Film Review: "Resident Alien"

Last thoughts for now, maybe, on Quentin Crisp and my own reaction to him.  Last night I watched, once again, the documentary Resident Alien, released in 1990.  This morning I again tried to track down who the various people in this documentary were.

It’s an odd documentary.  In some ways, the sections I like most are the staged scenes.   The film begins with a black-and-white parody of….well, my guess is a cheap, sensational, (bad?) science fiction film of the early 1950s—perhaps even something by Ed Wood.  Crisp walks down an empty alley in New York and is suddenly confronted by a bum declaring “I know you!”

In another scene, John Hurt, who played Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant, faces Crisp through a fake mirror.  The two smile, nod, and acknowledge one another.  It’s charming.

But the film as a whole is a documentary that doesn’t quite document.  But I suppose that’s one style of “documentary.”  Crisp amazes me with the number of people he knows (not really surprising, since one of his ambitions was to know everyone in the world!).  Thanks to this film, I’m now familiar with the the writers Hunter Madsen, Marshall Kirk, and Guy Kettelhawk; the painters David McDermot and Peter McGough; the painter Franco; the chanteuse Holly Woodlawn; the performance artist Susana Ventura (aka Penny Arcade); the painter Patrick Angus; and the writer Felicity mason (aka Anne Cumming).  I haven’t run into this many “friends of the main character” since I started reading about William S. Burroughs—and they’re all generally interesting folks!

But I had to work at this, since the film simply follows Crisp around as he visits these people or they talk about him.  The film uses no captions to identify anyone; you have to pay attention (or rewatch repeatedly).

And I’m not sure I learned much from this documentary that I didn’t already know from Civil Servant or the sequel, An Englishman in New York.  Several people have made the case that Crisp was a profoundly unhappy individual and an embarrassment to the Gay Movement.  But he never intended to be a part of any “movement.”  He held what seems a rather Calvinist view of humanity (“If people got what they deserved, everyone would starve”), and yet what impresses is the extent to which he seems to have been at peace with himself.  He realized early on what he was and how he wanted to live; he proceeded to live that way.  By age seventy he had become “one of the stately homos of England”—but not a celebrity until the release of Civil Servant.  Moving to New York in the aftermath of the film, he did become a celebrity; and seemed to feel that he and the human race had at last met and accepted one another.  He still generated controversy and hostility, but he felt accepted in New York, apparently, in a way he had never felt accepted in London.

Finally, he was witty, he was provocative—he’s been called the closest thing to Oscar Wilde that we’ve had recently.  In life he seems to have been a warm and considerate if somewhat distant person.  Considering the gender issues he grew up with and faced head-on when British society would have preferred to ignore them, that’s not bad at all.  Certainly a person worth knowing and knowing better.