Scorpio Rising

What is significant about this text is that Anger got many of the shots from the initiation rites of American biker gangs. As such, the butch ruggedness of these ostensibly "straight" men is conflated with the none-too-subtle homoeroticism of their rites--which leads the viewer to question the rigid dichotomies of "straight" and "gay" that dominate North American social discourse.

Also of significance is the extent to which, by appropriating "butch markers" such as leather and motorcycles, the homoeroticism undermines the stereotypicality of the "nelly" homosexual male.

Not a terribly accessible text, but it becomes pregnant with significance for the viewer who does a little background reading first.

One of Kenneth Anger's most popular and thematically accessible short films, "Scorpio Rising" consists of a series of montage images overlain by thirteen pop songs of the early 1960s. The film expresses nonconformist themes that herald the onset of the American counterculture movement. As the visuals focus on a group of New York City motorcyclists, viewers perceive a bohemian lifestyle, a nihilistic subtext, elements of erotica, and an amusing sense of irony from the juxtaposition of images and music.

There is no plot, no dialogue, no sets, no acting. Anger simply records on camera what he finds as he happens onto these bikers, who are not actors. Sans music, the film could easily be thought of as a polished home movie. It conveys a sense of realism and frankness. Cinematography is somewhat grainy; colors are muted. There are many close-up camera shots, and quite a few extreme close-ups.

The music gives thematic depth to the images and imposes varying moods and feelings, not the least of which is nostalgia, along with melancholy, lost childhood, rebellion, humor, and just a hint of fatalism. Probably one of the better sequences is the Bobby Vinton recording of "Blue Velvet" recorded over images of a couple of young guys who don their biker uniforms. A sequence or two in the middle seems either unnecessary or out of place. Editing is a bit fast and erratic in the second half.

Prospective viewers should expect the unexpected, given that "Scorpio Rising" is a 1960s underground film. It is definitely different. This is one of several that Anger made, all experimental. In retrospect, he can be thought of as a poetic visionary whose cultural influence is still being felt in the 21st century, especially in cinema.

Scorpio Rising marks the beginning of the mix-tape approach to film-making, the technique of adding texture, flow, counter-point to images by over-laying them with a soundtrack of pop songs. Kenneth Anger takes this technique to its limit right from the start, eschewing dialogue, narrative and everything else in favor of a thirty-minute greatest-hits medley wedded to a chaotic assemblage of pictures having to do with some gay-Nazi-anarchists engaged in all manner of rebellious behavior, from reading comic books to smearing mustard on a fat guy's stomach and tearing his pants off. The result is a bizarre fusion of the innocent and the profane, the quaintness of yesterday's Elvis/Bobby Vinton hits alongside the amateurish depravity and two-bit spectacle of Anger's underground opus.

Despite its reputation as a sort of counter-culture landmark, the movie seems largely irrelevant, a museum piece commemorating the excesses of '60s cult movie-making. It consists primarily of badly-lit home-movies of some nameless, faceless leather-fetishists posing like the most slovenly male-models you can remember, then going to some degraded costume-ball that degenerates into the sort of orgiastic hi-jinks that were a staple of "controversial" sixties cinema. For kicks, Anger keeps cutting in little snippets from a silent movie about Jesus, demonstrating a grammar-school-level sense of how to shock middle-brow audiences. This is avant-gardism at its most obnoxiously pointless, the deliberate mingling of opposing elements (bubbly pop tunes over random sexual carnage, cross-cutting between a gay-Nazi orgy and shots of the Last Supper) for the purpose of suggesting all sorts of potential meanings, none of which have been sufficiently thought-out.

Anger is so concerned with creating an intense experience that he forgets anything he might've known about film technique and simply wallows in his own fanatical, vaguely Satanic weirdness. Yet despite the film's sloppiness, it occasionally points the way toward what later, better filmmakers would do with the director's indisputably pioneering idea. The fusion of pop-music and pop-image (see the Layla sequence in Goodfellas; bits of Easy Rider; much of Tarantino) can lead to a sense of electricity, a heightening, where a moment can come to summarize the whole of the film texturally. The first glimmers of this galvanizing effect can be felt for a second here-and-there in Scorpio Rising, but either Anger didn't understand what he was on to, or didn't care. As so often happens in experimental film, the pioneer has the inspiration but lacks the expertise, the know-how necessary to employ the technique in a meaningful way. The little ripples of potential energy never amount to anything for Anger, who winds up coming across like Roger Corman without the movie-making acumen.

When Jonas Mekas, Alfred Leslie, etc sat down to compose the mainfesto of "The New American Cinema" in 1961, the amount of films made under this artistic statement doubled. Out of this period, we see the creation of some of the greatest underground films the world has seen. Taylor Meed's The Flower Thief, Bruce Conner's A Movie and Report, and most importantly Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising.

