Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Author: Dean DeFino
Date: 2014-02-18 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Movies & Video; Politics & Social Sciences; Social Science/Popular Culture; Social Sciences; Humor & Entertainment; Criticism; Documentaries; Movies; History & Criticism; Direction & Production; Biogr
Description: Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) is an enigma. A box-office failure when initially released on the grindhouse circuit, it has since been embraced by art-house audiences, and referenced in countless films, television series, and songs. A riot of styles and story clichés lifted from biker, juvenile delinquency, and beach party movies, it has the coherence of a dream, and the improvisatory daring of a jazz solo. John Waters has called it the greatest movie ever made, and Quentin Tarantino has long promised to remake it. But what draws them, and so many other cult fans to Pussycat
Publisher: Wallflower Press
Rights: Dean DeFino 2014

CULTOGRAPHIES

CULTOGRAPHIES is a new list of individual studies devoted to the analysis of cult film. The series provides a comprehensive introduction to those films which have attained the coveted status of a cult classic, focusing on their particular appeal, the ways in which they have been conceived, constructed and received, and their place in the broader popular cultural landscape.

For more information, please visit www.cultographies.com

Series editors: Ernest Mathijs (University of British Columbia) and Jamie Sexton (University of Wales, Aberystwyth)

OTHER PUBLISHED TITLES IN THE CULTOGRAPHIES SERIES

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW

Jeffrey Weinstock

DONNIE DARKO

Geoff King

THIS IS SPINAL TAP

Ethan de Seife

BAD TASTE

Jim Barratt

SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY

Glyn Davis

THE EVIL DEAD

Kate Egan

BLADE RUNNER

Matt Hills

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA

Ian Cooper

FRANKENSTEIN

Robert Horton

QUADROPHENIA

Stephen Glynn

FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!

Dean DeFino

WALLFLOWER PRESS

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Copyright © Dean DeFino 2014
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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Russ Meyer and Me

1      The Pussycats Gear Up
2      The Pussycats Find Their Audience
3      Seeing America First
4      Pussycats and Satyrs
5      A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to the many folks who helped in the preparation of this book. In particular, I wish to thank: my patient and thoughtful readers, Barbara Solomon, Stanley Solomon and Matt Longabucco; my editors, Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton, for their trust; Alex Eodice, who, as Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Iona College, supported my research with travel funds and release time; and my wife, Whitney, who supported me in every other way.

for Whitney,
who teaches me to see

INTRODUCTION

RUSS MEYER AND ME

The patient, a man in his late twenties, reported a periodic desire to be injured by a woman operating an automobile.

– M. H. Keeler, American Journal of Psychiatry (1960)[1]

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence, the word and the act.

– Narrator, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)

Not long ago, I had the opportunity to hear David Lynch speak to a motley assembly of earnest young art geeks, alt-rock poseurs and merlot-sipping baby boomers, all asking versions of the same questions Lynch must have suffered hundreds of times before: Who is your favorite surrealist? How can you create such dark worlds and still remain detached from them? Didn’t I see you standing on a sidewalk in Queens eight years ago? Listening to Mr. Lynch’s patient responses, I wondered where I fitted into this crowd, and while waiting dutifully in line after the talk for a handshake with the man who brought Frank Booth and Henry Spenser into my world, I had the opportunity to put the question to the excited young film student standing in front of me. ‘Are these really our peers?’ I asked as he instructed me how to operate the camera function of his cell phone. I took his awkward smile for encouragement, and joked that I would be more comfortable among the quick-stepping crowd filing out of the 24-hour video stores on Manhattan’s Eighth Avenue, because at least there you knew who you were dealing with. My companion hesitated a moment, then forced a polite chuckle, clearly wishing he had entrusted someone else with this priceless photo op. Which probably would have been a good idea, since I think Mr. Lynch was out of focus.

Killer women in cars

As fans, we are not always sure about the company we keep, which is one of the reasons some of us become critics and scholars. The application of critical rigour is in large part an attempt to justify our tastes despite those who may happen to share them. It is the worst sort of snobbery, and perhaps the purest application of reason: validation in a vacuum, or at least within the controlled environment of rational argument. We posit, we show causality, we speculate, we conclude, all in the name of exaltation. So doing, it is easy to forget that what we exalt lives not just in our own perception, but in the shared – and sometimes grossly opposed – perceptions of a community. And perhaps what disturbed me most standing in the company of a sort of evolutionary scale for pale ironic yuppies is that I simply did not want to think of myself as anything so nebulous. But as film critic Robert Warshow famously observed, ‘A man watches a movie, and the critic must acknowledge he is that man’ (1962:xli).

I stopped telling colleagues that I was writing a book about a Russ Meyer film the fifth or sixth time I got the look of barely-hidden disgust one might expect at admitting a love for Nicholas Sparks or Rush Limbaugh. Doing critical work on the films of Russ Meyer is a bit like trying to argue the virtues of human cloning or the Marquis de Sade: to most people, their merits seem beside the point. Meyer is known, if at all, as a smut peddler and breast fetishist, and though his enormous influence on the evolution of exploitation cinema is frequently noted, his films have generally been presented as the overheated fantasies of a stunted adolescent. This opinion is one Meyer helped to foster – mostly because he thought it was good for business – but it makes it difficult for a critic to identify with him, his work and his audience.

At the risk of sounding disingenuous or pompous, I should say that I am not generally a fan of Russ Meyer, nor of most exploitation films. While I admire the duct-tape-and-baling-wire production values of Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast, 1963; Two Thousand Maniacs!, 1964) and Doris Wishman (Bad Girls Go to Hell, 1965; Double Agent 73, 1974), their films generally leave me flat, and the rank misogyny of Bob Cresse (Mondo Bizarro, 1966; Love Camp 7, 1969) and Roberta and Michael Findlay (Touch of Her Flesh, 1967; Snuff, 1976) quickly devolves into tedium save the few moments they manage to zap my senses with their ‘Did I just see what I thought I saw?’ amateur theatrics. And though Meyer’s mastery of film form has been commended by even his most vocal critics, for me his technical craft merely amplifies the dearth of narrative, characterisation, and just about anything else that allows for identification, suspense or catharsis. Some see this as a virtue, claiming that Meyer does not let the story get in the way of the sex, the violence and the belly laughs, but for me his female characters are generally too vapid to be sexy, his violent scenes are merely bizarre, and his attempts at comedy make Hee Haw look like Oscar Wilde. Obviously this is a matter of taste, but with Meyer I generally find myself looking at my watch. That is, unless the film happens to be Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

If The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), Lorna (1963), and Vixen! (1968) are the films that made Russ Meyer rich, Pussycat is his masterpiece: a sensory assault of primal images and hardboiled wit, with the blistering tempo of a Charlie Parker solo. It is also the quintessential cult film, an amalgamation of fascinating, seemingly irreducible paradoxes. A box office failure when released in 1966, it has circulated continuously through repertory theatres, film festivals, college campuses and home video since the early 1970s. A mish-mash of ludicrous plot points and avant garde style, it appears at first viewing fully formed and self-evident, like a Jungian archetype. Made by a renowned soft-core pornographer, it is both lascivious and chaste. It stars two legendary strippers – Tura Satana and Haji – who never once doff their clothes and who trade the Sirens’ song for Amazonian strength. Built upon the conventions and clichés of every popular youth genre of the time – from biker and juvenile delinquent films to beach party and road movies – it not only transcends them but every other counter-cultural impulse to follow, from the wave of peace and love that carried a half million people to Max Yasgur’s farm in the summer of 1969, to the orgiastic violence of the same wave breaking at Altamont Raceway three months later. Pussycat is messy and precise, cruel and inviting, cartoonish and neorealistic, transgressive and revelatory. Its pop cultural legacy is enormous, from countless film and television references to music video homage, graphic fiction, multiple cover versions of the film’s main theme and a long-promised remake at the hands of Meyer’s most famous acolyte, Quentin Tarantino. Among its legions of fans and critics, its meanings are hotly debated: Is it proto- or anti-feminist? Is its central character, Varla, a hero or a monster? Is it tragic or comic, cathartic or campy? Is it a one-off masterpiece, or another stage in the evolution of Meyer’s ‘bosomania’ films?

I first saw Pussycat in what might seem the worst possible circumstances: alone in my parent’s basement one undergraduate summer afternoon, on an old IBM PC Jr monitor jury-rigged to a VCR I had won in a Cub Scout raffle. Upon reflection, the bizarre screening conditions only added to the cult appeal of the film, rented from the ‘adult’ section of a local video store and screened in a lightless concrete cave at barely-audible volume, as though I expected the vice squad to break through the door at any moment. The previews for Meyer’s raunchier softcore fare – Supervixens (1975), Up! (1976), Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979) – only amplified the cheerful wrongness of it all. But none of it could have prepared me for the feature.

From the first moments of John Furlong’s stentorian opening monologue, I felt an almost primal connection to the syntax and the language of the film:

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence: the word and the act.

The ominous, vibrating, multiplying lines of Pussycat’s optical track

Against a black screen, the vibrating white lines of the optical soundtrack replicate, the voice both embodied and disembodied, like that of Dr. Mabuse or the Wizard of Oz.

While violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favorite mantle still remains … sex.

As the rhythmic white striations continue to multiply, they become folds in a great black curtain that veils a dark, sensuous secret. The narrator warns of a ‘rapacious new breed’ of femmes fatales who prowl ‘both alone and in packs, operating at any level, any time, anywhere, and with anybody’, and the screen ripples and vibrates with the increasingly-erratic voice.

One might be your secretary, your doctor’s receptionist … or a dancer in a go-go club!

Then the screen explodes in an orgiastic montage of three half-naked women – Varla, Rosie and Billie – dancing on a stage, shot in low-angle medium close-ups, gyrating to the wide-eyed provocations of the blue collar club patrons. The dancers’ back bends and contorting torsos are cross-cut with extreme close-ups of the shouting men as the juke box grinds out the Bostweeds’ ‘Pussycat Theme’. Split seconds, barely time to hold your breath much less take one, then to close-ups of the three women – dressed to kill, speeding across the glaring desert in their sports cars.

Both visceral and abstract, titillating the viewer with the promise of revelation as it threatens and mocks, the sequence holds its own among great film openers: the sliced eyeball of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (1929), the bravado tracking crane shot of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), the prehistoric violence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In less than two minutes of screen time, Meyer manages to introduce the key motifs of the film: the primal relationship between sex and violence, the castration anxiety that undergirds male desire, and the tenuous relationship between female subjectivity and objectification. All the while making us feel as though we are taking part in some great revelation, some secret that the film will unmask. No longer will we be compelled to keep our seats and watch the dancers go so far and no further. This time, they will go all the way, and beyond.

This sense of revelation is a key component to the appeal of many cult films: the ‘Eureka!’ moment of discovery where the cult object seems to reveal – whole and entire – its apparently mystical power to us. At that moment, it feels less like revelation than creation, as though we are there to fulfill the potential of the work, to add the key element necessary to its perpetuation, our own consciousness. Like the detective story that allows us to believe that we are solving the mystery when we are simply having it revealed to us bit by bit, certain texts – and cult texts perhaps most potently – create the illusion that we take part in their making. Hence the participatory aspect of the midnight movie: the sense that the audience’s ritual invocation of dialogue and facsimiles of characters’ costumes sanctify the film, and transform its inherent banalities into the elements of a primal ceremony. Stories create templates for identification, catharsis and resolution, and cult films engender myths of passage and initiation tied up in the moment of discovery, often exaggerated, frequently misremembered. The greater the detail, the more fixed the revelation of such moments.

Hence the many versions of discovery one might find in the Cultographies book series: discoveries made in parents’ basements via Cub Scout raffle VCRs, via well-worn VHS dupes with hand-lettered labels circulating on some mysterious underground, via tentative commitments to accompany friends to a midnight showing, via head shop remainder bins or stolen afternoons in ‘art’ theatres accessed through propped fire doors: strange titles, bizarre images, promises of ritual sublimation. Consistent with cult, our ‘discovery’ of these films seems at once a vocation, initiation and ordination, and that it is often brought about by the most quotidian of means – a poster on a dorm-room wall, a passing mention – only heightens the concurrent sense of destiny. Like Poe’s purloined letter, it is ever in view, but only visible to those who can truly see.

Alas, I would love to say that I first discovered Pussycat through a seductive goth girl in high school, or better still – like Brad and Janet coming upon Frank-n-Furter’s castle at the beginning of the Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) – when my tyre blew out and I found myself knocking on a strange door. But there were no goth girls in my high school (it was the 1980s, when big hair belonged to the masses), and I was eighteen before I had my driver’s licence. The temptation exists, even as I write this, to make up a more compelling story, to satisfy not only my desire, but that of the reader to share in such a moment. Fictions reveal not because they are mimetic, but because they offer a satisfying continuity to contain and highlight these moments of revelation. But I suspect that many people discover cult films and other such artifacts in far less revelatory ways: we hear about them here and there, file bits of information away, and when opportunity arises, we seek them out, not with passion but almost clinical disinterest. One of the key features of any great cult film is that you have to experience it in order to validate its worthiness. Until then, it is little more than a good intention, like so many episodes of a PBS documentary stranded on a DVR, never to be seen. It doesn’t become important, valuable, worthy of cultish allegiance until you have experienced it. And at least for people like me, time spent on a lousy movie – as opposed to a ‘bad’ movie – is bitterly lost. No amount of mourning will bring back the 97 minutes I wasted on Weekend and Bernies II (1993). Where the archetypal fan of cult is a sort of self-styled expeditionary, I see myself more as an anthropologist, working my way slowly and methodically into the culture of the film. It is little surprise, then, that I ended up a film scholar.

My ‘discovery’ of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! did not in fact occur that undergraduate summer day I first saw the film, but some six years prior. It began as little more than a name spoken while I was in the eighth grade by a student two years my senior, delivered with the sort of blasé knowing that engenders casual authority, lent further credence by his Stiv Bators t-shirt and assortment of punk-ironic lapel pins. Devoid of any real context, as I am now certain my friend had not yet seen the film, the title took on a currency in my mind: like the few-remembered lines of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ studied that year in English class, but remembered only as a series of disconnected phrases about uneaten peaches, ragged claws, and pretentious old ladies ‘talking of Michelangelo’.

The year was 1983: Ronald Reagan was rattling sabres at the Soviet Union in an attempt to sell his Strategic Defense Initiative, McDonalds launched the McNugget, Return of the Jedi and Flashdance ruled the box office, and Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video was keeping MTV afloat. It was a time to hang onto rock ‘n’ roll, punk and other dark legacies of the post-War world if one hoped not to lose ones soul to a culture of legwarmers and Members Only. My own tastes ran to Bob Dylan, the Who and Elvis Costello, and my only accessory a classic brown fedora which, at a time when many of my male peers were sporting lace head scarves and costume jewellery, seemed to me a radical statement. It was also the year legendary punk rockers The Cramps covered the Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! theme on their Smell of Female album, a fact I was unaware of at the time, but very likely the reason my protégé carried the banner for the film in the first place. I was not much for movies in those days, too timid for Porky’s (1981) and too bored by S.E. Hinton to bother with Rumble Fish (1983) or The Outsiders (1983). The films that would change my life were ahead of me, but I was a gloomy and disjointed enough 14-year-old to recognise the dark, sexual cadences in Meyer’s film’s title, and sardonic enough to pretend to hold them at arm’s length. There was a sort of crass poetry in the words, strange and grand enough to stand on their own. Through my teenage years – years of sexual if not social development, of shame if not triumph, years without goth girls or any others to speak of – the title had been enough.

Which in part explains why I only bothered to seek out Pussycat at 21, after encountering the title again in a film studies text (or Mad or Harper’s or Necronomicon magazine, if any better serve the tale). The film had been released on home video in the early 1980s, and back when there were local video stores, and those stores actually had titles other than the latest Hollywood releases and a nod to the ‘American Film Institute Top 100’, I found it in an eclectic local shop, back behind the louvered doors of the adult section, between various oversized video boxes whose titles ran the spectrum of obscene puns. But I didn’t need the box dimensions to know that this was not a pornographic movie, nor the cover image of Tura Satana breaking the back of Rob Barlowe on the desert floor, nor Haji dancing the watusi in a sequined bikini, nor the magnificent carnival spiel splashed across the video cover:

Superwomen! Belted, Booted, Buckled!

Russ Meyer’s Ode to the Violence in Women!

Filmed in Glorious Black and Blue!

For I had read about it in a schoolbook (or some magazine not wrapped in plastic). Still, considering where I was and what had brought me there – not to mention the downcast faces that surrounded me in the room behind the louvered doors – the object in my hand seemed more a totem than a curiosity.

In the years since, I have screened the film countless times, and though I have never seen Pussycat at a midnight screening, nor at any other venue where like minds voluntarily convene, I frequently use it to introduce the concept of independent cinema in the many film courses I teach. Meyer remains one of the few truly independent American filmmakers – having personally financed, written, directed, shot, edited and distributed nearly all of his twenty-three theatrical features – and Pussycat is an ideal illustration of the iconoclastic spirit of indie films because it is so accessible, engaging and well-made. It is a remarkably easy film to teach. And though I justify its place on the syllabus by pointing to its influence on filmmakers like John Waters and the way it raises questions later complicated in the works of John Cassavetes, John Sayles and Alison Anders, really I just want to see it for the first time again through my students’ eyes. Their responses to the film mirror my own to an uncanny degree. Most intuitively key in on the dark ironic tone and the Meyer style, with its low ‘Dutch’ angles, arch compositions and rapid editing tempered by the loose, jazzy score. Many find it, as I did at their age, oddly familiar and compelling. Our discussion invariably shifts from what we find ‘cool’ about the film to more weighty issues of film form, sexual politics and its place in film history and the Meyer canon, but time and again I am left with the feeling that I have failed to account for the film’s strange effect upon me.

Did Pussycat change my life that summer day? Did it eclipse the previous decade of awkwardness and frustrated desire with the promise of entry into a secret society, practiced in the rites of Varla? Did it bring me instant credibility among my peers and help to shape my identity in ways that I could not then have predicted? No. In fact, outside of the classroom I doubt I have mentioned the film to more than a half-dozen people since (until I started writing a book about it). But the experience did open my eyes to the power of cinema in ways that few others had or would. Sitting there in my parents’ basement, I felt something akin to déjà vu, the whole instantly recognisable even as its meaning remained ambiguous (I would not say inscrutable). It was the same feeling I had the first time I saw Blue Velvet in 1986, a film that terrified me not for what it showed but for how it seemed to project a dark but familiar recess of my own mind. While I understood Pussycat to be campy and outrageous, its power seemed to me then as now entirely authentic. Unlike the clever but distanced postmodern work of more contemporary filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, Pussycat spoke to some deeper, more sinister part of my brain. For me, this book is an attempt to understand how and why.

1

THE PUSSYCATS GEAR UP

The budgetary formula applied in my earlier films was simple. I would hit upon an idea, and then impose strict limitations upon myself before even considering budget … With just a thin outline in mind, we would try to find a location. Then and there, I would know how to build my story.

– Russ Meyer, ‘The Low-Budget Producer’ (1979:180)

And here’s where our screenplay starts to unfold, right now.

