Good ol’ sleaze. By my Texan definition: it’s not just someone or something slippery and immoral. It’s an entire aesthetic.
In art, you can’t intentionally manufacture it, and for the most part, it’s extinct. It won’t be coming back, either, in any sanctioned form, because the feminization of culture has seen to it that sleaze’s practitioners, almost exclusively transgressive men with their finger on the pulse of humanity’s more anti-social tendencies, have been driven underground, or really, not even allowed to exist.
Sleaze’s aesthetic is cheap and putrid, and it’s also foreign and upsetting to contemporary sensibilities.
Sleaze in art has a very 1970s bent, too (its prime era), dosed with psychedelia, though it’s decidedly anti-hippie. On that note: Technology and sleaze don’t mix. Tech is too clean and ordered—it’s fascistic in its binary code. Sleaze is liberated. I realize porn and memes can be sleazy-ish, but materially comfortable trolls can’t produce authentic sleaze on computers, however much they’d like to. Sleaze requires physical space and collaboration. Sleaze’s impact, in art, is that it’s ripe with actual threat and creeping repulsion—with the dread of imminent bodily harm or corruption.
My favorite examples of Texas-made sleaze in art are the movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original from 1974, shot around Round Rock by Tobe Hooper, and the early years of the band the Butthole Surfers, who kicked off their run in San Antonio in the late ‘70s. Real art sleaze happens when its makers have nothing to lose, no reason to check their impulses, and they feel like showing off. It revels in its physical freedom. It’s more than a little nihilistic, and it has a distinctly pathological stamp.
Before anyone gets the idea that I have a particular taste for these things: punk and post punk? Yes. Horror? Nope. But allow my moment of nostalgia. This is a eulogy to an aesthetic and human behavioral truth, however rarely it occurred successfully in art, that once had a lot of power in our culture. Especially in America. Sleaze in art, of course, intersects directly with exploitation and genre. Its makers were absolutely in on its irony, but they were also committed to it, and they worked in unfettered conditions, ones that allowed for the weird intersection of qualities sleaze needs in order to surface.
When directors like Quentin Tarantino—I love him—and Robert Rodriguez or Rob Zombie try to reconstitute sleaze in newer genre movies (some filmed in Texas), they miss the mark. Not to say these aren’t successful movies on their own right. But these directors would love to tap authentic sleaze, and yet it can’t be forced. Their wealth and comfort preclude it.
So: Texas sleaze? I’d argue the state of Texas was an especially fecund environment for it once upon a time, given its libertarian tendencies, backcountry isolation, love affair with alcohol and ammo, and the distinction of being awash in both churches and the all-nude clubs of yore. There’s an alchemical dose of hypocrisy relevant to sleaze—having sprung from the Bible Belt is a feature of Texas sleaze’s appeal. (Though early John Waters movies, made in Baltimore, are good, fun Yankee sleaze.) Disgust is its calling card. Sleaze shows us the worst of us. When you stumble upon people who reek of real-world sleaze, you turn around and leave.
Established artists, like Zombie, can try again and again to capture its essence, or performance artists like Christeene, but these ultimately read as homages to sleaze (nothing wrong with that!), rather than actual sleaze. I don’t believe for a minute that Zombie or Christeene are going to damage me. I wouldn’t have made that bet about a Butthole Surfers’ show back in 1982, and the set of Chainsaw was notoriously dangerous, and that sordidness and chaos comes through on the celluloid. Sleaze is, above all, trashy: it’s poverty-stricken and unregulated, and it’s allowed to rib you. There’s no money or conscientiousness there to ensure civility or safety. That’s why you can’t fake it.
(Harmony Korine makes work that can feel really sleazy, but, I mean, in my humble non-professional opinion, I also suspect he’s a psychopath.)
The prime era of exploitation films happened when it did—after the fall of the big studio system—because on the more remote independent sets that followed, there was no such thing as intimacy coordinators or hyper-regulated unionized stunts. Those things developed in our era of encroaching liability and litigiousness. (For a buzzy, if not sometimes harrowing, documentary on unregulated filmmaking, I recommend Not Quite Hollywood, about ‘70s and ‘80s exploitation movies made in Australia—which as we all know is, or was before Covid, the Texas of the Commonwealth.) And as for for the post-punk of the Butthole Surfers—the carnival sideshow stunts of the live shows were not faked. Gibby Haynes shot loaded guns, many things were impulsively set on fire, naked women shat on stage—and there’s no way a rock club would let a band get away with any of that now.
It’s counter-intuitive for a careful and considerate person to lament that a movie like the 1974 version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre will never be made again, or that a band like the early Butthole Surfers wouldn’t be able to pull their stunts again. I mean, should we care? For those of you unfamiliar with the movie or the band, it must all sound so debased.
But here’s what I do lament. We’ve seen an incredible expansion of human narratives in art. This is good. We’ve also seen an alarming swing toward a conservatism that comes with the new morality codes in art. We’re getting a lot of art that tells us what to think and how to feel about it, before we even get to decide. This is not a liberated or liberating experience for many artists, or audiences. I think what chafes about it is that we sense we’re in an ever-narrowing valley of what’s acceptable or possible, and also: everything needs to be viable now, for the sake of money interest.
The only time I’ve ever sat through The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was, oddly, one night on my own when I was living in London. Some UK channel aired it unedited. I faltered onto it—it was just starting, and it had an ineffable, fucked-up quality that alarmed me immediately. I hadn’t seen the listing, but I knew what movie it was. In my deeply Texan bones I was sure that that sleaze, that feel, was Texan, and it was potent. I turned it off. Five minutes later, I turned it back on and watched the whole thing. I’ve often said that it was one of the biggest mistakes of my life.
But more honestly, and increasingly, I cherish that memory, that experience, because even then, in 2001, I was sure I was watching a thing that couldn’t be made ever again. Even a few years ago, I may not have felt that as a major loss. I do now.
Love the description of you stumbling on TCM in London. “one of the biggest mistakes of my life” YIKES! I hate horror movies and I’ve never seen it. Now I know I never will.
What about the musician who peed on the guy’s face onstage?
I agree, the Wokesters are pious and annoying, but I do think there are sleazy flowers peeking through cracks in the concrete.