The purpose of this paper is to explore queer expression in the film, the Rocky Horror Picture Show.(RHPS). Undeniably, RHPS expresses a great cultic power, however, i do not believe this power is because of some mismatched clothing or antisocial behavior. Rather, RHPS clearly expresses the cinematic apparatus- a production of intensive images, the creation of new ideas, new visions. To become queer then is not about the development of some persona or people, but the expression of the real itself, an alignment with the cinematic apparatus.Like the film camera, to become queer means to create.
le dispositif
Some features of film theory are not familar to the general reader. Specifically the cinematic apparatus, or what the french call 'le dispositif". What is le dispositif? the technical arrangement of cinema: the position of the viewer (passive, consuming), the nature of the imagery ( representational, unconscious, and comparable to Freud's 'psychic apparatus') . But also the basic structure of cinema: 'subjecting' or creating subjects ( perhaps ideological subjects as recognized in consumer culture and fascist states) But also, 'le dispositif' articulates the very french idea of 'machinery' , and this becomes important to define.
Lets differentiate mechanism from machinism. Mechanism is what we understand conventionally: an engine separate from ourselves defined basically as a 'tool'. A mechanism or tool does one or two things repetitively, and it is separate from ourselves. I can say my hand is a type of mechanism, capable of performing certain movements, and i will also say that who i am is not my hand. Machinism,however, is construction, defined as the movement or assemblage of parts. Machinism has no owner, no possessor, utility or definition .If a bicycle is a mechanism, machinism is a body connected to a bicycle defined by a conjunctive synthesis: a body AND a bicycle.The movement or synthesis of these two is machinism. A swimmer employing his body to move in the water in the most efficient way to win a competition is mechanism. The movement of body and water together in the expression-to swim- is machinic. In mechanism, there is a determining goal as well as a subject: i swim. Machinism, however, is activity. To swim is not my body or the water, but another experience entirely.
In his book "a thousand machines" the Deleuzian Gerald Raunig writes "The question should certainly not be : what is a machine? or even: who is a machine? It is not a question of the essence, but of the event, not about 'is', but about 'and', about concatenations and connections, compositions and movements that constitute a machine". (p19.semiotexte) We shouldn't say then the earth is a machine...but that it forms an assemblage with the universe, which is also an assemblage. A machinic assemblage has no subject, no object, but only parts and movements. And as well, intensities. Activity expresses itself in a particular way, as a quality, and this quality is intensive. To swim is neither subjective or objective, but it is a definitive experience- an intensity.
How does all this apply to cinema? In the late 60's in the wake of Louis Althusser's Marxist essays on State and Ideological apparatuses, two film essays made an indelible impression on the face of cinema and culture, and ignited the french 'nouvelle vague'( new wave cinema) . Christian Metz's psychoanalytic "the imaginary signifier" tied the cinematic apparatus to Freud's "mental apparatus" and jean Baudry's 'le dispositif' compared cinema to Plato's cave allegory.Both writers claimed cinema functioned as dominant ideologies that reinforced status quo values. Entertainment was conservative and consumer culture a euphemism for brain washing. Such counter strategies as 'self reflexive cinema' -inspired by Godard -aimed to make the spectator aware of the dream s/he was being served and to 'wake up' to the machine in an attempt to throw off its shackles. The apparatus was to be resisted and the war cry in France - to avoid cinema - appeared to be the paranoid solution to the problem of the dispositif.
Andre Bazin famously identified the power of cinema as the capture of an 'ontological' bond to reality. Like a chunk of paint capturing a bit of a face for a portrait, cinema captured the real. In his book ' the movement Image' , Gilles Deleuze agrees, only to add that cinema doesnt capture an image, but movement itself. he adds that it is not realism which demonstrates cinemas great aesthetic power, but rather montage and editing-the arrangement of movement images together',as Eisenstein asserted. Simply, Reality is montage, and montage is the arrangement of movements to create intensive sequences which heighten movement to the level of rhythm. To film is movement in variation, all images in variation. While realism concerns itself with the belief in objects-to represent a thing- montage concerns editing and suturing objects together which have not been connected before.
