This article was downloaded by: [Florida State University]

On: 23 December 2014, At: 16:34

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Women & Performance: a journal of

feminist theory
Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwap20

Alien/ating lesbianism: Ugly sex and

postpunk feminist dystopia in Liquid
Sky
a
Yetta Howard
a
University of Southern California
Published online: 22 Jul 2011.

To cite this article: Yetta Howard (2011) Alien/ating lesbianism: Ugly sex and postpunk feminist
dystopia in Liquid Sky , Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 21:1, 41-61, DOI:
10.1080/0740770X.2011.563036

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2011.563036

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or
howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising
out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-
and-conditions
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
Vol. 21, No. 1, March 2011, 41–61

Alien/ating lesbianism: Ugly sex and postpunk

feminist dystopia in Liquid Sky
Yetta Howard*

University of Southern California

This article uses Liquid Sky to consider the possibilities of feminist

reorientations outside of formal and political orthodoxies and suggests
Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 16:34 23 December 2014

that such disengagements from the dominant are alienated from the
utopian rather than re-imagined as transgressive modes of utopian
resistance. These disengagements are theorized as a postpunk feminist
dystopia: that is, a de-emancipatory system of gendered and aesthetic
practices that spatio-sonically shapes queer female sexuality as extrinsic
to social and sexual ideals. This dystopia specifically frames the lesbian
subject as a bodily terrain of self-estrangement, and names the film’s
network of alienated corporeal, subcultural, and sonic space. Feminist
dystopia ultimately describes female empowerment’s precarious position
in a sexual and sonic landscape of non-normativity and offers a way
to visualize oppositional practices that do not readily correspond to
liberation.
Keywords: alienation; dystopia; postpunk; ugliness; feminism; lesbianism;
soundscape

Set in New York’s new wave subculture, Liquid Sky (Tsukerman 2000 [1982]) – slang
for heroin – begins with space aliens who, seeking to ‘‘steal’’ the opiates released
from heroin use, land on the roof of an apartment where heroin use is frequent and
ubiquitous. Androgynous scenester and new wave fashion model Margaret lives
in this apartment with her heroin-peddling, performance-artist girlfriend, Adrian.
Simultaneously desired and detested – by Adrian and everyone else in the film –
Margaret repeatedly encounters violent sexual advances. As the film progresses, the
aliens discover that there are better opiates released during orgasm, which they
proceed to obtain ‘‘through’’ Margaret’s body every time she has sex. Consequently,
obtaining the opiates also kills those with whom she has sex – the victims are speared
through the head with a small glass arrow and, eventually, all are vaporized after
they have an orgasm. Each instance that Margaret has sex in the film, it is coercive,
joyless, or unwanted; therefore she never has an orgasm and always survives.
But each of her partners has an orgasm and dies. The film’s sex scenes are also,
then, its death scenes. Because sex is used to transmit opiates to the space

*Email: yettahoward@yahoo.com

ISSN 0740–770X print/ISSN 1748–5819 online

ß 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/0740770X.2011.563036
http://www.informaworld.com
 42 Y. Howard

aliens, Margaret’s body becomes ‘‘literally’’ alienated and situates queer female
embodiment as more deadly than heroin addiction. Essentially a string of sex scenes
gone bad, Liquid Sky builds on this spatial-corporeal transfer of the opiates to
question Margaret’s agency within a self-obsessed and self-destructive environment
marked by negative pleasures and desires. Rather than anticipate a utopian world
beyond the confines of normative social space, the sexual ambiguity and drug use
associated with the new wave scene stands for a contradictory, defamiliarizing
feminist politics that incorporates what it appears to reject and rejects what it
appears to incorporate. In other words, reflected in a landscape whose visual-sonic
composition is at odds with itself is an equally anomalous feminism: it is one that
is disempowering.
This article uses Liquid Sky to consider the possibilities of feminist reorientations
outside of formal and political orthodoxies and suggests that such disengagements
Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 16:34 23 December 2014

from the dominant are alienated from the utopian rather than re-imagined as
transgressive modes of utopian resistance. I call these disengagements a postpunk
feminist dystopia: that is, a de-emancipatory system of gendered and aesthetic
practices that spatio-sonically shapes queer female sexuality as extrinsic to social
and sexual ideals. This dystopia specifically frames lesbianism as a bodily terrain
of self-estrangement, and names the film’s network of alienated corporeal,
subcultural, and sonic space. Feminist dystopia ultimately describes female
empowerment’s precarious position in a sexual and sonic landscape of non-
normativity and offers a way to visualize oppositional practices that do not readily
correspond to liberation.
Liquid Sky’s early 1980s release significantly places it in a moment when
totalizing notions of feminism were collapsing, when attention to differences among
women troubled second-wave feminist understandings of coalitional politics.
Feminism became defined by conflict as much as by alliance. Informed by feminist
resistance to a masculinist dominant, queer opposition to normative sexuality was
still moving toward someplace better, even if defined by distinctly non-hetero-
normative feminist ideals. ‘‘Feminist’’ and ‘‘dystopia’’ come together in this essay to
signify the limitations of liberatory queer and feminist politics within a postpunk
filmic landscape that is coextensive with its queer female sexuality. This notion
of feminist dystopia is in line with Dianne Chisholm’s work on queer literary avant-
garde practices that ‘‘treat reality with ‘pessimism’’’ (2005, 60) and that reflect
a skepticism around progress narratives in the realm of the urban and subcultural.
Feminist dystopia also resonates with Judith Halberstam’s politics of negativity
located in ‘‘the bleak and angry territories of the antisocial turn’’ (2006, 824); these
territories include a range of negative and violent affects inextricably linked with
queer archives outside the domains of gay male culture. In Cruising Utopia, on the
other hand, José Esteban Muñoz disavows what he calls a romance of negativity
and, in the context of mostly gay male sexual cultures, includes nuanced uses
of negativity in the service of a utopian queer politics. Discussing the aesthetic
theory of Ernst Bloch via the Marxist notion of ‘‘surplus value,’’ Muñoz writes,
‘‘The utopian function is enacted by a certain surplus in the work that promises a
futurity, something that is not quite here’’ (2009, 7). Conversely, feminist dystopia
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 43

promises nothing. While Margaret’s post-coital victims get vaporized, Margaret

always remains because she never comes, until she fully succumbs to the alien – her
alienation – and gets destroyed. In contrast to the use of ‘‘surplus,’’ then, the lesbian
subject instead figures as the ‘‘residue’’ (of the alien-orgasm), that which is left
behind and eventually dissolved, and with it, a viable feminist and queer anticipation
of being recuperated.
The futile recuperation in Liquid Sky comes from the vantage point of New York
postpunk culture, with Berlin, in particular, becoming the signifier of a never-to-be-
realized feminist and queer Utopia. On several occasions throughout the film,
Margaret’s girlfriend Adrian expresses the hope that she and Margaret will leave
New York for Berlin. Historically known for its thriving environment of feminist
politics and lesbianism,1 Berlin was also a hotbed of new wave music culture in the
early 1980s, even inspiring the name of American new wave group Berlin. Fittingly,
Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 16:34 23 December 2014

