Rest in Peace, Kenneth Anger
On May 22nd, I started watching Kenneth Anger’s short films. I had meant to check them out for a long time, so I started with the first few I could get my hands on—Fireworks, Puce Moment, and Eaux d’artifice. I realized that he had used many of the techniques I had used in my own short film, except he did it sixty years prior, with analog technology, and had much more to show for it. I turned the TV off, thinking I had seen enough for one day. Two days later, his death was announced by the press.
Anger’s films are hard to put into words. Some of them lack a narrative or are subdued, like Eaux d’artifice and Puce Moment. Others are abrasive and provocative, like Fireworks, and The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. These are all great films, but there is one that stands over the rest, both as his most popular film and arguably his most provocative.
Scorpio Rising, released in 1963, is a film about a Nazi biker gang working on their motorcycles, worshipping Marlon Brando and James Dean, and throwing a sadomasochistic party. Throughout the film, we hear classic rock and roll singles from the 1940’s and 1950’s. The ending of the film edits images of Jesus, Hitler, and occult symbols together alongside the Nazis. In a way, this film is an insult to both American culture and the Nazis. Anger equates them to one another by finding their intersection—the very real history of Nazism in American biker gangs. Intercut with the Nazis are images of Jesus and American pop culture icons, while the movie is soundtracked exclusively by American-made pop tunes. These juxtapositions may be off-putting at first, but you settle into it after enough time passes, and you become comfortable seeing these sounds and visuals put together like that—the comparison begins to make sense.
The film also seems to avoid the problem of Nazi reappropriation of their own imagery in films. Anger portrayed the bikers in an explicitly homoerotic fashion. They use sleeveless leather jackets that show off their muscles, pretend to hump one another, and seem to obsess over their aesthetics. By portraying the Nazis as homosexuals in his film, Anger manages to insult them with something that truly offends them, because it strikes a certain chord. The interesting thing is that homosexuality is not portrayed in an insulting manner. Kenneth Anger was a gay man, and any regular viewer would probably watch this film and think that homosexuality was the least offensive thing about it. However, Anger is arguing that Nazi bikers do a lot of the same things stereotypes tell us gay men do. They dress in leather, obsess over their aesthetics, do hard drugs, and worship muscular bodies. By portraying them in this way, Anger makes sure that Nazis cannot reclaim these images any more than they could reclaim Springtime for Hitler or The Great Dictator.
Anger was definitely a provocateur, but more importantly, he was one of the first filmmakers to portray gay men in film without rancor, even while it was forbidden by the Hays code or illegal. With his death comes the loss of an unbelievably important force in film, and one whose unique voice we will miss forever.
Cover Image by Jimmy Desana.
