I've put in so many puzzles and enigmas that it will keep the professors busy for centuries over what I meant, and that's the only way of ensuring one's immortality. - James Joyce

In 1994 the celebrated young sculptor, performance, and multimedia artist Matthew Barney initiated a project to which he would devote himself for the next eight years: a series of five motion pictures called The Cremaster Cycle, whose screenings were accompanied by various books, photographs, and sculptures related to images and objects shown in the films. These installations were met with much fanfare by the fine-arts press, with various critics declaring that the four-hundred-minute opus "build[s] a parallel mythological world that probes deeply the dilemmas and traumas that shape our time," a "grand mixture of history, autobiography, and mythology, an intensely private universe in which symbols and images are densely layered and interconnected," a veritable "cosmology" of "birth and sexuality." The New York Times Magazine went so far to say that Barney "is the most important American artist of his generation." With superlative plaudits like that, it stands to reason that any arts enthusiast should avail themselves of any opportunity to partake of Barney's oeuvre.

The standard biographical blurbs all cite Barney's all-American upbringing in Idaho, competing on his high school wrestling team and quarterbacking the football team, studying art at Yale while working as a fashion model to pay the bills, and then making an instant splash on the art scene both in America and abroad. His works typically explored themes of masculine identity, and took the form of unique Vaseline sculptures, the exploration and appropriation of notable public spaces, live performances involving feats of athleticism by Barney himself, and video installations incorporating all of the above. Despite the variety of media, Barney insists his artistic output is all essentially sculptural, including the cinematic manifestations. Stephen Holden notes that the Cremaster Cycle "has been credited with breaking down the distance between sculpture and film," with their languid journeys across and around and over the surfaces of buildings, discrete objects, extravagant apparel, skin, mechanical apparatuses, and more elemental substances like mud and water (and, of course, Vaseline). Says Barney himself about the Cycle in an interview with Tate Magazine, "I wanted to see how this sculptural project, which is what it is, could align itself with the cinematic form, and still come out as sculptural."

At the least, what comes out of viewing the entire Cycle is possibly the greatest sense of befuddlement for even the most seasoned critic. Barney's by no means aspiring to a conventional cinematic language in any of the five films, and the viewer is largely adrift in a miasma of iconography that is either wholly personal to the author or beyond the scope of most people's interpretive faculties. This writer openly admits that his own critical talents fell far short of allowing for an edifying experience when he took in the Cycle in a single marathon seven-hour session at the Detroit Institute of the Arts several months ago, and spent a good deal of mental energies ever since trying to make sense of it. Ever eager to give myself the benefit of the doubt, it was easy to embrace the following quote when I stumbled upon it in that same Tate article:

For me it is critical that all of these forms come together as one piece. The films, the sculpture, the photographs, the books. And the museum is the place for that to happen. Probably the moving image aspects can travel most easily beyond the walls of the museum. The further, the better. But the museum is the place to make the overall form very clear, as we have done with the exhibitions at the Guggenheim and Paris.

It's likely that most of us did not have access to the above-mentioned exhibitions in which Barney states his work was given full expression; it's additionally unclear if Barney's plastic creations were present when the entire Cycle was unspooled at last year's Sundance Film Festival. The problem is this: though the Cycle does in actuality take a myriad of forms, in many instances it's being packaged as a purely cinematic experience. The celluloid quintology was given a limited release in theatrical venues over the past year minus the other installations, drawing audiences as "an art world phenomenon" not to be missed when it came through their neighborhood. And if more viewers walked out afterwards as alienated and drained as I was, was the art-film scene sold short due to the absence of additional illuminating materials? And, more importantly, why would Barney allow himself to be introduced to segments of the non-Guggenheim-patronizing public as a filmmaker if the films are only a portion of his message?

This of course assumes that the sculptures et al would indeed assist in our understanding of the Cycle's thematic concerns. (Note I do not say "and narrative": though the films do necessarily record the passage of time, with events and actions taking place in ways that might suggest cause and effect, Barney himself has disavowed the films of any linearity. To speak of the Cycle's "plot" is to flirt with scholarly investigations beyond the scope of anything less than a doctoral dissertation.) Those of us who partook of the films have them alone to go on in deciphering Barney's aims, and we must assume that some sort of meaning can be construed from within the parameters of the screen. We, then, come to the gist of this essay: What are we to make of the Cremaster Cycle solely as cinema?

