Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers opens with a familiar image. Mother and Father, solemnly middle aged, buttoned-up and meticulously kempt, stand in front of their white clapboard suburban home. They are arm in arm, yet convey no intimacy. They are modest, they are severe. It is a compositional and tonal match for American Gothic, but with the camera cast slightly upward to suggest the point of view of a child. The effect in the theater is a subtle distortion which lends the pair a ghoulish quality. They are just a little too close, and as the scene proceeds with the camera fixed on them, they start to feel a little sweaty. Father’s hair is a little greasy; Mother’s pearls are a little tight. Her makeup is wet. 

As they stand there, melting in their polyesters, the voice of a young ingenue informs her parents that she intends to leave. It’s time to hitch her wagon on a bus out of Kansas and try to make a name for herself in New York. They implore their sweet baby to stay and warn her that only ruin will befall those with the hubris to chase dreams of stardom in the ravenous city, but to no avail. She bids them farewell and these vacuous archetypes tearfully retreat, fully nude from the waist down, in a long jiggly saunter back to the house. Eve, our unseen heroine, is now free—off to New York via a portentously unglamorous montage of the landscape which bridges Secaucus to Port Authority. We have arrived in Manhattan in 1972 in appropriately gritty 16mm. 

We finally meet Eve, done up demurely and laden with suitcases, as she’s shoved off the bus somewhere in Midtown, left in a cloud of exhaust, and picked up in a cab driven by a wild, foul-mouthed nun before she’s had any time to orient herself. No matter, she’s arrived as Alice in Wonderland, completely witless and without any kind of a plan, and the nun knows a place. It is, appropriately, predictably, the Chelsea Hotel. Now we are fully oriented. We are not just in New York, we are Downtown, Warhol adjacent. We are in absurd New York, populated by art house eccentrics who treat drugs, sex, and reality with abandon. Everything is filthy. Everything is beautiful. Trash abounds. It’s a world of possibility. But this room just won’t do. The facade is impressive, but the hotel is a dump and crawling with unsavory loiterers who assume her to be a sex worker. This is no place for a young lady.

Eve is ostensibly in New York to become an actress, but this ambition is quickly overwhelmed with managing the logistics of getting by in the city. First order of business is finding a place to live. She sets off to meet her one contact, a successful actress named Margo Channing, only to find that the woman she’s revered has a salacious reputation and mostly stars in porn. Margo introduces her to Mary Poppins, a commanding presence with towering candy floss hair, sex bomb dresses, and a mean, mean mug. She carries a parasol inside and is flanked by two kept boy toys who silently serve her and speak to others in a kind of timed verse. She is supremely intimidating and Margo seems to view her as a kind of nemesis. She rules this scene. She also runs a roommate agency and might be of some help. Margo sets them up.

From here we proceed down the rabbit hole. Mary sends her on a series of appointments with the surreal. A pair of adolescent twins in doll dresses and ringlets who spout a singular stream of feminist theory in alternating syllables, an ebullient health nut with hundreds of houseplants which she dotes on with physical affection. At one point she views a bedroom that appears to be an actual void. Hey, take it or leave it, a deal is hard to find. Eve stumbles awkwardly through this dreamscape, looking for love, taking a serious acting class, and trying to make some kind of sense of it all. The path to stardom is filled with roadblocks and misdirection, but a girl can dream. 

With no prior knowledge of the film, when I first heard the title, I assumed it to be lurid and campy. I assumed the cucumbers were phalluses and that the film would be a stylistic antecedent to John Waters. But the phrase is actually taken from the Old Testament, and the film lets us know this early through a shot of the Bible. Jeremiah 1:70 states, “For as a scarecrow in a garden of cucumbers keepeth nothing: so are their gods of wood, and laid over with silver and gold.” The scarecrow is a false idol, all dressed up but without substance, towering above its followers, lifeless and absurd. This is a message to the Jews in exile in Babylon, that the ordeal of exile is God’s response to rampant pagan worship in Israel. The metaphor works, but it strikes as oddly specific. It also lends a bit of comedy as it casts the characters in the film as the cucumbers. Never mind, maybe the phallic association is intentional. 

New York serves as a modern Babylon here, and in the land of exile, the cucumbers are all searching for a scarecrow. Absent organized religion, people go searching for a god wherever they can find one. Many, like Eve’s potential plant-loving roommate, become consumed by dietary fixations that are followed with monastic intensity. Others, political philosophies, like the Third Wave Feminist rhetoric of the creepy twins, here not pilloried for the ideas themselves, but the zealotry and administration of formalized political groups. The acting class Eve participates in represents another type of modern god: the modern Western conception of the self, indulged through journeys of self discovery that often suspiciously resemble religious quests. Greater society’s modern gods are called out as well. The parents in the opening scene are the towering hollow scarecrows of heteronormativity and rigid conceptions of gender.

The film is a beautiful artifact of a moment, and belongs to a genre I would dub New York Grit. Films made in the 1970s and 80s, low budget, mostly shot on 16mm and include collective-conscious-making movies like The Warriors or Smithereens. Andy Warhol was not involved in the making of Scarecrow, but many of his collaborators were and the influence of the Downtown art scene informs every aspect of the film. Mary Poppins is played by Warhol star Tally Brown, there are cameos by Lily Tomlin and Bette Midler, and professional wrestler Sonny Boy Hayes is a love interest. The film indulges all of these performers, occasionally with full length musical interludes apropos of nothing, and once with an extended wrestling match scene. Eve is played by Holly Woodlawn, a trans actress previously featured in Warhol’s films, Trash and Women in Revolt. Scarecrow is a remarkable film not only for starring a trans actress in 1972, but also for the role being that of a cis woman. 

Despite a notable cast, a riotous script, and a well executed production, Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers was nearly a lost film. After a few screenings in the early 70s, it faded into obscurity and it was nearly lost forever when DuArt Film, the studio which housed the print, closed in 2013 with no plans for their archived films. The Academy Film Archive rescued and restored the print, and there have since been precious few screenings, including last week at Alamo South Lamar’s Weird Wednesdays. This was my first theater-going experience in awhile, but the energy in the theater that night felt particularly communal. Films like this are special, and sharing this particular experience of discovery with a crowd cannot be replicated. I asked a friend of mine with a talent for pirating obscurities to find me a copy of this film in preparation for my write up, so that I’d have more to reference than my memory and some notes scribbled in the dark. He came up with nothing. To me that highlights what a privilege it was to attend this screening and that, despite ever proliferating streaming services, art house theaters (and theaters that make room for art house films) remain a valuable resource for viewing such treasures.