The Brooklyn Rail

James Bidgood’s seminal poetic, hyper-artificial investigation of queer beauty and desire, Pink Narcissus (1971), is a lush and solipsistic jewel box jumble of myth and cheesecake; its gorgeous pastel surfaces ironically came to entrap their maker forever in his own doomed, autoerotic reverie. This hyper-aestheticized, 68-minute, 8 and 16 mm experimental film—beautifully restored in 4K by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and playing at Metrograph accompanied by a new book of the director’s photography this month—depicts a lonely, self-obsessed hustler lost in a Cocteau-style hall of mirrors, wandering through elaborate sets where he meets boys with taut muscles, pouty expressions, and lavishly scanty costumes. Each vignette in this tangled web of nested wet dreams (a structure Bidgood once called “an homage to gay whack-off fantasies”) is rendered with the delicate etherealness of one of Jacques Demy’s artfully stylized, queer-coded fairytale confections and the openly lustful, yet oddly innocent, gaze of a mid-century gay softcore magazine. Between visits from johns, the hustler (played by a pseudonymous model, Bobby Kendall, who was described as “mainly heterosexual”) envisions himself as the star of a series of kaleidoscopic, highly archetypal queer sexual scenarios: he’s a matador in Spain who eventually crosses horns with a Kenneth Anger-style biker in a squalid New York men’s room; he’s a Roman slave, the emperor watching his torture; he’s a Greek god cavorting in nature with his demigods; and he’s a harem leader and a concubine watching an erotic dancer twirl his erection under diaphanous veils. Outside his window between layers of billowing lace, falling rose petals, and glitter, Times Square is rendered in throbbing neon as a seething, Caligari-esque riot of queer nightlife, with bottomless cart pushers selling dildos to streaking altar boys, cowboys, and drag queens, none of whom ever seem to find emotional connection. The film is one part Fantasia (1940), one part Playgirl magazine; one part high art, one part bedtime story.

In other words, Pink Narcissus perfectly captures the melancholy, hopelessly nostalgic, riotously romantic dream life of its idiosyncratic auteur. Bidgood dedicated almost the entire span of the sexual revolution to Pink Narcissus’s bittersweet creation in the cramped confines of his Hell’s Kitchen apartment—only to lose control of its final cut and abdicate authorship until being “outed” as its creator in 1999. The end result is an art object that transcends time (John Waters, who’s programming the film at this summer’s Provincetown International Film Festival, once called it “as beautiful and timeless as The Wizard of Oz”), and it conjures this feeling, perhaps paradoxically, through the oneiric, yet oddly familiar nostalgia of its pure, romantic love of fantasy. The emotional power it brings to its blend of breathtaking sensual delicacy (á la Orpheus [1950]) and the gaudy pleasures of a raucous vaudeville revue serve as a testament to Bidgood’s artistic dedication and unabashed investment in his passions, be they for art, beauty, sex, or dreams.

James Bidgood, who died of COVID in 2022 after a life of broad obscurity and deep financial hardship (a GoFundMe was made to pay for his funeral), was a man self-professedly “unfortunately… addicted to dreaming.” In an interview with Butt Magazine in 2010, he insisted that he had “the very worst luck,” and the aborted ambitions of his film career confirm this notion. Bidgood began shooting Pink Narcissus in 1963, around the same time Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, and Andy Warhol released their own canonical works of queer experimental cinema, Flaming Creatures, Scorpio Rising, and Blow Job, respectively; Susan Sontag published “Notes on Camp” then, too. Bidgood’s vision, then, was in many ways perfectly aligned with the queer aesthetics being laid out and taxonomized in works like these, whose pastel delicacy and kitschy elegance scraped up against the perilous realities and barely-sublimated violence of mid-century queer life. His dreamily artificial photography, shot under the pseudonym “Les Folies des Hommes” [the follies, or madness, of men], depicting rosy-cheeked young men costumed as characters like Pan, Jack Frost, and Cupid, regularly graced the covers of softcore magazines like Muscle Teens, Demigods, and Adonis.