Berlin’s Pleasure Victim album was released in 1982, the same year as Liquid Sky,
and includes songs such as ‘‘The Metro,’’ and ‘‘Sex (I’m a . . . ),’’ synthpop anthems
to urban life and non-normative sexualities. While all of Margaret’s sex partners
literally become ‘‘pleasure victims,’’ Margaret’s lesbian body itself becomes a
dystopian landscape through which queer feminism, rather than ‘‘[getting] lost
in that magic place all alone now’’ (Berlin, ‘‘Sex (I’m a . . . ),’’ 1982), is simply just all
alone without a magic place.
Predating The Hunger’s (Tony Scott, 1983) release by one year and contempora-
neous with Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Liquid Sky premiered at the Montreal
World Festival in 1982 and was released as an independent feature in the United
States in 1983. The film had positive-leaning but mixed reviews, won various awards,
and was generally appreciated for its sophisticated special effects on a small budget.2
Crafting much of the equipment himself, director of photography Yuri Neyman
used a variety of techniques to give the film its striking new wave look. Without
necessarily appearing psychedelic, all of the orgasmic death scenes, as well as any
scene that is meant to be the alien’s perspective, have a metallic-liquid and heat-
sensitive-color quality, giving them a solarized visual effect, which was carried out
through ultraviolet light photography.3 Sped-up telephoto and time-lapsed shots of
the Manhattan skyline, particularly of the Empire State Building going from
dawn to dusk, along with shots of the busy city streets punctuate the film so that,
as Neyman explains, ‘‘‘It’s not the city of New York, but rather [it is] looked at as an
alien world’’’ (quoted in Trefz 1984, 71). In visually displaying its subcultural
nightscape, the film also makes heavy use of neon signs and lights in both the
apartment and club scenes, whose dwellers are adorned in elaborate new wave
costumes, fluorescent make-up, and day-glow colors that are not just reserved for
fashion shoots and club performances, but become their everyday wear. Partially
composed by director Slava Tsukerman using a primitive synthesizer and established
as one of the earliest computer-generated scores,4 the film’s electronic music, whose
oppositional geography of sound will be discussed at length below, accompanies this
otherworldly underground. Such effects are assembled to create the film’s
topography of subcultural and sexual difference, constructing an alienating
postpunk aesthetic.
 44 Y. Howard

Alienation in Liquid Sky also finds its literal form in the figure of the space
alien, which unambiguously mirrors the film’s various other social ‘‘aliens’’: queers,
addicts, new wave punks, and the German scientist investigating the alien. In an
interview shortly after the film’s release, Anne Carlisle, who plays Margaret, stated,
‘‘‘if we dubbed [the film] in a foreign language and subtitled it, it would play better’’’
(quoted in Patton 1983, n.p.). Carlisle’s description aptly situates the film’s alienating
aesthetic in terms of its visual differences from familiar qualities of American cinema.
The film owes its ‘‘foreign’’ appearance, as Carlisle’s remarks suggest, to the
artificiality of its special effects, saturation of bright colors, including the use of neon
lights, alongside the monotone-spoken lines of its actors, which lend to its overall
new wave theatricality. Tsukerman, a Russian-Jewish émigré, thus no stranger to
being an alien in the United States, was heavily influenced by the work of Bertolt
Brecht, whose plays are famously known for their ‘‘alienation effects.’’5 In addition
Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 16:34 23 December 2014

to linking explicitly Brecht’s avant-garde aesthetics of alienation to late twentieth-

century new wave culture, the film gives the impression of both borrowing and
ignoring conventions of science fiction genres; however, Tsukerman stated that he
had not seen a 1950s American science fiction film when he made Liquid Sky,
but instead was ‘‘[unconsciously motivated] to make a film which would be
impossible to show in Russia at the time’’ (quoted in Batchan 1990, 26). While
Tsukerman positions himself here as a filmmaker whose work is antithetical to the
Russian cultural imaginary, as a soviet émigré working in Ronald Reagan’s America
of the 1980s, he is equally situated as other within the Cold War politics accorded
to the era’s neo-McCarthyism.
In using the new wave punk scene of early 1980s Manhattan as the setting
for Liquid Sky, Tsukerman was meticulous in his execution of the film’s visual
and musical details. Researching clubs on which to base the film’s overall aesthetic,
he and the film crew frequented the Mudd Club, the nightclub/performance/gallery
space that became a mainstay for those in various postpunk music and underground
art subcultures in New York’s East Village.6 Clubs such as the Mudd Club and Club
57 played a large part in opening up the intersections and blurring the boundaries
between performance art, music act, fashion show, gallery space, dance club, and
movie theater. Bernard Gendron calls these creative practices ‘‘borderline aesthetics’’
and in his study of avant-garde art and music,7 he chronicles the formation of
these connections alongside the rise of new wave’s identity as ‘‘‘punk in pop drag’’’
(2002, 269), with participants taking part in several subcultural ‘‘scenes’’ at once.
A participant in New York’s downtown culture at the time, Anne Carlisle began as
a new wave actress-model when Tsukerman asked her to star as Margaret in the
film. Carlisle, who co-wrote the script and later went on to author a novel based
on the film’s screenplay, also loosely based the Margaret character on her own life.
In the film, Carlisle plays both Margaret and her gay male nemesis Jimmy; both are
androgynous, queer, and always at odds with each other whenever they interact.
As mentioned earlier, being ‘‘at odds’’ – and sounding/looking odd – is key to
thinking about the multiple sonic and visual axes that gender and sexuality share
in configuring the alienation of lesbianism in Liquid Sky’s dystopian feminist
landscape. Accordingly, gay male beauty is markedly set against lesbian ugliness as
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 45

represented by Jimmy and Margaret, whose hostile interactions often occur against
the backdrop of music that defies either strictly diegetic or non-diegetic categoriza-
tion. Because Carlisle plays these two characters who frequently appear in the
same scenes, her cinematic position also blatantly places itself beyond the film’s
diegesis, even if both characters are, by definition, diegetic. Operating as, and within,
an uncertain distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic sound, Margaret’s
‘‘alienated’’ body becomes a de-idealized space through which binaries such as male/
female, beautiful/ugly, masculine/feminine break down, only to surface as the residue
of queer female sexuality, an alienated lesbianism. In other words, Liquid Sky’s
feminist landscape operates as a framework of negation; its aesthetics of alienation
simultaneously excludes what it includes and includes what it excludes, leaving
behind the lesbian subject until she finally gives in to the alien (her alienation) and
self-destructs. This movement toward self-destruction makes use of what Lee
Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 16:34 23 December 2014

Edelman writes as ‘‘taking a side outside the logic of reproductive futurism and
arguing that queers might embrace their figural association with its end’’ (2004, 17).
Not emphasizing reproducibility or futurity, this essay considers the queer female
subject, rather than a sexually undifferentiated queer subject, as alienated from
political legibility.
While I depart from a psychoanalytic methodology in examining alienation,
Lacan’s formulation of the subject is useful for understanding the shaping of
sexuality vis-à-vis cinematic space in the film. In ‘‘The subject and the other:
Alienation,’’ Lacan outlines the parameters by which the subject in this case, rather
than the ego as in the Imaginary, is constituted as external to itself, hence, alienated
by the structure that produces it. Using a Venn diagram to describe such a space,
Lacan fashions two circles, each representing the subject and the other, which
converge halfway through, forming an oval-like shape between them. The oval-like
shape created where the circles intersect represents a space that does not belong to
each circle respectively, but is constituted by each of the circles in tandem. Lacan
describes this space as a vel, what he describes in terms of a logic of or: ‘‘The vel of
alienation is defined by a choice whose properties depend on [a logic of joining], that
there is, in the joining, one element that, whatever the choice operating may be, has
as its consequence a neither one, nor the other’’ (1981, 211). In other words, the vel,
the location of the subject and other’s coming together, does not necessarily
function to unite harmoniously the designated portions, but instead might be read as
adulterating the connecting components, engendering antagonism rather than
complementarity.
Liquid Sky’s feminist landscape as a framework of negation, perhaps better
described in terms of ‘‘neither/both’’ (or ‘‘none/all’’), maps the queer female body
onto postpunk filmic space whose aesthetics of alienation can be heard as much as
seen. Just as the film’s dystopian feminist landscape applies to gender and sexual
difference through the figure of the lesbian subject, it also applies to the film’s
construction of feminist politics and queer desires as negating and alienating:
empowerment is disempowering, desire paradigms function in terms of aversion, and
resistance is non-resistant. Likewise, androgyny, rather than being an idealized
combination of opposing ‘‘features,’’ is just the opposite in the film: it is distinctly
 46 Y. Howard

antagonistic and operates in the same scope as the film’s non/diegetic sound.
This essay emphasizes the connections between feminist dis/empowerment and
non/diegetic sound, the slashes here indicating the uncertain distinctions within these
categories that define the film’s feminist dystopia. Central to this feminist dystopia
and its aesthetics of alienation is what I call ‘‘ugly sex,’’ which indicates both
displeasurable sexual activity and female-bodied antagonistic androgyny, or to put
it differently, that which is ‘‘fucking ugly.’’ Before exploring specific examples from
the film that crystallize this landscape of alienation, it is essential to clarify briefly
the definitional frameworks of postpunk aesthetics and the role that midnight and
cult film has played in constructing queer sexualities through oppositionality and
negation as described above.
Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 16:34 23 December 2014

