Shortbus (2006) directed by John Cameron Mitchell
A group of strangers’ lives collide at a New York City sex club. Coming from the same director as Hedwig and the Angry Inch, critics have hailed Shortbus as a fascinating mixture of hardcore pornography and independent narrative cinema, defying Bush-era conservatism and capturing anxiety and loss in post-9/11 New York.
Perhaps it is the last scene of the film that best illustrates this transformative power to translate sexual awakening into sexual revolution.
Following an intense montage that joins all the characters in a moment of sexual anxiety that is bound to short-circuit, the lights literally go out in all of New York City. Amidst the blackout, the characters find themselves back in the space of Shortbus, a sex club for, as Justin Bond puts it, “the gifted and challenged”. The club is where many of the characters first realize their existential anguish through their sexual frustrations, a point that the film intends to drive home. In the final sequence, then, the characters have nowhere else to go with their own sexuality, as Hedwig at the end of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, has nowhere else to go in terms of her/his gender. The last scene of Shortbus begins quiet, with Justin Bond singing to acoustic accompaniment. The lyric “we all get it in the end” crescendos with the band’s entrance, and the room erupts. Leaving their desperation behind them, the characters can embark on a freeing sexual exploration. Where else could they go? It is a utopian envisioning straight out of Times Square Red, Time Square Blue where points of contact may as well be intersecting points of sexual permission. It is a New York City imagined for another time.
-M.N.
“…We have, in fact, to think humanity as a transindividual reality and, ultimately, to think transindividuality as such. Not what is ideally ‘in’ each individual (as a form or a substance), or what would serve, from outside, to classify that individual, but what exists between individuals by dint of their multiple interactions.” -Balibar
A group of strangers’ lives collide at a New York City sex club. Coming from the same director as Hedwig and the Angry Inch, critics have hailed Shortbus as a fascinating mixture of hardcore pornography and independent narrative cinema, defying Bush-era conservatism and capturing anxiety and loss in post-9/11 New York.
Shortbus is a film that has divided many fellow cinephiles, less because of what the film is trying to do, and more because it is, for many, a weak example of that effort. And yet, it is a film that keeps coming back into conversation. We are continually haunted by its importance, its ability to escort a more mainstream indie audience into the world of real sex in narrative cinema.
Perhaps it is the last scene of the film that best illustrates this transformative power to translate sexual awakening into sexual revolution.
Following an intense montage that joins all the characters in a moment of sexual anxiety that is bound to short-circuit, the lights literally go out in all of New York City. Amidst the blackout, the characters find themselves back in the space of Shortbus, a sex club for, as Justin Bond puts it, “the gifted and challenged”. The club is where many of the characters first realize their existential anguish through their sexual frustrations, a point that the film intends to drive home. In the final sequence, then, the characters have nowhere else to go with their own sexuality, as Hedwig at the end of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, has nowhere else to go in terms of her/his gender. The last scene of Shortbus begins quiet, with Justin Bond singing to acoustic accompaniment. The lyric “we all get it in the end” crescendos with the band’s entrance, and the room erupts. Leaving their desperation behind them, the characters can embark on a freeing sexual exploration. Where else could they go? It is a utopian envisioning straight out of Times Square Red, Time Square Blue where points of contact may as well be intersecting points of sexual permission. It is a New York City imagined for another time. -M.N.
