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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 January 2010
Morrissey generally denies making political films: “I'm very political, but I don't think it belongs in film. All politics change with the wind, so it's silly to put politics in movies. The politics in my movies is like the sex. It's always, always there to be funny.” But in the development of independent cinema, there has always been a “politics of the nonpolitical.” Simply to make an independent, noncommercial (or especially anticommercial) film is a political act. This is especially clear in someone with Morrissey's moral intensity and social concern. His resistance to commodification is as much a political stance as an aesthetic one. So, too, his disgust with the mass marketing not just of drugs and sex but of the religion of self-indulgence.
Ken Kelman defined American underground film as essentially the rebellion of imaginative and spiritual energies against the repressiveness of Hollywood (the macro fantasy industry, if you will) and American society. Morrissey's work would fall into Kelman's category of “outright social criticism and protest” – but with one difference: Morrissey's target is libertinism, not repression. Or, more precisely: his target is the repression of restraint. In three films Morrissey extended the sexual comedy of his Flesh trilogy into a consistent political statement. They give his moral vision a societal dimension. Women in Revolt (1971) is an ambivalent comedy about women's liberation. L'Amour (1972) and Madame Wang's (1981) are companion pieces that vary the traditional plot of the innocent abroad.
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