Climax

Although Gaspar Noé would probably never admit it, if there is anything that ties all of his films together thematically, it is how they, quite glaringly, depict the pre-apocalyptic decline of the Occident, especially the auteur’s adopted homeland of France. In fact, I would argue that Noé is probably the most perfect choice to direct an adaptation of Jean Raspail's classic racial dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints (1973)—a surprisingly darkly humorous and even salacious and scatological yet decidedly dejectingly prophetic work that depicts the destruction of Western Civilization via hostile invading third world hordes that are encouraged by ethno-masochistic traitors, nihilists, and ressentiment-ridden miscegenation victims—but we don’t live in a perfect world and thus just have to be satisfied with the auteur’s undeniably debasing yet nonetheless delectable works like his latest frenetically fucked dance-hall-horror feature Climax (2018) starring an ostensibly eclectic cast of mostly melanin-privileged non-actors of various shades (mostly dark!). Indeed, the film virtually (if not possibly unintentionally) depicts a sort of raunchy racial apocalypse of sorts in a sort of degenerate dance microcosm where sex and drugs lead to irrational race-hate, brutal murder, death of a child, and even grisly suicide, among other uniquely unsavory things that one has come to expect from a Noé flick. By no means Noé’s greatest feature (in fact, out of all the director’s previous works, his last feature Love (2015) is probably the only one that is clearly inferior), the just-over-90-minutes-feature has somewhat ironically received the best reviews of the auteur’s careers, as if the terminally ‘woke’ mainstream film critics missed the glaringly subversive racial subtext (or, even worse and not improbably, they enjoyed seeing a black-majority dance troupe commit quite literally savage hate crimes against mostly innocent whites, including a hot pregnant chick at the hands of a barbaric baldheaded black beastess). In short, as the film's title hints, Climax is an allegorical depiction of the French racial climate where all the vices of modern-day frogland—which range from gay pederastic miscegenation to Sapphic promiscuity to (sometimes involuntary) collective drug binges—act as a sort of convergence of social catastrophes that ultimately light the flame of genocidal race hate. Of course, considering this is a Noé flick, this ugly and dejecting material provides for endlessly enthralling and even sometime darkly hilarious material, as if the auteur was attempting to provide indelibly bittersweet therapeutic entertainment with plenty of raw and raunchy razzmatazz for Occidental Armageddon in the form of a quite literal (neo)Danse Macabre on bad psychedelic dope.

Not without good (and quite obvious) reason, ‘dance horror’ is an almost nonexistent sub-genre with only a handful of entries that include works ranging from Fulci’s tastefully tacky Murder-Rock: Dancing Death (1984) aka Slashdance to Peter Del Monte’s undeservedly obscure Etoile (1989) aka Ballet (as well as Aronofsky’s obscenely overrated rip-off Black Swan (2010)) to Tobe Hooper’s somehow watchable dystopian Masters of Horror entry Dance of the Dead (2005) to, of course, Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) and Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake. Of course, the above mentioned films range from insipid mindless trash to phantasmagorical gothic arthouse-horror, yet none of these cinematic works come even close to Climax in terms of seemingly perfectly interweaving dance with narrative and ultra-violence with pathos. A mere five-pages of script stretched out to 97-minutes of perversely pulsating orgasmic audio-visual potency, the film also manages to feel like a virtual filmic dance-of-drug-addled-death, as if the viewer is transported to the the realm of savage sensuality, senseless sadism and spiked sangria that positively pollutes the miserably multicultural blood-sweat-semen-and-urine-drenched dance floor. Additionally, while the film was shot in a mere 15-days, it takes the Rope (1948) route in terms of giving the impression that it was shot in a single night via one-take (apparently, the film was apparently actually inspired by the single-shot German film Victoria (2015) directed by Sebastian Schipper).

As one can be expected from Noé’s first feature to actually receive a mere R-rating, it is also his least explicit and arguably most accessible, though it is certainly not his worst and its rather curious racial politics are arguably more subversive than any of the more graphic scenarios from the auteur's arguable magnum opus Irréversible (2002) like the 10-minute long take rape of Monica Bellucci or the S&M sod getting his skull literally crushed with a fire extinguisher. In that sense, Noé makes fellow New French Extremity auteur Bruno Dumont—a pedantic (yet undeniably talented) intellectual that cannot help but constantly depict contrived ‘white racism’ in his films, as if that is some serious problem in the conspicuously cucked continent of Europa—seem like a timid little bitch boy that, despite his ambitious experimental approach to the cinematic form, strangely subscribes to an insufferably banal and ball-less basic bitch narrative when it comes to race, thereupon unfortunately irreparably tainting his entire oeuvre. Instead, the film has more in common with the first three features of Dumont’s underrated cinéma du corps superior Philippe Grandrieux, especially the beauteously brutal dance-and-synth-heavy La Vie nouvelle (2002) aka A New Life.

