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“Narcissus now had reached his sixteenth year
And seemed both man and boy; and many a youth
And many a girl desired him, but hard pride
Ruled in that delicate frame, and never a youth
And never a girl could touch his haughty heart.”
— Ovid, Metamorphoses
DIRECTED BY: James Bidgood
FEATURING: Bobby Kendall
PLOT: A modern-day Narcissus, alone in a New York City apartment, imagines himself as characters in a series of homoerotic fantasies while gazing upon his own reflection in a mirror.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: There’s nothing particularly weird about a teenage boy imagining himself as a matador bedecked in gold embroidery with red silk cape, but when the camera pulls back to reveal the “bull” in this corrida—a biker who looks like he rode right out of an illustration by Tom of Finland—we enter another level of surreal and sensual fantasy.
COMMENTS: In this silent modern-day retelling of the myth of Narcissus, first-time director and cinematographer James Bidgood creates an otherworldly dreamscape with a nightmarish edge. A young hustler falls into a series of sexual reveries in his bedroom while the lewd antics of a darkly Expressionist city parade outside his window. Mirrors take the place of the original’s pond, and as his dreams become increasingly self-obsessed, the lines between the worlds on either side of the glass blur, leading to a phantasmagoric conclusion.
Upon entering the apartment, awash in a warm pink glow, and decorated with multiple photographs of himself, Narcissus (Kendall) gradually strips off his tight white clothes. As he ripples his shirt before a wall of mirrors, it transforms into a red cape and a motorcycle engine revs, its handlebars cleverly framed as the bull’s two horns (aimed at the bull-fighter’s shapely rear end). A bathhouse hook-up intercuts this vision where Narcissus and the biker end up in a tub frothing with soap bubbles, the action occasionally interrupted by blank white frames.
For a first film by an amateur film maker, Pink Narcissus displays an impressive command of cinematic techniques. The inner life of the protagonist, in which he travels through time and around the world, when juxtaposed with extreme close-ups of his body—slow shots of fingers being licked, swelling nipples, belly button tickled with a blade of grass—underscore his absorption into solipsistic desires. When he gazes into the mirror, the camera flips to the perspective of his own reflection gazing back at him. Often shot from below, Kendall strides through the film with the camera staring up at his monumental form. Sometimes half-dressed, sometimes nude, the angle emphasizes his youthful and muscular physique but also the character’s revelry in his own power as he wields his physical attractions like a lure and a weapon.
In Classical Rome, he takes on the roles of both a cruel emperor and a powerless prisoner whom the emperor condemns. In an Orientalist tableau, he’s both a harem boy and a stern bearded sultan. A dancer draped with semi-sheer silk and strands of pearls performs for them in an extended sequence of images variously distorted, stretched and abstracted. The choreography, in which the movements of male anatomy form flowing patterns in the gauzy silk, recalls the Serpentine dances of Loie Fuller. The frames dissolve between the dancer’s body, close-ups of the pearls and Narcissus grasping the beaded strands in his hand. As the harem boy Narcissus enjoys the performance, but the sultan demands the dancer’s execution. Carried out with shocking rapidity, this death sentence marks the film’s most potently violent and sexual moment.
Unabashedly gay and erotic, daringly so for having been made in the pre-Stonewall era, Pink Narcissus take its stylistic cues from ’60s pinup art. Bidgood was a photographer for the men’s health and fitness magazines which featured coded gay imagery at the time. He once explained in an interview that when he grew bored with the typical images of beefcake models wearing g-strings, “I thought there should be something more.”
With his astute eye for composition and color, he began to design richly decorated tableau for his photographs, beginning with underwater scenes inspired by Esther Williams films and the glamour of Old Hollywood. Pink Narcissus blossomed out of a photoshoot for a Valentine’s Day issue of The Young Physique magazine. Bidgood created the pink-hued bedroom interior with the heart-shaped swan headboard for the cover in his own tiny NYC apartment. As the shoot with model Bobby Kendall progressed, a story began to take shape and Bidgood started to film the scenes. Over the course of seven years, he painstakingly crafted this journey into a mythic realm highly charged with sensuality yet strikingly beautiful, an example of DIY film making like no other.
Note: The executor of Bidgood’s estate has said that Blu-ray and VOD releases of Pink Narcissus are planned for Summer 2025.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
The comedy is good, including moves named for films Lee appeared in and talking skeletons. At times it’s naughty: a running gag involving Lee’s rumored sexual prowess and the Underworld King’s wives attempting to find that out firsthand; a joke involving nunchucks and “Bruce Lee’s Third Leg,” which was snatched subsequently for other kung-fu comedies. And just the idea of bringing together Popeye, Emmanuelle, 007 and others is brilliant, especially since such a thing wouldn’t even be possible in today’s corporate climate unless it were a no-budget ultra-underground project that maybe 30 people would even be aware of existing.
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