Russ Meyer and the Satire Under the Sleaze

Russ Meyer sold sex to American men for four decades and spent most of that time laughing at them. This is the fact people miss when they file him under smut. The films are stuffed with the buxom women that made his name and his fortune, and they are also, watched with any attention, savage cartoons about male appetite — its greed, its violence, its comic impotence. Meyer is one of the genuine independent auteurs of American cinema, a man who wrote, shot, edited, produced and distributed his own pictures and owned every frame, and the satire that runs under the sleaze is the thing that has kept the work alive long after the shock wore off.

The nudie who invented a market

Meyer more or less started the American softcore feature single-handedly. A combat cameraman during the Second World War, he came out of the war a skilled newsreel photographer and drifted into cheesecake stills before making The Immoral Mr. Teas in 1959, a slight comedy about a man who can suddenly see women undressed. It cost almost nothing and returned a staggering profit, and in doing so it invented the “nudie cutie” and proved there was a mass audience for a certain kind of cheerful, above-board titillation. Meyer had found a market with no competition and a business model he controlled end to end.

He did not stay in the shallows. Through the mid-1960s he made a run of black-and-white “roughies” — melodramas with violence and desire pushed to pulp extremes — including Lorna, Mudhoney and the picture that would become his monument, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! in 1965, a desert action film with almost no nudity and one of the great screen villainesses in Tura Satana’s Varla. Then in 1968 Vixen! became a genuine box-office phenomenon, the film that made softcore respectable enough to play ordinary theatres and turned Meyer from a fringe operator into a name Hollywood suddenly wanted to talk to.

The joke is on the men

Here is the pattern that distinguishes Meyer from every hack who copied his surfaces. In a Russ Meyer film the women are forces of nature — powerful, appetitive, frequently the only competent people on screen — and the men are weak, ridiculous, driven by lusts that make fools and often corpses of them. His male characters are caricatures of American masculinity at its most anxious: cheating husbands, blustering rednecks, impotent tycoons, all of them undone by the very appetites the film is ostensibly selling to men in the audience. The picture flatters the viewer’s desire and then holds up a mirror in which that desire looks absurd.

Meyer reinforced the mockery with tone. Several of his films are narrated by a mock-solemn voice delivering fake moral warnings, a carnival-barker sermon that frames the sensation as a cautionary tale while winking at the joke. The register is cartoon throughout — everything is bigger, faster and more ludicrous than life, the sex included. That comic exaggeration is the satire’s chief instrument, because it keeps the audience aware that they are watching a parody of American want and not an endorsement of it. The films are lurid and self-aware at the same frequency, which is a harder trick than it looks.

The editing is the auteur

If you want to know why Meyer is a real filmmaker and not merely a successful pornographer, watch the cutting. He edited his own films and he cut like the combat and newsreel cameraman he had been — rapid, rhythmic, percussive, a machine-gun montage that assembles a scene from dozens of quick shots and low angles into something closer to a comic strip than a conventional sequence. The technique gives his films their unmistakable velocity; a Meyer picture moves at a clip nothing else in the exploitation field could match, and the momentum is comic, timed to land gags and reversals like a drummer hitting the punchlines.

This is where the auteur argument is won. Meyer controlled every stage of production and financed the films himself through his own company, which meant no studio note ever softened the vision, and the editing is the purest expression of a single sensibility working without interference. Compare his cartoonist’s cutting to the opposite pole of the same era’s erotic cinema — the gliding, unhurried elegance of Radley Metzger, whose method I set out in the art house of its day. Metzger dissolved and lingered and trusted atmosphere; Meyer chopped and accelerated and trusted the joke. Two independent authors reading the same cultural loophole and answering in violently opposite dialects, both unmistakably themselves in every frame.

Ebert, Fox, and the studio experiment

The strangest episode of Meyer’s career is the one that most clearly reveals the satirist. After Vixen!, 20th Century Fox — a major studio, in financial trouble, chasing the youth market — hired Meyer to make a film, and he delivered Beyond the Valley of the Dolls in 1970, co-written with the young film critic Roger Ebert. The result is a delirious parody of Hollywood excess and the Jacqueline Susann melodrama, a studio-funded X-rated fever dream that lampoons the very industry that paid for it. Ebert, who became a lifelong friend and collaborator, always insisted the films were satires, and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is the clearest evidence — a picture that treats the whole machinery of celebrity, sex and success as a grand American joke.

The experiment did not fully take. Meyer’s follow-up for Fox, the courtroom drama The Seven Minutes in 1971, dropped the sex to make an earnest point about censorship and flopped, which taught him that his gift lived in the exaggeration and the appetite, not the sermon. He returned to independence and his own money, making Supervixens, Up! and finally Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens in 1979, each pushing the cartoon further toward pure abstraction of speed, flesh and gag. He essentially stopped making features after that, tended his catalogue, and let the reappraisal come to him.

The look, and the long influence

It is worth pausing on the iconography, because Meyer’s images have outlived the films that contained them and colonised the wider culture. He shot a heightened, sun-blasted Americana — desert highways, roadside diners, small-town backyards, the whole cheap-postcard landscape of the mid-century United States — and populated it with figures scaled like pin-ups and comic-book characters. The low angles that make his women loom, the crisp deep-focus of a location shot in hard daylight, the Pop-Art boldness of the compositions: these add up to a visual signature as recognisable as any in exploitation cinema. He was a photographer first, and it shows in every frame’s graphic confidence.

That look travelled. You can trace Meyer’s DNA through decades of downstream culture — the go-go iconography and desert menace of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! has been cited and pastiched by filmmakers, and Quentin Tarantino’s fondness for tough women, fast talk and drive-in texture owes an obvious debt to it. Music videos, fashion shoots and album covers have raided the same imagery for its instant charge of retro danger. The films became a visual vocabulary that people quote without always knowing the source, which is one working definition of a genuine stylist. A hack leaves no fingerprints; Meyer left a whole aesthetic that others are still borrowing.

What the sleaze was hiding

The reappraisal did come, and it was earned. John Waters championed Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! for decades; feminist critics have argued, with real evidence in the films, that Meyer’s dominant women and pathetic men complicate any lazy reading of him as a straightforward misogynist; a new generation found the editing genuinely radical. None of this launders the leering, which is real and central to the appeal, and honest criticism should keep both facts in view at once. The films want to arouse and they want to mock, and Meyer never pretended otherwise.

What the sleaze was hiding, then, is an American satirist of considerable nerve — a self-made independent who turned the country’s appetites for sex, violence, money and machismo into fast, funny, cartoon indictments and got the country to pay him for the privilege. The clue was always in the way the men come off: no filmmaker who actually admired the leering husband would draw him as such a buffoon. Watch Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! for the iconography, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls for the studio-funded parody at full tilt, and Vixen! for the film that changed what a softcore picture could earn, and keep one eye on the cutting the whole time. The velocity is the argument. Meyer built a career on the oldest exploitation promise in the book and used it to laugh, at machine-gun speed, at everyone who fell for it.