The Celluliod Cycle: On the Films of Dennis Cooper
Translating the world of Dennis Cooper to screen would seem like a herculean task to just about anyone. Whether you have rummaged through the pages yourself, caught a voyeuristic glance of The Sluts surprisingly shelved at a local bookstore, or had the unfortunate pleasure of having an overly-zealous and/or mulleted individual overexplain to you what the word “transgressive” means all while recalling graphic scenes without any narrative context – it becomes startlingly obvious that Cooper themes of extreme perversion, mutilation, and degradation are better left to the mind’s eye than spilling out of the screen with gaped and oozing viscera. Aside from the fact that filming any number of Cooper’s 20 or so novels beat for beat would be hard to do within an R rating along with only so few director’s can or would articulate the symbolic nuances of a cavernous asshole (let alone risk their careers doing so), it is felt that in reality the truly unfilmable nature of Cooper lies in squarely in the interconnectedness. This is because the George Miles cycle – though seen as primarily non-linear and greatly meant as to be a symbolic exploration of defenseless intersection grief and abuse – must be taken as transitory rather than these individualized plateaus of thought and character.
If one is to read Cooper, one is immediately struck with a reality that his characters can be seen as rather one-dimensional. To put it in the words of James Wright, the cast is majority “suicidally beautiful” yet traumatically hollow teens and preteens “galloping terribly against each other’s bodies.” These characters also speak extremely monosyllabically as if they have fully fetishized their objectified reality to the point of being braindead or (more often than not as the stories play out) are so repressed that their words are stuck in the all too finely meshed strainer of their minds/souls/consciousnesses. The constant foil to such band of seemingly naively airheaded twinks are extremely predatory, apathetic, and masochistic men usually of the older persuasion who aim to erode and continually be eroded by guts, gore, and fists. Boiling things down to this calculated of formula, one could argue that this is simply a color-by-numbers erotica where instead of paints it’s a mixture of blood, cum, and shit. Yet when taken into consideration of Cooper’s entire oeuvre this is not done without intention.
Cracking open Cooper’s latest full-length novel I Wished, we see not only the usual vignettes of incestual tension and laconically paced dread painted onto youth but also a stark transparency about the archetypal alignment of characters in the George Miles Cycle. “I still dreamed of reinventing George but only in the safety of my writings, poems and terrible short stories at that point and later novels, five of them, where I tried to recapitulate him, make him sexier, or semi-sane, or so cute his insides didn’t matter, sometimes by name, sometimes renamed and given similar but hotter bodies, other talents, different issues, and you can find out how terribly he fared in every variation if you want: George, David, Kevin, Ziggy, Robin, Chris, Drew, Sniffles, Egore, Dagger, George.” It is in this confession we find the reality of Cooper’s monochromatic worlds and the characters that seem to blur together through onion-skin layers of form and figure. In aligning said characters to this cypher one atop another we are not left with an exaggerated echo but rather a fully developed anatomy of a character – each part allowed room to exist as an ecosystem all its own while further coexisting in the skeletal surrogates of predator and prey, of love and lust, of manipulator and manipulated, of Dennis and George.
While this could very well have been more hypothetically assumed previous to the publication of I Wished – also referred to as the coda of the cycle – by connecting the dots on mirrored traits or scouring over previously published interviews in which Cooper alludes to each novel in the circuit being an like an organ (during a 2011 Shade Rupe interview, he states “Frisk is the libido, Try is the heart, Guide is the mind”), this level of metafictional unmasking pierces through the performatively nonchalant ambiguity which both Cooper the writer and Cooper the character so often use to protect themselves from confrontation with and exposure to the softest spot on the creative underbelly. For that it is with the looking glass shattered the audience is forced to put the pieces together and view characters as archetypal spirits forever ricocheting between possessed forms.
Such a seemingly involved aside is critical as we approach the external adaptations of Cooper’s in cinema. The first ever adaptation of Cooper’s work came in the form of Todd Verow’s 1995 film Frisk based off the second book of the George Myles cycle of the same name. Given Verow’s similarly lauded history of transgressive and unflinchingly transparent vantage point towards violence and sexuality, having the two artists collaborate on what could be considered Cooper’s most virile work (next to the aptly named and previously mentioned The Sluts) seems only natural. And to an extent the sweaty, Vaseline-smeared cinematography interspliced by Ken Russell-esque collages of fitness mags and fuzzed out porno close-ups does a lot to capture the mental and libidinal atmospheres the novel evokes. Yet even after all the eroticisms and bloodshed has come and gone and we’re left with a neon-lit infinity sign flickering into oblivion to the arrhythmic pulse of Coil not-so subtly hinting towards some greater cosmic return, there is something lacking with regards to Cooper’s pathos in the visual language of the acting and directing. The cheeky and stilted means of dialogue paired with the egregiously handsome nature of the actors and their bodies through which such dialogue is regurgitated has one expecting (either out of wishful thinking or macabre anticipation depending on the viewer) for any and all scenes to end with fucking. Not even thematic or plot-centric fucking – just pedal-to-the-metal gonzo fucking. Surely it isn’t completely uncalled for when we are dealing with a story that hinges partially on a fantasized meta-reality of a psychosexually perverse author (the author within the book…maybe), but since the differing realities are razor thin one is far less expecting there to be an emotional prodding towards the nature of a destroyed psyche than the appearance of some well-endowed cop out of a Tom of Finland comic.
