Surrealist Shanghai Gesture

Fabian Theater Detroit

Surrealist Shanghai Gesture

Luis Buñuel (LB)

Joseph Cornell (JC)

Jack Smith (JS)

John Waters (JW)

Ed Wood Jr. (EW)

Data Towards the Irrational

Enlargement of “The Shanghai Gesture”

In this Jack Smith experimental film treatment of von Sternberg’s classic, the fairly straight hetero Surrealist Group is replaced by other surrealists—and the irrational enlargement shifts to a more perverse, decadent derisory impudent concrete criticism with totally automatic responses, of course, that being the sole criterion for this study.

What is Poppy’s perversion?

“Clasping an octopus tightly to her distraught pussy with her kimono pulled up & thighs smeared with lots of greasy K-Y.” (LB)

“Stretched out spread-eagled on the green felt of a backroom pool table, as Victor Mature detaches pearl after pearl from Poppy’s damp pouty convulsing pussy.” (JW)

“Poppy has no sexual perversion other than the intense sensuality she gets on a poker table surrounded by cynical Shanghai gangster-type card players & a cocaine-intoxicated handsome young sailor on a doomed lucky streak.” (JL)

“As Poppy permits a Peking pinhead to slowly stick his tiny sleek dwarf shiny shaved head up her tight moaning & groaning pussy there is a hushed silence in Mother Gin-Sling’s personal private parlor.” (JS)

“Fellatio of a self-confessed, intensely masochistic nature beneath a bronze Shiva in the bathroom making the whole gambling joint tremor, premature ejaculations swallowed by greedy goldfish in the nearby toilet bowl, as an octopus winds its tentacles around her legs, while men in the casino suddenly get a whiff of a strange odor of distraught dampness emanating from beneath all the gaming tables with Poppy down there on he knees with her lips between the legs of the croupier’s trembling legs. (EW)

“Purposeful masturbation with a peacock feather—that once belonged to Rudolf Valentino and was used by an arrogant smirking slave boy who tortured the Sheik mercilessly in his tent late into the intense desert hashish night there in his secret tent of horrible decadent jaded male desire in the studio parking lot.” (LB)

“In a Japanese sushi-bar aquarium fathoms down there at the bottom of the sea where sunken Spanish galleons & old Greek temples lollygag in the silent Atlantis seabed abyss of Laundromat dirty gossip, scuttling crabs and the Forty Thieves’ den of inequity where Poppy is ravished day & night by hoodlum LA gangs & pimply-faced runaways from the filthy LA ghettos.” (JS)