Film poster; Suzan Ziegler and Lisa Haas
I had the pleasure of seeing Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same at the Galway Film Festival in Ireland last summer. It's now playing through January 12 at ReRunGastropub Theatre in DUMBO (more info below).
The film, written and directed by Madeleine Olnek, is a lovely, quirky, comic fantasia, with a beautifully understated performance by Lisa Haas as the sweetly codependent lesbian who's fallen in love with a space alien. Filmed in a sort of Ed Wood, low-budget camp sci-fi style, Codependent offers a fun queer evening at the movies.
Olnek was a regular at the WOW Café in the 1980s, when the underground lesbian
performance space was breaking rules about theatre and poaching from popular
culture to rewrite what we understood of gender and sexuality norms. The film is based on her play of the same title, which will soon be published in a
collection of work from WOW that Holly Hughes and Alina Troyano (Carmelita
Tropicana) are co-editing for the University of Michigan Press. Olnek made the play into an indie feature film that’s now making the rounds on the festival
circuit. I caught the showing on the
first night of the Galway Film Festival at Town Hall last July.
In true WOW style, the
film both quotes and breaks the genre conventions on which it’s based. Jane (Haas) is a desperately shy, lonely
lesbian clerk at a greeting card store, who finds a note dropped seemingly out
of the blue in which a lesbian space alien asks if they can be friends. As Jane’s therapist (the wry Rae C. Wright)
tries to help Jane puzzle through her emotions while persuading her that she
hasn’t really been contacted by
aliens, the planet Zots suffers an environmental
crisis. They believe their ozone layer
is being destroyed by “big feelings,” and resolve to send to Earth any of their
citizens whose love affairs are damaging their planet. On Earth, the reasoning goes, the aliens’
hearts will be broken, and they’ll return to Zots cured of their commitment to
love.
And so begins a tale of
aliens-on-another-planet, in which the sexual and cultural mores of Earth clash
with the otherworldly style of the citizens of Zots. Beaming down into Jane’s world, Zoinx (the
handsome, square-jawed Susan Ziegler) targets the shy lesbian for her
experiment in Earth-bound relationships.
Despite her monotone, high-tech, echoing voice and her utter lack of
human affect, Jane finds Zoinx charming.
Part of the film’s joke is that Jane never acknowledges Zoinx’s
strangeness, accepting the alien’s bald head, her never-removed large,
Elizabethan-style collar, which nearly encircles her starkly prominent pate,
and her strange way of expressing affection (she puts her hand against Jane’s
nose in an awkward gesture whenever she’s feeling intimate). Jane is so delighted by Zoinx’s company that
she happily engages her alien customs and generously teaches Zoinx the equally
strange ways of Earth.
Two other aliens have
been sent to Earth to participate in Zots’ project. Bar (Cynthia Kaplan) and Zylar (Jackie
Monahan) have the misfortune of having “big feelings” for one another, but try
to find earthlings who might cure them of their mutual affliction.
Olnek includes hilarious scenes in which
various local lesbians respond to Zylar’s personal ad (written and videoed),
and find themselves incapable of understanding or accepting what looks to them
like weird role-playing. In their
one-note delivery, Bar and Zylar’s declarations of desperate love both undercut
and underline the typical (or is it stereotypical?) excess of lesbian
attachments with truly funny, sweet knowingness.
Two “men in black,”
federal agents of some sort who track the aliens’ activity on Earth, shadow
Jane and Zoinx, trying to figure out the place from which the aliens enter and
leave the country. Their scenes are
filmed almost entirely in a parked suburban van, where the senior agent (Dennis
Davis) complains that he’s always passed up for promotion, watching those he’s
trained leapfrog over him professionally.
His junior partner (Alex Karpovsky) asks him probing questions,
inquiring, for instance, whether his wife, Debbie, is a “transman,” to the guy’s
utter perplexity.
The two men’s deadpan
humor offers a terrific counterbalance to Jane and the aliens’
shenanigans. Their surveillance
activities also allow Olnek to feed them anthropological lines about lesbian
relationships, as their ridiculous comments about whether these romances last (for one example) provide both a dominant cultural voice and an eye that lets them peer into the
margins with a rather friendly, liberal curiosity.
Davis and Karpovsky play their scenes with a
lovely improvisational tone and Davis, in particular, comments as much on
conventional masculinity as Jane and the aliens comment on lesbian
relationships.
Codependent Lesbian Space Alien is filmed with an intentionally
low-budget gestalt reminiscent of Ed Woods’ opus and the science fiction
movies of the 1950s. Olnek uses low-tech
special effects to represent the aliens’ space ship, and the film’s black and
white stock lets her use fun ‘50s-style titles and images of galaxies swirling
in space.
The music, too, quotes ‘50s melodramatic
film conventions to over-emphasize emotions and to help announce Olnek’s
affectionate parodies not only of sci-fi but of stereotypes of contemporary
lesbian relationships.
Watching actors
dressed as aliens walking robotically through real New York East and West
Village locations while no one on the streets blinks an eye is also a hoot. Codependents
ends up being a sweet, funny love story in which two deeply “different” women
triumph over their odds.
At a public discussion after the
showing in Galway, Olnek described how she researched the genre and understands
its roots in Cold War paranoia. Aliens,
she pointed out, where often portrayed as they are in her film (that is, bald and homogeneous in appearance) to
represent Americans’ fear of the uniformity a Soviet take-over might impose. Likewise, Olnek suggested, their monotone
speaking voices borrow from those ‘50s sci-fi movies, in which the aliens’
voices, too, were leeched of individual character and affect.
Putting these
characteristics in a lesbian context, however, makes them sweet and
hilarious. Jane takes Zoinx out for a
drink at the Cubbyhole, a lesbian bar in Greenwich Village, where Jane whispers
that the clientele tends to be unfriendly.
When Zoinx asks Jane to dance, she happily complies, trying to turn her
embarrassment into a kind of pride when Zoinx's moves prove anything but
conventional. The reaction shots are
hysterical.
Go; you'll have fun.
The Feminist Spectator
Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, through January 12, ReRunGastropub, DUMBO, Brooklyn.