(This was written for a zine that never came out so I'm posting it here on the ten year anniversary of the death of Marlon Riggs and Kurt Cobain. The topic? It was
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mala106's idea and I still think it's a good one. "Each person will write an essay about a person who is more punk rock than the average punk rock scenester. It can be anyone you want, living or dead. For example, Toby is going to do 'my GRANDMA is more punk rock than you.' I am going to do 'harriet tubman is more punk rock than you'll ever be.'")
I was still working at one of punk rock’s big institutions that week in 1994 when Marlon Riggs and Kurt Cobain both died. For once, the myopic indie label "politics" of punk worked in my favor. Because Nirvana had "sold out" by signing to a major label, public Kurt Cobain-mourning wasn’t OK there. So when I put up a memorial to Marlon Riggs at the punk store it was, ironically, one of the few places in the country where Riggs’s death wasn’t completely overshadowed by Cobain’s. I’ve been waiting for a chance to write this article ever since.
Marlon Riggs was a Black, gay, political, pro-feminist documentary filmmaker. In his far-too-short career he produced only four films, Ethnic Notions, Tongues Untied, Color Adjustment and Black Is, Black Ain’t . When I first saw his films I was in my late teens/early twenties and searching for models of how to be a political, pro-feminist man. With each film, and despite our obvious differences in background, Riggs provided some of these examples by showing the world in nuanced, complicated ways, rejecting easy political models and pushing for more.
If one thinks of punk as an underground art form, they should try finding copies of Riggs’s films today. Even though they were made for PBS, they’re very hard to find unless you want to buy your own copies. Not having seen any of his films since they came out, I decided watch them again while preparing to write this article. Unfortunately I could only find two of the four and if it wasn’t for the Gay Collection at the Castro branch of the San Francisco Public Library it would only have been one.
Tongues Untied is probably Riggs’s punkest film in terms of attitude, reflecting a sarcastic, political and angry subculture and not prettying it up for the public. Tongues is also activist, arty, and poetic. Surveying American Black, gay culture, Riggs tried to show the love, creativity, humor and resistance skills that dwell there through poetry, and dance as well as more standard narratives. He also tried not to ignore the confusion and ugliness engendered by struggles to survive in a society that wants to kill, use, or ignore Black men, especially Black, gay men. The film seemed to be an attempt to actually create dialogue and community out of the people and testimony it was portraying, rather than seeking to be just a viewing experience.
Riggs said of the film, "Frankly, with Tongues Untied if white heterosexuals don't understand the reasons why black people are angry and just consider this piece militant, then so be it. I'm not going to take time to justify this for people for whom this experience is totally alien. Tongues Untied is an affirmation of the feelings and experiences of black gay men, made for them by a black gay man, or actually by black gay men because the piece has a number of voices. If others understand, fine, but making sure everyone understands was not my prerequisite in making this." (Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media #36, 1991) As a white man watching this film, one of my points of entry was precisely this. Prettied up or assimilationist may have appealed to some audiences, but the honesty with which Tongues was created made it accessible to me with the cultural criticism I grew up on. And even if the final product was more Last Poets (without the homophobia) than The Clash.
When Tongues came out, the Christian right targeted Riggs, using selective images of gay, Black men from the film to help scare U.S. legislators into cutting public funding for the arts. Riggs spoke out against this. "(The Christian Right says) Bring back the melting pot. Restore ‘traditional values.’ Re-institute prayer in schools. Preserve the primacy of Western civilization (the only one that matters anyway). And not least, protect that critical bedrock of American greatness: ‘the American family’ Such pronouncements reveal an intense, even pathological desire to perpetuate a thoroughly obsolete myth of America, and through this, a repressively orthodox system of sociocultural entitlement."
There is some poetry and dance in Black is, Black Ain’t, but it’s a more standard form of documentary with heavy hitters from the left Black intellectual and arts communities (including bell hooks, Essex Hemphill, Angela Davis, Cornel West, Barbara Smith and Bill T. Jones) weighing in on the construction of Black identity. It’s epic and ambitious for an 86 minute film, discussing, the origins of Black as an identity, the Black Church, language and dialect, hair, Creole identity, Black Power, Black feminism, afrocentricity, and the meaning of "unity" (impossible, in Riggs’s thought, until Black people "start talking about the way we hurt each other".)
Riggs also has a crucial part, narrating and talking from his hospital bed as he lay dying of AIDS-related illnesses. At one incredibly funny and sad scene, realizing he won’t live to finish the film, he gives advice to his co-producer about a scene of him naked in the woods." It’s of critical metaphoric importance. I’m confined and lost in the woods as the community is confined by its own limited notions of identity." While metaphor usually plays better when not explained, watching Riggs trying to get his message out as he sits, nauseous, in a hospital bed with little time left had me mourning his death all over again.
Whatever view one takes of Cobain and his death, it was heart-wrenching to watch one artist trying to create his political art and build community and audience with his last breaths at age 37, while another offs himself at 27, at the height of his popularity, leaving behind a kid and millions of people who wanted to listen to what he wanted to say.
When I first saw these films, parts of San Francisco felt like a ghost town due to AIDS. I lived on the Castro edge of the Mission back then, and watching men much younger than they looked, and many younger than I am now, limp and roll by my apartment on Dolores Park was just part of the environment. This landscape also included dementia in public, funerals at the mortuary down the block a few times a week and pages of Obituaries in the back of the gay press. Beyond the merit of the films themselves, Black Is and Tongues Untied are also opportunities to remind oneself of that time and mourn the people lost in that era. Even though his last movie was completed ten years ago, Riggs’s films are also opportunities to find our own voice and strength and figure out ways to prevent the generation-killings that are, or are about to be, carried out today.
And how punk is that?
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