A Productive Fake has a Stake: Unnaming in THE OWLS

Over the past few days I’ve been teaching my recent writing about fake docs on YouTube to my Media Studies seniors, while thinking a lot about THE OWLS (and reading Trans Theory, more on this below) and chatting with my friend and colleague, Jennifer Friedlander, on her recent writing on art-world scams and reality-TV shams, as inflected by Lacan and Zizek. It’s enough to make a girl’s head swim with delight, below some avenues of flight (please, please, please respond, these ideas are new, and dangerous, and open to change):

While we were making THE OWLS, Campbell X, our “sound-man” (she’s a talented British director in her own right) noted in one of our talking-head interviews (the crew and cast were interviewed across the production about the themes and meta-themes of the film: queer cinema and identity, lesbian culture, aging, and the like) that as an English-woman of Caribbean descent she found it important that the two black characters in the film (played by Cheryl Dunye and Skyler Cooper) respectively, were not NAMED as black in the screenplay. The B-team (shooting the “documentary” component of the film), myself, Mariah Garnett and Rhys Ernst discussed (on camera) with Campbell the productive potential for unknowing in such post-identity moves.

Skyler and Lisa, Sky and Lily, THE OWLS

How could we guess the complex intellectual, artistic, and political ripples that would surface just the next day upon the visit to our set of theorist and activist Jack Halberstam to engage the cast in discussions of trans vs. butch identity and politics. For it came to our attention that the film’s six characters were also unnamed in relation to their gender/sexuality identification, although, given Cheryl’s interests, the assumption was that all the characters were probably women, who were lesbians, and mostly butch. Just so, it turned out that Skyler chose to play her character Skye, as an androgynous looking but female identified woman, just as she chooses to enact herself.

Some of the B-team, Rhys and Mariah, THE OWLS

And here the so-called “generational divide” presented itself, on one “side,” the nostalgic celebration of the lesbian or female or feminist, on the other the seeking for gender and sexual unmooring. During Jack’s talking head interview, he identified as “transgenderd butch” and then suggested that trans-people still need to be named (or counter-intuitively moored) because unknowing leaves them unseen, as fresh and fragile and mostly invisible is this position, even as post-trans theory hopes for the differences between performativity and materiality, the image and the body to remain unfastened and unfixed.

Carol, Cheryl, THE OWLS (all photos by Love)

Which brings the theoretical and political concerns that I’ve been toying with her, most recently, to a certain sort of front and center. Unknowing and unnaming, like any tactics or forms, are only relevant in relation to goals, communities, bodies, and practices. They too must at times float and at others be fixed. While the unknowing of race is liberating for Cheryl, Skyler and Campbell, the unnaming of trans silences for Jack, Mariah, Rhys and Deak Evgenikos. The ironic free-fall I’ve been thinking about lately, the place where the difference between the “real” and the “fake,” the known and the unknowable, the fixed and the uncertain are indeterminate is an unproductive place of muddle (if perhaps fleeting fun) until it is attached to something that matters: a stake in the future. A stake, which signifies the hard, mean and cutting over the soft, drab, and unmoving (of say the anchor).

As we discussed in class yesterday, while it once seemed enough to work towards a future where people learned that there was a critical distance between themselves and the “objective” or “ideological” productions of dominant culture, this knowledge, so obviously secured in what Friedlander identifies as the contemporary audience’s “knowing very well but even so” is not enough if it occurs in isolation, as an end in itself, unlinked to a body, a movement, or best of all, a project of becoming.

Lisa and Campbell, THE OWLS (photo by Love)

Whereas in my recent writing I had been wanting an anchor (to the “Real,” or what Zizek calls “the shock of the truth”), I now reconsider this to be an attachment and a commitment to a dream of a better reality.

Bad On Purpose: On the Corporate Faking of Hand-Made Films

I’m provoked. Just saw Paper Heart and this charming pseudo-naive cynical/happy fake-rumination on love by comedienne Charlyne Li pushes this blog’s fixations on fake documentary’s current yummy banality to new highs or perhaps lows.