Undoubtedly, one of the most refreshing things about Noé is that, despite being an arthouse auteur of sorts, he is an inordinately unpretentious filmmaker that has no qualms about exposing his greatest cinematic influences. In fact, as his various films demonstrate, the auteur loves boasting about his personal cinematic favorites and Climax—an experimental exercise in both cinematic form and excess that only Noé could have conjured—is certainly no different in that regard. Indeed, at the beginning of the film, there is a shot of a vintage TV that is flanked by various vintage VHS tapes, including copies of Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929), Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 (1979) aka Zombie, Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends (1975) and Querelle (1982), David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), Jean Eustache’s The Mother and The Whore (1973), Argento’s Suspiria (1977), Christiane F. (1981), Jan Kounen’s Vibroboy (1994), and Gerald Kargl’s Angst (1983). Noé also apparently intended to include VHS tapes for crucial influences like John Guillermin’s The Towering Inferno (1974)—a film he credits as having an imperative influence on Climax—and Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975), but he unfortunately did not have copies of these cinematic artifacts.

Additionally, the TV is also surrounded by various vintage paperback books, including works ranging from Oscar Wilde’s prison ‘letter’ De Profundis (1905) to Georges Bataille’s classic (anti)erotic novella Story of the Eye (1928) aka L'histoire de l'œil to Carlos Castaneda’s pseudo-anthropological best-seller The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968) to Patty Hearst’s memoir Every Secret Thing (1982). Naturally, the auteur’s collection also includes some film books, including Lotte H. Eisner’s classic text Murnau (1973) and Luis Buñuel’s short but sweet cinematic memoir My Last Sigh (1982), among others. Undoubtedly an eclectic mensch, Noé also displays works by French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot, gay (ex)Surrealist artist Pierre Molinier, French film critic and sometimes filmmaker/Jean Rollin associate Jean-Pierre Bouyxou, Swiss-German writer Fritz Zorn (of the decided downer of an autobiography Mars (1977)), Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and, sadly, Freud. Personally, I was glad to see Noé’s collection of works by Teutonic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his all-the-more-cynical virtual spiritual protégé E.M. Cioran. Aside from Nietzsche’s classic Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and the study Nietzsche (1925) by Austrian Jew Stefan Zweig, Noé curiously displays a copy of the literary forgery My Sister and I (1951). Purported to by written in 1889 or early 1890 during Nietzsche’s stay in a nut-house in the Thuringian city of Jena, the largely asinine apocryphal text, which reads like an unhinged parody’s of the philosopher’s writing, probably intrigues the auteur because it alludes to incest and other forms of degeneracy (apparently, David George Plotkin—the son of a rabbi—confessed to ghostwriting the book, which includes a number of obvious factual inaccuracies, including the Teutonic philosopher's unrequited love Lou Andreas-Salomé being described as a “Jewess”).  Undoubtedly, in terms of its various imperative cinematic, literary, and philosophical references, Climax can be seen as Noé's most overtly fan-boyish work which, in this case, is not a bad thing as he at least has respectable taste that does not involve the fetishization of superheroes or cartoon characters.