One could chalk this up to a stylized fingerprint of adaptation decidedly focused on a singular pilar of the holistic nature of Cooper’s work if it weren’t a common issue among other representations that have come forth as time has gone by. There’s a reason you can find Dan Faltz’s 2009 adaptation/amalgamation of Cooper’s early novels and poetry entitled Weak Species floating around on porn sites – and it’s not because of montage of character’s mid-orgasm that opens the film. It’s because the acting evokes the blurry line between after school special and skinemax! What one can earnestly complement Faltz for is that despite its moments of saturated melodrama there is far in a way more weight given to the broken and bleeding core at the hearts of George Myles (one of the many though this time fully recognized as George) and even this iteration’s author surrogate character. We see moments of huddled vulnerability, regret, and agony that instead of being externalized in an act of brazen dominance over one’s body or mortality are allowed to remain clenched and remain repressively vibrating behind the eyes of are two protagonists as they go about finding and being exploited by their almost predestined sensitivities.
After years of merely being adapted and a more recent string of explorations written to be performed theatrically, Cooper finally took to the camera himself with the help of co-writer and co-director Zac Farley. The duo is working their way through what could very well be a trilogy of films with their latest film entitled Room Temperature set for its second round of premiers later this month. This project would cap off not only a decade of collaboration but also the apex in the abilities to represent the authors true intent as both two previous endeavors Like Cattle Towards Glow and Permanent Green Light respectively radiate a sense of honing and artistic progress. Given these works are debuts for both creators (Farley previous history also being in literature) within the realm of cinema, dissecting whose specific influence is shining through with regards to directorial choices is hard to parse out. But across the two films there is an undeniable love of the thick silence and stagnant pacing of slow cinema with visual and thematic similarities to Gus Van Sant's Death Trilogy especially the crushing omniscience of nature of man seen in Gerry.
One of the starkest and ultimately most refreshing improvements in the visualization of Cooper is the choice of actors. Long gone are the beef cakes and acid house and in their place are tried-and-true teenagers pensively staring off into nothingness before briefly embracing and/or dying. One could overanalyze the drastic change in stature of these archetypes to that of a more petite androgyny as either a representation of Cooper’s controversial fascination with childhood sexuality that with the usual hands-off presentation borders on outright attraction (as reported in his ongoing collages of teenage escort ads he shares to his blog which may or may not have been the catalyst for his blog’s deletion by Google – however temporary – in 2016) or some grandiose messaging on the feminine decay of masculine adolescence in general with the rise of slender-framed and angular stars again and again becoming the look to aim for. Yet such conjectures of past and present are putting far too much emphasis on an improper comparisons as previous renditions have been made without Cooper fully behind the driver’s seat. Despite the quotation not being specifically about the films but rather the consumption and social representation of his work in general, in I Wished Cooper further states he – like true in-real-life George – is a “victim of the despotism of consensus” through which one can emboldens the idea that the only true vision of Cooper can only be seen (and therefore enacted) by Cooper. As such, these latest visions at the core of this representation should be seen as the most intentional to the age and lens through which the world of Cooper propagates his stories.
Of course, there is still plenty of lingering shots of pale anemic bodies groped by visible and invisible hands alike as no matter how mature and nuanced of a vision such stories at the end of the day revolve around blossoming curiosities and the macabre sigils signed therein. But unlike the heavy-handed flourishes of Verow and Falk, such glimmers and outright beams of homosexuality are purposeful and finite in relation to the greater whole of the works. Like Cattle Towards Glow has by far more of the outright transgressive nudity and sexuality one could expect going off of the author’s namesake alone and acts as a great treatise for the duo’s first steps into the world of cinema. Yet even at it’s apex of carnality (could be either the scene of two young males dissociatively humping one another while a framed photo of Adam Lanza looms in the background or the scene in which a performance artist punkster get intentionally interrupted and assaulted while confessing his deepest traumas on stage) one can see the symbolic forest through the trees of flesh and phalluses. We follow characters confronting the death of their cherubic youth, the desires for oneness with those that only want to destroy us, the constant desire to feel nothing, and the general sense of collapse that begins to spring out of the hormonally fogged reality never fully loosens its grasps until we are castrated by chemicals or life itself.
Whether this is all the maturation of an artist refining a permanently emblazoned creative burden of existential love, lust, and loss or some grand revelatory allowance through which Cooper has finally had the opportunity to present the deepest truth he is trying to emote, in either case it is an amazing and promising sensation to walk away from such recent works by Cooper knowing there is far more to discuss in the seemingly mundane and that a scene regarding the destruction of a pinata carries just as much gnarled brokenness as one of a stained, stabbed, or otherwise mutilated organ.