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications. - Marcel Duchamp

According to Michael Kimmelman, "Barney considers himself an abstract artist," and this emphasis plays out in his work's essential ambiguity. "Art is unresolved, otherwise it is uninteresting," is how Kimmelman sums him up. In an interview in The Stranger last year, Barney himself confesses as much: "I think there's a fair amount of things in [the films] that I don't completely understand," he says, which may alarm an audience looking for clues to the Cycle's meaning. If Barney cannot be relied upon to deconstruct every visual element, then the viewer is essentially given free license to interpret things in whatever practicable ways their resources allow. Barney is merely the barely-comprehending prism through which chthonic ideas are given birth; it is in their interaction with each spectator's frames of reference that any meaning is extracted. According to David Bordwell, this is the fundamental process of abstract, or avant-garde, artistic transmission:

Not only the particular meanings constructed but the conception of implicit meaning itself is central to criticism in the avant-garde tradition. Writing on the avant-garde relies on widely held assumptions about aesthetic practice. For the avant-garde explicator, as for critics of other stripes, the artist stands as creator or transmitter of meaning. The artist draws upon personal experience (here autobiography enters), or upon a private mythology (for example, Kenneth Anger's predilection for Aleister Crowley), or upon the art world, which passes along inherited "problems" to be solved. The critic will use the artist's writings, interviews, and recollections to support ascribed meanings…In Western culture, critical interpretation in any medium has long assumed that a psychological unity binds the artist's thought and behavior to the finished work.

By abdicating the primary burden of interpretation onto the critic/viewer, Barney's ensured that our guess is as good as anyone else's - including Barney's. But anything Barney has to offer as to what brought the project about is entirely welcome, and his interviews in Tate and Stranger are not unhelpful. He cites an increasing interest in "telling stories," and he structures the work as follows:

There was a kind of system that I laid out before Cremaster, which started in a place called 'Situation,' a sexual place trying to define drive or desire. That impulse would then pass through a kind of visceral funnel, called 'Condition,' that would shape that raw drive. And then 'Production' was an anal or oral output that would be bypassed by connecting those two orifices and making a circular system. 'Situation,' the sexual station, was always drawn as a reproductive system, before its embryonic point of differentiation between male and female…the cremaster muscle …is associated but not actually related to the height of the gonads during sexual differentiation in the womb. A story could be developed about a sexual system that could move at will, and within the fantasy the cremaster muscle would control that, although in fact it does not.

We are therefore handed a dominant metaphor through the title itself. Another definition I came across explains the cremaster as "the muscle that determines the height of the human testes in response to such stimulae as cold and fear, but beyond conscious control." This serves to connect the Cycle with Barney's previous preoccupations with gender roles, but once the projector starts up its usefulness in analyzing the phantasmagoria that unfold is of questionable value. But elsewhere Barney speaks of a continued interest in geography informing the Cycle as well: "The initial concept was to put together five locations as singular sculptural entities, on a line from west to east, so that a line could be drawn between them - not just by me but by anybody." He also notes a dialogue with "the tradition of physical comedy, which I'm really interested in. Its relationship to gravity, and how gravity acts on the body," which the oft-belaying Barney has explored in earlier performances.

The final bone Barney throws at us is his enduring fascination with Vaseline, which reinforces a biological bent to the project, which he explains as follows:

I think that the Vaseline is part of a family of materials that I use over and over again: prosthetic plastics, Teflon, things that can live inside and outside the body, both architecturally and biologically. I think that Vaseline belongs to this family of plastics as a sort of lubricant. One of the interests that the project has is to create a landscape that's both internal and external, and that there's often a need to moisten that landscape and make it internal. The jelly in some way fulfills that. It's sort of the mucous that binds things.

All of this can therefore serve as signposts of a sort when undertaking a reading of the Cycle, but the last word is truly up to us. To engage with this massive work is to submit to an interpretive free-fall, but Barney's own multiplicity of organizing systems ultimately identifies the work as polysemous, or having many meanings. Let this contribution of verbiage therefore constitute just one possible, and entirely subjective, assessment of one of the most intimidating works of our time.

