SCORPIO RISING (Kenneth Anger, 1964)

Laszlo Benedek's The Wild One (1953) serves as an obvious point of reference in Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1964), most strikingly through the appropriation of the culturally-encoded symbol of the motorcycle gang. Anger takes this masculine iconography and deconstructs it in meticulous detail, re-signifying the homosocial rituals associated with bikes and bikers as homoerotic.

In the first scene, Anger shows the biker tenderly tinkering with his bike, parts strewn throughout a garage floor. With teenage pop lyrics as the only dialogue, the bike is reassembled part by part, polished to an unnatural shine. Not a mode of transportation and stripped of its rugged masculinity, the bike is a merely a decoration, a code that allows its owner to identify with the "gang." It's Anger's filming style that deconstructs the lure of the motorcycle through montage, alternating between deliberate and frenetic pacing, which forces the viewer to focus on the erotic elements of the ritual--man bending over bike, caressing seat and handlebars, straddling the seat--a "to-be-looked-at-ness" of the male body. Anger's film transforms the pop culture construct of the motorcycle as symbol of male sexuality.

Similarly, in the following scene, the biker carefully adorns himself with the trappings of a motorcycle gang member, a clear reference to Johnny (Marlon Brando) in The Wild One. Brando's "biker as rebel" image, an outlaw who refuses to conform, is revised by Anger's exposure of the constructed nature of that image, an attempt to disavow the underlying homoeroticism of the motorcycle gang. As Anger's biker dresses for the gaze of the camera, primping and fussing over his appearance, we hear Bobby Vinton's "Blue Velvet," again exposing the constructed nature of the aggressive heterosexual masculinity as presented in The Wild One. No longer the trappings of the biker as rebel, the black leather jacket, boots, chains, and hat are feminized--figured as accoutrement for the benefit of a male gaze (as delineated by the subtext of Vinton's song).
These two images, the bike and the biker, clearly presented as images of homosocial masculine bonding in The Wild One, are now the tools of homosexual desire in Scorpio Rising. Anger visually modifies The Wild One's motorcycle gang imagery and conventions not as a celebration of the motorcycle gang, but to present an ironic twist.

The early scenes of Scorpio Rising depict a triad of objects central to the film: motorcycles, leather attire, and male figures. Focusing first on the motorcycles, the ever-gliding camera emphasizes the stationary status of these as yet unfinished machines. Several unidentified characters work on the bikes--sometimes with difficulty--creating an implied dichotomy of individual parts compared to the whole: the bikes are surrounded by their own inner gears and other tools, while the sounds of revving engines emphasize their incomplete status. There is no clear progression to the motorcycles' assembly, and it becomes doubtful that these particular machines will actually be completed and ridden. It is the interior and incomplete status of the bikes--not the aura associated with bike-riding depicted by the sound effects and intercut images--that receives primary focus here. This focus, furthermore, establishes a sense interiority for the scenes to come.

Following the depiction of assembly, the camera that had moved incessantly and freely, possibly finding a more compelling object, comes to a sudden halt. A number of male characters dress themselves in the leather attire typical of bikers, and the audience is invited to imaginatively engage, here, in the erotics (ironically enough) of dressing. As the characters buckle and zip their leather pieces together, the covering of the male form paradoxically draws attention to the hidden flesh beneath; rather than denying or covering the body, the movements of zipping and buckling emphasize the tenuous and incomplete status of dressing--at every successive moment prior to the garment being securely fastened, the body beneath threatens to reveal itself--a possibility made explicit by the intercut image of a bare-chested male body. Just as the unfinished motorcycles invoke the aura of the freewheeling biker, so does the incomplete act of dressing direct attention away from the material clothes to the sexual tone of concealment.

