Written for Culture Wars
I’ll give Trash City this: its production values are high. Lit up like a stadium concert, costumed like a catwalk show with a grand set that could pass as a fantastical centrepiece in any exhibition centre. However, while the design is gloriously excessive, Trash City’s content – more than that, its ideology – is grossly so.
Curled around the edge of the Roundhouse is a decrepit street front, frayed in both structure and morals. Sex shops saddle up to rusty garage doors. Enormous neon signs announce hotels. Mounds of televisions, entwined in colourful industrial wiring, splutter erotica with the hawking rhythm of a smoker’s cough. Thirty foot up, a wrecked car heaves smokes where it has smashed through a wall. An asteroid of kerb, ripped from the ground, is caught mid-trajectory above our heads. It looks brilliant, both grandiose and base. The debt to the endless Downtowns of Marvel comics is obvious, but there are quieter hints of Blade Runner, Tennessee Williams and the Blitz.
As soon as the show starts, however – as soon as the populace of Trash City emerge – it reveals its inauthenticity. The plasticized falsity of that set becomes totally apparent as this is a circus concerned only with image. It manages to make a Disneyland of grunge and deviancy by offering only iconography – and particularly chauvinist iconography, at that.
Instead of interrogating the concept and aesthetics of trash culture, Trash City regurgitates it unquestioningly. It is a parade of crass masquerading as cool; totally cosmeticised, totally hollow. At one point, a woman with bloodied prosthetic horns for breasts hangs from a chandelier, her modesty protected by only a thong. She pulls a necklace from her vagina and dangles it into the faces in the crowd below her. Elsewhere, two backcombed, busty vampires pluck victims from the crowds and tear into their throats mid-air, needlessly exposing their breasts. The whole affair smacks of masculine fantasies: man as overlord, women at his bidding call. All is titillation, a counterculture emptied of its subversion or radicalism and instead presented as little more than a harem dancing for we sultans gathered below. Its leather and latex is bound up into a neatly commercial package, like soft porn on late night cable or a raunchy Kerrang! music video. For God’s sake, the male ringleader has two phallic guns over his crotch that light up like a bull’s head.
What strips Trash City of content is its willingness to tick boxes with its individual set-pieces. We get flashes of aerial work, sparks of fire eating and half a clown routine. Nothing is allowed to build in a production content with its own dilettantism and the result is wholly unsatisfactory. It’s not even as if those moments are structured into anything beyond a conveyor belt of routines; if there’s a narrative intended, it is muddled to the point of obscurity.
If anything is worthy of interest, it is Trash City’s way of making strange bedfellows of grunge and high camp. Drag queens and excessive glam cosy up to the gothic and vampish in such a way that suggests an identity crisis. It’s as if Trash City can’t decide whether to take its own darkness seriously or send it up. To be honest, neither is a particularly appealing prospect for a self-satisfied, half-hearted circus with the attitude of a rebellious schoolboy showing off his stick-it-to-em independence, blind to his own surly immaturity.
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