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Reza Abdoh: Dahmer, Warhol, and Sinister Celebrity

11/22/2014

 
Filmmaker Adam Soch is running a Kickstarter campaign to support his documentary film about the avant-garde theater director, Reza Abdoh.  Any project that preserves and promotes Abdoh's amazing work is worth supporting.  Please consider donating before the December 1 deadline!

Abdoh was born in Iran in 1963 and died from AIDS in 1995, and during his too-brief life he was hailed as a "theatrical visionary" for his wildly theatrical and visceral performances. Among Abdoh's most famous productions is The Law of Remains, inspired by the murders of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. In the final chapter of Murder Most Queer, I analyze this remarkable play and its critical reception.  Here's an excerpt:

The first theatrical production about Jeffrey Dahmer was perhaps the most stunning—and the most open to diverse interpretations. In February 1992, avant-garde theater maker Reza Abdoh staged his production of The Law of Remains in the abandoned ballrooms of the Diplomat Hotel in Manhattan. The New York Times heralded this world premiere by proclaiming, “The enfant terrible of sex and death has created yet another demonic work of experimental theater.” As a writer and director, Abdoh eschewed realist notions of character and plot to create dense and layered performances with viscerally affecting sounds and images. Critic Stephen Holden described The Law of Remains as “a blood-soaked pageant of contemporary Grand Guignol depicting mass murder, sexual mutilation, necrophilia, and cannibalism.” Abdoh’s postmodern aesthetic intersperses found materials, including interviews and news reports about Dahmer, with scenarios inspired by the S&M club scene, African dances, and invocations from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. These scenes are joined by the story of Andy Warhol creating a movie about Dahmer, here named Jeffrey Snarling. Abdoh’s fourteen actors push the audience to different sections of the hotel, witnessing seven stations in the journey of Snarling’s soul through scenes of sex and violence, until the performance ends in Heaven.

Critics differed about the meaning and merit of the production, but most agreed that it was, in the words of New York Times critic Stephen Holden, “one of the angriest theater pieces ever hurled at a New York audience.” While Holden seemed to admire Abdoh’s skill, he complained that “the sheer density of the noise and tumult make it hard to follow” and that the production “seems to want to punish as much as to enlighten” the audience. Alisa Solomon in the Village Voice also found the performance elusive in its frenzy and assaultive in its “high pitch of rage.” Yet certain elements of Abdoh’s nightmare vision did resonate for both critics, and these elements speak to the ways in which Dahmer, as a gay serial killer, has functioned in American culture.

Along with noting the fury at the heart of The Law of Remains, both Holden and Solomon acknowledge the play’s commentary on a culture that turns murderous criminals into celebrities. But rather than focusing on mass media, Abdoh depicts Andy Warhol—the master of Pop Art  who died in 1987—as the avatar of America’s obsession with fame and celebrity. By putting the serial killer Jeffrey Snarling into a movie, Abdoh’s Warhol is exploiting him as a commodity, creating him in a “factory” and selling him like a can of soup. Warhol and Snarling are not protagonist and antagonist as much as they are two sides of the same coin: two gay men who gain celebrity in America, one for works of art (creation), one for acts of murder (destruction). Perhaps Warhol can also be seen as a stand-in for Abdoh, the auteur who offers an artistic representation of a celebrity serial killer that is somewhat different from the mass media image, but still attached to the culture of commodity and consumption.
  [pages 160-161]

The chapter goes on to discuss Abdoh's use of Dahmer as a "performer" and as a metaphorical embodiment of AIDS, as well as Abdoh's synthesis of rage and mourning, particularly when focusing on Dahmer's victims. Dahmer still haunts the American imagination, and Abdoh's Law of Remains brilliantly confronts the audiences with the brutality of his crimes and complicates his cultural significance.

Foxcatcher: Wrestling with Emasculation and Murder

11/15/2014

 
Picture
Bennett Miller’s new film Foxcatcher is based on a true story and stars Steve Carell as John du Pont, the heir to the Du Pont fortune who shot and killed the Olympic gold medal wrestler Dave Schultz in 1996.  Du Pont had turned his family estate, Foxcatcher Farm, into a training camp for athletes, and at the time of the murder case, rumors abounded that Du Pont was, in fact, gay and had a sexual interest in maintaining a stable of athletic younger men.  Miller’s film never directly addresses du Pont’s sexuality, and the result is a film that relies on the homophobic clichés that have long informed the depiction of the homicidal homosexual.

