Forms of Erotic Speculation in Isaac Julien’s The Attendant
“Ordinary Affects is an experiment, not a judgment. Committed not to the demystification and uncovered truths that support a well-known picture of the world, but rather to speculation, curiosity, and the concrete, it tries to provoke attention to the forces that come into view as habit or shock, resonance or impact.” –Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, 2007.
“Being humiliated is an experience, I presume, that you don’t want — unless you’re a masochist. And then your humiliation isn’t dire. It’s pleasure. Humiliation, if passed through the masochistic centrifuge, becomes joy, or uplift — all emotional dissonances resolved” –Wayne Koestenbaum, Humiliation, 2011
In Isaac Julien’s 1993 independent film The Attendant, a young white male in a black leather-clad suit appears on the screen. He is looking upward as he walks up stairs toward the entrance of an obscure building. Seconds later we encounter him at a security gate, on the inside of an unmarked building. From the film we notice that to enter the building, guests, including this white male attendant, must be subjected to a thorough inspection for security clearance. As the black male museum guard is conducting an inspection, of his bag, the white male museum attendant smirks at the black male museum guard. It is unclear, at least at first glance, whether his smirk is a look of erotic desire or passive compliance.
Occurring simultaneously, specifically on the right side of the screen, a white angel appears with a bow and arrow and orbits the white male’s visitor forehead. It is moving upright. It glows and leaves a light shadow in the air. The white angel circles his forehead from right to left. As the angel circles around his forehead, and as the white male smirks at the black male guard from the right side of the screen, our gaze is re-positioned to look to our left, specifically as the film hones in on the black male museum guard. For a second, the angel disappears.
The white angel, or the goddess of love and desire, “cupid,” returns, and is now orbiting the forehead of the black male museum guard. The black male guard is looking back at the white male visitor with a hint of suspension as he further searches his bag. As the white angel, or “cupid,” moves into the distance and vanishes out of sight, the black male museum guard returns a smirk, too.
Isaac Julien provides us with very little instruction on what to anticipate next. We, as viewers, are suspended into anticipation. Julien is probing us here, perhaps even pushing us further into the scene, thus requiring us to ask whether it is better and even more alluring to exist within the space of the double contradiction, that of not-knowing, and yet believing we do know, what to anticipate next.
As the white male attendant is cleared for security entrance, it becomes evident from the wall paintings, the large white walls, the mimetic paintings of slavery, and the visitors looking at wall paintings that this is indeed a museum. A modern museum. As it is the case for the white male attendant, as well as for us as viewers, there is no instruction manual or visual brochure on how to look, what to expect, or even what to anticipate next.
As the white male attendant enters the museum main gallery space, he looks at the camera, at us, looking at him, rather than looking at the wall paintings and other visitors in attendance. Can he see us, seeing him? Is his confrontational look supposed to be alluring or humiliating for us as viewers? Perhaps. Though it is hard to definitively say with any degree of certainty.
As film critics, and visual culture tourists trafficking through Julien’s “Dark Fantasy,” we enter Julien’s modern museum at our own risk and alongside — rather than behind — a suspicious-looking white male attendant. He is both a visitor and a guide. And yet to follow him is also to feel a bit uneasy as viewers of The Attendant. In other words, to follow the white male attendant is to be open to surprise and wonder and yet at a loss regarding his role and intentions in which he does not disclose. Though it not easy to speculate what Julien had in mind here, it is obvious that this is Julien’s uncanny speculation on time and history, a generative speculation of history that is malleable and contingent.
Our power as viewers and critics to deduce definitive meaning from the mimetic representations of slavery illuminated in the wall paintings of Julien’s film The Attendant is often aesthetically eclipsed and suspended by multiple guises and “props” that are temporal and contingent. A prop, according to queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman, can be a way of accessing time, a way of aesthetically feeling historical. To open up an advantage point to broach the subject of history differently then, as a way of trying to tell a different story that is not just about injury but of surprise and pleasure, I approach Julien’s film The Attendant from two temporal vantage points — that of the contingent and the uncanny.