Of course, Montage breaks our habits of vision, introducting dance into reality. No longer mechanical movements of bodies but surprise gestures as shown in musicals.The RHPS demonstrates the frankensteinian suturing of different objects into a new arrangement, a collage, montage or festival of various genres-alien, horror, gothic or americana -all stitched together. The characters too are more intertextual compositions from other movies and plays ( A critic characterized Frankenfurter as "part aunti mame, part victor frankenstein") . Drag or tranvesticism best expresses this collage of the body, a collage which is neither male or female, but rather expresses intensive parts sewn together, a monstrous body, a machinic body. In her essay on RHPS, Zachary Lamm comments that transvesticism erases both male and female signs: the drag queen is neither man nor woman . Rather, sex and gender become performative, are played with as signs, their essential status- as definitions of identity or of biology or nature- are removed. In true machinic fashion, the drag queen does not assert one sex or another but puts all gender on stage as parody, perhaps asking the question : should we really take sex and gender so essentially- or seriously?The drag queen creates an inhuman or machinic body. For Deleuze, this becoming also is the eye of cinema, the cinematic subject or perhaps what Walter Benjamin famously called the movie camera- an "optical unconscious" - a perception that plunges into a real far beyond human perception and natural vision. It is also an intensive vision and the reason why cinematic pleasure is closely associated with intensive zones of sensation.
Desire
While some may find transvestism and cinema an unlikely association, few would argue there is little difference between desire and movement. What causes movement?Well, desire. Like Freud , Deleuze argues for a desire which constitutes objects as well as pursues them.While this may appear to be a minor difference- for desire to pursue an existing object or to create one- it is this distinction which separates 'natural' sexuality from 'the perversions' . The male homosexual is a deviant because he makes an anus into a vagina, according to Freud. ( As well, this 'creation' is behind much homophobia, as clearly stated by rednecks in Sasha Baron Cohens film " Bruno" - " this asshole is for shitting".) The deviant engineers nature for his own personal desires_"come up to the lab and see whats on the slab" The body is no longer tied to nature but to desire, and it is this change in framework which identifies Frankenfurter as monstrous, as a type of Frankensteinian, Promethean hero. Frankenfurter's 'sin' is to subordinate the natural body to desire to such an extent as to rearrange it entirely.The body is no longer mechanical, engineered for reproduction and utility-to be a tool in a social apparatus of production.It becomes instead a zone of intensity-of pleasures. Its nature is machinic -to connect everything and produce new zones of intensity. Frankenfurter is part alien, part woman, part scientist, part primadonna, part of everything because his body is a desiring machine connected literally to every part in the universe. In contrast to the Brad and Janet celibate machine, frankenfurters machine crosses lines and zones with ease: a cross dressing alien living on earth. Significantly, he gets punished for his body's extension because it is just too excessive. The aliens cannot stand living on earth any longer, the humans cannot tolerate the transgressions of their social roles. The instigator must be eliminated, however the real cause to this reaction is not frankenfurter but the machinery of representation. For life to be represented, things must be in their proper order, and for this order to be recognizable, life must be made into an object. The desiring machine must be broken.Instead, a paranoic machine rears its ugly head- even the aliens have one. No more connections, no more becomings. That mass in the swimming pool-a body of limbs and organs in an orgy of connections - must return to separate individuals. Desire must know its place. And yet at the same time, the machine doesnt stop, When Brad and Janet leave the mansion at the films end, don't their bodies become subjected to another kind of dispositif ? A social body? a Hetero-normative assemblage connected to state organs,scientific organs, capitalist organs? Deleuze would argue that there are only machine assemblages-dispositifs- assembling and arranging matter, which is why he and his colleague Foucault argue that subjectivity is nothing more than 'power relations'. The main issue for Deleuze is whether these power relations are reactive or active.
