Performance
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Of a party in my hometown over a decade back, my memory is fractured in two. In the first memory, so many people attended this party that a low-slung porch caved in and sent a lot of intertwined legs and arms crashing into the yard. The victims were all laughing and enjoying themselves, yet all I really thought was now I'd have to go around to the back of the house to use the bathroom and it was probably time for me to get home anyway. In this memory I was too hot and everyone looked a little stupid. In the second memory, however, I remember seeing the porch cave in and all the smiling faces coming down, all of it, and think sadly that I no longer see sights like that anymore. In this memory I must have been having all sorts of fun because now all the parties are tasteful affairs where people wonder if they're being insulted or inauthentically praised.
In the same way, I squirmed in my seat during most of Nikolas Roeg's and Donald Cammell's Performance. Questions assualted my mind as the images played: why is the head gangster so badly dubbed in? Why are these seats so uncomfortable?Doesn't not having a job make it easier to find your "spirit demon?" And what is a picture of Jorge Luis Borges doing there spinning around inside of Mick Jagger's skull? Yet in the past week I have started to play Performance back in my mind and I think I enjoy it. It looks good, if unusual, filed into the gangster genre, especially if you see the lead gangster's transformation into Mick Jagger's spirit demon instead as the homely retribunal death all gangsters face in the movies. I have even been able to think of its naked landscapes of freckled white skin as really erotic instead of as one of those privileges of the rockstar-wealthy. The push and pull of the image remains and becomes real, and in this way Performance seems designed to be recollected years later but not discussed. Compare, please, to our generation's alternative to the straight gangster picture: goateed-film-student snuffle-truffling from the decades-long Quentin Tarantino school, Lucky Number Slevin, or whatever it's called. Which is to say that no one really throws parties like Performance anymore.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:21 PM,
