PDF: Sad Bunny: Vincent Gallo and the Melancholia of Gender

MARC JAMES LEGER
SAD BUNNY:
Vincent Gallo and The Melancholia of Gender
Resume: Cet article examine deux films realises par Ie cineaste independant Vincent
Gallo 11 la lumiere de la theorie queer et de I'analyse des roles sexuels. La fonction du
masochisme masculin chez Gallo s'articule selon un version heterosexuelle du queer,
ce qui permet de ra;eunir Ie cool contre-culturel et de distinguer I'ceuvre de Gallo de
celles des realisateurs Iiberaux grand public. Nous utilisons Ie model sociologique
de production culturelle de Pierre Bourdieu pour developper I'idee du cinema
« branche JJ et expliquer la decentralisation subjective, la thanatophilie et la traumatophilie contemporaines. La psychanalyse et la theorie queer s'amalgament 11 cette
lecture sociologique pour explorer les politiques culturelles de Buffalo 66 et The
B,own Bunny de Gallo.
ver since Norman Mailer defined the nature of countercultural cool in terms
of racial alterity, it became obvious that conditions of oppression in the U.S.
could not be narrowly limited to questions of class status. However, what was
perhaps less obvious at that time was that the nonconforming behaviour of what
he termed the "white negro" could also be used to evade the determining conditions of American capitalism. 1 In a manner that is analogous to the perennial
transgressions of modernist art, nonconformist behaviour has often helped to
consolidate the hegemonic operations of liberal capitalism as they are displaced
onto other scenes of cultural conflict. Countercultural dissent and distinction
have today found a new theatre for the staging of liberatory forms of lifestyling
in the area of sexuality.
While the sexual revolution as we know it belongs to the 1960s, the question
of sexuality as performative reiteration and the possibilities of social transformation that are specific to this new form ofjillalysis belong to the 1990s and to
the aQ.vent of queer theory. In light of the new theories of sexuality that articulate the relations between sex, gender and desire, it might appear thatthe work
of Vincent Gallo is best understood in relation to queer theory.2 Gallo's masculine
masquerade owes as much to queer theoretical analysis as it does to the historical conjunctures that now make queer theory a necessary level of analysis in the
elaboration of gender representation. In other words, there is no question here
of writing about questions of masculinity in the film work of Vincent Gallo without
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CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES' REVUE CANADIENNE D'ETUDES CINEMATOGRAPHIQUES
VOLUME 16 NO.2' FALL' AUTOMNE 2007 • pp 82-98
considering how these operate within the sex/gender system. Further, the theme
·of suffering in Gallo's films and in his personal life links gender to masochism,
understood psychoanalytically as an effort to evade the pressures of the superego. The type of male masochism that is found in Gallo's work relates directly
to the normalizing functions of heterosexuality. Is the foreclosure of homosexual
attachments the grounds for male masochism, however, or is the function of
masquerade and the performance of a straight masculinity not also an indication
of the foreclosure of any positive identity? In what ways can the (impossible)
loss of sexual difference become part of a strategy of masochistic deception, and
.can the coordinates of the symbolic order be mapped onto the field of cultural
symbolization?
. Gallo's masculine masquerade can also be productively understood in terms
of what Thomas Frank has called the "conquest of cool"-the commercial terrain
of rebellion and the assumption that it threatens social order. 3 Through his projection of melancholia as a displacement of same-sex desire and a factor in his
masochistic heterosexual masquerade, and through an equally projective antagonism towards the culture of independent cinema, Gallo has become one of the
most fascinating figures of the alternative film scene of the late 1990s and early
2000s. He has done so by offering himself to audiences as an "objectified subjectivity," foregrounding the dislocations and externalizations of intimate life in
a fantasy structure that misperceives both the cultural economy of cool affect
and the role of the sexual subject as the subject who is supposed to enjoy. If
Gallo's constant complaint is that his work has not been taken seriously by the
independent film world because it is produced by a self-defined straight, white,
and radically conservative male, this essay will attempt to unpack some of the
false choices that structure his provocation.
"FAGS LIKE ME"
While my focus in the following pages will be Gallo's most recent work as a filmmaker, there is no good reason to separate these films from the rest of his work,
from his screen acting, music, painting, modelling, motorcycle racing, go-go
dancing, and various other accomplishments. All of these, as well as his ties to
hip hop, no-wave and postmodern culture, are part of his persona and can be
said to be conditioned by Gallo's "working-class aesthetic." As Pierre Bourdieu
recognized, it is possible to read the work of a working-class artist transversally
across the entire social field; class and taste are not necessarily homologous.
Bourdieu's theory of distinction as a marker of class also helps us to underst~nd
contemporary media culture in a way that is not entirely dependent on distinctions between formal and popular culture.
The class determinants of cultural production often emerge in Gallo's interviews. For instance, he has argued that he can derive as much enjoyment from
storyboarding for a film as from repairing a broken refrigerator compressor. This
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83
class-based view of the aesthetic field corresponds precisely to Bourdieu's notion
of the social regulation of cultural practice:
The most banal tasks always include actions which owe nothing to the pure
and simple quest for efficiency, and the actions most directly geared towards
practical ends may elicit aesthetic judgements, inasmuch as the means of
attaining the desired ends can always be the object of a specific valuation.
There are beautiful ways of ploughing or trimming a hedge, just as there
are beautiful mathematical solutions or beautiful rugby manoeuvres. 4
However, Gallo's aesthetic theory also corresponds to Bourdieu's view that culture functions as a fundamental misrecognition, where sociological determinants
are often hidden to agents who believe instead in the illusory and sacred horizon of independent individual will. Gallo's unintended critique of the division of
labour nevertheless finds a correspondence in his desire to control almost every
aspect of his films, from the design of posters, CD covers, trailers, credit lines,
billboards, and reproductions of stills (which he refused to allow for the present
article) to more specialized functions, including musical score, screenwriting,
acting, casting, styling, film editing, direction, and production. He associates
good films with a willingness to be alienated and a willingness to work outside
of mainstream cinema. 5 In all instances; he explains this effort at control over the
production process not in terms of disaffection with capitalist relations of production, but with a desire to produce ~omething that he considers aesthetically
beautiful.
