by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $15.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Bobby Kendall, Charles Ludlam, Don Brooks
Intro:
… a beautiful work of pure male erotic fantasy …
In 1971, James Bidgood’s “homage to gay whack-off fantasies”, Pink Narcissus was released. Of course, at the time, no one knew it was Bidgood who made it, as behind-the-scenes disputes led him to remove his name from the final product, crediting himself as ‘Anonymous’.
It wouldn’t be until over two decades later that writer Bruce Benderson would start to track down the original artist and confirm Bidgood’s involvement with a film that has gone on to be a smaller but no less crucial addition to the canon that is now heralded as the Golden Age of Porn. Now in 4K for added defined arse pixels!
Filmed over the course of seven years, with all but one scene shot inside of Bidgood’s New York apartment, there is a level of homespun ingenuity and imagination on full display that is still marvellous to witness after all this time.
Bright, searing, dreamy colours float and dance across the screen as readily as any well-sculpted slab of mortal flesh, turning the fantastical interior screen of the film’s central character (an unnamed prostitute played by Bobby Kendall) into raw beauty.
In 2011, Bidgood told the New York Times that he found much of the contemporaneous Gay erotica to be lacking in art and underlying beauty that was allowed by straight publications like Playboy. In every single frame of Pink Narcissus, he not only corrects that error, but might even set a standard that would be followed (however subconsciously) by the cinematic world thereafter.
Kitsch and all things polished and pink radiate through Bidgood’s DIY aesthetics, transforming a hum-drum apartment into a dense mystical forest, a matador’s arena, a regal Roman throne room, a decadent harem, and even a microcosm of the rainy, neon-lit New York streets and skyline. It’s difficult to see such creative spark and not be reminded of when COVID lockdowns led filmmakers like Rob Savage and Bo Burnham to similarly create entire worlds out of their confined four walls. Its blissful and ethereal use of colour is as much a tribute to the palette of Powell/Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (along with its narrative mingling of artistic fantasy and reality) as it is evocative of the somnambulist moods of the French New Wave.
Even with its rough release window opposite porno chic pioneers like Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie and the paradigm-shifting Boys in The Sand, its abstract visual style is closer to the works of the Mitchell Brothers like Beyond the Green Door than the more accessible examples like Deep Throat.
There’s also a certain… let’s say ‘return to nature’ moment that is reminiscent of one of the more infamous sequences from Saltburn.
And through all the flesh, writhing and gyration, what is felt strongest (even beyond lust) is a want for some kind of control. Kendall’s performance, oft surrounded by gilded mirrors, is self-obsessed through and through (hell, the entire film, by design and intent, is a work of self-indulgence). But as more of his dreams of both submission and domination play out on-screen, there is a lingering sense of melancholy; these retreats into the self for a sense of gratification are the result of distance from what is material. While this was filmed and came out quite a while before the AIDS crisis would fully take hold, the depiction of back-alley fetish stores closing and the neon sign for a blood bank with a mysterious and menacing figure superimposed on top… well, it makes for one hell of an ominous premonition.
Pink Narcissus is a beautiful work of pure male erotic fantasy, to the point where the success of the brief goes far beyond stirring what bulges under the briefs. It is as up-front and blissfully without shame as porn is capable of being (right down to what can only be described in a print-worthy fashion as an early attempt at 4D cinema), but there is such clear artistry and devotion to making that vision a reality that it’s far more fascinating as genuine art than as what some would brush aside as being ‘merely’ pornography. It stands strong and proud alongside its contemporaneous cinematic cousins as an example of how pornographic cinema is cinema and is art.
