Pink Narcissus

According to Ovid, Narcissus was a beautiful young man, the object of both men’s and women’s desire, who one day saw his face reflected in the water for the first time and fell hopelessly in love with his own reflection. Unable to fulfil that love, he remained by the lake, admiring himself until he died of anguish, hunger and thirst.

In the early twentieth century, Freud revisited this classical myth to develop a convoluted theory of narcissism in which he linked narcissistic object-choice with homosexuality.

The Narcissus of this film is more literal: he looks in the mirror, delights in his image and gives himself over to autoeroticism. The protagonist, played by Bobby Kendall, imagines himself in immersive settings and fantasies: in a harem, as a Roman slave, or bullfighting his own image in the mirror and taking pleasure in the sight of his sinuous body, its contours revealed by his tight trousers.

He is presented as a male prostitute who immerses himself in his fantasies to escape a difficult reality, but I prefer not to cling to this storyline, since the film, with no dialogue and the delirious structure of dreams and nightmares, is unlikely to satisfy anyone looking for a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. The filmmaker himself, James Bidgood, said that the final edit of Pink Narcissus, made without his consent, had turned it into something even he could not follow and struggled to stay awake through.

Indeed, it was his disagreement with the edit imposed by the distributor that led Bidgood to remove his name from the end credits. The directing, writing, cinematography and production credits are all anonymous, and the filmmaker’s identity remained a secret for many years.

This loss of control over the identity of his work can only have been painful for Bidgood, who spent seven years, between 1963 and 1970, filming clandestinely in his flat with virtually no budget. Fields of flowers, the moon, birds: the whole natural world of Pink Narcissus is artificial, handmade from paper, scraps of dresses, sparkling embellishments and all kinds of found objects. Even the colourful, saturated lighting was achieved using coloured gels and shimmering filters. Bidgood was also a costume designer and drag queen, and that experience runs through the film’s visual construction.

It is hard to imagine anyone living inside those sets, but that is what happened. Many years later, in an interview with Butt magazine, Bidgood recalled that his flat had so little space that he shared his single mattress with a plaster mannequin almost two metres tall, which he used to make papier-mâché forms and drape costumes.

Pink Narcissus takes on another dimension when we learn about the stories behind its production and the historical and social context in which it was made.

The film was released in 1971. The Stonewall uprising had taken place just two years earlier, and homosexuality was still listed as a mental disorder in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). Its classification as a mental illness gave scientific and institutional legitimacy to a stigma with tangible consequences: gay people could lose their jobs, be subjected to psychiatric interventions, lose custody of their children or face legal persecution because of their sexual orientation.

Society at the time considered homosexual relationships unnatural, and Bidgood responded by creating an avowedly artificial world where every fantasy was allowed, free from shame, censorship and state violence.

Within four walls, Bidgood built a safe, idealised world. An intense, luxuriant, vibrant, excessive and artificial queer paradise. Pure camp aesthetics, in the sense Susan Sontag had described just a few years earlier.

In the gay culture of the time, camp functioned as a shared language and a form of resistance. Through exaggeration, theatricality, irony and artifice, it made it possible to play with gender norms and ridicule the seriousness with which those social norms presented themselves as natural.

Pink Narcissus is a celebration of homosexual pleasure and an aesthetic protest. An affirmation of the right to pleasure and beauty.

Story is sacrificed in favour of aesthetics, colour and fantasy, which are transformed into instruments of liberation and psychological survival. Its immersive images helped establish a gay imaginary and paved the way for artists such as David LaChapelle and Pierre et Gilles.

Pink Narcissus celebrates its 55th anniversary this year, and getting to know it means getting to know a little more about queer history.