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The Theatrical Pleasures of Actual Cannibal Shia LaBeouf

10/26/2014

 
For a great exploration of the pleasures to be found in the theatrical performance of murder, I highly recommend the “live” version of songwriter Rob Cantor’s “Shia LaBeouf.”  The viral video (about 2 million views at this point) imagines the Transformers actor as an “actual cannibal” who spends a “normal Tuesday night” hunting down and eating human prey.  Here’s the clip:
By recreating his 2012 song as “live theatre,” Cantor delivers a delicious mash-up of high and low culture.  The low-brow and gory fun of the horror film is filtered through “serious” cultural forms—a string quartet clad in black, the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles in tuxedos—and the aesthetic clash is hilarious.  We also get rock musicians and Cantor himself delivering the deadpan spoken-word narrative while wearing a suit, so the performance has pop elements of hipster irony, too.  As it progresses, the video grows increasingly campy, incorporating interpretive dancers, bare-chested men in over-sized Shia LaBeouf masks, and aerial silk acrobats.  By the time glitter falls from the heavens, we’re firmly in the world of aesthetic overkill.

The very “artiness” of the performance makes it both ridiculous and pleasurable.  Cantor satirizes genre clichés (“Wait!  He isn’t dead!  Shia surprise!”) and highlights the incongruity between the exceedingly messy and corporeal obsessions of the horror film and the more refined and conceptual ambitions of capital-A Art.  (It’s also worth pointing out that the video acknowledges how art engages in the common slippage between the twinned taboos of sex and murder, with the murderous hunt eroticized by the dancers as a heterosexual pas de deux.)

But who is the audience for this performance?  Cantor addresses the story in the present tense to “you,” the victim on the run from Shia LaBeouf.  And “you” ultimately, despite having lost a leg in a bear trap, decapitate the homicidal superstar.  But when the performance is over, the video reveals that the show has been performed for an audience of one: not the victim, but the killer, Shia LaBeouf himself.  The address has shifted from the hunted to the hunter.

LaBeouf, alone in the audience and in formal evening wear, vigorously applauds the performance, but he also looks a little self-conscious and troubled.  In the conflicting emotions flashing across his face, I see the deep ambivalence that any audience member might experience in seeing him- or herself depicted as a killer.  It’s potentially thrilling to imagine oneself as an almost super-human villain, letting go of social repression and indulging in the taboo.  Once the houselights come back on, however, the super-ego represses those id-driven fantasies, and the killer must go back into hiding.  Witnessing himself in the mirror of artistic representation, LaBeouf seems both thrilled by and somewhat ashamed of his murderous self.

But for the length of the performance, it’s a pleasure to imagine Shia LaBeouf going for the kill.

Wilde: "Monstrous and Marvelous"

10/16/2014

 
Picture
Murder Most Queer resists the demand for "normal" or "virtuous" LGBT characters in the theater, and one of the writers who influenced my thinking on this subject is Oscar Wilde, born on this date (October 16) in 1854. 

In addition to being a poet, playwright, novelist and incredibly snazzy dresser, Wilde wrote philosophical dialogues on the nature of art, in which he argued against the trend toward Realism in the theater.  In "The Decay of Lying" (1889), Wilde described how, in premodern times, the goal of art was not to mirror life as it actually is, but to create "complex beauty" that contained the "monstrous and marvelous."

[Art] enlisted Life in her service, and using some of life's external forms, she created an entirely new race of beings, whose sorrows were more terrible than any sorrow man has even felt, whose joys were keener than lover's joys, who had the rage of the Titans and the calm of the gods, who had monstrous and marvelous sins, monstrous and marvelous virtues.  To them she gave a language different from that of actual use, a language full of resonant music and sweet rhythm... jeweled with wonderful words, and enriched with lofty diction...  Old myth and legend and dream took shape and substance.  History was entirely re-written, and there was hardly one of the dramatists who did not recognize that the object of Art is not simple truth but complex beauty.

Far from expecting art to provide the audience with "good role models," Wilde understood that one of the functions of art is to present and express the extra-ordinary.  Wilde's aesthetic philosophy inspired my own attempt to find complex truths and complex beauty in plays and performances that depict the monstrous and marvelous.


Black / Queer / Alien Nation

10/12/2014

 
The fantasy of being a space alien can be found in both black culture and queer culture, and these worlds collide in "The Gospel According to Miss Roj" by George C. Wolfe.  In Chapter Six of Murder Most Queer, I discuss this vignette from Wolfe's The Colored Museum (1986) in relation to the Afro-Futurism of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and the film Brother from Another Planet, as well as the queer sci-fi glam of Ziggy Stardust and The Rocky Horror Show. 

