Scorpio Rising

The film turns out to be a riff on the gay fetish for black leather - and all the imagery/rites associated with it.

The Black Leather scene - certainly in the 60s - was very codified, and incorporated drugs (much like all gay culture at the time).

The songs chosen have, no doubt, much appeal to the gay community of the time ("Heat Wave" is also heard in "Boys in the Band), most of them citing lustful love from a female point of view.

There are coy/blatant references to water sports, anal rape, fisting and "pussy" (in the form of an on screen cat).

Anger's black leather queens doll themselves up in leather gear which is uber-accentuated with studs and other forms of steel (no real bikers ever wear that stuff). This is then intercut with footage of genuine, presumably str8 biker clubs (note the motorcyclers in the exterior shots - those racing each other - do not sport all the "accessories" that the black leather queens do, but, rather, "simple" black leather jackets, besides which, the biker clubbers actually seem to be wearing SHIRTS under their jackets - as opposed to the leather queens who do not).

There is also plenty of idolization of James Dean and Marlon Brando, two movie stars who, in addition to having gained fame as young punks who wear leather jackets, were also two of the most sexually-ambiguous male stars of their time. Anger, having grown up in Hollywood, might even have known men who slept with Dean and Brando! The whole Jesus/male-bonding thing is ingenious. As for the references to Hitler, well, perhaps Anger was Jewish and put Adolf in there to make it seem as if the life of a black leather queen is one which continually lived on the edge, always testing limits to see how far can go beyond them. Or maybe Anger was simply citing irony in the persecution of gays during the Third Reich compared to the subsequent gay American leather culture of the 50s/60s which is grounded in the role-playing of bondage and domination.

Kenneth Anger's "Scorpio Rising", set to the tune of thirteen 1960's pop songs, ranks as one of the best films ever shot in the experimental genres, which to some people might translate as the best pile of dog poop ever made, but in terms of visual imagery, context, and use of music, it ranks up there as one of the most important films of the 60's. Kenneth Anger's trademarks (outsider as protagonist, homosexual iconography, pop culture looked at in a different light) are at their most poignant here with most memorable scenes set to 'Blue Velvet", "I Will Follow Him", and "Wipe Out". Also classic is the use of clips from Cecil B. DeMille's "King of Kings" of Jesus and his disciples walking superimposed between shots of gay bikers. A classic piece of Americana.

Ever sit there looking at a Michael Bay movie, or a Martin Scorsese movie, or a Portishead video, or a CK1 commercial, and think, "So where did this come from, anyway?" The answer is Kenneth Anger's remarkable 1964 short film, the barbaric birth yawp of modern (and postmodern) cinema as we know it. Ostensibly a fetishistic self-generated porn reel, made, as Genet wrote his fiction, for the maker's masturbatory pleasure, SCORPIO RISING pulls together unlicensed pop songs with obsessive images of hunky guys, leather, chrome, comic strips, and death, to create a code for the programming of music, picture, and unspoken content that would go on to inform everything you see from Nicolas Roeg to VH-1. God knows where poor Anger is rubbing two nickels together, but tonight, say a prayer of thanks for the guy who made all your culture, the good, the bad and the ugly, possible.

Scorpio Rising marks the beginning of the mix-tape approach to film-making, the technique of adding texture, flow, counter-point to images by over-laying them with a soundtrack of pop songs. Kenneth Anger takes this technique to its limit right from the start, eschewing dialogue, narrative and everything else in favor of a thirty-minute greatest-hits medley wedded to a chaotic assemblage of pictures having to do with some gay-Nazi-anarchists engaged in all manner of rebellious behavior, from reading comic books to smearing mustard on a fat guy's stomach and tearing his pants off. The result is a bizarre fusion of the innocent and the profane, the quaintness of yesterday's Elvis/Bobby Vinton hits alongside the amateurish depravity and two-bit spectacle of Anger's underground opus.

Despite its reputation as a sort of counter-culture landmark, the movie seems largely irrelevant, a museum piece commemorating the excesses of '60s cult movie-making. It consists primarily of badly-lit home-movies of some nameless, faceless leather-fetishists posing like the most slovenly male-models you can remember, then going to some degraded costume-ball that degenerates into the sort of orgiastic hi-jinks that were a staple of "controversial" sixties cinema. For kicks, Anger keeps cutting in little snippets from a silent movie about Jesus, demonstrating a grammar-school-level sense of how to shock middle-brow audiences. This is avant-gardism at its most obnoxiously pointless, the deliberate mingling of opposing elements (bubbly pop tunes over random sexual carnage, cross-cutting between a gay-Nazi orgy and shots of the Last Supper) for the purpose of suggesting all sorts of potential meanings, none of which have been sufficiently thought-out.