When I discovered The Attendant in 2013 at a college movie night, it became apparent that we as viewers were, and still are, suspended into suspense, surprise, and anticipation. For us in attendance, it required curiosity and a willingness to be open to the unknown, as we sat through very uneasy moments in the film. How can we speak of Julien’s film, then, if speculation, surprise, and contingency are all we have? Rather than placing Julien’s independent film The Attendant within a particular history, say, of “uncovered truths that support a well-known picture of the world,” I have found it much more helpful to speak of anticipation, speculation, and surprise as sensorial genres and narrative strategies of visual aesthetics and as alternative ways in which to appreciate Julien’s black queer aesthetic interventions. To the contingent I now turn.
First: To historicize the past as contingent and contested is to unsettle the past and to provide a critical framework for understanding history and time as open and fungible circuits. Within the context of Julien’s independent film The Attendant, a historical past is mediated through the museum and the subject. By recasting history and time within the context of temporality and memory, Julien is reconfiguring the past and our masochist relationship to it. From this perspective, the past is viewed not as redundant or melancholic but as a contested and open terrain. Jennifer Nash shows us that when race is theorized beyond injury and debasement we are be able to visualize, “instances of surprising pleasures in racialization.” It is in Nash’s scholarship that we can glimpse how race, and blackness more specifically, can work as a “prop” for recalling sexual pleasure, surprise, and wonder, as well as speculation and reanimation. Here, to speculate is to imagine and to imagine is to be open to a possible “re-do,” that of return and reanimation.
Even more The Attendant also highlights Julien’s deliberate role in building a queer interracial BDSM archive. Queer interracial desire is reflected and revered in many of Julien’s independent films, from Looking for Langston (1989) to Young Soul Rebels (1991) to The Attendant (1993) to The Long Road to Mazatlán (1999). In his quest to build a queer interracial BDSM archive, Julien posits interracial desire as a rich theoretical framework to both represent the historical taboo of BDSM, interracial sex and desire, and miscegenation, and to conjure, say, by way of unconscious identification, the erotic fantasy of blackness via race-play. The Attendant is notorious for its explicit queer interracial BDSM content, as well as its racial and homoerotic iconography, and it calls our critical attention to the aesthetic possibilities of film as a visual genre for historical intervention.
In it, Julien “remixes” high art with low cultural artistic forms. The high modernist art of the opera and painting — as more readily accessible and open to the public in a global capitalist economy — are reflected and yet decentered in artistic form through the restaging of the modern museum as a visual exhibition of collaborative participation and anticipation, and as a site of homoerotic cruising, and erotic BDSM play. It is in looking at the film that it becomes apparent that the once distant museum observer is placed into an erotic BDSM relationship to time and history. It is also through the cultural production of the film and its publicity that the once private act of queer BDSM sex is made public and Freud’s uncanny is put into aesthetic form as a way of conceptualizing history and time differently. In Freud’s essay on the uncanny, he likens the uncanny to “not merely the theory of beauty, but the theory of the qualities of feeling.” In this way, the uncanny is a perpetual return not necessarily of pain and injury, but surprise, intimacy, and pleasure.
Upon closer inspection, the artistic form of Julien’s The Attendant is multivalent, referent and reads as a cultural remix, seducing the viewer into the scene through the seduction of a whip, a “hip” white male attendant who is wearing a black leather suit, and a “cool” black male police guard who is standing with a hint of anticipation in his look as an overseer. Similar to the work of the visual culture scholar Krista Thompson, light is both reflective and absorbent in Julien’s film The Attendant. In other words, the black body as a global semiotic is reflective of various histories and genealogies while also calling our attention to the absorbent character of the black body as a surface of knowledge. Understanding the black body in this way allows us to read the historical context of Julien’s scene at a proximate distance even in its close intimate encounter. The museum as the origin and site of historical memory, interracial desire and sex, and BDSM power play, also presents a challenge to linear readings of history, of the slave ship and southern plantation life, for instance.
It is through this struggle with history, time, and the body, as sites of racial subjection and diaspora longing that a counter culture of racial resistance can possibly emerge. Julien illustrates how history is a struggle with memory, time, and the fraught limitations of the archive and how racial domination can only be dealt with through the strategic tactics of negotiation and reversals that BDSM enables and inspires. His modern museum depicts a series of wall paintings, flying angels, portraits of slave rebellions, the late Stuart Hall and a black female conservator.