Postpunk aesthetics and the cult film/midnight movie

While punk has been given much critical attention as a primary cultural and aesthetic
marker of contemporary music’s break with harmony and homogeneity, the period
and genre that follows punk, beginning in the late 1970s and eventually peaking
in the early 1980s, has been underexamined or collapsed, somewhat erroneously,
with the category punk; therefore, as much as postpunk defines itself against punk,
it also simultaneously overlaps with it. The variety of experiments in music, fashion,
and artistic styles that fall under postpunk maintain several recognizable differences
from punk – incorporating dub, funk, and disco; emphasizing electronic music;
and embracing non-normative sexualities and longer song-lengths – without fully
separating from what is generally classified as punk. In his comprehensive survey of
postpunk, Rip it up and start again: Postpunk 1978 – 1984, Simon Reynolds describes
the distinctive range of genres associated with the category while isolating specific
features of postpunk sound: for instance Talking Heads’ songs ‘‘often had stop-start
structures and melody lines that were angular and jumpy rather than gently curving’’
(2005, 160) while Wire’s use of keyboards were ‘‘regarded with suspicion as somehow
unpunk’’ and their ‘‘guitars [were] so heavily treated that they might as well be
synths’’ (2005, 173). Without claiming that postpunk characterizes a distinctive
sound or style, Reynolds’s study branches postpunk into several subcategories
ranging from the widely recognizable new wave synthpop sounds to the more
impenetrable noise stylings and confrontational performances of No Wave and
industrial groups. New wave is probably the best example of which components of
postpunk crossed over into mainstream music in the early 1980s, and most accurately
describes Liquid Sky. Incorporating synthesized sounds and androgynous looks into
the popular imaginary, new wave ushered in the bizarre and sexually ambiguous,
emphasizing the relationship that the visual and performing arts had with
underground music. As a postpunk film that was shown as a midnight movie and
quickly became a cult classic, Liquid Sky’s overall structure and content make for
uneasy genre distinctions and stand perilously at the edges of being both ‘‘merely
aesthetic’’ and a formally innovative meditation on the unfulfilled promise of a
subcultural Utopia in the late twentieth century.
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 47

In relationship to Liquid Sky’s making literal the orgasm as ‘‘little death’’ in its
postpunk setting, the logical combustion of excesses associated with these music
subcultures found its manifestation in the deaths of prominent icons in the punk and
postpunk music scenes – such as Joy Division’s Ian Curtis (suicide by hanging
in 1980), the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious (heroin overdose in 1979), and the Germs’
Darby Crash (suicide by deliberate heroin overdose in 1980) – all of which also
signaled a turning point in the direction of the music. When John Lydon departed
from the punk image he cultivated while singing lead as ‘‘Johnny Rotten’’ for the
Sex Pistols, he ironically named his new band Public Image Ltd (PiL). Formed
in 1978, PiL characterized its postpunk sound by ‘‘[assimilating] both the dread
feel of roots reggae and the dub aesthetic of subtraction’’ (Reynolds 2005, 214).
The incongruous combination of these styles provided a way to strip the music of a
single category (such as ‘‘punk’’) and a subcultural identity (such as ‘‘punk rocker’’),
Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 16:34 23 December 2014

without necessarily creating or becoming something ‘‘new.’’ Describing a PiL show,

Reynolds writes, ‘‘There was no encore and the gig ended sourly, energy blocked,
like bad sex’’ (2005, 25); here the correlation of a postpunk performance with bad sex
stands for a way of seeing the less-ideal consequences of moving beyond strictly
conceived genres, invoking sex as a substandard public performance. The scenes
of sexual performance in Liquid Sky bring together sexual cross-identification,
drug use, and underground cultures as a dystopian landscape that holds in check the
emancipatory potentials of oppositional cultural practices, all of which begins to
approach a working definition of postpunk film.
Visually documenting performances such as those of the bands named above is
one way of delineating what might be called punk film and, subsequently, postpunk
film. Clips in random sequence from various musical acts, such as Roxy Club
disc jockey Don Letts’s The Punk Rock Movie (1978) and Ivan Kral and Amos Poe’s
non-musically synched The ________ Generation (The Blank Generation) (1976), shot
on affordable, low-quality Super 8 film, made up what was initially called punk film.
Postpunk film should not be thought of as entirely distinct from punk film in that
many postpunk bands, filmmakers, and artists emerged from, performed in, and
displayed their work in New York’s punk enclaves such as CBGB’s and Max’s
Kansas City. Emerging from No Wave, the less-listener-friendly, performance-
art-heavy subset of postpunk music, No Wave Cinema was key in expanding
postpunk film aesthetics to include more narrative elements, taking cues from
B-movies and sexploitation film, and becoming affiliated with the New Cinema,
a small storefront-turned-theater located in the East Village.8 No Wave filmmakers
‘‘saw the previous generation [Warhol, Brakhage] as both an inspiration and an
establishment to overthrow’’ (Masters 2007, 140). Significantly, these films relied
on cultural participants as both audiences and actors, reinventing the club space
as movie theater while reinterpreting film as performance art. Entrenchment in
downtown music scenes, then, largely dictated to whom such films were available, as
punk and postpunk films ‘‘were originally shown in clubs, both in special backroom
screenings and as a visual backdrop to the bands’’ (Hawkins 2003, 229). Punk and
postpunk’s relationship to cinema has been understudied and the task here is not
necessarily to emphasize this relationship. However, attempting to define postpunk
 48 Y. Howard

film – if not fully distinct from punk film – opens up a way to consider Liquid Sky’s
filmic landscape in relation to the structural incoherence embedded in postpunk
aesthetics. Like postpunk music, postpunk film does not share one distinctive feature
but instead combines several elements of underground cinematic technique and
subculturally specific subject matter, which results in alienating – and being alienated
from – the very influences from which it is derived.
This sense of an alienated influence extends to the ways that some punk and
postpunk films are shot in contradiction to what is putatively punk style. ‘‘Instead
of fast-moving narratives, and frequent jump cuts,’’ describes Stacy Thompson,
‘‘punk film-makers . . . slow their narrative pace to a crawl, scarcely move the camera,
make infrequent cuts and, in general, forego most of the techniques that would lend
their film commercial viability’’ (2005, 25). This resistance to commercial success
becomes even more ambivalent when specifically gendered. Questioning non-
Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 16:34 23 December 2014

conformity-as-conformity has been the subject of several postpunk films, often

featuring female protagonists. Brian Gibson’s Breaking Glass (1980), Philippe
Puicouyoul’s La Brune et Moi (1980), Lou Adler’s Ladies and Gentlemen, The
Fabulous Stains (1981), for instance, all share similar narratives of success in the
music scene. Frequently more about style and music than plot, such films single
out the female subject to interrogate whether ‘‘success’’ is actually desirable in
disengaging from dominant musical, gendered, and social spaces. This disengage-
ment lends itself directly to thinking about the ways that female embodiment
becomes the locus of postpunk’s complication of normative desirability and taste, as
Liquid Sky demonstrates. Operating in the same scope as these narratives, the degree
of success in postpunk film is usually measured in terms of whether the film achieves
cult status, which perhaps only arbitrarily marks the subcultural investment in its
content.
Accordingly, the difficulty of classifying postpunk film in terms of specific
qualities is similar to explaining what the many reception practices that encompass
cult film have in common. The ‘‘cult’’ of cult film, of course, describes an
unreasonable, sometimes obsessive, commitment to the film in question. Since
many postpunk films achieve cult status, which rests on fandom and/or an audience’s
entrenchment in the film’s content, it follows that music, drug, and sexual
subcultures define which types of audiences typically comprise those of cult film.
Discussing the role of the audience in shaping and being shaped by cult film,
J.P. Telotte describes cult film as ‘‘[evoking] a kind of subcultural desire, a desire
not simply for difference, but for an identifiable and even common difference,
in effect, for a safe difference that is, ultimately, no difference at all’’ (1991, 11).
Telotte continues his description by providing some distinctions between cult
films and midnight movies, which ‘‘fashion a context of difference – of rebellion,
independence, sexual freedom, gender shifting – that helps us cope with real-
world conformity’’ (1991, 11). In Liquid Sky, the active withdrawal from
‘‘real-world conformity’’ is not only the difference from a conformist environment
but also an indifference to the putatively ideal environment such a withdrawal
provides, often through drug use. Even though heroin addiction is central to
Liquid Sky, addiction in the film is really less about drug addiction and more
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 49

