‘Scorpio Rising’: how Kenneth Anger subverted mainstream heteronormativity
“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread…” Ricky Nelson’s all-American sound rings out. It’s the kind of do-good love song that would have played out of an old-school radio while a love-struck teenager twirled her dress and dreamed about some nice, classically handsome guy called Johnny or something. He’d be the type of guy you’d bring home to parents; she’d be doing good at school, and the whole family would tap their toes along to the track. But as Kenneth Anger plays it out over a scene of a leather-clad, greased-up biker, Scorpio Rising snatches at mainstream, heteronormative culture and steals their sounds for something different.
The 1963 short is less of a film and more of an experiment. Really, it could be seen as prophetic. There’s a case to be made that Kenneth Anger’s wordless project, instead built simply out of moving images over songs, predicted MTV. With no dialogue, no real plotline, and no clear characters, it’s really just a series of music videos before music videos were a thing.
It’s said that the move to make such a film was inspired by seeing people at Coney Island blasting music out of their radios into a public space. As Anger watched people moving in and out of the scene at the amusement park, he noticed how the song playing changed his view on things. In that thought process alone, Anger really predicted exactly why music videos would come to exist as a way to further translate and share the story and emotions of a song.
But what’s important in Scorpio Rising is what songs are playing. By the early 1960s, Anger was infamous. He was a queer pioneer, well-known for creating scandalous pictures that were circulated in the underground cinema world. Any time his pictures reared their head above ground, he was swiftly caught out. His 1947 short, Fireworks, led to him being on trial for obscenity charges thanks to its explicit content of sadomasochism and homosexuality. In all of his projects, his camera focuses on the topics of sex, occultism, homoeroticism and all manner of topics that made conservative Americans gasp at best or be utterly morally offended at worst.
Anger was a leading light in a thriving yet wicked scene. He mixed with Aleister Crowley’s cultish crowd, with Andy Warhol, or later with Mick Jagger and the 1960s music scene. He’s perhaps one of the ultimate countercultural figures, so why would his soundtrack ever include the likes of Ricky Nelson or Bobby Vinton?
That question alone is why he did it. By the time he came to make Scorpio Rising, Anger had really already done every shocking thing possible. He’d already experimented with full-frontal nudity, sex scenes, queerness and beyond. But what he hadn’t experimented with was mainstream heterosexuality.
Throughout the film, the plot loosely follows a group of bikers preparing for a night out. As one greases and prepares his motorbike, the twee sound of Peggy Lee March’s ‘Wind-Up Doll’ plays in the background. Next, we move to a second biker. Shot in glorious, illuminating lighting with several close-up shots of his hands on the bike, the 1963 hetero hit ‘My Boyfriend’s Back’ by The Angels plays in the back. Anger doesn’t need to do much to say a lot. Simply through the lyrics about “boyfriends” paired with these relatively plain shots of a garage, he’s queering track just as his culture queered the image of a typically macho biker.
At some point in the late 1950s and ‘60s, the biker image became codified with a whole new message. Cropping up around the time of Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones or James Dean’s breakout as their rebellious image ignited a whole new fancy across America, queer culture was into it too. Borrowing the image and taking it even further, the biker look became linked to kink and was also used as an open-secret symbol for cruising, signalling to other men that they were gay through wearable codes. The “leather daddy” look became a sort of uniform for exactly the kind of sadomasochistic scenes that Anger was interested in.
His audience would know all that. Simply showing these bikers, filmed with a definite glamorising eye, while playing mainstream hits is subversive enough not to add anything that scandalous.
But typically, Anger couldn’t resist. Not only is he stealing the favourite songs of the conservative mainstream, but he then decides to steal their ultimate idol, Jesus. As his bikers go deeper into the night, his style also descends, becoming choppy and more music video-like as he montages between scenes of his figures and stock footage from elsewhere. As The Crystal’s ‘He’s a Rebel’ plays, he cuts between the leader of the pack of his biker gang and footage of Jesus and his disciples from The Living Bible, a film made for Sunday School kids.
It’s an amazing moment. Watching the vignette with its images timed to change with the music and the switches between the bright clips of Jesus versus the dark, leathery night with the bikers, it’s almost comical in its scandalous dark humour. It’s hard to decide whether Anger is making a music video and casting Jesus as a modern idol or painting his biker as a modern messiah. Either way, the lyrics of “He’s a rebel, and he’ll never ever be any good” feel suitable for both as he takes the line of “that’s my guy” to create a simple scene that mixes religious, conservative culture, homosexuality and kink all together without saying anything at all.
After doing so much, perhaps the most shocking thing Anger could do was play a catchy little radio hit. He’s bringing a laugh to his audience that could get it, soundtracking clear queer coding and kink imagery with songs parents would love. And to those parents or any of the mainstream normies that happened upon this short film, he’s bringing a shock as he mixes the sound of a God-fearing home with the world that they fear the most.
