Jerk: gore porn

There is in London a tourist trap called the London Dungeon. Amongst its most prized exhibits is something called the Jack the Ripper Experience.

It features recreations of the murder scenes from the 19th century and includes, I believe, lavish details of how the women were murdered. Jerk, currently on as part of the PuSh Festival, is the theatre equivalent.

I’ll go even further: it’s worse.

At least there is some honesty in the exploitative, hucksterism of the London Dungeon. I’m sure somewhere they use the word “education” in their promotional material but they - and those who go to that place – know the truth about why they are there: to indulge in gore porn. Unfortunately, the creators of Jerk are not as honest with themselves or their audiences. Jerk is gore porn and the creators are not sophisticated enough to make it any more than that. This show has less intelligence – and certainly less integrity – than the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (original or sequel, take your pick). 

Here’s another reason that Jerk loses out to the London Dungeon. The murders that Jack the Ripper committed have passed into some form of queasy (and to my mind unfathomable) folklore; no one is alive from that time to be offended. Jerk is a “reimagining” (whatever that means) of a case that happened well within living memory.  Some guy named Dean Corll murdered at least 25 males in Houston in the mid-70s. The young men and boys that were murdered would have been the same age as my older brothers. These boys died horrible deaths.  For real. Not in someone’s fevered imagination. The families of these boys are still living with a mixture of pain and guilt that none of us (and clearly not the creators of Jerk) can imagine. These boys and their families deserve better than to be exploited by a bunch of middle-brow artists looking to be edgy and transgressive.

The audience is meant to be a class of psychology students (you wouldn’t know this unless you read the promotional material before-hand) watching David Brooks, one of Corll’s accomplices, tell us of his experience. The Brooks character uses puppets to re-enact what happened to him. I suppose this is to show us that David is really a child and not fully developed. Jonathan Capdevielle does intense “crazy” for us. And while I have nothing but admiration for the performer – he is charismatic – this is not a performance layered with truth. This is crazy via-Hollywood, complete with voices in the head and drool. In fact, Jerk owes a lot to Hollywood, including its creepy/intense horror-movie soundtrack and the way that Corll refuses to die (he even pops up again for a final go – just like Robert De Niro in Cape Fear).

In his curator’s notes, Norman Armour compares Jerk to Greek tragedy. I don’t see it. While Greek tragedy dealt with grim situations, it was based on myths and focused on the dramatic tension that led to and arose from violent actions. The violence took place off stage because theatre was considered a holy place, so to kill someone on stage was to kill them in the real world. Jerk doesn’t provide us with dramatic situations (except for the sexual tension between David and another young man named Wayne), instead we read them in a “fanzine” that’s handed out to the audiences. The performance then takes us down into the basement for the murders and torture. This is – I imagine – meant to evoke the disassociative experience of reading about a murder and then imagining it. No doubt the creators think this is a clever and sophisticated. It’s not.

The director, Gisele Vienne, in an interview in the UK Times explains the show in the following manner:

I do it for national health. I am interested in an honest approach. We all sometimes have bad thoughts, but the bad thought doesn’t mean bad action. We accept that we are all haunted and that we are all more or less perverts. To be able to face these bad thoughts honestly is the important thing.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t have fantasies about fisting the corpses of teenage boys or hacking off their legs so I can have easier access to their assholes. Vienne and her writer-collaborator Dennis Cooper (“the most dangerous man in America” or some such bullshit) do not explore transgressive fantasies that the majority of us have indulged in; rather they show us material that is beyond most of us to comprehend. There is no attempted explanation of why something like this might take place, no real exploration of the impact on David (except that he’s CrAzY), not even an evocation of what happens inside of us when we do read – by accident or on purpose – the details of a gruesome murder.  All we’re left with is wincing or looking away while Capdevielle goes through his repertoire of sound-effects and puppetry tricks. Vienne should just be honest and say she is into gore porn. And this is something she has in common with teenage boys, not with the vast majority of our society. If a thirteen year-old were to come up with a cool idea for a play, Jerk might be what he would create.

For his part it would seem that Cooper has made a career out of writing about the intersection of teenage violence and homo-erotic desire. Perhaps the most offensive element in Jerk is that the victims desire their death. Is this true? Did the boys long for their own deaths or is it some sort of psychological projection on the part of Cooper? I have no idea. But you know, this guy is 55 and surely he is old enough to move on from this subject matter. And, as a gay man, perhaps he should look into his soul for a few minutes and wonder why he feels he has to commit violence to the objects of his desire.

So here is my message to the creators of this work: grow up. And here is my question to the people who supported this production and brought it to Vancouver: why?

Oh, and by the way, there are people in Texas who deserve an apology.