⋆☾⋆⁺Interview » Laura Parnes⋆˚⊹₊
on outsiders, Pinterest virality, and merging humor with horror
Two teenage girls sit next to each other on a fuzzy pink bedspread. One of the girls has spiky, short blonde hair and is wearing an oversized t-shirt. She takes a drag of a cigarette and says to her friend, who is sporting black Bettie Page bangs, “That motherf*cker is trash. What are you doing with him?” Her friend looks down at her hands and responds, “He’s totally a pretty boy. You know, my weakness.” The spiky-haired friend lets out another drag of her cigarette and shuts it down, “Just get a vibrator. Hello???” The song “Rape Me” by Nirvana plays in the background as the clip spins into what looks like a fan edit of some obscure 90s movie.
The user @unhingedscars has uploaded this video edit to TikTok with the tags #noisyes #noisyes1997 #noisyesedit #grunge #goth #gothgirlsummer #grungevibe #messy90sgrungemakeup #lauraparnes #ericadaking #jendaking #nirvana #Aesthetic #indiefilm #90saesthetic #shortmovie #90svibes #letterboxd #Edit #fyp #parati. The video has over 203k views. The comments are filled with requests for links to stream what they just saw. Some commenters wrongly attribute the film to Gregg Araki, while others are quick to set the record straight: It’s by Laura Parnes.
Parnes’ 1997 film No Is Yes follows two teenage girls who meet and accidentally kill their favorite rock star. The piece, which has recently had a resurgence amongst a younger subset of internet users, uses the rape-revenge horror genre to comment on the corporate co-option of counter culture. Much of Parnes’ work toes the line between experimental and narrative cinema, and often stars her friends, collaborators, fellow artists, and musicians. She abstracts source material (Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, Dante’s Inferno, Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley’s Heidi), works with improvisation, and stages installations. Her body of work is both critical and reverent, and charts the ways that culture circulates, gets consumed, and spat back out. It’s also often really funny. Parnes recently finished screening a three-night retrospective of her early work at Anthology Film Archives in New York curated by Jane Ursula Harris.
You were there at every screening of your early works at Anthology. Did the energy in those rooms feel good?
It felt really good. The first night, well, I don't know because I went and got some food during the very beginning.
Because you couldn't watch your early work or because you were hungry?
I was starving. Also, it was a little painful for me to watch it. Those early shorts are rough. It's interesting to watch other people respond to them. I don't show those things for a reason. However, if there's going to be interest in it now and it's speaking to another generation, I need to rethink and consider how it's placed or how it could work. In terms of the confessional thing, that's very much in all of that—like some of the early music videos that list embarrassing memories from puberty, combined with an eighth-grade talent show or Ladies, There Is a Space You Can’t Go, sampled from a Sally Jesse Raphael episode, “My Daughter Dresses Like a Hooker.” The online harassment element is embedded in it. It's different because it's a talk show or whatever, but all that stuff is the precursor to the internet nightmare.
It’s been part of our culture for so long. When I was growing up, my mom would watch Jerry Springer, but in secret. I would come downstairs and she'd quickly change the channel because she didn't want to admit that she was enjoying it.
That's funny.
It touches on those very human feelings of wanting to say something mean.
Being part of the in group, the out group, who doesn't fit in, the outsiders. All of my work is about outsiders, as a place for potential real rebellion and as an important element and a way to negate all this toxic energy in our culture.
During the beginning of No Is Yes, there’s a pan to the products on the vanity. It was so thrilling to see this document of these 90s beauty products, because it’s always a moving target. Your piece No Is Yes has a cult following of younger fans online currently. How do you think that happened?
I think it started with the poster. Somebody uploaded the poster and then everyone was like, what is this? It was Pinterest of all places. Then it went to Letterboxd, and then people just kept contacting me—it was not public—they kept asking me all the time for the Vimeo password. Then I was just like, alright, I’m getting rid of the password.
I love that all of your work is accessible online. It’s very generous that it’s all there.
