R.L. Cagle: Scorpio Rising

Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019, Softcover, 192 pages, 17 × 12.5 cm

Kenneth Anger's avant-garde short film that about gay Nazi bikers preparing for a race. The film marked Anger's spectacular return to the US underground cinema scene after an absence of nearly ten years. Scorpio Rising represents the culmination of nearly twenty years' worth of Anger's work on unfinished, lost, or destroyed projects; it resonates with the thrill and energy Anger discovered as he mingled with young Americans on the beaches and under the boardwalk at Coney Island. He stuffs his film - one of the first to feature an all rocknroll soundtrack - with the symbols of their generation - motorcycles, transistor radios, comic books, matinee idols - until it literally explodes onscreen. Cagle reads Anger's film intertextually, bringing together a corpus of materials that includes Anger's pre-1963 works, feature films, pop music, and popular cultural icons. The aim of this book is not so much to establish Anger's role as an auteur, but rather to place the film in the larger social context of articulating gay identity in ways that reflected both 'gay' sensibility (camp) and contemporary popular media theories.