– Varla

Much like our discovery of them, cult films seem simply to emerge as the unforeseen result of rarefied conditions and happy accidents. Idiosyncratic, transgressive and more often than not made under singular circumstances, they should probably not find an audience at all, but each charts its own serpentine path to cult success. In the age of the DVD commentary track, even the casual viewer may be exposed to key facts about a film’s origins, but for the cult fan the act of retracing that serpentine path is a pilgrim’s progress, a ritual sanctification. At first glance, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! looks a lot like any other Russ Meyer film. Produced by one of the most successful independent filmmakers in the history of the medium, it is a work of remarkable craft and formal rigour that, like all Meyer films, came in under budget and on time. Exploiting the lust-and-rage formula that had served him well over his last three films – a formula Meyer described as a combination of Al Capp, Erskine Caldwell and the Bible, which exploited the recent vogue in sex-and-violence exploitation films known as ‘roughies’ – it was marketed to a loyal Meyer audience that had been growing steadily over the half-dozen films since he broke out with his first ‘nudie-cutie’, The Immoral Mr. Teas, in 1959. To its maker, Pussycat was just another Russ Meyer film, conceived not to realise some grand vision but to turn a profit.

Just another Russ Meyer movie?

The only trouble was, it bombed.

PRODUCTION

1964 and 1965 were prolific years for Russ Meyer, with three films made under his own banner, Eve Productions, and a fourth as director-for-hire on Albert Zugsmith’s hamfisted adaptation of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1964). Meyer’s first roughie, Lorna, about a young wanton stuck in a sexless rural marriage, was a massive financial success ($2 million against a $37,000 budget), so Meyer followed up with Mudhoney (1965), a Depression-era ‘shitkicker’ about the perverse underbelly of rural America that plays like God’s Little Acre as imagined by … well, Russ Meyer. But where the waifish Lorna Maitland of Lorna charmed the Meyer nudie-cutie faithful with her soft voice, overheated libido and enormous breasts swollen from pregnancy, the bizarre rural freaks of Mudhoney – including a post-pregnancy Maitland – confounded them. Meyer’s next film, Motor Psycho! (1965), which tells the story of three psychotic hoodlums who roll into town on mopeds and proceed to murder and rape the terrified locals, was more successful, largely because it exploited recent public hysteria about motorcycle gangs (it also predicted the vogue of biker films to follow in the late 1960s). From there sprung the idea of three female hoodlums. It would be the last of the Meyer roughies.

With little more than that basic idea and a $45,000 budget, Meyer turned to friend and former child actor, Jack Moran, who had worked with him on the script for Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962). Moran would script two other Meyer films – Common-Law Cabin and Good Morning… and Goodbye! (both 1967) – and define the Meyer style perhaps more than any other member of his coterie, with the possible exception of Roger Ebert, who co-wrote several of Meyer’s 1970s sex parodies, most notably Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). But if Ebert teased out the self-reflective camp qualities in Meyer’s work and lent him much-sought critical legitimacy, Moran’s work has a primal, straightforward quality that seems timeless next to the 1970s put-ons. Meyer’s working relationship with Moran is almost as legendary as the film they made together. Moran demanded only three things: payment by the page, brown-bag cuisine and plenty of alcohol at the end of each working day. After five days and nights locked up in a hotel room, Moran produced the first draft, tentatively titled The Leather Girls, then The Mankillers. The film had already begun shooting when sound editor, Richard S. Brummer, came up with its final title.

Though the script is full of iconic moments (Varla breaking a teenager’s back with her bare hands; a joust between a muscle man and a Porsche) and dialogue to shame Raymond Chandler (‘Drive! And don’t miss!’), the key to the film’s cult appeal is its casting, which in typical Meyer fashion began at a strip club. Haji (nee Barbarella Catton), a Canadian-born actor and exotic dancer whose chosen moniker means ‘pilgrim’ in Arabic and who claimed to be an extraterrestrial sent to Earth to teach respect for nature, was the first to be cast. A feline presence with soulful eyes, a wasp waist and the requisite Meyer bust, Haji would appear in more Meyer films than any other female performer (her only significant non-Meyer film role was as a stripper in John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, 1976). Whether playing the Cajun spitfire in Motor Psycho!, the sorceress who restores male potency in Good Morning… and Goodbye! or the lovelorn lesbian Rosie in Pussycat, whose growl sounds like a combination of Nico and Chico (Marx, that is), Haji embodied the mystical power of female sexuality at the very core of Meyer’s films: fecund, aggressive, a force of nature. Though Meyer made greater use of Erica Gavin, Ushi Digart, Shari Eubanks and Kitten Natividad, Haji was his great Muse.

She also introduced him to his greatest star, her friend and fellow dancer at The Losers Club: Tura Satana. The Pussycats’ monstrous ringleader, Varla, may have been scripted by Meyer and Moran, but the black-clad supervillain who remains the indelible cult image of the Meyer Superwoman was Tura’s creation. A Japanese-born American of mixed Asian and Native American background, Tura led a remarkable life before ever locking horns with Russ Meyer. At age five, she and her family were forced into a Japanese internment camp. When World War Two ended, they moved to Chicago where, at the age of ten, the precociously-developed Tura was raped by five men. They got off by bribing the judge, but she was sent to reform school. After her release a few months later, she began studying karate and aikido and formed a girl gang to protect others from sexual predators. They carried switchblades in their boots and razors in their hair. At age 13, her family arranged for her to marry a 17-year-old boy in Mississippi. The marriage did not last and, with a fake I.D., she made her way to Hollywood, taking work as a swimsuit model, then as a nude subject for screen legend and amateur photographer, Harold Lloyd, whom she credited with giving her the confidence to pursue a career in film. That same year, she moved back with her family in Chicago and began a long and highly successful career as an exotic dancer. By 15, she was doing strip-tease, soon earning a reputation for her back bends and tassle work (she could spin one at a time). By 20, she was earning $1,500 a week and had her own cult following. By 25, around the time she first met Meyer, Tura was teaching Shirley MacLaine burlesque moves for Billy Wilder’s Irma La Douce (1963), and could already claim Elvis as a lover. She turned down his marriage proposal, but purportedly kept the ring.[2] Tura’s was a big life, the autobiographical book and film versions of which were still incomplete at the time of her death in 2011, but you see the outlines of it in her larger-than-life screen image.

An iconic moment: Varla breaks Tommy’s back in the desert

Lori Williams got the part of blonde nymphomaniac, Billie, by answering a casting call. She had some acting experience, including an unexceptional beach party movie called A Swingin’ Summer (1965) that happened to be Raquel Welch’s film debut, along with un-credited appearances as a dancer in several Elvis movies. Though it is hard to imagine anyone else playing the role of Billie, and though the blonde beach bum was a popular cinematic type in the mid-1960s, Lori is the one casting anomaly in Meyer’s pantheon of ‘buxotic’ leading ladies, as her bust line simply did not measure up to the director´s standard. When asked about the decision to hire her, Meyer would merely shrug and admit that he had Lori stuff her top: heresy in any but this Russ Meyer film, because it is the only one not to feature frontal nudity. Perhaps to compensate for the perceived handicap, Lori plays Billie as the most hedonistic and sexually aggressive of the three, setting herself up in sharp contrast to the other female character of ‘average’ proportions, the naïve ingénue and kidnap victim, Linda, played by the 16-year-old Susan Bernard.

The male cast features two Meyer regulars: Stuart Lancaster in the role of the psychotic, wheelchair-bound Old Man and Mickey Foxx as the toothless, ogling Gas Station Attendant. The Old Man’s muscle-bound son, known simply as The Vegetable, who serves as the instrument of his father’s sexual aggression, is played by Dennis Busch in his only film role; his straight-laced, moralising, spineless brother Kirk is played by veteran television actor, Paul Trinka (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea); and the pasty, feckless jock who out-races Varla on the salt flats, only to have her break his back like a wishbone, is played by Ray Barlow. Each embodies familiar Meyer male archetypes: the raging impotent, the slack-jawed voyeur, the mindless stud, the morally conflicted hand-wringer and the earnest All-American boy. Meyer’s films refract male libido through a prism, breaking it down into a series of basic elements, then subjecting each to the same irresistible force: the Meyer Superwoman.

The crew consisted mainly of Meyer’s old army buddies (Meyer got his start as a filmmaker during World War Two, documenting the movements of Patton’s armies for the Air Signal Corps): a handful of guys out in the desert, doing everything from striking sets to running the second camera. The one technical stand out was the film’s sound editor, Richard S. Brummer, who had worked with Meyer on Motor Psycho! and would continue with him in one or more production roles right up to his final theatrical release, Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979). Brummer came with avant garde credentials, having cut his teeth as editor on Roger Tilton’s Jazz Dance (1954) and bummed around bohemian New York in the 1950s and 1960s with the likes of Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas (McDonaugh 2005:154). Brummer’s high technical standards and his innovative approach to sound design – especially the overlapping, cropped dialogue – amplify and extend the rhythms of Meyer’s Eisensteinian editing style.

By all accounts, Meyer was a ruthless dictator on the set. Charles Napier, who had roles in five of Meyer’s films, put it this way: ‘Working with Russ Meyer was like being in the first wave landing in Normandy during World War II, crossed with a weekend in a whorehouse’ (McDonaugh 2005:54). Meyer would certainly have denied the whorehouse part. He had a strict policy of no fraternisation between cast and crew members. He kept them bivouacked in an isolated motel the length of the shoot, cut off from the outside world and, when not shooting, largely cut off from each other. His logic was simple: he wanted every bit of sexual tension up on the screen. This policy would cause a famous rift between Meyer and Tura. She and Meyer fought furiously over the matter, but eventually came to a secret agreement, by which Tura would arrange secret trysts with one of the crewmembers. It was reputedly the only time Meyer ever bent the rules for one of his actors.

They shot in the desert. Meyer had neither the resources nor the inclination to work in the studio. Under punishing sunlight, made worse by the many reflectors Meyer used to achieve the stark whites and deep lines that are a trademark of his exteriors, dehydration and sunstroke were common. Tura, dressed entirely in black, had a particularly difficult time, not only with the oppressive heat, but with the dust that covered everyone and everything. It was gruelling, and tempers ran high. When Susan Bernard’s mother insisted on hanging around the set – criticising not only the production, but what she saw as the seediness of the other actors – she and Tura almost came to blows.[3] But rather than beat on the mother, Tura took it out on the daughter, who to her seemed unforgivably meek and feeble. Through vague threats and physical intimidation, Tura made Susan fear for her life. Meyer did nothing to stop it, because it only helped Susan’s performance. He was not above intimidating actors and fomenting dissent himself, if it helped the picture.

Of course, some of the ugliness was just plain acting. For example, it is frustration rather than anger that motivates Tura during the famous fight sequence where she breaks Ray Barlow’s back. So fearful was he of getting hurt that several shots from the sequence were performed in slow motion, and then sped up in postproduction. And it is disgust that motivates her during the roll-in-the-hay seduction scene with Paul Trinka. A health food junkie, Trinka’s breath was apparently so bad that Tura could hardly stand to face him.[4]

Pussycat was made, like the three roughies that preceded it, using black and white film stock. Though Meyer made conflicting claims about the reason for this (the influence of Italian neorealism vs. keeping costs down as he switched from 16mm to 35mm film stock), it would be difficult to overestimate the effect this choice has upon the viewer. His arch compositions, ruled by the curves of exposed and silhouetted flesh, his love of low ‘Dutch’ angles, close-ups, sudden gestures and staccato cuts, the harsh whites of his exteriors and the crisp greys of his interiors manage to bear equal resemblance to the expressionistic lines of film noir and the more impressionistic chiaroscuro of Italian neorealism. It is neither cartoonish nor naturalistic, yet at times it manages to seem both at once. Almost entirely gone are the Al Capp comedic rural primitives, the Caldwell preachers and moonshine melodramas of the previous roughies. Gone, too, the bucolic scenes of nature and languorous outdoor sex that make the landscape itself an erotic object. In Pussycat, where both sex and nature are manifestations of violence, the shape of all things evokes that abstract value. It is a cartoon in the classical definition of that term: a sketch or study of its primal subject.

PROMOTION

Whether art or commerce or some combination of both led Meyer to the style that defines his roughies of the mid-60s, there can be no doubt these films are in many ways fundamentally different from Meyer films preceding them and Meyer films to follow. They are darker, more threatening, and though rife with hyperbole and humour, dead serious. This shift is apparent even in the films’ advertising. Eric Schaefer writes at length about Meyer’s marketing campaigns, beginning with the nudie-cuties, advertisements for which used cartoon imagery and naughty copy. The posters and newspaper ads featured easy puns, and winking caveats like ‘You’ll NEVER see this on T.V.’, ‘Loaded with Belly Laughs and Bare Humor’, and ‘For Broadminded Adults Only!’ According to Schaefer,

the joking, fraternal nature of the advertising linked the films to traditional male smokers where stag films were shown. Just as joking and commentary served to diffuse some of the erotic tension in such homosocial situations, the cartoonish and playful strategy of nudie-cutie advertising served a similar function. (2007:23)

But if the nudie-cuties promised – and delivered – jocular titillation, the roughies were another creature entirely. Lorna’s ads describe its title character as ‘a wanton of unparalleled emotion’ and ‘too much for one man’, and according to its ads, Mudhoney ‘leaves a taste of evil in your mouth’, offering a story of ‘ribaldry and violence made from the juice of life!’ By the time he got to Motor Psycho!, Meyer was pitching straight violence, promising ‘THE ACTION BEHIND THE HEADLINES!’ and ‘Bike Riding HOODLUMS FLAT-OUT on their MURDER cycles!’ The nudie-cutie cartoons gave way to photos of characters in passionate postures, flesh bared to within the legal limit, and lurid graphics that might have been torn from the covers of pulp novels or E.C. Comics. According to Schaefer, this sort of advertising was more consistent with the seedy porn theatre than the drive-ins where Meyer hoped to screen his roughies, which may account for the films’ modest box office (with the exception of Lorna). It also helped to create the impression that Meyer’s primary audience was a group of degenerate low-lives, rather than the white collar professionals who bought the bulk of the tickets, and helped to draw a great deal of attention to the films: some welcome (record-setting theatrical runs for Lorna and Vixen!), some not (on-going censorship battles with, among others, Charles Keating).

In many ways, the marketing of the roughies was a simple reversion to the practices of exploitation filmmakers and burlesque showmen from previous decades. In the early 1950s, Meyer studied at the feet of one of the masters, Peter DeCenzie, while working as cameraman/director on his French Peep Show in 1954 (DeCenzie would later co-produce Meyer’s Teas). DeCenzie taught Meyer how to turn the ‘square-up’ – the moralising prologue that often accompanies exploitation films – to one´s advantage. The square-up operates on the principle of taboo. Play it up, and the audience begins to believe their admission buys them not only a cheap thrill, but membership into a secret fraternity, which was an important selling point since exploitation films almost never delivered on their salacious promises. With Teas, Meyer changed the rules. Rather than chiding the audience for their lascivious intentions, daring them to watch the film, Meyer’s nudie-cuties offered a knowing wink, and a promise that no one would be judged for what was understood to be a perfectly natural interest. But with the roughies, he fell back on the old ways.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, go-go for a wild ride with the Watasi-cats’, shouts the barker (Meyer himself) in the theatrical preview for Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, over images of Haji, Tura and Lori writhing on the nightclub stage. ‘But beware: the sweetest kittens have the sharpest claws!’ The girls race across the desert, snarling in their sports cars. ‘For your own safety, see Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Wild women, wild wheels! Race the fastest pussycats and they’ll beat you … to death!’ Tura delivers blow after blow to Ray Barlow’s spine, followed by a montage of seductions, revving engines and more murderous body blows.

Superwomen, belted, buckled and booted! You name it, we’ve got it! Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! delivers tons more than the opposition! Unladylike karate chops! Ungentlemanly haymakers! Spirited gymnastics! Corrective table etiquette! Sandbox joisting! Or a muscle-bound cat wrestling with a roaring sports car that’s intent on squashing him like a grape! Bizarre kidney- and chassis-rattling chases! And for the first time on the screen, a haymaking, belly-busting, karate-chopping, judo-flipping fight to end them all! Superwoman against man! The prize: life itself! Slashing, tackling, gouging, hacking, flipping, belting, smashing and blasting! Muscle to muscle, bone to bone! For an incredible evening’s entertainment, a film so totally satisfying, see Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Meyer had a genius for previews, exciting lust in an audience with a highlight reel edited together as precisely as an overture. His trailers were so popular that theatre owners often advertised them with their coming attractions, hoping to draw patrons to inferior features. Oftentimes, patrons paid full admission just to see the previews, and then left before the feature. And one can see the appeal. The preview to Pussycat, like the old exploitation square-up, promises taboo-busting thrills, where the ultimate battle of the sexes plays out in the desert, bumper to bumper, hand to hand, breast to breast. And the film delivers on its promise.

The only problem was, few people wanted to see it.

INITIAL RECEPTION

Pussycat opened in early 1966 on the same circuit of 600 or so grindhouse and adult theatres that had been screening Meyer’s films since Teas. When the film failed to draw crowds on its own, Meyer began double-billing with its companion piece, Motor Psycho!, then with Mudhoney. Nothing seemed to help. Reviews were sparse, and mostly in line with those of earlier Meyer films, highlighting his technical talents but bemoaning a ‘muddled’ and ‘one-note’ script and calling for ‘more adept acting’ (Murphy 1966:6). By now, violence had become a staple in Meyer films, and when noted, it was primarily to remark on its gratuity. The strongest sentiment in these reviews is nostalgia for Meyer’s earlier nudie-cuties, with their light-hearted sensuality and good-natured sense of humour, conspicuously absent in the roughies. They seem to long for simpler days, when men were allowed to gawk at topless women without fear of recrimination. The competing claims – that Meyer was both too serious and not serious enough – say perhaps more about the reviewers than the film, but they certainly highlight the orphaned status of the roughies – and Pussycat in particular – among Meyer’s works.

Some reviewers made a finer distinction, and a far sterner assessment. James Powers’ review calls Meyer’s ‘superficial, sensational presentation of the vicious, the depraved and the mentally ill’ a ‘sick picture for sick people’ (2004:40–1). And John L. Wasserman of the San Francisco Chronicle, who would become one of Meyer’s most vocal critics, musters the most indignation. Reviewing the double-bill of Pussycat and Mudhoney in a piece titled ‘Meyer’s Amateurs: Two Films with But One Thought’, Wasserman describes Meyer’s roughies as ‘gold-plated travesties’ posing as morality plays. ‘These two latest pix follow the pattern, but are unique on two counts: Pussycat has the worst script even written, and Mudhoney is the worst movie ever made.’ He calls Meyer ‘the Hollywood Peeping Tom’ and ‘a graduate of the cudgel school of direction’ who makes ‘incredibly bad sex films’, then in a bizarre non sequitur, lists the various strip clubs where readers might find the three female leads currently performing (Wasserman 1966:41). Meyer liked this review so much that he reprinted it in his autobiography, and it is easy to see why. Like Jerry Falwell decrying the blasphemy in the pages of Hustler magazine, Wasserman unintentionally supplied the film’s square-up.

