I was sitting at a single-post table near the back of Julius' on 159 W 10th. In between scanning the playbills, magazines, and fliers papering the walls and trying to write the preliminary outline of this piece, I just kind of stared into my clear plastic cup, where an orange rind was floating in shallow beer like an upside-down smile, reminding me of the Cheshire cat. The place was packed to the gills, which isn't unusual. But local hero John Cameron Mitchell let it be known that he and some friends were going to be DJ'ing that Thursday night following a Q&A at the IFC Center. The theater is hosting a limited revival through February 3rd of his 2006 film Shortbus, newly restored and distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories.
Originally released by the now-defunct TH!NKFilm, Shortbus is a seminal piece of independent queer cinema, an ensemble drama about the intersecting romantic lives and sexual dysfunctions experienced by a bunch of mostly professional middle-class New Yorkers who converge upon the weekly underground salon of the title. The interwoven narrative is anchored by the journey of a couples counselor named Sophia (Sook-Yin Lee). Though ostensibly happily married, Sophia is frustrated because, while she enjoys sex, she has never been able to achieve an orgasm. This comes with an added weight of embarrassment because, though she prefers the term "couples counselor," she is, after all, a "sex therapist" in some desperate need of her own sex therapy. After a particularly unproductive session with two new clients - an actor and former sitcom child-star named Jamie (PJ DeBoy) and his secretly suicidal partner of five years, James (Paul Dawson) - she is invited to "Shortbus," and thus begins a journey of self-discovery and sexual awakening.
Shortbus was only John Cameron Mitchell's second feature film as a writer-director, following the box-office disappointment but critical acclaim and cult status of his 2001 musical debut, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, itself adapted from the Off-Broadway hit he co-wrote with musician and composer Stephen Trask. At the Q&A following the screening this Thursday, attended by Mitchell and several of the films' cast and crew, he described the development of the film, which evolved out of his interest in making a narrative work that frankly and graphically depicted non-simulated sex acts, but as a radical counterpoint to not only the cynical exploitation of hardcore pornography, but also the sexual puritanism and heteronormativity reflected in mainstream cinema. Though a minor arthouse success - its distribution heavily limited by the filmmakers' decision to not bother submitting it for a rating by the MPAA - critical response to Shortbus was more divided, even lukewarm at the height of its praise, which Mitchell recalls and attributes to the all but inevitable inference that his utilization of non-simulated sex was deployed primarily for juvenile titillation and shock value.
Indeed, having long since gone out-of-print on home video, and with mainstream streaming platforms refusing to carry it, the reputation which precedes Shortbus, except among Mitchell's queer cult following, is primarily as the high-water mark of an independent and international film cycle that reached the United States at the turn of the millennium and lasted until roughly the end of 2007. Unlike the porno chic cycle of the '70s and on-going experimentations blurring the lines between art and pornography in foreign and exploitation films, this cycle of American and English-language independent films featuring un-simulated sex acts (including Larry Clark's Ken Park, Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny, and Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs) is distinguished by an uncensored treatment of sex that is often distinctly non- or even anti-erotic, emphasizing sexuality as an endemic feature of human existence. Also attending the Q&A, Frank G. DeMarco, the cinematographer of Shortbus as well as Hedwig, elaborated upon the extent to which that, even in non-pornographic films, the conventional "sex scene" in American film and video tends to interrupt, rather than progress with the development of character and the emotional themes of a narrative. Thus the challenge posed to independent filmmakers wishing to explore sexuality while demystifying it. Though extensive in its graphic depiction and attention to explicit details, Shortbus, and other examples of what we might call "The New Millennium American Sex Movie," are also intensive, dwelling upon the relationship between sex and the psychology, emotional states, and motivations of the characters involved. In so doing, Mitchell's film erases the formal line drawn in mainstream popular representation between the physical and the metaphysical, between the apparently sexual and the supposedly non-sexual, between the body as the vessel of the soul and the body as inextricable from the soul. The physical body as, itself, inherent to the fully embodied person, is clarified as the essential means through which that person experiences various forms of repression, moves through the world, attempts to discover and explore their own potential, and experiences what the counselor Sophia describes as "false epiphany," all along the way, hopefully, to some kind of "true" epiphany or catharsis.
