In this way Horn's film achieves a neat formal closure and an overall elegant arc structure, but only at the price of aestheticizing Nomi's death and presenting it as logical, even inevitable, while the voice-over in Arnold's film informs us that the aliens are leaving because humanity was not yet ready for them. But, of course, Nomi's death was neither logical nor inevitable, nor was there anything in it worth rescuing through aestheticization. Because he was suffering from an unfamiliar disease, most of Nomi's friends were, perhaps understandably, too afraid to visit him in the hospital. One of the few who were not was his friend and collaborator Joey Arias, whose written account of Nomi in his last days focuses on the visible manifestations of AIDS on Nomi's body rather than on the man himself:
He developed kaposis [Kaposi's sarcoma] and
started taking interferon. That messed him real bad. He had dots all over his body and his eyes became purple slits. It was like someone was destroying him.... Then he got real weak and was rushed back to the hospital. He couldn't eat for days because he had cancer in his stomach. Herpes popped out all over his body. He turned into a monster. (38)
| Unfortunately, such dehumanizing accounts of people suffering and dying of AIDS were by no means rare at the time. In a visualization of that dehumanization, Horn's film ends with footage of a visibly emaciated, dying Nomi's performance of "The Cold Song," an air from Purcell's King Arthur, in Munich shortly before his death. As though to confirm my critique of the film's treatment of Nomi's death, the footage is combined with an interview with Tony Frere, another Nomi collaborator, who comes dangerously close to rationalizing and justifying Nomi's death: |
It was definitely a very dramatic ending, and
you don't wanna say it was appropriate, but--at
the time it was extremely surprising--but
now, thinking about it, it was perfect, you
know, sort of like a perfect coda to everything.
You know, just like "Wow," it was like an ending
to this crazy, lavish opera in a way.
| The alien, the unrecognizable, the unidentifiable then simply had to go, the film seems to tell us; as such, he was never sustainable anyway. Frere's words, heard over the last chords of Purcell's somber air and Nomi's leaving the stage bedecked in a seventeenth-century aristocratic costume, provide for a suitably poignant operatic exit. The most useful conclusion that I have been able to draw from studying the reception ofKlaus Nomi is that such a radical refusal to identify with any normative identities cannot ultimately rescue us from the exigencies of identification. Having to identify with already existing identity norms in order to achieve both a recognized identity of our own and the cultural recognition of others can and often does feel stifling. Yet the radical alternative that Nomi embodied is not a viable answer, because cultural recognition will be withheld from those refusing to sufficiently adhere to a recognizable identity. What is needed for a more livable life is probably a third way, winding between a slavish identification with normative identities and a radical nonidentification that results in the loss of recognizability. (This passage is taken from "Do You Nomi?" Klaus Nomi and the Politics of (Non)identification. Contributors: Zarko Cvejic - author. Journal Title: Women & Music. Volume: 13. Publication Year: 2009). My (brief) comment on the conclusion I've just quoted. Very interesting indeed. Still, it begs the question of whether the symbolic interactionist paradigm in sociology will ever receive the acknowledgement it deserves from Cvejic and other like minded readers/theorists. For if one stops to recall Mead's description of the interweaving of the "me" and "I" respectively, it quickly becomes apparent that we already have a "third way" that can enable us to navigate between the positions Cvejic describes. Of course, a Deleuzian would merely snort in derision because such people have no vested interest in a "me"; the "I" is all that matters to them. One can make an educated guess then as to how a Deleuzian would respond to Cvejic, who at least manages to peel back the "radical" sci fi garb to see the kinds of problems that may be associated with a "politics of nonidentity". I hasten to add that Nancy Fraser's advocacy of a dual emphasis on a politics of recognition and a politics of redistribution is also highly significant. Please note that redistribution is conspicuous by its absence in Cvejic's essay. This song is from Klaus Nomi's unfinished space-western opera ZABAKDAZ. ZABAKDAZ is a collection of songs Klaus Nomi was working on up until his death in 1983, released posthumously in 2007. The large majority of the tracks have never before seen a studio release. Some of those involved with the project hint that the album was nowhere near completed at the time of Klaus' passing. http://zabakdaz.com/ |
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