The internet is filled with speculation about whether du Pont was gay.  So let’s just start with the assumption that he was.  Well, okay, maybe not gay like a post-Stonewall “out” gay person who identifies as part of a gay community.  And probably not even gay like a self-loathing-but-hiring-hustlers closet-case gay like Roy Cohn.  But let’s concede that, whatever the rumors (and the settled-out-of-court sexual harassment case and the quickly-annulled marriage to a woman), Du Pont’s strongest attachments seemed to be to men, specifically the athletic men with whom he surrounded himself. 

So how does Foxcatcher depict du Pont’s non-normative erotic life?  Miller’s film portrays du Pont not so much as a homosexual but as a machosexual: someone who valorizes masculine power in himself, in his companions, and in his nation.  Du Pont’s power is financial rather than physical, so he buys large athletes and large guns in order to increase his own sense of masculinity.  Does he “desire” these men?  Well, he certainly objectifies them, and he wants to be able to control them, even dominate them.  I’m not sure if that’s desire, but in Miller’s film, it’s deeply creepy and emblematic of all that’s wrong in America.

Foxcatcher primarily follows the relationship, beginning in 1987, between du Pont (Carell) and Mark Schultz, an Olympic wrestler played by Channing Tatum, complete with cauliflower ear and protruding lower jaw.  Mark won an Olympic medal in 1984, and he still trains with his older brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo), but he’s living an impoverished existence, both economically and spiritually.  When watching Carell’s rich older man “seduce” Tatum’s virile younger man with money, drugs, and helicopter rides, I couldn’t help but think of Mordaunt Shairp’s play The Green Bay Tree, performed on Broadway in 1933. 

In this British melodrama, a wealthy sophisticate named Dulcimer corrupts young Julian with a life of idle luxury, even getting in the way of Julian’s engagement, until Julian’s working-class father shoots the old pansy dead.  The play never directly addresses homosexuality, but, as the director of the American production Jed Harris noted, “The suspicion had to be there.  That’s the only way you can explain what was going on” (Alan Sinfield, Out on Stage, 118).  So The Green Bay Tree relies on coded signifiers for homosexuality, such as Dulcimer’s meticulous sense of style and penchant for witty epigrams in the manner of Oscar Wilde.  Miller uses a similar technique of connotation: when the audience sees that Tatum’s character, after spending time with du Pont, has dyed blond tips and mousse in his hair, we know that something has gone terribly wrong.

The film critiques du Pont’s attempts to purchase masculinity, and it’s a moment of high camp when du Pont throws a hissy fit because the army tank he ordered didn’t come with the machine gun he requested.  But the film itself displays a deep fear of emasculation, at times functioning as a horror film, with du Pont as the monster who threatens the hero’s masculine virtue.  In one particularly creepy sequence, du Pont wrestles Mark late at night, alone in the gym in the dark.  Since the film can’t imagine or depict actual homosexuality, it shows du Pont on top of Mark, with Mark’s face mashed into the ground, subjugated and emasculated not by du Pont’s superior athleticism, but by du Pont’s financial power.  If Mark wants to get paid, he will submit.  While some audience members might read this scene as “gay,” the filmmakers can imagine male same-sex relations only as emasculation, part and parcel of the decadence brought about by excessive luxury, wealth, and power.

Meyer Levin asserted this same connection in Compulsion, his dramatization of the Leopold and Loeb murder case on stage (1957) and screen (1959).  Leopold’s homosexuality is simply a failure of masculinity caused by too much money—and too much intellectualism.  In Meyer’s view, if the boy played more baseball and read fewer books, he wouldn’t have become a homicidal homosexual.  Note also that du Pont, like Leopold, is an ornithologist.  Du Pont’s collection of stuffed birds might remind the viewer of yet another queer killer: Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).  Like Bates, du Pont has a mother who disapproves of her son’s erotic life.  In Miller’s film, Vanessa Redgrave manages to give some depth and resonance to this role, despite the ready-made Freudian cliché of the overbearing mother.

