Eroticism and Glamour Collide in The Bikeriders

I'll bet the "e" word made you click real fast, didn't it, baby?

Whoever desires what is not gone? No one.

Ten years ago I discovered Danny Lyon’s photo book The Bikeriders. There’s one photo in particular that has ricocheted around in my memory ever since. It’s titled, simply, Renegade’s Funeral, Detroit:

My attention is always focused on the man in the foreground, with his embellished jacket. The jacket itself is a work of art, but the man himself is equally compelling. The way he holds his strong, easy body, the sweep of his hair, the elegance of his profile and his hooded eyes. Even the jaunty little hoop earring.

All the photos in The Bikeriders are romantic, gorgeous, and so evocative you can practically smell the motor oil and the cigarette smoke coming off them. Danny Lyon spent years riding with the Outlaws MC in Chicago and elsewhere in the Midwest. He interviewed many members of the MC, and their remarks are jarring and funny and sometimes brutal. The Bikeriders book is an indelible reference point for motorcycle culture in the midcentury, along with The Wild One, Easy Rider, and On Any Sunday.

Jeff Nichols’ new film The Bikeriders is an adaptation of the book. The movie plot is based mostly on the book’s interviews, and stars Tom Hardy, Jodie Comer and Austin Butler. I’ve seen it three times, because the source material is that important to me, and because it’s a good movie.

And I’d like to use these two works—starting with the movie—to discuss what is an unexamined connection between the phenomenons of eroticism and glamour.

Both glamour and Eros are taken too literally in our cultural imagination.

But I want you to see how much more interesting they are when you widen your aperture.

I see them as intertwined rhetorics and languages of desire. Ways we come to know what we want. And ways we come to know ourselves.

(Mild spoilers for The Bikeriders below)

Okay so what is eroticism really?

Let me say up front that roughly two thirds of what I believe about eroticism is from Anne Carson’s Eros The Bittersweet. Though that book is mostly about ancient Greek poetry, much of it still applies, because humans haven’t changed that much.

Eros, as Anne Carson and I define it, is not transactional. It’s not sated by pornography—which is to say, Eros is not merely physical libido.

Eros depends on your sudden awareness of the edges of things. Of yourself, and of the one you want. You think that you want to eradicate those edges and reach some ecstatic union with the object of your desire.

But that isn’t really what you want.

Union would actually be annihilating. (Avoidant attachment girlies, where you at?)

What you want is to face the object of your desire without collapsing.

But you are aware, all the time, of the edges and boundaries that keep you separated, be they physical, temporal, or societal.

Eros is paradoxical, ephemeral, and fragile, just like glamour is. Eros is pleasurable and painful simultaneously, just like glamour is. Our desires, whether they be the desire to transform or the desire to merge with someone else, tell us that something within us has gone missing and is now reappearing. Both phenomena may even rest upon similar aesthetic parameters, but I haven’t developed that idea quite yet.

In order for Eros to strike you in the heart, the one you want has to be out of reach. This fragment from Sappho illustrates this perfectly:

As a sweet apple turns red on a high branch,

high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot—

well no, they didn’t forget—were not able to reach

“The reach of desire,” Carson writes, “is defined in action. Beautiful (in its object), foiled (in its attempt), endless (in time.)”

What I loved about The Bikeriders movie is how it depicts this erotic reaching.

The movie has three main characters, all based on the real people in Danny Lyons’ book. Kathy, played by superb (!!!) Jodie Comer, serves as our narrator. Kathy is a conventional Chicago young woman who gets mixed up in the Vandals MC by accident. But she falls in love with and marries Benny (Austin Butler) and is both an insider and an outsider in the Vandals culture.

Meanwhile, Johnny (Tom Hardy) is the founder and president of the Vandals, but he holds a lot of ambivalence about his position. He’s both attracted to power and unnerved by it, which we come to see more and more as the film progresses. Johnny is determined that Benny should succeed him as club president. And Benny is allergic to responsibility, the consummate outlaw, and doesn’t want to be a leader. Kathy and Johnny are frequently in conflict because she wants Benny to leave the club altogether, not take it over—especially once it seems clear that the club culture is spiralling violently out of control.

Kathy is reaching for Benny, and Johnny is reaching for Benny. But the nature of their reaching is very different. One is an example, primarily, of Eros. The other is a tangled collision of Eros and glamour together—but even that is kind of an oversimplification.