Every text is incoherent. - Robin Wood

There's no dialogue in Cremaster 1 (1996), nor is there anything resembling exposition. What you see is what you get - which is in this case flight attendants and blimps. Two Goodyear™ dirigibles hover above a blue football field, upon which a gaggle of Ziegfeld girls perform in hoop skirts and with red or blue balls in hand. (In the endzones are the logos "C1," whose meaning should be obvious.) Watching the Busby Berkeley-esque configurations from above are several glamorously bored stewardesses, who sit around in a completely white compartment apparently on a perpetual break, smoking and sometimes checking their reflections in the windows. (From above the dancers resemble jellyfish, with their large skirts floating about.) Music is playing on the football field, but in the blimp all that's heard is the low hum of the ship's engine. I think we are also meant to understand that there are identical sets of ladies in both blimps, differing only by the color of their Isaac Mizrahi-designed uniforms.

What piques the interest the most is the centerpiece within both cabins, an arrangement of green (in one blimp) or purple (in the other) grapes atop a white tablecloth, with a white (and supposedly made of Vaseline) sculpture in the middle resembling a cross between fallopian tubes and a wishbone. And underneath each table lies another woman, this time blonde and in lingerie, her body not on the floor but awkwardly wedged within a shelf that circles the table's central leg, just beneath the tabletop. (It's not certain whether the hostesses are aware of her presence; nor is it ever clear why she chooses to remain there, but it certainly can't be by choice.)

It's through a hole already in the table that she slowly rends an opening through the tablecloth and starts surreptitiously grabbing grapes from the display. These she then rubs somewhat ecstatically on her chest, and they drop out of an oversized heel on one of her shoes, forming patterns on the floor mimicking the movements of the girls on the field below. Eventually the same actress (who was portraying both ladies under the tables) joins the dancers on the ground, with a miniature blimp tethered to each hand, and the camera zips between everyone's legs for a final dance number. It's certainly not the most scrutable of opening films, but at forty-five minutes it's also not the most demanding, thankfully. What it all means? That the fun's only beginning.

Texts, as occasions for perception, cognition, and emotion, possess properties which can function as cues - "prompts" for meaning-making. - David Bordwell.

1999's Cremaster 2 is a half-hour longer than 1, and its scope is decidedly more vast, and more sober. Described by Holden as "a Gothic western spoof of The Executioner's Song," and containing, per Barney, "geological and genealogical layering," we're taken from private rooms to recording studios to gas stations to the Great Salt Lake to the Chicago Columbian Exposition in 1893. But Barney's camera first navigates the contours of what we eventually recognize as a riding saddle plated completely in small mirrors. An organ plays on the soundtrack, and the scene shifts to a strikingly gorgeous exterior setting with a mountain range reflected in an adjoining body of water, bisecting the screen horizontally in half. (If I were feeling academic, I'd say this symmetry mirrors the above/below division from C1, but making such connections only exhibits one's critical flair, as opposed to offering true insights.)

We're then privy to a meeting between a young couple and an older woman in 19th-century American fashions, sitting atop contorted chairs and inserting their hands through an opening in the table between them and holding onto a bar below. "It's a pleasure to meet you at last," says the older woman, and as she rocks the table she recites ritualistically, "and so…let every bond be loosened, every force fail, let all iron be broken…for I am Baby Fay." We then see honeycomb being split apart, and a (possibly fake) woman in a glass girdle performing intercourse with an unidentified man, with genitalia possibly constructed of Barney's trademark Vaseline. The camera pulls back to reveal we're inside a soundstage, with a drummer (per the literature, Dave Lombardo, formerly of Slayer) pounding away while another man covered in bees recites lyrics in a guttural voice (Steve Tucker of Morbid Angel) into a phone. It all sounds very death metal, but with apian sounds on top, and the only reliable impression so far is that the camera's constant tracking implies Barney's trying to make connections by moving from place to place so steadily.

