Bodies Are Extreme Things

PUT YOUR CHARMING PRESUPPOSITIONS IN ESCROW FOR A MOMENT.

LAST NIGHT, OVER DRINKS WITH TUESDAY WELD IN A BAR COOL AS THE FROST OF TUESDAY'S LIPSTICK, COOL AS THE VERB TO BE, I DECIDED THAT TOO MANY SEE THE BLURRING OF FANTASY AND REALITY AS A TROUBLING MATTER INSTEAD OF AN EROTIC DRIVE; SOMETHING LIKE SEXUALITY, IF I COULD REMEMBER WHAT THAT WAS. I AM NOT ONE TO CRAVE PAIN; WAKING UP IS ENOUGH THANK YOU. I NEVER DEMAND THE TOO REAL; IT IS ALL AROUND ME. TUESDAY AND I ARE NOT ONES TO INSIST ON TRUTH, ON VERITÉ, ON AN URGENT SEPARATION OF FICTION FROM FACT, MOVIES FROM REEL, I MEAN, REAL LIFE. WE RENT TRUTH, WE DO VERITÉ, THE WAY YOU RENT A TRICK OR DO SOMEONE. LAST NIGHT AFTER A NEBUCHADNEZZAR OF ICY GIBSONS, WHILE WATCHING SCRUB YOUNG MEN EYE ONE ANOTHER, WHEN I TRIED TO DISCUSS SEX AND VIOLENCE, CAREERS ON THE ROCKS, THE FICKLE MACHINERY OF FAME, WHEN I MADE DIGRESSIONS ON CRACKED-UP BEAUTY, THE ONLY THING TUESDAY WELD WOULD SAY WAS 'GOOEY.' I HAD HEARD HER SAY MANY THINGS, OTHER NIGHTS. I HAD HEARD HER SAY 'KNOCKED UP', I HAD HEARD HER SAY 'STRUNG-OUT', I'D HEARD HER MUTTER LANGUAGE SO BLUE I MISTOOK IT FOR A POOL, BUT ALL SHE SAID LAST NIGHT WAS 'GOOEY.' IT BROUGHT TEARS TO MY EYES THE WAY SHE SAID IT. BEFORE COCKTAILS GOOEY WELD AND I HAD WATCHED SUPER 81Ž2: A CAUTIONARY BIO-PIC BY BRUCE LABRUCE. NO ONE ASKED GOOEY FOR AN AUTOGRAPH AS WE STOOD IN LINE FOR TICKETS. NO ONE HAD ASKED HER FOR AN AUTOGRAPH IN SUCH A LONG TIME. WE TOOK NOTES AS WE WATCHED THE FLICK. WE MADE LISTS. WE WERE CONSPIRATORIAL. LATER MAYBE I WAS TOO DRUNK TO UNDERSTAND, PERHAPS HER WORDS WERE SLURRED, BUT TUESDAY'S ONLY SAYING 'GOOEY' WAS NOT A BAD RESPONSE: IN FACT WHEN I CAME TO, AFTER OUR NIGHT OF HOOCH, I ADMIRED ITS BALDNESS, ITS BLUNT PRECISION. I THINK WHAT SHE MEANT WAS THEY'RE STICKY SUBJECTS - FANTASY/REALITY, I/YOU, FAME/OBLIVION - NOT DICHOTOMIES, BUT THE SAME THING SEEN FROM DIFFERENT VANTAGES. BUT WHEN I TELEPHONED TO CLARIFY, HER SECRETARY SAID SHE'D HAVE TO TAKE A MESSAGE. MS WELD WASN'T ACCEPTING ANY CALLS. AS IF SHE WERE BUSY. AS IF SHE HAD A LIFE. I PITY HER SOMETIMES. LIKE RIGHT NOW.