Towards the end of his life, Gilles Deleuze wrote two books on film-the movement image and the time image. I believe his serious interest in film derived from his life long obsession to discover an inhuman perception which he recognizes in the cinematic apparatus.Unlike natural perception, the film camera restores objects to an 'aggregate of images', a virgin world . Following Henri Bergsons ideas , Deleuze believes this aggregate of images is the real itself: an object consists of being an image primarily and as well this image has no separation to all other images. Only human perception creates objects and breaks between images-where one object begins and another ends is a matter of human intervention and designation-of representation. In their primordial state, images are connected together as one infinite totality. Because the film camera restores the object back into an image, and returns movement to images, Deleuze believes the film camera is a dispositif of affirmation capable of restoring primordial perception and a primordial being. This pure movement is active since nothing opposes, judges, or stops this movement. Deleuze describes an atom as the best example of a being who reaches into all things, who posseses great extension, a great mobility and range of travel. Simply, activity is movement,machinic movement, the capacity for affection for all things . Reaction is territorialization, mechanism , the use of matter for a specific end-utility. If affirmation is to connect, then reaction is to separate, to put at a distance, and it is only by making images into objects that distance can be created between things. This is why desire as creation becomes so important to Deleuze since then desire creates connections, returning an object to a movement image. In contrast, reactive imagery attempts to restore objects- cliches- and moves in the opposite direction away from machinism to a kind of recognition and identification.
Cinematic Body
While much has been said about film and fantasy, it would be mistaken to identify the the film world as fantasy in the same mistaken manner that we label the mental world as fantasy. Frankenfurters political platform-" dont dream it, be it" - aims to challenge fantasy as secondary, compensatory, and subordinate to 'the reality principle'. And while he alludes mostly to sexual fantasy in his anthem, Frankenfurters existence as alien, sexual deviant, inventor etc..is testimony to fantasy as real. His body parallels the body of cinema which picks up from Spinoza's famous musing : " we do not know what a body can do" . In both the body of Frankenfurter and the cinematic apparatus we witness experience into all possibilities of reality. The intertextual allusions in RHPS- alien, horror, and camp genres sewn together- are not only references to other movies but to the machinic movement of the cinematic apparatus itself, a movement that constitutes frankenfurters life. The RHPS is simply a festival of film, an expression of the cinematic apparatus-of what it can do.
It would be a reduction then to classify RHPS as merely 'gay' or ' camp' or 'queer'. Of course, those terms are undeniably there. But to reduce queer to narrative, to actions made by a character, is to miss the value of cinema itself as a queer machine. In the collection of essays " Reading Rocky Horror" , Jeffrey Weinstock frames RHPS in a typical dichotomy: status quo values versus the counter culture. While this is actually true historically-RHPS was made in the midst of Watergate, the moral majority, and the counter cultural revolution- such reductions ignore the machinic movements of queer culture and cinema ,expressing subversion only as an affront to established values, as a kind of minor rebellion, a tantrum. Why Frankenfurter and his cinematic lifestyle must die is precisely because queer activity usually gets framed as a reaction to the norm. What I would like to illustrate in this next section is how queer politics cannot be a reaction to norms, but is-like the cinematic apparatus- a ruination of representation. At the core of this argument is the status of fantasy which cannot be taken as a substitution but as a real fact. As mentioned before, the homosexual must create a new sexual object and this is the nature of deviant desire (and probably why many homosexuals are creative) . However, 'creation' is not substitution-the anus is not pretending to be a vagina, the penis is not a stand in for a breast. Faced with a limited palette of options, the deviant begins to invent a new body of desire, a hybrid species that cannot exist within the norm of male/female signification.
