The Intellectual Homosexual

So, I didn’t get a chance to watch the first presidential debate last night between McCain and Obama, but from what I hear, the subject of gay zombies didn’t come up once.

Ahhhh, yes, it’s all coming back to me - the movie last night. I caught a screening of underground filmmaker Bruce LaBruce’s new opus, Otto; or, Up with Dead People at Cinema 21 as part of the Portland Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. I can only describe it as an anarcho-punk gay zombie porn love story, although I’m sure a few more adjectives could be thrown into that mix. I enjoyed the film immensely. It is most interesting to survey the mutations and evolutions of the zombie genre - this is coming from a lifelong horror and cult film aficionado - over the years and the ways that it has been co-opted by intelligent outsiders ever since Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead first offended audiences (and stimulated a few forward-thinking critics) way back in 1967 (the year of the Summer of Love!)

LaBruce stated during the Q&A after the screening that his intention was to make a zombie who was a likable protagonist rather than a dumb extra or mindless, villainous other, and he’s certainly done so here. Otto, as played by 18-year-old Jey Crisfar in his first major film role, is a sensitive, attractive young man who just happens to be…dead. (I think he’s kinda cute, actually, even in full zombie get-up, but then I went through a good goth phase myself not so long ago.) Otto was a vegetarian and had a boyfriend while alive; turns out those sorts of proclivities follow you into the netherworld, as he continues to be attracted to men and to shy away from human flesh as one of the undead. But is he really undead, or just a young man with serious mental problems? The film seems to intentionally hold this ambiguity out to the audience in the scene in which Otto meets up with his former boyfriend, who tells him he had to dump him after he was committed to a mental institution for complications due to acute schizophrenia.

Also excellent is Katharina Klewinghaus as Medea Yarn (an anagram of “Maya Deren,” an experimental filmmaker of bygone days with whom LaBruce is quite taken), a hilariously campy Marxist-feminist filmmaker struggling to complete her political zombie porn film despite lack of funding. Klewinghaus gets a good laugh with almost every scene she’s in, as she strides about directing her crew of mostly scantily clad young men through a megaphone, or struts through a cemetery like a morbid peacock admiring tombstones (”I love birthdays,” she purrs; “Each one brings you closer to death!”), or chastises her lover, a black-and-white apparition from the silent film era who has no lines and is always accompanied by antediluvian soundtrack music. (The cinematic divide doesn’t prevent the two ladies from passionately making out a couple times.) According to LaBruce, Medea Yarn represents a number of women who have influenced him throughout his life, starting with an older sister, while Klewinghaus is a filmmaker in real life who has just completed a documentary on women in horror films.

The photo above, crappy though it is, was taken during the Q&A session after the screening. The majority of the audience left, but enough remained to give LaBruce plenty of questions to answer, including Gus Van Sant, who you can’t see, but who was seated on the far left end of the very front row along with his retinue of attractive young men. LaBruce said he was breaking out of the “safety zone” by screening the film in sci-fi, fantasy and horror conventions rather than just queer festivals - he’d just shown it at a fantasy festival in South Korea - which really cemented my respect for him. I can only imagine the kind of reception it might get at a “straight” horror festival. It doesn’t pull its punches in terms of homosexual imagery, although it shies away (just barely) from a full-on money shot (as Splendora pointed out in the Q&A afterwards). Still, it’s not something you’d take your parents to see, unless your parents are Patsy and Edina from Absolutely Fabulous.

I really liked this film. I suppose it’s impossible in our modern, post-everything era to make a zombie film that doesn’t deconstruct itself as a zombie film, but this one did so in a subversive, intelligent, entertaining way. I recently finished reading a book called Monsters in the Closet by Harry M. Benshoff which I recommend to all queer horror film fans. I find it fascinating that throughout the history of horror cinema - going back to the original Nosferatu and the Universal classics of the ’30s - the monster in horror has often been coded or figured as a queer, and it’s encouraging to see that trend change with new films like Otto co-opting and subverting the figure of the monster queer by making him/her the sympathetic protagonist rather than the dread-inspiring antagonist. I’d love to lock John McCain and Sarah Palin up in a room and make them watch it. (With one of those devices that holds your eyes open, like in A Clockwork Orange.)

On a follow-up note to my first blog: I looked in the paper yesterday and saw that Brideshead Revisited is already out of the theaters. It must not have done so well. Do you moviegoers not know quality when you see it? It saddens me, but I’ll hope a healthy second life for it in the second-run theaters and on DVD.

Until next time,

Tony LeTigre out

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