Regarding Sedgwick

Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory

Stephen M. Barber, David L. Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135300630
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is one of the most important figures in the history of modern gender studies. This book, which features an interview with Sedgwick, is a collection of new essays by established scholars

Sedgwick’s Subjects and Others

1
Mario Montez, For Shame

Douglas Crimp

From shame to shyness to shining—and, inevitably, back, and back again: the candor and cultural incisiveness of this itinerary seem to make Warhol an exemplary figure for a new project, an urgent one I think, of understanding how the dysphoric affect shame functions as a nexus of production: production, that is, of meaning, of personal presence, of politics, of performative and critical efficacy.¹

Eve Sedgwick’s intuition, indicated here in one of her essays on queer performativity, might be more unfailing than she knew, since at the time she wrote this sentence she would have seen very little of what most bears it out—Andy Warhol’s vast film production from the mid-1960s.² I want in this essay to consider one instance of Warhol’s mobilization of shame as production, and in doing so I want to specify the urgency Sedgwick imagines such a project might entail, an urgency that compels a project of my own.³ I should qualify “my own” by adding that this project heeds Sedgwick’s axiom for antihomophobic inquiry: “People are different from each other.” This is, of course, Axiom 1 from the introduction to Epistemology of the Closet, but I take it to be much more thoroughly axiomatic for Sedgwick’s writing generally and what I’ve learned most from it: the ethical necessity of developing ever finer tools for encountering, upholding, and valuing other’s differences—or better, differences and singularities—nonce-taxonomies, as she wonderfully names such tools. In one of the many deeply moving moments in her work, Sedgwick characterizes this necessity in relation to the “pressure of loss in the AIDS years”—years in which we sadly still live—“that the piercing bouquet of a given friend’s particularity be done some justice.”⁴

“Poor Mario Montez,” Warhol writes in Popism,

Poor Mario Montez got his feelings hurt for real in his scene [in Chelsea Girls] where he found two boys in bed together and sang “They Say that Falling in Love Is Wonderful” for them. He was supposed to stay there in the room with them for ten minutes, but the boys on the bed insulted him so badly that he ran out in six and we couldn’t persuade him to go back in to finish up. I kept directing him, “You were terrific, Mario. Get back in there—just pretend you forgot something, don’t let them steal the scene, it’s no good without you,” etc., etc. But he just wouldn’t go back in. He was too upset.⁵

Poor Mario. Even though Andy is full of praise for Mario’s talents as a natural comedian, nearly every story he tells about him is a tale of woe:

Mario was a very sympathetic person, very benign, although he did get furious at me once. We were watching a scene of his in a movie we called The Fourteen-Year-Old Girl [also known as The Shoplifter and The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, the film is now known as Hedy], and when he saw that I’d zoomed in and gotten a close-up of his arm with all the thick, dark masculine hair and veins showing, he got very upset and hurt and accused me in a proud Latin way, “I can see you were trying to bring out the worst in me.”⁶

I call my project, provisionally, “Queer before Gay.” It entails reclaiming aspects of New York City queer culture of the 1960s as a means of countering the current homogenizing, normalizing, and de-sexualizing of gay life. In an essay initiating the project, on Warhol’s classic 1964 silent film Blow Job, I wanted to contest the facile charge of voyeurism so often leveled at Warhol’s camera.⁷ It seemed to me important to recognize that there can—indeed must—be ways of making queer differences and singularities visible without always entailing the charge of violation, making them visible in ways that we would call ethical. In that essay, titled “Face Value” both to suggest that I meant to pay attention to what was on the screen (in this case, as in so many others, a face) and to gesture toward Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, I contrasted the self-absorption of the subject of Blow Job to what seemed to me its comic opposite, the utter self-consciousness of Mario Montez as he performs mock fellatio on a banana in Mario Banana, a single 100-foot-reel Warhol film of the same year as Blow Job.⁸ On this subject of Mario’s self-consciousness, Warhol writes, “He adored dressing up like a female glamour queen, yet at the same time he was painfully embarrassed about being in drag (he got offended if you used that word—he called it ‘going into costume’).”⁹

How certain the violation, then, when Mario was subjected by Warhol in Screen Test #2 to being shamed precisely for his gender illusionism, or perhaps his gender illusions. Warhol—with his uncanny ability to conceal dead-on insight in the bland, unknowing remark—writes of that film in a parenthetical aside in Popism, “Screen Test was Ronnie Tavel off-camera interviewing Mario Montez in drag—and finally getting him to admit he’s a man….”¹⁰ I call this “insight” because, although it doesn’t really describe what takes place in the film at all, it nevertheless gets right to the point of what is most affecting, most troubling, most memorable about it—that is, Mario’s “exposure”—a word that Warhol used, in its plural form, as the name of his 1979 book of photographs,¹¹ and the word Stefan Brecht chose to characterize Warhol’s filmic method:

