The Movie Orgy (Joe Dante, 1968).
The title is a kind of ontological dare: can an assemblage of movies all lay on top of each other, swap positions, feel each other? Surely humans love, as they say, “to watch,” to raise voyeurism up as art. But when left to its own devices, does cinema also experience such base urges?
Asked another way: when we say “the movie orgy,” don’t we mean “editing”? Disparate parts colliding with and enveloping one another, penetrating and being penetrated, and finally mutating after coming together? Cinema is transformed by—and transforms (us) through—the spaces between the images. A classier writer might cite Robert Bresson, speaking to Cahiers du cinéma at Cannes in 1957: “The cinema must express itself not with images, but with relationships between images, which is not at all the same thing.” A happy vulgarian—I betray that I am one, as I suspect Joe Dante, the man behind The Movie Orgy (1968), is—might highlight the way Bresson wraps up that same point: “The first image is neutral, but in the presence of another, it vibrates [...] Beginning with the moment when the image vibrates, we are making cinema.”
The Movie Orgy is Joe Dante’s vibrational ode to orgiastic bad taste. Made in collaboration with future Robocop executive producer Jon Davison while the two were seniors at the Philadelphia College of Art, the film takes its name seriously: Orgy is a composite monster, a sprawling and shifting body of a thousand bodies, incorporating footage from a galaxy of American images just-post-one-war and mired in another. Atomic-age newsreels and chirpy updates from the front lines in Vietnam (spoiler: it’s going well) rub up against commercials enraptured by suburban fantasia, as well as clips from B-movies of dubious origin and slapdash composition. The cast includes the giant gila monster from Ray Kellogg’s The Giant Gila Monster (1959), a battalion of rhythmless youths stiffing along to “Walk Like a Man” on American Bandstand, then-candidate Richard Nixon sweating out “...sock it to me?” during his unhomely, pre-election image tune-up on Laugh-In, and hundreds (thousands?) more. The spaces between the denizens of this psychic junk drawer collapse and expand, throttle and vibrate; drop your keys in a bowl and take your pick. Don’t like your partner? Wait a minute, somebody else is just around the film platter.
The DCP that is currently in circulation—transferred from Dante’s original 16mm print—runs 275 minutes long, which is nothing compared to the original seven-hour cut that Dante and Davison would lug around college campuses in the sixties and seventies. And so it is a beautiful fool’s errand to try and account for every cinematic artifact that appears in The Movie Orgy. This isn’t to say that the film feels random or unconsidered. Tune in and watch this movie-thing recreate the limited and beautiful human urge to make meaning from the collisions between fragments: here’s John T. Coyle’s Queen Esther (1948)—“You’re the envy of every maiden in the land. But Esther, remember that you are not to make it known to anyone that you are a Jew”—and then a cut to that film’s ending title card (“The End”...as if), and then a cut to a minute-and-a-half of Krazy Kat played without interruption and in earnest, and then a cut to Mighty Mouse in full PSA mode squeaking out “Wasn’t that good? And now for some more cartoon fun!”, and then a cut to an instructional video about proper tampon usage. And then? “I’m sure you think that’s funny,” an unknown actress says to an unknown actor.
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (Fred F. Sears, 1956).
On the one hand, we should acknowledge that this is all junk. Some junk is admirable: Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) crashes Harryhausen’s stop-motion poetry straight into Washington Mall monuments; Return of the Ape Man (1944) reminds us that Bela Lugosi never went into cruise control on a movie screen, not even in a Monogram quickie sequel to schlock. Some junk is plain junk: the Coronet Instructional Media short High School Prom (1958) is both boring and noxious in its rank frankness about white suburban norms. But The Movie Orgy recontextualizes this boredom by transforming the small-town objects of marketing into narrative subjects in a mash-up film. The very people for whom so much of the “movie” part of The Movie Orgy was made are forced to navigate those images as co-stars. To watch them is to remember that all of these images were meant to be seen, albeit mostly by a specific, proximate cultural milieu. High School Prom can’t conceive of a spectator who doesn’t exactly resemble the bodies who populate its celluloid. It assumes the universal viewer must either idolize or aspire to its proposed design for living. Thus, The Movie Orgy removes the expected universality of spectatorship as it strips the product for parts; we aren’t subjected to this suburban hell as a base inevitability, but rather, are challenged to absorb its blasé horror from a critical distance. When we remove the source context, we set the image free to mean less, and in so doing, move more people. It’s all comedy, and grandly so—“smile though your heart is aching / Smile even though it’s breaking”—but instead of prompting dissociation, it encourages attachment, a desire to make meaning. “If you’re just going to make fun of something for five hours, that’s kinda nihilistic,” Dante notes in a recent interview with Colin Souter.
