Bent

 

Once long ago, the now deceased singer of a fascistically iconoclastic yet decidedly degenerate grindcore band with the positively poetic name “Anal Cunt” wrote a song entitled “Hogging Up the Holocaust,” which features the rather insightful lyrics regarding the greedy victim of God's chosenites, “Other people were fucked with too…But all you care about is you…Faggots, gypsies, others too.” Of course, the faggots, as well as their ostensibly female counterparts (who the Nazis did not typically harass), are now undoubtedly only second to the Hebrews in getting a piece of the persecution pie because, in terms of being a political collective with a discernible agenda like their Judaic allies, they are pushy, politically subversive, relative wealthy, love to whine, and hold victimhood as the height of moral superiority, thus it was only natural that they would begin telling their “holocaust story” in celluloid form. In terms of homo holocaust flicks, probably none is ‘greater’ than Bent (1997) directed by gay British theatre director Sean Mathias and based on the blockbuster 1979 play of the same name written by gay Jewish American screenwriter/playwright Martin Sherman, who also acted as one of the film’s producers. Technically a British-Japanese co-production, Bent features an Anglicized National Socialist Germany featuring popular (and rampantly heterosexual) English actor Clive Owen in the lead role as a bourgeois bugger who takes on the false identity of a Jew and wears an ugly yellow star of David in a concentration camp rather than admit to being a homo and wearing a pink triangle as a wide-receiver on the fluff team. Following the tradition of Italian maestro Luchino Visconti in unabashedly portraying Nazis in an absurdly eroticized and fetishized fashion and featuring erratically exaggerated anti-reality melodrama that would even make Fassbinder’s stomach churn in disgust, Bent is surely a penetrating, if not oftentimes plodding, piece of sadomasochistic ‘persecution porn’ that seems more interested in enticing the viewer with salacious sex scenes and bodacious bloody violence than promoting the apparently 'good fight' of the poofer plight. Indeed, it terms of resembling reality and authentic human emotion, Bent is about as historically authoritative in sensitively portraying the horrors of the Second World War as Spielberg’s Schindler’s list (1993) and even Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974) and The Berlin Affair (1985), but all the more fetishistic, suavely stylized, and entertainment based. Essentially beginning on the Night of the Long Knives aka Röhm-Putsch—Hitler’s treacherous purge of the Nazi Strasserite ‘left-wingers’ and largely homosexual led Sturmabteilung (SA) that took place between June 30 and July 2, 1934—Bent focuses on a sexually promiscuous and supremely narcissistic sodomite from a wealthy family who finds himself a marked man after having an affair with a blond beast of a brownshirt. Featuring a cameo from Jude Law as a one-eyed SA brownshirt with nonsensical SS insignia, SS men hanging out in and brutally raping and torturing prisoners in a relatively empty cattle car headed to Dachau concentration camp, old rock queen Mick Jagger in radically repulsive hagsploitation-esque drag, and a conspicuously British cast that look like they could be the cast of a Derek Jarman film, Bent, not unlike the TV movie Christopher and His Kind (2011) based on British author Christopher Isherwood’s 1976 memoir of the same name, is a relentlessly culturally and historically retarded and superlatively sordid tale of Teuton buggery after the purge of the big bad butt-darting brownshirts. 

 Max (Clive Owen) is a dandy degenerate gay boi and black sheep from a wealthy German family who, judging by his rather promiscuous sexual behavior, is itching for a poz-cock as he spends a good portion of his time hanging out in Weimar Berlin cabarets and engaging in sodomite orgies. Despite the glaring jealousy of his four-eyed and effortlessly effete dancer boyfriend Rudy Glass (Brian Webber II), Max does not think twice about starting a solely sexual relationship with a handsome blond Nazi brownshirt named Wolfgang Ganz (German-Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), but little does he realize that it is the eve of the Night of the Long Knives and his new piece of Aryan Übermensch meat is also the boyfriend of Berlin SA leader Karl Ernst, an ex-bouncer of a gay bar who will be one of Hitler’s homo victims. Naturally, since Ganz is Ernst’s boy toy, the SS comes for him and slits his throat right in front of Max and Rudy at their apartment, so the two make a run for it and go into hiding. Not long after, Max and Rudy discover that their old drag queen friend Greta (Mick Jagger), the star of their favorite gay cabaret is an opportunistic tranny traitor, who sold out Wolfgang Ganz to the SS and put his own friends in jeopardy after being bribed. Greta, who was awarded handsomely by the SS for his treachery and has burned his entire drag queen/cabaret wardrobe in a rather ritualistic fashion as a way to say sayonara to his past life as Berlin's most glamorous queen, gives Max the sound advice to accept the fact that in Nazi Germany, “Queer is out. Queer is dead” and that they should pretend to live their lives as heterosexuals as he has already started to as demonstrated by his new butch suit and name. Uncle Freddie (Ian McKellen) has given him new papers to hide his identity, but the naïve nephew refuses to leave his bitchy boyfriend Rudy behind. In a rather anti-völkisch action scene filmed in a seemingly haunted and phantasmagorical German forest that seems like a horror-like take on the mystical Germanic woods of the National Socialist propaganda flick Ewiger Wald (1936) aka Enchanted Forest, Max and Rudy are caught by the SS and sent on a train headed to Dachau as homosexual criminals. Rather absurdly, Rudy is forced to break his own glasses and is routinely tortured by an SS officer who also sports glasses because the naughty Nazi assumes that his lack of vision is a sure sign that he is a member of the intelligentsia. Max, who keeps telling himself like a scared child that “it isn’t happening” as he sees his boyfriend routinely beaten to a bloody pulp in the cattle car, is forced by the sadistic SS officer to also beat Rudy, who is inevitably killed by being thrown out of the moving train. A traitor to his lover, Max also becomes a traitor to his homosexuality after he is forced by the SS to copulate with the corpse of a 13-year-old girl. For his daring display of heterosexual necrophilia/pedophilia, as well as bribing the SS men, Max is rewarded with the supreme honor of wearing the yellow star of David label as opposed to the dreaded pink triangle because, apparently, being a poof is worse than being a Jew at Dachau concentration camp. 

