Outrageous! and the Possibilities of Coming Out
While Richard Benner’s Outrageous! has been hailed as everything from a compassionate look at homosexuality to an idealization of non-sexual love between men and women, the movie actually accomplishes something far more interesting. For Benner, the cliches of homosexuality—notably “coming out”—become revitalized metaphors for the release of private fantasy. Rather than connoting a public acknowledgement of sexual identity, “coming out” suggests, in the figure of Robin Turner, a hairdresser-turned-female-impersonator, a bringing to life of the complexities of personality. While others in the film struggle to maintain monolithic identities by which to define their lives, Robin, in his words, “blows the lid off” a lifestyle which sequesters imagination in a dark closet of the psyche and literally brings to light “the people who live inside” him. As a cinematic metaphor, Robin’s coming out in drag is a positive step toward externalizing and making visible the images which fill his mind; he becomes, in essence, a filmmaker, a creator of dynamic images. Although the other female impersonators in the film are thoroughly forgettable and stereotyped (the black dancers who lipsynch their way through numbers look amazingly similar), only Robin appears totally different each time he’s on stage and only he is capable of inexhaustibly creating new forms.
His roommate Liza, however, a schizophrenic escapee from a mental institution, is involved in a futile attempt to repress her fantasies. In an effort to strip her of any creative impulse, her psychiatrist keeps her on a steady diet of shock treatments, tranquillizers, and birth control pills. Liza’s hallucinations take the forms of haunting faces “from the other place where they all laugh at me” and a horrifying “bone crusher” who tells her she is “the one born dead.” Never without her overflowing journal of stories, Liza creates a nightmarish world of fantasy turned in upon itself. While Robin actively brings fantasy to life, creating a world in which there is no rigid categorization of life into “reality” and “illusion”, Liza, with the guidance of her psychiatrist, fragments experience into worlds of disturbing sounds, alien languages, and grotesque ghastly images. Minding the warning of her doctor (“These faces aren’t real. They come from you and only you can control them.”), Liza represses her fantasies, seeing them as murderers of the indivisible “Liza” the asylum wants to construct. Her creative instincts become desperate attempts to connect: picking up cabbies (and not taking her birth control pills), frantically scribbling “strange sounds” in to masochistic stories, and, most importantly, urging Robin to perform impersonations for others. While constantly pushing away her own creations, she encourages Robin to bring out Tallulah Bankhead (“She’s one of the people living inside Robin.”); when Liza finally gives birth to her own baby, it is born dead, an expression of her hostility toward her own imagination.
Liza’s obsession with identity (and her constant need to discuss “Liza’s head”) is accurately assessed by Robin as egocentricity. That he leaves his job as hairdresser suggests his movement away from the “head trip” world of boosting egos; he can succeed in this world only by repressing his imagination and living a schizophrenic life (or by, as he says, “screwing the lid on my head tighter and tighter.”). Once Robin begins performing and creating, he “pops the lid off” irreparably, giving birth to image upon image, unable ever to return to merely “doing heads.”
Robin brings not only movie queens to life but, finally, Liza as well. Encouraging her to view her madness as imaginative rather than destructive, he throws her bulging journal and pills in the sink and leads her, in the last image of the movie, onto the dance floor of a nightclub where we hear a song whose lyrics recapitulate the progress of the movie: “Call out the stranger living inside … Step out to a world you’ve never seen/It’s no good living in a dream.”
As its title suggests, with implications of a pushing beyond the bounds of reason, Outrageous! is not so much interested in sociology as in irrationality and fantasy. Robin’s homosexuality is not an issue; his letting go of definitions (“fag,” “drag queen”) is. Once he lets go of his fear of being labelled his capacity for procreation is infinite. He is, in fact, transformed (as “Peggy Lee”) in our last image of him, and seems to exist as a purely cinematic character, incorporating male and female in a union of endless possibilities.
Allison Graham is currently writing her Ph.D. dissertation on English filmmaker Lindsay Anderson. This is her first contribution to Arts Manitoba.