I propose Paper Heart to be another member of what I’d like to call the slow-film movement (I’ve already written about Be Kind Rewind and Zach and Miri Make a Porno as high achieving students in this pseudo school, but we’d need to remember Dogme 95 as well), by which I really mean the bad-film movement, by which I refer to corporately financed and released feature films that at once mimic, make fun of and glorify an over-the-top parody of hand-made (DIY, YouTube) style. It seems that just as it true with food and foodies who relish expensive old-fashioned tomatoes, filmmakers are rebelling against corporate made excess, manipulation, expense, blandness and froth by faking the heirloom forms and humble preoccupations of people-made video: intentional shadows where any studio would produce over-lit scenes, staging actors in stinky Motel 6 lodgings as if anyone would stoop to such grimy lows, or actors underplaying scenes and feelings to the point of the zero-degree non-acting (of the fake-doc Office) that is all the rage on television and the YouTube that both leads and follows it.

However, the ultimate pinnacle of this new practice is represented through the inclusion of  Yi’s childish puppet shows (and hand-made score, written and performed by fellow [real movie] star, Michael Sera) which punctuate her film to illustrate the “true” love stories of the “real” corn-husker over-weight charming real-people documentary subjects she “finds” “on the road” (although critically, this film really does seem to like its real people, unlike say Borat or the recent indie narrative that covers much of the same ground as Hearts, Away We Go) as if the art practices of six year olds are the new cherished vernacular for adult indie cinema even as, or perhaps precisely because today’s six year olds actually produce masterful, highly mediated video through the ubiquitous use of home video programs (many made for children) that allow anyone to make slick media. My kids would never show the edges of  cardboard and pieces of string in their puppet shows. This corporate-financed retro-futurist throwback winks at nostalgic memories of an improbable time when there was any terrain of media untouched by the machine, just made by the wee babes. But face facts: it’s made by the machine. Hmm.

And how does Yi’s movie-making feel to adults? Sweet-ish. I guess. Sappy but self-knowing. Cynical in reverse. Because, of course, I’m currently working on my own mean-spirited contemporary fake doc, The Owls (just wrapped principle photography, yeah!) returning in its special middle-aged way to the hand-made styles, desires, and communities of its actual (not imagined) forebearer, the new queer cinema and the “real” indie feature of the 90s. We actually did shoot The Owls for $15K (and The Watermelon Woman for $30), while Paper Heart pretends to (I’d love to know its budget and finance history), and our crew actually fights about (and self-reflexively tapes) whether we should still strive for the beautiful Hollywood style many of us have become accustomed to or whether a brash, bad, ugly style that marks our actual poverty would be more interesting. The one Yi fakes. Furthermore, Yi and Cera bumble into love, playing themselves as naive, nerdy, almost asexual pre-teen-like grown-ups (something Owl’s star and director Cheryl Dunye did in her earliest work, She Don’t Fade for instance), while our cast plays it all as post-love: the site of violence, sadness, manipulation, and anger.

Which brings to be mind the edgy fake doc anthem of my youth, Sandra Berhard’s Without You I’m Nothing.

In our time we loved this fake doc because it angrily pushed against simplified and packaged ideas of race, sexuality, and gender. To fake was to cut, hard. Now it’s just to play, soft. Love/Schmove.

Watermelon Woman: Release Our Print!

Although the film I produced, The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1995) was a festival and art house hit, we never saw any money, and our master rots at DuArt. We owe them $3000 or so. We’re using a screening at Redcat in LA to ask for your help. If the print can be freed it can be re-mastered and saved by the Outfest Legacy Collection (where my own Women of Vision is already proudly archived).

Here’s info about our May 11 fundraiser.

Phyllis Stein Art would like to invite you to please join us for a reception honoring Director Cheryl Dunye.

Emceed by Dalila Ali Rajah (of AfterEllen’s Cherry Bomb.) The evening will include special guest appearances by members of the original ‘Watermelon Woman’ cast and crew. Burlesque performance by Malaika Millions. DJ set by Anna Margarita Albelo

The night will include an art auction, all proceeds go towards adding Watermelon Woman to the Outfest Legacy Collection at UCLA. Due to economic constraints, labs notoriously discard film elements – please save Watermelon Woman! Placing the film into the archive is the first and best step against film disintegration!

Notable artists contributing:
Nichole Eisenman, Ceres Madoo, Sharon Bridgeforth, Kaucyila Brooke, S. Lee Robinson, Eve Fowler, Nolan Hendrickson, Rachel Maxi

Contact: cheryl@watermelon.phyllissteinart.com