America exposes itself in its waste, The Movie Orgy argues. The formalism of ’50s Biblical epics is recontextualized to appear to be (as it always was) casual antisemitism. Cartoons are great, as long as they are deployed to hock studio and status quo public messaging. Sex is a thing to repress or discuss in limited and clinically cold detail, and grade-school health class is the extent to which we pay attention to reproductive health. “The end”’ is always a joke. The bomb drops or it doesn’t; we live and look until we don’t. Eventually, we’ll become waste, too. As portraiture, The Movie Orgy mirrors our anxieties and exaltations, our daily life of absurd and pleasurable ephemerality.
Or atomized another way: The Movie Orgy is about drawing lines that span the psychic distance between popular culture and the postwar/prewar/forever-war American Empire. Ray Kellogg, maker of the monsterpiece The Giant Gila Monster (1959), was a special effects artist and director for 20th Century Fox. Before that, he served in World War II, in the OSS Field Photography division led by John Ford. Gila Monster is exactly the kind of atomic-age sci-fi that ignites Dante’s nostalgia and imagination. A low-budget genre film that subjects an American idyll (somewhere “in the enormity of the west,” an offscreen narrator intones) to a monster of uncharted origin or motive, the film is as titillated by the empty-headed, white “youth culture” as it is distanced from it, culminating as it does at a sock hop and in the transformation of the teenage hero, Chase Winstead, into a kind of avenger of domestic settlement. As the monster bears down on the small town, Chase packs his hot rod full of nitroglycerin and rigs it to run straight into the gila monster. Explosion and resolution; once more, a bomb in the desert saves the town from alien menace.
Also featured prominently in Orgy is another Kellogg film, The Green Berets (1968), a jingoistic, xenophobic screed that vociferously sought to rebuke then-popular anti-war sentiment. The Green Berets—co-directed with John Wayne and (uncredited) Warners/MGM journeyman, Mervyn LeRoy—received full material support from Lyndon B. Johnson and the US Department of Defense. The film is a very literal gesture of American militarism, but its anticipated viewer isn’t the colonized subject or even the foot soldier of imperialism; The Green Berets is aimed at the domestic front, the sock-hop-prom crowd. Like Chase Winstead emerging from youth culture an avenging serviceman, The Green Berets agitates polite society (its “target audience”) with shockwaves of fearmongering over the international situation. It proposes retribution—and so military service—as a predetermined, noble end. It enlists the spectator’s imagination and exploits genre filmmaking’s own exploitative tendencies in order to frame the Vietnam War as narratively righteous in the minds of a consumerist class.
The Giant Gila Monster (Ray Kellogg, 1959).
The monster movie and war movie genres collapse when tracing the career of this single Hollywood journeyman; the fantastic movie monster is turned into a material one from abroad, and both films teeter on the thin line between protecting an American way of life and insisting that apocalypse is inevitable. It’s a move Dante would exercise with deadly precision in his narrative works, like Matinee (1993), itself a fictionalized celebration of a William Castle-type exploitation director in a very real 1962 Key West, FL. That film’s young cast vanquishes their foe—the specter of lost innocence and nuclear annihilation in a long, long summer—by leaning into camaraderie and crushes and schlocky films. And when the film concludes with its kid hero and kid heroine walking together on a beach, it feels like an allowance of sentimentality, which is jarring from the man who made an edit of monstered skin in The Howling (1981), and who killed Santa-dad down the chimney in Gremlins (1984) a few years later. But in the last moments of Matinee, the camera swoops out on a crane shot. “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” begins to play. Just before the credits roll, as we hear, “In the jungle / The mighty jungle,” a Sikorsky helicopter—parent company Lockheed Martin—enters the frame, and will be the last thing we see before the movie ends. The Sikorsky UH-34D became the most-used helicopter by the United States Marines in the Vietnam War, the looming conflict that so many of Matinee’s youthful chorus would be prime draft-age for.
In choices like this, we see how The Movie Orgy rehearses the motion that would typify Dante’s work as he grew from campus mashup pirate in the late sixties, to Corman regular throughout the early seventies, to studio filmmaker throughout the eighties and nineties. Crucial to this motion is a decided rejection of selling out, both literally—Dante never hired a personal publicist—and filmically. His pictures retain their genre lunacy, their “lowness” even as they navigate the same issues that other filmmakers of his generation would explore in ways recognizable as “art” (Scorsese and Coppola), “spectacle” (Spielberg and Lucas), or “pastiche” (De Palma and Bogdanovich). And despite lacking an obvious (or obviously marketed) mark of auteurism, the films share a unifying consciousness from Dante, for whom the incorporation and suburbanization of America remains the original sin of the modern world. Through Matinee, The ’Burbs (1989), The Second Civil War (1997), and Small Soldiers (1998), Dante continually connects the American international war machine with the soft violence of the domestic American suburb. One can’t exist without the other—they are twin limbs spliced from the same imperial project. When, in Small Soldiers, Phil Hartman’s suburban bourgeois Phil Fimple asserts, over the hum of his home entertainment system, “I think World War II was my favorite war,” I’m sure you think it’s funny. I do, and Dante does too. And then we all sigh.
