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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783204854 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect, Limited |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2015 |
| Pages: | 308 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.70(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
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Drive in Cinema
Essays on Film, Theory and Politics
By Marc James Léger
Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2015 Intellect LtdAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78320-485-4
CHAPTER 1
Sad Bunny: Vincent Gallo and the Melancholia of Gender
Ever since Norman Mailer defined the nature of countercultural cool in terms of racial alterity, it became obvious that conditions of oppression in the U.S. could not be narrowly limited to questions of class status. However, what was perhaps less obvious at that time was that the nonconforming behaviour of what he termed the 'white negro' could also be used to evade the determining conditions of American capitalism. In a manner that is analogous to the perennial transgressions of modernist art, nonconformist behaviour has often helped to consolidate the hegemonic operations of liberal capitalism as they are displaced onto other scenes of cultural conflict. Countercultural dissent and distinction have today found a new theatre for the staging of liberatory forms of lifestyling in the area of sexuality.
While the sexual revolution as we know it belongs to the 1960s, the question of sexuality as performative reiteration and the possibilities of social transformation that are specific to this new form of analysis belong to the 1990s and to the advent of queer theory. In light of the new theories of sexuality that articulate the relations between sex, gender and desire, it might appear that the work of filmmaker Vincent Gallo is best understood in relation to queer theory. Gallo's masculine masquerade owes as much to queer theoretical analysis as it does to the historical conjunctures that made queer theory a feature of gender representation. In other words, there is no question here of writing about questions of masculinity in the film work of Vincent Gallo without considering how these operate within the sex/gender system. Further, the theme of suffering in Gallo's films and in his personal life links gender to masochism, understood psychoanalytically as an effort to evade the pressures of the superego. The type of male masochism that is found in Gallo's work relates directly to the normalizing functions of heterosexuality. However, does male masochism relate to the foreclosure of homosexual attachments, or is the function of masquerade and the performance of a straight masculinity an indication of the foreclosure of any positive identity? In what ways can the (impossible) loss of sexual difference become part of a strategy of masochistic deception, and can the subjective coordinates of the symbolic order be mapped onto the field of cultural symbolization?
Gallo's masculine masquerade can also be productively understood in terms of what Thomas Frank has called the 'conquest of cool' – the commercial terrain of cultural rebellion and the assumption that it threatens social order. Through his projection of melancholia as a displacement of same-sex desire and a factor in his masochistic heterosexual masquerade, and through an equally projective antagonism towards the culture of independent cinema, Gallo became one of the most fascinating figures of the alternative scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s. He did so by offering himself to audiences as an 'objectified subjectivity,' foregrounding the dislocations and externalizations of intimate life in a fantasy structure that misperceives both the cultural economy of cool affect and the role of the sexual subject as the subject who is supposed to enjoy. If Gallo's constant complaint is that his work has not been taken seriously by the independent film world because it is produced by a self-defined straight, white and radically conservative male, this essay will attempt to unpack some of the choices that structure his provocation.
'Fags Like Me'
While my focus in the following pages will be Gallo's work as a filmmaker, there is no good reason to separate these films from the rest of his activity, from his screen acting, music, painting, modelling, motorcycle racing, go-go dancing and various other accomplishments. All of these, as well as his ties to hip hop, no-wave and postmodern culture, are part of his persona and can be said to be conditioned by Gallo's 'working-class aesthetic.' As Pierre Bourdieu recognized, it is possible to read the work of a working-class artist transversally across the entire social field; class and taste are not necessarily homologous. Bourdieu's theory of distinction as a marker of class also helps us to understand contemporary media culture in a way that is not dependent on outmoded distinctions between formal and popular culture.
The class determinants of cultural production often emerge in Gallo's interviews. For instance, he has argued that he can derive as much enjoyment from storyboarding for a film as from repairing a broken refrigerator compressor. This class-based view of the aesthetic field corresponds precisely to Bourdieu's notion of the social regulation of cultural practice:
The most banal tasks always include actions which owe nothing to the pure and simple quest for efficiency, and the actions most directly geared towards practical ends may elicit aesthetic judgements, inasmuch as the means of attaining the desired ends can always be the object of a specific valuation. There are beautiful ways of ploughing or trimming a hedge, just as there are beautiful mathematical solutions or beautiful rugby manoeuvres.
Gallo's aesthetic theory also corresponds to Bourdieu's view that culture functions as a fundamental misrecognition, where sociological determinants are often hidden to agents who believe instead in the illusory and sacred horizon of individual will and judgement. Gallo's unintended critique of the division of labour finds a correspondence in his desire to control almost every aspect of his films – from the design of posters, CD covers, trailers, credit lines, billboards and reproductions of stills, to more specialized functions, including musical score, screenwriting, acting, casting, styling, film editing, direction and production. He associates good films with a willingness to be alienated and a willingness to work outside of mainstream cinema. In all instances, he explains this effort at control over the production process not in terms of disaffection with capitalist ideology, but with a desire to produce something that he considers aesthetically beautiful.