In part because I got tired of giving out the password and then I thought, what is the point? I do want people to rent my work and make money from it. When you're dealing with distribution, it's often in an academic setting. The content of this work does not mesh well with academia—where people are very afraid to show things that are controversial. But there is an audience for this, so let them find it.
There are still people that would rent it for a screening and also the people that want to watch it in bed on their laptop.
Which does kind of pain me.
Really?
My laptop is so dirty and...
Even worse, they're probably going to watch it on their phone. That I can’t do.
That's the thing with doing installation, you have so much control over what people see.
Normally, you show in an installation context, with the audience coming in and out of the gallery. Does your work need to be viewed from start to finish?
It depends on the piece. Some pieces work better screened. For Tour Without End, the best way it was shown was screened with live bands. That was great and just made so much sense. For County Down, you can totally watch from beginning to end, but I really liked it as an installation more. Sometimes I can't really articulate why that is.
Showing video is so hard because you almost have to plan for people to not watch the whole thing.
The structure of those vignettes is part of that. You're getting little contained movies.
You have a number of episodic works as well. County Down was a web series and Hollywood Inferno states that it’s the first episode. Is there another episode?
We want to do one. Somebody’s got to write it. [laughs] I love the idea of working with people you worked with like 20 years ago and having them age.
The reboot.
That's a fun idea. In Hollywood Inferno, like each one is a separate little vignette, which I kind of think of as chapters. For Blood and Guts for instance, I would make one and could show it in a group show or show it as a chapter and then people would start talking about it and they’d want to see the next chapter. It’s sort of art world episodic TV.
It’s strategic.
When you don't have the money to make the full thing, but it's a fun way for me to work, too. I could write a chapter, and different things would happen, you can respond to it and then you write your next chapter instead of having to have everything in some tight, planned out scenario.
You were mentioning how people considered your work to be negative, but it’s never cynical about the things that everyone else is cynical about. Teenagers, especially teenage girls—we’re obsessed with them and we also hate them. You’re able to treat them with care. There’s an autonomy to them.
For example, in something like No Is Yes, the characters are really smart. There are ethical and moral questions, but they’re also finding out who they are. Of course they’re making mistakes. In the case of County Down, a lot of mistakes. They are kind of driven. They’re excited about connecting with their own power and agency. That is something I don’t see enough in popular culture. In No Is Yes, she says, “That song’s about Nietzsche going crazy because he's so smart. I can relate to that.” You're not going to see that on any kind of TV show about teenage girls, but I certainly hung out with those people.
It was interesting watching Tour Without End because it brought up this question of how to age within counterculture without being embittered.
Right.
It was really special. It acts as an intergenerational document of a specific moment in time in New York DIY, but extends beyond that.
There’s always an obsession with youth in terms of creativity and this idea of killing your heroes or what have you. That’s not the way the real world is. Obviously, we all get older and there's a tour without end. There are a lot of people who are going to keep being creative until they die. I envy those people. I want to learn from them.
I'm kind of one, actually, too. At the time I was like, wait, how do we keep doing this? I also wanted to connect the younger and older generations. I think there's a false idea of the youth and the more venerable artists always being in some collision course. I don't really see it that way. Even if it was that way, let's show a different way. Doing that scene with Kate Valk and Alex Drewchin (Eartheater), those conversations they have, I find it really touching. It was improvised and they both brought so much to the scene.
It seems like you almost exclusively work with people you know. You're not really hiring actors.
Only a couple times have I done an open call where I listed something in BackStage. For me that just didn't work. I realized I can't work with people who don't understand my work. I mean, I could if I were doing a different kind of project, but for my art projects I really love that people get what I'm doing. That's almost more important to me than a lot of other things you might pay an actor for. That being said, I'm connected to a bunch of great actors. Kate Valk has been in stuff, who is for theater, a legend, and Jim Fletcher. But then I'll have musicians like Lizzi Bougatsos, Kathleen Hanna, or Brontez Purnell who's hilarious. So, they're non-actors, a lot of them.