Scorpio Rising's devices are fundementally simple-didactic montage, ironic sountracks, and archival footage. What seperates SR from the realm of mediocre is its deep underooted message of sexual perversion, S&M, and the cruelty of sexuality to a point of Nazist ideology. Scenes such as young man with a smile on his face being "raped" by leather clad bikers is a point of sadio-estasy. To say that SR is not a 22 min. perversion is to ignore its fundemental principles and the principles of its filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Anger has emerged himselfin both the terror of the haunte monde of Hollywood in the 30's (hence the birth of his hugely read Hollywood Babylon- a study as perverse as SR) and the drug and sexually illusioned world of the 50's/60's lower bohemia.

Scorpio Rising is a film of a generation. As Allen Ginsberg put it: "a generation starved on madness". It's signifigance ranks up there with Keroauc, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. Anger's film is a portrait of a world so far from our 90's train of thought- yet so strikingly fimiliar.

I know I'm not the first person to point this out, but I'm fairly certain without this uncanny, sort of experimental short film (I say 'sort of' since it's experimental mostly in it having a lack of a clear story and definable characters, but more on that just a moment), we wouldn't have Martin Scorsese. It may seem obvious to some, but it's confirmed when reading the book of interviews he did with Richard Schickel several years ago, when he recalled seeing the film when it was first released - in an underground format, as it was that kind of picture, on someone's rooftop or in a basement or other - and that it really made an impact that he couldn't articulate.

Seeing this today it's somewhat easy to see why: the rock and roll music, the emphasis on montage that cuts in flow and sync with the image, and how the image of a man is based on how he looks (we see in Mean Streets and Taxi Driver how a man looks will define him, both in clothes and in style, i.e. Travis Bickle or, on the comedic side, the awkardness of Pupkin). There may have been some influence on Lynch too, if only through the 'Blue Velvet' song, though somehow, someway, I think Anger comes away with using the song in a more iconic way: a soothing tale of a woman putting on and being beautiful in a dress juxtaposed with a man putting on his jeans and jacket and being in front of the camera like 'yeah, what?' It's probably in a mocking tone that Kenneth Anger shows his figures in biker garb, and yet it's hard to tell exactly what the intention is. This is not a bad thing; the way it's presented different people will take away different aspects. If it is satirizing the culture of rebellion it's that it's like, 'well, this guy thinks he's tough and manly and yet wait until that erect genitalia comes out' (and if you look close enough it's not hard to miss, no pun intended).

The majority of this film is really about its style, if that makes sense. The first 16/17 minutes is simply seeing set up. We don't know what for since there are no characters and there's no dialog: the soundtrack is made up of songs (really great ones by Elvis and Ray Charles and Martha and the Vandellas and the Crystals and so on) and sometimes the sound of motorcycles revving up. So it's all about ritual - how to put together the bicycle, how a little kid (who is only there briefly) plays with his toys, and how the men put on their jackets and rings and stand in front of the camera like any moment they might just start masturbating to their own image. As if by some happenstance as well (according to Anger this was a coincidence by some miracle) The Wild One is on TV, which lends this to being akin to Godard's Breathless as far as figures trying to attain their ideal images.

Only this isn't Brando; these bikers are, I think gay Nazis(?) It's hard to tell exactly, but then the substance in this case *is* the style. I'm still pondering over what the religious symbolism means as well, as Anger cuts in shots from some other black and white film showing Jesus (I think it's him, he had the beard and all). Is this meant to be mocking as well, as if to say 'well, you think YOU got a crew?' This was lost on me as I was watching it, but it's fine to think about it later on too.

The whole experience of Scorpio Rising is just one of total fascination. There's nothing as far as there being a concrete story - maybe there is one and I just missed it - but as far as simply showing us things, it's an excellent example of how to marry image and music. Without the songs this wouldn't really be all that much, just a lot of well-shot but randomly and at times very wildly cut together images of male perversity and hedonism (and sometimes just showing us shots of bikers riding around is simple). But you get the sense that in a weird way this is almost like a documentary of how men who go into the world of dangerous rebellion see themselves, and to go one further how if you do happen to be a gay nazi motorcycle man who gets in leather and rides around and does things with other men... well, do these guys even exist? Probably, or probably not.

For Kenneth Anger there's some satire to mine in the ritual of getting ready, the image of over-hyper-WTF-masculinity, and how far the world of Marlon Brando and his "What are you rebelling against" "Whaddaya got?" can go. It's sophisticated and daring and campy and deranged, and it feels still fresh today in its craft that it almost doesn't feel like it's from 1964, rather that it's from the 1990's and it's looking back at that period - it's post-modern to the core.