FREE4ALL, Chapter 7: Ken or Edward

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The 1940s saw some classics of US cinema hit the big screen.

But those movies are not what we’re talking about here.

Make room for the cinematic outsiders!

Our two filmmakers of focus lived very different lives. They had very different ambitions. And they had very different levels of success in achieving their dreams. But they shared some important things in common. And taken together, they can help us understand this certain moment in time for outsider films.

1. Look to the Stars

Once the screen lit up the darkened theater, a series of dreamlike images unfolded: haunting, seductive, and terrifying. The work was only 15 minutes in length, but, when caught up in the dance of its scenes, it seemed endless. Timeless. Immortal. 

Kinsey was transfixed. And he was moved to purchase a print of this film for his own viewing at home.

He also made a new friend in Dr. Kinsey, who soon provided an opportunity to take part in some revolutionary research.

Kenneth Anger’s participation helped to map out a pattern of variation in toe curling behavior in men during orgasm.

The 1940s were not known for their sexual liberalism, but there were exceptions. And Hollywood was a land of opportunity for such exceptions, at least discreetly.

Yet Kenneth Anger’s film was not discreet. Fireworks wasn’t pornographic by any means, but it was the most openly homoerotic film to date, by far.

Was it some sadomasochistic longing? Some innocent desire cut short by nightmarish fears? Or maybe something deeper?

Watching Fireworks, it’s clear that Anger was indebted to the early Surrealist films, such as Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou.

The occult magician Aleister Crowley died in the same year that Fireworks debuted. Anger was convinced this was no mere coincidence. Shortly after his family moved to Beverly Hills in 1944, the young Ken Anglemeyer was introduced to Crowley’s writings by a friend. 

Fireworks and every work henceforth attempted to communicate magical ideas via his carefully considered processions of sights and sound.

Now, Crowley can be really hard to get into. Most of what he wrote was cryptic, provided as tools for guided practice and contemplation.

Thankfully, other writers have explained some of Crowley’s ideas in a way that I can understand and appreciate. The puzzling line I quoted above is actually about how every person’s soul has the light of a star within them, and as such they are the legitimate center of their own solar system. It’s an argument for the emancipation of the individual, for the exercise of free will, and for everyone to cultivate their truest selves.

And the incandescent light of the titular fireworks represents the inmost light, to usher a new state of independence.

As painters used liquid pigments to communicate with audiences, Anger said that filmmakers conveyed their ideas with light. And light as a force for independent true will would show up in several of his subsequent works.

In many ways, Anger was voicing the same aspiration as the Beats from around the same time, albeit coming at it from a different medium and narrative approach. A marginalized eccentric was demanding the right to be who they wanted to be, to live their life openly and without shame.

2. The Angora Within

In 1947, the same year that Kenneth Anger released Fireworks, Edward D. Wood Jr moved to Hollywood, CA.

Shortly after his honorable discharge, Wood packed up and moved across the country to Tinseltown, where he hoped to find success as a screenwriter or director.

Alas, he did not find the success he was seeking. He never did. But Wood did find some minor jobs in writing and directing commercials. And on his own time, he wrote and directed some plays for theater.

In 1953, an opportunity presented itself in the newspaper’s classified section. Wood saw an ad for a new film to be made based on Christine Jorgensen, an Army veteran who was all over the tabloids as the first person to get a sex reassignment surgery.

Wood met with producer George Weiss, who wanted a cheap trash flick to cash in on the press surrounding Jorgensen.

Weiss was determined to make the film no matter what; he would simply make it a knock-off story that was close enough to capitalize on the moment. He planned to call it: I Changed My Sex.

Wood insisted to Weiss that he would be particularly well suited to write and direct the film. Not because he had changed his sex. But because he too lived with a secret. He often dressed like a woman in the privacy of his own home, particularly favoring luxuriously soft angora sweaters. He would often wear bras and panties underneath the suits he wore. And in fact had worn them under his military uniform while fighting in Japan. This otherwise normal man was engaging in transvestism.

Weiss had major doubts about the prospect, but what the heck? He gave Wood four days to shoot a film that he could distribute to make a profit.

Unfortunately for Weiss, the film that was given to him was nothing close to what he had wanted. It wasn’t even called I Changed My Sex.

It was now Glen or Glenda.

Even worse, the movie made no sense at all. It framed itself as a docudrama, but veered into strange and incoherent directions. Random stock images appeared out of nowhere. Outlandish dream sequences pushed the story into gaudy surrealism. 

Yet Lugosi’s presence was most enigmatic of all: he sat in a mad scientist’s laboratory next to a human skeleton, and he rambled incoherently about big green dragons and puppy dog tails. Audiences would be too confused to understand anything about the film, let alone be titillated by it.

Wood went on to make more films that are now considered to be cult favorites for their astonishingly impressive terribleness: 

Most of them were in the sci and horror vein, where the use of Lugosi made a lot more sense. The scripts made maybe a little more sense than Glen or Glenda, but incoherent editing, wooden acting, and laughably bad special effects ensured that any popularity Wood got would be due to infamy rather than fame.

But make no mistake: Glen or Glenda is a radically inventive film. Wood was apparently trying to emulate Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane with his use of stock footage, and he ended up channeling the spirit of the experimental Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov.

It was also a great example of camp in film.

“Camp” as a concept goes way back, at least to the early 19^th century. Its earliest connotations had to do with ostentatious display, exaggeration, theatricality, and homosexuality. Yet Susan Sontag later expounded on the style in a way that sets it a bit apart from the earlier understanding. For instance: “The ultimate camp statement: it’s good because it’s awful.” Welcome to the postmodern era.

Kenneth Anger and Ed Wood both presented films that engaged with this new postmodern variation on camp in film. With Anger, it was more accentuated in his films that followed Fireworks.

With Ed Wood, pretty much everything he made had camp value, though it wasn’t intentional like it was with Anger. But both of them made works that seem campier in this new sense than, say, the ornate excesses of Jean Cocteau. 

I don’t think that Wood and Anger ever met, although they were active in Hollywood around the same time.

Perhaps they crossed paths without realizing it. In any event, I feel like their early films crossed paths in aesthetic space, in the Promethean incandescence of the small theater screens, and the minds they fertilized. I for one can’t imagine the films of David Lynch without either of them.

Now he’s part of the broader family, at least queer-adjacent. And now nerds like me can wax ecstatic about the brilliance of his failed documentary. And revel in his dogged commitment to his outsider vision, to hell with what everyone else was thinking.

The subversive glamor of underground cinema. Abracadabra! 

I guess Ken knew what he was doing. 

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