A lot of your work is non-linear. How do you approach writing a screenplay?
I've written a lot of scripts and the only unscripted piece that I've done with the cast and crew is Tour Without End, which was slightly scripted. I came up with the scenario, got the people together, we'd have notes beforehand and then it was all improvised.
For Blood and Guts in High School, that was based on the Kathy Acker book. I wanted to take the years that she wrote the book and make it a period piece, connecting it with some of the major historical events that happened during that period. Like Jim Jones, mass suicide, Ronald Reagan, the rise of Theocracy, nuclear meltdowns. It was all these things that connected to that time period but also connected to the time period I was making it in because it was during the Bush administration and the Iraq War. Also, I wanted Janie to confront all these different institutions.
It's like a setup that's totally different than how you would set up a conventional screenplay. But sometimes I do write scripts in three acts.You almost can't help but write in that way because we're so used to it. But then I might take one line from the book, so it's just really loosely weaving these ideas together. I love that you can look through the book and look at the script and notice the differences. Kathy Acker's book is so high energy, really intense, a lot of chaotic violent eruptions and things like that. This is so slow, almost like stretching everything out so you can see every part of it. Showing how the power structures are designed the way they are. They're all kind of funny, they all have a punchline.
Your work is very funny.
Thanks! With Blood and Guts it would be funnier but the pacing is intentionally slow.
Can you talk about Magic Thinking, the new piece that you’re working on?
I was trying to do a documentary at a certain point about how young people get hooked into far-right ideas through the internet. I was also interested in people like ContraPoints who are trying to reach those people, but also have this intelligent conversation about how people are being manipulated. I couldn't get money for that. I had done so much research. Then I turned my attention to Wellness and the far right.
The idea that you should love and accept yourself as is, is not a good idea when you are a white supremacist for example. I saw this show that was asking women to look in the mirror and say, “I love you” to the image in the mirror. There are a lot of people in this country who shouldn't be saying that. That's not what they need. The QAnon thing interested me and also this idea of trying to be perfect. There's physically perfect, mentally perfect. Originally, I actually wanted to do it with a cast of all men as transhumanist cowboys and I wanted to shoot out West. Once again, I didn't get the money. It ended up being better that I didn't get the money because I think I write women characters better.
I ended up making it about this couple, and it's even more perverse, because they're in love together going through these series of self-improvement programs—they do psychedelic therapy. It's all in a very abstract way. I'm making it sound like a much more conventional narrative than it is. There's a Tony Robbins character. There's this kind of Curtis Yarvin character. All the weirdness of the new right.
Things that were coded as fringe or left wing have totally veered off course in the past five to ten years.
For one, they do steal everything and that's a thread in my work, how all these different countercultural things get appropriated, whether it's by mainstream culture or by deeply reactionary elements of the culture. In this case, the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) thing is deeply reactionary. It's funny because, I don't know about you, but I can look at all these things that they're doing and I’ve done them too. Meditation, yoga…
There’s a tone of aspirational anxiety to your work. The characters are striving but they always get stuck.
It's the struggle for—whether it's real rebellion or accomplishment—in late capitalism, we are stuck. I believe we can break out of that, but my work is not didactic in the sense that I don't pretend to have answers. I'm trying to make our culture look in the mirror and not say, “I love you.”
Is Magic Thinking your first piece that acknowledges the internet and influencing?
That's a good question. Yeah. It's funny. It might be. I mean, it's always there..
It's underneath.
It's kind of always been there just in terms of things that get us stuck and the way people treat each other. But honestly, visually, it's not.
You're not showing the phone.
I did do a music video for The Julie Ruin and it starts with Kathleen Hanna, saying, no, I'm not going to read the mean Tweets. It was also a decision not to linger on those more obvious things and find another way in. I know in your work it’s really grounded in that.