Besides homosexuality and transvestism the RHPS contains incest, s/m, orgies, cannibalism and other less obvious perverse trends. While some viewers may interpret this cornucopia of deviancy to express the simple message of shock value, I would suggest that libidinal pathos is a means for the body to make new connections, to create new relationships. Rather than shut down and withdraw from objects, the body opens onto a new plateau of libidinal becomings and intensities in the same way as the camera searches for new image arrangements, new connections. The activity of perversion then cannot be recognized as a reaction to a norm or a disavowal of reality but more like the movement image, as activity, as an assemblage of desire, a machinic arrangement. Like the cinematic apparatus, to be queer becomes a practice . The questionn becomes " what can a queer body do?" and not 'what designates 'queer'? To move everywhere, to cross lines, zones, thresholds and intensities-to be a movement image is queer expression.
Taken to the extreme, in both cinema and psychology, the movement image expresses a kind of pandemonium, a chaos or schizophrenia of connections loosely tied together . Deleuze exhibits Vertov's "man with a movie camera" - the 1920's constructivist soviet film which reduces a city into a zone of abstract lines and movements- as the great example of visual schizophrenia.However, RHPS never falls into the abyss of meaning since it remains tied to a musical comedy. The real depth of madness, of a horrible schizophrenia, a monstrously transformed body, is better expressed in David Cronenbergs oeuvre where the surface of representation always collapses under a heated intensity of psychosis .In Naked Lunch, the protagonist William Lee becomes homosexual. However, this becoming does not take the form of a declaration or a celebration. It is an hallucination, a gradual deterioration of reality where the intensive zones of gay sex surface everywhere. Lee's typwriter transforms into part insect, part anus, and Lee begins to imagine a body dominated by its asshole-a becoming anus ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRjIwOk_Nqw&feature=related) The signature of Cronenberg is specifically a bodily becoming, a zone of intensity. A becoming Fly, a becoming car crash, (crash) , becoming transexual (M Butterfly) ,becoming scientific experiment (dead ringers), or becoming madness (spider). In each film the intensity of becoming transfigures the body into a singular creation. If montage is visual extension -the suturing of images together- then intensity is the felt sense of this montage, the felt existence of this being, this new creature. To become homosexual is then to invent new sexualities on the body, new intensive zones, and this is why the RHPS exhibits so many of these experiments. To be gay is really 'to experiment', to discover new zones of sexual pleasure, new couplings, new bodies. Cinema is also the same: to film is to delve deeply into the real , to traverse all genres and history by tying them together into a singular monstrous movement image.
le dispositif
Some features of film theory are not familar to the general reader. Specifically the cinematic apparatus, or what the french call 'le dispositif". What is le dispositif? the technical arrangement of cinema: the position of the viewer (passive, consuming), the nature of the imagery ( representational, unconscious, and comparable to Freud's 'psychic apparatus') . But also the basic structure of cinema: 'subjecting' or creating subjects ( perhaps ideological subjects as recognized in consumer culture and fascist states) But also, 'le dispositif' articulates the very french idea of 'machinery' , and this becomes important to define.
Lets differentiate mechanism from machinism. Mechanism is what we understand conventionally: an engine separate from ourselves defined basically as a 'tool'. A mechanism or tool does one or two things repetitively, and it is separate from ourselves. I can say my hand is a type of mechanism, capable of performing certain movements, and i will also say that who i am is not my hand. Machinism,however, is construction, defined as the movement or assemblage of parts. Machinism has no owner, no possessor, utility or definition .If a bicycle is a mechanism, machinism is a body connected to a bicycle defined by a conjunctive synthesis: a body AND a bicycle.The movement or synthesis of these two is machinism. A swimmer employing his body to move in the water in the most efficient way to win a competition is mechanism. The movement of body and water together in the expression-to swim- is machinic. In mechanism, there is a determining goal as well as a subject: i swim. Machinism, however, is activity. To swim is not my body or the water, but another experience entirely.
In his book "a thousand machines" the Deleuzian Gerald Raunig writes "The question should certainly not be : what is a machine? or even: who is a machine? It is not a question of the essence, but of the event, not about 'is', but about 'and', about concatenations and connections, compositions and movements that constitute a machine". (p19.semiotexte) We shouldn't say then the earth is a machine...but that it forms an assemblage with the universe, which is also an assemblage. A machinic assemblage has no subject, no object, but only parts and movements. And as well, intensities. Activity expresses itself in a particular way, as a quality, and this quality is intensive. To swim is neither subjective or objective, but it is a definitive experience- an intensity.