Erotic Reaching: Benny and Kathy

The scene where Benny and Kathy meet for the first time succeeds entirely based on the chemistry between the two actors. Kathy has to go bail out a girlfriend who needs money at the biker bar. She’s a good girl in white Levi’s and a sweater, getting leered at like the fresh meat that she unknowingly is. Kathy’s initially disgusted by the whole scene—dudes with earrings and their colors on and their bellies hanging out (“to me they was like half-naked,” she says) and gets up to leave. Then she sees Benny leaning over the pool table in a direct reference to one of Danny Lyon’s pictures.

Benny (Austin Butler) looks up at her through his long blond eyelashes. The needle drops on “Talkin’ Bout You” by The Animals. It’s an electrifying moment. Only God could have made a cocktail like Austin Butler.

Kathy rushes back to her seat to ask her girlfriend who he is.

“That’s Benny, but you don’t want to go out with him. Nobody wants to go out with Benny,” the girlfriend says. “He cracks up on his bike. Every time he gets up on his bike, he has an accident.”

But of course we already know that it’s only a matter of time before Benny ambles over to Kathy’s side, and when he does, he just looks at her squarely in the eye, saying “hey, I’m Benny” and not much else. She does her best to keep up her defenses, but we can already see her losing her resolve. “I gotta go home,” says Kathy, but she doesn’t get up. He leaves first.

Jodie Comer and Austin Butler do great work here letting the tension crackle and combust between them.

This scene is erotic even though no one is naked. He reaches for the object of his desire by going over to her, and then later by inviting her to ride on the back of his bike to the gang’s next stop for the night.

But she allows herself to be reached for by instantaneously dissolving her disgust and distaste for this subculture. One of her boundaries collapses for him.

And in so doing, she discovers previously unconscious, hidden parts of herself:

The part that is attracted to danger.

The part that wants to be admired and pursued by an outrageously beautiful man.

The part that hungers for excitement rather than monotony.

The part that’s fascinated by pain, constriction, and sorrow.

Eros is always returning the parts of you that you thought you successfully amputated or abandoned.

So it is that erotic experiences, just like experiences of glamour, are usually a vehicle for self-discovery.

Erotic Reaching: Benny and Johnny

“When he inhales Eros, there appears within him a sudden vision of a different self, perhaps a better self, compounded of his own being and that of his beloved. Touched to life by erotic accident, this enlargement of self is a complex and unnerving occurrence.”

—Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

Benny and Kathy’s relationship is toxic but relatively straightforward. It’s the anxious vs. avoidant attachment melee that single-handedly supports all of the world’s therapists, psychiatrists, wine merchants, and divorce attorneys.

But the other half of this love triangle, between Johnny and Benny, is weird as hell.

It’s complicated, it’s tender, it’s archetypal, it’s sub-textual.

In other words, it’s symbolic.

The kind of love between the two men doesn’t neatly slot into a homoerotic dynamic, a father-son dynamic, or even garden variety brotherly loyalty.

Midway through the film, there’s a pivotal scene at a picnic. Johnny beckons Benny to leave the campfire and they skulk off together where they can’t be overhead, Benny limping along with his crutch (he’s been injured in a fight). Benny leans against a bike, lights a cigarette, and the conversation begins.

Johnny offers Benny the leadership of the Vandals club. Benny demurs. He doesn’t want the responsibility.

“That’s why it’s gotta be you,” Johnny counters. The leader needs to be someone everyone in the club respects, and Benny is that guy precisely because nothing means anything to him.

“You’re who all these guys are trying to be,” Johnny says.

But Benny doesn’t want a job of any kind, even leading the club that gives him a sense of belonging and identity.

“I can’t even pay the dues,” he says. Johnny replies tenderly, “fuck the dues.”

The two men start out a few feet apart from each other. But during this entire conversation, Johnny slowly edges closer and closer to Benny, until at last they are inches apart, the amber glow of the distant fire contrasted with dark shadows on their faces. Johnny is whispering in Benny’s ear.

Equally, though, Benny doesn’t move away. He allows himself to be approached; he holds steady.

Nothing Johnny says gets through to him. So Johnny lets up and gives him physical space, imploring him to “just think about it”. Benny nods and goes back to the group.

This scene is erotic, it is intimate, and it is dangerous.

But not in the expected way you might think.

