Cinema is a powerful art form. It can bewitch us and submerse us in a completely different reality, making us experience incredible sensations through the sheer power of image and sound, and making us understand different perspectives from our own. Cinema is incredibly powerful in showing us different realities from our own, and that is why it is an incredible medium to portray queer stories. This is the objective of this event, to bring attention to queer films throughout the years, bringing attention to the stories they tell.
| Release Dates: 10 October 1969 (Denmark) Genre: short, music IMDb Rating: 6.9 Director: Kenneth Anger Cast: Ernie Allo, Bruce Byron, Frank Carifi |
Roaring motors, black leather jackets. Machines as well-groomed as their toned bodies. In a dirty garage, the radio softly plays a song of desperate love. Blue rough jeans, like the finest blue velvet. An insidious presence hovers above, intoxicating, and ominous. Mechanical parts scattered across the floor, as he plays with his metallic toy of roaring menace. In the air an electric menace crackles, masculinity with ill intent. Rebels without a cause, James Dean bad-boy types, lonely and alienated. Misunderstood, as they say.
Toxic restlessness brews inside their longing bodies, untamed sex, and unbridled violence mixed into the vilest potion. The heatwave of methamphetamine rushes through their bloodstream, raging flashes of red bursting across their sight. Urban streets with urban knights with no kings. Lost in a concrete jungle, a trap of modernity. Souls turning red with a fanatical consumption of hatred. Drugs and intoxicating masculinity; empowered by the unholy rock & roll beat bursting from the rebellious machine. Young male anger, so lost and aimless, in a collective madness.
Party lights shine over orgiastic meetings, walls of sanity torn asunder. The smell of mingled sweat and black leather. Reality and hateful fantasy, indistinct. It is an irresistible power, one cannot fight it, doomed to veer out of control. So, take that white powder, and let these fools rush in – embrace the queer fever dream of violent and insane pop spectacle about to unfold.
With increasingly feverish editing and shot through a spectacle of madness, Scorpio Rising is undeniably one of the great milestones of queer cinema, considered by many to be the single most influential experimental/avant-garde short of all time. Kenneth Anger sends us reeling through the dark story (I use this term in the loosest definition of the word) about rebellious gay bikers, making both bleak, and hyperactive portrayal of America, infusing the screen with the most aggressive male chauvinism and toxic masculinity.
Scorpio Rising is divided into 13 sections, each one to the sound of one of 13 top-charted rock songs of 1963, making this short the first instance in film history where pop music was used to add to the meaning of the scene, connecting it to the American reality of the 1960s, instead of a mere way to appeal to some kind of young audience (many people have called this short the first MTV music video, MTV and modern music videos, in general, taking a lot of influence from this short).
The infectious pop tunes are the first aspect of the film that strikes us, as we see a young man working on his motorcycle in his dusty working-class garage, while Ricky Nelson’s Fools Rush In invites us to this wild ride that we are about to embark on. Anger cleverly uses the soundtrack to create both conflict and cooperation between sound and image within the film, the songs acting as a sort of a Greek chorus and an ironic commentary. The mix between the innocent-sounding songs and the increasingly violent and sexual imagery also brings out in them their latent sexuality, in a masterful orchestration of sight and sound to create new meanings and messages.
As the film progresses, exploitative images of displays of masculinity shoot through the screen. Proudly and aggressively, toxic masculinity is captured on screen in an unfiltered way, with intimidating leather jackets and bulging muscles, glaringly contrasting with the cheerfulness of the pop songs that seduce our ears. However, this aggressive masculinity, bursting out of its seams with disturbing violence, is subverted by Anger with the homoerotic way he captures these images.
These men that we observe exert their power over the machines they ride on and threaten everyone around them, but under a scrutinous gaze they become vulnerable, their longing, loneliness, and alienation being what is truly revealed in these images.
Anger fills the images he captures with the sexual intoxicating power of these men, their imposing manly figures, their fierce movements, and their sexuality both repressed and manifest. This subversion of the power of these violently male images is also revealed in the relationship between the young men and their motorcycles – the relationship between man and machine.
In a scene where we hear Little Peggy March’s Wind Up Doll, a song that is an interesting antithesis of Lesley Gore’s fiercely feminist You Don’t Own Me (which was also released in 1963), the comparison between the control of man over the machine and the control of men over women is put in a clear way.
