KERN FINGERS

October 8, 2010 by Editor
Filed under Mondo Archive

Writer, Matt Sanborn takes a look at Richard Kern’s classic experimental short from 1986, Fingered. It’s not coming to a theater near you…

Written By: Matt Sandborn
Mondo Film & Video Guide Contributor

The screen goes black and an almost unnecessary warning is shown: “This film is an EXERCISE in the CAPITILIZATION of an EXPLOITATION that some may find unnecessarily VIOLENT, SEXIST and DISGUSTING. We therefore suggest the viewer EXECUTE caution and discretion. Although it is not our sole intention to SHOCK, INSULT or IRRITATE, you have been warned that we are CATERING only to our own preference as members of the SEXUAL MINORITY.”

This collaboration between filmmaker Richard Kern and performance artist legend Lydia Lunch, FINGERED, is the ultimate scream into the void where sex and violence become one – melding into a degradation/death hybrid. Moving past previous Kern classics LEFT SIDE OF MY BRAIN (written by Lunch) and YOU KILLED ME FIRST, the two reach the deprivation nirvana they had been working towards for years with this 8 mm masterpiece.

Lydia plays a phone sex operator who gets into it so much with low life Marty Nations, she invites him over to play. He arrives, bangs his new fuck toy in the ass, as they insult each other. Here the themes that Lunch had explored for years in her music and writings come to full bloom – the search for sex and companionship which is but a lead-in to violence, bringing her to the closest brink of full annihilation without stumbling over. The two are hardly satisfied so they drive to Nation’s house out in the middle of nowhere, where Lydia is pawed and insulted by her new partner-in-crime’s scum bag housemates. After some violence, the two depart and more arguing ensues.

Sick of her shit, Nation pulls the car over and sodomizes her with a pistol. (To make the scene ever more intense, a real and loaded gun was used). He then bangs her again, firing the pistol into the air. Energized, the two take to the back roads again, where they encounter Lung Leg, the star of YOU KILLED ME FIRST, who has just been gang raped. They take her into the car, comforting her. But neither can stand the fact she is playing the role of victim, and begin to feel her up. When she fights back, they pull over and the two women engage in an amazing cat fight. Leg breaks free, but not before Nations catches up with her and gives her a thrashing, where the punches and slaps are too realistic not to have really landed. But Lunch’s annihilation has to arrive and this time it is in the form of the police, who scream “freeze!” as the film ends abruptly.

“Fingered was done very quickly, just blurting it out to get the film out of our system,” Lydia Lunch said in an interview for the book 1999 UK published book – Deathtripping, by Jack Sargeant.

Although a frenetic and sometimes rushed piece, Kern takes a thoughtful approach throughout. Using an interesting camera style here, he begins using well centered and steady shots. By the end it is rough, hand held, giving the viewer the sense they are watching clips that are home movies of the most degenerate type. Leg lying in the dirt, beaten, reaching out to the camera/audience, and resigned to her fate is perhaps the most powerful shot in the movie. The writers seem to be saying, if you play the victim, this is what you deserve. And it is this that perhaps angers viewers the more than anything else about this film – the arrival at absolute zero empathy for a victim.

“I was really taken for a ride in this movie,” Lung Leg said in Deathtripping. “Unfortunately there was no script, if I had seen the script I wouldn’t have had anything to do with it. Half way through the film I realized, this woman, Lunch is not making a film, Lunch is playing some kind of bored game; with me and the other people involved… maneuvering… manipulating.”

If this is true then there is a hierarchy of exploitation here. Lunch clearly enjoys the torment and humiliation that Nations dishes out on her. She is dominated and violated, constantly fighting back, constantly overpowered, put back in her place – the comfortable role of the willing victim. But Lung Leg’s fight to stop her assault, and her eventual failure, is seen as something of scorn. How dare she not want to take all sex and violence to its furthest extreme? She is the low one on the totem pole and deserves what she gets. How can an individual really be alive without feeling the terror and exhilaration of it all? It is all a game played in a vacuum, ruined by the sudden crash of the real world, the police – the true violators.

Fingered is the antithesis of 1988’s THE ACCUSED starring Jody Foster as the target of a barroom gang rape. Being a victim is seen as the ultimate weakness here, where one should not complain, but find their extreme pleasure therein. Kern dares the viewer to endure this movie, and then reject the dangerous notion that maybe there was something in here that they did not find titillating or down-right enjoyable. It is what makes the film so dangerous.