Viewing Super 81/2 with Gooey Weld:

My notes: Starts with Bruce in a straight (ha ha) jacket, ends with a crying jag 'for Judy.' Judy Chicago. Johnny Eczema gropes his basket, holds his shaft in place. I love boys basket grabbing, shifting their shaft. Boys gotta have something to hold onto, that's the difference between boys and girls. Cat fight. Catty fag fight. Pornographic melodrama is the fag narrative: if you have a fag and he has a story and it doesn't include pornographic melodrama, why bother, shut up. Punk dyke graveyard frolic. Why don't more auteurs have vomit scenes? (John Waters!) Jewellery on boys with tight bods is nice. Porn is cute. Watching is nice. 'Sexploitation. Blaxploitation. Bruceploitation.' Shooting wild. Pursed puss, crossed legs. More actors should forget acting and read cue cards.

Gooey's notes: Mr Bruce is Maria Wyeth, I merely played her. Anthony Perkins is dead. Paul Lynde is dead. Too many people are dead. Then again, after certain parties, I feel that not enough people are dead. Mr Bruce is felicitous with the subjunctive, pursuant of grammatical niceties, elegant with titles. Some of his titles: I Am Curious (Gay); Pay Him As He Lays; I Was a Fugitive from a Gang Bang; Pretty in Porn a.k.a. Double Mint Fuck; Ass School; No Skin Off My Ass; My Hustler My Self; Ride, Queer, Ride. Mr Bruce doesn't care for continuity which is exactly why he doesn't care to measure up to reality; why he can joke about it. How many men dream of being ploughed by their wives with strap-ons? More than would admit it. Idea: straight men don't have assholes, they are assholes. I need a drink. J'adore Scott Thompson!!! Memo to Scott: consider sperm donation. Ah, the 70s, I used to masturbate to a David Cassidy poster, too. Career care car crash.

In Super 81/2, 'Bruce' lives in the Weld building. Although he says good morning to a Nathalie Wood photo, the movies he watches star Elizabeth Taylor and Tuesday, with the occasional sex film or cable access goings-on. At times it is difficult to distinguish the difference between what is interesting about watching Elizabeth and Tuesday and what is interesting about watching men do other men, pee on each other, 69. One of Tuesday's movies that Bruce watches, and it gave me great pleasure to watch Tuesday watch Bruce watch her, is Play It As It Lays, based on the remarkable novel by the remarkable Joan Didion. Tuesday is Maria Wyeth, she does not merely play her - but in a different way than Bruce is Bruce and doesn't merely play him - and Anthony Perkins is BZ, who at the end of the movie, the end of the book, O.D.s on Seconal while Maria dozes. In an amazing scene from this amazing 70s flick, Maria (Tuesday) drives very fast while shooting desert highway signs with a handgun. 'Bruce' means having gotten to that point - driving fast, shooting highway signs - but without a car and without a gun.

Gooey and I agree: mostly the swish of his hips and his gorgeous voice through it all: black vinyl's purred honey. Bruce does not like 'losing control of the tone of his voice,' but he is famous for it. The sex of the sound of his voice.

From an interview.

Bruce: Yes.

Bruce: Yes.

Bruce: I don't think I ever had another name. Were you ever named something else?

Bruce: I'm not sure that matters. There is a legion aspect to everyone.

Bruce: I seem to delight in excess, in exaggeration.

Bruce: There is no seeming or else it is all seeming. Certainly it is all excess, all exaggeration.

Bruce: What do you see when you look in the mirror? The camera?

Bruce: You. Something extreme. Bodies are extreme things.

Bruce: [garbled] had sex with [garbled]. There have been so many rumours about his 'marriage.'

Bruce: The rumours are true. Anyway, most of the time they are. Rumours determine Holly-wood. Hollywood without rumours is like a hairdresser's without fags.

Bruce: Do you work out?

Bruce: ?

