Patrick Keiller has remarked that we now live in futurism's future, that future, which, from the historical avant-garde to last mid-century's space age, aspired to the radically new.

Moreover, things are not so very different after all. This is not unrelated to another meta-historical comment made recently, Fredric Jameson's claim that today it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.¹ Dystopic science-fiction scenarios notwithstanding, we find ourselves living in a future without a future, in a future that is already the past, living on a map of the world where that place called utopia has, for this modern memory at least, never been so out of sight.

I want to catch sight of that illusive thing called utopia, using as my illumination the bright glow that emanates from that thingest of things called the commodity. To begin his chapter of Capital called 'The Fetishism of Commodities (and the Secret Thereof)', Marx wrote:

It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of
the materials furnished by Nature, in a way as to make them useful to him. The
form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet for
all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But so
soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something
transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in
relation to all other commodities, its stands on its head, and
evolved out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful
than 'table turning' ever was.²

Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising, now forty years old, stands out, not only from his own oeuvre, but also from cinema history as a whole. Like never before or since (outside of advertising), he grabs the fulcrum of society - the commodity - and uses it for the heart and soul of his film. Even the hard-bodied, densely coloured, subjectivity-sapping ornaments that taunt Douglas Sirk's mise-en-scène fall short of this all-out explosion of use value and its drudgery into expenditure's sacrificial play. All this is by way of saying that Anger's Scorpio Rising gets us where we live: in things.

The film is an arcade of displays, framed collections of things for casual visual consumption, each window with its own piped-in music. Like the Paris arcades that in their decay so fascinated Walter Benjamin, it pulls the crowd's attention, now this way, now that, with its assortment of 'wish images'.³ Unlike this model of distracted spectatorship, however, we look in the dark. The darkness of the cinema, rather than the iron-and-glass passages of the Paris arcades, is home to the roving, untendered consciousness that ambles through the modern city. The movie-house for Barthes is the 'site of availability (even more than cruising) which best defines modern eroticism'.⁴ From fenders to faux fashion models, the eroticism that features in Scorpio Rising is a genuine come-on from the world of lively things.

The film's first sequence centres on a motorcycle, a song and a man, alone together in a clean, sparse garage. The motorcycle shines to the peals of the simple proud melody, 'Fools Rush in Where Angles Fear to Tread' that accompanies the camera, which spotlights the bike from above as if to track a star's walk up a stage ramp for an Academy Award. The man is working on the bike, but more than that, he's watching it, kneeling by it, loving it. He doesn't love it as much as the camera does, however, which follows its every curve, licking it with light to polish the fenders for a brilliant showroom sheen. This is then inter-cut with shots of wind-up plastic motorbikes, paraphernalia old and new, pinups of Marlon Brando, James Dean, live shots of men flexing their smooth muscles, dressing and grooming themselves for the party. A now-famous series of 1950s and early 60s rock-and-roll hits narrate the film, ballads of youth, death and love religiously left to play out all their verses.

While all films are simulacra, copies of things as they never existed, Scorpio Rising is explicitly so. When Benjamin described the magical independence of the image from its apparatus, and noted the artful absence of all the cameras and lights from the final product, he used the image of a carefully cultivated, rare flower, not a daylily, to describe the effect of the transformation from reality to film: 'The equipment-free aspect of reality has become here the height of artifice and the sight of unmediated reality has become the blue flower in the land of technology.'⁵ Benjamin's use of the German Romantic Novalis's term 'blaue Blume' suggests that the unattainable telos of the Romantic quest would be found in the cinema rather than in nature.

Anger takes advantage of the cultivated rather than the natural quality of cinema - that is, the image's acquisition of new vitality when completely divorced from its surroundings - by piecing the film together as a collage of dormant objects and found footage. His filming of objects also belies the irony and pathos Miriam Hansen has suggested prompted Benjamin to deploy the Romantic term.⁶ Instead of probing, revealing, provoking or concealing, this camera is a roving spotlight shining on things that already appear to exist in their own right, independent of their screen time. We meet this film head-on as a reified commodity; surface is everything. It is this surface quality of a thing that generates warmth, a kind of warmth that is always familiar. A strange city is unbearable on a Sunday, for instance, until you find a shop window aglow. So too, Anger's commodity-rich montage democratises the work of art and extends a casual invitation to enjoy its comforts. Anger is utterly at home in, and takes full advantage of, late-capitalism's referentless space. His is a work that revels in the art form of the simulacrum.