It is especially fitting that Noé included a copy of Cioran’s The Trouble With Being Born (1973) as the Romanian philosopher once described Paris as an “apocalyptic garage,” which is a pretty good way to describe the setting of Climax (of course, “apocalyptic school turned dance hall” is even more fitting for modern-day France considering the intellectual and racial deterioration of the country). The film is actually set in abandoned school that resembles some sort of snuff film factory in the largely culturally banal year of 1996 (and very loosely based on true events from that time). Opening with a clearly ironical title that reads “A Proudly French Film” juxtaposed with a French flag that covers the entire screen, the film is so innately and undeniably un-French that the so-called racial minorities are the majority and classic frog stereotypes like elegant romance and intellectual sophistication are completely nonexistent. Indeed, on top of only a couple of the character being actual white indigenous frogs, the majority are negroes who ultimately demonstrate many of the same grotesque negative racial stereotypes as their Afro-American counterparts (rather humorously, many of these black characters express the desire to travel to the United States as if compelled by some atavistic collective unconscious yearning). For example, every single interracial attack involves a negro irrationally brutally assaulting and/or stabbing a white, including an incestous black brother that brutally beats a white dancer for virtually no reason and then, in a moment of insane (yet all-too-common) irony, accuses him of “racism” and brands his forehead with a poorly drawn swastika. In short, whether by (possibly subconscious) intent or accident, the film unequivocally reveals the true contemporary racial climate of the Occident where indigenous whites are victimized while so-called minorities absurdly play the victim. Indeed, as belated French right-wing theorist Guillaume Faye noted in his penetratingly incisively theoretical swansong Ethnic Apocalypse (2019), “Out of sheer resentment, frustrated self-victimization, a decidedly vengeful and vindictive mentality and racism too, many of their members abhor France and long to destroy it from within.” Undoubtedly, the abandoned school setting of Climax certainly acts as a microcosm of France, so I don’t think Noé could have missed the grating irony when he opted to open intro to said setting with a large fancy title reading, “A Proudly French Film,” but then again Noé is a drug-addled dude and he might just be depravedly clueless enough to believe such an outstandingly absurd statement. On the other hand, the film also includes a inter-title reading “living is a collective impossibility” after the racial chaos erupts and I doubt that is a coincidence.  In short, the film demonstrates that diversity is a disease that metastasizes like a cancer until is breaks down the organic national body.

While I did not realize until after watching it for a second time, Climax manages to do the seemingly impossible by being a great film despite not having a single sympathetic or likeable character as if it is set in the real world where most people are not much more than uninteresting meat puppets looking to get fucked by other seemingly uninteresting meat puppets. Indeed, while I would typically like to root for the lone white dude David (Romain Guillermic)—a fairly stereotypical-looking swarthy frog that would be easy to forget in terms of appearance were it not for his curious skinhead-esque wardrobe, which includes a bomber jacket and Dr. Martens boots—I found him to be a fairly sleazy, low-class, and loathsome piece of rotten frog excrement and he almost deserves the nonsensical beating from the colored gentleman. Initially, kraut cunt ‘Psyché’ (Thea Carla Schøtt)—a slightly chubby blonde with a butch dyke hairdo and blank stare that hints at drug-induced psychosis/sociopathy—seems fairly reasonable as she explains how “I don’t want to end up like Christiane F” and doesn’t want to succumb the same incessant acid-dropping that has apparently consumed her Berlin buddies, but by the end of the film it becomes fairly clear that she is a completely crazed carpet-muncher that senselessly unleashed the LSD nightmare on the unwitting members of her violently ‘vibrant’ dance troupe. Indeed, as her compatriots are fighting, killing, being sexually reckless, and committing suicide and other forms of self-harm, Psyché manages to spend the entire night dancing her tiny dead cold heart out, though she does piss on the floor at one point in an arguably symbolic scenario that underscores her value and contributions to French society. On top of assumedly spiking the sangria with LSD, Psyché is a total cunt to her pseudo-blonde mystery meat girlfriend Ivana (Sharleen Temple), who rightly tells her “you’re so fucking fake” as she is a character that is completely devoid of organic personality and her recklessly venomous spiking of the sangria is in complete contradiction to her interview confession that she left Berlin to escape drug debauchery.  Meanwhile, David watches the Sapphic cat fight and rightly remarks to his negro pal ‘Omar’ (Adrien Sissoko), “Dyke stuff never works. They need cock. Both of them together, fuck it.” In the end, Psyché drops LSD into eye while her girlfriend Ivana cheats on her with arguable lead Selva (played by Sofia Boutella, who is the only real actor in the film). Needless to say, this film does not do much to help the cause of lesbianism, or so-called ‘alternative lifestyles’ in general, but that is what one has come to expect from a great post-sanity amoralist like Monsieur Noé.

