Proteus (2003)

As far as pomo homo auteur filmmakers are concerned, probably none is more artistically and politically subversive than Canadian cocksucker John Greyson (Un©ut, Zero Patience), a politically incorrect yet equally degenerate far-left poof whose recent anti-Zionist political activism has given him some rather negative press, especially in the fiercely Philo-Semitic world of filmmaking. Indeed, in a world where fags can marry and one is supposed to accept the act of a man anally penetrating a man as totally normal and even liberating, homosexual ‘culture’, especially in the celluloid world, has become hardly subversive and just as banal as the bourgeois heterosexual world that ass-pounding abberosexuals once felt superior to. A queerly queer veteran who originally emerged in the Toronto film/fag scene in the late 1970s, Greyson has lived long enough to see the ideas he spread like a venereal disease via his poofter political activism to become mainstream and overwhelmingly socially acceptable, yet he has remained an uncompromising filmmaker whose cinema works tend to appeal to the most esoterically-inclined of cinephiles, be they homos, heteros, or otherwise, and his most recent feature-length narrative film, Proteus (2003)—a low-budget (at $500,000.00 despite being an international production with a large international cast) Canadian-South African co-production of postmodern historical revisionism of the audaciously anachronistic sort that was co-written/directed/produced by SA documentary filmmaker Jack Lewis (a man responsible for producing a series of educational documentaries for the Robben Island Museum in the late 1990s)—is no less perniciously provocative and socially deleterious than his early works Urinal (1988) aka Pissoir and Un©ut (1997). A sort of daringly degenerate cross between Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) directed by Héctor Babenco, Querelle (1982) directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Jean Genet’s Un chant d'amour (1950) aka A Song of Love, Proteus is loosely based on the racially-charged true story about two South African prisoners on Robben Island (where anti-white terrorist turned Nobel Laureate Nelson Mandela spent 18 of the 27 years he was in prison), a gay Dutch sailor and a Capoid Khoi/Bushman Negro, who were both executed in 1735 for the unholy mortal sin of interracial sodomy. Undoubtedly a far-left fag-cist flick of the militantly homosexualist sort that portrays sexual orientation as a more serious source of discrimination than racial differences, Proteus is assuredly incriminating on the director’s part as a sometimes sickening and would-be-salacious but mostly sardonic sub-erotic arthouse flick directed by a man who was clearly heavily enticed by the fervently foul fantasy of a Nordic and a Negroid physically and metaphysically destroying racial and national barriers via blasphemous black-on-white and white-on-black buggery. A patently pretentious piece of race and sex hustling of the curiously carnal and even campy sort, Proteus, despite ostensibly taking place in the18th-century, features ANC era prison guards as leather-fag-like fascists of the sadomasochistic sort, pancake make-up wearing Goth fags wielding electric guitars, gay orgies taking place on the streets of Amsterdam, and snarky 1960s style fag hag stenographers with beehive hairdos arguing over the middle Dutch origins of the word “fuck” and, indeed, Greyson’s digital video work is certainly a piece where the two persecuted poof protagonists fuck, get fucked, fuck each other, and get fucked over by the Dutch-run South African government. 

 Taking its name from the South African flower better known as “King Sugarbush” that was named “Protea Cynaroides” by Swedish botanist Carolus Linneaus in 1735 and was proposed as the National Flower of South Africa in 1964, Proteus uses the flower as a faggy ‘flowery’ allegory for the blossoming and eventual death of the romantic relationship between the two pansy protagonists. Claas Blank (Rouxnet Brown) is a rare bilingual black servant fluent in two European languages (Dutch and English) of Khoi Hottentot ancestry (although his father was a Bushman, thus making him still a 100% pure member of the dying Asian-like Negro Capoid race, which Nelson Mandela also symbolically belongs to), thus making him a racial ‘untouchable’ of sorts and a racial enemy of both blacks and whites. Lucky for him, a Scottish botanist named Virgil Niven (Shaun Smyth) of the latent homosexual variety takes Blank in as an assistant and uses him as a model for his homoerotic ‘scientific’ drawings. After receiving ten years of hard labor on Robben Island for the seemingly bogus crime of “assault and insolence on a Dutch citizen,” Blank starts an initially hostile but eventually romantic relationship with a debauched Dutch sailor named Rijkhaart Jacobsz (Neil Sandilands), who has no qualms about committing sodomy, especially when he is on the receiving end, thus volunteering to experience reversed racial subjection. Naturally, Blank’s master Virgil Niven is jealous of his black boy toy’s new fuck buddy friend, but he has his own problems to worry about as a married man who was found guilty of sodomy in absentia, a fate that inevitably led to his ex-lover/assistant’s execution. A crafty and shifty trickster, Mr. Blank lies about the Bushmen words for certain South African flowers to his master Virgil Niven, absurdly replacing the real Bushman flower names with words “cunt” and “fart,” among other linguistic absurdities, thus highlighting the dubious research done by Europeans when recording African history. From Niven, Blank learns that his people, the Hottentot people, belong to one of the three subspecies of man, the “bridge between simian and homo erectus.” Of course, that does not stop Niven from lusting over his subhuman partner, but his bourgeois airs prevent him from acting on his impulses, which offends Mr. Blank, who taunts his sexually mixed-up master with the words “I see the way you look at me...I know what it means.” Being a humble sailor of the colonial proletarian prisoner sort with not even the slightest Dutch Calvinist inclinations, Jacobsz has no problem engaging in jungle fever with tribal twink Blank, but when the two men are caught literally with their pants down and engaging in multicultural mud-packing, they are convicted of sodomy, an uniquely unholy crime that is punished with death by way of execution, which the victim's family is forced to pay. After being tortured, wussy white boy Jacobsz, unlike his brave lover Blank who never gives in under the pressure of torture, cowardly caves in after being tortured via drowning torture device and admits he committed sodomy with a true blue spade. While Jacobsz is convicted of sodomy and sentenced to death, Blank only has to return to Robben Island as he never confessed to engaging in cocksucking, which the Dutch court requires when carrying out an execution. Displaying his true commitment to his cracker lover, Blank ultimately decides to admit to the Dutch court that he is a homo Negro, thus he and Jacobsz are allegorically chained together and dropped in the sea, thus demonstrating director John Greyson’s conspicuous belief that homo-hating transcends racial lines, as cocksuckers of all colors are equally hated by the Dutch court. 