c)
From a political point of view, Gallo criticizes the liberal mainstream for
pandering to working-class audiences as political idealists while at the same time.
rejecting their tastes and sensibilities. By publicly supporting Republican politicians, including New Right extremists Pat Buchanan and George W. Bush, Gallo
provokes disidentification on the part of educated liberal audiences. Culturally
speaking, he is perhaps less a neoconservative than a pop cultural vanguard
modernist, working in the offensive manner of punk musicians like the Ramones
and the Sex Pjstols. 6 Though he consjders himself to be a radical conservative,
his self-positioning is always undercut by a typically understated irony and the
fact that he has so little in common with the people who fit this description. He
is a self-described futurist, conceptualist and minimalist filmmaker. Because
Gallo's cultural analysis is so uneven, inconsistent, and tends toward the antiintellectual, his description of a working-class sensibility cannot be said to be
related to any positive working-class identity. If, however, the function of class
power is precisely to identify determined activities within an "incorporated conception of the community," which is of course the lesson of Bourdieu, then Gallo
effects what Jacques Ranciere has called a democratic redistribution of the sensible that warns against the presumptions of politicization.?
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MARC JAMES LEGER
In keeping with formalist theory, Gallo attempts to separate aesthetic from
. political issues, emphasizing elitist aestheticism and subjectivism. He specifically
directs his critique of "tendency cinema" at the identity politics of mainstream
discourse. Given the numerous examples of the corporate co-optation of identity
politics, with Brokeback Mountain (USA, 2005, Ang Lee), Capote (USA, 2005,
Bennett Miller) and c.R.A.2. y. (Quebec, 2006, Jean-Marc Vallee) as recent examples,
Gallo's cynicism is not without support. His aversion to the obsession with mainstream success and pandering to unsophisticated audiences relates specifically to
his concern with "good" cinema and is not t6 be confused with a specifically
Marxist critique of Tendenzkunst. His stated influences include Monte Hellman,
Richard Kern, Jerry Schatzberg, Todd Solondz, Yasujiro Ozu, Michelangelo
Antonioni, Robert Rossen, Rainer Fassbjnder,Jim Jarmusch, Mario Bava, Pier
Paolo Pasolini, and Robert Bresson. s Although some have linked his aesthetic to
the independent cinema of the early seventies, including the giallo film genre, he
rejects the idea that he is making retro films. Unlike many independent filmmakers who delegate artistic decision-making to numerous other individ~als,
Gallo is recognized for his control over most of the artistic aspects of production.
Gallo's acting and promotional stunts supply many critics with the view
that he is a narcissistic megalomanic. He insists on appearing on the cover of any
magazine to which he gives an interview and, like the nineteenth-century aesthete Charles Baudelaire, takes the opportunity to smear the reputation of anyone
whose work or person he dislikes. Gallo's understanding of himself as a po~tmod­
ern actor is difficult to ascertain, but one can assume that this involves playing
"himself" in almost any role, from the character Paul Leger in Arizona Dream
(USA/France, 1993, Emir Kusturica), the communist sympathizer-cum-corpse in
The Funeral (USA, 1996, Abel Ferrara), and the neoliberal-capitalist-vampirecannibal Shane in 7touble Every Day (France, 2001, Claire Denis). The simulacral
absurdity of the Gallo acting phenomenon was brought home in his double performanceas Bobby Bishop/Kevin Moss in Get Well Soon (USA, 2001, Justin
McCarthy). His signature style involves a hapless sincerity, random aggressivity,
fidgety movements and hypnotic staring, an emphatic pronunciation and repetition of phrases, a fondness for the word "nice," and several other characteristics
that make him easily imitable. His work as a model may have contributed to his
fashion sense, which sometimes includes sensuous long hair, tight-fitting
clothes, a sometimes depthless and sometimes energetic affect, and shameless
preening in cultural settings. Gallo followed up on the relative failure of The
Brown Bunny (USA, 2003) at the box office and at film festivals with increasingly provocative behaviour. In 2005 he offered his sperm for sale on eBay'" and
on his personal website for $1 million-$1.5 million for natural insemination.
The offer contained overt white supremacist and eugenicist banter. This was followed one year later by the offer of his services to women as an escort for
$50,000 per night. 9
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85
Gallo's relatively rare position in the system of cultural production becomes
problematic when we consider the fact that his screen persona operates primarily
as a parody and a critique of what was once in vogue in the days of "new times"
cultural theory, that is, the emphasis on subjectivity <l;nd the fluidity of identity
as corollaries and points of resistance to the flexible economics of post-Fordist
global restructuring. lO His films, however, have more in common with 1990s
abject art and underground culture than with an 1980s culture of conservative
backlash. The performative aspects of Gallo's straightness make sense in relation
to his elective affinity with 1970s cinema and 1990s queer cinema, and is in
keeping with Sianne Ngai's notion of the "cuteness of the avant-garde. "11 Gallo's
aesthetic can best be described in terms of its association with queer survival
strategies, defiance and deviance, a set of cultural practices that are based not in
academic identity politics or in constructivist techniques of the self, but in a
calculated and often masochistic self-positioning outside of mainstream norms.
Furthermore, the performative aspect of his straightness, psychoanalytically
inflected (even through his own disavowal of narci~sism), ignores the social constructionist emphasis on the internalization of social structures.
The resultant incoherence of identity becomes a matter of style in his work
and in his masochism, whether this is related in interviews or expressed through
fiim characters or music. Paradoxically, Gallo's "working-class" aesthetics can be
summed up as a refusal of what Slavoj Zizek defines as "the form of subjectivity that corresponds to late capitalism," defined as an acceptance of the destabilization of fixed roles and identities as obstacles to the commodification of
everyday life. Zizek writes, "The problem here is simple: how can one be a white
heterosexual male and still retain a clear conscience? All other positions can
affirm their specificity, their specific mode of enjoyment, and only the whiteheterosexual male position must remain empty, must sacrifice enjoyment. "12
According to Zizek, the problem with this sacrifice of enjoyment, enacted in
conformity with obsessive political correcmess, is that it retains the white-male- .
heterosexual position as the universal form of subjectivity and functions as
bulwark for the protection of bourgeois Fberalism against Left alternatives. This
is why the sexist and homophobic transgressions of working-class men are often
perceived as more threateningly violent than those of the middle class. Despite
the fact that Gallo is unable to offer a positive theory of his resistance, it is in
relation to these issues that we find the grounds for his melancholic foreclosures
and his "irrational" attachments to the logic of extremism.
