Jackson, J; (2019) Decadence, Homoeroticism and the Turn Towards Nature in James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus. Moveable Type , 11 , Article 3. 10.14324/111.1755-4527.097.

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Abstract

This essay argues that James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus, a 1971 arthouse film produced in the confines of the director’s apartment in the years leading up to the Stonewall Rebellion in June 1969 and released almost two years later in New York when homosexuality had been legalised, responds creatively to the moral and legal restrictions placed upon homosexuals during its production. Bidgood’s juxtaposition of the camp, rosy world of the narcissist’s apartment, where the character contemplatively fantasises about his natural desires and sexual encounters, with the harsh, animalistic world of the city underground, where gay men go searching discreetly for one-off encounters, taking risks along the way, mirrors the world of the New York underground scene inhabited by Bidgood in the 1960s. The pleasant aroma felt as Bidgood whisks Pan away from the brightly coloured and elaborately decorated apartment to fantastical, dreamlike spaces, illuminates the desire of the character to act in ways he cannot in the outside world, and to distance himself from the harsh realities of life’s underbelly. By drawing on historical, cultural, and natural imagery in his depictions of Pan’s role-playing fantasies, Bidgood does not merely acknowledge the common assumption — in the time this film was being made — of homosexual acts being socially and morally transgressive, but actively challenges it by giving us a perspective on homosexuality that goes beyond the social and moral and embraces the full beauty of homosexuality in nature. Bidgood though recognises not only the beauty associated with homosexuality but the power of nature in general, hence why he simultaneously reveals to us the fear of the unknown and the potential, animalistic dangers associated with the sexual underworld he was part of in the 1960s. The aesthetic of benevolence, beauty, and homoeroticism, so often seen in clichéd, camp depictions of homosexuality, is used ironically by Bidgood to remind us that it is merely a veneer for those more dangerous encounters. Bidgood then presents a holistic view of homosexuality, with decadence a characteristic showing what lies beneath the homoerotic surface, projected through the fantasies and risk-taking of the film’s main protagonist.

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