Why I Love Shortbus

I can count off on one hand the movies that I don’t just love but credit with changing the way I look at my life:

Word Is Out, the 1977 documentary that assured me there were any number of ways to be gay in the world, most of them interesting, many of them desirable;

Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, which helped me find the courage to walk away from spiritual abuse at the hands of a dogmatic, life-denying religious hierarchy;

Babette’s Feast, which goes on reminding me that the only way to find the deepest joy is to give joy lavishly away;

And Shortbus : John Cameron Mitchell’s sexy, sad, funny, compassionate vision of a queer utopia, set in and around a Brooklyn salon/sex club hosted by the outrageous and divine Mx. Justin Vivian Bond (then still pre-Mx. and pre-Vivian).

When the movie came out in 2006, I was raw from a long, obsessive breakup with plenty of confusion, grief, anger, and blame to go around. Mitchell’s film showed me people trying hard, fucking up, struggling against shame, longing to connect, fleeing from connection, hurting those they loved, forgiving themselves and each other. I found myself in more or less every scene.

I had a chance this weekend to take part in a conversation about the movie with twenty other gay men--some of us newcomers to the film, some fanatic fans for the six years since it came out. At the end of the evening, one man who came observed that if the leader had screened the end of the film as one of the clips to prompt discussion, he would likely have cried through it, as he had before. I expect I would have too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJ6y1eBDUYc

In candlelight during a blackout, Mx. Bond sings "In the End," more or less summing up the vision of the film. Songwriter Scott Matthew's lyrics are anything but upbeat: "We all bear the scars," they begin. "We all feign a life." But it's the tenderness and affection that Bond brings to the song, and that Mitchell and his cinematographer bring to the shooting and editing of the scene, that convey what matters here: that the participants in this "salon for the gifted and challenged" have touched what a Buddhist teacher like Pema Chödrön would call "the genuine sadness at the heart of things": bodhichitta.

This is the realization that our lives are infinitely precious because they are infinitely vulnerable. The end of the song erupts, with the incursion of a marching band--I'm not making this up--into a riot of musical and erotic carousal. In the end, the characters celebrate their humanity not despite but in and through their flaws. They find community, but only because they accept the aloneness that we can't overcome.

Some less than appreciative responses to the film, including Bruce Diones' snyde notice for The New Yorker, objected to the utopianism of the final scene. But the inbreaking of what isn't expected and can't be foreseen, until we let go of our attachment to the illusion of perfection, is the whole point. "I never saw that one coming," Bond observes through a bullhorn in the last line of the film. "You never know what's gonna happen in this neighborhood."

Liminal This, Liminal That

It’s hard to hang out for long in any crowd draped in the fashions of post-modern or queer theory without picking up “liminality” as staple buzzword. What’s on the threshold between states of being gets a more or less immediate vote of approval by the very fact that it doesn’t fit one category or the other–that it queers the stable options and shakes the boxes that people and their experiences get put into.

But if you push beyond the sometimes sloppy generalities to an important source of the word’s popularity, you arrive at the anthropological theories of Victor Turner. From Turner, you get a different perspective on liminality, one with more positive content, with more meat on its bones.

Turner’s view of liminality embraces more than the simple fact of not fitting in. It’s about experiences, especially experiences of ritual, that suspend the clearly defined social structures of everyday life. Hovering between one state and another, outside of ordinary social categories, strips away the distinctions that normally define (and limit) individual identities. It enhances the bond between members of the ritual group and creates among them what Turner calls communitas.

The Latin word simply means community, but Turner uses it to emphasize that this experience isn’t about the structures that usually keep people in their pre-determined place or restrict them to the choices they’ve already made about their lives. Communitas unites the ritual group around a radical encounter with a deeper truth of our Being revealed when ordinary trappings of status and routine are stripped away.

Communitas is the experience of the innumerable faithful circling the Ka’aba in Mecca during the Hajj, which Malcolm X said transformed his understanding of the possibility of connection across lines of race, class, and nationality. It’s the experience of deep fellowship described by walkers on the route to the shrine of St. James at Compostela, cutting across lines of sectarian belief, age, and language in the decades since the medieval pilgrimage route was revived in the 1970's.

And here’s where the penny really dropped for me: it’s also about the distinction between ordinary eros and sacramentalized eros. Turner’s ideas about liminality and communitas help me make sense out of the intense transpersonal bonds that we’re capable of forming in erotic contexts where a focus on predictable individual identities aren’t key to the interaction’s quality. Turner provides insight, for example, into the final, redemptively celebratory scene of John Stuart Cameron’s wonderful romp of a film, Shortbus, set in and around a New York sex club; out of the deep, albeit sometimes ephemeral connections and insights that men experience at retreats offered by the Body Electric School; out of some men’s focused and articulate commitment to BDSM practices and culture; out of the reflection of some queer men (Armistead Maupin among them) that they’ve never felt closer to God than they felt in bathhouses in the 1970's.

The energy of the liminal state–in ritual, in erotic life–is not an unmitigated good. Its power is life-giving; and it’s dangerous. Hitler’s Nuremberg Rallies also forged liminal communitas of a sort. The hucksterism of the religious right draws much of its power from the liminality it manipulates in the service of homophobia, misogyny, and class oppression. And the rush of liminal experience can become a drug of sorts, drawing us, if we’re not mindful and grounded, into a pattern of “chasing the dragon,” like the addict who goes on endlessly hoping that the intensity of his first high will be repeated with the next hit. Distorted into a fixture of our daily lives, the liminal recedes endlessly into the distance. Ironically, and sometimes tragically, the more obsessively we try to assure ourselves of access to its power and energy, the more we risk trivializing our search for something precious and unpredictable into a search for cheap thrills.

The liminal exists in balance with the fact that ordinary life goes on. We always return from liminal experiences: to daily lives that often look much as they did before; to jobs that depend on our qualifications and our personal connections; to friendships and primary relationships founded on the specifics of our individual personalities; in short, to life options shaped and limited by the sum of all the choices we’ve made so far. The liminal can reshape our relation to our ordinary lives, but it can only manifest itself in tension with the ordinary. We get into trouble when we imagine that we can make the liminal into “the new normal”; but when we welcome it as an unpredictable guest, we meet extraordinary moments that have the power to change the way we inhabit our skins and walk in them through the world.