Now we behold a man listening to that same music on a car radio, but the car is unusual - it's actually two conjoined cars, facing opposite directions on either side of Sinclair gas station pumps, their interiors connected by a tunnel hewn out of, again, a Vaseline-like substance. (The license plates are from Idaho and Utah.) The man's unshaven, has bloodshot eyes, and wears a white jumpsuit, and while he lays about within the car(s) another young man (his name tag reads "Max") comes out, fills up one of the gas tanks, checks the oil, and starts wiping the windows, curiously peering through. The car's occupant spends some time frustratedly refashioning some of the tunnel's Vaseline into strings spanning across the interior, then exits, takes Max inside the station, and shoots him in the back of the head, blood seeping onto the tiles. (Until now there's been a consistent use of a single overhead light source, if that means anything.) Barney strictly rations the flow of information as C2 unfolds, only handing us a snippet of "story" each minute, which suggests a purposefulness amidst these vague and surreal events.

Then we're suddenly in what looks like the interior of a Mormon tabernacle, complete with singing choir (the music's very 2001), their blue robes matching the color of the considerable ceiling. The camera ascends, studies the pews from above, and two USA flags are draped over some of them. Now the scene shifts to the outdoors, the camera gliding over blue water, stopping at what seems to be a small stadium sculpted out of the Great Salt Lake itself. A group of 25 mounted police enter, and the formations they create we view from above, much like the Ziegfeld girls in C1. The same man who shot Max is escorted into a rodeo chute and seated upon a bull, and is let loose into the arena. (A logo emblazoned throughout this scene looks like two conjoined 'G''s.) The rider is not shaken from the beast, and it eventually lays down, both mount and rider lying limp. I'll give Barney this much - whatever's going on, it hasn't been dull on the eyes.

Our final venue (after a brief scene of a couple in country-western wear two-stepping around the saddle we saw at the beginning) is a sizeable and dank exhibition space, where an older lady in black walks her dog warily between Victorian-era lamps and enormous Polaris snowmobiles draped in flags. Coming upon a stage in the middle of the hangar-sized interior, she calls out to a man packing things into a trunk, next to ice sculptures: "And how did you fare with your metamorphosis?" "You didn't see it?" he asks. The rest of the dialogue includes such phrases as "transcend your position in the hive," "this mere exercise in physicality," and "a real transformation does take place"; it then becomes clear that the man is Harry Houdini, who "becomes part of the cage that seals him," and who poetically "digests the lock." (We also understand that he's being played by Norman Mailer.) The lady finally asks him: "Would this drone care to end his life as a drone?", and identifies herself as Baby Fay, the lady from earlier in the film. Whereupon the camera hurtles back through the mountains and over water, a sumptuous display accompanied again by a pipe organ.

I recounted the on-screen events in detail so as to verbally reproduce the sort of experience your brain might have in trying to identify and then explain the film's visual pageantry. This also serves to illustrate how detailing "what happens" in a Cremaster film clearly has its limitations; Barney's intentions (to the extent that he claims to have an agenda) clearly lie deep beyond what our standard semiotic inferences might dig up (forgive my lapse into scholar-ese). To bring into high relief the distance between what you or I might have deduced, I present Barney's own interpretation of C2's proceedings:

In Cremaster 2 there is a paternal constellation of Mailer, Gary Gilmore and Harry Houdini. [Gilmore killed two Mormon men in 1976, and became the first man executed in the United States after the death penalty was re-instituted; Mailer's The Executioner's Song details Gilmore's battle with the courts to terminate the endless delays leading up to the firing squad.] That made the choice seem obvious. Mailer becomes paternal to Gilmore as the author of [Song]. Although it is brief in Mailer's book, the relationship here to Houdini is that Gilmore's grandmother may or may not have had an affair with Houdini at the 1893 World's Fair; whether or not it is true is unknown. This would make Gilmore Harry Houdini's illegitimate grandson. The Cremaster 2 story is to do in part with this leap from Gilmore's generation to Houdini's. When he was younger Mailer looked an awful lot like Houdini…

The closing credits indicate Barney was portraying Gilmore (note the double-G logo), another character is titled "Mormon Elder," the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was indeed the group singing, and some lyrics (perhaps the ones performed by Steve Tucker?) were apparently composed by Gilmore and Nicole Baker (Gilmore's girlfriend). This is certainly all very suggestive information, but none of this comes out from simply watching the film. This begs the question, is a film like C2 a failure if its historical referents are not clear, or is an avant-garde film more than the sum of its parts, more about the experience of viewing than about any perceived "message?" (But if I come out more confused than entertained, more nonplussed than enraptured, has the film squandered the potential of the medium?)