 Not long after arriving at Dachau, Max begins to fall in love with a less than handsome homo named Horst (Canadian actor Lothaire Bluteau), a mentally tough fluff who wears the pink triangle proudly as an activist of gay Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld who was naturally sent to the concentration camp due to his political commitment to cocksucking. Not unsurprisingly, Horst initially finds Max to be a repulsive character for being a self-loathing sodomite who pretends to be a Jew to save his own skin, but things change over time as the wealthy conman proves his commitment to his new comrade. A homo hustler of the supremely shameless sort, Max bribes the SS men and manages to get Horst a relatively easy job with him pointlessly carrying rocks from one side of a room to another, work designed to break the will and spirit of the prisoners. In a patently ridiculous scene of the quasi-supernatural sort, Max and Horst manage to reach mutual orgasms while standing side-to-side without even looking or touching one another nor themselves, but merely by talking dirty to one another and using their wanton will to power. Eventually, Max and Horst develop debilitating colds, which mark them as dead men as far as the concentration camp guards are concerned. To get medicine for Horst and himself, Max gives a blowjob to an SS officer. After finding out how Max was able to procure the meds, Horst refuses to take the drugs and the same SS officer who his boy toy blew begins to taunt him. Realizing he is about to die, Horst charges the SS man and is shot dead on the spot by a guard, but not before scratching the statuesque face of his seemingly gay Aryan persecutor. With his lover dead, Max finally gets enough courage to accept death like a Third Reich era German soldier would and he commits suicide by grabbing on an electronic fence in a morbidly melodramatic fashion worthy of Elie Wiesel's diluted literary fantasies. 

 A shamelessly sensationalized and even exploitative tale of cocksucker concentration camp blues, Bent expresses the sentimentalized message that it is better to die an open faggot than it is to live as a closet colon-choker. Undoubtedly, considering the sometimes surreal and theatrically stylized setting of the film, as well as the somnambulist-like movement of the characters, Bent resembles more of a Nancy boy nightmare than any sort of serious depiction of kraut fairies being fag-bashed by Hitler’s heroes. Indeed, although penned and produced by a Jewish mensch, I would assume that most Jews (Shabbos Goys like Roger Ebert included!) would consider Bent to be a piece of holocaust heresy that uses kitschy and high-camp tableaux, as well as unwaveringly decadent eroticism and gratuitous ultra-violence to enthrall the viewer in what amounts to loony celluloid libertinism with a sorry shade of senseless sentimentalism, thus overpowering its rather weak and meek pro-homo message. In fact, Bent goes so far as to not only turn sodomite stormtroopers into super sensual sex objects, but also sadomasochistic SS men, one of which literally grabs the testicles of a prisoner in an S&M fashion and another one, arguably the most archetypically handsome and Nordic man in the film, receives head from a man he assumes to be a Jew. In what amounts to a rather insightful scene, protagonist Max remarks to his homo homeboy Horst regarding the sexual persuasion of a Svengali-like SS man, “Of course, he could be queer, but you don’t like to think about that. You don’t want them to be queer,” thus discrediting the absurd idea that all queers are as morally supreme as Hollywood and MTV would lead one to believe. Although probably inadvertent on the director’s part, Bent even hints that if the Sturmabteilung brownshirts, most of whom are portrayed in a reasonably positive light in the film, ruled Nazi Germany, the nation would be a virtual homo heaven on earth. Either way, Bent, like Visconti’s The Damned (1969) and Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), is just one of many reasons why Nazis will live on to be the most potent and fetishized objects of artsy camp cinema. Unfortunately, kraut fag Führer Michael Kühnen, a man inspired by the struggle of slayed gay SA leader Ernst Röhm, died of AIDS before he could see what would have probably been his favorite film, Bent, a virtual romance flick for sodomite Strasserites.

-Ty E