A minority of reviewers saw a sort of progress in the film. In Kevin Thomas’ Los Angeles Times review, he seems to predict the direction Meyer criticism will take in the 1980s and 90s, suggesting that the film’s ‘ludicrously erotic and sadistic’ characters and ‘fetishistic fantasies, projected with crude gusto’ may be intended as a parody of exploitation films in general (Thomas 1966:11). But perhaps the most articulate defence of the film was published in the Boston Phoenix:

Some of us have always thought that Meyer’s feeling for erotica was considerably less deft than his flair for comicbook iconography, stroboscopic editing, and full-throttle action sequences. Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, the best showcase of those gifts to date, is a trash-art classic.[5]

In a guarded gesture of praise, the anonymous reviewer inadvertently reveals the very reason Pussycat failed the first time out: it eschews the burlesque aspects of his earlier films for a pop art sensibility. But this is also the key to the film’s enduring power. If the thrill of the sex film is spent once the lust it inspires is satisfied, Pussycat is relentlessly artful and artificial, offering no release, cathartic or otherwise.

This last review would turn out to be prescient: Meyer would soon abandon both the nudie-cutie peep shows and the lurid backwater roughies for steamy Technicolor melodramas and broad sex parodies. As his popularity grew among critics and academics in the 1970s, these later films would be identified as ‘quintessential Meyer’, and praised (as well as reviled) for their outrageous take on sexual mores in the age of Deep Throat (1972) and Last Tango in Paris (1973). And while critics fawned and fought over such salacious camp as Supervixens and Up!, Varla, Rosie and Billie would spend the 1970s racing across movie screens in mostly empty theatres.

But eventually the world would catch up with them.

2

THE PUSSYCATS FIND THEIR AUDIENCE

For the next ninety seconds, while this preview of coming attractions is playing, will all filmgoers with any degree of wit, taste and intelligence please keep your critical remarks to yourselves, or we’ll nail your tongues to the floor.

– Introduction to the theatrical preview for Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

See, Mr. Meyer, we’ve caught up.

– B. Ruby Rich, ‘What’s New, Pussycat?’ (1995:56)

For a guy who got rich by making so-called dirty movies, Russ Meyer has received a remarkable amount of positive critical attention, including comparisons to Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Federico Fellini and Jacques Tati, as well as literary figures from Geoffrey Chaucer and Francois Rabelais to Thorton Wilder and John Steinbeck. While many continue to see him as a misogynistic sexual Neanderthal, others have called him a twentieth-century Sade, a Mennipean satirist and a Romantic ironist.[6] His fans have included such luminaries as Leslie Fieldler, Camille Paglia and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. His 1960s melodramas about insatiable women on the prowl constituted their own front in the sexual revolution, and his 1970s put-ons – beginning with the Fox Studios project, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls – harkened a period of both popular and academic respectability. That same year, Yale University sponsored the Russ Meyer Film Festival, and similar events followed at Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Champaign, Princeton and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Scholarly pieces began appearing in Film Comment, Cahiers du Cinema, and the Journal of Popular Culture, while the Nation, Newsweek, Forbes and many of the world’s major newspapers featured lengthy profiles. A surprising number hailed his films as witty satires on sexual repression and conspicuous consumption, and acknowledged his auteur status.

Largely absent from this ascension was Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, which was shown to little acclaim at Yale and several other of the film festivals, and made the rounds of college campuses in the 1970s, but failed to capture much popular or critical attention alongside Meyer’s overheated skin flicks. Fortunes would change in the 1980s, when Meyer’s sex films had to compete with direct-to-video hardcore and popular R-rated teen sex comedies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Hardbodies (1984).[7] But the transgressive violence and noir aesthetics of his mid-1960s black and white roughies would appeal directly to the evolving punk and postmodern sensibilities of young Gen-Xers. Many would find in Pussycat’s hard-driving, thrill-seeking, bisexual nihilist strippers an alternative to the banal horrors of Ronald Reagan’s America, where Baby Boomers abandoned the last vestiges of 1960s idealism for mutual funds and retirement plans and their children surveyed a cultural inheritance of deficit spending, racial division and AIDS from behind a mask of disaffected irony.

But first this new audience would have to see the film, which was little known and nearly impossible to find in 1981, the year it first appeared on VHS. That year less than five percent of American households with televisions had VCRs. The number would increase nearly ten-fold by 1985, and by the end of the decade they would be as common as telephones, but even as the technology became available, finding Meyer films on tape was no mean feat. Copies had to be ordered directly from Meyer’s company, RM Films International, which in the 1980s was little more than a duplicating machine, a receipt book and a telephone, usually answered by Meyer himself. Unlike studio releases, Meyer’s films were not featured in rental supply catalogues, which meant few video stores stocked them. Anyone who wanted a copy either needed to know someone who had one, or dig up the name and number of Meyer’s company and be willing to spend 80 dollars. Of course, finding that information was its own challenge, since RM Films only advertised in pornographic magazines.

Despite these obstacles, the audience did find them, and Pussycat soon became one of RM Films’ most popular titles, thanks to a confluence of cultural events in the early 1980s. It all began with John Waters, a cult celebrity who had made his name on the midnight movie circuit with Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974). In 1981 he released Polyester, the first of his films to cross over into the mainstream, in part because it was simply less explicit than his earlier films (it earned an ‘R’ rating, where all previous were ‘X’ or unrated), and in part because audience sensibilities had evolved following a decade of films like A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Caligula (1979). That same year, Waters published his autobiography, Shock Value. Part memoir, part poetics, the book traces the filmmaker’s history, working methods, and key influences and contains interviews with Waters’ favourite filmmakers: shockmeister Hershell Gordon Lewis, and Russ Meyer. Waters had long been a devotee of Meyer, even paying homage to him in several of his films (including Polyester, where a Pussycat poster hangs prominently on the wall of Elmer Fishpaw’s porn theatre office), but in Shock Value he pays his mentor even higher praise: ‘Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is, beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future.’

Waters is the ideal person to carry off this bit of hyperbole because he is in many ways a bridge between Meyer’s sensibilities and those of his burgeoning cult audience. Deeply invested in 1950s and 1960s exploitation filmmaking, as well as a do-it-yourself aesthetic that made Meyer look the rigid formalist by comparison, Waters was hip in the ways Meyer never could be, more socially and intellectually evolved, and a master of self-conscious camp. He was an obsessive fan, a bona fide outsider, and a practiced ironist whose film world was, like Meyer’s, a joyous simulacrum of perversions played entirely for effect; only where Meyer aimed for the erotic, Waters went for the emetic. ‘To me,’ his autobiography begins, ‘bad taste is what entertainment is all about. If someone vomits watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation.’ On Pussycat he continues:

I first saw the film in 1966 at a local drive-in after being attracted to the radio ad that blared, ‘It will leave a taste of evil in your mouth!’ At the time, I was totally unfamiliar with Russ Meyer’s work, but after seeing Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! he became my lifelong idol. I went back to the drive-in every night of the run, even if I had to go alone, just so I could watch the picture over and over while I had a chance. (I always respected people I saw alone in the drive-in for their unabashed devotion to films). I wrote Russ gushing fan letters, which he politely answered. I got a job as a film reviewer in a local underground paper for the sole purpose of raving about the film. If there is such a thing as a film being a bad influence on youth, here was the perfect example. Russ’ nasty ‘pussycats’ became a role model for all the characters in my productions – especially Divine. The one big difference was that Divine was a man and his big set of knockers was nothing but a pile of old wash rags. (1981:192–3)

Waters’ gushing assessment has all of the earmarks of a cult devotional: the celebratory rites, the identification of a community, the personal commitment, and of course the sense of discovery. It is a story any devotee would love to tell, even if it is not precisely accurate (the ‘taste of evil’ line was actually part of the marketing campaign for Mudhoney, which was released a year before Pussycat). Though it would be an exaggeration to suggest that Waters’ paean to Pussycat set the tone for future critical and cult assessment, those first two lines found their way into just about every piece that followed written on the film – not because anyone agreed with Waters, but because this younger auteur on the up-swing of what would soon be a highly successful career was willing to claim Meyer for his own.

Pussycat also benefited from a growing popular interest in cult films generally. Cult communities had begun to form around magazines like Fangoria, Sleazoid Express, and Michael J. Weldon’s seminal fanzine, Psychotronic, a labour of love packed with reviews of ‘films traditionally ignored or ridiculed by mainstream critics at the time of their release: horror, exploitation, action, science fiction, and movies that used to play in drive-ins or inner city grindhouses’ (Weldon 1989:2), which Weldon launched in response to Michael and Harry Medved’s condescending take on B- and Z-movies, The Golden Turkey Awards (1980).[8] In 1983, Weldon published the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, which contained more than 3000 reviews, including a highly-laudatory piece on Pussycat that pronounces the film ‘outrageous, ahead-of-its-time,’ ‘a funny, non-stop barrage of sex and violence’, with ‘the best dialogue you’ve heard in years’ (Weldon 1983:233). This was followed by the Psychotronic Video Encyclopedia of Film in 1996, which features another 3000 reviews.

Weldon’s work is an indispensable resource for the study of cult films, but it also represents a shift in cult film criticism. Where the communal, participatory experience of the grindhouse and midnight movie screening had once been a hallmark of film cult, Weldon recognised (with great sadness) that the days of regular public exhibition of these films had come near to the end, and that the new cult audience would be born in the living room, sitting in front of a video player or watching B-movie television broadcasts in the wee hours. The Psychotronic project,[9] much like Tim Lucas’s Video Watchdog magazine launched a few years later, is about acknowledging that shift and helping to create a new sort of community more in tune with what would later be known as the Information Age, a virtual one, connected not by a common space but a shared text. It was here rather than among Meyer’s grindhouse patrons that the cult of Pussycat would really take root. Like John Waters in 1966, cocooned night after night in his Buick at Baltimore’s Carlin Drive-In, the Pussycat devotee would practice the cultic rite alone or among a few like-minded friends, in basement rec rooms and college dormitories.

In many ways, this shift to the living room cult experience helped to solidify cult studies as an academic discipline in the 1980s, engendering the sort of isolation and circumspection (aided by a technology that allowed the home viewer to endlessly stop, start, and review the film as required) typically associated with scholarship. It also essentially guaranteed that the scholarly work of cult film studies would be done first and foremost by the true cult enthusiast. Two such works of scholarship appeared in the early 1980s. In 1981, Danny Peary published the first of a three-volume series entitled Cult Movies. Though cult had been a subject of film scholarship since the 1920s,[10] Peary’s texts left aside theory and focused upon the movies themselves, literally hundreds of ‘special films which for one reason or another have been taken to heart by segments of the movie audience, cherished, protected, and most of all, enthusiastically championed’. For, according to Peary, ‘Cultists believe they are among the blessed few who have discovered something in particular that the average moviegoer and critic have missed – the something that makes the pictures extraordinary’ (1981:xiii). In 1983, J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum – two highly-respected film critics whose tastes ran to the art house and avant-garde – published Midnight Movies, which charts the history of that particular cult film practice from the late-night B-movie television broadcasts of the 1950s, to the underground cinema of Andy Warhol, Jack Smith and Ken Jacobs, to theatrical screenings from the 1970s to the early 1980s.

Neither of these texts mentions Pussycat specifically, but Peary would call it the ‘ideal drive-in movie’ in his 1986 Guide for the Film Fanatic (1986:147–8) and in Cult Movies 3 (1988) he compares it to the work of Sam Fuller and Don Seigel (1988:85). Hoberman would shower praise on the film in a 1987 piece for Premiere magazine, where he lists it among his ten favourite genre films available on video, and describes it as having the ‘convoluted quality of a gothic novel’ (1987:99). But if Peary and Hoberman are a bit late to the Pussycat party, their seminal work in cult film studies had already helped to pave the way for the Pussycat Renaissance. In 1983, the film would be screened as part of major Meyer retrospectives at the London National Film Theatre and the Cinematheque Français in Paris, and the Cramps would cover the film’s main theme on its Smell of Female album (the album title itself taken from the film’s opening monologue).[11] Among punk rockers, film cultists and cinepiles word spread quickly. By the mid-1980s, demand for the film on the college and festival circuits multiplied, and Meyer was making regular appearances at screenings. In 1986, the Chicago Psychotronic Film Society made it the centerpiece of its annual film festival, and Jim Morton lavished praise on the film and its maker in the pages of Incredibly Strange Films, highlighting in particular its dialogue, which ‘rings in the ear like beat poetry’ (1986:86). Shortly after, Jonathan Ross would devote an episode of his highly-regarded British documentary series, The Incredibly Strange Film Show, to Russ Meyer and single out Pussycat for special consideration (the episode would also feature a lengthy interview with Tura Satana). In 1987, Meyer would direct his one and only music video for a newly formed Los Angeles glam rock band that called itself Faster Pussycat. The video would feature clips from his film.

The ultimate measure of Pussycat’s ascendancy came in 1995 when, following a highly successful theatrical run in Germany and France, the film was re-released in America. Fans and film critics flocked to theatres to see Pussycat as most never had before, on the big screen in pristine new prints. Meyer toured with the film for two months, and at several screenings the Pussycats themselves made appearances, including Lori Williams, who had retreated from the public eye decades before. Fans came to gather autographs, to hear these four highly articulate ambassadors for the film speak, and in general to gawk at the women who, though thirty years had passed, still managed to turn heads. And Meyer, still a few years away from the dementia that would rob him of his quick wit and showman’s instincts, gave countless interviews to promote the film whose appeal he never seemed to entirely understand. But at least this time around it was making money.

Critics came, too. Some registered familiar complaints about the thin plot, the two-dimensional characters and the film’s underlying misogyny. Marjorie Baumgarten’s review for the Austin Chronicle is perhaps most pointed, likening the film to ‘some Sixties Strom Thurman nightmare about emancipated women run amok’ (1995:42). But most found enduring archetypes in the film they and their predecessors had so long managed to ignore. In his New York Times review, Stephen Holden claimed that watching Pussycat offers the clearest evidence that Meyer invented John Waters, Madonna and ‘anything and everything else in popular culture that proudly advertises itself as trash … In its humorous celebration of a buxom dominatrix as the ultimate icon of female desirability, it is also a movie with an erotic vision in tune with contemporary interest in so-called mean sex’ (1995:10). In Bright Lights Film Journal, Gary Morris hailed the film as ‘a masterpiece’, and ‘a cornerstone of both camp and punk cultures’. He describes the Pussycats as ‘early riot grrls’, and likens Meyer’s ‘subtle detailing’ of the characters’ dysfunctional relationships to a William Inge play (1996). Entertainment Weekly’s Troy Patterson gave it an ‘A’ grade, and had this to say: ‘The camera work is as sharp as Gregg Toland’s, the scenario is a Warholian daydream, and the slangy, innuendo-laden dialogue … nearly aphoristic.’ In their 2003 list of the top 50 cult films, EW would rank Pussycat number fifteen (Anon. 2003:31). Even Roger Ebert, who had stopped reviewing Meyer films in the late 1960s due to a conflict of interest, could not help but mark the occasion with exuberant praise and some account of the contemporary appeal of the film:

What attracts audiences is not sex and not really violence, either, but a Pop Art fantasy image of powerful women, filmed with high energy and exaggerated in a way that seems bizarre and unnatural, until you realize Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal play more or less the same characters. Without the bras, of course. (1995)

Perhaps the most surprising remarks came from feminist scholar and sometime Village Voice critic, B. Ruby Rich, who in a column of unrelenting praise for Pussycat admitted that her initial judgment of the film as ‘retrograde male-objectification of women’s bodies and desires further embellished by a portrait of lesbianism as twisted and depraved’ after seeing it for the first time in the mid-1970s – ’the heyday of right-on feminism’ – was short-sighted. ‘From a contemporary perspective,’ she wrote in 1995,

the film inverts positive and negative images of ‘woman’ to show just how interrelated the bad and the good have turned out to be, once sexuality is no longer deemed suspect. Further, Faster Pussycat deals a comparable body blow to the idea that women are victims: just sign up for a few aikido courses, buy a Mazda Miata, and you, too, can traverse the wide-open spaces of America, and woe to the man who crosses your path or the woman who tries to leave your orbit.

She continues:

Faster Pussycat seen through a 1995 filter is a veritable Rosetta stone of contemporary attitude; ironic, irreverent, sexually polymorphous, mixing high and low forms, reversing camera angles as handily as it does power and prurience, bending dialogue to suit its whims and wit … See, Mr. Meyer, we’ve caught up. (1995:56)

In the age of political correctness, when the halls of academe rang with feminist, queer and postcolonial theories, Russ Meyer was being hailed by the same critic who had coined the terms ‘chick flick’ and ‘New Queer Cinema’. This was simply too much to ask for a filmmaker who was fond of making the claim that he never met a good-looking feminist. But Rich’s comments are consistent with a larger trend, for Pussycat’s popularity among women had been increasing exponentially since its initial video release. By the time of the film’s theatrical re-release, women made up the majority of Pussycat’s audience.

This highly-publicised second run effectively bestowed ‘masterpiece’ status on the film. Though it had stood in the shadow of the campy Beyond the Valley of the Dolls for more than two decades, fanboys, cultists, and members of the mainstream media alike were now hailing Pussycat’s manic energy, cool style, pulpy dialogue and larger-than-life characters as timeless. It certainly did not hurt that a younger generation of filmmakers had begun to claim Meyer’s film as their own, including directors Robert Rodriquez and Quentin Tarantino, who would pay explicit tribute to Pussycat in From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), Sin City (2005) and their Grindhouse double feature (2007).[12] As a measure of this new cache, references to Pussycat would begin showing up in all areas of pop culture, from music (White Zombie’s ‘Thunder Kiss ’65’, the B-52’s ‘Funplex’, Paul Oakenfold’s ‘Faster Kill Pussycat’), to television (The Simpsons, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena, House M.D.), to graphic fiction (Dan Clowes’ Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron), and merchandising (Pussycat lunch boxes, refrigerator magnets, t-shirts).

Though Pussycat was not released on DVD until 2005, it has since found a third life on the Internet among bloggers and fans too young to see the film on its last go-round. Websites like Cinephilia.com offer primers on the life and work of Russ Meyer, always with special consideration for Pussycat. ‘The Definitive Russ Meyer Thread’ began that same year on the DVD Maniacs website, and its pages continue to ring with praise for Pussycat, including a post by contributor, Ian Jane, that claims ‘everyone interested in exploitation films should not only see this film, but commit it to memory’. Episode 5 (December 2007) of the on-line Film Geek Primer is devoted to Russ Meyer, and Pussycat in particular. YouTube hosts several video projects constructed almost entirely of pirated Pussycat clips, including Mikolino Gonz’s ‘Russ Meyer Visuales Simpl3’, music videos for Bootstrap’s ‘Bootstrap Streetlight’ and April March’s ‘Chick Habit’, and daVJdek’s ‘Faster Pussycat Dance Dance’ series. And the Pussycats themselves continue to meet their public at screenings and cult film and comic book conventions, and through their websites and social networking pages. Until her death, Tura Satana was particularly successful cultivating her cult celebrity, inspiring comic book characters, a rock band (called, not surprisingly, Tura Satana), a Varla action figure, several fan sites, and ‘TURA! TURA! TURA!,’ a group art show at the Tattoo Factory Gallery in Chicago in October 2008. A documentary film, Tura!, based on her long-anticipated autobiography, The Kick-Ass Life of Tura Satana, awaits release from Varla Films, and she voices a character named Varla in Rob Zombie’s animated film, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto (2009).