All of these factors have helped Gallo to construct an aura of radicality with
regard to questions of working-class masculine sexuality. What is this radicality
and what are its limits? While Gallo's films depict a subject in excess of institutions and gender categories, they do so in the terms of a straight version of queer.
In comparison with the hip, white masculinity of the post-war era and its appreciation of jazz and the blues, Gallo's very personal brand of disingenuously soft
86
and fragile music could be thought to have been incubated in the context of
queer visibility.13 In keeping with the mood set by Gallo in his self-promotion
and with the mainstream fashion cycle of c.2002-2005, we could perhaps refer to
this distinct sensibility as "the browns."
Gallo's style figures partly as a consequence of the hegemonic struggle over
the increased visibility of gays, lesbians and queers in both consumer culture and
in the dominant forms of conservative political discourse. In 2004, Gallo appeared
in bondage gear on the cover of HX, a gay men's New York nightlife magazine.
The photograph was by the well-known fashion photographer Terry Richardson.
An appreciative article in another gay men's magaZine, Night Charm, was titled
"Vincent Gallo: My Cock is Just Too Big." Gay pop culture has some reason to
be-interested in Gallo. His "street credits" include hustling as a teenager on 53 rrt
Street in New York City and' go-go dancing in downtown gay clubs. His masculine masquerade, however, functions in separatist terms. As such, it could be taken
as another indication of the misbegotten "arrival" of queer theory in popular
culture. Through his routine exposure of the operations of normative p~wer,
Gallo only unwittingly asserts the universalizing view that homosexuality is
structural to all sexuality. While Gallo rejects gayness in order to declare himself
straight, he avoids overtly universalizing his position, a move that could very
easily be ascribed to the ideology of individualism. His acceptance of difference
is also the classic move of invisible mediation that allows the unmarked and naturalized norm to better function as universal. 14 Gallo's solipsistic gesturing and
his questioning of the gravity of an established symbolic structure make his selfidentifications queer. However, these negotiations of sexuality and gender only
make sense in relation to the logic of countercultural transgression and in relation to Gallo's position(ing) within the economy of cultural production,
IT SUCKS TO BE ME
Through his intuitive awareness of the function of sexual differentiation and the
failure to achieve an identity that is capable of linking sex and gender in a direct
and unconflicted manner, Gallo embodies a particular aspect of today's cultural
moment,IS Sexuality never appears on its own in Gallo's persona, but overlaps
with ethnic, gender and class economies. His transgression of normative structures can be noticed in his often humorous appropriation of the affective codes of
endearment developed by immigrants, women, gays, and youths, and incorporated
into his "intelligent design" as a bad-boy provocateur, While it is obvious that
Gallo is often racist, sexist, misogynist and homophobic in his enunciations, the
self-cancelling, masochistic manner in which he performs these positions and
their tropes disarms any immediate critique one might make. His mimicry of the
effects of ideology through a quick glossing-over of its presuppositions, known
to anyone who could be either amused or offended by them, complicates his performance. For example, in an interview with himself, Gallo performs the cliche
MARC lAMES LEGER
SAD BUNNY
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disavowal of homosexuality as an operative term in the universiu grounding of
heteronormativity: "Okay, before we 'begin I just have to tell you something.
Although] don't know how to say it ~First of all, I have to tell you, right off the
bat, I'm not gay. Not even a little. Never have been. Never will be."16 With this,
Gallo asserts the universalizing view that homosexuality is structural to all
sexuality and that sexuality operates through normalizationY His solipsistic selfreference and its allusion to an established symbolic structure, here given the
mark of time, make hisself-identification masochistic. In this manner, Gallo's
characters and his personal attitude typically express the failure of subjectivity
to fit into social structures, dominant, countercultural, or otherwise.
In the following I will provide a brief description of Gallo's two best-known
films and relate these to some reflections on the cultural economy of contemporary "indie" versions of cool, all the while retaining the link to questions of gender and sexuality. Buffalo 66 (USA, 1998) is the. story of Billy Brown (Gallo), a
paroled convict who has served a five-year prison sentence as a way to avoid a
gambling debt and to assure that a mobster bookie (Mickey Rourke) does not
hurt his parents (Anjelica Huston and Ben Gazzara). In the opening scenes, the
classic functionalist opposition of system an(ilifeworld is comically played out
as Billy desperately looks for a place to urinate. When he finally finds a bathroom stall inside a dance studio, his 19n9-awaited discharge is interrupted by a
young man who defies Billy's command not to look and exclaims in wonder, "It's
just so bigl" Billy's violent response is the first of further indications that he
suffered sexual humiliations while in prison. The interaction is followed by a
telephone call to Billy's mother, who seems to not recognize the voice of her
unloved son. Both of these scenes are witnessed by Leyla (Christina Ricci), a
young tap-dance student. So that he can impress his parents, Billy kidnaps Leyla
and forces her to play the role of Wendy Balsam, a high-school infatuation whose
unrequited love we learn about later. Despite the fact that Billy is aggressive
towards her, Leyla comes to believe in her role and falls in love with Billy. The
rest of the film revolves around unfinished business related to his prison
sentence and his avoidance of intimacy with Leyla for fear of rejection.
Among the most prominent influencei'that can be said to motivate Gallo's
characters are the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, whose despairing male
characters share the film space with self-searching female characters, and Robert
Bresson, whose ill-fated "models" are the product of isolation, cruelty and forced
intimacy. Just as Bresson's figures are people who do not know who they are,
the characters in Buffalo 66 have an almost reverent mildness tha,t is conveyed
through the filmmaker's close attention to humble, everyday objects and emotions. Consider for example the bowling scene, where the mating ritual between
Billy and Leyla is distributed through the camera's sensual scanning of
surface of their clothes, bodies, gear, and seductive performance of bowling and
tap dancing.