Peggy March compares herself to a wind-up doll to be played with by her boyfriend the same way that the young man we observe plays with his machine – it is also important to consider that as we see the young man fixing his bike, we see a boy playing with a biker doll, maybe through this juxtaposition, Anger suggesting the early subjection to chauvinist ideas that these men have been put through. With subtle symbolism, Anger creates a brilliant audiovisual manifestation of patriarchal power – and fierce criticism of it.
As the film progresses, this relationship, however, starts to falter. The editing of the film progressively starts to quicken, almost as if Anger puts us inside the mind of these men, and as their drug-soaked minds start to lose grasp of themselves, so do we. The images slowly descend into an insane madness. Images become more and more unstable, colors shoot before our eyes, and symbolic imagery of both Christianity and Nazism mix together, confusing themselves, haunting us. As we descend into a more testosterone/cocaine-fuelled hallucination, the control over the machines that these young men possess starts to spiral out of any perceived form of control.
In an incredibly creative way, Anger shows us as man is slowly (or quickly) overtaken by the machine he created, as the balances of power are destabilized and the film rolls into its feverishly nihilistic climax. With images bursting with oneiric colors that hypnotize with explosive homoerotic sexual power, Anger envelopes us in a dark and queer mirror of modern society, as he subjects us to increasingly violent and disturbingly confusing imagery that is subversively (maybe even perversely) mixed with the most delightful love songs from the summer of ’63, drilling deep and effectively into our psyche.
It’s impossible not to be helplessly overtaken by the maddening flurry of images that Kenneth Anger drowns us in, both in a violating and in an entrancing way. Images of rebellious bikers, Marlon Brando, James Dean, comic strips, gay biker orgies, a fanatic biker delivering a Hitler-like political speech, swastikas, and Jesus Christ mingle together in an orgiastic display of images and music that meld and interact with each other in fascinating ways.
Anger juxtaposes images of a biker (the titular Scorpio) delivering an energetic speech in a run-down cathedral with images of Nazi memorabilia, pictures of Hitler, Christian symbols, and images that portray Biblical episodes related to Jesus.
The use of Nazi and Christian symbolism is extremely intriguing, and maybe the part of this short that is most frighteningly modern.
Through this juxtaposition, Anger suggests the modern merging between Christianity and fascism, merging together as part of an oppressive system that is coming to surface. Scorpio Rising was described as “a dark mirror put in front of American society” upon its release, and I believe that it still is that very same dark mirror, making it feel incredibly modern and militantly revolutionary even over 50 years after.
It’s a film that feels unreal as it feels bleakly real. We are subjected to the most perverse sensations as if we are inebriated by the same testosterone, methamphetamine, and cocaine that these men are under – there is a particular scene where we see Scorpio snorting white powder, quickly followed by flashes of deep red, that truly made me feel as if I was having cocaine rushing through my bloodstream. The sexual power mingled with an alienated longing that Anger captures in these bikers emanates through this audiovisual experience.
Deeply thought-provoking and deeply emotional, the abstract joining of unrelated images, in a very Eisensteinian way, creates endlessly fascinating meaning that is enough to keep one awake at 3 am trying to figure out what it all means and how it so deeply moved our soul.
Truly, it’s a transcendental experience that I felt completely hooked on.
Really, how can one make a film about toxic gay nazi bikers be so stirring and infinitely intriguing?? It makes me think about how when we repress emotions they turn into the vilest actions, with how it seems that the violence that moves these bikers is created by deep repression of sexual desires that only manifest themselves through violent orgies hidden in dirty warehouses.
Scorpio is the zodiac sign most associated with masculinity and aggressiveness, and that is an almost oppressive presence throughout this fascinating masterpiece of underground queer cinema, and it’s its driving force in its exposure of patriarchal and fascist forces within our society – American violence.
Through subversive homoerotism and exploitation of maleness, Anger creates a militant and powerful anti-fascist commentary, intelligently made out of immediately recognizable American iconography.
Scorpio Rising is one of the most groundbreaking films ever made, still as groundbreaking today as it was in 1963, and Anger, who directed, shot, and edited it, is a true undeniable genius.
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If you are courageous enough to go down this rabbit hole of sleaze, homoeroticism, and disturbing violence that influenced almost every great auteur, from Martin Scorsese and David Lynch to Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Nicolas Winding Refn, I really and vehemently recommend watching this masterful work of cinema. (Scorpio Rising is available on YouTube)
