The testes have dropped! The whole mess is complete!
And who makes a film franchise chronicling the slow droppage of the balls anyway? Oh right, Matthew Barney does. And it seems if you couch that in as many ideas culled from a myriad of other sources, the overall effect has the appearance of depth to many. But the fact remains that The Cremaster Cycle is a hermetic system – Barney admits so much himself – a self-contained and self-reflexive work that offers up no more insight, in the end, than into its own inner workings. That can be interesting and all, and can offer up in the proper gallery settings as good product placement for the same statues Barney has for sale in the lobby, but that’s it. Cremaster is its own thing, and can have no significant conversation with the greater aesthetic world, be it cinema, performance, sculpture or photography.
Or opera…Cremaster 5 employs opera as its central motif, using its Budapest opera house setting to tell basically the same meta-narrative as Cremaster 4 explored via the Isle of Man. As the final piece of a mostly-answered symbolic system, and a means to join the technical skill between Cremasters 1 and 2, Cremaster 5 doesn’t have much. Besides, I was pretty drunk when this thing came up (having done the Cycle in a single masochistic sitting), and was ready to be done.
As an opera, Cremaster 5 is a bust. Jonathan Bepler’s Hungarian arias, even with their five-act structure and all that formal jazz, fail to match the visuals. It’s all rather flat. And those visuals are nice, a splendor no one denies, even if they’re too baroque for their own good. As an experience wrapped wholly around the visuals, Cremaster 5 offers no grand transcendence, rather just mixing preexisting nice buildings with Barney’s own biological prosthetics and Vaseline creations – two things I have grown very unfond of in the past 6 hours.
I don’t wish to run my same issues into the ground – the intended meaning cannot be derived without access to outside reading, which only then informs us of the supposed despair and longing the film dabbles in. That’s par for the course, so I won’t go into histrionics about yet another Harry Houdini reference, or essential character titles unrevealed, or all that other goodness. Rather I shall make this writing experience as fruitless as the viewing, and just relay the facts.
Ursula Andress stars as the Queen of Chains. Yeah, “Queen” I can see. But “Chains?” The central premise is that Ursula Andress makes balls drop – a fact most young men learned upon viewing Dr. No, which made the point more efficiently and potently. Basically, she’s here so Barney can have a classic sex symbol to construct his body-hugging sculpture-costumes onto, and then share an onscreen kiss with later. Most of us would do the same.
The Queen has to aides, Asian twins. They bore me.
Also, the Queen is the central voice in Bepler’s tossed-off opera. I’ve seen Ursula Andress’ lips issue forth someone else’s voice before (again, Dr. No), but for an opera, that’s pretty pointless.
As for Andress’s costume, which Barney put such, er, effort into, well…meh. She has two dangling glass spheres upon her head, and I’ve run out of creative ways to point out the exceedingly obvious testicles. Also, her mat is pink, and has anuses. For no reason, there are Jacobin pigeons all about – Okay, one reason: They’re nice to look at. (Same reason Andress is here.)
On the opera’s stage is Her Diva (Barney, now literally hogging the spotlight). Barney is nude, once again, with a Vaseline phallus given full attention. From now on, such information shall be conveyed through the following symbol: ¥
Her Diva climbs the opera’s proscenium, dislodging flowers. As in every notion that can be stated in a simple and elegant sentence, this act is on screen for the better part of 10 minutes.
The Lanchid Bridge, that which joins Buda and Pest, crosses the Danube at night. Upon it is Her Magician (Barney, natch). ¥. He is shackled – guess in what material – and carrying a great clanging ball and chain because – say it to the heavens – GONADS! GONADS GONADS GONADS GONADS! I am fucking sick of this thought process! Her Magician considers leaping from the bridge. Reading the essays Barney wrote to supplement his own insufficient movie (though I could’ve just translated the Hungarian arias – sure), I learn that Her Magician intends the same nebulous moment of metamporphic transcendence we’ve already put up with for four entries. Footage cuts back and forth to Andress. This is normal in Cremaster, because the editor sucks, except this one and only time it’s because she’s interacting with this footage – instead of the usual, directionless reasoning. So she fears he intends suicide. Yeah, suicide because his testicles are growing!
Down in the Gellert Baths, Barney is Her Giant. Also, ¥. He walks along in a manner I would call slow, even by Cremaster standards, along a watery isthmus separating two baths – the two distinct genders. By Barney’s admission, this tile peninsula is supposed to be Ursula Andress’ perineum (it’s her taint). Tasteful! Androgynous mermaids are in the water – okay, androgyny is nearly as common as ¥ is. Swimming takes place for a while as I drift in and out of booze-related unconsciousness.
Her Giant plunges the liquid, ribbons ties to his nascent junk – We’re at exactly the spot Cremaster 4 left off! I guess the majority of 5 was just a waste of time then! So, pigeons pull on the ribbons, and lo and behold, there are gonads in the water.
Andress shrieks in mortal terror.
Her Magician dives from the bridge, into a bed of exquisitely meaningless river flowers.
Her Diva also falls. I’m getting the faintest hint falling has to do with the titular testicular tale.
There’s tapioca in the water. It’s over.
The Music Box Theater then puts on one of Barney’s later efforts, De Lama Lâmina. I can only assume it’s about a plastic-covered alpaca…that, or just more Vaseline and penises. I did not stick around to find out.
So…The Cremaster Cycle, a franchise all about the scrotum. About its muscular descent, more specifically. I could do something like that! It’ll be a five-film piece about the act of passing flatulence, called The Sphincter Ring. Part 1 concerns the nitrogen, 2 the hydrogen, 3 the carbon dioxide, and so forth (oxygen, methane). Assorted visual metaphors would be developed to portray peristaltic movement and anal embouchure. And to let people know it’s not all about the butt, complex and veiled reference would be made to the works of Plato, ancient Olmec myth, the life cycle of the wombat, Scientology, continental drift, Goedelian logical criteria, prop comic Carrot Top, this one credit card statement I got back in 2007, the Chernobyl disaster, forms of Middle Italian economics, and Season Three of “Buffy.” It would try to do for John Waters (and the singing rectum in Pink Flamingoes) what Barney does for David Lynch – that is, copy his styling while achieving a mere fraction of his triumph. People will be too confused to say it’s bad. But as a flatulence franchise, it shall mostly be full of hot air.
Related posts:
• No. 2 Cremaster 1 (1996)
• No. 4 Cremaster 2 (1999)
• No. 5 Cremaster 3 (2002)
• No. 1 Cremaster 4 (1995)
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