Perhaps the ultimate proof that Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! has and will continue to find a vital audience is the furor arising when a rumour hit the Internet and the entertainment press in the summer of 2008 that Tarantino planned to cast Britney Spears in the role of Varla in his long-promised, though still unrealised remake of the film. Though Tarantino himself attempted to squash the rumour only days after it first appeared, the outrage persisted for months, thousands of loyal fans registering their distaste on various blogs and Internet forums. Even Tura Satana seemed alarmed by the news, claiming that she called Tarantino immediately after hearing and threatened to castrate him if he cast Spears. Though subsequent gossip that porn star, Tera Patrick, would fill the role met with far less vitriol, Pussycat fans proved that they were no less invested in questions of casting than, say, avid readers of the Harry Potter or Twilight series who worried over the suitability of Daniel Radcliffe or Robert Pattison embodying their beloved fictions. Perhaps moreso. If J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer fans had only their mental picture of Harry Potter and Henry Cullen to compare to the young actors playing them on the screen, for Pussycat devotees, the authentic Varla, Rosie and Billie already existed. Any substitute, be it a pop princess or a porn star, was at best a cheap copy: a novelty of no small interest – like Vince Vaughn trying to fill Anthony Perkins’ shoes in Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho (1998) – but a novelty nonetheless, one that would threaten to undermine the primal power of the original, the very source of the film’s cult.

3

SEEING AMERICA FIRST

Behind us lay the whole of America and everything Dean and I had previously known about life, and life on the road. We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic.

– Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Yessir, the thrill of the open road. New places, new people, new sights of interest. Now that’s what I believe in, seeing America first!

– Gas Station Attendant (staring at Varla’s cleavage)

You won’t find it down there, Columbus!

– Varla

The year 1965 began with the arrival of the first 3,500 American combat troops in Vietnam and ended with nearly 200,000 in the field. That same year, the Students for a Democratic Society organised the first teach-ins and draft card burnings, hundreds of thousands attended anti-war rallies, and pacifists Roger Allen LaPorte and Norman R. Morrison set themselves on fire to protest the war. Only months after Martin Luther King received the Nobel Peace Prize, Malcolm X was assassinated, Alabama State Troopers brutalised civil rights demonstrators on ‘Bloody Sunday’ and five days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, riots broke out in Watts. It was the year Bob Dylan recorded ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and brought an electric guitar to the Newport Folk Festival, the Rolling Stones released their searing anti-consumerist sex-bomb, ‘Satisfaction’, and the Grateful Dead took up residence in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. In 1965, America stood at a crossroads, wondering where the Cold War, the civil rights movement and the sexual revolution might lead. And while the country braced itself for the American Renaissance or Armageddon, Russ Meyer went about making Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

‘You won’t find it down there, Columbus!’

The America of Pussycat is the sort of desolate wasteland one might expect to find in a zombie movie co-scripted by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Samuel Beckett: an open patch of dirt littered with the detritus of modern life, from broken-down main streets and dust-covered trash heaps, to transistor radios and empty beer cans. But unlike the modernist wastelands described in the works of Fitzgerald and Beckett, it is neither a poetic ruin nor an abstraction, but a realistic backdrop against which to play Meyer’s outsized tale of sex and violence. Pussycat’s America is a place where the nascent rebellion of the 1950s has devolved into disposable pop culture, where rockabilly gives way to bubblegum pop, and Kerouac’s mystical road has been reduced to a dirt circle in the desert where a pasty white teenager comes to clock time trials, only to be beaten to death by a sociopathic Amazon. But what does it mean? And what does it have to do with military escalation, radical politics, civil rights and a revolution fuelled by rock and roll, LSD and free love?

To begin to respond to these questions, we have to jump back a decade to the 1950s, a period of conservatism and prosperity more often than not defined in opposition to the 1960s. Russ Meyer spent the 1950s making industrial films and shooting glamour photos for Playboy and other men’s magazines. He also made his first million dollars from the runaway success of The Immoral Mr. Teas. But the 1950s were also the matrix of the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement and the sexual revolution, not to mention television, rock ‘n’ roll and what would become New Hollywood. Its conservatism grew from a great darkness in the national psyche, perhaps most apparent in Cold War anxieties about the spread of communism, both in America (McCarthyism) and abroad (Eisenhower’s ‘falling domino principle’). You see this darkness in sci-fi films like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) where the alien embodies the imminent threat, in the ecstatic rage of Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) and the nightmare hallucinations of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959), in Jackson Pollock’s manic canvases, Bo Diddley’s hoodoo sneer and the tortured faces of every Marlon Brando and James Dean anti-hero.

Sociologist C. Wright Mills, one of the most influential thinkers of the decade and a seminal figure of the 1960s New Left movement, defines this darkness as the sense of alienation brought on by modern society, where time-honoured institutions (the family, the school, the church) are displaced by bureaucratic systems (the corporation, the army, the state) and cultural traditions give way to mass culture. In his writings of the 1950s,[13] Mills focuses on the emerging ‘white collar’ professional: the company man who blindly serves what Eisenhower would later dub the ‘military-industrial complex’. In the movies he is played with a fractured nobility by Gregory Peck (Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, 1956), or Paul Newman (From the Terrace, 1960) or Jack Lemmon (The Apartment, 1960), but for Mills he is a figure of anomie – amoral, directionless, lacking in purpose – who fills the existential void with consumer comforts, and substitutes branded lifestyle choices for principles: he reads Playboy and Life, smokes Lucky Strikes, prefers Perry Como to Elvis and Jack Paar to Johnny Carson.

Mills’ company man is a key figure in the Meyer universe, first and foremost because he represents Meyer’s most valued audience demographic: just the sort to wander into a Russ Meyer movie or the Pussycat Club to watch Varla, Rosie and Billie dance before heading home to a lonely apartment or taking the train to his wife and kids in the suburbs. The company man, with his disaffected manner and discretionary income, made Meyer rich in the early 1960s. But he is also Meyer’s primary subject. For behind every Meyer buffoon – from the immoral Bill Teas to the Gas Station Attendant in Pussycat – lies this same figure of alienated man, lost in a labyrinthine power structure without a clear centre or circumference, looking for temporary escape from his growing sense of impotence in guilt-free pleasures. He is a pathetic rather than tragic figure, because he cannot fall from a great height when the lone measure of his worth is his position within a meaningless bureaucracy. The only differences between Meyer’s Teas and C. C. Baxter from The Apartment are the illusions they perpetuate about themselves and, less effectively, for themselves.

One of those illusions – endorsed by Teas but mocked by Pussycat – is that pleasure may come without a price. Like the femmes fatales of earlier films noir, Meyer’s Pussycats threaten the male character’s sense of virility. Only, where the compelling male lead of noir reasserts his phallic authority by foiling the femme with a stunning display of prowess, Meyer’s men are too busy gawking to ever foresee the coup de grace. They are emotionally and physically crippled, no match for the Amazonian might of Varla. And those few who do survive are like the virginal young Malcolm, who ascends to the crown of Scotland at the end of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: symbols of generic innocence, weak, inexperienced, and un-suited for the challenges that lie ahead.

Like Macbeth, Pussycat veers in the direction of the horror story, where the destruction of one avatar of evil creates only a temporary peace, for other avatars will rise in its wake. Jim Morton puts it best:

At first Varla appears to be nothing more than a sadistic bitch, but by the end of the film she seems almost supernatural. The plot mechanics of the film are similar to those of a monster movie, with Varla as the monster. We know she is evil and will die, but we can’t help but root for her; alongside her, the heroes are a washed-out and bloodless lot. (1986:86–7)

Following Pussycat’s penultimate scene, how many of us are not only expecting but rooting for Varla to rise up once more and crack the necks of squeaky-clean Kirk and simpering Linda? They express the sort of bland virtues one might find in Madison Avenue ‘good life’ advertising of the time, virtues that the Meyer audience – and Meyer himself – no more value than admire. Indeed, nearly all of Meyer’s films demand identification with his superwomen, in absence of any other compelling choices. Jonathan Crane sees this as an extension of Meyer’s comic inflation. He compares Meyer’s female characters to King Kong and Godzilla – the latter another bi-product of 1950s Cold War paranoia – too outrageous to be taken for genuinely threatening, but just outrageous enough to ‘engender pleasure’ by bringing ‘welcome chaos and ruin to the social order’ because they are ‘the only beings not compromised by the chafing bounds of social intercourse’ (2000:91). But while this may be a source of pleasure for a contemporary viewer, the original audience for the film would likely have found Varla merely monstrous.

To return to the 1950s: If C. Wright Mills’ image of mid-century America is bleak, social psychologist Erich Fromm’s is bleaker still. In The Sane Society (1955), Fromm answers a remark made by Adlai Stevenson in a 1954 speech at Columbia University – ’We are not in danger of becoming slaves anymore, but of becoming robots’ – with an insight that speaks directly to the monstrous aspect of Varla:

There is no overt authority which intimidates us, but we are governed by the fear of the anonymous authority of conformity. We do not submit to anyone personally; we do not go through conflicts with authority, but we also have no convictions of our own, almost no individuality, almost no sense of self. (1955:102)

Varla embodies the notion that the only true form of rebellion is to make oneself a grotesque inversion of the values one abhors, the very definition of a monster. Varla is a sociopath in a world of conformity, where the road belongs to empty-headed teenagers and the wealth ends up in the hands of the crippled (the Old Man) and the weak (Kirk), but the harder she pushes against it the more alien and remote she becomes. Her rebellion against conformity devolves into a sort of madness, a ruthless nihilistic assault on anything that stands in her way, with no clear goal in mind, save the ability to continue on. The Old Man’s money would only take them further down that endless highway. In the final chapter of The Sane Society, Fromm concludes:

This alienation and automatization leads to an ever-increasing insanity. Life has no meaning, there is no joy, no faith, no reality. Everyone is ‘happy’ – except that he does not feel, does not reason, does not love.

A more succinct description of Varla’s existential condition would be hard to imagine. Fromm continues:

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead; in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead. In the nineteenth century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation. The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man’s nature, robots cannot live and remain sane, they become ‘Golems’; they will destroy their world and themselves because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life. (1955:360)

Fromm’s solution, best expressed in The Art of Loving (1956), was to embrace a rational morality and to create communal bonds of love, and so expel the guilt and shame one feels in isolation: to ‘get ourselves back to the Garden’, as Joni Mitchell would later sing in ‘Woodstock’. But Meyer’s women take another, darker path.

If the primary symbol of 1950s anomie was the Cold War, others more potent lay ahead in the 1960s: a decade that began with John F. Kennedy promising an end to poverty, a flowering of the arts and a man on the moon. Of course, the 1960s would have their fair share of Cold War tremors – the humiliation of the Bay of Pigs, the horror of the Cuban Missile Crisis – but unlike Eisenhower, who ignored the McCarthy hearings, JFK proved himself a grave and circumspect leader even in the worst of times. Then in November 1963, just three months after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech and a new morning seemed finally to have broken in America, JFK was assassinated and the bottom dropped out. Dazed and grief-stricken, the nation turned to Lyndon Johnson, who moved quickly to earn the public trust by pushing through JFK’s progressive agenda, but almost immediately after promising not to send combat troops to Vietnam in his 1964 campaign, he broke that trust and all the old fears returned, now amplified by a growing sense that the government had abandoned its people. It was, as Barry McGuire sang in 1965, ‘The Eve of Destruction’. Some responded with despair, some with revolution.

Hollywood responded with a handful of films that exploited this mounting sense of doom, where the last light of hope was snuffed out in Dallas and the world looked more dangerous and complex than ever before: John Frankenheimer’s Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964), Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe (1964) and A Deadly Affair (1966), and perhaps the bleakest political satire ever made, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964). But these were the exception, not the rule, for Hollywood was facing its own impending Doomsday, with television cutting the box office in half and foreign films outnumbering domestic by more than two-to-one in American theatres, with the influx of a well-heeled youth audience whose tastes Hollywood seemed incapable of predicting, and with rising production costs forcing studios to outsource projects to foreign and independent production companies. Hollywood responded to the mounting crisis by falling back upon old models of success: bloated sword and sandal epics, jingoistic westerns and war movies, feather-light musicals, escapist comedies and Disney fairy tales. But even these old stand-bys were being made better elsewhere: spaghetti westerns were out-grossing the Hollywood variety, and French New Wave filmmakers were reinventing the crime thriller and the musical for a new generation.

In this fractured marketplace, independent exploitationers like Herschell Gordon Lewis, Bob Cresse, Michael and Roberta Findlay and, of course, Russ Meyer, found niche audiences for their nudies, roughies, and mondo films. Exploitation producer David K. Friedman even tapped into the growing market for foreign films, hawking them with the exploitation spiel he had perfected in the 1950s. His two greatest successes were Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika (1953), which he re-titled Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl for its American release and advertised it as ‘A Picture for Wide Screens and Broad Minds’, and Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman (1956), to which advertising copy rejoined, ‘but the Devil invented Brigitte Bardot’. But the successes of Friedman, Lewis and the Findlays were nothing compared to American International Pictures, an independent production company formed in 1956 that would launch the careers of Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, and dozens of other now-famous actors and directors, not to mention the most successful indie producer of all time, Roger Corman. The key to AIP’s success was its ability to tap the growing youth market by using teen focus groups and applying what came to be known as the ‘ARKOFF Formula’ (named for AIP’s co-founder, Samuel Z. Arkoff): Action, Revolution, Killing, Oratory, Fantasy and Fornication. Though AIP’s horror, biker, beach party, LSD and juvenile delinquent films often had their origins in the successful youth rebellion films of the 1950s – The Wild One (1953), Blackboard Jungle (1955), Rebel Without a Cause (1955) – where these earlier films attempted to deal earnestly with the widening generation gap in the America of ‘(How Much is That) Doggie in the Window?’ (1952) and Howl, AIP’s films exploited ‘straight’ anxieties about ‘hip’ culture as camp, attracting young people with a knowing wink and a sense of fun.

The appeal of these films could not be more obvious. For example, AIP’s beach party movies – not to be confused with the ‘clean teen’ Gidget and Tammy beach movies being produced by Universal and Columbia in the late 1950s and early 1960s – were basically nudie-cuties for teens, only here the teeny bikinis stay on and the guy (Frankie Avalon) generally gets the girl (Annette Funicello). They are wholesome little dirty movies (the poster of 1964’s Pajama Party reads: ‘When the Pajama Tops meet the Pajama Bottoms someone’s gonna have a fit!’), where horny, jobless Southern California teenagers rub tanning butter on each other, chase that one last summer fling, and watusi to a Dick Dale soundtrack. Only here hedonism verges on camp, and any eroticism is undercut by the films’ moralising Uberplots about fidelity and responsibility, where the beach – and not its sun-baked buffet of flesh – is its own reward.

Meyer began making his roughies to appeal to this growing youth audience, to affect a move from the grindhouses to the far more lucrative drive-ins – or ‘passion pits’ as they came to be known for their popularity among teenagers looking for a place to grope each other in relative privacy. In an attempt to create some crossover appeal, Meyer exploited several conventions of these teen genres. We see elements of the beach movie, for example, early on in Pussycat, when the three lead characters meet up with Tommy and Linda in the desert. Rock music blares out of a transistor radio as a simulacrum of every movie perfect teen couple arrives, hoping to rev their engine and make time on the hot sand. Only here the beach is replaced by the sun-drenched desert, and the surf by the billows of dust they leave in their wake. But Meyer’s primary means of exploiting the genre is through the character of Billie. Lori Williams began her career in beach pictures, and her intuitive understanding of their inherent conservatism is the source of Billie’s spark. Unrestrained by any morality plot, Billie’s lust is allowed to swell into full-blown nyphomania. She does not swing her hips, she thrusts them, as though attempting to scratch a deep and abiding itch or to at once entice and knock aside any advancing predator. And her voice fairly yelps with unrestrained libido.

Pussycat also combines elements of biker, juvenile delinquent, women-in-prison and horror movies, resulting in what might best be described as The Wild One meets Reform School Girl (1957) meets Beach Party (1963) in the desert. And though one might expect the film to simply devolve into an awkward pastiche of mismatched banalities – which would explain why it failed at the box office – it manages to transcend banality thanks to Meyer’s formal instincts and the film’s primal sex and violence. No, the failure of Pussycat to find its audience in the 1960s has to do with a more invidious cultural issue than Vietnam, Hollywood or the Cold War, though the issue runs through each and every movement, revolution and crisis of the period. Put simply, the film failed because of the gender of its main characters. Where Motor Psycho! offered rebellion-as-male-potency – a theme later exploited by AIP in films like The Wild Angels (1966) and Hell’s Angels on Wheels (1967) – Pussycat challenged the patriarchal authority endemic even to the counterculture. In the age of the birth control pill (1960), The Feminine Mystique (1963) and Title IX (1964), when women were declaring their sexual and social independence and demanding equal treatment, men still ran the show, from the corporate offices to the motorcycle gangs, from the debates in the halls of government to the anti-War rallies on the Capitol steps. In such a world, it should come as little surprise that a film where a ferocious half-Japanese half-Native American woman who murders men with her bare hands did not meet with enthusiasm from Meyer’s almost exclusively white male audience.

Before I am mistaken for calling Meyer a feminist (though I would not be the first to make that creaky claim), I should say that Meyer’s professed love of powerful women in no way precludes his objectifying them. But though the Meyer woman appears to embody in extremis a number of archaic female stereotypes – lasciviousness, fecundity, wrath – she is a towering figure of authority in a world of foppish, often impotent men, an idealised combination of masculine and feminine qualities.

If Meyer’s Pussycats seem to emerge fully formed from the film’s primal wasteland – like Aphrodite and the Furies born from the blood of the castrated patriarch – they reflect an evolving notion of female sexuality that begins with Meyer’s first feature, The Immoral Mr. Teas, and continues on through his nudie-cuties and earlier roughies. Teas is a crude but good-natured picaresque that drew early comparisons to Jacques Tati’s M. Hulot’s Holiday (1953), about a feckless middle-aged lecher who believes he can see through women’s clothing. It was a unique idea at the time: a non-pornographic film that featured unashamed nudity, without the heavy-handed redemption plots of earlier exploitation movies. In fact, Teas has no real plot to speak of, only a series of set-pieces and an all-in-good-fun narration that at times sounds like a hold-over from Meyer’s days making educational films. ‘What makes Teas unusual,’ noted San Francisco Chronicle critic, Paine Knickerbocker, as the film entered its third year of continuous exhibition at a local theatre, ‘is that it regards nudity with tongue in cheek, instead of a sanctimonious leer’ (1961:31). Where earlier exploitation films dared the viewer to observe morally depraved behaviour while pretending to condemn it – so making the viewer a co-conspirator – and where nudist ‘lifestyle’ films offered only clinical representations of the flesh – a sort of ersatz National Geographic approach, where the anthropological subject is the pasty white American playing volleyball in the buff – Teas offers what Leslie Fiedler called ‘voyeuristic license’, an invitation to gawk without guilt along with our foppish surrogate (1961:118–9). The nudie-cuties are never lurid, partly because censorship codes forbade ‘lewd’ contact between the subject and the object of desire, and partly because such contact would disrupt the solipsism which is the source of voyeuristic pleasure. Like gawky teenagers, Meyer’s men recognise that the women are out of their league, and engage in a masochistic fantasy of unfulfilled desire, the source of the sexual pleasure as well as the pathos Fiedler identifies in Teas, where modern man responds to his sexual inadequacies with good humour and something approaching honesty. At least, as much as a darkened theatre allows.

