Review of WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) by Al M — 22 Feb 2013

My second film to see by Serbian provocateur Dusan Makavejev (the first being Sweet Movie), W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism is a thoroughly engaging and original blend of documentary and fictional cinema that simultaneously focuses upon the life of Wilhelm Reich (W.R.) and explores the nature of revolution in both sexual and socialist senses. W.R. is a film about freedom: freeing ourselves and freeing society. However, it is also a film about our ideas of freedom get perverted in different ways: these different perversions of freedom are represented by both the supposedly democratic freedom of the U.S. and the supposedly communist freedom of the U.S.S.R. The film paints both as totalitarian regimes that restrict and oppress individuals by twisting the ideologies of democracy and communism into what Marx would have called false consciousness. At the heart of Makavejev's film are the theories of Reich, who believed that we could liberate ourselves through orgasmic energy, a kind of energy that liberates from the ego and from the society that forces repression on us. Reich provides an interesting figure because he fled Europe to escape the totalitarian regimes that arose there only to meet with similar discrimination in the United States, where his books were burned in true Fahrenheit 451 style.

Featuring graphic sex, documentary footage, and surrealistic imagery, W.R. is a constantly engaging, funny, riveting, and always thought-provoking film that blurs the line between genres and shows the line between seemingly opposed ideologies is not as clear as it might seem.