about being addicted to self-destruction fueled by substance abuse and sexual

degradation.
Pertaining to the sometimes extreme display of sexuality and substance use, the
classification ‘‘midnight movie’’ organizes as much as it de-specifies the exhibition
patterns for which it serves as a rubric. Indicating when such films were shown,
‘‘midnight’’ – when club goers are ready to go out; the time of night when various
substances have fully taken effect; an unreasonable bedtime – foregrounds several
assumptions about the intended audiences whose differences are both sustained by
and reflected in the films in question. Marking these differences within the context
of non-standard viewing practices, a midnight show is and continues to be outside
the framework of consideration for general audiences; for these reasons, midnight
movies retain an iconic position as for and about ‘‘creatures of the night.’’
Significantly, this positioning makes explicit the use of underground cultures as
Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 16:34 23 December 2014

formats for gender and sexual transgressions to be expressed.9 Not all midnight
movies gain cult status and not all cult films were shown as midnight movies.
Yet Liquid Sky, in mapping alienating embodiment onto its dystopian feminist
landscape, is all at once postpunk film, cult film, and midnight movie.

Female bodily space and dis/empowerment

Key to Liquid Sky’s frameworks of difference are the film’s new wave setting and
the role that postpunk styles play in breaking away from sex and gender binaries.
Just as contesting normative femininity in women’s fashion often dictated female
punk sartorial choices in the late 1970s and early 1980s, androgyny and unisex styles
eventually became trendy mutations of punk in the postpunk era, influencing both
female and male new wave fashion, which also contributed to the popularity of
queer identities, particularly bisexuality, within new wave scenes. While Liquid Sky
capitalizes on these gendered and sexual ambiguities to almost obsessive lengths,
the alienated subject comes through as unambiguously female and lesbian. Janet
Bergstrom has explored the significance of the film’s preoccupation with androgyny,
writing that Margaret’s masculinity and Jimmy’s femininity ‘‘are used to cancel each
other out’’ (1991, 48). Bergstrom is correct to read the film as breaking down the
idealization of androgyny as taken up and routed through mainstream fashion
imagery. Nonetheless her notion that androgyny is used as a canceling-out device
in the film is less convincing given the outcome of Margaret and Jimmy’s final verbal
confrontation. Eventually leading to their sexual interaction, this confrontation
epitomizes the lesbian subject as the site of the alien/ation. When Jimmy immediately
vaporizes the moment he comes, Margaret is left behind as the residue of the alien-
orgasm because she never comes, and thus singularly embodies Liquid Sky’s
formulation of ugly sex.
Nowhere is this female-embodied location more apparent than in Margaret’s
stating ‘‘I kill with my cunt’’ several times throughout the film, making explicit her
position as a (non-literally) re-conceived vagina dentata; on more than one occasion,
she ‘‘euphemistically’’ states, ‘‘this pussy has teeth.’’ Yet the sound the alien makes at
the moments the opiates are transmitted – tinny, watery electronic mini-explosions,
 50 Y. Howard

resembling sped-up distortions of wind chimes or bells – is labeled ‘‘The Way the
Alien Kills’’ on the film’s original score. The alien, not Margaret, is identified in
the track’s title as responsible for the killings, marking her as both the agent and the
vehicle with no agency. Margaret’s realization that her body is lethal, but only lethal
when giving orgasms to others, grants her agency only as filtered through her bodily
dissociation. This dissociation ultimately translates as surrendering to the aliens any
control her body harbors, thus marking her ‘‘alienation’’ and forming a corporeal
landscape that fatally ‘‘alienates’’ those with whom she has sex.
As Margaret’s body develops as a conduit of sorts, replacing heroin as the source
of the opiates, heroin becomes less lethal than the lesbian body that she signifies.
When Liquid Sky premiered in 1982, homophobic claims about the STD-ridden
queer body as a contaminating entity were already rapidly crystallizing and
eventually peaked with the conflation of gay sex and AIDS. In his landmark essay
Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 16:34 23 December 2014

‘‘Is the Rectum a Grave?,’’ first published in the 1980s, Leo Bersani writes that AIDS
has ‘‘reinforced the heterosexual association of anal sex with a self-annihilation
originally and primarily identified with the fantastic mystery of an insatiable,
unstoppable female sexuality’’ (1988, 222); yet his essay ultimately does not move
beyond ‘‘the gay man’s rectum’’ (1988, 222). Focusing on public discourse about
passive sexualities and de-idealizing gay sexual liberation, Bersani’s argument against
a communitarian queer politics has been critiqued by José Esteban Muñoz.
In contrast to Bersani, Muñoz contends that utopian thinking ‘‘permits us to
conceptualize new worlds and realities that are not irrevocably constrained by the
HIV/AIDS pandemic and institutionalized state homophobia’’ (2009, 35) but, too,
grounds his critique mostly within the context of gay male cultures. Predating the
height of AIDS anxiety, Liquid Sky reroutes and displaces both Bersani’s rectal
topography and Muñoz’s sexual Utopia: Margaret’s body, as the figure of the
STD-laden queer body, becomes the corporeal landscape through which a female-
sexually specific dystopia takes shape.
Anxieties surrounding sexually transmitted diseases instead are directed toward
the lesbian body, which furthermore speaks to the film being situated at the end
of second-wave feminism and thus also questions the female body’s stability as the
emblematic site of feminist coalitional politics. Notably, Margaret mostly has sex
with men in the film, but her primary relationship is with her girlfriend Adrian,
who is no less abusive than the others. Their relationship halts any promise of
lesbianism as an escape from the strictures of heterosexuality. For the men who
coerce her to have sex, Margaret’s lesbianism is disturbingly intriguing, cast as more
estranged each instance she appears to be desired for her androgynous femininity,
which reads as a combination of slutty-punk and cabaret drag in the context of new
wave styles. This desire for her androgyny is defined in terms of aversion to the
way she looks and sexually identifies; as part of the film’s framework of negation
and ugly sex, desire-as-aversion becomes a crucial mode of alienation that the film
manifests in relation to the figure of the lesbian.
Paul, one of Adrian’s heroin-addicted clients, takes an interest in Margaret,
asking whether she is Adrian’s girlfriend, to which she answers, ‘‘What difference
does it make?’’ Paul proceeds to taunt her about whether she ‘‘[likes] girls better
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 51

than boys,’’ after which she accuses him of being a junkie who cannot get an erection.
To prove otherwise, Paul returns later to ‘‘show [Margaret] the difference between
men and women.’’ The ensuing scene is telling since it reveals as much about sexual
difference as it does about where the difference between consensual and non-
consensual sex breaks down. ‘‘Fuckin’ dyke. You’re just a dyke,’’ Paul sneers when
Margaret continues to reject his advances. When Paul calls her a whore, Margaret
shouts back, ‘‘You’re right – I’m a whore! I’ll lie down and you fuck me, see, ‘cause
it doesn’t matter to me. ‘Cause you don’t exist, you’re nothing, you’re nobody.
You just don’t exist. You’re just a fly.’’ As they have sex, Margaret describes how
bored she is and, clearly annoyed, tells Paul to ‘‘Hurry up, please.’’ Gaylyn Studlar
writes that Margaret ‘‘rejects sexual puritanism and assumes the identity of the
profane whore who will permit anyone to do anything to her’’ (1991, 151). Studlar’s
reading is valid, but Margaret’s above statement does not quite fit into such a ready
Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 16:34 23 December 2014

