I hated the first Kenneth Anger film I saw. It was Scorpio Rising (1964), a thirty-minute stylized portrayal of fascist gay motorcyclists in provocative leather outfits. At the time, I considered myself fairly conversant in experimental cinema: I could dig the pure abstraction of Stan Brakhage and the zonked-out dreamscapes of Maya Deren.
But Anger's work left me cold. There was supposedly a genealogy that directly linked
Scorpio Rising to many of my favorite filmmakers. With its then-visionary Golden Oldies soundtrack, the film practically gave birth to Martin Scorsese. But all I saw were a lot of gay biker Nazis under flashing lights.
But in the ten years hence, something changed. I found myself going back to Anger's work more than once. A recent screening of
Puce Moment was revelatory — his brief 1949 film that consists entirely of a glamorous movie-star type (Yvonne Marquis) combing through gaudy evening dresses, lounging around, then taking her dogs for a walk. (The film was put together with material originally intended for an aborted longer film called
Puce Women.) I then sought out — and was mesmerized by — the color-drenched, sensationalistic rituals in
Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), which has a bizarre, ear-grating synthesizer soundtrack composed by Mick Jagger. These and Anger's other films are now available in two gorgeous volumes, the most recent released by
Fantoma earlier this month. My recent viewing of
Scorpio Rising felt like the revelation it's been all along. Why is it that these films feel so urgent today, when a decade ago I found them unwatchable?
Certainly, I've changed in ten years, but Hollywood has changed, too. Celebrities have outpaced the roles they play; their work as actors now seems incidental to their fame. This phenomenon has been fueled by media ventures designed to reflect the glamour back onto itself, be it through TV (see:
Entourage, every celebrity reality show), well-funded gossip websites like TMZ and an ever-expanding tabloid universe.
More than any other filmmaker, Kenneth Anger depicted this trend half a century in advance. Born in Santa Monica in 1927, Anger was a Zelig-like figure of twentieth-century pop culture. He got part of his film education watching the classics at Los Angeles' Grossman Gallery cinema in the 1930s. In Elio Gelmini's excellent new documentary,
Anger Me, Anger describes how D.W. Griffith — by that point, a has-been living at the Knickerbocker Hotel — would come in and watch his own films on the screen, often sitting next to the young Anger, the smell of Southern Comfort heavy on his breath. Anger's first film,
Fireworks (1947), a dreamlike portrait of a young man (played by Anger) who lusts after a sailor and is then attacked by another group of sailors in a bar, was admired by Dr. Alfred Kinsey, who purchased a copy of it and invited Anger to work with him. Anger would become one of Kinsey's research subjects in various capacities, including being filmed while masturbating.
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The content of
Fireworks was inflammatory for its time. Anger, who shot the film over the course of a weekend at his parents' Beverly Hills home while they were away (take that,
Risky Business!), found himself arrested on obscenity charges upon its release, though the California Supreme Court eventually declared the film art and dismissed the charges. It may have seemed dangerous or even prurient in its day, but there's a good deal of poetry in
Fireworks. Although Anger is certainly a pioneer of queer cinema, as a straight man I don't find his depiction of sexuality particularly inaccessible, due to a wry balancing act between the disarmingly frank and the artfully indirect, not to mention a good dose of humor. In the opening scene, the protagonist wakes up with what appears to be a massive erection lifting his sheets; he reaches down and reveals the
"erection" to be a long, totemic statue. When he later meets his object of desire in a bar, the sailor has his shirt off and is vainly displaying his pecs and biceps. We can sense both Anger's longing and his fascination with the absurdity of desire. The film's finale comes with the sailor unzipping his pants and revealing an exploding firecracker where his penis should be. It's a hilarious and unsettling moment: there is clearly a living, breathing actor attached to the firecracker.
Fireworks opened plenty of doors. One admirer of the film was Jean Cocteau, who invited its young director to come to Paris. There, Anger wound up working alongside Henri Langlois at the Cinematheque Francaise, where he befriended Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, regaling them with tales of scandal and debauchery from Hollywood's Golden Age — tales that would form the basis of his best-selling compendium of that city's sordid side,
Hollywood Babylon, originally published in French in 1958. One imagines the budding European New Wave filmmakers salivating over Anger's accounts of the sexual proclivities of Mae West and Errol Flynn. Along the way, Anger also found time to live in Rome at the height of "
la dolce vita," even claiming to have befriended Federico Fellini. (I say "claiming" because we have only Anger's word to vouch for his celebrity connections — he has also said he was a child actor in Max Reinhardt's infamous 1936 adaptation of
A Midsummer Night's Dream, a claim that's since been debunked.)
