#95: Fleshin 2008: 95; in 2006: 74; in 2004: 71 dir. Paul Morrissey, 1968 cin. Paul Morrissey with Joe Dallesandro, Geraldine Smith, Patti D'Arbanville, Candy Darling IMDb // Leave a Comment |
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In 100 Words: Like Sirk in Factory clothing, i.e., very little clothing, Flesh
is an unpredictably poignant melodrama where Joe Dallessandro stays as paralyzed within his social
"place" as Jane Wyman ever was. Young, inarticulate beauty provides a ticket only to semi-consensual
attention, the unremunerative economy of other people's awkward longings. This deadpan joke
deepens into an Au hasard, Centerfold, comprising exquisite interludes when Joe counsels
other hustlers, or lolls with an infant—studying and relating, like Goodall with her apes.
The fender-bender edits rough up the texture, aesthetic poverty evoking a hand-to-mouth
marginality that is Joe's idiom and his great, sad fear. Food for Thought: Loath as I am to perpetuate the pattern of conflating billed director Paul Morrissey's legacy completely with that of producer-impresario Andy Warhol, I think I arrived at my most stimulating thoughts about Flesh while reading the Warhol chapter in Matthew Tinkcom's Working Like a Homosexual (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). Tinkcom compellingly blends Marxist methodologies with camp insight, theorizing the traces of invisible queer labor and attempting to posit the peculiar value, in any number of senses, of film work credited to Vincente Minnelli, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and John Waters. Flesh is nowhere mentioned, but not unusually for me, it lingered in my mind while I read. |
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