Johnny loves Benny, but it isn’t a romantic kind of love. That’s what makes the intimacy of this interaction so compelling to watch—it subverts your expectations. I’m not saying there’s no attraction here at all, but it isn’t just a seduction. There is a Lover and a Beloved, the Lover reaches for the Beloved and is foiled, but the goal of the reaching isn’t lovemaking.

It’s something that isn’t possible.

The attraction between them does hinge in part on Benny’s extraordinary beauty. I cannot overstate how beautiful Austin Butler is in this movie. He is, and I do not say this lightly, as erotically powerful as a young Gary Cooper. And yet, you never get the sense that Johnny wants to fuck him, not really. Their mutual attraction is about projection, masculine identity, and competing ideals of power.

Now we happen upon the area where glamour and Eros overlap. Or, where they both lead people to similar internal experiences and similar conclusions.

Benny is Johnny’s Fantasy Self. What he’s reaching for in this scene is something he cannot possibly have—transformation.

When he’s saying, here, you lead the club, you take my place…

He’s also saying, indirectly, take my place. Turn me into you.

Which is a desire that cannot possibly be fulfilled.

A Symbolic Romance Between The Outlaw And The King

Benny illustrates the critical distinction between the Explorer and the Outlaw archetype in that he is “free from” rather than “free to.” Benny has pursued freedom to a pathological degree. All of his bonds are tenuous. He’s married to Kathy but any time she makes a request that he doesn’t like, he just threatens to leave her.

And while he’s loyal to Johnny, you get the sense that this loyalty is ultimately conditional. He’ll never betray Johnny outright. He’ll simply leave once Johnny disappoints him—which is eventually what happens.

Johnny, meanwhile, fulfills the archetype of the King. And he sows the seeds of his own destruction when he weaves violence into the culture of his little outlaw kingdom. You want to challenge his authority? You can only do it with fists, or knives.

But Johnny’s also afraid of his own power, and he can’t control his own violent and destructive impulses. When he sets a bar on fire to get revenge on people who beat up Benny, he stands in front of the blaze with fear in his eyes. Even the cops and the firemen are too scared of him and his gang, standing behind him beholding their handiwork, to arrest them or put out the blaze.

And Johnny is afraid of the fact that these authority figures are afraid of him.

He knows it means something about his character that he’d rather not look at directly. It’s also his love for Benny that compels him to take things too far. (Like I said, this relationship between them is deliciously complicated.)

That’s one reason why he’s trying to pass the club off to Benny: Benny will fight anyone, anywhere, on a dime, and it means nothing to him.

There’s a joyousness to how quickly Benny springs into violence that complicates the character, turning him from just a beautiful, avoidant misfit into someone darker. Fighting is fun for him, he gets off on it, it makes him feel alive.

Johnny, on the other hand, starts to feel alienated by his own displays of power and violence. He’s trying on the role for size, but it doesn’t truly fit him like it fits Benny. And he takes it too far—he enacts cruel, capricious violence onto members of his own club.

Ironically, it’s Benny’s distaste for this act—for Johnny’s disproportionate, retaliatory violence against one of their own—that drives him away. Benny is maybe the only person who can really see that Johnny’s nowhere near as tough as he wants to be, and is overcompensating wildly.

Furthermore, by attempting to map rules and protocol onto misfits—people who can’t follow rules—we can see that on some fundamental level, Johnny doesn’t understand the psychological character of the subculture he rules over. Outlaws can’t reasonably be expected to follow the loose honor code of “destroy each other’s property and maim if you must, but never kill nobody.”

Like Hamlet, or a few of my ex boyfriends, Johnny is smart enough to know what his problem is, but not smart enough to know how to fix it.

By attempting to live up to the ideal that Benny embodies, Johnny is deeply aware of what he lacks.

In the end, is it better to have power or freedom?

And yes, you have to choose.

The Cliffs Notes of This Whole Thing

To sum up, glamour and Eros are both about your sudden awareness of The Distance.

The Distance.

Between you and the object of your desire (Eros), or the embodiment of your desire (glamour).

With Eros, you want to be close to them. With glamour, you want to become them.

And so, you reach out.

P.S.: If anybody knows Jeff Nichols, please send this to him. I’d like him to know how obsessed I am with his movie. Either he will take it as the compliment it’s meant to be, or send me a restraining order. I’d be flattered either way.