BANNED:
Cocksucker Blues
Dir: Robert Frank
(1972)
BANNED is a series of reviews focusing on films that have been censored, boycotted or suppressed.
Mick Jagger’s mouth seems to be everywhere in Cocksucker Blues: grazing the microphone as he performs, dabbed with makeup backstage, hanging slackly open during an interview as his words spill out. Already cartoonish, the mouth takes on even greater prominence in the eerie blue light of the film – directed by Robert Frank and never actually released – standing out as a grossly expressive metonymic symbol.
“You have to interpret the mouth like it’s satire,” Don Delillo writes in his novel Underworld, where the lost film pops up repeatedly, as a mysterious cult object and signifier of cultural decay. Shot in 1972 as the Rolling Stones toured America in support of Sticky Fingers, Cocksucker was muzzled by the band for its inappropriate content. Even now it remains imprisoned, thanks to a court order allowing screenings only when the director is present. Its lure has a lot to do with this legendary status, granting a nearly mythic quality after 37 years under wraps.
Beyond the legend, the film is most significant as a document, a rare example of unfettered access to a big name act, which, as its illegal status proves, is nearly impossible to find. While shooting, Frank gave free reign to anyone who wanted it, leaving cameras and film scattered about backstage and in hotel rooms. This allowed the members of the Stones’ freewheeling entourage the chance to document themselves, whether the band was present or not.
A surprising feature of this approach is how often they aren’t. Unlike most rock documentaries, there’s no great concern with following the band around. The focus is more on capturing the aura emanating from them, creating a gritty, dream-like disaster whose piecemeal construction assures that any potential statement is put together after the fact. By implementing chaos into his process, Frank, primarily a visual artist and photographer, assures he has no direct control over his materials, leaving us with a kind of distorted found object.
The footage finds a voice in the editing room, where these loose chunks of saturnalia are shaped into cohesive document, one that’s less concerned with telling a story than presenting a definitive mood. Like Gimme Shelter which bent its captured footage into a sinister divining rod toward the eventual murder of Meredith Hunter, Cocksucker’s parts are cobbled together with a definite purpose, forming a morbidly dull portrait of excess. What we’re shown is raw, bizarre, and fairly often, gross. Jagger snorts coke off a switchblade, groupies and roadies shoot up in hotel rooms, Charlie Watts tries, with some difficulty, to order three apples from room service.
Under this treatment, the entire tour blurs together, dissolving into a sickly-sweet puddle of aimless debauchery. Rather than hint at backstage antics, Frank openly presents them, and what he reveals is less exciting and sexy than haggardly dissipated. The rock-star fantasy bubble is burst. In the film’s most famous scene, a small orgy erupts on the band’s tour plane. They seem jovial about it at first, dancing around and shaking maracas, but before long retire to their chairs, bored, to sit back, read and sleep. The sex continues around them.
It’s this illusion shattering presentation that has forced Cocksucker’s suppression. Its portrayal is too bold, too lurid, too unflattering for the band or its handlers to allow, even if this is The Rolling Stones, whose entire image is built around the lurid suggestion of this kind of lifestyle. By pushing through suggestion into reality, Frank explores a divide between the slickly presented and the grimly actual. The band’s calling card may be exaggerated excess – Jagger’s lips are their logo, after all, but this persona gets its power from the alluring connotations held by this kind of excess. The reality of it, meanwhile, verges on disgusting and the band, rather than immersed in revelry, seems bored. Repeated shots of them about to go on stage, being brushed down with makeup, establish a visual motif, hinting at the preparation that must occur before they can be publicly presented.
On a song like “Moonlight Mile”, a relic of this period, Jagger speaks of his exhaustion, lamenting the toll taken by this kind of lifestyle. But is this a real emotion? Is his expression a genuine feeling or another facet applied to the band’s sordid image? Is there really any difference? Through its full-scale immersion and lack of filter, Cocksucker Blues examines these issues, cutting through the pre-fabricated grit and innuendo with focus, establishing itself as one of the few truly dangerous films.
by Jesse Cataldo
