are captured nicely
by author D. B. Weiss in his recent novel of cult/geek obsession, Lucky Wander
Boy (2003). Here arcade video game junkie Adam Pennyman begins lovingly
cataloguing his passions (Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Microsurgeon) in a Cata-
logue of Obsolete Entertainments before falling headfirst into a dangerously
fetishistic and narcissistic affair with the memory of the particularly obscure
game referred to in the novels title. Pennymans increasing self-absorption is re-
flected ironically in his writings, which begin as musings on specific games but
soon veer toward larger digressions, including a supplementary essay (inter-
estingly enough) On Geeks. A geek, Pennyman insists, is a person, male
or female, with an abiding, obsessive, self-effacing, even self-destroying love
for something besides status (italics omitted).6 Indeed, the heroic pointless-
ness of true geekdom actually serves as a sort of evolutionary door prize
for societys also-rans; for only when some missing rung prevents a person
from climbing their social ladder will they find themselves on a fallow patch of
ground where other, more fragile interests can take root. This makes the emer-
gence of the Status Geek and the broader cultivation of geek chic a deeply
cynical, pernicious, even nihilistic attempt to plunder lives that are more often
than not emotionally destitute already, to steal their sole prized possession and
trade it on the open market for a minute of juice with a sexual target, a fleeting
hit of superiority in a friendly discussion, the shimmering mirage of depth for
an in-flight magazine profile.7 For Pennyman, then, the Status Geek is thus
not simply a fake but a vampire who drains cultism of its very lifeblood while
advancing relentlessly toward the very success and recognition that the authen-
tic geek can never hope to attain. In response, the true geek turns his sad fate
to his advantage, wearing his marginality on his sleeve while defiantly tran-
scending the very notion of means and ends by encountering comics or cars
or computer games as pure Quidditas, whatness, thereness for its own sake.8
To have to explain why he likes what he likes, and knows what he knows, is to

Cultism as Discernment 263

give in to the underlying premise that taste and knowledge must be inherently
useful, even pragmatic. In a sense, this makes geeks like the fictional Pennyman
cultural renegades in the grand romantic/modern traditioneven as they now
operate in the absence of tenable romantic/modern aesthetics. As a result, they
must carry the force of their geek resistance almost wholly through the anti-
instrumentalism and seeming purposelessness of their cultist obsessionswith
the vigorous assertion of distinction from other cultural consumers, notably
Status Geek wannabes, sufficing as an end in itself. The ultimate value of this
end is another matter: as for Pennyman, he eventually forfeits his job, his girl-
friend, and his already tenuous connection with the world that lies beyond his
inner memories and fantasies.
An avant-gardist without much of a platform, the geekish Adam Pennyman
strikes me as an archetypal victim of the prosperous new cultism, typified by
the ascent of Quentin Tarantino, the berStatus Geek whose Kill Bill: Vol. 1
(2003) represents a veritable orgy of cultist reference to everything from Shaw
Brothers martial arts films to spaghetti westerns, Japanese anime, Franken-
heimers Black Sunday (1977), Ironside, The Green Hornet, the Raquel Welch
revenge western Hannie Caulder (1971), even Trix cereal commercials. What I
find particularly interesting, however, is that this new cultism, while apparently
antithetically opposed to the ideal of difficult, elitist art, nonetheless secretly
clings to its own highbrow bias at least as tenaciously as did the old cultism of
Farber and Sarris. Indeed, that bias continues to be obscured so as not to call
attention to the nakedly pragmatic nature of cultisms patronizing interest in
pop culture as a vibrant (and scandalous) alternative to the stultifying, self-
congratulatory safety of middlebrow, the vacuous commercial art of the undis-
cerning wannabe intelligentsiawhether in the form of a gripping tome from
Oprahs book club or a heartwarming Best Picture nominee. In the end, cultists
have traditionally been interested less in pop culture per se than in the very
ability to gesture toward pop culture in the first place, as to look too closely, or
too seriously, at the pop artifact being celebrated is to risk the revelation of em-
barrassing formal simplicity or self-evidence. This is why placing a premium on
being able to claim that I like what I like (and know what I know) is so useful,
as it nicely sidesteps the why of aesthetic discernment, even as it also implies a
level of condescension that seems oddly out of keeping with cultisms professed

264 G reg Tayl or

ideals. Now that the cultists focus rests squarely on the assertion and regulation
of oppositional knowledge and taste, the specific terms of the cultural distinc-
tion and authority he pursues can remain especially fuzzy. Why is this particu-
lar expertise valuable? On what basis are these certain works to be privileged?
Why is it important to know all this stuff?
The considerable effort it often takes to avoid these questions is nicely fore-
grounded by Comedy Centrals cultist quiz show Beat the Geeks (20012). Os-
tensibly a contest in which challengers vie to best resident experts in movie,
music, and television triviaalong with assorted guest experts in fields such
as horror, Star Trek, The Simpsons, James Bond, even KISSBeat the Geeks is
actually centrally concerned with the assertion, regulation, and continued mys-
tification of cultural authority, including the spectators own authority as an
empowered cultist. An amalgamation of formats pilfered from a number of
game/quiz/cooking shows, the program plays out its curious drama of chang-
ing reputations and shifting fortunes within the Kitchen Stadiumlike Geek
Arena, where the mighty geeks (the finest steel-trap pop-trivia minds in exis-
tence, as the host exclaims) stand elevated on an illuminated platform. Robed
yet wildly unkempt, they arrogantly yet insecurely tout their own cultist au-
thority in opening pronouncements such as Ive heard a thousand bands per-
form live, and youve never heard of any of them and Starsky and Hutch, Baa
Baa Black Sheep, Mannixthese are some of the shows I watch . . . in the morn-
ing. Then the weeks three contestants play the first (Jeopardy-styled) Toss-
Up round. This first round is the programs opportunity to showcase the geeks
privileged status; indeed, in season 1, the geeks sat out this segment entirely,
speaking only when asked a casual prompting question designed to showcase
their depth of knowledge. (For instance, when asked if he knows what show has
won the most Emmys, television geek Paul Goebel carefully notes that Cheers
has won the most Comedy Series awards, but that The Mary Tyler Moore Show
has won the most overall, prompting an enthusiastic Geek! Geek! Geek!
chant from the studio audience.) Even more significantly, our host (initially
J. Keith van Straaten, then Blaine Capatch) might now also prompt the geeks to
make judgments of aesthetic value: Movie Geek Mark Heuck, for instance, sug-
gests that Linda Fiorentino is the sexiest and most underused actress in Holly-
wood, and that John Cusack . . . is the best actor working right now. He is an

Cultism as Discernment 265

Figure 1 The resident geeks and hostess of Comedy Centrals Beat the Geeks (lr: Marc
Edward Heuck, Andy Zax, Tiffany Bolton, and Paul Goebel).

embodiment of what every man either wishes he was or wishes he knew in a

friend. You either want to be him or you want to know somebody just like him.
Even when hes played heel characters hes had a humanity about them that he
hasnt just been putting on with a handlebar mustache or by cackling weirdly.
That the Geeks get to make such judgments is actually really important, if only
because the contestants do notfor unlike the Geeks, they have apparently not
earned the right to do so through an appropriately prodigious display of cul-
tural knowledge. Initially at least, it seems that the challengers, like the rest of
us, might only aspire to legitimate judgment by pitting their modestly geekish
obsessions against those of the masters, who even manage to curry the favor of
sexy co-host Tiffany Bolton: turning to the camera with a little advice for all
you other co-hosts, she warns, Stay away from my geeks, bitches!
Appropriately enough, the obsessions of the contestant pretenders are at first
all but ignored by our host, who deigns to chat with them only at the opening
of round 2: Youve survived round 1, he announces, so we might as well get
to know you. When he then inquires, Whats the geekiest thing about you?,
he is met with typically modest admissionsa waitress is obsessed with New
Kids on the Block, a jeweler is addicted to PlayStation. But these admissions are

266 Greg Tayl or

nonetheless crucial, as they suggest a subtle turning point in the proceedings.
For now the contestants are being taken a little more seriously, and in the fol-
lowing two Challenge Rounds, where they first match wits with actual geeks,
the geeks themselves will begin to face an uphill battle to retain their dignity.
Indeed, they must now literally defend their large gold medals of honor, which
must be surrendered to a contestant when they lose a challenge. Everything,
it seems, is at stake, and suddenly it doesnt seem quite so fun to be a geek.
Not only are these experts now subject to impossibly difficult questions (as
opposed to the relatively easy ones posed of the contestants), it seems clear
that the geeks perversely large pop-cultural expertise is the only thing keeping
them from being complete cultural rejects. Given their slobbish appearance and
boorish behavior, why else keep them around? The host sternly warns them: As
all you Geeks know, you are being closely monitoredgive any indication that
you are no longer the Geek we thought you were and you may be replaced. And
lets face it: if you begin to suck we really wont like you anymore. So stay on it,
guys. I mean, who are we kidding? Appropriately enough, challenged geek and
contestant now trade insultsgeek mildly chides challenger for her lack of ex-
pertise (Danielle, I am starting a disco inferno, and I am bringing you down),
while challenger hits geek with a reminder of his looks and/or undesirability
(Dont be jealous that I wont go on a date with you). The host, for his part,
continues to stoke the flames: Just remember, all the TV geek has is his TV
knowledge, he tells a contestant. Youre much better than that, arent you?
While Geek success in the Challenge Rounds might be met with the audi-
ence Geek! chant, failure invites loud boos and shame, and even an excessive
display of knowledge or evaluative acumen might prompt a disdainful chant
of Show-Off! Show-Off! Show-Off! (Even the Iron Chefs dont have it this
rough.) Then its on to the brief Geek-qualizer, another geek/contestant chal-
lenge designed (as the title suggests) to further winnow the field by revealing
one contestant to be worthy of a final Geek-to-Geek Showdown with the ex-
pert of his or her choice. This showdown is what the entire episode has been
moving toward: finalist and Geek facing off, literally on the same level now, with
the other Geeks rooting lazily from the platform, where they lounge together
on a musty couch, eating peanuts out of a yellow plastic bowl. And yet the Geek
is still at a disadvantage here, because in this final defense of his honor he is

Cultism as Discernment 267

forced to pick a harder (though more valuable) question than the lucky contes-
tant. If he wins, he lives on to be tolerated for yet another day. If he loses, he is,
of course, no longer the geek we thought he was.
On the surface, at least, the show appears to level the playing field, gradually
stacking the deck in favor of contestant and against geek. As we move along, the
sacred cows begin to look less sacred, and we begin to wonder if the geek will
even survive another day. This certainly serves to make things more interesting
for us spectators, as it complicates and regulates our own empowered involve-
ment by playing with, and dispersing, our potential allegiances with geeks and
contestants. The geeks are arrogant underdogs: serious and brilliant but also
excessively enamored with their own (illusory) status, marginal and radical but
also lonely and subject to ridicule. The contestants, for their part, are comfort-
ably normal but also tediously ordinary, socially acceptable but also danger-
ously close to being Status Geeks themselves. True Geek life is comically pre-
social and even pre-sexualpromo spots show them sharing a shabby (frat?)
house, sitting around eating cereal and watching television while cloaked in
their ridiculous robesbut then again, its also reassuringly pre-social and pre-
sexual. While chances are we too may fancy ourselves as geeks, deep down we
also suspect that we are no longer the geeks we thought we were, either, and the
program encourages us to feel OK about this by presenting sacred geekdom as
a decidedly mixed blessing. You dont really want to be a true geek anyhow, do
you?
Beat the Geeks sure hopes not. Like more recent cultist nostalgia-fests such
as VH1s I Love the 70s and I Love the 80s, it needs to preserve the weakly
grounded specialness of its cultural experts; hence it disperses our allegiances
in order to ensure that we do not identify so strongly with the geeks, or with our
own geekishness, that cultisms aura of mystery becomes compromised. This is
why our geeks must remain odd, removed, and ultimately inaccessible; even
if the final contestant manages to beat them, she or he will have a hard time
joining them in the habits and odors of authentic geekdom. More important,
the play of allegiances also serves to keep us distracted from those larger terms
of cultural distinction and authority (the nagging why of discernment), ob-
scuring the link between the cultural knowledge elicited by the hosts questions,
and the cultural authority claimed by the geeks and so prized by the host and

268 Greg Tayl or

audience. We may gather that sufficient range and depth of knowledge is the
basis upon which that authority (which includes the authority to discriminate)
is conferred, but Beat the Geeks consistently fudges the relationship between the
two in order to ensure that the latter remains vague and mysterious, the domain
of its weird and ultimately untouchable aficionados.
Ultimately, then, the program is founded on a ruse: by keeping our attention
so focused on immediate questions of prestige and authenticity (who is the real
Status Geek here?), it prevents us from questioning the very standards by which
specialized knowledge and cult taste are determined in the first place. Why is
it important to be able to identify the director of Lost Souls (Janusz Kaminski),
or the two stars of the film version of the board game Jumanji (Robin Williams
and Kirsten Dunst)? Beat the Geeks assumes the answer to this question to be
self-evident, but of course it has to. The problem, again, is that while cultist
discernment still accepts implicit evaluative criteria and the inherent aesthetic
value of its chosen objects, it cannot quite fess up to either, as doing so only
draws attention away from the gesture itself, and toward aesthetic assumptions
which may themselves seem self-contradictory, awkwardly amalgamated, or
even inappropriate. This is why cultisms very process serves as a sort of protec-
tive veil, naturalizing such implicit criteria within the countercultural gestures
very assertion of rarefied taste. Now one can hope to include an eclectic array of
works or artists (Andr de Toth, Bert I. Gordon, and Linda Fiorentino) in ones
own personal pantheon without having to worry about defending the relative
meritsas opposed to mere distinctivenessof each in traditional aesthetic
terms.
This veil still serves to maintain the oppositional gesture as a promise of cul-
tural (and more specifically, evaluative) authority over the brave new world of
pop entertainment. But this promise necessarily remains a little hollow, to the
extent that the means of evaluative assessment remain hidden from view. This
actually serves to make the cultism of Beat the Geeks seem a little anachronistic,
if only because one would think we now live in a climate where one shouldnt
have to treat pop culture so gingerly. The truth is that cultists make value judg-
ments all the time; indeed, evaluative assessment is part of the real fun of cult-
ist discourse (think High Fidelity [2000]). But cultism has never known quite
how to handle aesthetic discrimination, as its grand oppositional gesture is de-

Cultism as Discernment 269

signed to mask evaluative criteria. When Movie Geek Marc Heuck celebrates
the talents of John Cusack, he does so using fairly traditional evaluative criteria
of subtlety, nuance, and skill of performance, but the show still tries hard to
obscure this, elevating and mystifying him, loosely rooting his discrimination
in cultist trivia knowledge in order to celebrate his supposed authority while
simultaneously shoving him into the margins of resistant spectatorship.
The big secret of Beat the Geeks is that beneath the robes and stringy hair,
the geeks are actually very much like us after all. Like them, we make evalua-
tive queries and judgments about pop works all the time; it just doesnt seem
so special when we do it. Why was M*A*S*H such a great show? Do the later
Star Wars films live up to the original trilogy? Why do CSI: Miami and CSI:
NY seem lame compared with the original? These are not aesthetically insig-
nificant questions, and yet our culture is still extremely reluctant even to con-
sider them matters of aesthetic discernment. Why not? I suspect it is because
we are still beholden to the same underlying assumptions that fueled cultism to
begin with, and that continue to give rise to cultist games like Beat the Geeks.
If we cannot quite seem to acknowledge the presence of engagement, fandom,
and fun within high culture, we have an equally difficult time acknowledging
our routine subjection of pop products to aesthetic criteria such as wholeness,
richness, organizational interest, intensity of feeling, and verisimilitude. The
countercultural gesturewith its protective veilstill appeals to us, in part be-
cause it actually allows us to avoid taking pop culture too seriously. Considering
a pop text as pure Quidditas lets us off the hook of real comparative discern-
ment by couching evaluation in terms of heroic pointlessness versus crass op-
portunism, marginality versus mainstream, us versus them. In the end its not
about the work, its about the empowering nostalgic comforts of the personal
past in the face of the looming uncertainties of a collective future.
Now, I am not suggesting that this is in itself a bad thing, or that issues of
image and identity are somehow absent from normative evaluative procedures
(far from it). Nevertheless, the overwhelming pragmatism of geekish cultism
continues to discourage us from facing pop works naked and head-on, and
our understanding of culture suffers for it. I see my own difficulty in assessing
the merits of the Stone Rosess Second Coming echoed and amplified in the
work of Chuck Klosterman, a gifted critic but also a dedicated cultist who, for

270G reg Tayl or

example, denigrates the artful X-Files while brazenly elevating the mindless
transcendence of Saved by the Bell (I watched it with the same thoughtless in-
tensity I displayed when watching the dryer).9 But when Klosterman sees true
inherent value (richness, affective poignancy, social relevance) in the work of
Billy Joel, he seems unsure of how to proceed, because he stubbornly sets his
analysis within a cultist framework. So on the one hand, Joels subterranean
fabulosity somehow relates to his authenticity, to his not being cool: unlike
Lou Reed or David Bowie, Billy Joel is not a larger pop construct or an expan-
sive pop idea. Billy Joel is just a guy.10 Yet on the other hand Klosterman also
wants to insist that Joel is not great because hes uncool,11 but that hes simply
great. How ironic then that the work he chooses to epitomize Joels greatness is
The Nylon Curtain, an album that only sold one million copies and was widely
seen as a commercial disappointment, but nonetheless includes six amaz-
ingly self-exploratory songs that almost no one except diehard fans are even
vaguely familiar with. The problem here isnt that Klosterman wants to praise
the heart-wrenching honesty or enigmatic richness of Joels oeuvre, but that he
seems unable to draw the line between more distanced discrimination (Joels
best work always sounds like unsuccessful suicide attempts) and cultist appre-
ciation (Granted, I realize that Im making a trite, superfan-ish argument).12
This is not because Klosterman is a bad critic, but rather because his (and our)
beholdenness to cultist impulses makes the line itself seem woefully uncool and
best ignored. Perhaps we still live in an age where we dare not publicly praise
Billy Joels artistry without at least a hint of irony.
If this is true, so much the worse for usfor, like Michael Brub, Simon
Frith, and Richard Schusterman, I would insist that aesthetic discrimination
actually goes hand in hand with an immersion in pop culture.13 People do take
pop works seriously (as art, in effect) all the time; we just cannot or will not talk
about it. We might consider jettisoning our old biases in order to begin examin-
ing more closely the various and complex aesthetic means by which (and vari-
ous contexts within which) pop cultures works are commonly assessed, in the
living room and the academy alike. But I would also suggest that we continue to
examine the various underlying assumptions that have so strongly discouraged
us in academia from seeing our own places within this spectrum. After all, who
could be more geekish than media scholars?