Towering women and foppish, impotent men

Meyer would more or less repeat the Teas formula a half-dozen times before growing sick of it, and the scores of imitations that followed on its heels. By 1964, the nudie-cuties had run their course and Meyer was looking for a new direction. He found it with the first in a series of four ‘roughies’, Lorna. The sordid story of an unhappily married young sex-pot, Lorna is a morality play without the morals, a black and white rural melodrama boiling with lust and violence. It opens with a fire-and-brimstone sermon by an interloper credited as the ‘Man of God’, who stands in the middle of a long, winding highway, stopping cars and warning them of the depravities that lie just up ahead:

Do you know where this road leads?... Do you indeed seek righteousness? Do you speak rightly … Or do you do unto others as they do unto you? And do you judge as others judge? And woe to the hypocrite: thy form is fair to look upon but thy heart is filled with carcasses and dead men’s bones. For as you judge, you shall be judged, and if you condemn, you are condemned.

Then, after a pregnant pause:

And who will rise up with me against the evildoers? Who will stand up with me against the workers of iniquity?

When none respond, he glares sternly, waving them on, promising that once they pass, ‘there is no return’. We then enter upon a lengthy rape scene, and from there things only get darker.

If the nudie-cuties reflect a sort of pop-Playboy ethos of safe, relatively guilt-free sex, Lorna looks and feels much more like the exploitation films of old. As a rule, roughies – and their still seedier offspring, ‘kinkies’ and ‘ghoulies’ – are pretty rank affairs, gory and naturalistic in the Grand Guignol tradition, with a deep vein of misogyny. I think of David Friedman’s Defilers (1965), about a pair of psychopathic teenagers who kidnap a young woman, chain her down in their basement, and make her their sex slave; or, Michael and Roberta Findlay’s Touch of Her Flesh (1967), about a scorned lover who works out his feelings of betrayal by murdering strippers. But, unlike these cheap depravities, Meyer borrows the ‘square-up’ of 1950s exploitation pictures to create ironic distance. In Lorna, the Man of God seethes with a facsimile of Biblical platitudes on the subject of sexual depravity that makes Jules Winnfield’s ‘Ezekial’ monologue in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) seem precious by comparison. And where Jules uses the bastardised Bible passage[14] to articulate a central theme of the film – the Pilgrim’s Progress – for Meyer, the narration merely pretends to structure an otherwise tawdry story of unrestrained sexuality and cruel retribution, and the Man of God caricatures the notion of morality by cribbing clichés into a cheap sermon.

In Doyle Greene’s study of Meyer’s oeuvre, Lips Hips Tits Power, he describes Meyer as a latter-day Marquis de Sade. According to Greene, Meyer’s films, like Sade’s notorious texts, combine sex and violence as part of a systematic discourse on the banality of bourgeois morality and the limits of power, and that while Meyer clearly delights in fetishistic representations of women in films like Cherry, Harry and Raquel! (1970) and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, he rejects culturally-constructed notions of gender for a hybrid fantasy object: ‘Amazonian uber-women who yield phallic power,’ or as Meyer put it, ‘men with big tits’ (2004:226).

But while Meyer clearly had an interest in manifestations of sexual power, he was no libertine. By which I do not simply mean that Meyer’s willful ignorance of all but the most rudimentary hetero-normative sexual practices makes his lesbian sequences, for example, seem ridiculously naïve, though his films are certainly more about the display of the female form and the idea of sex than the clinical description of it. In Sade’s best-known work, 120 Days of Sodom (1785, first published in 1904), his philosophical treatise on the darker implications of the Enlightenment manifests itself as a taxonomy of depravity – monstrous acts of rape and murder described in meticulous, mathematical detail. Like Meyer, Sade seems obsessed with anatomical measurements, but his interest is less erotic than, if you’ll pardon the too-easy pun, ‘sadistic’, forcing the reader to acknowledge the sheer pain inflicted in the performance of the novel’s many deviant and monstrous acts. All of this is a cold, logical extension of Sade’s self-conscious discourse on the nature of power. For Meyer, on the other hand, it is never about the power expressed in mechanics of sex, but the erotic power of the object of desire. Though ripe for psychoanalytic reading, his films lack the moral or rational structure required of deeper philosophical inquiry. The difference is best measured affectively: between the profound disgust one feels when reading Sade (or screening Pasolini’s Salo from 1975, a harrowing film adaptation of Sade’s Sodom) versus the undeniable erotic appeal of even the darkest Meyer film: say, Lorna, with its multiple instances of rape, or Vixen!, with its famed incest scene. No grindhouse Sade, Meyer’s perspective is much more primal.

Meyer had no politics to speak of, save a hatred of communists and censors, whom he saw as trying to steal his money; and drugs, because he feared some stoned teenager would smash into his Cadillac. He simply found powerful women sexually appealing, and saw absolutely no conflict in also presenting that power within the big-busted, wasp-waisted dimensions of the Barbie doll, invented the same year Meyer released Teas. That said, the Pussycats are truly powerful characters, as arousing as they are dangerous. ‘Watch out!’ Meyer’s narrator all but says in the opening monologue, ‘They’ll castrate you if they get the chance.’ The story itself is still less subtle, where an old man and his sons murder women in an attempt to assuage their feelings of shame and guilt. The old man is driven to serial acts of revenge when he is crippled and made impotent trying to save a pretty young woman from certain death. His muscle-bound idiot son serves as the instrument of that revenge, himself driven by guilt for having ‘killed’ his own mother in childbirth. Meanwhile, the older, clean-cut son seeks vengeance on Varla for allowing himself to be seduced by her (‘You’re a beautiful animal, and I’m weak, and I want you,’ he says as he submits to her will).

The politics of gender are everywhere in the film. When the girls first arrive at the Old Man’s house, he comments on Varla’s brazen manner by essentially blaming feminism for all of America’s social ills. ‘They let ’em vote, smoke and drive – even put ’em in pants!’ he snarls. ‘So what do you get? A Democrat for president, a lot of smoke up your chimney, Russian roulette on the highway.’ As the social distinctions between men and women dissolve, the world turns upside-down: it’s gotten so ‘you can’t even tell brother from sister, unless you meet ’em head-on’. The Old Man is not simply saying that women should know and return to their ‘place’, but that this imbalance in the natural order of things has had a Butterfly Effect, the implications of which can be seen everywhere. His solution: rein women in. As Varla walks away, he comments upon how de-feminised she has become – ‘More stallion than mare … Too much for one man to handle’ – but concludes that she ‘might just gentle down real nice with the right halter’.

Varla does submit by the end of the film, though ironically at the hands of a woman, and arguably the weakest character in the film: Linda, who runs her over with a truck. But if Linda is the instrument of her doom, Varla is destroyed to restore patriarchal order. Linda kills Varla not to save herself (she could more easily have driven away) but Kirk, who lies beaten on the ground where Varla has left him, awaiting the coup de grace. Once she sees Varla die, she immediately breaks into hysterics and throws herself into Kirk’s arms. ‘Easy now, it’s okay,’ he coos. ‘I killed her like she was an animal,’ sobs Linda, ‘like she was nothing.’ ‘She was nothing,’ responds Kirk, ‘nothing human.’ But what he really means is that she was only monstrously so: ‘A real Jekyll and Hyde’, he concludes. Then the two of them drive off in the truck, leaving her for the buzzards and coyotes. For this is the way all of Meyer’s Pussycats die: alone, face down in the dirt.

The penultimate scene in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, made just a year before Pussycat, contains perhaps the archetypal scene of mid-1960s anomie: Slim Pickens riding the phallic nuclear warhead that will trigger the Doomsday Device, whooping with the mad glee of one who knows that the utter annihilation of the human race is the ultimate confirmation of his potency. It is a disturbing image precisely because it is so jubilant. But this last scene of Varla lying broken in the dust is perhaps a more appropriate image of America in 1965, for it is more comical than disturbing. Varla is destroyed not to confirm the power of another more heroic character – Kirk and Linda remain feckless and two-dimensional – nor to uphold a deeply invested cultural value like male potency. Her strength may have a primal source, but it is irrelevant in the America of her time because it does nothing but assert itself. Varla truly is a rebel without a cause, driven by little more than the sociopathic impulse of one who has been stripped of all real power. So her death seems utterly meaningless: she is just another dead stripper in the desert.

4

PUSSYCATS AND SATYRS

Apart from wine, there is no cure for human hardship.

– Euripides, Bacchae

I’m dealing with women who are archetypes. In fact, they’re beyond women.

– Russ Meyer[15]

Little more than halfway through Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Russ Meyer serves lunch: a simple, rustic meal of fried chicken and corn on the cob, but one consumed with more surreal gusto than any dreamed up by Luis Bunuel or Peter Greenaway.[16] It begins as a sort of celebration, for Varla and the Old Man at least, who broker a tenuous peace after do-gooder Kirk inadvertently thwarts Linda’s attempt to escape her captors. The Old Man swigs a bottle of Cutty Sark and Varla nibbles seductively on an ear of corn while they trade double entendres over the head of Linda, who sits frozen between them, her face a mask of terror. Meanwhile the ever-oblivious Vegetable shovels food into his mouth like hay into a thresher, while Kirk cautiously picks at a piece of breast meat – his own expression a mix of confusion, suspicion and curiosity as Varla turns her flirtations upon him – and Varla’s jilted lover Rosie looks on, her eyes black pools of bottomless sorrow. But the wild card in this scene is sexually frustrated Billie who, after having failed to seduce the Vegetable in the previous scene, has committed herself to getting drunk. Already well on her way, she waves her empty cup at the Old Man. ‘Mr. Host,’ she slurs, ‘I’m of legal age for whiskey, voting and loving. Now the next election is two years away, and my love life ain’t getting much better, so how about some of that one hundred percent?’

A strange meal

Despairing over a future with this motley crew, her last inhibitions washed away by a flood of alcohol, she proceeds to destroy the fragile peace at the table by poking at her fellow diners’ vulnerabilities with a string of sarcastic observations that reference the train accident that crippled the Old Man, Varla’s murderous past, Rosie’s abandonment issues, Kirk’s gullibility, the Vegetable’s sexual dysfunction and Linda’s fear of them all. It is a desperate attempt to get a rise out of anyone, to prove that she still has a will to exert, and when Varla finally does react, striking Billie across the face, the scene explodes into chaos. Linda goes into hysterics, the tearful Old Man curses the Vegetable for ‘killing’ his wife in childbirth and has to be wheeled off to bed, Varla pulls Kirk away for a roll in the hay while Rosie, with an expression by turns mournful and furious, tries to rationalise Varla’s actions as nothing more than a component of the caper, and Billie mocks her loyalty, bragging, ‘Nobody owns me, yet’, before draining the bottle in one long draw and passing out face-first on the table.

The scene serves as a turning point in the film: as the characters’ façades begin to crumble, laying bare their deepest fears and desires, Meyer’s Pussycats find themselves forced to act, not out of the sort of casual nihilism that has so far substituted for motive, but out of a mounting desperation. Though Varla will continue to prey upon the weaknesses of Kirk and the Old Man, and though Rosie and Billie will summon the strength to make one last charge – Rosie to reclaim Varla for herself, Billie to escape her grip – it is the beginning of their end, when opportunity gives way to necessity. Such a moment is inevitable in the story of the femme fatale, that figure of film noir discussed in the previous chapter who, as an emblem of patriarchal sexual anxieties, must inevitably be undone by her corrupt motives and subjugation to the will of powerful men. But the Pussycats are no stock femmes – they are subject only to their own impulses – and Meyer’s film no dark morality tale. Films noir typically trade on dime novel pathos, where women are made vulnerable, and finally pitiable to add a gloss of nobility and purpose to the leading men who at once try to love, redeem and destroy them. Theirs is a story as old as Adam and Eve: in Genesis the two are ejected from Eden to share their collective misery, whereas in film noir Adam is already fallen, and Eve gets the gas chamber. But if Meyer’s lunch scene exposes the Pussycats’ vulnerabilities, their growing despair and ultimate destruction does nothing to elevate Meyer’s twisted, impotent men, and their deaths fail to restore the patriarchal order.

So what purpose does their destruction serve? For the answer, one must look beyond noir and the Judeo-Christian morality at its core. In the opening monologue of Pussycat, the narrator claims that women like Varla, Billie and Rosie belong to a ‘rapacious new breed’ – a toxic bi-product of the same cultural chain reaction that gave rise to C. Wright Mills’ ‘company man’ – but their like can be found for as long as myths have sought to give shape to male erotic anxieties. The ancient Greeks were particularly adept at embodying these fears, from the divine Furies, to the monstrous Sphinxes, to the mortal Amazons. But these archaic female avatars are stoic symbols of retribution and violence, while the Pussycats are figures of reckless abandon, sexual excess, intoxication and frenzy, much more closely associated with the Greek god, Dionysus: a figure whose spirit would imbue all aspects of the hippie counterculture just beginning to assert itself as Pussycat entered theatres, with its psychotropic drugs, unshorn heads, free love and priapic music. But if Dionysus would be celebrated by that same counterculture from the Summer of Love onward, in the years preceding he would dwell in exile with a handful of followers in Russ Meyer’s desert wasteland.

When I say that the Pussycats are Dionysian figures, I mean two things: first, that they share a great deal in common with early devotees of the cult of Dionysus, and second, that they embody the qualities commonly associated with the term, Dionysian: wantonness, inebriation, impulsiveness. The story of Dionysus is perhaps best remembered from Euripides’ play, The Bacchae (405 BC), though versions of his myth had been around for centuries, on several continents. In the Greek version, Dionysus is the God of Wine and the youngest of the Olympian gods, a bastard son of Zeus and mortal Semele, who as an infant was spirited off to Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) to protect him from the wrath of Zeus’ wife, Hera. As the myth goes, Dionysus arrived in Greece as a young man, along with his retinue of exotic female followers – called Maenads, or ‘raving ones’ for the frenzied dancing and shrieking that accompanied their sacred trances – and demanded his godhead be acknowledged. This myth is an attempt to explain the migration of the cult of Dionysus from Asia Minor, where it originated, but it also explains why the religion – foreign, ecstatic, gynocentric – was initially taken as a threat in xenophobic, conservative, patriarchal Greece, where Dionysian rites were perceived as violent and depraved, and the Maenads as inhuman savages. It also invites a comparison between the Maenads and the Pussycats: three powerful women engaged in wild behaviour who – at least in the case of Rosie and Varla – are distinguished by their exotic features. Like the followers of Dionysus, they are seen as barbaric, even animalistic. ‘These pussycats have claws,’ warns Meyer’s trailer for the film, ‘and they’re not afraid to use them.’ Like the ancient Maenads, Varla and her crew are at their core feral beings.

Meyer’s Dionysian woman

And where there are Maenads, there are satyrs, the half-human/half-goat woodland creatures who figure in myth as the male half of Dionysus’ retinue. Drunk, lusty rogues and debauchees often depicted balancing Dionysus’ wine cup on the tips of their erect penises, satyrs are typically an idle and cowardly lot. But they are also wily, wanton, and capable of violence, particularly against the nymphs they eternally pursue and occasionally rape. They are the archetype for nearly all of the male characters in Pussycat – in fact, the entire Meyer oeuvre – from the strip club patrons who gawk at Rosie, Varla and Billie from the edge of the stage, to the lecherous drunken Old Man who chases defenseless nymphs in his endless pursuit of revenge. Satyrs embody man’s unfettered lust and his folly, as he is reduced to an impulse. Unlike the fearsome Maenads practicing their brutal rites in the forest clearing, satyrs are weak, horny cowards hiding in the surrounding woods, sexual failures who make their furtive advances and dirty jokes from a safe distance. They want to feel powerful – hence their endless attempts to subject nymphs to their sexual will, just as so many sexually frustrated Meyer men take out their frustrations on vulnerable women – but like the company man, satyrs are utterly lost within an immense, mysterious and perhaps unknowable power structure. Neither gods nor men, capable of irony and flashes of (typically obscene) insight while being reduced to brute beasts by their relentless desire, they are the model for every barroom blowhard. In the presence of real female authority, they cower like Meyer’s men in the presence of the Dionysian Pussycats, waiting for them to show signs of weakness or to separate from the pack so that they may pounce.

A satyr watching from the edge of the strip club stage

In modern times, the term ‘Dionysian’ has come to be associated with the intuitive and the irrational, thanks in large part to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872), in which he pairs the term with ‘Apollonian’ to describe competing but complimentary aspects of human nature. Apollo, the Sun God, is a figure associated with light, reason, and balance. The god of Plato and the moon landing, he represents the triumph of moderation and individuation. On his temple at Delphi are inscribed the mottoes ‘Nothing in Excess’ and ‘Know Thyself’. Dionysus, on the other hand, is the god of vitality, altered states of consciousness, and the communal. He represents our irrational nature, manifest in drunkenness, passion, violence and ecstasy. Like Freud’s Id, the Dionysian is the primordial aspect of human consciousness, while the Apollonian is civilisation, the determination to create harmony and order that roughly correlates to Freud’s Superego. According to Nietzsche, these forces compete for dominance, but also co-exist in creative tension, like yin and yang. If the Apollonian is the harmonious body, the Dionysian is the percussive beat of its blood.

To elucidate this relationship, Nietzsche uses the example of ancient Greek tragedy, which he saw as an ideal balance between Apollonian and Dionysian forces, of reason/order and instinct/chaos. Or perhaps a collision: in tragedy, powerful heroes attempt to bring order to the chaos, but chaos has its own plans. Oedipus tries to avoid his terrible fate, but inadvertently steps right into it; Antigone tries to give her brother an honourable burial, but Creon’s pride and rigid adherence to custom lead not only to her death, but that of his own son. Tragedy is all about structure – episodes, perepetia, strophe – but those structures strain under the weight of unknown or unpredictable forces: the will of gods, the impulses of men. By story’s end, it would seem we are left with nothing but what Aristotle describes as catharsis: the purgation of pity and terror, and the uneasy realisation that there but by the grace of the gods go we. But if tragedy attempts to contain the Dionysian within the Apollonian, to give it structure and continuity in clearly defined narratives and identifiable characters (if Dionysian rites are ecstatic and associative, tragedy is, by all appearances, sober and logical), in the right balance, says Nietzsche, tragedy vividly embodies the Dionysian spirit. The fall of tragic heroes merely represents the death of the individual, who is subsequently reborn into what Nietzsche calls the ‘primal unity’, a sort of transcendent universal oneness roughly equivalent to the Buddhist notion of nirvana. It is precisely this orgiastic state that the followers of Dionysus seek through his sacred rites.