Foxcatcher contrasts the emotionally stunted and sexually frustrated du Pont, as well as the morose and victimized Mark, with the most vibrant character in the film, Mark Ruffalo’s Dave Schultz.  Dave is the burly and bearded older brother, a family man who adores his wife and two little children.  He’s a man of principle who can’t be bought by du Pont’s money.  Although he agrees to work as a coach at Foxcatcher, his conscience won’t allow him to call du Pont a “mentor” or a “hero,” because he knows it’s not true.  Indeed, his unwillingness to submit to du Pont may be what makes him du Pont’s murder victim.  The film does little to set up the shooting in terms of a direct cause and effect, and the audience might understand the violence simply in terms of du Pont’s increasing megalomania.  The film does nothing to suggest that the murder is directly tied to du Pont’s sexual desires—and the real criminal case established that there was no “gay angle” to this murder.  The audience of the film, however, will understand that Dave Schultz, the good brother and father, the normative family man, has been shot and killed by the queer psychotic.

One might argue that the film is simply being true to the facts of the case.  If Miller’s du Pont falls into homophobic cliché, it’s because du Pont himself lived those clichés.  Perhaps.  But when depicting a homicidal homosexual, the key difference between a homophobic film and a non-homophobic film is the degree of subjectivity given to the queer character and the degree of empathy asked of the audience for that queer character.  If du Pont is an egomaniacal sexually-frustrated closet case, what exactly is his experience, and how might we understand it in a way that doesn’t simply pathologize homosexuality?  Even if du Pont is a monster, what are the forces (psychological, social, ideological) that construct his monstrosity, and how do all of us potentially participate in those forces?  The film fails to go deeper into the character’s inner life, and it fails to look outside to the broader social landscape in which the character exists.  Therefore the film remains frustratingly opaque, never challenging the homophobic understanding of queerness as emasculating and deadly.

Capturing the Queer Killer on Camera

11/8/2014

 
Theatrical performance is ephemeral, existing in a particular time and space -- and then disappearing.  So the photographers who capture images of live performances serve a crucial function in creating a visual archive.  Their photographs can give scholars and fans an idea of how a particular scene might have appeared on stage, preserving the work of the actors, designers, and director, and indicating the style and tone of a production.

I'm thrilled that so many photographers generously granted permission for their work to be used in Murder Most Queer.  This blog post is a special "hat tip" to these artists and their work.  (I don't have the rights to publish these images in a blog post, but in many cases you can find the images at the links.)

Rope (1929)  The key photographer of Broadway in the first part of the twentieth century was White Studios, and the Billy Rose Theatre Collection at the New York Public Library is a fantastic archive of their work.  (page 44)


Vampire Lesbians of Sodom (1985)  Sadly, I was unable to track down photographer Adam Newman, but Charles Busch graciously
gave permission for the use of this photograph from his hit off-Broadway play.

The Secretaries (1994)  Joan Marcus recently received a Tony Award in recognition of her work as one of the great photographers of contemporary theater.  I'm also indebted to the Theatre Communications Group for sharing this image of the Five Lesbian Brothers in performance at New York Theatre Workshop.  (page 96)


The Lisbon Traviata (1989)  Photographer Gerry Goodstein captured the performances of Nathan Lane and Anthony Heald in Terrence McNally's play at Manhattan Theatre Club.  Bonus points if you can spot Maria Callas in the photo. (page 108)

Porcelain (1993)  The Dallas Theatre Center produced Chay Yew's play in 1993, directed by Richard Hamburger, and the company generously shared this haunting image of actor Steven Eng surrounded by hundreds of origami cranes.  (page 125)


Zombie (2009)  Dixie Sheridan has photographed hundreds of off- and off-off-Broadway productions, including Bill Connington's 2009 adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates' novella.   Sheridan's specialization in the avant-garde is especially valuable, preserving innovative performances outside of the commercial mainstream. (page 169)

Jerk (2010) French photographer Alain Monot captured the performance of Jonathan Capdevielle in this adaptation of Dennis Cooper's short story, seen at P.S. 122 in New York.  (page 170)


In addition to production photographs, Murder Most Queer also includes the work of an artist who is in a category unto himself:

Deathtrap (1978)  If you've seen any Broadway show posters over the past few decades, you've probably seen the work of design artist Fraver (a.k.a. Frank Verlizzo).  He created posters for productions ranging from Sweeney Todd to The Lion King, and his poster for the original Broadway production of Ira Levin's thriller Deathtrap is a classic. (page 66)

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    Jordan Schildcrout is the author of Murder Most Queer

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