Cremaster 2

In the second film of the five-part Cremaster cycle (chronologically the fourth made), Matthew Barney indulges his obsession with Gary Gilmore, the murderer who made legal history by insisting that his execution proceed in spite of efforts by the American Civil Liberties Union and others to postpone it, if not rescind it altogether. Does an individual have the right to insist on his own state-sanctioned death?

The film opens with Gilmore's parents visiting a medium of some sort, segues into a heavy metal/Goth band with lots of bees, moves on to the reenactment of the first of two murders Gilmore committed in Utah (that of gas station attendant Max Jensen; ironically, it was the second murder for which Gilmore was tried, convicted, and executed), and effectively ends with Gilmore's symbolic execution. Interspersed throughout are scenes involving Harry Houdini (Norman Mailer), from whom Gilmore's mother claimed descent.

Although Gilmore was intelligent (reputedly with an IQ of 130) and artistically talented, he was also an alcoholic habitual criminal completely lacking in impulse control. Barney himself plays the role of Gilmore (what a surprise!) and the casting of Norman Mailer is inspired. Some may remember that Mailer was instrumental in securing the early release from prison of Jack Henry Abbott who authored "In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison." Mailer felt such a talented individual should be given special consideration. Shortly after his release, Abbott stabbed a deli worker to death because he had the temerity to tell Abbott he couldn't use the employees' bathroom. Thanks, Norman.

With panoramic shots of the Utah salt flats, the western setting is reminiscent of the surreal films of Alejandro Jodorowsky set in Mexico (e.g., "El Topo (1970), "Santa Sangre" (1989)) as well as the latter part of David Lynch's "Wild at Heart" (1990), and there are hints of David Cronenberg's influence in the early scene involving Gilmore's parents. In one scene, the viewer is treated to some fine Texas two-step dancing by a couple who clearly know their way about it, and there is one notable use of theremin and modern synthesizer music that slowly climbs in pitch, reaching a physically uncomfortable sonic range before ascending to the frequencies privy only to dogs and bats. Very artsy and a bit overwrought, Cremaster 2 is the kind of work one expects from Barney. Rating: 6/10.

For me, this is the most interesting, and most 'story driven' of the series, although it's still very surreal.

Cremaster 2 combines the story of Gary Gilmore – who spends most of the 1st half sitting in a Mustang at a gas station that has an umbilical like tube attaching it to another Mustang (he and Nicole both drove Mustangs). He commits the murder, and then is executed by being forced to ride a rodeo bull until both rider and animal die of exhaustion.

We then go to a section involving Harry Houdini (played by Norman Mailer?!?) who may have been Gilmore's grandfather.

None of it makes a lot of literal sense, but it does work as cinema poetry. I suspect how anyone responds to this kind of work is highly subjective, and there are no right or wrong opinions. Only whether it speaks to something deep inside you or not

Barney is starting to drive me crazy. It would be simple if he were worthless, but he isn't.

Where I stand: I'm watching the Cremasters in numeric sequence and have seen number one. I've also seen two other projects. In half of the four, I felt rewarded. He's a bit too much preoccupied with notation than form, disconcerting in a sculptor, but "Drawing Restraint" and "Cremaster 1" had moments that were transcendent. The projects as whole compositions collapsed under their heft, but when they impressed, they really did.

Where he gets into trouble is when he tries to impose narrative. You can be visually strong in terms of pure form. Or you can be narratively strong using cinematic form, which is visual in a different way. He understand the first and is wholly incompetent in the second. Unfortunately here he "has something to say." Fragments of actual stories appear where they were avoided in the other projects.

Lynch knows how to do this. Medem. Tarkovsky. Its what I call the long form and it requires an understanding of whole realms not just bits from them.

Stay away from this one. It fails and the collapse is uninteresting.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

Not since Warhol has a visual artist made movies as masterfully as Matthew Barney. "Cremaster" describes a muscle in the testicles, and Barney's career-long subjects--masculinity and the biological, rather than societal, roots of male behavior--are given a hypnotic treatment here. Barney organizes the movie as rigorously as if it were an argument; but rather than rhetoric the movie is powered by dream logic. For an image such as the soon-to-be-killed gas-station attendant sniffing around Gary Gilmore's car--two sixties beauties joined with a mass of canvas like Siamese-twin mutants--you'd have to go back to the top shelves of Kenneth Anger and David Lynch. Filled with genital prostheses and heebie-jeebie-giving hive imagery, CREMASTER 2 has a hidden, hivelike structure that suggests a way out of out post-MTV, post-web-surfing image surplus. Barney has at times seemed a preening poseur; CREMASTER 2 reveals him as focussed in his private ecstasies as Cocteau.

I only gave this a six, because it was a painful movie to sit through at the time, and I found myself very bored, frustrated, and begging the film to end. But as the film gestates in my mind I've been able to select the moments that did stick with me, and so I may see it again if the entire series is ever released on DVD and change my mind about the film. It made an impression, and that's more than can be said of most movies.

Barney continues his Vaseline-fetish, and I'm not sure what he intends it to represent, if anything, but where in the first "Cremaster" they seemed to exist as molds, the same way the women existed as identical objects from the same mold, here it's much more sexual in nature: when we see Gilmore smother two balls with Vaseline we can't take our eyes away; it's not sexy, but it's certainly sensual (if a malleable inanimate object can be called sensual). That soulless, cold sex is depicted physically with the robotic sex we see from below, where it looks like bees procreating.

There are a lot of individual moments that don't seem to have any relation to one another, but stick with you regardless: cowboy line dancing, a woman at a seance who toes a cowbell, Gilmore being sentenced by Mounties to ride a bull, men in a giant boardroom, and the scene with two of the most famous death metal musicians playing incarnations of Johnny Cash. Norman Mailer, too, should be mentioned, as he's perhaps the most memorable aspect of the entire film. (I haven't read his "The Executioner's Song.") 6/10