Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Pink Narcissus

Nathaniel over at The Film Experience is holding another edition of Hit Me With Your Best Shot (only two more chapters to go for this season!). Cryptic with no narrative through-line or spoken words, Pink Narcissus offers fawning, sometimes graphic, shocking imagery of a ridiculously full-lipped young Mediterranean man, with genetically blessed buns wrapped tightly in white jeans that are so skin tight and pale, on film, with saturated pinks and blues, the actor seems nude when clothed (during the few times that he is). And the camera really loves the model, as well as it did in all of the photos of him littered throughout the apartment of his paramour. There are cryptic, unapologetic pornographic moments, but they are few and far between in the endless array of more nuanced homoerotica that reaches to say something beyond the obvious.

Narcissus is filled with lusty and pensive energy that comes across as a kind of a foreplay for the solo set, with very little contact between bodies and what there is of sex between people is short and dispatched early on in the toilets.  The grungy, raw interaction is quickly flushed down the commode like a jarring palette cleanser that also serves as a stark reminder of the realities of typical gay male behavior of the 1960s.  With very little contact, when the model ventures into the world, it's full of dark, shameful sexual expression and the commercialization of sex, brought on partly by the repressive, puritanical nature of American (and maybe even Westernized) society at the time.  Accentuated by a soundtrack of music gone askew, a glowing, blinking neon sign takes on the form of a limp penis.  This is no world for a healthy relationship. The contrast between the natural beauty of one’s sexuality with the undignified manner in which sex has been exploited by urban living makes it natural for the kid to retreat to the confines of his keeper’s abode like he’s the bottled Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeannie with nothing else to do but fancy all the different ways he can turn himself on and escape his depraved options. 

Often alone in the apartment, the young man experiences a liberating, sexual awakening, losing himself in a fantasy land of role-play, including both the roles of sheik and slave boy, as well as an admirer of a penis-flopping belly dancer.  The film begins and ends in an almost animated version of the natural world.  Gazing upon a nipple to classical music while stroking his aureole with a piece of grass and inviting the flutter of a butterfly’s wings, the film reaches into the senses of tactility and taste.  There is also a sequence where he becomes one with the ground reminding me of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900, when the younger version of Gérard Depardieu literally fucks the Earth.  In Narcissus, the act is identical, but the difference couldn’t be greater, as one may distinguish having sex from making love, at least from the director's point of view.  The protagonist’s motivations are pure and true, whereas Bertolucci’s preteen has an unconsciously arrogant and selfish view of the world (at least, from what I recall).  

However, the shot that most resonated with me may come across as crass and to-the-point, but there was a poeticism in its straightforwardness.  After admiring his blessed body in the mirror and a narcissistic auto-kissing scene which predates navel-gazing artist James Franco, the lead character imagines himself as a toreador pitted against a leather-clad blond motorcyclist.  The pitter-patter of a bull’s feet sounds like a dick getting slapped and for a brief moment, the cape which calls his opponent’s attention is transparent and turns the power play on its head.  As the cyclist charges towards him, the novice toreador cuts to the chase, turns around, and offers his Greek-approved ass-cheeks to  his object of desire.  This dude has a fire that needs to be put out, pronto.  

The "best" shot

Shot over seven years, the producers funding the project grew understandably impatient with the once anonymous director (now known to be James Bidgood) and hired editor and co-scorer Martin Jay Sadoff to assemble the fascinating and carefully composed footage together to create some kind of watchable product.  The result is a meandering homoerotic pastiche which also stands in as a historical document of the gay male artist perspective of the 1960s.  

Previous HMWYBS:
Pink Narcissus
Road to Perdition
Picnic
The Story of Adele H.

Possessed

Edward Scissorhands

The Exorcist

Pariah
Raise the Red Lantern

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

The Circus