The Transcendence of Transgression in Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures more

The Transcendence of Transgression in Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures By Scott Birdwise To appropriate something means basically only to manifest the supremacy of my will in relation to the thing and to demonstrate that the latter does not have being for itself and is not an end in itself…This manifestation occurs through my conferring upon the thing an end other than that which it immediately possessed. I give the living creature, as my property, a soul other than that which it previously had; I give it my soul. - G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right[1] Transcendence, transgression: names too close to one another not to make us distrustful of them. Would transgression not be a less compromising way to name “transcendence” in seeming to distance it from its theological meaning? Whether it is moral, logical, philosophical, does not transgression continue to make allusion to what remains sacred both in the thought of the limit and in this demarcation, impossible to think, which would introduce the never and always accomplished crossing of the limit into every thought. - Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond[2] I begin this response to Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, 1963) with a quote from Hegel for a number of reasons, some rhetorical, others specifically and literally argumentative. I suppose that one of the main reasons I begin with Hegel is that he is widely considered the “supreme” dialectician – if not the most widely discussed. And it is relevant, to my thinking, to bear in mind the nature of the dialectic when considering such a film as Flaming Creatures. Another significant reason for this specific Hegel quotation is that it explicitly takes up the issue of appropriation. As I will discuss, questions related to appropriation are of the utmost significance to Flaming Creatures as well. Of course, in the very act quoting Hegel – as well as Blanchot (whose quotation I will briefly address below) – I am practicing the (fine?) art of appropriation as Hegel defines it: I am seemingly manifesting the supremacy of my will (my own purposes and agenda) in relation to the thing (Hegel’s so-called intended meaning, context, and function), and therefore both “objectifying” Hegel and his work and “subjectifying” it (giving it my soul). At risk of (over)stating the obvious, it is also fortuitous to note that Hegel’s very words – especially “the living creature” phrase – in my appropriation of his appropriation, work, in Judith Butleresque terms, as a performative discursive practice. That is, as a discursive practice which 1 “produces or enacts that which it names”[3] Hegel’s – now my – words produce their object as they work to define or describe it. Thus we see that Hegel’s – now my – dialectical, appropriative operation reiterates and reproduces – performs - what seems to be an already existing meaning, as well as affecting and altering it. Considering these theoretical points, we shall critically discuss some of the meanings that Flaming Creatures reproduces, subverts, diverts, parodies, and produces as simultaneously: a fiction film, an avant-garde/experimental work of art, a variation on the ethnographic film, and a “loving” homage to classical Hollywood. We will see that if we take Flaming Creatures as a “queer” film, it is one that both affects and is affected by so-called “mainstream” articulations of identity (sexual, gendered, etc.), aesthetics, and iconography. As a final note in this rather long-winded introduction, I want to suggest that we will find that Flaming Creatures is all of the above and more, and that one of its great critical – and fun! – merits is that it helps one to see how “queerness” is already manifest in the so-called mainstream; Flaming Creatures thus radically questions the very divisions between, for example: homo and heterosexual, mass and high art, the personal and the political. After detailing Jack Smith’s fascination and admiration for 1940s Hollywood film star Maria Montez’s “beautiful womanliness that took joy in her own beauty and all beauty – or whatever in her that turned plaster cornball sets to beauty”[4], in Montez’s embrace of artifice, theatricality, and fantasy, Marc Siegel, in “Documentary That Dare/Not Speak Its Name: Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures,” writes, Smith embraced (cinematic) artifice as a necessary precondition for the acting out of fantasies. He realized that only through artifice – and self-consciously trashy artifice at that – could the reality of his creatures be expressed on film.[5] But what “reality of [the] creatures” exists in relation to a pre-filmic or extra-filmic queer identity in regards to Smith’s actors and Smith, himself? Fundamentally, Smith doesn’t take as his subject/object of study some exterior, pre-filmic reality – the realm of fantasy and artifice that Flaming Creatures most explicitly refers to is the cinematic world of Maria Montez – or ground itself in an essential subjectivity or identity (say, a gay identity) that he represents; rather, Smith constructs and performs a multiplicity of performances which point to the constructedness, the referentiality to prior discourse (a la Maria Montez) of all identity. For an example, one can say 2 that in the appropriative dialectical operation which is Flaming Creatures, Maria Montez is both a determining, necessary condition and standard by which the expressions of sexuality and the like are measured and “made sense of” – a kind of contingent “origin” - and, conversely, a copy or performance among other copies and performances which is actively and explicitly “worked on” by Smith and his creatures in their multifarious acts of subjective agency. The film thus testifies to the interpretation of the filmic (artifice) and the so-called “real.” While Smith has professed his admiration for Montez and Hollywood film more generally in interview, there still is an obvious element of critique in his appropriation of Hollywood iconography, subject matter, and characterization. This relationship between “admiration” or emulation (repetition) and critique (difference) is illustrated by Judith Butler’s comments on another film – Paris is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1990) - which, perhaps more problematically, deals with questions of difference and repetition. Butler writes, This is not an appropriation of dominant culture in order to remain subordinated by its terms, but an appropriation that seeks to make over the terms of domination, a making over which is itself a kind of agency, power in and as discourse, in and as performance, which repeats in order to remake – and sometimes succeeds. But this is a film that cannot achieve this effect without implicating its spectators in the act; to watch this film means to enter into a logic of fetishization which installs the ambivalence of that “performance” as related to our own.