identification. On the one hand, Margaret can be said to have orchestrated her own
rape. On the other hand, her aggrieved nonchalance in this statement is also
a strange brand of empowerment. Margaret’s vigorously apathetic participation
in missionary-position heterosexual sex, the epitome of normative sex, constitutes
her aggressive disengagement with it, or, to put it differently, becomes a non-
transgressive transgression that eventually kills Paul.
Insofar as it is the least expected in the above scenario, this mode of transgression
also extends to the outcome of the film’s first ‘‘sex’’ scene: Margaret’s brutal rape
in the stairwell of her apartment and her subsequent avenging of it. Rape only
precariously falls into a category of sex, but as a sexually violent act, rape is never
fully separable from sex. While all sex scenes in Liquid Sky may not necessarily be
thought of as rape, Margaret’s agency concerning when and with whom she has sex
is questionable in each instance. Regarding Margaret as both desired and detested
for her androgyny, ugly sex, as introduced earlier, also indicates the film’s range of
displeasurable sexual activity: joyless sex, rape, bad sex. In historicizing onscreen
portrayals of sex, Linda Williams explains that bad sex was represented as ‘‘the sex
the woman did not want to have,’’ but by the 1970s, bad sex included ‘‘inauthentic or
faked sex’’ (2008, 171). As Williams describes, ‘‘the spectacle of the orgasmic
woman’’ (2008, 170) became the focus of depicting unwanted sex and non-orgasmic
sex; yet Liquid Sky significantly alters this equation. Sex in the film is certainly
represented as orgasmic – for everyone except Margaret: her embodiment of
lesbianism is also an embodiment of the non-orgasmic, non-desiring woman. Unlike
the scene with Adrian’s client described above, there is no question about reading
the stairwell ‘‘sex’’ scene as anything other than non-consensual. Nonetheless the
atypical rape-revenge formula that ensues invites a considerably less transparent
reading than the rape scene itself. In order to kill her rapist, Margaret must give him
an orgasm, and, armed with an observably fake desire for him, she later returns to
the club to find him and lure him back to her apartment for sex/death. Ironically,
this determined desire for revenge is also the only instance in which Margaret
expresses any sexual desire – even if faked – in the entire film. As in the scene with
Paul, the rape and all that leads up to it substitutes displeasurable sex for drugs:
in both instances, forced sex supplants drug fixation for all involved.
 52 Y. Howard

What is at stake here, besides whether desires for sex and drugs are
distinguishable, is how to read Margaret’s use of sex with her rapist to avenge the
initial episode of being raped by him. The framework of sexual violence gets turned
on its head in this instance because Margaret reinscribes the rapist’s more
‘‘traditional’’ act of sexual violence as a deadly version all her own. In other
words, Margaret’s brand of sexual killing revises both the sex and the violence
in reversing the dynamic by which each violent sex act is accomplished. While the
rape constitutes a sexually violent act, the rape-revenge constitutes the sex act to
carry out the killing, thus placing Margaret as the potentially more dangerous
figure. This is not to say that looking at this shift between Margaret and her rapist
is not without problems. After all, the rapist never knows he is about to be killed
and when Margaret aggressively pursues him to go home with her, he eagerly
consents. Tania Modleski’s notion of ‘‘counterphobic cinema’’ offers a way to
Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 16:34 23 December 2014

approach the possibility that a film can be resistant while appearing to contradict
the very terms of its resistance. In the context of sexploitation film, Modleski asks
if ‘‘we can locate moments that both protest sexual violence and keep alive woman’s
‘right to sexuality’ when sex is killing her’’ (2007, 48). Although specifying female
filmmakers, Modleski’s analysis is useful for thinking about Liquid Sky’s accounts
of desire-as-aversion and the decidedly questionable modes of resistance that
Margaret stands for in returning to the sources of her oppression in order to work
against them.
As sexual promiscuity in Liquid Sky is the driving force behind revenge and death
rather than pleasure, it is the non-desiring lesbian body that is cast as venereal-
disease-ridden and infectious. What results is the film’s inscription of lesbianism as
a misogynistically inflected attraction to humiliation and displeasure. The attraction
to humiliation is inextricably linked with the film’s representation of desire-as-
aversion. Margaret’s first victim, her former acting instructor and ex-lover, Owen,
criticizes her new wave androgyny, accusing her of looking ‘‘like a hooker’’ who ‘‘will
come down with some horrible disease’’ but makes it clear that he is there to have
sex with her. Mildly protesting while mildly succumbing, she responds, ‘‘I thought
I looked ugly and would give you diseases.’’ When Adrian returns to find the post-
coital Owen lying dead, she unsuccessfully persuades Margaret to engage in
necrophilia, and then face-fucks the body instead. Visibly upset about this, Margaret
pleads with Adrian to stop, which develops into a barrage of insults.
The significance of this episode is the pejorative corporeal geography of feminist
empowerment that it constructs. Rather than emerge as traditionally emancipatory,
in killing Owen, Margaret’s body becomes the reference point for a sexually specific
estrangement. Besides being estranged from her body in its ability to kill, Margaret’s
lesbian relationship with Adrian is defined in terms of a hateful communication
that constantly estranges rather than connects them; the bodily location of this
estrangement and the alienating lesbianism crystallize in Adrian’s constant use of the
word cunt to insult Margaret. Adrian warns her, ‘‘You better watch your mouth or
I’ll cut your face and no one will want to fuck your ugly cunt!’’ and continues
with, ‘‘You’re gonna kill me with syphilis one day, you dirty cunt!’’ Margaret
tries to defend herself and the argument results in both women struggling for
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 53

control of a switchblade. Adrian is non-differentiated from Owen as an enforcer of

Margaret’s sexual degradation, effectively replacing a putatively male subjugation
with lesbianism. Margaret symbolically qualifies this non-differentiation by literally
turning off visual markers of subcultural and sexual difference in their apartment –
the neon lights – and, later, in day-glow make-up, confesses, ‘‘men won’t step on
you anymore, women will.’’ Just as Adrian’s female bodily difference makes no
difference here as an antagonistic force aimed at Margaret, neither does the film’s
new wave landscape in providing a space that is all at once distinct from and
complicit with the dominant.
Subcultural style and queer sexuality, as elements such as lighting, clothing,
color, make-up, and hair signify in the film, do not function as utopian promises
of resistance to the status quo – especially when the unorthodox eventually becomes
the standard, as the film suggests with respect to the influence of new wave. In his
Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 16:34 23 December 2014

much-studied Subculture: The meaning of style, Dick Hebdige discusses the

commodification and incorporation of punk style in the fashion industry and
emphasizes the aesthetics of alienation that contributed to it. Hebdige writes of the
difficulty to ‘‘[maintain] any absolute distinction between commercial exploitation
on the one hand and creativity/originality on the other, even though these categories
are emphatically opposed in the value systems of most subcultures’’ (1979, 95).
Accordingly, fashion is both critiqued and lauded in Liquid Sky’s approach to
fashion photography and fashion shows, as the film showcases what Chris Barber
and Jack Sargeant fittingly observe as ‘‘new wave’s new attitude [of] chic indifference
[and] alliance with crude camp expression, effete narcissism, and the obscene
glamour and fashion industries’’ (2006, 208). Despite the fact that the fashion
‘‘industry’’ in the film is part of underground club culture it is also, at the same time,
on the precipice of mass consumer uptake. Featuring club goers as models, fashion
shows occur in the club and, rather than in a studio, the fashion shoot for Midnight
magazine takes place on the roof of Margaret and Adrian’s apartment. While the
photographers and interviewers from the magazine seem eager to capitalize on the
popularity of new wave, they also participate in its indulgences, for instance bringing
drugs for themselves and their photographic subjects, with the intention of
contributing to the decadent atmosphere of the shoot. Even though cocaine is the
dominant drug throughout the Midnight magazine photography session, ‘‘shooting’’
photography – and film – operates in the same scope as ‘‘shooting’’ heroin. That is,
the separation between diegetic and non-diegetic begins to break down as the film
closes in on drug-altered subjectivity, which contributes to the alienation that defines
the cinematic landscape itself.

