Party Monster

We already had one by this title. It's not my fault they made two Party Monsters. This one is the orginal, and lesser known version : Party Monster 1998, by Fenton Bailey, with the actual historical characters involved : Michael Alig, apparently interviewed in the most glamorous interiors the penitentiary could fabulously provide ; the actual Cynthia Haatajaⁱ ; the genuinely stroke surviving Mme. Alig ; the truly obscenely fat Brooke Humphreys, with that batracian wattle of hers ; the aging clerk of the whole shebang -- all of them coming at you live, in all their sordid, trite irrelevancyⁱⁱ. Documentary style!

I generally don't like documentaries, but here the vehicle is profoundly adequate. How else would we have intuited why exactly Beavis and Butthead chuckle the way they do, or for that matter why they even exist at all ?

Anyway. Suzanne feeds you tea and oranges, same shit for a different generation. Functionally illiterate, that's what it means : complete inadherence to history, so everything has to be re-done all the time for each new crop of innocent cowsies.

1. Generally known as "Gitsie". She was a potential witness in Peter Gatien's "racketeering and conspiracy" trial based on fabricated evidence set to begin on January 14th, but was found dead by a roommate at 1129 47th Ave Long Island City on January 12th, 1998. These things happen.

   The footage, showing a tired girl without a septum reclining against some cheap imitation-pinewood paneling is valuable because even in her beat-up shape, as a fifty-year old tramp and streetwalker aged 22, there's a fundamental quality that very well conveys -- a warm, loving, caring feminity that was caught outside the sliding doors and drug against the concrete for a few blocks. It's impossible to look at her and not think of Adriana. It's impossible to look at her and not whisper to oneself, "io la conoscevo bene". It's just what it is.

   Chloe Sevigny turns out an exceptional cast for this part in the later film. Whether it's research that allows her to convey the same or just sheer luck (or, uncharitably, the trite banality of womanhood that makes them all a reasonable replacement for each other), the artifice is so exquisite as to pass for life. There are no greater accomplishments in the craft -- this, or any other. [↩]

2. Do you understand that the height of this "scene" consists of finally daring to implement the tiredest of barracks jokes, to this day a favourite of migrant agricultural workers and other daring youths of the preoraseneasca milieu ? Really, took a leak in a bottle and had someone drink from it ? Wowza, I totally have to leave Tashkent & Bishkek behind an' go straight to New York for such refinements of elite glamour and fabulous fucktardry.

   Such outrageous, I am epatee'd! [↩]