Juliet Bashore’s Kamikaze Hearts, originally released in 1986 and now set to screen in a new 2K restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive (May 13 in NYC at BAM and May 20 in LA at Alamo Drafthouse with a nationwide rollout to follow), is a mesmerizing time capsule of the San Francisco porn industry in the 80s, told through the toxic romance of two star-crossed lesbian lovers. It was an era defined by a Hollywood-conjured president, busily selling trickle-down snake oil to the masses while blithely ignoring a fast-moving epidemic (that would go on to kill well over 30 million). None of which is explicitly addressed in Kamikaze Hearts, but rather looms like a boom mic hovering from above offscreen.
Though shadows do appear. As when the gender-bending, X-rated legend Sharon Mitchell (aka “Mitch”) tells us that she counts Ronald Reagan, along with James Dean and Gloria Swanson, as an idol. “To be president and an actor, it must be a shot in the arm,” the avid drug user surmises. And like Swanson, Mitch, an unapologetically unreliable narrator of her own tale, is always ready for her closeup, whether it’s for Bashore’s unflinching lens or on the set of “porno operetta” Carmen. (Which was itself a dummy production that was actually a vehicle for Mitch, fully financed by Bashore and her producers – including Tigr Mennett, Mitch’s lover and Kamikaze Hearts co-star.)
Indeed, Bashore’s cliché-bashing “fictionalized documentary” makes its intent crystal clear from the start. Near the opening we get a front row seat to one of Mitch’s live shows, where she holds forth naked on a stage engaged in a Q&A with her adoring audience. Someone shouts a query about whether Kamikaze Hearts will be “more truth or fiction.” Mitch earnestly replies that she herself doesn’t know because, “I don’t know if I’m more truth or fiction.”
And it was this uncertainty surrounding whether the film was in fact “truth or fiction” (as if it couldn’t be both simultaneously) that seemed to unnerve during a period before “hybrid docs” – and of course, non-binary folks like Mitch – became de rigueur. Several critics at the time of the initial release even inexplicably found Kamikaze Hearts – a film about the porn world that includes very few scenes depicting sex (or drugs or rock and roll for that matter) – “harrowing” and “distressing.” Oddly sidestepping the hybrid allure of Mitch herself, a female crew member on a porn set actually cites Mitch’s lack of “happily-ever-after baggage” as the key to her underground fame. She’s the “perfect one-night stand.” (But isn’t that just part of the sex star job description? Tigr perhaps gets closer to the truth by touting Mitch’s “desperate eroticism.” Love itself is a many-splendored, desperate thing.)
Things aren’t worth doing if there’s no one there to watch it
Mitch’s in-your-face embrace of her gender and sexual fluidity, anticipating and ushering in a new zeitgeist as all pornography does, was nevertheless nothing short of revolutionary in the 80s. Depending on makeup and camera angle (of which everything in Mitch’s life depended) she’s a girl, a boy, or a trans woman; gay, straight or bi. Mitch is anything and everything the viewer/consumer wants her to be.
And yet our society is also addicted to the binary – why this same fluidity terrifies so many. (We claim to hate polarization, but really that’s our comfort zone.) The intoxicating-alienating element of Mitch is what compels – and ultimately destroys – whatever bond Mitch and Tigr may have had. I type “may have” since Tigr herself, after all the blood, sweat and tears of production and the relationship nears its end, candidly admits, “It’s possible we were never actually lovers.” She may in fact have fallen for a fictional character.
“Things aren’t worth doing if there’s no one there to watch it,” she earlier said of this “romance designed for the business.” Now “the only thing that gets me off is that I can still live,” she sadly adds.
And yet Kamikaze Hearts is steadfastly determined to not let society itself off the hook. “Every time you shoot up it’s like a truth serum,” Tigr says, which nicely applies to Bashore’s shooting style as well. At one point Mitch even asks another porn actor if she is on set as herself or as a personality. To which the petite blonde swiftly counters that she’s “now permanently” a “camp personality.” And aren’t we all in this pornographically explicit social-media age.