Images Courtesy Artist
When Pier Paolo Pasolini delivered his cinematic swan song, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, shortly before being brutally murdered on a beach of the Roman district of Ostia in 1975, he had already firmly established himself as an artisan of provocation, and Catholic Italy’s most abhorred Antichrist. Salò, an intricate allegory of fascistic power’s pornographic abuses was banned in multiple countries until the 21st century, but it’s the auteur’s assassination, as well as the film’s metaphorical amalgamation of sex, violence and death that shaped both the cult fascination it prompted and cultural simplification it underwent in the decades that followed its disputed release. “He was the victim of his own characters”, Michelangelo Antonioni has said of his coeval. Perhaps his characters were the fruit of a rabid desire for revolt — one so potent, it may have intuited, and even hailed its author’s capital sentence.
As the Freudian doxa will have us believe, we seek death as much as we seek life-affirming pleasure; our libidinal and morbid impulses intermesh. Photographer and filmmaker Bruce LaBruce‘s most recent body of work, Death Book II — the second instalment of a two-part volume — fleshes out the inextricable tension at the core of human nature through a visual collection of performances, actions, film production stills and photography that explicitly outline his obsessions, with never-before-exhibited archival works from projects including Hustler White, Otto; or Up with Dead People, and L.A. Zombie. From his theoretical inspirations to the aesthetic execution, LaBruce tells us how he reconciles the lustful and macabre.
Historically, your visual work has often treaded the line between the erotic and what could be construed as “the obscene”, and in Death Book, the morbid. In this Death Book, the struggle between Eros and Thanatos seems to have been conquered by the latter. Is this reification of the death drive an attempt to demystify it?
I take the French notion of La Petite Mort—the orgasm as a “little death” very seriously! The feeling of emptiness, of being spent after a sexual climax is a kind of death. Indeed the aggression inherent in Freud’s notion of “the tendency toward the debasement of the love object” suggests that the sexual drive may indicate an innate impulse toward death and destruction. In ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Freud also says that “the goal of all life is death”. This is the central enigma (and irony) of life, along with the acknowledgement that life and its pleasures would have no meaning if there were no death. In the same book, Freud talks about how people who have had traumatic experiences of violence in their lives tend to recreate or re-enact them, either in dreams or in certain behaviours, or indeed, in art. Some of the final images in Death Book are from my movie L.A. Zombie, in which at the beginning I recreate a traumatic fatal car crash I witnessed as a child. In my reenactment of the event, the alien zombie fucks the dead body back to life. I suppose it was my way of demystifying the event, or at least coping with its memory—almost an attempt to reverse it. The live performances and actions I do involve terrorist abduction and torture scenarios, which also often have an erotic undercurrent, are also a kind of demystification of this kind of horrifying death. It’s playful and cathartic, another way of coping. This is also the function of gore and splatter movies, which are a big influence on my work.
Jung makes the distinction between our societal understanding of death as mere cessation, arguing that death can in fact be the key towards the meaning and fulfilment of life itself, the attaining of its “missing half”. Do you agree? How do you grapple with your own mortality?
I must confess that I tend to be more Freudian than Jungian, which doesn’t mean I don’t attribute a spiritual dimension to sex and death. As I just mentioned, life has no meaning without death. The quest and desire for immortality eludes me (unless I suppose, you believe that your art can imbue you with certain immortality) because only the cessation of life makes sense of it. There is no light without darkness. That’s how I grapple with it. In the great Elizabeth Taylor movie The Driver’s Seat, directed by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, based on the novella by Muriel Spark, Taylor, as Lise, searches for the perfect man to kill her in a sexualised ritual, the ultimate death orgasm. When I saw it in the eighties it mesmerised me. For me, creative and sexual energy both come from the same place, and the prospect of death enhances and intensifies them both.
When thinking of depictions of death that truly disrupted the collective consciousness, the ones that spring to mind are a dying David Kirby or Peter Hujar’s ‘Candy Darling on her deathbed’. If the visual representation of illness or private death without artifice is the last standing taboo of Western societies, the gore, violent, spectacular, sensationalised death is somehow all over film and TV. Its shock value has become diluted. How do you, as an aesthete of the gore, avoid falling prey to commercial tropes?