The materiality of metallic bike, leather clothes, and male skin, read intertextually, can be seen to dismantle and deconstruct the unified, triadic spectacle of these same objects in The Wild One. Rather than the implicit call for audience imagination in Anger's film, the opening titles of the earlier film foretell a shocking story to come. The audience is thereby constructed and positioned as distanced voyeur to the unified whole of rebellious biker. In the opening scenes in particular, the group of riders seem an organic whole. Even more so in the character of Johnny (Marlon Brando), who leads the pack along the winding roads; the objects of bike, leather, and man are not individualized units but rather indistinguishable signifiers to the signified aura of "rebel without a cause." Given Johnny's lack of cause or explicit motivation, the visual spectacle is as much performance as it is material: posed the question of what he's rebelling against, Johnny responds, "Whattya got?" Interpreted from Anger's lens, then, the focus on interiority and incompleteness in Scorpio Rising eroticizes the totalized elements of The Wild One by taking the untouchable and inseparable units and turning them into specific items of inquiry, while at the same time heightening the erotic content by overvaluing the individual objects of bike, leather--denying spectacle and demanding audience engagement.

While László Benedek's The Wild One suggests that the bikers perform a rebellion for a female and male audience, a rebellion with homoerotic subtexts, Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising links his bikers' performance specifically to homosexuality. Johnny (Marlon Brando) and his crew rebel for rebellion's sake; their mimetic rebellion, à la Baudrillard, is a copy without an original. The female protagonist, Kathie, who eventually gets a fake trophy from Johnny, confesses that both her father and Johnny are fakes. The wild ones cover their homoerotic male bonding with an empty rebellion and with heterosexual pursuits. Since many of the seemingly heterosexual images in Benedek's film are rendered gay, Scorpio Rising ironizes and mocks its intertext, The Wild One, and shows that the Brando bikers look like heterosexual angels when in fact they are homosexual "Devil[s] in Disguise." Two symbols, the machine and death, illuminate homosexual underpinnings in both films.

Anger and Benedek both employ the connection between the male body and the machine to render homosexual desire. Yet in The Wild One, the bikers cover their homosexual impulses with heterosexual conquests. For instance, Kathie's physical integrity is endangered when the bikers circle around her, yet nothing happens. Johnny saves her from his unthreatening peers, takes her in the park, brings her back, and does not take her with him when he leaves the town to join his crew. Although women stir the bikers' curiosity, they remain transient presences that trigger the bikers' gay performances. Their free life on their phallic motorcycles, their race that decides who buys gas, and their black leather jackets all establish erotic symbioses with their machines. Anger shows only close-ups with Marlon Brando and images with his bikers on the road and extends further the connection between male bodies and the machine. The homosexual context of Scorpio Rising alludes to the homosexual subtext in The Wild One and mocks its heterosexual content. Anger's short centers on several bikers who prepare for a race by tinkering with their bikes and dressing up in fetish gear. The focus on parts of male bodies and parts of the bike eroticize the machine and imply an analogy between reparability and sex. After some scenes describe how the pieces of the machine are put together, the "Blue Velvet" sequence shows how the male body is assembled and dressed up.

The death and necrophilia symbolism in both films allude to homosexual relationships. Condemned unfairly to twenty years of prison for murder, Johnny is saved by Kathie and her family. However, he turns his back, namely his black leather jacket with the skull, at Kathie and kills heterosexual relationships when he decides to rejoin his gay crew whose identifiable symbol is the skull. Anger expands on the comparison between death and homosexuality when he shows images of skulls accompanying male bodies and their machines throughout the film. The scene with skull wearing a blonde wig and smoking a cigarette marked with the word "Youth" suggests necrophilia. The cigarette coming out of the skull's teeth is erotic and eroticizes further the scenes with Brando and the men in Anger's film smoking. Christ and a boy appear in the eye sockets of the skull, an image that speaks of the boy's short life due to smoking. Yet because Christ symbolizes resurrection, the images of the dying boy or the dismembered body in the crash at the end of the film suggest a new assemblage of their erotic bodily parts.

