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'Party Monster' Was the Film That Changed How I Thought of Elitism

"Party Monster" is packaged as a fairytale-like moral lesson on the true price of excess.
Daisy Jones
London, GB

This post first appeared on VICE UK

It's hard to accept the plot of Party Monster as truth. But on the night of March 17, 1996, Michael Alig—the snide man-child who'd been dominating the New York club scene since the late 80s—murdered his drug dealer Angel Melendez over a debt. Along with accomplice Robert "Freeze" Riggs, Alig dismembered the body and threw it into the Hudson River (in a box lined with cork) effectively killing off an already-dying era of the New York club circuit.

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Alig and Rigg were arrested eight months later, and it took a further seven years before the story was made into the film Party Monster—the overtly kitsch, badly acted, bizarrely casted, low-budget disco oddity that was discharged out of 2003 like it had swallowed a glitter bomb. Macaulay Culkin stars as Alig, and it's worth watching if just for Marilyn Manson's performance as his bedraggled drag queen cohort, Christina Superstar.

Manson in Party Monster

Party Monster is packaged as a fairytale-like moral lesson on the true price of excess. But, in reality, all it does is make you want a little slice for yourself. I always found its camp, trashy spirit remarkably addictive, and like RuPaul's Drag Race—which was, incidentally, produced by the same team—it forced me to rethink my own beliefs on elitism and success.

Like many British 20-somethings, I flew out of my mother's vagina into the stagnant mess that was post-Thatcher Britain. Inequality and poverty were at an all-time high and, like most of my peers (although not all of of us), I was brought up to view capitalist ideals with a crinkle-nosed disdain. Irvine Welsh described this as "a time when, after the bitter, class-war 80s, Britain suddenly remembered how to enjoy itself again."

Like him, I didn't think that needed to involve an elitist society that left a whole bunch of people on the shit heap.

That was until I watched Party Monster, a film whose very essence is about leaving people on the shit heap. The film's not really about the murder—and that's blatantly obvious from the way in which it's trivialized—but rather about opulence and exclusivity. It captures a subculture that caricatured the consumerist, elitist mainstream culture of the 80s—one that thrived on throwaway fashion trends that were spat out before they were even fully ingested.

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"Club Kids were very current to the 80s. Of the packaging, press, corporation, out-for-yourself, money-for-nothing," said Michael Alig in the 1998 documentary Party Monster: The Shockumentary. "It was very American: 'Give me money because I'm fabulous because I say so.' It was great as a scam for a while, and the 80s were all about scams."

Chloe Sevigny, who appears as Gitzy in Party Monster, spent the early 90s frequenting nightclub owner Peter Gatien's empire (Limelight, Tunnel, Palladium). "There was a big hierarchy in the club scene," she said of the time. "[Michael] would never deign me with any sort of acknowledgement, because I was too low on the totem pole."

Objectively, the whole debacle should leave me feeling sad and empty: A decade built upon frenemies and plunging K-holes would, realistically, be pretty bleak. But Party Monster was, and still is, weirdly enticing. It makes me want to climb the ladder of social fame while tossing $100 bills at the "normals" (as they call them in the film), clawing at my seven-inch heels below. "No ugly or poor people allowed!" reads one of Alig's party promo posters in the film. It's both outlandish and hilarious.

"We thought their ideas were quite sophisticated," said Randy Barbato, the co-director of Party Monster. "They were commenting on where fame was going, on this notion that we brand ourselves. It was this post-Warhol idea of turning yourself into a brand and taking it out there, and you can not only become famous, but drive that fame into some kind of business."

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At this point, it's worth stating that the elitism depicted so well in Party Monster has a few core differences to, say, that of society in general. Club kids were outsiders by default: queens, queers, kids who weren't pageant pretty. "It doesn't matter what you look like!" goes the film's most famous quote. "If you have a hunchback, just throw a little glitter on it, honey, and go dancing!"

Club kid Ernie Glam summed it up pretty succinctly, saying, "The message was, and still is, that if you feel like an outcast in your small town you can move to a big city like NYC and become a designer, a stylist, a nightclub promoter, or a junkie. It all depends on your initiative, creativity, and focus."

The fame-hungry hierarchical structures as depicted in Party Monster were created from the inside out. They were operating under their own rules, not the rules of a society that said it wasn't OK to be gay, or that you couldn't cut the butt cheeks out of your trousers, or dress up as a slutty clown. An elitism that places those kinds of people at the top of the totem pole is my kind of elitism. I love Party Monster—and drag culture in general—because it embodies a tongue-in-cheek competitiveness, not the real, soul-sucking life contest that's led to me only eating beans and not being able to afford to pay my rent.

In his 1999 memoir Disco Bloodbath, James St. James (played by Seth Green in the film) writes, "It certainly let a whole generation of teenagers see homos and weirdos and sickos up close and personal, in all their majesty and splendor. And they learned that, often, the very same kids they pick on in high school are the ones holding the drinks tickets, the drugs, and the guest list at the coolest club in New York City. And maybe it caused them to rethink just who 'the cool ones' really are."

The film will always have a place in my heart because it represents the underdogs taking back the mantle and making the world more glamorous and more obscene. To the family and friends of Angel Melendez, I'm sure this is entirely irrelevant, but the political nuances of the film are undeniable; it's bleeding with the character of Michael Alig and it emanates through the hugely catchy soundtrack: "Money, success, fame, glamour! We are living in the age of the thing."

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