Subcultural space and non/diegetic sound

Queer sexual difference and new wave androgyny, as I have been arguing, are further
and further removed from being ideal spaces of resistance, and aid in constructing
a feminist dystopia that is characterized by an empowerment that is distinctly
disempowering. I want to extend this network by interrogating diegetic versus
non-diegetic difference in Liquid Sky’s soundscape. Robynn J. Stilwell examines
 54 Y. Howard

unclassifiable features of film sound, what she calls the ‘‘fantastical gap’’ between
the diegetic and the non-diegetic. Stilwell writes:
The border region – the fantastical gap – is a transformative space, a superposition,
a transition between stable states . . . . when we are talking about movement through
the gap between diegetic and nondiegetic, that trajectory takes on great narrative
and experiential import. These moments do not take place randomly; they are
important moments of revelation, of symbolism, and of emotional engagement within
the film and without. (2007, 200)
Non/diegetic sound, while not unlike Stilwell’s notion of unfixed diegesis, expresses
less ambition about the ‘‘transformative’’ possibilities that Stilwell sees in the
‘‘transition between stable states.’’ Bound up with postpunk, which, as earlier
described, characterizes a range of experiments in musical boundaries, non/diegetic
sound is not simply a progressive diegeticization of film music under the category
Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 16:34 23 December 2014

postpunk. Coextensive with postpunk music culture’s uncertain definitional borders,

the soundscape in Liquid Sky mobilizes ugly sex, as the hostile instability of new
wave androgyny and displeasurable sexual activity, within its non/diegetic space.
A prominent example of what this looks and sounds like returns us to the film’s
fashion shoot. When one member of the photography crew turns up the volume on
the stereo, the electronic music that immediately follows is putatively diegetic
(uncannily mimicking the Glove’s ‘‘Like an Animal’’) even if it stops and starts
rather than just stays ‘‘on’’ in the background. But as the film quickly cuts between
shots of drug and alcohol use, what at first appears to be music coming from the
stereo increasingly resembles insular-sounding electronic slurping coming from a
straw grasping at the last bits of liquid; this sonic shift begins when various
crew members and models pour drinks and snort lines in preparation for the shoot.
As Nellie, the magazine’s fashion editor, begins to interview Margaret, the last word
of each question she poses repeatedly echoes in mechanized slowed-down or sped-up
high and low pitches, taking the form of the electronic music/sound that
characterizes the soundtrack. Nellie’s interview, consisting of a series of insulting
questions about Margaret’s new wave style, ends in words such as look, tacky, and
strange, which get distorted to the point of losing any semblance of a ‘‘natural’’
voice, de-gendering it as it becomes robotic. Overloaded with the sensory
environment of the photography session, Margaret’s subjective reception of the
words as the drugs have kicked in seems to be what is conveyed in this scene.
But what is actually being heard here is the network of alienating aesthetics that the
filmic body and the queer female body’s ugly sex share via this subcultural space.
Unwanted sex, as analyzed above, becomes questionable as unwanted for
Margaret’s dystopian brand of empowerment, and the film’s soundscape similarly
becomes an alienating entity in its configuration of the non/diegetic. Namely, the
structure of alienation that un/wanted sex exemplifies is bound up with the film’s
auditory space. In his study of noise, Paul Hegarty discusses ‘‘unwanted ambience’’
in the context of hearing versus listening: ‘‘[h]earing is the simple perception of
sound, listening the reflective conscious hearing. Even though on occasion the words
can be used interchangeably, . . . there is a division into attentive perception
and inattentive or unwilled perception, with the latter the lesser’’ (2007, 197;
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 55

emphasis added). If Margaret hears Nellie’s questions, but also appears to be hearing
the auditory hallucinations, then the status of whether the sound is diegetic can
only be measured to the extent that it is meant to include, yet is external to, what
Margaret is listening to: neither the questions directly nor the auditory hallucinations
directly, but skewed versions of both at the same time. Like her ‘‘inattentive’’
relationship to both the sex and the killing, Margaret’s not fully ‘‘attentive’’ listening
translates, in the film’s sonic space, as a glitch, what Torben Sangild describes as
‘‘a minor malfunction or spurious signal, often related to a system or an electronic
device’’ (2004, 258). This auditory sphere moves beyond the notion of internal
diegetic sound: because the words so closely resemble the purposefully composed
dissonance heard in many of the new-wave-inspired electronic tracks on the film’s
original score, the glitch in – and as – the film’s sound functions as a refusal to be
categorically bound to either the diegetic or non-diegetic. Moreover, each time one
Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 16:34 23 December 2014

of the words transforms into an auditory hallucination that Margaret is assumed

to be experiencing, the film cuts to still photographs of the photography shoot,
which jarringly occupies a diegetic framework paralleling the future anterior of the
diegetic photography shoot.10 As the photographs of Margaret posing at overtly
uncomfortable angles in brightly colored clothes and make-up accompany the
distorted words, the juxtaposition-as-intentional-glitch-in-the-diegetic takes on an
otherworldly, or alien, quality, similar to what Arto Lindsay of No Wave group
DNA describes as ‘‘interested in ideas of structure that are just as obvious to the ear;
but not so much like arithmetic’’ (quoted in Heylin 1993, 318). In other words, the
glitchy quality of the soundscape emerges as a synchronized type of sonic chaos,
a way that alienation is inhabited even as it functions to estrange.
Vivian Sobchack nonetheless has remarked that ‘‘[Alien Others] have become
our familiars, our simulacra, embodied as literally alienated images of our alienated
selves’’ (1993, 293). Indeed, such ‘‘literally alienated images’’ in Liquid Sky
correspond to the space alien, which looks something like a huge eyeball and is
always watching and waiting for the next moment heroin enters a vein, until it
discovers the orgasm opiates that it acquires ‘‘through’’ Margaret. The alien’s
perspective, rendered in ultraviolet, metallic-looking primary colors, presents
another sonic and visual schism in the framing of the alien’s omniscience with
regards to the film viewer. The viewer is presumably the only one who can see the
alien, which seems to be invisible to the other characters throughout the film; yet
this view is undermined when the scientist tracking the alien shows someone a
photograph of it – the identical image presented ‘‘solely’’ to the viewer up until that
point. While the viewer’s perspective is the same as the alien’s when it observes
possible opiate sources, the difference between the sound that accompanies the alien
and the sound that the alien appears to be making is more obscurely presented.
As stated earlier, each time the alien obtains opiates, the sound of the alien is
incorporated within the scope of the non-diegetic music and the diegetic narrative;
however, the degree to which the music actually is non-diegetic brings into view the
role that subcultural space has in the film’s alienating soundscape.
Unmistakably non-diegetic music introduces the spacecraft’s landing as well as
subsequent shots of the interior of Margaret and Adrian’s apartment in the opening
 56 Y. Howard

sequence, but when the film cuts to club goers dancing, the music changes to a
synthesized dance beat. Switching between shots of the apartment and the club
initially appears to correspond to non-diegetic and diegetic music, respectively;
however a closer look reveals otherwise. In his examination of the film’s music,
Mitchell Morris writes: ‘‘The dance music in Liquid Sky’s club is sonically a few
steps closer to the written-tradition avant-garde to give it qualities of increased
depersonalization as well as more generic neutrality’’ (2008, 166). While Morris takes
into account that Tsukerman ‘‘did not aim at illusions of verisimilitude’’ (2008, 165)
with respect to new wave music, the notion that the film displays merely the idea
of the era’s music overlooks the fact that ‘‘generically neutral’’ elements, such as
minimal bass hooks and the appropriation of sounds not traditionally thought of as
musical, characterize postpunk aesthetics, particularly new wave synth and other
electronic and noise styles. Although the film offers no recognizable song from the
Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 16:34 23 December 2014