With a blatantly queer colonial queen absurdly stating, “as they say, what’s good for the motherland is good for the colony. Or rather, vice versa,” John Greyson has certainly demonstrated with Proteus that his sardonic sodomite wit has yet to wane over the decades, as colonialism has been entirety deleterious to both the colonizers and the colonized and has been the true root of racial chaos and cultural mongrelization throughout the world. Of course, with South Africa now being in black hands and white South Africans facing very potential genocide as demonstrated by the savage black-on-white murders of white Afrikaner farmers, with Genocide Watch placing South Africa at level 6, “Preparation”, remarking “we have evidence of organized incitement to violence against White people,” race hate in the rainbow nation has reversed in such a remarkably radical manner of the genocidal sort that it makes John Greyson’s criticism of colonial racism in Proteus seem rather trivial and absurdly outmoded. Of course, Greyson's main focus was portraying homosexuals as perennial victims who have it much worse than even blacks, while also portraying male-on-male buggery as something that was believed to only afflict Europeans as depicted in a scene in Proteus where a Dutch lawmaker remarks, “I thought the natives were immune to such unnatural deeds,” as if even the apparently racial colonialists even regarded their own imperial way of life as deracinated and deluded, while seeing the savages as still pure and untainted by the anti-organic phenomenon of colonialism and multiculturalism, which has only gotten all the more apocalyptic since the centuries have past. In fact, it seems that Proteus depicts homosexuality as the only positive import to the dark continent, as if technology, medicine/antibiotics, cities, and civilization are totally negligible things. 

Of course, in its totally negative depiction of the Dutch East India company—the very first multinational corporation—in regard to its exploitation of South Africans, Proteus ultimately has a nonsensical message of globalization = bad yet cosmopolitan cocksucking and international interracial sodomy = good. Featuring a contrived past where everyone seems gay yet also inexplicably anti-gay, Proteus is another great example of John Greyson’s keen ability to cinematically sodomize history in a militant far-left homo manner that, in its intentionally belligerent anachronism and oftentimes disinterest in historical truths, is most importantly about today’s globalized world and not the old colonial world it is set in. As Greyson admitted in an interview for the DVD release of Proteus, the real Claas Blank and Rijkhaart Jacobsz met each other when the former was only 16 years old and would maintain a romantic relation for two decades before they were actually convicted and executed for sodomy, which is quite remarkable considering it was nearly three centuries ago. In a nation where no less than ½ a million rapes are committed a year and child/baby rape (many HIV-infected South Africans believe if they rape a baby, it will cure them of their affliction) is at one of the highest levels in the world yet it also happens to be the first African country to legalize gay marriage, South Africa certainly has more things to worry about than whether the typical Joe Schmo negro tolerates buggery. Featuring the fetishization of quasi-fascist crypto-fag cops, a history lesson in old school European racial theories, the campy homosexualizing of the Dutch aristocracy (the old colonial men in stupid wigs are portrayed as hysterical yet sexually repressed old queens), unintentionally farcical glorification of the so-called “noble savage,” and promotion of homosexual miscegenation, Proteus is a film that is ultimately far more humorous in its homo-centricity than it is genuinely ‘romantic’ and socio-politically potent as a sort of unflattering, if not totally accidental and pathology-driven, deconstruction of the degenerate queer artist and political activist.   Described by co-director John Greyson himself as a “low-budget sodomy epic,” Proteus is a proudly profligate piece of ridiculously risque and pseudo-romantic fag historical revisionism that is sure to offend any self-respecting heterosexual, be they white or black, who has the gall to endure the abberosexual artsy fartsy essence of the film.  Concluding with the 1964 Nelson Mandela quote “some of the things so far told the court are true and some are not true” regarding being sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island, Proteus is ultimately a film with the message that all history is subjective and written by the conquerors. Of course, with “peace keeper” Nelson Mandela on his deathbed and the looming threat of race war against South Africa's white population, one can only wonder the sort of bogus history black leaders will write in the future of ridding themselves of the culture-carrying and producing Caucasian menace.

-Ty E