Chapo Trap House - Bonus: Virgil Interviews John Cameron Mitchell on "Anthem: Homunculus"

Episode Date: April 29, 2019

Virgil talks to John Cameron Mitchell, creator of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" and "Shortbus," to discuss his new musical narrative podcast, "Anthem: Homunculus". They also discuss being extremely online, the end of sex, and William S. Burroughs. You can find Anthem: Homunculus here: https://luminarypodcasts.com/listen/john-cameron-mitchell-and-bryan-weller-topic/anthem-homunculus-luminary-exclusive/ab4fffb8-7835-4482-8b48-c9898818768f?country=US Tickets still available for our upcoming shows in Berlin, Glasgow, Manchester and Dublin at: http://chapotraphouse.com/tour

Hey everyone, joining me today in the mansion is John Cameron Mitchell, Obie award-winning writer, director and star, head of Wing and the Angry Inch, director and writer of Short Bus, and creator of a new project that's not a film, it's a podcast. Films are dead. Anthem Homunculus, what is it? It is a alternative autobiography, meaning it's somewhat about my life, but it's a fake version of my life. And it's alt.

It's alt, which, you know, is now can be right wing too, alt is used by everybody. And it is a audio, I think of it as like an audio cinema, you know, it's an audio TV show in terms of its density, like a lot of narrative podcasts, you know, tend to be two people in a room or one person speaking like Night Vale or Homecoming or Comedy, but we wanted to bring what we learned in film and cinema and the theater into the audio form kind of in the way it happened in the 30s, where there was a, you know, ongoing radio serials, the stories that continued, but something perhaps denser. So it's kind of like Head Vig, but on, just to be listened to, 40 actors, 40 pieces of

music. 40 actors. Yeah. There's like a ton of actors and about five and a half hours of story. Because I listened to the first four or five episodes and it's fantastic. And it does have this feel of, I don't know where it's going, but so far it's had this feel of, you know, Monster of the Week, except the monster is someone from the protagonist past.

Yeah. Yeah. The character has a brain tumor. Luckily I don't knock wood, but we've all dealt or seen this strange situation where people are crowdfunding their health care in our rich country. And my character is out of insurance, a failed artist stuck in the Midwest, never left a small town, the one that I lived in Junction City, Kansas. And he has a, he needs an operation.

So he finds an app that I've dubbed in Telethon, which is a live stream Kickstarter. So he's going to stay online on this audio app till he gets the 100K to get the tumor out or till he dies, whichever comes first. And so there's a marathon for life here. Meanwhile, he's got a lot of time to fill, you know, cause he's staying online, even when he sleeps. So he's telling his life story through stories, monologues, songs, and then we break the fourth wall in a way and we go into flashbacks and hallucinations, which is where the Monster

of the Week comes in because the tumor in this part of the brain, which is weirdly responsible for this area responsible for empathy and poetry, is giving him hallucinations of the afterlife. And he's seeing people who have died, who have affected his life and he's working some shit out with them the way you do when you're faced death. You start out each episode, at least the ones I've listened to so far, they start out in the present, then we go to the past, he recalls something from his past and then you recall something from the future, which for him, since he has brain cancer, is death.

It's a fantasy of the past. That's right. You've got past, present, and future happening all the time and memory is very much a part of it. His mom has Alzheimer's as my mom does. There's a lot of stuff that is autobiographical and a lot that isn't. As the episodes go on, we break out of that routine of the present and the past and start to go places that, you know, there's an ayahuasca scene in episode five and six, there's new

characters developing. And what's been great about it is we have these incredible collaborators like Glenn Close and Laurie Anderson, Patty Lupone, Marion Cotillard, Dennis O'Hare who are friends that can do an entire season in three days. That's the joy of the podcast, right? You can condense a lot of work into a short period of time because you don't have to shave. Yeah. Then you just leave it all for an editor.