For some reason, I’ve never really been accused of being too commercial! The very fact that my movies have been more underground and pornographic has kept me somewhat separate from the commercial world, and it has afforded me a great amount of freedom in the representation of extreme and graphic imagery. It has not only been largely underground and pornographic, but it has also been so in an orthodox and some ways uncooptable, and not merely for its “queer” aspect. The explicit sex in my early films was awkward and real and even somewhat shameful, or at least self-conscious, not exactly marketable or to be used in a Gucci campaign! If I could do an awkward, self-conscious Gucci campaign, of course, I would. And the combination of sex and violence in my photographs and movies is also presented with a certain romantic sensibility (romantic in its awkwardness and naivety), or even with a sense of comedy and farce. The commodification of sex and violence in fashion and pop culture is generally a very serious affair, where glamour is a cold-blooded killer possessing a kind of fascist appeal. My idea of glamour is a little more off-kilter. For me, the outsider, the misfit and the renegade are more glamorous, going against the grain of the corporate, fascistic exploitation of sex and violence.
The advent of violence, blood, gore and splatter done with pitiless digital effects is so cold and detached. It's not fun at all. It has that fascist feeling, and fascism isn't fun.
When thinking of the gore in cinema, for instance in slasher movies, it seems like the more blood and guts are splattered on a screen, the more perversely entertaining, and often humorous the overall work becomes. I feel like you often tread that line in a way that’s quite ambiguous. Can death be funny?
Well, this was especially true of the B-movie slasher and gore films of the late sixties and the seventies—all low-budget B-movies done with cheap and creative analogue effects, which I’ve also used in my movies and photographs—especially my zombie movies. There’s something about finding the right recipe for fake blood, and sloshing around with pales of it with buckets of squirmy fake organs and limbs that make the whole enterprise more fun and playful—you can tune into that sense of play when you watch those movies. Night of the Living Dead is terrifying, but you also kind of think sometimes how much fun it must have been to do all that fake gore and cannibalism. I’m sure they had a ball making it. The advent of violence, blood, gore and splatter done with pitiless digital effects is so cold and detached. It’s not fun at all. It has that fascist feeling, and fascism isn’t fun. As I say in my introductory interview in the Death Book, the feeling at my public performances of death, torture and gore is not negative at all, but rather playful, cathartic and fun. When I direct people, I do so to make it look as realistic as possible. Play it straight, not smiling or laughing, that way it’s even more fun.
The design of the book paraphrases the Bible, yet its release is (I’m supposing, intentionally) set for Halloween. When thinking of how Western societies culturally frame death, are you more interested in the pagan or the liturgic?
I don’t know how intentional the Halloween release was, but for me, like for Ministry and a lot of people I know, every day is Halloween! For quite a while now my work has included aspects of the pagan and liturgic. My photo series ‘Obscenity’, which I shot and presented at La Fresh Gallery in Madrid in 2012, was based on certain sexual paganisms applied to Catholic rituals, exploring the intersection of sexual and religious ecstasy. In my movie The Misandrists from 2017, there is a ritualistic castration/sex reassignment scene which ends in an orgy of splatter. In my new movie, Saint-Narcisse, a demented priest enacts a sexually violent ritual based on Saint Sebastian as a young monk. The performances at my gallery openings have also had that same ritualistic quality in which the models and members of the public who participate are baptised in blood. It’s a kind of holy art ritual.
Pasolini was a gay Marxist atheist living in 60s Catholic Italy—yet his work translates an obsession with religion that makes for quite a fascinating duality. Do you believe in transcendence and/or afterlife? If not, is it something you consider in your work, especially when taking on an issue such as death?
Today [2 November], happens to be the anniversary of Pasolini’s assassination and martyrdom in 1975, so your question is particularly apropos! Movies of the masters like Pasolini’s Salo and Makavejev’s Sweet Movie were big influences on me when I saw them in film school. Both of them have that pagan and liturgic quality you were talking about, and both were highly controversial and frequently censored. Both were banned in Ontario, the province of Canada I live in, and later I would have my own work routinely censored, confiscated and deemed “obscenity”, with the film labs calling the cops and customs delaying or even destroying my work. Both films also deal in the kind of extreme fetishism and perversity that could only be produced by the ambivalences and contractions of religion. The stories of the lives of saints are full of fetish, gore, self-abnegation and spiritual transcendence through ritualistic torture and violence. Ken Russell’s The Devils is another great example but each one is also an example of an artist representing all of these violent contradictions with passion, intensity, intellect, and spiritual devotion.
Can the morbid be aesthetically desirable or pleasing? Should it be?
When the great Dario Argento was once asked why he depicts the murder of so many women in his films, he replied: “because they die more beautifully”. This is far from politically correct, and I don’t share the same sentiment—in my work, everyone dies with equal beauty—but I know what he was getting at. There is that moment of transcendent murder and death that can take on a profound aesthetic dimension, especially in cinema (and of course theatre, from Shakespeare to Grand Guignol and beyond). Aesthetics are also a way of tempering the fear of death, making the inevitable demise almost seductive.
Death Book II by Bruce LaBruce is available for purchase here.