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MARC JAMES UlGER
The charm of Gallo's sensibility in this film is that it appears to come across
unintentionally and without explanation. Like Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp,
Gallo's relation to society is seen through his relation to his body. Unlike
Chaplin, the laughter stimulated in Buffalo 66 does not emerge through resolved
tensions, but because of the relative impossibility of their resolution. In his
Critique of Everyday Life, Henri Lefebvre describes Chaplin's film image as a
fictitious negation, a reverse image of a world in which people behave like
predictable, mechanical things. IS Lefebvre's concern was the potential for cinema
to lead to political consciousness and revolutionary action. For him, the key to
Chaplin's humour was the body's failure to conform to the modern techniques
of control that impoverish everyday life. The Little Tramp took the Baudelairean
investigation of modern life, with its irascible affirmation of fashion and deviant
behaviour, and made it the province of "everyman." The seriousness of Gallo's
work lies beyond his willingness to exploit himself and his body, or those of his
actors, and relates to what that might mean as a political act and an aesthetic
problem. For Gallo and for Lefebvre, the key to both good art and ethical action
is awareness of alienation. This awareness is codified in Gallo's discourse in
terms of hard work, asceticism and its psychic consequences. In other words, the
freedom of the body from economic and administrative constraints is registered
in terms "beyond the pleasure principle." In his interviews, Gallo never tires of
telling how hard he is on himself, how little people appreciate his work, how dull
the average film audience has become, and how he wishes to need nothing and
nobody. The measure of his immodesty can be noticed in the fact that although
people jeered throughout the entire screening of The Brown Bunny at Cannes, he
was nevertheless glad to experience what he calls a "landmark" event.
The Brown Bunny has none of the dark humour of Buffalo 66. Because fans
of Gallo might find everything he does and says slightly humorous, this morbid
story of a "destroyed soul" is shot through with unexpected ironies. The film follows a Formula II motorcycle racer, Bud Clay (Gallo), 'from an opening race at
Willow Springs, New Hampshire, to his next race in California. Bud is haunted
by the memory of Daisy (Chloe SeVigny), his lover who, we come to understand
by the end of the film, died a drug-related death after being raped. This rape
is witnessed by Bud, who assumes at that moment that the sexual engagement
is consensual. The film as a whole can be taken as an anti-drug and antipornography cautionary tale, with all manner of psychic denial, grief, anger,
angUish and consequence being expressed obliquely through the slow, minimalist
treatment of the main character. Gallo wanted the film to fit in the tradition of
adult cinema and the sex scenes to be objective rather than titillating. Criticism
of Gallo's film has so far failed to address this combination of pornography and
narrative cinema. 19
Gallo's approach to the contradictions of a "working-class" aesthetics and
his self-positioning outside of mainstream norms can be productively associated
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with a queer destabilization of the operations of genre classification. This concern
with aesthetic destabilization is noticed in Gallo's criticism of the mainstreaming
of sexual variance and queer culture in the 1990s. In recent interviews, he
laments the disaffection he now feels towards the "gay community" as a result
of the commercial integration of non,typical sexual behaviour and minoritarian
efforts to redress injustices by seeking inclusion and respectability through the
normalization of sex. Gallo's character in The Brown Bunny is in many ways a
queer figure, overexposed yet beyond classification. The allusion to pornography
as a form of administrative fixing of sexual identity as well as a site of resistance
establishes Bud's queerness. By including himself in his film, Gallo performs in
real life-shooting three sex scenes-the contradictions and anxieties that seem to
affect his character. This spectacle of the "paranoid structure of the ego," compounded by Gallo's frank and revealing interviews, functions as a challenge to
the spectatorial narcissism of ,viewers of the film.
Gallo's queering of cinema is also noticed in the non-literary, performative
dimension that is mobilized in his films, a stylization of the vernacular that
Michael Warner associates with queer counterpublics aware of their subaltern
status, addressed to indefinite others, and attentive to the links between living
contexts as sites 'of unevenness between private and public selves,z° Of course
Gallo does not categorically belong to these specific counterpublics. However, his
aesthetic disposition allows hiII,1 to identify with underground gay culture, that
is, before the conservative mainstreaming of gay politics in the 1980s and 1990s.
Both share the traditional bohemian disregard for bourgeois sexual morality.
Despite its somewhat hypocritical anti-pornography message, The Brown Bunny
is not produced from a safe voyeuristic position outside the world of pain and
suffering that it depicts; nor does it ignore the pleasures of fantasy that link the
space of inquiry with the realities of poverty, abjection and discrimination. It is
telling that in an interview, Gallo described the pick-up scene with the forlorn
character played by Chery) Tiegs as "the best gay cruising scene I've ever seen
in a film."21 If this is the case, it is also telling that Bud fails to "follow through"
on this encounter. The presence of Cheryl Tiegs in this scene recalls the pin-up
posters that may have once occupied the space of teenage fantasy but are now
the ruins of nostalgia, no longer able to sedate the imagination.
I WANT TO BE A HOLE PERSON
While queer sexuality allows Gallo to positively create a mood around his film
and real-life persona, the masochistic aspects of his identifications rencj.er this
problematic. Gallo's masochistic deception, his identification with and defense of
a lost masculinity, can be situated in relation to the interest in trauma as a reflexive
trend in contemporary culture. 22 In terms of popular culture, thanatophilia,
or what 1 also refer to as "killer cool," marks a shift from 1950s cool to a 19908
"extreme" version of the commodification of oppositional energies and affective
90
MARC JAMES LEGER
economies. In relation to Gallo'sfilrns and characters, I think we need to consider Lauren BerIant's argument that if we are not to banalize the coupling of
suffering and identity that permeates the political public sphere, we need to pay
attention to what kinds of. bodies are losing their iconicity and how the
virtualized figures of citizen trauma relate to neoconservative and neoliberal cultural politics. How does the privatization of citizenship inform the kinds of links
that are drawn between sexual, gender and class economies?23 In other words, is
the kind of male subjectivity that is performed in Gallo's films truly threatened
by renunciations of power?
In Brown Bunny, we follow Bud's failed attempts to make meaningful contact with other people and, in particular, to become interested in other women.
We discover that he is haunted by the memory of Daisy and the fateful eveIling
that brought her death. Because of the graphic nature of the rape and its resemblance to the aggressive tropes of hardcore pornography, the segment functions
as a metacomment on the pornographic imaginary, with Daisy's death figuring
as the metaphorical death of real-life women as they are replaced by the reifie,d
imagery of the porn industry. Gallo's inquiry into the aesthetics of adult cinema
addresses the role played by masochism as a means to reduce the tension caused
by overstimulation and the role of desire in the quest for more differentiated
forms of representation. The fetishism that is associated with the consumption
of imagery supplements the abstract process of the cultural reproduction of cool.
