Seventy-Two Ways to Say Memphis: Intimacy and Loneliness in The Eddies

The first two shots, of a stream followed by a street corner, reveal, very quietly, almost everything that you will see in the rest of The Eddies (2018). This does not mean that the remainder of its 16-minute runtime is redundant—far from it. These two shots do not disclose a plot as much as form an anchor that draws all the threads in the film back to itself and to Memphis, Tennessee.

Screened as part of the opening day programme of the annual Flaherty Seminar, which hosted a pod-edition in Bengaluru this year, The Eddies is directed by Angelo Madsen Minax, a Vermont-based multi-disciplinary artist, filmmaker and educator. Exploring relationships, queer desire and spatial history, the film fits perfectly into this year’s seminar theme, “Queer World-Mending”, and holds its own even in a line-up including iconic queer filmmakers like Barbara Hammer and Curt McDowell.

Minax, who also features in the film, uses a mix of lingering landscapes, screencasts, intimate close-ups, dark underground footage and projections to weave a narrative that is both documentary and sensory in nature. He captures the urban landscape of Memphis with low camera angles and slow, placid shots that invoke a gentle familiarity—you may not have seen these places before, but surely you have, too. The lens is initially reminiscent of Stephen Shore, particularly the outdoor shots. Indoors, it transforms into something closer to, and perhaps more fittingly, that of the Memphis-born William Eggleston.

The above-ground landscape is contrasted by the underground, through the vast network of storm drains that run underneath the city. This interplay of the antithetical permeates the film, which also explores the intersection of nature, the built environment and humanity. Minax refers to the two other characters as Eddie #1 and Eddie #2, evoking the natural eddy we see in the first shot, formed by the flow of water from the tunnels into the Gayoso Bayou.

Eddie #1’s barely corporeal presence in the film is accompanied by his extensive knowledge of the urban history of Memphis. He walks the filmmaker through places that do not exist anymore, like Catfish Bay and Gayoso Bayou, which are buried under the city as part of a sanitation plan. These were also historically Black, low-income neighbourhoods that the administration erased without any qualms. One may wonder if the anonymity surrounding Eddie #1 has anything to do with the murky legality of stormdrain exploration in the city. One may also remember that Tennessee has enacted at least thirteen anti-LGBTQ laws since 2015, including the recent anti-drag law that was struck down by a federal judge. 

Minax weaves these physical and cultural landscapes of Memphis with personal threads of intimacy and loneliness, invoking the antithetical yet again. He is seen watching war films and cruising Craigslist for highly masculine eroticism. He gets a response from Eddie #2, whose face we never see, and asks him to pleasure himself while holding his (explicitly unloaded) gun. So gentle is his approach, however, that what might have been provocative, perhaps even crude, stands out as a portrait of tenderness in queer masculinity. 

If this is a surprising turn, it should not be. Minax hints at it in the second shot, where the sharp framing draws your eye to hand-drawn graffiti—lyrics from the blues artist Blind Boy Fuller’s “Pistol Slapper Blues”. This is not to say that the shot does not bring up the distressing implications of rampant gun culture in America or how it intersects with violence against queer communities. As a viewer, it is impossible to reconcile the intimacy on screen with the violence of everyday life. But Minax navigates this swampy terrain by opening up about his identity, showing glimpses of his home and baring his loneliness through Queen’s “Somebody to Love” as he uses his vulnerability to establish an intimacy with the audience.

This intimacy, this intent to show life as it is, resonates with the Egglestonian aesthetic so much that the parallels keep cropping up. One of the most culturally significant photographers of the American South, Eggleston also happens to be a firearms enthusiast. One cannot help but recall this photograph by Eggleston, of an elderly man with a gun.

With its juxtaposition of past and present, aboveground and underground, personal and spatial, The Eddies paints a picture not just of human desire and belonging but of the many different kinds of being. In the tunnels, Eddie #1 says, “In downtown Memphis, there’s over 2000 manhole covers (...) and there’s seventy-two different ways you can say ‘Memphis’ on a manhole cover (...) by the font, the letter that’s shaping (sic) Memphis Machine Works or Memphis S or Memphis this or Memphis that…” Seventy-two ways to say Memphis, then, and perhaps an infinite number of ways to be queer.

To read more about queer explorations of space, revisit Avrati Bhatnagar’s essay on William Gedney in India and Parth Rahetekar’s response to Sunil Gupta’s Cruising 1960s, Delhi.

All images from The Eddies (2018) by Angelo Madsen Minax. Images courtesy of the director and the Flaherty Seminar.