BIJOU
The movie I’m watching—I’m hesitant to call it porn, since its intentions are less obvious than that—was made in 1972, and couldn’t have been produced in any other era. A construction worker is walking home from work in Manhattan when he sees a woman in a short fake fur coat knocked over by a car when she’s crossing an intersection. The driver leaps out to help her up, but the construction worker—played by an actor named Bill—picks up her purse and tucks it in his jacket. He takes the subway to a banged-up-looking block, maybe in Hell’s Kitchen, climbs up to his tiny, soiled apartment, nothing on the walls but a few pinups, women torn from magazines. On his bed, he opens the purse, looks at its spare contents, keys and a few dollars. He opens a lipstick and touches it to his tongue, tastes it, does it again, something about his extended tongue touching the extended lipstick…Then he’s lying back, stroking himself through his jeans, getting out of his clothes; he’s an archetypal seventies porn guy, lean, with thick red hair and a thick red mustache, a little trail of hair on his wiry belly. Then he’s in the shower, continuing his solo scene, and he begins to flash on images of women, quick jump cuts, but just as he’s about to come, he sees the woman in fur falling when the bumper of the car strikes her. That’s the end of that; the erotic moment is over, for him and for the viewer, once that image returns.
Chastened, toweling off, he’s back in the bedroom, looking again at what spilled from her purse. There’s an invitation, something telling her about—a party? an event? someplace called Bijou at 7 p.m.
Then he’s walking in Soho—the old Soho, long before the art glamour and even longer before the Euro-tourist-meets-North-Jersey shopping district: garbage in the streets, cardboard boxes in front of shuttered cast-iron façades without windows. He finds the address, goes in and up, and the movie shifts from the gritty Warholian vocabulary it’s trafficked in thus far to another cinematic tongue. An indifferent woman in a lot of eye makeup sits in a glass booth; Bill proffers the invite; she gestures toward a door and utters the movie’s only line of dialogue: Right through there.
“There” turns out to be a hallucinatory space, its dominant hue a solarized, acidy green. Within that color, Bill moves forward. He confronts the image of his own body in one mirror and then in many, reaches out to touch his own form with pleasure. Time dilates, each gesture extended, no rush to get anywhere, only a little sense of forwardness. In a while, there’s another body—man or woman?—prone, facedown, and Bill’s on top of him or her, they’re fucking in a sea of all that green. In a while, we can see the person beneath Bill is definitely a man. Then, much later, Bill’s alone, lying prone on the floor as if now he’s let go, all his boundaries relinquished, and one man comes to him and begins to blow him. Bill lies there and accepts it. In a while, another man enters the scene, and begins to touch and cradle Bill’s head, and then—no hurry here, no hurry in all the world—there’s another. Now the pattern is clear, one man after another enters the liquid field of green that sometimes frames and sometimes obscures—and they are all reverently, calmly touching Bill. They have no end save to give him pleasure, to make Bill’s body entirely, attentively, completely loved.
This is the spiritualized eroticism of 1972 made flesh, more sensuous and diffuse than pointedly hot, a brotherhood of eros, a Whitmanian democracy. It makes the viewer feel suspended in a sort of erotic haze, but whatever arousal I feel in imagining Bill’s complete submission to pleasure suddenly comes to a halt, as surely as if I’d seen that woman struck down in the crosswalk again, because I realize that all the men in the scene I’m watching are dead. Every one of them, and the vision they embodied, the idea they incarnated gone up in the smoke and ashes of the crematoriums, scattered now in the dunes of Provincetown and Fire Island.
Or that’s one version of what I felt, watching Bijou, Wakefield Poole’s weird period piece of art porn. Of course, it is not news that the players are all gone now. How beautiful they look, the guys in the movie, or the men in the documentary Gay Sex in the 70s, posing on the decks in the Pines or on the porches of houses in San Francisco, eager for brotherhood and for knowledge of one another. That is a phrase I would like to revive: to have knowledge of someone. It suggests that sex is, or can be, a process of inquiry, an idea that Poole would certainly have embraced.
