Having exchanged vituperative asseveration for untrammelled glee in participating in the on-going carnival that marks the return-of-the-real and death-to-betrayal-of-authenticity that is the scandalised aftermath of JT LeRoy’s literary hoax, I was both surprised the film adaptation of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things hadn’t been inhumed in quicklime, and quite salivating at what would be a pack of deranged hounds eviscerating the quivering marrow of a defenseless Bambi. I wasn’t disappointed.
So, the short version: This “not at all autobiographical” “fiction” is, and I’m putting this as delicately as I can, in close competition for the title of “Most Egregiously Ridiculous Piece of Shit the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Have Ever produced.” Hell!! It may be the most egregiously ridiculous piece of human culture ever created, though I’m sure there’s some pretty bad cave paintings out there.
As such, Deceitful really should blow Showgirls out of the water as the ideal drunken-screaming-queen date movie, and in many ways is just begging for the Rocky Horror Picture Show treatment. I, for one, spent the last half of the movie sketching out my Halloween costume.
But there’s a categorical difference between Deceitful, Showgirls, and Rocky. Care to guess what it is? THAT’S RIGHT!! Nobody would have ever taken this pathetic piece of tragedy tourism even remotely seriously — not even Joe Esterhaz! — if it hadn’t been promulgated as the “real” story of a “survivor.”
Movie Review: The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things
Movie Review by Thomas S. Roche
About fifteen minutes into screening director Asia Argento’s adaptation of JT LeRoy’s second novel, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, I was — in an expression that I feel compelled to utilize but I PRAY does not permanently enter the lexicon — “pulling a Jeremiah.”
That was the point at which Argento, playing young Jeremiah’s mother, after spending the movie so far taking Jeremiah away from his loving foster family, getting him high on dexies, beating him and screaming at him a lot, get’s loaded and gussied up in a wedding dress. She then leaves the hapless tot for the weekend while she and her new husband head off to Atlantic City.
In a lengthy and painful scene that pretty much sums up the whole flick, Jeremiah wanders around the empty house in his underwear for a while, then gets out a black marker and draws an unhappy family on the wall, in stick figures. The family just keeps growing, and growing, and growing, to what sounds like a bad Sonic Youth rip-off (which, sadly, actually is by Sonic Youth), until dozens of unhappy stick-children cover the walls. Foreshadowing of some sort of fragmented personality thing? Yeah! Probably! I think! Maybe!
Which is sort of like what I did, but my “Jeremiah” was to scribble a stick-figure drawing of me, sitting in front of the movie screen with my hands over my eyes.
That amused me for forty-five seconds, which was roughly how long it took to reach the movie’s first rape scene, which lands Jeremiah in the hospital and thereafter at a born-again Christian orphanage presided over by Peter Fonda, who is not amused when Jeremiah sings him his favorite “hymn,” which goes something like this: “I am an antichrist! I am an anarchist!” More wacky physical abuse ensues. The movemaking is fragmented and shot from freaky angles, has all sorts of weird stuff that I guess is supposed to seem goth, urban and noir and ultra-artistic and poetic and dreamlike. It was almost like being back in college and having to sit through my film-major friends’ senior projects.
Sound like fun? Oh, trust me, it is! And it gets even better when Sarah reacquires Jeremiah and dresses him up like a girl so she can turn tricks with him as her underage “sister.” Since you asked, no, I am not making this up — this was made up by someone far more creative than I could ever hope to be.
But let me back up here a second: On the off chance you don’t know, “JT LeRoy” is the pseudonym of an author who spent eleven years claiming to be an HIV-positive former male prostitute and the survivor of exactly the sort of child abuse Jeremiah suffers in the movie. “JT” was unmasked as a middle-aged San Francisco woman named Laura Albert.
Hey, a pseudonym’s a pseudonym, right? Who cares? It’s fiction! Right? Fiction accompanied by a fraudulent and demented marketing plan — but since when is that unusual?
