Look Back At Anger: Underground Movie Magician Kenneth Anger Did Not Live Forever, After All

Kenneth Anger was a beautiful boy. He would probably have been the first to tell you so. You can see it in Fireworks, his first short film of note, made in 1947, when he was just 20 years old. In that picture he plays a “dreamer” whose visions include that of ravishment by sailors, one of whom has a lit roman candle coming out of the fly of his trousers. Anger, born Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer in 1927, frequently claimed that when he was but a wee lad, and even more gorgeous than he was as a 20-year-old, he played the Changeling Prince in Max Reinhardt’s 1935 film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, starring James Cagney, Olivia De Havilland, Mickey Rooney and scores of other major stars. According to official record, he did no such thing. But the story was, among other things, a way for Anger to place himself in the Hollywood firmament that he would make often gorgeous war on via art and prose. 

Fireworks was literally a home movie — he made it in his parent’s house, on weekends while they were away. You can see the influence of Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet in it, but Anger went further in exploring homosexual dread and desire than Cocteau, and as far as American moviemaking was concerned, he went far enough to go beyond the pale. The exhibition history of the movie is marked by numerous citations for obscenity, despite its containing nothing that you could today call explicit content. Which is not to say that its shot of stream of milk hitting a man’s shoulder and flowing down over his nipple lacks for hotness — it does not. 

This landmark of queer cinema inspired the poet Robert Duncan, who became friends with Anger and dedicated sections of his poem “The Torso,” whose imagery is akin to that of Fireworks, to Anger. 

While Anger’s family was only middle-class, he was able to move to Europe shortly after making Fireworks and hooked up with filmmaking friends who’d gone into exile after hounding by HUAC. His fanciful Rabbit’s Moon was shot in a studio on the sly; when he was discovered, he was ejected. He returned to the U.S. after his mother died, and, reflecting his increasing interest in the occult, he made Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, a luridly colored enactment of trippy, feathery ritual, starring some of the cream of what was then Los Angeles’ bohemian underground: writer Anais Nin, poet and Aleister Crowley follower Marjorie Cameron, future director Curtis Harrington. 

The young Anger was socially talented: he befriended the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, who was fascinated by Fireworks, and they travelled to Italy to make a film together, about Thelema, the former abbey where the occultist Crowley decamped at one time. The adventure left him broke, and for money, he and the film critic Elliott Stein (uncredited) wrote the first version of Hollywood Babylon, a collection of scurrilous and largely unsupported tales of Tinseltown decadence. 

The book first appeared in France, as no American publisher would touch it; it was bootlegged in the States in 1965. It quickly became a collector’s item, but by this time Anger had stirred up censorious America with another movie, Scorpio Rising. This short was drawn from footage Anger shot of biker gangs in Brooklyn and the Bronx in the early ‘60s. Tight jeans, black leather jackets, wild parties with guys (always guys) urinating in motorcycle helmets, scored to the top twenty hits of the era. (For a long stretch the movie couldn’t be properly distributed because Anger didn’t clear the music.) 

For fun, in a sequence with some biker strutting about to the song “He’s A Rebel,” Anger threw in some Jesus-walks snippets of the silent Cecil B. DeMille King of Kings. What a scamp. The scene is still funny today. Anger was again dragged on obscenity charges, but Scorpio ultimately triumphed and proved, as they say, seminal; much of Andy Warhol’s subsequent film work was predicated on the movie and its fetishization of male bodies and the leather that often adorned them. 

Back when Rolling Stone magazine was into fucking with norms, its subsidiary, Rolling Stone Press, took a chance on Hollywood Babylon, printing a lavishly illustrated hardcover edition. For better or worse this too became a publishing landmark. Gossip collector Anger’s dry prose style stood in harsh judgment above the fallen stars it depicted. Once beautiful Marie Prevost brought down by alcoholism and dying in a cheap hotel room, her body then partially eaten by her beloved pet canine, as was discovered when they were found days after her death. (The rock singer-songwriter Nick Lowe played this story for laughs in his tune “Marie Provost,” which scanned better than “Prevost,” I guess.) Latin lover Ramon Navarro killed by gay prostitutes who shoved a dildo down his throat, choking him to death. Golden Age Hollywood teen prince Andy Hardy’s kindly old dad, Judge Hardy — the actor Lewis Stone, that is — dropping dead of a heart attack after chasing some punks off his lawn. And so on. Because by this time Anger —who’d announced his own death in a full page ad in the Village Voice in 1967 and then announced himself reborn as a Crowleyesque master of Magick  — was as well known for his occultism as for his art, some speculated that the unusual margination and leading of the text in this edition of the book constituted some kind of code that, if deciphered, yielded more profound secrets. It was that kind of book. 

