Terrorist porn: "The Raspberry Reich"

Besides religious terrorism, political terrorism and "intellectual terrorists", Canadian director Bruce LaBruce in 2004 introduced, with his film "The Raspberry Reich", the category of terrorist porn (or alternatively, if you will, social and political thought porn).

www.theraspberryreich.com/rasp.html

Superficially styled a critique of "radical chic", "The Raspberry Reich" is the smutty cousin of this year’s Academy-Award-nominated "Baader Meinhof Complex". It claims to show how today’s mainstream has adopted (or adapts to) signifiers and postures of radical movements of the past, such as the German Red Army Faction (RAF) of the 1970s-90s or the iconic image of Che Guevara. However, the film can’t help but glamourize terrorism itself in its use of machine guns and pistols as sexual props, boundless sexual (and theoretical) energy, and hardcore straight and male-on-male action.

The leader of the Raspberry terrorists (or "activists", as they prefer to call themselves), one Gudrun, "a strict devotee of Wilhelm Reich [The Sexual Revolution] and Herbert Marcuse [One-Dimensional Man], believes that heterosexual monogamy is a bourgeois construct that must be smashed in order to achieve true revolution. To that end, she forces her straight male followers [including her own boyfriend] to have sex with each other to prove their mettle as authentic revolutionaries". After all, as she says: "The revolution is my boyfriend".

It is explained that "Marcuse believed that the workers and the prosperous, technologically advanced countries now have their needs satisfied beyond sufficiency to superfluity by the power elite, but much of what they receive is the satisfaction of false needs, while their true needs remain undiscoverable even by themselves. [...] The notion Marcuse calls surplus repression has to be fought by liberating ourselves from the constraints of dominant sexual practice. It's true that there will be no revolution without sexual revolution, but it's also true that there will be no sexual revolution without homosexual revolution".

The film opens with a black-and-white sequence of a Muslim reciting the Qur'an and throughout it sports the director's opposition to capitalism, war, and oppression. Be aware that the UK DVD edition (see cover image) appears to have been censored and some scenes (and body parts) of an explicit nature are masked with images of and quotes by Tony Blair and George W. Bush that move up and down, forth and back in unison with actors’ sexual thrusting. Depending on one’s personal taste (and political leanings), this may be perceived as adding to or detracting from the pleasure of watching.

To further their cause, the terrorists seek to extort a ransom from the wealthy banker father of a teenage boy they abducted, only to find that his father disowned the boy when the latter "came out" to him as gay. Of course, the film suffers from a neglect of the fact that homosexuality by now has also reached the mainstream and signifiers and postures of homosexuality are adopted (and have been adapted to) by the masses.

"The Raspberry Reich" premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Special Jury Award and the award for Best Gratuitous Use of Sex at the 2004 Melbourne Underground Film Festival.