Pink Narcissus (1971)

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The Allan Fish Online Film Festival 2017

Director/Screenwriter: James Bidgood

By Roderick Heath

Pink Narcissus is a relic of cinema that has journeyed from virtual oblivion to belated appreciation in a corner of the cinematic world that long hungered for elders to respect. The story of how it came to be unearthed and its worth today is bound up in who made it and why. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, James Bidgood arrived in New York in the early 1950s aged 17. Like many young gay men then and now, self-described farm boy Bidgood was surely on the search for a tenable existence and a community, and he carved out his place in the city’s queer underground as a drag queen and night club dancer. He found commercial success as a dress designer prized for his opulent debutante apparel, as a window dresser, and as a photographer. This last passion became increasingly compelling to Bidgood, and through the 1960s his homoerotic studies were popular in the “physique” magazines that allowed a little soft-core gazing to gay readers; at a time when most of their pictures were flat and trite, Bidgood gained attention by bringing his decorative and compositional gifts to bear. Bidgood sarcastically referred to his Hell’s Kitchen apartment as Les Folies Des Hommes, in tribute to the Folies Bergeres, as that tiny abode doubled as his studio and theatre of creation, and he soon started using it as a pseudonym when publishing his photos. Soon Bidgood began trying to make a movie, shooting entirely within his apartment confines. Bidgood’s partner of the time, Bobby Kendall, a former hustler, became the epicentre of his attempts to inscribe in pure cinematic terms an obsessive fascination with his lover’s body and, beyond that, to create a total work dedicated to celebrating his aesthetic fetishes, in a film encapsulating a series of fantasy sequences built around what Bidgood himself described happily as “gay whack-off fantasies.”
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Bidgood worked on the film off and on for about seven years, eventually spending about $27,000 on the project. He utilised friends and acquaintances as actors, including Charles Ludlam, who had founded the landmark avant-garde “Theatre of the Ridiculous” movement, which has been credited with a powerful influence on later expressions of camp aesthetics like The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). The time it took Bidgood to finish his dialogue-free, highly experimental movie testified to his fastidious dedication and creative verve, but also foiled what ambitions he harboured for the result. By the early 1970s, following the Stonewall riots and the explosion of the new liberationist era, gay culture was just starting to claw its way to the surface of modern life whilst also developing a taste for more direct and hard-edged self-portraiture. If Bidgood’s film had come out a couple of years earlier, it might have seemed radically frank and a pivotal artwork. Instead, it was dismissed as a kitschy, already dated hunk of amateur showmanship. Bidgood’s obsessive points of reference, encompassing a brand of lush, artificial expressiveness beloved of vintage camp enthusiasts including old Hollywood fantasy films featuring the likes of Maria Montez, belonged to a mode then falling out of favour. Not helping matters was the decision by Bidgood’s distributors, who, having invested money in his never-ending project, eventually decided to finish the editing and release it without his permission. In retaliation and fond hope, Bidgood took his name off the film, on the off chance this might lend it an inscrutable aura on the underground movie circuit. He was right, as the film did begin to slowly accrue a cult following, and many fans theorised its director might be Andy Warhol. Over the next few decades Pink Narcissus had occasional revivals, but it wasn’t until the writer, and fan of the film, Bruce Benderson set out to finally solve the riddle of its creator that the link was made between the movie and Bidgood.