While Hollywood and the grotesque globohomo elites love portraying negresses as glamorous ‘queens’ and other patent absurdities as arguably most insufferably exemplified in Theodore Melfi's tedious historical revisionist turd Hidden Figures (2016), Climax actually dares to depict a black woman as a brutal beastess of the most primitively evil form via a deathly dark dame named ‘Dom’ (Mounia Nassangar) who reveals certain sadistic self-control issues that involve attempting to kill unborn white babies. Indeed, in what is one of the more shocking scenes of the film, Dom—a baldheaded brute that might as well have a dick (and surely has a monstrously large clit)—brutally assaults a white chick named ‘Lou’ (Souheila Yacoub) in form of a couple kicks to her pregnant stomach. Unwillingly to believe that Lou didn’t drink the spiked sangria because she is pregnant, Dom not only attempts to give her a virtual abortion via kick-to-stomach, but also gets her negro friends to encourage the scared white girl to kill herself in one of the film's more disturbing scenes that is likely to infuriate any sane racially conscious cracker. Unable able to handle the racial hostility from Dom and her pack of predatory LSD-addled darkie dancers, Lou turns a knife on herself after initially attempting to fend off her attackers and eventually concludes the film in a bloody hysterical state crawling out of the building into the snow as if being brutally birthed from the fiery cunt of jungle juice hell into the relative safety of cold lonely white death. Of course, not all the interracial encounters are violent, as a fag negro DJ named ‘Daddy’ (Kiddy Smile)—a large yet goofy and (seemingly) harmless ‘black bear’ type—reveals a sort of depraved tenderness by deflowering a young gay boy of dubious racial ancestry name ‘Riley’ (Lakdhar Dridi) that was hoping to have his boy-pussy popped by straight white boy David. As for all the bizarre racial hostilities, they probably could have mostly been avoided were it not for the superlatively sleazy scheming of disgustingly degenerate white Aryan woman Psyché who would have been better suited for her parents' generation as a member of the Baader–Meinhof Gang. Either way, Climax is a film with a cast of apocalyptically cringey characters that inspire absolute aposematism and really underscore the sad (anti)humanist joke that is so-called multiculturalism. As the film (seemingly unintentionally) demonstrates, H.P. Lovecraft was certainly right when he wrote, “Race prejudice is a gift of nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved.”  After all, not a single character in the film would be in the shitty situation they find themselves in were it not for the existence of a Kalergian Europa;or, anti-Imperium par excellence!

Apparently, I am not the only one that noticed the film’s rather savage racial (sub)text, as a dumb twat that writes neo-commie claptrap for Yahoo Movies UK bitched in regard to the film, “Noe has said he wanted to show the regression of human nature, and CLIMAX does that, but in doing so he’s made black people look like the most violent and primitive race, and that’s the hardest thing about this movie to watch. It feels like an ugly step backwards when in recent years we’ve seen a cinematic movement to show the beauty of black culture which has served to ameliorate a faux image forced upon its people.” Of course, as this racially dubious lobotomized little lady fails to realize, all crime stats (not to mention good old-fashioned common sense) demonstrates that the film is completely accurate in terms of depicting the color of crime and race hate on the street level, especially in France where Africans and Arabs mostly excel in extralegal excesses and good visceral ultra-violence, among other things that the French media and culture elite do their darnedest to cover up (in fact, in the French Republic, it is even illegal to perform census in regard to racial and religious background). Surely, it is hard to imagine that average white French woman brutalizing the pregnant belly of a bulbous black beauty, but I digress.

Needless to say, the French have certainly forgotten the hard lessons of the so-called Haitian Revolution (aka ‘colonial Caribbean frog genocide’).  Had Noé gone the Hollywood-esque Bizarro World route and depicted an anti-reality dance floor of the damned where black scientists where preyed on by pretty-faced white boys in the same vein as kosher-certified crap like The Purge franchise, he would no longer be an artist and instead a spiritual eunuch-cum-whore that worships lies over truth like so many Tinseltown hacks. Needless to say, when Noé recently confessed that he hated the unintentionally absurd Afrocentric Marvel abortion Black Panther (2018)—a movie based on a comic book superhero that, not coincidentally, was sired from completely kosher, as opposed to colored, minds—and had to “escape the cinema after 20 Minutes” partly due to it being plagued with R&B music, all the usual suspects accused him of racism, thereupon confirming that Hollywood has finally indoctrinated enough mentally feeble automatons that aesthetic taste is now completely irrelevant and even denying liking big budget celluloid shit can cause you to be seen as a virtual thought criminal among the moronic mainstream.

Not long after first seeing Climax for the first time, I had the grand unexpected pleasure of wallowing in Marcel Carné’s coldly romantic masterpiece Port of Shadows (1938) aka Le quai des brumes. Despite featuring a number of dark elements, including art fag suicide, sexual exploitation, and a decidedly dejecting (yet nonetheless quite fitting) ending where a beautiful fresh young love affair is swiftly annihilated after the male lover is coldly gunned down like a rabid dog in the streets, Carné’s film contains a certain hope and romance that Noé’s nihilistic danse macabre is completely devoid of, thus underscoring the complete and utter spiritual degeneration of France as a whole. Indeed, had a fire broken out and every single character burned alive while screaming in great agony, it would still be impossible to care for the lost souls and miscreants of Climax—a film that is only orgasmic in the same way as a Viagra-driven moneyshot in a cheap contemporary fuck flick is. In short, Noé has his finger on the pulse of frogland, but there seems to be no heartbeat.

