Porn, porosity and promiscuity: the recombinant self and industrialized celebrity in Super 8 1/2.

David McIntosh

The Recombinant Self and Industrialized Celebrity in Super 8 1/2

"If art still remains the closet, let's make pornography." Bryan Bruce(1)

"Somewhere along the line Bruce lost the ability to distinguish between movies and real life." Googie

"This is a true story, my story." Bruce LaBruce

"The truth is that very few people care. The reason is that the confusion of real life with `role' life is now

a fixture of business and politics as much as entertainment."(2)

Bruce LaBruce (invention, extension, subsidiary of Bryan Bruce, a reluctant intellectual and critic with a penchant for commodity theory, rebel sex, and 70's gay porn) has been central to Toronto's queercore scene for many years, producing the zine J.D.'s, making Super 8 films and generally testing the limits of attitude and fashion. Four years ago he achieved minor celebrity status in the international avant-garde underground set with his first no-budget feature film No Skin Off My Ass. In his new feature Super 8 1/2: A Cautionary Bio-Pic, LaBruce offers us his latest re-fashioning of self as Bruce LaBruce, fading porn star taken up and destroyed by post-modern critics, queer theorists and the exploitive lesbian art pornographer, Googie.

Demonstrating an expert understanding of and ability to manipulate the mechanisms for producing fame, LaBruce demystifies and defiles the celebrity industry while mythologizing himself within it. Cognizant of and addicted to the massive doses of unreality we all require simply to function, he has carefully constructed a closed system of queer history, a highly circumscribed map of the collective homo unconscious, built from relentless quotations from queer art, entertainment, camp and porn history. The narrative antecedents for Super 8 1/2 are well known, well worn and comfortable: mass market pseudo-celebrity bio paperback trash like Valley of the Dolls, Edie and A Low Life In High Heels. The aesthetic approach is equally contained and referential, a nostalgic recreation of the 70's look of Andy Warhol and Fred Halstead films retrofitted with 80's punk fashions.

Within this closed system of industrialized celebrity, LaBruce has assumed complete control of his only resource -- himself -- and inserted his own factitious history -- his "true story" -- into the factory of fame, offering both his real life and his "role" life as the raw materials for exploitation in his own nascent cottage industry version of the manufacturing of a star, the only thing to be in a totalized simulacrous world. His many selves offered up for processing include: director, performer, narcissist, meat, fashion victim, bitch, and finally crazed object of humiliation. But as pointed out in Googie's quote, Bruce has no ability to distinguish between movies and reality; consequently, the most industrially exploitable quality of his self is its porousness and promiscuity.

In setting up a dynamic between a closed system of industrially produced consciousness and a porous self, LaBruce sets the ground for highlighting reality as an attribute of that dynamic. In this realm it is only authenticity, a lesser version of reality, which is, in fact a media product, that can be detected. The greater the confusion and blurring of boundaries between self and system, reality and movies, the greater the need for signs of authenticity. LaBruce utilises celebrity itself as a strategy of authenticity, including cameos by real film or TV personalities like Scott Thompson, Richard Kern and Vaginal Creme Davis. But his most important signifier of authenticity by far is pornography -- hard core representations of cocksucking, ass fucking, piss drinking, fisting. Without the regular hardcore porn intervals, Super 8 1/2 would just be another embarrassingly kitsch fashion and attitude exercise. Of all of our industrially exploitable selves, the eroticized meat self is the most authentic, the most renewable and the most liberating.

But despite the relative coterminousness of mediated sexual activity with the real queer self, porn is still a self-sealing discourse, subject to the rules of the celebrity industry. To move beyond this hall of mirrors discourse in critical terms as LaBruce has done in cinematic terms in Super 8 1/2 requires stepping outside standard theoretical approaches and moving more deeply into matters of sex and structure. One source of inspiration is writer Samuel Delaney's fictional autobiography (or perhaps autobiographical fiction) The Mad Man. Half philosophical murder mystery, half filthy (in the literal sense of the word) queer pornography, the novel traces the obsessions of a young PhD student with a passion for sucking off park winos. His major philosphical breakthrough is derived from and replicates his sexual practices:

"Large scale, messy, informal systems are necessary in order to develop, on top of them, precise, hard-edged, tractable systems ... structures that are so informal that it is questionable whether they can be called systematic at all are prequisites for those structures that can be recognised as systems in the first place. The first three quarters of our century has been dominated by the unquestioned conviction that the world worked the other way around: that reality was built up of atomic perceptions, that language was built up from meanings and grammatical potentials associated with individual words... Clear and specific counting is basically a refinement of generalized, messy pointing, or even random flailing."(3)

Structurally, Super 8 1/2 is what Delaney calls a messy, informal system which falls within the category of the faux compilation film, built from a constantly shifting range of registers of address, including archival material, documentary interviews and voice-over commentary. It lays down a comprehensive, anarchic surface of mediated queer culture predicated on pornography and celebrity which is analogous to the random sex-starved and flailing approval-seeking behaviour (the lowest incarnation of celebrity urges) of many fags and dykes. This effervescent messy pointing seeks to evolve its own structures, systems and metaphors, to effect bottom up change, but LaBruce studiously avoids moral or sociological intentions, indicating instead that while sexual identity and porn might constitute an informal system of random flailing, they serve as the foundation on which the tractable industrial celebrity system has already been firmly built. Or as Bruce states unequivocally, "Porn is the wave of the future."

