written and directed by Paul Morrissey

Criterion #27.

Good lord.

In her classic essay on “camp,” Susan Sontag differentiates between two types, “naïve and deliberate,” and says that only naïve camp is satisfying. I agree.

The formulation “so bad it’s good” should properly denote cultural artifacts that are genuine failures but that intrigue because their failure happens to take a spectacular form. They are “bad” judged by their own intra-cultural terms; “good” judged from a broad, curious perspective that doesn’t subscribe to any particular narrow culture (or at least purports not to).

Generally, what makes campy failures compelling is that unlike garden variety failures, they are internally coherent; they have a delectable dream logic. In most cases this coherence is not just a lucky coincidence; it arises from the artist’s actual philosophical outlook and creative priorities. And skewed as these might seem, they’re almost always part of a real culture, even if one shared by only a few people. The artist had to come from somewhere. The supposed “failure on its own terms” is actually a failure on the terms of the beholder’s culture, not the creator’s. Camp is really a form of culture clash.

So the responsible question about any specimen of camp becomes: what kind of legitimacy should we afford the “absurd” culture? The slightly uncomfortable thing about a mass-consumed bit of “camp” like the Double Dream Hands video is that it actually emanates from a robust, well-populated sub-culture. So when we all laugh at it for being campy, we are not really aligning ourselves with some kind of broad and curious anthropological perspective; we are just aligning ourselves with the dominant culture and ridiculing with impunity. Not all that different from ethnic humor, etc.

(Reader A’s preferred example of this sort of thing is JonBenét Ramsey. Here’s another one for you.)

Lest this sound prickly and political, let me clarify that I do think that Double Dream Hands is absurd, and that responding to absurdity with amusement isn’t necessarily a cruel, bigoted response; it can also be a warm, human, admirable one. It can indeed be broad-minded and curious and joyful. But as to what qualifies as absurd, I tend to take a more Camusian attitude: nearly everything about every culture is absurd! The truly open-hearted attitude Sontag describes (“Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature”) should be so all-encompassing as not to need naming. It is a kind of lightness. That’s an attitude to which I aspire.

But that’s not what is generally meant by “camp,” and certainly not by “so bad it’s good.” These encourage us to subscribe to a culturally-validated notion of what is campy (i.e. Double Dream Hands and child beauty pageants but not Facebook or, say, the White House), which converts camp into just another arbitrary cultural charade, no less absurd than what it mocks.

Which is why what Sontag calls “deliberate Camp” always strikes me as sad, or worse. Deliberate camp is the attempt to bring about the pleasures of camp by intentionally trafficking in culturally-validated “campy things.” At its most innocent there is something foolishly fetishistic about it: it’s like a primitive ritual to gain the favor of some god by dressing up like it and dancing around. At its most offensive it is a complete inversion of the significance of the camp attitude. “Oh god campy things are amazing and we love them so of course we want to put on our own show that’s just as amazing as all the truly campy things that we love.” This, far from being a broad-minded and curious, is actually a deeply hypocritical cultural conformity, embodying none of the values it claims to cherish.

Okay, okay, I know what you’re wondering: “Which is he going to say Flesh For Frankenstein is, already?”

Have I got a surprise for you!

I have no idea what this movie is. I really couldn’t tell you what we’re dealing with here. I have watched it twice now, once straight and once with commentary, and I am just befuddled. My gut tells me that despite the obvious it may not be any kind of camp at all. I feel disoriented.

Flesh for Frankenstein has many of the standard camp trappings: very bad acting, very bad writing, constant “exploitative” nudity, sex, gore, etc. If I thought its intention was to be a traditionally effective movie, I would consider it true camp. Alternately, if I thought this movie’s being a dense nexus of outrageous trashola was clearly no accident, I would assume it to be a rather on-the-nose case of deliberate camp (bearing as it does a passing resemblance to The Rocky Horror Picture Show of two years later, all-time standard bearer for deliberate camp).

But I genuinely don’t know what it is.

The strange impression I get is that much of its monumental garbageosity — not all! — is in fact intentional… but that the intentions are not those of deliberate camp; they are far more eccentric. And less hypocritical. Which means I am stymied: it’s not naïve camp because they knew what they were doing, sort of; it’s not deliberate camp because the thing they knew themselves to be doing wasn’t “being campy.” There’s sort of an idiot-savant quality about it. Or maybe I mean savant-idiot.

Let’s watch that clip again.

In the commentary — which is by writer/director Paul Morrissey, star Udo Kier, and an obligatory academic, in this case a guy named Maurice Yacowar — Morrissey and Kier (and maybe Yacowar too; I mostly tuned him out because he was ridiculous) both talk about the movie in terms of “comedy” and “humor.” I would be tempted to accuse them of “outsider” opportunism (“yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket, it was supposed to be funny!”) except the specific things they mention as “jokes” — particularly absurd gore, particularly absurd lines — do indeed seem to be intentional. And yet the overwhelming inadequacy of the movie still requires explanation. Is there anything more confusing than crazy people trying to be funny?

