Sound And Vision: Bruce LaBruce
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at several music videos by Bruce LaBruce.
The line between symbolism and fetish is a thin one. Nobody knows this like art porn director Bruce LaBruce. He approaches kink not just as an object of lust or horniness. He approaches fetish in the same way other directors approach symbolism: putting the spotlight, in an almost laser focus way, on just one image or object. Heightening its significance. Whether that significance is getting your rocks off, or touching your soul or mind, I'll leave in the middle.
Bruce LaBruce often works in the area of gay and queer kink porn, pushing the boundaries of kink in sometimes uncomfortable ways. If your most mainstream film is about gerontophilia that is saying something. He also made skinheads into an object of desire, made porn films about Marxist terrorists, shot films about twincest, and focused on sexualized gore horror with zombieporn.
It might then be surprising that most of his music videos are rather sedate affairs. Only the music video for Rusty's Oh No Joe was outright banned for nudity, but for today's standards it isn't that shocking. The two videos for Rusty's Joe's Empty Cell, starring fellow director Floria Sigismondi, and Misogyny for the same band are fairly anonymous affairs. And while Fifth Column's Like This brims with punk rock energy in its style, there is nothing much shocking in the way of content, even if the latter two both re-use footage from earlier Bruce LaBruce works. Danko Jones' Legs (below) even feels surprisingly heteronormative in its fetishization of womens legs in lingerie, until the slightly subversive final shot of the male singer wearing the same garb. This is fetish as fun, the legs being objects of desire as much as symbolic iconography.
(ADDENDUM: Bruce LaBruce reached out to me to tell me that all the dancers in the Danko Jones video were trans women, which is significant for properly interpreting the video. He also pointed out several other music videos he made, so I might follow up this edition of Sound and Vision with a sequel in the future...)
The only music video that truly pushes past boundaries in the way we are used to from LaBruce is Gio Black Peter's Revolving Door (New Fuck, New York). It is even so shockingly pornographic and twisted that I can't link to it here, only to the trailer (also below), because it is not even findable on mainstream porn sites, only shady ones. Search for it at your own risk.
The video has people fucking in racist garb and pig masks being doused in liters of blood, while there is full male-on-male anal penetration on screen. It is so deliberately gross, offensive and off-putting that it does not scan as sexy or arousing, but instead as highly symbolic and politically charged. This is offensiveness as a tool to shock and ruffle feathers. Its use of racist caricatures fits with LaBruces subversive fetishization of skinheads in the past as a counterpoint to the assimilative tendencies of queer culture. LaBruce would never want to be one of the "good gays" who play by the rules of heteronormativity to get the perks of patriarchy. Fetishishing the dangers of patriarchy and white society (fascism, nazism and racism) is both a way to get back at it, and defang it.
The gore on the other hand fits with his later zombieporn films that fit the theme of queer death. At the time of the AIDS epidemic sex and death went hand in hand in gay culture, tied especially to the notion of blood. Kink is about embracing taboo and nothing is more taboo in gay culture than blood. The notion of death and queer culture as symbiotic is also often discussed in academics tied to self-destructive behaviours like chemsex. Kink can be about looking those taboos in the eye, taking what we fear and our darkness and sexualizing it.
LaBruce's work is about that dichotomy between sex and fear, getting horned up about gay bashers, blood and more. By pushing that sexualization past a point of arousal into an extreme that most people would not recognize as horny anymore, he lands on something else: symbolism. And politically particularly potent symbolism at that. His porn films are not that sexy, but they are extremely powerful. His one taboo-breaking music video is as well.