In his most recent films, No Skin Off My Ass and Super 81/2, Bruce, as sissy, as hairdresser, and as Bruce, has-been porn star and director, complains. He fawns over silent punks. He whines. He orders his boyfriend about, he reprimands. Bruce marches for no cause, he walks his dog on a leash. Snarly, flippant, porno prima donna, he has fits, he kicks and hisses. He casts himself as some anal virgin's ass-double. He licks the shaved teddy heads of young hung men, he fucks, is fucked, rims, is rimmed. He dismisses anyone he feels like with a verb and a cigarette. He drinks, and he blows smoke in your face. He minces, bitches, swishes, dishes, drones. He wears tight black jeans, applies make-up, watches movies, watches boys move. He employs fluffers. He discusses fluffers. He fluffs. He lisps, baby-sits. He stomps, shampoos, draws a bath, fists, and reveres severe lesbians. He jerks off, sucks cock, is into bondage, into handcuffs, chains and piercings, into Karen Carpenter, into Nico, into Sandy Dennis, into skinny. He vindicates the good name of evil, the good name of connoisseurship, of dandy, of renegade, of aesthete. Nasty and milquetoast, fey and fierce, he exaggerates, he threatens. He discombobulates. He does everything a fag should want to.

Some lines:

'Look, if you want to be in my life, you have to be in my movie.'

'The whole goddamed world's a fag, don't you know that yet?'

'Do you have AIDS? Yes. I have a publicity person, a press agent, and a secretary.'

'There's only one word to describe you - lazy, unmotivated and selfish.'

'I love it when guys suck on my titties.'

'I just like pornography.'

'Sex is a very mysterious thing. Do you know what I mean?'

'There's lipstick on this glass - you're fired.'

'Comeback - I hate that word. It's a return.'

'I know how exhausting exploiting people can be.'

By casting himself as a porn star turned porn director whose career is on the rocks and whose boyfriend turns tricks to support him and then leaves to be a banker; as 'reluctant pornographer' whose fantasies are about cracking up, being the next gay celebrity to die of AIDS, and ending it all in a glamorous car crash; as someone who has patterned his life after Butterfield 8, and incorporated Mahogany, Paranoia and Contempt, Bruce thwarts the expected.

In 'Bruce' a movie by Googie, his rival filmmaker in Super 81/2, Bruce sits on a bed in a bedroom. His boyfriend's bare butt can be seen beneath the clear plastic sheets. The walls are covered in silver foil. A poster for Andy Warhol's Blue Movie, Andy blank and bewigged blond, hangs on the wall over it all. About Googie, 'Bruce' says: 'If life were the Factory, I was playing Edie to her Viva.' Andy Warhol's portraits of 'stars' were only a process of depicting the self that wasn't there because it was everywhere. The dismissal of surface and sheen in Warhol's work might be a dismissal of the only things that matter. What if we begin with the surface to end there? Where do you think depth is? How deep do you want it to be? Bruce's work may seem, like Warhol's, to be about himself, when really he is showing the pornography of you.

Warhol's lesson was to do it then move on. Do screen tests of anyone at all and show them as your movie; poke the body in as many ways as possible; trust your own intelligence even if to others it seems contradictory, useless, obscene, repetitive, mean; the worst idea of yours is better than the best idea of anyone else's because it is yours. If one of your stars has had too many fits, use someone else in a wig (in Super 81/2, Stacy Friedrich as Googie does G.B. Jones from No Skin Off My Ass). If you hear a good line, see a good scene, redo it, steal it, use it, make it your own.

Instead of primly observing generic stability, Bruce ransacks (I am tempted to say buttfucks) the history of film - star vehicles, comebacks, exploitation flicks, pornos, cinema verité, melodramas, melodramas as verité, documentaries, docudramas, videos, 'home' movies, silents, 'art' films - as well as its formal structures and techniques. Bruising limits, cruising anything, claiming it all, denying everything and nothing, 'Bruce' says: 'I gained a certain notoriety in underground experimental art circles, owing largely, as I understand it, to my camera style. The excessive use of zooms and swish pans and my unique manipulation of focus were cited in particular. I guess you could say not knowing how to operate a camera, dropping the camera frequently, and not being able to afford a new prescription for my contact lenses worked to my advantage.'

