From Cronenberg’s Crash: a scene of ragged lines being tattooed over a scarred torso, with the caption “This is not a medical tattoo. This is a prophetic tattoo.”
I hope everyone is enjoying the last half of summer, finding some rest, some adventure, and some fresh air. A reminder that there is still registration available for my workshop day on Sunday, August 27th (apologies for my very confusing typos last newsletter). Find the details here. I hope to see you there!
Crimes of the Future
David Cronenberg’s 2022 return to filmmaking— his first release since 1999’s Existenz— brings us everything I like in a film: a future dystopia, send-ups of the art world, a neurotic and horny Kristen Stewart, campy biomechanical furniture, underground anti-government cells, and of course, tattooing. In the film, Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux play a prominent artist couple whose work consists of Seydoux performing live public surgeries to remove extra organs produced by Mortensen’s body as a symptom of “accelerated evolution syndrome.” In this future, humans have ceased to feel physical pain or to contract infection, spurring a new movement of open-air cutting as a form of erotic exchange. Caprice (Seydoux) tattoos the organs she removes during the couple’s performances, and there is a twist at the end wherein the tattoos play a pivotal role. I read an interesting interview with the special effects artists for the film detailing the process of designing the organs, though the artist who did the tattooing for them is credited only as Sophia from Greece.
From Crimes of the Future: a preserved extra organ with tattoos on it in a clear class jar.
Biker Boyz
This star-studded film brings us the joy of Lisa Bonet as a biker queen in full riding leathers, and Laurence Fishburne as the undefeated racing champion whose title is threatened by the determined Kid. The fashions here are flawless: smoked-lens sunglasses, black leather cowboy hats, jeweled bolo ties. Kid learns that his love interest, Tina, is a tattoo artist (hot) when he spies her peeling off a bandage at a party to get a look a piece she just did. He shows up at her home studio only to be told that he needs to make an appointment and sent away with a business card, though not before leaving her flowers. Soon, he comes back to get a tattoo to memorialize his father and confesses his crush on her. What follows is a scene involving kissing a fresh tattoo through the bandage and a hookup post-tattoo (you know what, it’s movie magic). Tragic transphobe Kid Rock even makes a cameo in a studded dog collar, as does Rufio from Peter Pan. If you want a moody tale about chosen family and generational redemption, amazing riding performed by real biker clubs, and peak early aughts fashion, this movie is the one.
From Biker Boyz: A woman peels a bandage from a fresh tattoo to see its healing progress.
Foxfire
There’s nothing I can say about this movie that isn’t perfectly synthesized here:
“Four high school girls form a gang when an enigmatic 17-year-old female drifter moves to town. The girls learn about lesbianism, drug addiction and empowerment, all of which transforms them forever.”
Polaroids, rollerblades and the ubiquitous 90s voice-over narration introduce us to the story of Legs (Angelina Jolie), who slinks into a small-town high school in a motorcycle jacket and boots and inspires the local misfit girls to beat up their predatory gym teacher and give each other matching stick and poke tattoos. The movie is made better by knowing that Jolie and Jenny Shimizu were a real-life couple for some time, and I can’t imagine a more perfect scenario than exchanging girl gang handpokes (in color, no less, drawn from glass vials filled with witchy pigments) by candlelight in an abandoned house as Mazzy Star plays and Angelina Jolie whispers “don’t be scared.”
From Foxfire: A person applies yellow ink to a stick-and-poke tattoo they give themselves on their chest.
Un Chant D’Amour
Owing to its gay content, Jean Genet’s only film, Un Chant D’Amour (1950), was too risky to screen and subject to censorship at the time of its making. There’s an interesting history about its initially being distributed only through direct sales of private copies, and of legal censorship that screenings in the US were met with. In the film, the characters both eroticize and subvert separation by prison walls. They blow cigarette smoke to each other through holes in the wall, swing bouquets of flowers from cell window to cell window, and daydream about being with one another. The actors in the film participated uncredited and anonymously for fear of legal and social repercussions. In a particularly memorable scene, a prisoner dances with the tattoo on his upper arm, the wall behind him graffitied with penises.
From Un Chant D’Amour, a young man dances with the tattoo on his arm inside his prison cell.
Crash
Another Cronenberg film, Crash was incredibly controversial when first released in 1996. It took me until being out with not Covid, not strep, but a secret third virus this week to finally watch it, and I loved it immediately. Following a highway automobile collision, James Spader becomes drawn into the cultlike world of a group of people obsessed with eroticizing car crashes. The film is slow, with plenty of sensuous, lingering close-ups on vehicle bodies as well as humans— the first three scenes of the movie are sex scenes back-to-back. The costumes and cinematography are stylish and the trysts themselves are very, very bisexual. While the acting in the film has been criticized as wooden and detached, it made it easier to believe that these people are seeking to feel something, willing to pursue bizarre lengths to elicit emotion in themselves. As someone who is no stranger to “bizarre” erotic subculture, I laughed when I read Roger Ebert’s assertion that Cronenberg made a movie “about characters entranced by a sexual fetish that, in fact, no one has.” The tattoo scene in the film is phenomenal, and it immediately precedes a gay, leathery hookup in the back of a car where the two men unveil and kiss each other’s new (unrealistically bruised-looking) tattoos:
From Crash: Vaughan lifts his shirt to reveal his newly tattooed torso as Ballard gazes upon it lustfully.
[Vaughan is being tattooed]
Vaughan : It's too clean.
Tattooist : Medical tattoos are supposed to be clean.
Vaughan : But this is not a medical tattoo. It's a prophetic tattoo. Prophecy is ragged and dirty... so make it ragged and dirty.
Crash also reminded me to rewatch Married to the Eiffel Tower, a short documentary on people who fall in love with buildings and monuments. It was made in 2008, but looks as if it were made in 1992 (delightful), and is full of sweet, sentimental moments. You can also watch an unauthorized 1986 adaptation of Crash titled Nightmare Angel, directed by Zoe Beloff and Susan Emerling, on Vimeo here.
📡 SIGNAL BOOSTING 📡
~ Those of you local to Brooklyn may have heard about the former workers of Playground Coffee calling for a boycott of the business over labor injustice and unpaid wages. You can support their worker solidarity fund here, which helps cover their living costs as they seek new employment.
~ My friend and incredible talent Lex Brown just launched a Kickstarter to support the live performances of her musical Carnelian, a stunning, multifaceted performance with upcoming shows in Maine and Philly. I can’t wait to attend one of the Philly dates, and highly encourage you all to support the production if you’re able!
Holy Shit FOXFIRE the undercurrent of my life is chasing the feeling I had seeing that movie for the first time. I still hardly know what to do with myself around fire/femmes/sharp implements all together