aka The Slit

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DIRECTED BY: Christoph Schlingensief

FEATURING: Udo Kier, Kitten Natividad, Joachim Tomaschewsky, Johnny Pfeifer, Jones Muguse, Thomas Chibwe

PLOT: The wife of a gay German UN commander stationed in Africa gives birth to a child who is declared the new messiah; when an accident causes the boy to be horribly injured and endangers the UN mission, an escalating battle for power arises between the power-hungry commander, a religious leader who has declared war on the Vatican, and a chieftain who is attempting to actualize his dream to ride a ramshackle rocket into the White House to kill the American president.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Movies can be weird, they can be strange, they can be bizarre, but it’s rare to come across a movie that is actually insane. Under the trappings of satire on a global scale, United Trash offers a critique of international affairs forged in the crucible of late 20^th century daytime talk shows. There is not a single character in the film who isn’t as awful as they can be, nor a situation that is not plussed to become the most grotesque version of itself. So many fluids are spattered across the screen, everyone is subject to abject humiliation, and not a single institution fails to be undermined. Rarely has a film’s contempt for its subjects been so blatant and so complete, nor has a commitment to the most base appeals for a laugh been pursued so vigorously.

COMMENTS: In a career cut appallingly short by cancer, Christoph Schlingensief racked up a remarkable number of achievements, including staging a Wagner opera at the Bayreuth Festival, making plans to build a performing arts center in Burkina Faso, and curating a retrospective of his art that was staged posthumously at the Vienna Biennale. In cinema, he created a trilogy of films exploring the trauma caused by both the rise of Hitler and the process of German reunification. (The last of those, Terror 2000, also sits in our Reader Queue.) And in the middle of all this, he directed a film in which Udo Kier paints himself in blackface, dons a skirt made of bananas, and dances like a monkey in front of an audience of Africans while stroking the center banana aggressively. It’s an extraordinary career.

United Trash features one of the most game casts I have ever seen. There’s not an ounce of shame among the lot of them. They got the note that subtlety would be punishable by death, and they responded by going furiously over the top. Keir leads the way with his relentless prissiness, matched by a frequently naked Natividad raving maniacally about her lack of sexual satisfaction. They are surrounded by actors working just as hard to win the title of Least Restrained Performance, including a Hitler-mustachioed doctor/rocket scientist, an amoral, sexually ravenous, Vatican-hating priest, and Keir’s absurdly bewigged, unexpectedly jacked, child-molesting lover. Special attention must be given to the Zimbabwe locals who participated in the filming. They seem to be following Schlingensief’s direction without much awareness of what they’re saying, but they somehow emerge with more dignity than any of the international interlopers. This includes the gleefully ludicrous scene set at an unusually red White House that is evidently populated by artist Jeff Koons and his porn-star wife, making virtually no attempt at authenticity. (Rome and Venice are similarly depicted on the cheap.)

And then there’s the messiah himself, named Peter Pan but alternately called Jesus Peter or Mohamed Peter and depicted by a small African person (whether it is a child or a little person is not clear; either possibility is concerning) with a monstrous gaping wound in his skull that spews some sort of hollandaise-looking fluid, with a dubbed voice that suggests Looney Tunes’ Henery Hawk being stuffed into a pasta maker. He is perpetually covered in some sort of effluvia, and he’s happy to help out by pouring booze directly into the vulvaesque hole in his head. In theory a victim of all these machinations, Peter Panne manages to become possibly the movie’s most horrifying creation.

There’s an overwhelming desire to assign some sort of meaning to all of this, to try and discern the commentary that Schlingensief tucks beneath the comedy. (The final dedication is to “the victims of slowness and the UN.”) But the targets are so many, so varied, so broad that it’s hard to discern any motivation beyond pure nihilism. There are many reasons why an African tribal leader might want to unleash hellfire upon the USA, but here, it’s merely a given. The UN has no end of missteps in its history, and there’s an argument to be made that simply dropping a contingent of peacekeepers into an unfamiliar land cannot hope but to fail. (Kier proudly declares a water well and a crematorium the greatest achievements of his tenure), but again, Schlingensief castigates the mere existence of the UN. The fact that its leadership is by perverted opportunists is a fact rather than a cause or a symptom. The Catholic Church comes in for criticism, but most of it from the mouth of a vulgar apostate, so maybe that’s a push. And why a messiah? Why now? The answer seems to be: why not? Meanwhile, Schlingensief throws out references to tragedies and disasters as if their very mention should be hilarious: the Challenger accident, the Kennedy assassination, the collapse of Yugoslavia, even the Holocaust. It’s supposed to be uproarious because it’s supposed to be uproarious. The wildly broad performances speak to that, as does the musical score, a neverending romp with a title theme that resembles the opening credits to “Police Squad!” and a soundtrack filled with wacky clarinets and vibraphones to give it the flavor of a jazz-era frolic. It’s funny as a threat: laugh, or else.

United Trash is undeniably angry, irrepressibly weird, and unfathomably exhausting. It’s hard to come away from the film with a message other than “everything is awful.” (The film’s happy ending revolves around an atomic explosion, an incestuous marriage, and a bile-streaming lump of excrement.) And it’s unthinkable to contemplate watching it again. That said, it pulls off the trick of rendering each plot twist more shocking than the last, going lower and lower and still finding something more unexpected, more gruesome, or both. United Trash is truly a singular achievement. It’s not the monument we might seek for ourselves, but for Christoph Schlingensief, it’s pretty hard to top.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“I’ve brought you some weird movies as part of my Weird Wednesdays project, but perhaps I’ll never be able to bring you another one weirder than this… It’s what you might get if Luis Buñuel took aim at western political and religious power structures and John Waters rewrote his script. If that sounds schizophrenic, it really is. The entire approach screams for analysis, as if there are deep and meaningful metaphors in every scene, but they’re all smothered in faeces and hurled at us by a chimp tripping on acid.” – Hal C. F. Astell, Apocalypse Later

(This movie was nominated for review by JT. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

United Trash ( Die Spalte ) [DVD]

• United Trash ( Die Spalte ) ( The Slit )
• United Trash
• Die Spalte

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