Bruce is daringly cavalier with stereotypes. Homo is refracted back into its too often maligned sources: swishy queens, rapacious hustlers, killer dykes, hairdressers, crazed fags, obsessed fans, dim hunks, bitches (of both sexes), promiscuous whores (of both sexes), leather advocates, pierced homocore punks, confused bis, closety wrecks, S/M aficionados... I await Bruce's forays into the lives of murderous florists, vapid male models, paedophiliac booksellers. Bruce is influenced and enthralled by, even somewhat in awe of staunch women: lesbians, librarians, sisters, grammarians, girl gangs, pussycats, strong spinsters, kittens with whips. It is about time faggots admitted, 'the second best thing to being a dyke is being a fag.' Edifying the 70s by remembering Edie Sedgwick and Little Edie Bouvier Beale, 'Bruce' says: 'The future was the bottom of the swimming pool; Grey Gardens awaited me.'

About self-indulgence let me say this: if I do not indulge myself, who will? Will you? Tuesday won't. Tuesday still doesn't return my calls. She doesn't budge, she doesn't indulge. These various methods of knowing the other have ended where, resulted in what? What do you know about indulging the other?

On a train bound for who knows where, tiny Jean Genet saw a deserted shack of a man turn into a resplendent penthouse (humpy man, succulent member) and return to shack state; and Genet saw he was just looking into his own eyes looking at this shack, looking at his own heart - some drum - looking at this shack, the gaze amid the vistas of the self so rarely taken in. 'If each envelope previously sheathes a single identity, each envelope is individual and succeeds in establishing in us an opposition that seems irremediable, in creating an innumerable variety of individuals who are equivalent: each-other. Perhaps the only precious, the only real thing that each man had was this very singularity: "his" moustache, "his" eyes, "his" clubfoot, "his" harelip. And what if his only source of pride were the size of "his" prick? But this gaze went from the unknown traveller to me, and what of the immediate certainty that each-other were only one, both either he or I and he and I?' Bruce's work is influenced by Genet's but isn't so testily butch. His transvaluations are less stable, like desire's. Watching Bruce in his movies causes vertigo. Instead of showing, saying, doing, making what everyone already knows (a touching coming-out story, sober disease-of-the-week drama), Bruce throws a star fit not opting for safety or the constipation of self-censorship. Bruce returns, thank god, homo to the strange, the scary, the lavender. To accept anything else assures zombification.

Those overly interested in movie stars, fashion and trivia, the totality of STAR - not just good perfs, but every random occurrence (photo ops, misdemeanours, daily disaster, career flux), every stray perfumed rumour - are often dismissed as soft, not serious. Doughy. Such dismissal is too often easily accessorised with a denigration of the feminine. Recent arguments - not really argued, mind you, but preached - about the dangers of 'art', are nothing but a putsch of the self-government of the imagination. None of the so-called responses to this Daddy-O reprimand of 'art' have been strong enough, clear enough. Instead of another parade for the good, for the kind, for the family, for the retarded, for the authentic, how refreshing, how astringent, to see Bruce's work about refusal, about all kinds of fakery - the fakery of you, the fakery of me, the fakery of art, the fakery of biography, the fakery of self.

There should be more violence. I want to see gratuitous fucking. I'm a homewrecker. Before departing I want to use every word in the dictionary, employ every arcane mark of punctuation, burst timpani with my more than three-octave range. I am Elizabeth Taylor and I am going to have my limo run over you, back up and do it again upon my command, Repetez; I am going to gain every pound back and sit on your face; the glory of it all will be filmed in Todd-AO and screened at the local cineplex; for this, I will receive my third and fourth Oscars (Best Actress; Best Original Screenplay) and use them as dildos that night, after the gala, after the soirée, forgetting Larry - I will call it Forgetting Larry. I am Sandy Dennis, a fright, and my wig is a holocaust. I rim Ethan Hawke. I was Michael Bergin's butt-double. I taught Whitney Houston coprophagy. I was there when the cavalry never came. I was the one who called you Mongoloid. I go for years without speaking. I confuse the living and the dead on purpose. I say adults before children, intelligence before retardation. I will be here before dawn, after dusk. I am losing it right before your very eyes. I am a sequinned, pink-eyed, blue-tongued has-been; my gaze fixed to the back of your neck like electrodes, I will stalk your waking and sleeping until annihilation seems a long lost sweetness.

Guerrilla. Samizdat. There are days when living is an aggressive act - just getting on, just remaining. The countless petty indecencies we commit for one another every day, every evening.

I just love it. I love it to death.