Cultism as Discernment 27 1
Notes

1. The revised second edition of the Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current Eng
lish (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) defines geek as 1. an unfashionable or
socially inept person. 2. an obsessive enthusiast.
2. Libby Slate, Trading Faces: TV Trading Cards Take Their Rightful Place in the Collec-
tibles Market, TV Guide, November 15, 2003, 63.
3. Manny Farber, Underground Films: A Bit of Male Truth, Commentary (1957), re-
printed in Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies (Expanded Edition) (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Da Capo, 1998), 1224; White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art, Film Cul-
ture 27 (196263), reprinted in Negative Space, 13444.
4. Andrew Sarris, Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962, Film Culture 27 (196263), 5.
5. See Kaels Circles and Squares, Film Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1963): 1226, reprinted in
I Lost It at the Movies (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 292319.
6. D. B. Weiss, Lucky Wander Boy (New York: Plume, 2003), 181.
7. Ibid., 182.
8. Ibid., 183.
9. Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (New York: Scribner, 2003), 130.
10. Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, 4445.
11. Ibid., 43.
12. Ibid., 49.
13. See Michael Brub, Pop Cultures Lists, Rankings, and Critics, Chronicle of Higher
Education, November 17, 2000), B7B9; Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of
Popular Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); Richard Schuster-
man, Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 2000).

272G reg Tayl or

Jeffrey Sconce

Movies A Century of Failure

I n the distant science-fiction future of 1995, a bored French-

man decides to spend the afternoon at the cinema. He looks
through the ads for the current titles in release: Dracula versus
the Nymphomaniacs, Sade, Youre a Prude!, The Rape of Franken-
stein, Polyanas Orgy, Sodomy on the Bounty, and Passport to
Lesbos.
He finally decides to see The Rape of Frankenstein, as it seems
to have the largest number of negative guarantees. It had little
chance of disappointing me, observes the jaded narrator. The
fact that it had been breaking box-office records for three weeks
meant that it had probably also broken some enviable records
for stupidity and lunacy.1 Arriving at the theater, he is happy
that the films poster confirms his suspicions.

Frankensteins monster . . . was walking with his hands out

in front of him, not in a cemetery this time, or across a bleak
moor, but through a horde of naked women writhing with
desire, offering themselves to him, arching their bodies
toward him, oozing lust from every pore, split all over like
walking orifices, stewing in their own hot juices, with their
windblown hair brushing against the fleece of their genitalia
that seemed to be eagerly reaching out for the whole world;
some of them were rubbing their bellies against the monster,
who appeared to wonder what was happening to him, while
 others were on all fours, spread wide, looking defiantly down at the public
with an obvious craving for caresses, whips, orgasms, and terror.2

The movie itself proves no less disappointing. Diagnosed by a Viennese

psychoanalyst as having a blocked libido, Frankensteins monster escapes on
a two-hour sexual rampage that has him raping a painting, a mannequin, and
a corpse before finally turning to the women in the village, all of whom gladly
give themselves over to the creatures prodigious sexual assets. In the end, the
men of the village disguise themselves as women to lure the creature into a trap
and kill him. Leaving the theater, our narrator observes, When you realize that
it took no less than three professional scenario writers, two dialogue writers,
and four artistic advisors to turn out that story for retarded adults, its hard not
to feel a little dejected. Then, because youre used to such things, you shrug your
shoulders and smile.3
This vision of the cinemas future comes from Jacques Sternbergs 1971 novel
Toi, Ma Nuit (appearing in the United States under the more salacious title
Sexualis 95). Sternbergs account of a public hungry for the exploits of a rapa-
cious Frankenstein might be dismissed as a standard (though lasciviously exag-
gerated) mass-elite critique of popular culture, which it certainly is. Yet Stern-
bergs narrator is not necessarily a high-art snob. He has just as little patience
for the avant-garde. If you want to avoid films made for the mass market,
he laments, you have to put up with abstract films that have no plot or actors
and are reduced to cascades of disjointed sounds, fleeting images and shapeless
masses.4 Writing in the late 1960s, Sternbergs disgust with all cinemahigh
and lowexpresses a perhaps inevitable endpoint to an elite disaffection stalk-
ing the decades film culture. This is, after all, the same era that saw a revolu-
tionary Jean-Luc Godard pronounce the end of cinema in the closing frames of
Weekend (1967) and a bored Pauline Kael champion AIPs goofy teen-pic Wild
in the Streets (1967) over Stanley Kubricks seriously important 2001: A Space
Odyssey (1968).5 Musing over the ridiculously sleazy movie titles in the news-
paper of the future, Sternberg considers them a statement on where the cinema
has arrived after all its wasted research, honorable bankruptcies, and noble fail-
ures: just below the waist. For a long time the cinema has never reached any
higher. Terry Southerns Blue Movie, also a product of the decades celluloid
ennui, opens with a similar revelation. Bored with his critical and commercial

274Jeffrey S c once
successes in Hollywood, a rudderless director embraces the cinemas last re-
maining artistic challenge: making a multi-million-dollar hard-core porno film
complete with A-list stars, tasteful lighting, and European-style camerawork.
This coalescence of the 1960s cinematic imagination around tropes of
sleaze, boredom, and failure is a fascinating moment in the history of American
film culture. While 1968 brought an increasing radicalization of cine-politics in
France, the late 1960s saw many critics in the United States raising the white flag
of surrender, giving in at last to a long-brooding disillusionment over the gap
between films historical promise and its actual year-to-year practices. This dis-
illusionment continues to haunt contemporary film culture even today, perhaps
even more so. Disaffected cinephiles such as Sternberg, Kael, and Southern were
once canaries in a cultural coal minestruggling with a passion for film turned
to disappointment turned to derision turned to resignation. Today, however,
an entire segment of the culture industry thrives on serving the cinematically
dispossessed, a once subterranean but now increasingly visible nation of cine-
philes who love movies yet hate the cinema (or at least what they perceive the
cinema as having become). A response, perhaps, to Hollywoods own cynicism
in creating increasingly calculated and artless product, a legion of perpetually
disgruntled movie critics rant about the state of cinema in contemporary print,
broadcasting, and cyberspace, not to mention daily conversation. United in the
principle that the cinema has become an unimaginative and perhaps irredeem-
able sewer of clich and stupidity, these critics collectively articulate a voice
that ranges from the bitterly comic to the comically bitter. In recent years, such
ludic cynicism over the state of cinema, the cult of celebrity, and the general fate
of popular culture has become known as snark, an attitude that captures the
love/hate relationship of the pop connoisseur to the contemporary media land-
scape. Cultivated in an ever-growing cultural formation during the 1990s and
thriving in our own historical moment, this snark has become a dominant voice
in contemporary film criticism, a mock and mocking despair that ranges from
Joe Queenans prankster irony in Movieline to the Onions weekly feature, DVD
Commentaries of the Damned. Beth Littleford and Steve Carrells We Love
Show Business segments for The Daily Show translated this cynicism into an
arch parody of entertainment reporting puffery, damning not just Hollywood
product but the entire parasitic support industry that keeps such product afloat.

Movies: A Century of Failure 27 5

On the Web, movie review sites like RottenTomatoes.com and Mr. Cranky em-
ploy an inverse ratings scale. The best any film can hope for under Mr. Crankys
ratings system is one bomb, a designation that equates to almost tolerable.
Whether its a comedy, drama or action-adventure film, reads the Web site,
Mr. Cranky can provide myriad detail as to why the movie, to quote the film
school term, sucks.6 Meanwhile, the Razziesan awards show for Holly-
woods worst achievements of the yearhas gone from private party game to
international media event. Indeed, recognizing catastrophic cinematic failure
has become such a mainstream pursuit that some celebrities actually agree to
appear at the Razzies to pick up their awards, all in the hopes of showcasing a
sense of self-deprecating humor and thus garnering good press to counteract
the horrific buzz about a particularly notorious performance. A more general
and increasingly vitriolic disgust with the excess, narcissism, and condescend-
ing parochialism of Hollywood, finally, fuels not only the tabloids, but Web
sites like defamer.com, television series like Celebrities Uncensored, and a grow-
ing catalogue of mass market books. Indeed, the culture of Hollywood entitle-
ment has become a convenient populist whipping boy for both the political left
and rightnot only do the movies suck in this worldview, but so too do the
amoral, narcissistic, elitist, talentless, navel-gazing suits and stars that keep the
entire embarrassing charade going.
Hollywood has always had its critics, of course, ranging from the post-Day
of the Locust tragedies of innumerable novelists spurned by the film industry to
the recurring moral crusades of the religious right. As films like A Star Is Born
(1937, 1954, 1976), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), and The Player (1992) dem-
onstrate, Hollywood itself has for decades rather solipistically reveled in the
self-perceived tragedies of its above-the-line citizenry. Our current era of cine-
philic disaffection, however, posits a world where the cinemas unending com-
promises have finally produced a complete and irreversible artistic collapse,
leaving only derisive irony and disengaged contempt as viable modes for en-
gaging the vast majority of contemporary cinematic product. Like Sternbergs
misanthropic cinephile, there would seem to be an audience today that appears
to go to the movies, not out of an expectation of actually being moved, engaged,
or even remotely entertained in any conventional sense, but rather to wallow in
the cinema as a faltering medium in a failing culture. Often, the goal is less to

27 6Jeffrey Sc once
Figure 1 Halle Berry in Catwoman (2004), a classic in the cinema of negative
guarantees.

watch an individual title than bear witness to an entire cultural institution in

collapse. Almost every title is to be met with suspicion, and if there is any plea-
sure to be had in a day at the theater, it is rooted either in masochism or a radi-
cal reframing of what constitutes interest in the cinema (or perhaps both). In
the summer of 2004, some went to see Catwoman because they love loud action
movies. Others went because they wanted to see Halle Berry prance around in
bondage gear for two hours. And then there were the smirking cine-cynics who
could not resist the films ample negative guaranteesOscar-winning actress
reduced, quite literally, to pandering sex kitten, generationally pitted against
berbitch Sharon Stone in a spin-off of a sequel to a sequel to a sequel in a
supreme testament to the complete creative exhaustion of Hollywood. Advance
buzz of production troubles and last-minute recutting only amplified wise-ass
anticipation. This last audience, in other words, gleefully went to the theater to
see a train wreck. They were not disappointed.
As the cinema enters its second century, we might ask why so many people
love to hate the movies. In this new era of snark, negative cinephilia and cine-
cynicism, a certain audience no doubt continues to attend dutifully the latest
quality films that generate art-house buzz yet reserves its true passion for

Movies: A Century of Failure 27 7

ripping the work of Jerry Bruckheimer, Michael Bay, and other purveyors of
spectacular idiocy, a cinema of negative guarantees that compels a position of
estrangement, alienation, and derision. Such cine-cynicism might be thought
of as camp without the empathy or historical distance, a once playful dandyism
decayed, through years of despair and disappointment, into the giddy nihilism
of the bored libertine. When so few films are capable of surprising you, be they
commercial, classic, or experimental, what is the film lover to do but give up
and engage the institution as a whole in terms of disappointment and failure?
For the jaded, bored, and otherwise dispossessed cinephilea viewer who has
spent years chasing even a hint of the faintest possibility of a potential har-
binger of something interesting in the cinemapast, present, or futurethis
final moment of disappointment brings a collapse of all evaluative and affective
hierarchies, replacing them with bitter acceptance of a stalemate in the ongoing
challenge of outwitting the banality of commercial cinema. Considered in
this respect, our historical moments continuing and even growing interest in
cinematic failurebe it the doomed blockbuster, the overly precious Sundance
winner, or the grindhouse travestymight best be thought of as a cinematic
death wish, a new and terminal aesthetic order where the landmarks of the
cinema are not Hitchcock and Welles, neorealism or various new waves, but the
delicious implosions of ego-porn like Full Frontal (2002) and Battlefield Earth
(2000), the screw-you pre-sold hubris of Godzilla (1998) and Wild, Wild
West (1999) remakes, the midcult pomposity of American Beauty (1999) and
Timecode (2000), and that secret history of sleazy, shitty exploitation cinema
that forces all viewers to confront the limits and mortality of the cinema as a
whole.

Movie Melancholia

Are there really viewers who love to hate the cinema? To the extent that such
self-conscious hostility exists in contemporary film culture, it remains an ad-
mittedly esoteric phenomenon, at least in its most bitterly ludic forms. Judging
by the opening weekends and eventual DVD sales of Men in Black 2 (2002), Van
Helsing (2004), and Kangaroo Jack (2003), some people still love the movies.
Most people probably have no real complaints as to the state of film art. Box-
office receipts generally continue to rise, movies are faster and louder than ever,

27 8J effrey Sc once
and DVDs allow us all to become idiosyncratic archivistswhat could be the
problem? No doubt those who continue to find the cinema a source of constant
disappointment are the very same people who have (or once had) the highest
hopes for the medium: cinephilesthose who do have a profound, even per-
verse attachment to the movies. As Web pestturnedHollywood player Harry
Knowles proclaims, Movies should be better. And someone should be held
accountable when theyre not. Speaking like generations of movie lovers be-
fore him, Knowles declares films far too important to be left in the hands of
those without an emotional stake in them.7 In this respect, the current quest
for a cinema of negative guarantees, movies that indulge pleasures of alien-
ation over empathy and identification, can only really be understood as part of
a larger cinephilic tradition that has long focused on the seemingly perpetual
failures of film art. At their core, many cinephiles have long been haunted by
a sense of loss and failure in the cinema, making film history, criticism, and
theory an often melancholy pursuit.
Reviewing aesthete discourses over the course of the century, the cinema
may well be the most disappointing artistic medium in the history of human
endeavorespecially the Hollywood cinema that has so dominated film cul-
ture since the mediums inception. Whatever period of film history one cares to
explore over the past century, one thing is for certain: the cinema has not and
is not living up to its potential. Vachel Lindsays foundational study of 1917, The
Art of the Motion Picture, is as much a complaint as a celebration. Writing in
1933 about the impact of sound, meanwhile, Rudolph Arnheim warned, The
majority of art-lovers . . . do not see that the film is on its way to the victory of
. . . wax museum ideals over creative art.8 Thirty years later Kael bemoaned a
rise of narrative incoherence in film. I dont think that my own preferences or
the preferences of others for coherence or wit and feeling are going to make
much difference, she laments. Movies are going to pieces.9 Meanwhile, were
all familiar with the depressing critical doxa of today: movies are terrible, audi-
ences are stupid, critics are powerlessall signs point to the cinema devolving
into some form of interactive gaming in the next twenty years or so. Bazins
Myth of Total Cinema will finally be realized not by immersing audiences in
dramas of Dickensian complexity or landscapes of surrealist desire, but instead
through endless CGI shots of kickboxing action heroes whirling around and