Despite Mitchell's recollections, what must be emphasized is that Shortbus was, by and large, a well-received film upon its release, and that a major component of its positive reception was, in fact, its narrative use of non-simulated sex. Contemporary criticism of his film tended to praise his humanistic depiction of sex, particularly with regards to its setting in the margins of American culture and its embracing of the fluidity of sexual and gender expression at a time when the superficial rhetoric of multicultural diversity and the proactive representation of queer people had yet to penetrate the liberal mainstream of Hollywood. Accurately identified at the time as part of a new vogue of sexually explicit arthouse cinema, it was certainly better received than antecedent works, which were more likely to be written off as either examples of provocateur gimmickry or shallow and turgid pretension. More often, Shortbus was dismissed, if anything, because of the perception that it was too cutesy, too saccharine, its flabby ensemble narrative wrapped up too tidily. It was doomed, if anything, by the fact that it was a work of queer cinema that did not treat queerness as an ongoing, maudlin tragedy. It failed to endear itself to a mainstream film culture that could only identify with queer characters because they felt sorry for them, having held up Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain as a ground-breaking statement against homophobia only a year prior.
It's now been a little over sixteen years since Shortbus was first released, and Mitchell and his fellow filmmakers had reason to be pleased. Once the credits started rolling, the ovations for the film were strong, if not standing. The audience was a composite of Gen-X'ers, older fans of his work, as well as a significant cohort of younger folks, millennials and even Gen-Z'ers, who, not unlike myself, probably had been attracted to the revival of Shortbus as possibly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see this notorious classic of queer cinema. In all this time, the salacious taboo infamy that preceded Mitchell's film upon its initial release has not only not been abated, but has only grown the more attractive. Which is to say that Mitchell and his team had reason to be pleased, but the night was also touched with an air of melancholy that went beyond nostalgia for a different time in queer and alternative culture. The wave of the the New Millennium American Sex Movie basically crashed with this feature, and since then the tide of sexual and queer liberation had evidently rolled back.
If Mitchell's recollection of the critical reception of Shortbus isn't entirely accurate, it might just be that his anecdotal point-of-view reflects upon the hardbitten ethos of a midwestern Catholic schoolboy-turned-New York theater refugee, born just a bit too early for the window of Generation X, but nonetheless coming out into manhood somewhere between the Radical Faerie and Queercore movements of the '80s and '90s. He probably didn't pay much attention to what the top critics said about Shortbus. At any rate, what seemed to preoccupy and visibly exacerbate the nonetheless patient Mitchell was that, then as now, reactionaries and conservatives were content to ignore his work, whereas the harshest criticisms come from his contemporaries on the American Left. By his estimation, the negative appraisals of Shortbus are emblematic of a reactionary turn in the Left itself, increasingly preoccupied with semantic and moral puritanism. This is, he believed, reflective of a new generation's regression, for various reasons, into sexual repression, alienation, and narcissism.
One fresh charge that Mitchell seemed to take with particular umbrage - who knows where it came from, it certainly didn't come up from the audience that Thursday - was that he was guilty of cultural appropriation. Previously, Mitchell had elaborated that the process of writing, finalizing the story, and financing the production of Shortbus had taken some two years, in which time he had worked intimately with his cast members to organically suggest and develop their characters based on their own experiences and those of people they knew. The key exception was Lindsay Beamish, who ended up receiving the role of Severin, a manic-depressive dominatrix, only after a previous actor dropped out. Otherwise, the supporting cast of the film is largely composed of real-life individuals culled from New York's queer and underground art and performance scene, who frequently play themselves or their artistic alter-egos. The same intimate process of casting and character development was certainly true of Mitchell's work with Sook-Yin Lee, who was nearly fired from her job on CBC Radio One for her participation in the controversial film's production. Mitchell now finds that there are some younger voices suggesting that it was neither his right nor his place as a white man to tell the story of a sexually-frustrated Asian woman. In response to this claim, Mitchell cites the work of author and educator Toni Morrison, who he says encouraged her white students to responsibly research and write for characters outside of their anecdotal perspectives or constructions of personal identity. Though he never used the term "identity politics," it was clear that Mitchell, now inevitably but despondently on the other end of a generational divide, was concerned by its centrality to how so much of Leftist discourse seemed to appraise the ethics or merit of works of art.