Psychoanalysis understands masochism as a dominant tendency i~ me~tal
and nervous life and in tension with desire as part of the life-preserving nature
of the organism. According to Sigmund Freud in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle,"
the aim of life is death and the purpose of desire is to extend the journey.24 Desire
tolerates unpleasure for the benefit of satisfaction and self-preservation. As in the
case of abreaction, this tolerance can build into a pleasure of the second order
a repetition of impressions and traumas that the subject seeks to gain control o~
through the mechanism of repetition itself. Because the trauma of representation
leads to direct stimulation, psychoanalysis helps to account for the way that the
witnessing of traumatic events can be as injurious to mental capacities as direct
physical traumas are to the body. Unpleasurable experience is recollected,
remembered and worked through by the mind and through the compulsion to
repetition. Freud defined consciousness as the relationship between "perceptions
of excitation coming from the external world and of feelings of pleasure and
unpleasure arising from within the mind. "25 Excitement and the flooding of stimuli leave memory traces that can be either conscious or unconscious; traumatic
stimuli can break through the protective defence mechanisms of the organism
and affect consciousness. Unpleasurable experience helps in the formation of ego
and the ambivalent aggressivity that is known as narcissism.26
In their study of cool as "the dominant mindset of advanced consumer capitalism," Dick Pountain and David Robins define narcissism as one of the four
SADBUNNY
91
personality traits of the cool attitude, along with detachment, irony and hedonism. 27 They argue that the countercultural attitudes of post-war cool were based
in the rebellion against puritan moral values and the Protestant work ethic.
Cool's ironic stance was self-defensive, avoiding direct conflict, and its narcissistic emotional shallowness was mostly protective. The cool attitude, they
argue, is essentially anti-social and apolitical and accounts for the ironic cruelty
and cold sensuality that characterizes contemporary popular culture. Moreover,
the cool attitude helps to translate alienation and despair into political consent
and contributes to the absence of oppositioJ;lal politics. 28 Their thesis was preceded by Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool. In this influential book, Frank
takes issue with the notion that the counterculture of the late 1950s and 1960s
was an opponent of consumer capitalism and that it brought' revolutionary
changes to American society.29 He disputes the idea that the counterculture was
at odds with the dominant society and that it was eventually co-opted by the
mainstream. He argues instead that consumer capitalism depends on values that
are countercultural, including the Willingness to violate boundaries, hatred of the
old and habitual, a doctrine of liberation, the rejection of tradition, and the
impossible embrace of desire. 30 Capitalism does not require conformity and
hierarchy so much as it does non-restraint, play, newness, and constant change.
As part of the consumer cycle, hip and cool figure in Frank's analysis as a recognition of alienation within consumer society and as ideological attempts to
resolve the contradictions between conformity and disalienation.
Alienation, caused in part by the exhaustion of the nervous system, erupts
through the contradictions that are covered over by the seeming homogeneity of
mass cultural forms. Because of the unevenness of experience, the boredom that
comes from the consumption of mass culture can eventually become a "tool of
discrimination," a marker of difference, and the diagnosis of boredom a "sign of
social critique."31 Here, the life experiences of variously marked "others" enter
the relations of consumer-cultural production in the diversified forms of spectacle,
with the possibility of reproducing relations of oppression through the attempted
loosening of relations of social status, social hierarchy and obligation. In her
reworking of Walter Benjamin's artwork essay, Susan Buck-Morss relates the
processes of sensory' alienation to the aestheticization of politics. 32 What
Benjamin discovered in his analysis of fascist spectacle was the possibility of
enjoyment in viewing one's own destruction. In films like Buffalo 66 and The
Brown Bunny, this hidden dialectic of the unconscious takes place on the stage
of contemporary cultural politics as the latest manifestation of countercultural
disalienation.
This question of masochism relates directly to the social demands of new
modes of behaviour and lifestyling and can be associated, as Pierre Bourdieu
might have argued, to people's tastes and dispositions towards cool things. What
one recognizes and does is objectively tied to the practical mastery of, and
91
inevitable failure to master, the space and positions that lead to the appreciation
33
of the new. Struggle over the stakes of the game of cool transforms the arbitrariness of the game into the objective markers of difference, leading to an
avant-garde of cool always looking to the externalities of uncool in order to
outflank the existing version of manufactured "pseudo" cool. Competence at
playing the game allows agents to recognize and avoid overinvestment in markers of legitimacy. As with culture in general, Bourdieu would argue that the game
of cool is based in a misrecognition of the calculations that motivate investments
and involvement. The street credit that operates as a kind of advance credit for
the manipulators of cool means that small-time operators can influence the field of
production, but cannot escape it. 34 The limits of the space of homologies between
different economies, say between feminists and queer theorists, between institutionalized cultural administrators and subcultural heresiarchs, between no-wave,
alternative and indie, are marked out by participants who can impose new norms
of taste and affect. The limits of what can be imposed as the art of living is related
to cool's elective ilffinities and relative indeterminacies. Here, both desire and
masochism are enlisted in a game of seduction and forced intimacy, where things that
go together can be either forced together once again for counter-effects, or simply broken apart, and where both amor {ati and odium {ati allow the game of
counterculture to gloss over the relations of power that define legitimate culture.
UnJike the producers of cool affect and cool things, Gallo is not the manip~
ulated manipulator that Bourdieu associates with the executant class of the petty
bourgeoisie. Through his autodidactic assimilation of popular music and cine'ma
GalIo is disabused of the power discourse oithe culture industries and can adjus~
production to meet the relative autonomy of his own tastes. 3S Nevertheless, The
Brown Bunny received advance condemnation by the, as he calls it, "socialist"
independent film industry. In this context, Gallo has had to objectify the game
of independent cinema, taking the road of the happy few whose elitism condemns both leftist tendency cinema as well as the mainstream counterculture.
But Why has his work eluded serious criticism? Could it be that the commodified
and subsidized world of independent cinema can onJy thematize working-class
subjects and tastes, and that GalIo's combination of politics with the contradictions of the aesthetic runs below the radars of liberals and conservatives alike?