Yeah. But I'm really heavily, you know, I'm such a perfectionist that I brought in film editors that I've worked with, you know, Emmy award-winning Oscar-nominated people who are thrilled to do something really new for very little money. They're like interns going, you know, but old. So Anthem's very autobiographical, which is interesting to me because most of your prior work is not autobiographical. Like, Hedwig isn't autobiographical.

You're not Hedwig. No, I wasn't John. I was John, but it was emotionally autobiographical. Sure. So the feelings and the settings were from my life. My dad was a general on the Army, lived all over the world, Germany, Britain, and here. So I was inspired by living in Germany and going to Squeeze Box, the rock and roll drag bar and watching these incredible trans performers and drag performers.

So in some ways it was, but in this case, I'm really using aspects of my life. My mom, who was an artist from Scotland, my dad, who was a general, my brother who passed away, my aunt, who was a nun, my boyfriend, who is, you know, the character of gyros based on. So I realized at this point in my life, people had asked if I wanted to write about my life and I was like, I could either be alone and write my autobiography or I could make this fantastical autobiography, which is more fun. Oh, absolutely.

So the the the lattice work of this, the structure of it is about live streaming, right? Livestreaming a telethon, yeah, about surviving through an app. It's about online. Yeah. And you tackle the subject with a level of specificity that I rarely see from people my own age who are digital natives and who, you know, right up in it, you know, molded by it and who even write, you know, bullshit books about it. You know, you're you're not in a queer punk club in the meatpacking district anymore.

You're in my fucking house. You are. This is about someone begging for money on the internet, which is the principle of our show. Principle of all podcasts. It's somebody who's dying, who's begging for money online. I'm surprised there isn't, you know, in my in the film Short Bus, I was a futurist as well because I had a GPS hookup app called Yenta to make people before there was grinder

or any tender. And I was said to my my lawyer, you know, this is going to happen. I mean, is there any way I can copyright? She's like, you can't copyright an idea. You can patent something. And I'm like, but there's nothing to patent. So in a in a way, I'm trying to see the future again, I guess. And those are the parts that I like the most from the podcast are the current parts, the

present day parts of which, you know, I hope you don't consider that disrespectful because it's not saying your life's boring. I like the parts that are online and closer to my experience, because what's really thrilling for me is you articulate quite precisely the experience of not just the passive consumer of a digital spectacle, but the manufacturer of a digital spectacle, which is again, tends to be self made. Yeah. So why, you know, why did you decide to make a podcast as your next project?

But also why a podcast about podcasting, essentially, well, I've always been interested in the future and also how technology affects us and changes us. I was just talking today about how sex, people have gone off sex. It started in Japan because they have more technology than anyone. They're advanced. They're advanced. And the future is celibate. Yes.

And because it's very messy to be with people because anything can happen. But if you just fantasize or jerk off online and this and that, then you're free to just buy cute things and hang out as you do and work your ass off as you do in Japan. So we have become Japan and we're all going to become Japan and China, which in one way is very traditional and another way is very futurist. So a lot of young, that's why I was saying short bus would be very hard to make right now because sex is now icky, not from a right wing point of view, but from a young and left wing point of view.

It would be confusing to the audience, you know, it's like, what are those people doing with each other? What is that? Why are they in that position? They're upside down. Couldn't they do that alone? Why aren't they posting? They're posting that.

Interestingly, I'm glad I made short bus pre kind of the beginning of digital because even the auditions would have been online and and then it's leakable. We had them on VHS's, which we destroyed the way heavy metal people did disco records in 79. No, people would be posting their auditions online. You know, well, nowadays it's not, you know, a sex tape is kind of a plus, you know, it doesn't really take you down anymore. It's sort of a career builder and you know, I'm sure there's some publicists who are

making them to be released a certain key moment to help a career. Yes. I mean, I've always been interested in what's happening right now and what it means to be young right now, whatever that right now is, even in HeadVig, my manager had a phone in her tooth, which is a new kind of, oh, I don't remember that part. Yeah. It was, it was in the deleted scenes and in fact, there's going to be a HeadVig criterion edition in June, which will have those scenes in it.