Hall is staring at a painting, of a great slave rebellion, and seconds later he is depicted walking away from the camera. Walter Benjamin’s angel of history is forever present in Julien’s film, as it appears from still images and paintings and turns its back on the past. The museum paintings and drawings mirror the sexual and racial sadomasochistic acts of the white male attendant and the black male guard and are queering a mimetic representation of time and history, through the queer interracial BDSM scene.
Read in this way, reanimation and pure speculation are genres in which Julien’s art and film takes refuge. It is from this vantage point that the sadomasochist roles of the black male guard and the white male attendant switch. And it is here that the power of a possible redo takes form, where in which the white male attendant assumes the position of a desiring masochist.
The aesthetic pull of reanimation and a possible re-do, of roles not being fixed, is similar to Thelma Golden’s notion of freestyle as a sub-genre of art historical criticism and black radical aesthetics that emerged out of a post-civil rights era, particularly in the 21st century. Golden describes freestyle as montage and as the diverse co-constitutive arrangement of art and aesthetics, say, from painting, drawing, sculpture, video, photography, sound and digital art, merging together in the 21st century. Freestyle as both a metaphor and a post-black genre “is the term which refers to the space where the musician (improvisation) or for the dancer (the break) finds the groove and goes all out in a relentless and unbridled expression of the self.”
In other words, to remix is to improvise and to improvise is to play with a work of art. Here, the parables of anticipation and improvisation are key here because both are descriptive of the “unbridled” power-play of sadomasochism, its unforeseen utopian possibilities, and the constant role reversals and switching of the black male guard and the white male attendant. As theorist Elizabeth Freeman reminds us, “…however one views S/M, it is inescapably true that the body in sadomasochistic ritual becomes a means of invoking history — personal pasts, collective sufferings, and quotidian forms of injustice — in an idiom of pleasure.”
In this way the queer interracial BDSM scene that occurs between the black male attendant and the white museum participant captures the uneasy, rather than the uneven, bond and paradox existing between white spectatorship, on the one hand, and black abjection, on the other hand. It also presents a challenge to us as readers because it is both complimented and complicated by peripheral museum wall paintings, photography, moving mimetic angels and paintings, and a black female spectator, and to a greater extent, the modernization of the museum in a neoliberal age as a space of queer inclusion, erotic possibility, and race play.
That said, to appreciate the aesthetic value of Julien’s film it seems that the punitive function of historical criticism and interpretation as deliberation and judgment must be thought through in order to breathe life into the spectacle of race, BDSM performance, and queer aesthetics in the museum as parody, play, and possibility. In doing so we are able to glimpse the concrete and the everyday, say, of uneasy moments of racial abjection and sexual possibility, and to develop a way to critically listen and aesthetically value and appreciate the rhetorical styles of queer interracial desire, and those uneasy moments of racial-sexual seduction. And, of course, the black female conservator does just that, as she listens from the opposite side of the wall.
Rather, I am interested in how Julian inhabits this space of historical freakish play and colonial power differently, by asking what is possible when we theorize blackness not as historical trauma or injury but as unconscious fantasy, speculation, and contingent method, of anticipation and BDSM erotic power-play? Julien obvious investment in the museum is not to revisit the transatlantic slave trade but to experiment with museum tourism, the spectacle of racial consumption, and the queer homoerotic pleasure experienced in the act of visually consuming blackness. To travel and see, as Kobena Mercer argues, is to look unflinchingly and requires both self-reflection and a personal willingness to grabble with vexed historical representations.
Starting at the white male participant who enters the museum for a tour and the black male guard as one who protects the museum, and ending the film with the black male police guard who happens to be a star in the opera world and kisses his wife goodnight in what seems to be their home, Julien presents a view not of high art but of an open, malleable past.
I take Julien’s film The Attendant as an exemplar to tease out the obscene forms of sex and queer interracial desire to imagine a possible space and world to dialogue differently about queer interracial desire, sight and seeing, history, fantasy, BSDM and space.
