Uninhabited Space

Like Cattle Towards Glow
Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley, 2015

I have been immensely close to Dennis Cooper's work for going on 15 years at this point. His fiction was strikingly important to me and constantly engaging with it taught me more about writing than any MFA program could have. While I may not be as hyper-engaged with the work now as I was before, I still anticipate and enjoy each thing he releases, still consider him a very important artist.

In many ways it made sense to me when it was revealed Cooper was working on a film with visual artist Zac Farley, as many of the "metaphysical concerns" (for want of a better expression) of Cooper's fiction are perfectly suited to a cinema of affect--a sort of impossibility, the tension between abject humor & a deadly serious profundity, the emotion carried through a body.

But as painters don't always make the best dancers, writers don't always make the best filmmakers. With Zac Farley--a visual artist--taking the reins directing, Michael Salerno--another visual artist with experience making short films--responsible for the cinematography & color correction/post-production work, and apparently Grandrieux's sound design guy for part of the film, I can't imagine Dennis's "atheology of the flesh" more perfectly coming across on screen--limited at times by budget, but more than accomplished in how it works.

The film is not a film in the traditional sense. What that means, of course, is that it is something more exciting--the five vignettes borrow narrative as a structure, but narrative is not the motivating factor, affect is. Emotion. Non-actors are used, coached to speak in English (most often a language they can neither understand nor speak), so the acting becomes a beautiful non-acting, allowing for a wonderful distance from the concept of acting, letting the gestural body and confusion take precedence.

So what is the film about? If you're familiar with Cooper's fiction, the territory explored here will not be unexpected--it follows young boys encountering emotionality somewhere between the body and the self, the impossibility of knowing, the impossibility of connecting to other people. But instead of being expressed in words, as in the books, these concerns are encountered in cinematic and gestural modes, through a combination of image and (spoken) text. There's boners, there's rimming, there's off-screen fist-fucking, yes! This is a gay movie that is mostly not that phallocentric. It's strangely beautiful, it's hot, it's fucking intense at times (highest possible compliment I could give to a film), AND it's also occasionally hilarious, but not in an ironic way.

It does nothing that a film is supposed to do, and that's why it works so well. It was a wonderful experience and I look forward to seeing the film again.