Miss Roj, a fierce snap queen who claims to be an alien from another planet, is a "homo superior" rather than "your regular oppressed American Negro."  Wolfe complicates this fantasy of empowerment, however, by indicating that Miss Roj's special abilities may come from a more sinister realm.  The more Bacardi and Cokes she consumes in a gay bar known as The Bottomless Pit (read: Hell), the more her "demons" take over.

Her weapon of choice is the snap, which underscores a truth and can steal a heartbeat.  A series of snaps can cause a homophobic racist to drop dead from a heart attack.  This empowerment, then, includes the ability to kill with a vengeance, taking control over the power of death in a world filled with horrors that threaten to destroy Miss Roj -- and the rest of us.  As a black queer alien, this triply alienated observer of our "deteriorating society" has a grasp on the truth, and we ignore her gospel at our peril. 

Below is video of the "Miss Roj" vignette from
the PBS version of the Public Theatre production of The Colored Museum with the amazing Reggie Montgomery.  Snap!

Digging "The Well" of Holly Hughes

10/5/2014

 
Last spring, CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies hosted a fantastic event that featured critic and scholar Jill Dolan interviewing writer and performance artist Holly Hughes.  Hughes was in New York with a troupe of her students from the University of Michigan, and they performed scenes from one of her plays, a sexy and subversive comedy called The Well of Horniness.  You can watch a video of the whole event at the website of the CUNY Graduate Center.

The Well of Horniness (1983) is an early example of an out lesbian playwright appropriating the "homicidal homosexual" for her own radical purposes.  The play was originally performed for a predominantly lesbian audience at the WOW Cafe, but it's frequently been revived by other companies for not-necessarily-queer audiences -- and in their fascinating conversation, Dolan and Hughes discuss how different venues and audiences can affect the meaning of queer culture. 

In Murder Most Queer, I write about the significance of the "killer lesbian" in The Well of Horniness, along with Lesbians Who Kill by Split Britches and The Secretaries by the Five Lesbian Brothers, in a section about the WOW Cafe.  Here's my take on Holly Hughes's funny and incisive play:

.
Holly Hughes was instrumental in creating one of the house styles of the WOW Cafe, which C. Carr described as "dyke noir."  Her 1983 cult hit The Well of Horniness was an over-the-top all-female burlesque that was part parody of the classic lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, part trashy lesbian pulp novel, and part radio soap opera, complete with vocal sound effects, organ stabs, and commercial breaks.  In the play, Vicki is engaged to marry Rod, but her secret past as a member of a "sapphic sorority" is in danger of being exposed when she meets Rod's lesbian sister, Georgette.  When Georgette is shot dead in a lesbian lounge, Vicki is suspected, and private detective ("lady dick") Garnet McClit is on the case.  Garnet falls in love with Vicki and reveals that the real killer is Babs, the tough-talking hatcheck girl who was Georgette's previous lover.  Babs (who is greeted with hisses each time she enters) tries to frame Vicki and is about to kill Rod, but suddenly the scene shifts--and we realize that everything we've seen was Vicki's dream.

Babs the killer lesbian was, in fact, imagined by Vicki, a closet case who fantasizes about "killing off" her own lesbianism so she can be "the best little wifeypoo a man could ever want."  Yet Vicki is perhaps also expressing a fear and desire when she fantasizes that Babs will kill Rod, thus relieving Vicki of the need to be a wifeypoo and allowing her to continue her affair with the lady dick.  Even while the play revels in campy presentations of the villainous dyke, Hughes exposes the actual murderous rage (and lesbian passions) in the dream life of Vicki, the femme who has "defected" from the  sisterhood and is trying to pass as straight.  Repressive heteronormativity becomes the real villain of the play.  Of course, the heteronormativity in The Well of Horniness is presented queerly, since a woman plays Vicki's future husband Rod, and the playwright herself originally played Vicki.  Kate Davy has argued that Hughes's work "liberated lesbian and feminist theater from the 'good-girl syndrome,'" freeing it from the need to beg for acceptance and allowing it to be "sexy and dangerous."  Hughes's play about the expression and repression of erotic and violent passions set the stage for similar works that would find a home at the WOW Cafe.
  [Murder Most Queer,  92-93]

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    Jordan Schildcrout is the author of Murder Most Queer

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