But that goes haywire and it won't hang up and, you know, there's a phone in her head. But I really am interested in what's different about right now, but also the weird disappearance of history when all history is available, there's only somewhat, you know, I have that song Gog and Demagogue where it's like allow and remember, which comes from, you know, the Adobe notification when you, you know, when you need to, you know, that's, I think that's my favorite song of the ones that I've listened to. Oh, really? Yeah.

And it sounds like I think I forgot my own address and, you know, I'm desperately trying to see someone's face behind a screen. But at the same time, I did make a podcast because this story, which doesn't fit into any genre, the way HeadVig didn't either was rejected by all the TV networks. So first look, a company which makes podcasts like Missing Richard Simmons said, why not make it as a podcast? And my friend who does one called Orbiting Human Circus that I'm a voice on, Julian Koster, who was a member of Neutral Milk Hotel, inspired me and many other friends to make

their fictional podcast now. That song, Allow and Remember, it begins with Key and the Protagonist, who, it should be explained to our listeners here, is not only, he's not only live streaming, he has a tiny in-studio audience of his young neighbors. The young layabouts in the trailer park. And, you know, he calls of the kids. It's very like Buddy Dean show, you know. And he leads them in this call and response where they say, we fetishize the past and

over curate the present because what's that kids? We've been cheated out of a future. And there's a kind of fatalism throughout the show. The Protagonist is literally dying. You say, you know, John's telling me that, you know, I'm interested in the future, but it seems throughout that we don't have a future. You're interested in the end. Right.

Which, you know, I mean, that's kind of, you know, how we feel about this. That's the strangest thing about being young now is that there's an understanding or an assumption that it's downhill from now on, as opposed to that thing. We intuit that. People my age intuit that and it's all over the. We don't have to have a dying man tell us that, but I don't know if dying people think of that. Think of themselves as part of the future in their death.

That's what's really different about now. You could say that in some ways things are better in the world than they've ever been in terms of poverty, in terms of certain rights and certain economics. The way we get the information emphasizes the negative because people respond to the negative, but also there's a kind of panic that has arisen because of the internet that has made people only want to read the news that they want to hear and to believe the conspiracy theories they want to believe. So everyone has become a dangerous shut-in Ted Gazinski, you know, with their conspiracy

theories right, left, whatever, which is a strange dystopian point of view. So all children's literature is now dystopia, right Harry Potter is gone. It's all hunger games and how are you going to survive the deluge and there's an understanding young people have that and again, I want to say assumption is opposed to understanding because I still have hope that we're fucked and how are we going to go down? How are we going to gracefully die? Which is what one of the characters later in later episodes has a song about. And I don't think it's particularly useful, but it's a reality and I do want this piece

to be a bit of a, not a reinforcement of that, but as you'll see, as you'll hear, I really want there to be alternative as opposed to a lot of young people walking around like pre-zombies. And I'm not saying that I'm not that old guy who's like young people are, you know, or shit. No, not at all. In fact, I feel a lot of energy and I hang out with a lot of young people because I don't want to get set in my ways, but my young people tend to be Generation X.

And Kean's not dying with dignity, or at least not initially. He's in this position. Well, I failed in all of my ambitions. So fuck it. I'm going to do the gaudiest thing I can imagine, which is just live stream my life and my decline while begging for money. Again, hoping my death will go viral. And it, at least to the, in the episodes that I've listened to, he seems to be going viral.

He seems to be getting some improbable success in no small part because he is this, this dyageness. He's telling us these uncomfortable truths about the digital age. And he's prepared a show. You know, he's taken the time and he has a lot of time, but he's written songs for it. He's written stories for it. The things that derail them are these hallucinations, which are extrapolations of his story too,

you know, that our dreams, we're all geniuses when we dream, right? That's what Emil Curin said, you know, the butcher is the poet's equal in dream place. You know, we're all brilliant when we're dreaming. So his losing control of his narrative, which happens in the hallucination, in effect happens because of the tumor. The tumor is giving him these hallucinations. And in fact, the tumor becomes a character, which you're not sure if it's real because he's, you know, seems to be going mad and brain tumors do things like that.