Another theme of the night was, of course, sexual politics. For her own part, Lindsay Beamish, who now teaches acting at Emerson College, struggled, along with the rest of the cast and crew, with how to talk about Shortbus with a post-#MeToo generation. The social gatherings, avant-garde and performance spaces, and orgies depicted in the film were shot on-location in a real-life collective living space in Brooklyn called "DUMBA," a feminized play on the neighborhood of Dumbo. Though hardly a socially realist film, Shortbus is as much a drama and dark comedy as it is a document of real happenings as they might have occurred in downtown New York's radical queer scene. And in this context, all but absent from interactions between the characters are what we might define as "affirmative consent." There is a sense of danger to the film's reflections on not just acts of sex, but also the pursuit of sex itself, that goes beyond mere riskiness. Sophia's first foray to Shortbus includes one encounter with a performance artist played by Ray Rivas who, despite protestations from Jamie, attempts to seduce her despite her clear discomfort and distress at his advances. Jamie is ultimately forced to "rescue" Sophia from the interaction, literally wrestling Rivas and grabbing them by their hard-on, but Sophia can only look on as their tussle only brings them closer together in laughter and good faith. Especially in retrospect, DeBoy and Rivas's performance comes off as a particularly effeminate form of what we might now called "toxic masculinity." They perform bravado and the struggle for masculine dominance, but they come together in the acknowledged intimacy, and effeminacy, of this performance. At the same time, Sophia is frozen out, made observer as the person who threatened her is re-embraced into the community. If anything, it is Sophia, as the observer, who has more to prove. As "vself," the Mistress of Shortbus (Justin Vivian Bond) reminds her, "Voyeurism is a form of participation." Sophia can only engage in the act of looking based on the implicit consent of the observed. There are all kinds of spaces in Shortbus, but there are no "safe spaces." The pushing of boundaries, the lack of structure or hierarchy, the embrace of fluidity and chaos, is what this generation that Mitchell documents is looking for.
The problem isn't so much whether Shortbus will be accessible to a new generation of progressive youth. Rather, the issue is that, then as now, the intensity of the film's exploration of sexuality, and what individual sexual experiences can reveal about broader social dilemmas, is holistic, but non-prescriptive. The emotional impact of the film partially hinges upon the capacity of the spectator to embrace a worldview in which the power imbalances, dangers, and risks fraught within the pursuit of sexual fulfillment - and, hopefully, liberation - are to be desired, rather than purged. One of the heaviest scenes in the film involves an incident in which Sophia, having inserted a remote-controlled vibrating egg into her vagina controlled by her husband Rob (Raphael Barker), finds herself alone in vself's bedroom making out with Severin. Rob misplaces the remote, and as a result, other members of the Shortbus play around with it themselves, unaware that Sophia is on the other end, her arousal constantly spoiled. Nonetheless, Severin, herself vulnerable, drawn to Sophia, and caught up in the moment, takes advantage of the vibrator herself, rubbing her vagina against Sophia's until she achieves orgasm. It is only after her climax that Severin sees what we see: Sophia, detached, miserable, having effectively been used by someone she trusted. Severin can only apologize, but there's no going back from this experience. What could have been a moment of mutual fulfillment instead clarifies the toxic nature of their obsession with one another. Sophia is only repeating the mistake of expecting others to be the controllers of her sexual liberation, rather than claiming it for herself. Severin, herself chronically depressed and unfulfilled, only confirms her worst feelings about herself. In the end, Mitchell treats both parties with empathy, and frames even this privately humiliating experience as crucial to their development as characters.
