By Chuck Stephens

A SHOE FETISH that dreamed it was an opera, Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle is one of the grandest – well, costliest anyway – acts of artistic folly ever committed to celluloid: a five-part, multihour, phantasmically overdesigned and fabulously well-financed extrapolation on themes variously related to the musculature that controls – based on data from internal emotions and external temperatures – the rising and the falling of the testicles. Who says modern art is afraid to put its balls to the wall?

A brash assertion of cinematic morning wood, The Cremaster Cycle – both not unlike, and yet totally unlike, Citizen Kane – is as much a study of risen empires and fallen kings as it is both a portrait of the artist as a young gland and a calculatedly dazzling cine-debut. Across backdrops from Boise to Budapest, scored to the sounds of bees and scree, strings and stings, and in images ripe to the point of rotting with ram-headed dandies, demolition derbies, decaying ponies, prolapsed muscles, mirror-encrusted saddles, dancing androgynes, sculpted Vaseline, Masonic mysticism, Murphy's Law, and Norman Mailer, the life and art of one Matthew Barney unfurls: high school athlete, football scholarship to Yale, onetime Ralph Lauren model, hottest pretty-boy art-world stud since Jeff Koons (with whom Barney and his work share a variety of similarities), and now, arriviste auteur. Throughout it all Barney incarnates various versions of "Matthew Barney": tap-dancing billy goat, wall-climbing performance jock, master artist's apprentice, hot rod-fixated serial killer, buff specialist in "sublimating violence into form."

No, Barney hasn't just bitten off a mouthful with The Cremaster Cycle, the final installment of which, Cremaster 3, the cycle's centerpiece, longest episode, and mirroring hinge, set in the pinnacle of the Chrysler Building and the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum, premieres locally at the Castro Theatre, along with consequent screenings of all five of the cycle's films (episodes four, one, five, and two came before it). Like the supersado antihero of Ichi the Killer, he's widened his lips to their limit and, finding the aperture insufficient, torn his cheeks open as well, hoping to swallow the entire world.

Perversion with a pedigree, the Cremaster films gussy up all of the black-and-white demonology and hunk lusting of Kenneth Anger and Gregory Markopoulos's 1950s psychodramas in pink plaids, fuzzy scrotal headgear, and healthy latherings of petroleum jelly – retro avant-gardistry for the age of Agnes B., if you know what I mean. And if you don't, that's probably even better. A gallery installation that dreamed it was a Hollywood blockbuster, The Cremaster Cycle works, despite its plethora of indecipherables, in multiplex terms as well: think of it as The Lord of the Rings sucked inside-out; Middle Earth with its legs in the air while David Cronenberg furiously works away between them, a set of gynecological implements for mutant women clinking and clanking in his hands while something awful sluices down a chrome channel beneath the table that leads to a wet pink hole in the floor. God bless the critics who've suggested that the Cremaster films capture all of the sense of wonder the Star Wars films have lost; in addition, let me only propose that Barney's sense of genital endangerment might qualify him as a useful candidate for directing the next installment of Jackass as well.

Just as the cremaster muscle is also related to sexual differentiation during fetal development, The Cremaster Cycle describes both a kind of system – buoyant and potential-rich in the early chapters, increasingly defiled and gravity-sucked by the end – and a kind of chaos, in which everything takes place on a variety of levels at once: operatic excess, punk spazz, installation piece, athletic event, noodle western, art-world lark. There are even bits of gore and fucking along the way, as awful as they are unnervingly real and unnervingly fake. Serious film critics seem most to have embraced Cremaster 3, but for me nothing in it compares with the moment in Cremaster 2 (the one about murderer Gary Gilmore and Harry Houdini, and my personal favorite of the bunch) when a manlike being seems to be having actual intercourse with a womanlike being, only to withdraw for a money shot in which a clearly fake penis ejaculates a clearly fake bumblebee.