But there's also a sense of the thing that is killing you becomes your ruler. And in fact, the first song is anthropomorphizing his tumors, like, if my tumor could sing, it might sing something like this, you know, and says, I'm the, as a lover, I'm unsurpassed, but I come first and you go last. And this, this breakdown is also being live streamed. This is his, he's having these heated gaming moments. Yeah. And he's actually good at it.

You know, he, he ran from reality back in the 80s. You know, he's sneaked out of his small town to go, you know, be a, you know, try to be William Burroughs, but boy, you know, and, and methadone mule. I was, I was going to ask you about that. Did you meet William Burroughs? No, but here's an interesting story. As I was writing this, I went back to my, to Junction City, Kansas for my first high school reunion, 35th, which six, six members arrived out of the 15 that graduated.

Two of them were ex-girlfriends and we just bonded and I was thinking about, and they're both in the piece, adapted in the piece. And, but on my way there, I knocked on William Burroughs door 40 minutes away from my house was Lawrence, Kansas, which was the liberal house on the prairie. There was nothing else for a thousand miles. And as a kid, as a budding queer punk or Burroughs was like the nearest cool thing. So I knocked, of course he's past, but I knocked on the door and a cranky old guy said, what? As if, you know, once a month, someone would do this.

And I said, I'm writing a musical that may take place on this porch. He was like, oh, that's a new one. Give me your number. I'm busy. And then he, I stuck around and he called and said, all right, I Googled you and you're you seem like you're legit and everyone who lives in William Burroughs house talks like William Burroughs. So I went over and he's like, here's the bathroom and there's a bullet hole that he

shot, you know, through the ceiling from the bath. Is he just some guy who bought a house? No, he is a caretaker and he was an awesome guy. He used to be tour manager for Patty Smith and, you know, a restaurant tour and he came to Lawrence to retire. And James Grauerholtz, who was Burroughs partner and, you know, manager in a way, he introduced me to. And then James, who was, you know, I always remember his pictures because he was so cute.

James said, why don't you come and write your first draft at the house? So me and my composer, Brian Weller, I was out in the garden writing the script and he was in the living room doing demos for music. So we wrote our first draft for this at Burroughs house. And he approved, you know, what I wrote, the scenes, I don't know if he got to those scenes with Burroughs. Yes. I just listened to those.

Yeah. And that was the last one I listened to. And Ben Foster, you know, movie star plays him. He's actually working on a film about him. So it was, it was kind of, you know, awesome that way. And of course, being in, if anyone knows about anything about Burroughs, which was the deepest paranoid, fantastical drug infused brilliance of satire and just phantasmagorical, futurist panic, we now live in William Burroughs world.

Donald Trump is a Burroughs character. I rewashed the head wig a couple of weeks ago. And what struck me about it, I had not seen it for several years, what struck me about it is I'm so used to seeing things that are autobiographical, that are confessional. And you've said that you probably could not make head wig today as someone who has not had reassignment surgery. Oh, I never, you know, I, that has come up recently, but it's interesting because the character, I don't think of the character as trans, because this was a boy who was comfortable

in his gender, and it was only his boyfriend who kind of co, and mom who coerced him into getting a gender reassignment officially through the East German government, which requires, required that for him to escape and get married. So he's also coerced by the physical border. Yeah. He's coerced by, in some ways, by the patriarchy, deciding that there has to be a certain way. So which is the opposite of the trans experience, which is, tends to be one of volition and choice.

So I think of the character as kind of, you know, mutilated by society and family and love, and it's, the true transformation happens after the, you know, the actual unsuccessful gender reassignment and involuntary one, when she sees a wig, sees a guitar and creates head wig. Yes. The persona, which saves him slash her because it's self-creation. I'm sorry, I did, I got that mixed up. You said you couldn't make short bus today.