Kenneth Anger takes plot structure and distinct costume elements from The Wild One to reference the general sense of camaraderie and rebellion in his Scorpio Rising and makes it explicitly homosexual. Scorpio Rising co-opts The Wild One as an intertext of gay biker subculture.

Both films have scenes with a bike race, party, “torture” (during the party), and a moment of vulnerability involving a motorcycle. As discussed in class, the engagement in overly-masculinized activities is almost categorically defined as “gay”. Anger plays on this by emphasizing the repressed sexuality of these situations. The angles used in shots of the first young biker polishing the pieces of his motorcycle suggest the movements of masturbation, and indeed the activity is itself euphemistically associated.

Anger makes multiple allusions to The Wild One; a hat almost identical to Johnny’s hangs on the handlebars of a bike, shown in multiple shots. At one point, toy men on motorcycles whirl around in circles, copying the scene in which Kathie is tormented by Johnny’s gang. The harassment of another without intending real harm, a hazing of sorts, is reflected in the party scene in Scorpio Rising, as the carousing itself mimics the exuberant drunkenness of the Black Rebels.

In the scene after Johnny escapes his tormentors and reaches his abandoned bike, the audience witnesses an unguarded moment; Johnny sobs and gasps, short of breath, but also relieved to have gained the safety of his trusty steed. This is the first time he appears as anything other than tough and angry. Anger’s use of clips of a young blond man smiling and riding a motorcycle, cut with shots of a newspaper headline--“Motorcycle hits hole, kills two”--suggests that this blond man was both important to the protagonist of the scene, and killed in this accident. It may be guessed that the two were lovers.

Ostensibly, Scorpio Rising refers to the name of the gang--the phrase and a scorpion is on their jackets. The Black Rebels have a skull and crossed pistons on theirs; pistons are often linked with penises because of their function and movement--basically, they pump. Anger uses the skull in multiple places in the film, often as a tool of the "lost lover" narrative. The concept of orgasm as the "little death" also ties into this. But many are the implications of a scorpio--Greek for "scorpion", it is used in astrology, the most virile of signs. The scorpion has a very prominent and powerful tail. To have one rising is, indeed, an even more phallic suggestion.

And, a separate thought:

What is also interesting is the treatment of women in Scorpio Rising and The Wild One. Females simply do not appear in the Anger film--it is pretty clear that either women are unworthy of appearing, or they simply cause no conflict for the male characters. The latter interpretation strongly implies homosexuality, the former misogyny. I believe it is simply the latter case in this film. In The Wild One, two women are interested in Johnny, and they seem diametrically opposed in their appeal; one is rather mannish, the other supremely feminized. Britches (hardly a “feminine” name) is virtually stripped of her identity as a woman--she travels with a gang of bikers, of which there are very few women; she wears a very tight sweater and pants, as the men wear incredibly tight tees and jeans; she smokes and speaks in an unusually rough and low voice, for a woman. But she also has no sway with Johnny. Kathie, on the other hand, is a small-town girl in nearly every way, wears dresses and a bobbed hairdo, and tantalizes Johnny on multiple levels. With this in mind, Johnny’s brief affair with Britches and continuous (for the span of the film) interest in Kathie can be interpreted as a rejection of homosexuality on Johnny’s part, and his conscious alignment with heterosexuality. Or, at least, this holds sway until the end of the movie. Johnny gifts Kathie with his trophy (a gesture of courtship), but heads back onto the road with his crew. He gives Kathie his power and relinquishes his façade. Now, this may be his acknowledgement of a more gentle kind of heterosexuality, his attempt to thank her for her efforts on his behalf and “repent” of his stolen acclaim, or it may be tacit thanks for clueing Johnny into his choice of companions (a definite homosociality if not homosexuality). He gives up his phallic symbol, in any case. Whether it is a gesture of trust or tender rejection is difficult to pin down.

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Last update: 8/27/2004