Drunk on Poetry: Michael and Roberta Findlay’s Take Me Naked
Art & Trash, episode 8
Drunk on Poetry: Michael and Roberta Findlay's Take Me Naked
Stephen Broomer, March 25, 2021
American sexsploitation filmmakers Michael and Roberta Findlay's first collaboration, Take Me Naked, occupies the curious territory between ornamental, self-conscious artistic filmmaking and pulse-quickening tension. A "roughie" with themes of obsession and necrophilia, the film shares common traits with much of the American underground cinema of its era, from its Lower East Side setting to its spontaneous, naturalistic staging to its modernist literary debts. Its eroticism is made all the more potent by the dark corners of its story, in which voyeurism, murder and delusion bind a fantasy of ancient loves, from the tongue of a poet to the mind of a madman. This video essay considers Take Me Naked in relation to the movies of the Beat movement and the subgenre of killer hipster films of the 1950s and 60s, as well as their sources, such as the writings of Pierre Louÿs.
SCRIPT:
“Mysteries of an unknown time. Within three walls where men did not penetrate, we were born: Astarte, mother of the world, fountainhead of all the gods. I will reveal it, but not that which I may not.”
In the mid-1960s, Michael and Roberta Findlay began to make exploitation films in the roughie style. The roughie subgenre integrated sadism and violence with softcore sex. It not only tempered eroticism with brutality, but often took its narratives into very dark territory, dealing with rape, sex trafficking, and murder. The Findlays would go on to find success as commercial exploitation filmmakers, and, following the death of Michael Findlay in the late 1970s, Roberta Findlay turned to horror filmmaking to considerable cult success. The Findlays’ first film, Take Me Naked, occupies the curious territory between ornamental, self-conscious artistic filmmaking and pulse-quickening tension. Its eroticism is made all the more potent by the dark corners of its story, in which voyeurism, murder and delusion bind a fantasy of ancient loves, from the tongue of a poet to the mind of a madman. The film has two literary sources: Pierre Louys, the French romantic poet, and Arthur Symons, the British symbolist poet. Both are recited during the course of the film, and the film reflects their decadence. It might also be argued that the film ultimately bears the graver influence of Eudora Welty, whose tragic short story, “Flowers for Marjorie,” had a similar protagonist, Howard, a man who confuses the urgency and desperation of love and violence.
The story of Take Me Naked is minimal: a bowery bum leers out of the window of his squat at a woman masturbating in the opposite apartment. His narration betrays his greater complexity; he is a well-read poet contemplating beauty and distance. As the scene goes on, intercutting the woman’s flesh and the poet’s face, his vantage point appears to be limited to his own apartment window, and yet he possesses an all-seeing eye, as the cameras follow the woman to the shower and his commentary continues. He speaks of her with fascination and excitement; he falls asleep with her on his mind, reading the love poems of Pierre Louÿs. In his dreams, he sees visions of Sappho and Cleon, he imagines erotic encounters in luminous artificial light, much of it in the service of Aphrodite, goddess of love, but more, Louÿs’s Aphrodite, the major subject of his epic novel, of a sculptor who prefers statues and erotic dreams to the company of women, and who ultimately engineers the suicide of a courtesan so that her body itself can be used as one of his sculptures; it is a work of decadent, magnificent beauty, but it is also a necrophiliac fantasy. This collaboration of lust and death in Louÿs’s work will cast a long shadow through Take Me Naked.
The poet is interrupted from his dreams by another bowery bum, who discovers his sleeping body, tries to fondle him, and is then brutally beaten to death when the poet wakes. As the poet returns to his dreams, they have become fearsome, a veiled body struggling into love. At the conclusion, the poet, now finally driven fully mad, goes after the woman next door with a knife which he imagines are flowers. The film intercuts his dream of going to her to romance and seduce her with the reality of his actions, when he forces his way into her apartment, to terrorize, rape, and murder her. As the film concludes, the poet reads a love poem by Arthur Symons that assumes a far more menacing tone in light of his delusions.
The role of poetry on the film’s soundtrack serves three purposes: it makes the poet’s dreams into illustrations and situates him as an idealist who seeks epic love; it ties the taboos of erotic art and voyeurism to the long and storied tradition of erotic literature; and finally, in its contrast with his barbarism and cruelty, it signals that this bowery bum poet is an unreliable narrator. Although Louys and Symons are credited prominently, the bulk of the writing is by the Findlays, and the narration, always caught between decadence and insight, is consistently poetic in the style of New York in the 1950s and 60s. The poet mixes a beat posture with narrative content. His narration is always melancholy and, romantic, by turns, menacing. The women, who serve as the narrators of his dreams, are mournful and confrontational from too many years in the dressing rooms of Jonathan Swift. The narrator exists, like the beats, without regard to questions of authenticity, his defiance closer to Gregory Corso than to Maynard G. Krebs. In this, the Findlays engage with the poetic spirit of the era, and in spite of its standing as a roughie exploitation movie, Take Me Naked would not be out of place paired with Chappaqua or Pull My Daisy. It is not intellectual, nor is its narrator a caricature of intellectualism; it is emotional in reaction to a lonely, loveless world where passions can only lead to uncontrollable, incomprehensible fury. The soundtrack, of orchestral anxiety jazz, furthers this disconnect between the spell of eroticism and decadence, and a trembling anticipation of violence. This disconnect is first felt early in the film, when the narrator declares his desire to be “drunk on poetry, drunk on anything.”
“I am drunk on wine, on virtue, on poetry.
I am drunk on anything.”
Take Me Naked is struck between two worlds of beat culture representation. On the one hand it shares qualities with the authentic work of Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie. Its citations to the history of poetry are reminiscent of the esoteric education of the beats as rendered in Laurence Lipton’s The Holy Barbarians. Even the brutality of the film is not alien to the violent world of the beats: consider William S. Burroughs’ killing of Joan Vollmer or Lucien Carr’s murder of David Kammerer. On the other hand, it is an exploitation movie and so it trades in the kinds of stereotypes of the deadly bohemian that one might encounter in movies like The Screaming Mimi, A Bucket of Blood or Color Me Blood Red. In these contexts, hip culture becomes a superficial padding, a mental illness that deceives the narrator into mistaking his worst impulses for his best. The difference here is that, unlike those films which traded in beret-wearing cartoon hepcats, the Findlays offer a convincing hipster.
Take Me Naked contains moments of extraordinary tenderness and beauty, exaggerated by cinematography in which haze and shadow and pure white forms render its erotic phenomena unreal. In this soft black and white world, bare flesh resembles the smoothed stone of Grecian statues. It is a soft-core exploitation film with appeal to the darkest side of that marketplace, and in this it is lurid, even cruel; it is also a work that arises from eros, locating eros within the realm of poetry and love. A cynic might argue that this is a film made not by poets but by pornographers who have used poetry as a shield. A readymade defense for the vice squad. But regardless of motive, Take Me Naked casts a spell that unites the romance of language with the pleasures of flesh, and follows it through to the same tragic end that Louÿs found for Demetrios, his sculptor, who favoured the silence and stillness of statues and dead women.
“Why should I paint my lips,” asks a woman worn out by the fickle and passing interests of men. The sadism and cruelty of Take Me Naked is balanced by sentiments like this, fever dreams of love desperately longing to be made, an experience that is equal parts pleasure, heartache and fear.