House Of Air Music Video

House Of Air Music Video
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Daniel Villarreal

on March 22, 2018

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When we first saw the NSFW music video for Brendan Maclean’s “House of Air” we considered it a stylish yet delightfully naughty one-off. After all, what else were we to make of a pop-song with diagrams labelling different aspects of cruising, blowjobs, fisting, watersports and poop play?
But when we spoke at SXSW with the video’s co-creators — the bearded musclebear duo of Brian Fairbairn and Karl Eccleston — we realized they’re dead serious about creating challenging, provocative, celebratory queer film that goes against the condescending eye-candy and self-pity porn we’ve come to expect from gay film.
The directing duo first met in Sydney, Australia, around 2010. Fairbairn had a background in theater and Eccleston had literary ambitions, but they decided to begin working on music videos and independent shorts together.
Early into their collaboration they created a 2011 short called “Skwerl” ( below ) listed on YouTube as “How English sounds to non-English speakers.” The four-minute film portrays a dramatic moment between two characters who speak nonsensical English. The video blew up, eventually garnering over 40 million views on YouTube.
“Honestly,” Fairbairn tells Hornet, “it’s a gimmicky little thing, but definitely kind of got the ball rolling for us. It made us think maybe we can do films.”
Two years later, the duo directed two music videos for Brendan Maclean, an outspoken, openly gay and (at the time) unsigned Australian pop musician.
The first video, for his song “Stupid,” depicted a girl in a party hat trashing party decorations while Maclean enthusiastically dances. The second video, “Winner,” was shot in reverse and featured Maclean running backwards, gradually pulling on shiny clothes before triumphantly dancing in a lit up stadium amid a shower of silvery confetti.
“Brian and Karl can work on a five dollar budget and make it look like something the whole world will find eventually,” Maclean says of their work.
But it wasn’t until April 2015 when gay viewers at large would become aware of Brian and Karl as they’ve come to be known. At the time, the duo had moved to London and created “Putting on the Dish” ( below ), a short film widely covered by gay websites for being written entirely in Polari, a slang language mishmash used by British gay men to avoid being detected before the 1967 legalization of homosexuality.
Eccleston explains that at the time of their film’s release, there was “kind of a renaissance of Polari” because an academic named Paul Baker released a Polari dictionary and also because the 50-year anniversary of the partial decriminalization of homosexuality in Britain was just one year away.
“So people were making documentaries about Polari,” Eccleston says. “There were talks, workshops about Polari. Our film kind of just happened in that moment and has kind of become part of that moment.”
Their film was deliberately inaccessible: With no subtitles, the actors’ thick British accents layered on top of Polari’s mishmash of Italian, Romani, Yiddish and Cockney rhyming slang made the story a bit hard to follow. In the film, two men meet in a park and discover each other is gay. When one admits he once had his gay lover arrested so he himself could evade arrest, the other is disgusted, spits on him and leaves.
Despite its inaccessibility, the film still struck an emotional chord with audiences. Some fascinated viewers spent time releasing an annotated version of the script online, and the film won the duo recognition once more at it was covered in at least 17 online publications.
It wasn’t until the guys released their pornographic music video for Maclean’s “House of Air” that they realized just how resistant gay audiences would be to a truly transgressive queer film.
The duo got the aesthetic for “House of Air” from several sources: 1970s era gay porn magazines, the satiric science edutainment series Look Around You and Hal Fischer’s 1977 work Gay Semiotics: a photographic study of visual coding among homosexual men .
Fischer’s study featured harmless photos of gay men dressed in street fashion and leather gear with diagram labels upon their clothes and coded hankies dangling out of their pockets. The raw homosexual subtext of these fashions only becomes clear when you read Fischer’s accompanying text.
Maclean initially wanted to keep the gay sex as innuendo, as a sort of winking joke. But Eccleston and Fairbairn encouraged him to show complete nudity and full-on sex.
“We were getting frustrated being knocked back from [pitching] more queer, more risqué stuff to labels, and it was always getting knocked back. And Brendan was also having frustrations, as a very openly gay, opinionated kind of gay person in the music industry in Australia,” Fairbarin says. “So we were all kind of feeling like actually we had nothing to lose. And so we just decided to go all out and make the most risqué thing that appealed to our own kind of dirty, gay sense of humor, the way we talk about sex with our friends, how candid I think a lot of gay people can be. We somehow wanted to pool that into something we’d find really funny.”
“And joyous and unapologetic,” Eccleston adds.
So on a budget of less than £10,000 (roughly $14,000), they wrangled Ashley Ryder, a famous gay porn star, and a few other actors who were comfortable performing sex on camera, art direction, post-production processing and some ’70s-era costuming like tube socks for Ryder to wear while being pounded on-camera.