Um….yeah. In evaluating The Heart is Deceitful, the movie, I feel strongly that one should divorce the fraudster from the fraud, the “autobiographical” from the “novel.” Mind you, nobody wanted us to do that back when this was the deeply moving proof that the power of storytelling could liberate the human soul from unthinkable abuse. But what the hell, I’ll play the game now, because that’s the only way this distasteful task is any fun at all.
So, the short version: This “not at all autobiographical” “fiction” is, and I’m putting this as delicately as I can, in close competition for the title of “Most Egregiously Ridiculous Piece of Shit the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Have Ever produced.” Hell!! It may be the most egregiously ridiculous piece of human culture ever created, though I’m sure there’s some pretty bad cave paintings out there.
As such, Deceitful really should blow Showgirls out of the water as the ideal drunken-screaming-queen date movie, and in many ways is just begging for the Rocky Horror Picture Show treatment. I, for one, spent the last half of the movie sketching out my Halloween costume.
But there’s a categorical difference between Deceitful, Showgirls, and Rocky. Care to guess what it is? THAT’S RIGHT!! Nobody would have ever taken this pathetic piece of tragedy tourism even remotely seriously — not even Joe Esterhaz! — if it hadn’t been promulgated as the “real” story of a “survivor.”
I do remember a few very altered midnight showings when I was 17 where I was convinced that Rocky Horror was utterly real, but I was pretty clear from the start that Showgirls was a fantasy. But I submit that Deceitful, now being sold after-the-fact as some sort of dark fantasy, could NEVER — and I mean NEVER — been produced as such. “JT” could only visit this nightmare on a public that was begging for it because it was “real” — presenting it as fiction would (then as now) make it a seriously fucked-up jerk-off fantasy for somebody with MAJOR fucking tragedy-tourism issues and, clearly, no respect at all for the plight of real abuse survivors, sex workers, or people forced by their drug addict mothers to crossdress.
But even then — EVEN THEN! — who gives a shit? Anything is fair game in fantasy! Anything! Anything at all! Close your eyes and have a ball with it! Write porn about it! I don’t give a flying fuck!!
There’s a line that one crosses, though — and I don’t know where it is any more than you do — where tragedy tourism becomes creepy, hateful voyeurism, where fantasy becomes….ick. And while I say I don’t know where the line is, if you ignore my warning and subject yourself to this unwatchable torture-chamber of a movie (in which case you deserve every god damned thing you get), you will have no question that the line of good taste is so far in Asia Argento’s rearview that she forgot it was ever there — and that Isaac Hayes should have resigned from this movie even though he never worked on it. This is White Oleander pumped on steroids and huffing amyl; it’s the money shot of a culture so horrendously bankrupt that I think it’s finally inspired me to move to Sweden.
Deceitful was reportedly completed two years ago, and only released now — which might lead you to think, perhaps, that somebody in control of the film’s distribution got wind of the hoax a couple years back and held onto it, not knowing what to do — and then when the cover was blown, said “Oh shit!” and got the thing released into the wild.
Hey! I’m just speculating. It’s actually more likely that somebody in Hollywood with some sort of taste — I know! What are the chances? — realized how irredeemably awful the film was, and sat on it. Thanks, guys. I especially thank you on behalf of all the people that shit like this really happened to, since it seems to be all the rage to speak for groups one’s not a part of. By creating and releasing Deceitful you’ve managed to make the reality of severe child abuse as deeply affecting as Season 1 of Melrose Place or A Very Special Episode of TJ Hooker.
If you’re one of the many people — in San Francisco and elsewhere — who have been outraged by the Albert/LeRoy hoax, I encourage you to let the matter drop and forget this wretched pustule of a movie ever existed. Unless, like me, you are the most evil son of a bitch who ever lived. Then, shoplift a copy when it hits DVD, get your friends together with a case or two of tequila and plenty of limes — and laugh your deceitful, savage ass off.