The Brooklyn Rail

How do you live at the end of the world? What does living look like juggling multiple traumas, loss, systemic injustice, insurmountable grief, and the never-ending possibility, if not hope, for love? Artist-filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang’s feature film debut, Fresh Kill (1994) addressed many of these questions thirty years ago with the answer: chaotically. In Fresh Kill, nothing makes sense. The plot, character decisions, aesthetics, fashion, and so forth. Nonsense is the point. The nonsensical nature of the film mirrors the nonsensical reality drafted by capitalism. Capitalism’s articulation through chattel slavery, as Hortense Spillers argued in her seminal essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” (1987) changed the grammar of what it means to be human. Normalcy ceased to exist with the invention of capitalism as labor became the predominant way in which individuals can express their self-worth and are subsequently judged. Rather than try to rationalize capitalism and imperialism, Fresh Kill meets its absurdity with glitches, formal and conceptual interruptions in the film and by extension the world as we know it. Cheang’s film is here to hack the communication system and tell you what it means to live.

A new 35mm print and 4K restoration of Fresh Kill, led by Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University, will begin a roadshow tour in North American theaters this spring, with its first stop occurring at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). This tour of the film will no doubt reach a new generation of audiences who may be unfamiliar with Cheang’s practice but are all too familiar with the realities of living through late capitalism and ecocide that emerge within her work. Fresh Kill is a film with many plotlines—the predominant narrative concerns a young interracial lesbian couple Shareen (Sarita Choudhury) and Claire (Erin McMurtry) who furniture-dump in the (former) Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, New York. Through their adventures as radio pirates, hacktivists, and employees at a fashionable sushi bar in Manhattan named Naga Saki, they bear witness to the radioactive effects caused from the “Yamakazu” fish imported from Taiwan. The fish is commonly used in a popular cat food by GX Corporation and as a delicacy at Naga Saki by art world fiends and finance tech vultures. Consuming the thick, red-lipped pouted fish causes individuals to glow a radioactive green hue, speak gibberish, and, ultimately, disappear.

When Shareen and Claire’s daughter begins to exhibit the same signs of radioactive poisoning, followed by her disappearance, they become broadcast communication activists. The medium is the message in Fresh Kill. The message: subvert the system by flooding it with information. The film cuts between geographies as quickly as one would channel surf. In the beginning we’re at the then largest landfill in the world, and then we’re across the globe on Orchid Island, an island off the coast of Taiwan used as a nuclear dump by the nation. Cheang explained in an interview with me earlier this year that the glitch nature of the film’s aesthetics was a response to living in New York during the height of HIV/AIDS visibility and witnessing how media was complicit in the silence of the pandemic. As such, media was the weapon of choice by artists to do something against the corporations controlling the narrative. The whiplash effect of the film—from the red sky filter effect to the numerous televisual adverts and infomercials, ranging from dildos to cat food—is to both mirror and parody our mediated relationship with commercial enterprises.

Kinship, too, becomes an aesthetic interruption in the film. Shareen, who is of South Asian descent, and Claire, who is caucasian, have a Black daughter with no mention of her father or whether she is adopted. Even more confusing is that Claire’s mother (the late Laurie Carlos) is Black and Shareen’s father Clayton (Rino Thunder) is Native American, with her brother Jiannbin (Abraham Lincoln Lim) of East Asian descent. This, of course, is all intentional. As Cheang described, she wanted to “fuck” with the dynamics of biological kinship to have a multiracial cast. “Racially you are stereotyped all the time, so the film wanted to fuck it up. And in the end people didn’t seem to mind and did not spend time trying to figure it out,” she said.

Informed by her video activist work with the non-profit public access television program Paper Tiger Television and installation work in the 1980s and 1990s, Cheang wanted to unpack the sexual politics of queer women of color to go against the dominant representational force and image of whiteness. “I was burdened by the politics of the 1980s…. There was a lot of non-traditional casting of minoritarians. At the time it was an awakening,” she said. The familial bonds in the film demonstrate that family does not have to align itself around biological familiarity to have its ties bind but can emerge through political solidarity instead.

There is a lot of poetry in Fresh Kill. This is partially aided by the screenwriting of Jessica Hagedorn who imbues the characters with a type of Shakespearean gravitas. The dialogue is as manic as the world, but, unlike the world, its density allows the characters to express feelings that lead to action. In one poignant scene following the disappearance of their child, Shareen insists on going back to work as a furniture mover/collector, whereas Claire is grief-stricken, as she simply collapses and refuses to accept the reality that she must move on. Withholding her labor is a way for Claire to experience her grief but also refuse the culture of labor that demands we simply “work through it.” Claire and Shareen’s use of speech noticeably differs from the stiff commercial language used by the corporate antagonist and owner of GX Corporation, Stuart Sterling, who speaks in a combination of art-world liberal jargon, finance tech talk, and infomercial ad-lib. Claire, Shareen, Jiannbin, and their friend Miguel speak with their heart and, in a rather romantic sense, their use of language and poetry is what restores their humanity and pulls them out of the hustle and bustle of the daily corporate grind.

Sex, too, is a way to disconnect from the capitalist realism of society. While the film’s focal narrative concerns environmental racism and capitalism, sex still exists within this political narrative. Cheang expressed to me that the inclusion of sex between Claire and Shareen, and between Jiannbin and his paramour, was simply to show audiences that they have healthy lives. The characters fuck. They fuck when they are happy, and they fuck when they are distraught. The myriad of ways in which we see them come together allowed Cheang to revert the sexual gaze back to audiences and reconcile with what she described as her “tension with the missionary position.” A small detail like this should not be so unique. And yet, as the past thirty years revealed, many of our political spaces and films consider sex as something “over there,” something private, and disentangled from larger arguments on political solidarity.

While our protagonists triumph at the end of the film, the evil is in fact, not vanquished. Instead, the GX Corporation merely rebrands to a wellness business model instead, hacking off recyclable products and a green-based lifestyle that speaks to affluent wealthy individuals interested in suburbia or Park Slope (same difference). The critique is scathing. “Green=Greed” is one of the final title cards, remarking that our recycling obsession has turned our shared struggle of environmental racism into an individual one sold to us by the same corporations killing us. The film returns us to Orchid Island, home to over four thousand aborigines, still used as a nuclear waste dump by Taiwan. The people’s land is still being poisoned but is now a site of leisure by German tourists. Fresh Kill in 2024 feels eerily prescient, but what it reveals is that for the past thirty years the same concerns and warnings have gone unaddressed and if they ring true now it is because they have reached a deafening pitch.