New biological theory can help extend our analysis of construction of the porous self in less moral or sociologically constructive terms in that it conceives of the body not as unitary, "not one self, but a fiction of self built from a mass of interacting selves. A body's capacities are literally the result of what it incorporates; the self is not only corporal but corporate."(4) If we shift to a less zoocentric corporal level to examine bacterial sex and structure, we discover that:

"Bacteria are omnisexual. Bacterial omnisexuality refers to the fluid genetic transfers, by definition sexual, among continuously reproducing bacteria. Bacteria are able to trade variable quantities of genes with virtually no regard for species barriers. Bacteria are so genetically promiscuous, their bodies are so genetically open, that the very concept of species falsifies their character as a unique life form."(5)

Considered from this perspective, the corporate LaBruce's mass of porous interacting selves are engaged in fluid and promiscuous sexual/intellectual transfers, absorbing, recombining and reproducing mutated strands of celebrity industry coding -- best illustrated in a scene where he jerks off on a framed poster of David Cassidy. And analogous to survival rates of recombined bacteria, where billions of mutants expire instantaneously for every bacteria that flourishes so vigourously that it turns into flesh-eating disease, millions of mutant flash-in-the-pan celebrities are the evolutionary price paid for the stability of industrial celebrity system capable of throwing up a the rare mega-mutant on the order of Elizabeth Taylor or Andy Warhol.

The bacterial strategy of open-bodied disregard for unity of self as a reproductive method is also reflected in LaBruce's positioning of himself as the surface through which industrial celebrity vectors intersect, a strategy possibly best demonstrated in his explanation of the genesis of his films: "I steal all my lines. There's no copyright on good lines. When I used to direct my pornos, I'd steal titles, chunks of dialogue, entire plots. Everything came from other movies... Why? Because I'm busy. I have enough work to do without thinking up a new idea for every movie I make... even talking to myself is work." The virulence and thoroughness of his mutation is confirmed in a scene where he wakes up, turns on the TV and effortlessly voice-overs the lines of every Hollywood actress on every channel. Even his demise at Googie's hands is genetically coded in celebrity fashion: "I was playing Edie to her Viva. The future was the bottom of the swimming pool. Grey Gardens awaited me."

LaBruce also constructs lists of queer references that operate like strands of genetic code, to be incorporated into a new species. In a segment where he considers gay celebrities who have died of AIDS, wondering if he'll be next, he recites a list which is akin to oral history but which is as deeply imbedded in us as DNA: "Fashion victims Halston, Perry Ellis, Willie Smith, all of the actors from The Boys in the Band... Denholm Elliot, Franklin Seals, Rock, Liberace, Keith Herring, Robert Reed, Mapplethorpe, Anthony Perkins, Roy Cohn, Nureyev, Freddie Mercury, Peter Allen, Foucault...." The list of his porn titles is also evidence of recombinant processes, with famous film titles recorded as queer: I am Curious Gay, Pay Him as He Lays, Fugitive from a Gang Bang, Pretty in Porn, My Hustler-Myself, Ride Queer Ride. And at the end of Super 8 1/2, as LaBruce's celebrity strategy fails and he is confined to a straightjacket, he offers us a tragic visual list, a recombined strand of queer DNA, derived entirely from the preceding images: an archival sequence of stills of his many selves as they transform, reshape and recombine through their various porn roles.

True to his objectives articulated as Bryan Bruce over seven years ago, LaBruce has pried open the closet of art and given us an ultra-contemporary and hilarious porn fest. Super 8 1/2 succeeds in resituating the complexities of porn and celebrity, sex and structure, real life and "role" life, and the recombinant self in a public space which is not coded exclusively as an art site or as a porn site, and in doing so maps a new territory of mediated queer space. However, despite the fact that Super 8 1/2 packed houses at the Toronto International Film Festival and his appearance at screenings elicited squeals of recognition and anticipation, LaBruce's film will most likely not be readily accessible through conventional film distribution and exhibition means. Ironically, its intentionally crude production values and hardcore porn exile it from the commodity system it plays off, confining it to its sources in the art and porn underground.

(1) Bryan Bruce, "Whipping It Up" in CineAction, Fall 87, p.44.

(2) Iain Mitroff and Warren Bennis, The Unreality Industry. Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 121.

(3) Samuel Delaney, The Mad Man, Richard Kasak Books, NY, 1994, p.243.

(4) Dorion Sagan, "Metametazoa: Biology and Multiplicity" in Incorporations, Zone 6. Urzone Inc, NY, 1992, p. 370.

(5) Ibid, p. 378.

All unreferenced quotes are from Super 8 1/2.