Bruce LaBruce has made everything from sex with skinheads (No Skin Off My Ass) to sex with someone's leg stump (Hustler White)
seem sexy. (Or not sexy, considering how far you are willing to allow
yourself to witness such dark, taboo terrain.) With his latest, Otto; or, Up With Dead People (currently screening at the IFC Center),
he has decided to tackle the most difficult subject ever for a
man-on-man political porno: existential angst, melacholia, death
(cannibalism and necrophilia seem tame in comparison).LaBruce seems to have arrived at the zombiefest a little late. After recent campy zombie comedies Shaun of the Dead and Fido, the gay zombie film seems to be riffing on themes that would have been better suited to some time in the 1990s when it could have shocked or horrified (or maybe with all the blood-gay-AIDS references on Alan Ball's True Blood, the plot is better off being freed of such associations).
We're introduced to Otto (Jey Crisfar), a young German youth who is stumbling around, his pale zombie eyes scoping out something to feed his hunger. He is afraid of man flesh, so he first devours bunny roadkill (one of the most hilariously gruesome scenes in the film) on his way to Berlin. Only later do we discover that we're also watching an experimental art film by by Medea Yarn (Katharina Klewinghaus) that takes the gazy zombie as an extended metaphor.
Yarn's character is both the most droll and amazing; LaBruce is able to encapsulate every Goth fantasy possible: she wears all black and even walks around with a parasol to keep her pale skin unblemished; she talks in a passionless voice and lacks any emotion; she reads Marcuse; she even dates a 1920s silent film star named Hella Bent (Susanne Sachsse), whose scenes are actually shot in scratchy black-and-white with title cards. Yarn's monologues are structured to be both horribly didactic and surprisingly revealing: as if she is a stand-in for LaBruce, explaning how difficult and dreary it can be to be a cult filmmaker and yet how personally satisfying.
Of course there are problems with continuity. Of course there are moments that are boring, stupid and insufferable. What do you expect? In his youthful days, LaBruce openly flaunted the conventions of narrative and good taste, and like other bratty provocateur's (John Waters, for instance), he seems to have grown weary of what's expected (full-penetration porno, complete with cumshots) and learned how to both entertain and bore. With Otto, LaBruce continues to subvert the indie filmmaking narrative: Instead of the unidentified ambiguous angst of some middle-class cutie which will be eventually resolved in a quirky, comical fashion by the end. He gives us a dirty, smelly, bloodthirsty walking dead who never really figures himself out and ends up, like Frankenstein's monster, trudging around searching for love.
The metaphor may seem strained, but LaBruce seems to be attacking the bourgeois gay lifestyle, a life of zombie-like hookups that usually occur online and may not have any semblance of passion. In one of the most exciting scenes, Otto is picked up by a guy outside a club where the theme of the evening is to dress like a zombie. The guy thinks Otto's costume is great, they go back to his place, Otto ransacks the trick's drugs and ends up eviscerating him. The naked man, whose guts are splayed around him, then wakes up and say, "Can I see you again?" It seems like the punchline to a short film (several of the vignettes actually feel that way and the entire film could have been wrapped up in 45 minutes instead of the 94 it is currently).
When I first watched the film at a MoMA screening packed full of hipster gays and art fags, a palpable feeling of wanting more signature Bruce LaBruce sex on film (there's one B&W scene where a zombie fucks a gash in his boyfriend's ripped open stomach, romantic interlude that's cropped like a Hollywood love scene and the zombie orgy at the end) hung in the air. It's always been LaBruce's trick: you suffer through the silliness, the boring bits, because you're titillated by the sexy stuff. Now that no one orgasms, there's less exposed flesh and it all ends with a whimper, it's that much more difficult to convince someone they should tackle a tedious film about gay zombies. But they should anyway.