“ It’s just funnier seeing a guy being fucked with a pair of gym socks,” Eccleston says, “and hotter.”
The very NSFW video and its 3.8 million views speak for itself. The camera focuses in at the most transgressive part of each sex act: male buttocks thrusting against a man’s head, urine as it enters a guy’s mouth, a greasy fist plunging in and out of a man. One scene involves a man in a jockstrap and a concoction of chocolate and oats.
During each act, the performers gaze directly into the camera — shamelessly, confrontationally — as if daring the viewer to look away first.
The video can be read numerous ways: It’s both hot and awkward, exhibitionist and voyeuristic, revelatory and clinical.
“I think we were kind of playing with the idea of filthy, homophobic gaze,” Fairbairn says.
“It can be read both ways,” Eccleston adds. “I think that’s what’s interesting. Because some people will look at it and go, ‘I feel a bit uncomfortable. Are we looking at lab rats? And is this homophobic?’”
The duo once said the negative response to their video from the LGBTQ community showed “just how conditional acceptance of gay identity can be.”
Surprisingly, the duo say that pretty much every LGBTQ film festival they submitted it to rejected it. Having the video showcased at SXSW felt validating, like “a real seal of approval” and gratifying for the huge reach the festival gave them.
“We very much made this video as kind of a response to the gay and queer stuff that we were seeing in the music video world,” Fairbairn says . “There’s a lot of pity porn. A lot of people being beaten up. A lot of really condescending stuff. And there’s also in Australia a real rise of respectability politics. Around the gay marriage debate, whatever you want to call it, that was happening at the time.”
When asked whether a video like “House of Air” will ever be seen as anything other than provocative, and whether its pop pornography could ever change anyone’s mind or whether it just preaches to a choir that already considers transgressive queer videos cool, Fairbairn says that a majority of the video’s views actually came from Russia, a country infamous for its anti-LGBTQ politics.
“It has changed things,” Eccleston says, “because the video was huge in Russia actually. There was a band that kind of loved the video, and they would play the song at the end of their concerts. They shared the video. So it actually reached a huge Russian fan base. And what’s interesting about that is that we’ve seen it has kind of tapped into … there’s obviously a very repressive climate there. But, there’s this sort of anarchic thing where people are looking for something to latch onto, to express that thing they can’t express openly. You know, or they’re not finding those reference points in their own culture.”
“A guy did a Ukrainian cover of the song,” he goes on to say. “There are all these memes that have popped up, sort of Russian recreations of the video — lots of fan art. So I think it has changed things actually. I don’t think it is just pure shock value. The shock value might be the hook. But I think what people have really responded to is, like, ‘Hey, this is sex and it’s explicit, but it’s fun and it’s kind of liberating.’”
Fairbairn feels people may watch the video and dismiss it as porn, but he believes others will want to learn more about the hanky code and Hal Fischer and explore those aspects of queer culture as a result.
While the duo aspires to direct a feature-length film eventually, they have their next short film project in mind and expect it to be just as challenging to queer viewers.
“I mean, we don’t always hand things on a plate to people. There’s enough of that in culture as it is,” Fairbairn says. “I mean, as it is our next film is gonna be about a slice of queer history. About a gay sort of news scandal in regency era London. Again, we’re not gonna hand everything on a plate to everyone. But it’ll at least be in English.”
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I’ll admit I was a bit shocked the first time I saw Brendan Maclean’s video for the song “House Of Air.”
The clip, released Jan. 30 and inspired by Hal Fischer’s 1977 essay “Gay Semiotics,” features graphic scenes of water sports, fisting and even coprophilia (look it up), but it wasn’t the sex that surprised me — it was seeing it showcased in a music video on YouTube.
Granted, it wasn’t long before the clip got yanked for violating the video site’s community guidelines . But it managed to rack up over 700,000 views in 10 days before it was pulled down. In many ways, that’s beside the point. What matters is that for a period of time, however brief, Maclean’s explicit celebration of gay sex and sexuality existed right alongside videos by Katy Perry, Kanye West, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and every other offering deemed innocuous enough to live on YouTube.
Though the video is no longer available for viewing on YouTube, the 29-year-old Australian singer isn’t exactly complaining. For him, being able to present a work that challenges both the music video industry’s status quo and the shift in political power currently happening around the world is a victory in and of itself.
“ Nothing I’ve shown is particularly new but what was new was the context: a pop music video with fetish porn,” Mclean told HuffPost in an email. “The pendulum has globally swung to the right and that’s scary. In creating this video we wanted to give a royal fuck you to this concept of moving to a centrist position.”
