Film poster; Suzan Ziegler and Lisa Haas
I had the pleasure of seeing Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same at the Galway Film Festival in Ireland last summer. It's now playing through January 12 at ReRunGastropub Theatre in DUMBO (more info below).
The film, written and directed by Madeleine Olnek, is a lovely, quirky, comic fantasia, with a beautifully understated performance by Lisa Haas as the sweetly codependent lesbian who's fallen in love with a space alien. Filmed in a sort of Ed Wood, low-budget camp sci-fi style, Codependent offers a fun queer evening at the movies.
Olnek was a regular at the WOW Café in the 1980s, when the underground lesbianperformance space was breaking rules about theatre and poaching from popularculture to rewrite what we understood of gender and sexuality norms. The film is based on her play of the same title, which will soon be published in acollection of work from WOW that Holly Hughes and Alina Troyano (CarmelitaTropicana) are co-editing for the University of Michigan Press. Olnek made the play into an indie feature film that’s now making the rounds on the festivalcircuit. I caught the showing on thefirst night of the Galway Film Festival at Town Hall last July.
In true WOW style, thefilm both quotes and breaks the genre conventions on which it’s based. Jane (Haas) is a desperately shy, lonelylesbian clerk at a greeting card store, who finds a note dropped seemingly outof the blue in which a lesbian space alien asks if they can be friends. As Jane’s therapist (the wry Rae C. Wright)tries to help Jane puzzle through her emotions while persuading her that shehasn’t really been contacted byaliens, the planet Zots suffers an environmentalcrisis. They believe their ozone layeris being destroyed by “big feelings,” and resolve to send to Earth any of theircitizens whose love affairs are damaging their planet. On Earth, the reasoning goes, the aliens’hearts will be broken, and they’ll return to Zots cured of their commitment tolove.
And so begins a tale ofaliens-on-another-planet, in which the sexual and cultural mores of Earth clashwith the otherworldly style of the citizens of Zots. Beaming down into Jane’s world, Zoinx (thehandsome, square-jawed Susan Ziegler) targets the shy lesbian for herexperiment in Earth-bound relationships. Despite her monotone, high-tech, echoing voice and her utter lack ofhuman affect, Jane finds Zoinx charming.
Part of the film’s joke is that Jane never acknowledges Zoinx’sstrangeness, accepting the alien’s bald head, her never-removed large,Elizabethan-style collar, which nearly encircles her starkly prominent pate,and her strange way of expressing affection (she puts her hand against Jane’snose in an awkward gesture whenever she’s feeling intimate). Jane is so delighted by Zoinx’s company thatshe happily engages her alien customs and generously teaches Zoinx the equallystrange ways of Earth.
Two other aliens havebeen sent to Earth to participate in Zots’ project. Bar (Cynthia Kaplan) and Zylar (JackieMonahan) have the misfortune of having “big feelings” for one another, but tryto find earthlings who might cure them of their mutual affliction.
Olnek includes hilarious scenes in whichvarious local lesbians respond to Zylar’s personal ad (written and videoed),and find themselves incapable of understanding or accepting what looks to themlike weird role-playing. In theirone-note delivery, Bar and Zylar’s declarations of desperate love both undercutand underline the typical (or is it stereotypical?) excess of lesbianattachments with truly funny, sweet knowingness.
Two “men in black,”federal agents of some sort who track the aliens’ activity on Earth, shadowJane and Zoinx, trying to figure out the place from which the aliens enter andleave the country. Their scenes arefilmed almost entirely in a parked suburban van, where the senior agent (DennisDavis) complains that he’s always passed up for promotion, watching those he’strained leapfrog over him professionally. His junior partner (Alex Karpovsky) asks him probing questions,inquiring, for instance, whether his wife, Debbie, is a “transman,” to the guy’sutter perplexity.
The two men’s deadpanhumor offers a terrific counterbalance to Jane and the aliens’shenanigans. Their surveillanceactivities also allow Olnek to feed them anthropological lines about lesbianrelationships, as their ridiculous comments about whether these romances last (for one example) provide both a dominant cultural voice and an eye that lets them peer into themargins with a rather friendly, liberal curiosity.
Davis and Karpovsky play their scenes with alovely improvisational tone and Davis, in particular, comments as much onconventional masculinity as Jane and the aliens comment on lesbianrelationships.
Codependent Lesbian Space Alien is filmed with an intentionallylow-budget gestalt reminiscent of Ed Woods’ opus and the science fictionmovies of the 1950s. Olnek uses low-techspecial effects to represent the aliens’ space ship, and the film’s black andwhite stock lets her use fun ‘50s-style titles and images of galaxies swirlingin space.
The music, too, quotes ‘50s melodramaticfilm conventions to over-emphasize emotions and to help announce Olnek’saffectionate parodies not only of sci-fi but of stereotypes of contemporarylesbian relationships.
Watching actorsdressed as aliens walking robotically through real New York East and WestVillage locations while no one on the streets blinks an eye is also a hoot. Codependentsends up being a sweet, funny love story in which two deeply “different” womentriumph over their odds.
At a public discussion after theshowing in Galway, Olnek described how she researched the genre and understandsits roots in Cold War paranoia. Aliens,she pointed out, where often portrayed as they are in her film (that is, bald and homogeneous in appearance) torepresent Americans’ fear of the uniformity a Soviet take-over might impose. Likewise, Olnek suggested, their monotonespeaking voices borrow from those ‘50s sci-fi movies, in which the aliens’voices, too, were leeched of individual character and affect.
Putting thesecharacteristics in a lesbian context, however, makes them sweet andhilarious. Jane takes Zoinx out for adrink at the Cubbyhole, a lesbian bar in Greenwich Village, where Jane whispersthat the clientele tends to be unfriendly. When Zoinx asks Jane to dance, she happily complies, trying to turn herembarrassment into a kind of pride when Zoinx's moves prove anything butconventional. The reaction shots arehysterical.
Go; you'll have fun.
The Feminist Spectator
Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, through January 12, ReRunGastropub, DUMBO, Brooklyn.
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