If modern history is largely about the dominance of the Apollonian – from humanism and scientific method to the Enlightenment and psychoanalysis – it was never more self-consciously so than in that period of American history directly preceding the appearance of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. The 1950s and early 1960s were a time of rigid social conventions and consumer ambition, of giant computers and even bigger corporations. But while Dionysus seems to have gone underground during this period, his presence was still to be felt in the driving rhythms of rock ‘n’ roll and the giddy excess of the businessman’s three-martini lunch, not to mention the facile hedonism of the many Playboy-type clubs and grindhouses that dotted the American landscape. And as the 1960s wore on, the Dionysian spirit became still more prevalent, most apparently in psychedelic culture. In 1964, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters began travelling the country in their Day-Glo bus spreading the gospel of LSD, while in the years to follow bands like The Doors and Jefferson Airplane offered a brand of music that promised expanded consciousness (in fact, the Doors’ front man, Jim Morrison, often referred to himself as Dionysus). Orgiastic sex and violence filled the pages of popular fiction, from Terry Southern’s Candy (first published in 1958, but not released in the United States until 1964) to Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge (1968), as well as movie house screens, from the avant garde (Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Ken Jacobs’ Blonde Cobra were both released to great notice and notoriety in 1963) to the mainstream (Sergio Leone’s blood-spattered spaghetti westerns beat out Hollywood productions in the box office, while Tony Richardson’s bawdy adaptation of Tom Jones won Best Picture, Director and Screenplay at the 1963 Academy Awards).

But Dionysus was also finding his way back to the stage, thanks to the burgeoning popularity of ancient Greek theatre in the later part of the decade. Edith Hall outlines this trend brilliantly in her introduction to Dionysus Since ’69, a collection of essays that takes as its starting point Richard Schechner’s infamous take on Euripides’ Bacchae, entitled Dionysus in ’69 (1968). Written and directed by Schechner, though largely improvised by his acting troupe, the Performing Group, the play opened at New York City’s Performance Garage in June of 1968, at the height of the hippie movement. Dionysus in ’69 does not so much adapt Euripides’ work as use its characters and dramatic situations to read its own time, making frequent references to the Vietnam War, free love and civil rights. It is truly Dionysian theatre, filled with nudity, violence, gore and audience participation, including an extended orgy sequence. But where Hall sees Scheckner’s play as a starting point, I see it as a culmination of sorts. Schechner’s vision for Dionysus in 69 grew out of the theories of Antonin Artaud, who in the 1930s theorised a ‘Theatre of Cruelty’, in which the false realities perpetuated by mainstream theatre – character, unified action, time and space – would be shattered, and existential truths revealed through instinctive, sometimes violent action.[17] Theatre of this sort is cruel not because it is sadistic or willfully brutal – though it certainly meant to assault the senses – but because the illusions it attempts to shatter protect the audience from truths they do not wish to see, truths hidden in irony, ambiguity, symbolism, and in the affective distance created by the structures of the fiction itself: staging, costuming, formal story divisions and so on. According to this theory, to truly express the core of the drama theatre must appeal to the gut as well as to the intellect, and to do that it had to peel away the many layers of remove and create a new sort of language, ‘somewhere between thought and gesture’. And who better to speak to the gut than Dionysus, a figure of fecundity and excess, of ecstasy and orgy, perhaps the most visceral deity ever conceived?

In his opening monologue to Dionysus in ‘69, actor William Finley introduces himself thus as Dionysus:

For those of you who believe … that I am a god, you are going to have a terrific evening. The rest of you are in trouble. It is going to be an hour and a half of being up against the wall. Those of you who believe can join us in what we do next. It’s a celebration, a ritual, an ordeal, an ecstasy. An ordeal is something you go through. An ecstasy is what happens to you when you get there. (Hall 2004:49)

Like Dionysus addressing Pentheus at the beginning of Euripides’ play, the actor/character is not merely asking the audience to suspend their disbelief, but to actively commit to the notion that he is a divine being. For, without that level of commitment, the audience will never achieve that ecstasy, will in fact be compelled to face the paradox of an embodied deceit (the play is not merely a fiction, but a lie), and so facing it either admit that the play is robbed of value, or that value is contingent upon one’s willingness to foster that deceit. It is a bit like the problem several critics have noted in modern stagings of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: if the audience is not willing to believe in the witches, then the fate of Macbeth can never be seen as anything more than a metaphor for monstrous ambition. But in Macbeth the choice to believe or disbelieve is made independently of the text. If modern audiences find it hard to suspend disbelief, Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have had little difficulty believing in witches. But Schechner’s play demands a willful suspension of disbelief, at once an acknowledgement and disavowal of the artifice of the text. Findley’s introductory remarks are a scold against a purely pedantic reading of the play, because it robs the experience of a more visceral, and by Artaud’s standard, genuine element.

So what does any of this have to do with Pussycat? On the surface it would be hard to imagine two projects with less in common than Meyer’s film and Schechner’s play. While Scheckner reinvents one of the key works of Western literature for an audience of radicalised bohemians and intellectuals, Meyer merely attempts to squeeze another dollar out of his loyal audience with a warmed-over quasi-sequel to his previous film, Motor Psycho!. Yet Pussycat somehow manages to embody the conflict between the solipsistic patriarchal fiction of film noir – where women flaunt their sexuality for the pleasure of men, then are sacrificed in the service of male authority – and the reality beyond. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is a cruel film, both in the sense that it manipulates audience desires and perceptions, only to undermine and/or threaten them (it is the striptease without the strip), and in the sense that it is built upon a power structure that, once revealed, threatens something far deeper: the autonomy of the Apollonian individual. And though it never promises – as Artaud and Scheckner and Jim Morrison do – to open the gates of perception, Pussycat demands that the audience place blind faith in its avatars of power, its Superwomen, because no other characters seem worthy of our allegiance. Little wonder it has had such success as a cult film, a mode of discourse that not only demands submission but embodies the Dionysian spirit in its ecstatic communal rituals, while it utterly bombed in its original release to an audience of men seeking fantasy fulfillment, not the exposure of erotic anxieties.

Obviously, Meyer did not consciously aspire to alienate his audience, nor do I imagine he had Aeschylus or Euripides in mind while making the film. Meyer’s sensibilities were simply geared toward this primal way of thinking – or, in his case, primitive. For Meyer the ritual cleansing we associate with catharsis had its most potent corollaries in scatology and sex, where excretion and orgasm amounted to a form of purification. ‘The cleansing act of sex – that was his theory,’ recalls Charles Napier, who appeared in four Meyer pictures. In his films, the rhythms of sex are mechanical and detached, like the movements of a plunger against a drain – or a toilet. Continues Napier: ‘For Meyer, sex is something like a bowel movement.’ Indeed, Meyer, whom former lover Kitten Natividad nicknamed ‘Mr. Poo-Poo’, said more than once that, next to sex, his favorite activities were farting and defecating.[18] Of course, most great comedy has its source in the lower body, from Aristophanes’ erection jokes in Lysistrata to any Groucho Marx double entendre. And many tragedies simply extend the same taboos, from the incest anxieties at the core of Oedipus Rex to the homosexual subtext of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But if Groucho and Tennessee Williams are finally constrained by modern notions of propriety, in Meyer’s films there is no line between text and subtext. Rather, he steps over the line with the gleeful delight of an adolescent making wolf whistles and fart noises in the back of a darkened school auditorium.

Which brings us back to the satyr. In Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argues that the figure is not only the mythical source of classical tragedy (the Greek tragodia literally translates as ‘goat-song’) but of the Dionysian impulse in all art that, like Freud’s notion of humour, is meant to contain and give shape to ideas and impulses society finds objectionable or dangerous, especially those rooted in sex and violence. Nietzsche idealises the satyr as a figure of ‘primordial humanity’, before our natural impulses were completely suppressed by civilisation, but like all ideals the satyr is a paradox: neither weak nor strong, god nor human, a thing set apart. But according to Nietzsche, it is precisely this satyric state of being, not some bland Aristotelian revelation of existential truths, which the audience for tragedy seeks. Like Meyer’s men – on both sides of the screen – they attempt to embrace their satyr selves.

The roots of this impulse run deep in classical drama, which had its origins in dithyrambic poetry sung in praise of Dionysus by a chorus of satyrs. As Greek drama evolved over time, the satyr chorus was eventually replaced by one made up of ordinary Greek citizens, but the mythical figure did not disappear. He was simply given his own venue, the satyr plays performed alongside what have come to be considered the masterworks of high tragedy at the most renowned of all Greek theatre festivals, the Dionysia. Playwrights entering the competition were required to submit four works: three tragedies and one satyr play. The satyr plays were tragicomic burlesques, typically set in a field or secluded place, and borrowed from the same classical myths that served as the narrative core of the great tragedies, though with the comic addition of drunkenness, sex, a happy ending and, of course, a satyr chorus whose obscene commentary and frequent displays of cowardice are the primary source of the plays’ humor.

It is not difficult to see the connection between this lesser-known classical form and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. The setting of Meyer’s film is certainly evocative of the satyr play’s seclusion: the lonely backwater town and dilapidated ranch in the middle of the open desert, which serves as a safe haven for Meyer’s sexually-frustrated, emotionally damaged men. But what truly marks Pussycat as a latter day satyr play is the way it manages to maintain its bawdy humour through all of the murder, perversion and misogyny by playing the Pussycats’ Amazonian willfulness against the fatalistic wit and limitless folly of Meyer’s satyric men. Satyr plays make light of the same matters that give tragedy its weight. Indeed, the inclusion of satyr plays in the Dionysia was intended for comic relief. If the tragedies attempted – albeit fleetingly – to address the inherent mysteries of human suffering and truth, satyr plays were pleasurable precisely because of the comic, frequently obscene manner in which they undermine these mysteries. So it is with Meyer’s film. While the mystery of female sexual power is a compelling subject, Meyer’s satyr play makes little or no effort to actually understand it. Rather, it revels in the restless thrill of proximity to that mystery. The strip club patrons are only too happy to perch at the foot of the stage, provided they get a glimpse at the mighty, writhing Pussycats, just as the Gas Station Attendant gladly receives Varla’s insults for a glimpse at her cleavage, and the Old Man allies himself with her for the opportunity to rape Linda: actually having the Vegetable do so, as his surrogate.

For in Meyer’s wasteland, pleasure requires distance, either physical (voyeurism) or emotional (rape), because that distance allows the recipient of pleasure to maintain the mystery. For satyrs both ancient and modern, the desire to ‘know’ – in this case, the secret of women’s sexual power over men – is rhetorical. But it is a mistake to think that refusing to plummet the depths of these mysteries is the same as seeing them as meaningless or empty. Rhetorical or not, the questions raised by satyr plays from Euripides’ Cyclops to Meyer’s Pussycat are bound to produce anxieties as they expose rather than resolve doubts.

The actor in ancient Greece was originally known as hypokrites, a word that translates as ‘I play a part’, but encompasses a variety of meanings, from play-acting and feigning to its common contemporary usage, in which it refers to one who judges others by a harsher standard than himself. In its original theatrical usage it meant simply ‘the answerer’. Early Greek drama was comprised of songs and odes recited to the gods – Dionysus in particular – by a satyr chorus, until in the sixth century BC Thespis (whose name is the source of the term ‘thespian’) conceived the notion of having a single character take the stage and respond to, or ‘answer’ the chorus. So drama as we now know it was born. Over time, the roles of the chorus and hypokrites were further refined, so that the primary functions of the chorus became to state the overall themes of the play and to give the audience some sense of its meaning, and the actor performed the role of the central character in the myth, while continuing to engage in a dialogue with the chorus. Other of his ilk soon joined the hypokrites on the stage, and he was elevated to the status of protagonist, which translates literally as ‘first combatant’.

Meyer’s satyrs comprise the chorus: from the disembodied narrator in the opening monologue who lays out the central themes of the story to follow, to the club patrons who offer provocations to the Pussycats from the edge of the stage, to the Gas Station Attendant who offers Varla his unsolicited commentary on the state of the world and the Old Man and his sons who attempt to dominate the Pussycats. The Pussycats are the actors, with Varla standing in the position of the first combatant/protagonist/hypokrites, not simply because she rejoins the narrator’s words of welcome – ‘to violence: the word and the act’ – with genuine acts of violence, but because she offers the most direct answer or response to the chorus’s running commentary on her terrifying, seductive power. Of course, the answer is not one the satyrs want to hear: that her power is real and destructive, not simply a prop in some elaborate male fantasy.

At this point we run into a nagging doubt. After all, this is a Russ Meyer sexploitation film, and the notion that he intended his Pussycats to be both powerful and empowered may be difficult to swallow. But I would argue that the Pussycats’ remarkable power – indeed, that of Vixen or Lorna, or any of Meyer’s Superwomen – is merely a bi-product of his Dionysian sensibility. Meyer’s Pussycats are not only avatars of the ‘raving ones’ who helped the God of Wine turn Western civilisation on its head, but progeny of the dramatic tradition that grew from his sacred rites and gave us such imposing dramatis personae as Sophocles’ Antigone, Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra and Euripides’ Medea. Rebels all, they express their rage against the patriarchal machine through taboo-shattering acts of social transgression: suicide (Antigone), the murder of a husband/king (Clytemnestra) and the slaughter of one’s own children (Medea). If Varla, Rosie and Billie’s transgressions seem tame by comparison, it is because their rebellion is general. If Medea, Clytemnestra and Antigone specifically seek to harm Jason, Agamemnon and Creon, the Pussycats are simply looking to stir things up.

In Timberlake Wertenbaker’s essay from Hall’s Dionysus in ‘69, the playwright highlights an essential difference between Greek tragic men and Greek tragic women that offers a great deal of insight to Meyer’s Pussycats. According to Wertenbaker, male characters from tragedy pride themselves on having achieved the Apollonian ideal of self-knowledge. Men of intellect and experience, they remain convinced right up to the moment of their destruction that they have acted properly and that reason will reveal to them the best course of future action. This inevitably leads to the revelation of a far deeper level of ignorance, as in the case of Oedipus, who steps right into the trap he has all along sought to avoid. But women in tragedy make no such claims to self-knowledge, nor do they assume the efficacy of reason. Argues Wertenbaker, because tragic women are denied access to the privileged knowledge that inspires tragic heroes like Oedipus to seize control of their destinies, they are much more likely to follow their Dionysian instincts. While the men attempt to conquer the Unknown with what finally reveals itself to be an over-weaning confidence in their own intellectual gifts and powers of discernment, the women reconcile themselves to the Unknowable and turn their attention to transforming and transcending their reality through acts of will not merely bold but unthinkable. Like Nietzsche’s Übermensch, they achieve power by threatening the values at the very core of the social order. Hence the popularity of Greek drama in the 1960s, a time when Apollonian models of social order (government, law, religion, family) were being directly challenged by a growing body of Dionysian dissenters, who answered Apollo’s ‘Know Thyself’ with LSD guru Timothy Leary’s famous phrase, ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out.’

Leary would first utter his call for an expanded, ever-shifting, communal consciousness in 1966, a year after Pussycat had its first theatrical run. But if his statement offered some indication that Dionysus was finally making inroads to the verdant landscapes of the burgeoning hippie utopia – from the communes of New Mexico and California to Max Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York – the Pussycats would not make it out of the desert alive. Driven not by ambitious ideals and psychedelic visions but a sort of tragic fatalism – an understanding that the road leads not to Heaven, Nirvana or Woodstock but to annihilation – their rebellion is not so much counter-cultural as anti-social, and in the case of Varla, sociopathic. If the hippies represent a crossing point between Dionysian ecstasy and New Left politics, where change comes from the limitless power of the collective wish (‘Hey, if you think real hard, maybe we can stop the rain!’ says the p.a. announcer at the Woodstock Festival), the Pussycats chase ecstatic thrills not to effect change but because they no longer believe in change. They take pleasure in the hunt, but little in the kill, which signals not the goal achieved but the thrill spent. Varla relishes humiliating Tommy in front of his girlfriend, Linda, but when he sucker punches her, she murders him with dispatch. And when the deed is done, her first thought is of escape, not the display of the kill. So with the Vegetable when she attempts to run him down with her Porsche. As he miraculously pushes the car away with his own brute strength, we see Varla’s face turn from bitter amusement to frustration. ‘That’s two out of three falls,’ she finally concedes with disgust, not because he has beaten her but because the battle has come to naught. Or the fistfight with Kirk in the film’s final scene. Rosie and Billie gone, she continues to pursue Linda and Kirk out of an instinct that is one part survival (if she can kill them before they contact the authorities, she will be the only survivor) and an equal measure of primal violence. Even after Linda runs her over with the Old Man’s truck and life begins to leave her body, Varla raises her gloved fist one last time. Like a pissed-off Terminator in a Fredericks of Hollywood brassiere, she looks to deliver one last blow before collapsing, defiant even to death. Though in Meyer’s fatalistic wasteland, her destruction is as assured as was that of her ancient Greek forebears.

But if things end badly for the Pussycats, the satyrs fare little better. If feckless Kirk and simpering Linda survive the melee, and the nearly crushed Vegetable is left to lick his wounds and grieve Billie’s death, the Old Man is not so lucky. His death is one of the most brutal in the film: as he struggles to maneouvre his wheelchair over a curb, Varla runs him over with her car.[19] But while this ought to be a shocking, or at the very least pitiable moment, it is merely humourous, as we watch the bitter, vengeful man get what is coming to him. In fact, the film develops almost no sympathy for the Old Man, even though his crippling occurred as the result of an act of heroism: he saved a young girl from being killed by a train. But after she left him to his fate with barely a word of thanks, he developed a deep hatred for her and the rest of humanity, shutting himself off from the world and setting traps for unsuspecting young girls in a twisted attempt to right the wrong done to him. This is also what turns him from a man into a satyr, a cowardly half-man who exercises his wit and bawdy humour in service to his limitless, often violent libido. He is also perhaps the most complex, even contradictory character in the film, with his tragic back-story and fiendish plots, perverse joviality and simmering hatred, critical acuity and crude country manners. In this he also reflects the inherent paradox of the satyr: a Dionysian figure whose cowardice and social impotence stem from a competing Apollonian intellect.

In Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche attempts to make a clear distinction between the goals of the Apollonian and Dionysian by comparing them to the theoretical man and the artist:

While the artist, having unveiled the truth garment by garment, remains with his gaze fixed on what is still hidden, theoretical man takes delight in the cast off garments and finds his highest satisfaction in the unveiling process itself, which proves to him his own power. (1993:92)

Indeed, Meyer’s satyrs – from the narrator, to the strip club patrons, to the Old Man – observe the bacchanalia with the stated expectations of theoretical man, seeking power in the possession of the hidden secrets of sex and violence, ‘the word and the act’. Then, like the voice of God in Genesis, the words become flesh, though not of man (or as in the Gospel of John, of God), but of Woman. And as in Genesis, Women embody Sin: sex objects writhing in a joyful, wanton go-go dance, then as high-velocity free spirits in sports cars, dangerous and danger-loving. But because this is Russ Meyer – over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek – the viewer does not avert his eyes but openly gawks like the sordid chorus of strip club patrons who shout ‘Go! Go!’, worked up and eager for a big payoff. And because this is a Russ Meyer film, we assume that payoff will eventually come, though we never see beyond the halter tops and impossibly tight jeans, nor the convoluted pop psychology and bizarre storylines.