How does all this apply to cinema? In the late 60's in the wake of Louis Althusser's Marxist essays on State and Ideological apparatuses, two film essays made an indelible impression on the face of cinema and culture, and ignited the french 'nouvelle vague'( new wave cinema) . Christian Metz's psychoanalytic "the imaginary signifier" tied the cinematic apparatus to Freud's "mental apparatus" and jean Baudry's 'le dispositif' compared cinema to Plato's cave allegory.Both writers claimed cinema functioned as dominant ideologies that reinforced status quo values. Entertainment was conservative and consumer culture a euphemism for brain washing. Such counter strategies as 'self reflexive cinema' -inspired by Godard -aimed to make the spectator aware of the dream s/he was being served and to 'wake up' to the machine in an attempt to throw off its shackles. The apparatus was to be resisted and the war cry in France - to avoid cinema - appeared to be the paranoid solution to the problem of the dispositif.
Andre Bazin famously identified the power of cinema as the capture of an 'ontological' bond to reality. Like a chunk of paint capturing a bit of a face for a portrait, cinema captured the real. In his book ' the movement Image' , Gilles Deleuze agrees, only to add that cinema doesnt capture an image, but movement itself. he adds that it is not realism which demonstrates cinemas great aesthetic power, but rather montage and editing-the arrangement of movement images together',as Eisenstein asserted. Simply, Reality is montage, and montage is the arrangement of movements to create intensive sequences which heighten movement to the level of rhythm. To film is movement in variation, all images in variation. While realism concerns itself with the belief in objects-to represent a thing- montage concerns editing and suturing objects together which have not been connected before.
Of course, Montage breaks our habits of vision, introducting dance into reality. No longer mechanical movements of bodies but surprise gestures as shown in musicals.The RHPS demonstrates the frankensteinian suturing of different objects into a new arrangement, a collage, montage or festival of various genres-alien, horror, gothic or americana -all stitched together. The characters too are more intertextual compositions from other movies and plays ( A critic characterized Frankenfurter as "part aunti mame, part victor frankenstein") . Drag or tranvesticism best expresses this collage of the body, a collage which is neither male or female, but rather expresses intensive parts sewn together, a monstrous body, a machinic body. In her essay on RHPS, Zachary Lamm comments that transvesticism erases both male and female signs: the drag queen is neither man nor woman . Rather, sex and gender become performative, are played with as signs, their essential status- as definitions of identity or of biology or nature- are removed. In true machinic fashion, the drag queen does not assert one sex or another but puts all gender on stage as parody, perhaps asking the question : should we really take sex and gender so essentially- or seriously?The drag queen creates an inhuman or machinic body. For Deleuze, this becoming also is the eye of cinema, the cinematic subject or perhaps what Walter Benjamin famously called the movie camera- an "optical unconscious" - a perception that plunges into a real far beyond human perception and natural vision. It is also an intensive vision and the reason why cinematic pleasure is closely associated with intensive zones of sensation.