Dante and Davison’s project is partly archival, which is to say: morphable. Bound only by the limitations of whatever new reels they could get their hands on, the filmmakers were constantly adding material and re-editing the cut, letting the absurdities they observed (that is, “real life”) influence the absurdity of this vast and ever-vaster movie monster. Of the Bufferin commercials, Dante admits, “Someone must’ve thought they were a good idea. They ran them once and then retired them. I happened to get a hold of the 16mm prints and put them in The Movie Orgy. Otherwise, nobody would’ve remembered they existed.” This is time capsule stuff, not far from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town dictum: “This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.” The way we were, The Movie Orgy suggests, in a feint and switch not far off Wilder’s play, is worse than the history textbooks would have us remember. In its constant reorganization of pre-baked cultural narratives, the film is an act of anti-nostalgia that archives Bufferin commercials and military PSAs as evidence of what passed for “regular” imagery in the postwar fifties. And the way we are, Dante insists, is more malleable than statuesque, as plastic as Daffy Duck smushing his body all around.
Unlike Our Town, though, The Movie Orgy doesn’t attempt to reflect on our consciousness of our existence. This speculative turbulence is the rare privilege of puerility; it’s not egging us on to complete an airtight analysis. “We would always tell them up front: you can go out, get a pizza, come back, and you won’t have missed anything,” Dante recalls. This admission isn’t posturing: you really can run out and get a pizza and then fall back under the Orgy’s spell. With its running time such a blatant dare, The Movie Orgy asks us to rethink what submitting our bodies to cinema means. Its method of hypnotism is a fevered Etch a Sketch reset-shake, but still it hypnotizes, and no less thoroughly than Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó (1994) or Lav Diaz’s A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery (2016). These objects of duration benefit as much from a pizza break as they do from complete submission. You can’t watch them incorrectly. You don’t have to know every strip or scrap of reference to “get” The Movie Orgy—cinema is not a thing to be fully known or conquered, just lived alongside.
The Movie Orgy (Joe Dante, 1968).
The Movie Orgy attains a kind of commercial-trailer logic wherein the camera eye is imbued with near omnipotence in service of hinting at—and crucially, always obscuring—a central mystery. That mystery is functionally a tension-building mechanism (“What happens next? Watch to find out!”), usually one subsumed into megaplex capitalism (“What happens in this product? Pay to find out!”). Is The Movie Orgy an experimental film? It thinks of editing as the primal act of creation and abhors the absorption of experimentation into the product-minded bottom line of commercial America. Is it, rather, an art exhibition? Instead of demanding viewers stay sutured to their auditorium seats, the film not only encourages, but expects them to wander as they watch. Is Orgy film criticism? Certainly, writing sentences “about” cinema can’t be the most productive strategy for relating how it moves, or for relating how it moves us. Why not Orgy it?
Among Dante’s subsequent features, a useful comparison for The Movie Orgy is Explorers (1985), a science fantasy film that sees its space-obsessed intrepid young heroes come face to face with two extraterrestrials, whose entire working knowledge of the planet Earth and its denizens are transmissions of old movies. A vulgarian could be forgiven for seeing two sophomoric Jersey film rats in the roles. There is, however, a better figurative stand-in for The Movie Orgy’s particular montage theory: the transformation of the Gremlins. In The Movie Orgy, the space between cuts is incubative. Images that have previously existed only as blasé acquiesce to—or worse, willing participants in—an American status quo are now chaotic, deployed to destabilize it. In Dante’s Gremlins (1984), the space that separates the cuddly and commodifiable mogwai from the dripping and wretched gremlin is an edit, a long one, albeit, but a cut nonetheless. Once made gremlin, the formerly passive product has agency enough, alongside a multitude of other cut monsters, to mount an assault on good taste. What do Gremlins want, ultimately? To go to the movies. To become the movies.
The Movie Orgy doesn’t simply expose or critique the American society whose excess produced it. Like its Gremlin brethren, it ultimately seeks reconstitution of the bourgeois society it is born into, placing it at definitive odds with 21st-century cinema’s fixation on reboots, re-ups, and repeats. Whatever it is, The Movie Orgy is the way that it finds us: whether we discover it for free on the Internet Archive, or in the communal dark of a movie house, on a digital print supervised by Dante himself, so long as the movie house in question doesn’t charge admission. “There is no booking fee for the DCP of The Movie Orgy,” reads the rights page on the American Genre Film Archive, “but it can only be booked if admission is not charged at the screening.” These instructions from Dante are partly logistical—after all, the film is constructed from copyrighted images—but can also be read philosophically, a reaction to the bankrupting system that policies film exhibition. Rather than engage with for-profit content models—and in doing so, reassert a status quo’s sociopolitical line—Dante’s lifelong project imagines a world as free as the image itself. He invites us to prank the image with the image, and as we brush each image up against the next, we transform, too.
The Movie Orgy (Joe Dante, 1968).