“It’s interesting for me to make a film that’s more accessible to a larger audience because it makes me realize that, you know, if you keep on making just harsh, pornographic films your whole career then you are going to be limited to a certain audience. It’s nice to reach a larger audience sometimes. I really like to be both but people don’t want you to be both.”
Bruce LaBruce, interviewed here
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I recently saw filmmaker Bruce LaBruce’s 2013 Gerontophilia at the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. It is the story of an eighteen-year-old boy who falls in love with an octogenarian man, eventually breaking him out of the assisted living facility where he is regularly drugged and embarking on a road trip destined for the ocean, a gay Harold and Maude-cum-Thelma and Louise. The film has been criticized as marking a move into the mainstream for LaBruce, whose other work regularly features pornographic and violent elements, including zombie sex and diverse paraphiliae. Gerontophilia sticks to LaBruce’s preferred themes of sexual transgression and general rebellion against society, but lacks scenes of penetration or gore.
Gerontophilia brought to mind my own preferences of taste. If there’s any quality as ubiquitous in LaBruce’s movies as explicit sex is, that’s bad, bad acting. His performers almost always address us with a mannered cadence that suggests the director must be feeding them lines from just off camera. It’s an effect that is simultaneously, inarguably “bad” and wonderful. His 2004 The Raspberry Reich, for instance, tracks a terrorist group attempting to reboot the Red Army Faction—throughout, propagandistic flashes of text insist on declarations such as “Heterosexuality is the opiate of the masses” or “Madonna is counter-revolutionary” while actors alternately rant in this stilted performance style (super fake) and engage in unsimulated sex (hyper real). In butting together camp and sincerity, the insurgent punk and queer content forces audiences to reconsider the values they attach to it, all while the director celebrates.
It is the style LaBruce introduced in his first feature (1993’s No Skin Off My Ass, which was Kurt Cobain’s favorite film), and it remains closely aligned with the style of Gerontophilia. But without the explicit sex that many viewers find shocking, a lot of critics had turned against it. A Variety review, for instance, declares “Better camerawork and a lower gross-out factor than usual seem to have taken the oomph out of bad boy Bruce LaBruce,” which is fascinating in that it ties the fault both to mainstream content (a lower gross-out factor) and mainstream skill (better camerawork). The Hollywood Reporter says “this tonally uncertain romance is both surprisingly conventional and tame.”
For my own part, I thought Gerontophilia was fine, although not nearly as exciting as his other narratives. The appreciative, sold-out audience of the lesbian & gay film festival seemed to be big fans. A man next to me gasped and wept when (not-really-spoiler alert) the 81-year-old Melvyn dies at the most expected moment he could die, while nearing the end of the road trip and as the young Lake reveals that his feelings have grown to love. Everyone laughed long and hard at the visual gags, and even the two women making out in front of me paused for occasional appreciation.
I like writing that upsets what we deem to be tasteful. I like writing when it’s bad as often as when it’s good, and think either can be equally artful. I like Robert Herrick best when he seems really cheesy to me, like “Bid me despair, and I’ll despair, / Under that cypress tree; / Or bid me die, and I will dare / E’en death, to die for thee,” which reminds me a bit of the tone when Lake speaks his love to a deceased Melvyn. And I like Ernest Dowson when he’s obviously trying to be risqué, “Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet; / But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,” like how Lake looks admiringly on an older crossing guard. And I like when essays are conversational to the point that they seem unformed, and when poems are shaped to look like a butterfly, and when critics find a way to use bowel movements as metaphors when they obviously didn’t need to.
But I don’t like all bad taste, and I don’t like bad taste for the sake of bad taste. Which is why that Variety critique of Gerontophilia— “Better camerawork and a lower gross-out factor than usual—” preoccupies. It yokes taste (the gross-out) to technique (the camerawork). Better camerawork implies camerawork that is more traditionally accomplished, in the same way that if we said a story had “better narrative work” we would likely mean that it had a refined and subtle sense of pacing the plot. In reality, the camerawork in LaBruce’s previous films, which is typically clumsy and forces you to stare too-long at certain poses and to miss others, is “better” than the “better camerawork” of this latest, which is often slow-paced and careful, even quite lovely. The worse skill made a better movie.
I wonder about the categories into which we put our art, whether it take the form of film or text or something else entirely. And I wonder about this because, as much as I want to defend the movie, it’s my least favorite I’ve seen of his, and I’d have to admit that it’s as much because of the “better camerawork” as it is the “lower gross-out factor,” and maybe because of how they work together, too.
I want to shake this impulse, this gut want to align raunchy, verboten, lewd content with rough and rowdy technique, with conversation stilted like a bad porno and a camera or perspective that moves awkwardly along. Intellectually, I know they’re not linked and can cite work that proves the alignment wrong (Anne Carson: “You could / take the entirety of the / common sense of humans / and put it in the palm of / your hand and still have / room for your dick;” or a really good Vaginal Davis performance). But still, that thing in my gut. It’s a thing I think about especially when I’m leading a workshop or teaching, when it’s so easy to say yes, writer, you should tidy up that grammar, or you could refine that rhythm a bit, or you might want to take out some of that lust. It’s a voice that I have in my head, too, and a voice I want to challenge, knowing the possibilities are greater if we can encourage writers, in LaBruce’s words, “to be both.”