Perhaps this is part of the appeal, what separates the erotic from the purely pornographic: the perilous narrative turns and character transformations that ever hold the object of desire just out of reach, versus, say, the bloodless mechanical intercourse of the ‘adult’ film that, once it fulfills its stimulative function, seems laughably hollow and pathetic. Meyer’s roughies, and Pussycat in particular, build erotic tension only to disrupt, disarm and dismantle it: not in the postmodern sense of exposing ideologies at the core of the erotic, but in the primal sense of revealing the rift between the rational and the erotic, between the misogynistic logic of the disembodied Lawgiver and the wild ecstasies of the strip club patrons, drunk and livid with desire.

For Meyer, this is a matter of degrees: the satyr, like the voyeur, must get close enough to see, but not so close as to be exposed to danger. In Euripides’ Bacchae, King Pentheus observes the orgiastic rites of the Maenads from just such a position, sure in the knowledge that his exalted reason will prevent him from giving into lasciviousness. But when he leans too far out into the clearing for a better look, the entranced women spot him and, mistaking him for a sacrificial goat, rip his head from his shoulders. Among its retinue of satyrs, every Meyer film has at least one Pentheus character: a straight-laced young stud who spurns the advances of Meyer’s sexually-voracious women, sometimes out of naiveté, sometimes out of prudishness. But really they are repressed satyrs, who respond to their sexual urges and anxieties by attempting to reason them away and projecting them onto the object of desire. If the fully realised satyr achieves a certain balance between his cowardice and his lust – endlessly pursuing and retreating from the object of desire in what amounts to an endless erotic game – for the Pentheus character, the fear has completely taken over. Like the opening narration of Pussycat, these figures condemn the wanton female, not as a moral but as a mortal danger.

‘Because you’re an animal, and I’m weak.’

Pussycat offers two such figures, but only one will survive. Tommy unwittingly parks his car at the very site of the Pussycats’ Dionysian rites – the dirt circle in the middle of the desert – and foolishly agrees to sport with them. Too naïve to recognise the car race for the trap it is, he takes Varla’s challenge, and soon learns that she will win at any cost. Kirk, on the other hand, manages to walk away from two tussles with Varla: once in the hay bale seduction that follows the lunch scene described at the opening of this chapter, and again in the desert sand at the very end of the film, where Linda rescues him just before he meets the same fate as Tommy. Surely he owes his survival to Linda, but it is also his hesitation – his unwillingness to give into his weakness for Varla – that keeps him alive that long. It is the same reticence that compels him to remain quiet at lunch, even when Varla pokes fun at his manhood after learning that he has prepared the meal. ‘He’ll make someone a fine wife,’ she jokes with the Old Man: ‘Does he sew?’ ‘Only his wild oats!’ the Old Man replies in a strained attempt to rescue some measure of sexual authority for his son, but Kirk is content to observe, comfortable being referred to in the third person, as though he were not there at all. Or, like Pentheus, watching from the edge of the clearing in relative safety. In the hay bale scene that follows, he nearly falls into Varla’s trap, but when destiny takes a hand – in the form of Linda’s second escape attempt – he manages to survive even passion’s grip.

Here again we see the insistence of Kirk’s ‘reason’. Their conversation begins with his observation that she is very much like the Old Man, and when she asks why he would then be interested in her, Kirk declares, ‘Because you’re an animal, and I’m weak.’ But even as she shows him that animal side, pressing her body against his and offering it as his ‘cup to fill, to overflow’, he continues to question her motives. ‘What do you want?’ he asks again and again, to which she finally answers, ‘Everything, or as much as I can get.’ But this is clearly too abstract for Kirk and, even as he falls into her clutches, his face and gestures are strained, unable to give himself over to pleasure in the moment. But if his natural reticence is a big factor in his eventual survival, Meyer certainly does not admire Kirk for walking away. He has given up a few moments of intense passion for a lifetime with the lifeless Linda. Pussycat, like any of Meyer’s films, seems finally to ask, ‘What’s sex – or indeed life – without a little danger?’ In any other universe – say, the seedy underworld of film noir, in which the femme fatale undermines the autonomy of the male hero – Kirk’s scepticism would be seen as wisdom. If only Walter Neff had not paid so much attention to Phyllis Dietrichson’s anklet in Double Indemnity (1944), he would not be bleeding all over Barton Keyes’ Dictaphone. But in Meyer’s world, it is all about the anklet. Not to look is to be guilty of a crime far greater than stupidity: unforgivable blandness.

So is the male better off dying a satyr hunting the queen of nymphs, rather than being forced to live on – as most of Meyer’s Pentheus characters are damned to do – in a world of safe, predictable sex with the good girl? Probably not. Nor would it be reasonable to judge a film this arch and humourous as a call to rape, murder, or kinky sex for that matter. But it does promise its own unique version of sublimation. Just as, according to Nietzsche, Greek drama allows audiences a vicarious link to their satyr nature by creating a socially acceptable venue for the performance of Dionysian rites, Meyer’s films allow us to become satyrs and/or Pussycats vicariously, living on the edge of danger for the sexual thrill that comes with it. The film is less a warning about the dangers of embracing our satyr/Pussycat nature (since all of the Pussycats die, as do many of the satyrs) than a lesson in sustained sexual pleasure. For Meyer, the thrill of sex is titillation rather than the illusory catharsis that comes with orgasm (hence Meyer’s refusal to move from softcore to hardcore pornography, where orgasm is the only objective). Like his audience – indeed, like Pentheus in Euripides’ play – Meyer’s male characters beg to be teased, to be dominated, and to remain ever at the edge of the woods, watching the Pussycats practicing their rites. But in Pussycat, the garments are never cast off, and no quarter is given to those who seek the confirmation of voyeuristic power, or at least the uni-directional hidden gaze that stands in for a species of power. In Pussycat, the girls gaze – nay, glare – back at the patrons, and by extension the viewer, knowing precisely that the power resides in what is not revealed, because it cannot be: the irreducible libidinal impulse at the center of Dionysian ritual. The patrons presume to participate in the ritual, but they are no better than Pentheus sitting at the edge of the woods, trying to remain hidden in the shadows so that he can observe and possess these latter-day Maenads with impunity. But Meyer throws a bright light upon them as well, exposing their slovenly faces and lascivious intent, robbing them not only of power (hence the high-angle shots that diminish them) but also of any semblance of dignity.

Which brings us back to the stage: not the Greek amphitheatre or the Performance Garage, but the burlesque stage, where the Pussycats refuse to be relegated and continue to exercise (at their peril) a sexual power that no man – Apollonian or Dionysian – could ever subdue. The lesson of Meyer’s Dionysian drama is not that we need to penetrate reality in order to experience it, but that it is better to drink the Dionysian wine, to submit to the Bacchic spell, to temporarily embrace our satyr nature and become one with the ‘primal unity’. Worry about the hangover tomorrow. ‘Go! Go!’ the men in the audience shout as the three girls tower over them from a burlesque stage, their own frenzied cries and postures of ecstasy matching the wild gyrations of Meyer’s Maenads. But like the satyr, the men know better than to touch or attempt to mount the stage themselves, lest the flailing hands of the dancers reveal their claws and strike at their necks.

5

A VELVET GLOVE CAST IN IRON

Ebert: But, Russ, how will people be able to order it?

Meyer: They can call me up.

Ebert: But your number is unlisted!

Meyer: That’s their problem.[20]

By the time Russ Meyer died in 2004, his movie empire was nearly in ruins. Having suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for the better part of a decade, he had come to rely exclusively upon a small group of assistants who knew little about his work, and who seemed only interested in insulating him from the rest of the world. Though the films themselves were still in excellent shape (Meyer had always taken scrupulous care in preserving them), video releases from the late 1990s onward were increasingly haphazard and sloppy. No efforts had been made to re-master the degraded video transfers made in the early 1980s, and even the DVD versions that began appearing in 2002 came from VHS and laserdisc sources. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! made its first DVD appearance in 2005: a $40 disc with the sort of muddy video image and cheap airbrushed cover art one might expect from a three-for-ten public domain title found in a remainder bin. Concurrent with its appearance, British video distributor, Arrow Films, released its own licensed version – along with 17 other Meyer titles – on a region-free disc. The Arrow DVD soon became the European and Asian standard, not only because it is widely available and cheaper by nearly half, but because it offers a slightly better transfer and includes a variety of extras (cast interviews, commentary tracks). But in Meyer’s native country this version is only available through resellers, eBay and torrent sites, and most of us are stuck with our RM Films discs and memories of the good old days, when Meyer answered his own phones and stood behind every copy of his film.

Despite the filmmaker’s absence, and the ineffectiveness of those charged with stewarding the film’s legacy, Pussycat remains Meyer’s most popular title, and the only exploitation film to consistently rank among the major works of American independent and cult cinema. But considering the film’s tenuous position in the marketplace, it seems reasonable to ask how that legacy might be protected. If an exploitation film has ever deserved the Criterion treatment – a quality transfer and ancillary materials that attest to the cultural significance of the film – it is surely Pussycat. The task would be made all the easier by the quality of the prints available, and the wealth of critical and pop cultural material surrounding the film. But while Criterion’s catalogue of ‘important classic and contemporary films’ marking the ‘defining moments in cinema’, includes a range of cult movies, from the popular (Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap, 1984) to the notorious (Pasolini’s Salo: 120 Days of Sodom, 1975) and the obscure (Bennet’s Atomic Submarine, 1959), Pussycat remains on the outside looking in.

Perhaps this omission is due to a licensing issue, perhaps to indifference, or perhaps it is because Pussycat – like so many other cult films – is dogged by the insistent problem of evaluation. By what standard might we call it an ‘important’ or ‘defining’ film? Most cult films distinguish themselves not by how well they meet the criteria by which mainstream movies are measured (the quality of writing, acting, direction, technical work: awards show categories), but how well and thoroughly they flaunt conventional standards. Cult fans are fond of saying that there is ‘nothing quite like’ their beloved films, placing a higher value on transgressiveness, novelty and messiness than on any conventional criteria: hence the preponderance of ‘bad’ movies in the cult canon. All of which makes them very difficult to evaluate on their own merits.

This problem has beset Pussycat from its first theatrical release in 1965, when the majority of reviewers argued that its observable virtues (Meyer’s editing and cinematography) were outstripped by its deficiencies (cardboard performances and a bad script). And while the film’s reputation would improve over time, the aspects of the film most singled out for praise – Meyer’s technical skill, his bold characterisations, and his keen sense of parody – actually speak to very conventional qualitative criteria. As we see with films like Zemeckis’s Back to the Future (1985) and the Coens’ The Big Lebowski (1998), mainstream respectability and cult reputation are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Indeed, even the most outrageous of cult films – Jodorowski’s El Topo (1970), Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) – are rooted in familiar narrative elements and genres (the western in El Topo, horror and melodrama in Eraserhead). Moreover, the very notion of a cult canon – a body of ‘important’ works of cult cinema – assumes a standard that by default must draw, if only by way of contrast, upon a more conventional set. Cult films do not so much re-invent the wheel as bend it out of round. Though the cart may wobble and list to one side, it still manages to roll along. And it is precisely their unusual carriage that makes cult films not only interesting but also culturally vital. By challenging conventions and expectations, they compel the audience to see the world – or at least the world of the film – differently. Cult films make familiar things strange again. If Pussycat’s storylines and characterisations borrow heavily from film noir, neorealism, melodrama, and the L’il Abner comic strip, it manages to make these elements fresh by constantly undermining their facile fantasies of revenge, redemption and sexual sublimation. And it achieves this by at once refining and ramping up the out-of-round formal and aesthetic elements long since associated with Russ Meyer: the arch compositions, the Eisensteinian editing, the comic book hyperbole.

All of which goes a long way towards explaining why Pussycat might to be considered an ‘important’ work of exploitation cinema, independent cinema and American cinema. But to be considered a cult film, Pussycat must do more than merely challenge conventions. The annals of art and avantgarde – not to mention mainstream – cinema are filled with examples of films that do so, yet never achieve cult status. Cult films compel the fan to identify with their transgressive worldview, to embrace their rebellious posture and acknowledge their values, even if one does not share them. But what makes the general merits of the cult film so difficult to assess is the highly varied manner of identification cult films engender, from the ‘so bad it’s good’ ethos of fans of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), to the self-incriminating ‘then I’ll be damned’ attitude of those who champion Ruggero Deodato’s depraved Cannibal Holocaust (1980). When dealing with Russ Meyer’s nudie-cuties, for example, the values with which the audience identifies are fairly plain: the guiltless sex, the convivial humor. But the roughies, and Pussycat in particular, complicate matters significantly, with their violent plots, moral ambivalence and shifting gender roles.

Perhaps the best way to assess the cult value and values of Pussycat is to consider its awkward place in the pop cultural lexicon. Though filmmakers, music video directors, television writers and graphic artists love to reference the film and exploit its potent iconography, they do so in decidedly disconnected ways, as though their knowledge of the film comes second- or third-hand. Most references are gratuitous puns: an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon in The Simpsons called ‘Foster Pussycat Kill Kill’ frames Bart’s and Lisa’s anxieties about being taken from their parents (‘Home Sweet Home-Diddly-Dum-Doodly,’ 7.3); the title character of House M.D. goads a kitten believed to predict death with Meyer’s title phrase (‘Here Kitty,’ 5.18). But even the most faithful and doting references fail to do more than scratch the surface, including Meyer’s own use of the film in his ‘Don’t Change That Song’ (1987) video for the sleaze-metal band, Faster Pussycat. In the video, the band plays on an elevated stage while a montage of clips from Pussycat is projected on the screen behind them and a bevy of buxom young women writhe on the dance floor below. Though the writhing women’s physical proportions fall well in line with the Meyer body type (big busts, thin waists), their role in the video-worshipping at the feet of virile, lion-maned men in lipstick and earrings – not only reverses typical Meyer gender roles but throws them into a blender. The men are no longer aggressive cripples or satyrs but Dionysus, himself – potent, androgynous – and the women their entranced Maenads. But the rock gods and groupies are dwarfed by the enormous images of Varla, Haji and Lori displayed behind them, making their hyperactive cavorting seem by comparison like little more than a raunchy high school dance. And while the contrast certainly highlights the power of Meyer’s imagery, its dislocation from the scene also makes it seem more remote, more purely iconic.

Ironically, the pop cultural text most faithful in spirit to Meyer’s original film is one that outwardly has little to do with it. Dan Clowes’ graphic novel Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1998) takes nothing directly from the film except its title, which references a line of dialogue spoken by Billie, meant to indicate the cruel strength beneath Varla’s veneer of femininity. The entire line reads: ‘You’re cute, like a velvet glove cast in iron. And like a gas chamber, Varla, a real fun gal.’ On the surface, Clowes’ text would appear to have nothing in common with Pussycat – no superwomen, no sports cars, no old man in a wheelchair – but as an expression of male anxieties about female sexuality, it shares a great deal in common with Meyer’s film. In the graphic novel, the protagonist, Clay Loudermilk, happens to witness his wife playing the part of a dominatrix in a bondage film he sees at a local porn theatre. He suddenly has an overwhelming (one assumes erotic) urge to search her out, but a series of perverse situations and bizarre characters – religious cultists, conspiracy theorists, and a mysterious fish-shaped woman – prevent him from doing so. Clowes’ story is a paranoid fantasy of libido, fear and loss, where women remain powerful only insofar as they remain strange, bad and out of reach, and otherwise impotent men eagerly submit for the promise of sexual fulfillment, though only in the realm of fantasy. It is pure Pussycat.

While these allusions to the film certainly help to ‘get its name out there’ and encourage perhaps a few of the uninitiated to seek out the source of the strange words and images (as the title encouraged me to do when I was thirteen), they are more likely to discourage any deeper engagement with the text because they oversimplify its meaning. The result is a sort of Che Guevara effect: complex narrative and characters are reduced to snappy lines of dialogue quoted out of context and t-shirt-ready icons, where a film still of Tura Satana snapping Ray Barlowe’s back stands for ‘badass’ just as a hard-eyed snapshot of Che in the black beret stands for ‘revolution’. Like a velvet glove cast in iron, the words and images are given durability only by divorcing them from their original meaning, by branding them with some concrete though utterly fantastical value, and so making them negligible.

Pussycat is anything but negligible. It is a bold and frenetic film, from its frenzied opening and two-fisted finish, to its staccato pace, film noir iconography, outrageous title and outsized tits. It is expressionistic and excessive, yet sure and controlled. We see this control not only in the skilled cutting and camerawork, but in every gesture of the Pussycats themselves, who seduce, taunt and spit insults from behind rigid masks of anger, ecstasy, rebellion and loss. Though familiar and compelling figures, they remain illusive and distant behind these masks. And though the film may at times seem ludicrous and laughable – the masks cheap as children’s Halloween costumes – it is never facile. From bizarre characters and situations, it builds unexpected tension, and then refuses to release that tension with easy resolutions. Pussycat does not resolve: it stops. Rather, it is run down in its tracks by a careening truck. It offers no insight, no closure, only a few bitter asides from the battered Kirk and a doubletime run of end credits over a long shot of Meyer’s barren wasteland. And as the story dies its sudden death, we freeze a moment in our seats, disbelieving the evidence of our eyes, that the film actually has come to an end, asking ourselves involuntarily, ‘What was that?’: the very question that led me to write this book.

Next to Russ Meyer himself, no figure has been more central to the propagation of Pussycat’s pop cultural currency than Quentin Tarantino, who makes reference to Meyer’s film in no fewer than three of his own, and has teased a remake of Meyer’s masterpiece for more than a decade. For all that, one might be tempted to cast him as a sort of high priest in the film’s cult. But I contend that Tarantino’s interest in the film, and Meyer in general, is less that of a devotee of Pussycat than a pop culture maven. Though I am sure Tarantino is a fan of Meyer and all of the other filmmakers for whom he claims a deep affection – from the Shaw brothers to Jean Luc Godard – his creative engagement with their films is far too clever and meta-textual to be taken for devotional. Even at its most affectionate, his work operates at a level of ironic distance and aesthetic posturing that makes anything like simple dotage impossible. Maybe love motivated Tarantino to revive John Travolta’s career in Pulp Fiction, and lift David Carradine and Pam Grier out of relative obscurity with Kill Bill: Vol. I (2003), Kill Bill: Vol. II (2004) and Jackie Brown (1997), but he did so by recalibrating and updating their best-known characters – Tony Morino, Kwai Chang Caine, Foxy Brown – and imbuing them with a postmodern cool and humour that makes them entirely his own. Perhaps the reason Tarantino has yet to deliver on his promised remake of Pussycat is because it would require him to engage the film on its own terms, rather than his own.

Remakes intimate a sort of reverence for the original text (Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1998) leaps to mind). But by their very nature they express a sentiment utterly anathema to any cult film fan: that the original might benefit from improvements, recalibrations, updates. Cult film fans may recite the lines of the film while dressed in the costumes of their favorite characters, and play out key scenes in front of home video cameras or indulgent friends, but they do so to mirror, rather than improve upon the original, to reveal the depths of their identification with it. It is a ritual sublimation, where the crude pantomime becomes part statement of joyful affiliation – like belting out the chorus to a favourite song while it plays on the radio – and part sacrament, where the words and costumes are meant to reify the insubstantial images on the screen. Cultists attempt to embody the film as they celebrate it.

