Richard Kern's The Right Side of My Brain is, from what I've seen so far, his dreamiest and most hypnotic effort, frighteningly potent with its saturated black and white photography and frequently haunting with its narration by its lead actress, Lydia Lunch. Lunch plays a woman, who uses the entire twenty-four minutes of the short to voice her rambling opinions on sex, her own self, and the entirety of existence. It's a short that gets pretty immersive for a few minutes, but the monotonous and overall dreary style gets tiresome far too quickly for its own good, leaving the short sort of wading in the water for the latter half. Even an intriguing fellatio scene involving Black Flag's Henry Rollins doesn't add much variety to a short that kind of talks around itself and never finds a great deal to say.
It ends, however, with probably the most potent quote of Kern's short filmography that I have seen, which could very well serve as his defining motto for life. That quote is, "we'll take the bad with the bad and make it worse."
Starring: Lydia Lunch and Henry Rollins. Directed by: Richard Kern.