Alas, as for Narcissus himself, Bidgood’s passionate, drawn-out affair with his daydreams (“I [kept] going, ‘Oh, what I could do over in this corner… and that’s another four years’ work”) proved deadly. By the time his film was released in 1971, cultural mores had shifted radically. Warhol’s pornographic Blue Movie (1969) began rewriting the rules of sexual explicitness on screen before being superseded by Wakefield Poole’s fully hardcore film Boys in the Sand (1971) as the queer erotica du jour just months after the comparatively prudish (read: there’s only one direct-to-camera ejaculation) Pink Narcissus debuted. Soon thereafter, John Waters’s gay trash coup of murderous drag, dancing anuses, and coprophagia, Pink Flamingos (1972), would bring the arthouse and the grindhouse closer together. As if demonstrating just how much had changed since Bidgood’s project began, the mythically-tinged thriller Boys in the Sand would become the first pornographic picture to receive a review in Variety, and was well-received. Pink Narcissus, meanwhile, was panned by Vincent Canby in the New York Times as “a fragile antique, a passive, tackily decorated surreal fantasy out of that pre‐Gay‐Activist era when homosexuals hid in closets and read novels about sensitive young men who committed suicide because they could not go on.” Continuing to remark on the film’s blend of high kitsch and what Richard Dyer once called the film’s “delicious melancholia,” Canby also complained of what he viewed as a confusing contradiction in the film’s tone: for a work that, at least in his opinion, “aspired to … camp,” it was “sad and very vulnerable and as serious as it is sappy.” Where before, then, Bidgood’s style was au courant and his love of figures like Maria Montez (camp queen of fifites B movies) was earnestly shared by his contemporaries, by the dawn of the seventies, to quote William E. Jones in ArtForum, “Bidgood found himself in a moment of gay culture not to his taste; he preferred the epicene ephebe to the macho clone.”

The failure of Pink Narcissus was, of course, traumatic for Bidgood on many levels. Not only was the final cut not his own, his choice to be credited as “Anonymous” led to the assumption that the film was the work of either Kenneth Anger or Andy Warhol, propelling him into obscurity. The latter comparison in particular stung Bidgood, even later in life: “Pink Narcissus doesn’t look anything like Warhol,” he once quipped, “he would never put that much effort into anything.” As this new 4K restoration attests, Bidgood’s contribution to queer cinema history has slowly been brought into the canon, but too slowly for it to matter to the director himself. He was, after all, addicted to dreaming, and as he put it soon before his death, “I’ve been stuck with my dreams for close to eighty years now, and I still have to worry whether I have the rent money every month.” At the same time, his influence is on clear display in the self-awarely camp-infused music videos of queer artists like Chappell Roan (i.e., the undersea grotto in “Casual”) or even Lil Nas X’s deployment of the same fantasy archetypes in videos like “Montero” and “Industry Baby.” Charli XCX has also cited Bidgood as a visual inspiration.

In light of his critical failures and his dedication to dreaming, the loneliness and self-consciously constructed escapism at the heart of Pink Narcissus feels even more personal; in retrospect, the image of the hustler rejecting the neon-slicked grime and bustle of the city out his window—for the comfort of gods and kings, the delicate touch of a blade of grass or a butterfly’s wing under a glowing full moon—feels grounded in the alienation that Bidgood’s particular pre–liberation-era, camp-inflected sensibility eventually brought him. Regardless of the particular imagery on display, artifice—that central pillar of camp—remains the film’s beating heart. Indeed, he built this obsession into a loving philosophy over the course of his life. In a New York Times panel on the 2019 Met Gala theme, “Notes on Camp,” Bidgood noted that homophobes in the sixties would have argued that queerness was unnatural. “You could say that one of the foundational gestures of camp,” he suggested, “is to say, ‘It’s unnatural? Absolutely.’” At the same time, though, he rightly rejected the idea that camp was an all-encompassing signifier for artificiality, opting instead for the idea of fantasy as a positive, serious structuring principle: “There are movies that are called camp,” he remarked in 2006, “but I don’t even know why they are called camp. I think they’re Vegas, ice shows … all glittering, chiffon, and feathers, but for some of us that’s a great deal more real.”

There’s an innocence to this framing that stands out starkly from the drollness of his more familiar, “campy” contemporaries, a directness of vision that sheds light on both the pain and pleasure that undergirds this desire for escape into fiction at the heart of Pink Narcissus. Describing moving to New York from rural Wisconsin as a young man, he presented an interviewer with a fantasy: “I thought I would come to New York and ten minutes later … you’re singing and dancing on Broadway … you’re meeting the guy who wrote the show and he falls in love with you … it’s very naïve, but I like to thrive in naïve conceptions, they’re nice.” Like Anna Biller, whose slow, meticulous approach to her retro mise en scène undergirds a similar nostalgia for classical Hollywood and a desire for the emotionality of a romanticized bygone era, this affected naïveté in substance as well as style provides the pathos and tension that Canby observed in Pink Narcissus at the time: the film is electric with artifice and earnestness jostling for control under the surface of his languid erotic fantasy—and this push and pull can be haunting as well as camp.

Bidgood once made a stark distinction between the act of dreaming awake, i.e., the fantasies he prizes, and the passive act of dreaming asleep. “I’ve won the Tony and wept uncontrollably giving my thank you speech at least a dozen times in my imagination,” he told Butt. But, “If you mean do I dream at night, I try not to because I am prone to having terrible nightmares and so I sleep with the television on.” Dreaming in all its forms, then, could be understood as the madness of men in Bidgood’s terms, a pseudonym he allowed to appear before the title of Pink Narcissus even after he insisted his own name be excised, a sort of guiding principle: as the hustler waits for his next client, he drowns out his nightmares with his daydreams, slips into the moonlight with a handful of pearls and champagne dripping down his chest.