★★★★           By Z.P. Kibbleworth               January 27, 2090

There’s a story that has been passed around film circles so long it’s become more of an urban legend: in 2038, after a screening of his film Urologists Don’t Know Ball in Glasgow, the always-volatile director Vic Lickstick held a Q&A with the audience, and one person asked him, “Do you think that in 50 years this film will still have any value?” In response to this, Lickstick yelled, “If the future wants to fuck me, I’ll have you know that I charge 50 bucks for the service,” then proceeded to bound into the audience, drag the questioner on stage, and publicly spank him. Now, the spanking is usually the part that gets emphasized, usually by fantasizing filmmakers waxing about how audiences these days never grow up with any discipline, but allow me to turn the focus to the verbal response Lickstick gave. He frames being criticized by later viewers as a service one pays to the future. To any film we call a classic of trash cinema and revel in tearing apart, we owe that film for the material it gave us. And more than just providing fodder for our carnivorous viewing tendencies, each present failure also adds to the wealth of material future films can build on. Every film owes a debt of gratitude to all the films on whose shoulders it stands, even if by standing on them it tramples them. Now, maybe Lickstick didn’t mean any of this and was just spouting nonsense (it’s plausible, given he’s known to have had a severe cocaine problem in this period). But I think there’s still wisdom to be found in his statement, intentionally there or not. All this is a very roundabout way of saying: the lifespan of a film is more than just its theatrical run, or even the period in which it is seen. A film lives on in all the films afterward that build on, respond to, or in some way engage with it. And under this view, Glitterganja is back from the dead.

The movement’s revival comes in the form of the new film Oswaldo’s Throbbing Dream, directed by Lou Epicure, which recently won the Golden Zucchini award at the Veggielicious Film Festival. The film’s title character is banished from his suburban home upon turning eighteen and embarks on a surrealistic journey partly along the New Jersey Turnpike and partly along a psychedelic space that feels as though Woodstock has taken over the Yellow Brick Road. He encounters strange characters along his journey: Shastafina, Muse of Big Toaster Energy, played by an unrecognizable Indira Dellanova as a sort of robot fish drag queen; a propellor hat that names itself The Physical Embodiment of Deontology; and the spirit of Ronald Reagan housed inside an anthropomorphic frog. The “throbbing” aspect of his dream manifests in a literal sense through tentacles that begin growing out of his neck and quickly begin getting into arguments with each other over the proper way to make a grilled cheese sandwich. I should mention this is all within the film’s first twenty minutes.

There are the obvious similarities to Glitterganja in the film’s look and feel. Visually, it is a constant dance of deep neons in an ever-shifting color grade that resembles the work of Andy Warhol. Its psychedelia manifests clearly in the surreal characters described above, but also in its avoidance of representational imagery. The film makes extensive use of rear projection to turn its backgrounds from places into abstract artworks, like living Rothkos. But what makes me so keen on declaring Oswaldo’s Throbbing Dream a revival of Glitterganja has less to do with these elements than with the ideology behind them. The Glitterganja movement began in the early 2030s as a fusion of countercultural spheres. As political conservatives pressed down ever harder on the lives of queer people, artists in those communities hearkened back to the drug-heavy rebellions of the 1960s. Glitterganja artists brought the freedom and psychedelic expression of 1960s counterculture to the queer communities of their day. The central ethos of the movement was always one of brazen defiance, embracing all of the uniqueness and self-expression conservatives sought to eliminate and pressing it even further. Glitterganja was never about vibrant colors, zany characters, and acid trips. It was about freedom, rebellion, and self-discovery. While the iconography of Glitterganja survived in its inspiration of further movements, the heart of the movement died out as it became absorbed by the dominant culture and the anti-queer upheaval was increasingly snuffed out. But with Oswaldo’s Throbbing Dream, we now have a film that brings back that rebellious spirit nearly sixty years later.

The reason behind Oswaldo’s banishment from his parents’ home at the start of the film is never explicitly stated, nor does the film ever overtly specify Oswaldo’s sexual orientation, but the implication, through coded dialogue and the iconography he encounters throughout his journey, is that Oswaldo is not straight and this had a good deal to do with why he is no longer welcome at home. What happens to Oswaldo throughout the rest of the film can roughly be described as a journey of self-discovery; at the beginning of the film he is a terrified boy alone in a dangerous world, by the end he is the lead guitarist for a band of tattered smelly socks and puppets made out of moldy baseball cards. The film’s drama hinges on Oswaldo’s refusal to conform to the standards of the world that rejected him, and instead embracing the surreal and nonsensical world he ventures into.

What constitutes rebellion today is certainly different from what did in the heyday of Glitterganja. The queerness that became the movement’s marquee has been more or less entirely integrated into society, and so the queer element of Oswaldo’s Throbbing Dream fades into the subtext. But we still live in an age of conformity and repression, only defined more by the dominant terranism that demand one comply with the prescribed cultural identity of their home planet or moon than by fighting among other various ethnic and social groups. Hence the rebellion of Oswaldo’s Throbbing Dream manifests as a refusal to adhere to anything Earth claims it stands for. The characters of the film resemble a circus, filled with the kind of so-called freaks and oddities which terranist rhetoric uses to describe the inhabitants of other planets. The film’s dive into the surreal, the psychedelic, and the sexual rejects all the claims of seriousness and civilization which fuel this planet’s colonialism. Implicitly the film makes the claim that the very things which Earth points to on other worlds as proof of their inferiority exist on this very planet, only shoved out of sight.

Glitterganja has long been a cinematic realm I hold quite dear, and so no doubt it gives me joy to see it so grandly revitalized. But that is not the thing which makes Oswaldo’s Throbbing Dream a remarkable film. It is a film with its own identity, breaking its own ground, and what it brings us is not merely Glitterganja repackaged for the present day, but the potential for an entirely new form of subversive filmmaking. The promise that Oswaldo’s Throbbing Dream makes, and which I hope later films will act on, is that we can go beyond the path laid by Glitterganja into uncharted territory, and break the cinematic norms that have yet to be broken. The only limits are the courage filmmakers have for unchained self-expression, and that is something about which I have little reason to worry.