Movies: A Century of Failure 279

around in the air until even the most hardened PlayStation veteran vomits in
ecstasy.
Almost from the origins of film culture, then, cinephiles have measured
films seemingly unlimited potential against the ceaselessly depressing reality
of its achievement. There would seem to be few arts where the stink of failure
is so ever present, where more time is spent despairing over lost opportuni-
ties, wasted ambition, and abject art. The cinema constantly fails the cinephile,
never living up to the imagined ideals of transcendental bliss it once seemed to
promise (or more tellingly, actually delivered earlier in life). So, like a spouse in
an abusive relationship, the cinephile cannot simply love the cinema, but must
constantly try to work through the diabolical mix of pleasure and disappoint-
ment that attends that love. Perhaps this is why seemingly all cinephiles have
typically had an inordinately tortured relationship to the object of their desire
one of attraction and repulsion, intimacy and estrangement, hope and despair,
nostalgia and melancholy. Why dont people like the right movies anymore?
complains David Denby in the New Yorker, putting a new culturalist twist on
former colleague Kaels patented aesthetic question, Why are the movies so
bad? Like many American film critics of his generation, Denby is nostalgic
for the 1970s, a period when acknowledged auteurs still put art into general
release, repertory theaters still unearthed lost gems of the studio era, critics felt
they still had some impact on shaping the future of cinematic practice, and the
East Coast was still the bastion of taste that kept the philistines of Hollywood in
check. Like most people left stranded by the changing eddies of taste, Denbys
complaint is more about proles than about practice. Standing alone before a
boarded-up rep house, espresso in hand, he might as well be asking where all
the right people have gone.
Much of this melancholia is no doubt a function of the unique social position
of the film critic in the culture at large. As Greg Taylor argues in his essential
history of postwar film criticism, Artists in the Audience, movies have proven
surprisingly useful to different groups seeking to bolster widely disparate social
identities.10 Taylor argues that Manny Farber and Parker Tyler, as perhaps the
two most influential postwar critics in the United States, turned to movies in
the 1950s as a reactionary retreat from the burgeoning success of abstract ex-
pressionism and were determined to resist the commodification of modern-

2 80Jeffrey Sc once
ism and individual expression.11 In this way, what Taylor terms the vanguard
criticism of Farbers cultism and Tylers camp embraced the cinema less as a
legitimate object of artistic interest than as a medium for personal and idiosyn-
cratic critical polemics. The vulgar medium of motion pictures could become
a means to an end, observes Taylor, offering the vanguard critic an authen-
tic vibrancy against which the studied efforts of the fashionable abstractionists
seemed forced and opportunistic.12 Postwar film criticism as a whole, Taylor
seems to suggest, has its foundations in exile, pioneered by aesthetes at odds
with the prevailing trends in the world of legitimate art. As cultural elites in-
terrogating a popular medium, film critics frequently bring inordinate amounts
of cultural capital to bear on extremely impoverished texts, carrying with them
all of the confusion and even contempt of films ambivalent relationship to pre-
vailing hierarchies of taste.
Strongly indebted to the vanguard criticism of Farber and Tyler, the melan-
choly resignation of Sternberg, Southern, Kael, and others in the late 1960s
seems to issue from a profound moment of self-recognition as to the futility
of continuing to critique and encourage cinematic art. This is especially true of
Kaels 1968 essay for Harpers, Trash, Art, and the Movies. For Kael circa 1968,
the search for serious artistry in the cinema had become a ridiculous project.
We generally become interested in movies because we enjoy them, she writes,
and what we enjoy them for has little to do with what we think of as art.13 She
finds in-depth analysis of film technique a laughable pursuit, arguing the avail-
able repertoire of film form is by nature limited and by practice positively in-
distinguishable. Blasting the 1960s vogue for divining serious statements made
by important auteurs, Kael writes, If you could see the artists intention you
would probably wish you couldnt anyway. Nothing is so deathly to enjoyment
as the relentless march of a movie to fulfill its obvious purpose.14 Following
Farber, Kael argues viewers must be willing to sift through torrents of movie
mud for fleeting nuggets of gold, tiny epiphanies that often have little to do
with artistic design or intentionality. Even this, however, may not be enough
to save the cinema. She is sympathetic to the many dispirited film critics who
have simply given up. Many film critics quit, she observes, because they can
no longer bear the many tedious movies for the few good moments and the
tiny shocks of recognition.15 In yet another melancholy admission of failure,

Movies: A Century of Failure 2 81

loss, and defeat, Kael claims that she finds only documentaries to be of interest
anymore. After all the years of stale stupid acted-out stories, with less and less
for me in them, I am desperate to know something, desperate for facts, for in-
formation, for faces of non-actors and for knowledge of how people livefor
revelations, not for the little bits of show-business detail worked up for us by
show-business minds who got them from the same movies were tired of.16
This vanguard line of popular criticism trailing back through Kael, Farber,
and Tyler all the way to Oscar Wilde is one antecedent for our current climate
of cine-cynicism. But this obsession with futility and failure in the cinema is
not limited only to popular film criticism, as it has also significantly informed
academic film theorys attempts to bolster the cinemas status through ongoing
flirtations with continental philosophy. Consider Christian Metzs comments
on cinephilia in his canonical contribution to film theory, The Imaginary Sig-
nifier: To be a theoretician of the cinema, one should ideally no longer love
the cinema and yet still love it: have loved it a lot and only have detached one-
self from it by taking it up again from the other end, taking it as the target
for the very same scopic drive which had made one love it.17 Of the cinephile
himself, Metz advises, be him and not be him, since all in all these are the
two conditions on which one can speak of him.18 Small wonder that Lacan-
ian psychoanalysiswith its narratives of lost plenitude and endlessly deferred
desireshould so dominate film theory over the past thirty years. Here we
see an attempt to theorize the fundamentally deceptive and unsatisfactory ex-
change in the cinema, a gap once again between promise and execution, fan-
tasy and reality. Work in the Lacanian paradigm typically followed Metz and
Raymond Bellour deeper into the mysterious mechanics of film formbut it
may well be this body of theory ultimately speaks more to a cultural desire for
cinema than any hallucinatory psychic structures of desire imagined within
cinematic form. Before they are regressed, interpellated, and sutured, what in-
effable longing brings people into the theater in the first place? Over the years,
why does ones desire for cinema wax and wane? In contemplating the influence
and affect of cinema, are the lived anticipations and memories of film content
ultimately more meaningful than the occult fantasies of primary and secondary
identification? Why, finally, does the cinema remain a source of such constant
disappointment for so many, promising much, but ultimately failing over and
over again to realize its most transcendental possibilities? In simply accepting

2 82Jeffrey Sc once
the micropolitics of the gaze as the privileged site for understanding the circuits
of cinematic desire, Lacanian film theory often overlooked the cinema in its
totality as a terrain of libidinal investment, an institution and experience that,
for many years at least, seemed always on the verge of realizing some unspoken
and yet continually thwarted potential.
In their darkest moments, all cinephiles brood over the final and most pro-
found failure facing their beloved art formits death. The cinema has died
many times nowthe advent of sound, the Paramount Decision, the coming
of television, the opening frames of George Lucass Star Wars (1977), the pro-
liferation of digital imaging and effects, the triumph of spectacle over narra-
tive, producers over directors, marketing over execution. We should not be sur-
prised, then, that so much writing on film and film culture has been elegiac
if not downright funereal. A recent anthology, for example, announces The
End of Cinema as We Know It, concluding with Twenty-five Reasons Why
Its All Over.19 We are faced with the inescapable fact, writes Wheeler Win-
ston Dixon, that film has become an altogether different medium from that
imagined and practiced by its pioneers and classicists.20 Like Denby, Dixons
end of the line is to be found in the misguided tastes of youth (Audiences
keep getting younger and more impatient, he laments, as if the Tarzan series
of the 1930s and 1940s were kept alive by the philosophy faculty at Princeton).21
This familiar diagnosis of the cinemas ills betrays the cinephiles anxiety over
his or her own mortality, a paranoid and self-pitying fantasy that the object of
ones affection is constantly threatening to move on and start over, sleeping
with younger and more brutish audiences, leaving the spurned lover alone and
depressed in bittersweet memories of what once was. Like so much writing on
the perpetual crisis of failure, collapse, and death in the cinema, Dixons piece
ultimately assumes the tragic voice of the exiled cinephile (No, well never see
the like of Casablanca again, he writes), even as he just as inevitably maintains,
despite all this, the cinema will live forever.22 This last comment is key. All
cinephiles, despite their constant depression over a cinema that is lost or never
was, ultimately cannot let go, and so continue to animate the body of cinema
with regressive dreams of resuscitation and reunionan act of disavowal much
like the serial killer who keeps corpses in the basement for ritualistic abuse and
sad comfort.23
One might say that all arts have their critics, pessimists, and outright mis-

Movies: A Century of Failure 2 83

anthropesaesthetes nostalgic for representational painting, high modernist
fiction, or nineteenth-century tonality. Yet the cinema seems especially cursed
in the gap that separates potential from achievement, history from future, and
idealization from reality. After all, we rarely critique literature for the novels
that should have been written, or the art world for the paintings that should
have been painted. We expect television to be crap, so it is never in a position to
disappoint us. But movies continue never to live up to their promise, directors
never fulfill their potential, producers never seem to understand the artistic
possibilities of the medium, lowbrow audiences misdirect a profound art into
a puerile waste of time, and the cinema as an institution continues to wander in
the desert. Thus, in so many tragic scenarios, film history becomes the story of
two cinematic planesa Platonic realm of transcendental synesthesia and the
depressing reality of the continuing insults to our cinematic intelligence.
Film, our most vivacious art, is young enough to remember its first dreams,
its limitless promise, wrote Annette Michelson in 1966, and it is haunted,
scarred, by a central, ineradicable trauma of dissociation.24 This dissociation, of
course, is between cinema in a state of pure abstract possibility and its eventual
grounding in a corporate economy based on profit. As many have lamented, and
will no doubt continue to lament, the cinema is an art form of potentially radi-
cal possibility held hostage to the mundane demands of commercial viability. It
is the commercial popularity of cinema, after all, that provides both the forms
most dynamic engine and most maddening constraints. Born of modernitys
new technologies, modes of production, and mass cultural logic, the cinema
has always confronted the paradox of linking expanded artistic potential with
increasing expenditures of capital. It has thus long been a medium of compro-
mise, reenacting again and again that age-old conflict between directors and
studio bosses, screenwriters and producers, geniuses and philistines, art and
capital. Unlike most previous forms of aesthetic appreciation, cinephilia has
always had to incorporate amateur sociology and cultural history in addition to
the usually unsullied realm of poetics. A full appreciation of a benchmark film
like Edgar G. Ulmers Detour (1945), after all, requires familiarity with both the
historical context of film noir and the production practices of Poverty Row. The
film only achieves its true greatness when integrated into a larger metanarrative
of popular history, noir literacy, and intrepid directorial perseverance. Without

2 84Jeffrey Sc once
these larger historical frames and fantasies to anchor it, Detour remains just a
cheap and corny B film.
In its halcyon days, auteurism presented a valiant attempt to organize film
art around a more manageable and familiar model of individual creativity, but
even here, the emphasis was as much on failure as success. Consider, for a mo-
ment, all of the elaborate autuerist mythologies that cinephiles have generated
over the years, stories of failure, conflict, and compromise that endlessly re-
hearse Michelsons trauma of dissociation, pitting art and capital against one
another in a death struggle for the cinemas very soul. Thus, there is the foun-
dational Welles mythos of the tortured genius misunderstood and mistreated
by Hollywooda flash of youthful brilliance slowly extinguished by corporate
philistines. For many years, classic cinephilia thrived on such recurring tales
of injustice and stupidity, as if despotic studio bosses were the colonial oppres-
sors and not the foundational architects of narrative cinema. Welles also fig-
ures prominently in what might be called the mangled masterpiece mythos, the
story of perfect cinematic achievements taken away and destroyed by studio
hacks.25 Mangled masterpieces, it should be noted, are not always purely a func-
tion of studio suits recutting a film. Such disasters can also hinge on a single
weak link ruining an otherwise brilliant achievement. This curse seems to
plague Martin Scorsese in particular, with both The Age of Innocence (1993)
and Gangs of New York (2002) impeded by the inclusion of bankable (but less
talented) actors in key roles. Perhaps most tragic of all, however, is the unreal-
ized masterwork mythos: a production long dreamed of and yet never realized
by an auteur (Luis Buuels The Monk, Orson Welless Don Quixote, and David
Lynchs Ronnie Rocket come to mind).
Beyond these sagas of unrealized and/or unrecognized genius, there are also
a host of stories centering on film as a site of artistic resistance and subterfuge.
In the Sirk mythos, an artistic genius must labor in lowly genres with insulting
scripts but exploits the opportunity to produce thematic or formal critiques of
his material, thus casting the director as a subversive trickster creating politi-
cal art from popular dross. Closely related is the genre displacement mythos,
a scenario wherein censorship or studio concerns force a filmmaker to dis-
guise subversive content in the language of a seemingly unrelated genre (typi-
cally westerns, horror, or science fiction).26 Then there is the genius of poverty

Movies: A Century of Failure 2 85

Figure 2 By very publicly going over budget, encountering numerous difficulties
while filming, and running headlong into a growing Kevin Costner backlash,
Waterworld (1995) helped introduce the idea of the troubled production into the
popular vocabulary.

mythos, wherein the affronts of low budgets and absurd preselected titles actu-
ally present the artist with creative challenges leading to greater experimenta-
tion. Ulmer, mentioned above, frequently finds refuge in this mythos, as does
Val Lewtons horror cycle at RKO in the 1940s. Cinephiles have also long en-
joyed the hidden drama mythos, seeing a particular film as symptomatic of
some submerged conflict or trauma in the production. Marnie (1964) and The
Misfits (1961) are classic examples at the dawn of New Hollywood. Documen-
taries like Hearts of Darkness (1991), Burden of Dreams (1982), and Lost in La
Mancha (2002), meanwhile, present auteur-centered hagiographies that bring
this mythos to the screen.27 As promotional and behind-the-scenes discourse
multiplied in the 1980s and beyond, films like Heavens Gate (1980) and Water-
world (1995) created a subgenre of the hidden drama mythos in the guise of
the troubled productiona term that moves beyond a purely auteurist fasci-
nation with the potential for conflict and failure to incorporate a mass inside
dopesterism, one increasingly hip to the rumors of creative and commercial
conflicts that can beset a blockbuster production.28 Though this type of cover-
age goes back as far as Cleopatra (1963), more recent examples often dovetail

2 86Jeffrey Sc once
with larger backlashes against overexposed Hollywood players (e.g., James
Cameron, Kevin Costner, and Ben Affleck).
For those wholly invested in the industrys offscreen tragedies of failure,
finally, there is the remorse offered by wholly speculative scenarios. What if
Kubrick had directed A.I. instead of Spielberg? What if Buster Keatons rela-
tives hadnt sold him out at the end of the 1920s? What if the studio system
had survived? What if Woody Allen had never seen a Bergman film? What if
Peter Jackson had never read Tolkien? What if Michael Bays parents had never
met? Uniting all of these mythologies in cinephilic lore, from the lone tortured
genius to the grand road not taken, is the melancholy and seemingly unwaver-
ing idea that film can never be simply what it is but must instead be gauged
against some imaginary ideal of a film or cinema that never was or, indeed,
could never be. What is on the screen is imperfect, but somewhere else there
exists another film, another career, another cinema that is potentially perfect,
limitless in its possibility rather than consistently up against the wall of com-
mercial and historical reality. It is a world where Welles doesnt lose final cut
on The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) or has to settle for Charlton Heston in
Touch of Evil (1958); a world where Grace Kelly doesnt become the queen of
Monaco, leaving us with the simulacrum of Tippi Hedren; a world where Zoe-
trope studios succeeds and Coppola is not reduced to directing crap like Jack
(1996);29 a world where dadaists, surrealists, minimalists, and other assorted
modernists had defeated the cinemas plodding turn toward bourgeois realism;
a world where the American renaissance doesnt give way to the Endless Sum-
mer of Porkys American Pie, Part 7.