[6] Questions of the failure of performance – of the failure of the veracity or consistency of a given actor’s performance of her/his “character” – and a logic of fetishization are of the utmost importance when considering Flaming Creatures. Failure becomes, itself, a mark and space of agency, indeterminancy, and creation, a space of experimentation, except that the “scientists,” the subjects, are expereimenting on themselves. Fetishization, by way of the erratic frenzy of the camera – its jostling (a la the earthquake), its close-ups on various tableaus detailing spatial and metaphoric connections between and within the genitals, its fundamental materiality as an object itself, what with the overexposed film stock that testifies to its giddy “used-ness” – is practiced as a libinal exercise of object relations between a multiplicity of (body) parts – new subjective 3 configurations are produced, enacted, and abandoned in the dialectical process of fetishization and failure. Butler again: “But if the film establishes the ambivalence of embodying – and failing to embody - that which one sees, then a distance will be opened up between that hegemonic call to normativizing gender and its critical appropriation.”[7] Effectively, Smith’s Flaiming Creatures works to make – in the “distance” – our own gender and sexual categories bizarre and exotic, foreign and unnatural, strange and insecure. In “The Perfrect Queer Appositeness of Jack Smith,” Jerry Tartaglia states the crucially obvious: “At the most basic level, Smith’s films violate the formal structure of narrative cinema which holds that each element of the film has a particular function to serve in the production and that taken as a whole, they all serve the propulsion of the narrative.”[8] This, effectively, articulates how Smith’s radical formal aesthetic signifies and effects a radical position on sexuality and gender, and vice versa. To put it another way, Marc Siegel aptly writes, The failure of his aesthetic, the breakdown of a unified representation of erotic life, therefore expressed a flamboyant refusal to be contained within fixed categories of knowledge. Smith’s strategic disruption of gender and sexual norms was ultimately an attempt at expressing the possibilities of an eroticism that is always beyond the reach of representation.[9] Indeed, Smith’s creatures – both determined by previous cultural expressions of sexuality and gender (discourse) and, in turn affecting a distancing critique – defy “knowledge” in Foucault’s sense of the scientia sexualis, and yet provide pleasure. Perhaps some of this pleasure, then, is not merely simultaneous with but is a direct cause and effect of this critique; that is, perhaps alongside the distance is also a sense of proximity. The ethnographic elements of Flaming Creatures testify, indeed, to the power of the fetishistic gaze, a gaze that revels in its closeness as well as its distance. And accompanying this gaze, initially structuring its logic and then faltering under the very weight of its own rigid boundaries, are the obviously ridiculous clichés and sentiments of heterosexual normative, so-called “normal” culture: “Is there a lipstick which doesn’t come off when you give blowjobs?” Lovingly embraced by Smith and co., the tired 4 commodities of heteronormative culture expose themselves as utter waste, as things which can be and are appropriated by the agency of the creative subject. By way of a conclusion, I will return to the Blanchot quotation that introduced this response. In considering the nature of transgression and its connection to the sacred, I put forward that Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures considers the detritus and (seeming) excess of artifice that much of capitalist heterosexual culture produces and expends as sacred, as transcending the very limits and borders that are its condition, its ritualized genesis. Indeed, it would seem that built into the very fabric and logic of the heteronormative model is its own desire to transgress – to transcend! – its own limiting existence. It is as if the logic of identity that goes hand in hand with the operations of oppression, repression and suppression of the heteronormative model, generates, at its very secret core, a desire, a wish, to smash its very foundation. Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, then, is in on the (sacred) secret. NOTES [1] G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A.W. Wood (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 76. [2] Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992) p. 27. [3] Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London & New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 13. [4] Jack Smith quoted in Marc Siegel, “Documentary That Dare/Not Speak Its Name: Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures,” Between the Sheets, in the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, Gay Documentary, ed. Chris Holmlund and Cynthia Fuchs (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1997) 96. [5] Siegel, “Documentary That Dare/Not Speak Its Name: Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures” p. 97 [6] Judith Butler, “Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion,” Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London & New York: Routledge, 1993) p. 137. [7] Ibid., p.137. [8] Jerry Tartaglia, “The Perfect Queer Appositeness of Jack Smith,” Experimental Cinema. The Film Reader, ed. Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (London & New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 168. [9] Marc Siegel, “Documentary That Dare/Not Speak Its Name: Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures,” p. 104. 5