Through poetic connections feeling is heightened and the spectator is made more active. He becomes a participant in the process of discovering life, unsupported by ready-made deductions from the plot or ineluctable pointers by the author…Complexities of thought and poetic visions of the world do not have to be thrust into the framework of the patently obvious. - Andrey Tarkovsky

Another of the Cycle's more famous aspects is the fact that Barney did not make them in numerical order. (The order of production is actually 4,1,5,2,3.) Barney attests this was done "for practical reasons…I took on locations as they became available," but re-presenting the quintology in theaters in numerical order, versus the order in which they were initially unveiled to the public over the past decade, implies a flow of ideas with a beginning and an end. (This sequential ordering is one of the Cycle's more misleading features - I would've preferred they be given different subtitles altogether, like Cremaster: Situation, to more clearly communicate their interchangeability.) Tate argues the Cycle has "many strong narratives, a polyphony of beginnings and ends," so it wouldn't matter in what order they are watched, but Barney has since suggested that a one-to-five viewing does serve a larger purpose: "I've begun to see the five parts differently," he says, "I've begun to see them in terms of having an idea in 1, rejecting it in 2, experiencing a kind of narcissistic interlude in 3, panicking in 4 and resolving the idea in 5, which ultimately kills the thing."

The problem with a sequential viewing is that Cremaster 3 is a staggering 182 minutes long, which when placed dead in the middle, effectively knocks the wind out of your sails for the remaining two installments. If C3 was created last to serve as a magnum opus, with a running time befitting a dramatic closure (and appropriately exhausting any further interest in the project on the part of both artist and audience), it certainly was not put together with this later theatrical run in mind. C3's length tests the butt and attention span like few films that have come before (I imagine Warhol's Empire might be at least as taxing), and not just because of its duration. When the film opens with both mythical giants quarrelling on the Scottish Hebrides and a Vince Lombardi quote ("character is an integration of habit of conduct superimposed on temperament"), you know you're in for an eclectic doozy.

According to what I've read elsewhere, the mummy-like figure disinterred from the muddy cave by five gloved figures in black is meant to be Gary Gilmore once again, but he is promptly taken upstairs to the lobby of the Chrysler Building in Manhattan and placed within a vintage car that is subsequently demolished by five 1967 Chrysler Crown Imperials over the course of the next hour or two, until all that remains is a tiny compressed cube. Meanwhile, Barney appears in a fedora and leather overalls, brandishing a spatula first seen at the home of one of the giants in the film's opening. (Oh, and it takes twenty minutes before we are granted any opening credits - what does that tell you about C3's pacing?) Barney proceeds to scale up one of the elevator shafts until he arrives at an elevator compartment, which he enters through a panel in the ceiling. He lights a cigarette, places it under the fire-emergency sprinkler, and water starts to trickle out. (All while we continue to hear the cars going at it in the lobby.)

Barney takes a bag of sand or of cement, adds water to it in a pail, and proceeds to hurl the contents against the elevator walls over and over. This and the climbing all seem physically demanding enough, to be sure, and his disregard for both his safety and standards of cleanliness seems typical of a mischievous young boy who'd enjoy making a big building his own personal playground - as he would undoubtedly enjoy the demolition derby taking place on the ground floor. When this ends, Barney continues upwards, exiting the shaft at a dining room, whose maitre d' accepts from him a set of various carved stones. Barney then installs himself at the bar, which appears to have an extension added to it, made of (probably) Vaseline.

Ensconced away in a tiny room (we assume) on the same floor sits a young lady surrounded by stacks of potatoes, festooned in elegant eveningwear, and sporting unusual footwear that she takes her time assembling. (Everything takes its time in this film.) It eventually becomes clear that there are blades on the bottom of her shoes, with which she steps upon and carves up the potatoes one by one. Meanwhile, the maitre d' has assembled, and plays, some sort of harp he's constructed next to and connected to the elevator shafts, with the stones received from Barney and a number of wires. (The drafts blowing up the shafts provide accompaniments in various tones.) We also hear some creaking now and then - perhaps the elevator car, weighed down by all the mud and water Barney's filled it with?

