Wicked Fun

Under discussion:

Being There  (1979)

Rain Man  (1988)

Welcome to the Dollhouse  (1995)

The Mudge Boy  (2003)

Duncan Mudge is the town joke. 14 years old, he rides around on his bike, running errands with his familiar, a white hen he calls “chicken.” Half the time he seems to be in a trance, the other half he lacks the judgment to keep his more peculiar thoughts to himself. His mother has died suddenly and Duncan has shifted into the realm where terrible loss either blinds us to the appropriate world or pushes us past caring. He has a kind of accidental, naive nobility. Duncan (The Mudge Boy) needs what he needs and never pretends otherwise. He doesn’t even know it’s not okay to ask. And writer/director Michael Burke doesn’t make him a quaint human rabbit, like say, Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man or Chance the Gardener in Being There.

Emile Hirsch jumps into the role with both feet and there are times when he positively seems to have flown in from Planet Neptune. Hirsch’s performance becomes all the more impressive as Duncan begins to grow on us, despite his eccentricities. Obviously he and his father, Edgar (Richard Jenkins) miss the mother intensely, but while Edgar takes to burning all her belongings, Duncan sleeps in her fur coat, speaks for her at the supper table and imitates her skill of calming a chicken by putting its’ head in his mouth. Needless to say, there are gender issues at work behind this imagery.

If you can get past the bizarre conceit that informs The Mudge Boy, it is more than worth your while to do so. The hen that Duncan carries with him is actually a very complex metaphor that works on several levels. Whether male or female chickens peck. Chickens probably remind Duncan of his mother. Chickens are nurturing. Chickens live in a passive world of their own. Chickens are synonymous with cowardice. And so on. It takes a while for the various components of the film to kick in and come together, but when they do, the effect is brutal, unsettling and inconsolably sad. It never explains its idiosyncratic devices, it never resorts to shorthand, but like the best poetry or painting it often brings the grotesque, menacing world into sharp focus.

Men dominate the film, it is their world for the most part, and we are relieved when Perry Foley (Tom Guiry) another teenager, takes Duncan under his wing, protecting him from the other teenage boys that mock him. There’s an ominous sense of dread that suffuses the movie. We keep bracing ourselves for some horrible, ugly act of abuse, and it comes, although ultimately Duncan seems to handle it better than we do. He is more terrified of his father’s reaction and Perry’s, than the toxic behavior he’s been subjected to. Like Dawn Wiener in Welcome to the Dollhouse, he will take any reasonable facsimile of love, whenever and however he can find it.

The rape scene that occurs at the climax of the film was, frankly, horrendous, but not gratuitous. It’s appropriate, I guess, that Perry mistakes conquest for urgency, on the one hand showing concern for Duncan’s welfare, and on the other, slapping him, dressing him in his mother’s wedding gown, calling him “bitch.“ Perhaps there’s some solace in understanding Perry’s inability to reconcile his feelings of tenderness for Duncan and the need that drives his attachment to women. When Duncan finds him a few nights later and asks for a kiss, we realise Duncan’s overwhelming need to connect has blinded him to Perry’s cruelty. And Perry’s response will knock you on your ass. If you’re not already down there.

At it’s core, The Mudge Boy is about the inability of straight men to comfort, nurture and care for one another, even when it’s legitimately, desperately needed. And how they mask their ambivalence with contempt for other men too “weak” to pretend it’s not important. You don’t have to be queer, of course, to understand men (and all human beings) have an infinite capacity to express this tender side, once they get past the roles that culture would foist upon us.  At first The Mudge Boy seems careless or nasty or arbitrary, it takes awhile to catch up to it’s wisdom. I’m skeptical of any movie that tries to suggest possible “reasons” for why some of us turn out to be gay (and worse yet, a “cure”) but the end of the film more than compensates, I think, for what may be dubious intent. And putting that issue aside, for the moment, Michael Burke has fashioned an important, disturbing, deeply affecting and ultimately redemptive film on the destructive impact that society has on men and our ability to protect, restore and save one another.