era, its soundtrack conceivably stands on its own as new wave electronic music,
complicating the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic at the same time as it
constructs its own postpunk brands of both. Caught between and beyond diegetic
and non-diegetic, the club music sounds similar to the spare electronic sequencing
of notes heard in new wave songs such as the Human League’s ‘‘Being Boiled,’’
Men without Hats’ ‘‘Safety Dance,’’ or anything by Kraftwerk, for instance.
This similarity positions the club music as plausibly diegetic music to which the club
goers dance; but in mainly retaining features of recognizably new wave music, the
film’s club music, in its uncanniness, also becomes eerily mismatched with the
dancing. Nonetheless presented as what Hebdige calls a ‘‘dumbshow of blank
robotics’’ (1979, 108), the dancing sets out to further obscure the non/diegetic
composition of the scene in that the dancing’s robotic qualities obfuscate its
relationship to the music, which is already unclear as the source being danced to.
Here, the soundscape mirrors the simultaneous incorporation of and distancing from
feminist empowerment discussed earlier.
Accordingly, with respect to the film’s club music, this postpunk soundscape
presents itself as uncomfortably distant from diegetic music inasmuch as it is
inextricably bound to being represented as such. However the way that Liquid Sky
constructs diegetic and non-diegetic sound in other instances is less a question of
occupying a space outside of both categories and more a question of depicting
music that is intended as one, only to take on the characteristics of the other.
‘‘Although the film can create certain illusions that fortify audience acceptance of a
given piece of music as diegetic,’’ Royal S. Brown writes, ‘‘the diegetic tipoff
generally comes from an object such as a radio or a phonograph in the visual
diegesis’’ (1994, 69). As explored above, the indication of diegetic sound that Brown
explains emerges when a character turns up the volume on the stereo, only to have its
diegetic certainty quickly undermined. In another scene, the film similarly disrupts
its diegetic sound but does so specifically through ugly sex’s double meaning as it
pertains to androgyny and sexual activity. When Margaret and Jimmy go to her
apartment for what turns out to be Jimmy’s failed attempt to get some free heroin on
her initial assumption of going to her apartment to have sex, the first shot displayed
is a record player, indicating that the music is diegetic. Yet as the scene progresses,
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 57

the music, continuing at an identical volume, accompanies a medium shot of the

outside of the apartment followed by the alien’s sudden awareness of Margaret
and Jimmy in the apartment. The sound of the alien’s awareness – shown via the
heat-sensitive-color perspective and the eye-like figure appearing suddenly to open –
seamlessly blends in with the music. Only once Jimmy, in frustration, smashes a glass
against the record player and the music stops, is the viewer abruptly reminded that
the music is supposed to be diegetic. Predicting Margaret’s abrupt reminder of her
ability to kill in later fellating Jimmy to death, the sonic space here further reflects
the film’s alien/ation in the dystopian landscape represented by the apartment and
the club.
Intercut with this scene is Adrian’s performance piece, ‘‘Me and My Rhythm
Box,’’ which takes place at the club. With a beatbox literally strapped to her body,
Adrian sings monotone lyrics about the estrangement of her body, a body as
Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 16:34 23 December 2014

a rhythm box, against the backdrop of diegetic beats – resembling heartbeats –

emanating from the box. The moment Jimmy smashes the record player, the film
immediately cuts to Adrian’s performance, the music of which, when switching back
to the apartment, becomes the non-diegetic music that establishes the antagonistic
tone of Margaret and Jimmy’s fighting in the apartment. From there, the scene shifts
to the dressing room at the club, where Margaret and Jimmy get ready to participate
in a fashion show. The background music, which is still ‘‘Rhythm Box,’’ is diegetic
in that it is meant to be Adrian performing in the club’s main room, adjacent to
the dressing room. But this diegetic music is dislocated at best: because the
previous scene positioned ‘‘Rhythm Box’’ as non-diegetic within Margaret and
Jimmy’s hostile interaction with each other, the music was also, at the same time,
diegetic in depicting Adrian’s performance. The source of the background music
in the dressing room, then, ruptures its position as the diegetic music from
Adrian’s performance next door, since its effect is conspicuously non-diegetic.
Murray Pomerance has explored diegetic sound in the context of Michel Chion’s
theories of the acousmeˆtre, the source of a sound that can be heard but not seen.
In dialogue with Chion, Pomerance discusses ‘‘an acousmeˆtre for the eye’’ and
de-acousmatization. He writes,
This is a visual analogue for de-acousmatization: the unrealized and indefinable is
slowly transposed as geography and form. A similar refiguration of the self takes place
with de-acousmatization, as when, suddenly aware of the source of the sound that
had presented itself suspended and disconnected from a visible origin, we recognize
ourselves in a fixed rather than an indeterminate space. (Pomerance 2008, 119–20)
Liquid Sky’s de-acousmatized sound nevertheless is its re-acousmatized sound,
so that self-recognition and a stable sense of familiarity are locatable only to the
extent that they are temporary.

Defamiliarizing community
Questions of recognition and familiarity directly come through in the two sex scenes
that occur in front of a group of people in the film. The group ‘‘participation’’
represented in them brings the film’s ugly sex and feminist dystopia full circle;
 58 Y. Howard

subcultural alliances form to antagonize rather than coalesce around liberatory

intentions. Consequently, these scenes are the film’s queerest and ugliest ones:
Margaret’s fellating Jimmy, and the lesbian sex scene with Adrian. Unlike the others,
these sex/death scenes vehemently defamiliarize the contexts that they set up, doing
so through undoing the modes of recognition that justify anything other than
a foreclosure of lesbianism’s redemption. Recall that Carlisle plays both Margaret
and Jimmy, and as convincing as are her individual performances, the film capitalizes
on both characters looking alike in order to put pressure on the binaries beautiful/
ugly, masculine/feminine, gay/lesbian, male/female all of which coagulate in the
figure of Margaret. During the photography shoot, Margaret and Jimmy begin
to exchange words against the backdrop of a non-diegetic ‘‘Rhythm Box’’; but each
time Jimmy says to Margaret, ‘‘You’re so old and ugly, I can’t look at you,’’
Margaret responds with, ‘‘I’m so ugly and you’re so beautiful, I think you should
Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 16:34 23 December 2014

hit me.’’ The magazine’s crew, seeing this interaction as an S/M-flavored photo
opportunity, dares them to have sex, chanting ‘‘do it,’’ until the words become
menacing, electronic bullets of sound. At first, Jimmy insists that he cannot;
however, someone holds a mirror up to him, telling him, ‘‘look at yourself, you are
the most beautiful boy.’’ While looking at himself, he gives in to being fellated by
Margaret and then vaporizes at the moment of his orgasm. Taking what Chris
Straayer calls ‘‘bi-sexed performance’’ (1996, 88) one step further, Liquid Sky,
in having Carlisle play the roles of both characters, sets up Jimmy’s gay male beauty
in opposition to Margaret’s ugly lesbianism, with the ugly dyke ultimately surfacing
as the residue of the scenario. Here, as residue, the figure of the lesbian is alienated
from the group even as she is the very catalyst for its grouping in this context.
After Jimmy vaporizes and Margaret attempts to convince the onlookers
from the magazine crew of her ability to kill, Adrian makes the crew a bet: ‘‘I’ll
bet you three hundred dollars I can fuck Margaret and not die,’’ she says. ‘‘Of course
you won’t die,’’ responds one of the photographers, ‘‘but I’m not sure that watching
you two fuck is worth three hundred dollars.’’ While moments earlier in the scene,
the crew was keenly intent on documenting androgynous heterosexual sex for the
magazine, lesbian sex is deemed ‘‘too much,’’ as the photographer claims, implying
that it will in no way resemble the idealized image specific to heterosexual
pornography. Determined to prove that she can survive sex with Margaret, Adrian
seems merely to want to have sex in front of the crowd. Significantly, Adrian gets
two women from the crew to hold Margaret down as she non-erotically tribates with
Margaret. Adrian uses a non-normative sexual act to prove lesbian sexuality’s
ugliness to the heterosexual gaze, but, in doing so, she is also proved wrong about
Margaret’s ability and dies. Female alliances at this moment position feminist
resistance as an exercise in futility – and fatality.
As Margaret attempts to resist being literally pulled to the bed by Adrian,
she desperately asks, ‘‘We’re going to Berlin, right?’’ and repeats, ‘‘Berlin, Berlin,’’ all
while knowing that she is about to kill Adrian without wanting to. As discussed
earlier, Adrian persistently mentions their plan to leave New York for Berlin, which
all at once stands for a feminist Utopia that is both queer and new wave. In the film,
this convergence remains an inaccessible location, an ideal place without the ability
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 59

to be realized. Recognizing that Berlin instead represents giving in to the alien/ation,

