Interlude: “You’d have to be an insipid, wretched creature not to enjoy the buzz…”
3.4 On viewing a white auteur's orgy
how Wade Davis writes in Passage of Darkness: The ethnobiology of the Haitian zombie, that (quote) “For Americans, in particular, Haiti was like having a little bit of Africa next door, something dark and foreboding, sensual and terribly naughty.”
In our current era, zombie culture is experiencing a renaissance in response to renewed, this time global, fears and insecurities. Zombies had become almost blank texts onto which we project social anxiety about globalisation (and terrorism). New era, new anxieties, new (material) projections. In more recent zombie films from the US, “the infected are no longer considered Americans, but have become unwelcome immigrants, former citizens who have been
‘thirdworldized’” according to Wald (2008:61). This is not only the case in American film though:
Ancuta’s (2016) analysis of the zombie trope in Thai horror films indicates how these narratives are built on “foreignness and the tensions between what is local (Thai) and what is not”
(2016:35) relying heavily on newer tropes of inter-nation-al racial stereotyping. It is clear that the zombie sub-genre, which has since its inception been predicated on notions of (social) inclusion and exclusion, has now explicitly begun to engage with the idea of citizenship, specifically with the idea of the zombie as cypher of non-citizenship.
extends outside the film itself, and onto onto-issues immediately surround the text, and to how we perceive it, such as the overbearing and invasive social – mediated figure of BLaB-as-auteur he pops up in my FB feed on a daily basis)
When the auteur (perhaps out of necessity) becomes ringleader for their own work, even micromanaging how the materiality of the film/stock (his interviews on working in older film formats as opposed to working in digital; his multiple opinion pieces on how we should relate to older, forgotten queer film) to affect the viewer and spur them to the new. “Share the shame”, LaBruce often reminds us in interviews. This materiality-plus-auteur provocation is perhaps parodic of porn but does create distance between the viewer and the trope, especially when:
LaBruce's filmic staging itself explores different themes of belonging in scenes that are so gratuitously explicit-sexual (as opposed to erotic or desirous) that the viewer can't not think they were intended as parodic of established pornographic conventions.
As such, it forms part of a larger range of post-millennial films that reflect changing social norms and values regarding desire, sexual praxis, and love. At a time when clear-cut distinctions between ‘queer’ and ‘mainstream’ films are starting to fade – see, for example, quite a large number of ostensibly queer films which ‘repackage’ queer desire and queer practice into more palatable reterritorialised forms – the films of LaBruce are still unapologetically provocative. His provocation, however, lies in how he simultaneously arouses and repulses his viewer – in essence, how he eschews palatability by amalgamating cinematic contours of desire and the abject in scenes that are at the same time both highly sexual and horrifically abject. For
example, black ooze ejaculate spraying over a hapless bottom’s face (and other OTT – pushes the signification ability of porn conventions to ridiculous heights.) By having his characters intentionally move between zones of pleasure and of abjection in order to navigate (categories of) belonging, LaBruce not only shows repulsion and arousal both to be affective responses to
porn’s heightened materiality (we have to hide porn viewing, we watch it in the dark, we are overly aware of the sounds it makes, we have to delete our search history, lest it leaves traces on our computers) but also how it is reliant on seeing the body as heightened open to stimuli, porous.
Deterritorializing filial categories of belonging, such as national belonging: (to orgy, to end of film). As in his other films (notable 2004’s terrorist-porno, The Raspberry Reich), LaBruce posits an ambitious form of abject citizenship, as a community of zombies go on a recruiting rampage, aiming to cause anarchy and overthrow the conformist status quo, but the final scenes of the nested narrative is still, a white auteur’s orgy.
The thematics of the narrative and the nested-frame structural composition of the film (Otto; or, Up with dead people) speak in concert (and in a sense subverts its own project) about this ambitious form of abject citizenship (however arrested in the filial). After arriving in Berlin, Otto attends an audition for a zombie porno with nationalist and anti-fascist undertones. Intersecting the primary narrative (presented in colour), the viewer is then confronted with a secondary, nested narrative stream in black and white, showing scenes from the zombie porno. (A film- within-a-film, thus.) This nested porno is set in a time of “purple peril”, when a “wave of gay zombies has made everyone even more paranoid than usual about homosexuals”. Its
protagonist is a zombie insurgent leader called Fritz (a “gay Che Guevara of the undead”, leader of “a macabre muhajireen”) who, after his zombie husband is slain by conformist straights, plans an uprising against the heterosexual living. This is done by “[l]uring homosexuals into dark alleys and fucking them into immortality” until he in time creates a “small army of gay zombies”
who want to establish their own republic as they feel that the government is not able, or willing, to protect them from the living heterosexuals. They spend the remainder of the film “recruit[ing]
members by fucking, killing and partially devouring vigorous young men. Not necessarily in that order,” and the film culminates in a manifesto-shattering orgy of ‘Stalinist proportions’.
This explicitly positions the abjectly desiring and decomposing bodies within frameworks of national identity, but crucially they are posited as oppositional subject positions, offering commentary on the futility of contested (and, after Charlottesville, and Senekal, very topical) ways of being, belonging, and citizenship. Or, perhaps not so futile. While the orgy is presented as politically (and symbolically) vacant and vacuous, it is part of a series of events that lead Otto to recognise the futility of oppositional spectacle and sloganeering. He then decides to, in the primary narrative, shed his zombie identity “to move onward, to find some others like me”. This could be read as a line of flight, as a type of political-erotic consciousness awakened by the body’s experiences of the vacuity of the orgy (which is filial homonormativity per excellence: all white male, all pretty, all well-built, all able-bodied, all grunting and groaning with an emphasis on physical assertive intimacy).
This plugs into the film’s larger consideration on the movement between individual becoming and national belonging, with the texts echoing the Deleuze-Guattarian view that society is not
“defined by its contradictions […but rather] by its lines of flight […] There is always something that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organisations, the resonance apparatus and the overcoding machine; things that are attributed to a ‘change in values’, the youth, women, the mad, etc.” (1987: 216). By paying close attention to such qualitative changes in the lattice of organisation, in the slippage and leakage of the film, we might be able to make more sense of the whole as assemblage. That is, by analysing how citizens, based on their race, gender, sexual orientation and sexuo-political inclination, conceptualise their sense of belonging through their bodies, we may be able to improve our understanding of the ever-changing social, cultural and sexual landscapes which inform social and sexual being. Assemblages are, after all, also
performances. As M. Tamboukou reminds us, they are “nomadic modes of existence […] What is critical in the experience of freedom is our movement in between, when we follow lines of flight or escape, the intermezzo, the process of becoming other” (Tamboukou 2008:361).
But if the white auteur can be linked more explicitly to capitalist, colonialist heteropatriarchy, then how these tropes correspond with material reality (the refugee; the hot Charlottesville protestors, Danie on top of an upturned police van. What are sexual zombies, what are political zombies? Why this focus on abject sexuality? What does this correlate with in reality? How are these time-images manipulated (though montage or cut-ups have an impact on the spectator – to draw the spectator into the assemblage beyond the spectacle and thus politicise the entire assemblage?