If this all sounds like too neat a comparison between religio-cultic practice and film cults, there are distinct differences. The religious cult speaks to a need for moral and spiritual order, and the practice of cultic faith is an expression of devotion to a set of ideas that promise transcendence and grace. But as devoted as the cult film fan may be, he recognises that the film promises only temporary transcendence. Indeed, this is the initial attraction of the film: the moments of intense pleasure it offers come at little cost, and at whatever level of commitment one chooses. Unlike mainstream film fanatics, whose devotion to certain films is akin to an earnest and steadfast romance, the cult fan’s relationship to the film is largely fetishistic. The film is imbued with value directly proportional to the pleasure it brings.

In their introduction to Unruly Pleasures, Graeme Harper and Xavier Mendik draw a parallel between that pleasure and orgasm, both of which embody a ‘combination of intense physical and emotional involvement’. The orgasm serves as a symbol of all that is transgressive and subversive about cult films: an ‘uncontrollable’, ‘unfathomable’ – and so taboo – force (2000:7). We see this in the Pussycats: figures whose sexual power – whose ability to bring the viewer to orgasm, literally and figuratively – is directly tied to what makes them dangerous: their Dionysian wildness and inscrutability.

The problem with Harper and Mendik’s perspective, as highlighted by Joanne Hollows, is that it clearly privileges the masculine position. Indeed, their very notions of orgasm are gendered: the cult audience’s ‘intense’ and ‘violent’ excitement – the earmarks of male orgasm – contrast to the ‘random, directionless, entertainment-seeking’ pleasure experiences by the mainstream audience (Mendik & Harper 2000:9; quoted in Hollows 2003:37). In other words, the cult experience is masculine, while the mainstream one is feminine. Hollows further suggests that the traditional means of consuming cult films – in seedy theatres in the worst parts of town, via mail order advertisements in men’s magazines – enforces this perspective, making the very act of going to a cult film in the heyday of the grindhouse a sort of masculine adventure (women were much more likely to seek out the safe consumer comfort of the movie palace). Cult consumption so becomes tied up in the notion of ‘hardness’, where the courage and prowess required to seek out these films is rooted in the biological imperative that compels him to search in the first place, the erotic act of seeing inextricably tied to the erotics of seeking (Hollows 2003:44). One’s relative willingness to traverse the seedy street, to buy the ticket or to stand at the video store counter while the cashier checks the member number or counts out the wad of bills is proportional to the level of pleasure one receives from actually screening the film.

My problem with Hollows – and by extension Harper and Mendik – is that her definitions of what constitutes ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ seem too simplistic and Victorian to be of much use to a discussion of cult films in general and sexploitation films in particular, where, as Moya Luckett points out, gender identity and gender identification are often highly malleable.[21] Where else would a cross-dresser like Ed Wood find an audience for Glen or Glenda (1953), or a proud breast fetishist like Russ Meyer be allowed to project fantasies of female domination? Pussycat is about gender confusion, not gender reversal, where the women are ‘masculinised’ not by displacing feminine qualities, but by combining the two to create a Meyeresque ideal he referred to as ‘men with big tits’, while the impotence and domesticity of the men paradoxically makes them more aggressive, not more effeminate. While it is true that, at the time of Pussycat’s release, Russ Meyer’s audience was almost entirely male, the homosocial environment of the grindhouse offered a unique opportunity to play out experiments in gender identification, perhaps because women were tacitly excluded from the exhibition space. Their territory no longer threatened, men were freer to expose their anxieties right alongside their desires.

Shortly after Pussycat, Meyer’s audience demographic would begin to shift, and the number of women in the audience would grow exponentially from Vixen! in 1968 onward, with Meyer’s successful move from the grindhouse to the mainstream theatre: a venue more socially inviting to women. To explain this shift, one might argue that Meyer’s films from Vixen! on were simply more female-friendly, that the women in the later films were less objectified and more in touch with their own sexuality, that they rejected the patriarchal roles assigned them and followed the course of their own desires, though rarely to good effect. But while it is true that women were getting more sexual satisfaction in the cycle of melodramas initiated by Common Law Cabin (1967) and peaking with Vixen! – for the simple reason that Meyer wrote more, and more varied sex into the stories to appeal to audience demands – to achieve this satisfaction female characters were being forced to surrender to the will of increasingly foppish men. In point of fact, Meyer’s women would never again embody Varla’s Amazonian strength, would become far more sexually objectified, and more traditionally ‘feminised’. This is also the period when Meyer began to soften the hard edges of the roughies, to introduce more comedy, and to turn toward self-parody. Though the transformation would not be complete until Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, we see its roots in Meyer’s follow-up to Pussycat, Mondo Topless (1966). A crass ‘documentary’ of the topless craze that the film claims was sweeping through America and Europe in the mid-1960s, it was a cheap cash grab meant to recoup some of the losses from Pussycat. In its artless return to the nudie-cutie formula, it is also a repudiation of Pussycat’s dark themes and strange characters, perhaps even an admission that Meyer himself did not quite know what to make of them. Yet as crass as Meyer’s succeeding films might become – and it is hard to imagine greater depths than Pandora Peaks (2001) – Russ Meyer’s films would continue to draw from the sexual dynamic best articulated in the domineering superwomen and impotent cripples of Pussycat: a dynamic that essentially extended Meyer’s own sexual fantasy.

Doyle Greene, who calls Meyer ‘one of the most important commentators, and even theorists, of sexual politics in the twentieth century’, argues that Meyer’s films eliminate boundaries and dichotomies. In them, ‘The lines between sex and violence, humor and evil, tragedy and farce, high art and low culture are all erased in a surreal assemblage that is both hilariously satirical and unnervingly brutal.’ Here he puts his finger on precisely what makes Pussycat, which Doyle identifies as the ‘quintessential’ Russ Meyer movie, such a durable cult film. By blurring the distinctions between often opposing impulses, he makes them vital again: sex and violence become infinitely varied elements of one another; laughter no longer neuters socially unacceptable impulses but showcases them; tragedy reveals itself not only as a cosmic joke, but a domestic one, where sexual failure and cataclysm are intimates (Meyer’s revenge-seeking Old Man is his version of Kubrick’s impotent General Jack D. Ripper from Dr. Strangelove). Doyle goes on further to say that the dichotomy ‘most problematically questioned’ in Meyer’s films is male/female. By skewing biological and cultural notions of gender, Meyer forces the viewer to reconsider, even reconfigure them (Greene 2004:225–6). And that he does this while seeming to present fairly orthodox hetero-normative male fantasies is precisely the point: he is presenting orthodox hetero-normative male fantasies. Only in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, he does so without the gloss of sophistication, the wink and the nudge of the nudie-cuties, instead revealing the inherent conflicts that come not only with desire, but also with getting what we want.

Pussycat deserves its place near the very centre of the cult film canon because it suggests that the collusion between desire and suffering is precisely the source of pleasure. Pussycat is a come-on, but one that demands we acknowledge our self-destructive impulses along with our wants, like Billie asking Tommy, ‘Would you like to look under my hood?’ only moments before Varla murders him. Or like Varla and Kirk in the hay bale: she encouraging his lust at every turn, he recognising her for what she is – ‘a beautiful animal’ – but unable or unwilling to pull himself away even though he knows he will be mauled. Of course, he cannot actually be mauled without undermining the erotic effect, because he is the vehicle of the film’s fantasy. For good or ill, Kirk is the viewer’s surrogate, the one ‘normal’ character among Meyer’s monsters and nymphomaniacs. But if orthodox fantasies rely upon rigid gender categories and genre conventions – the death of Varla’s femme fatale, the romantic entanglement of stalwart Kirk and simpering Linda – Meyer’s cult classic maintains an ambivalent attitude towards gender identity, violence and orthodox cultural values, opting instead for the darker truth of his own sexual fantasies.

If this ambivalence would lead the audience of 1965 to reject the film, the cult of Pussycat has grown and prospered over succeeding decades precisely because of it. If the value of a cult film is measured by the way it challenges conventions and allows for fan identification, then Pussycat’s cult fans surely find some point of identification in Meyer’s dark fantasy: a world where gender boundaries blur, goodness equals blandness, and the ultimate erotic image is of a big-breasted woman in black snapping a pasty-faced young man’s back with her bare hands. Is Pussycat about female empowerment? Maybe. But if so, we may need to redefine what we mean by ‘female.’ Is it a castration fantasy? Possibly, but from whose point of view? Is it simply the reductio ad absurdum of film noir, where the battle of the sexes reveals itself as patriarchal fantasy? The case seems to make itself, though the terms of that fantasy have never looked quite so murky. And to cult fans, the murk would seem to be the point. Pussycat is an opportunity to retreat from the familiar and the known into something strange and unknowable. And that is why we continue to seek out this increasingly hard-to-find masterpiece and perpetuate its cult status. For whether the appeal is ironic, erotic, or iconic, we continue to embrace the towering image of Varla cracking Tommy’s spine – and the spine of the world as we know it – just as we welcome all of this film’s violence against our perceptions, both in word and act.

NOTES

1       I discovered Dr. Keeler’s case study, ‘An Unusual Perversion: The Desire to Be Injured By an Automobile Operated By a Woman,’ through a chance mention in Tom Stafford and Matt Webb’s Mind Hacks blog.

2       Tura Satana has repeated her life story in several interviews, the best of which remains that with Marc Isted in Psychotronic Video #12 (Spring 1992). Jimmy McDonough fills in several of the gaps in his Meyer biography, Big Bosoms and Square Jaws (2005), for which Ms. Satana gave the author access to her as-yet-unpublished memoir, The Kick-Ass Life of Tura Satana.

3       Susan Bernard would appear as a Playboy pin-up shortly after the release of Pussycat. Apparently her mother was less bothered by her daughter consorting with Hugh Hefner than with a couple of strippers.

4       Details of the production have been repeated countless times in interviews given by Meyer and his actors. Credit is again due Jimmie McDonaugh for piecing accounts together in Big Bosoms and Square Jaws.

5       This anonymous, undated review is included in Meyer’s autobiography, A Clean Breast, p. 387.

6       David Ansen begins a review of Supervixen (1975) with the claim, ‘Russ Meyer restored my faith in movies’ by doing ‘what Ingmar Bergman and Robert Altman could not’: making fun, engaging, technically exacting films. In the same review, he offers this bit of praise: ‘If Jonathan Swift were a Hollywood Boulevard voyeur with a breast fetish and a Bolex, this was the kind of movie he’d make’ (1975:18).

7       As Meyer’s bosomania films ceded erotic territory to pornography and hard R films in the 1980s, critical perspectives on his films tended to take the retropective view, where his work served a more mythic function, speaking not so much to contemporary mores as to a nostalgic American ideal of the erotic. This trend is most evident in the first Meyer biography, French cineaste Jean-Pierre Jackson’s Russ Meyer, ou, Trente ans de cinema erotique a Hollywood (1982: trans. Russ Meyer, or, Twenty Years of Erotic Cinema in Hollywood) and William Karhl’s superb ‘Peep Show Becomes Fine Art: The Transmogrification of Russ Meyer’ (1982), which argues that Meyer’s softcore films are designed to preserve the ‘innocence’ of the peep show.

8       Weldon personally reviewed nearly all of the films, and for the first few years of its production, when it ran as a weekly, issues were hand-written and photocopied.

9       Weldon’s magazine was originally titled Psychotronic TV, because he only reviewed films he had seen on broadcast television. In 1989, he renamed it Psychotronic Video because many of the reviewed films had since become available on home video.

10     Siegfried Kracauer snipes at ‘the masses’ who demand ritual sublimation through crass entertainments in ‘Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces’ (1926), while Harry Allan Potamkin (‘Film Cults’, 1932) and Walter Benjamin (‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, 1936) offer more progressive Marxist perspectives on the relationship between high art and mass media. In the 1960s, writers like Susan Sontag, Parker Tyler and Pauline Kael expanded the discussion of cult cinema to include such concepts as camp and underground, and in the 1970s critical conversation focused primarily upon genre and cult, with particular attention to horror and science fiction.

11     Meyer frequently claimed that the Cramps’ cover of the ‘Pussycat Theme’ was the single most important factor in the resurgence of the film in the 1980s and 90s.

12     The Tarantino contribution, Death Proof, is particularly rife with references, including three marauding women – one of whom sports an imagine of Varla snapping Tommy’s back on her t-shirt – who enact vengeance on an emotionally-crippled man who murders young girls.

13     See esp. White Collar (1951), The Power Elite (1956) and The Sociological Imagination (1959)

14     The quote is attributed to Ezekial 25:17, but only the last two lines are Biblical. The rest – a mash-up of Psalm 23 and the Beatitudes, with liberal doses of Jonathan Edwards’ ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ – is Tarantino’s invention. The whole reads as follows: ‘The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.’

15     Teicholz 1986:72.

16     Doyle Greene describes the scene as ‘Norman Rockwell meets Luis Buñuel’ (2004:99).

17     See Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double.

18     Meyer’s talent for turning his personal pleasures into art extended to recording his farts and using them as sound effects during the sex scenes in Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens (1979).

19     That the automobile is so often used as a murder weapon is consistent with the common figuration of the car as a phallic symbol. Varla’s murder of the Old Man and attempted murder of the Vegetable then represent a double transgression: the murders themselves, as well as the appropriation of male power to do so. Or triple: the Porsche Varla drives actually belonged to Meyer.

20     Ebert 1985:39.

21     See Luckett’s ‘Sexploitation as Feminine Territory: The Films of Doris Wishman’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anon. (2003) ‘The Top 50 Cult Movies’, Entertainment Weekly 711 (23 May): 26–38.

Ansen, David (1975) ‘Russ Meyer: Auteur of Sleaze’, The Real Paper 4 (30): 18–19.

Baumgarten, Marjorie (1995) ‘Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!’, Austin Chronicle 9 June: 42–3.

Burn, Gordon (1996) ‘Rising Below Vulgarity’, Sight and Sound 6 (12): 14–16.

Clowes, Dan (1998) Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics.

Crane, Jonathan (2000) ‘A Lust for Life: The Cult Films of Russ Meyer’, in Graeme Harper and Xavier Mendik (eds) Unruly Pleasures: The Cult Film and its Critics. Guildford: FAB Press: 89–101.

Ebert, Roger (1973) ‘Russ Meyer: King of the Nudies,’ Film Comment 9 (1): 34–45.

____ (1985) ‘Russ Meyer Busts Sleazy Stereotypes,’ Chicago Sun-Times (15 November): 39–40.

____ (1995) ‘Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!’ Chicago Sun-Times (24 March), available at <http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/faster-pussycat-kill-kill-1995> (accessed 30 September 2013).

Fiedler, Leslie (1961) ‘A Night with Mr. Teas’, Show 1 (1): 118–19.

Frasier, David K. (1990) Russ Meyer—The Life and Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Fromm, Erich (1955) The Sane Society. New York: Rinehart.

____ (1956) The Art of Loving. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Greene, Doyle (2004) Lips Hips Tits Power: The Films of Russ Meyer. London: Creation Books.

Hall, Edith (2004) ‘Why Greek Tragedy in the Late Twentieth Century?’, in Dionysus Since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millenium. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Harper, Graeme and Xavier Mendik (2000) ‘Several Theorists Ask “How Was it For You Honey?”; Or, Why the Academy Needs Cult Cinema and Its Fans’, Unruly Pleasures: The Cult Film and its Critics. Guildford: FAB Press.

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Hoberman, J. and Jonathan Rosenbaum (1983) Midnight Movies. New York: Harper and Row.

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Hollows, Joanne (2003) ‘The Masculinity of Cult’, in Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lazaro-Reboll, Julian Stringer and Andrew Willis (eds) Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Knickerbocker, Paine (1961) ‘He Scorns Nudity Bare of Humor’, San Francisco Chronicle (7 July): 32.

Luckett, Moya (2003) ‘Sexploitation as Feminine Territory: The Films of Doris Wishman’, in Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lazaro-Reboll, Julian Stringer and Andrew Willis (eds) Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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____ (2000) A Clean Breast: The Lives and Loves of Russ Meyer. Hollywood, CA: Hauck.

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INDEX

Page numbers refer to the print edition but are hyperlinked to the appropriate location in the e-book.

American International Pictures (AIP) 49
Apollo, Apollonian 66–8, 71, 76–7, 79, 84
Artaud, Antonin 69–71
Bacchae (see also Euripides) 60, 63, 69, 80
Barlowe, Ray 11, 90
Beckett, Samuel 43
Bernard, Susan 19, 20

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
15, 29, 38, 95

Blue Velvet
12

Busch, Dennis 19
Bostweeds, The (‘Pussycat Theme’) 7
Brummer, Richard S. 16, 19
Caldwell, Erskine 14, 21
Capp, Al 14, 21
Clowes, Dan 38, 89–90
Cramps, The 10, 35
Cresse, Bob 3, 49
Criterion Collection 86
DeCenzie, Peter 23
Dionysus 63–77, 79, 81, 83–4, 89, 93

Dionysus in ’69
69–70, 76

Dr. Strangelove
49, 58, 96

Ebert, Roger 15, 36, 85

Euripides (see also Bacchae) 60, 63, 69–71, 74, 76, 80, 83

Fiedler, Leslie 54
Findlay, Michael 4, 49, 55
Findlay, Roberta 49, 55
Fitzgerald, F. Scott 43
Foxx, Mickey 19
Freud, Sigmund 66–7, 72
Friedman, David K. 49, 55
Fromm, Erich 46–8
Furlong, John 5
Haji 4, 11, 16, 24, 89
Hoberman, J. 34

Immoral Mr. Teas, The
4, 14, 43, 52

Kerouac, Jack 41, 43
Lancaster, Stuart 19
Lewis, Herschell Gordon 3, 30, 49

Lorna
4, 15, 22–3, 54–5, 57

Lucas, Tim 33

Lynch, David 1–2, 87

Macbeth
45, 70

Maenads 64–6, 80, 84, 89
Maitland, Lorna 15, 75
Mills, C. Wright 44, 46, 63
Moran, Jack 15–16
Morton, Jim 45
Motor Psycho! 15, 19, 22, 25, 52, 71

Mudhoney
15, 22, 25–6, 32

Napier, Charles 20, 72

Nietzsche, Friedrich 66–7, 72. 76, 79, 83
nudie-cutie 14–5, 22–3, 25, 27, 50, 52, 54, 55, 88, 95, 97

Peary, Danny 34

Playboy
43–4, 55, 68

Pulp Fiction
55, 92

Reagan, Ronald 10, 29
Rich, B. Ruby 28, 37
RM Films International 30, 86
Rosenbaum, Jonathan 34
roughie 14–5, 21–3, 25–7, 29, 49, 50, 52, 54–5, 80, 88, 95

Sade, Marquis de 3, 28, 55–7
Satana, Tura 4, 11, 17, 35, 39–40, 90
satyr 65–6, 72–5, 78–80, 83–4, 89
Schaefer, Eric 22–3

Schechner, Richard (see also Dionysus in ’69) 69–71
siren 4
square-up 23, 25–6, 55
Tarantino, Quentin 5, 12, 38–40, 55, 91–2
Teas, Bill 44–5
Trinka, Paul 19, 21
Vixen! 4, 23, 57, 95
Wasserman, John L. 25–6
Waters, John 11, 30–3, 36
Weldon, Michael J. 32–3
Williams, Lori 18, 35, 51, 72
Wishman, Doris 3