heaves.
Popular lore has it that society is fascinated with the congenitally anomalous because we higher primates have the inner sense that underneath our skins we are all defective somehow. This theme has never been more apparent than in the mother of all freaksploitation movies -- Tod Browning�s sublime 1933 shocker, Freaks.
Though circus sideshows had been making the rounds for years, and congenital oddballs been otherwise oggled and set apart since the beginning of time, director Tod Browning was chastised for making a movie about this particular historical footnote. Browning, whose career was built on his propensity to shock with such Lon Chaney collaborations as the exquisitely perverse The Unknown, as well as his 1931 masterpiece Dracula, pushed the envelope as far as it would go when he traded in makeup and camera tricks for the real thing with Freaks.
Stark, beautiful and compassionate, Freaks tells the story of a little man on the midway who has turned his drarfism into a thriving career. Enter Cleopatra, an outwardly attractive but inwardly conniving woman who seduces our hero into a marriage celebrated by all his compatriots in the ten-in-one, despite their misgivings about opening their hearts and community to an ostensibly �normie.� Meanwhile, covertly, Cleopatra is in league with the circus strong man to steal her liliputian lothario�s fortune, never foreseeing that she's not the only one keeping secrets.
As in the great Sophoclean tragedies, it is Cleopatra�s fatal flaw that foretells her undoing. Her greed deforms her every bit as much as the Armless Legless Wonder. In the film�s chilling and intensely disturbing finale, the freaks become the masters of fate instead of its slavedogs, as they mete out their own unique brand of justice on the unlucky bride, falling on her while chanting a relentless, haunting judgment: �one of us! ONE OF US!�
For a movie that is so nakedly revealing and truthful about such a dark, musty corner of the human experience, it's relevant to note that Browning's insight into the sideshow world is rooted in real-life experience. Browning joined a traveling circus while still a teenager, eventually working his way up to performing as a contortionist and illusionist with an act called �the Living Hypnotic Corpse.� An early association with D.W. Griffith led to his entre into the movie business, but it was a drunken car accident that catapulted him head first into the headlines as some of the more illicit reports alluded to a disfigurement in the tenderest of places. Whether this is fact of an ourgrowth of his seeming obsession with physical transgressions and monstrosities has never come to light (at least to this reviewer). In any case, Freaks is said to have damaged his career to such an extent that he made a few more unremarkable features then retired in 1941. He died 21 years later.
The congenitally joined Hilton Sisters (Violet and Daisy, not the arguably more freakish Paris and Nikki), who made their silver screen debut in Freaks but became truly ready for their close-up in the freaksploitation melodrama Chained for Life, embody what would become the thriving subgenre of Siamese Twin movies. As freaks go, none has peopled the movies more than the congenitally fused -- whether they take the form of Margot Kidder in Brian De Palma�s clever if silly ode to siamese twins, Sisters; or Dead Ringers, David Cronenberg�s superlative study of the real life twins Cyril and Stewart Marcus. The psychology of the twin is a spicy yet potent cocktail of identity transference, familial security and emotional slavery that does not begin and end with twins but speaks to universal truths about the ties that bind. What Hitchcock took a swung at for schizoid projection in the final five minutes of his horror hall-of-famer Psycho, Frank Henenlotter sends flying out of the park for twin-ness in his over-the-top but heartfelt fable, Basket Case.
The Basket Case in question is the parasite half of an autosite-parasite (like Cuato in Total recall, a semi-formed and semi-absorbed twin sibling that remains attached). Severed from his big brother during adolescence, Belial has survived through the most psychologically traumatic dilemma of the twin -- separation. Though he spends some of his time safely tucked inside a wicker basket carried around by Duane (Kevin Van Hentenryck), his "normal" twin brother, the rest of his time Belial is hunting down the perpetrators of his brutal excision from his brother.
Henenlotter�s sensitive and insightful script, along with truly inspired performances from both flesh and blood and not-too-shabby prosthetics, help push this low budget B-movie into the airy heights of cult classic territory. Henenlotter is a director whom horror fans would be ill-served to forget. His (and co-writer Robert Martin�s) subsequent film, Frankenhooker, is one of the most unique horror films ever made, but 1992�s Basket Case 3: The Progeny was the last known incidence of him picking up a camera. Now known mainly for his warehouse full of "sexy shockers" available by mail order, his presence behind the camera is sorely missed.
With medical science grinding its way out of the dark ages and barbarism finding more than adequate outlets, the sideshow (in its old form, at least) has become a thing of the past. Though a fire consumed P.T. Barnum�s famed freak palace long ago, vestiges of the old rites can be found by the patient prospector. Mummified organs of extravagant size or misshapen foeti in formaldehyde pop up here or there, be they real flesh or plaster-of-paris. The low-key Mutter Museum in Philadelphia is probably the best freakshow around, containing in its sealed chamber such psychologically resonant pieces as the actual web of flesh which connected the original Siamese twins, Chang and Eng.
Alas, the cyclical surge of �freak fetishism� has come �round again. In a culture in which hipsters wear bad taste like a badge of honor, oggling the �freak� is no longer a viable American pastime -- becoming the freak, or as Cronenberg perceptively forecasted, the "new flesh," is now a real life option.
Self-created P.T. Barnum-for-the-�90s Jim Rose built a mini-empire on our urges to explore the freak within with his Jim Rose Circus Sideshow. Shot live in Seattle, Washington, the film documents a brief moment in time before some of his collection of self-made freaks disbanded to the four winds, to be remembered for little more than their appearance in a particularly memorable episodes of The X-Files. But in this documentary, Jim Rose, a passionate barker, takes his audience through a stomach-churning lineup of extremists, each of whom displays his own unique self-taught freakism.
These anomalies have scratched and clawed at the tapestry of �90s culture for their place in the sun, and there on Jim Rose�s stage, each of them has a once-in-a-lifetime chance to shine. The Torture King�s meat-skewer-through-the-f***ing-face trick along with Lifto�s nifty penis trick, Matt �The Tube� Crowley�s gut-wrenching bile cocktail and the Enigma�s creepy snack food demonstration are real showstoppers. But while it ain�t bad, it�s no shadowy glimpse of a pickled punk in a tent.
When we look past the piercings, tattoos, stretch marks, calluses and scarred stomach linings, we see ourselves leering back at us. These freaks weren't born different -- it's a choice each one made, a crucial difference. Watching self-made freaks removes the catharsis of a shadowy glimpse at a pickled punk in a tent, or a solemn hermaphrodite like the poignant oracle in Flannery O'Connor's amazing short story "A Temple of the Holy Ghost." There is no emerging clean of all fear and doubt, no repentent humility at our essential nuts & bolts humanity. The sideshow was always a mirror. To oggle in a ten-in-one is to worry the edges of our essential human identity, glimpsing but not making full eye contact with the freak within us all.
This and some of my other reviews were originally written for Eulogy Magazine.
heaves.