Jennifer Montgomery as Marie in The Deadman
(dir. Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn, 1989)
"When Edouard fell back dead an emptiness opened inside her,
a prolonged shudder went through her, and bore her upward like an angel." [1]
I.
D. H. Lawrence insisted that there was "no real battle" between himself and Christianity [2] and that's certainly true when it comes to the question of nudity in art and the importance of retaining the essential beauty and dignity of the human form.
For like any devout Catholic, Lawrence believes that the human body is sacred - not least in its sexual aspect - and that whilst art affirms this fact and manifests being, pornography attempts to deny it; to reduce the human form to base matter and to do dirt on sex.
Pornography, says Lawrence, is an insult to the flesh and to a vital human relationship: ugly and cheap it makes human nudity; ugly and degraded it makes the sexual act; "trivial and cheap and nasty" [3].
And that's nothing to be proud of ...
II.
I was reminded of Lawrence's vital opposition to pornography - defined as the "grey disease of sex-hatred, coupled with the yellow-disease of dirt-lust" [4] - when reading Maggie Nelson's favourable review of the short film The Deadman (1989), by Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn.
Based on Bataille's story Le Mort - written sometime during the period 1942-44, but first published posthumously in 1964 - The Deadman is summarised on IMDb as a "strange tale of a woman who sets off on a wild adventure before returning home to die" [5].
Somehow, that doesn't quite prepare the viewer for the 40 minutes of black-and-white depravity that follow; a symbolic free play of bodies and images that many queer feminist commentators - including Nelson - find liberating.
According to the latter, what's great - and important - about The Deadman is that by giving back full and uncompromising sexual agency to a nearly naked female protagonist (played by Jennifer Montgomery), it reclaims the pornographic imagination from its confinement within a certain (male) cinematic history and genre for a female audience:
"It's a funny, radical, stand-alone reclamation of realms in which so many of us have too often had to hold our noses and practice a robust disidentification in order to play." [6]
And that's a good thing, I suppose ...
III.
Although Keith Sanborn - who had read Bataille in the 1970s and produced his own translation of Le Mort - is co-credited as a director, Nelson seems to think that Peggy Ahwesh - who "comes out of the anti-art sensibility of punk, out of feminism, and out of lowbrow horror" [7] - is the real driving force behind the film, responsible for getting the actors to do "real sexual things to each other, with all the mess and stakes" [8].
When, says Nelson, you combine Bataille's transgressive philosophy with Ahwesh's anarcho-feminist sensibility, you get "an exploration of perversity that nods to misogynistic tradition and feminist corrective while also devoting itself to nongendered erotics - the erotics of chaos, of self-abandon, of wrestling, of scatology, of necrophilia, of ugliness, of aggression, of suicidality, and so on" [9].
And you also get a film that is, says Nelson, "laugh-out-loud funny" and "crackling with distubance and pleasure" [10].
Though Lawrence wouldn't like it - and, to be honest, I'm not sure I do either ... [11]
Notes
[1] Georges Bataille, The Dead Man, in My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (Marion Boyars, 1995), p. 168.
[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'There is no real battle ...', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press,1988), Appendix I: Fragmentary writings, p. 385.
[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornograpy and Obscenity', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 241.
[4] Ibid., p. 242.
[5] See the entry on The Deadman (1987) on IMDb: click here.
[6] Maggie Nelson, 'A Girl Walks Into a Bar ... On Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn's The Deadman', in Like Love: Essays and Conversations (Fern Press, 2024), p. 70.
[7] Ibid., p. 71.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., p. 72.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Readers who wish to judge for themselves can watch an eight minute excerpt from The Deadman on Vimeo: click here.
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