What happens When the working-class subject becomes disabused of the usual
class distribution of the field of cultural production? Does this subject retain his,
or her working-class status? Does the bourgeois economy not insist on clear representations that -are politically motivated, and do not the demands of the aesthetic push these signs further into the realm of the invisible?
Gallo's endgame of art versus politics deserves to be criticized and not simply dismissed. This brings me to the question of masochism and lifestyling in
Gallo's aesthetics. His self-exploitative, masochistic tendency not only complements
the cultural politics of intentional dissimulation (hype), but also represents a
MARC JAMES LEGER
SAD BUNNY
Qdill?
93
critique of the conformism and se]f-censorshi~, to which many artists have
retreated since the rise of neoconservatisj1l, wliete oppositionality is often consigned to conventional identity politics at the expense of radical artistic experimentation. If the alienation of affective economies can on!y figure in the homes
of broken families, in depressed mid-sized cities, in hotel~ and roadside coffee
shops, in Vintage clothes, music and pornography-in other words, in the few
places that people can go in order to escape domination by systems of administration-then what films like Buffalo 66 and The Brown Bunny are telling us is
that those places are not places of escape, but places conditioned by the kinds
of people who are noticeably absent: the professional middle-class technocrats
who try to keep the latest conquest from beconling banal.
DIALECI'ICS OF COMPULSORY HETERONORMATIVITY .
Gallo's conservative politics and his avant-gardist aesthetics condition his posi'tion in the world of independent cinema. However, he seems to be playing both
to himself and to his audience when he says that he is a fan of, for example,
Richard Nixon. By staging scenes of contractual masochism, he is lying mostly to
his audience, since the space of the social symbolic is already organized in such
a way that people in the independent film world are not supposed to admit to
such identifications, even if they have them. Gallo dares us to include him out of
the spac~ of the cultural contract. Another way he has done this is by offering us
an image of Daisy fellating Bud and presenting it in a way that foregrounds sexual estrangement rather than mutual sexual pleasure. Of course, as a matter of
style, and with some reference to the exploitation genre, we are hardly expected to .
disreg~d the license that is allowed by the form of the cautionary tale. This
deception relates to Gallo's masochistic fantasy of being exposed to ridicule and
critical condemnation by Unimaginative conservatives, as well as by politically
correct liberals. Almost as if directed by Gallo himself, film critic Roger Ebert condemned The Brown Bunny as the "worst film in Cannes history," a dishonour that
Gallo now shares with filmmakers like Isidore Isou and Michelangelo Antonioni.
The real question is whether or not mainstream film criticism would matter
to Gallo and it it is willing to address the question of gender performativity that
is the basis and the limit of his work's impact. Perhaps his masochistic desire to
be punished by the "consciousness industry" misrecognizes what that industry
is and does. In other words, his fantasy is that the film industry has to exist as
it does in order to recognize his transgressions. Not only does his fantasy construct a symbolic authority against which his own work can help him sustain a
minimum of subjectiVity, it also enables a perverse questioning of authority. The
question, however, is Whether this radicality is subversive of existing forms of
power, including the hegemonic norms of liberal power, the norms of gender
hierarchy, and those of compulsory heterosexuality.36
Gallo's attitude towards the film world forecloses the space of theory and
94
criticism from the start and does so' by priVileging the established currency of
avant-garde and underground film aesthetics. As I have already argued, the coordinates of this aesthetic interest are articulated in relation to contemporary sexual politics, a fact that allows Gallo a measure of distance from the conditions in
which he works. This foreclosure of the objective grounds of culture functions
simultaneously as a foreclosure ofthe grounds of sexual attachment. In Gender
Irouble, Judith Butler defines the melancholia of gender as a function of the
simultaneous denial and preservation of homosexuality, experienced by the
infant in relation to the parent of the same sex and brought to con~ciousness by
the prohibition against incest. 37 Melancholia is the condition under which both
the girl and the boy can come to terms With the loss of both parents. The ego
then develops as an agency that consolidates gender identity.38 Farriously, Butler
argued that the limits of the body correspond to the limits of socially dOminant
codes of cultural meaning and that gender performativity has the potential to disrupt the naturalization of gender constructions. She also cautioned that subversive repetitions could just as easily reinscribe gender hierarchy and compulsory
heterosexuality.
The question of melancholia and masochism in Gallo's mascuiine masquerade should, therefore, be placed in the context of a consciously queer understanding of sexuality in contemporary alternative culture. Most recently, Butler's
~ost provocative interlocutor has been Slavoj Zizek. In The Ticklish SUbject,
Zizek takes issue with the Foucauldian view that resistance to normative power
is always already inscribed in the game of power and argues along with Lacan
that the superego injunction to enjoy (jouissance as a surplus of enjoyment and
a prohibition against it) is sustained through fantasy and is itself a means to
libidinize the mechanism of repression. Against the post-structural structure of
performative iteration, Zizek proposes the rearticulation of power through what
he calls the dialectics of the authentic act.39 By "traversing the fantasy," the
authentic act destroys the masochistic fantasy of narcissism and interrupts the mode
of interpassivity that allows subjects to identify through the suffering of others.
We could say, then, that Gallo's performative iteration of heterosexuality,
based in the melancholia of gender and sustained through passionate attachments to foreclosed Possibilities, comes too late. If we view Gallo's disidentifications as a mode of sustaining fantasy, we cannot say that his work constitutes
an authentic act and that what we are dealing with is actual clinical masochism,.
where the subject dupes the superego in the service of pleasure and by accepting
punishment for it. 40 To put it simply, Gallo wants to be forgiven-or to win at
Sundance. However, ,pnd to reintroduce Lacanian theory, the subject has not
demonstrated the symbolic authority of heterosexual norms, but the Real of the
function of sexual differentiation, a Real that is impossible to circumscribe.
Gallo's deception as a straight queer is therefore sustained by the conditions of
consumption and the cultural coordinates that distinguish certain forms of hip
MARC JAMES UlGER
SAD BUNNY
95
~idin ~a~iri, "Gallo's Rumors," San Francisco' Gate (September 5, 2004); Caveli Zahedi,
masculinity from those of his contemporaries and previous generations. What
we have here is a clear case of aesthetic myth-making: loser wins?