Exploiter and Exploited

Even before our own era of mass-cult cynicism about the cinema, one group
of cinephiles openly embraced the cinemas limitations, failures, and funda-
mentally disassociative struggle between art and capital. Todays snark and
cine-cynicism, an audience entertaining the appeal of negative guarantees, has
its foundations in the cults of exploitation, sleaze, and bad cinema that have
thrived for over twenty-five years now. As I argued in an earlier article, the ap-
preciation of bad cinema followed an interesting trajectory during the 1980s
and 1990s, beginning as a simple so bad its good type of derision, but eventu-

Movies: A Century of Failure 2 87

ally mimicking the esoteric discourses of outsider art to forge a pseudo-populist
avant-garde.30 Ed Woods transformation from laughably untalented pervert to
the idiosyncratic counter-visionary portrayed by Johnny Depp in Tim Burtons
bio-fantasy is the most famous example of this impulse, but Doris Wishman,
Jess Franco, Mario Bava, and many other fringe filmmakers have enjoyed simi-
lar critical reassessment. In the process, many exploitation filmmakers have
inspired cults of personality that focus less on their talent or vision, but on
the filmmakers heroic challenge to the fundamental obstacles presented by the
cinema itself.
It is a safe bet, for example, that Roger Corman will always be a more be-
loved and even a more respected figure in film culture than James Cameron.
Anyone could sink the Titanic convincingly with $140 million, obsessing for
months over every digital extra that spills into the Atlantic, but just try cre-
ating a creature worthy of the title It Conquered the World (1956) out of $300 in
chicken wire and papier-mch.31 As anyone who has worked on a film set can
attest, Corman stands as patron saint of a bygone era when a filmmakerde-
spite irritable cameras, questionable film stock, bad sound takes, lousy actors,
flubbed lines, or botched continuitycould still take on twenty-five set-ups a
day and finish a film in a week. Much of the romance of exploitation cinema
stems from this valorization of film production itself as an elemental struggle
against the conspiratorial forces of the universe. For many trash cinephiles, this
is the essence of the art form, a medium of exploitation that has always been
less about realizing some idealized artistic vision than the act of creation itself,
transforming the cinema as a whole into an existential metaphor of affirmation
in the face of chaotic absurdity.32 Though aficionados of low-budget science fic-
tion and horror may have first watched these films as objects of ridicule, many
also went on to identify with the role of the exploiter in exploitation cinema.
Director/producers like Corman, David F. Friedman, William Castle, H. G.
Lewis, and others have become folk heroes in this community by acknowledg-
ing, indeed embracing, the fundamental hucksterism of all cinema, each in his
own way a cynical pragmatist unencumbered by the delusions of art and gravi-
tas that afflict more deluded filmmakers. Echoing P. T. Barnums archetypically
American credo Theres a sucker born every minute, these filmmakers revel
in a mutual hostility for an audience of pigeons that ranges from the playful to

2 88Jeffrey Sc once
 Figure 3 Promotional still from Roger
Cormans It Conquered the World (1956):
It remains an emblem of the courage
and creativity involved in low-budget
filmmaking.

the downright nasty. Friedman, for example, proudly calls himself Americas
most notorious carpetbagger of Cinemadom, while Cormans autobiography
appears under the rather confrontational title, How I Made Over 100 Movies
and Never Lost a Dime. If there is an art here, it is the art of surviving week to
week in the fleecing of hix in the stix with pix.
The nostalgic charm of William Castle, in particular, speaks to a men-
tality that divides everyone into either the exploiter or the exploited. Castle, of
course, is revered in film lore for hyping his low-budget horror films with out-
landish promotional campaigns and unusual gimmicks, all lovingly recounted
in his own aggressively titled memoir, Step Right Up and Ill Scare the Pants off
America. The last great practitioner of the lost art of ballyhoo, Castles stunts
included stationing nurses in the lobby for overwhelmed spectators, fright in-
surance for those who might die of shock during a screening, and the miracle
of E-Mergo, which consisted of a plastic skeleton flying over the audience on
a wire.33 In his most infamous stunt, Castle wired random seats with electrical
joy buzzers for screenings of The Tingler. To the extent that American popular
culture remains infatuated with this era, it is based on a nostalgic fantasy of
audiences charmingly naive enough to be taken in by such ridiculous hijinx, a
time when a local screening of Strait Jacket (1964) could still cut through the
media landscape to become a community event, and when one could still zap

Movies: A Century of Failure 2 89

Figure 4 William Castles The Tingler (1959): the charm of naive
exploitation and the melancholy of those who can no longer be exploited.

audience members in the ass with bolts of electricity without getting sued.34
But, for those cinephiles obsessed with this era and its charmingly dated low-
budget fodder, the pleasures of such popular memory are more complex. Bal-
ancing this nostalgia, a cultural memory perhaps never even experienced by
younger cinephiles, is a metonymic rehearsal of a lifetimes relationship to the
cinema, a journey that carries personal memory from the days of giddy mati-
nee expectation to that of growing multiplex disillusionment. Who wouldnt
like to re-inhabit, at least for a fleeting moment, the childlike imagination
genuinely excited at the sight of a fluorescent skeleton swooping down over the
auditorium, to once again surrender to the overwhelming powers of anticipa-
tion, desire, and spectacle the cinema once possessed both in our childhoods
and in the culture at large, to believe once again, if only for a moment, that It
might actually conquer the world?35 When that absolute investment in cine-
matic magic is no longer possible, there remains only the tragicomic saga of
the cinema itself. Film history becomes a mirror to our own mortality, bring-
ing with it the bittersweet recognition that one can never again sit among the
screaming yokels below. By reveling in this disjunction between expectations
and disappointment, the trashophile is constantly reliving a sadomasochistic

290Jeffrey Sc once
fantasy organized around binaries of child and adult, desire and disillusion-
ment, navet and cynicism. Like a true sadomasochist, the trashophile enjoys
both points of identificationtransported one moment to a magical world of
skeletons, dinosaurs, vampires, and spaceships, and in the next, laughing at the
cheap chicanery that long ago, both culturally and personally, held the power to
captivate.
As the most naked battlefield in the cinemas traumatic dissociation between
art and capital, the cinemas of trash, sleaze, and exploitation threaten to im-
plode the power of all film by foregrounding yet another fundamental dissocia-
tion in the cinema, one even more elemental to debates about the mediums
foundations and possibilities. As an art form created from immutable photo-
graphic windows on the ever-accelerating culture of the twentieth century, the
cinema has always been a paradox: living, immediate, real, and immersive, and
yet historical, fading, and obsolescent. Confronting this paradox, trash cine-
philes have embraced the valiant yet ultimately doomed attempt of the cinema
to transcend not only the eternal struggle between art and capital, but also the
mediums foundational anchor in indexical reality.36
Once motion pictures lose their ability to transport viewers, to take them
to another diegetic time and place, they simply become photography. Diegesis
must always eventually yield to documentation as representational codes lose
their power, leaving nothing but the naked strategies of shaping reality that
only decades, years, or even weeks earlier still held the power to suspend dis-
belief. By pulling at the stitching that usually binds representation and reality,
trash cinephiles live the famous credo of radical documentarians that every
film, even the glossiest MGM musical, is ultimately a documentary. They em-
brace an ethos in stark contrast to the recently publicized efforts of George
Lucas and Steven Spielberg to update their back catalogue with new more con-
vincing digital effects, as if any amount of digital tweaking could prevent Star
Wars or E.T. (1982) from further deteriorating into archival windows on the
late 1970s.37 By trading in obsolescent trash, exploitation fans stage a continual
return of the repressed in film culture generally, lurking at the margins of the
arts greatest achievements with a reaper-like reminder of the entire forms in-
evitable collapse. Consider, for example, the uncontested classics of the cinema,
titles regularly vying for the top ten in the esteemed Sight and Sound critics

Movies: A Century of Failure 291

poll: Sunrise (1927), Citizen Kane (1941), Vertigo (1958), Tokyo Story (1953). The
editors of the magazine say the poll was devised to show which films stand the
test of time in the face of shifting critical opinion. And yet, in its panic to arrest
the cinemas decay, the poll just as persuasively demonstrates how no film can
stand the test of time. Movies move us, thrill us, scare us, arouse us, scandalize
usbut eventually there is only the photographic record of obsolete strategies
for moving, thrilling, scaring, arousing, or scandalizing.38 As they and we get
older, it becomes increasingly difficult to sort out artistic power from personal
memories of their former power.
As the films of Castle, Wood, Corman, and other B-film luminaries illustrate
so vividly, what we typically designate as exploitationcheap horror, lowly sci-
fi, sleazy skin-flicks and other disreputable fareonly compresses this unsat-
isfactory exchange, accelerating a bait and switch that tricks audiences with
promises of exhilarating content but gives them, in the end, only badly ren-
dered spectacle, low-budget genre clichs, or even an asinine plastic skeleton on
a wire. While some films require time to dull their affective power, exploitation
by its very name implies a gap between promise and practice, ambition, and
execution. Titles like Night of the Bloody Apes (1969), The Amazing Transplant
(1970), and Nude for Satan (1974) seem to promise so much, and yet can never
live up to the images they suggest to the imagination. What film, after all, could
possibly live up to the mental theater evoked by the words Nude for Satan?
Similarly, the poster art for exploitation titles promise a vision that the films
themselves can never hope to match. Photographic monsters can never match
the ink-and-paint creature on the poster.39 Hints of sexual abandon lasciviously
rendered in advertising translate in the theater into brief and badly exposed
moments of nudity. Promises of furiously paced nonstop action that defies time
and space are dashed by a few crudely executed and unconvincing fight or chase
sequences. No doubt this is why sensationalistic body genreshorror and
sexploitation especiallyremain so central to trash film culture.40 Nowhere is
the gap dividing internal fantasy from public representation more profound.
By plumbing the most explosive and taboo recesses of the imagination armed
only with impoverished budgets and minimal talent, exploitation trades on
that razors edge dividing desire from disgust and temptation from trash. In the
end, the only lasting pleasure is reveling in the chasm dividing expectation and

292J effrey Sc once

 Figure 5 Satans Cheerleaders
(1977) promises so much, yet
delivers something less.

execution, as well as pondering our own embarrassingly consistent gullibility.

Of course Dr. Butcher, M.D. (1980) will live up to its title. Satans Cheerleaders
(1977) is bound to satisfy even my most appalling fantasies about the intersec-
tion of Satanism and cheerleading. Jason or the Leprechaun in outer space
how could that not be unbelievably great?

The New Leavisites

One might argue that todays cinema of negative guarantees simply con-
tinues this impulse, expanding this sensibility beyond the traditional hunting
grounds of trash, sleaze, and exploitation to encompass almost the entirety of
the cinema. When the cinema gives you unending lemons, make even more
lemonade. And yet todays snarkish cine-cynicsthose who would stand in
line opening night to witness Alien fight Predator or who are genuinely excited
at the prospects of The Island (2005) arriving on DVDpresent an important
shift in the tone and object of such perverse cinephilia. While the badfilm

Movies: A Century of Failure 293

and trashophilia cults of previous decades maintained at least one foot in the
affectionate tradition of camp, the new quest for the bad replaces camps
tender empathy with a more adversarial engagement of film failure. Ever more
sophisticated in the aesthetic and economic foundations of the cinema, todays
vanguard cinephilelike Sternberg thirty-five years earlieradopts an increas-
ingly hostile and confrontational approach to moviegoing. Confronted with
increasingly diminished expectations for the cinema, this current film culture
mirrors Hollywoods own lack of respect for the movies, attempting to outflank
the cynicism of the industrys product with an even more caustically cynical
sarcasm and irony. One of the most interesting and influential sites in this re-
gard is the Onion, Americas premiere repository of collegiate irony and a prime
venue in the culture of cine-cynicism. The Onion engages movies and pop cul-
ture on two fronts, a fake news section of satirical comedy and semistraight
entertainment section called the A/V Club. A similar sensibility animates both
sections, however, especially in relation to mainstream film and television. For
example, a front-page story greeted the release of Catwoman with a mock head-
line reading, Movie Praised for Not Being as Bad as It Could Have Been. The
opening copy continues:

Moviegoers coast to coast hailed Catwoman, the new action film starring
Halle Barry, as not as much of an unforgivably awful piece of formulaic
commercial pabulum as it could have been. You know, I have to hand it to
Warner Brothers, Miami resident Tom Peebles said Monday. Catwoman
was terrible, but it actually had one or two decent parts. I really have to
say, it could have been a lot worse! . . . Catwoman, loosely based on the
DC comics character, has similarly shattered other viewers bottom-of-the-
barrel expectations, offering a small number of redeeming features instead
of the expected none.41

The article follows the usual comic formula of the Oniontranslate the
minutiae of everyday life into the stilted conventions of journalistic discourse,
thus producing an observational humor based on an ironic disjunction be-
tween the mundane and the officious. The kernel of truth to be observed here,
of course, is the defensive posture so many of us now carry into the multiplex.
What had been an esoteric pleasure of slumming for Sternberg in his imaginary

294Jeffrey S c once
screening of The Rape of Frankenstein is now increasingly the default sensibility
for a much larger audience greeting all cinema. Moreover, the article also cap-
tures that momentous shift in adult audiences over the past few decades from
more or less neutral spectators in search of entertainment to self-aware targets
of marketing hype, an audience thatalso like Sternbergcomes to the the-
ater, not so much to lose themselves in a thrilling motion picture, but instead
to witness the escalating loudness and stupidity of Hollywoods intertwined
strategies for marketing and spectacle.
As an instant bad movie, one requiring absolutely no historical distance to
betray the clumsy calculations of its makers, Catwoman is a perfect target for
such satiric abuse. Nominally related to the hit-and-miss history of the Batman
franchise, Catwoman epitomizes a genre that didnt exist twenty-five years ago,
one that at last embraces the cinemas true foundations in an aesthetic and eco-
nomic order. Not so much a science-fiction, fantasy, or crime film, Catwoman
instead follows the semantic and syntactic protocols of the summer action
blockbuster. Generic markers, in this case, have as much to do with extratex-
tual hype, cross-marketing opportunities, and strategic release schedulesele-
ments that are no longer simply the concern of industry accountants, but are in
and of themselves in the foreground of popular cine-culture. Kael observed in
1968 that we often know much more about both the actors and the characters
theyre impersonating and about how and why the movie has been made than
is consistent with theatrical illusion.42 If anything, this battle between insider
knowledge and theatrical illusion has become even more lopsided, especially
as this background knowledge goes beyond long-familiar celebrity gossip to
indulge a larger fascination with the production protocols and political econ-
omy of the cultural industries in general. Why, for example, are audiences now
interested in the weekly horse race of box-office receipts, so much so that these
updates have become a staple everywhere in the ExtraTotal AccessInside
Hollywood culture? How many more thousands of civilians now know such pre-
viously insider terms as saturation release, points, word-of-mouth campaign,
and final cut? Why is there such an inchoate sense of populist glee when mar-
keting monsters like Godzilla, Mariah Careys Glitter (2001), and the infamous
Gigli (2003) implode into abject failure? Finally, has there ever been a time in
film history when more people have more opinions about movies they havent

Movies: A Century of Failure 295

Figure 6 Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez in the infamous Gigli (2003),
its failure a rich source of populist glee.

actually even seen, evaluating them less on their actual content than on their
public profile within a larger cultural field of demographic address and promo-
puffery? Indeed, the cinema of negative guarantees might more accurately
be termed a culture of negative guaranteesa synergistic sarcasm standing in
opposition to the synergistic opportunities increasingly exploited by the ever-
growing media conglomerates. When yet another Madonna film tanks, it is a
cause for celebration on a number of fronts, a small victory in the war against
a newly Kabbalahed and Kundalinified persona that will not die, as well as the
evil necromancers at Time-Warner who continue to allow Esther-Madonna to
sing, act, design, and write childrens books.
These tensions between film as art and film as commerce also inform the
Onions entertainment section. In its straight interview features, for example,
the A/V Club consistently features artists most at odds with the mainstream
Hollywood ethos: independent filmmakers, cult actors, respected (but little-
known) screenwriters. Interspersed with this valorization of marginalized
cinematic possibilities are weekly columns that continue an assault of high sar-
casm on low objects from a position of cinematic exile. Movies That Time
Forgot, for example, continues the previous decades interest in trashophilia,

296Jeffrey Sc once
Figure 7 Featuring the former star of The Exorcist, Linda Blair, and centering
on the short-lived late-1970s fad of roller disco, Roller Boogie (1979) awaited the
bemused derision of future generations.

allowing various staff writers to opine about the detritus of 1970s and 1980s
cinema titles like Roller Boogie (1979) or Maniac Cop (1988).43 Like most current
popular writing on trash and sleaze, the articles are more anthropological than
aesthetictypically engaging the films as strange creatures from a lost and in-
comprehensible era. Instead of searching for a Farberesque moment of termite
activity in these lowly genre titles, the tone is more bemused bewilderment at
the social, industrial, and historical confluence that could give rise to a mutant
elephant like Roller Boogie.
More recently, the Onion has responded to the impact of emerging cinematic
technologies with a new weekly feature, DVD Commentaries of the Damned.
Here a columnist reviews the commentary track for a recently released and
embarrassingly horrible Hollywood feature, standing as mock judge, jury, and
executioner for the films purported crimes against the cinema. The review of
the David Spade childhood regression vehicle, Dickie Roberts: Former Child
Star (2003), lists its crimes:

Assuming, even after Lost and Found and Joe Dirt, that inveterate support-
ing player David Spade somehow qualifies as leading-man material.