Notably, in his penetratingly incisively theoretical swansong Ethnic Apocalypse, Guillaume Faye argues, “Just like a baby viper that breaks its egg shell, the coming racial civil war is only in its humble beginnings […] The responsibility for this ethno-racial civil war, which has already been kindled, will be borne by our political, intellectual and mediatic elites and a statal apparatus that have conjointly been tolerating and enabling this colonizing immigrational flooding for a period of forty years. But remember—he who sows the wind shall reap the whirlwind.” Far from deserving to reap some sort of whirlwind, Noé, quite unlike any other modern-day French-language filmmaker, has consistently created films that are viscerally symptomatic of an innately sick and increasingly racially anarchic society that act as cinematic canary in a coal mine of sorts for a dystopian future that arguably can be seen as a sort of Haitian Revolution 2.0, albeit Islamic and more morbidly multiculti. I just hope that the auteur, not unlike his family emigrating from their native Argentina to France in 1976, manages to flee frogland before it is too late lest he experience something à la The Camp of the Saints that make the scenarios in Climax seem like good-humored child’s play.  Rather unfortunately, not unlike the characters in Noé's film, it seems there are very few places to run as globalization, reverse colonialism, and anarcho-tyranny has already engulfed most of the West.

In one of his most impossibly poetic aphoristic scribblings, Friedrich Nietzsche—a painfully introverted mad man that was probably too shy and timid to dance—declared in regard to the seemingly otherworldly quality of dance, “What a host of things can be accomplished by the state of intoxication which is called by the name of love, and which is something else besides love!—And yet everybody has his own experience of this matter. The muscular strength of a girl suddenly increases as soon as a man comes into her presence: there are instruments with which this can be measured. In the case of a still closer relationship of the sexes, as, for instance, in dancing and in other amusements which society gatherings entail, this power increases to such an extent as to make real feats of strength possible: at last one no longer trusts either one’s eyes, or one’s watch! Here at all events we must reckon with the fact that dancing itself, like every form of rapid movement, involves a kind of intoxication of the whole nervous, muscular, and visceral system. We must therefore reckon in this case with the collective effects of a double intoxication.—And how clever it is to be a little off your head at times! There are some realities which we cannot admit even to ourselves: especially when we are women and have all sorts of feminine ‘pudeurs.’ . . . Those young creatures dancing over there are obviously beyond all reality: they are dancing only with a host of tangible ideals: what is more, they even see ideals sitting around them, their mothers! . . . An opportunity for quoting FAUST. They look incomparably fairer, do these pretty creatures, when they have lost their head a little; and how well they know it too, they are even more delightful because they know it! Lastly, it is their finery which inspires them: their finery is their third little intoxication. They believe in their dressmaker as in their God: and who would destroy this faith in them? Blessed is this faith! And self-admiration is healthy! Self-admiration can protect one even from cold! Has a beautiful woman, who knew she was well-dressed, ever caught cold? Never yet on this earth! I even supposed a case in which she has scarcely a rag on her.”

 Of course, in Climax a dancer crawls in the cold as she bleeds out and a darkie danseur even freezes to death, which is quite fitting as Noé’s nasty little celluloid dance number feels like the sardonically vengeful ghost of Cioran ruthlessly raping his one-time-hero Nietzsche’s inordinately elegant words, though these characters would caught by what might be charitably described as a ‘triple intoxication’ and it is hardly of the relatively wholesome sort Nietzsche alludes to.  Undoubtedly a film with a deceptively simple title that inspires many meanings, Climax—an oftentimes uncomfortably captivating cinematic work that is certainly not the Nietzschean ideal of Dionysian yet Dionysian nonetheless—depicts the last gasp of the Occident in a maniac microcosm where Mother Africa quite literally delivers a blow to a pregnant France (carrying, rather fittingly, a literal bastard) and where there is not white man to provide the white women the appropriate dance ‘intoxication’ (in that sense, the degenerate ghetto dance numbers are quite apt as they allegorically express the aesthetically and culturally debauched state of France as a whole).  After all, as Noé once said himself,  “all history is written in sperm and blood.”  In the end, it will not just be France and its indigenous white population that are swallowed up by the multiculti nightmare, but eventually everyone and everything just like virtually every single character in the film.  Until then, one can only hope that Noé continues to devour drugs and and remember that, “one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

-Ty E