Barney certainly isn't a lazy filmmaker, with so much going on at all times and in so many different settings, the camera frequently taking in the action from more than one angle. The visuals are always consistently crisp as well, confirming Barney didn't enter into the project unversed in the technical aspects of cinematography. But now there's some secret society confabulating in another private room, with a number of silver drafting tools upon the table among all their glasses of ale. And then the bartender starts breaking glasses, the kegs' spigots start bursting, and a lengthy round of slapstick ensues with the barkeep rolling about in the suds. The suds spill over into the potato-carving woman's room, her potatoes end up in the society's room, and it's still completely unclear why any of this is happening.

Mercifully there is an intermission, but not before another odd scene, this time at the Saratoga racetrack, with decaying horses (flayed skin, ribs showing) in a harness race almost single file, the spectators wearing forties-style outfits, the horses crossing the finish line in a tie, then a pair of thugs attacking Barney and shattering his teeth upon a ceramic (Vaseline?) post. We cut back to Barney at the bar in the Chrysler Building, and his mouth is bleeding as well. (Oh, and there's a flag with "C3" on it, as well as one with the double-G's on it again. And it's probably worth mentioning that the entire film to this point is littered with pentagon-shaped visuals, a shape the Chrysler logo shares.) When we return, the society gents have taken Barney in their arms and escorted him what appears to be a dentist's office. His mouth is revealed to be toothless, and his genitalia are exposed as well - but whatever that is down there, it looks more like a sea anemone than anything.

It's at this point in my notes that exasperation finally took over, approximately halfway through the entire series: "I understand none of this," I wrote, upon which secret handshakes are exchanged, the miniature remains of Gilmore's car is inserted in Barney's mouth, and fluid starts coming out of his butt. "Boy am I skeptical thus far," I scribbled on the next page, indicating my declining faith in the validity of this enterprise. The venerated sculptor Richard Serra's now in a dark upper chamber of the building, pulling endlessly on chains and piling pentagon-shaped pieces of metal atop each other without breaking a sweat. Barney, since left alone in that office, joins Serra at what we understand to be the uppermost room of the building, filled with flowers, where men wrap ribbons around a Maypole. We've made it to the top, and the best I can say is that C3 is some sort of paean to the Chrysler Building itself, while making special note of the contributions of the Irish in its construction.

Barney himself says this sequence "relates somewhat to the conflict between the stone-masons' union and the metalworkers' union," and Serra's character embodies

a problematic character…that was guilty of hubris. Along with thirties New York came the desire to build higher, shinier, and the construction of the Chrysler tower became the thing I focused on as a kind of building of a false idol…I ended up looking into the Freemasonic myths and finding that the myth of Hiram was really useful to this story. Hiram, the architect of Solomon's Temple, was never able to finish it. He was killed by apprentices because they believed he could communicate with God and had the answers to everything, but he wouldn't divulge this to them. So again, it is sort of a layering of a couple different stories…

…none of which I gleaned in the course of this ordeal. "In Mr. Barney's imagination," writes Holden, "the Architect, as he is known, is a fanatical master builder worthy of The Fountainhead and the skyscraper's spiritual father." That may be the case in Barney's imagination, but the result on my end is emphatically hazier. By now I'm wondering if it wasn't a mistake to try and take this all in at once - but it's being screened that way, so the programmers must believe that some good will come of it. A particular Barney quote is also starting to haunt me - "After I understand something completely, I'm not interested in it anymore" - well, Mr. Barney, I tend to lose interest if I don't start understanding it at least a little bit. Narcissistic interlude, indeed.

The better hidden the author's views, the better for the work of art. - Friedrich Engels.

And don't you wish I was done detailing the parisological contents of C3; I regret to announce that the most illustrious segment is yet to come! (One hundred eighty-two minutes was never so sharply felt; and as long as your reading all this takes less time than I spent in the theater, then perhaps a valuable service of some sort has been rendered.) The now-kilted Barney leaves the Chrysler Building for the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum, and he scales its uniquely striated walls level by level, at each floor encountering a wholly unexpected cast of characters. On the ground floor he hobnobs with more high-heeled dancing girls (adorned in pasties, lamb-shaped caps, and not much else) in a suds-filled tub, who start up a kickline. An on-screen graphic informs us that this gathering is the "1st Degree: The Order of the Rainbow for Girls."

