a body scourged by sailors
by Douglas
Messerli
Kenneth
Anger (director) Fireworks / 1947
Kenneth
Anger (director) Scorpio Rising / 1963
Most
of experimental gay filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s works are an acquired taste. If
you love leather, bikes, and boys who spend hours pulling on their denims, slicking
back their hair, slipping into tight leather jackets, checking out the outline
of their protruding cocks, and zooming up their motors, you will adore Scorpio
Rising (1963). Sorry to say, as sometimes sexy as these images are they
don’t quite put me into cinematic ecstasy.
The sailors here serve as a kind of
double-edged sword, beautiful boys in summer whites to whom the unnamed 17-year
old Anger is simultaneously highly attracted but also repelled. Anger himself
has noted that during the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 he had witnessed sailors in
uniform chasing down Mexican men and attacking them.
Accordingly, one of the standard symbols
of homosexual eroticism is presented in this film as also a possibly dangerous
force to which one must sacrifice oneself before being able to partake in the
sexual joys they represent.
The dreamer, in fact, has already
sacrificed himself or at least been crucified by the men in white before the
film’s very first frame, showing the young man (played by Anger) being carried
into his bedroom like the dead Christ as depicted in the many historical pietàs.
Placed rather gently upon his bed, the dreamer gradually awakens to recall his
soldier-boy re-encounters through photographs of the sea men and himself. In a
somewhat witty moment, the boy appears suddenly to be getting an erection until
he pulls the projectile of a male African sculpture from under the covers.
He dresses and tentatively crosses the
room to enter a door marked “Gents” as if it were a urinal filled with sexual
possibilities or, in this case, possibly even a kind of inverted version of the
typical carney invitation of “Girls, Girls, Girls.”
The boy enters only to find himself in a sort
of bar, surely something close to a gay bar wherein a muscular sailor, much
like a hoochie-coochie girl, performs his tricks, which in this case instead of
dancing consists stripping off his shirt to flex his muscles and pose.
A bit like an intoxicated carnival goer,
the boy’s eyes open wide as he admires the man’s arms, chest, and back. But
when he proceeds to offer the sailor his cigarette—an act extraordinarily
similar to Jean Genet’s prison-set offerings of his 1950 short film Un Chant
d’amour—which instead of the sailor accepting the offering, results in his
taking umbrage, attacking the handsome kid and using a flaming bundle of sticks
with which he lights the boy’s symbolic phallus.
But even that somewhat calmer act is
interrupted as a phalanx of sailors gradually moving forward as if in some
mysterious military operation or even a dance in which the males maneuver in
pairs, trios, and quartets. This too also quickly grows violent as they near
the young gawker, chasing after him and pinning his body to the ground,
whereupon one stuffs his fingers into his nose while the others beat him with
metal chains in an obvious allusion to sado-masochistic sex, before reaching
into the inner recesses of his bodily organs, to discover his heart which
appears as a ticking timer. The blood pouring from his bodily orifices which
has resulted from the sailors’ physical attacks is soon after washed away with
milk, which clearly reminds us of the substance of motherly nourishment and,
obviously, a stand-in for urine, the male fluid often employed in S&M sex.
In another witty moment, one sailor
unbuttons his pants crotch only to reveal a Roman candle shooting its contents
into space instead of a penis filled with semen (all puns applicable).
The
dreamer, now wearing a decorated Christmas tree upon his head, as if decked out
in drag somewhat like Carmen Miranda, moves toward the burning fireplace where
several of the sailors’ photos, obviously a reference to early versions of
pornography, are burning, as if the sexual excitement of the boy has
spontaneously brought the objects of his desire into the realm of his own body
heat.
Back in in the sack once more, he is seen
sleeping with a man whose head is radiating light, as if the film itself, just
like the photographs, has caught fire within its projector.
Perhaps Anger’s later musings about this
flick, which he claims was shot in his own Beverly Hills home with sailors he’d
hired over a long weekend while his parents were away on a visit, says
everything we need to know about his freshman work: “This flick is all I have
to say about being seventeen, the United States navy, American Christmas, and
the Fourth of July.”
One would think that a film such as this,
with no apparent nudity, no male-on-male kissing, or even simulation of
homosexual sex could hardly be subject to any obscenity charges.
Yet upon showing the film at Los Angeles’
Coronet Theatre, the owner Raymond Rohauer was arrested and charged for
presenting homosexual content with William C. Doran, as the prosecutor,
focusing on what he repeatedly described as “the penis scene,” evidently the
comic moment when the sailor’s open crotch revealed a firecracker. Rohauer was
found guilty with a fine and three years’ probation in 1958.
Appealed by civil rights attorney Stanley
Fleishman to the California Supreme Court, the judges found homosexuality to be
a valid subject of artistic expression, reversing all previous charges.
Fleishman later defended and won the case against Anger’s Scorpio Rising.
Los
Angeles, September 27, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema blog (September
2020).
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