The Kuchars, the 1960s and queer materiality

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This essay explores the peculiar, largely unexplored queerness of Mike and George Kuchar's 1960s films through a combination of close reading, material culture studies, art history and critical theory. Using the conceptual leverage provided by Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas on the carnivalesque and Georges Bataille's notion of heterology, it proposes that queerness in the Kuchars’ films takes the form of a generalized demotion whose main objects are sexuality, desire, and the material culture of plastic consumables in their immediate environment. These are insistently reduced to, or brought in contact with, excrement, and thus rendered doubly disreputable – because of their the scandalous nature and low cultural status, and because they are smeared with a defiling substance whose open display signals bodily and communal disorder. The essay traces the origins of their queer worldview in the popular culture of the 1950s, especially in the crime and horror comics, explores the role of excrement in the iconography and syntax of their films, and shows how the excremental is used to subvert the hygienic aspirations of the plastic modernity of their youth. A final section locates their strategies of subversion and their scatophilia in the broader context of 1960s experimental art and reads their work as a queer critique of the mid-century everyday.