“What does magic imply to me?” wonders an indomitable Genesis P-Orridge, puffing on the oxygen tubes that sprout from h/er reconstructed nostril at first of David Charles Rodrigues’ loving, curious, partial documentary. “The one actual reply to any query you have got is: the sum complete of my life to date.”
S/he Is Nonetheless Her/e doesn’t fairly give us that sum complete, and feels very very like the authorised story (a big a part of it’s advised by h/er delightfully nonchalant Californian daughters, Genesse and Caresse). However then any correct reckoning with this queer, relentless, experimental life would possibly run to a number of hours, in lots of media and be seized by police in most international locations.
In some methods, Rodrigues provides us the fairy story: how a sickly, sullen boy from Center England heard voices within the hedgerows, dived headlong into the Nineteen Seventies transgressive artwork scene and finally, by way of the ability of unconditional love, remodeled themselves into a wonderful pandrogynous worldwide artwork monster.
It contains numerous fairy godmothers and fathers (notably William Burroughs who, over a few bottles of whisky, advises the younger GPO that “your job is to discover ways to short-circuit management”), some very depraved witches (the police, censors and politicians who finally drive the P-Orridge household to flee to California within the early ’90s) and a string of gorgeous princesses – Cosey Fanni Tutti, Paula Brooking and eventually Jaye Breyer, who Gen appears to understand as Blakean emanations of some primal goddess, Cosmosis.
The movie is predicated on a sequence of interviews that Rodrigues carried out within the final months of h/er life, as GPO was ailing with continual myelomonocytic leukemia. We see h/er holding court docket in New York, nonetheless humorous, philosophical and topless, as s/he sits for one final portrait. “The physique is an inexpensive suitcase for consciousness,” s/he proclaims, telling the story because the digicam and paintbrush roams over each tattoo and scar, the stickers the vessel has collected on its manifold travels by way of time, area and extra psychic realms.
Because the pendulous breasts and fulsome lips point out, the suitcase is the truth is not so low cost, having been the recipient of the higher a part of half 1,000,000 {dollars} in beauty surgical procedure (thanks largely, we uncover, to a lawsuit towards Rick Rubin, following a fireplace on the producer’s LA mansion). There’s something unearthly, uncanny about h/er presence – half Sea Witch, half Marianne Faithfull, half (in Morrissey’s phrases) “nightmare teenager of 70”, and Rodrigues’ movie has the distinct really feel of a hagiography: the life and occasions of a latter-day post-gender saint.
The disparity between the loving, compassionate philosophy GPO espoused, and the brutal, industrial varieties this typically took in h/er artwork and life involves a head when the movie covers the Throbbing Gristle years. One-time COUM member Les Maull tells of GPO’s scary mood and tantrums. For a few minutes, this relentless, flickering movie goes silent and darkish, and onscreen textual content says: “In a 2017 memoir Cosey accused Genesis of controlling aggressive behaviour. Genesis denied all accusations. Cosey politely declined to remark.”
The refusal definitely feels pointed and is a sickening abyss within the story, however the movie proceeds regardless, heading onwards by way of the ’80s of Psychic TV, the north Californian rave ’90s and the Twenty first-century renaissance, the place in an East Facet BDSM dungeon, Gen meets the humorous, charming dominatrix Girl Jaye, the muse and love s/he had been all the time trying to find.
There are different extra detailed investigations of the “magic strategy to sound” of COUM and Throbbing Gristle (notably the 2020 BBC oral historical past Different, Like Me), however as a portrait of a singular, unrepeatable particular person that is arduous to beat. In a paradox Gen might need loved, it’s finally touching: detailing a really charmed life the place each catastrophe – exile, imprisonment, life-threatening damage – is one way or the other turned to benefit, and our hero/ine persistently escapes sure doom to land magically on their ft. As our leaders diminish our liberties each day, this relentless dedication to a life lived experimentally and with out concern feels notably and profoundly well timed.
For information on the most recent screenings of S/he Is Nonetheless Her/e, go to the Doc’N Roll web site