~*ARTZ*~
Written by Davey Gravy
Every week I attend a class, and in this class we sometimes watch porn. Now, before you go jumping off your warm squishy bee-hinds in excitement you should probably understand something. This class is called Transgressive Cinema, which means in a nutshell “Movies that have freaked out and continue to freak out the squares.” While you may or may not consider yourself a square, or failing that a quadrilateral of any kind, you should consider exactly what that means. We have watched close to thirty-nine jillion films thus far in this class, and nearly all of them have had a ratio of ten diarrhea bombardments per every one boob. If you’re like me and haven’t taken math since you were four, basically what that means is that if you like porn, which considering you’re on the internet I can only assume you passionately do, you still may be unlikely to enjoy Transgressive porn.
The plus side for you is that you don’t need to watch the movies that I do, but you still get to read what I have to say about them in my weekly 500 word essays. What follows is the essay I wrote last night about Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassssssss Song. The italics from the actual paper have been removed due to a computer virus that has infected the internet. If you’d rather not read my stupid essay, please enjoy this drawring on your way out. Thank you.
I wasn’t completely sure what to expect from Sweet Sweetback’s Baadaaassssss Song, but I admittedly had certain expectations. The title alone lends itself to certain blacksploitation love letters that followed in its footsteps, for me namely Pootie Tang. But with a quick scan of my memories through the content of Pootie Tang, I put two and two together and decided that its nonsense-speaking protagonist’s innovative use of gibberish and silence in hip-hop simply wouldn’t be enough of a push against the norm to make it a transgressive film. Sure enough, Sweetback’s opening sequence assured me that I was in for more of transgressive cinema’s fundamental roots: under-aged nudity, low production value, and probably a giant cock or two. The story got a tad hazy after that for me. I found myself getting lost in the whole 1970’s low-budget appeal when the story stopped making sense, then a mind-bogglingly hilarious stylistic choice would throw me back in.
A few of these choices come to mind. I found the cops’ one-camera blank-faced interrogation of Sweetback particularly amusing. The film had enough of these types of things to hold me in a state of full-on attention, even though most of the time I had no idea what the fuck was supposed to be going on. Its seemingly completely unprovoked sex scenes (which I guess could be explained as simply as necessities under the filmmaker’s guise of making a porn movie to gain funds) though confusing, didn’t oddly enough seem out of place among the other scenes. Somehow the disjointed layering of one tough guy moment after another, coupled with jarring lighting shifts that at times changed the film’s style, seemed to fit together. I wasn’t even thrown off-balance by the abrupt changes in soundtrack from one mono track to the next. It again seemed somehow appropriate. I could almost hear Sweetback himself saying to me, “Look how little the Man left us to make this piece of shit! We can’t even afford stereo!”
Eventually, I reached that same point I almost always reach when watching a film someone tells me is unconventional. It is the point at which the viewer must say, “This is it. It’s not going to get any better. You might as well lose hope.” In the case of Sweetback, I accepted this notion rather light-heartedly. I would rather not leave any misconceptions about this movie. Know that I, by the end, was completely bored out of my fucking skull. Those fleeting hints of enjoyment I experienced throughout were mere pinpricks. But my enjoyment as a viewer aside, cramming in a bunch of shit to keep me going would’ve been totally inappropriate. A one track sloppy recording of a church congregation saying, “Run, Sweetback,” inter-cut maniacally with the same cheap piece of looped music over and over again fit this film so well I wouldn’t dare touch them. Beyond that, I have only one thing left to say: the best part was when he rode on top of the van.