Anger is so concerned with creating an intense experience that he forgets anything he might've known about film technique and simply wallows in his own fanatical, vaguely Satanic weirdness. Yet despite the film's sloppiness, it occasionally points the way toward what later, better filmmakers would do with the director's indisputably pioneering idea. The fusion of pop-music and pop-image (see the Layla sequence in Goodfellas; bits of Easy Rider; much of Tarantino) can lead to a sense of electricity, a heightening, where a moment can come to summarize the whole of the film texturally. The first glimmers of this galvanizing effect can be felt for a second here-and-there in Scorpio Rising, but either Anger didn't understand what he was on to, or didn't care. As so often happens in experimental film, the pioneer has the inspiration but lacks the expertise, the know-how necessary to employ the technique in a meaningful way. The little ripples of potential energy never amount to anything for Anger, who winds up coming across like Roger Corman without the movie-making acumen.

I know I'm not the first person to point this out, but I'm fairly certain without this uncanny, sort of experimental short film (I say 'sort of' since it's experimental mostly in it having a lack of a clear story and definable characters, but more on that just a moment), we wouldn't have Martin Scorsese. It may seem obvious to some, but it's confirmed when reading the book of interviews he did with Richard Schickel several years ago, when he recalled seeing the film when it was first released - in an underground format, as it was that kind of picture, on someone's rooftop or in a basement or other - and that it really made an impact that he couldn't articulate.

Seeing this today it's somewhat easy to see why: the rock and roll music, the emphasis on montage that cuts in flow and sync with the image, and how the image of a man is based on how he looks (we see in Mean Streets and Taxi Driver how a man looks will define him, both in clothes and in style, i.e. Travis Bickle or, on the comedic side, the awkardness of Pupkin). There may have been some influence on Lynch too, if only through the 'Blue Velvet' song, though somehow, someway, I think Anger comes away with using the song in a more iconic way: a soothing tale of a woman putting on and being beautiful in a dress juxtaposed with a man putting on his jeans and jacket and being in front of the camera like 'yeah, what?' It's probably in a mocking tone that Kenneth Anger shows his figures in biker garb, and yet it's hard to tell exactly what the intention is. This is not a bad thing; the way it's presented different people will take away different aspects. If it is satirizing the culture of rebellion it's that it's like, 'well, this guy thinks he's tough and manly and yet wait until that erect genitalia comes out' (and if you look close enough it's not hard to miss, no pun intended).

The majority of this film is really about its style, if that makes sense. The first 16/17 minutes is simply seeing set up. We don't know what for since there are no characters and there's no dialog: the soundtrack is made up of songs (really great ones by Elvis and Ray Charles and Martha and the Vandellas and the Crystals and so on) and sometimes the sound of motorcycles revving up. So it's all about ritual - how to put together the bicycle, how a little kid (who is only there briefly) plays with his toys, and how the men put on their jackets and rings and stand in front of the camera like any moment they might just start masturbating to their own image. As if by some happenstance as well (according to Anger this was a coincidence by some miracle) The Wild One is on TV, which lends this to being akin to Godard's Breathless as far as figures trying to attain their ideal images.

Only this isn't Brando; these bikers are, I think gay Nazis(?) It's hard to tell exactly, but then the substance in this case *is* the style. I'm still pondering over what the religious symbolism means as well, as Anger cuts in shots from some other black and white film showing Jesus (I think it's him, he had the beard and all). Is this meant to be mocking as well, as if to say 'well, you think YOU got a crew?' This was lost on me as I was watching it, but it's fine to think about it later on too.

The whole experience of Scorpio Rising is just one of total fascination. There's nothing as far as there being a concrete story - maybe there is one and I just missed it - but as far as simply showing us things, it's an excellent example of how to marry image and music. Without the songs this wouldn't really be all that much, just a lot of well-shot but randomly and at times very wildly cut together images of male perversity and hedonism (and sometimes just showing us shots of bikers riding around is simple). But you get the sense that in a weird way this is almost like a documentary of how men who go into the world of dangerous rebellion see themselves, and to go one further how if you do happen to be a gay nazi motorcycle man who gets in leather and rides around and does things with other men... well, do these guys even exist? Probably, or probably not.

For Kenneth Anger there's some satire to mine in the ritual of getting ready, the image of over-hyper-WTF-masculinity, and how far the world of Marlon Brando and his "What are you rebelling against" "Whaddaya got?" can go. It's sophisticated and daring and campy and deranged, and it feels still fresh today in its craft that it almost doesn't feel like it's from 1964, rather that it's from the 1990's and it's looking back at that period - it's post-modern to the core.