Ahead of our screening of the film, Shortbus, we sat down with the film’s director, John Cameron Mitchell, to discuss the legacy of this polysexual cult classic.
KHJ: Hi everyone, my name is Kelsey Halliday Johnson, I’m the Executive Director of SPACE.
GJ: I’m Greg Jaime, I’m the Film Programmer at SPACE.
KHJ: We’re so honored to be here tonight. As you know, John Cameron Mitchell couldn’t make it in person but will be joining us in Portland tomorrow at the State Theater with Portland Ovations. We are really thrilled that we’re getting a chance to get some questions answered before the film as we celebrate Shortbus‘ 4K restoration and the 15th anniversary run in the theaters. For those of you new to SPACE, we are a non-profit contemporary art center that does a little bit of everything, and has always been interested in exploring, celebrating, touching upon taboos and sexuality and all the questions that come with it. This is a wonderful film to be showing and thinking about freedom of expression and freedom of sexuality in our communities. John Cameron Mitchell is here on the call, they’re an American actor, writer, director, producer and icon. Perhaps best known for their off Broadway rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch and the Golden Globe nominated film version of that. John has won a Tony, multiple Obie’s, and is starring as Joe Exotic in the Tiger King biopic JOE vs. CAROLE, reflecting on perhaps one of the more interesting early icons of our pandemic times. We’re so psyched to be showing Shortbus this evening in its new form. John, we want to ask for the audience: if you were new to Shortbus or coming in after not seeing it for a long period of time, what would you want the audience to know about the film, or is there any interesting fact to start out as you’re revisiting it 15 years on?
JCM: It’s interesting having people who saw it in the day see it again now and new people, one’s who had seen it said “all I could see was the sex before” it’s almost like thinking back on a relationship, how sometimes all you can see is the sex, but by the end of it the sex might be the last thing you’re thinking about. In the beginning of the film we frontload the sex like a relationship, and by the end it’s kind of less important, it’s more of a metaphor for other things in the character’s lives. This time around people felt it a lot more emotionally. [Now] sex is all over the internet, so its been compartmentalized in a way. The film is kind of an antidote to that. To reinsert sex back into our lives just like it is in our real lives- of course COVID-permitting. Especially nowadays in the wake of #metoo and consent stuff, sex has somehow gotten a bit of a bad name, as opposed to the bad use of it. In America we’re scared of sex, our culture was invented by puritans and invading conquistadors who did not always have the best view of sex. So it can seep out in different ways in this right wing, religious, and the left wing can come up and we’re a bit of an antidote to that. I was brought up very Catholic so that’s my own delving into loosen my fear about it. The people who hadn’t seen the film before, young people, Gen Z people are like “oh my gosh is that what happened back then? Did people have sex in groups and they were getting together in these salons and I’m trapped behind this damn screen?” We all have been for a while. But even before COVID there was a kind of digital siloing where we only watched what we want to and randomness is unusual and of course sex can be random and uncontrollable so a lot of young people are having less sex as IRL becomes more frighteneing. Again, this is an antidote to that.
GJ: In the way the film anticipates things like Tinder and OnlyFans, how do you think Shortbus would incorporate modern technology if it was made today?
JCM: Well I’m a bit of a Luddite, you can see in the film technology kind of goes on the fritz a lot.
GJ: Like with the brownouts?
JCM: Yeah. I sort of invented the idea of Grindr in this film, it was pre-iPhone, pre-apps and all that, we called it Yenta which is the name of the matchmaker in Hello, Dolly! which is a cuter way I think of getting people together than Grindr, Tinder, which implies forest fires and meat grinders. But that wasn’t to be and it can be a harsh territory in the dating apps because people aren’t in front of each other and they don’t behave as well when they’re not in front of people. Which is why people are screaming all the time through social media, because they feel very lonely. Also in this day and age because of Trump, a lot more evolved people felt ‘oh my god we have to do something’ so there was a rush to correct the world very quickly in the last five years and in that rush to fix things there can be collateral damage. A rush to justice and mob vigilance. I get a little annoyed by people who define themselves by their accusations and by calling people out, as opposed to calling in, or creating alternative spaces. If you believe in prison reform, you can’t believe in cancel culture, you know what I mean? That’s called rehabilitation. That’s called restorative justice, how do we move forward instead of just becoming our oppressors and lashing out and canceling and censoring. I’m an artist, I want to hear every opinion even if it’s a horrible one because I want to know who my adversaries are. Canceling on the left and the right are really getting on my nerves. The “don’t say gay” bill in Florida, and ok ‘you can’t tell a story that’s not your own’. It was interesting, I had a screening of this and young people were really into it, but they felt there was something they needed to cancel about it, you know they couldn’t quite put their finger on it, there was something problematic about this, I use the term ‘problemagic’, which means it might trigger you a bit and be challenging but it’s fabulous. One person said “is it really your story to tell, this Asian woman having an orgasm?” and I said “yes it is”. Sook-Yin Lee and I developed that character as we did all the characters over two and half years and there were elements of her life and elements of my life, and that is called fiction, that is called art, and that’s called film. Putting yourself in other people’s shoes is the beginning of empathy. If we only have people telling their own stories then we have nothing but autobiographies and Netflix of narcissism, then we all end up the stars of our own story and no one can get together and get the work done. That annoys me, though I know it’s coming from good intentions. So the question right after was, “have you considered making this film with a more diverse cast?” Of course, is that my story to tell? A more diverse cast? Everyone is confused about what they’re supposed to do. In our case I could barely get those people to be part of a project that had real sex in it. I couldn’t find everybody I wanted. But those people were the ones, the vanguard. She said “I’m a Colombian Latina, I can’t relate to these white characters”. I love when I see someone has some things in common with me, but just because I’m a white man can I not identify with The Color Purple and the character of a Black lesbian? If I can’t feel for someone else’s plight, you might as well just game over, and cancel fiction and art. Because we’ve got to be able to step into each other’s shoes, responsibly, in an informed way, in a loving way, in a challenging way, and I hope to do the same for others. Tell my story, I want to know how you would do my story, again, with love. Sorry I’m talking too much.