At the Q&A this Thursday, Mitchell expressed his concern that today's generation of younger people are too risk averse when it comes to sex, largely due to an overcorrection over legitimate concerns about systemic sexual harassment and assault. In his opinion, the #MeToo movement has resulted in a chilling effect on young people's willingness to explore sex, which has necessarily meant greater sexual repression and, thus, a new kind of sexual puritanism that appropriates the semantics of social justice in order to rationalize its collective pathology of fear. This is, of course, balderdash. Younger people were having less sex long before #MeToo, and the palpable fear of sex is but one facet of the far more important phenomenon that Mitchell also acknowledged, which is the retrenchment of American society into hyper-atomized nodes at a time of profound economic and physical insecurity, distrust of conventional authority, and lack of optimism about the future. Experiencing the world increasingly through digital means, Shortbus's new generation audience also primarily engages with the world as consumers, saturated in content that is targeted and pandered to them through increasingly sophisticated means, and thus further numbed in their imagination, curiosity, and literacy. There's no doubt that much of Mitchell's concern arises from his own position within this increasingly alienated ecosystem, the specter of woke hot-takes taking on an exaggerated degree of significance and totality. But there's also no doubt that the sexual alienation and repression being experienced by younger people today is just one component of a broader crisis of alienation, the solutions to which seem increasingly impossible to practically achieve, much less imagine with a sufficient degree of discipline and focus.
The tragedy is precisely that Shortbus is all too accessible to the present moment, that this sixteen-year-old film remains so relevant as an artistic rendering of repression, alienation, and malaise in the face of an uncertain future. At a time in which the representation of fluid forms of sexual and gender expression is all the more proactively pandered to consumers in mainstream popular culture, the frankness and melancholy of Mitchell's film points up the staggering paucity of these works in a spiritual sense. There are more works with characters for individuals of marginalized groups to identify with than ever, but the essential crisis of the inability to identify, the alienation from being able to conceive of oneself as something apart from a carefully managed consumer identity, has not only not been addressed, but has rather been compounded via the encouragement of narcissism. Mitchell, like many popular artists, then and now, may indeed be overstating their negative engagements, the attempts at their "cancelation." But where he is absolutely correct is his intuitive assessment of the extent to which discourse about the popular arts frequently degenerates into circuitous infighting over the progressive and the problematic elements of works, a process of ritualistic and hedonic vetting of consumer canon that serves to distract us from this fundamental absence, this lack of fulfillment that we get out of living and experiencing the world itself.
Of course, in real life, the oppositions between past and present, between old and young, between reaction and progress, are rarely as stark or combative as they appear online. One of the final questions of the night was posed by a young queer woman of color, who admitted that, while she thought the film was "dope," that she couldn't identify with any of the characters in it. She noted that they were mostly white, and that even as a queer person, her own experiences as a queer person, intersectional with her identity as a woman of color, simply didn't align with those of the film's ensemble cast of weirdos. In a revelatory moment, Mitchell had to admit that his own films, in some sense, are reflective of his particular experiences and sense of his identity as a kind of gay man who was "more punk" than his hippie antecedents. Films like Hedwig and Shortbus are, in part, motivated from the perspective of a young artist who, himself, had difficulty identifying with the works of a previous generation of gay artists, to say nothing of the heteronormative mainstream. In response to the young woman's question about how Mitchell would feel about a remake of Shortbus, with a more racially diverse cast, or with more transgender characters in central roles, the writer-director's interest seemed to peak, but he could only say, as expected, that he hoped newer, younger filmmakers would make that kind of movie.
The most challenging question that Mitchell had received that night proved to not be so challenging or contentious at all. But, to that young woman's credit, it still clung to the cold January air, and seemed to follow me all the way from the IFC Center to Jules'. More or less comfortably seated, scribbling a draft of this piece that I knew I was going to throw out anyway, I couldn't help but eavesdrop when it turned out that the younger patrons next to me had been to the same screening and Q&A. They were not so much talking about the young lady's question as gingerly tiptoeing around how they were going to talk about it. There was an extent to which they wanted to signify their support of her perspective in principle, but, again, there was a problem of "identification."
I did what nobody should ever do, which was to interject upon a couple strangers with my own idea. Though Mitchell had emphasized the collaborative nature of developing Shortbus, I suggested that what anyone wishing to remake it should really do is give it the old Gus Van Sant Psycho treatment. Instead of an organic development, there should simply be a shot-for-shot remake of Shortbus with a new cast. "That's an idea," said one of the strangers, and I went back to not writing my review.
