From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
A high-camp “love story” of an outrageously handsome heroin junkie and his trash-scavenging girlfriend (played by a female impersonator), this film skips from fellatio to seduction to foot fetishism in its attacks on soap opera myths and Hollywood. A playful perversity, an acceptance of the soft underbelly of bourgeois society, a strange poignancy informs this fable of impotence, drugs, and sex. In the climactic love scene, the hero — remaining impotent — suggests to the lusting “girl” — reclining on a rumpled bed among objects gathered from garbage cans — that she use a beer bottle instead; she does, while he solicitously inquires whether she is coming, then holds her hand and promises to do better next time. In a second scene, she accuses him, in rage, of not even letting her “suck” him off. What with an antiwar Welfare worker revealed as a malignant foot fetishist, assorted females as sexual aggressors against the forever innocent male, drug-fixes or penises casually displayed, the mounting intrusions upon the viewers’ value system mark this as a truly seditious work.Read More »
