|
|
 |
 |
|
 |
| "CREMASTER 2," 2000. Production still ©2000 Matthew Barney |
|
“CREMASTER 2”
|
 |
|
|
|
“CREMASTER 2" is loosely based on "The Executioner’s
Song," by Norman Mailer, which tells the story of Gary Gilmore,
a convicted killer put to death in 1977, who since has been famed
as Harry Houdini’s grandson. Filled with beautiful shots
of glaciers in the Canadian Rockies and the Salt Flats of Utah,
the film moves back and forth in time, from the 1893 World Fair
in Chicago where Gary Gilmore’s grandmother supposedly met
Harry Houdini (played by Norman Mailer) and conceived Gilmore’s
father, to the 1970’s. The story unfolds in a series of stunning
and surreal scenes that are narratively obscure and visually persuasive.
The scene immediately preceding when Gilmore murders the gas station
attendant and thus begins his infamous killing spree, has him
parked in a shiny Mustang that is seamlessly connected to another
Mustang by a tunnel linking the two cars. Seen sitting inside
the tunnel, Gilmore (played by Matthew Barney) pulls and pushes
at the Vaselined interior that appears in all of the "CREMASTER"
films. The tightly-corseted grandmother of Gilmore conducts a
seance with her son and his fiance in which Gilmore is conceived
to the buzzing of thousands of bees. The hexagon-inspired,
beehive shaped room where the seance takes place references the
state of Utah and Mormonism (the beehive is one of the chosen
symbols for both), Gilmore’s home state and religion, respectively.
Also featured is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, giving Barney’s
interpretation of Gilmore’s story the foreordained, tragic
feel of a religious figure enacting his scripted fate. That Gilmore
was the first person to be executed in the United Sates after
the reinstitution of the death penalty also contributes to the
complex martyrdom (political and moral) with which both Barney
and Mailer surround his death.
Using the gothic Western to frame this movie, Barney fills it
with references to that film genre: a beautiful mirrored saddle
that reflects the landscape of the glaciers in the Rocky Mountains,
and the pristine surfaces of the pools of water that flood the
Salt Flats, and a pair of solemn Country & Western dancers who two-step in front of the saddle.
The reoccurring patterns and formations that the “CREMASTER”
movies all reference also appear here. The beehive pattern informs
the architecture of the small room where Gilmore is conceived
and the dancers two-step (literally mirroring each other’s
movements), as well as being inscripted into the salt floor of
the Salt Flats by the Canadian Mounties whose choreographed riding
leaves their horse’s hoof prints behind in the same pattern.
The climactic scene of "CREMASTER 2" shows Gilmore riding
in a prison rodeo held in a ring constructed in the Salt Flats,
as he and the bull on which he rides, slowly and simultaneously
collapse.
|
|
|