Then there’s the strange issue of sex. The movie goes through standard inane porno scenarios in very slow motion (the sex-obsessed baroness scolds the sullen strapping peasant lad and tells him to report to her bedchamber, which he does, she tells him that he’s to be her private servant, etc. etc.) but then when they eventually take off their clothes, the movie seems immediately bored and disgusted. We get all the idiocy of the buildup with no actual erotic payoff. In fact the ultimate “sex scene” between the baroness and the peasant lad is intentionally made ridiculous and gross: she buries her face in his armpit while we hear outlandish slurping noises.

At one point Baron Frankenstein makes a speech about how disgusted he is by ordinary sex, by “overdeveloped women” with their “filthy movements.” This is part of the portrayal of the Baron as a hopeless pervert, an evil mad scientist obsessed with eugenics, who is only turned on by corpses and internal organs… and yet, oddly, the movie seems to sympathize with his disgust. From the speech, we cut away directly to a dumpy whore rather ridiculously washing her pendulous breasts. The message, essentially, is that the Baron was right, sex is indeed ugly and stupid! I was reminded of the scene from “The Singing Detective” when the psychiatrist reads the writer a sex-phobic passage from one of his books and points out that such a passage sticks out as psychologically revealing because it “doesn’t belong in a detective story.” Here one is similarly caught off guard by the inappropriateness. Believe it or not, you are watching a sexploitation movie made by someone who hates sex.

Here’s what Morrissey says about it on the commentary:

There’s always a sexual element in these stories, I think because I think that sex has become such an absurd thing in modern life that it lends itself to all sorts of comical interpretations or versions… Whatever people’s sexuality is in a story in a movie I make, it’s usually an absurd sexuality; it’s not sincere, it’s not really important. It might drive their lives but it almost is as inconsequential as the breakfast cereal they might have. It’s all reduced in my movies, very intentionally, to something that in effect has no real meaning.

Now, you could write a whole awful thesis on the homosexual “subtext” of this movie (in fact the movie seems to exist solely to provide material for such a thesis) but I’m only going to touch on it briefly. The movie screams “queer!” in a hundred ways (do I really have to defend this impression? don’t make me), and yet oddly enough, for all its tiresome “transgressiveness” (sibling incest; the creepy children of sibling incest voyeuristically watching their parents’ sex lives; evisceration rape, for crying out loud), homosexuality still dare not speak its name. It isn’t mentioned or depicted in the script and it doesn’t play any explicit part in the plot. But here’s the core of the story: there is a beautiful sad-eyed young man who wants to become a monk and isn’t interested in sex with women. Once or twice we see him glance expressionlessly at his friend the strapping farm lad. His head gets cut off and gets put on one of Frankenstein’s monsters, but disappoints the Baron and the Baroness because they each want the monster for sex — the Baron wants it to mate with his female monster; the Baroness wants to have sex with it herself — and he has no sex drive (the Baron got the wrong guy’s head; he really wanted the head of the horny friend). In the end, the boy, in his new monster form, kills the Baron and has a chance to return to the world. But the tragic ending is that he says no: he can’t explain why, but he must die here. Then he tears his own guts open and dies. The only real moral I can take away: even in this incredibly debauched world of absurd garbage, there is still no place for a homosexual, and no place for the sex-positive feelings that the strangely repressed homosexual filmmaker has had to hide far away.

I say strangely repressed because surely in Andy Warhol’s coterie (see below) there was no stigma whatever attached to being gay, and you’d think that being drawn to such a world would be a sign of readiness to open things up a bit. I mean, these are the people who took a walk on the wild side! (Flesh‘s strapping lad is in fact the Little Joe of the song, and Paul Morrissey “discovered and signed The Velvet Underground.”)

But here’s a quote from Andy Warhol that I just found: “The running question was, did he [Paul Morrissey] have a sex life or not? Everyone who’d ever known him insisted that he did absolutely nothing, and all his hours seemed accounted for, but still Paul was an attractive guy, so people constantly asked, ‘What does he do? He must do something…”

So I think I got it right and this movie is a sad document of repression far weirder than the norm. Let’s move on.

Yeah, so if you didn’t know, there is an Andy Warhol connection here. The movie was originally released as “Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein” because he had some small amount of money in it and consented to the use of his name for promotion. But that’s about it for his involvement. Morrissey had been ghost director for Warhol’s various experimental films, and then was in charge of film production for “The Factory,” Warhol’s half-baked all-purpose culture operation -slash- poser party. This movie, made in Europe, marks the start of Morrissey’s complete artistic independence from Warhol.