,,' don t mten? to be a provoc~teur:' Greencine (September 9, 2004); Todd Gilchrist,
Gallo. Gets hiS ~r~ove On," Film Stew (September 27, 2004); Mike D'Angelo, "The
Und.eflnable P~sltlon: The Brown Bunny Is a Decent Flick," Esquire (October 2004);
DaVid Denby, Thr: Brown Bunny:' New Yorker (October 4, 2004); "Vincent Gallo Talks of
~t~nt Cocks, Metrrc Bolts, and Relocation," Cawker (March 25, 2005); John Calendo,
"Vmcent Gallo~ M'y Cock is Just Too Big," Night Charm (March 26, 2005); Amy Taubin,
Fugue States, Film Comment; San Francisco Gate (February 2006)' Richard Jonson
"Gallo Off-Line Over Sex Ads:' New York Post (December 21,2006).' Other articles that
were c~nsulted have been published in About, Anticool,BB Gun, Buffalo Beat, Cups, Flux
Magaz~ne, HX, Independ~nt Film Quarterly, lndiewire, Metropolis, Neon, Soma
MagaZIne, Shout MagaZIne and Transportation Alternatives.
NOTES
1.
2.
Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 19S9).
Marc James Leger, "Is Vincent Gallo Queer?" in Proceedings from the 1st University of
Lethbridge Gender Research Symposium, Jill Veenendaal and Tiffany Boulton, eds.
(Lethbridge, AB: University of Lethbridge, 2006), 88-97.
3.
Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Coof: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of
Hip Consumerism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997).
4.
Pierre Bourdieu, Photagraphy: A Middle-Brow Art, Shaun Whiteside, trans. (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1990), 7-8.
5.
Gallo states, "The best films ever made are one of two things. They're by filmmakers
who are working class and they're just doing their thing and they've had no real support
system and their films reflect a real soul, or they're by very average filmmakers who
found a way to make a good film almost by luck~ Cited in Chris Fujiwara, "Metaphors
for Beauty: Vincent Gallo Speaks," Boston Phoenix (September 3-9, 2004), http:/
www.galloappreciation.com/(accessed December 30, 2006).
6.
Gallo's aestheticism conforms inversely to Peter Burger's definition of modernist art and
the formalist autonomy that marks late nin\lteenth-century aestheticism. It further
supports his view that the strategies of the historical avant-gardes are now the stock-intrade of the culture industries. Note that avant-garde does not automatically imply a
progressive political worldview, with Futurism being the most obvious example of
conservative avant-gardism. In some ways, Gallo's self-defined futurist and modernist
sensibility comes close to Adorno's position on the avant-garde's "mimetic adaptation"
to the conditions of reification and its interest in newness. Adorno mentions Andy
Warhol as an example. However, if we were to accept this classification for Gallo's work,
we would have to consider it in terms of aesthetic theory and not consumption fads, a
shift from the cultural logic of the sphere of "legitimate culture" (Bourdieu) to that of
commercial popular culture, a shift that Burger disallows but that is nevertheless possible in terms of cultural and social theory. See Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde,
Michael Shaw, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 59-63.
7.
Jacques Ranciere, "On Art and Work," in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the
Sensible, Gabriel Rockhill, trans. (London: Continuum, 2006), 43.
8.
Gallo's influences and opinions can be found in the countless interviews he has given to
newspapers and magazines. Most of these were consulted while still available on the
Vincent Gallo Appreciation Page, http://www.galloappreciation.com/(accessed
December 30, 2006). Short articles and interviews have appeared in the following: Dave
Carpenter, Bleach Magazine (June 1998); Allen Smithee, "Prince Vince tells it how it is
and how it should be," Mean Magazine; GioIa (June 27, 1998); "Gallo's Humour," Genre
Magazine (July 1998); Marco Balbi and Stefano Lusardi, "The Anti-Couple," OAK (July
1998); Dale Peck,Artforum (Summer 1998); Tom Charity, "Mouth Almighty," Time Out
(September 9-16, 1998); Scott Macaulay, "The Running Man," Filmmaker (Winter 1998);
Andrew Monko, "Indie Renaissance Man Vincent Gallo Explains His Life-as-Job Work
Ethic," Resonance Magazine (2001); Andrew Smith, "Buffalo Boy," Observer (September
30, 2001); Fiachra Gibbons, "Bad Boy Vincent Treats Festival to Gallo Humour," Guardian
(May 22, 2003); Mark Peranson, "My Bunny Valentine: Vincent Gallo at Cannes-A Blowby-Blow Account," Vi/loge Voice (June 2, 2003); Mark Peranson, "The Brown Bunny
Redux:' Cinema Scope (December 2003); Jared Abbott, Next (August 2004); Randy
Kennedy, "Vincent Gallo Dares You to See It," New York Times (August 15, 2004);
Defamer (August 23,2004); Warren Curry, "An Interview with Vincent Gallo,"
Entertainment tnsiders (August 25, 2004); Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times (August 29,
2004); Ray Pride, "Interview with Vincent Gallo:' Movie City News (September 3, 2004);
96
MARt JAMES LEGER
9.
The advertis-;ment for the sale of sperm stated, "Mr Gallo maintains the right to refuse
the sale of hiS sperm to those of extremely dark complexions. Though a fan of Fra nco
Harris, Dere~ Jeter, ~enny Kravitz and Lena Horne, Mr Gallo does not want to be part of
that type of mtegratlon:' The. offer of his escort services stipulated, "Heavy set, older,
redheads and even black chiCks can have me if they can pay the bill. No female will be
refused:'
10.
Johanne Lam oureux, for instance, considers the fluidity of identity as the most contemporary ava~t-ga.rde means of testing institutional boundaries. See Lamoureux, "AvantG~rde: A HlstorJo~raphy of a Critical Concept:' in A Companion to Contemporary Art:
'
Smce 194$, Ameha Jones, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 191-211.
11.
Sianne Ngai, ''The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde," Critical Inquiry 31 (Summer 2005)'
811-847.'
.
12.
Slavoj ~izek, "Eastern Eu ropean Liberalism and Its Discontents," in The Universal
Exce~tlon: Selected Writings, Volume Two, Rex Butler and Scott Steph ens, eds. (London:
13.