Desire
While some may find transvestism and cinema an unlikely association, few would argue there is little difference between desire and movement. What causes movement?Well, desire. Like Freud , Deleuze argues for a desire which constitutes objects as well as pursues them.While this may appear to be a minor difference- for desire to pursue an existing object or to create one- it is this distinction which separates 'natural' sexuality from 'the perversions' . The male homosexual is a deviant because he makes an anus into a vagina, according to Freud. ( As well, this 'creation' is behind much homophobia, as clearly stated by rednecks in Sasha Baron Cohens film " Bruno" - " this asshole is for shitting".) The deviant engineers nature for his own personal desires_"come up to the lab and see whats on the slab" The body is no longer tied to nature but to desire, and it is this change in framework which identifies Frankenfurter as monstrous, as a type of Frankensteinian, Promethean hero. Frankenfurter's 'sin' is to subordinate the natural body to desire to such an extent as to rearrange it entirely.The body is no longer mechanical, engineered for reproduction and utility-to be a tool in a social apparatus of production.It becomes instead a zone of intensity-of pleasures. Its nature is machinic -to connect everything and produce new zones of intensity. Frankenfurter is part alien, part woman, part scientist, part primadonna, part of everything because his body is a desiring machine connected literally to every part in the universe. In contrast to the Brad and Janet celibate machine, frankenfurters machine crosses lines and zones with ease: a cross dressing alien living on earth. Significantly, he gets punished for his body's extension because it is just too excessive. The aliens cannot stand living on earth any longer, the humans cannot tolerate the transgressions of their social roles. The instigator must be eliminated, however the real cause to this reaction is not frankenfurter but the machinery of representation. For life to be represented, things must be in their proper order, and for this order to be recognizable, life must be made into an object. The desiring machine must be broken.Instead, a paranoic machine rears its ugly head- even the aliens have one. No more connections, no more becomings. That mass in the swimming pool-a body of limbs and organs in an orgy of connections - must return to separate individuals. Desire must know its place. And yet at the same time, the machine doesnt stop, When Brad and Janet leave the mansion at the films end, don't their bodies become subjected to another kind of dispositif ? A social body? a Hetero-normative assemblage connected to state organs,scientific organs, capitalist organs? Deleuze would argue that there are only machine assemblages-dispositifs- assembling and arranging matter, which is why he and his colleague Foucault argue that subjectivity is nothing more than 'power relations'. The main issue for Deleuze is whether these power relations are reactive or active.
Towards the end of his life, Gilles Deleuze wrote two books on film-the movement image and the time image. I believe his serious interest in film derived from his life long obsession to discover an inhuman perception which he recognizes in the cinematic apparatus.Unlike natural perception, the film camera restores objects to an 'aggregate of images', a virgin world . Following Henri Bergsons ideas , Deleuze believes this aggregate of images is the real itself: an object consists of being an image primarily and as well this image has no separation to all other images. Only human perception creates objects and breaks between images-where one object begins and another ends is a matter of human intervention and designation-of representation. In their primordial state, images are connected together as one infinite totality. Because the film camera restores the object back into an image, and returns movement to images, Deleuze believes the film camera is a dispositif of affirmation capable of restoring primordial perception and a primordial being. This pure movement is active since nothing opposes, judges, or stops this movement. Deleuze describes an atom as the best example of a being who reaches into all things, who posseses great extension, a great mobility and range of travel. Simply, activity is movement,machinic movement, the capacity for affection for all things . Reaction is territorialization, mechanism , the use of matter for a specific end-utility. If affirmation is to connect, then reaction is to separate, to put at a distance, and it is only by making images into objects that distance can be created between things. This is why desire as creation becomes so important to Deleuze since then desire creates connections, returning an object to a movement image. In contrast, reactive imagery attempts to restore objects- cliches- and moves in the opposite direction away from machinism to a kind of recognition and identification.
Cinematic Body
While much has been said about film and fantasy, it would be mistaken to identify the the film world as fantasy in the same mistaken manner that we label the mental world as fantasy. Frankenfurters political platform-" dont dream it, be it" - aims to challenge fantasy as secondary, compensatory, and subordinate to 'the reality principle'. And while he alludes mostly to sexual fantasy in his anthem, Frankenfurters existence as alien, sexual deviant, inventor etc..is testimony to fantasy as real. His body parallels the body of cinema which picks up from Spinoza's famous musing : " we do not know what a body can do" . In both the body of Frankenfurter and the cinematic apparatus we witness experience into all possibilities of reality. The intertextual allusions in RHPS- alien, horror, and camp genres sewn together- are not only references to other movies but to the machinic movement of the cinematic apparatus itself, a movement that constitutes frankenfurters life. The RHPS is simply a festival of film, an expression of the cinematic apparatus-of what it can do.
