'I am most surely living / In the minds of farm boys: I am he who drives / Them like wolves from the hound bitch and calf / And from the chaste ewe in the wind. / They go into woods / into bean fields they go / Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming of me'
- James Dickey, The Sheep Child
'If I made a movie, it would be about hot chicks.'
- Howard Stern discussing Vulgar with Bryan Johnson on his show
In order to reconcile the offensive elements of the exploitation film, one must take them deadly seriously. This is a tricky business when dealing with a clown. The fool, the trickster, the dunce, the masochist. These characters straddle the line of relief and frustration, embodying our most embarrassing traits and yanking them from our hands so we never have to actually experience them ourselves, making them an almost androgynous saviour to all, transgressing the bounds of gender by universalising failure. Furthermore, Donald McManus details in the book, No Kidding!: Clown as Protagonist in Twentieth-century Theatre, that the clown character exists to 'break the rules governing the fictional world' and that it is the clown's 'essential otherness' that will cause them to 'fail because of a hopeless inability to understand the rules, or succeed because of a limitless ability to invent new [ones]'.
Vulgar (2000) is a hard film to like and an even harder film to watch at times. The vacillating tone and implicit homophobia baked into the narrative make it easy to argue against the film's existence, dismissible as poorly conceived and sloppily executed. On top of this, trying to find reappraisals of the work that take into consideration why audiences were so repulsed by the film when it came out and how its subversion of the male revenge genre film both (accidentally?) bristle to the point of being unwatchable and also manage to be (accidentally??) astute.
Following the birthday clown, Flappy AKA Will Carson, as he fumbles through his life, not making enough money and not being able to please his emotionally abusive mother, Bryan Johnson, in his sole credit as a director, introduces us to a hostile world filled with jarringly cruel people. There are men sleeping on Will's lawn, teenagers chasing him through the street with water balloons and a domestic violence incident at a child's birthday party. Despite all of this, Will is unreasonably convinced that he can make his living as a clown, even though it's very clear that this is not working, a shame because he seems to really love his job and the effect his kindness has on children.
In a spur of the moment decision, Will decides to take on a kind of comedy sex work, in which he will appear as 'Vulgar' the clown, dancing in lingerie at bachelor parties, a gag act there to prank the groom-to-be. His only friend, Syd, played by Johnson, thinks that this is a bizarre and degrading idea, something the film proceeds to actualise. In his first gig as a clown stripper, Will is attacked, tortured and raped by three men, a father, Ed Fanelli, and his two sons, Frankie and Gino. Unlike a typical rape revenge film, Will is not keen on getting his own back. After a gruelling and poignantly quiet moment of sadness, Will tells Syd what happened, and then vows to never speak of it again. It's a film with a pathetic protagonist who is subjected to prolonged degradation and fails to allow the audience the breathing room to reappear from the traumatic haze before returning to a Kevin Smith-style narrative about trying to make it big on television.
The male revenge film can take many shapes, have many motivations and isn't confined to a specific time period, though it would be fair to argue that they typically seek to reinforce conservative values, returning the world to a version of the past in which a man's role seemed more simple. Straw Dogs (1971) uses a violent finale to expose the supposed facade of the intellectual man and uses sexual violence to punish the women in the film for embracing more liberated attitudes towards sex. Death Wish (1974) further exploits the sexual victimisation of white women to justify a man taking the law into his own hands and gunning down black people in the street. Falling Down (1993), an ostensibly postmodern but no less blatantly conservative narrative, hides its disdain for humanity, that being people of colour and women, with self-awareness, allowing the audience to enjoy mass murder with one hand and finger-wagging with the other. Taken (2008) is potentially the most rancid of the bunch, with its blatant enjoyment of sexual violence and racialised murder, all in the name of defending the hierarchy of gender and whiteness. Needless to say, this is a messy and unpleasant genre that is rarely as self-critical as it needs to be, always enjoying its violence too much and prioritising the victims of systemic violence too little.
Johnson's film has firm roots within the genre and, when blended with the 1970s exploitation film it's often riffing on, is able to comment on the conservatism at heart of these stories, particularly how rape is feminised and the retribution is masculinised. The world of the film is also a mess of brutality and many of the characters in Vulgar, including his best friend, seem to wish that Will would be more manly. A revenge arc might actually help him, they seem to say. His one passion, clowning, doesn't make him cool or likeable, and it definitely doesn't make him enough cash. His decision to do sex work 'as a joke' smacks of masking the pain of being financially emasculated with humour. The fact that his very first job calcifies his circumstances into an onslaught of cruelty, that being a filmed gang rape, serves to articulate the weakened position of the Gen X man, a fool incarnate, feminised and tortured, converse to the typical male protagonist of this genre.
