fresh kill review
film by Shu Lea Cheang (1994)
Ahhhh, Staten Island. The respirating trash compactor, the collation of The Other Four Fiefdoms’ flotsam, jetsam, various congealed jellies. A home for refuse, and incredibly—don’t tell anyone—the coolest fucking people you’ll ever meet.
Review by: James Carneiro | Filed Under: Film Reviews
June 07, 2025
Time Out New York, all those Whit Stillman publications who manufactured consent for the Koch Regime, even The Gray Lady Herself, the consensus is the same; Staten Island is garbage, a moored pollution ark. The residents, derided as “barnacle like” if afforded any defining characteristics at all, seem unfit for The End of History. The Times calls for UN Blue Helmets and a trade embargo; The Post offers nuclear fire. The AFL-CIO, in a stunning display of philanthropy, is willing to train 14 Unemployed Youths of Indeterminate Ethnicity in counterinsurgency and/or incinerator operation—14 new jobs, 1700 fewer bag ladies.
But what do the people of Staten Island think about their pariah status? Surely those staggering egg-carton tenements, those informal cities of cardboard mainframe held taut with crucifix and Spanx, surely they hold Humans With Opinions. Fresh Kill confirms this with a caveat; they also have Dial-Up.
This movie is almost invariably slotted under experimental film with a kind of hands-thrown-up “We dunno where to stick ya, Freak Child.” Even worse, it’s placed behind strobing police kliegs and mustard CAUTION tape with the sorrowful warning: “Do not confuse Experimental Film for Genre Thrills. Experimentation isn’t fun.” I find this an egregious dereliction of duty; this is riotous AgitProp which uses experimental methods, but its function as manifesto, as polemic, is cogent and blaring and obvious as the crimson lipstick smudge occupying the upper 17% of the frame in those establishing shots, where the bawdy beauty of the Staten Ferry has to endure a shared space with that twin sepulcher to capitalism-imperialism.
The sepulcher thought it would outlast Staten Island. (It was mistaken.) What Shu Lea Cheang does here—within the necrotic aquarium of the Naga Saki, the bullet-hole CRT warmth of the hacker pads, the analog-digital audio tracks running parallel in sexy camaraderie, the schizophrenic linguistics of Different Tongues Embodying The Same Avatar—is an achievement lurid in its (apparent) simplicity.
Film site synopses are more accurate on the subject of screenwriter Jessica Hagehorn; her Filipina status—both as ethnic/geographic point of reference and subject to Amerikan imperialism, both on The Archipelago and in The States—absolutely informs the construction of Fresh Kill.
Characters, whether the prole-commie-culture jammers we’re meant to identify with or the Brooks Brothers Gone Captain Planet cyborgs we’re meant to loathe, behave “strangely,” eschew realism, but always with The Overriding Political Code punched into the 16mm frame. The thesis never wavers. Hagehorn delights in the irony between Those Insistent On The End of History—that global capitalism’s Borg-like absorption of every subaltern culture, every captive market, every unspoiled ecosystem, is going to happen, especially now that the Eastern Bloc no longer exists as a counterbalance—and those who say, “Fuck off.”
It is a jazzy, horny, audio-visual mixtape, one in which every exchange of dialogue is breathlessly poetic. Perhaps in the hands of a lesser screenwriter this would degenerate into lazy crypticisms or simply become tiresome, but man, every snatch of polemic sings. Teetering on the fulcrum between a slam poetry open mic and an issue of Ramparts, it never forgets its prime directive: everything is political and our enemies are in power, but our enemies are too ridiculous to hold onto it for much longer. History never ends, a luta continua.
Critics as politically divergent as David Ehrlich and Bob Avakian may find common ground On The Difficulty of Subject Identification Within Agit-Prop, but I found myself “rooting for” Shareen Lightfoot (Sarita Choudhury, Devil May Scrap Collecting) and Claire Mayakovsky (Serving up irradiated snapper at the Naga Saki) like they were the 2005-06 Texas Longhorns. You want them to break beams and crosses, jam corporate-imperialist frequencies, raise their daughter Honey in a world where “commodity production” is a nonsense specter to threaten Toddlers Flaunting Bedtime.
I liked how their divergent work environments (service industry versus informal economy) is never a point of tension; in fact, it sutures them all the closer and allows both women access to complimentary Staten environs they’d never ordinarily encounter. (These are best personified in Annoyingly Cool Mainframe Moonlighter and Paranoic Nuyorican Borges Snippets.)
The erotic component to Claire and Shareen’s relationship is unashamed, sashays in green text luminescence; they fuck a lot. I’ve never seen the undulating billows of an accordion used as erotic motif before—they fuck to its breathing and their bedside is littered with them—but it never feels shallow or Self-Consciously Artsy. Just twin mainframes swapping code. This is a household Staten Island should be proud of.
I don’t think it’s helpful to think of this film as speculative fiction. Every city has its homeless encampments which sprawl for miles, everyone is subject to irradiated goods, panoptic surveillance, digitized echoes of screams originally emitted in Shenzhen or Mobile or Staten or Tamil Nadu. Fresh Kill, already “prescient” in 1994, is simply our unthinking mundanity today. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool.
The NYC Department of Parks and Recreation is embarking on a grand adventure, a sort of ecological philanthropy: it is transforming Fresh Kills Landfill into Freshkills Park. From April 1948 to March 2001, it functioned as an Island of Misfit Run-Off, shunting The Other Four Fiefdoms’ effluvia through the alluvial plain, the saline estuary’s equilibrium swapped for less savory makeup—the run-off of a moribund, flailing empire. The Extent of the Damage (whether human, animal, localized ecosystem, biosphere-wide funeral barge) is incalculable. Experts predict a ribbon-cutting ceremony in 2035; Staten will not attend.
Author
Reviewed by James Carneiro. Initially caught the film bug while cruising for used copies of Bergman flicks/bootleg concert footage at Disc Replay. These days, he’ll review quite anything, though he is partial to Italian neorealism, American underground film, and whoever is using cinema as a method of interrogating power structures. You can follow him on Letterboxd and Twitter.
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