I'll admit, I was finding myself suitably depressed by the question. A remake of Shortbus? Obviously, the young woman shouldn't be taken to have been overly literal. But doesn't even the idea of it perfectly encapsulate her inability to identify, or to at least interpret this inability to identify? The problem is not that there does not exist a version of Shortbus that is more progressive, that is more proactive in its attention to marginalized groups, or whatever. The problem is that movies like Shortbus don't get made anymore, and, to a certain extent, can't get made anymore. As Mitchell himself noted, the decline of home video in favor of subscription-streaming has meant that independent films actually have less commercial viability than ever, and independent filmmakers thus have less creative control. There was more hanging onto that question than an inability to identify. It was a thought wearing a straight-jacket. It was a pure expression of an inability to relate the work of art experienced, not to oneself, but to reality, to engage with art as reflective of and in conversation with the world in which it exists.
The rub of it all was that the young and old queer person were trying to meet each other in the middle on a question that had absolutely no baring on the nature of what art is, or how art is even created. We don't identify with characters, with fictional people measured against even more abstract, imaginary, and essentialized constructions of identity. We identify with the art itself as an experience, as a transcendent mirror reflecting back to us our own irreducibility as individuals, formed as we are, just as the art is formed, by the world around us. We now seek identification as a "false epiphany" of ourselves, because it conforms to our desire to recede from an increasingly precarious world, to take prescriptive shortcuts to recovery from our collective trauma. We seek identification because we are content with what we believe we want, ignorant and terrified by what we might want, and what it might cost to achieve it.
* * *
The cycle of the New Millennium American Sex Movie was eerily timed with the two successive presidential terms of George W. Bush. Just as Shortbus represents a superior example of this cycle in terms of its integration of non-simulated sex into character development and narrative, the trauma of this period is not simply a part of the subtle political background. It is addressed explicitly. We are introduced to Severin in a hotel room overlooking Ground Zero, where her client, a trust-fund college boy, plays his own version of the bratty submissive by provoking her with political questions, like if she supports the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq. When Sophia wonders why a new generation of American young people have flocked to New York City despite the high costs of living, vself opines that they are attracted to it because of the trauma of September 11th. The falling of the Twin Towers has shattered their illusions, and they now join the new flock of middle-American, small town expatriates to the Big Apple. They pursue some vague reclamation of themselves, gravitating towards the epicenter of a collective trauma as something altogether more authentic than the remote complacency of their origins.
The New Millennium American Sex Movie is a definitively post-9/11, Bush-era genre. These more frank and intensive works of art dealing with the endemic nature of sexuality were formed in anticipation of and reaction to the signal crisis of the country's decline into a commensurate cycle of systematic violence, immiseration, and alienated retrenchment from which it now seems impossible to recover. The wave of this cycle, with Shortbus at its foaming crest, crashed against the rock of Barack Obama, the false epiphany of progressive feeling manifesting itself into a new dawn of humane relationship with the world around us and a holistic approach to our myriad, compounding crises of security and confidence. In optical terms, our popular culture became more sexually liberated, but our relationship to sex only became more repressed. Our popular culture became more diverse, but the socio-economic chasms between the most privileged and the most neglected only grew and intensified. A social document as well as a compellingly exaggerated drama, Shortbus is, even further than this, a testament to the recurrent predicament in which we now find ourselves, in which the aperture of our imaginations is increasingly closed off, and everything stays largely the same but somehow keeps getting worse.
As I stated above, the fictional radical space of the film was not simply inspired by, but was shot on-location in its real-life, downtown Brooklyn analog. The kicker is that, shortly before the release of Mitchell's film, DUMBA would be shut down, a casualty of the gentrification to which its characters explicitly allude. Shortbus thus reveals itself to have been, unintentionally, a document of the end of an era, a work of Fin de siècle comparable in its ennui and pessimism to the popular culture of the late-19th century. Its characters, in their fulfillment of New York as a sanctuary for their own liberation, are also part of a trend of rising property values and more atomized relation that will freeze out the very marginalized subcultures and radical spaces that made the city so attractive. It is not an exaggeration to say that the characters of the film seem to anticipate, even relish, the extent to which their own practice has doomed itself. vself even compares the orgies of Shortbus to a Hippie love-in, "but without the hope." The denouement of the film, a retro chic burlesque musical number in which Sophia finally achieves orgasm, echoes the waning Weimar decadence of John Kander and Fred Ebb's Cabaret. If Mitchell is right, if Shortbus was not sufficiently appreciated in its time, it is only because it probably needed these sixteen long years to achieve its full impact, for the death of innocence that it depicts to strike at the heart with such lethal force.
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