The second level, or "degree," is called "Agnostic Front vs. Murphy's Law," and contains two metal/rap bands performing a few yards from each other, with enthusiastic groupies moshing between them. The third degree is "Aimee Mullins," whom a quick Google™ search identifies as a much-decorated Paralympian track and field athlete, and who here wears remarkable glass prosthetic legs; we also immediately recognize her as the woman who was previously carving potatoes with her (now-understood-to-be-artificial) feet in the Chrysler Building. The fourth degree is called "The Five Points of Fellowship," possibly referencing the pentagonal figures in the film's earlier section, and the fifth and final degree is simply "Richard Serra," also played by himself. (The audience around me was generating giggles by this point, possibly simply out of relief that the on-screen antics were no longer deadly serious.)

On level two, the bands' audience skips around him. On level three, Barney's suddenly wearing the same dress adorning Mullins. On the fourth, Mullins appears as a leopard, and her makeup and prosthetics in this guise are frankly astounding (her tail even moves independently), and she seems to be threatening Barney as he tries to ascend higher. Up top, Serra begins pouring what must be molten Vaseline down a ramp that snakes along the railing, and Barney takes some of this liquid and spatters it against a metal block. And at some point we realize that where Barney's mouth should be is instead a bloody crater, out of which extends an anemone-like appendage much like what we saw between his legs in the dental office. (My notes start sounding a lot more cynical at this point.)

Upon reaching the fifth degree Barney turns around and starts rappelling back down, as if racing the Vaseline Serra's sent flowing. Back on level four, we watch him hurl into a pile like a javelin some identical long and white objects I can't describe much better than freaky leg bones for some unreal creature. Back on the main floor, the dancing girls give him his own baby lamb, then toss him into the tub. Then he starts going back up again, and apparently tries to kill both Mullins' leopard and Serra until a pot falls onto his head. Then it's back to the British Isles and the giants briefly enmeshed in combat, and one of them hurls a pentagon-shaped discus into the ocean. Finis!

There's definitely no emotional engagement throughout any of this, certainly nothing resembling character identification, and only the most oblique narrative arcs; still, C3's beginning and ending in the same location implies a reaffirmation of themes, some sort of framework by which Barney's structured his ideas. Only three-fifths of the way through the Cycle I was feeling sapped and angry, seemingly ill-equipped for whatever symbology was at play here. (And yet, at the DIA the crowd remained the same size from start to finish - did they know something I didn't? Were any of them feeling equally bemused?) And then something approximating an insight finally hit me: Barney's not coming from a filmic tradition at all. All the inferential strategies I'd always relied upon to get me through difficult films before were exactly the wrong tools to use for deciphering The Cremaster Cycle. Barney's claiming to always be creating works of sculpture regardless of the actual medium of which they're composed, so should sitting through these films be like contemplating an object in a museum?

A man with only one theory is a lost man. - Bertold Brecht

It's not likely I was going to skip the last two segments after surviving all that preceded them, though it was clear Barney was making no effort to meet the average moviegoing public at their level. Finally conceding that the Cycle may not be a "cinematic" experience (as I have come to understand the term) was progress, but for the Cycle to have been marketed as a must-see in the art-film circuit, when it's not meant for public consumption at all, seems disingenuous. Cremaster 4's tap-dancing goat-men, race-car drivers oozing cysts out of their pockets, and picnicking female body-builders certainly do nothing to contradict "high" art's reputation for inaccessibility and irrelevance; the continued lack of verbal dialogue proves a liability, and stuff like this would be indistinguishable from anyone trying to spoof the abstruse ephemera of the stereotypical art film.

The cars drive endlessly around the Isle of Man, Barney's goat-man falls through a pier and tap-dances on the ocean floor, and then he digs through the ground (using relatively amateurish stop-motion photography) until he has to laboriously squeeze through a hexagonal tunnel lined with the usual Vaseline (which at one point passes underneath the androgynous picnickers). A crash scene involving one of the drivers is also surprisingly maladroit, but this was the first film Barney made in the series, so it's possible his filmmaking skills were still developing over the course of the Cycle. But it's now also clear this project was uncompromisingly personal from the start - so at least we can applaud Barney for sticking to his standards.

