Director: Kenneth Anger
Writer: Ernest D. Glucksman
Cast: Bruce Byron, Ernie Allo, Frank Carifi, Steve Crandell, Johnny Dods
Runtime: 28 mins.
1963
Scorpio Rising is an experimental short film about gay Nazi bikers. There is no plot to speak of beyond whatever you can glean from a series of circumstances and impressions: a motorcycle race, an orgy, some sort of occult ritual. But first, the longest scene in the film, a relatively tranquil sequence of men working in their garages.
The shooting style in Scorpio Rising is impressionistic. I mean that in two senses of the word. The first is that the filming and editing tell their story not through temporal cause and effect like most narrative film, but by cobbling together isolated gestures and images in order to create a general impression of an environment. We don't even see our first face for a while, as the camera instead frames bodies, hands at work, tools, machinery, decoration. The effect is immersive, as if we have just wandered into a garage ourselves and are being hit with the sights and smells all at once. But I am also fascinated by the way it disappears its characters into their environment, cancelling their subjectivity and subsuming them in the ideology of their symbolic world. Director Kenneth Anger operationalizes this as an intentional commentary about the communities these men inhabit, and the way they can get lost in their mystique.
I also use impressionistic in the original sense of the word: an artistic movement heavily focused on representing the dynamic qualities of light. From the jump, Anger's lighting design* does as much to shape the space as the physical objects. The camera eagerly laps up every gleam of light that bounces off the sleek metal bodies of these fetish object vehicles. When the film turns darker and more chaotic, the lighting slips into expressionism: framing bodies with an eerie glowing halo, carving out sharp gestures from darkness, or bathing figures in flashing shocks of primary colors.
*I'm assuming the lighting design is Anger's, since he acted as cinematographer as well, and there is no credited lighting designer
Even more iconic and influential is the sound design, a stream of '60s pop-rock hits that stays jacked way up in the sound mix the entire time. There is no dialogue, only music and occasional intrusive sound effects. Form meets function beautifully here, as the omnipresent soundtrack feels like a radio blaring in a workshop. The choice would be justified even if it were a well-worn cinematic technique, but Scorpio Rising is the first of its kind to utilize anything like it. You could probably genealogize the legacy of Scorpio Rising directly to the genesis of MTV.
The soundtrack also creates tension by clashing with the subject matter. The screams of the motorcycles, the rough bloody sex, the racist iconography all become more pronounced when juxtaposed with the sounds of chart-topping americana. Here the genius of Anger's work emerges with clarity. Without lecturing us about the dangers of racist ideologues, or hypermasculinity, or driving 200 pound machines recklessly, he instills in us a sense of deep dread. We are complicit in a nation that could produce such hatred. White supremacy, he seems to say, is as American as Elvis Presley.
It would be reductive to suggest that Scorpio Rising dismisses these men. There is no doubt about their monstrosity, but with that monstrosity is woven in a current of humanity. There is beauty to be found here. Sexiness. Domesticity even, as the most prominent biker lounges around in his room reading comics and petting his adorable cat. Monstrosity and the mundane coexist, and they do so every day. To understand how, we have to look to the libido.
One of Freud's great psychosocial innovations was the identification of the death drive in human behavior. Humans so rarely act in their own best interest because we all have within us a powerful lack that cannot be filled, one that drives us to self-destruction. It is this psychic cycle of construction and dismantling that sustains our libido, and it is our libido that sustains our ability to do very much of anything at all.
With this concept in mind, all of the signifiers that Anger bathes us in start to align. The insert of a newspaper headline, "Cycle Kills Two," apparently saved as a memento mori. The numerous skeletons, both diegetic and abstract. The motorcycle races and crashes. The occult ritual. The intercuts of Jesus heading to his death in an old Biblical movie. The cocaine. The massive BDSM sex party. The Nazi iconography. The final image of emergency lights and sirens.
This is a stunning portrait of men following their dark desires to the edge of oblivion.
4.5 / 5 BLOBS
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