No Skin Off My Ass

Supposedly Kurt Cobain’s favorite film according to mainstream abberosexual auteur Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho, Elephant) – who directed a film loosely based on the reluctant famous rock star’s suicide for his mundane minimalistic pseudo-arthouse flick Last Days (2005) – No Skin Off My Ass (1993) directed by homocore auteur Bruce LaBruce (Hustler White, Otto; or Up With Dead People) is undoubtedly one of the most positively perverse ‘punk’ flicks ever directed, not least of all due to its sadomasochistic, skinhead-sucking protagonist played by the director himself. Inspired by and vaguely a decidedly debauched remark of Robert Altman’s overlooked minor masterpiece That Cold Day in the Park (1969) – a certainly chilling and creepy cinematic work about a wealthy yet lonely spinster who invites a young and handsome proletarian boy that is pretending to be mute into her apartment and inevitably imprisoning him but at the same time attending to his every need, including buying him prostitutes – No Skin Off My Ass centers around a poofer punker hairdresser who ironically falls in love with a shaven and stoic yet simpleminded skinhead, takes him home, gives him a bath, and locks him in one of his bedrooms. Patently politically incorrect in terms of its imagery and some of its sentiments and not the least bit pretentious for an audacious arthouse work, No Skin Off My Ass, despite its lack of production values and all around technical incompetency as a cinematic work, proved to be a potent first feature-length for Bruce LaBruce as it signified the arrival of an aberrant-garde auteur who was only out to construct his own carelessly crude, carnally campy, and even creepy fetishes and fantasies in grainy celluloid form. A born masochist, LaBruce once admitted in an interview in regard to a real-life neo-nazi hustler boyfriend of his that, “He needed a place to stay, and I didn’t know how into Nazism he was, so I took him in. I kept ridiculing him for his views and beliefs and trying to talk him out of it. Then he got fed up with me one night and beat the crap out of me. So I kicked him out. But there was definitely a sexual dimension to it. On some level, I got turned on.” And, indeed, No Skin Off My Ass is a softcore pornographic work of minimalist movie masochism that – with its zit-popping perversity and boot-to-butt buggery – is anti-erotic in its essence, at least if you’re anyone aside from Bruce LaPoof.  In the tradition of Kenneth Anger (Scorpio Rising, Lucifer Rising), early John Waters (Pink Flamingos, Desperate Living) and Fred Halsted (The Sex Garage, LA Plays Itself), No Skin Off My Ass is a hyper-homo arthouse trash flick where one does not have to be a flaming fairy, fierce fist-fucker, nor homophile hipster to enjoy it.

 A fan of the classic horror punk band The Misfits, as well as hair sissy salon-styling and masculine hetero hunks, “The Hairdresser” (played by Bruce LaBruce himself) is a severely sad fellow who gets all sappy and sentimental over solitary skinhead boys with big boots and bald heads. Once day whilst strolling around a local public park, he spots a depressed bootboy (played by assumedly Aryan aristocrat Klaus von Brücker) sitting all by his lonesome on a park bench and his maternal man-meat craving instincts kick in, so the Hairdresser decides to talk the sad and speechless skin into coming back to his punk pad. A master of ridiculous manipulation, the horny hairstylist surprisingly is able to also talk the melancholy macho man into stripping his skinhead uniform under the preposterous pretense of giving him a bath. The skinhead may not be the brightest bootboy in town, but he has a loony lesbian filmmaker sister named "Jonesy" (played by real-life Riot grrrl lezzy filmmaker/musican G.B. Jones) who is working on a pussy-licking agitprop piece entitled "Girls of the SLA" – in tribute to the far-left terrorist group comprised of cuckold crackers, mudshark murderers, and a Negro rapist Führer best known for their sexual torture and brainwashing of American heiress Patty Hearst – that acts as a sort of brain for her bald brainless bro. A fierce feminist punk pussy-licker that loathes shaved heads but loves shaven cunts, Jonesy tells her brother that “If you’re a skinhead, you’re stupid, and if you’re queer, you’re smart” and "The second best thing to being a dyke is being a fag" as if potentially getting AIDS from a creepy punk hairdresser is a wild and wonderful virtue straight from the perverse playbook of Rosa von Praunheim. Of course, as a lecherous lesbo of the lunatic libertine kind, Jonesy has no problem filming her brother’s cock in compromised sexual positions, but such is the wacky wiener world of Bruce LaBruce where sociopolitical messages are an intrinsic part of the entire cinematic package, but portrayed to the point of preposterous parody whether a penis is involved (it usually is) or not.   Featuring music from groups ranging from the ska punk band Operation Ivy's cover of the Nancy Sinatra hit "These Boots Are Made For Walking" and Deutsch diva Nico's cover of the German national anthem "Das Lied der Deutschen," No Skin Off My Ass surely makes for one those most anarchistic postmodern softcore gay porn flicks ever made.