Warhol around 1965 discovered the addictive ingredient in stars. He found that not only are stars among the industrial commodities whose use-value is a product of consumer phantasy, a phantasy that publicity can addict to a given brand of product …, but that what addicts the consumer is the quality of stardom itself…. He set out to isolate this ingredient, succeeded, proceeded to market it under the brand name “Super-star,”—Warhol’s Superstar. Superstar is star of extraordinary purity: there is nothing in it but glamor, a compound of vanity and arrogance, made from masochist self-contempt by a simple process of illusio-inversion. The commercial advantages of this product originated in its area of manufacture: the raw materials, any self-despising person, were cheap, and the industrial process simple: to make the trash just know he or she is a fabulous person envied to adoration. You didn’t have to teach them anything. If the customers would take them for a star, they would be a star; if they were a star, the customers would take them for a star; if the customers would take them for a star the customers would be fascinated by them. Exposure would turn the trick. Here again Warhol’s true genius for abstraction paid off: he invented a camera-technique that was nothing but exposure.¹²

Ostensibly just what its title says it is, Screen Test #2 is the second of Warhol’s screen test films of early 1965 in which Ronald Tavel, novelist, founding play-wright of ridiculous theater,¹³ and Warhol’s scenarist from 1964 to 1967, interviews a superstar for a new part (Screen Test #1, which I haven’t seen, stars Philip Fagan, Warhol’s lover of the moment, who shared the screen with Mario in Harlot, Warhol’s first sound film and the first in which Tavel participated.)¹⁴ In the case of Screen Test #2, Mario Montez is ostensibly being tested for the role of Esmeralda in a remake of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He is shown throughout in a slightly out-of-focus close-up on his face, wearing (and often nervously brushing) a cheap, ratty dark wig. He also wears dangling oversize earrings and long white evening gloves. For a long time at the film’s beginning, he ties a silk scarf into his wig, using, it seems, the camera’s lens as his mirror. After speaking the credits from off-screen, where he remains throughout the film, Tavel begins to intone, insinuate, cajole, prod, demand: “Now, Miss Montez, just relax … you’re a lady of leisure, a grande dame. Please describe to me what you feel like right now.”

“I feel,” Mario begins his reply—and there follows rather too long a pause as he figures out what to say—“I feel like I’m in another world now, a fantasy … like a kingdom meant to be ruled by me, like I could give orders and suggest ideas.”

Poor Mario. This kingdom is ruled by Ronald Tavel. It is he who gives orders and suggests ideas. At first, though, he indulges Mario’s fantasy. He asks about his career to date, allowing Mario to boast of his debut as Delores Flores in Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, his part as the handmaiden in Ron Rice’s Chum-lum, his starring role as the beautiful blonde mermaid in Smith’s Normal Love and his small part as the ballet dancer wearing hot pink tights in the same film. Asked whether the critics were satisfied with his performances, he gives an answer fully worthy of his namesake in Jack Smith’s famous paean, “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez.”¹⁵ “It’s a funny thing,” Mario says with no guile whatsoever, “but no matter what I do, somehow it comes out right, even if it’s meant to be a mistake. The most wonderful mistakes that I’ve done for the screen have turned out the most raging, fabulous performances.”

Poor Mario. Now begins his humiliation. Tavel tells Mario to repeat after him, “For many years I have heard your name, but never did it sound so beautiful until I learned that you were a movie producer, Diarrhea.” Mario is obliged to say “diarrhea” again and again, with various changes of inflection and emphasis. Then to lip sync as Tavel says it. “Mouth ‘diarrhea’ exactly as if it tasted of nectar,” Tavel instructs. Mario obeys, blissfully unaware of where this game of pleasing a producer named Diarrhea will lead. He will gamely demonstrate his ecstatic response to “playing spin the bottle”—to masturbating, that is, by shoving a bottle up his ass (remember, though, we see only his face).¹⁶ Mario will ferociously mime biting the head off a live chicken as he obeys Tavel’s demand that he pretend he is a female geek. He will show how he’ll manage, as Esmeralda, to seduce three different characters—captain, priest, Quasimodo—in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He’ll scream in terror and dance a gypsy dance with only his shoulders; he’ll pout, sneer, and stick out his tongue; he’ll cover the lower half of his face with a veil and show that he can be evil or sad using only his eyes. He’ll repeat after Tavel, apparently as an exercise in stressing consonants, “I have just strangled my pet panther. Patricia, my pet panther, I have just strangled her, my poor pet. Yet I am not scratched, just a little fatigued.”

Now and again Tavel gives encouragement: “That’s fine, Miss Montez, thank you very much.” “That was delightful, Miss Montez.” “Thank you, Miss Montez, that was beautiful, that was perfect, and I think we are going to sign you on immediately for this role.”

“How can I ever thank you?” Mario replies, so delighted as to make it obvious he’s still hoodwinked. But the encouragement only sets Mario up for his fall, which comes near the end of the film’s second thirty-three-minute reel. Mario has just cheerfully described the furniture in his apartment. Then it comes, as if out of nowhere.

“Now, Miss Montez, will you lift up your skirt?”

