the museum of mayhem
by Douglas Messerli
Charles Ludlam (director) Museum of Wax / 1981-1987, remastered 2010
In the late 1970s or early 1980s (several sources suggest the project was begun in 1981), Charles Ludlam worked on a silent film Museum of Wax, a work left unfinished at the time of his death of complications from AIDS in 1987.
The incomplete work was shown only three
or four times after; but in 2010, singer/songwriter Anthony Hegarty along with
the New York Film Forum approached Ludlam’s surviving partner Everett Quinton,
who reported that both Museum of Wax and another of Ludlam’s film’s The
Sorrows of Dolores were still sitting on shelf in his closet. Making a
digital transfer of the works and adding music by composer Peter Golub, the
Film Forum showed the films on February 22 of that year for the first time in
20 years.
A mix of elements from the horror, comedy,
and melodrama genres, along with moments of vaudeville-like slap-stick routines,
Ludlam’s film is a highly fragmented and a fairly incoherent work, but its
major concerns are quite apparent. Using his own and his cast’s talent as
quick-change artists, Ludlam and others appear at various moments in numerous “drag”
outfits, mixing their sudden appearances and disappearances with the wax heads
and other body parts along with the wax tableaux of the Coney Island wax museum
to suggest mayhem.
Other subplots include a bearded villain,
evidently the owner of the museum, desperate to rape any woman that crosses his
path, including the ticket-taker and an elderly woman visitor in a wheelchair.
He is finally stabbed to death with a pair of scissors by a 1920s-style actress
who might remind one of Sunset Boulevard’s Nora Desmond, an action that parallels
one of the museum’s panoramas. To hide the body, she makes up the cadaver to
appear in the Dr. Einstein exhibit.
At another point our prisoner hero meets
up with a second escaped prisoner and engages in a lengthy kiss among the body museum
body parts with his prisoner-lover, reminding me of the two prisoners of love
in John Requa and Glenn Ficarra’s 2009 film I Love You Phillip Morris.
The actress also kisses another woman
for several moments.
In short, one of Ludlam’s major themes
in this work is gender and sexual confusion, as well as questioning whether
these figures are among the living or the dead.
Do the two kissing women, one of them a
male in drag, represent a lesbian couple or a heterosexual pair who just happen
to be cross-dressing?
Were the two prisoners lovers in prison
or aspects of the same self who have just suddenly come across one other in
their zany escapades as escape artists? And what is the director suggesting by
posing his kissing male prisoners in front of a display of doll-like wax
children being brought into life? Do they represent the offspring that this
couple will never be able to produce, forcing us to ask if they are prisoners
of their own gender?
Similarly, are some of the figures we
encounter simply visiting the museum or are they variations of the museum’s wax
figures momentarily come to life as in the later commercial film fantasy, Shawn
Levy’s Night at the Museum (2006).
If one cannot quite argue that Ludlam’s film
is profound or even as much fun as his numerous theatrical offerings, this
black-and-white piece of cinema is stall enchanting. And we cannot help but
ponder, given Ludlam’s highly expressive face, that he surely might have made a
great silent film star. At least, before he died, he gave himself the
opportunity to be just that.
Los Angeles, March 10, 2021
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (March 2021).
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