Raspberry Revolution

Bruce LaBruce is a funny motherfucker. The other night my roommate and I watched The Raspberry Reich, which I hadn't seen before - surprisingly, Netflix has it! Where Otto: or, Up with Dead People is sort of a softcore porn gay zombie movie with satirical and political underpinnings, Raspberry Reich is more of the sort of film Andy Warhol may have made about midway through his film career if he had been working in East Berlin in the early 2000s and simultaneously more overtly political and more hardcore pornographic than Warhol ever was.

There's no denying it's a very homoerotically - no, homosexually - arousing film, and at the same time, I found it more entertaining than I expected. There were definitely moments where I felt, "LaBruce is just using the appearance of political subtext to satisfy his desire to see cute 'straight' young dudes get it on with each other." Well, no harm there, imho. BLB obviously has the same taste in guys that I do. The film is replete with hypersexualized Marxist propaganda and slogans such as "Out of the bedrooms and onto the streets!", "Heterosexuality is the opiate of the masses!" and "The Revolution is my boyfriend!" Of course, historically in Communist countries pornography has been outlawed and repressed, but that would only enhance its usefulness as a talisman of the sort of rebellion and revolution yearned and struggled for by the film's characters (particularly the hilarious Gudrun, portrayed by Susanne Sachße, who is much like the figure of Medea Yarn - an anagram of Maya Deren - in Otto.)

No doubt about it, this is fun stuff, bridging the gap between art and hardcore porn, with a heavy dollop of radical socialist politics thrown in. Not everyone's cup of tea, no doubt. I won't be recommending it to mum any time soon. But somehow, despite the explicit sexual sequences, I never found it more than...innocently charming. If you enjoy/can stomach films such as Shortbus, Caligula, Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom, Warhol films like Flesh and Chelsea Girls, and early John Waters movies like the infamous Pink Flamingos, this may work for you. If not, just play it safe and read about it here.

As for my own attitude, Perry Farrell summed it up best years ago: Nothing's shocking.