09/07/2025
Premiered on this day (6 July 1986) at New York’s Cat Club (formerly at 76 East 13th Street in Manhattan): disturbing, sexually explicit, misanthropic 25-minute-long Super 8 underground film Fingered. Hailed by John Waters as "the ultimate date movie for psychos” and “the best hillbilly-punk-art-porno movie in the world”, Fingered is the most notorious collaboration between antisocial Cinema of Transgression auteur Richard Kern and his frequent leading lady No Wave death kitten / punk poetess Lydia Lunch (who also wrote the screenplay. Her scathing performance is described (aptly) by Dana Reinoos of Screen Slate website as “terrifying and erotic and glamorous and disgusting all at once”). In my youth, watching Kern’s grainy nihilistic “Death Trip” movies like Fingered, Right Side of My Brain, You Killed Me First and Submit to Me Now (inevitably on a bootleg VHS) was a punk rite of passage. Later, I revisited them at venues like London’s Scala Cinema and The British Film Institute (introduced by Lunch herself). Who could have ever anticipated the high falutin’ Museum of Modern Art would acquire a print of Fingered for its permanent collection? I interviewed Kern in London way back in 1995 when he was promoting his photography book New York Girls, and he told me about his admiration for Michelangelo Antonioni – which I guess makes Lunch his Monica Vitti. (Pictured: Lunch with her genuinely creepy leading man – and off-screen boyfriend at the time – Martin Nation).
