3. Geek Love
The geek, in the American carnival tradition, is not physically deformed but a debased human being, maddened and made feral by his circumstances. In the hand-to-mouth showmans world of the carny, if a guy had fallen off his bottom rung then, for the price of some straw to sleep in and a bottle of whisky a day to drink, hed to all extents and purposes become a wild man: snarling and growling at onlookers; maybe biting the head off a hapless chicken that had been thrown his way. The geek in GEEK LOVE, the cult 1989 novel by boxing journalist and devotee of bizarre Americana Katherine Dunn, is Lil Binewski a fallen member of Boston society who created her niche in the carny world via chicken slaughter. Lil is enterprising and wants to create her own familial stable of performers, abusing her body with pesticides, drugs and radiation to ensure she gives birth to deformed kids. In this sense, Ms Dunn was being politically correct in calling her title characters geeks instead of freaks. For Lils offspring includes Arturo the Aqua Boy, who crawls along without limbs a fictional counterpart of Prince Randian, the Human Torso of Tod Brownings classic 1932 exploitation movie FREAKS. Similarly, Lils children include Electra and Iphigenia, sexually promiscuous Siamese twins who recall the (presumably much more chaste) Daisy and Violet Hilton, British twins who performed a tap-dancing routine with Bob Hope prior to appearing in Brownings film. The main reason FREAKS banned in Britain for 30 years and not much seen till a brief spate of showing on Channel 4 in the 1980s holds up today is its strange mix of grotesquerie and sentimentality. We may baulk at the freakshow mentality that exploited authentically disabled people and squirm at the revenge sequence that shows them as near-monsters crawling through the mud. But theres a poetic moralism at work in their decency and loyalty towards each other. Its the able-bodied characters a predatory trapeze artist and her strongman lover who are the real monsters. Katherine Dunn was far from unaware of the controversial legacy of Brownings film when she wrote GEEK LOVE. Several decades removed from the era of the carny freakshow (already eliciting moral disgust and in decline by the 1930s), hers was a more surrealistic and darkly cynical view of the world in which natures anomalies made the best of it by putting themselves on display. It embraced some science-fiction elements, in that some of the offspring had telekinetic or telepathic powers; yet it was very much a literary work in its vividly florid (and occasionally sick-making) construction. Little wonder perhaps that David Lynch, the great American surrealist, should briefly be spoken of as director of a film adaptation. His art-house debut, ERASERHEAD (1977), possessed its own personal poetry of deformity, while his first mainstream film, THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980), featured a sequence set in a Belgian freakshow that owed much to Brownings FREAKS. That Lynch never directed GEEK LOVE may also be a testament to his personal vision; its unlikely he would have taken the short cuts of animation or CGI (still in its infancy back then), and itd take a particularly brave producer to encourage him to dis-anchor himself from normality and engage with the 100% grotesque. It was animation that suggested a route into Dunns phantamasgorical world, as Henry Selick, director of TIM BURTONS THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (1993) and JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH (1996), explained: I talked to Tim Burton about producing it as an animated film, but honouring the book, hardcore. Warner Bros took out an option, but again, the Selick/Burton version never got made. The animation director recently opined itd have been impossible to make the film at any time over the last 20 years, for both technical and content reasons but now believes it might happen. As do the Wachowskis, directors of THE MATRIX trilogy (1999-2003) and erotic neo-noir BOUND (1996). It is a diabolically insightful and exquisitely rendered examination of the transformational power and pathology of familial love, says Lana Wachowski, the filmmaker now equally famous for transforming her own gender. We do have a dream of adapting it; we would love to work with Tim Burton. Once again, fellow filmmakers fantasise about unleashing Burtons sublime visual sense with their dream project. Warners are said to hold a perpetual option on GEEK LOVE, but whether it actually happens depends on a modern audiences ability to embrace what was once low-budget exploitation material up at the glossier end of the spectrum.
A carnival barker promotes the geek show in Nightmare Alley (1947).