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Audio input Bernadett Settele: A secluded universe. A stage. Domestic romanticism? (written version see below)

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A secluded universe. A stage. Domestic romanticism?

Input by Bernadett Settele

Through a certain shabby cabaret materiality, the setup of Toxic makes us feel at ease, at least for a while. The performers feel at home . . . moving plants slightly and smoothly, sidling through the glittering remains, or digging for a cigarette in them. They live in a melancholic or maybe toxic performance world.

And they’re not alone on this scene, as from the beginning, there are plants and their shadows, truncated, overlapping the silver screen with the mug shots. These plants, being moved around, being held up, changing their positions, get a certain agency. Like the layers of cloth on bodies, the light of a projection on a platinum wig, or the shadow of a head on the screen. It all gets into movement. The abilities to move may not be equal, but the visual agency on the silver screen, or, even, the power to affect, is tantamount. Animate players create tableaus vivants, and we should mention the tenderness of the movements and the touching in this queer inside world. A punk figure in glitter recollects the names of stimulants and addictive drugs, a queen tosses out a cloud of glitter. Not much toxins, it seems, but a lot of bonding. Both character—or performers—don’t communicate directly though, they appear consecutively, one after the other. They act on the same stage, but in two separate spaces. It’s rather the montage that connects them. They overlap through sound and light. Reenacted history and future remembrance.

Toxic as a performance film rich in allegory appeals to us through its slightly alienating everyday practices. Like the moving of future remains on the floor, like commemorating toxins, like the rearrangement of plants, like watching the smoke casting a shadow. These minor acts, all too quickly experienced as subjective, insignificant, or unimportant, constitute something that I would call a minor politics of performance. They appeal to us as a politics of affect.                                         

At the same time, realist strategies enter the game as the film shows off how it is made, accentuating the gaps and stripping the medium of its superficial slickness. With a mediality of sloppy zooms, fierce cuts, and willful montage techniques—and with a lot of visible clapper boards—we’re looking behind the scenes in more ways than one through Toxic. And we may still find its outcast glamour, the humor and the anger reenacted by the performers, directly appealing.

There’s a moment when a bigger gap occurs and the situation turns from slippers into scandal. A reminiscence of activism, one of the performers, Werner Hirsch, makes a point of addressing the hierarchies entailed in the production of the film. It’s not about getting positions straight, whether Hirsch is doing, or acting, or pretending to act. For this is a re-enactment of a historic revolt in a BBC interview of Jean Genet, 1985.       

***

The gaze is reversed—our gaze is reversed.We look at the “other side.” But still, there seems to be a certain wish to submit to the gaze of the camera. Even now, reverting and revolting the order, the images are luxurious, the gestures well-set . . . part of a radical chic that suits a glamorous riot-queen so well.

So, in order to speak with a psychological term, what kind of transference (Übertragung) happens between the film Toxic and the queer viewers it addresses? How does “toxicity” gain its metaphorical stature—its stickiness? How is “the toxic” portrayed or performed, and how does it gain agency and affect us? And what is our role in this? Shall we “become toxic” ourselves? What would it mean to keep up our estrangement or alienation to grand gestures and role models? What would “toxic” then mean?

By Bernadett Settele