Kevin Gonzalez revisits Kenneth Anger’s groundbreaking “Scorpio Rising,” exploring its biker aesthetic and enduring political resonance through the lens of its iconic soundtrack.
By Kevin Gonzalez
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A still from Kenneth Anger’s “Scorpio Rising” featuring a biker in a leather cap, highlighting the film’s iconic visual style.
Parker Tyler, in his seminal 1947 work Magic and Myth of the Movies, astutely linked filmmaking to myth creation. He argued that Hollywood cinema traffics in archetypes, navigating the space between collective understanding and personal intimacy. This perspective mirrors that of Kenneth Anger, a director and author who saw filmmaking as akin to spell-casting, a process of shaping perceptions of reality. However, a crucial distinction lies in their viewpoints. Myths, while influential in shaping worldviews, are static narratives, gaining power only through their deployment as tools of persuasion or allure. Spells, conversely, are dynamic and operative. They exert force, manipulating and occasionally compelling individuals, sometimes against their will, existing in a realm between manipulation and genuine magic. It’s in this context of cinematic spells that Anger’s work, particularly Scorpio Rising, takes on a deeper significance, especially when considering the film’s bold use of popular music, including the provocative choice of “Fools Rush In.”
My own introduction to Kenneth Anger’s 1964 film Scorpio Rising was serendipitous, appearing on my YouTube homepage amidst a stream of algorithmically curated biker content: “Death Valley Chopper Run,” “How to Rebuild a CV Carburetor,” and “[Biker Girl] Harley-Davidson.” The thumbnail, featuring a leather-clad figure with a cigarette, resonated with the familiar aesthetic of motorcycle videos that had become a digital comfort, a predictable dopamine source for anyone drawn to the grease, chrome, and self-assured swagger of chopper culture, invariably soundtracked by rock ’n’ roll anthems. This digital immersion is fueled by a long-held fascination, sparked by a childhood encounter with a motorcycle cop whose imposing Harley-Davidson Road King and knee-high leather boots left an indelible mark. These online videos serve as soothing balms, easing the frustrations of wrestling with vintage Harley-Davidson parts that too often crumble into irreparable relics of a bygone era. A familiar frustration for any devotee of classic motorcycles.
Anger’s film, celebrated by directors like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino for its innovative music integration, immediately captivated me. Scorpio Rising opens with scenes of men in tight T-shirts, meticulously working on motorcycle fenders amidst the gritty backdrop of a garage floor strewn with grease, chains, and engineer boots. In these opening moments, the film appears to align with the conventions of contemporary motorcycle music videos, a genre popularized online and featuring figures like chef Matty Matheson and actor Jason Momoa in slick productions for publications like Dice and Harley-Davidson’s promotional campaigns. Yet, Scorpio Rising, as I soon discovered, transcended these typical portrayals. Unfamiliar with Anger and his cinematic reputation at the time, I sensed a distinct undercurrent, something unsettling beneath the surface. The film’s opening song choice was the first hint: “Fools rush in where wise men never go.” This wasn’t just background music; it was a deliberate statement, a thematic prelude to the visual and narrative journey that was about to unfold. The song, “Fools Rush In,” originally popularized by Ricky Nelson, immediately sets a tone of impulsive action and potential danger, foreshadowing the reckless abandon and tragic undertones that permeate Scorpio Rising.
By 1964, Anger was already established as a controversial storyteller, particularly among French audiences with a taste for the sensational. His 1959 book Hollywood Babylon, published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, known for his association with Marquis de Sade, was a scandalous exposé of Hollywood’s hidden underbelly. This publication marked the culmination of Anger’s decade-long European sojourn, initiated by an encouraging letter from Jean Cocteau, an admirer of Anger’s surreal 1947 film, Fireworks. Hollywood Babylon was a collection of unsubstantiated rumors and lurid anecdotes: speculative accounts of Rudolph Valentino’s sexuality, biting portrayals of Charlie Chaplin’s first wife as a “nymphette,” and a gruesome tale of a starlet’s corpse consumed by a dog after her isolated death. Anger claimed “mental telepathy” as his primary research methodology, leading to the book’s swift ban in the United States after its initial release. It was a deliberately outrageous and unserious depiction of Hollywood’s Golden Age elite, filled with tales of murder, extravagant parties, and cover-ups, a formula he revisited decades later with Hollywood Babylon II (1984). In a 2014 Esquire interview, he even fabricated a claim that the Paramount Pictures studio lot was built on a section of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, prompting a denial from the studio and highlighting the pattern of fabrication that characterized many of Anger’s projects and pronouncements.
