Chop Suey

This film is a documentary directed by Bruce Weber, who is an internationally famous photographer. Weber's specialty is in photographing male nudes and Chop Suey is full of male nudity (all done tastefully). In particular, the film highlights (or celebrates) the physical beauty of one Peter Johnson, an actor/model with a great and lean physical build. Weber's camera is in love with Johnson. The film also highlights Weber's other passions, including the music of singer Frances Faye, as well as the "coolness" of actor Robert Mitchum. Chop Suey is basically a cinematic scrapbook of one man's passions and interests. There is hardly anything that can be called a "story" to link the various episodes that occur in this film together. But the film is distinguished by its excellent use of black and white (as well as color) photography--so it at least looks good (as one might expect, being photographed as it is by a professional photographer). However, ultimately one gets the sense that Chop Suey will appeal mainly (or perhaps only) to those (i) who also share Weber's passion of looking at great looking guys (often nude), and/or (ii) who find the idea of watching a film that often feels like a feature-length version of Calvin Klein's Eternity commercial even remotely appealing. If you don't fit into either of the above categories, heed my warning and skip this baby.

This movie came out briefly in one theater in Los Angeles and then disappeared. Why I don't know, because it was a fascinating look back into the gay life in the 50's and 60's when everything was kind of hidden and hush-hush. The other fantastic thing about it was its focus on the great singer Frances Faye. Mention her name now and most people would have a blank look on their faces - which is too bad because this great talent deserves more recognition. I just can't understand WHY this movie hasn't been released on DVD. Something is wrong because every other film -good and bad- eventually is put on DVD. This film is GOOD..........so come on guys - get it out there!!!!!!

This movie is essentially a "how-to" on how to be a well-connected pedophile. I'm amazed that so many people-- especially other gay men-- have seen this movie and read the book and no one has brought up the fact that if Weber was not an influential photographer, he would be in jail, doing time for child abuse. Poor Peter Johnson. Weber took this poor, naive (although incredibly handsome) teenager whom he found at a training camp for high school wrestlers in the Midwest, brought him to live in his home, and took thousands of homoerotic photos of him, many of them full-frontal nudes, all through Johnson's teenage years. That ain't art. It's child abuse. And what's worse, Weber made lots of money off of it, and poor Johnson is going to have serious "issues" the rest of his life. Weber's lecherous love of the boy is downright creepy, as are his ramblings about famous (and not so famous) people he's known, as he tries to complete Johnson's "education." Creepy, and then just plain boring. The only redeeming thing I can say about the movie is that it is a fascinating study of self-deception. But I can't help but wonder why no one ever considered the effect this was having on "Chop Suey" (Weber's nickname for Johnson) himself.

Bruce Weber's movies are the upscale gay man's version of those Starbucks jazz CD's. There's something authentic in there somewhere, but in the making it's been banalized out of existence Everything in Weber-World reeks of white terrycloth bathrobes, running with terriers on the beach, cheekbones, white teeth, gaily laughing women in pajamas, and all the other images that are permanently encoded in our brain as Polo-specific. Weber can be photographing a thalidomide wino or the desiccated face of a seventyish Robert Mitchum, and somehow it all comes out like the glossy welcome brochure at an A-list hotel. CHOP SUEY purports to spread wider and dig deeper as it is Weber's record of his obsession with Peter Johnson, a high-school athlete Weber commemorated in torrential, Dantean detail. But Weber continues to pretend that he's only interested in "beauty"--and that his interest in Johnson stems from the wrestler's being what Weber could never be (beautiful, I guess). There's no sex in Weber's voiceover explanation of his Aschenbach-like dwelling on this gorgeous nobody, and thus Weber is able not to be homosexual. Weber plunges into denial as passionately as he falls into reverie. He means for the movie to be a fantasist's autobiography, and also a highly self-conscious arrangement of Weber in the history of American photography (quotes from Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon and Larry Clark abound). But what comes across is a guy who is trapped in an upmarket carnival of surfaces. Weber is more interested in his Josh Hartnettesque models' torsos and legs than even in their faces; for Weber, pornography is not a projection of a psychological state but simply a record of physical perfection. He seems to throw uglinesses at us in this movie as a means, again, of denying his own predilections. He may enjoy presenting us with an old, ugly female cabaret singer, or the mummylike visage of Diana Vreeland, but he certainly has no interest in copulating with them. So why put up this front of "romanticism"? There's nothing romantic about the movie--maybe partly because, unlike masturbatory artists from Genet to Larry Clark, Weber doesn't investigate or push or worry his desires. He doesn't even take them at face value. He fanatically perfumes them. This makes everything feel hollow, personalityless, and fake--just like the stuff Weber makes at his day job.

This felt a lot like DEATH IN VENICE, CA to me, who arrived at UCLA at 17 looking better than Peter Johnson and knowing who Frances Faye was from hip parents in Cosmo SF and the "in" crowd that was very rich and filled with artsier geniuses in posher houses.I hung out at the Interlude which was as gay as I was straight almost every night before enrolling at UCLA. The owners and the bar fans of mine and Frances' were my first taste of the gay world.In SF it was not happening yet except for decorators. It was there that I met Teri and became good friends for years and she introduced me to a lot of players in the film although I was much more white tennis sweater looking and acting and had a life in the Bel Air movie star tennis group within weeks. I did not meet Weber till NY which became my mid point on my way to Paris where I moved after dropping out of school.CHOP SUEY does have a wonderful feel to repression and Bruce's love for Peter who is really charming as his sexual preference is shielded even when he wears dresses and hugs elephants while nude on a beach. Nearly ALL of my favorite friends and some icons are there like a scrapbook to look at although I did miss a Weston or two.Henry Miller, Cocteau and Mitchum are joyful to see as it was to play with them once. Mostly, it is a lot of beautiful young men who never appealed to me at any time, but, to his credit, Weber crammed the faces with the gorgeous past and many parts of where I first learned that there were only '10,000 people in the world' thinking.Had Weber been handsome, he would never have become the success he did. It is kind of sad to think that, but, I revert to loving this indulgent postcard which fits just fine into my own past which had an equally innocent beginning as Johnson's.