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The sheer level of craft and ingenuity often on display in Pink Narcissus for a work made in such conditions is worthy of admiration purely in itself, but the real quality of delirious artistry Bidgood achieved is quickly evinced even in his opening shot, with his camera tracking through dense, obviously fake jungle. The full moon shines through the leaves, orchids bloom at night, and a butterfly emerges from chrysalis. All is touched with a quality of hand-made magic thanks to Bidgood’s reverence for a certain brand of artificial yet pellucid beauty and mystique, and his utilisation of basic yet difficult cinematic effects like stop-motion animation. Pink Narcissus wears some of its inspiration in its title, a twist on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1946), as Powell’s films were a potent influence on Bidgood’s ardour for intense colour and drenched optical effects, and their method of bending established melodramatic narratives and exotic trappings to their own purposes. Pink Narcissus’ title is also a statement of plain subject, as Kendall’s central character is presented as both a love object and a narcissist, captured in all his self-love, which is also the love of the camera-filmmaker. The story, such as it is, finds Kendall’s young and insouciant male prostitute, referred to as Pan by most reviewers because he’s first glimpsed dressed up like that god of nature, lounging around an apartment presumably paid for by his sugar daddy, who occasionally phones up to make sure he’s there. Pan seems to leave the apartment for a quick adventure, or perhaps only remembers doing so. He finds it in a tryst with a leather-clad biker in a toilet block. Back in the apartment, Pan idly masturbates whilst ranging through a series of fantasies in his head, including being served up as a dessert at a Roman emperor’s orgy, being the favourite in a Sheikh’s male harem, and escaping into green fields and jungle night.
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Pan’s encounter with the biker is a great example of Bidgood’s fearsome cinematic energy and his will to express erotic furore with unique concision, as Pan dips in and out of fantasy transformations of the event in contrast to the gritty immediacy of actually getting a blow job from some random dude in a toilet. He sees himself as a matador, waving his red cape for the biker riding his motorcycle who transmogrifies into a very horny bull. Bidgood puts across the idea of fellatio without quite showing it as the biker, mouth welded to Pan’s crotch, is submerged in a bath of foaming water, filmed in orgasmic slow-motion, sexual thrill rendered as amniotic immersion and painted over with jets of ejaculate-mimicking soap foam. Pan’s nasty streak emerges as the encounter turns violent: he knocks the other man to the ground and enjoys the sight of him squirming in both pain and auto-erotic pleasure. Pink Narcissus reveals itself at such moments to be about the very urge that drives Bidgood’s filmmaking, the tension between a sordid reality and a transformative vision that can constantly remake that reality in an ever-shifting series of guises. Artifice isn’t just a method but the essence of the work, as Bidgood painstakingly creates a series of little worlds, totally invented zones of being and imagining where caprices cordoned off from the main flow of life can bloom in private domain.
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Not that the fantasies are esoteric. Indeed, most have easy analogues with common straight fantasies, particularly that of the harem. But that passage appropriates the oh-so-common dancing girl scene of historical epics and disposes of the barrier of enjoyment so many gay fans found in such movies. Indeed, the commonality of the fantasies here seems very much part of the point Bidgood was trying to make, to synthesise a clear and recognisable shared ground, trying to map out the coasts of a hitherto largely uncharted continent. Pan exists as male houri kept around purely for convenient moments of sexual pleasure. His is a little uterine world of pinks and reds, gilt frames and mirrors where his own image lurks like some wistful spirit fascinated in his person looking in from a more real world as he lounges through the day. Pan is a satire-cum-inverted celebration of the great cliché of Orientalist art, the lounging odalisque – a figure embodying all voluptuous sensual potential happy enough to exist purely for that end and frustrated only when they cannot indulge it. This lineage is also clear in the harem sequence, where Pan and his master and fellow slaves watch a male belly dancer, whose shimmying fills the screen in images layered one upon the other, his penis shaking like a fire hose under diaphanous silk. Bidgood’s frank enjoyment of eroticising the male body – or to put that another way, his delight in great butts – is in constant evidence throughout, as Pan’s mental peregrinations drag him through various settings replete with fantasies of sexual wealth. But he’s also subject to another pull, away from other people, to imagined scenes of lounging in fields and forests, jerking off on the grass and inseminating the earth.