GJ: No you’re definitely not, thank you, it’s beautiful. I’m in total agreement. I love the specificity of the time and place, the movie really feels in some ways like a time capsule. Is there a way that you think the politics of that moment affected or played into the sexual awakening of the characters in the film, in the post 9/11 time of New York, the politics of that specific moment.
JCM: Right after 9/11 there was this rush to patriotism which I even felt. My America that I used to love, is the one- [the film] opens with the Statue of Liberty, that idea of America as a sanctuary is what I wanted, that resonates with me. My mother was an immigrant, I’m an immigrant, a sexual immigrant, a gender immigrant in my own family. To me, the idea of chosen family, the idea of America as a chosen family, is what I love. After 9/11 there was a rush to patriotism. There was also a rush to censorship and the Dixie Chicks criticizing the president for being unpatriotic, which in retrospect is laughable because with the war in Iraq that led to the death of over a million people, and to what end? The only thing I agree with Trump on. But at the same time, that time was a beautiful time. Young people did come to the city because 9/11 was the first real thing that happened to them. It was a bit of a dying out of a certain alternative New York because real estate prices were going up and real estate is everything and that place that we shot in was called DUMBA, it was a queer art collective, and that’s gone, now that’s where rich people live. So it is a certain New York that I miss, there were parties like that, that space we shot in was where the band Le Tigre did their first gig and it was a legendary space. A lot of people in the film were from that scene, the Radical Faerie scene, and some of them have dispersed from the city because of all these pressures and even I am spending- I moved to New Orleans but I have a place in New York still- but I’m looking for places that still have a soul.
KHJ: I think a lot of us in Portland can probably feel that very deeply as the pandemic and work from home has changed where people are being based. I think for our last question before you introduce the film to the audiences- I’m glad you brought up Le Tigre, another person who makes a cameo in this film is Bitch who is actually coming to SPACE April 23rd, there’s a lot of SPACE friends that make their way through so I hope that everybody watching he film enjoys being like “is that who I think that is?” “Probably, yes”. But you are pointing to these culture war moments and cancel culture, certainly an interesting Leftist, progressive symptom of culture wars that are happening right now. What do you think the role of comedy is in culture wars and how do you use that in a moment when media can’t really do right by any side of our imaginations or political correctness?
JCM: Sadly the feeling is if all news is fake then all stories are true. I bemoan the fact that we can no longer agree on certain basic facts. Conspiracy theories proliferate right and left, there’s a kind of insanity in the air, apocalyptic, end-times insanity. It’s funny, you know, if you have questions or beliefs in certain conspiracy theories, question why you only believe the ones that you want to. It’s because they’re not fact-based. The facts are really suspect. Again, in this end-times feeling I believe these stories are important, since facts are suspect, so let’s really make a good story that’s useful for life. Everyone can agree right, left, center, whatever, is stories in some ways have more weight than so-called facts. That’s why in all my stories I try to create something that’s useful to peoples lives to move forward, rather than just escapism. I need the comedy and music and sex and the other- lets call them delivery systems- to deliver the content that im saying which is a message of empathy and kindness and trying to be less alone, and creating your own communities. During the Gulf war the only people that couldn’t be cancelled were questioning blind, blood-thirsty patriotism was South Park, using extreme satire and comedy sometimes in a very funny and sometimes in a stupid way, a Beavis and Butthead way, it was weirdly the only thing that was allowed. So I, with my own work with Hedwig, Shortbus, with my podcast Anthem: Homunculus which is a musical podcast series, something I’m working on now is another podcast series on the subject of cancellation is going to use riotous comedy to get those messages across, because that’s what dissolves our rigid, ‘that’s the way it should be!’ kind of thing. I see the next generation after Z being a little more relaxed, I think Z can be a little uptight and started to become a little bit like old people telling me what you can and can’t do, and teenagers just a bit younger are like “oy, these college students are so bossy!”. Part of youth is questioning the status quo, and Millenials failed that in some ways. But the other thing is freedom is finding, is punk rock, is questioning things through anarchy, through love, through satire, through everything goes, to find out what lasts.
KHJ: Thank you so much, and I love that idea of dissolving rigidity, we’re all looking for some erosive forces on things that are blockading us these days. Everybody who’s watching this is about to dive into Shortbus, do you have any last words for our audience?
JCM: Have a great time, suspend not just your disbelief but your beliefs, and again, like a relationship, we frontload it with sex. By the end, it’s cuddles all around.
This interview was recorded on March 14, 2022 for the March 17, 2022 screening of Shortbus at SPACE.