Movies: A Century of Failure 297

 Cannibalizing the premise of Billy Madison.
Creepily giving Spade a love interest . . . who doubles as his mother sur-
rogate.
Following in the footsteps of Joe Dirt by taking cheap shots at a pathetic
lead character who embodies a much-abused cultural stereotype, then try-
ing to elicit sympathy for that characters plight.44

Importantly, the crimes here almost always involve aesthetic, economic, and
ethical misjudgments, illustrating the impulse in this strain of cine-culture to
see a motion picture not so much as a rarefied piece of art, but as an over-
determined symptom of a more diffuse cultural logic. In the docket as The
Defendants for Dickie Roberts are David Spade himself and cowriter Fred
Wolf, who out of either vanity or masochism have actually agreed to provide an
audio commentary on the DVD. Under the recurring categories Tone of Com-
mentary, What Went Wrong, Comments on the Cast, Inevitable Dash of
Pretension, and Commentary in a Nutshell, the Onion skewers that weird
yet seemingly ubiquitous mixture of mediocrity and narcissism attending the
public profile of so much Hollywood product. As the column mocks Spade
and Wolf s attempts to defend the artistic miscalculations of the film, it also
implicitly raises a series of potentially disturbing questions about the current
state of cultural production. As Dickie Roberts was hardly a box-office smash
or a critical landmark, why does it merit the bonus feature of audio com-
mentary (as if we were listening to Bergman discuss the set-ups in Persona)?
Beyond writers on deadline in the Onions staff room, who would sit through
a two-hour audio commentary about Dickie Roberts: Childhood Star? For that
matter, who would want to own (or even rent) Dickie Roberts on DVD? Back at
the studio, whose taste and sense of the marketplace could be so misinformed
as to have allowed this film to be made in the first place? Is every Saturday Night
Live alumnus, no matter how marginal, uninspired, or unbankable, entitled to
a lifetime in feature film production? Is anyone really a David Spade fan? For
those who do rent a David Spade film, do they do so to enjoy Spade as a comic
performer or to sample the cultural symptom of a David Spade film?45
No doubt at the expense of their own comfort and sanity, Onion columnists
actually rewatch these terrible movies (in the commentary mode, no less!) to
harvest little gems of delusion, narcissism, and insincerity for the pleasure of the

298Jeffrey Sc once
snarkish audience fascinated by such questions. Obviously, this is a much dif-
ferent approach to close textual analysis than that practiced in the cine-culture
of previous decades. It speaks to an interest in the cinema less as a closed tex-
tual system than as an open battlefield in an endless struggle between smart
and stupid culture. In opposition to previous forms of mass-elite criticism,
however, most of the ire here is directed not at the poor bedraggled audience
that must endure such crap, but at the cultural producers complicit in allowing
such crap to thrive. Beyond the fatuous artistic self-importance of the creators,
other favorite targets of the column include the obligatory and inevitably con-
descending praise heaped on the crew for its outstanding commitment to the
project, and the endless fawning appreciations of every performance, no mat-
ter how inept, horrifying, or downright embarrassing. DVD Commentaries of
the Damned taps into that strange (and perhaps necessary) sense of denial that
permeates the industry, a delusion that once again springs from the cinemas
fundamental trauma of dissociation between art and capital. When, as in
another installment of the column, the director of the American Idol quickie
knock-off From Justin to Kelly (2003), actually claims in all seriousness that
his film, while no Citizen Kane, is the best summer beach movie since Where
the Boys Are, he captures tragically and farcically a world where the ego tries
desperately to maintain a Cahiers-era self-image of a cine-artist, even as ones
real existence as a wholly replaceable cog in the Fox empire lurks behind every
corner and paycheck.
Humorist Joe Queenan explored similar territory in his columns for Movie-
line, GQ, and Esquire in the early 1990s, much of which appears in the collec-
tion Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler. Like the Onions, Queenans approach
to film and other arms of the culture industry combines cynical exasperation
with a faux-populist call to liberate humanity from the tyranny of studio stu-
pidity. More specifically, Queenans critical voice combines Kaels urbane resig-
nation as to the state of cinema with the confrontational pranksterism of the
legendarily snide Spy magazine.46 In Matinee Idle, for example, Queenan in-
vestigates what lost souls would actually be attending an 11:30 a.m. screening
of the Joe Pesci/Danny Glover bomb Gone Fishin (1997). He begins the piece
with a classic summation of the negative guarantee aestheticLet me con-
fess that I am one of those people who has never lost his childlike belief that

Movies: A Century of Failure 299

the next motion picture he sees could be the worst film ever made. Thats why
I go to all of them.47 After he makes a senior citizens day by refunding his
$9 ticket, Queenan anoints himself the bad movie angel and begins handing
out refunds at theaters across Manhattan. Wherever theres a movie starring
Dan Ackroyd, look around and Ill be there. Wherever theres a movie starring
Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, David Spade or Pauly Shore, look around and Ill
be there.48 In Remains of the Dazed, meanwhile, Queenan returns to the
familiar whipping boy of midcult pretension, accepting an editors challenge to
view every single film made by Merchant-Ivory. What does he learn from his
experience? Basically to go a whole lot easier on people like Sylvester Stallone.
Movies like Judge Dredd may be fascistic and sadistic and evil and stupid, but at
least nobody ever says, You have your vicars benediction? or Youre a ripping
girl in them.49 Finally, in A Complete Lack of Direction, Queenan satirizes
the self-importance of B- and C-level directors who insist their names appear
as part of the title and marketing of their films, as in Dave: An Ivan Reitman
Film (1993). For this piece, Queenan appeals to old-fashioned American horse
sense. Americans are intelligent, sophisticated people, he writes, who intu-
itively understand that the motion picture industry is a glorified form of manu-
facturing, not unlike the canning industry, where a bunch of interchangeable
packagers with interchangeable skills compete to see who can produce the most
serviceable, durable merchandise, and who can do it in the most timely and
cost-effective fashion. The American people do not know or care who Ridley
Scott or Adrian Lyne are, and they havent the faintest idea which one of them
directed Indecent Proposal.50 Queenan might be thought of as a liberal version
of Michael Medved or Ben Stein, equally convinced that the cinema is out of
touch with any reality beyond Sunset Boulevard, and yet attacking the cul-
ture industries for their uninspired artistic ambitions rather than any perceived
moral irresponsibility.
Bringing the snarkish sensibility of the negative guarantee to the blogo-
sphere (where it thrives in its most unadulterated forms), Defamer.com an-
nounces in its masthead, L.A. is the worlds cultural capital. This is the gossip
rag it deserves. A twenty-first-century version of the old tabloid rags of classic
Hollywood, Defamer balances embarrassing tidbits about celebrities and in-
dustry executives, most often gathered by a string of disaffected gophers, PAs,

300J effrey Sc once

interns, and hangers-on, with more sweeping condemnations as to the state of
the motion picture business. Reporting on the Labor Day box office for 2004,
for example, the editors note, Unlikely second place finisher Without A Paddle
is redefining the term late summer blockbuster. This new definition includes
screaming thirteen year olds needing something to do, not actually making
much money, and Matthew Lillard hilariously playing off a strong homoerotic
subtext. Watch for the lessons learned from WAP in next years crop of late
August releases.51 As with Queenan and the Onion, the critique is of art and
industry interpenetrated, approaching Without a Paddle not as a good or bad
comedy, but as strategically dumped bomb strategically spun by studio flacks
into the illusion of a moderate success. As is befitting a blog manned by aspir-
ing above and below the line talent living in Hollywood, Defamer is particularly
insider in its approach, its collective voice capturing the alienated self-loathing
of writers, directors, and actors who aspire to make it in the industry and yet
recognize that making it will require the complete and utter surrender of their
artistic integrity: Without a Paddle sucks. But I would kill for the opportunity
to be involved in its sequel.
The caustic irony and derision of the Onion, Queenan, Defamer, and many
other burgeoning voices in contemporary cine-cynicism continue an ongoing
fascination with the contradictions and failures attending the cinemas schizoid
identity as art and commodity, even as they offer significantly new iterations
of this theme. Moving beyond the often narrow concerns of formal analysis
and aesthetic value, they instead present a more politicized engagement of the
cinema as a cultural institution. Film criticism, of course, has always been po-
litical in some sense, be it implicitly or explicitly. As veterans of the Seventh Art
debates, for example, the earliest film critics sought to encourage the cinema
to realize its potential, to eschew the theatrical and novelistic and exploit the
promise of its own media specificity. Later critics sought to define and defend
the battle lines between art and capital, reveling in the autobiographies of those
intrepid artists laboring within or against the hegemony of the Hollywood
studios. Camp and cultism, as we see in Taylors work, empowered the critic
to sift through film history and create his or her own idiosyncratic standards
for true or great cinema, criteria that rarely had anything to do with artistic
intention or even audience enjoyment. Todays increasingly prominent strand

Movies: A Century of Failure 301

of caustic, cynical, and otherwise negative film culture, however, like so much
other contemporary pop cult criticism, revels in both high irony and a ludic
nihilismseeing the cinema not so much as an art form that one might val-
iantly defend from clueless moneymen or that might be mined creatively for
individual epiphanies, but rather, as an occupied cultural field that must be
continually attacked, resisted, and mocked in guerrilla skirmishes of wit, snark,
and sarcasm.
Many have observed that irony, sarcasm, and satire are often employed as
tools of the dispossessed, providing a strategy for confronting power indirectly.
In this respect, the insider cynicism of so much contemporary writing on film
and popular culture might best be approached as a form of elitist populism
elitist in that it speaks from a position of privilege on the terrain of cultural
capital, inheriting the vanguard critics aesthetic pedigree and an accompanying
reflexive disdain for middlebrow pap,52 populist in that it attempts (or feigns)
to speak for a vast audience that might be liberated from the venal stupidity of
those who hold the culture industries hostage. One might describe this mode of
ironic derision as a new form of Leavisism, a term that critics, fairly or unfairly,
have come to attach to any mass elite agenda of cultural custodianship. Unlike
the criticism practiced by the Scrutiny group at the beginning of last century,
however, cine-cynics do not seek to snuff out an emerging popular art so as to
defend the standards of an existing elite; rather, they write from within a posi-
tion of popular discrimination as cinephiles who feel dispossessed of their own
beloved popular medium.53 It is a Leavisism, in other words, born of a centurys
worth of experience, both good and bad, with the possibilities and limitations
of the culture industries. Moreover, it is a Leavisism that incorporates both
popular experience with mass art and an acceleration of information about the
practices of the culture industries. As the Onion, Queenan, and Defamer make
clear, when the cinema is increasingly less about the possibilities of art and af-
fect and becomes more the decipherment of predictable architectures, witless
formulas, and achingly obvious attempts at exploitation in all of its guises, the
actual viewing of films is no longer all that important or even necessary. These
writers epitomize an ironic cine-subculture that now thrives in the absence of
any actual cinema. To the delight of Oscar Wilde, Roland Barthes, and an en-
tire intellectual tradition devoted to creating criticism that is more interesting,

302Jeffrey Sc once
lively, and engaging than its nominal object, this latest strand of cine-culture
demonstrates that having a position on the cinema is often more rewarding
than actually viewing cinema.

Our Dismal Yet Delirious Future

Writing on the threshold of Hollywoods attempt to exploit the camp/trash aes-

thetic in titles like Barbarella (1968), Modesty Blaise (1966), In Like Flint (1967),
Myra Breckenridge (1970), Rocky Horror (1975), The Valley of the Dolls (1967),
and Beyond (1970), Sternberg, Kael, and other cinematic misanthropes of the
late 1960s anticipated a moment when films formal limitations, cultural fis-
sures, and accidental absurdities would become more interesting than its con-
sistently unimaginative artistic ambitions. Assessing Kaels broadside on the
possibilities of film art, Taylor observes skeptically, Now the crazy vitality
of one small scene could make even the most terrible picture worthwhile, re-
minding us that Art is first and foremost about enjoyment, not boredom or
pedagogy.54 After meticulously detailing the history and legacy of the van-
guard criticism practiced by Farber, Tyler, and Kael, Taylor ends Artists in the
Audience with a somewhat unexpected plea for restoring more objective cri-
teria of value as a legitimate pursuit in film criticism. For Taylor, it would
seem, the cinema is once again in danger of perishing, and the vanguard critics
legacy of elitist repurposing devolved into smirking irony is a chief culprit. As
Taylor argues, vanguard camp and cultism has always pitched itself against the
very possibility of popular movie art, assuming that Hollywoods centrifugal
collective militates against formal unity and integrity, and that business inter-
ests, marketing campaigns, and popular fashion foreclose any real possibility of
judicious gatekeeping within the commercial realm.55 Taylor ends his book by
calling for a retreat from the vanguard beachhead, hoping to restore a certain
equilibrium between artist, critic, and audience.

In warping key conceptions of aesthetic value and critic-artist relations, cult-

ism and camp have risked consigning an entire medium to the scrap heap of
cultural detritus. In privileging the marginal or derided, in claiming formal
or symbolic intricacy where none exists, we prove again and again that we
are more inventive and more profound than the guardians of the culture in-
dustry, that we ultimately exercise (aesthetic) control over the consumption

Movies: A Century of Failure 303

 of their trash. But we do so at the expense of engaging the larger possibilities
of movie art and the larger obligations of criticism.56

No doubt the positions taken by Farber, Kael, and Tyler were extraordinarily
elitist at times, and faced with the prospect of vanguard criticisms dumbing
down in the endless mockery of a postMystery Science Theater 3000 universe,
Taylors turn to a quasi-Arnoldian, semi-Kierkegaardian stance on film aes-
thetics certainly has some appeal. Rather than bring sweetness and light to the
cinema and its audience, Taylor implies, camp and cultism can only approach
issues of artistic merit with discomfort, confusion, and denial. Having retreated
into wholly idiosyncratic criteria of excellence, the pop cult connoisseur (of any
and all media) finds it difficult to engage in any meaningful debate over aes-
thetic power and worth, instead playing the endless one-upsmanship of his or
her superior sensitivity to embodiments of true cinema, rock n roll, manga,
roman noir, and so on.
And yet as critics, fans, and general audiences become increasingly self-
aware, fragmented, and cynical as consumers of cultural product, one might
ask if it is possible (much less desirable) to return to an era where aesthetic
values, critic-artist relations, movie art, and the obligations of criticism
could be seen as stable categories. Taylor calls for nurturing the fragile art of
cinema, sheltering it from a culture of corrosive irony and competitive con-
noisseurship. But what if the mass audience for cinema has now come to real-
ize what so many writers of film history and criticism have either known or
suspected for many years now: the cinema is not really an art at all, but an
industrial and cultural circus masquerading behind obsolescent discourses and
impossible expectations about art. At best, the cinema is, as Kael describes it, a
tawdry corrupt art for a tawdry corrupt world.57 Perhaps our current moment
of snarkish cine-cynicism, in turn, is exactly the tawdry, corrupt critical voice
the movies deserve. As the culture of film production becomes increasingly
about fame rather than art, as corporate interests continue to solidify in shaping
the possibilities of movies big and small, as the avant-garde remains stranded
in the solipsistic hinterland of gallery and museum distributionperhaps the
movies should be resisted, mocked, and discouraged on all fronts.
A half-century ago Theodor Adorno lamented, every trip to the cinema
leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse.58 Thirty years ago Kael

304 Jeffrey Sc once

observed cinephiles have always recognized each other at once because they
talk less about good movies than what they love in bad movies.59 Our current
climate of cine-cynicism might be thought of as an attempt to merge these two
seemingly immutable truths, an attempt to synthesize camp and critical theory
in a new sociological poetics that views the supreme obligation of criticism to
be the continued cultivation of an audience more inventive and profound than
the guardians of the culture industry. Even today, many still enjoy discussing
what they love in bad movies more than debating if there really is a new way,
after all of these years, to position a camera, edit a scene, light a set, or unfurl a
narrative. Increasingly, what we love in bad movies is less the isolated conti-
nuity error or over-the-top performance, but instead the richly over-determined
moments of excess that invoke the vertiginous breakdown of sanity and logic
across our entire culture. The slow-motion shots of children running with
American flags at the end of Armageddon (1998). A hyperbolically homophobic
ex-Marine killing a martyred Kevin Spacey at the end of American Beauty. A
rappin kangaroo that in fact doesnt actually rap in his own movie. Vin Diesels
mysteriously inconvenient fur action coat in XXX (2002). A murderous Lepre-
chaun smokin chronic with his army of zombie hos in Leprechaun 5 (2000).
The exceedingly obvious collection of character-defining modernist paintings
on display in Titanic (1997). Bruce Willis and Matthew Perry mugging their
way through a sequel to a film that no one saw in the first place. A sexy heroine
walking through a postapocalyptic landscape armed with an Uzi and yet mod-
estly holding a bath towel around her naked body in Resident Evil 2 (2004). Jar
Jar. Gigli. Josie and the Pussycats (2001). These are the great moments in our
current cinemasymptoms of a cultural imagination unfettered in exploring
the depths of its own confusion and bankruptcy. We need a poetics up to the
task of engaging the profoundly bizarre, disturbing, inane, and epiphinal mo-
ments that characterize our current cinematic plight, a poetics that no longer
brackets off the cinema from the entire field of cultural production but instead
integrates the incomplete (and often arbitrary) object on the screen with the
strategic beauty of a well-executed billboard campaign, the demographic chi-
canery of a misleading trailer, the reinscription and retextualization of the DVD
release, the ineffable mechanisms of buzz that situate films, performers, and
audiences in seemingly random empathetic and adversarial relationships. We

Movies: A Century of Failure 305

need a poetics that follows every moment of every film back through its fleeting
diegetic illusions to the profilmic nexus of strategies that give shape to every
frame. Cultism we can probably do without. But camp in all its various incar-
nations, including todays snarkish cine-cynics, has always been its own form
of deconstructive critical theory and thus remains a crucial tool to help us re-
double our Adornoesque vigilance against our own impending mass stupidity
and worseness. If the cinema is to be saved, it will be by finally and forever re-
framing it as practice. At this point in its frustrating history of perpetual failure,
the cinema is far too important to still be hamstrung by accusations of being
simply an art.

Notes

1. Jacques Sternberg, Sexualis 95. (New York: Berkley, 1967), 17. Originally published in
France as Toi, Ma Nuit.
2. Ibid., 17.
3. Ibid., 19.
4. Ibid., 16.
5. Pauline Kael, Trash, Art, and the Movies, in Going Steady: Film Writings, 19681969.
New York: Marion Boyars, 1994.
6. See www.mrcranky.com.
7. Harry Knowles (with Paul Cullum and Mark Ebner), Aint It Cool? Hollywoods Red-
headed Stepchild Speaks Out (New York: Warner Books, 2002), 13.
8. Rudolph Arnheim, Film as Art. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 213.
9. Pauline Kael, Zeitgeist and Poltergeist, in I Lost It at the Movies (New York: Marion
Boyars, 1994).
10. Greg Taylor, Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism (Prince-
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 19.
11. Ibid., 20.
12. Ibid.
13. Pauline Kael, Trash, Art, and the Movies, in Going Steady: Film Writings, 19681969
(New York: Marion Boyars, 1994), 102.
14. Ibid., 93.
15. Ibid., 93.
16. Ibid., 12829. In his most recent films, Werner Herzog seems to have taken up this aes-
thetic as well, increasingly turning his back on the fiction film for a series of essayistic
and idiosyncratic documentaries.
17. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1982), 15.

