“Why did I come to BROOKLYN to see THIS?”
It’s a Saturday night in Greenpoint. The brisk autumn air is moist with traces of the East River only a block or two away. I’m famished. There isn’t anything like a bodega or deli anywhere in sight, it feels more like the suburbs or uptown Manhattan…this is barely Brooklyn.
Nevertheless, neighborhood disdain twice caught the blame tonight as the scholarly gentleman who thrust these words [in bold] upon the gathered crowd proceeded to repeat them verbatim only minutes later.
The great irony here is that we were all assembled in celebration of the inaugural Brooklyn International Horror Film Festival. Proudly regional, this small fest has made great use of alternative spaces throughout the Brooklyn area for their screenings. Bushwick haunt Catland, an occult book store and performance space, for example, has served as a hub of sorts for the festival, hosting a variety of spooky events.
Tonight we’re sitting in a small theater at Triskelion Arts, a maximum of 40 people in attendance to catch a screening of We Are the Flesh (Tenemos la carne), a 2016 Mexican film that the BIHFF’s programmer described as being “like a Jodorowsky film, only angrier and more sexually perverted.”
I trembled with anticipation. The eager audience chuckled at the allusion to the Chilean midnight master, most perhaps from a general free-association with the director and the bizarre, rather than an actual understanding of the cinematic sensibility that such a comparison would yield. From the crowd’s subsequent reaction to the feature, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them actually booing a Jodorowsky film like El Topo or Holy Mountain.
The nature of the particular moment of derision profiled above is a scene about halfway through the film in which a brother and sister are compelled (though it didn’t take much) into intercourse. A charismatic and manipulative older, bearded man (something like a Mexican Charles Manson) berates the boy for not being able to get a hard-on at the sight of his naked sister and “forces” her to give him a blow job until he does indeed get it up. The brother and sister are in their late teens or early twenties — they’re not kids, which allows for the sex scenes to be especially graphic.
A jarring but delightful compositional surprise comes in the form of dual point-of-view shots during the blowjob scene: we gaze downwards at the girl’s searching eyes as her lips slide up and down her brother’s now fully erect cock and later peer upwards with the sister as she alternates between seeing her brother and imagining the bearded man’s wide, toothy grin. All three characters are shown to be in complete ecstasy.
By this point the audience is downright ROWDY. The out-of-towner and his friends have turned the screening into a heckling session: a couple walks out, not to return; someone takes out their phone, maybe snaps a picture; others laugh, smack their lips, crinkle something in their hands or shift in their seats — ANYTHING to avoid sinking into the uncomfortable masterpiece flickering before them. But what got the crowd so pissed off?
We Are the Flesh is a sensuous film that celebrates the complexity of human sexual experience and challenges conventional notions of family, impropriety, and the afterlife.
But it wasn’t the taboo of incest or the gratuitous character of the sex that sent this crowd of horror fans over the rails. Morally suspect, this was a crowd hardened by countless hours of gore and exploitation of all varieties. Indeed, the audience seemed most at ease during scenes when either a woman was crying or someone was screaming. Such actions are par for the course in this genre. Horror they could handle. This was NOT horror, but it was HORRIBLE for them.
The opening statement says it all. With Brooklyn’s ongoing notoriety as a bohemian paradise of the strange, it is clear that what was most upsetting to the largely white male (presumably non-Brooklyn) audience tonight was the frank portrayal of another man’s penis…a quite large one at that, despite being called “ugly” in the film.
Horror has always been mainstream fare, romanticized in the American collective consciousness as a vehicle with which men may prove their emotional superiority over women in times of fictional distress and channel their supposed empathic weakness into a chemically-charged sexual conquest of power dynamics. Nothing could have been more off-putting for these horror jocks than to see a rival penis featured so gorgeously and prominently on the screen before them.
I wanted to turn around and like Michael Jackson in the Thriller video reassure them: “It’s only a movie”, but there was no turning back. No amount of bloodletting or cannibalism would put this crowd back on the track of enjoying the well-made movie they’d paid to see. What may have begun as a serious case of locker room insecurities amongst them soon broadened to highlight their very real over-arching fear of the body and its mechanisms.
Without having to go as far as Cronenberg for rending, tearing body-horror, this crowd was brought to an almost sophomoric level of awkward, aggressive discomfort at the sight of any of the body’s humblest functions. Intimate views of male and female genitalia continued throughout the film, but it was really the following examples which opened up a whole new world of displeasure for the remaining members of the audience: a) a shot of the sister squatting and vigorously, visibly peeing after sex and b) a scene in which the sister crouches over her brother’s mouth and dribbles a few drops of menstrual blood onto his lips while proclaiming the unattainability of real love — all casual enough occurrences, I can assure you. ;)
The three girls in front of me were not having it, they were literally like: “I can’t e-ven.” Everyone was whispering, not a single person shushed. It was like we had all collectively given up on this movie, which was a shame, because it really is quite beautiful. Later, when the film had ended, the most overheard phrase in the lobby was: “I’m sorry” — as in, ‘I am sorry I brought you here’. Practically nobody was satisfied with their experience, but it didn’t make any sense, we’d gotten exactly what we thought we wanted…we got scared.
**Spoiler Alert**
In thinking about this audience’s cool reception of the film, it became clearer to me how much the film’s narrative and structure mirrors that of Plato’s allegory of the cave. Having reveled in their cardboard, womb-like cave in the film, the main characters lose themselves in an orgy of sex and violence that culminates in a blinding act of consensual cannibalism. This is all they (and we, by extension) have come to know as real.
The next scene is a kind of morning after in which everything we thought we knew about the film suddenly changes as a queer boy rises from the floor of this mad party and stumbles out the door into the light, taking us out of the squatter’s flat we have been in for the entire film and onto the real streets of some large Mexican city. The abruptness of the shift from dark to light / fantasy world to real, as with Plato’s escaped prisoner, is blinding. We know from Plato’s thought exercise that the escaped prisoner upon adjusting their eyes will perceive the new world as more genuine than the old. In attempting to return to the cave to impart this new found wisdom on their fellow prisoners, they would again be blinded, now by darkness, and may even be killed by the others for what they perceive as the disastrous effects of leaving the cave.
The idea of this liberated cave party in a squatter’s building seeming safer than the world outside resonates with the film’s overarching theme of acceptance of life at the margins. In this way, the story of incest and cannibalism appears largely allegorical, a place where fantasies are cultivated, rather than repressed. Guess what these horror fans hated even more than Brooklyn, or dicks, or girls pissing — ALLEGORIES. When the kid takes viewers outside of the cave for the first time and the possibility that the events we had just witnessed were not meant to be taken literally hit people in the audience, the teeth sucking began once again, and it was like Plato had freed all of those prisoners at once and they all got dragged out into the light and begged to be put back in chains.
Programming We Are the Flesh was a brilliant move by BIHFF organizers as it pushed the envelope away from mortal terror into social terror, forcing modern viewers as hyper-sensitive to appearances and as desensitized to violence as us to confront the troubling fact that as a culture, what we are most afraid of is honesty.
We all are the flesh.
Horror fans…grow up.
