Guest post by Shawn Coughlin.
In an interview with Film Independent, director Ondi Timoner recalls her decision to approach Mapplethorpe as a scripted drama rather than a documentary. She explains, “I wanted to bring [Robert Mapplethorpe] alive for you. You know, I felt like, ‘We want to see this man and we want to see him grow up and have to come of age and come into his sexuality and understand that true art is an unpeeling of the layers of ourselves.”[1]
Mapplethorpe: The Director’s Cut imagines scenes from the artist’s life that animate his desires, fantasies, and anxieties. Seen through the soft grain of 16mm film, we witness Robert as a young boy captivated by the glory and gore of Catholic iconography, as an emerging photographer anxiously and later confidently cruising homoerotic subcultures, and finally as a commanding visionary that demanded to capture his immaculate visual sensibility.
These imagined scenes are essential to the story that Timoner wants to tell: that Mapplethorpe’s life and career were always in dialogue with divinity, perfection, corruption, and the beauty that binds them. His erotic photographs engaged audiences not merely through shock (indeed, Timoner’s Mapplethorpe is often dismissive of viewers that gasp at his sadomasochistic imagery) but by insisting that they recognize the divine in homosexuals bound, chained, masked, or clamped.
In one scene, Robert attends the openings of his 1977 solo show, Pictures, a twin exhibition divided across two locations. Immersed within a celebratory crowd of leather and gear, Robert eyes one of his photographs, Dominick and Elliot (1979). The image momentarily manifests illusory additions: the Dominant appears with angel wings, the submissive is bound to a cross, and the background shifts to a romantic landscape. More than ever before, Timoner had me seeing Mapplethorpe’s photos as a sacred battleground where opposed forces fight, make love.
Timoner brings life to both Mapplethorpe and his photographs by envisioning their origins. In one scene, Robert roams a gay BDSM sex club perhaps inspired by Mineshaft, a gay leather bar and sex club of which Mapplethorpe was a member. He stops before a leather-clad man standing beside a crouching submissive dressed in a full rubber gimp suit and snaps a shot nearly identical to Mapplethorpe’s Joe. As Robert exits the club, a projection of Joe floats overhead, implying that this encounter will inspire the later photograph.
This scene depicts a potential history for Joe and imagines the photograph as a point of access to NYC’s gay subculture of the 1970s and 80s. In Timoner’s hands, Joe represents a tool for imagining a lived scene of gay sadomasochism. Her confabulations attempt to do what Mapplethorpe’s photographs, by themselves, do not; namely, provide their viewer access to this subculture.
While photos such as Joe and Dominick and Elliot may depict the subculture’s rituals and paraphernalia (binding, suspension, leather, breath-control), they explicitly locate viewers within the controlled, pristine, well-lit space of Mapplethorpe’s studio. As Richard Meyer suggests, Mapplethorpe’s photographs provide a clever “masquerade” of BDSM subculture rather than a point of access: “Far from ‘saving us the trouble’ of going there ourselves, Mapplethorpe’s work announces the impossibility of ever knowing, of ever fully entering, the site of gay sadomasochism through photography.”[2] By imagining and presenting Joe’s hypothetical origin story, Timoner conjures precisely what Mapplethorpe’s work forestalls.
Watching Mapplethorpe: The Director’s Cut leaves me wondering whether a recovery is possible, whether one can bring Mapplethorpe, his subjects, and their world alive.
I think of a scene from Andrew Durbin’s recent novel, MacArthur Park. Tasked with writing an article on the Tom of Finland Foundation, the narrator, Nick, tours the foundation’s extensive archive of Touko Laaksonen’s gay erotic illustrations. “When I looked at Tom of Finland, I didn’t feel like Durk in the leather bar, I didn’t see myself, I didn’t see the people I knew…instead, I saw bodies sealed within a realm of ideals I was otherwise meant to dream of, hope to realize at the gym, but never would.”[3]
When I view Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic work, I get a similar feeling of forced distance, like I can’t access the world it stages, no matter how bad I’d like to, no matter how many back rooms or bathhouses I frequent. And maybe that’s not the point of being alive.
To be sure, I enjoyed Mapplethorpe: The Director’s Cut although it makes me want to ask…
Dear Homos, Daddies, bois, babies, subs, Doms, Masters, and Misters: when you watch Mapplethorpe, when you see the artist’s work, when you see Matt Smith’s cute, pasty butt, do you feel alive/a life? Do you feel lonely?
1. “Ondi Timoner – ‘MAPPLETHORPE, THE DIRECTOR’S CUT’ Q&A | Film Independent Presents.” YouTube, uploaded by Film Independent, 3 Mar. 2021.
2. Meyer, Richard. “Imagining Sadomasochism: Robert Mapplethorpe and the Masquerade of Photography.” Qui Parle, vol. 4, no. 1, 1990, pp. 65. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20685907. Accessed 10 Feb. 2023.
3. Durbin, Andrew. Macarthur Park. New York: Nightboat Books, 2017. p. 135.
Mapplethorpe: The Director’s Cut will be screened at IU Cinema on February 19 at 1 pm as part of the Art and a Movie series. A pre-screening gallery talk, Mapplethorpe in Focus, will take place at the Eskenazi Museum of Art at 12 pm. This talk is free but registration is required.
Shawn Coughlin is the Education Graduate Assistant at the Eskenazi Museum of Art. He is an art history graduate student at Indiana University studying contemporary and twentieth-century American art with a focus on queer and trans cultural production. He enjoys karaoke, comics, and reading alongside his dog, Buddy.