Week 9 (Aug 16 – 22) – Cinema of Transgression: “none shall emerge unscathed” -Nick Zedd
Lung Leg was born Elisabeth Carr, and for so much of the art I consumed in the mid-80s, she seemed like a poster girl. She’s right there, screaming on the cover of Sonic Youth’s EVOL, all over Richard Kern’s books and movies. She’s the kind of dream girl that probably only makes sense to me: an enraged, dark-eyed violence object.
In Kern’s You Killed Me First, she plays teenage punk Elizabeth—steeped in the dark aesthetics of her cramped, brooding room—who is at war with the suffocating domestic and religious orthodoxies enforced by her parents (David Wojnarowicz and Karen Finley). Rejecting the demands of demure respectability, standard hairstyles and forced family turkey dinners, Elizabeth channels her alienation through voodoo and sheer defiance. When pushed to the absolute brink by the suffocating hypocrisy of her household, the young antihero turns the tables on her tormentors, dismantling their rigid belief systems and physical bodies alike with a chilling declaration: “You killed me first!”
Directed, shot, and scripted by Richard Kern over two days in October 1985, You Killed Me First stands as a vital pillar of the Cinema of Transgression movement. Kern and his peers rejected the sanitized aesthetics of mainstream Hollywood and traditional indie films alike, favoring a gritty, confrontational Super-8 aesthetic fueled by punk rock nihilism. The unsettling, industrial soundscape for the short was crafted by the musical mastermind J.G. Thirlwell (known for projects like Foetus), perfectly matching the visceral, razor-sharp imagery on screen.
The film was originally created to accompany Wojnarowicz’s You Killed Me First Installation #8 at the Ground Zero Gallery in the East Village. During the exhibition, the 12-minute short played on a continuous loop directly above a sculptural installation of a family dinner table populated by bloodied skeletons.
You can watch this on YouTube.