From a political point of view, Gallo criticizes the liberal mainstream for pandering to working-class audiences as political idealists while at the same time rejecting their tastes and sensibilities. By publicly supporting Republican politicians, including New Right extremists Pat Buchanan and George W. Bush, Gallo provokes disidentification on the part of educated liberal audiences. Culturally speaking, he is perhaps less a neo-conservative than a pop cultural vanguard modernist, working in the offensive manner of punk musicians like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. Though he considers himself to be a radical conservative, his political posture is undercut by a typically understated irony and the fact that he otherwise has little in common with the people who fit this description. He is a self-described futurist, conceptualist and minimalist filmmaker. Because Gallo's cultural analysis is so uneven, inconsistent and tends towards the anti-intellectual, his description of a working-class sensibility cannot be said to be related to any historically meaningful working-class politics. If, however, the function of class power is precisely to identify determined activities within an 'incorporated conception of the community,' which is of course the lesson of Bourdieu, then Gallo's work can be said to contribute to what Jacques Rancière has called an aesthetic regime that guards against the presumptions of politicization.
In keeping with formalist aesthetic theory, Gallo attempts to separate aesthetic from political issues, emphasizing elitist aestheticism and subjectivism. He specifically directs his critique of 'tendency cinema' at the identity politics of mainstream discourse. Given the numerous examples of the corporate co-optation of identity politics, Gallo's cynicism is not without social relevance. His aversion to mainstream success and commercial pandering to unsophisticated audiences relates specifically to his concern with 'good' cinema and can therefore be easily confused with a specifically Marxist critique of tendenzkunst. His stated influences include Monte Hellman, Richard Kern, Jerry Schatzberg, Todd Solondz, Yasujiro Ozu, Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Rossen, Rainer Fassbinder, Jim Jarmusch, Mario Bava, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Robert Bresson. Although some have linked his aesthetic to the independent cinema of the early 1970s, he rejects the idea that he is making retro films. Unlike many independent filmmakers who delegate artistic decision-making to numerous other individuals, Gallo is recognized for his control over most of the artistic aspects of production. This has gone so far as refusing to show his 2010 film Promises Written in Water and his 2014 feature April to the public.
Gallo's acting and promotional stunts supply many critics with the view that he is a narcissistic megalomaniac. He insists on appearing on the cover of any magazine to which he gives an interview and, like the nineteenth-century aesthete Charles Baudelaire, takes the opportunity to lambast anyone whose work or person he dislikes. Gallo's understanding of himself as a postmodern actor is difficult to ascertain, but one can assume that this involves playing 'himself ' in almost every role, whether it be Paul Léger in Arizona Dream (1993), Johnny, the communist sympathizer-cum-corpse in The Funeral (1996), the neoliberal-capitalist-vampire-cannibal Shane in Trouble Every Day (2001), the troubled genius Angelo Tetrocini in Tetro (2009), the escaped political prisoner Mohammed in Essential Killing (2010) or the town sheriff/pusher in The Legend of Kaspar Hauser (2012). The simulacral absurdity of the Gallo acting phenomenon was brought home in his double performance as Bobby Bishop/Kevin Moss in Get Well Soon (2001). His signature style involves a hapless sincerity, random aggressivity, fidgety movements and hypnotic staring, an emphatic pronunciation and repetition of phrases, a fondness for the word 'nice,' and several other characteristics that make him easily imitable. His work as a model may have contributed to his fashion sense, which includes sensuous long hair, tight-fitting clothes, and a sometimes depthless and sometimes energetic affect. Gallo followed up on the relative failure of The Brown Bunny (2003) at the box office and at film festivals with increasingly provocative behaviour. In 2005 he offered his sperm for sale on eBay and on his personal website for $1–1.5 million for natural insemination. The offer contained overt white supremacist and eugenicist banter. This was followed one year later by the offer of his services to women as an escort for $50,000 per night.
Gallo's relatively rare position in the system of cultural production becomes problematic when we consider the fact that his screen persona operates primarily as a parody and a critique of what was once in vogue in the days of 'new times' cultural theory, that is, the emphasis on the fluidity of identity as a corollary and point of resistance to the flexible economics of post-Fordist global restructuring. His films have more in common with 1990s abject art and underground culture, however, than with the 1980s culture of conservative backlash. The performative aspects of Gallo's straightness make sense in relation to his elective affinity with 70s cinema and 90s queer cinema, and is in keeping with Sianne Ngai's notion of the 'cuteness of the avant-garde.' Gallo's aesthetic can best be described in terms of its association with queer survival strategies: defiance and deviance, and a set of cultural practices that are not based in academic identity politics but in a calculated and often masochistic self-positioning outside of mainstream norms.
