Monster's Ball
by Christopher Bollen
(V; December 2002)Every generation has its cautionary tale. The drug-and-love hippies of the 1960s had Charles Manson. The hard-glamour punks of the 1970s had the grisly death of Nancy Spungen (questionabley at the hands of boyfriend Sid Vicious). Even the "live rich, breed well" preppies of the 1980s had the Central Park strangulation of Jennifer Levin by psycho hunk Robert Chambers, the crime later famously tagged "the Preppies Murder." It is from this genre of "youth subculture going too far" that the deranged, dense populated comic-book playground of the upcoming movie Party Monster springs. The movie, wose titles comes from the 1998 documentary on the same subject, captures the entire pink-pony-ride life of club kid Michael Alig.

Alig was the mid-'90s king of the downtown-New York club world. He was the founder of Limelight's Disco 2000 and the style avatar of its Leigh Bowery-esque gender-bending costumes, complete with shoulder pads, nipples cutouts, clown mouths, and platform shoes. In the end, Alig was also the heroine-addicted, K-and-coke mixer who murdered dealer Angel Menendez, injected the victim's veins with Dragon, chopped up his body, and dumped him in the East River. So much for the innocent promise of a fast, young, glow-in-the-dark party life.

The Film, shot last summer at a swarm of downtown-New York locales, boasts an impressive A-list cast: Macaulay Culkin as the boyish Alig, Seth Green as sidekick James St. James, Dylan McDermott as pirate-patched club owner Peter Gatien, and Chloe Sevigny as the iconic club girl Gitsie. A cool cast, yes, but directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato have been careful not to create a glitzy Hollywood version of a very New York-underground story. After all, they are not strangers to clubland. Bailey and Barbato knew Alig almost as soon as he got off the bus from Indiana. The duo deejayed at Danceleria, where Alig first worked as a busboy. "He was incredibly innocent at first," Barbato recalls. "He wore checkered bowling shirts." By the time Bailey and Barbato had started doing elaborate background videos for Club USA, Alig was drug-addicted, scene-driven, and ruling a band of club kids what were changing the somber look of post-Warhol New York into a sequined wonderland.

"This Was high-concept image making," Wilkinson explains. "The club kids experimented with ripping things apart and putting them back together, exploring the girl-boy friction that makes people uncomfortable." It is a haunting mental image that Wilkinson even reproduced Alig in the depths of is drug descent after the murder. Once, to Bowery Bar, Alig wore and old army blanket that he'd had on for months and the word guilty written across his forehead. "He was draped like a saint."

Behind all of the rich getups and bathroom-stall shoot-ups, there is the question of whether the film is making Alig the murderer into Alig the tragicomic saint. "This isn't a club movie," Bailey says. "It doesn't glamorize what Michael Alig did at all." The directors instead see the film falling into a very different genre, one that is less about confrontation and more about compassion. "It's a character piece, a buddy film between Michael Alig and James St. James. It's a kind of morality tale about outsiders who make themselves insiders." For one of Alig's most famous Limelight parties, he chose a gory blood theme and had the crowd scream, hemorrhage, and die all to a nonstop techno soundtrack. This is a generation that knew how the party would turn out.