Interlude: “You’d have to be an insipid, wretched creature not to enjoy the buzz…”
3.2 On seeing LaBruce’s films as texts of belonging
awareness, and then a potentiality for a re-negotiation, of citizenship – a space for potentially seeing ourselves as filmic desire-citizens.
aspect of citizenship, performative, constructed and pointing to the fact that the abject – as a performative role usually assigned by society during marginalisation processes – can also be willingly taken on, temporarily.
Otto; or, Up with dead people’s 'U.S. remake', LAZombie, also directed by LaBruce, was released simultaneously as a set of two films, marketed as two versions of the same narrative;
an arthouse version and a pornographic version – labels which perhaps denote moralistic rather than film-structural description (especially as the arthouse cut is simply the porno sans
penetration or erect penis shots). In LAZombie, LaBruce shuns a number of genre (and film- structural) expectations completely: he does away with Otto; or, Up with dead people’s frame narrative and also with dialogue, while the nested narrative’s pornographic elements are foregrounded, and he builds on the former’s necrophilic undertones by including scenes of sex between the living and the dead. These amorous scenes, though grisly in concept, are shot in the mode of traditional pornography's pacing and setting; the rhythm of the narrative echoing mid-90s Anglo-US porno. In intentionally low-budget schlocky aesthetics: a succession of scened set pieces in a car crash scene, a homeless shelter made of boxes, a meth lab, with interjected scenes where the groggy protagonist ambles aimlessly through the city.
LaBruce cast popular pornographic actor, Francois Sagat, in the lead role and as such plays with the audience’s preconceived receptional schemata, especially that of desire and the abject’s affective responses to film. The boundaries of representation between ‘chosen’
zombiehood and the displaced, family-less/homeless/stateless self is further blurred. The protagonist (of whom the viewer never learns whether he is really a zombie or just a severely schizophrenic man) ambles through LA coded as what traditionally would be termed a
‘homeless person’ (in terms of filmic troping; at one point even pushing a trolley containing all his earthly belongings). Relationality is compromised: The only way he can connect or
communicate with others is by fornicating with them, usually with the dead. As the film’s poster states, he came to “fuck the dead back to life”.
There is more than mere shock/schlock tactics at play here: The deceased are all typified as from categories of collateral damage of capitalism: Automobile accident victims, homeless people who had starved or frozen to death, junkies killed by their dealers. The settings, which in traditional porn is usually highly coded (the frat house, the gym locker room, the public
restroom) here instead resemble the abject spatial offcuts of capitalism: drainage pipes, sewers, sites of car crashes, slop houses – echoing more elegiac scenes from Otto; or, Up with dead people set in abandoned theme parks, waste management plants and abattoirs. The remake thus offers a narrowing focus from ecological, planetary concerns to abject metonymic-
urbanised personae and settings, but, in this way, prefigures – and relativises – atomistic (and abject-leaning) pornography circa 2021.
In tandem with this, notions of belonging socially are activated: To the wealthy/healthy denizens of Los Angeles, the abject protagonist is, in a sense, invisible; the physical violence of Otto; or, Up with dead people thus replaced in LAZombie with the violence of structural invisibility (even when Sagat’s nationality problematizes white/passing), whilst notions of how such an abject state might affect the ability to relate to others are explicitly activated. The remake – coded explicitly in promotional material as ‘the U.S. remake’ – more clearly hones in on national belonging: Although he spends the majority of the narrative in various stages of undress, at one point Sagat’s character steals clothes emblazoned with the American flag, which offers tongue- in-cheek commentary on national identity as performance. A kind of (abject) citizenship as performance, but through commoditised clothing, stolen clothing. (These clothes are also extremely low cut and figure hugging, sexualising him even further. [See still sequence B]) Through the films’ interplay between (sexual) connection and (social) exclusion, notions of the
abject – and abject citizenship – are irrevocably coupled with desire and pleasure, and shown to be intimately connected to larger modulations of (national) belonging.
In a similar way, through different layers – from the intimate to the national – LaBruce first sets up and then disrupts expected oppositionality between the erotic and the abject (especially in the bodily mechanics of, for example, anal-penetrative sex – where he relocates the the
penetrative entry point to a bullet wound, an oozing headshot, a gaping wound in a man's flank), thereby necessitating an exploration of the different ways of seeing, unseeing and re-seeing the abject and desire – not as binary opposites, but as affective responses situated on an abject- erotic continuum, the one always already contained within the other – immanent to it. The abject is in essentia defined as that which I must turn away from so as to create corporeal boundaries between ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ (other, one might say) and so create myself as an “idiosyncratic entity” (Weiss, 1999:44) in the process. Desire, on the other hand, is seen as “a mode of surface contact with things and substances, with a world, that engenders and induces transformations, intensifications, a becoming other” (Grosz, 1995:249, emphasis added).
Of specific focus is the effect this intertwined nature has on the spectatorial viewers of LaBruce’s films, and on how this activates rethinkings of the different ways in which citizens belong and relate to larger groupings. Jacques Rancière writes in The Emancipated Spectator (Rancière, 2009) on distinctions between political/politicised spectators and the spectator who simply takes part in the spectacle. This distinction between active and passive positionalities vis-à-vis spectatorial engagement is of fundamental importance in how it relates what we come to expect from the text. In LaBruce’s films, thematic dualism between the abject and desire manifests on structural level in various ways: in a spectatorial pushing and pulling of the viewer’s bodily reactions, manifest in alternating identification/alienation with the bodies on screen, as a textual straddling of two genres (bodyhorror and porn), and as a split between two
narratives, each with its own alter-protagonist (Otto in the frame narrative and Fritz [A short contextualisation for the characters will have to come earlier in the study] in the nested narrative – two characters perhaps amalgamating in the unnamed protagonist of LAZombie).
LaBruce’s use of the textual double and split narrative fragments – splits – how the viewer
‘reads’ the films. The various (sometimes disparate) modes of narrativization, which stretch the skin of the film close to breaking point, alienating-intriguing the viewer to the extent that our emotional and affective investment in the film is at risk of being compromised. These pairings of identification/alienation affects, the push-pull of arousal and repulsion, have a specific effect on the viewer, as it mirrors social process of inclusion and exclusion, and BLAB necessitate looking anew/askew at the relation between abject desire, genre/film-structural considerations, and the inclusion-exclusion pas de deux of citizenship. Based on a shift in textual engagement, from asking what the films mean, to asking what really happens to the viewer of LaBruce’s films [a second, nested, provocation: what happens when that rather generic-vague 'viewer' is give the adjective “Afrikaner”?] and how it activates a re-seeing of the unsettling, politicising, bodily engagement of queer film.