Flesh Failures: On George Kuchar’s Hold Me While I’m Naked by Jonah de Forest

Trite as it may be, I’ve come to associate spring with revitalized lust, a season where desires seem to resurface from the depths of melted snow mounds. Having shed the oppressive layers of winter, we are at long last reminded of our bodies' existence. As Guinevere sings in Camelot, spring is “that shocking time of year/when tons of wicked little thoughts merrily appear.” 

It was amid this shift that I revisited Hold Me While I’m Naked, a 1966 short film by the multi-disciplinary artist George Kuchar. Clocking in at just under fifteen minutes, Kuchar casts himself as a bespeckled filmmaker who lives with his mother and directs a series of comically excessive sex scenes. Shot on 16 mm, the film parodies the stylistic extremes of Hollywood melodrama through gaudy costuming, bewigged performers, an arresting color palette, and blaring needle drops that evoke operatic passion or violence, depending on your outlook. 

(That Kuchar’s name is similar to George Cukor—a creative force from Hollywood’s Golden Age whose popularity with female moviegoers earned him the title “The Woman’s Director”—is merely a coincidence, but it makes for a curious sort of cultural symmetry). 

Released two years after Susan Sontag penned her landmark essay, “Notes on ‘Camp,” Kuchar broke new ground in that much-debated domain. He achieved what Sontag describes as “the theatricalization of experience” and “a sensibility of failed seriousness.” The title itself is at once histrionic and plainspoken in its vulnerability—whittling down desire to its basest impulse. Kuchar’s brazen, bouffanted aesthetic would go on to reverberate in the work of camp practitioners like the B-52s and John Waters (the latter of whom has called Kuchar his favorite filmmaker). 

Hold Me While I’m Naked is a self-deprecating bottle rocket that equates the plight of independent filmmaking with sexual frustration. Our protagonist’s vision is exacting, but his resources are limited; he’s forced to shift gears when his leading actress drops out on the grounds that she’s tired of disrobing for the camera. In an age where discourse around the necessity of onscreen sex has reached a fever pitch, Hold Me While I’m Naked makes a case for the catharsis to be found in flesh on film. With Kuchar at the helm, the innate ridiculousness of simulating intimacy is the point. His anatomization of this attempt is, dare I say, an exercise in camp.

Kuchar’s character is not explicitly depicted as gay, as Kuchar was in real life, but one can discern some voyeurism in his fixation on manufacturing intimacy with his hetero screen couplings. This is further emphasized by Kuchar being the sole voice heard throughout the film, intoning the thoughts of others in a register that falls somewhere between a cigar-chomping bookie and a mid-century mother barking orders at a Bat Mitzvah reception. 

Interspersed between the sexual pantomimes are glimpses into Kuchar‘s solitary life. One scene tracks the director as he moves through a tree-lined grove, the camera framed claustrophobically on his face. If Hold Me While I’m Naked functions to place an audience within its central character’s erotically-strangled psyche, this is the most head-on we get. There is something disarmingly innocent about Kuchar’s demeanor in this moment, braving the outdoors with a sense of searching. His naked curiosity makes you root for his development as an artist. 

Later on, a sexcapade that plays out on a mod bedspread gives way to a shot of Kuchar lying on the floor, his body obscured by rolls and rolls of unspooled film. The action moves to the shower, with his actors embracing euphorically under the faucet. The wet-and-wild pleasure is intercut with Kuchar in the shower by himself, looking maudlin and banging his head against the wall.

Kuchar’s shower flagellation is brought to a halt by his mother, who calls him to the kitchen for dinner. Looking up from a plate of roast beef, he delivers the film’s final adage, “There’s a lot of things in life worth living for, isn’t there?” With one last glance toward the camera, the music swells into a crescendo, and a crudely drawn “THE END” brings things to a close. 

It’s an appropriately anticlimactic ending for a film about displacing one’s wants. An ungenerous takeaway could be that Kuchar’s self-insert character is doomed to live in a state of perpetual anticipation, cucked by a hell of his own making. The closing sentiment certainly has an ironic sting, but reading the film’s conclusion as solely cynical feels off the mark. There’s something strangely, wonderfully, defiantly hopeful to be found in Kuchar’s final remark, even if fulfillment still evades him. 

For Kuchar, waiting for sex, waiting for an artistic breakthrough, waiting to be seen and heard and touched by others, are all acts of doing. And maybe, if we keep attempting to source out an outlet for these wants, the thing we’re waiting for will eventually manifest itself in the process. There’s always next spring.