Pink Narcissus

This post is part of Nathaniel's "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" series in which the participants must post a single image from a movie he or she deems as the "best shot" for any particular reason.

I don't think I have ever seen an art-house erotic gay film before, which is pretty darn disappointing if you think about it, but after screening Pink Narcissus that is no longer the case. Directed and written by James Bidgood, the film centers around a beautiful male prostitute played by Bobby Kendall and his imagined masturbatory fantasies he uses as a form of escapism where he is a slave or an emperor or a matador or simply a guy jacking off with a butterfly. That latter part pretty much tells you how surreal this film could be. As another example, there's a sequence of a male belly dancer dancing with an erection that must have lasted a good 15 minutes or so (the movie is only a little more than an hour) and while sensual at first, the longer it went the more surreal and abstract it got. It was wholly hypnotic. Maybe that was the point.

In any case, the star of the film is Kendall as the male hustler. And that is certainly evident from the way the film lingers at his whole being--his youthful face, his ruby red lips, his tight body, his bubble ass and everything else. There were plenty of scenes in the beginning where he would just be looking himself in the mirror, such as the image above, and clearly infatuated with what he sees. The film has "Narcissus" in its title after all. With all of this said, I was quite tempted to pick as my favorite shot something that featured this beautiful specimen of a man like the aforementioned butterfly jack-off scene, which makes me giggle whenever I think about it, or this amazing shot of his naked backside from below:

I mean just... wow, right? The coloring (the titular pink) and the bright lighting of this shot really elevate it to another level for me. And yadda... yadda... it's just really hot, okay? And yet, my favorite shot ended up not featuring Kendall at all. The shot is from one of the scenes that takes place in the dark and sleazy cityscape which acts as the harsh reality that Kendall's character is trying to escape when he indulges in his various fantasies. It's of three men, a man inside the telephone booth (Kendall's john perhaps?) flanked on either side by the two other men who evokes two different iconic gay imagery, the cowboy and the leather-bound biker (both pleasuring themselves).

For me I picked this shot because it looked like a painting. A dark, naughty painting, you wouldn't want your grandma to ever know you own, but a work of art nonetheless. I wish I knew more why it grabbed my attention, it just did. Or you know I can stop intellectualizing as well as lying to myself and just own up to the fact that my favorite shot is actually Kendall's naked ass. Whatever!