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  Submit to Me |
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Transgression seems more like concept than reality in these no-boundaries days, but in the ‘80s and early ‘90s there was in fact a Cinema of Transgression, a mini-movement devoted to the far fringes of sex and violence among alienated, tribal urban youth. Based in New York City and closely allied with the music of Sonic Youth, Jim Thirlwell (of Foetus fame), Dream Syndicate, et al., its luminaries included Nick Zedd, Lydia Lunch, Beth B, Leg Lung, and most notably, Richard Kern.
 Lydia Lunch in Submit to Me Now |
One of the earliest entries here is the 1985 The Right Side of My Brain, which could have been subtitled "Or Salvation Through Face Fucking." This exercise in psychosis and paranoia stars Lydia Lunch (who also wrote some of the droning, dissonant music) as an urban casualty who talks in voiceover about being "sucked into an endless vacuum" and entering "a place where reality was no longer necessary." The usual rituals of daily life are suspended in this study in psychological free fall, as Lunch spends her time squirming in bed, undressing, fondling her tits, and submitting to some violent sex with a mysterious grunge boy with a gun. New York never looked so grim, reduced here to dilapidated apartments and dirty streets that recall the work of novelist Hubert Selby.
Also from 1985 is You Killed Me First, whose main inspiration seems to be John Waters. This critique of middlebrow American life has hilariously bad, Waters-style declamatory acting by several of the superstars of ‘80s performance art. Zucchini fucker Karen Finley plays Mom; the late art-queen David Wojnarowicz is Dad; and Lung Leg, the ‘80s answer to Mink Stole, is the demented daughter who screams "I really hate you!" and "You’re just as disgusting as I am!" before mowing down the family at a Thanksgiving dinner. Waters isn’t the only influence here. The Warhol/Morrissey touch is noticeable in mangled dialog that Kern doesn’t bother to reshoot. Like both Waters and Warhol/Morrissey, Kern gives full play to the personalities of his stars, and no doubt a personality like La Leg is as crazed in real life as she is here. Despite the tinny trappings and amateurish feel, You Killed Me First succeeds as a grainy snapshot of a particular time and place: Richard Kern’s brain in the mid-1980s.
Gore also dominates Death Valley 69 (1986), which features "the bad kids" running amok, far from the institutions society has erected — the family, school — to control them. The film is a catalog of violent teenage wish-fulfillment fantasies via giant switchblades, martyred teens who’ve been eviscerated (shown in loving tacky detail), and attacks by cops with tear gas. Sonic Youth provides the soundtrack to these twisted lives, and Kern employs some crudely effective, if now dated, montage work.
One of Kern’s most ambitious works is Fingered (1986), whose sarcastic disclaimer says "Although it is not our sole intention to SHOCK, INSULT, or IRRITATE, you have been warned that we are CATERING only to our own preferences as members of the SEXUAL MINORITY." The film opens with Lydia Lunch as a phone-sex operator chatting up an adult baby who turns on her: "You don’t give one good fuck for me, do you Mommy!" From there the film devolves into an evil road trip with Lydia and her boyfriend, who have rough sex and assault various friends, strangers, and a hitchhiker played by poor Lung Leg. There are echoes of Terence Malick’s Badlands and of course the Manson family here. Typical of Kern’s world, gratification must be immediate, and every slight, real or not, is answered with a knife in the gut or a gun in the head. The ever-versatile Lunch provides some of the music here.
Two of Kern’s more notorious works are Submit to Me (1985) and Submit to Me Now (1987), which dispense with narrative entirely, being simply a record of brief performances by some of Kern’s friends and actors. Self-mutilation, crucifixion, bondage, blow jobs, and other divertissements are on florid display here, accompanied by the music of the Butthole Surfers. Kern himself appears in the 1993 My Nightmare, which features masturbation (by the naked Kern), spanking, and bondage scenes. In the quasi-epic (35-minute) omnibus film Manhattan Love Suicides (1985), a loopy David Wojnarowicz’s arm falls off and he’s sketched by a creepy artist.
 The Sewing Circle |
Despite his work’s often laughable special effects, arguable misogyny, and dogged insularity, Kern successfully showcases the pleasures of trading bourgeois life — and the angst that inevitably accompanies it — for sex, violence, drugs, and music. His films are at the very least a welcome tonic to those sleek, empty, picture-perfect teen dramas from the John Hughes school that occupied so much cultural space in the eighties.
October 2001 | Issue 34
Copyright © 2001 by Gary Morris
ACCESS: This collection can be had for a mere $29.95 list price from Music Video Distributors or any of the usual venues. Richard Kern has his own web site. There’s a useful interview at Kulture-Void. Also, an enchanting site called nerve.com has a gallery of naked guys by Kern that merits attention. You have to join nerve to get access but it’s free and well worth it. Jack Sargeant wrote a book on the movement, Death Tripping: The Cinema of Transgression, for the estimable Creation Books.
ALSO: More director profiles and experimental and avant-garde cinema