30 6J effrey Sc once
 18. This comment, in particular, is worth relishing for its logical circularity and dissocia-
tive conflict.
19. See Jon Lewis, ed., The End of the Cinema as We Know It (New York: New York Univer-
sity Press, 2002).
20. Wheeler Winston Dixon, Twenty-five Reasons Why Its All Over, in The End of
Cinema as We Know It, ed. Jon Lewis (New York: New York University Press, 2002),
356.
21. Ibid., 365.
22. Ibid., 366.
23. As a product of the tail end of hard-core 1970s-era avant-populist cinephilia, I only
have the most vague and repressed memories now of the cruel moment when I finally
realized and accepted that Jerry Lewis would never direct another film.
24. Annette Michelson, Film and the Radical Aspiration, in Film Theory and Criticism,
2nd ed., ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press,
1979), 618.
25. Ironically, an always resourceful Hollywood has become very savvy at turning even this
artistic outrage into a marketing strategy by releasing the directors cut version for
video and DVD consumption by in-the-know cinephiles.
26. A classic example is Renee Daalders Massacre at Central High (1976)a Holocaust
allegory expressed in the conventions of the teensploitation revenge flick.
27. Before turning to hobbits and Kong, Peter Jackson parodied this particular type of film
history in his mockumentary for New Zealand television, Forgotten Silver (1995).
28. The troubled production also contains the occult subgenre of the cursed produc-
tion. The Exorcist and Poltergeist have been accompanied by stories of cursed cast
members and unexplainable accidents on the set. More recently, advance press for Mel
Gibsons The Passion of the Christ claimed James Caviezel, the actor portraying Jesus,
was hit by lightning during the filming!
29. And where heir apparent Sofia does not become romantically involved with every film-
geeks ego un-ideal, Quentin Tarantino.
30. Jeffrey Sconce, Trashing the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of
Cinematic Style, Screen 36 (1995): 37193.
31. Frank Zappa, of all people, extols the virtues of this film and its cheesy monster in the
song Cheepnis on Roxy and Elswhere (1974).
32. Tim Burton captures this attitude perfectly in the sequence of Ed Wood where the di-
rector, previously depressed at not finishing Plan 9, pulls it together in a whirlwind of
can-do creativity to finish the film.
33. Eric Schaefers Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of the Exploitation Film, 1919
1959 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999) documents the use of many of these
practices well before Castle adopted them in the 1950s.

Movies: A Century of Failure 307

 34. This nostalgic approach prevails in Matinee (1993), Joe Dantes valentine to B-cinema
loosely based on Castles career.
35. In Trash, Art, and the Movies, Kael writes, When youre young the odds are very
good that youll find something to enjoy in almost any movie. But as you grow more
experienced, the odds change (127).
36. This might explain why there is no camp animation.
37. Such desperation is the celluloid equivalent to the larger Hollywood ethos that believes
immortality lies in the right combination of yoga, publicity, and plastic surgery.
38. This anxiety over films ties to indexical reality has been a recurring theme of classical
film theory. As early as 1938, Rudolph Arnheim wrote, I would venture to predict that
film will be able to reach the heights of the other arts only when it frees itself from the
bonds of photographic reproduction and becomes a pure work of man, namely, as
animated cartoon or painting (A New Lacoon: Artistic Composites and the Talking
Film, in Film as Art [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967], 213).
39. No doubt this truism is at the heart of that philosophy of horror that maintains it is best
to suggest the monster, as in Cat People or The Blair Witch Project, rather than show it
directly.
40. Linda Williams, Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess, Film Quarterly 44, no. 4
(1991): 213.
41. The Onion 40, no. 31 (August 4, 2004).
42. Kael, Trash, Art, and the Movies, 88.
43. In an interesting generational shift, writers for the Onion seem much more fascinated
with schlock from the 1970s and 1980s, as opposed to the previous generation of trasho-
philes interest in cinematic detritus of the 1950s and 1960s.
44. Onion, August 511, 2004.
45. Spades career, it should be noted, began as one of the vanguard practitioners of snark.
His Hollywood Report segments on Saturday Night Live (19901995) are emblematic
of the snark sensibility in its formative moments. Somewhat ironically, in the time
since I wrote this paragraph, Spades less-than-stellar film career has brought him back
to television, where he has translated his SNL snarkdom into a half-hour entertainment
show for Comedy Central titled The Showbiz Show.
46. In many respects, Spy was truly a magazine ahead of its time. Snarkish in the extreme,
its inability to translate beyond its NYC-centric Gen-X audience prevented the maga-
zine from surviving into the golden age of snark it helped create.
47. Joe Queenan, Matinee Idle, Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler (New York: Hyperion,
2000), 101.
48. Ibid., 105.
49. Queenan, Remains of the Dazed, in Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler, 92. Updating
the piece for his book, Queenan adds as an epilogue, Since this piece appeared in 1995,

308 Jeffrey Sc once

 Ismail Merchant and James Ivory have continued to make Merchant-Ivory movies, as
there is no law against it (93).
50. Queenan, A Complete Lack of Direction, in Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler, 58.
51. Defamer.com, September 4, 2004.
52. The foundational work in this area remains Pierre Bourdieus Distinction: A Social Cri-
tique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).
53. Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel employed the concept of popular discrimination in
The Popular Arts (New York: Pantheon, 1965) to complicate the eras typically binary
divide between mass and elite culture, arguing that audiences of popular culture always
make discriminating choices of value within mass cultural offerings.
54. Taylor, Artists in the Audience, 123.
55. Ibid., 151.
56. Ibid., 157.
57. Kael, Trash, Art, and the Movies, 87.
58. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 1974), 25.
59. Kael, Trash, Art, and the Movies, 89.

Movies: A Century of Failure 309

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Wyatt, Justin. Cinematic/Sexual: An Interview with Todd Haynes. Film Quarterly 46, no. 3
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32 0Selected Biblio gr aphy

Contributors

Harry M. Benshoff is an associate professor in the Department of Radio, Television, and

Film at the University of North Texas. He is the author of Monsters in the Closet: Homo-
sexuality and the Horror Film (Manchester University Press, 1997) and coauthor (with Sean
Griffin) of Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America (Rowman and
Littlefield, 2006), Queer Cinema: The Film Reader (Routledge, 2004), and America on Film:
Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies (Blackwell, 2004). He has also
published many essays on topics such as Dark Shadows fan cultures, blaxploitation horror
films, Hollywood LSD films, and The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Kay Dickinson lectures in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, Univer-

sity of London. She is the editor of Movie Music, The Film Reader (Routledge, 2003) and
coeditor, with Glyn Davis, of Teen TV: Genre, Consumption and Identity (BFI, 2004). Her
articles can be found in Popular Music, Screen, Camera Obscura, and in many anthologies
on film, television, and music. Her contribution to this volume is part of a larger project
titled Off Key: When Film and Music Wont Work Together (Oxford University Press, forth-
coming).

Chris Fujiwara is the author of Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2001) and of forthcoming books on Otto Preminger and Jerry Lewis. A
film critic for the Boston Phoenix and a former contributing editor of Hermenaut, Fujiwara
has also written articles and reviews for Film Comment, Cineaste, InterCommunication,
Osians Cinemaya, Film International, positions, and other publications, and he has contrib-
uted essays to such anthologies as The X List: The National Society of Film Critics Guide to
the Movies That Turn Us On (ed. Jami Bernard, Da Capo, 2005), The Film Comedy Reader
(ed. Gregg Rickman, Limelight Editions, 2004), The Science Fiction Reader (ed. Rickman,
Limelight Editions, 2004), The 1,001 Films You Must See Before You Die (ed. Steven Jay
Schneider, Quintet/Barrons, 2005), and Ozu 2003 (ed. Shigehiko Hasumi, Asahi Shimbun,
2003). Fujiwara has taught and lectured on film studies and film history at Yale University,
Rhode Island School of Design, and Emerson College and has served on juries at many
international film festivals.

Colin Gunckel is a PhD student in the critical studies program of the Department of Film,
Television, and Digital Media at the University of California at Los Angeles. Drawing from
undergraduate studies in media arts and Latin American literature, his research has fo-
cused on low-budget and exploitation genres produced in Mexico, contemporary Mexican
cinema, Spanish-language film exhibition in the Southwest, and Chicano art.

Joan Hawkins is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Culture

at Indiana University. She is the author of Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-
garde (University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

Kevin Heffernan is an associate professor in the Division of Cinema-Television at South-

ern Methodist University and the author of Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and
the American Movie Business, 19531968 (Duke University Press, 2004). He is the coauthor
of My Son Divine and coscreenwriter and associate producer of the documentary Divine
Trash, winner of the Filmmakers Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. He is cur-
rently writing a book on East Asian cinema after 1997.

Matt Hills is a senior lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. He is the
author of Fan Cultures (Routledge, 2002), The Pleasures of Horror (Continuum, 2005), and
How to Do Things with Cultural Theory (Hodder-Arnold, 2005). Current works in progress
include Key Concepts in Cultural Studies (Sage), and Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating
Doctor Who in the Twenty-First Century (I. B. Tauris).

Chuck Kleinhans has pursued disreputable subjects since writing a dissertation on the
low form of comedy, farce. He has written articles on the change from film to video por-
nography, the Pamela Anderson pirated sex tape, trash and camp aesthetics, and the work
of George Kuchar and John Waters. He also made films on tacky subjects such as the Jerry
Lewis Labor Day Telethon and juvenile amusements in the Wisconsin Dells. When not
moonlighting in Chicagos offbeat urban wonders, he pursues his day job at Northwestern
Universitys program in screen cultures.

Tania Modleski teaches in the English Department at the University of Southern Califor-
nia and has long written about topics considered sleazy in the academic world. Her books
include The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (Methuen, 1988),
a second edition of which has just appeared and includes a lengthy new afterword; and
Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women, a new edition of which is
forthcoming from Routledge.

322C ontri bu tors

Eric Schaefer is an associate professor and associate chair in the Department of Visual
and Media Arts at Emerson College in Boston. He is the author of Bold! Daring! Shocking!
True!: A History of Exploitation Films, 19191959 (Duke University Press, 1999) and has
published articles on exploitation and sexploitation film in Cinema Journal, Film History,
Film Quarterly, and other journals and anthologies. He is working on Massacre of Pleasure:
A History of Sexploitation Film, 19601979.

Jeffrey Sconce is an associate professor in the Screen Cultures Program at Northwest-

ern University and the author of Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to
Television (Duke University Press, 2000). His work on disreputable media product has
appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Screen and Science as Culture. His
article Trashing the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic
Style has recently been reprinted in the third edition of Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohens
Film Theory and Criticism (Oxford University Press, 2004).

Greg Taylor is associate professor of film in the Conservatory of Theatre Arts and Film
at Purchase College, SUNY. He is the author of Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and
American Film Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1999) and a number of articles on
film criticism, cinematic modernism, and the avant-garde.

C ontribu tors 323

Index

A&M Records, 199, 216 n.14 Allied Artists, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160
Abductors, The, 32 All That Heaven Allows, 207, 208, 210, 211,
Abominable Dr. Phibes, The, 153 213
Acapulco Uncensored, 26, 27 Amanti doltretomba. See Nightmare Castle
Ackroyd, Dan, 300 Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,
Adorno, Theodor, 167, 171, 186 nn.5, 8, 304, The, 205
306 Amazing Transplant, The, 5558, 66, 292
Adult Film Association of America American Beauty, 278, 305
(afaa), 39 American Broadcasting Company (abc),
Adventures of Lucky Pierre, The, 22 157
Advertising Code for Motion Pictures, 20 American Film Distributing (afd), 22, 30
Advise and Consent, 79 American Film Institute (afi), 205
Affleck, Ben, 287, 296 American Idol, 299
Age of Innocence, The, 285 American International Pictures (aip), 1, 4,
Ah est el detalle, 136 21, 144, 145, 152, 153, 155, 157, 159, 274
A. I., 287 American Pie, 99
Akerman, Chantal, 240, 242 Anger, Kenneth, 73
Alazraki, Benito, 136 Animal, The, 32
Albertazzi, Giorgio, 154 Annie Hall, 162 n.19
Alberti, Guido, 247 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 244
Alda, Robert, 144, 156 Anything Once, 32
Alexandrov, Grigori, 185 n.5 Archibald, William, 81
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 189, 210, 213 Arenas, Rosa, 137
All en el Rancho Grande, 128 Are We Not Men?, 177
Allen, Richard, 240 Argento, Dario, 167, 168, 170, 173, 175, 179,
Allen, Woody, 162 n.19, 287 188 n.21
Arkoff, Sam, 145, 153, 155, 157 Bazelon, Irwin, 185 n.4
Armageddon, 305 Bazin, Andr, 279
Arnheim, Rudolph, 279, 308 n.38 Beat the Geeks, 14, 259, 265270
Arnold, Matthew, 304 Beatty, Warren, 35
Art Forum, 3 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 174, 175
Art:21, 3 Bell, Bare, and Beautiful, 21
Assassins, The, 214 Bellour, Raymond, 282
Atamian, Armand, 26 Benshoff, Harry, 11, 191
At War with the Army, 73 Berenstein, Rhona, 125
Audubon Productions, 24, 31 Berg, Charles Ramirez, 129, 130, 137
Auteurism, 3, 159 Bergman, Ingmar, 287, 298
Avant-Garde, 9, 73, 99, 123, 170, 207, 208, Bern, Gus, 158
221, 222 Berry, Halle, 277, 294
Azteca Distribution, 25 Brub, Michael, 271
Bestia magnifica, La, 137
Baa Baa Black Sheep, 265 Best Man, The, 79
Babuscio, Jack, 71 Bethview Amusement Corporation, 39
Baby Doll, 21, 75 Beyond, The, 168, 173, 179
Bad and the Beautiful, The, 276 Beyond the Door, 162 n.19
Bad Girls Go to Hell, 5254, 55, 66, 68 Beyond the Green Door, 35
Baker, Carroll, 21 Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, 189, 190, 200,
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 64, 204 201, 303
Bamboo House of Dolls, 157 Big Snatch, The, 2627
Barbarella, 303 Billy Budd, 11, 72, 77, 78, 79, 92 n.21
Bare Hunt, The, 21 Billy Madison, 298
Barker, Martin, 183, 185 n.3, 188 n.28 Black Sabbath, 149
Barnum, P. T., 100, 106, 107, 117 n.7, 288 Black Sunday (1960), 148
Baron Blood, 144, 155, 156, 160 Black Sunday (1977), 264
Barron, Bebe, 173 Blade Runner, 192
Barron, Louis, 173 Blair, Linda, 297
Bartco, 2526 Blair Witch Project, The, 186, 187 n.12, 308
Barthes, Roland, 89, 170, 302 n.39
Batman, 192, 295 Blanc, Erika, 148
Battlefield Earth, 278 Blanco, Jorge Ayala, 137
Baudry, Jean-Louis, 64 Blaze Star Goes Nudist, 52
Bauman, Zygmunt, 169, 170, 171, 184 Blood and Black Lace, 151
Bava, Mario, 12, 144, 145, 146, 148, 151, 153, Blood Feast, 223
155, 156, 158, 159, 235, 288 Blue Velvet, 192
Bay, Michael, 278, 287 Bobbit, Lorena, 47

326 Index
Body of a Female, 30 Cabaret, 155, 157, 160, 203
Boin-n-g!, 21 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 154
Bolton, Tiffany, 266 Cady, Dan, 35
Bonanza, 103 Cahiers du Cinma, 159
Bond, James, 59, 265 Cameron, James, 287, 288
Bourdieu, Pierre, 6, 8, 28, 99, 184, 188 n.32, Camille 2000, 31
196, 216 n.14, 221, 222, 234, 309 n.49 Canby, Vincent, 84
Bowen, Michael, 6568, 119 n.20 Cannes Film Festival, 12, 144, 145, 152, 155,
Bowie, David, 203, 217 n.29, 271 158, 191
Boxoffice International, 24, 27 Cannibal Ferox, 168, 172, 180
Brackage, Stan, 118 n.13 Cannibal Holocaust, 168, 172, 180, 181
Brainiac, The, 15 n.5 Cantinflas, 123, 124, 125, 131, 133, 134, 135,
Brando, Marlon, 81, 82 136
Braunsberg, Andrew, 161 n.6 Capatach, Blaine, 265
Brecht, Bertolt, 181, 198 Capote, Truman, 81
Brennan, William J., 43 n.6 Captain, The, 73
Bresson, Robert, 261 Crdenas, Lzaro, 128
Briggs, Joe Bob, 60 Cardona, Ren, 137
Broidy, Steve, 155 Carey, Mariah, 295
Bronski, Michael, 73 Carlos, Wendy, 174, 175
Bront, Charlotte, 68 Carpenter, John, 174, 226, 227, 228, 231, 232
Bront, Emily, 68 Carpenter, Karen, 190, 195, 198
Brooks, Mel, 201 Carpenter, Richard, 199
Broomfield, Nick, 217 n.29 Carrell, Steve, 275
Brophy, Philip, 181, 186 n.5 Carroll, Nel, 125, 129, 130, 139
Brown, Royal, 185 n.4 Casablanca, 197, 283
Bruckheimer, Jerry, 278 Case, Sue-Ellen, 64
Brutes, The, 32 Casey, Larry, 88
Bucket of Blood, 153 Castaeda, Luis Aceves, 138
Budra, Paul, 228 Castle, William, 5, 288290
Buuel, Luis, 118 n.16, 221, 285 Castle of Blood, 149, 150, 151
Bunny & Clod, 35, 36 Cathouse, 97
Burden of Dreams, 286 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 75
Burlesque, 21, 29 Cat People, 308 n.39
Burns, John Horne, 73 Catwoman, 277, 294295
Burstyn v. Wilson, 20, 4243 n.3. See also Caught in the ActNaked, 32
Supreme Court Cavara, Paolo, 180
Burton, Tim, 288 Caviezel, James, 307
Bush, George W., 188 n.34 Celebrities Uncensored, 276