Anger's use of pop music made film history (for better or worse) when he simply bought the rights to the songs. From the very start, the songs were addressed as commodities. With their strong melodies, often sung in unison, the songs have a formal narrative quality quite apart from the stories they tell. Melody is narrative itself here, directing the flow of the film with images cut synchronically to the beat or the words. The earnestness of the sound threatens to overcome the ironic textual relation to the images on screen. Irony and the mythic are in perpetual tension as the film runs merrily along through images of death, torture, fascism and the motorbike. Anger capitalises on the pleasure of the melody (analogous to the comfort of narrative), the appeal of stories within the songs (that they progress from beginning to middle to end regardless of the particular content of the story), as well as the unambiguous textual relation of the words to the images on screen. Also, the songs are recognisable as cultural commodities. The film glows in the glitter of the kitsch value they now evoke. Viewing the film years after it was made, it is difficult to remove the new layer of these songs' nostalgia then contemporary with the film. Anger clearly intended to draw on their value as popular hits. Carel Rowe points to the problem that, in later receptions, the film took on the vacuous qualities of nostalgia, which 'originally served as a critique against idolatry and romanticism', in Anger's words, 'turned in on itself and was beginning to rot.'⁷ But Anger can't have it both ways. He is, on the one hand, clearly deploying and enjoying the songs' commodity value with their reverent lyrics' clever juxtapositions, and on the other, he uses them to make his film go. Like Rabbit's Moon (1971), it's a form of opera.

But one never hears pop tunes 'for the first time'. Because of their repetition (a recorded song is always a copy) the pop songs, even at the film's first viewing, carry a further significance. We are always aware of our aural belatedness. Fredric Jameson argues instead that we live in constant exposure to them in various contexts: car radio, market, boutique, restaurant and lunchroom. The pop single then, 'by means of repetition, insensibly becomes part of the existential fabric of our own lives, so that what we listen to is ourselves, our own previous auditions.'⁸ Each audition carries traces of other auditions, so that they accumulate a narrative of experiences associated with them that may come together in their full-fledged performances at a nightclub, in a dance hall or in an instance such as their audition in this film.

'Torture' narrates the major rite-of-passage sequence in which hot mustard is smeared over a man's pelvis and a crowd of men hover over him with a brief shot of a cock waving over his head, careful too, to register his tense but smiling face. Introduced by a pious parade from the film The Road to Jerusalem (that Anger claims to have found on the street) to the tune 'He's a Rebel', the film explodes into a party. Jesus is there, the church is there, a cop is around, not to mention real people - as opposed to film clips, snap shots or models for clothing - with candid expressions, having a good time. The reverie of the 'party lights' turns to 'Torture', sacrifice and the sacred. The knife's edge between irony and the mythic, between the sacred and the profane, cuts through to the open air. Symbols of death and fascism, fresh torture marks on a bare bottom, are amongst the images that inter-cut this convulsive communal moment. 'Christianity may have made the sacred substantial,' says Bataille, 'but the nature of the sacred, in which today we recognise the burning existence of religion, is perhaps the most ungraspable thing that has been produced between men: the sacred is only a privileged moment of communal unity, a moment of the convulsive communication of what is ordinarily stifled.'⁹ Now dormant, now erupting, the sacred, like the songs, hovers over this hell-raiser of a film. Like its ancestor L'Âge d'or it is under the sign of Scorpio: 'The scorpion, governing the genitals and the anus, is the symbol of sex, excrement and death, dweller in the shadows and in hell.'¹⁰

Recalling the commodity narrative that moves from use value to exchange value when a thing is severed from its means of production and becomes reified, the commodity finally ends up just like any other thing and interchangeable with any other thing. The rough life story of the object reaching its maturity as reified commodity continues in its golden years among the great debates of aesthetics and politics in late capitalism. In Andy Warhol's Shoes or his prints of stars, Fredric Jameson tells us that Warhol is referring to their repetition and interchangeability, and betrays an allegiance to surface rather than depth, the appearance of a thing (exchange value) rather than the function of a thing (use value) in the same way that Van Gogh's well-worn boots had.¹¹ Well past Lukács's requisite saturation point described in History and Class Consciousness, we are also beyond simple reification. In our late-night capitalism, the commodity emits something like a radioactive glow.

