Killing the Patriarchs

When I first conceived of this film, I imagined a neat narrative movie about two men falling in love and other men reciting a modern day retelling of Plato's 'Symposium.' Each symposium member would communicate a different idea of radical queer theory. No character's voice would dominate. The original idea for this film was tragically flawed. It was called 'The Patriarchs.' It used an Aristotelian narrative structure and too many monologues. It was shot classically. In exploring the classical impulse, the symposium model of discourse, ideas of love, and ideas of gay male identity, through the editing process, I learned that everything I was focusing on I hated. So I began the long process of chopping it up, over-correcting the flaw of rigidity and classical structure, smashing the images together into incoherent flirtations with disembodied, crude, creepy ideas. I started to fall in love with the material in this perverted, orgiastic, violent form.

As I was wreaking havoc on my original, bad idea, I still cut together a version of the film that was straight forward and narrative. I loathed it. I sent it out to festivals, ashamed of my failure to execute my own vision (finish it, not kill it, we'll come to killing it later). I was beholden to the popcorn and soda, cheese-ball gods of story, and neglecting the holy monstrosity of fecund, vile nature where beauty is found in the chaos of weeds, decomposition, and the violent cycles of life death life, mold, fungus, rot, and rupture.

Stupid.

So, as the film was failing in its utter deadness, I continued to violate the material in this most fantastic way. My friends suspected me of killing everything I was trying to create. They were right. In material destruction, I find some degree of liberation in the artistic process, and I started killing 'The Patriarchs,' a process I invite you to join me in. To this day, I suffer from anxiety that all the lovely people who worked on the original movie will want to see it in its original form. To them, I apologize. I have mangled our movie, our baby, our joint creation and constructed a droning, chattering, chaotic monster unrepresentative of their fabulous work.

Watching 'Killing the Patriarchs' you will be unable to see the intended story or structure. Your viewing of this material will aid me in destruction because with such layered, dense, and noisy video there is no perfect reading, only a butchering of my original authorial intent and an assault on those ideas I was trying to represent.

The title, 'Killing the Patriarchs' suggests that the act of violence is happening in the present tense. Violating patriarchy, story, artificial beauty, and the integrity of philosophical ideals will be the ritual viewers will join me in. We are not engaged in art but in the ritualistic slaughter of singularity, patriarchy, identity politics, and moralistic values. What we're doing is ugly, brutal, crude, and amoral.

So why do it? Why not bask in a pretty picture or an entertaining movie instead?

Because killing the structural integrity, the beauty and artifice of a violent system is the only possible way we can free ourselves from it.  This movie is not an act of storytelling, philosophical discourse, or art making. It is an act of wallowing in the contradictions, the noise, the layers and the failures.

Don't expect to be entertained by all this chaos. Expect to engage in an aesthetic, queer, anarchistic ritual sacrifice of form, content, structure, reason, meaning, morality, identity, and possibility.

If you want to escape, to be told what to think or how to think it, to be convinced of a party line or a direction for your life, if you want an experience that is beautiful, sexy, cutting edge, if you want a good feeling or a bad feeling or a sense that you are doing something important like saving lives while watching this movie, forget it. You won't get this hour back and you'll be miserable.

Pick up your brain-bats, your eyeball switchblade knives, and your ear-hole machetes. We're going to butcher the Western tradition of linear meaning. Is it new? Hell no. Nothing is. Is it worth it? Find out for yourself.

When you hit play, know that you are involved in the symbolic killing of the patriarchs, men, white men, even white gay men who horde power and oppress others using their privileges for violence.

What will you see?

A radical queer cinematic orgy of excessive desire, anarchic politics, and ecological collapse blended together into a combustion of quivering theory and madness, political failure and triumph, sadness and ecstasy. Tackling issues as diverse as police violence, inter-generational love, male rape, the sexuality of gardening, graffiti, 1960s Leftist politics, tidbits about the sexuality of French poststructuralist philosophers, genocide, the gay ultraright, and memories of Fire Island, salad spinners, gay bathhouses, and golden showers, 'Killing the Patriarchs' attacks narrative, emotional cinema, identity politics, romance, love, beauty, and hope. Refusing to tell a coherent story or deliver a singular coherent message, 'Killing the Patriarchs' is a psychological assault on patriarchy, 'the classics,' and narrative structure. The film is structured in rich layers where centralized meaning is lost in the chattering weeds of repetition.

Crisp linear narrative images of a love story between a middle aged activist and a young man have been sliced, diced, and reordered, layered into a world where strangely dressed men sit around a candlelit basement and lecture. All these images reflect a tension between the past and the present, the old and the young, the dying and the reborn.

'Killing the Patriarchs' is an exploration of queer identity in late capitalism, in a world where stability is no longer an option and where coherence has been destroyed.