Short bus is the one. Head wig, I don't think I could make as a feature though. I think if you were not a known quantity and someone like you showed up today and did something like that, people would revolt against it. Maybe. I mean, I think some people would. You know, I'm still a man of the theater and I believe that role-playing and fiction are necessary and I don't think that just gay men need to play gay men and just women.

But I also understand that it's absurd if I want to play a Japanese character. You know, it's like there's so many people that could play it. I don't think, I think of head wig as a mask. So I like trans people have played it, males, female, all ages, all ethnicity, all everything. To me, it is mask and drag is mask. You could also, someone could also legislate that there'd be no drag because you're appropriating femininity if you're a man in drag and you're parodying it. That's a logical thing.

I don't agree with it, but you could say that. I have enough women. Why do we need men playing men? As a side note, I think you could play a Japanese person. I think you could do like breakfast at Tiffany's. There is a scene in Anthem where Kian, I believe this is his student film and he has these gripes against a liberal film professor and there's a parody of the professor within this who says, you know, all art has to be autobiographical now or else it's appropriation.

And you've gone from doing head wig, which, again, is not you, to doing something, but is so flavorful and so honest and so touching that my brain is programmed to think, oh, this is autobiographical. This all happened to him. But now you've actually gone and done something that's firmly autobiographical. And do you perceive any kind of pressures that as Kian might chafe against identity politics and art, that I have to do something autobiographical because that's safe now? I think that is the pressure.

And to me, it's limiting. Growing up queer and in the military world, I chafed against authority and what I was supposed to do, I was supposed to be married, I was supposed to be straight, I'm supposed to be in the army. Men are better than women. You know, we're taught all these things that I chafed against and those are authority comments of authority figures. So I still chafe when I'm told I can't do this, I can't do that, when my intentions

are pure and trying to find truth. I agree having been grown up gay in the business, it is annoying when a lot of straight movie stars would play gay or ethnic or whatever it was that there were plenty of other actors that could do, but it was more of an economic decision that stars can do whatever they want and everyone else just gets the crumbs. I grew up with that. So I understand that completely. At the same time, I believe one of my lines is studies say that people who read fiction

have more empathy than people who read the news. I read that on HuffPo and it really moved me. It's also true that we have to put ourselves in other points of view through fiction to be able to feel empathy and a lot of the cultural rules that are coming up I think can squash empathy a bit in the rush to be offended. And God knows there's grievances plenty that need to be addressed, but you also can put yourself in a box and while Steve Bannon laughs, we slash our allies to pieces. No one's going to be pure enough to be the Democratic candidate.

You know, you're not black enough. You're not this enough. You're too white. You're gay. You don't act gay. Nobody's Zoe Latter's idea of a gay. Everyone is authentic. You can have bad intentions.

You can have exploitation for sure. You can have misuse of power. But when that's all you're seeking, you start to end up getting a lot of weirdly going back to Japan. You're sitting with a kid in Lawrence who is a very sweet kid who is marinating in a PC culture, so looking very hard to not offend in a way that's the main goal is to not offend as opposed to to explore. It's like, how can I not offend?

I'm being trained to not offend for four years in college as opposed to I like offending people that I disagree with, you know, personally, not to insult. You headway triggered the right. Short bus triggered people. Short bus I couldn't make now because maybe someone would say you're a white gay man with an Asian straight woman as a lead and you're making or having an orgasm in front of you on a camera. How dare you?

You know, let alone we're trying to find some metaphor here. Well, I mean, also a lot of it today is, you know, you talk about exploration and a lot of it today is just not fun. Everybody wants to have fun. It seems they're afraid to get hit, you know, by whatever. Everyone's flinching. Everyone's flinching. And it's, it's embarrassing, you know, and it also doesn't feel like the essence of youth

that I always admired, which was questioning authority, but also demanding change. Some of this is change, you know, it's like adding rules can be changed, but also safeguards is changed too, so there's good change, but it's, it tends to be like cranky old, old people telling you what you can't do. And that really gets on my nerves and that's why I'm sort of seeking a new, a new version of punk, you know, which is irreverent, but moving to the light, moving into the light as opposed to, you know, hardcore or whatever, which sometimes could veer into the into fascism. You know, it's like the best punks were moving towards the light, but also using dark imagery