Silent star Gloria Swanson sued Anger, who reportedly countered by sending the icon, who at the time was a passionate health food advocate, a coffin full of sugar. Apparently money was no longer a problem for him.

(It’s worth mentioning that the critic and podcaster Karina Longworth dedicated a whole season of her You Must Remember This podcast to fact-checking Anger’s diary stories.)

In this phase of his career he gave off an aura of danger that was entirely credible, and it attracted other artists who flirted with the dark side, either sincerely or as a marketing device. A scion of J. Paul Getty with bohemian aspirations served as his patron in the late ‘60s. Marianne Faithfull appeared in his second attempt at the film Lucifer Rising, begun in 1970. Anger had tried to persuade Mick Jagger to appear in the film, in the title role, but Jagger, exercising post-Altamont prudence, declined. Crowley enthusiast Jimmy Page attempted to score the picture. 

A prior try at that scenario was attempted in mid-60s San Francisco, with a character named Bobby Beausoleil, who would later figure in Charles Manson’s family, which had begun in the city by the bay and drifted down to Los Angeles. What footage Anger got was made into Invocation of My Demon Brother, which feature fleeting glimpses of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey, Anger himself conducting (in fast motion) a ritual which involves a Nazi flag, and closeups of creepily tripping-balls beardos, and some footage of the Stones in concert. It’s a disturbing eleven minutes. The score by Mick Jagger, which he may have accomplished by repeatedly flicking a toggle on an early synthesizer, is one of the most annoying things you’ll ever hear.

Anger, in interviews, deplored that Beausoleil (who is credited with the Lucifer Rising score on the remarkably beautiful version of the film included in the BFI collection of Anger shorts released some years back, and still serving a life’s prison sentence for murder) had fallen in with a, um, bad crowd. By the same token, writing on the Manson murders in the Rolling Stone Press edition of Hollywood Babylon — a book that has been re-embraced by fans of Damien Chazelle’s recent epic trashing of the silent era, Babylon, all twenty of them — he stated, “wasted lives make waste, not tragedy,” a sentiment that at best can be seen as uncharitable, at worst, profoundly twisted. 

He was often capable of immense charm, and profound reflection. Writing of his calling as a filmmaker, he stated: “Heir to a culture traditionally enamored of the small and the refined, this poet does not scorn the 16 mm camera, considering its lightness and its small size to be every bit to his advantage. He started out with an 8mm camera, and had it existed he would have used a 4 mm camera. The dream of a personal, free, pure cinema can be fulfilled as long as you are modest.” Modest he was capable of being, but he could not be called “nice.” One of his last works, 2008’s Ich Will, is an entirely uncritical assemblage of found footage of Hitler youth rallies; the stuff that was the object of fast-paced fetishization in Scorpio Rising and Demon Brother is the full subject here, and it’s queasy viewing. 

He never made a full-length feature film but his work was incredibly influential on filmmakers who got closer to the mainstream than he ever did. Harrington’s genre movies, both low-key (Night Tide, with Dennis Hopper’s sailor falling in love with a maybe mermaid) and crazed (What’s The Matter With Helen, starring Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters as made-in-Hollywood psychos), are inarguably touched by Anger. Martin Scorsese has spoken of how the pop soundtrack to Scorpio Rising influenced his own use of music in films, from Mean Streets through Goodfellas. The dreamy poetics live on with David Lynch; John Waters expanded on the lurid qualities of Anger’s work. He lived to a very ripe old age, to the extent that one began wondering if there was anything to that Magick business after all. In the sense that he, too, finally proved mortal, his passing is an occasion for relief as well as mourning. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.