“You’re messing with a holy man”

In 1998, Erick Ifergan - a Morocco-born music video director, photographer, painter and sculptor (to name a few of his professions) lensed his first feature length movie. At the time of shooting, the controversial and ever-enigmatic Vincent Gallo was struggling to acquire sufficient finance to complete his own directorial debut ‘Buffalo 66’, whilst his counterpart in the movie, the renowned Israeli supermodel Nina Brosh, was about to have her first (and only) acting role after making a name for herself leading campaigns for major fashion houses such as Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, Chanel and Dior.

‘Johnny 316’, originally titled ‘Hollywood Salome’ was never given an official theatrical release. The film was screened only twice in the span of nine years, first at the New York Underground Film Festival in 1998 and then at Drake International Film Festival Caserta in 2007. It would be a further five years until the film would mysteriously appear on YouTube around 2012, available to be viewed by the general public for the first time.

The movie takes place on Hollywood Boulevard in the city of Los Angeles, with both the location and time period being paramount to the film’s entire aesthetic and tone. The famous street was known for its decline into ‘seediness’ during the 1970s and up until the mid-1990s, when efforts to revitalise the street to its original glory began. During the time of shooting, Hollywood Boulevard was in its final days of playing host to abandoned cinemas and sleazy strip joints, and thus through the cinematography, Irfegan was able to exhibit the hopelessness of day-to-day life in a much darker side of Hollywood.

The plot involves Gallo as a religious preacher named Johnny who spends his days standing atop a plastic crate, handing out pamphlets to the people who walk by, attempting to spread the message of God with typical street-preacher lines such as “God loves you; God forgives you” and “take heed as the Angel of Death approaches”. At one point, the camera pans to the shopkeeper of the corner store of which Johnny stands outside (played by indie film veteran Seymour Cassel) who says as if he were being interviewed for the audience, “clever scam, I’ll tell you that. He works it good – free food, peoples’ respect, all the perks. All that little fucker’s doing is chasing pussy like the rest of us”.

Soon after we meet Sally (Nina Brosh), who works as a hairdresser on the same boulevard. She seems caught in a trance as she distractedly cuts the hair of her client whilst watching the 1953 William Dieterle-directed movie ‘Salome’ on the shop’s television; a great use of foreshadowing by Ifergan. She seemingly quits her job half-way through the haircut and stumbles her way down the street. Still in a trance-like state, it becomes clear that she is utterly lost – in every sense of the word. While walking down the boulevard, she crosses paths with the local pimp who attempts to prey on her in this vulnerable state by forcing her into his world of strip teases and prostitution. She is able to narrowly escape his grasp but not before he yells out “you’ll be back!”. Sally carries on down the street, searching for any sort of meaning or purpose and in desperate need of salvation when she stumbles across Johnny giving a sermon and the ultimately doomed love story begins.

The story of Salome originally dates to the New Testament where it is heavily implied that Salome was the name of the daughter of Herodias and Herod II. Salome’s mother, Herodias, was to divorce Herod II and marry his half-brother King Herod Antipas which, according to Matthew 14:3-5 and Luke 3:18-20, was the marriage that St. John the Baptist opposed, claiming it was unlawful. Mark 6:21-29 further states that this led to Herodias encouraging her daughter to dance for her new stepfather the King, in order to then ask for the favour of bringing her mother the head of John the Baptist, which she wanted as she felt insulted by what the preacher had said. Since then, the story has been re-told numerous times in film, theatre and literature with the plot often being tweaked to fit different narratives. The most notable example of this is the 1891 theatrical play ‘Salome’ by Oscar Wilde. Wilde had been influenced by earlier French writers who had transformed the image of Salome into an ‘incarnation of female lust’ and so, he chose to make the focal point of the play the perversion of lust and desire of Salome instead of Herodias’ act of vengeance on John the Baptist.

Following the two protagonists’ first encounter, the film is centered around Sally following Johnny wherever he goes, desperate to get his attention and affection as Johnny rejects all her advancements. At various points of the movie, we see visions that could be in the characters heads, of passionate and intimate encounters between the two, touching on the same themes of sexual desire and lust that Wilde chose to signify. We learn Johnny had previously lived a life of sin before giving himself entirely to God when he finds Sally on the boulevard one night, handing out leaflets of religious texts in an act of imitating him in a last ditch attempt to gain his attention. He aggressively berates her for this and claims her love for God is unlike his, untrue, and warns her to stay out of his life once and for all. It finally becomes clear to Sally at this point that this love she has for Johnny will forever remain unrequited. The following day, Sally runs into the pimp from the beginning of the movie once again and this time she gives in to him on the basis he carries out a favour for her – killing Johnny. The film ends with Johnny having his throat sliced by the pimp and collapsing on the street, bleeding out, whilst Sally, overwhelmed with joy, is finally able to kiss him on the lips.

Johnny 316 shares many parallels with Wilde’s interpretation of the story of Salome, although discards much of the original plot in order to focus on the themes of sexual desire, temptation, rejection and vengeance, with Sally playing the typical femme fatale role. This is similar to how Wilde emphasised Salome’s dance for King Herod as a focal point for his play, naming it the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’, whereas the Bible refrained from going into detail about the situation, only stating that the King was pleased with the dance. In the movie, this dance is referenced through the notion of sex, be it through strip teases or prostitution -  in order for Sally to convince the pimp to kill Johnny, she must first give herself to him. Another parallel includes Sally/Salome kissing the head of the dead preacher, an ideal that American literary critic Bram Dijkstra referred to as ‘the virgin whore, a perversion of purity tainted by lustful desires’.

The gospels in the Bible do not give much more information about Salome after the death of John the Baptist, although according to the ancient Jewish historian Josephus, she went on to marry Philip the Tetrarch and afterwards Aristobulus Minor, living a royal life. The fate of Sally in Johnny 316 is unknown, but Richard Strauss’ 1905 opera based on the same story ends with a horrified King Herod ordering his soldiers to kill Salome after she maniacally caresses and declares her love for John’s severed head.

And so there are many different portrayals of Salome’s story manifesting across many different art forms. However, Ifergan’s film has perhaps the most rejuvenated take on the classic story through its emphasis on inherent human desire, situating this theme against the backdrop of Los Angeles, exhibiting how an old biblical story can still be considered relevant and translated into today’s contemporary setting.

The full movie can be found here.

By Dillon Gohil