The Believer Logger - Brucito Subversivo — Brucito Subversivo 20/07/2014 18:04

The Believer Logger - Brucito Subversivo — Brucito Subversivo 20/07/2014 18:04 BELIEVERMAG.COM SUBSCRIBE STORE CURRENT ISSUE Enjoy the special features below and please consider subscribing to the Believer. MAY 29, 2014 BRUCITO SUBVERSIVO Photograph of Bruce LaBruce by Maxime Ballesteros http://logger.believermag.com/post/87209818064/brucito-subversivo Page 1 sur 20 The Believer Logger - Brucito Subversivo — Brucito Subversivo 20/07/2014 18:04 An Interview with Auteur of Pornology, Bruce LaBruce “Now raise your hand up out of the grave. That’s it. Raise it as a protest against all the injustices perpetrated against your kind. Raise it in solidarity with the weak and the lonely and the dispossessed of the earth, for the misfits and the sissies and the plague-ridden faggots who have been buried and forgotten by the heartless, merciless, hetero-fascist majority. Rise! Rise!” So declares Medea Yarn, the strident radical filmmaker in Bruce LaBruce’s film-within-a-film, Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008). A zombie-political-porno, which, like most of La Bruce’s work, arouses, amuses, and repels at once, Otto is an incisive critique of gay consumer culture, and its mindless assimilation of bourgeoisie values. The critique has remained fundamental to the director’s queercore aesthetic since the mid-1980s, when BLAB (the artist’s chosen acronym) developed his prescient queer punk zine, J.D.s (co-edited with G.B. Jones). http://logger.believermag.com/post/87209818064/brucito-subversivo Page 2 sur 20 The Believer Logger - Brucito Subversivo — Brucito Subversivo 20/07/2014 18:04 Not surprisingly, his first feature films, No Skin off My Ass (1993), Super 8½(1993), and Hustler White (1996), with their B-movie depictions of taboo desire, from a skinhead fetish to gang rape and amputee sex, cemented BLAB’s cult status as the reigning daddy of queercore film. That they also conjured the anarchic ideals of writers like Georges Bataille and Jean Genet, who similarly viewed sexual deviance as political transgression, was of course lost on many, but their trademark mix of high and low, of emotional tenderness and abject fetish, still registers as mutiny. Certainly, anyone looking for the money shot pleasures of commercial porn will be disappointed. BLAB thwarts as he titillates for the same reason he reflexively calls attention to his medium, mashing up genres and referencing other films: to challenge our expectations, and force us to consider our spectatorship. The trope of the social outcast in later films—be it vampire, prostitute, vagabond or terrorist—functions in http://logger.believermag.com/post/87209818064/brucito-subversivo Page 3 sur 20 The Believer Logger - Brucito Subversivo — Brucito Subversivo 20/07/2014 18:04 much the same way, as what initially provokes our disgust often begets our (eventual) sympathy. Ironic, then, that his notoriety comes from his reputation as a pornographer, when he’s a provocateur first and foremost. True subversives, though, often function as Trojan horses, their weapons necessarily concealed. No wonder his Cuban husband calls him, half-jokingly, Brucito Subversivo—a moniker which, if not as Warholian as his elected name, evokes the same provocative irony. Angélique Bosio’s aptly titled documentary about BLAB’s life and work, The Advocate for Fagdom (2011), traces the origins of his identification with “the misfits and the sissies and the plague-ridden faggots” from his rural upbringing as the son of farmers in Ontario, Canada to the identity politics of his film school years—both experiences he found equally alienating. In fact, many of his films satirize the totalitarian tendencies of the politically correct, exposing their hypocrisies with the same campy vigor reserved for the right wing ideologues (and gay assimilationists). To this end, the line between homage and satire can get very blurred, which is what makes his films, as Gus van Sant points out in Bosio’s doc, so complex, and yet purposely crude. The Raspberry Reich (2004), with its parade of cheeky, nonsense slogans —”The Revolution is my boyfriend!”, “Cornflakes are counter-revolutionary!”, “Fuck me for the Revolution!”—is a perfect example. Titled after both the communist sexologist Wilhelm Reich and a term coined by Gudrun Ensslin (leader of the infamous 1970s German terrorist group Red Army Faction) to designate the tyrannical consumer society, the story imagines a contemporary version of the group, led by a sixth-generation Gudrun who calls her comrades to action in The Homosexual Intifada. Heterosexual herself, she declares that masturbation is counter-revolutionary, and commands her followers to fuck each other publicly (though one manages to jack off in front of a giant poster of Che Guevera in a controversial scene that offended many). It’s a sly dance in the slipstream between revolutionary ideals and their compromised practice, and a slapstick study in “radical chic.” BLAB explains: “The problem with