Index 327
Chabon, Michael, 205 Copley, James S., 37
Chambers, Marilyn, 35 Coppola, Francis Ford, 81, 287
Champlin, Charles, 83 Coppola, Sofia, 307 n.29
Chandler, Otis, 41 Cordio, Carlo, 188 n.24
Cheers, 265 Corman, Roger, 288, 289, 292
Chernoff, Sam, 40, 41 Correll, Matilde, 123
Childrens Hour, The, 82 Costner, Kevin, 286, 287
Chimes at Midnight, 157 Cotton, Joseph, 144
Chion, Michel, 186 n.5 Counter-cinema, 10, 62, 70 n.11
Cinecitt, 244 Counterphobic cinema, 63
Cinfantastique, 159 Country Hooker, 27
Cinephilia, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 15, 160, 274306 Crane, Jonathan Lake, 229, 230, 232
Cioran, E. M., 240, 242 Craven, Wes, 226, 231
Citizen Kane, 105, 203, 204, 292, 299 Cresse, Bob, 26
City and the Pillar The, 73 Cronenberg, David, 233
Clark, Graeme, 196 csi: Miami, 270
Cleopatra, 286 csi: New York, 270
Clift, Montgomery, 82 Cultism, 6, 14, 259271, 301
Clinton, Bill, 71, 116 Cunningham, Sean S., 231
Clockwork Orange, A, 40, 174, 175 Curious Female, The, 32
Cloister of the Innocents, 150 Cusak, John, 265266, 270
Clover, Carol, 47, 62, 229, 232, 233, 234
Clover Films, 37 Daalder, Renee, 307 n.26
Cobain, Kurt, 203, 217 n.30 Daily Show, The, 275
Coleman, Lonnie, 73 Daisy Chain, The, 27
Collins, Jim, 192, 193, 194, 196 Dali, Salvador, 221
Columbia Pictures, 39 Damn the Defiant, 79
Come Play With Me, 31 Danse macabre, 146, 150, 151
Comedy Central, 14, 265, 266, 308 n.45 Dante, Joe, 308
Coming Out Under Fire, 89 Danza Macabra, 151, 152. See also Castle of
Commission on Obscenity and Pornogra- Blood
phy, 34 Daughter of the Sun, 19, 20
Committee for the Freedom of Homo- Dave, 300
sexuals, 87 David, Zorro, 81
Conner, Bruce, 195 Dawn of the Dead, 224, 225, 231
Conrich, Ian, 224, 234, 235, 236 Day of the Dead, 225
Consolidated, 25 Deadly Weapons, 59, 64, 66
Conte, Maria Pia, 247 Debauchers, The, 32
Cook, Pam, 10, 69 Debord, Guy, 257

32 8In dex
Deep Throat, 4445 n.30 Drive-in cinema, 42
Defamer.com, 276, 300301, 302 Dumb and Dumber, 99
Defilers, The, 32, 5052 Dunaway, Faye, 35
Delany, Samuel R., 44 n.29, 120 n.21 Dynasty, 98
De la Vega Alfaro, Eduardo, 136, 143 n.35
Del Ro, Dolores, 135 Ebert, Roger, 201
Demolition Man, 192 Ed Wood, 288
Denby, David, 280, 283 8, 162 n.15
Deodato, Ruggero, 168, 172, 181 Eisenstein, Sergei, 185 n.5, 192
Depp, Johnny, 288 Eisler, Hans, 186 n.5
Deren, Maya, 221 Elders, Jocelyn, 116
Drive, 14, 256257 Elsaesser, Thomas, 209
Detective, The (1968), 80 Emerson, Keith, 178, 188 n.21
De Toth, Andr, 269 Empire, 242
Detour, 284 End as a Man, 76
Dtournement, 14, 256257 Entertainment Ventures, Inc. (evi), 25, 26
Dever, Susan, 136 Erpichini, Mario, 247
Devils Cleavage, The, 114 Escalera, Rudy, 25
Devils Nightmare, 152 E.T., 291
Devo, 176, 177 Euripides, 104
Dickie Roberts, Former Child Star, 297298 Eve and the Handyman, 21
Dickinson, Emily, 68 Excited, 32
Dickinson, Kay, 1213 Exorcist, The, 12, 145, 148, 174, 297, 307 n.28
Diesel, Vin, 305 Exotic Dreams of Casanova, The, 29
Dika, Vera, 230, 231 Evans, Mark, 185 n.4
Di Lazzarro, Dalia, 161 n.6 Exploitation cinema, 10, 24, 99100, 114,
Direct Cinema, 103, 115 278
Distribpix, 30
Dixon, Wheeler Winston, 283 Fadiman, William, 81
Doane, Mary Beth, 63 Fajardo, Eduardo, 146
Dolce vita, La, 244, 245 Fangoria, 224
Do Me! Do Me! Do Me!, 32 Farber, Manny, 6, 261, 264, 280, 281, 282,
Don Quixote, 285 303
Donna & Lisa, 31 Far From Heaven, 13, 191, 207215
DOrgaz, Elena, 123 Farley, Chris, 300
Dottie Gets Spanked, 191 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 189, 210, 211,
Double Agent 73, 5960, 66 213, 214
Dracula, 148 Feel Like Im in Love, 181
Dr. Butcher, M.D., 293 Felleghy, Tom, 246

Index 329
Fellini, Federico, 162 n.15, 244, 252 Frith, Simon, 271
Fernndez, Emilio, 121, 135 Frizzi, Fabio, 179
Ferry, Bryan, 203 From Justin to Kelly, 299
Fiorentino, Linda, 265, 269 Frusta il corpo, La. See Whip and the Body
Fireworks, 73 Fujiwara, Chris, 14
First Amendment, 20 Fulci, Lucio, 168, 248
Fisher, Terence, 244 Fullerton, Carl, 223
Flateau, Joel, 80 Full Frontal, 278
Flesh for Frankenstein, 161 n.6
Flinn, Caryl, 185 n.4 Gaines, Jane, 118 n.10
Flipper, 31 Galn, Alberto, 135
Flynn, Hazel, 92 n.22 Gallery, The, 73
Forbidden Planet, 173 Gangs of New York, 285
Forbidden Pleasure, 32 Garber, Marjorie, 64
Ford, John, 2 Garland, Judy, 87
Forgotten Silver, 307 Gastaldi, Ernesto, 161 n.5
For Single Swingers Only, 32 Gay, Ramn, 137
Forster, Robert, 81, 82 Gay Deceivers, The, 11, 72, 8589
Fortune and Mens Eyes, 73, 95 n.74 Gays and Lesbians in Mainstream Media,
Fosse, Bob, 203 79
Foucault, Michel, 58, 225 Gazarra, Ben, 7677
Fowles, Jib, 28 Genet, Jean, 189, 191, 205, 214
Franco, Jess, 159, 288 Gibson, Mel, 307 n.28
Frankenstein, 123124 Gigli, 295296
Freda, Riccardo, 149 Gilligans Island, 260
Freddys Dead, 187 n.14 Ginzberg v. United States (1966), 26. See also
Freddy vs. Jason, 229 Supreme Court
Fredericks of Hollywood, 105 Girls Gone Wild, 107
Frenzy, 52 Girl with Hungry Eyes, The, 31
Freud, Sigmund, 107, 108, 127, 191, 243 Glen or Glenda, 114, 115
Friday the 13th, 13, 219, 222, 224, 225, 226, Gli Orrori del Castello di Noremburga. See
227, 228, 230, 231 Baron Blood
Friday the 13th, Part II, 223, 231 Glitter, 295
Friday the 13th, Part III, 229, 231 Glover, Danny, 299
Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives, 229 Goblin, 178, 179, 188 n.23
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, 223 Godard, Jean-Luc, 53, 202, 244, 274
Friedkin, William, 174 Godzilla, 7
Friedman, David F., 22, 24, 25, 26, 32, 34, Godzilla (1998), 278, 295
50, 61, 288 Goebel, Paul, 265

330 Index
Goldilocks and the Three Bares, 21 Hideout in the Sun, 23
Gone Fishin, 299 High Fidelity, 269
Good Man is Hard to Find, A, 28 Hills, Matt, 13, 188 n.32
Gordon, Bert I., 269 Hitchcock, Alfred, 5, 5152, 66, 68, 162 n.15,
Gorky, Maxim, 96 261, 278
Grand Guignol, 224, 235 Hoberman, J., 207, 211
Great White, 162 n.19 Hocquenghem, Guy, 90, 91 n.11
Greene, Lorne, 103 Hodges, Charles, 34
Green Hornet, The, 264 Hoffman, Robert, 246
Greer, Michael, 86, 88 Home Box Office (hbo), 96, 97, 201
Gunckel, Colin, 12 Homicidal, 5
Horkheimer, Max, 167, 171, 186 n.5
Hall, Stuart, 14, 309 n.53 Horowitz, Gad, 127
Halloween, 226, 227, 228, 230, 231, 232, 235 Horrible Dr. Hitchcock, The, 149
Halloween H20, 231 Hot Erotic Dreams, 29
Hamilton, George, 80 House of Exorcism, 12, 144, 145, 154, 157, 158,
Hanna-Barbera, 181 162 n.19. See also Lisa and the Devil
Hannie Caulder, 264 How I Made a Million Dollars and Never
Harries, Dan, 123, 124 Lost a Dime, 289. See also Roger Corman
Harris, Julie, 81 How to Shoot a Crime, 194
Hawkins, Joan, 13, 221, 222, 234 Howarth, Troy, 156
Haynes, Todd, 13, 189215 Hudson, Rock, 207, 208
Hearts of Darkness, 286 Humbug Effect, 100, 106, 107
Heavens Gate, 286 Humphries, Reynold, 231
Hedren, Tippi, 287 Hungerford Chapel, 150
Heffernan, Kevin, 12, 227 Hunt, Leon, 167
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 192 Hurdes, Las, 118 n.16
Heidegger, Martin, 14, 251, 255 Hussein, Saddam, 188 n.34
Heilman, Jeremy, 197 Huston, John, 81, 82
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, 175, 187
nn.14, 19, 226 I Am Curious Yellow, 108
Hentai, 29 I, A Woman, 35
Hepburn, Audrey, 82 I Crave Your Body, 32
Hermanaut, 14 If . . . , 73
Hershfield, Joanne, 131, 132 I Love the 80s, 260, 268
Herzog, Werner, 306 n.16 I Love the 70s, 260, 268
Heston, Charlton, 287 I tre volti della paura, 149, 151. See also
Heuck, Marc Edward, 259, 265, 266, 270 Black Sabbath
Hidden Persuaders, The, 21 Ihde, Don, 243, 254

Index 331
Image Entertainment, 160 Juno, Andrea, 8
Imitation of Life, 207 Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World, 6, 7
Immoral, The, 32 Justine ou les Infortunes de la Vertu, 53, 67
Immoral Mr. Teas, The, 20, 21, 23, 49
Importance of Being Earnest, The, 98 Kael, Pauline, 19, 14, 15, 67, 262, 274, 275,
Incredibly Strange Films, 8, 223, 224 279, 281, 282, 295, 299, 303305
Indecent Desires, 58 Kaminski, Janusz, 269
Indecent Proposal, 300 Karloff, Boris, 149
Independence Day, 89 Kauffmann, Stanley, 84
Inferno, 168, 173, 178, 188 n.21 Kazan, Eliza, 6
In Like Flint, 303 Keaton, Buster, 287
Ironside, 264 Keith, Brian, 81
Isherwood, Christopher, 81 Kelly, Grace, 287
Island, The, 293 Kendall, Suzy, 247
Island of the Burning Doomed, 244 Kessler, Bruce, 95 n.71
It Conquered the World, 288, 289 Key Club Wives, 2930
Kier, Udo, 161 n.6
Jack, 287 Kierkegaard, Sren, 258 n.16, 304
Jackson, Peter, 287, 307 n.27 Kill, Baby, Kill, 148
Jacobellis v. Ohio, 43 n.6. See also Supreme Kill Bill, Vol. 1, 260, 264
Court King Crimson, 188 n.21
Jacopetti, Gualtiero, 117 n.6, 180 Kinkies, 49. See also Roughies
Jaeger, Andy, 155, 157 Kinsey, Alfred, 108
Jameson, Fredric, 191, 192 Kinsey Report, The, 29
Jancovich, Mark, 222, 223, 224, 236 n.4 KISS, 265
Janitzio, 121 Kiss, The, 96, 97
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, 229 Klein, Melanie, 59
Jason X, 229 Kleinhans, Chuck, 11
Jaws, 157 Klinger, Barbara, 196
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, Klosterman, Chuck, 14, 270271
1080 Bruxelles, 240, 242 Knowles, Harry, 279
Jenkins, Henry, 188 n.32 Koschina, Sylva, 146
Jerry Springer Show, The, 106107 Kraftwerk, 176, 177
Joe Dirt, 297, 298 Kraus, Chris, 194
Joel, Billy, 271 Kruger, Barbara, 194
Johnson, Claire, 10, 62, 69 Kubrick, Stanley, 40, 175, 274, 287
Johnson Administration, 119 n.19 Kuchar, George, 99, 114
Josie and the Pussycats, 305 Kuleshov effect, 253
Jumanji, 269 Kurt and Courtney, 217 n.30

332I ndex
Lacan, Jacques, 57, 64, 282, 283 Lorre, Peter, 76
Landeta, Matilde, 136 Lost and Found, 297
Lasch, Christopher, 31 Lost in La Mancha, 286
Lasky, Gil, 95 n.71 Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, The, 23
Last Action Hero, 192 Lost Souls, 269
Lastretti, Adolfo, 247 Love and Anarchy, 157
Last Year at Marienbad, 153 Love Camp 7, 52
Law, John Philip, 83, 85 Love Thy Neighbor and His Wife, 31
Leather Boys, The, 73 Lucas, George, 283
Leavisism, 302 Lucas, Tim, 156, 291
Lehman, Ari, 225 Luchadoras contra la momia, Las, 137
Lenzi, Umberto, 168, 244, 249, 253 Lucky Wander Boy, 14, 263264
Leone, Alfredo, 12, 144, 148, 153, 155, 156, Lugosi, Bela, 195
158, 160 Lupo, Michele, 248
Leone, Sergio, 161 n.5 Lusty Neighbors, 32
Leprechaun 5, 305 Lynch, David, 285
Let Me Die a Woman, 61, 113115, 119120 Lyne, Adrian, 300
n.21 Lyon, Sue, 21
Lets Go Native, 2425 Lyons, James, 210
Lets Play Doctor, 32
Lewis, Herschell Gordon, 5, 22, 223, 288 Macdonald, Dwight, 261
Lewis, Jerry, 73, 307 n.23 MacLaine, Shirley, 82
Lewton, Val, 286 Madison Avenue, 75
Libertine, The, 37 Madonna, 296
Lillard, Matthew, 301 Maglione, Budy, 188 n.24
Lindsay, Vachel, 279 Magnificent Ambersons, The, 287
Lippert, Robert, 154 Magnificent Obsession, 207
Lisa and the Devil, 12, 144146, 148158, 160 Maltin, Leonard, 144, 145, 148, 160
Lisztomania, 203 Mancori, Guglielmo, 248
Littleford, Beth, 275 Mangravite, Andrew, 148
Living Head The, 137 Maniac Cop, 297
Livingston, Jenny, 201202, 206 Man Machine, 177
Llorona, La, 137 Mannix, 265
Locke, John, 117 n.7 Mantis in Lace, 4
Lola Cassanova, 136 Many Ways to Sin, 32
Lolita, 21 Man Who Would Be King, The, 155, 157
Lonesome Cowboys, 84 March of Time, 104105
Lopez, Jennifer, 296 Marcuse, Herbert, 127
Lorna, 52 Margheriti, Antonio, 149, 159, 161 n.6, 248

