What does the city of Detroit have to do with ancient Egyptian pharaohs, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and various types of butt play? That’s what I set to find out at last weekend’s Detroit premiere of River of Fundament, a nearly six-hour cinematic opera by artist Matthew Barney, with music by Jonathan Bepler. Loosely based on Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings––a novel whose protagonist’s search for immortality takes him through a literal river of feces––Barney’s film is a sometimes perverse, often brilliant, and entirely avant-garde spectacle. A third of it is situated in Detroit, where the declining auto industry serves as a backdrop to the weirder exploits of Egyptian deities.
For the most part, Detroit and the cars that appear throughout the film serve to satirize American culture and its obsession with performance, power, and eternal youth. Act I principally takes place at a Chrysler dealership in Los Angeles and in Mailer’s actual home in Brooklyn Heights during the author’s reimagined wake, with a star-studded cast of the likes of Gyllenhaal, Aimee Mullins, Paul Giamatti, Debbie Harry, Fran Lebowitz, Elaine Stritch, Salman Rushdie, and a number of very major opera singers. In Act II, whose footage was taken from the 2010 performance KHU (attended and COVERED for the OC blog by Patrik Ervell), a 1979 Firebird Trans Am emerges from Detroit’s Rouge River and is taken by boat to McLouth Steel Mill, where it is then thrown into smelters in a kind of ritual sacrifice (we hear Barney used 25 tons of molten steel while making the film.)
River of Fundament also has scenes in Los Angeles and New York, but Detroit is somehow always lurking in the background. As the preeminent urban symbol of post-industrial decline in the Internet age, the city is a prime metaphor for the male artist-ego Barney is interested in satirizing and annihilating via the figure of Mailer and others. At one point, Jeffrey Eugenides, local Detroit hero and author of The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex, and The Marriage Plot, is also at the wake. “Detroit is a shithole!” one of the opera singers shouts, interrupting Eugenides after he is asked how often he goes back to the city. “No one in New York can be trusted,” Mailer’s actual son, playing Mailer II, says to Paul Giamatti’s character in the film. Is that self-awareness or perhaps just irony? I wondered, and I never heard a theater laugh with such relief.
River of Fundament screens in Toronto, Basel, London, and Amsterdam this month.![]()
Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler. River of Fundament: KHU, 2014. Photo: Hugo Glendinning. © Matthew Barney
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For the most part, Detroit and the cars that appear throughout the film serve to satirize American culture and its obsession with performance, power, and eternal youth. Act I principally takes place at a Chrysler dealership in Los Angeles and in Mailer’s actual home in Brooklyn Heights during the author’s reimagined wake, with a star-studded cast of the likes of Gyllenhaal, Aimee Mullins, Paul Giamatti, Debbie Harry, Fran Lebowitz, Elaine Stritch, Salman Rushdie, and a number of very major opera singers. In Act II, whose footage was taken from the 2010 performance KHU (attended and COVERED for the OC blog by Patrik Ervell), a 1979 Firebird Trans Am emerges from Detroit’s Rouge River and is taken by boat to McLouth Steel Mill, where it is then thrown into smelters in a kind of ritual sacrifice (we hear Barney used 25 tons of molten steel while making the film.)
River of Fundament also has scenes in Los Angeles and New York, but Detroit is somehow always lurking in the background. As the preeminent urban symbol of post-industrial decline in the Internet age, the city is a prime metaphor for the male artist-ego Barney is interested in satirizing and annihilating via the figure of Mailer and others. At one point, Jeffrey Eugenides, local Detroit hero and author of The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex, and The Marriage Plot, is also at the wake. “Detroit is a shithole!” one of the opera singers shouts, interrupting Eugenides after he is asked how often he goes back to the city. “No one in New York can be trusted,” Mailer’s actual son, playing Mailer II, says to Paul Giamatti’s character in the film. Is that self-awareness or perhaps just irony? I wondered, and I never heard a theater laugh with such relief.
River of Fundament screens in Toronto, Basel, London, and Amsterdam this month.
Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler. River of Fundament: KHU, 2014. Photo: Hugo Glendinning. © Matthew Barney
Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler. River of Fundament: REN, 2014. Photo: Chris Winget. © Matthew Barney
Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler. River of Fundament: KHU, 2014. Photo: Hugo Glendinning