X is Y (1990) is classic Richard Kern. Since his heyday as one of the great provocateurs of the Transgressive Cinema movement Kern has been working primarily as a photographer. His work, most notably the collection Soft, often consists of erotic depictions of women. In these photographs Kern stages his subjects as if they are going about ordinary, every day tasks. Kern looks for the erotic and fetishistic as it appears all around us all of the time. This career long search for “kink” in the ordinary clearly has its beginnings in Kern’s work as a filmmaker.
X is Y epitomizes Kern’s fusion of erotic pleasure with the mundane. This two minute short is composed of a series of scenes, intercut in rapid succession, in which women, posed as if for a glamour shot, reveal a firearm. In true Transgressive fashion the social commentary is pretty hard to miss. Kern is equating women with guns within the wider complex of the masculine gaze. Kern poses the question: why do straight men look at a phallic symbol like a gun the same way as they view women as sexual objects?
This isn’t an offbeat brand of fetish porn. Kern’s No Wave soundtrack for X is Y keeps the audience at a distance, on edge. The spectator cannot accept the images merely as titillation when those images are joined with this specific soundtrack. Kern, like fellow Transgressive filmmaker and frequent collaborator Lydia Lunch, employs harsh juxtapositions in his videos between the pictorial and the auditory.
There’s also an overriding theme in Kern’s work, and Transgressive cinema as a whole, where the modes of commerce are questioned and/or subverted. In X is Y Kern is obviously interested in the popular trend within the gun industry of advertising various weapons by photographing them being wielded by buxom women. Of course the women who appear in Kern’s works would probably never be asked to pose with a gun by the executives at Smith & Wesson. The women who populate the world of Transgressive cinema (Tomoyo, Jacqui O, Linda Serbu, Lydia Lunch) are often queer, punk and do anything but conform to the popular standards of beauty circa 1990.
Of all of Kern’s films X is Y is one of his least pornographic. It is also one of his shortest works so it makes for a good introductory piece. Compared to the shock tactics of Kern’s masterpiece Manhattan Love Suicides (1985) or his controversial The Sewing Circle (1992), there isn’t much to offend here.