I've noticed a general disdain for art about the internet. We're so exhausted by it because it’s part of our everyday reality. It’s a difficult task to make work that integrates technology without it feeling all-consuming.
It's interesting because your work is so on the pulse in that way. Sometimes that really is super beneficial and sometimes it actually makes things more difficult. For No Is Yes, that work was so 90s that it was harder for people to get it. And now they get it.
That's why I never stress too much about it because you just have to let things age. You might hate it or you might look at it differently in 20 years.
Some artists go into the fetishizing of new technology, and to me that’s not interesting. The ones who are really embedded in what is happening culturally online, that stuff is fascinating. I think it's going to stay fascinating because it's capturing an important moment. This moment is so pivotal in terms of where we’re at.
You work in a really lo-fi, low-budget way. Is that out of necessity? Even the cameras you use feel very of their time. Is that important to you?
I shot No Is Yes on a Betacam, but then I didn't like it because it was too clear, so I reshot it off a TV. I do like that aesthetic. I like things pared down. I’m not interested in shooting on 8k. Having a low budget allows me to make this work. It takes like 30 million now to make an independent film. Then you have to convince someone that what you're making is going to be commercial, and I have no interest in doing that. I like being able to make what I want to make. Even with the low budget, it's complicated because you still have to raise the money.
Yeah.
It's not free, and I always pay people. Once you get to a certain point in your career, you know, people aren't like, “Awww, you need help.”
Just me and my friends this weekend!
Exactly. That just doesn’t cut it. It’s the right thing to do.
Do you feel like fundraising has stopped you from working on things that you'd like to be working on? Or does it always find its way? Maybe you table it and then come back to it when you have the resources.
I do fantasize, what if I were given the resources that I needed? How much more work would I have made? What kind of work would I have made? It's kind of a lie to say, like, oh, it's good that I had all these limitations. I think it's good to have some limitations. Sometimes limitations can work to your favor. I do think there are way too many women artists who have to deal with limitations.
Lorraine O’Grady was talking at the New Museum about her career, she had just had a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, and they asked her how she felt about it. And she’s like, well, honestly, I'm looking around and I'm thinking, what if I were actually supported as an artist when I was young? What would have happened then? The world would have been a better place if Lorraine O’Grady had more support.
The attitude towards artists in this country is ridiculous. It's so hard to get funding for anything. That being said, the scrappy aesthetic is something I embrace. It allows me a tremendous amount of freedom, too. I don't want to spend time raising money, but I have to.
You use a lot of horror tropes in your work. It’s never what the work is about, but rather this lingering, underlying component. Can you talk more about that?
When I started, I was thinking about what's marketed to youth culture, and horror is very much that. The whole thing with horror is—especially the slasher films of the 80s—it’s pretty reactionary. People have sex and then they get punched and killed. In The Exorcist, she's 13 and going through puberty, so she must be possessed by the devil. With No Is Yes, I was thinking about how there are all these rape-revenge films and they're always made by men. There's this history of a final girl who's very strong and who survives, but I wanted people to survive who can also have fun and do wrong things. They don't need to be morally punished and lose their lives for that.
I worked with Sue de Beer on Heidi 2, and that was fun because you could take on what these “bad boy” male artists do and have fun with it. But also to have permission to make really visceral, abject work that connects directly with the body. I like the immediacy of that, it really takes us in, and that can be powerful. I also wanted to have a critical edge, so you don’t fall into being frightened. You understand why it’s constructed that way, and it can become a metaphor for so many things. Horror as a genre actually has the most potential for creative, surreal imagery. It doesn't have to have logical answers for everything.
In Hollywood Inferno, the protagonist Sandy says something about horror movies being bad for her career as an actress. The entire piece felt like you were quietly nodding at your own art practice.
There are quotes from some art dealers in there.
Oh, really?
“Those breasts, they're fantastic. I mean, conceptually.”
I wrote that down too.
To see more of Laura Parnes’ work visit her website, Vimeo, and Instagram.
Yesss two icons! Loved this!