Under discussion:

Venus Boyz  (2002)

Perhaps one idea the queer community might agree upon in its entirety (gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered, and undecided) is that gender is ultimately a mystery. Enigmatic and elusive. Fluid but not necessarily shapeless. Detectable but impossible to pin. However we express it we have found the limitations a dominant culture places on gender to be unacceptable, or at any rate, without merit. The irony of culture, gender and politics is that it’s our oppressors who interpret our actions as anarchy. We simply recognize the nature of our sexual attraction without shame, and those who find this behavior inappropriate call us rebels because we are unwilling to hide, apologize or plead not guilty by reason of insanity. Our mere existence has been politicized by our opponents (as if you could oppose a class of people). Because we want the “privileges” of respect, housing, and the right to earn our daily bread, we have a special “agenda.”

It may not be a coincidence that the Gay Rights Movement was precipitated by the Drag Queens that hung out at the now legendary Stonewall Inn in New York City, back in 1969. If announcing we’re queer makes us de facto anarchists then I’m guessing our cross-dressing sisters and brothers may deserve the title in earnest. The original gender warriors, who understood that what passes for “male” and “female” in American (and human) culture is nothing more that a collection of gestures, actions, inflections and comportment, comprising an illusion that anyone can cultivate. And if anyone can cultivate them, then, to quote Diane Torr, “masculinity is no longer sacred.” When Drag Queens and Kings adopt a persona in the other gender, they challenge the status quo. The popular notions that genitals are destiny, gender is : a script, a map, a codified manifesto of values and desires.

Venus Boyz, Gabriel Baur’s documentary celebration of Drag Kings, explores women  who have endeavored to summon their “female masculinity”. Some are performance artists, some entertainers, some identify as men or choose to live in the context of a masculine identity. Some are combinations. Some call themselves inter-sexed (what was once referred to as “hermaphroditic”) or “other-sex.“ Some are androgynous in the truest sense. They do not wear makeup or other trappings. They are fetching and wise and charismatic and you can’t tell by looking what gender they were born with. And you start to grasp that maybe it doesn’t matter. Venus Boyz makes us startlingly aware of how gender perception affects our attitudes towards one another.

Baur touches on many different aspects of transgenderism for women. They speak candidly about anguish, cruelty, violence, the sense of elation, emancipation, and empowerment. Some women strap on dildos as part of their transformation; male-transgender workshop participants pass around a “faux penis” more supple than customary sex toys. Some of the ladies act out male identities as a way of channeling their male spirit, or creating a third gender other than “male” or “female”. They don’t necessarily identify with, or need to make themselves into men. It is never suggested there is one simple answer. Though the women seem to share some traits, we learn what makes each one unique.

In Venus Boyz, Gabriel Baur captures all the grace, eeriness and loopy humor of Drag King performance and the women who feel they must live as male or “other-gender” identified. Bridge Markland is sardonic and withering when she creates her men. In one number, she comes out in “female drag” looking like a man dressed as a woman. All voluptuousness and sexual allure, she vamps and camps like a force of nature. Then she pulls off the wig, tears off her blouse to expose taped nipples and now, suddenly her gender becomes even more obtuse. You can’t tell what the hell she is! She’s next to naked and yet wickedly, grotesquely, confounds our need for gender assignation.

What’s so engaging about Venus Boyz, so mesmerizing and enchanting, is how it spins the mystery of gender. It doesn’t just deconstruct it. It mocks it, worships it, shatters it, and somehow it all works. Somehow the net result is subtle and jarring and reverent and provocative. Watching the performances at Club Casanova and the Slipper Room we cannot tell if it’s Queer Vaudeville or the liturgy of Dionysiac priestesses. They could be wielding seltzer bottles or suckling fawns. The players are engulfed in butchy incantation and the audience is spellbound. Markland, Dred, Torr and the others take this sorcery to transcendent realms. They reveal gender as simultaneously sacred and profane.

Venus Boyz a documentary by Gabriel Baur features Dred Gerstand, Diane Torr, Del LaGrace Volcano, Bridge Markland, Mo Fischer, Storme Webber, Queen Bee Luscious, Mistress Formika and Judith Halberstam.