Scorpio Rising is a 1963 short film (28 minutes) directed by Kenneth Anger.
The film is a silent movie about motorcycles and a biker gang that is filled with homoerotic imagery. It starts with a young man painstakingly working on his bike. Intercut are shots of a big beefy muscle-bound man wearing a leather jacket over a bare chest. The young man then dresses up in an outfit that suggests a motorcycle cop, with the shots being very homoerotic as he puts on all his gear, and still being intercut with shots of the large muscular shirtless man in the leather jacket.
The young man goes off to a party where he meets his buddies, where even more homoerotic antics take place. Then there is a motorcycle race, apparently officiated by the young man—although he is somehow in a church while he is dropping the flag to start the race—and then a crash.
All of that is intercut throughout with even more bizarre imagery, including a lot of shots of Nazis and swastika flags, homoerotic comic strips, and icons of biker culture like James Dean and Marlon Brando in The Wild One.
Tropes:
- The End: Ends with the end of a belt flopping onto the screen with "END" written on the belt in metal studs.
- Flashback: The shots of the young man doing work on his bike is intercut with clips of a little boy playing with wind-up motorcycle toys.
- Jukebox Musical: The movie is filled from beginning to end with 1960s pop hits. Many are matched up with what is shown onscreen. Instrumental hit "Wipeout" plays along with the crash shown at the end of the film, "Wind-Up Doll" plays over the flashback clips of the little boy playing with wind-up motorcycle toys, and the lyrics of "He's a Rebel"—"watch the way he walks down the street"—play as the young man walks down the street after he leaves the garage.
- Leatherman: The protagonist is implied to be an early-era Leatherman and is outright stated to be a Greaser Delinquents style rebel. See also the much bigger, musclebound biker guy who wears a leather jacket over a bare chest. The early leathermen of the 1950's and 1960's were often bikers, rockers, and greasers. On a more meta-level, Scorpio Rising was very popular in the actual gay leather scene of the 1970's and influenced leather fashions at the time.
- Lipstick-and-Load Montage: The gay Spear Counterpart thereof, as the camera shows the young man carefully putting on his biker gear—leather jacket, gloves, mirrored sunglasses, Nazi cap, the works—in a very fetishistic manner.
- Shout-Out: Pictures and clips of James Dean on a motorcycle as well as shots, recorded from a television, of Marlon Brando in that iconic 1950s biker gang movie, The Wild One.
- Silence Is Golden: No dialogue in the short.
- Stock Footage: Stock footage from, of all things, a Jesus movie.
- There Is Only One Bed: Unsurprisingly, all the comics the young man reads have homoerotic imagery. One briefly shown comic panel shows a boy inviting another boy to share his room.
- Visual Innuendo:
- There's a phallic image of a traffic cone between a man's legs.
- A shot of what appears to be a commercial, with coffee being poured into a cup, is followed by the young man turning around with his helmet held at crotch level, implying that he peed in it.
