Escales Documentaire II: The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

The many faces of Genesis P Orrige and Lady Jaye.

 Walking into this documentary never having heard of Genesis may have given me the ideal experience of the film. It is only half way through the film that I realized that Genesis is a big deal, recording with Peaches and the YeahYeahYeahs, selling books like mad, lecturing academics about pandrogyny, and hanging around all of the most important avant gardes. As the film began and moved between the bizarre and the quotidian I was forced to constantly reevaluate my expectations, or leave them completely out of my control. 'So this film is about a love affair,' I first thought. It is about fetishism. It is about the history of industrial music. It is about pandrogyny. It is about Genesis...

Yes, it is all about Genesis P'Orrige. I never fully understood Lady Jaye. Genesis sits before a camera and holds down keys on the electric piano that scream "yes" until you cringe. She pushes a floppy toy doll to her implanted breast, which she reveals about every 5 minutes throughout the film. Another cringe. The film revealed my automatic and ignorant response to performance art: it is about the performer, even if it is about something else.

It seems egocentric and is at times very unpleasant to watch, but the jarring nature of Genesis' performance creates an appropriately unstable stage for her philosophy. And though it may be entirely about Genesis, that doesn't mean a thing, as she is a living artistic embodiment of her own philosophy.  Genesis raises from the start the issue of creating, from the joining of two, a third. She addresses it with music: as two electric violins pound madly together, the music is above her, apart from her, out of her control.

Admittedly borrowing from friend William Burroughs, she primarily uses this idea to explain the course of her bigger-than-love affair with Lady Jaye. She talks about the type of love that makes you want to consume another, be one with another. The metaphor of the orgasm. To physically obtain this, Genesis and Lady Jaye began to make "cut-ups" of themselves to look more alike, having plastic surgery, getting breast implants, dressing alike. The film never gets too theoretical about pandrogyny, but presents it through these two lives. At one point they both agree, "I have always thought of my body as a suitcase."

Genesis's "I" eventually becomes "we." Because it doesn't occur until the end of the film (that I noticed) so you are left to wonder about it. Just as you are left to wonder about Genesis and your own reaction to her. The film presents the systems that we are conditioned to want, those Genesis throws out the window, her naked breasts hanging over the sill, I'm sure. Probably not the best film to see with people uncomfortable with issues of sexuality, but interesting all the same.