The less accessible a work is to the intellect, the greater it is. - Goethe

Which brings us at last to 1997's Cremaster 5, with its fluffy birds, twin Asian attendants, bizarre footwear, and Ursula Andress. She's installing herself in her box at an empty opera house, wearing one heck of a glass headdress, and on the stage is Barney himself, who proceeds climbing (an activity he's performed enough times in the course of this series that we can safely assume that's a significant metaphor of some sort - ascending and descending - like the cremaster muscle does to the testicles?) up and across on vines, but this time he doesn't look quite so confident. Ursula starts singing in some unknown language (so who's the performer and who's the audience?) - heaven forbid any verbal communication should be comprehensible - and then we see another handlebar-mustachioed Barney on horseback outside on an urban bridge, naked under a black robe. He stands atop the bridge's railing, with Vaseline scissors and gloves in hand, chained to a Vaseline ball between his feet. We're then handed a brief "flashback" with Andress and Barney kissing in a wintry forest, so I guess we're to assume these two "characters" have some sort of mutual history.

But now we discover there's a large chamber directly beneath Andress' box, in which sits a swimming pool inhabited by a pair of webbed-footed water nymphs. (There's also a handrail carved out of Vaseline.) What appear to be ping pong balls float on the surface as Barney enters the water with quite the makeup job, looking like some sort of sea creature. Andress and her attendants watch from above as the nymphs tie blue and yellow ribbons to his groin region, with birds attached to the other end. The birds fly off, the on-stage Barney's still struggling to climb down stage right, and Andress suddenly collapses. The climber's fallen, his head nothing but pudding on the stage floor; the bridge-jumping Barney falls into the river below, where he finds beautiful flowers on the bottom, and the ping pong balls continue to float atop the pool. This marks the end of the film, and of the entire Cycle, and the audience started clapping - but was it for the film, or for their own sense of accomplishment having stuck through to the end, regardless of the actual rewards?

They always say that art has to reflect life and all that. But it's nonsense: the writer (poet) himself creates life such as it has never quite been before him. - Dostoyevsky

Just before his death in 1986, Andrey Tarkovsky issued a book encapsulating his filmmaking philosophy entitled Sculpting in Time, a phrase that might apply to this eminently acroamatical quintology. When we approach a sculpture, we're less likely to ask what it means than to simply appreciate its physical qualities, and this might be how The Cremaster Cycle should be approached. I spent the good part of a rectalgic Sunday embroiled in abortive attempts at interpretation, which Paul Ricoeur defines as "the work of thought which consists in deciphering the hidden meaning in the apparent meaning, in unfolding the levels of meaning implied in the hidden meaning," which is what film critics of all stripes are commissioned with doing. It's possible that Barney may have hoped that simply showing the films independent of his other Cremaster creations would've generated new meanings not seen in the original presentations (seeing as he's only partially self-aware of what it's all about anyway), but in the end a conventional analysis of all this results in a case of Toxic Mental Vaseline.

And it appears we finally have an answer to the question, when is a film not a film? There's a saying that if a film can be understood in one sitting, it's just a movie; if subsequent viewings elicit deeper meanings, then it's art; so if a movie requires multiple interactions to coax out any of its secrets, it may not belong in the category of "cinema" at all. And for readers to slog through seven thousand words only to be told that the moving pictures in question might be that in name only, an apology is probably in order. A brief summation of the Cremaster films' contents and implications is probably impossible, and this turned out to be as much about me as it is about Barney, but if this is what it takes to de-apotheosize a work that not everyone's going to grok, then the time spent was well worth it.

This has also been no less concerned with the limitations of criticism as it is practiced by a humble amateur as myself. It's probably not often that a critic devotes so much space to recounting his own failings, and to some this may constitute a dereliction of duty when a critic doesn't explicate all that's before him, but maybe this can live on as the world's most verbose starting point. It stands to reason that some works of art will sit at the outer limit of both human comprehension and entertainment value, and The Cremaster Cycle may stand among those creations whose appeals speak only to the most selective of audiences. So consider this passing the baton to anyone with the critical fortitude to tackle the beast; as for me, my brain's crying out for a spoon-feeding Hollywood summer blockbuster.