Scorpio Rising itself began with a similar deception. Anger misled the Brooklyn biker gang who became the film’s subjects, telling them he was making a documentary. This allowed him access to their lives, capturing intimate scenes of biker parties, garages, and even a bedroom, all of which were later edited to create the film’s surreal and homoerotic Nazi biker narrative. Anger intercut footage of a bodybuilder, hired from a Los Angeles gym, with scenes of Scorpio, played by Bruce Byron, consuming methamphetamines and delivering sermons from a Nazi flag-draped makeshift pulpit. He also incorporated scenes of Jesus Christ from The Living Bible (1952), purportedly delivered to him by chance during the editing process (a claim also disputed), to construct this experimental and largely plotless film. Anger’s method of storytelling prioritized the aura of truth over factual accuracy, exploiting the vanities of the unsuspecting biker gang. This manipulation is central to the spell he cast, both on his unwitting subjects and his audience. It places Anger himself at the narrative core, making the film’s creation as significant as its visual content, soundtrack, and thematic elements. The opening song, “Fools Rush In,” becomes ironically prophetic in this context, highlighting the bikers’ naiveté and their willingness to be swept up in Anger’s vision.
Upon its release, the Brooklyn bikers were enraged, and the Hells Angels, as Hunter S. Thompson recounted, worried about being perceived as “queers” after the San Francisco premiere. Yet, similar to the Paramount story, the bikers’ proximity to a queer aesthetic is supported by John Waters’s recollections of the era. Waters noted that in the 1960s and 1970s, outlaw motorcycle clubs and gay men often frequented the same leather shops, adopted similar styles, and patronized the same bars. Scott Zieher’s Band of Bikers (2010), a collection of photographs of gay motorcycle clubs found in a Manhattan basement, corroborates Waters’s observation. The men depicted share the same denim and leather-heavy aesthetic as the stars of Scorpio Rising, a look that persisted through biker magazines like Choppers Magazine and Easyriders for decades. While the nature of the relationship between these groups might be ambiguous, Naomi Klein’s insight that conspiracies “get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right” is pertinent. Anger’s fabrications animated the bikers’ images against their will, pushing them toward interpretations they would likely reject. The bikers were, in a sense, undone by their willingness to “rush in,” as subtly hinted by the opening use of Ricky Nelson’s “Fools Rush In.” The edit, in this case, only amplified a pre-existing tension.
Scorpio is introduced watching The Wild One (1953) and reading comic books. Photos of Steve McQueen and James Dean adorn his bedroom walls, the same room he shared with his wife in his everyday life. He embodies a portrait of arrested adolescence, mirrored by the rest of the gang who are filmed engaging in juvenile antics, such as smearing mustard on an inductee’s genitals and dancing with exposed genitals. Had Anger’s project been a straightforward documentary as promised, it would likely have been relegated to the archives of 1960s biker kitsch, joining other films showcasing societal fringe figures performing rebellion for the camera, complete with predictable cameos and rock music cues. However, Scorpio Rising transcends this categorization by weaponizing the subjects’ desire for recognition. Their images appear to move as if under a spell, manipulated to reveal an undercurrent of homosexual desire. Anger juxtaposes sexual tension with symbols of death, using Grim Reaper figures and skull masks, underscored by a deceptively light pop music soundtrack. The juxtaposition of upbeat tunes with images of bikers wielding guns or chains creates a disturbing sense of disjunction and danger. The seemingly innocuous “Fools Rush In” takes on a sinister irony as the film progresses, mirroring the reckless plunge into desires and dangers that the characters embody.
