The Legend of Leigh Bowery

Directed by Charles Atlas

Starring Leigh Bowery, with Boy George, Lucien Freud, Damien Hurst, Bella Freud, Michael Clark and Rifat Ozbek

90 minutes runtime

USA Release Date: November, 2003

Unrated

Rating (out of 5 stars)--***

In inside look at London’s “Culture of Outrage” during the 1970s and 1980s via the experiences and inventions of Leigh Bowery, the pre-eminent fashion designer of the time and paradigm smasher par excellance.  Responsible for giving life to fashions that were beyond the unusual, Bowery’s creations were premeditated disturbances of the piece, and all the more so when coupled with his nearly unbelievable performances and music.

Anthropologists tell us there are cultures in which people do not wear clothing; but there are no cultures in which people do not wear ornaments.  How appropriate that Bowery should take clothing so totally out of the practical and turn it into his personal political statement.  His modus operandi was to systematically exaggerate every part of the body with the apparel that covered it; or almost covered it; or hideously uncovered it.

The clothing was no longer the medium, it was the message about the culture surrounding it; such as a wig intentionally worn off-kilter, or so badly made that the stitching and fabric showed through.  How like society, at times---so poorly covering the emperor with no clothes.  Bowery was homosexual from the start and apparently told his mother, when he was in secondary school, that his school uniform was his best asset for getting sex.  But although gay culture and the drag queen scene formed the background for Bowery’s life, there was more to his fashions than that.  The “culture of outrage” says it all.

I reviewed the DVD version of this film, which includes extensive interviews with his father and sister.  His sister knew the whole story about Leigh from the beginning---his outrageous gayness and his excessive sexuality.  His parents actually worked for the Salvation Army and were part of the most religious and conservative element of Australian society.  Given this sort of life-contradiction, Bowery had a tremendous set-up to transform what could have been a rather mean persona into one that included ample elements of hilarious humor.

Unfortunately his humor didn’t always make it through the exposure of his sexuality; like the time he returned home to Australia having made his fortune in London and performed for the first time in front of his parents, family and their close Salvation Army friends.  The whole story of this event didn’t make it into the film, other than reports that people stood up and left, and his mother was reduced to tears for days.  But still, you get the idea.  It was impossible for humor, admittedly black humor, to not find a way into his antics and into the story of his life.  There will always be a place in America’s heart for the truly unrepentant and extreme non-conformist.

Rather than trying to disguise his six foot, 200+ pound frame, Bowery exaggerated it and challenged viewers to counter his enactment of the “big boned woman” extraordinaire.  His dresses were as wide as airplane landing strips and they flowed like the Mississippi River. He was a master of pratfalls.  He would first command the gaze of his hapless audience, whether they were watching him on TV or watching him walk by on the street.  Then he would bump into things, break things, fall over and/or drag others over with him.  Good humor, but, of course, the alcohol helped.

If the eyes themselves were too ordinary, he wore huge fake glasses with eyes on them.  If the physical appearance of the head and face got in the way, he wore head gear that covered them.  There was no escape from his art; you had to look at it.  His extensive use of piercings included household items like safety pins, often attached to chains that draped around his ample figure in a bizarre parody of the banker familaris with the gold watch and chain hanging from the vest pocket.

Bowery was able to take his static art onto the performing stage with his band “Minty” who conducted performances that will never be seen again (of course, their are many who feel that is best for the performing arts).  But if one feels, like Neil Young, that “you don’t get many chances to play in front of a crowd that’s booing, so you have to take full advantage” then these performances are a treasure.  Whether it’s singing a song naked and suspended upside down and being swung through a plate glass window, or engineering an on-stage enema with fallout rivaling that of Hiroshima, Bowery’s sound and fury pelted the establishment like hailstones and locusts raining down on crops in Kansas.

When he performs, there is simply nowhere to hide.  The closest he ever got to a permanent venue was the Taboo club, which he rented one night a week in order to have full control over the artistic statements presented therein.  These included various upside down acts, standing on a stool and bashing his head into light bulbs and, of course, the inevitable pig-pile of bodies that he always seemed to cause by the end of the night. 

He met his soon-to-be wife at the Taboo and apparently they hit is off famously.  Sharing the deepest bonds of affection for one another, although sex was apparently something Bowery wanted to “get out of the way so they could be friends.”  Whether this is Platonic, or psychotic, will remain up to the judgment of Bowery’s public.  But his wife was in the hospital with him when he died of AIDS related causes at the age of 34, on New Year’s Eve of 1994.  There is nothing in her filmed testimony that leads us to believe she would have had him any other way.  His honesty with her was complete, at least as complete as he could muster considering his outlook on life; and the love she shared with him was shared amongst others as well, in more ways than one.  He died looking into her eyes.