Bruce LaBruce's The Raspberry Reich: Revolutionary Corn, Revolutionary Flakes - Page 4

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.)

With The Raspberry Reich I wanted to revisit these ideas and sentiments in a more modern context. After 9/11, particularly in North America, the left was castrated and rendered virtually silent. I wanted to make a movie that gave voice once more to the left wing, anti-corporate, anti-capitalist rhetoric that was once part of the public discourse but which had become completely absent. The movie also operates as a critique of the left, skewering people who either don't practice what they preach, or who become so self-righteous and intractable in their beliefs that they themselves become oppressive and dogmatic.

Clearly, LaBruce would see someone like Gudrun as having fallen off from a radical ideal.

This formal statement of his intentions, however, doesn't describe how the movie plays, in part because it doesn't account for LaBruce's rejection of professional moviemaking polish and discipline. But what happens onscreen also supports what I noticed in Berkeley, that the politics were always secondary to the gratification the leaders of the group drew from controlling the interpersonal dynamics. (In addition, the political theories, with no experience-testing behind them, and perhaps none possible, were illusory, never more obviously so than when they were carried into the streets, but LaBruce doesn't consciously go that far.)

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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