Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker? (review)

Somewhere near the middle of Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker?, Barbara Caspar's celebratory documentary about the experimental writer Kathy Acker (1947-1997), her agent, Ira Silverberg, declares: "Kathy was a woman who probably lied a great deal about her life story, but the lies were as important as whatever the truth was." It is a good line, witty and provocative, consistent with the tenor of incendiary indifference to conventional canons and codes that characterized Acker's own work. But for anyone interested in actually understanding the arc of Acker's career, such disinterest in the actual facts of Acker's biography, a disinterest broadly shared by the filmmakers, is less than fruitful. Nor will someone interested in the broader contexts within which Acker's work was received—say, concerned with the ways her borrowings from the canon corresponded with contemporaneous photographers' appropriationist strategies, or poststructuralist theories of the self and art, or even the punk movement's defiance of conventions—likely find much in this film beyond general broad-brush sketching and a general sense of her cultural milieu, shaped through the assortment of talking heads interviewed about Acker—including experimental writer Gary Indiana, collaborator Mel Freileicher, poststructuralist thinkers Avital Ronell and Sylvia Lotinger, performance artist Carolee Schneeman, punk rocker Richard Hell, and ex-lover (if that is the right word) Alan Sondheim). Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker? is, ultimately, less interested in situating Acker or her work than in celebrating it, bringing new attention to it without asking many hard questions.

As celebration, the film has clear virtues. It skillfully weaves its talking-head interviews (which, aside from her personal acquaintances, include a group of awed women students fresh from a late-career reading by the writer) and its archival footage with engaging animated and acted accompaniments to excerpts from most of her major novels) and a range of stock footage. Between Acker's pronouncements (mostly in British television interviews) about her intentions and influences and the extended excerpts from her fictions, Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker? provides a reasonably clear glimpse of the author's published work and artistic aims. For anyone unfamiliar with Acker's work—who missed the moment when, in the early 1980s, following the lead of the punk musicians with whom she was keeping company, her work broke into the mainstream, widely circulating on college campuses, hailed in London while being banned in Germany—the film may provide a useful introduction to the artist and her work.

For those, however, who already know Acker's work, the film offers few surprises. The tone of celebratory praise becomes frequently excessive. "No one had really done it," Silverberg asserts of the sort of work she was producing; later, he insists she was "the person coming from the states who could alter the way we speak about literature." Sometimes the tone becomes comically hyperbolic, as when Lotinger says of New York in 1973: "It was difficult to live here. You could be killed any second." Some of the interviewees do discuss Acker's problematic sexuality:. Sondheim recalls of The Blue Tape (a pornographic film he and Acker did together), that "neither of us was really that comfortable with the sexuality"; Acker herself laughs about feminists' ambiguous response to the sexual dynamics in her work; Sheree Ross (identified as an "ex-dominatrix") discusses Acker's role as a "bottom"; and editor Amy Scholder recalls going along when Acker had her labia pierced and noticing she seemed indifferent to the pain. But none of this amounts to anything like a full exploration of her sexual identity. Controversies provoked by her work—over pornography, plagiarism, even her rejection of traditional medicine in fighting the breast cancer that killed her in 1997—are mentioned, but seldom fully analyzed. And the tone of glowing praise for her work leaves little room for a serious discussion of the importance of her literary work, either in terms of its immediate impact or its continuing importance.

Those...