Watching the movie is just one of countless experiences in which the fact of the AIDS epidemic is accommodated somehow. “Accommodated” doesn’t mean understood, assimilated, digested, interpreted, or integrated. Accommodated: We just make room for it because it won’t go away.
I don’t know what else I expect. What could lend meaning to the AIDS crisis in America? Hundreds of thousands perished because there was no medical model for understanding what was wrong with them, and no money or concerted effort offered soon enough to change the course of things in time to save their lives. They died of a virus, and they died of homophobia. But this understanding is an entirely social one, and it doesn’t do much to help the soul make meaning of it all. I have no answer to this problem save to suggest that a kind of doubling of perspective—an embracing of the layered nature of the world—is one thing one could carry, or be forced to carry, from such a shattering encounter. AIDS makes the experience of the body, a locus of pleasure and satisfaction, almost simultaneously the site of destruction and limit. What if, from here on out, for those burned in that fire, the knowledge of another body is always a way of acknowledging mortal beauty, and any moment of mutual vivacity understood as existing against an absence to come? Presence made more poignant, and more desirable, even sexier by that void, intensified by it.
Maybe the viewer’s involuntary gasp, when Bill thinks of the woman hit by the car as he’s jerking off, is twofold—first, the shock of the inappropriateness of it, and then the secondary, deeper shock—that the particular fact of her body is differently understood, differently longed for, when it is seen where it really is, in the world of danger—and that such a perception shakes the desirer out of simple lust and into some larger, more profound realm of eros.
I used to like to go to a sex club in the East Village, a place now closed through some combination of pressures from the Health Department, the police, the IRS, and the real estate developers who are remaking Manhattan as a squeaky-clean retail zone. A combination Whole Foods/condo development has opened right down the block.
Beyond a nearly invisible doorway (shades of the one Bill entered in Soho, long ago), there was a bouncer inside the door, a flirty man who loved jazz music, and then an attendant in the ticket booth (“Right through there…”), and then a sort of living room where you could check your clothes with the two attendant angels, one black and startlingly shapely, one blond and ethereally thin. They were loving, kind, and funny boys; they looked at the goings-on before them with a sly combination of blessing and good humor, which is just what you’d want in an angel.
Then, beyond a black vinyl curtain shredded so that you could part it dramatically with a swipe of the hand, were two floors, with a kind of stripped industrial look to them—bare brick and cement, a certain rawness, and structures of wood and metal in which to wander or hide, all very plain the first year I went there, and later redone with branches and dried leaves everywhere, as if an autumn forest had sprouted in the ruins of a factory.
Sometimes it was a palace of pleasure, sometimes it was a hall of doom. Sometimes when you thought you wanted to be there, you’d discover you just couldn’t get into the swing of it. Sometimes you weren’t sure you’d wanted to go and it was marvelous. Often it felt as if whatever transpired had little to do with any individual state of mind, but rather with the tone of the collective life, whatever kind of spirit was or wasn’t generated by the men in attendance that night, or by the city outside busily thinking through the poem of this particular evening. There were regulars who became acquaintances and comrades. There were visitors who became dear friends. There was a world of people I never saw again, once the doors closed.
Whoever made the decisions about what music to play preferred a kind of sludgy, druggy trance, often with classical or operatic flourishes about it. The tune I’ll never forget was a remixed version of Dido’s great aria from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. It’s the scene where the Queen of Carthage, having been abandoned by the man she’s allowed to wreck her kingdom, watches his sails disappear out to sea and resolves to end her life. As she prepares to bury a knife in her breast, she sings, unforgettably: Remember me, but—ah!—forget my fate.
It seems, in my memory, that they would play this song every night I attended, always late, as the evening’s brighter promises dimmed. There was a bit of a backbeat thrown in that would come and go, in between the soprano’s great controlled heaves of farewell and resignation, but the music always had the same effect. I’d take myself off to the sidelines, to one of the benches poised on the edges of the room for this purpose, lean back into the swelling melancholy of the score, and watch the men moving to it as though they’d been choreographed, in some dance of longing held up, for a moment, to the light of examination, the perennial hungry quest for whatever deliverance or release it is that sex brings us. It was both sad and astonishingly beautiful and now it seems to me something like the fusing of those layers I mentioned above: the experience of desire and the awareness of death become contiguous—remember me—one not-quite-differentiated experience.
