In 1964, US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously attempted to explain what constituted pornography by saying, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced... but I know it when I see it ..." I take great joy in believing that he would be flummoxed by Vernon Chatman’s Final Flesh from 2009. Chatman wrote a four-part script and sent the sections off to four separate porn sites that specialize in creating custom fetish films for their customers, none of which were advised about his intentions. Once he received them back, Chatman edited them together into a supremely bizarre 71-minute nuclear apocalypse film that contains no actual sex but is filled with what I might describe as porn-adjacent imagery. It might also be one of the most hilarious flicks I’ve ever seen.
Let’s get this straight, the narrative is extremely loose. In fact, I’d say there’s no real reason to try to go into detail about it. In fact, if you said the film has no narrative, I wouldn’t argue. There are a couple of recurring motifs that tie the segments together, but really the film is just a string of nonstop surrealist non-sequiturs held together by the surprisingly game performers. Whether it’s a woman spontaneously giving birth to a sexy cantaloupe or a family having handwritten notes from God slipped under their door, the actors earnestly deliver what is requested of them.
Only three of the performers are credited and I think they are from the initial chapter. There are twelve actors in total, though (a family unit of father, mother, and daughter for each section). Much of the comedy is derived from the stilted deadpan line deliveries of Chatman’s purposefully strange and faux pretentious dialog. This collision of mock art film sensibilities and nakedly (heh) unpolished performances truly creates a wholly unique and entertaining watch.
Ike Chatman is credited on IMDb as the director of Final Flesh, but I’m thinking he is really just one of the producers/directors/cinematographers/actors of one of the segments. That’s not to take anything away from him, but this is obviously Chatman’s project in total. The script is absolutely saturated with off-the-wall, ridiculous scenes. In that sense, the intent is easy to discern. Also, the motifs, such as they are, and the chapters give a small amount of structure to the onscreen lunacy. At its heart, this is a surrealist art film with an anarchic spirit.
Production values, as you might imagine, are extremely low. Each chapter unfolds in a single location. With the exceptions of a conch shell and a Halloween mask, props seem to be mostly of the found variety in that they’re everyday items that were probably already at the various apartments that serve as the settings. They all look to have been shot on video or digital video and have different aspect ratios. A few bizarre sound effects are judiciously sprinkled here and there. Like the aforementioned lack of credits for the actors, neither could I find technical credits for the behind-the-scenes technicians.
The writer Neil Gaiman, speaking about art, once remarked, “the world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.” Vernon Chatman’s Final Flesh is definitely something that wasn’t here before. Additionally, I’d like to say that the film isn’t making fun of its performers. On the contrary, I’d say it humanizes them and acts as a subversion of the notoriously dehumanizing porn genre. Based on the blooper reel included on the American Genre Film Archive’s Blu-ray, at least some of the actors seemed to have a blast with the material, too.
Now even though the irony is ratcheted up to the stratosphere and there are a handful of fairly explicit images along with copious nudity, I’d still say without hesitation that this is an experimental art film. It’s goddamn hilarious to be sure, but it’s an art film, nevertheless. I can’t recommend it to everyone because of those pesky porn-adjacent images and the quirky-as-hell sensibility, but I guarantee that a segment of film fandom will adore this flick. It’s available now on Vinegar Syndrome’s site and as of this writing, there are 790 copies left. Get yours now!
Michael Cavender