The resultant incoherence of identity becomes a matter of style in his work and in his masochism, whether this is related in interviews or expressed through film characters or music. Paradoxically, Gallo's 'working-class' aesthetic can be summed up as a refusal of what Slavoj Zizek defines as 'the form of subjectivity that corresponds to late capitalism,' defined as an acceptance of the destabilization of fixed roles and identities as obstacles to the commodification of everyday life. Zizek writes:
The problem here is simple: how can one be a white heterosexual male and still retain a clear conscience? All other positions can affirm their specificity, their specific mode of enjoyment, and only the white heterosexual male position must remain empty, must sacrifice enjoyment.
According to Zizek, the problem with this sacrifice of enjoyment, enacted in conformity with obsessive political correctness, is that it retains the white male heterosexual position as bulwark for the protection of bourgeois liberalism against radical left alternatives. This is why the transgressions of working-class men are often perceived as more threateningly violent than those of the middle class. Despite the fact that Gallo is unable to offer a positive theory of his resistance, it is in relation to these issues that we find the grounds for his melancholic foreclosures and his 'irrational' attachment to the logic of extremism.
All of these factors have helped Gallo to construct an aura of radicality with regard to questions of working-class masculine sexuality. What is this radicality and what are its limits? While Gallo's films depict a subject in excess of institutions and gender categories, they do so in the terms of a straight version of queer. In comparison with the hip, white masculinity of the postwar era and its appreciation of jazz and the blues, Gallo's very personal brand of disingenuously soft and fragile music could be thought to have been incubated in the context of queer visibility. In keeping with the mood set by Gallo in his self-promotion and with the mainstream fashion cycle of c. 2002–05, we could perhaps refer to this distinct sensibility as 'the browns.'
Gallo's style figures partly as a consequence of the hegemonic struggle over the increased visibility of gays, lesbians and queers in both consumer culture and in the dominant forms of political discourse. In 2004, Gallo appeared in bondage gear on the cover of HX, a gay men's New York nightlife magazine. The photograph was by the celebrity fashion photographer Terry Richardson. An appreciative article in another gay men's magazine, Night Charm, was titled 'Vincent Gallo: My Cock is Just Too Big.' Gay pop culture has some reason to be interested in Gallo. His 'street credits' include hustling as a teenager on 53rd Street in New York City and go-go dancing in downtown gay clubs. His masculine masquerade, however, could be taken as another indication of the misbegotten 'arrival' of queer theory in popular culture. While Gallo rejects gayness in order to declare himself straight, he avoids universalizing his position, a move that could very easily be ascribed to the ideology of individualism. Despite this, his acceptance of particularity – straightness as difference – is a classic move of invisible mediation that allows the visibly marked to more easily deny its own normalizing logic. Gallo's solipsistic gesturing and his questioning of the gravity of established symbolic structures make his self-identifications queer. However, these negotiations of sexuality and gender only make sense in relation to the logic of countercultural transgression and in relation to Gallo's position(ing) within the economy of cultural production.
It Sucks To Be Me
Through his intuitive awareness of the function of sexual differentiation and the failure to achieve an identity that is capable of linking sex and gender in a direct and unconflicted manner, Gallo embodies a particular feature of today's cultural moment. Sexuality never appears on its own in Gallo's persona, but overlaps with ethnic, gender and class economies. His transgression of normative structures can be noticed in his often humorous appropriation of the affective codes of endearment developed by immigrants, women, gays and youths, and incorporated into his 'intelligent design' as a bad-boy provocateur.
While it is obvious that Gallo is often racist, sexist, misogynistic and homophobic in his enunciations, the self-cancelling masochistic manner in which he performs these positions and their tropes disarms any immediate critique one might make. His mimicry of the effects of ideology through a quick glossing-over of its presuppositions, known to anyone who could be either amused or offended by them, complicates his performance. For example, in an interview with himself, Gallo performs the cliché disavowal of homosexuality as an operative term in the universal grounding of heteronormativity: 'Okay, before we begin I just have to tell you something. Although I don't know how to say it. First of all, I have to tell you, right off the bat, I'm not gay. Not even a little. Never have been. Never will be.' With this, Gallo asserts the view that homosexuality is structural to all sexuality and that sexuality operates through normalization. His solipsistic self-reference and its allusion to an established symbolic structure, here given the mark of time, make his self-identification masochistic. In this manner, Gallo's characters and his personal attitude typically express the failure of subjectivity to fit into social structures – dominant, countercultural or otherwise.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Drive in Cinema by Marc James Léger. Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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