The leather jackets, studded belts, chains, toys, icons, motorcycles and bikers' gear are filmed in adoring floods of light, recalling Marx's fetishism of commodities, 'in which a definite social relation between [people] assumes ... the fantastic form of a relationship between things'.¹² Benjamin refers to the attractiveness of the fetish, the way commodities draw you near to them, in his discussion of crowds and arcades in 'Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism'. 'Baudelaire,' he wrote, 'was a connoisseur of narcotics, yet one of their most important social effects probably escaped him. It consists in the charm displayed by addicts under the influence of drugs. Commodities derive the same effect from the crowd that surges around and intoxicates them.'¹³ And of the proletariat's relationship to commodities he wrote: 'If it wanted to achieve virtuosity in this kind of enjoyment, it could not spurn empathising with commodities. It had to enjoy this identification with all the pleasure and the uneasiness, which derived from a presentiment of its own destiny as a class. Finally, it had to approach this destiny with a sensitivity that perceives charm even in damaged and decaying goods.'¹⁴ In his Arcades Project Benjamin described the collections of recently out-of-date objects displayed in the glass cases of the Paris arcades as 'dream-images of the collective', which, according to Susan Buck-Morss, were both 'distorting illusion and redeemable wish-image, and so took on political meaning'.¹⁵

Anger's parading of these commodities conflates sexual with consumer seduction in a way similar to that which developed with the department store in Paris of the 1850s. Of this development Buck-Morss writes: 'if commodities had first promised to fulfil human desires, now they created them: dreams themselves became commodities.' No longer merely supplying goods for sale, 'the use of display techniques and eye-catching design which developed rapidly over the next decades supplanted the commercial principle of supply with consumer seduction. As reification of desire, commodities generated dreams rather than satisfied them.' The display of objects and models in Scorpio Rising moves us farther, not only away from the utility of things (narrative or otherwise), but beyond commodity fetishism: Anger's displays become collective dream images.

The film proudly displays posters of male stars. Images of rebellious manhood become icons for the gay collective. They are not interested in the 'aura' of the person but the 'spell of the personality', 'the phoney spell of a commodity'. The spell conjured up in Scorpio Rising is a magical way of being embraced by a hostile society, one that in its heterosexual hegemony of the early 1960s would not even acknowledge gay culture. Warming themselves by the hearth fire cinders of what was once use value, the answer to society's scorn is to steal the aura of its things, to make society's commodities the meta-narrative of gay culture. Hence the ritual of torture is interspersed with segments from a film version of one of Western culture's strongest narratives, The Great Code,¹⁶ which, in its commodity form as film, knits together the sequence. This, it seems to me, is a radical form of play.

Anger mischievously steals images, narratives and icons for his child's play. It was with particular glee that he told an audience that the film stock for Fireworks (1947) was purloined by sailors from the US Navy. Play, toys and the play of children feature large in Benjamin's conception of revolution which he defined with the cursory remarks: 'the idea of revolution as an innervation of the technical organs of the collective (analogy with the child who learns to grasp by trying to get hold of the moon)'.¹⁷ Much of the film burns away at the 'technical organs of the collective', pushing strenuously towards such 'innervation'. As hopes fade in the light of dawn and the life cycle of the motorbike nears its end, Anger inserts a film clip from his childhood: Puck bursts onto the screen reaching for the moon. 'There isn't an ocean too deep', are the accompanying words when Mickey Rooney beams and stretches his arms to the sky.¹⁸ The child's imagination, in his yearning to do the impossible and in his relish of toys, is the workshop wherein utopia is formed. No less Promethean than puckish, Anger's grand theft of things in their afterlife becomes the symbolic expression of the collective's dream.

— Rachel Moore