Actual adult actors play alternate versions of themselves in the West Coast songwriter’s NSFW clip for ‘Medusa’s Outhouse’
Few American mythologies remain as fixed as the fantasy of the West. Whether we’re talking about the early American magnetic healers and clairvoyants who sought Western refuge in California at the turn of the 20th century or the youth still swarming to LA in packs today, the identity of the West as a locus for freedom, rebellion, and alternative thinking remains intact. For many, the West has always embodied pay dirt – the promise of new economic opportunity. Some struck actual gold. Some were cast in movies. Some were just happy for warm weather. For others, the pay dirt was the new life itself, an energizing chance at forgetting who they used to be in favor of what they could be. In the West, new money is old money and one can admit to wanting to be a movie star. Dreams are said aloud, for better or for worse.
Musician Cass McCombs and filmmaker Aaron Brown love the archetypal West. “Medusa’s Outhouse”, Brown’s new intimate short film set to McComb’s song of the same name, feels like a quintessentially Western story, if not as a genre as a mood. The setting is Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, the West of Sex in its own way. Before iPhones and webcams provided everyone everywhere with the tools necessary for becoming an adult content creator, the San Fernando Valley was a dry oasis for the porn industry – a suburb welcoming to adult commerce.
In the Valley, people’s nudity became a site of potential reinvention, where new names could unleash old desires. Before everyone was an exhibitionist online, hams moved to Hollywood. A culture was built around the freedom to reveal one’s own secrets and one’s own body in the service of entertaining others, whether that was through mainstream entertainment or the various facets of the adult industry. People were freer to use themselves in whatever ways they wanted.
“Medusa’s Outhouse” is a story about the way people in the West toggle reality and fantasy.
At the onset of the film, we hear the squeak of the house’s linoleum floor and the chatter of a film set. We see administrative moments, like an actor posing with her ID card while filling out consent forms. The porn set is visualized as a practical space for a working community. The sumptuous, pink-haired vixen and baby-faced girl-next-door perform their sexualities on a set laden with extension cords and men in gloves handling hot lights. This doesn’t interrupt the fantasies we see created within it, it just reveals them to be actively constructed. We’re reminded of the labor that facilitates the nature of the space as McComb’s lyric tease: “If it’s so easy, you try.”
Actual adult talent performs as alternate versions of themselves, unnamed porn performers in a simulated porn environment made for the video. In an interlude, they get interviewed about Southern California and its dreams: “Hollywood is absolutely haunted,” April Flores’s character vows. She’s the aforementioned pink-haired vixen. “The internet fucked me,” DeArmond’s character says, neither lamenting or celebrating.
Outside of the video, DeArmond built her business online by branding herself as “The Internet’s Girlfriend”. She manifested her destiny by earning a huge following on Myspace and giving herself a fantastical title online. Nothing, of course, is more marketable than fantasy. In this way, it’s easy to make glancing parallels between the symbolic West and the internet: new space, vast possibility, and an opportunity to define and broadcast one’s identity in ways removed from static reality. Both are places where personal escape became the springboard for many people’s entrepreneurship. If the Valley was once the West of Sex, then the internet was, and maybe still is, the modern world’s Wild, Wild, West.
As friends and collaborators, Brown and McCombs have long been fascinated with the mythology of The West and Manifest Destiny, specifically related to the dreaminess of California. After meeting in Oakland in 2004 or 2005, McCombs and Brown became regular interlocutors, obsessed with the “California tradition of BS” and Western lore. Both live in California now, further participating in the very culture of their long term fascinations. “Ideas grow up and you take them with you,” Brown says.
In honor of today’s “Medusa’s Outhouse” release, Brown and McCombs returned to some of their favorite fireside topics for a brief conversation about the Wild, Wild, West.
Cass McCombs: What is ‘The West’?
Aaron Brown: California is the last stop on the train. To go past it is to go backwards, both geographically and culturally. There are two kinds of people who came out west. First, there are those who chased the ideals of Manifest Destiny and a new culture free from the restraints of the past. Then there are those who never really meant to go to California, people just wind up there, given that it's the last place to go before you fall off the face of the earth. Nothing unites people here except for a stirring in the soul, an ache to escape. If that’s not in them, it's in their direct ancestry.