Still a ‘work-in-progress’ as a filmmaker at the time of completely his first feature, LaBruce has pointed out certain flaws – both aesthetic and philosophical – in No Skin Off My Ass, but the most insightful is the following from an interview excerpt he did for the book The View From Here: Conversations with Gay and Lesbian Filmmakers (2007) by Matthew Hays regarding the quote from the film "If you’re a skinhead, you’re stupid….if you’re queer, you’re smart”: “I felt very influenced by that ideological conformity for a while, like in No Skin Off My Ass (1991)…It was an upbeat message that it’s cool to be a fag, but it’s also naïve and simplistic: we were trying to be provocative in other ways which undercut that straightforward message….After that, some friends made me aware that I was still kind of brainwashed by my Marxist-feminist education at University. They slapped me out of it…I got freed from that…I try not to think about [my work] in terms of having a gay agenda.” Of course, No Skin Off My Ass – a work that freakishly fetishizes the ‘neo-fascist’ body in a way that no limp-wristed leftist would dare – still proved that LaBruce was a filmmaker that was more interesting in pleasing himself than his mentally defective Che Guevara shirt-wearing cock-sucking compatriots. The Teutophile auteur would also go on to direct Skin Flick (1999) aka Skin Gang; a work featuring a seemingly braindead bootboy busting his load on an original edition of Uncle Adolf’s Mein Kampf, as well as a depiction of a gay bourgeois mixed race couple that is less flattering than that of the skinhead sodomites that rape them. In the tradition of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (1979), LaBruce also parodied the megalomania of kraut RFA-style far-left terrorist with his seedy and satirical cinematic work The Raspberry Reich (2004) aka The Revolution Is My Boyfriend, thus it should be no surprise for anyone who has seen No Skin Off My Ass that the poof-punk auteur went in this daring, mainstream-gay-scaring direction in his filmmaking career. Regarding his fixation with the bare-skinned and buggering neo-brownshirt bootboy, the director remarked in an interview: “I have a bit of German blood in me…I find it intriguing that the Germans went from being this Aryan Überpower to being a kind of downtrodden nation. All the great shame they’ve suffered; perpetrating the holocaust has created a certain humility in many of the them. Yet they still have that German pride about them, an ego. It’s an interesting psychology, this restrained ego.” That being said, if a homocore Canad-Aryan filmmaker has to pass on the Teutonic torch because authentic Aryans are too busy getting shit and pissed on when not pandering to politically correct perversity than so be it, as I certainly don't see Teutonic aristocrat of ass-eating and flagrant fag Führer Rosa von Praunheim doing it anytime soon, although he certainly seems to be a fan of Bruce LaBruce's films as testified by his inclusion of a scene from Skin Gang in his documentary Men, Heroes, and Gay Nazis (2005).  Now LaBruce just needs to do a pornographic remark of Veit Harlan's Jud Süß (1940) aka Jew Süss as the world would be a better place because of it, at least for the the Nancy Boy-hating neo-nazis of the effete filmmaker's flesh-based fantasy world.

-Ty E