Bruce LaBruce's The Raspberry Reich: Revolutionary Corn, Revolutionary Flakes

In her 6 April 1968 New Yorker review of Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise, Pauline Kael began:

A few weeks ago, I was startled to see a big Pop poster of Che Guevara--startled not because students of earlier generations didn't have comparable martyrs and heroes but because they didn't consider their heroes part of popular culture, though their little brothers and sisters might have been expected to conceive of them in comic-strip terms.

Well, we're way past being startled anymore, I should think. In Bruce LaBruce's The Raspberry Reich, a small band of left-wing terrorists in contemporary Berlin have incorporated the radicalized student generation of the '60s that Godard made movies about, "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola" as he put it, into their romanticized pop politics right alongside Che. LaBruce's little sect models itself on the German Red Army Faction (the "RAF"), a/k/a the Baader-Meinhof gang, perpetrator of terroristic crimes in the '70s. The head of the group, and its only female member, calls herself Gudrun after Baader-Meinhof member Gudrun Ensslin and dons a blonde wig in order to more closely resemble her as she spews slogans to the impressionable guys under her.

Gudrun's ideological base is Marxist, of course, but she tilts toward Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse's individual blends of historical materialism and psycho-sexual theory. In this light she has updated Karl Marx's formulation, "Religion is the opiate of the masses." Shaking her synthetic mod locks she cries, "Heterosexuality is the opiate of the masses!" to which one of her confused boys replies, "I thought opium was the opiate of the masses." (The funniest variation on the original since "Marxism is the opiate of the intellectuals.") Pushing a recalcitrant boy toward her idea of revolution, Gudrun insists, "It's time for you to put your Marxism where your mouth is and help us initiate the homosexual intifada."

In "honor" of the RAF's kidnaping and murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, an industrialist with a Nazi past, Gudrun plans the abduction of the son of an industrialist. She had previously forced her own companion Holger to have sex with Che, the masturbatory gun fetishist of the group. (When Holger objected, "But I'm your boyfriend," she exulted, "The revolution is my boyfriend!") She now forces one of the gang to have sex on video with the captive, who, it turns out, is perfectly willing. He's actually been trying to escape from the old man, who wants to institutionalize him and subject him to a "cure" for his homosexuality.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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