Working only with images and continuous waves of early ’60s pop songs, Scorpio Rising sketches the tale of a biker gang caressingly repairing its motorcycles, attending a lewd homosexual masquerade, desecrating a church, and meeting oblivion in a street race. The contrast between iconically sweet music and aggressive imagery prefigures the work of later American stylists such as Scorsese and Lynch, but Anger utilizes this contrast for much broader goals, presenting fetishism as iconography and bikers as postmodern prophets.
At first the camera focuses on individual body parts, motorcycle gears, and leather jackets, fetishizing them. Rather than building character through action or dialogue, it constructs a world as a set of symbols, and characters as the confluence of those symbols. Magazine photos of James Dean are tacked to the bikers’ walls, and shots of Brando in The Wild One are spliced throughout one scene; the bikers knowingly equate themselves with these icons—not with the particular actors, but with their iconography. The camera lingers on the donning of leather attire, casting the event as a momentous transmutation: the creation of Self as symbol.
Besides making the film more dynamic, and thereby averting any potential boredom with the obscure narrative, the soundtrack of pop hits expands the film’s process of symbolization, making it into a study of symbols in general. The songs themselves are already symbols of American pop culture en masse, and the film appropriates these cultural symbols, skewing their meaning: the latent morbidity of “My Boyfriend’s Back” is exaggerated by a death’s head motif, the sexualized objectification in “Wind-Up Doll” is made disconcerting when it simultaneously sexualizes the bikers’ motorcycles, etc. Beyond these specific re-presentations of lyrical meanings, the contrast between the glossy songs and the gritty images and jarring cuts forces a continual reappraisal of both sets of symbols. The separation of the two styles seemingly ensures that the two remain distinct, but as the songs and images comment on each other, the meanings of the songs become inextricable from those of the images, and vice versa. Thus, the broader cultural symbols are not only commented upon by the fetishistic symbols of the film—they are entirely incorporated within the bikers’ symbology.
With this dialectic constructed, the film then moves onto an extended, ridiculously grandiose comparison between Scorpio (the leader of the biker gang) and Jesus Christ (our savior). The bikers attend an orgy that is contrasted with a gathering of Christ’s disciples, they ride off on motorcycles that are compared to Jesus’ donkey, and Scorpio preaches with a machine gun and urine-filled helmet in a church, as the Christian motifs are overwhelmed by Nazi symbols. Peggy March’s “I Will Follow Him” reinforces the notion of Nazi biker as both popular and religious idol. We are never given the words of Scorpio’s sermon, but the words are irrelevant: his sermon consists of himself, his self as constructed from his symbols. If Christ is the Word made Flesh, then Scorpio is the Flesh made Word. He is the prophet of the signifier, of pure, scintillating meaning dancing on the edge of the void, meaning always in flux, meanings built one atop another with no bottom in sight.