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Pink Narcissus betrays evident influences, or at least precursors, from the history of experimental and underground film added to the stew of images harvested from popular cinema. There’s a similarity to Joseph Cornell’s fetishistic appropriation of Hollywood image-making and two-bit exotica, Rose Hobart (1936). Kenneth Anger’s imprint is powerful throughout, in the use of double exposures for dense and oneiric incantation: the shots of the mystic moon strongly recall those in Anger’s Rabbit’s Moon (1950) and the belly-dance, with its hallucinatory historical kitsch and double-exposed images, is reminiscent of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954). Equally Anger-like is the employment of music, ranging from surges of high-romantic classical music to harvested movie scores to electronica-tinged avant garde racket. When Bidgood makes occasional forays into the world outside Pan’s apartment, he does so only with extremely stylised models and sets that hark back to silent Expressionist cinema. The imprint of Powell and Pressburger lurches to the fore again as Bidgood’s use of highly stylised, purposefully theatrical approximations of reality often resemble those found in the grand ballet sequence of The Red Shoes (1948), all painted imps and cardboard sets. When his camera drifts out the window to survey the city night, Bidgood fills the soundtrack with audio harvested from radio and television, sarcastically portraying that world outside Pan’s onanistic bubble as one of droning advertisements and flim-flam – in short, another bubble contained by infinitely less personal yet equally masturbatory aesthetics than those exhibited in Pan’s existence. Bidgood relishes not just the garishly colourful reaches of Pan’s room but also the grimy fecundity of such sights as graffiti decorating the men’s room wall, and the litter collected in a urinal rises on the swirl of flowing water and urine filmed the way other directors might survey some deep space nebula.
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Pan, true to his name, repeatedly leaves behind his invented lovers and overlords for wandering in forests and lounging on hillsides, escaping into nature, although even that can be feverishly eroticised, as when he gets caught up in reeds that he finds he has to please in a phallic manner, whilst drenching rain falls on him. At other points, Pan lies on a grassy patch of ground, playing with the butterfly seen hatching at the start, an emblem of furtive sexuality itself, in a state of constantly becoming. Pan’s connection with nature suggests a part of Bidgood’s mind pining for the lazy sensuality and beauty of a boyhood on the farm, caressing himself all over with a blade of grass in shots where Bidgood renders Kendall’s nipples or navel as universes in themselves, which indeed they can be on such a sensual, nerve-sense level. In actuality, Pan tries to match the imagined/remembered sensation by pouring champagne on himself. Bidgood’s camera strives to record sensuality in such moments on an intimately physical level, communing with his audience through sense-memory stirred by vision: it’s hard to think of more intensely sensual moments in cinema. Bidgood’s hunt for such electric visual similes for sensatory experience also sees a bundle of pearl necklaces caressed in phallic manner during the belly dance scene. This image leads to a climax, in both sense of the word, for the sequence when Pan’s sadistically stoked excitement demands the belly dancer be executed by the Sheikh’s bodyguards. The dancer is hacked down with scimitars, whereupon Bidgood fills the screen with a colossal penis jutting at the camera, squirting spunk both real and gleefully animated in pearl-like globules shooting through the air.
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Bidgood’s confrontational streak is gleefully unleashed here, depicting ejaculation as the natural end of all these pictured labours, a fillip of hardcore footage offered not as mere punctuation for the sex act as in pornography but as a totemic event. The way Pink Narcissus proceeds from primly hiding away shots of genitalia to scenes in which extras stand around with their dicks out and increasingly direct sexual expression like this offers a telling incidental depiction of Bidgood responding to the loosening sense of what he could get away with during the laborious process of making the film. When Pan comes, he comes all over the presumed viewers, implicating all in the spectacular pleasure but also examining its strangeness, a wild, flowing vision of galactic panspermia. The death of the belly dancer, as in a slasher horror film, suggests the act of climax can only be matched and correlated in the remoteness of cinema with the spectacle of violent death, one form of violation of the body offered in lieu of another; it also a cyclical moment, the touch of Thanatos lending its perpetual spice to the cause of Eros. Although Pink Narcissus becomes increasingly brave in what it shows, it stands aloof from pornography in the sense that it’s a film trying to purvey an aestheticized essence of experience rather than reflect the viewer’s wont back at them. The only scene that actually describes Pan having sex with someone else, the blow job the biker gives Pan, is both cleverly illustrative but discreet in that regard, and this grandiose celebration of coming is as wildly amusing as anything else. No wonder the film failed to go over with the Times Square beat-off crowd.