Determined to learn more about one of the smartest, most compelling videos I’ve seen in years — and the man responsible for creating it — I asked Maclean about the reaction to the “House of Air,” his response to those in the queer community who think it’s problematic and more.
The Huffington Post: Where did the idea for the video come from? Brendan Maclean: A rare sunny day in London with a joint or two led me to a sex toy store. Within it was a teeny tiny library which included Hal Fischer’s landmark essay Gay Semiotics. He wrote it in 1977 and apparently it’s still shocking today. The models were dressed all very Tom of Finland but the photography was very basic, awkward even, kind of like Fischer had just asked his friends to pose, and I loved that so much. I knew I had to create something from that.
Did you know from the start that you wanted it to be as explicit as it ended up being? There always had to be a sense of explicitness to it. Did I know my directors, Brian Fairbairn and Karl Eccleston, would hire actual porn stars to feature and have real sex? No. But looking back at the reaction, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
What was the reaction to the video like? And what’s your reaction to the reaction? Wasn’t it just a reaction and a half? It’s funny to think if I’d just made a clip where I was shooting up a mall or stabbing people it probably would have got a couple thousand views and be forgotten about. Unapologetic, joyful kink? How very dare you!
Look ― I get it. I’m not sitting here playing dumb. Many people were just mad I was getting away with having the video on YouTube but let’s not pretend the homophobia in the comments had anything to do with platform selection. I know the images we presented can be triggering for people but they are all very real. Nothing I’ve shown is particularly new but what was new was the context: a pop music video with fetish porn. I will say it’s pretty incredible that these conservatives who wish death upon me sat through a blow job, a cum shot, anal, piss play and fisting just to comment on two seconds of rather tame scat play (it was fake poo but it really came out of a butt). It really makes you wonder what they were hoping for...
Talk to me a bit about the political implications of the video. We live in a time when many queer people are more interested in assimilating into non-queer culture than celebrating or honoring or progressing queer culture. What do you make of that? ”House of Air” is pulled almost directly from a 40-year-old essay ― if anything it’s a look at queer history. Obviously we’re not even ready to embrace the reality of our past, which is concerning. Coming from Australia, filming it in London and watching the rise of Trump in America was hugely impactful on the video.
It’s why it ended up being so important that the sex was real ― because some people truly want to tell you what you can and can’t do in your bedroom. You want to hurl shit at me and my culture? Well, guess what? I can do it myself and without leaning into bigotry or normalizing the disgusting orange sock puppet that is President Trump.
What do you say to those people who claim that the video is doing a disservice to the LGBTQ community or “setting the community back”? You have to wonder if they’ve ever been to PornoTube if they really think a four-minute video has the power to set back the culture of an entire sexuality. It’s a shortsighted, weak comment. To people who say, “Well great, now you’ve given them a reason to hate us more” I want to ask do you really think if I’d censored the scat the conversation wouldn’t have been about fisting? Censor that and it’s about piss-play. Censor that and it’s about a blowjob. And guess fucking what: you censor that and put in a hetro-friendly cuddling scene with two guys just kinda smiling at each other and someone will say, “Why do they have to be fags?”
Get a grip. If you don’t like this video I’ve made, go make your own and stop wasting your time and mine.
Do you feel (more) pressure to make art that has an agenda and/or provokes strong reactions in an era where Trump is president of The United States and has selected one of the most anti-queer cabinets in history ? It’s been a wake up call. I’m not about to say, “Trump will make Punk great again.” Instead let’s be honest and admit that a lot of us simply were not paying attention when the corruption wasn’t so obnoxiously shoved in our face. I had a comfortable privilege as a cis white guy of not needing to hit back or create provocative art, and now I see that simply is not good enough. I see that I need to march, to donate, to piss off “the man” as it were. And if anything, I’m sorry to people I claimed to be an ally to that I wasn’t stepping up earlier.
How do you feel about the way sex is approached / understood / packaged at this moment in history ― both within queer culture and mainstream culture? Are you disappointed? Hopeful? Maybe it’s just me getting older ― my circle of friends and gay uncles and family, both biological and logical, have always had a sex positive attitude. But a lot of this project was a reaction to the vanilla depiction of gays. Why are we always just hugging or proposing in marriage equality ads or when it’s a political commercial the queers are always doctors and scientists saying, “Hey! We’re all normal, just like you.” We’re not normal, we’re fucking fantastic and weird and things we do in bed might not make you comfortable, but guess what Janet, we didn’t make “Rocky [Horror Picture Show”] for you!
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