It would be a reduction then to classify RHPS as merely 'gay' or ' camp' or 'queer'. Of course, those terms are undeniably there. But to reduce queer to narrative, to actions made by a character, is to miss the value of cinema itself as a queer machine. In the collection of essays " Reading Rocky Horror" , Jeffrey Weinstock frames RHPS in a typical dichotomy: status quo values versus the counter culture. While this is actually true historically-RHPS was made in the midst of Watergate, the moral majority, and the counter cultural revolution- such reductions ignore the machinic movements of queer culture and cinema ,expressing subversion only as an affront to established values, as a kind of minor rebellion, a tantrum. Why Frankenfurter and his cinematic lifestyle must die is precisely because queer activity usually gets framed as a reaction to the norm. What I would like to illustrate in this next section is how queer politics cannot be a reaction to norms, but is-like the cinematic apparatus- a ruination of representation. At the core of this argument is the status of fantasy which cannot be taken as a substitution but as a real fact. As mentioned before, the homosexual must create a new sexual object and this is the nature of deviant desire (and probably why many homosexuals are creative) . However, 'creation' is not substitution-the anus is not pretending to be a vagina, the penis is not a stand in for a breast. Faced with a limited palette of options, the deviant begins to invent a new body of desire, a hybrid species that cannot exist within the norm of male/female signification.
Besides homosexuality and transvestism the RHPS contains incest, s/m, orgies, cannibalism and other less obvious perverse trends. While some viewers may interpret this cornucopia of deviancy to express the simple message of shock value, I would suggest that libidinal pathos is a means for the body to make new connections, to create new relationships. Rather than shut down and withdraw from objects, the body opens onto a new plateau of libidinal becomings and intensities in the same way as the camera searches for new image arrangements, new connections. The activity of perversion then cannot be recognized as a reaction to a norm or a disavowal of reality but more like the movement image, as activity, as an assemblage of desire, a machinic arrangement. Like the cinematic apparatus, to be queer becomes a practice . The questionn becomes " what can a queer body do?" and not 'what designates 'queer'? To move everywhere, to cross lines, zones, thresholds and intensities-to be a movement image is queer expression.
Taken to the extreme, in both cinema and psychology, the movement image expresses a kind of pandemonium, a chaos or schizophrenia of connections loosely tied together . Deleuze exhibits Vertov's "man with a movie camera" - the 1920's constructivist soviet film which reduces a city into a zone of abstract lines and movements- as the great example of visual schizophrenia.However, RHPS never falls into the abyss of meaning since it remains tied to a musical comedy. The real depth of madness, of a horrible schizophrenia, a monstrously transformed body, is better expressed in David Cronenbergs oeuvre where the surface of representation always collapses under a heated intensity of psychosis .In Naked Lunch, the protagonist William Lee becomes homosexual. However, this becoming does not take the form of a declaration or a celebration. It is an hallucination, a gradual deterioration of reality where the intensive zones of gay sex surface everywhere. Lee's typwriter transforms into part insect, part anus, and Lee begins to imagine a body dominated by its asshole-a becoming anus ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRjIwOk_Nqw&feature=related) The signature of Cronenberg is specifically a bodily becoming, a zone of intensity. A becoming Fly, a becoming car crash, (crash) , becoming transexual (M Butterfly) ,becoming scientific experiment (dead ringers), or becoming madness (spider). In each film the intensity of becoming transfigures the body into a singular creation. If montage is visual extension -the suturing of images together- then intensity is the felt sense of this montage, the felt existence of this being, this new creature. To become homosexual is then to invent new sexualities on the body, new intensive zones, and this is why the RHPS exhibits so many of these experiments. To be gay is really 'to experiment', to discover new zones of sexual pleasure, new couplings, new bodies. Cinema is also the same: to film is to delve deeply into the real , to traverse all genres and history by tying them together into a singular monstrous movement image.
