The awkwardness of the boys is somewhat different. If their "bad" acting seems to be of a familiar type it's because they're all actual porn stars. When it comes to breaking through generic categories LaBruce puts Godard in the shade; the most offputting aspect for most moviegoers, no matter how cosmopolitan, would have to be that The Raspberry Reich includes explicit sex, money shots and all.

These scenes would be considered "gratuitous" by conventional narrative standards (and I don't just mean Hollywood standards) and they can't be said to work in terms of the characters or story--supposedly hesitant guys finish off their first acts of gay sex not only with gusto but evident expertise. LaBruce, who directed the controversial skinhead-fetish porno movie Skin Gang (2000), doesn't justify the sex acts, which can be enjoyed for their own sake (the guys are as unrealistically good-looking as in any gay porn). His immediate intention is to prevent the movie from being a user-friendly consumer item. But the sex scenes also function more generally (as they do in the Marquis de Sade's incomparable Philosophy in the Bedroom) to keep you aroused in ways you usually aren't while thinking.

LaBruce is often referred to as a "provocateur," and in interviews he glorifies the freedom (conceived in terms of permanent adolescence) that he got from the punk movement. He seeks a revolution that keeps on revolving. So he's turned off by a gay movement that focuses on integration into middle-class monogamy and finds even gay porno movies too conventional. (As he says in the Filmmaker interview: "Everything is contrived to present the illusion of sex spontaneously unfolding before your eyes, but it's actually extremely calculated. It's an industry, so you are pushing out this product.")

Thus, the irony of The Raspberry Reich is that whereas LaBruce plainly satirizes the sloganeering Gudrun, he shares a fair amount of her ideas. Here he is at his most inappropriately humorless: "In [The Raspberry Reich] one of the slogans is 'Madonna is Counter-Revolutionary', and I do mean that literally.... Madonna ... zeroes in on revolutionary moments (usually gay and/or black subcultural manifestations), but with the strategy of co-opting, neutralizing, commodifying, and ultimately exhausting and abandoning them. She is the ultimate example of someone who uses radical chic for exploitative and purely capitalistic ends."

LaBruce couldn't have written Gudrun's lines if he didn't see what was funny about a walking, talking revolutionary doll. But he's more disappointed in what this bodes for revolutionary politics than he is disgusted or even amused. As he says in this interview posted on the website This Is Baader-Meinhof:

The platforms of the ultra left wing terrorist groups which emerged from [the student protest movements of the '60s] were based on these humanist, egalitarian ideals. They believed, however, that any ends justified the means to achieve these goals, which placed them in morally untenable situations, eventually rendering them almost indistinguishable from their avowed enemies. (The oppressed becoming the oppressor is a theme that runs throughout my movies.)

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