Index 333
Maria Candelaria, 121, 135, 136 Midnight Cowboy, 73
Marie, Kelly, 181 Mier, Felipe, 136
Marinet, Pascal, 153 Miner, Steve, 231
Marnie, 286 Minnelli, Vincente, 75
Marriage Drop-Outs, The, 32 Mini-Skirt Love, 29
Martin, Dean, 73 Misfits, The, 286
Marx, Karl, 192 Miss America pageant, 195
Mary Tyler Moore Show, The, 265 Mitam, 30
Maschera del demonio, La. See Black Sun- Mitry, Jean, 244
day Modleski, Tania, 10
M*A*S*H, 270 Moeller, David, 23
Massacre at Central High, 307 n.26 Molesters, The, 32, 33, 34
Massacre of Pleasure, 30 Mom and Dad, 6061
Masters and Johnson, 108 Momia azteca contra el robot humano, La,
Mati, Tia, 131 138
Matinee, 308 n.34 Mondo Bizarro, 99, 102, 105, 106, 108
Maus, Pedro, 136 Mondo Cane, 99, 100, 180
McCartney, Paul, 203 Mondo Cane 2, 117 n.6
McCullers, Carson, 73, 81 Mondo cinema, 1112, 99103, 105, 172
McDonagh, Maitland, 170 Mondo Freudo, 99, 100, 102, 106, 107, 108
McNaughton, John, 175 Monet, Monica, 247
Medel, Mauel, 123, 125, 134 Monk, The, 285
Medved, Michael, 300 Monogram Studios, 6, 155
Melly, George, 215 Monsivs, Carlos, 143 n.26
Melville, Herman, 77, 92 n.21 Moon is Blue, The, 75
Men in Black 2, 278 Moonlighting Wives, 32
Men, Women, and Chainsaws, 62 Moore, Julianne, 209
Mpris, Le, 244 Morangolo, Agostino, 188 n.23
Merchant-Ivory, 300, 309 n.49 Morante, Massimo, 188 n.23
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 253 Moreno, Mario. See Cantinflas
Messiah of Evil, 162 n.19 Morgan, Chesty, 59, 60, 68
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 291 Morricone, Ennio, 246
Metz, Christian, 240, 282 Morrisey, Paul, 161 n.6
Metzger, Randy, 24 Morrison, Jim, 203
Mexican Revolution, 121, 128 Motion Pictures Association of America
Meyer, Russ, 8, 21, 49, 52, 189, 190, 191, 200, (mpaa), 20, 24, 35, 40, 80
201, 205 Mr. Cranky, 276
Michelson, Annette, 284, 285 Mr. Peters Pets, 21
Michigan State Court of Appeals, 36 mtv, 96

33 4 I ndex
Mulvey, Laura, 63 Obscenity, 23, 26, 100
Mutiny on the Bounty, 79 Odd Tastes, 32
Mutual v. Ohio, 42 n.3. See also Supreme Offers, Steve, 2425
Court Oklahoma Publishing Company, 39
My Bare Lady, 21 Oldfield, Mike, 174
Myra Breckinridge, 200, 201, 303 Ophuls, Max, 189
Myrick, Daniel, 186 n.12 Olympic International, 29, 30
Mystery Science Theater 3000, 2, 304 Once Upon a Time in America, 161 n.5
Onion, The, 275, 294299, 301, 302, 308
Naked Fog, 30 n.43
Naked Paradise, 21 Only Angels Have Wings, 73
National Catholic Organization of Motion Oona, 31
Pictures, 84 Operazione paura. See Kill, Baby, Kill
National Film Board, 103 Orano, Alessio, 146
National Screen Service, 25 Orellana, Carlos, 122
Nature Camp Confidential, 52 Orgy at Lils Place, 32
Navarro, Carlos, 121 Oro, Juan Bustillo, 136
Near Dark, 192 Ortega y Gasset, Jos, 261
Nestle, Joan, 48 Ortolani, Riz, 180, 181
Neu!, 175 Oscars, 87, 277
New Kids on the Block, 266 Othello, 252
New Queer Cinema, 195
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 167 Packard, Vance, 21
Nightmare Castle, 148 Papillon, 155, 157, 160
Nightmare on Elm Street, 226, 231 Paracinema, 8, 13, 15 n.5, 200, 215 n.3, 220,
Night of the Big Heat, 244 221, 222, 224
Night of the Bloody Apes, 292 Paramount Decision, 283
Nineteen Eighty-Four, 204 Paramount Studios, 157, 227
Nixon, Richard, 119 n.19, 194, 215 Para-paracinema, 13, 219
Noriega, Chon, 75 Paris Is Burning, 201202, 206
Notorious Big City Sin, 26 Paris Ooh-La-La!, 22
Novak, Harry, 24, 25, 26 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 172
Novo, Salvador, 123, 124, 128 Passion of the Christ, The, 307 n.27
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, 167 Peeping Tom, 59
Nude for Satan, 292 Peppard, George, 80
Nude on the Moon, 49, 50 Peppercorn-Wormser, 145, 157, 158
Nudie Cuties, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 29, 49 Performance, 201, 202
Nudist Camp Films, 20, 23, 4950, 52 Perkins, Anthony, 146
Nylon Curtain, The, 271 Perrin, Toms, Jr., 123

Index 335
Perry, Matthew, 305 Quaid, Dennis, 191, 208, 209
Persona, 298 Queenan, Joe, 275, 299300, 301, 302
Pesci, Joe, 299 Quetzalcoatl, 125
Petro, Patrice, 241
Phillips, Adam, 241 Rachel, Rachel, 79
Photon, 159 Radford, Michael, 204
Pignatelli, Fabio, 188 n.23 Radio-Keith-Orpheium (rko), 286
Pilcher, Jeffrey M., 123, 124, 126, 128, 134, Races, 136
143 n.26 Randall, Dick, 22
Pink Flamingoes, 3, 114 Rassimov, Ivan, 246
Plan 9 from Outer Space, 190, 195 Razzie awards, 276
Playboy, 34, 85, 106 Reagan, Ronald, 204, 215
Player, The, 276 Reali, Carlo, 156
Plus longue nuit du diable, La. See Devils Real Sex, 96, 97
Nightmare Reckless Moment, The, 189
Podalsky, Laura, 135 Redes, 121
Poe, Edgar Allan, 117 n.7, 149, 150 Red Lips, 31
Poison, 189, 190, 191, 211, 214 Reed, Lou, 271
Polsky, Abe, 95 n.71 Reed, Rex, 201
Poltergeist, 307 n.28 Reflections in a Golden Eye, 11, 72, 80, 81,
Polyester, 3 82, 84, 85
Ponce, Manuel Barbachano, 136 Reflections on Black, 118 n.13
Pornography, 4, 19, 34, 40, 41, 49, 58, 96, 97, Rgion centrale, La, 242
109, 110 Reich, Wilhelm, 116
Porter, Cole, 98 Reitman, Ivan, 300
Portillo, Rafael, 122 Replicas, 177
Postgraduate Course in Sexual Love, The, Republicans, 116
110112, 115 Resident Evil 2, 305
Poverty Row, 155, 284 Resnais, Alain, 153
Powell, Michael, 59 Revueltas, Silvestre, 123
Price, Vincent, 153 Riera, Emilo Garcia, 124
Prince and the Nature Girl, The, 52 Rimbaud, Arthur, 205, 214
Production Code, 20, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80 Rio Escondido, 121
Production Code Administration (pca), Rivera, Diego, 121, 124, 128
75, 77, 79, 80, 82, 92 nn.16, 17 Road Warrior, 192
Psycho, 4, 53, 146, 176 Robot Monster, 15 n.5
Public Broadcasting System (pbs), 3 Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy, The, 122, 137,
Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 185186 n.5 138, 139, 140
Pussycat Theater, 41, 42 Rocky Horror Picture Show, The, 303

336 Index
Rodrigo, Joaquin, 147 Schaefer, Eric, 10
Rodrguez, Ismael, 137 Scheingarten, Louis, 25
Roeg, Nicholas, 201 Schindlers List, 6, 7
Roller Boogie, 297 Schneider, Steven Jay, 227
Romero, George, 225, 233 Schoenberg, Arnold, 188 n.26
Romm, Mikhail, 242 Schusterman, Richard, 271
Ronnie Rocket, 285 Sconce, Jeffrey, 173, 187 nn.14, 19, 188 nn.32,
Rophie, Katie, 48 196, 200, 215 n.3, 216 n.14, 220, 221, 222,
Rosemarys Baby, 148 225, 234, 236 n.4
Ross, Andrew, 200202, 205, 207, 210, 215 Scorsese, Martin, 285
Rossellini, Roberto, 172 Scott, Ridley, 300
Rossi-Stuart, Giacomo, 148 Scream, 228
Roth decision, 23, 38. See also Supreme Scrutiny, 302
Court Scum of the Earth, 3233
RottenTomatoes.com, 276 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 79
Roughies, 5, 49 Sei donne per lassassino, 151
Ruined Bruin, The, 21 Sensual Encounters, 32
Russell, Jane, 21 Sergeant, The, 80, 8385
Russell, Ken, 203 Serving in Silence: The Margarethe
Russo, Mary, 64 Cammermeyer Story, 89
Russo, Vito, 87 Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, 14
Ryan, Anthony-James, 2122 Sexploitation, 10, 1946, 108116
Ryan, Robert, 78 Sex Shop, Le, 157
Sexual Freedom in Denmark, 108110, 115
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 203 Seyrig, Delphine, 154
Safe, 189, 191, 215 Sgt. Matlovich vs the U.S. Air Force, 89
Sal, 172 Shakespeare, 206
Sanchez, Eduardo, 186 n.12 Shaw Brothers, 264
San Fernando, Miguel, 137 Shes . . . 17 and Anxious, 32
San Francisco International Film Festival, Ships Company, 73
84 Shore, Pauly, 300
Santoni, Espartaco, 146 Showbiz Show, The, 308 n.45
Sarne, Michael, 200, 201 Shurlock, Geoffrey, 82, 92 n.16
Sarris, Andrew, 95 n.74, 260, 261, 262, 264 Sight and Sound, 291, 292
Satans Cheerleaders, 293 Signo de la Muerte, El, 12, 121135, 136, 137,
Saturday Night Live, 298, 308 n.45 140, 141
Savalas, Telly, 144, 146, 153 Silva, Carmen, 156
Saved by the Bell, 271 Silva, Franco, 248
Savini, Tom, 223, 224, 225, 232 Simpsons, The, 265

Index 337
Siqueiros, David, 121 Steele, Barbara, 148, 149
Sirk, Douglas, 191, 196, 207, 209, 210, 211, Steiger, Rod, 80, 83
213, 285 Stein, Ben, 300
Situationists, 14, 256257 Steinman, Joe, 2425
Slasher film, 194, 223, 224, 225, 226, 232 Stephens, Chuck, 197
Sleaze, 4, 5, 6, 9899, 114, 115 Sternberg, Jacques, 274, 275, 276, 281, 294,
Sleep, 214 303
Sleep With Me, 89 Stone, Sharon, 277
Smith, Dick, 224 Stone Roses, The, 260, 270
Smith, Jack, 99 Straight Jacket, 289
Smith, Jeff, 185 n.4 Strange One, The, 11, 72, 7677, 79
Smut Peddler, The, 32 Streamers, 89
Snow, Michael, 242 Streetcar Named Desire, A, 75
Snyder, Marjorie, 82 Streible, Dan, 118 n.17
Sobchack, Vivian, 243, 254 Substitution, 28
Sollima, Sergio, 248 Suburban Confidential, 29
Solomon, Joe, 95 n.71 Suddenly Last Summer, 75
Some Like it Violent, 32 Sundance Channel, 208
Something Weird Video, 119 n.20 Sundance Film Festival, 191, 278
Sommer, Elke, 144, 146, 156, 160 Sunrise, 292
Sontag, Susan, 6, 98 Superstar, The Karen Carpenter Story, 13,
Southern, Terry, 274, 275, 281 190, 194199, 203, 212, 215
Space Thing, 29 Supreme Court, 20, 23, 26, 42 n.3, 43 n.6,
Spacey, Kevin, 305 49
Spade, David, 297, 298, 300, 308 n.45 Swappers, The, 32
Spasmo, 14, 240257 Switchblade Sisters, 259
Spiegel, Sam, 92 n.16
Spielberg, Steven, 6, 7, 287, 291 Take Me Naked, 2930
Spigel, Lynn, 197 Tales of Terror, 153
Springer, Jerry, 107 Tarantino, Quentin, 90, 260, 264, 307 n.29
Spy Magazine, 299, 308 n.46 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 242
Stag films, 23 Taste, 7, 8, 13, 28
Stallone, Sylvester, 300 Taylor, Elizabeth, 81, 82
Stamp, Terence, 78, 92 n.22 Taylor, Greg, 6, 14, 280, 301, 303304
Star is Born, A, 276 Tea and Sympathy, 75
Starsky and Hutch, 265 Tenebrae, 168, 172, 173, 178, 179
Star Trek, 265 Terror at the Opera,167
Star Wars, 270, 283, 291 Terzano, Ubaldo, 161 n.6
Steamroller and the Violin, The, 242 Test Pilot, 73

33 8 Index
Thar She Blows, 26 Un chant damour, 189
Thatcher, Russell, 73 Underwater, 21
Thatcherism, 183 United Theatrical Amusement (uta), 26
Thelma and Louise, 192, 194 Universal Studios, 123124, 138, 157, 208
Thibaut, Professor, 66, 68 Unlawful Entry, 5
Thomas, Kevin, 39 Urueta, Chano, 121, 122, 123, 137
Thomas Crown Affair, The, 4 Ustinov, Peter, 77, 78, 79
Thoreau, Henry David, 212
Thornton, Sarah, 188 n.32 Vale, V., 8
Timecode, 278 Valenti, Jack, 40, 41
Times Square, 44 n.29, 67 Valley of the Dolls, The, 303
Time-Warner, 296 Valli, Alida, 146
Tingler, The, 289, 290 Van Straaten, J. Keith, 265
Tinti, Gabriele, 146 Van Voorhis, Westbrook, 104105
Titanic, 305 Vanguard Criticism, 6, 281
Tizoc, 137 Velde, Donald, 2526
Together, 35 Velvet Goldmine, 13, 189, 190, 191, 199206,
Toi, Ma Nuit, 274 212, 214, 215
Tokyo Story, 292 Venus in Furs, 203
Tolkien, J. R. R., 287 Verdi, Giuseppe, 98, 178
Too Young, Too Immoral!, 32 Vertigo, 292
Top Gun, 90 vh-1, 96, 260, 268
Torosh, Rosita, 247 Victim, 80
Touch of Evil, 287 Victors, The, 80
Trader Hornee, 26 Vidal, Gore, 73, 201
Trial, The, 252 Video formats, 42, 159
Troma Films, 5 Video Nasties, 13, 168, 172, 183, 185 n.3
Tubeway Army, 176, 177 Video Recordings Act, 168, 182, 188 n.28
Tubular Bells, 174 Video Watchdog, 159
Tudor, Andrew, 125, 228 Vietnam Conflict, 89, 111, 194
Tuthill, Bruce, 195 Vixen, 35
25 Greatest Commercials, 260
Twilight Girls, The, 20, 24 Wallon, Henri, 243
2001: A Space Odyssey, 1, 274 Wanda, the Sadistic Hypnotist, 4
Two Weeks in Another Town, 252 Warhol, Andy, 67, 241, 242
Tyler, Parker, 6, 72, 90, 280, 281, 282, 303 Warner Brothers, 40, 81, 82, 294
Warriors, The, 259
Ulmer, Edgar G, 6, 284, 286 Waters, John, 3, 13, 99, 207
Ultra Volume Photo, 26 Waterworld, 286

Index 339
Waugh, Tom, 120 n.21 Wish, Jerome, 88, 95 n.71
Weekend, 84, 274 Wishman, Doris, 2, 1011, 4769, 112113,
Weill, Kurt, 203 288
Weiss, D. B., 14, 263 Without a Paddle, 301
Welch, Raquel, 201, 264 Without a Stitch, 31
Welles, Orson, 104, 157, 203, 204, 205, 252, Wizard of Gore, 223
278, 285, 287 Wolf, Fred, 298
Wertmuller, Lina, 157 Wonder, Stevie, 175
Wes Cravens New Nightmare, 226 Wood, Ed, 114, 115, 159, 190, 195, 196, 288,
Wexner Art Center, 189 292
Whale, James, 123124, 233 Wood, Robin, 12, 127, 131
Whannel, Paddy, 14, 309 n.53 World without Shame, 23
Whip and the Body, 151 Written on the Wind, 207
Whitehouse, Mary, 185 n.3 Wyman, Jane, 207, 208
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, 192
Wilcox, Fred M., 173 X-Files, The, 271
Wild, Raymond, 37 XXX, 305
Wilde, Oscar, 6, 200, 203, 205, 206, 214,
282, 302 Yellow Submarine, 84
Wild in the Streets, 12, 4, 7 Yes, 175, 188 n.21
Wild, Wild West, 278 You, 31
Williams, Linda, 49, 51
Williams, Robin, 269 Zappa, Frank, 307 n.31
Williams, Tennessee, 75 Zax, Andy, 266
Williamson, Kevin, 232 Ziggy Stardust tour, 203
Willingham, Calder, 76 Zinnemann, Fred, 121
Willis, Bruce, 305 iek, Slavoj, 64
Winfrey, Oprah, 264 Zoetrope Studios, 287
Wings, 73

3 40 Index
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sleaze artists : cinema at the margins of taste, style, and politics / Jeffrey Sconce, ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 9780-822339533 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 9780-822339649 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Sensationalism in motion pictures. 2. Sex in motion pictures. I. Sconce, Jeffrey, 1962
pn1995.9.s284s54 2007
791.43'653dc22 2007014128