“What?” Mario asks, with a stunned look. He’s clearly caught completely off guard.

“And unzipper your fly.”

“That’s impossible,” Mario protests, shaken.

“Miss Montez,” Tavel continues, “you’ve been in this business long enough to know that the furthering of your career depends on just such a gesture. Taking it out and putting it in, that sums up the movie business. There’s nothing to worry about, the camera won’t catch a thing. I just want the gesture with your hands. This is very important. Your contract depends on it.” Following confused, helpless, silent stalling, Mario finally gives in, and the humiliation continues: “Look down, look down at it,” he’s commanded.

“I know what it looks like,” is his petulant response.

“Zipper your fly half way up and leave it sticking out. That’s good, that’s good, good boy, good boy.” When he refers to Mario this way, Tavel isn’t calling attention to Mario’s “true” gender; far worse than that, he’s treating Mario like a dog. “Take a look at it, take a look at it please. What does it look like?”

Mario half-heartedly fights back, “What’s it look like to you?”

“It looks fairly inviting, as good as any,” Tavel answers, not with much conviction. “Will you forget about your hair for a moment. Miss Montez, you’re not concentrating.”

But Mario is defiant: “It’s really senseless what you’re asking me. I must brush my hair.”

Mario finally seems able to put a stop to this couch-casting episode, and we breathe a sigh of relief. But Tavel has still one more ordeal in mind, and it’s no doubt all the more painful for Mario because it follows upon the mockery of his cross-dressing. Remember that Warhol writes in Popism of Mario’s embarrassment about doing drag. He goes on to explain that Mario “used to always say that he knew it was a sin to be in drag—he was Puerto Rican and a very religious Roman Catholic. The only spiritual comfort he allowed himself was the logic that even though God surely didn’t like him for going into drag, that still, if He really hated him, He would have struck him dead.”¹⁷ So, resisted by Mario in making him expose his sex, the ever-inventive Tavel moves on to a new torment. Showing Mario how to take a supplicating pose, with eyes and hands turned heavenward, he instructs him to say, and repeat, and repeat again, “Oh Lord, I commend this spirit into Thy hands.” Poor Mario looks alternately bewildered and terrified, as though he feels he might truly be struck dead for such irreverence. Finally, though, Tavel has little time left to taunt his super-star. As Mario begins to acquiesce in giving the camera the cockteaser look Tavel wants, the film runs out. Just how tense the experience of watching Warhol’s films makes us is revealed to us from the release that comes when the reel comes to an end, a moment always entirely unanticipated but occurring with astonishingly perfect timing.

Many of Warhol’s films include similar scenes of extraordinary cruelty that are met with disbelief on the part of the performers, most famously when Ondine, as the pope in Chelsea Girls, slaps Ronna Page. “It was so for real,” Warhol writes, “that I got upset and had to leave the room—but I made sure I left the camera running.”¹⁸ The moment that I’d found most discomfiting, up to seeing Mario’s shaming in Screen Test #2, is when Chuck Wein, who’s been taunting Edie Sedgwick through the whole of Beauty #2, but who’s rarely a match for her sparkling repartee, suddenly hits the raw nerve of her relationship with her father. She looks more stunned than if she’d been literally hit, like Ronna. It isn’t merely a look of incredulity, it’s one of utter betrayal, a look that both says, Surely you didn’t say that, and pleads, How could you possibly say that? How could you so turn our intimacy against me? Would you really do this for the sake of a film? I thought we were just play-acting.

George Plimpton captures the feel of such moments when he describes Beauty #2 in Jean Stein’s devastating book Edie:

I remember [Chuck Wein’s] voice—nagging and supercilious and quite grating…. A lot of the questions, rather searching and personal, were about her family and her father. On the bed Edie was torn between reacting to the advances of the boy next to her and wanting to respond to these questions and comments put to her by the man in the shadows. Sometimes her head would bend and she would nuzzle the boy or taste him in a sort of distracted way. I remember one of the man’s commands to her was to taste “the brown sweat,” but then her head would come up, like an animal suddenly alert at the edge of a waterhole, and she’d stare across the bed at her inquisitor in the shadows. I remember it as being very dramatic … and all the more so because it seemed so real, an actual slice of life, which of course it was.¹⁹

How might we square these scenes of violation and shaming with what I’m describing as an ethical project of giving visibility—and I want also to say dignity—to a queer world of differences and singularities in the 1960s? What does the viewer’s discomfiture at Warhol’s techniques of exposure do to the usual processes of spectator identification?

To answer these questions, I need to take a detour through the present, whose sexual politics fuels my interest in this history in the first place.

Following New York’s annual gay pride celebrations in 1999, the New York Times editorialized:

When police harassed gay patrons of the Stonewall Inn in 1969,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Introduction Queer Moments: The Performative Temporalities of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
• Sedgwick’s Subjects and Others
• Writing Ethics: Reading Cleaving
• Envois
• Selected Bibliography of Texts by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
• Notes on Contributors
• Index