Bruce LaBruce's The Raspberry Reich: Revolutionary Corn, Revolutionary Flakes - Page 3

If anything puts the movie over, it's the big laughs LaBruce gets from the wigged-out radical sloganeering. One of two gangmembers on a couch watching TV scoffs that Gudrun thinks cornflakes are counterrevolutionary, and the other boy (with whom he's about to have sex) says, "Cornflakes are counterrevolutionary!" and explains how. Even better is when Gudrun (overcompensating for her German accent) convinces Holger and Che to steal from a mom-and-pop grocery store instead of a corporate chain by reasoning: "Sometimes the exigencies of the revolution necessitate the adwancement of praxis over theory." I was an undergrad in Berkeley in the early '80s where adherents of every conceivable revolutionary lunacy said similar things with utter self-seriousness. (One bitterly unhappy young woman claimed that the taboo against incest was an oppressive, bourgeois-patriarchal construct. She has since committed suicide, and who can wonder.) For me, LaBruce gave vent to years of disbelief with this florid-yet-deadpan clowning.

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.")

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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