His art-house debut, ERASERHEAD (1977), possessed its own personal poetry of deformity, while his first mainstream film, THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980), featured a sequence set in a Belgian freakshow that owed much to Brownings FREAKS. Little wonder perhaps that David Lynch, the great American surrealist, should briefly be spoken of as director of a film adaptation. It embraced some science-fiction elements, in that some of the offspring had telekinetic or telepathic powers yet it was very much a literary work in its vividly florid (and occasionally sick-making) construction. Several decades removed from the era of the carny freakshow (already eliciting moral disgust and in decline by the 1930s), hers was a more surrealistic and darkly cynical view of the world in which natures anomalies made the best of it by putting themselves on display. Katherine Dunn was far from unaware of the controversial legacy of Brownings film when she wrote GEEK LOVE.
Its the able-bodied characters a predatory trapeze artist and her strongman lover who are the real monsters. But theres a poetic moralism at work in their decency and loyalty towards each other. We may baulk at the freakshow mentality that exploited authentically disabled people and squirm at the revenge sequence that shows them as near-monsters crawling through the mud. The main reason FREAKS banned in Britain for 30 years and not much seen till a brief spate of showing on Channel 4 in the 1980s holds up today is its strange mix of grotesquerie and sentimentality. Similarly, Lils children include Electra and Iphigenia, sexually promiscuous Siamese twins who recall the (presumably much more chaste) Daisy and Violet Hilton, British twins who performed a tap-dancing routine with Bob Hope prior to appearing in Brownings film.
#Arturo the aqua boy movie
For Lils offspring includes Arturo the Aqua Boy, who crawls along without limbs a fictional counterpart of Prince Randian, the Human Torso of Tod Brownings classic 1932 exploitation movie FREAKS. In this sense, Ms Dunn was being politically correct in calling her title characters geeks instead of freaks.
Lil is enterprising and wants to create her own familial stable of performers, abusing her body with pesticides, drugs and radiation to ensure she gives birth to deformed kids.
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The geek in GEEK LOVE, the cult 1989 novel by boxing journalist and devotee of bizarre Americana Katherine Dunn, is Lil Binewski a fallen member of Boston society who created her niche in the carny world via chicken slaughter. In the hand-to-mouth showmans world of the carny, if a guy had fallen off his bottom rung then, for the price of some straw to sleep in and a bottle of whisky a day to drink, hed to all extents and purposes become a wild man: snarling and growling at onlookers maybe biting the head off a hapless chicken that had been thrown his way. Geek Love The geek, in the American carnival tradition, is not physically deformed but a debased human being, maddened and made feral by his circumstances.
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