Normal Love (1963)
By Jack Smith
"Normal Love" is a screwy hybrid of Busby Berkeley kitsch and Dionysian pageantry. There is no dialogue. What little there is in the way of plot is difficult to talk about, since the film was never actually finished. Dismayed that both his censors and his champions had reified "Flaming Creatures" into a "sex issue of the cocktail world," Smith never competed another film. Instead, he occasionally screened "Normal Love" in various permutations (sometimes even re-cutting the film as he screened it) as a mercurial filmic collage. This open structure mirrors the flexibility with which sexuality plays out on screen. In "Normal Love," gender is an orgy of mascarading identities. Smith's creatures seem to dwell in a feminine-androgynous utopia. Men and women are indistinguishable from one another in their bejeweled costumes, pancake makeup, and languid, overwrought gestures. Smith's personal mythology of C-list vamps and movie monsters is enacted by '60s counterculture fixtures including Beverly Grant as the Cobra Woman, avant-drag performer Mario Montez as a mermaid who bathes in milk, falsetto-voiced bizarro ukulelist Tiny Tim as a besotted Terpsichorean character known as the "Gilde…
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