Margaret climbs on the roof, injects a lethal dose of heroin, does a spastic, orgasmic
dance, and gets vaporized, dissolving what Berlin has stood for up until that point –
which ends at the point of the needle in Margaret. Here, we see Margaret, alone,
walking toward the camera (the alien): she is almost exclusively rendered through
the alien’s perspective represented via the heat-sensitive solarization, which all but
removes any semblance of a human figure. Suicide, the simultaneously self-obsessed,
self-estranged, and self-destructive act par excellence, becomes the embodied location
of a feminism that is finally and fully placed outside the realm of emancipation.
Liquid Sky’s oppositional topography demonstrates what it means to dislocate the
female bodily cohesion required by a communitarian feminist and queer politics,
and ultimately asks if the liberatory glass is half empty or half full. Berlin sings
the answer: ‘‘I’m alone/sitting with my empty glass’’ (‘‘The Metro,’’ 1982).
Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 16:34 23 December 2014

Notes on contributor
Yetta Howard received her PhD in English and Gender Studies from the University of
Southern California. She is broadly interested in the connections between queer sexualities and
anti-aesthetic practices.

Notes
1. See Stratigakos 2008; Tamagne 2004.
2. See Thomas 1982, 1983; Canby 1983; Patton 1983; Maslin 1983; London and Gross 1983.
3. See Trefz 1984, especially 64–9.
4. See Carlson and Connolly 2010, 213.
5. See Rorrison 1987, xviii, xxiv; Batchan 1990, 27–9.
6. See Trefz 1984, 65; Batchan 1990, 27.
7. See Gendron 2002, 225–327.
8. See Reynolds 2005, 149–50; Masters 2007, 141–42.
9. See Vogel 2009, on nightclubs’ and bars’ ‘‘closing time,’’ 112.
10. See also Morris 2008, 164–5.

References

Barber, Chris and Jack Sargeant. 2006. No focus: punk on film. London: Headpress.
Batchan, Alexander. 1990. The ‘Alienation’ of Slava Tsukerman. In Before the wall came
down: Soviet and East European filmmakers working in the West, ed. Graham Petrie and
Ruth Dwyer, 15–34. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Bergstrom, Janet. 1991. Androids and androgyny. In Close encounters: Film, Feminism,
and Science Fiction, ed. Constance. Penley, et al., 32–61. Minneapolis and Oxford:
University of Minnesota Press.
Berlin. 1982. Pleasure victim. Vinyl Recording. Enigma, Torrance, CA: Enigma Records.
Bersani, Leo. 1988. Is the rectum a grave? In AIDS: Cultural analysis/cultural activism, ed.
Douglas. Crimp, 197–222. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press.
Brown, Royal S. 1994. Overtones and undertones: Reading film music. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
 60 Y. Howard

Canby, Vincent. 1983. Independent movies take a turn for the better. New York Times,
31 July, late edition.
Carlson, Zack and Bryan Connolly, eds. 2010. Destroy all movies!!!: The Complete guide to
punks on film. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books.
Chisholm, Dianne. 2005. Queer constellations: Subcultural space in the wake of the city.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Edelman, Lee. 2004. No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Durham, NC, and London:
Duke University Press.
Gendron, Bernard. 2002. Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular music and the
avant-garde. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Halberstam, Judith. 2006. The politics of negativity in recent queer theory. PMLA 121, no. 3:
823–4.
Hawkins, Joan. 2003. Midnight sex-horror movies and the downtown avant-garde. In Defining
cult movies: The cultural politics of oppositional taste, ed. Mark Jancovich, et al., 223–234.
Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 16:34 23 December 2014

Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The meaning of style. London and New York: Routledge.
Hegarty, Paul. 2007. Noise/Music: A History. New York and London: Continuum.
Heylin, Clinton. 1993. From the Velvets to the Voidoids: A pre-punk history for a post-punk
world. New York: Penguin.
Lacan, Jacques. 1981. The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan.
New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co.
London, Michael and Linda Gross. 1983. Lots of film for small outlay. Los Angeles Times,
30 April.
Maslin, Janet. 1983. Liquid Sky, high fashion and a U.F.O. New York Times, 22 July,
late edition.
Masters, Marc. 2007. No Wave. London: Black Dog Publishing.
Modleski, Tania. 2007. Women’s cinema as counterphobic cinema: Doris Wishman as the
last auteur. In Sleaze artists: Cinema at the margins of taste, style, and politics, ed.
Jeffrey Sconce, 47–70. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press.
Morris, Mitchell. 2008. In marginal fashion: Sex, drugs, russian modernism, and new
wave music in Liquid Sky. In Composing for the screen in Germany and the USSR, ed.
Robynn J. Stilwell and Phil Powrie, 161–177. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. New York
and London: New York University Press.
Patton, Cindy. 1983. Orgasmic death on film. Gay Community News 11, no. 7.
Pomerance, Murray. 2008. The horse who drank the sky: Film experience beyond narrative and
theory. New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press.
Reynolds, Simon. 2005. Rip it up and start again: Postpunk 1978 – 1984. New York: Penguin.
Rorrison, Hugh. 1987. Brecht: Plays. Vol. 1. xv–xxxviii. London: Methuen.
Sangild, Torben. 2004. Glitch – The beauty of malfunction. In Bad music: The music we love to
hate, ed. Christopher J. Washburne and Maiken Derno, 257–274. New York and
London: Routledge.
Sobchack, Vivian. 1993. Screening space: The American science fiction film. 2nd ed. New York:
Ungar.
Stilwell, Robynn J. 2007. The fantastical gap between diegetic and nondiegetic. In Beyond the
soundtrack: Representing music in cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer and
Richard Leppert, 184–202. Berkeley: University of California Press.
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 61

Straayer, Chris. 1996. Deviant eyes, deviant bodies: Sexual re-orientations in film and video.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Stratigakos, Despina. 2008. A woman’s Berlin: Building the modern city. Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press.
Studlar, Gaylyn. 1991. Midnight s/excess: Cult configurations of ‘femininity’ and the perverse.
In The cult film experience: Beyond all reason, ed. J.P. Telotte, 138–155. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Tamagne, Florence. 2004. A history of homosexuality in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris
1919–1939. Vol. 2. New York: Algora Publishing.
Telotte, J.P. 1991. Beyond all reason: The nature of the cult. In The cult film experience:
Beyond all reason, ed. J.P. Telotte, 4–17. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Thomas, Kevin. 1982. Film cornucopia, Canadian Style. Los Angeles Times, 5 September.
Thomas, Kevin. 1983. Looking at America with ‘‘Liquid Sky.’’ Los Angeles Times, 14 April.
Thompson, Stacy. 2005. Punk cinema. In New Punk Cinema, ed. Nicholas Rombes, 21–38.
Downloaded by [Florida State University] at 16:34 23 December 2014

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Trefz, Linda. 1984. Photographing Liquid Sky. American Cinematographer: International
Journal of Film and Video Production 65, no. 2 (February): 62–72.
Tsukerman, Slava, dir. 2000 [1982] Liquid Sky. DVD. Wintertainment.
Vogel, Shane. 2009. The scene of Harlem cabaret: Race, sexuality, performance. Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press.
Williams, Linda. 2008. Screening sex. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press.