Cass McCombs: And genocide of the Native American as an almost admissible justification for the impossible quest for self-discovery.
“Time and again in California, the dreamer is punished for their dreams” – Cass McCombs
Aaron Brown: The history is a jumble of overlapping stories of immigrants and dreamers. This coast was the last to hear the chirp of the American Dream. When things didn't work, when jobs were lost, when hearts were broken or dreams were dreamed, people came here searching. The search always ends up here, and for better or for worse, reality sets in here.
Cass McCombs: Do you know your family’s own story about landing in the West?
Aaron Brown: As a kid, I kept nagging my dad about where my family was from. With the last name Brown, it wasn’t completely obvious. He would always say, ‘Heinz 57’. After the joke got old, I asked my grandpa and he told me: ‘My grandpa, who I never met, lived in Louisiana. As a boy, he got in a fight with another young man from town and was humiliated, cuckolded. Later my grandpa went over to that young man’s house and shot his dog. When his nemesis tried to shoot my grandpa in return, he fled as far away as he could, to California.’ This spirit carries over to a lot of the characters who spend time out here. It’s a good place to dream and wander.
Cass McCombs: We’re been talking about these ideas for a long time. Let’s talk about Die Sect.
Aaron Brown: Die Sect itself was a self-generated myth, aware of itself in the California tradition of BS. Die Sect created a symbol, a crossed-out peace sign, kind of a symbolic end to the 60s. From this symbol, we created an original lettering font.
Cass McCombs: It was an anonymous thing we founded in 2007 in Pasadena and Sonoma, two cities in California. We wrote a manifesto, or actually, a satire of one. Our slogans were: ‘We do not name names’, ‘If you give they people what they want, they’ll destroy it’, and ‘What’s your favorite religion?’ It was heavily influenced by Robert de Grimston, an ex-communicated Scientologist who moved to San Francisco in the 1960s to develop the Process Church of the Final Judgement with his wife, Mary Ann MacLean.
Aaron Brown: We were aware of the duality of some of the new ways of thinking. The counter culture flourished in San Francisco, but with the breakdown of social norms brought with it characters like Manson. Hippies encouraged freedom, but from that all sorts of other cultures emerged who revealed different aspects of human nature. Hollywood is a land based on dreams. People travel from all over to participate in this industry of dreams, but it makes me wonder what they find out about themselves. Hollywood was founded on fantasy. It made no plan to preserve its history. As a result, it’s not very good at remembering and is filled with ghosts and regrets. Ghosts of those who tried and failed to immortalize themselves on screen linger as ghosts in Hollywood. In Hollywood, there are only graveyards for the stars.
“I was interested in the humanity that exists within the transgressive nature of the adult film industry” – Aaron Brown
Cass McCombs: The West was founded on delusion. The California flag has a grizzly bear on it, an animal long extinct in the wild and therefore as mythological as Bigfoot. The Gold Rush excited the world’s lusty imagination, and my folks were some of the many real 49ers who came to find a hard reality. And then, ‘If you’re going to San Francisco, don’t forget to put flowers in your hair.’ In Southern California, the film industry lured every small town beauty in search of fame. Time and again in California, the dreamer is punished for their dreams. But that doesn’t crush them entirely, they remain stranded with a new sense of humor and optimism, a kind of well-fought absurdity.
Aaron Brown: Die Sect made a few short films and then went officially defunct.
Cass McCombs: That was Die Sect. However, those same ideas are still relevant in this video.
Aaron Brown: Very much so. This video feels personal somehow. I feel a very certain way when I watch it. We’re as much a metaphor for the video as the video is a metaphor for Hollywood, or even songwriting. Anything that deals with storytelling and drama and using your own emotions and feelings to connect to an audience. I was interested in the humanity that exists within the transgressive nature of the adult film industry, in the way that people are interested in the transgressiveness of Hollywood actors who portray ‘humanity’ in the movie. In a way the video is its own Hollywood Babylon.