Scorpio Rising

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.

i totally agree with a previous guy...this movie is on par with a bout de souffle for sheer vision. like nothing that came before it. the first time i saw a gregg araki film, i was very impressed...then i saw this and kustom kar kommandos. that someone could have produced this in 1964 is almost unbelievable.

Kenneth Anger's "Scorpio Rising", set to the tune of thirteen 1960's pop songs, ranks as one of the best films ever shot in the experimental genres, which to some people might translate as the best pile of dog poop ever made, but in terms of visual imagery, context, and use of music, it ranks up there as one of the most important films of the 60's. Kenneth Anger's trademarks (outsider as protagonist, homosexual iconography, pop culture looked at in a different light) are at their most poignant here with most memorable scenes set to 'Blue Velvet", "I Will Follow Him", and "Wipe Out". Also classic is the use of clips from Cecil B. DeMille's "King of Kings" of Jesus and his disciples walking superimposed between shots of gay bikers. A classic piece of Americana.

Ever sit there looking at a Michael Bay movie, or a Martin Scorsese movie, or a Portishead video, or a CK1 commercial, and think, "So where did this come from, anyway?" The answer is Kenneth Anger's remarkable 1964 short film, the barbaric birth yawp of modern (and postmodern) cinema as we know it. Ostensibly a fetishistic self-generated porn reel, made, as Genet wrote his fiction, for the maker's masturbatory pleasure, SCORPIO RISING pulls together unlicensed pop songs with obsessive images of hunky guys, leather, chrome, comic strips, and death, to create a code for the programming of music, picture, and unspoken content that would go on to inform everything you see from Nicolas Roeg to VH-1. God knows where poor Anger is rubbing two nickels together, but tonight, say a prayer of thanks for the guy who made all your culture, the good, the bad and the ugly, possible.

The film turns out to be a riff on the gay fetish for black leather - and all the imagery/rites associated with it.

The Black Leather scene - certainly in the 60s - was very codified, and incorporated drugs (much like all gay culture at the time).

The songs chosen have, no doubt, much appeal to the gay community of the time ("Heat Wave" is also heard in "Boys in the Band), most of them citing lustful love from a female point of view.

There are coy/blatant references to water sports, anal rape, fisting and "pussy" (in the form of an on screen cat).

Anger's black leather queens doll themselves up in leather gear which is uber-accentuated with studs and other forms of steel (no real bikers ever wear that stuff). This is then intercut with footage of genuine, presumably str8 biker clubs (note the motorcyclers in the exterior shots - those racing each other - do not sport all the "accessories" that the black leather queens do, but, rather, "simple" black leather jackets, besides which, the biker clubbers actually seem to be wearing SHIRTS under their jackets - as opposed to the leather queens who do not).

There is also plenty of idolization of James Dean and Marlon Brando, two movie stars who, in addition to having gained fame as young punks who wear leather jackets, were also two of the most sexually-ambiguous male stars of their time. Anger, having grown up in Hollywood, might even have known men who slept with Dean and Brando! The whole Jesus/male-bonding thing is ingenious. As for the references to Hitler, well, perhaps Anger was Jewish and put Adolf in there to make it seem as if the life of a black leather queen is one which continually lived on the edge, always testing limits to see how far can go beyond them. Or maybe Anger was simply citing irony in the persecution of gays during the Third Reich compared to the subsequent gay American leather culture of the 50s/60s which is grounded in the role-playing of bondage and domination.