Naturally it’s tempting to explain the movie’s disorienting is-it-camp-or-not tone as an extension of Warhol’s brand of faux-naif faux-art, but this turns out not to lead us anywhere because in the commentary Morrissey claims full responsibility for the Warhol films:

I borrowed from those early experiments, that’s for sure, but that aesthetic, it’s just something peculiar to me. There was no other person involved in the making of the films. The producer, Andy, certainly was involved in the sense that he wanted an undirected film, which I would be gradually evolving away from, but certainly for a year or more I did something like an undirected film. But his ideas were so simple that they didn’t have… you had to try to analyze them yourself and figure what they might be. But if you knew Andy, you knew that he didn’t have many ideas.

Here’s what he says about acting:

My objection to so many American movies [is] this dreadful idea that an actor is a good actor if he’s incredibly sincere in front of a camera, if he really lives the part, means the part… all this garbage idea about acting which is really the worst kind of acting. I think the most important thing in acting is it look natural and it be the evidence of a very distinctive personality who is getting the chance to be in front of a movie camera.

This while we’re watching some undeniably distinctive personalities undeniably getting the chance to be in front of a movie camera. To the degree that we are enjoying them – and it’s hard not to enjoy them a little bit – we are basically in agreement with him.

Our stars are Udo Kier, who is terrifically photogenic, has a hilarious cartoon German accent, the acting instincts of a 7-year-old, and a great deal of enthusiasm. All of which is, admittedly, magnetic. (Go watch the clips again and tell me you don’t agree.) As his sister and bride we have a lumpy society facelift named Monique van Vooren, vamping like a pro and exposing her breasts despite looking creepily like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Her accent is also a doozy. And finally we have Joe Dallesandro, who never gave it away, lumping around with dead eyes like a guy in a porno here to fix the TV ma’am. His utter and hopeless New York accent is perhaps the best of all, flopping into every scene like a huge hamburger that crushes everything in sight. He is exactly like one of the cutouts from Our Lady of the Flowers.

Kier’s commentary is just as cheerful, guileless and cartoonish as his performance: “I sink Joe is a very natural actor. Like Andy Warhol told me once — we were talking about acting and Andy said ‘There’s two kind of actors, there’s natural actors like Joe and there’s dramatic actors like you.’ So Joe is Joe. And he’s very good in bofe of the films, I sink he is totally fulfilling the personality he’s playing. But I’m I sink more the dramatic kind.”

Here’s what we said during the movie and this is still about the best I can do to describe its effect: The movie feels like one of those willfully inscrutable high fashion shoots that go beyond deliberate camp into genuine intentionlessness, into an apotheosis of hypocrisy — a transcendent hypocrisy that creates a taste smokescreen behind which the transcendently needy can curl up and hide. Which isn’t a bad description of Andy Warhol’s M.O.

But perhaps it’s just the opposite. Perhaps was made in Sontag’s spirit of true camp appreciation, which is to say with a heart so big it doesn’t fit into any culture. Udo Kier has the ditzy purity of someone who grew up as a sex object, and he seems to have loved working on the movie in a very sincere way that was not unduly concerned with whether the movie was serious or campy or comic or what. He just loved working on it. His passion shows, and that passion is watchable.

And heck, maybe the admirers of this movie — they exist — admire it exactly in that spirit. Who am I to say? It is a true cult movie. If you can hear its voice clearly enough to comfortably understand what you are hearing, it is for you. It is definitely not for me, because it confused me. All I’m saying is that I heard it clearly enough to know that if you think you get this movie because it’s “so bad it’s good,” you’re wrong. Or at least not entirely right.

So that’s that for my attempt at insight. For everyone else: this movie is a huge heap of garbage. There’s a companion movie, exactly like it, that I have to watch next. So that’s more than enough for now.

(The Criterion Edition is out of print, not held at libraries, and used copies are unacceptably expensive. All I could find was a “rip” of the movie and commentary, which is why there’s no menu image above. I apparently also missed out on a “gallery of stills” feature. I’m not concerned.)

Oh right the music. Here’s the main title, your track 27. (If you insist on knowing what those sound effects are, it’s the creepy kids cutting open a doll and then guillotining it. You didn’t need to know that.) This is by Claudio Gizzi, an arranger that Morrissey encountered at Cinecittà who hadn’t scored any other movies and didn’t go on to score any other movies (except for Criterion #28, coming up). Apparently he was intimidated by the assignment (or didn’t know how to get away from a temp track), because he immediately resorted to plagiarism. I seem to be the only person in all of Google to know what this is a rip-off of! Now you all know too. He rips off the third movement later in the movie. And he uses Tannhäuser for every scene having to do with the Baron’s eugenic fantasies. Lame.

Oh and also I forgot to mention: this movie was originally released in 3D. Guts needlessly come right at the camera several times. I would have preferred to see it that way, of course. But now that I’ve settled for flat Frankenstein, I’m done here. This is not my cult.