Homosexuality In Bobby Vinton's Blue Velvet

“Why would anyone want to make avant-garde/experimental films in a time of virulent anti-intellectualism, widespread political repression and persecution, misguided social and cultural priorities, an increasingly ugly and vulgar popular culture, and, perhaps most questionable of all, an intense apathy to all things beautiful and sublime” (Varela 3)? In the early 1960’s, a group of artists and filmmakers primarily set in New York City began create films that would later define the decade as a period of sexual and cultural upheaval. For numerous of these films, they uncovered hidden or unspoken of worlds, such as the underground world where the middle-class inhabited. Audiences and critics alike deemed those who appeared in these films as dwellers …show more content…
This misfit is so disruptive that homosexual desire is often framed through supplementary differences such as race, class, and age. Scorpio Rising rose to this challenge by altering the pre-existing cinematic elements so that it would serve representational purposes. Montage in the film enabled experimental ethnography to interrupt the assumptions of the dominant form of sexuality. In one scene of the film, we see a couple of rough looking biker boys slowly getting dressed to Bobby Vinton’s version of “Blue Velvet”. There is a close up of one boy with his shirt raised and we’re really close to his chest and then it cuts to another boy pulling up his pants focusing in on his crotch. This montage of the boys metaphorically represents heterosexual masculinity, but the way the images are situated puts them in a context that invokes homosexuality. The irony of the song in itself teases at the fact that there is no woman in blue velvet, but instead boys wearing denim. Anger’s clever use of the song in which the pronoun “she” is often used, plays on the femininity of these biker …show more content…
“The true and most important function of the avant-garde was not to “experiment”, but to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence” (Greenberg). By Anger creating a film about homosexuality in a heterosexual society and even being recognized as being gay himself, he found a path that kept culture moving in the midst of confusion. Greenberg also expressed that avant-garde is the unconscious aspects that take place when creating art is. In Scorpio Rising, Anger took homosocial and heterosexual situations of biker guys bonding and getting along with each other, and put a spin on it by using the close up and montage on certain aspects of the boy to reappear as homosexual