(After Roland Barthes’ “The Face of Garbo”)

Cher’s face belongs to our current moment in cinema when the female visage represents a kind of absolute non-state of the flesh, which can be reached through a variety of (as-yet-not-entirely-confirmed) nips, tucks, filler injections, makeup and post-production airbrushing.

Cher’s is indeed a formidable face-object. In Burlesque, her makeup is thicker than her costars’ because the paint has been applied atop an increasingly contoured plaster surface. What was once a Byzantine icon — heavy lidded eyes and elongated nose framed by an oval countenance — has become a Noh mask. Her famed mile-long cheekbones are no longer defined by their underlying hollowness, but by the gibbous moon-like protuberances of her cheeks. So too does the plumpness of her lips, the lower line always under-drawn, exhaust the descriptive powers of “bee-stung.” Amid the snow of her foundation, her eyes remain her most expressive feature, narrowing slightly whenever she offers a bemused smile and wetting at the edges (glycerin?) to indicate sadness. This face, with the dark vegetation of its eyes and totem-like countenance, comes to resemble Louise in Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960) or Dead or Alive singer Pete Burns.

Yet how many actresses have consented to let the crowd see the ominous maturing of their beauty? Not many, unless it’s Oscar season. Their essence is not to be degraded, their faces are not to have any reality except that of their perfection. The face of Cher — whose character Tess, also a showbiz vet, has probably been around the block as many times and could claim as many comebacks as the actress playing her — openly testifies to the existence of this unspoken entertainment industry mandate, “forever young,” and burlesques it into a form of extreme beauty.

Viewed as a transition the face of Cher reconciles two iconographic ages, it assures the passage from actual plasticity to a molded mask. As is well known, we are today at the other pole of this evolution: the face of Heidi Montag, for instance, is homogenized, not only because of its peculiar thematics (woman as child, “real girl” as reality star) but also because her face, which has nothing of an essence left in it, is constituted by an infinite complexity of cosmetic enhancements. Cher’s enhancements only further enhance her “Cher-ness,” whereas Montag’s sundry “improvements” ultimately render her (or say, Madonna) less distinguishable. The face of Cher is an Idea, that of Montag an Afterthought.

[Originally published in the SF Bay Guardian]

If a Viking takes a shit in the woods, will anyone care? I asked myself this after watching Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America, an admirable if somewhat aimless and altogether odd duck of an independent film. Believe me, I wanted to love this movie more. The press release couldn’t have made it sound any cooler: Vikings lost in the New World in 1007! A black metal soundtrack! They terrorize Irish monks! It’s in Old Norse! Duuuuuude! […]

If John Waters is “the Pope of Trash” (according to the gospel of William S. Burroughs) then freelance curator and film fanatic Jack Stevenson is a shoe-in for Cardinal. The last time Stevenson rolled into town in 2006, he arrived with a stack of film canisters that were a veritable Pandora’s box filled with drug scare propaganda, witchcraft and Scandinavian skin flicks. This time he comes bearing amateur blue movies, a gritty portrait of a bisexual hustler, and grainy reels documenting live, nude girls — all shot in San Francisco — for the series “The Superstars Next Door” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. I checked in with Stevenson via email before he boarded his transatlantic flight. Here’s what he had to say about his hatred of television, why film preservationists have it wrong, and the most depraved flick ever made in Denmark. […]

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s great backstage drama, The Red Shoes (1948), Boris Lermontov, the controlling impresario behind a famous ballet company, asks the up-and-coming dancer Victoria Page why she wants to dance. She snaps back with the question, “Why do you want to live?” I imagine that director Ted V. Mikels would give the same response were he asked why he makes movies. “It takes your guts and your entrails and your soul to make a film,” Mikels proclaimed in an interview in RE/Search’s Incredibly Strange Films. “It takes everything you possess within you!” […]

Judging by Google hits alone for “I hate Sandra Lee,” Sandra Lee might be the most reviled cooking show host in America second to Rachael Ray. And while Ray’s golly-gee-whiz style is the most frequent target of her detractors, few people would actually dispute that her 30-minute meals are the products of real cooking. Lee, however, tests the very limits of cooking itself. Her Food Network show, Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee, runs on a calculus of deception whereby you get to take all the credit for whipping up gourmet-tasting fare out of 70 percent pre-made food items and 30 percent fresh ingredients. Lee is the perky, blond Antichrist to the gospel of local, sustainable, capital-F Food as proselytized by Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, and Eric Schlosser. She knows how to package herself, and comes not bearing peace, but Cool Whip. And I love her. […]

Will queers ever get the horror movie they deserve? Granted, with the recent coast-to-coast ratifications of same-sex marriage, LGBT folk have more pressing issues than debates over genre cinema on their mind. Besides, that intransitive verb — deserve — provides an extra soupçon of tastelessness to an already loaded question: wasn’t the golden age of the celluloid closet defined by giving onscreen queers “what they deserved,” doling out silent suicides and grisly homicides as the price of representation? And aren’t we faced with enough real-life horrors? Homophobia and AIDS are still killers on the loose. So why appeal for terror? […]

Black Lizard made me gay. Or, at the very least, Kenji Fukasaku’s 1968 jewel-toned mod noir opened my quasicloseted 16-year-old eyes to a certain queer aesthetic — one which foregrounds its own artifice by using Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salome as wallpaper; one which dresses deviance in a gown with a 25-foot-long feathered train; and one which knows that the flipside of fabulousness is utter ridiculousness. It certainly wasn’t something I was seeing in the twink-filled issues of XY foisted upon me by my Pride ring–wearing, secret community college beau, but something closer to what I later found in John Waters’s films with Divine, James Bidgood’s diaphanous beefcake photography, and Ronald Firbank’s deeply purple prose. […]