O~ !his topic, se.e Rosemary Hennessy, "Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture," 'Cultural
Cntlque 29 (Winter 1994-95): 31-76.
14.
This sort of ambivalence can be noticed in Gallo's role as Bobby ill Justin McCarthy's
2001 film, Get We" Soon.
15.
See, in par.ticular, Judith Butler, Gender Trou~/e: Feminisn: and the Subversion of Identity
,(Ne~ York. Routledge, 1990) and Gayle Rubin, "The TraffIC in Women: Notes on the
P.ohtlCal Economy' of Sex," in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, Linda
16.
Vincent Ga 110, "A rare chance to interview with Vincent Gallo," Grande Royale (February
11,1997), http://www.galloappreciation.com/(accessed December 30, 2006).
See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, Robert Hurley,
trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1978) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the
Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
Continuum, 2006), 24.
Nicholson, ed. ( New York: Routledge, 1997), 27-62,
17.
18.
19.
~:nri Lefeb~re, The Critique of Everyday Life, John Moore, trans. (London: Verso, 1991), 10.
ZIZ~~, desc~lbes th-; pornographic objectification of the viewer in terms of an "impossible
log!c that IS pre~~~:d on the. collapse of eye and gaze, narrative and pornographic
action. See SlavoJ Zlzek, LookIng Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through
Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), 109-111.
20.
21.
Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 109-111.
Gallo cited in an interview with David Lambie, http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=/
(accessed June 21, 2007).
22.
For example, see Mark Seltzer, "Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public
Sphere," October 80 (Spring 1997): 3-26.
23.
L~~ren B~rlant. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and
Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke Univelsity Press, 1997), 1-3.
24.
Sigmund Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," 1920, in The Freud Reader, Peter Gay
ed. (New York: WW. Norton, 1989), 594-626.
'
SAD BUNNY
97
25.
26.
PAUL MATTHEW ST. PIERRE
Ibid., 606.
Lacan argues that the paranoid structure of the ego compels the split subject toward a
domination of space that is "based in narcissistic fear of damage to one's body," condemning humanity to the isolation of the individual soul and "the most formidable hell~'
Jacques Lacan, "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis:' in Eaits: A Selection, Alan Sheridan,
.
trans. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977),28-29.
Dick Pountain and David Robins, "Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude:' New Formations
.39 (Winter 1999-2000): 8-9. See also Dick Pountain and David Robins, Cool Rules:
Anatomy of an Attitude (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).
27.
SILENT FILM AND THE EARLY FICTION
OF STEPHEN LEACOCK
Pountain and Robins, "Cool Rules,"14.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
Frank, 5.
Ibid., 19.
Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2002), 11.
Susan Buck-Morss, "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics," October 62 (1992): 3-41.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Sodal Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Richard Nice,
trans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
34. The career of Chloe Sevigny is a case in point Her early role in Larry Clark's Kids (USA,
1995) has not only resulted in star roles in the films of influential directors, from Harmony
Korine and Lars von Trier to Jim Jarmusch, Olivier Assayas and Woody Allen, but has also
created expectations.for desultory sexual content
35. Gallo's curating of the annual British music festival, "All Tomorrow's Parties" (2005), is a
good example of this. Many of the acts enlisted for this event were artists who work on
the margins of the mainstream music industry, and some in the experimental spaces of
avant-garde production. In some insta nces, his selections seemed more visual than
musical in motivation.
36. This phrase, developed by Gayle Rubin in "Thinking Sex," is elaborated in Michael
Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
37.
38.
39.
40.
Butler, 57-71.
Ibid., 63.
Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontofogy (London:
Verso, 1999), 253.
Ibid., 280.
MARC JAMES LEGER is a graduate of the doctoral programme in Visual &
Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. His essay is part of a larger proj ect on the cultural phenomenon of thanatophilia and "killer cool." He has published essays on contempor~ry art and has recently edited a collection of essays
and interviews by Bruce Barber on the subject of politicized performance art. He
has taught art history and cultural theory at Lakehead University, the University
of Lethbridge, and the Universite de Montreal.
Resume: En plus d'offrirune parodie du cinema muet melodramatique, la nouvelle
de Steph en Leacock, « Ma deline of the Movies: A Photoplay Don e in Words» (1916)
montre aussi comment les spedateufs des annees 1910 ont apprisa comprendre
les films de I'epoque. Leacock recree de fa~on humouristique fapprentissage d'une
narratrice naive qui decouvfe Ie langage du cinema, comme les gros-plans, les raccords, les intertitres, les retours en arriere et Ie montage.
tephen Leacock's early fiction, published in the 1910s, coincided with the
middle decade of the silent-film era. While his comic technique derives principally from the fiction of Charles Dickens, Mark 'I'wain, and other literary
humorists, such as Thomas Haliburton and Thomas McCulloch, Leacock also
drew on silent film dramaturgy and on the editing techniques of film imiovators
such as Edwin S. Porter and D.W Griffith.
In his article "Leacock and the Media," Ralph 1. Curry chronicles Leacock's
references to film in the short stories "Madeline of the Movies," from Further
Foolishness (1916); "The Discovery of America," from The Hohenzollems in
America (1919); "Dead Men's Gold" and "People We Meet in the Movies," from
Over the Footlights (1923); "One Crowded Quarter Second" and "Done into
Movies," from Short Circuits; and "Boom Times," from Happy Stories, Just to
Laugh At (1943). Curry observes that
S
Leacock's involvement in the motion picture industry was a more active
one than the results would indicate. He could never quite seem to make the
right connections, but he was early quite interested in movies. Family legend says that Mary Pickford, formerly of Toronto, tried to have Leacock
come to Hollywood to write for Pickfair Productions in the twenties,l
Curry's criticism of the movie references and techniques in these short stories is
more taxonomic than interpretive, restricted to brief categorical comments such as,
"In 'One Crowded Quarter Second' he makes fun of the way movies handle time,"
and "In 'Done into Movies' he satirizes what happens to stories once the movies get
hold of them. 2 Leacock's exploitation of contemporaneous films and filmmaking
98
MARC JAMES LEGER
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES· REVUE CANADIENNE D'ETUDES CINEMATOGRAPH'IQUES
VOLUME 16 NO.2' FALL. AUTOMNE 2007 • pp 99-111