Anger is clearly fascinated by fame, image and celebrity, and his entire body of work — including the
Hollywood Babylon books — can be thought of as the fever dream of an impressionable young boy growing up under the glare of Hollywood. And this, I think, is one of the reasons why his work can initially be off-putting: He takes the familiar and renders it otherworldly, corrupt. While other avant-garde filmmakers like Brakhage and Michael Snow seem
sui generis, Anger's films are steeped in movie-star iconography and glamour. You can watch
Puce Moment and wonder how an entire film can revolve around a celebrity showcasing her wardrobe, until you realize that today there are entire TV shows devoted to such things. Actually,
Puce Moment specifically reminds me of one episode of
Newlyweds in which Jessica Simpson spends half the episode pawing through racks of couture at a boutique, proclaiming each article "cute." And how different, really, is
Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), Anger's three-minute automobile-worship flick, from MTV's
Pimp My Ride? It's the basic template forty years early. You could even swap the titles.
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Puce Moment reminds me of an episode of Newlyweds in which Jessica Simpson spends half the episode pawing through racks of couture at a boutique, proclaiming each article "cute."
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The culture, it seems, has caught up with Kenneth Anger. Even his well-documented fascination with proto-pagan cosmology feels like a side effect of growing up in Hollywood. This is, after all, today's fertile crescent of cultish New Age religion. Perhaps not coincidentally, Anger was obsessed with legendary occult figure Aleister Crowley, who would later write several influential works about Kaballah. The elaborate and esoteric rituals depicted in Anger's films may incorporate gods, goddesses and mythical beings from all over the world, but they're Hollywood through and through. In
Lucifer Rising (1972), two ancient Egyptian gods join together and create Lucifer, who seems more like a wannabe rock star than any kind of ancient deity. He dons a jacket that has his name stitched floridly across its back, and the occult's iconic red triangle has "trademark" written at its base. The role of Lucifer was played by Anger only after Chris Jagger, brother of Mick, dropped out. (The soundtrack was to be composed by Jimmy Page, who also bailed, leaving Anger to enlist the imprisoned Manson Family member Bobby Beausoleil.) Marianne Faithfull is all over the film's second half, cavorting about in various settings. The film fuses mock-ancient ritual, pop culture and celebrity kitsch. At the end, flying saucers arrive to haul everyone away.
Anger's work doesn't exist in the experimental, far-off edges of the cinematic empire. It straddles — and crosses — a very thin line between the conventional and the insane. His cinema is the dark, deranged runoff from Hollywood's dream factory: crazed, breathless nightmares of glamour, ritual and tough-guy iconography. In
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), ancient gods, pagan figures and historical personages come together in a fevered Bacchanal, then spin off into a surreal kaleidoscope of tripped-out hues and patterns. It's all the discarded footage from all the cutting room floors in Hollywood rising and mutinying at the same time in glorious, garish Technicolor.
The sexual charge of Anger's work could also be seen as Hollywood's id coming back to bite it in the ass. Like the preening sailor in
Fireworks, his homoerotic images often feature the same kind of posturing we find in conventional films. His bikers aren't just playing dress-up — they really are a butch bunch of guys, and in a typical movie they'd be romanticized as heterosexual studs. The images of Brando as
The Wild One that play during
Scorpio Rising aren't just ironic counterpoint; they're an example to live up to, just as much as the images of Jesus with which they're intercut. Anger locates the latent content within Hollywood's definition of manhood and pushes it back in our faces. Aesthetically speaking, the gay biker orgy at the end of
Scorpio Rising isn't bizarre, it's the natural outcome of all the crazed machismo on display.
Anger, now eighty, ended a twenty-five-year hiatus in 2000, and is again interrogating the vagaries of fame in his work — his recent output, all shorts, tackles such topics as Mickey Mouse and the death of Elliot Smith. But maybe today's real Kenneth Anger movie is simply the one we see on our TV and computer screens each day: Hollywood's most cherished product — itself — set to an inescapable pop soundtrack.
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