My partner Paul’s mother has Alzheimer’s, or senile dementia. The first sign of it he saw was one morning when, for about a forty-five-minute period, she didn’t know who he was. Now she doesn’t know who anyone is, or if she does it’s for seconds at a time. I was sitting beside the condo pool with her—the Intracoastal Waterway behind us, so that we sat on delicate chairs on a small strand of concrete between two moving bodies of water—along with one of her other sons. Who are you, she said to him. I’m Michael, your son, he said. She laughed, the kind of humorless snort that means, As if… Then he said back to her, Who are you? And she answered, I watch.
That’s what’s left for her, the subjectivity that looks out at the world without clear attachments or defined relations. She is completely obsessed with who everyone is; she is always asking. I wonder if this has to do with her character, or if it’s simple human need; do we need to know, before we can do or say anything else, who people are to us?
Not in Bijou; abstracted subjectivities meet one another in the sheer iridescent green space of sex. They morph together in patterns, they lose boundary; they go at it so long, in such fluid ways, that the viewer does too.
Paul’s mother’s state is not, plainly, ecstatic; she wants to know where she ends and others begin. The desire to merge is only erotic to the bound.
The other day my friend Luis asked me if I thought there was anything spiritual about sex. We happened to be walking in Soho at the time, on our way back from some stores in the Bowery, so we might have passed the very door through which Bill long ago entered into his acidulated paradise. That prompted me to tell my friend about the movie, and my description prompted Luis’s question. Luis has a way of asking questions that seems to say, You really think that?
I am not ready to give up on Whitman’s vision of erotic communion, or its more recent incarnation in Wakefield Poole’s pornographic urban utopia. But the oddest thing about Poole’s film, finally, is that woman knocked down by the car; why on earth was she necessary to the tale? I suspect it’s because even in the imagined paradise of limitless eros, there must be room for death; otherwise the endlessness of it, the lack of limit or of boundary, finally drains things of their tension, removes all edges. Poole can almost do this—create a floating, diffuse, subject-and objectless field of eros. But not quite; the same body that strains toward freedom and escape also has outer edges, also exists in time, and it’s that doubling that makes the body the sexy and troubling thing it is. O taste and see. Isn’t the flesh a way to drink of the fountain of otherhood, a way to taste the not-I, a way to blur the edges and thus feel the fact of them? Cue the aria here: Remember me, sings Dido, but—ah—forget my fate! That is, she counsels, you need to both remember where love leads and love anyway; you can both see the end of desire and be consumed by it all at once. The ecstatic body’s a place to feel timelessness and to hear, ear held close to the chest of another, the wind that blows in there, hurrying us ahead and away, and to understand that this awareness does not put an end to longing but lends to it a shadow that is, in the late hour, beautiful.
Shadows, of course, lend objects gravity, attaching them to earth.
Luis is right, sex isn’t spiritual. The spirit wants to go up and out; it rises above, transcends, flies on dove wings up to the rafters and spies below it the formbound world. Who was that peculiar French saint who died briefly, returned to life, and then could not bear the smell of human flesh? She used to soar up to the rafters in church, just to get away from the stench of it. Sex is soulful; sex wants the soul-rich communion of other bodies. The sex of Bijou isn’t really erotic because what it wants is to slip the body’s harness and merge in the light show of play, the slippery forms of radiance. That’s the aspect of the film that’s more dated than its hairstyles, as if it were desirable for sex to take us up out of our bodies, rather than further in. That distance is a removal from knowledge; the guys who are pleasuring Bill aren’t anyone in particular, and do not need to be individuated. But that’s not soul’s interest. Back in the sex club in the East Village, soul wants to know this body and this, to seek the embodied essence of one man after another, to touch and mouth the world’s astonishing variety of forms. Spirit says, I watch. Soul says, Time enough to be out of the body later on, the veil of flesh won’t be set aside, not tonight; better to feel the heat shining through the veil.