and humor and violence. Yeah. I, I think that, you know, you've been on the right path in your career and I haven't been attacked yet. So you have, I'm just waiting, avoid it. This is like, you know, the, you, I'm sure you know that there is a big, I'm sure you'll agree that there is a big, you know, age gap in the LGBT community and all these views. But you've avoided being called out in the way that Dan Savage has been called out or

RuPaul has been called out. Maybe it's because I'm less famous. I like to say. I don't think it's because I fucked my way to the middle and that's all that's where I want to stay. I don't think it's because you're less famous. I think because you're, you're on to something. I think you, having followed your career for many years that you're on the right path

and you've the right artistic ambition or ideological ambition. And it's, it's something of a message that I hope that everyone pays attention to. I appreciate that. I mean, I'm sure there will be some point that, you know, I'm not, maybe it's something in this podcast that will offend and I can't do anything about it, but try to be honest. But I was. That's all I feel about our show. Yeah.

I know. You guys do the same thing. I also have someone to edit out all the slurs. Here's an example of that empathy thing I was telling you about that I didn't finish the story. There was a kid in, in Lawrence who was young and we were hanging out, we were watching a documentary and I think on the time site, going back to Japan about a Japanese house husband who took care of his mom and his kid while the mother worked, which is very unusual

there. And his mom had Alzheimer's and you see a beautiful scene where he's washing her in the bath and it's this shot of just neck up of her smiling and he's washing her in the bath and I'm tearing up. And the kid who's perfectly sweet was like, I feel really uncomfortable. I'm like, why? He goes, because she can't give her consent for that scene and I'm like, have you lost your capacity to feel in your seeking trouble?

You know, I really believe that's what a lot of people have started of lost their feelings in their need to fix their honorable need to fix everything now and fix it fast before Trump leaves. Well, I think it's a it's a it's a double mean hit you get from being angry online and I think social media, like the digital spectacle, the new spectacle where that's interactive now makes you feel like you're alive, too. It's like if I scream and fight, I'm alive. So where can how can our audience listen to anthem anthem is going to be part of a new

podcast network called Luminary, which is experimenting with the subscription form. They want to be the Netflix of podcasts for better or worse, but we are launching with the app. So April 23rd, Luminary will have an app available everywhere. The first episode is free. Then you go under like a $7 monthly subscription, but you can light Netflix. You can get three free months if you act now. There's a special sweepstakes raffle thing where you know, if you enter, you can come

backstage with me at a head big show or be interviewed by Lena Dunham or talk to Conan O'Brien. So there's there's that as a special thing, but they're trying to get podcasts. They have about 40 original ones, and they're great people. They're really good people. You know, I can smell a good person at this age. And this is my good. You're a good person.

Great. It's thunder very Jewish that you're a good person. What people do good things, Jewish people are good people. John, thank you so much for joining me. You're welcome. My name is Kian, which means head in Gaelic, and I have a brain tumor, but I'm having a good day. I've got a lot of energy and I want all five of four of you still listening to know I will

remain online and on this porch till you cough up the hundred grand I need to cut this out. Or till I die, whichever comes first. Now I wrote this song for my tumor. It's actually a conversation between my tumor and me because I figured if my tumor could sing, it might sing something like this. I'm a mold on your bread, the prayer grows on your head, the pause in the joke that makes you cry till you choke. As a lover, I'm on surpass, but I come first and you go last, no rival comes above me,

I will fuck you till you love me. The end is nigh, so am I. I am free to be there when you die. Suck on your memories, learn from your mistakes, curate the nightmares that keep you awake. I will text from upstairs just to say you're pretty. May you live to see my love turn to pity. When you cry, so dry your eyes, I'm so free. To be there when you die, I will eat the sins pressed into your flesh.