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Ejaculation might briefly exhaust Pan’s frustrated libido but it also signals a shift in the film into a different realm. An epic, dazzlingly bizarre sequence sees Pan phoned up by his keeper (Ludlam), who is exploring a downtown scene where the flotsam of the city night reel by and rough trade comes out of the woodwork. This sequence is a triumph of Bidgood’s artisanal world-crafting, as he recreates the reaches of downtown Manhattan from its heyday, as glimpsed in movies like Midnight Cowboy (1969), as a place littered with human refuse, reconfigured as a guerrilla theatre playpen. Amidst all the wandering hustlers and cruisers, Pan’s first meeting with his lover is described, an act that Pan is all too aware saved him from selling his body out there. Johns lurk like dapper neo-Bluebeards in their frock coats and bowler hats, satiric visions of classy conformity out seeking their own personal big-dick id-beast for kicks. The prettiness that dominates the rest of the film here is transmuted into a no less aestheticized but far harsher evocativeness. The languorous mood imbued by the orchestral strains on the soundtrack earlier in Pink Narcissus here gives way to spasmodic and grating scoring, approximating the cityscape’s collective nervous system as a schizoid beast. The turn of seasons is noted with cardboard ice, the pavements are haunted by twisted wretches selling flowers and newspapers, and shaggy, filthy wastrels. Rival hustlers try to catch eyes with ploys like pouring mustard on their pricks.
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Pink Narcissus is quite often described simply as a perfect gay fantasia, a luxurious decorative object not unlike its hero. And yet Bidgood’s statement about the lot of queer sexuality in his time deepens and becomes more critical here, setting up a new tension that resolves in a series of brilliantly effective images at the very end of the film. Mutual exploitation is in play here, and Pan’s narcissism is much a rebellion against the exigencies of the situation where he plays love object at the convenience of another man as it is against boredom and solitude. And yet this theme is also eternally subject to Bidgood’s engagement in alternations of exterior admiration and interior imagining, invading the object of gazing with an urgent, ferocious desire to possess the very quality of indifference. Pink Narcissus could be the deepest, most fiendishly obsessive and morbid dive into the essential problem of trying to know the lover in American art since Poe wrote about Morella and Ligeia, and yet its urges run in the opposite direction, away from the grave and towards the explosively sensuous. Bidgood opens up vast yet intelligible schisms between the lives we lead and the ones we imagine, and sees the way the two are rarely easily teased apart, as the acts of imagining, contrasting, masking, and discerning, are deeply enmeshed with all experience. The last phase of Pink Narcissus sees Pan, purified of sexual urge by ejaculation but plunged with new intensity into the wandering through his dream life, traversing formless landscapes, entering the jungle where the vegetation slaps against his body and torrential rain falls upon him, as if the very earth itself is intent on ravishing him, and Pan wants to dissolve into world-spirit, assailed by fluttering petals beating at his body, wandering in floods of hallucinatory colour.
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The knock at the door must come inevitably and drew the stud out of his fantasia. Except that when his lover comes into the apartment, Pan sees him with his own face, simply incorporating him into his fantasy life, contained as another doppelganger. But the infinite mirror is cracked in the end, the screen itself breaking under the strain of such much looking and the young man’s projections can only stretch so far before he too will be an old man buying love. The crack becomes a spider’s web, glistening in the jungle night again, the place where all dreams well and wane. One prominent modern filmmaker who might well have absorbed something of Bidgood’s vision, or at least displays some telling intersection with it, is Nicolas Winding Refn, whose work often feels like it’s taking place in a similarly subliminal realm, particularly his Only God Forgives (2013) and The Neon Demon (2016), similarly exploring environs of clashing, supernaturally rich colour, replete with dangling beads and boles of mysterious and engulfing, eroticised settings, offering up the sign-play of sexuality as a series of masks. As is so often the case, the out-of-time quality that prevented Pink Narcissus from gaining much favour in its day now seems like its greatest quality, the conjuration of the world the mind can contain. Certainly many will still be turned off by Bidgood’s unabashed depictions of gay sexuality, but they’ll only be missing out on a genuinely unique and mesmeric cinematic experience.