By succumbing to the need for recognition, the biker loses a part of himself. His image, in turn, consumes the viewer, drawing us into a voyeuristic fascination with the rugged Scorpio. We are invited to fall into the abyss alongside him as the film transitions from dreamy sequences to nightmarish visions. Even the interspersed images of Jesus, meant to suggest salvation, are overshadowed by the looming presence of a tyrant figure. A menacing biker literally points a gun at the audience from a pulpit, leaving us in a state of helpless enthrallment. Anger seems to offer an unsettling answer with the inclusion of Little Peggy March’s song, “I Will Follow Him / Follow him, wherever he may go,” suggesting a blind, almost cult-like devotion to these figures of masculine allure.
This sense of helpless enchantment finds a parallel in Jean Genet’s 1947 novel Querelle of Brest. The protagonist, a gay sailor, navigates a world of drug smuggling, murder, and sexual encounters. Querelle dominates other characters with his rugged charm and criminal cunning, becoming an object of worship for bikers who are as vain and beautiful as he is. Querelle grapples with his own need to be seen and recognized, conflating intimacy with the gaze of others and linking pleasure with death, echoing the themes present in biker films and powerfully amplified in Scorpio Rising. However, unlike Scorpio, Querelle possesses the strategic advantage of secrets. He proclaims, “If you want to be somebody, you have to be what does not meet the eye,” echoing Anger’s understanding that complete exposure renders one vulnerable to external interpretations. The forfeiture of self allows for manipulation by others for their own purposes—precisely what Anger achieves with the bikers’ images in Scorpio Rising.
Both Querelle and Scorpio Rising, though one narrative and personal, the other occultist and psychedelic, explore the tension between the yearning for and loathing of metamorphosis, as described by Jean-Paul Sartre. Anger’s visual mysticism and Genet’s interpersonal explorations present complementary forms of transgression. Scorpio is transformed from a Brooklyn biker into a deified image, while Querelle’s calculated opacity shields him from being reduced to “just a sailor.” Querelle’s success, however, relies on deception and the faith of others, opening the possibility of vampiric exploitation. His relationships become parasitic, devoid of genuine intimacy. This dynamic resonates with former US Representative Anthony Weiner’s reflection in the 2016 documentary Weiner, where he questions if his political ambitions stemmed from a desire for proximity to others without genuine connection. Whether driven by fear of intimacy or disregard for others’ needs, it reveals a rejection of genuine connection in favor of a will to power. These figures, like the bikers in Anger’s film, push others away while simultaneously demanding their attention. It’s a spell cast to maintain a precarious orbit, preventing a catastrophic fall. Anger successfully cast this spell in Scorpio Rising, and its influence has endured.
Even after Anger’s death in May of last year, and fifty years after Scorpio Rising’s release, the film remains a captivating spectacle, created at the expense of those who never sought retribution. Scorpio and Querelle, similarly, evade consequences. Scorpio’s fate remains ambiguous, and Querelle avoids imprisonment, leaving others to bear the repercussions of his actions. Perhaps there is a liberating element in the idea that secrets permeate everything, that truths lie just beneath the surface, waiting to be revealed. Yet, revelation can also be perilous. The film’s final scene, depicting Scorpio wielding a gun from a church pulpit, encapsulates this danger—a symbol of death on the stage of salvation. Ultimately, Anger, like many within his cinematic spell, falls prey to the same paradox: the desire for immortality breeds vulnerability; the need to be seen exposes us to forces beyond our control. It’s an inescapable truth that to be immortalized in film is to be perpetually frozen within an image, a kind of cinematic death. The seemingly innocent invitation of “Fools Rush In” ultimately leads to this complex and unsettling revelation about image, desire, and control.
LARB Contributor
Kevin Gonzalez is a writer based in New York City whose work has been featured in *The Reservoir***, Guernica, and the New York Review of Architecture. He is currently working on his first novella, which is about a cowboy addicted to television.**
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