The film draws on the trope of the murderous family present in exploitation and horror cinema, often depicted as low class, white trash and compensating for their dismissal from polite society by punishing those that are perceived as too sheltered to defend themselves. Moreover, this trope has historical ties to more insidious racist tropes around black men's sexuality, with D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation being a key example of how American cinema (and identity) is predicated on the existential crisis about black Americans threatening to usurp white supremacy, and how this will manifest in the sexual assault of white women. Once black Americans are made absent from the cinematic frame, the villainy is then transferred to those next in line to be demonised: working class and poor white people. Matt Wray even argues in the book, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness, that poor white people are made to 'appear more like a caste than a class, and as such are thought to have no social worth and only regressive political tendencies'. Vulgar mines these tropes and presents this type of family as a performance, where the normal patriarch of a middle class family can transgress the bounds of class, sexuality and morality without sullying his reputation or implicating the family structure itself as a knot of abuse.
Vulgar is a film about the reverberations of patrilineal violence. The first thing we learn about Will's mother is that she experienced prolonged sexual abuse from her father, a fact that Will glibly throws out during a conversation with Syd. We learn that Will's father was also abusive and, most notably, Ed Fanelli goads his sons into sadistic violence. More specifically, he is a suburban dad hiding his violent ways in hotel rooms, behind the lens of a camera. Ed's wife even complains about her step-sons don't date women and only hang out with their father. The incestuous nature of the gang rapes they commit here are both an aberration because of the sexual violence itself and because of how it is a failure of heterosexuality.
Citing Frank Booth from Blue Velvet (1986) as an influence, Johnson created a violent and horrifying phantom in his villain, a man who terrorises and dominates every scene. Still, it's hard in a film that is so terrified of queerness to not read the fears beneath the text. David Lynch was fascinated and scared of traditional masculinity and so, hyperbolised Frank's qualities to skewer the role models that had been mediated through American film and television. Here, there is an acute fear of being perceived as unmanly, most evidenced in the 'comedy' of a man choosing to feminise himself in order to pay his rent. Ed Fanelli groomed his sons into diverging from heterosexuality, provoking them into participating in the practically performative sexual violence of men. There is an anxiety that the masculinity on display by Will and Syd, is simply not equipped to deal with any real danger, unable to really defend themselves, and this manifests in a cartoonish and erratic man violating heterosexuality, and making 'women' of them, the worst thing a man can be.
Will uses his character, Flappy, to differentiate himself from the cruelty that is so crudely drawn around him but which he can't internalise, or else it would annihilate his dreams of making the world better with laughter. It is key to me that when Will is being raped, he retreats into his own mind and imagines himself entertaining children on a beach as a way to escape. He imagines a little girl covered in blood. Is this him? Or is this his failure? Trying on lingerie, being publicly queer, has harmed this imaginary child. His worst nightmare is not being able to make children smile, and this is at odds with the kind of gender Will is made to perform.
Criticised on its release for an uneven tone, I would argue that the complete inability the film has to switch between a wry, laid-back Kevin Smith off-shoot, and a harrowing tale of trauma, actually speaks to the sheer incomprehensibility of sexual violence, how it can make you at odds with those around you and unable to process cruelty as anything other than the elements of recognisable genre. The film is daring you to dismiss it as 'the cross-dressing clown rape' movie and then subverts this joke by taking sexual violence deadly seriously. I'm reminded of the way Deliverance (1972) has come to be defined by its depiction of male rape and how the scene itself is so viscerally grounded that watching it feels at odds with how it has been joked about culturally. At its core, Vulgar is about the homophobia cloistered around the sexual violence committed against men, and positions gender as innately hierarchical and programmed via fear.
Subverting the rape revenge narrative and leaning into its more farcical elements, Will isn't able to kill any of his rapists. Frankie and Gino are shot by accident, and Ed dies of a heart attack. It is as tragic as it is funny that, in spite of putting on the costume of 'Vulgar' and finally embracing punitive masculinity, Will still isn't able to be the man needed to complete this generic circle. Contrast this with a scene earlier in the film, when Will, dressed as Flappy, is able to save a little girl from being murdered by her abusive father, and you have a clear message. Will's impulse is towards care, laughter and the protection of the vulnerable, even if he can't always include himself in that category. It's incredibly affecting that the film ends with Flappy on his television show, locking up three cartoon robbers, so clearly using and interpreting his abuse through the confines of a comedic variety show, rendering his rapists as the criminal clown brigade and putting them behind cardboard bars. Television mediation then becomes a form of control and empowerment, no longer a stranglehold but a tool to help those in pain. Are you able to make other people happy after experiencing such a horrible thing? Vulgar argues that you must.
*
Further Reading:
He Who Gets Slapped (1924, directed by Victor Sjöström)
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975, directed by Jim Sharman)
Drawing Flies (1996, directed by Malcolm Ingram and Matthew Gissing)
A Better Place (1997, directed by Vincent Pereira)
Death To Smoochy (2002, directed by Danny DeVito)
Calvaire (2004, directed by Fabrice Du Welz)
Working in the Theatre: Clowning | American Theatre Wing