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.

Homoerotic bikers, nazism, suicide, 50's/60's pop songs, Jesus, pulp cartoons, mustard, and quite a bit of leather, i.e. everything I look for in a movie. This had me questioning "This Kenneth Anger guy achieved notoriety?" at the first 3 minutes, but by the end, the whole thing gained a certain rhythm and I began to understand what it was trying to do. This is for fans of experimental underground/midnight cinema, anyone else I would recommend staying far away.

As for the guy below who claims this inspired Martin Scorsese, Calvin Klein commercials and Michael Bay...Okay, Martin Scorsese, yes, to an extent. Calvin Klein commercials...maybe. Michael Bay? What? If the comment was sarcasm, than I accept you as an evil genius, otherwise you might belong in an asylum. Although I guess you could argue his last two movies are far more depraved than 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.

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.