Radical, Political, Sexual: Bruce LaBruce Pushes Boundaries and Buttons
Words: Adam Hart
Photo: Derek Sharpton
Hardcore has gotten kind of hip lately. With A-List directors like Larry Clark, Lukas Moodysson and Michael Winterbottom all pushing the limits of arthouse edginess, it's easy to lose in the controversy-filled shuffle an underground veteran like Bruce LaBruce, who over the past 15 years has been making some of indie cinema's wittiest and most visually inventive films, all of which are, by definition, gay porns. Not especially concerned with eroticism, his films are down and dirty punk comedies that marry the energy and methods of classic sexploitation with a sensibility born out of art school brattiness. Likely to reference Kenneth Anger or Andy Warhol but also likely to kick off a sex scene by repeatedly zooming in onto the cleavage peeking out above a plumber's low-hanging jeans, LaBruce inhabits a middle ground too artsy for most porn audiences, but too cheerfully faithful to the conventions of cinema's least respected genre, and too unwilling to strike an ironically distanced pose even when tweaking conventions, to catch on with the arty types. "That's the point -- to work within those conventions enough for them to be considered actual porn movies but to subvert the form as much as I can within those strictures," LaBruce claims of his chosen milieu. "For me it's something like a genre exercise."
His self-conscious, unironic embrace of genre has never been more effective than in his latest offering, The Raspberry Reich, which juxtaposes the political sloganeering of a band of radical German activists with the quasi-terrorist group's reluctant entry into what team leader and den mother Gudrun refers to as "the orgasmic revolution." Taking a cue from the writings of '70s psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, Gudrun proclaims, loudly and often, that freeing the masses from sexual repression is the first step to liberating them from the bourgeois capitalist system. "I was struck by how the Left was silenced and almost castrated after 9/11," LaBruce explains. "So I wanted to give a voice, however comically or ironically, to all that good, solid Leftist rhetoric that used to be part of the public discourse in the '60s and '70s -- stuff about empowering the people and promoting the rights of the working class, calling for social and political change, Marxist-based ideas about economic parity and sharing the wealth, and so on."
LaBruce approaches the didactic politics of the film in the same way he does the sex, parodying the formula while celebrating it at the same time. Barrages of slogans and speeches scroll across the screen from the film's opening moments (example: "Heterosexuality is the opiate of the masses!"), as if the film, like Gudrun, feels that the audience should be taking notes. LaBruce never openly mocks the group and their ideas, maintaining a tone of bemused admiration. He never faults them for the inherent ridiculousness of their idealism, but he never tries to conceal that ridiculousness, seemingly finding it both charming and sexy.
Working in hardcore means that LaBruce has often been hampered by the same limitations other porno directors face. Working with miniscule budgets (high for porns, very low for independent films), low-end equipment, untrained actors and the like, he has made a giant leap forward by going digital on his latest feature. Shooting entirely in DV, the constraints of a rushed production were largely overcome by Final Cut Pro. "It gave me a lot more freedom to work with the material I had, which is always very limited -- very few takes, some poor quality footage that needed to be doctored -- to play with the text, and to use all sorts of visual effects that I never had access to before." The result is his best-looking film, and the one in which the ideas are most fully developed, with his most delicately drawn characters and a complex, engrossing storyline. It's also his first film since 1996's Hustler White in which the sex is fully integrated into the rest of film, in terms of both narrative and the film's ideas -- including the ones hurtling across the screen sometimes two or three at a time.
The satirical didacticism starts from the very first sex scene between Gudrun and her boyfriend, a tour de force marathon session that moves from the bed to the living room to the elevator, where it spreads like a virus to an unfortunate elderly couple that happens to arrive in the building at the wrong time. The couple's roommate, meanwhile, can't help but listen to the noises coming from the other side of the wall (which include the high-pitched recitation of various vaguely Marxist declarations). Using the group's arsenal of handguns and rifles to stimulate himself, and evidently trying to return the favor, he masturbates as images of radicals past -- from Baader-Meinhof to the SLA - look on from the wall behind him. At one point, when the roommate puts his ear to the wall, LaBruce intercuts an image of Fidel Castro leaning in to a confidant. In a year already glutted with didactic political films (what filmmaker and radio commentator Avi Lewis likes to call "protest porn"), this playful, smart and incredibly clever mixture of sex and politics is an extremely welcome addition.
