March 26, 2003

By Johnny Ray Huston

BOBBY ABATE IS young, but he's enough of an old soul to know that nothing soundtracks gay teen melancholy quite like a secondhand pop symphony. Abate's early videos are haunted by the lonely singing souls of '60s pop. The Fleetwoods drift along toward an elusive dream date, and Skeeter Davis likens a breakup to the apocalypse, in his Tanti Man (1999). Nancy Sinatra wonders what she'll do with just a photo to tell her troubles to in Real Videos 1,2,3 (1999-2001). Little Peggy March's teenage castle comes tumbling down during 1999's Chisholm, though if the visuals accompanying her cries are anything to go by, Abate's castle is a motel where he and a friend meet to shoot a lo-res porn memento of their graduation day.

There's a catch to Abate's early-'60s symphonies: he's hardly the first underground filmmaker to make use of secondhand blues. In resurrecting Little Peggy March, he's also invoking the formidable Kenneth Anger, who wound up March to obediently follow the sadistic biker boys of 1963's Scorpio Rising. The relative complexity of Anger's aesthetic – Scorpio Rising's a cultural critique that verges on historical hex – makes Abate's early, mock-diary approach seem simplistic. The Tanti Man and Chisholm are more like gay brothers of Sadie Benning's first Pixelvision shorts. The nude centerfolds on the floor and the couple groping on top of a Candy Land board are expressions of a bedroom-bound romantic imagination. The only travel is from a solitary present into a vision of the past.

A hand-me-down sensibility still dominates Zero Order (2000), which explores an obsession with Holly Golightly. Once again, Abate's marking familiar territory: created by Truman Capote, Holly has had her share of fey huckleberry friends over the decades; just a few years ago, Morrissey crooned "Moon River" to more thoughtful and swoon-inducing effect than Zero Order's pantomime. But identifying with Holly's untamed status (hilariously, Abate slows down Audrey Hepburn's "You mustn't give your heart to a wild thing" speech so that her hoity-toity voice takes on a more masculine tone) is certainly more liberating than the movie's other option, heterosexual reprogramming. The world of Zero Order is a mean red one in which "real" lives messily spill out of mirror reflections. Tiffany's – and the capitalist security it represents – is just out of reach.

Abate's approach becomes more distinctive, critical, and contemporary with the Real Videos trilogy, the first personal artistic response I've seen to the Internet-ization of sexual identity. Voyeurism is a recurrent motif in Abate's videos; more than one features close-ups of the director himself staring wide-eyed. In this case, Peeping Tom pleasure gives way to paranoid terror. Abate edits live cam stripteases, chat room emoticons, 'N Sync RealPlayer clips, and "CIA animation" renderings of airplane accidents to create a streaming Craven-era Scream of Munch-like intensity. At one point he French-kisses a modem, but that rather literal image doesn't express alienation as well as his montage techniques.

The Pac-Man-yellow skies of One Mile per Minute (2002) signal a venture into digital animation. Over time Abate's work has grown more playful in terms of form, and his soundtrack choices aren't quite as Anger-y. Debbie Gibson's "Electric Youth" provides a coda to the Real Videos trilogy, and One Mile per Minute's creepy score splices and loops instrumental passages from Richard Marx's "Right Here Waiting" and Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On." Swelling synths and oh-so-wistful pan flute accompany animated images of two towers. A body swan-dives from one, and then the towers collapse. The clouds that float through those Pac-Man skies are corporate logos: Mattel, Xerox, Panasonic, CNN, and many others.

One Mile per Minute's noncartoon passages flaunt telltale influences. A faux-confessional I-heart-TV segment brings back the Benning aspect of Abate's early work, but he's grown more wry and performative. Close-ups of a hand against a white backdrop are reminiscent of shots from Todd Haynes's Superstar and Poison, in which that part of the anatomy is symbolic shorthand (yikes) for personal desire and societal punishment; Abate's car-window tracking shots of suburbia are also Haynes-like, but he changes the angle, so the houses he passes all seem to be falling down. In this portrait of the United States, the click of a car's turn signal sounds like a bomb ticking.