http://logger.believermag.com/post/87209818064/brucito-subversivo Page 4 sur 20 The Believer Logger - Brucito Subversivo — Brucito Subversivo 20/07/2014 18:04 working within the capitalist system by making these radical political movements alluring, and even sexy, is that it plays into what Marx called commodity fetishism.” When the group of avowed vegans goes through a Burger King drive-through, the kidnapped son of a wealthy industrialist in the trunk, the parody is complete, and as with all BLAB’s work, the explicit sex is never an end to itself. Frequently, elements of the autobiographical are conflated with campy pornographic story lines openly culled from other sources, employing the strategy of détournement to recontextualize their meaning. Super 8 ½ (1993) is the most obvious instance of this, featuring a failing triple-X director named Bruce that parodies Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece, a semi-autobiographical comedy-drama about a filmmaker in creative crisis. A poster from Warhol’s Blue Movie (1969) and clips of Elizabeth Taylor from Butterfield 8 (1960) round out the film’s self- conscious quotations, which the platinum-banged, sunglass-wearing protagonist cheekily celebrates in his declaration: “There’s no copyright on a good line. When I used to direct pornos, I’d steal titles, dialogues, entire plots. Everything came from other movies.” http://logger.believermag.com/post/87209818064/brucito-subversivo Page 5 sur 20 The Believer Logger - Brucito Subversivo — Brucito Subversivo 20/07/2014 18:04 Bruce LaBruce, Super 8 1/2, 1993 If Super 8 1/2 is also a campy rebuke to the notoriety of early films, particularly critics unable to reconcile BLAB’s hardcore, B-movie aesthetic with his complex political and avant-garde leanings, recent films like Gerontophilia (2013) and Pierrot Lunaire (2014) offer a more subtle redress. So much so that, in an ironic turnabout the artist will no doubt exploit in some future film, these works have been interpreted as evidence that BLAB has gone soft. The interview that follows attempts to explore these reactions as well as the films themselves, and their place in BLAB’s evolving legacy. As fellow filmmaker and friend John Waters points out, regardless of what others may think, Bruce LaBruce is an auteur, perpetually ahead of his time. As such, his “pornology,” a term he devised to distinguish his work from pornography, will never achieve mainstream success. Queercore to the end, his films’ http://logger.believermag.com/post/87209818064/brucito-subversivo Page 6 sur 20 The Believer Logger - Brucito Subversivo — Brucito Subversivo 20/07/2014 18:04 celebration of sexual deviance, social misfits, subversive love, and all things politically incorrect refuses that aspiration anyway, standing instead as testament to film that can’t be packaged for the masses. Vive la révolution! —Jane Harris I. FIGHTING AGAINST NATURE JANE HARRIS: With films like Super 8 1/2, Hustler White and Skin Flick/Skin Gangs, you became quite infamous for controversial pornographic, queercore storylines involving necrophilia, neo-Nazi skinheads, etc. While these films were complex allegories for political and social commentary, many critics missed this aspect in the face of their more disturbing and salacious aspects. While being about taboos, the films became taboo. Your recent work seems to have moved away from such overtly provocative and explicit narratives. Were you trying to avoid more (mis)interpretation/negative reception? http://logger.believermag.com/post/87209818064/brucito-subversivo Page 7 sur 20 The Believer Logger - Brucito Subversivo — Brucito Subversivo 20/07/2014 18:04 Bruce LaBruce, courtesy Peres Projects BRUCE LABRUCE: No, not at all. In fact, Pierrot Lunaire, a film I made concurrently with Gerontophilia, has a controversial “queercore” storyline with a bit of pornographic content. It’s an adaptation of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, which itself is a kind of precursor to “queercore” inasmuch as it is an atonal work, radical for its time, with very violent, disturbing imagery provided by 21 poems by Albert Giraud. The male character Pierrot is always played by a woman, lending it a subversive and modern gender twist. This is why I applied to it the true story of a female-to-male transsexual, who serves as a kind of allegory for all gender radicals and outcasts driven to extremes by the disapproval and hostility of the dominant order. For me, Pierrot Lunaire is quite consistent with my previous work. With Gerontophilia, I also chose a character—a young man with a fetish for the elderly—who goes against the grain of society, but I approached it in a more strictly http://logger.believermag.com/post/87209818064/brucito-subversivo Page 8 sur 20 The Believer Logger - Brucito Subversivo — Brucito Subversivo 20/07/2014 18:04 romantic and somewhat mainstream narrative style to make it more accessible to a wider audience. But for me, the message of the film is still subversive, even using a more gentle and subtle approach.

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