The film opens on a podium, where a stuffy professor lectures in un-subtitled German sprinkled with English words: “Teaches of Peaches,” “rock mainstream,” “Fatherfucker,” “clitoris.” Then he disappears, replaced by Berlin-based girl group Jolly Good, both wearing Plasmatics T-shirts and screeching “Rock Show.” It’s the first of 22 songs by the Canadian electro-clash rocker Peaches, best known for Lost in Translation’s “Fuck the Pain Away.”
Peaches Does Herself, which celebrated its New York premiere at Quad Cinema on Friday night, was adapted from a stage play written, directed and performed by Peaches at the Hebbel am Ufer Theater in Berlin in 2010. As far as it can be categorized, the film is a rock opera loosely based on her rise to stardom, co-starring transsexual porn star Danni Daniels as love interest-slash-muse and Sandy Kane, better known as Times Square’s “naked cowgirl,” as bawdy comic relief.
Peaches first appears in the film seated on a giant neon bed, her knees spread with a synthesizer between her legs. She has the messy brown ‘fro that fans will remember from the Teaches of Peaches era. “I’m making beats in my bedroom,” she sings, punching at the synth to create the halting bleats of “I’m the Kinda.” A massive neon vagina descends from the ceiling and Sandy Kane tears through, wearing a cascading blue wig and very little clothing. A dozen dancers emerge from the bed, which, as it turns out, is another vagina. They are soon ripping their body stockings and engaging in a massive simulated orgy.
There is very little dialogue; Peaches’s music pushes the minimal plot from one shocking or grotesque moment to another.
At a Q&A session after the screening, Peaches explained the film’s origins. “It was in answer to jukebox musicals, which I find almost offensive,” she said. “They take the music from artists and do a completely different story. I thought, what if we do an anti-jukebox musical that would actually relate to the artist and the artist’s world.”
“We didn’t really mean to make a movie,” she added. Cinematographer Robin Thomson shot each of the five stage performances and cobbled together a rough edit, at which point Peaches decided to make it into a feature film. “The first time we saw an edit, we realized that if we just got a few close-ups it wouldn’t look like weird high school musical.”
Peaches Does Herself is highly conceptual and barely coherent, but parts seem to echo her career arc, from the Toronto-born schoolteacher named Merrill Beth Nisker to the sexually ambiguous burlesque shock-rocker better known as Peaches.
“The autobiographical part of it is about the world, when I created Peaches and what people said about me, what people wished I would be,” she explained. “I would get a lot of comments because I was so aggressive onstage, like, ‘Why is she trying to be so macho, does she have a dick under there?’ And I was just like, well, what is our relationship to female and male and gender – and instead of being really intellectual about it I’d put it all out there, dick and pussy.”
Peaches is now in her mid-forties, but her voice — high-pitched, girlish and furious — is forever eighteen. At the screening she looked decidedly un-Peaches-like, wearing a long black coat with not a hint of visible undergarments. In the film, meanwhile, she sports a shimmering purple bodysuit and a hairstyle that’s part Mohawk, part mullet. There’s blue glitter on her eyelids and pink paint that swipes from her eyebrows to the shaved sides of her head. She snarls and seems invincible, a cross between Ziggy Stardust and Wendy O. Williams.
“Come on, you boring fucks, let me hear you!” she cries, in one of the only lines of dialogue in the film. “Now shut up and listen to me.”
We have our first sighting of the spectacularly tall, statuesque and sexually confounding Danni Daniels when Peaches collapses onstage, spitting blood, and has a vision of Daniels as a thong-clad transsexual superstar with antlers.
Peaches first met Danni at a Perez Hilton show in London. “Danni came up to me and said, ‘I lost my virginity in the back of a truck when I was 14 to your music and now I can shake my dick and my tits,’” she said. “It was around the time when I was trying to develop [the play] and I was missing a muse. It was perfect.”
Then there’s Sandy Kane. During an interlude in the play Kane stumbles from the wings shouting “Where the fuck is Peaches?” in a whiskey-and-cigarettes croak. She clutches a black dildo as she recites a ditty of her own invention, an ode to male genitalia called “I Love Dick,” then segues into Peaches’ “AA XXX” – inventing her own, even filthier lyrics.
“I was a fan of her rendition of ‘Gloria,’” Peaches said during the Q&A, sharing a few choice lines with the audience. “Gloria. She’s a cocksucking warrior and she charges 20 bucks for every penis that she sucks. Gloria loves sucking schmuck. Cocksucking Gloria. And I thought, ‘I need to meet this woman.’”
“You can’t really direct Sandy Kane,” she added. “I knew if I asked her to sing a rendition of “AA XXX” she would only remember, ‘I’m only double-A thinking triple-X.’ And what’s amazing is the lyrics she comes up with are way more sick than I would ever imagine.”
In the most riveting sequence of the movie, Peaches plays an a cappella version of “Sucker,” accompanied only by a Doepfer ribbon outfitted with LEDs so that it lights up as she manipulates it. Her voice, which on her records is abrasive and confrontational, is surprisingly soft and operatic. As she moves into a haunting rendition of “Operate,” band members conduct an orchestra created entirely out of laser beams.
The film’s finale is the only departure from the staging of the original performance. In the play, “we just had people come onstage to sing ‘Fuck the Pain Away,’” Peaches said. “But you can’t really do that in film.”
Instead, in the film the house lights come up to reveal an empty theater. Peaches hops off the stage and pushes through the playhouse’s front doors. She’s wearing a suit with exploded breasts and a penis that’s split and leaking blood, chanting “fuck the pain away” as she cycles off into the Berlin daylight.