Headcase - The freak is chic

There’s a great line in the song that ends Shortbus, the new film by John Cameron Mitchell. Unfortunately, the lyrics are nowhere to be found yet, so I’m paraphrasing: “When you’re taking your last breath, then you’ll realize your demon is your best friend. ... Everybody gets it in the end.”

You’ve already read about the movie, I’m sure. It is full of explicit sex — “unsimulated,” critics gasp — but nearly everyone agrees it’s not pornographic. Still, psychoanalysts-in-training could develop a parlor game based on reading the reviews. You can tell a lot about a critic’s attitude toward sex — and thus, toward pleasure — by reading between his lines.

Mitchell is a hero of mine. The longest chapter of my doctoral dissertation is about his first film, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which is about the virtue and difficulty of being a “freak” in America. I mean “freak” in the ’60s sense of being an outsider by choice or nature — a “misfit” in Hedwig’s terms. In Hedwig, Mitchell plays a would-be transsexual whose sex reassignment surgery is botched so that she — the gender she chooses — is neither really male nor female. The movie, a campy rock musical, is about Hedwig’s journey to realizing that her “deformity” embodies her gift.

Thus, the song at the end of Shortbus, with its declaration that your demon is your best friend, makes the same point. The difference, however, is that the new film articulates this idea — that the freak is chic — as every human’s positive potential, not just as a solution for those fated by circumstance or nature to be conspicuously different.

And that’s undoubtedly why Mitchell chose to make sex the central activity of Shortbus. For sex is the everyday theater of the absurd. Yeah, sure, we express our affection and love in sex, but we also enact our obsessions, our insecurities, our terrors and our hatreds.

Another recent film, Little Miss Sunshine, makes similar points — and is much better reviewed, doubtlessly because it lacks explicit sex. In this case, a dysfunctional family — that is, a family of freaks — bonds at a pre-pubescent beauty pageant.

In my past life as a reporter, I twice covered such events and the movie does not exaggerate the grotesquely erotic presentation of participating girls. But the sexualizing is never acknowledged. In Little Miss Sunshine, the young heroine, who retains her natural look, disrupts the pageant by performing a bump-and-grind dance taught to her by her grandfather. The over-the-top performance parodies and de-represses acknowledgement of the weird erotica of the pageant. Havoc ensues, while the family bonds in its eccentricity.

The line in Shortbus, “Your demon is your best friend. ... Everybody gets it in the end,” has several levels of meaning. Not the least is the joke that everyone gets penetrated ... in the literal end. Anal sex is in fact a repeated theme of the movie and represents the male’s complete surrender to love. (Don’t worry. It’s comically treated.)

But the line also refers to — considering the reference to one’s last breath, to death — the way that awareness of mortality heightens intimacy and sexual pleasure. A sense of mortality also renders our demon, whatever has plagued us in life, as something that gives shape to our brief existence. Shortbus is set in New York, after 9/11, so there is a communal sense of mortality. They all want to know their demons and be penetrated by the arrow of Eros.

Longtime readers of this column know that despite 10 years of education and training in psychology, I became disenchanted with psychotherapy, moving toward a practice based on aesthetics. These movies are pointed lessons in what real personal growth should encourage — not cures and normalization but outright cultivation of the eccentric, the demon, in us.

The movies also demonstrate another principle that is helpful in that regard. You don’t handle your demon by hiding from it. Instead, you make the problem that demonizes you bigger by bringing it out in the open. Most of us are not lucky enough to have access to a salon of like-minded people like the characters in Shortbus.

But you can achieve this through symbolization, too — by journaling your dreams, by enactment, by any form of art. (The Shortbus characters make art, too, besides having lots of sex.) The point is not to produce formal art, but to play with images that represent or allude to our demon.

Shortbus reveals what a different world this would be — one of pleasure instead of needless restraint and alienation — if each of us welcomed his demon.

Cliff Bostock holds a Ph.D. in depth psychology.